prejudice

Desensitized to joy

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So highly critical of everything despite being unqualified to criticize (that is, offering blind critique of films he had not seen, theories he had not studied, and so on), listening to him was instructive in ways not to be, i.e., behaving in pseudo-intellectual going against the grain for the sake of going against the grain… but it was also unproductive, spending time on ineffective, uninformed opinions crafted for controversy’s sake without even being wrapped in the blanket of devil’s advocacy.

It was all Moonlight (which he had not seen) was “pretentious navel-gazing only praised because it was a ‘black movie’”. Or “women are routinely jealous of other women, and that’s why you don’t appreciate Kate Tempest” (now Kae Tempest, whose coming out as non-binary is probably another thing he’d have uninvited commentary on). Or worse yet, and most offensively, it’s “not numerically possible for as many people to have perished in the Holocaust as commonly claimed” (a “theory” relayed to me by phone in the waning moments of our acquaintance, as I sat in a Jewish restaurant glancing across the street toward a heavily guarded synagogue).

Now of course my brain screams the words I should have blurted out then without hesitation: “What happened to you, dude? What happened to you that makes you like this?! Why would these be the thoughts you think are worth sharing?” I was so much in it at the time, in the moment, wanting everything to progress in a linear stitch, that I did not dare voice my disbelief. I was so much in my own cloud of grief and recovery from a variety of unrelated things that I didn’t see it clearly at the beginning of the conversation. I sewed myself into this predicament that could never yield anything. This is what happens when you believe that any change will be preferable to the current circumstances … and the more dramatic and jarring that change, the better.

Years and years removed from this brief, quilted little mess, it’s these incongruous utterances, betraying a strange mix of what I can only characterize as a mix of jealousy, unconscious bias, latent prejudice, and a need to be perceived as driving dialectical arguments that were nevertheless completely subjective, that occasionally spring to mind. It’s impossible to say if these vignettes reflect who he really was, who I interpreted him as being, or someone he projected or pretended to be in a bid to get rid of me without having to be direct. Or some combination of all of these.

While none of these things matter and don’t figure into my life, sometimes while driving long distances in the dark (my favorite way to drive), listening to music I collected during that period in my life, the mind wanders.

And now in the present, I think, my god, what did I see in this person? I was so tightly wound, I’d have overlooked a lot and basted a patchwork of excuses over the top of both of our inconsistencies and shortcomings. All to prevent my own unraveling. In truth, I never knew this person. I tried to live according to a pattern that was less a form and more a bubble. Being in that momentary bubble, we were not who we really are – on so many levels. We were ephemeral, interim people. Or at least I was … just a thread – loosely connecting one part of my life to an entirely different one. And I can only interpret him and his presence in my life through that lens.

Beyond that, though, and once again only through my own filters and limited information, I can only wonder what his actual partner saw in him? I can only think – based on what little I knew of her and what pieces of himself he showed me – that she suffered. For years. Even if he complained about her (which was exceedingly and respectfully rare), he spoke reverently of her intelligence, her potential, and of all the beautiful things that made her her. She sounded so much more enchanting, patient and forbearing than he could ever be, and certainly more than he deserved if he really did put her through the things he described doing in the course of their lives together. I thought I understood why they were, as he claimed, splitting up, given their long and complex history (the first thing of which I can’t pretend to know about), but even so, I could only guess that she wasn’t living the fullest life she could have been by staying with and relying on him. She sounded like she deserved so much more. It’s not as simple as that, and it’s easy for a rootless character like me to dismiss roots, ties, history and even – or perhaps especially – love.

I find myself thinking of these kinds of people – the person in a partnership who must get something fulfilling from it but who suffers at the hands of the whims, addictions, fickleness and capriciousness of the partner to whom they’ve tied themselves. It’s not rare. Another man I’ve known for years is a serial philanderer (I use this word without assigning a moral judgment to it); I have always wondered what his wife thinks and how she feels. She, like the aforementioned woman, is deeply intelligent, worldly, talented, beautiful, and at least on paper, everything her husband could ever want. But it’s still not enough (or rather, he is not enough so constantly has to prove and reprove that he is attractive to anyone and everyone else). To satisfy his own low self-esteem, some aspects of his choices and behavior must erode her self-esteem. I hope not, but I can’t see how it wouldn’t.

But what do I know? Desensitized to joy, indulging in the purchase of preposterously expensive keychains, seeking out highly practical portable air compressors and searching out capellini in a pasta wasteland, I am always casting an eye on the past and the scales that blinded me.

shaping minds

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In these unusual times, in which people are sent to work and study at home, in which schools are closed, and we rely on the sense (I know – what sense?) of the greater public to be rational (but… have you not been washing your hands before? have you a reason for hoarding toilet paper?), I reflect on a few things:

We have no idea if things go “back to normal” in a few months. What if we are moving in a direction that is completely different from anything we’ve known before? For the time being, nothing at all changes for me. My life has been one long exercise in social distancing, so I have the same amount of human contact right now as ever. That is, none. And the world from my vantage point remains exactly the same calm it has always been. It is much like my life at Christmastime. The retail world bursts with angry mobs trying to buy the limited supply of the latest toy/game/whatever, lights and decorations appear everywhere. But Christmas is like any other day in my world. And this feels like that. So far even rare visits to shopping outlets haven’t been any different from normal.

As many of my friends and acquaintances shift to working from home and having to do some form of home schooling, many of them have praised teachers and remarked on the difficulty of a teacher’s job. I agree with this completely. I taught for a brief moment in my younger life, and I would never, ever like to do it again. I have to hand it to teachers, particularly the best of them. Yet, tonight, as I was reading a book that mentioned something about the artist David Hockney, I was reminded of how limited, limiting, and judgmental teachers can be, bringing their personal prejudices and convictions to school and ‘infecting’ young people with them.

Our academic decathlon team in high school had to study several works of art, including Hockney. What is burned into my memory isn’t his work but instead how our advisor – one of the district’s well-respected history teachers – declared that she didn’t approve of our having to study Hockney because he is “a pervert”, which was, for her, a very thinly veiled code of disgust and disdain at the fact that Hockney is gay. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m pretty sure that most of my friends would feel angry to learn that any of their kids’ teachers were making such remarks in a classroom. It’s been… I don’t know… almost 30 years since this teacher made this comment, and I remember it so clearly, so angrily. She was summarily judgmental about everything, but this particular comment felt so bitter, venomous, hateful and damaging that I’ve never been able to forget.

Meanwhile, I had a teacher in elementary school who was deeply loved, popular and gifted – extraordinary at connecting with the minds she was shaping without injecting ideological or controversial ideas into the equation. I recall things that, even as a child, I didn’t agree with, such as the Reagan/Bush 84 bumper sticker on her car, but she didn’t bring her politics or religion into the public-school classroom. And that, too, has stuck with me.

Both teachers are examples of the extremes the education system might serve up randomly – and it makes me thankful in some way that I don’t have children. You just don’t know what kind of education – or inaccuracy, biases or prejudices they may be exposed to day to day, and would they even tell you everything their teachers said? I don’t recall ever mentioning the “pervert” comment to my parents, and they would not have been invested or interested anyway. But personally, I would be livid if I had kids who were exposed to these kinds of hateful opinions.

It also strikes me as typical (and horrifying) these accepted norms. The same year we studied Hockney we also studied opera star Placido Domingo. Our teacher thought he was magnificent. I had no idea at the time that Domingo would be just another in the endless list of men exposed as a serial sexual harasser. But it’s disappointingly unsurprising that the teacher, and by extension her students, and all of society, looked at Domingo and pretty much all other entitled men, with admiration, regardless of their behavior and treatment of others while they vilified someone like Hockney only because of who he is. (I wish I had adequate words for how angry it makes me to reflect on this now.) I can hope teachers aren’t still out there saying, at best, insensitive and thoughtless things, but I suspect there’s still a whole lot of this – and I would not even know where to begin exposing and expunging it from the education system.