Antiques, Capitalism, Irony, and Fitting In

I was watching the Antiques Roadshow program the other day, and was struck by how monetized it was.  Everyone was wondering how much their knick-knack was worth – by which they didn’t mean how pretty it was or historically significant or how much pleasure it might give you to contemplate it in the quiet of your own home.  Why ask anyone else about that, after all?

No, they wanted to know its money value – and there were some astonishing values.  A paperweight worth $5,000, a sculpture worth 20 …  I couldn’t believe it.  My girl-friend said it just reflected the nature of our society.  Capitalism, yes, I get it – though it seems to me there was a time when we cared less about what hockey players made and more about how many goals they scored.  And Shakespeare – do we care whether he died rich or poor?  Does it matter?  To whom?  He wrote some wonderful plays.

And I wonder about going to others for validation.  Oh, please, Mr. Expert, tell me that this old artifact of mine is precious.  And the experts were very impressive, I admit that; they knew their Louis Quatorze from their Early American.  But why do we need such external validation?

Human nature, I suppose.  We’re social animals.  We want to fit in.  Or perhaps stand out.  Stand out while fitting in, if at all possible.  If I like pictures of dogs playing poker, though, I better keep it to myself, at least in the circles I move in …

Fashions change, of course.  I was noticing some self-consciously clever ad in the washroom yesterday – the very fact that there are ads in washrooms, let alone self-consciously clever ones, tells you something about the world we live in, a capitalist society gone postmodern perhaps.  But at the height of capitalism who would have advertised in washrooms?  Has our decorum vanished?  Is nothing sacred?   The answer to that is probably no; hence the self-conscious cleverness.  It is the style of the time.  Irony.  As if we have all become Oscar Wilde.

Except we haven’t.  That self-consciously clever washroom ad didn’t actually work; it wasn’t funny (at least not to me); it didn’t even convey a clear message.  Once upon a time if you sounded like Oscar Wilde, you were Oscar Wilde – a lone genius.  But there aren’t very many geniuses – and if irony is simply the fashion, you’ll get a lot of people trying to be clever and witty who just aren’t.

In essence this is no different from the 1950’s.  Back then the fashion was for earnestness.  Ties and suits.  Presumably, there were geniuses at that too, but the vast majority were just conforming, getting along, trying to fit in.  Now to fit in you’re supposed to be witty and clever, but it doesn’t really mean anything; it’s no sign of genius.

The other day when I discovered something new (and what a joy that is), discovered that in the Muslim tradition it was Ishmael not Isaac whom Abraham almost sacrificed, someone commented, Who cares about these fairy tales?  But I care.  I’m not sure why.  I care about the stories people tell, about what they value.  Is it the look of a paperweight or the price it commands?  Of course, I suppose it could be both; people can care about money and art.  I suppose.

So today we care about making money, or having it, and being cleverly ironic.  Post-modern post-capitalism.  Or something.

Snapping Back

I’ve been watching the McLaughlin Group for many years, at least as far back as 1989, that year of tremendous upheaval, with the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and the student uprising in Tiananmen Square.  Politics was interesting then, or I was more interested in politics, and McLaughlin’s Group was a lively bunch, interrupting each other, shouting out their views.  It was both educational and entertaining.

Sometimes the interrupting would get a bit much, though; sometimes you couldn’t even hear what people were saying; and sometimes, especially in recent years, the panelists themselves would get frustrated.  The most frustrated of them all in recent years is Eleanor Clift.  Or I shouldn’t really say frustrated, perhaps rather faux frustrated.  It’s the others who are truly frustrated, for Eleanor keeps saying, “Let me finish, let me finish,” as if the others are bullying her, when of course the truth is the other way around.

Maybe it’s because for a long while she was the only woman on the panel and had to fight against the dominant males, but in fact the men tend to be rather gentlemanly.  They almost always back down when Eleanor complains, and when she herself does what she complains of, they usually say nothing – at least until this week.

For Eleanor perpetually interrupts others and normally they say nothing.  But let someone interrupt her, and, Wow, she has at them.  Until this week.  Mort Zuckerman, one of the courtly gentlemen on the panel, who actually tends to be on Eleanor’s side, on the Democrats’ side, against the neo- and paleo- conservatives – Mort was criticizing the Democrats for not reaching out to the Republicans in this time of deadlock.  This raised Eleanor’s ire, for she is nothing if not pro-Democrat, pro-Obama, pro-party line.  She interrupted him, rudely, as she often does, but this time Mort did not give way.  He said, “Wait a minute!”  Loudly.  Angrily.  And finished his thought while Eleanor laughed nervously.

The camera pulled away as if embarrassed.  It was as if some unwritten rule had been broken: don’t shout at the lady.  Later when Eleanor interrupted him again, Mort much more mildly said, “Excuse me a second.”  First a minute, then just a second.  First a blast from the bellows, like a bear, then the polite gentleman again.

But that’s what happens when you give way to bullies over and over.  Eventually one day you snap and become a bear and people are astonished.  It will be interesting to see if the dynamics of the show change as a result.  Will Eleanor interrupt as much?  Will she still complain if others interrupt her?  Will Mort or others complain about Eleanor?  Will everything just go back to the way it was?  Will the moderator finally step in and moderate, as he did a little more than usual after Mort’s outburst?

Tune in next week and see.

Hats Falling Down

I heard a three-year-old today complain to his mother that his hat had falled down.  It was an epiphany.  Now I understand what drives the usage mavens and letter-writers to say things like “25 words or fewer.”

I once read an article on how children learn language.  First they copy what they hear and so say things like, “My hat fell down.”

Then they learn RULES.  They learn that the past tense is formed by adding “-ed.”   Simple.  Except English is not simple.  English is full of exceptions, and the so-called rules don’t begin to encompass it.

One year in school they taught us “i before e except after c,” but that rule is violated all the time, which made me scratch my head because in those days I liked to follow rules, and yet I knew how to spell “weigh” and “neighbour.”

A friend of mine one time recited an extended version of the rule, which said, “i before e except after c, or when sounded like a, as in neighbour and sleigh.”

But that still doesn’t account for “weird” and “seize” and I believe a lot of others.

Nowadays the language experts and those they have cowed into submission go around saying that you must use “fewer” with all countable nouns.  So you have to say “fewer books” (sounds natural), “fewer than three books” (sounds barely okay, but a bit prissy), “three books or fewer” (who would say that if they didn’t think they were supposed to?), and “one fewer book” (oh God no, save us).

They have forgotten that the English language is full of exceptions.  The rule, or really just a rule of thumb, was to use “fewer” with countable nouns EXCEPT when mentioning a specific number.  So standard English would be “less than three books,” “three books or less,” and of course “one less book.”

Now that I’ve read Moby Dick I have one less book to read on my list of classics.  But sigh … the three-year-olds have taken over, and they want us to read one fewer book.  Soon they will want us to say we falled down or runned away.  After all, the rule says to use “-ed” to form the past tense.  Every three-year-old knows that.  Sigh.

On Not Being Kind

The other day I shared a link on Facebook of a commencement address by the writer George Saunders, who told the graduating class that the things he most regretted in his life were the missed opportunities to be kind.  His message was, of course, to be kind, but beyond that he sketched out a theory of why people aren’t always kind, and he settled on selfishness.

Which may be part of the answer, but I think there’s more to it than that.  There’s more different types of people than that.  I think it’s a mistake to think that everyone’s failure to be kind has the same cause.  Some people, for instance, are too shy.

Shy, you ask?  What does shyness have to do with kindness? 

Well, suppose you’re a shy person and you see someone who could maybe use a hand; you even think, they could use a hand; they’re struggling with that silly bus window which I’ve learned how to open; I could help them, be kind, be nice.

But then you think, Maybe they don’t want a hand.  Maybe they’d even be mortified if someone offered them help, as if we were saying, We don’t think you’re capable of opening a window. 

Of course, some people (not shy types) have a way of offering help.  “Oh, those windows are a real bugger,” they might say.  “It took me years to figure them out.  Here’s the trick.”

Or something like that, to put the other person at ease and show you’re not judging them.  And then you can help them and everyone is happy.

But the shy person doesn’t think of those things naturally, and they’re afraid of being rebuked for offering help.  Maybe their intentions will be misinterpreted.  That little girl that George Saunders wanted to help when they were both in school; maybe she would have shrunk from assistance from some boy she didn’t know.

Of course, the confident person might shrug such a rebuke off.  But the shy person might not.

And beyond shyness there’s sometimes just what the philosophers might call a category error.  Sometimes the person who needs help is in a category you don’t expect to have to help. 

In that post of mine about Passive Revenge, I didn’t expect to have to help the older boy who had given me a derisive nickname.  (I did help that time, but only because a person in authority told me to.  Which no doubt suggests all sorts of things which will have to wait till another blog post.)

One time when I was an undergraduate at McGill the History Department secretary, an imposing figure before whom I cowered, slipped on the ice while walking across campus.  I happened to be right there.  I froze, so to speak.  Others rushed forward to offer assistance, but I just stood there.

Not from pleasure; it wasn’t like people laughing at someone slipping on a banana peel.  It was a not being sure what to do.  Perhaps because this was an authority figure who I would never have thought of as someone needing my help.  Or perhaps because at that young age I had not learned how to offer help.  Or perhaps because of the shyness and uncertainty I’ve already mentioned.

People need to become more confident.  It’s not so much selfishness that needs to be overcome (well, maybe for some people; not you and me, of course).  Some people need to learn how to help, how to offer, how to follow their instincts, how not to over-think, how to tolerate rebukes if the person doesn’t really need help.  Some …

Passive Revenge

My last post about how us timid types got our revenge on the more aggressive campers because the more aggressive ones were foolish enough to try an experiment on themselves reminds me of another occasion of what I might call Passive Revenge.

It was a couple of years after the camping experience.  If I was eleven then, I was about fourteen this time, and off on a student exchange in New York City.  What a weekend we chose for the exchange: the night we got there Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the city suddenly became a dangerous place.

But that’s not what this story’s about.  I played the violin in the school orchestra, which made me feel a bit dorky because only girls did that; there was only one other boy violinist in the school.  The other boys played manly instruments like trombones.  The result, though, was that I got to go on the exchange at a younger age than most of the other boys: only the senior trombonists went, but there weren’t that many violinists, so the younger ones went too.

(Did I mention that this was a musical exchange?  Our school orchestra was to join forces with one in Bedford, New York, in fancy Westchester County.  And being musical, the trip included a visit to the Metropolitan Opera, where I saw Carmen for the first time and thought it was wonderful.  But the story’s not about that either.)

So I was billeted in the house of one of the Bedford school members.  He was cool; he drove a red sports car.  And he was older, as were the two other Montreal schoolboys I was billeted with.  Let’s call them Howard and Jason.  Howard and Jason didn’t exactly bully me; it was more that they were the two versus my one.  Jason did, however, decide that I deserved a nickname.  “Pineapple,” he started calling me, for no reason I could tell.  Did I have an acne problem?

Anyway, not being one to object, I put up with the Pineapple nickname throughout the trip, which included rehearsals and of course the final concert, at which I scraped my bow across the violin and hoped no one would hear my wrong notes.

There was also a party one night.  Now, at this point I didn’t get invited to parties.  The cool kids back home went to them, but I wasn’t one of the cool kids.  Here, though, I was staying with a cool kid, and he was going to a party, and he took all of us along: Howard and Jason and Pineapple.  In his red sports car.

Feeling totally out of place among the partying teens, most of whom were older (and cooler), I wandered outside and killed time by walking around the block.  On the way I met three girls.  “Who are you?” they said.  “Sheldon Goldfarb,” I said, and felt dorky immediately.  They laughed and hurried away.

Eventually I made it back to the party, where it seemed some people had been going upstairs for, I forget what: it may only have been spiked punch.  Anyway, the result was that some of the kids, most notably Jason, were showing signs of inebriation.

“Take care of Jason,” said my host, the cool sportscar driver, and I wondered a bit because I had never seen anyone drunk before and didn’t realize that was the problem.  “Pineapple, Pineapple,” said Jason.

I stayed with him, waiting beside the red sports car.

Eventually, our host returned with Howard and a girl, who apparently was of interest to Jason.  Or maybe she’d been waiting with us.  In any case, we all piled into the sports car.  I got the front seat next to our host; the others crammed into the back.

Jason, it seemed clear, was trying to impress the girl despite his drunkenness.  It may even have been working.  But then he caught sight of me in front of him. 

“There’s Pineapple,” he said.

“What?” said the girl.

“There’s Pineapple in the front seat,” he said.

“There’s no pineapple in the front seat.”

“Yes, there is.  It’s Pineapple.”

Now I could have helped him out by turning around and saying, “That’s the nickname he’s given me.”  But I didn’t.  I let him make a fool of himself in front of the girl.  Passive revenge, as I said.  Like being safely on the dry porch while the foolish campers drenched themselves.

Is this a sin?  Should I confess?  Well, perhaps I have.

Camping Trips

My last posting, about camping trips as a metaphor for life, has got me thinking about my very first camping trip, which took place many, many years ago, when I was a boy away at summer camp.  During that month away, our bunk, or perhaps it was two bunks combined, headed out on a trip into the woods, packing tents, and what not.

There was food and perhaps water, or at least special tablets to put into dirty water that would supposedly make it clean and drinkable (I remain dubious, but I am alive to tell the tale, so perhaps it wasn’t nonsense).

Anyway, just our luck, it rained.  We put up the tents.  As I recall there were at least two: one for the counsellors and then another for us campers.  The more aggressive among us grabbed the prime spots inside the tent, leaving three of us less aggressive types to make do with the tent “porch”: an extension of the tent with a roof but no sides.

If camping trips are a metaphor for life, then I suppose life must be a hierarchical affair where those in authority get a private tent for themselves and what’s left is distributed according to who is the most powerful.  A combination of Hobbes and medieval feudalism, one might say.

We three oppressed types on the tent porch did get our revenge, however.  We were not particularly wet, since there was no wind and the rain did not come at us sideways.  But those inside the tent decided to perform an experiment.  This is not at all the Aristotelian approach; they should have just read books and thought about the logic, but no, one of them had heard that if you touched the top of a tent during the rain, the rain would start to come in.

We porch-dwellers heard this theory discussed and then heard a shriek from inside.  Someone had carried out the experiment – as foolishly as Ben Franklin testing the nature of lightning by standing outside with a kite, and with worse results.  The bullies in the tent got soaked; we meek and mild ones survived relatively dry.

Perhaps this means that the meek will inherit the earth, or at least a dry spot while camping.

On Being the Odd Man Out

It’s an odd thing being in a group whose views are antithetical to your own.  Why, you might ask, would you join such a group?  Good question.  Well, in search of intellectual stimulation I stumbled across them.  They promised to study Aristotle.  That sounded interesting.  But it turned out they also wanted to hold forth on modern politics, typically from a left-wing point of view which is not at all mine.  I shrugged and ignored the modern politics.  Seeing which way the wind blew, I thought it safer.

But years went by, I became a stalwart in the group, tenacious in my attempts to wrestle with Aristotle, and eventually felt at home enough to venture to challenge some of the others’ assertions on modern politics.  This may have been a mistake.  Now I am ganged up on by them.  Made to account for myself.  As a moderate with no strong political affiliation (except to be opposed to extremes of left and right), I am often taken aback by demands that I label myself.  So you’re a conservative, they say.  No, I say.  Then what?

Another good question.  Or is it?  Isn’t the demand for labels part of the ideology I reject?  I enjoy Montaigne the skeptic and learned from him that even skeptics need to follow some authority.  I enjoyed Thoreau and his disavowal of the pursuit of riches, though not his interest in camping.

Life is like a camping trip, one of my antagonists said in the Aristotle group today, or at least implied it.  I don’t like camping, I said.  But my real point was that life is not a camping trip.  Though who knows, maybe it is.  I am not one for making bold assertions.  Life is full of uncertainty, and wisdom I think comes from acknowledging that.

The problem is that I often let myself be backed into corners and give in to the demand to self-label or at least to come up with counter-proposals.  That’s another mistake.  Just because I am dubious of others’ nostrums doesn’t mean I have better nostrums of my own.  The problem is with proposing nostrums at all.

But when one of my confreres proposed that equality of property is the ideal we all hold, and I said I was dubious about that, I ended up having to invent an alternative ideal.  Actually, it was quite an interesting one.  Not really invented, no doubt, but pulled out of the various things I have read over the years.  Something about needing some people with more property, with capital if you like, to do the big projects that distinguish modern society.  How can you create a university or a cathedral or any other modern institution without massive investment?  Who’s going to provide it?  If we all have $50 each, how will that ever work?

One of my colleagues even gave pause over that, and said well, maybe in practice, for the sake of productivity, you do need some inequality.  He wasn’t quite prepared to agree, but nor would he reject the idea outright.

I actually think the same thing, though forced into a corner I pretended to believe this idea wholeheartedly.  Actually, who knows?   I’m no economist.  It does strike me as plausible, but I don’t really want to be tied down to it.  I don’t like being tied down to a position, and here I had tied myself.

Maybe the solution is to ignore the digressions into modern politics and stick to Aristotle.

Maybe.