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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