What if Everyone Crowded Into a Redneck Bar?

I grew up in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and early 60s. Black men stepped off the sidewalk to let white men pass. Everybody’s maid was a black woman. Sometimes they wore little white caps like servants to British aristocrats. The racial order was well established and taken for granted. The sexual order too: women stayed home and took care of their men and children.

The attitude of well-off whites toward blacks and women wasn’t hatred. That wasn’t necessary. Everyone knew their place and stayed in it. But in the country bars where the air was thick with the lust and free-floating rage of young men with too many hormones and too much beer in their bellies, things could get nasty pretty quickly. You didn’t want to be a black man in one of those bars. You didn’t want to be private-school white boy either. “What are you looking at,” was a common greeting.

I wasn’t allowed in the men’s grill at the country club, but from the times I was in there with my father, I thought it wasn’t a place I wanted to be either. Those men weren’t likely to punch you or cut you, but they were as quick with a demeaning joke about blacks and women, and Jews, as those redneck barflies.

That’s just the way it was in the Deep South in 1959, the year I started high school.

The other big part of life in the South in those days was religion. Everyone went to church, to see and be seen. The sermons were high-minded Christian dogma about the golden rule. Everyone prayed the psalms and sang the hymns. I can’t speak for myself, because I was an atheist even then, so it was all a bit like participative performance art to me, but my impression was that those around me were impressed with their piety and charity toward their fellow man.

When racism and sexism leaked out of the redneck bars and country club men’s grills, it washed up on the rocks of that sanctimonious piety. Someone would have too many martinis and get a little too colorful at a suburban party and the host would ask a friend to drive him home, bless his heart. Polite company wasn’t the place for that kind of thing.

So to get a thorough indoctrination in racial hatred and sexism, you had to go to those country bars or country club men’s grills. They were self limiting. Like a localized tumor that couldn’t easily metastasize.

But now we have social media, and we’re all plugged into it all the time. We’re drunk on it. And it’s making us mad. Perversely, that’s a big part of it’s appeal. Making us mad is a moneymaker for its sponsors.

Here’s what Roger McNamee, an early advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, says:

The problem is that the underlying business model of Facebook, where you bring three billion people onto one network with no boundaries and no safety net, then combine that with a business model that's based on essentially promoting emotionally intense content in order to promote engagement, and then add into that the ability to target people with extreme precision. And the result is that an enormous number of ideas that have lived for years at the fringes of society — things like white supremacy and anti-vax — have suddenly been thrust into the mainstream and done huge damage. *

I had friends who went into those country bars of my high-school years and basically never came out. Now it seems like we’re all doing it. 

Somehow we need to find a way to sober up.

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* Interview with Julia Chatterley, CNN Business, October 26, 2021 

My Madness

My madness isn’t constant. At least I don’t think it is. It’s episodic. Its root cause is my compulsiveness.

I’m afflicted with a gift for seeing straight lines. This means that when I have work done in my house, I see if it’s out of square. I notice the change in luster if the paint is too thin. My feet feel a floor out of level or a piece of limestone that is a bit too high on one side. I’m forever hovering over workers, to their and my dismay. I know I should probably stay out of their hair until they finish, and then check, but it always seems easier to try to get it right the first time.

I don’t do this with doctors. If a surgeon is well trained, has a brilliant reputation in their field, and is recommended by someone I trust (usually another doctor), I listen to what they plan to do, ask a few questions to be sure I understand what’s being recommended and why, and then I let them do their job. I don’t google my problem and quiz them based on what I read on the internet.

In fact, I spend more time scouring online reviews of cheap electronics. 

When I was a lawyer, I worked on big mergers and financings. My firm was new to some of the more exotic financing approaches, so I spent a long time learning the craft. It was like looking for straight lines and level floors on every page of the documents. It was tedious and a little terrifying…and exhausting. Eventually I realized that if we were going to do these deals over and over, we needed to standardize our forms and procedures. So we did that. The young lawyers working on the deals with me became experts. They did the work on hundreds of deals and only came to me with the problems. As we worked together and I saw their skill firsthand, I came to trust them. I didn’t have to hover over them. I knew they would do the job right.

I couldn’t have done it any other way. Certainly not as a practical matter. If I’d been involved in the details of every deal, I would have been a bottleneck. But also I would have driven myself crazy.

So that’s what I’ve learned about myself. If I’m to maintain my sanity, I have to let others do things for me and not stand over them while they do it. The trick is to make sure I have confidence in the people I’m relying on.

If I haven’t trained them myself, though, or know someone outstanding has, it’s hard for me to depend on others. To come back to where we started—home improvement—sometimes it can be so hard to find good people that I just hire and hope. After all, it’s only a window replacement or a drywall patch, not major surgery. 

But the lines have to be straight and the paint smooth. And if it’s up to me to make sure they are…well, let me just say this to all the workers I have held to my perfectionist standards over the years: I’m sorry, I can’t help myself.

The Wisdom of Solomon

I watched an episode of Grantchester that had a happy ending that left me sad. Do you know the show? Set in an English village in the 1950s, a priest and a detective, each with their own demons, are a crime-solving pair. In this episode two couples want the same baby. An adoption agent dies and it could be murder. It was an accident, as it turns out, and after a good bit of wise counseling by our priest-detective duo, the final scene is a christening with both couples in attendance and the priest telling the story of Solomon and the child claimed by two women. In Grantchester, there was no need to split the baby; they shared it.

So what made me sad about that?

The biological parents were not married and the dad was a good hearted n’er-do-well. The would-be adoptive parents were well-off; the man desperately wanted a son, but his wife was just fine with no children in the house. The solution? One couple raises the child, the other provides financial support so the boy has a good chance to make something of himself.

It was a good piece of story-telling. You felt the longing and pain of both couples, so the ending that gave them each some of what they wanted and needed was particularly satisfying.

So what about that made me sad? 

Look around. We aren’t doing that these days. We aren’t compromising. We aren’t honoring the feelings of others. We aren’t trying to understand them. Push them aside, take them to court, that’s what we’re doing.

The priest and the detective from Grantchester would be appalled. In their village there is all the bigotry, hate and murderous rage we face today, but somehow they manage to talk to one another, to try to understand one another, to see their common humanity.

We’re not doing that. That’s what makes me sad.

Oh, what a foolish dreamer you must think me, to be so naive as to believe life could ever be like a moralizing tv show. To which I say, how can we accept that it is not?

I Really Do Care, And You Do Too

We didn’t need Melania’s green-jacket pronouncement of her personal lack of interest in the rest of us to suspect as much. Some people just seem to not give much of a damn about others. She might be one of them. Her husband another. Aren’t they cute? A perfect pair.

Most of us do care, though. It’s hard wired into us by evolution. Those who survived to propagate were the ones who took care of one another.

The speed of modern life has short-circuited evolution, or at least our ability to understand what is happening to us now. It’s hard to think in terms of swimming out of the sea to walk on land or shedding prehensile tails when the daily news cycle is screaming apocalypse now.

A lot of us are very angry at others. One wonders what happened to our evolutionary imperative to look after one another. Are we evolving away from it? Will we survive without it?

Almost all of us look after our children. Most of us look after other family members, after a suitable cooling off period following Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Joe from back home. On down the line of concern, we might drop a dollar in the Salvation Army holiday collection bucket. Some days that might be about as far as our concern goes.

If indeed we are that unconcerned with how the less-fortunate among us are faring, why does it make me so mad that some people seem determined to stand in the way of helping those who obviously need help? Joe Biden wants to make investments in medical care and child care for those who can afford neither. These initiatives would make us more healthy and productive over the long run, so they should be an easy sell. They are also humane. Another easy sell.

But that’s not the way approximately half the country sees things. I’m not sure if they don’t believe the long-term economic benefits of having a healthy population that has child care so they can go to work, or if they just aren’t into being humane. At least not to “those folks.” And you know who they mean by that.

A related question might be: why do I care? No one in my family needs Medicaid or free child care. Leaving aside his sensible climate policies, the Biden plan is not designed to help me. If fact, the tax increases to pay for it will hurt me.

And yet, I can’t read the news without getting frustrated that we seem so determined not to help one another. When did we get like that? Did Darwin take a break?

Perhaps the answer is that most of us never cared about more than our families and friends. Everyone else was just a statistic. We don’t love statistics. Or mourn them.

What, then, gives a push to big social programs like Roosevelt’s New Deal? Does it take the widespread suffering of the Great Depression to make us care? Does it take the fear of “there but for fortune go I”? Lyndon Johnson wanted to do something like the New Deal, a program he called the Great Society. That went nowhere. The Vietnam war took all his political juice, and we weren’t in the middle of a depression.

Is it only politicians who want to get elected who offer to do good for others? And their political opponents who find fault with that? So that we’re locked in the push and pull and bombast of stump speeches, divorced from genuine notions of the common good. Do we even believe there is a common good?

Or is it just what’s good for each of us individually and those we love? Those other people are just that: other people. They can look after themselves. That seems to be a common sentiment. Along with the implicit idea that if they need help they aren’t trying hard enough. “God helps those who help themselves,” comes to mind as a rationalization for looking away from the needs of others. Also, “Charity begins at home.”

We have so many good reasons for not helping. For not caring about the plights of others. The truth is that their plight is our plight. Too often, though, we don’t come to that realization until it’s too late. Until, as Martin Niemöller so powerfully wrote, “Then they came for me.”