Читать книгу Land of the Free - David A. Bedford - Страница 7

I. You Can Take the Boy out of the Country

The sign on the barbecue restaurant proclaimed with engagingly naive gusto that “In order to serve the needs of our customers, in summer we are open until 8:00 p.m.” I was flabbergasted. In Buenos Aires a handful of restaurants opened for dinner at 9:00 p.m. and most never did before 10:00. My adolescent mentality scoffed. I had much to learn. Over time I observed that in Lubbock people ate dinner around 6:00 p.m. But why? The easy answer is “Why not?” of course, but that did not satisfy me.

There were other puzzling differences from what I was used to. Lubbock boasted a population of around one hundred forty thousand but I could not cover any significant distance on foot, as I would have been able to in any similarly sized city where I grew up. The campus at Texas Tech was uncommonly large, with buildings spaced widely from each other, large expanses of walkways and grass connecting them. There was plenty of room to fit two or three enormous structures between each pair of existing buildings. You could easily build a thriving and very populous mixed-use neighborhood in the area covered by the campus. Except for a small area in the old downtown, no two buildings in the city shared walls. All the houses were separated by generous and assiduously irrigated lawns. Clearly the city layout was designed with cars more in mind than people. It seemed that everyone except me had a car. Still, why were the houses all detached with so much room around them?

One day I was crossing a parking lot on the way to class. In the driveway which connected the street with the lot, one exiting car had stopped right next to an entering car. The drivers had rolled down their windows and were engaging in an extended conversation. Suddenly I had the image of two men on horseback talking on a vast expanse of ranch. What I was seeing was what people did on the farm before cars had replaced horses as the preferred means of transportation, and here they were exhibiting the same behavior in the middle of the city, on a busy parking lot. People still do that. A few days before I sat down to write this, I had to honk at two cars, one in front of me and the other in the opposite lane, whose drivers had stopped to converse with one another. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it is a country way of doing things, not exactly the most appropriate procedure in a city of over three quarters of a million people in a metropolitan area of nearly five million.

I have just alluded to one of the major themes of American life: a country culture which has moved to the cities. Culture, however, changes slowly. The learned ways of doing things and the assumptions which underlie them persist over generations. When I arrived at Texas Tech in 1967, the majority of Americans still lived on farms or in small towns. It was a rural, not an urban country. I had grown up in a thoroughly and historically urban society which owed much of its culture to Spain. I needed an attitude adjustment. The US is to this day heavily influenced by its rural history and culture, and why not? My own mother lived on farms until she enrolled in college. Consequently probably most Americans still follow the pattern of eating dinner early, before the sun sets and getting up with the sunrise, as their parents and grandparents did all their lives on the farm, not because it is strictly necessary in an urban setting, but because culture changes slowly and traditional patterns persist.

Another incident from my first year at college remains vividly memorable. I had been charged out-of-state tuition although my family’s permanent official address in the US was in Texas. That was something I needed to deal with. First, however, something more urgent came up. On Tuesday of registration week I saw a number of students walking around with a punch card in hand. I asked,

“What is that?”

“It’s my registration permit. Don’t you have one?”

“No, how did you get it?”

“It came in the mail a couple of months ago.”

“I never got mine,” I commented.

“Well, you better do something about it. If not, you won’t be able to register.”

Perfect! I thought. Just what I needed. It was a good thing that I had asked. I went to the registrar’s office to see if they could issue me a permit. The middle-aged woman who attended me rummaged through a drawer in a file cabinet against the wall, pulled out a folder and told me,

“We mailed you your permit two months ago.”

“Well, I never got it!”

“It’s not my problem. You probably threw it away by mistake.” She was clearly on the defensive.

“I would never throw out anything that came from the university.”

“Don’t question me. I can’t do anything for you.”

She clearly resented my persistence and her demeanor oozed an attitude of assumed superiority over a mere student. Another person in the office took pity on me and asked me, “Where do you live?”

“Buenos Aires.”

She thought a moment and then suggested I try the post office, saying that sometimes the letters get returned there. I went to the campus post office, explained the situation and waited while they looked through the returned mail.

“David Bedford? Here it is! It came back.”

They handed me the envelope with the all-important registration permit in it. It was marked return to sender: insufficient postage. They had put domestic postage on a letter bound for Argentina. When I pointed it out to them, they shrugged and said that it happened sometimes. It was all done by machine. From then on until I graduated, I made the yearly fall pilgrimage to the returned mail section of the campus post office to get my registration permit.

Now I can resume my story. I returned to my room somewhat stung by the attitude of the woman in the registrar’s office, but I was to encounter the same attitude again, and repeatedly. On visiting the office of Admissions, as it was called then, to find out the procedures to follow to prove in-state residence, I encountered the same problem. The woman behind the desk insisted that since I had come from another country, I would clearly have to pay out-of-state tuition. When I argued, in a manner quite acceptable where I came from, that my situation was unusual and that Americans residing overseas were required to maintain an official address in the US, and that therefore I was in fact a resident of Texas, she dressed me down for being impertinent. She clearly felt that she was in an unassailable position of superiority and was not to be contradicted.

I was used to being treated nicely when I had to buy anything in Argentina (Sí, señor, ¿Qué desea? – Yes, sir, what might be your pleasure?), or less nicely but still politely in government offices, even while laying out my case when there was a difference of opinion. In my country of birth, the middle-aged women seemed to resent being questioned on anything. Of course, the university is a large bureaucracy, not unlike government offices, where people can be surly regardless of country, but there was something more there. Many of the adult women I encountered after coming to college were unhappy. Why? It was several years before I fully understood what was going on.

It is my firm conviction that one cannot understand persons, institutions, or nations without knowing their history. My family is a case in point. Both my grandmothers were intelligent and resourceful people. When their families were intact, they were an important element in the economy of the household. They prepared food, made clothes, salted meat, canned fruits and vegetables and performed numerous other tasks without which there would be no income into the family nor food for the winter. At certain times of the year, they joined the men and children in harvesting the crops. They cared for the cows and pigs, which provided sustenance, and for the horses, which provided work and transportation. Everyone in the family had chores and together they kept themselves fed, clothed, relatively healthy, and educated (the children, that is) during the depths of the Great Depression. When my grandfathers died, both in the year 1935, my grandmothers took charge. My mother’s mother kept a farm going in Roosevelt and Floyd counties, New Mexico and my father’s mother helped the family finish out their contracted rent of a farm in West Texas and then moved the family to Clovis, a small town in the county just north of where my mother lived.

In this the women were typical of the traditional American rural and small-town experience. In the recent past they had enjoyed a respected place as a productive member of the family unit. Their resourcefulness and grit were valued. This sort of family had predominated since the earliest times of British colonization of North America. The first British colony, Virginia, was a publicly traded corporation which had been granted a charter by the crown in the early seventeenth century. Many people bought shares and although many shareholders remained in Great Britain, some traveled to the colony. Other settlers were indentured servants: people who agreed to work for the company for a certain time, seven years in most cases, in exchange for passage to North America and a share in the company and some land at the end of their period of servitude. The Virginia colony was primarily commercial. It sold crops raised in the colony for a profit. The second colony, Massachusetts, was also granted a charter and sold shares as any modern corporation did and as do current postmodern corporations. A large group of British Separatists, one of the groups that left the Church of England during the Reformation, had taken refuge from persecution in the Netherlands. There they discovered that they owned nearly half of the stock in what was then known as the Second Virginia Company, so they bought up enough more to ensure control and moved the company, headquarters and all, to North America. We have all heard how they got blown off course and wound up in what is now Massachusetts. The new colonists were all free men and women and all belonged to the Congregationalist Christian Church. They established towns and cities, created a vibrant economy, provided education for all their children, and practiced their religion (Blum 20-21).

Both colonies became prosperous and soon others came into being. People began moving west beyond the Alleghenies, where they established farms. Over time the family-owned and run farm became the predominant social pattern, where slavery was not practiced, as the booming colonies continuously expanded. By the mid eighteenth century, North America had established universities, seminaries, and thriving businesses, rivaling the United Kingdom in economic power. The family-operated farms and ranches moved into the lands taken from Mexico after the war in the mid-nineteenth century and into the southern states after the Civil War, which took place not long after that.

The family-run concerns which drove the economy required, as we have seen, the cooperation of every member of the family. The work was hard but it provided livelihood, sometimes prosperity, and always a true sense of freedom, not just from a petulant king or a violent task master, but from the hierarchical relationships established in the Middle Ages which continued to affect Europe until World War I. In such a social structure, women felt, and in fact were, usually as strong, independent, and valued as the men.

When I arrived in college, just over half of Americans still lived on family farms or ranches or in the small towns which were built to serve the agriculture and cattle raising that surrounded them. The situation was changing rapidly at the time, however. During my years as an undergraduate the balance of people living in rural areas dropped to slightly below one half. Now most Americans lived in cities or their suburbs. On the farm or ranch the women worked primarily, but not exclusively, in the house while the men worked the fields or tended to the cattle. Women often participated in the latter activities as well. When families moved to the cities and suburbs, the culture (learned ways of doing things based on shared assumptions) of course remained firmly ensconced in people’s subconscious and behavior. These people did not have experience in city living. So they divided the work as they had on the farm: the men outside the house at a job earning money and the women taking care of the children and household chores. Now, however, what the women worked at did not produce income although the work was just as intense. Families felt the weight of the problem but reacted in different ways.

Some women joined the work force. After all, during World War II, when so many of the men were conscripted to fight, the women left behind were needed in industrial jobs making armaments, in clerical jobs in the offices that managed the factories, and in many other jobs that had been vacated by the men. These women had a taste of independence and worth that they had lost when they moved from the farm or ranch to the city. Of course there were still many women running the farm or ranch single-handedly and there was a fairly large population who had always lived in the great cities. At this point, the latter did not typify the experience of the majority of Americans. When the war was over, the women were expected to leave the job and let a returning soldier take it.

From the mid-1940s and into the 1950s, many of the women who had worked jobs during the war and those who had moved from the farm to the city felt that their worth had been taken away from them. In a culture which values only those who make money, they were considered, and considered themselves, worthless, although everyone concerned would deny it. It strikes me as a convincing explanation of why so many middle-aged women in clerical jobs seemed resentful and unhappy when I started college and for many years thereafter.

One of my mother’s brothers was named Dallas Maurice. The family regularly made the pilgrimage to the State Fair, to this day still held in Dallas, and my grandfather loved the city, which accounts for my uncle’s name. At the fair people sold some of their produce but were drawn primarily by what they could buy there that was not available any closer. Farm and ranch people have always, for obvious geographical reasons, traveled considerable distances in order to procure basic necessities and to sell what they produced. Going to the state fair was a grand event: adventure for the children, family time with no chores involved, entertaining sights and events, and plenty of shopping.

The move of millions of farm and ranch families to the cities after World War II coincided with the ready availability of affordable automobiles. The new families moving in thought nothing of traveling twenty minutes to a store. On the contrary, it was a big improvement over the day-long trip to the state fair and the expense of finding lodging for a night or two. The nice new cars made it more comfortable and easier than ever before. Moreover, the new arrivals were accustomed to living in quiet surroundings and not seeing their neighbors any more often than they cared to. The increasingly ubiquitous cars allowed developers to plan the burgeoning neighborhoods in the cities and suburbs to replicate the country lifestyle up to a point. Zoning ordinances, curving streets, and large lots recreated the quiet ambiance of the ranch, with neighbors at a comfortable remove and no commercial buildings or activities within sight, except at the fringes of the developments, where duplexes and other less desirable housing was placed.

People often comment hyperbolically that no one knows the neighbors any more. At first, in the new post-war situation, people often came with food to greet new arrivals and arranged “poundings”, events in which each settled family gave a small appliance or other useful household item to help the new family get started. Little by little this practice has faded, relegated primarily and sporadically to church groups. If the hypothesis of slow cultural change is correct, all the preceding is easily explained: people really want their space and the presence of too many neighbors nearby feels uncomfortable and intrusive.

In rural areas, especially in small towns, although people usually did not have to deal with neighbors any more than they cared to, they all knew each other. This meant that nearly everyone was aware of what nearly everyone else did, through observation, gossip, or deduction. They held each other to an ethic of commonly accepted values and as a result violations of the code were usually well hidden to avoid social censure. This societal control broke down when people moved to the cities. These larger societies are not subject to control in the same way, so people can do more of what they please more easily and without social disapproval. The first generation that moved to town maintained the values they had grown up with and many participated actively in church. The next generation, however, was not prepared by their parents to operate in an urban context. They were just expected to continue behaving as their parents had without the relatively benevolent oversight of a community where everyone knows everyone else.

Of course the US has always had cities and is full of people who live in cities and none of whose forbears lived anywhere other than a city. However, the overwhelming experience of American culture was rural until the middle of the twentieth century. At present we have several generations of Americans who have grown up in cities but whose families come from a culture that does not match the new situation because culture changes slowly. Some families have made the transition successfully and are thriving. Some are holding together but feel with profound malaise that the America they knew growing up is inexorably slipping away. Others have fallen completely apart. People moved to the cities primarily for the manufacturing jobs which paid well and did not require a college education. Several of my uncles did exactly that. When I came to college, it was still a viable option for those who did not wish or who could not afford to get a university education. We are all aware that since then, most of the old manufacturing has moved overseas or has been entrusted to robots.

The American economy was built on agriculture and its culture was rural for three hundred fifty years, from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth. No wonder that it is a cultural theme that runs deep in our subconscious and continues to affect our lives. We now live in an economy based on consumerism and finance and reside in the cities and their suburbs. Our rural past, which until recently informed and maintained a widely accepted way of behaving based on shared assumptions of what is ethical and desirable does not match our new lifestyle, but we have not developed a culture to replace it. As a result we live with competing ethics and assumptions, our political identities are splintered, and, as we no longer have a recognizable cultural identity, people have tried to contrive one: mods and rockers, goths and skinheads, emos and hipsters, kickers and metrosexuals, and so on. We identify by sports teams, whether college or professional, by religious affiliation or non-affiliation, by political party faction, by profession, or in any other of a number of ways. Gangs were never a factor in rural America, but they are one way, albeit tragic, to gain an identity and a community for those who live in the cities and have no culture they belong to and whose families are not strong. The cultural theme of a rural America explains much of how we behave and its breakdown accounts for many of the social ills we see now, not because cities are bad, but because cultures change slowly and we are at a loss. Not understanding this matter is dangerous but becoming aware of it is the first step in seeking a solution.

It is not to be wondered at, then, that when in the 50s and 60s, young people asked why they should not have sex before marriage or take drugs or engage in other behaviors not sanctioned by society, most parents had nothing to answer because they had never needed to think it through. So they said: “Because I said so, that’s why. And don’t question me.” Of course that sort of answer, while understandable, did nothing to provide any guidance to the young people. That is a recipe for trouble. If teenagers ask an important and searching question, we need to have a solid, studied answer or be willing to say, “I’m sorry but I don’t know.” That is the only way to keep their respect.

As a result, the 60s were a time of revolt, anger, and lostness on the part of many young adults. I was unusually fortunate in having parents who answered my questions, no matter how embarrassing, fully and objectively. Living in two cultures promotes a thought process that helps in such situations, but my parents’ upbringing in the best of American traditions had much to do with it as well. At least what I have discussed will help explain the various different outcomes occurring in different families. Note, however, that it was family by family and not social.

Rural life was a major theme of US culture all through its history until recently. The persistence of the theme and the behaviors and assumptions it drives explain much of what happens at present. They drive the goals, desires, and assumptions of a large portion of the society without most people being fully aware of them or their power. This chapter attempts to show how powerful cultural themes can be and illustrate the idea by using one important theme that most people will recognize when brought to their attention. Some of the effects of the cultural theme are positive, others not so much, primarily because of the incompatibility between what life used to be like and what it has become now. In the remaining chapters I will try to discuss some of our other cultural themes with the same purpose in mind.