Hello, hello, hello --
And what a wonderful day it is, here in North America -- the sun has once again miraculously stayed in its place in the vastness of the universe, while the teensy earth spins around it, giving us even teensier creatures the reassuring illusion that the sun has once again 'come up', as the parlance is. The air, here in New Jersey at least, is sweet and oddly devoid of the many unpleasant aromas of what must surely be the thousands upon millions of pollutants...
Oh, forget that part. It's nice outside, although the front lawn looks a bit shaggy, due to the preponderance of flat leaf plantain, where one would ideally see, say, Kentucky blue grass, or some other monoculture popularized by photographs of professionally-maintained golf course greens. Flat leaf plantain, however, being said to have medicinal values -- curing dyspepsia, for example -- it might actually be a good thing to have a lawn infested with such a plant. But, just as most men I know would refuse to leave the house if they were forced to wear trousers three inches too short, I cannot escape the tyranny of suburban aesthetics, and the sight of those tall flowering stems, rampant across our modest swath of frontage, gives me a bit of nausea. Which I could calm, I suppose, by making a poultice of flat plantain, but somehow that seems like capitulation. Later today, or by tomorrow mid-morning at the latest, the poor unsuspecting plantain will be faced with this specter: a huge, roaring, mobile guillotine, bearing down, without discrimination, upon them all.
But I didn't really intend to talk about the lawn. I really wanted to start this, my new blog, right now -- a time made more auspicious, some would say, because the moon has just finished with its monthly waning, and is now beginning to shift again toward fulness, and new moons traditionally support new ventures -- because I've just discovered that, according to a list I recently found on my Facebook page, I am not a white person.
You could look it up yourself -- the list is called 'Stuff White People Like', and it's on a blog with the same name, and with quite a following.
(Here, also, I am about to break one of my cardinal Rules in Life: I am going to repeat myself. I hate the idea of repeating myself. I don't even like repeating myself in things like to-do lists, that no one will ever see. But finding out that I've been mistaken, all my life, as to my cultural or racial makeup, however, seems important enough to trump my dread of saying the same thing the same way, twice. Or three times, if it comes to that...)
Stuff White Folks Like, then.
The idea of a list of stuff that white folks like was, I admit, intriguing -- being myself a white folk (is that a singular form of 'folks'? I'm actually afraid that there isn't), and having the usual degree of self-involvement that leads people to check themselves out as they walk past a bank or some other shiny reflective surface.
Besides, it wasn't a test -- not one of those annoying, ever-proliferating 'quizzes' which promise that, if you answer just five questions, you will be told which tender entling you would have been in Tolkein's Ring Trilogy, if Tolkein had bothered to go into that much detail about entlings. I hate those tests. I really do find incredible the number of these witless diversions which crop up almost without pause, on Facebook, which is itself almost the largest time-suck devised by humankind, second only in time-suckiness to pornography. If I really needed to know whose belt I would be, if Game of Thrones were suddenly merged with Duck Call Dynasty, and then piled into one of the more spectacular accumulations documented on Hoarders, to fight their way to the death, I would immediately seek professional help, and schedule a course electroshock therapy, to begin at the earliest possible time.
But, back to the list. It was not only a list, but a numbered list. Intriguing -- a hierarchy in play? Or a chronology of the fascinations under which white folks have historically fallen? Plus, the list started at... 136! Another mystery, in and of itself. How could it be that, after countless thousands of years of evolution, migration, internecine warfare and the unannounced changing of city bus routes, there would be only 136 bits of Stuff That White Folks Like?
Or, was I simply reading too much into the title list itself? It wasn't, for example, 'Stuff Only White Folks Like', or 'The Only Stuff White Folks Like', or 'Stuff Mainly Liked By White Folks Who Are Middle-Class and Live in the First World'. Or even 'Stuff White Folks With Their Own Computers and Plenty of Time To Waste, And Just A Soupcon Of Racial Guilt, Like'. I did try to take these qualifiers into consideration, as I scrolled my way through the enumeration, the tension rising as I neared The Number One Bit Of Stuff That White Folks Like.
And almost immediately -- as as should have come as no surprise to me, and yet... it did -- I began to feel... oh, I don't know -- a sense of dislocation? A sense of having walked through a door marked 'Mens Room', only to find myself at an outdoor market (which is mentioned, actually, as something I might like, being white and all), selling the strangest assortment of wares. And the Mens Room door behind me has disappeared. And this sense of dislocation arising because (and remember, we're counting backwards from 136; imagine that conventional tension music they play on game shows, while the contestant is trying to remember the name of that dinosaur -- you know, the one they think actually had all those yellow spots?) it wasn't until the list had dwindled to #106: Facebook, that I could honestly say I liked anything at all. And even liking Facebook was something of a stretch -- Facebook having insinuated itself into my daily life to such a degree that whether I like it or not ranks alongside my preference for oxygen as a breathing choice.
But I had to remind myself that I'm the guy who, when Happy Days was all the rage, and The Fonz (I didn't live in a total vacuum) was a teen idol across the nation, managed to avoid watching even one entire episode on a TV which I could easily have used, to avail myself of exposure to this cultural icon. Same with 'Laverne and Shirley' -- although I may have watched parts of one or two episodes, mostly because of the bowling jackets. Same with 'West Side Story', which, though not a TV show, was still such an overpowering Movie of the Moment that some of my high school classmates claimed to have seen it 18 or 20 times. Explaining, perhaps at least in part, why my grades in Senior English were so much higher than theirs.
I plodded on, metaphorically. And really, to be fair, I did pass up #109: The Onion, but that's because I really did used to like it, but suddenly their satire became virtually indistinguishable from actual headline news, and then it started to seem as though there was a competition, between The Onion, and what we accept as Reality, to see which one could be the weirdest and most bizarre and unpleasant. My 'liking' of The Onion quickly shrank into a kind of wincing state of denial.
The list, Walter, the list! Focus!
#94: Free Health Care, popped up. The list having begun to take on a subtle, but unmistakable tone of barbed censure and condescension, I was startled that liking Free Health Care might be seen as a racial flaw. I thought that liking Free Anything was pretty much universal -- unless it was Free Plague, or Free Acne, or Free Massive Student Debt That You Actually Had To Pay Back. Hmmm. I was feeling less and less white, but was also barely halfway to whatever mysterious Bad Affection sits in the coveted place of Number One...
I had to look up Ed Hardy and Michel Gondry, failing to add these to my list of Stuff I As A White Person Am Expected To Like. I had to puzzle once more at TV or movie references which meant little if anything to me. I did freely admit to liking our #60: Toyota Prius -- a car which routinely gets 50 miles to the gallon of gas, and which, although pilloried as the kind of car only someone like Ed Begley Jr would drive, can actually shut you down at a red light, without even shifting gears, because it doesn't have any. (My excellent reflex time, and uncontrollable urge to compete, contributing somewhat to the shutting down part. And I'm not completely certain about the gear detail either -- I just know that what would be a terrifyingly bad grinding sound in another car, is actually perfectly fine in the Prius, so I just keep stepping on the gas, while watching you shrink into pathetic insignificance in my rear view mirror...)
And I was puzzled, shortly thereafter, by #55: Apologies. Which seemed far afield from the topic of ethnicity. And which instantly raised the question -- are we talking about White Folks Liking to Give Apologies? Or are we talking about White Folks Like To Get Apologies? There being a substantial difference. Think: oral sex.
With this conundrum bouncing about in some back room in my brain, I quickly found a supposed like of mine, in #52: Sarah Silverman, and was instantly clear on this one. No one of any skin tone, I am certain, really 'likes' Sarah Silverman. Because all of us, I'm pretty sure, are scared shitless of Sarah Silverman, and that she will catch sight of us someplace, and proceed to tell us, in an unmistakable voice, what she thinks of us. Which will be hilarious for the other people around, but only because they're relieved that she's not looking at them... For the moment.
#44: Public Radio. A poser, for me. When I take care of my neighbor's cat, Olive, I enter a house where the radio is tuned to Public Radio all the time, I guess to give the sub-class of burglars with keener hearing the impression that there's some grumpy insomniac in the kitchen, who has easy access to big knives, so said burglars had better find another house to pillage and plunder. And I have to admit that, as I rinse out Olive's food bowls, and refresh her drinking water, I sometimes find myself hooked on the pleasant, cultured conversations drifting past. I can't hear them while I'm cleaning the litter, but I can usually pick up the general drift again, pretty quickly.
But I'm not sure that constitutes 'liking'. I mean, it's not as though I race home and try to find a radio (?) (Do such things even exist any more?), so I can tune in to PBS, and catch the rest of that rivetting discussion about the misperception of how politically polarized our country has become. Usually, for me, just the one sound-fact -- that most Americans today, in the year 2014, do not believe in the theory of evolution, for example -- suffices, for quite a while. I have enough to worry about. Plantain in the lawn, just for starters.
#25: David Sedaris, and #26: Wine, caught me off guard. I used to think I liked David Sedaris, but the more I read, the less fond I became of what he had to present. And now that he gets to live in Paris, and struggle to learn proper French, and is paid money to write about his challenges, I actually hate him. As for wine, I think it would be much more correct to say that I like the alcohol content of wine. The wine itself often being an annoying side effect that I would just as soon overlook, instead of swishing it around in my mouth, pretending I can detect hints of eucalyptus and moon rock.
We're almost done, I told my diminishingly white self.
#20: Being An Expert On YOUR Culture caught my eye, not because of any particular liking of it on my part, but because this item supported my suspicion that this list wasn't quite as light-hearted and playful as it might like to think itself to be. Suddenly, because of the all-capped YOUR, I felt as though this list, which I'd been perusing so seriously, was actually being addressed to someone I didn't realize was standing right behind me. I got one of those aid showers of embarrassment, like when you're at the train station, and wave back enthusiastically at someone who's really waving at someone else who's much better looking than you. Besides, as was becoming alarmingly clear, I'm not even an expert on what I had supposed was MY culture.
#17: Hating Their Parents also leapt out at me, if only because it somehow veers in the direction of Mothers' Day cards, and carnations for all the ladies in church that day, and other treacle-soaked conventions. Do I, in fact, like to hate my parents? Well-- and at the risk of spoiling things here -- I just happen to have had parents who, if what they did to my brothers and me were being done by them, to us, today, my parents would both be in prison. It's not as though 'Hating Their Parents' is a merit badge for me, but I think my discomfort with the prevailing cultural myths of parenthood and family life, a la Father Knows Best, and the Donna Reed Show, is come by honestly. And even something as purportedly light-hearted and inoffensive as a 136-point blanket list of cultural likes and dislikes is bound to run into the odd, wince-making bruise here and there.
#8: Barack Obama is another case in point, vis-a-vis the fragility of humor (if that is what this list is truly about). I will stand by my excitement at his election as President of the United States, in spite of the raging torrent of racial hatred this triumph unleashed. I certainly believe he is much more principled, and clearly much more intelligent, than previous residents of the White House. So also, I suspect, is his dog. And I've come to grasp that even the legendary powers of the Presidency are overstated and hemmed-in than the general population would like to admit. In some ways, we might as well admit that, every four years, we hold an election for the next Scape Goat of the United States, given how many people seem -- really! -- to believe that their President can single-handedly provide them with a parking space closer to the main entrance of the supermarket, and/or to force the weatherman to provide cooler temperatures for the family reunion in August.
And finally -- the #1 Stuff White Folks Like. Can you guess? Do you have any idea? Do you want to take a moment, and not cheat, and try a stab at guessing what a list like this, with the attributes and characteristics I've enumerated, as I studied by my way through it -- more than once, I might add -- might select as the absolute first Stuff In The Universe That White Folks Like?
It's coffee.
Coffee.
I stand convicted.
But now, the truly disheartening part -- the tally. The grim news. The equivalent of my College Board Scores, only this score measuring only who I have become, over the years, in my struggle from Poor-White-Trash-Hood, to Barely-Holding-On-To-Credibility-As-A-Member-Of-The-Lower-Middle-Class-iness. Of the 136 things I was predicted to like, in all my paleness, I scored maybe 11 solid hits, with perhaps two or, at most, three kinda-likes, or don't-really-mind-all-that-muches. Which, interpreted as a percentage, makes me a paltry 13% white, tops. Which means, in turn, that for my entire life, I have been, as is said in the world of my African-American brothers and sisters, when speaking of their paler-complected relations, 'passing'.
Well, I truly can't say just how I feel about this. Another marginalization I wasn't expecting, and from Facebook, yet -- the widest, least discriminating net imaginable -- the largest tent conceivable, under which all humanity is seemingly being herded, so we can send each other birthday greetings, and try to ignore the stream of ads for free catheters. I've already had my essential gayness openly and pointedly questioned -- at an all-gay party, no less, in the anything-goes 70's, and while talking with an older man of the homosexual persuasion, who I thought would have been more worldly and tolerant of human variability. I was thrown completely off-guard, afraid that a bunch of fashionable guys would come storming out of the bathroom at that moment, to slap a strip of that new Gay Litmus Paper on my forearm -- and when it failed to turn the requisite shade of, shall we call it lavender?, I would be hurled unceremoniously out onto the cold dank pavement of State College PA, with nothing left to do but wander down to the New College Diner, and try to console myself with a bowl of their legendary chili, which they kept under the steam table counter, ceaselessly bubbling in a tomato-and-meat-sauce-encrusted drawer.
Somewhat White. Only Partially Gay. (I mean, July Garland is okay, but I'd much rather listen to Josquin des Pres. His 'Missa Ave Maris Stella' kills) And there are, no doubt, other categories within which I don't quite fit. From a political test (with more than five questions...), I learned, for example, that if there were such things as Czech Communists anymore, I would be off somewhere to their left. Can you imagine being disdained by the world's most extreme radicals, because you're too out-there for them? I'm also an omnivore who has just discovered that our much-maligned gluten can be prepared to taste like yummy bits of roasted, slaughtered cattle, and who would turn vegan in a second, if someone could just explain why tofu always has to taste like chicken, but nobody seems to be trying to make pork sausage taste like broccoli?
So, for lack of anything better, what I've been forced to settle with, in terms of Who I Am, and the Corollary Stuff People Like Me Like, is height. Which in my case, is 6' 2 1/2", in my bare feet. (My favorite work steel-toed work boots add another inch or so, making me feel gigantic and invincible on any dance floor) And, by generally accepted standards of measurement, with the average American male topping off at about 5' 10" or so, I can reasonably lay claim to being Tall.
Tallness, then, is my new bedrock identity. I will stand by my Tallness, and not shrink from admitting to it. I will take all manner of abuse for being Tall -- I have, indeed, already paid hefty Tallness-taxes, in running into supposedly overhead racks that, in fact, hit me square between the eyes. I will take yoga classes, and gobble down all sorts of nutritional supplements of dubious value, to forestall any gravity-based encroachments on my Tallness. I will square my shoulders, and face a doubting, troubled world, even though most of what I see when it's raining is just a sea of wet black hemispheres bobbing up and down on Eighth Avenue. I am, and I will be... Tall.
100% Tall.
Thank you.
(Final note: Tallness does not, it seems, denote any specific kind of loyalty to others of the Tall variety, whether human or otherwise. Tomorrow, for example, I will start up the mobile guillotine, and proceed to execute, without mercy, as many of those plantain florets as I can. Especially... the tall ones)
