I AIN’T NO ANYBODY
“I used to ask myself, ‘Does it matter that I’m here instead of somebody else?”
Elizabeth Warren’s question hit me deep and dead center. On one hand, it’s all over now — I’ve done whatever I could where I was at the time. On the other hand, I’m old now (it’s becoming a fetish) and I can do whatever the hell I want to do. (Within some limits.)
DRK once asked me a different question: “What did it feel like when everyone around you was the same as you?” What he was noting was that I was white on the rez and everyone else was indigenous, coffee-colored, easy, at home. When he was off-rez raising money for Piegan Institute, he was aware of being different. He said being Indian was like the sci-fi Heinlein book, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” But I never felt different in Browning. I feel different in Valier but not because of race. It’s education. And that separated DRK in Browning.
David Brooks’ essay in Atlantic about class and economics in America addresses this sort of thing. Money, status, education, locale, morality and hierarchies within categories are noted. I’ve gone up and down through these stages and strata all my life. I joined Kindergarten late and was despised as an outsider. In primary school I was teacher’s pet. By 4th grade I was too near-sighted to function. By 8th grade I was a sentence-outlining champion.
It’s been like that ever since. They told me in high school I was one of the elite thinkers, meant to be a leader. I dsccovered in college that so was everyone else. Then I found a niche I loved in the theatre department. But had to graduate. Then built a new life teaching and wife-ing on the Rez. Had to leave that and went to work as an Animal Control Officer, so low class that my mother was too embarrassed to tell her friends.
But then the U of Chicago Div School — can it be more elite than that? They worried that I didn’t know how to dress. After the ministry it was being a computer clerk for the City of Portland among women who considered themselves an elite among keyboarders.
Then to Valier where they never can figure it out. I just do my stuff, but so quietly pecking away in the back bedroom — not publishing, not writing for the local paper — that they think I may have moved away, abandoning my decrepit house and yard. Or maybe I’m on drugs. Their least likely suggestion would be a “public intellectual” because to their minds “intellectual” is a slam, something phony. Bit after all, I was once married to a famous man, an artist, or so says their grandma.
Here’s what Brooks says:
https://medium.com/the-atlantic/how-the-bobos-broke-america-ddb70cda2343
I thought Paul Fussell’s insights were excellent and identified with “Class X,” have claimed it ever since. Brooks is critical, though he includes himself. Some quotes.
“In 1983, a literary historian named Paul Fussell wrote a book called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Most of the book is a caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers prevalent at the time. After ridiculing every other class, Fussell describes what he called “X people.” These were people just like Fussell: highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. . . .They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility. The chapter about X people was insufferably self-regarding, but Fussell was onto something. Every once in a while, in times of transformation, a revolutionary class comes along and disrupts old structures, introduces new values, opens up economic and cultural chasms. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was X people.”
“Members of our class find it natural to leave their hometown to go to college and get a job, whereas people in other classes do not. In study after study, members of our class display more individualistic values, and a more autonomous sense of self, than other classes. Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence”
That’s me. Has been since kindergarten. You know that principle about people who are too dumb to know they are dumb? Well, I’m too smart to know that I’m smart, because I found out how formidable the smartest people are, but I’m also smart enough to question the whole thing about what the heck “smart” means anyway.
“According to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, 65 percent of Americans believe that “the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good.”
That’s me, too. Being a UU minister cured me of the idea that there IS anything a person could identify as “common good.” It’s a morality, isn’t it, and it’s Brooks’ stumbling block. He thinks there is a common good. That’s because he’s on PBS, a left-over from the Enlightenment, much like the UUA.
For me, the question is inclusion versus exclusion. And the answer is relative: it all depends and it may not depend on what I want.
