My mother (not blood-related to these people but obliged nonetheless to represent them in what she has always perceived (rightly) to be their grievance against a social contract both she and they think (wrongly) was rigged long ago by her sort of person (being only by small degrees of politesse, and hardly any more money, removed from their sort of person) for the purpose of holding their sort down (one increment of prosperity being about as far as the nearsighted American now can or cares to see, so that the trailer-homed man thinks it perfectly moral to direct his rage against anyone in a better car, while a helper like my mother suffers physical guilt over the fact that her own children are not, or are no longer, on food stamps), when in fact the contract was rigged long ago (yes, that part is correct) by a sort five or six or ten steps above either one of these sorts (or is it a hundred? or is it a thousand? and does it really matter, given that control of this mechanism has scampered up and down the rope with such agility over the eons, in an effort to obscure and protect itself, yet has never sought, and will never seek, asylum among my own particular sort (or sorts)?)) has on the occasion of paragraphs akin to the previous pronounced me a “snob.”
I say that if I have any such impulse in me it will show in the paragraph just completed, and not in the gem before that. I say that the truth is, or anyway ought to be, sufficient defense against the charge, and that opposing counsel knows full well where to rank my honesty among humans she has either birthed or ignominiously fled. Do I count myself better than my uncles and aunts and cousins? I know that I was meant to: I know that the primary excuse given by my parents for our removal to the Virginia shitscape was an intention to see my siblings and me reared apart from, and uninformed by, uncles who were soon to lose their small grip on reality, and aunts who were soon to lose their small grip on hope, and cousins who were soon to lose their small grip on cash to what chemical replacements for hope and reality (and cash) could be fashioned in the basements and garages and attics of the middle west.
I intend no objection to this worldview but only cite it here as evidence that I, who am in provable fact blood-related to those fled-from midwesterners, and am no obvious improvement on them, was not by any stretch the first in my circle to grab at a cruel conceit in the pursuit of something higher.
This notion of snobbery
Still, this notion of snobbery does weigh on me, as I bet it weighs on every American who tends to go clownish or stony before what he perceives to be those either better off or worse off than he, lest a word or a gesture (which are anyway the same thing) out of place reveal that he thinks himself better rather than only better off, or worse rather than only worse off, such attitudes being proscribed by his television set yet dependably represented on it, so that in truth he cannot help but think himself better (who would not?), and cannot help but think himself worse (who would not?), and so is forever sent in one direction by his scorn and in another by his bitterness. Were it not for his steadfast avoidance of anyone above or below him in this equation he would probably explode.
For myself, I would like to see the American classes mix more, not because I can foresee a day when my fellow citizen will enter a voting booth or a jury box or a convenience store with some livelier spark in his head than that what matters here is how he feels (not thinks, mind you, because people who think are generally out to make him feel bad for not having thought enough, and he will not be made a fool of, except by himself), nor because I honestly believe the nation would benefit much if its voters and jurists and flip-flopped shoplifters suddenly set aside their feelings, being mostly terror and its satellite states, and adopted the reasoned approach Mr. Jefferson championed publicly (as opposed to the Romantic approach he got wind of privately and, thinking himself better, leaned into), which correction might be worth something had this narcotic land, and the sleepy institutions built upon it, and the nightmarish educators those institutions then produced, eroded no more than our habit of thought and not our actual capacity for it.
No, despite all temptations of politeness I can discover no decent way to vouch for the native intellect, nor do I harbor much hope for its betterment elsewhere, since emigration would, I suspect (or fear, or maybe “feel” is the word I want here), only further accelerate the export of New World stupidity to the Old, or to the older still, and does that commerce not already redound upon us in towering waves? Do we not daily know our stupidity returned to us in blatant echo, here and there honed and amplified? Will we still maintain that we are alone on this planet, and in our homes, and that this aloneness alone is sufficient defense against the backwash of an ignorant self-assertion, when the next wave sees us all drowned together like attic rats?
Is this eschewal of anyone remotely dissimilar, in case we might be forced to interact at the mall with someone we perceive to perceive himself better, or with someone we perceive to perceive himself worse, really the brave individualism we imagine? Or is it instead a collective and thus extra-cowardly form of suicide? And is that eschewal, or that suicide, since it takes as an article of faith that no one should ever dare think himself better, not strangely evocative of the sad drab grays of Communism? And did that go well, for the Communists? Are we to suffer their same fate: a collapsed ideology and a collapsed economy, a twenty-first-century serfdom to potato-fed bullies with guns? Are we to dwell in a land where (and we have already had a taste of this) the oligarch with the most potato guns at his beck is proclaimed (first by himself, and then by all the television channels) to be our “commander in chief”? or is this perilous thought, that no one should ever dare think himself better, safely offset by its very American cousin, that no one could possibly be as good?
These are fascinating questions, I agree, but well beyond my purview here. I leave them to the philosopher, of whom this nation will undoubtedly produce, and then exterminate (or ignore, which amounts to the same thing), many fine examples after my time. My own desire to see the American classes mix more must remain as it always has been: a simple, perhaps even a humble, desire to know whether I am right (if not, I have cause to celebrate; if so, I have reason to cheer!) about my countryman’s innate potentiality to explode.
Flower
In a field to the north of our house, one spring day when I was in my fifteenth year, I saw a figure walking the opposite way of mine, far enough off at first that I could make out only a yellow on top, and a blue green below, and a purer green in flapping fronds to the sides, and I wondered for a moment whether this was not some enormous species of migratory flower I might tackle and subdue and stake a great scientific reputation upon. As it neared, though, I could see that it was only a young man of about twenty or so, with wild blond hair and the start of a beard, done up below in a too-large green tee beneath denim overalls that if washed once or twice might have staved off forever that ridiculous mirage about the flower.