Returning to New England after six months away in France, I find
this country suffocating in its own domestic issues, strangely
unconcerned by the momentous events in the Middle East or the dual
tragedy in Japan. We have always been an isolationist people but if
anything could shake Americans awake, I thought, it would be the
historic events unfolding today.
But no, domestic squabbles over education, healthcare, and
taxation seem to blot out the world, even for President
Obama.
Try watching international news on CNN — a jerky
experience at best, with ridiculous advertising spots for Japanese
cars interrupting the story every few minutes, sometimes every
minute. Coming from Europe, this is maddening. Fortunately my cable
company provides TV5 Monde, the French-language channel for export.
The commentary there is a marvel compared to the superficial U.S.
choices.
Seemingly educated young Americans are turning their backs
on the outside world. When I bought a cell phone at an AT&T
outlet in Brookline I was asked by the clean-cut, 6-foot-3 salesman
for my permanent address. When I said “Bordeaux,” he looked
disoriented. “Is that a town or a country?” he asked. I chastised
him but he was defensive. “I have a B.A. in political science,” he
countered. I doubt that it was from Harvard.
A few days later I decided to have a look at the new Mark
Twain autobiography, the one with the unreadable 6-point typeface.
Barnes and Noble has a monster bookstore on the edge of the Boston
University campus, a perfect place to browse. When I couldn’t find
the book, I asked the comely salesgirl with long dark hair if she
had it in stock. She turned to her computer and got to work. This
dialogue ensued:
“What’s the title again?”
“The Autobiography of Mark Twain.”
“Okay, I’ll find it. Author’s name?”
“Pardon?” I said, thinking I had misheard.
“Who wrote it?”
“It’s an autobiography,” I said.
She dug in her pretty little heels. “I still need the
author’s name,” she insisted.
I promised her I would not repeat that to anyone. (I
lied.) But out of pity I bought the book.
Taking the temperature of the U.S. on a regular basis, I
have discovered that the New York Times crossword puzzle
contains some pretty good clues to what’s going around. One recent
day a clue was “John Boehner’s outstanding characteristic”. The
answer was a three-letter word, “tan”.
Even the world of journalism seems to be going astray.
Journalism is no longer sacred, if it ever was. Northwestern’s
Medill School, one of the nation’s top five, has just changed its
name to “The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated
Marketing Communications.” Come to Medill and study PR. That’s
where the money is.
The most surprising American cliché to emerge recently is
the allusion to Proust’s doorstop novel that nobody reads,
Remembrance of Lost Time. The madeleine cake scene, in
which the taste triggers childhood memories, has been extended, at
least in the Boston suburbs, to any memory event. One Sudbury woman
tells me, “A certain type of person uses it with abandon today.” I
read a newspaper account recently that proves her point. A Canadian
Air Force colonel who made a habit of stealing women’s underwear
from the neighborhood and videoing himself prancing around in it
was re-creating the “Proust moment, the biting into the madeleine
that brings back the rich memory,” rhapsodized a Columbia
University criminologist. Proust was also in the background when he
watched his video of himself strangling his neighbor’s wife. She
had caught him hiding behind her furnace.
A peek into the uptight world of newsgathering can be had
for two dollars and a look at page 2 of the New York Times, the
Corrections section. One can only imagine the shame a reporter
suffered for mentioning GLAD instead of GLAAD (two competing
gay-lesbian groups), or the reviewer of the book Red Herring
Without Mustard who wrongly said a Gypsy woman turned up dead
when actually she was only badly beaten. But my favorite is the
sloppy cricket writer who referred to Raugarajan Sricharan instead
of Sricharan Rangarajan. At least Sricharan cared.
Want to buy insurance in America? Apparently it is a
hilarious experience. The Geico pig, the Aflac duck, the Allstate
reckless driver, the Flo the Progressive agent all want to let you
in on the fun. Insurers used to try to scare you into buying their
wares. Now they pick your pocket while you’re laughing.
But coming in from the outside, it’s the mangling of the
American language that bothers me most. Next time some divorcée
tells me she is “in a better place” I may scream. If a politician
or a businessperson tells me of plans “going forward” I just may
say I prefer going backward. Beware of anyone who tells you a
policy or a budget is “transparent.” And “mashup” now appears in
the public prints, even in the prose of the estimable Michiko
Kakutani, who apparently was stuck for a real word to compare a new
book to three other genres thrust together. Please, can we all go
backward together?
Perhaps the word with the most curious history is “suck”,
now common parlance among the young but viewed suspiciously by
their parents, who know what it really means. A few years ago, as
the word was working its way into daily speech, a woman came to
McGraw-Hill to sell us her magazine. She said it was worth a lot
because the competition “sucked.” I thought six white-shirted,
tight-suited McGraw-Hill executives were going to choke. But they
agreed with her and she walked away a very rich woman. The magazine
was the now-defunct Byte.
Suck has a controversial history. Even Mel Brooks fell
afoul of the language police when he made his movie Life
Sucks. The studio forced him to change the title to Life
Stinks. Now my daughter has to censor her kids when they sing
along with Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.” Kelly
is perhaps mild compared to Cee-Lo Green, who leaps straight to the
F-word. And what is one to make of his passage, “I don’t know what
you came to do but I came to get this thang crunk for
you.”
I think I’ll go back to France.
