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A Life Out of Whack: Confessions and Reflexions of an Un-American All-American
425Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771833158 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Guernica Editions, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Guernica World Editions , #5 |
| Pages: | 425 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THIS IS MY YOUNG LIFE
Childhood and adolescence: a privileged lack of privilege and a vital measure of resistance
I was born and grew up mostly in the very small Northeastern Pennsylvania town of Carbondale, population about 10–13,000. My childhood included a number of trips to the New York City borough of Queens and Long Island, where most of my mother's family resided. For two years, from the age of six to seven, I resided with my mother and three brothers in Queens. This was a time when, because of financial difficulties in Carbondale, my mother moved her brood of four boys (the fifth would be born much later) to her mother's home, where we were not really "poor" in the same way as in our home town. We were a quite poor family. Though I say this knowing that there are as many interpretations of "poor" as there are readers of this book. I remember, for example, conversations on the topic with my fellow doctoral students at Brown University in 1988, most of whom in my opinion came from fairly well-off families. Yet a good many of these students still tended to downplay their relative affluence and paint their family backgrounds in a negative light as being either "working class" or of modest means, with connotations of poverty. The term "working class" meant "not really middle class." It was meant to convey some lack of material comfort and a condition of need. One of these students, who is now a professor at Harvard, claimed that his family's difficult financial circumstances owed to the fact that both his father and mother were forced to raise their family on the "very modest" incomes they received as college professors and they couldn't afford the luxury of wall-to-wall carpeting in their home.
Consequent to these and other similar conversations, I will say that, despite the relativity of material comfort, my family would have been considered poor by most American standards. My father, a first-generation American of Lebanese immigrant parents, was not working class; he seldom held any job at all. He had a sixth-grade education, my mother achieved two years of high school. My father was a disabled veteran, having received a medical discharge from the Army in the early years of World War Two due to a mental breakdown while still in basic training. Ever since, he was under the regular care of an incompetent Veterans Administration psychiatrist, who prescribed heavy doses of psychotropic drugs, which did not predispose my father to leading a life of labor. His father died when I was about four, but he often borrowed small sums of money from his mother, brother, and sister, who lived fairly close to us. Despite their relative poverty, they were all in a position to lend him small sums only because of their extreme frugality, their barebones material needs and austere lifestyle. They all were physically handicapped in some way and subsisted on small pensions from the federal government. My grandmother and uncle (an albino) were legally blind, my aunt, legally deaf. Given my father's lack of income, my family received various forms of government welfare subsidies, the most memorable of which, for a child, was the biweekly allocation of surplus foods: peanut butter, cheese, flour, powdered milk, and the nauseating cans of "pork and gravy." One source of our Christmas presents was the local Salvation Army's holiday charity distribution program. The "Army" was also the go-to shop for most of my mother's used clothing purchases and other sundry items.
Nevertheless, since our poverty was more small-town rural than urban, and our race/ethnicity was perceived as white Caucasian despite the Arabic origins of my grandparents — who could not speak English — we were spared all the nasty collateral damage of the deprivation experienced by racial and ethnic minorities in the vast yet compacted wastelands of U.S. inner-city ghettos, where the concentration and ethnic mixing make poverty more brutal. When I was four, we moved from an apartment to a rather large, if very old and quite dilapidated house. The coal furnace required constant refilling with coal and on long winter nights it would go cold long before we awakened the next morning, and we often had icicles in our kitchen. My mother cooked for many years on a coal stove.
But, happily for us, we shared our lack of material comfort with our neighbors. We lived in a neighborhood with a huge community of families in some kind of financial distress, and most of these families had lots of kids the same age as my brothers and I. My parents had five sons, but the single-mom next door had twelve children and she raised them all in the half of a house she rented, a space amounting to less than half the size of ours. Talk about relative poverty! The other house alongside of ours was rented by a family with five kids, all very close in age. They lived in the bottom half of their two-story house because the roof of the second story had collapsed and the landlord placed some kind of cover over the floor, which became the roof of the first floor. Relative misery!
Thanks largely to the communal situation in which we lived, we kids didn't know how poor and deprived we were. There was always a huge clutch of friends to muster to play an array of games and sports. We called one another out to play by standing in front of a friend's home and yelling "Hello Mi-chael!, Hello Chu-cky!" until the friend appeared or the mother would tell us they weren't home or available to play. There was always a way to find or to confect some type of ball, be it a whiffle ball, softball, baseball, football, kickball, or basketball — or some facsimile thereof. The many local junkyards and unofficial dump sites provided hardware and parts to build bicycles, go-karts, and snow sleds. In the summer, the city government provided many of the neighborhoods with playground recreation centers, staffed with young social directors, a group that probably included college students working a summer job. The playgrounds were rundown remnants of Carbondale's pre-war anthracite coal-industry glory days, and each summer the centers offered increasingly reduced staff, hours, and activities. But they helped keep us kids busy and amused during the summer, and we only used them as an alternative source of recreation anyway.
Our primary pastime consisted of kid-generated sports, games, hikes to swimming holes, building projects (like good-sized huts), and other activities. Summer evenings as many as two dozen of us, of all ages, played hide-and-seek or Frozen Witch. We often camped out overnight in someone's backyard, and in bands of five or six we patrolled the mysterious nighttime stillness and sometimes callously rang doorbells or raided family gardens. In the winter, we spent most of our evenings sledding in large groups on the many hills that surrounded us. We kids were so busy in fact, and we spent so much of our young lives outdoors, that we didn't have time to think about the wall-to-wall carpeting we couldn't possibly have in our homes. One might suppose that this kind of childhood experience was more or less the norm for Americans growing up in the fifties and sixties. But I'm convinced that even at this moment of the American dream its availability was limited mostly to low-income families living in small towns. Kids came together as generic playmates, to play and cooperate in a fairly egalitarian relationship despite potential barriers such as family background and education, a mix that one might not encounter in today's suburban neighborhoods, which are more homogeneously self-selected according to family income. Many of the kids I played with remained functionally illiterate well into adulthood, even as my brothers pursued higher education — which would come later for me. All in all, I would say that today's kids are quite deprived!
On the lost art of material deprivation
I've heard too many fathers, especially those of my parents' generation, say they wanted to give their children everything they were denied as children. They invariably refer to the material conveniences they thought they hadn't had and surely missed. (Curiously, these are often the same people who wax nostalgic about how simple their lives were "in the old days.") I've already discussed my "deprived" but happy childhood. With the kind of poverty we had experienced, I've always had in mind that, in this American society, some kind of relative poverty is often a virtue. At the very least, a childhood lifestyle guided by financial lack has as much potential to lead to well-being than one activated and facilitated by affluence. I'm quite sincere about this. One regret that I have about my own kids' childhood experience is that, given the environment and the times of their youth, the economic milieu into which we were cast, they were not sufficiently "deprived" of those material goods and services and the societal structures that can damage a child's innocence, creativity, and passion, and which can eliminate opportunities for communal interaction among children.
Living among the un-poor in a car-dependent suburb of a southern city, the abundant time-consuming toys we furnish children and the adult-organized and -supervised activities in which we engage them result in a deprivation that can be just as tragically consequential as financial limitation. Consider all the hype dedicated to promoting new technologies — a hype that is biased and manipulated by the corporate interests that, more than ever before in history, determine the nature and rhythm of the introduction of technology into our society.
Yet, from a social perspective, TV, electronic games, and more recently surfing the Internet and social networking are not healthy activities for either children or adults. A motorized vehicle that a small child can drive is not as healthy as a bicycle, from physical, social, and psychological points of view. A neighborhood "pick-up" basketball, whiffle ball, kick ball, or football game is healthier and more stimulating than not just the electronic gaming that might mimic these group activities but also the activities that "soccer moms and dads" shuttle their kids to twice a week. From a socio-psychological perspective, any game or sports event that is honestly and freely organized by a community of kids has more positive, creative passion-potential than anything an adult can propose for them.
But that's not the way our consumerist society wants us to see it. Like too many middle-class Americans in this society, I've wound up in a 200-home suburban subdivision in which each separate home is built on one-third to one-half acre of land and there is absolutely no common turf or playing area for kids to play in or in which they can easily organize their own fun and community. What a waste that, in the place of a good-size communal basketball court, for example, probably one third to one half of these homes have their own "private" basketball equipment in the driveway.
Think about it. You're an eight-year-old and one or a group of your neighbor-friends come to your door to ask you to come out and play (or, as in my experience, they simply stand in front of your house and yell "Hello John-ny!"). There's something liberating and edifying about the spontaneous decisions and activities that follow.
So why does my family live in this neighborhood? At the risk of appearing both judgmental and hypocritical, the simple answer is that American neighborhoods seem to offer an "either/or" formula: either you live in a non-communal neighborhood like ours or you live in a neighborhood where you are exposed to more crime and bothersome, even abusive, behavior. Given the demographic status quo, what we consider to be poorer neighborhoods tend to produce certain kinds of uncivil behavior, such as loud parties, vandalism, and fights. So we live in our non-communal neighborhood because 1) we admittedly did not make the effort to resist buying a home in an area in which a number of our work colleagues do or would reside; 2) we thought we were buying the most expensive home we could afford; 3) prior to our expedited decision on a home, we did not take the time to thoroughly explore a wider range of areas in the city; and 4) once you buy a home and a mortgage, it's quite difficult to change your mind: a new home and mortgage would be too time-consuming and costly to consider, barring any serious problem with the property you've purchased.
Small town economy
On a return family trip to Carbondale in the summer of 2005, I was both surprised and quite proud to learn that one of the sledding courses I had named as a kid (a combination of two connecting and steeply inclined streets) was still called "Suicide Hill." On the downside, however, I was disappointed to find that all the small "candy and sundry item" stores that were so numerous when I was a child have completely disappeared. Within a three-block radius (although, given the way our streets were laid out, there were no "blocks" in today's sense of the term) we had numerous tiny one-room stores like "Mrs. Ungeleider's," "Walter's," "Bill's," and "Rice's" that we simply called candy stores, but which also offered staple items our parents could send us to purchase in a pinch, such as bread, milk, eggs, and clothes pins.
In March 2017 my oldest brother sent me a list of "neighborhood little stores, Carbondale circa 1960" that appeared on a Yahoo site. This still incomplete list includes the names of around sixty stores. We always viewed these places as charmed, but frankly, I don't think any of the owners of these stores could have possibly turned a profit. Their numbers constituted a sort of sub-economy of the city and were a consequence of the number of kids in the area and not of the purchasing power of the families.
Kids and their families had very little "disposable" income. We rarely had change to buy candy, ice cream, or cheap toys before becoming old enough to be able to earn something on our own. But from a very young age we learned how to tap into the local economy. Most of our money came from doing chores (snow shoveling, painting, yard-work, etc.) for the older single women and men living in huge homes by themselves, or from scavenging and selling rags, paper, and metal scrap to the local junkyards. Lawn-mowing, by the way, was not among the odd jobs of my youth, because very few homes in our community had any grassy-green lawn to speak of. The closest I came to cutting my own family's "lawn" was clearing overgrown vegetation with a scythe.
School, disciplinary "problems," and alcohol
We kids viewed school as time out from kid-inspired recreation. Stigmatized by a teacher-hiring practice corrupted by nepotism, our K-12 schools were very weak in academics. Yet there were few disciplinary problems of the kind you would find in big-city ghetto schools. Thanks largely to Pennsylvania's generous higher education subsidies for the poor in the sixties and seventies, my older brother was the first college graduate in the fully extended families of both my mother and father (no one in my father's small immigrant family had even attended high school). He was also the first to receive a master's degree. Being second in line, I declined to go to college when my time came, but my three other brothers all followed the first and completed university master's degrees — long before I even decided to attend college. My mother was exceedingly proud of her sons' academic success. The dedication for my first book reads as follows: "For Mom, Dorothy Marie. A devoted dreamer, a mother with a mission, you always knew your five sons would go to college. Thanks to you, we knew it too."
I didn't enroll in college because I was, in short, sick of the disciplinary structure, the dogma, the conformity, and the inanities of K-12 school culture. I excelled academically up to the point of my first year in high school, consistently receiving the award for "Best Student in Class." My high school experience, however, was not quite what one would characterize as normal or predictable, especially considering my early success. Some features of my high school years were rather normal. To earn money, I did a good deal of chores and yard work, painting, and snow-shoveling for a portion of the many elderly single-women around the neighborhood. I had a part-time job at a small drugstore, where I stocked and dusted shelves, washed prescription bottles, cleaned the floors, and, unlawfully, delivered prescriptions to customers in the drug store owner's car. Like most of my peers, I got my learner's permit at the age of fifteen and my junior driver's license as soon as I turned sixteen, and, with the 65 cents an hour I earned at the drugstore, my brother and I bought an old car. But I was not supposed to be doing any driving for commercial purposes at that age. So much for small-town rule of law.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Life Out of Whack"
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Copyright © 2018 Les Essif and Guernica Editions Inc..
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Part 1 This Is My Young Life 1
Part 2 Themed Chapters 71
Chapter 1 Aging 73
Chapter 2 Death 91
Chapter 3 Our Bodies/My Body/Body-Mind 97
Chapter 4 Family 105
Chapter 5 Nature and Human Nature 119
Chapter 6 Life 139
Chapter 7 Literature and the Arts 183
Chapter 8 Religion 191
Chapter 9 History/War 199
Chapter 10 Teaching and the Academy 207
Chapter 11 American, French, and Global Cultures 223
Chapter 12 Politics 259
Chapter 13 Money/Wealth 297
Chapter 14 Corporate Capitalism 311
Chapter 15 Consumerism 357
Chapter 16 Hyperreality 385
Chapter 17 Technology and Media 405
Concluding Remarks 441
About the Author 445
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