She has a fuzzy golden-brown perm, a kinky halo that she has worn since
at least 1984. In her overdetermined world, a woman with straight hair
must have a perm – keeping straight flat hair is not a matter of taste,
but a crime against common sense. And someone told her once that a
woman with a high forehead must wear a fringe. This rule too has been
incorporated into her world view. There are no exceptions. She once
said to me that it is a fact of nature that I must wear a fringe
(actually, she called them “bangs,” our Midwestern word).
That
certain things were inevitably right and others wrong was part of my
life from the very beginning. I experienced this triage with
desperation: I could only be good by agreeing fully and in every case.
There was no agreeing to disagree. There is the seed of future sorrow
and ambivalence. It is a heavy burden to live in a world wherein you
can only be good by accepting without question a list of rules that are,
on the face of it, so arbitrary that any person with the least amount
of common sense would go, “What?” Why is chocolate cake with white
frosting bad? Why are only braids, not two ponytails, called pigtails?
Why does the Pope decide which movies can be watched? (Even she said
sadly that it seemed unfair that Catholics could not watch “The Greatest
Show on Earth,” a movie she longed to see when it came out.) Why were
boys dumb and girls who liked them crazy? Why does a person who
divorces and remarries go to hell?
I had a game when I was a
teenager – on the rare occasion I went to a restaurant, I would
sometimes order the last thing I would normally choose. So if I went to
the Sirloin Stockade, I would chose a steak, a baked potato, and jello
cubes for dessert. The idea, I guess, was to prove to myself that
things could be otherwise. I still do the game with myself, in my head,
imagining my life with no children. My children are central to my
identity – they are who I am. I have always wanted them, always dreamed
about them, always knew that I would have them. So the hardest leap of
imagination for me is to reinvent my life without them. I force myself
to do it. Because I do believe that things could be otherwise. The
rules that she laid out as natural law simply are not. I do not have to
wear a fringe.
Living in exile has a logic. It is proof that I
did not have to live anywhere in particular. It is proof that I do not
have to live according to those rules. It means that we Americans are
not naturally right, but rather irrational Lockeans, that our most
fundamental beliefs are grounded in easily-identifiable myths, just as
are those of all cultures, and that they can be deconstructed,
de-chunked, reduced to a series of primal reactions to a philosopher
over-relied upon. Things could be otherwise in the US; they could be
much better. We don’t even need to go back and change the reading
programs of our founding fathers: we could require high school students
to study political philosophers and think about what they best sort of
society would be. We could force them to write essays at the age of,
say, fourteen, reacting to Locke, and then ask them to read Rousseau and
respond to him. We could demystify our political discourse. We could
train people to think, to be responsible for their ideas. Then things
would be better.
These are the complaints of one in exile:
looking over there and picking out the problems. Slowly training myself
for what I have now begun to realize as inevitable, that there is just
too much that is toxic in that society for me to accept it in the way I
used, too, with full-hearted ease and a sense of belonging, of being at
home. I no longer have the urge to kiss the soil when I land at LAX. I
used to be so willing to embrace the fuzzy golden-brown perm. Usually
we become more tolerant of what is our own as we get older. For me the
process is just the opposite, slowly approaching the point where I can
begin to contemplate without grief finally letting go. Where I can hear
criticisms about us and shrug them off, because I am, after all, a
cosmopolitan.
Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus.
If ever there was a person who manifested in his very being the
proposition that it might be otherwise, it is he. He is infuriating,
self-centered, vain, and smart, smart, smart and thoughtful. Half of
the time I want to throw what he writes out the window; but whatever he
writes is interesting. If I prayed I would pray for his recovery, even
though he of course would not appreciate that. I will hope actively for
his recovery.
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