Playing “Ain’t It Awful?”

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE Alaska—(Weekly Hubris)—8/1/11—Recently, I had a conversation with a guy in the bookstore where I work. He was an elderly tourist, from somewhere in the Midwest, and he started up the conversation by asking me if things were as bad in Alaska as they are in the rest of the country. I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, though I did start to get that sinking feeling that I often get when middle-aged guys from Kansas or Iowa want to engage me in deep conversation.

“What do you mean?” I asked him. I wasn’t playing devil’s advocate; I really wasn’t sure what he meant. Bad in what way? What was so bad?

“Well,” he said. “You know. This country is going to the dogs fast. It’s horrible. It’s not the country that I remember, the country I grew up loving.”

“Really? In what way has it changed?” I asked. Now, of course, I was getting the idea where this was going, but I wanted to hear what he had to say.

“Well, the country,” he said. “You know. It ain’t what it used to be! It’s going to the dogs. Why, just coming here to the airport, I passed three homeless guys on the street, holding up signs, begging for help. Why the hell don’t they get a job like the rest of us?”

I knew it was pointless to explain to him that these guys were, for the most part, convicted felons and drug addicts and alcoholics, and that their résumés were probably not up-to-date. Who is going to hire these guys? Who is going to rent them an apartment? They don’t even have a place to shower or any nice clothes to change into for a job interview.

“It’s their own fault,” he said. “I’ve had hard times, too. I didn’t turn to the bottle or to drugs or to crime. I am a good, law-abiding citizen. They probably make more money there on the street than I do at my job.” He muttered again about how things didn’t use to be like that.

“Used to be when?”I asked.

 

He said: “Forty-fifty years ago, when I was a kid. When you were a kid.”

“Well, it sure is different now in many ways,” I conceded. I thought of our obsession with technology, which worries me. I thought of our overpopulation, global warming/climate change. I thought of a number of things that were different now.

But those were not the things he was talking about. He seems to have forgotten, if he ever knew, about the long bread lines of the Depression Thirties, of the thousands of unemployed roaming the streets, hoboes riding the rails, beggars knocking on doors, asking for a hand-out. That was considerably worse than now.

And, of course, the demographics of poverty and addiction and homelessness and the threat of all these things have changed in one significant way. Our society is browning. It is no longer the Irish or the Italians or the Jews that we fear; it’s now African-Americans, East Indians and Pakistanis, Asians, and Mexicans. They have changed the “complexion” of America, and many people fear that. He talked then about crime, about crime in the streets and drugs and the infiltration of people of color into all of this. He was worried that people of color (i.e. Non-Whites) were “taking over the country” (his words) and that we were all going to pay the price for that.

He was, of course, distressed that we now have a Black president, which he does not see at all as progress but as a threat to the American way of life. Because, in his mind, people who are not White are not “real Americans.” They are aliens, they are unlike us, they are others and, therefore, they are dangerous and, surely, up to no good. We have, he reminded me, a president who is not only Black, but is named Barack Hussein Obama, who is surely a Muslim and was not even born in this country.

“He is not a Muslim,” I said. “And he has proven time and again that he was indeed born in this country.”

The old man shook his head. I was an innocent dupe. I had fallen victim to “them”—the great dark conspiracy to take over our country and probably even the world.

“It’s not good,” he lamented. “There are no jobs, there’s violence, there are illegal aliens everywhere. And they want to take our guns from us! They want to suppress us, to keep us down!”

“Who wants to do that?” I asked.

“They do!” he said, trying to reason with unreasonable me. “The government! The Liberals!”

I had heard enough. I had certainly heard it all before and sometimes far more eloquently. My eyes began to glaze over.

He was just one paranoid old man, but the sad truth is that this fear, this anger, this sense of sureness that alien enemies who are not “us” are plotting to destroy all that we Americans hold near and dear is widespread today. Of course, trying to convince this man that the government that he so fears is his government, elected by him to meet his needs, to represent him in governing bodies, to speak with his voice, and that if he doesn’t like the way he is being represented, then the system provides ways to get rid of “them” would be pointless. He doesn’t see it that way: he didn’t vote for Obama, and Obama sure as hell doesn’t speak for him. And, for the life of me, I cannot figure out where all this Right-Wing rage is coming from.

In spite of all my book-larnin’ and the volume of reading I do and the conversations I have with all kinds of people and the hours I have spent channel-surfing through the major 24-hour news stations and the pouring over newspapers and news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, and just thinking, I have yet to find where all this Right-Wing White man’s anger is coming from.

Some of it, of course, is economic, but the economic crisis, bad though it is, has been far worse before in this country and I have never had the sense (through reading; I wasn’t there for the Depression) that people then were as angry as they are now, even though, it seems to me, they had every right to be. Sitting in the Hoovervilles, they must have raged in pain and frustration, but that was understandable, rational. This is . . . well, neither of those things.

Are things worse now than they were for my 97-year-old father-in-law (named O’Connell), who remembers signs in windows that read: “No Irish need apply”? He remembers being called “dirty shanty Irish,” even by his teachers at school. Is our country worse today than that?

Go further back. Is the country worse today than it was during the Civil War when, for four interminable years, we slaughtered our young boys and men by the thousands, leaving their rotting and vulture-picked bodies scattered throughout America’s cornfields and meadows and forests?

Is it worse now than it was when, in the years leading up to that devastating war, Americans were so politically divided that congressmen attacked each other with guns in legislative houses?

Is it worse now than it was when orphaned children were put on trains and taken out West to be auctioned off and farmed out to prospective “parents,” many of whom wanted only slave labor out of them?

Is it worse now than it was when young men and women and children worked twelve- and 16-hour days in sweatshops, under the most deplorable of conditions, and sometimes died as a result of their labors or were health-damaged forever after?

It only takes a little reading of American history to wonder why in the hell we are so angry today.

I hear a lot now about the 1950s. That was, apparently, the golden era. Back when all American families were like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and June and Ward Cleaver and the boys. Everyone was wholesome. Everyone was basically good, even the Beaver, whose naughtiness was cute and innocent. Mothers, like Harriet and June, were all attractive and wore pearls and heels at home, even in the kitchen, Fathers were always wise—Ward and Ozzie and, especially, Jim Anderson (Robert Young of“Father Knows Best”) always dispensed wisdom and gentle tough-love to their wayward sons.

There were no Black people. There were no Hispanics. There were no Asians. There were certainly no East Indians or Pakistanis. These people apparently did not exist and allowed the American Dream to thrive as wholesome, pure, good, and white. Apparently the 50s were the most golden time ever to be alive. Ask any Right-Winger over the age of 50, and they will tell you.

But I remember the 1950s very well. I was a kid then. And I was, for the most part, a happy kid and I have good memories of those days. But I doubt mine are any better than the memories of any imaginative boy in any era. But, I certainly remember that the golden 50s, that some so nostalgically muse over, were as non-existent as the worlds of elves, fairies, and trolls.

Ozzie and Harriet, for example, never really existed at all, at least not in the way you see them on TV. The Nelsons were as dysfunctional as any of us. They battled alcohol and drug addiction, divorce, marital difficulties, and serious problems with their children. But, of course, no one talked about those things in those days.

I remember riding with my grandfather in his pick-up truck sometime in the 50s, riding from his small farm in Virginia into the nearby small town. Every day, in front of the courthouse, a group of elderly men would sit for hours on end, lining the straight-backed chairs and benches at the courthouse steps. Always the same group of old men. Sometimes, they played checkers; most of the time they just talked.

“What do they talk about day after day?” I remember asking my grandfather.

He would chuckle. “Oh, they are playing ‘Ain’t It Awful,’” he would say.

‘What’s ‘Ain’t It Awful?’” I asked.

“It’s their favorite game,” he explained. “They all sit around and bitch and whine and complain about how awful everything is.”

“What everything?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. The world today. Our government and politicians, the president, the social climate, everything and anything that they think is awful.”

Well, so much for the golden 1950s. It wasn’t, apparently, so golden to the ones who lived in it.

I remember a family down the street, the Martins. Several times a week, we would all hear the screams and cries and pleading for help of Mrs. Martin, as her alcoholic husband beat the crap out of her on a regular basis. Once I saw her run from the front door of her house, with her husband (in his boxer shorts and wife-beater T-shirt) following in hot pursuit. He grabbed her by her long, black pony-tail (pony-tails were the look in the 50s) and dragged her back across the yard, screaming in agony, while he punched at her with his fists. None of the men on the street, including my own father, did anything at all about it. No one wanted to interfere. They minded their own business in the 50s.

“She’s his wife,” my father explained to me with a shrug. “It’s a terrible thing, but it’s their business.”

Ah, the golden 50s. Was that better than now?

I remember, when I was 14, a popular senior girl in the high school became pregnant—a shocking event of now-unimaginable horror. She was found dead one morning in her bedroom, having tried to give herself an abortion with a coat hanger. Was that better than now?

My parents were nothing like the Nelsons or the Cleavers. My mother and father were both alcoholics. I learned quickly that if I needed them at all as Mom and Dad, I had to reach them before 8 p.m. After that, they were too drunk and out of it even to talk to me. Once my father attended the Open House at my elementary school, drunk as a skunk, and I was so horrified that I skipped school and hid in the woods and parks for days. Ah, the golden 50s!

The point I am trying to make (I hope not badly) is that the wonderful 1950s were no more wonderful than any other era. Sure, there were some things about that time that I nostalgically sigh over, too, but there were certainly other things that we have happily left behind us forever.

And, to everyone’s surprise, apparently there were Black people then. And Hispanics and Asians and Arabs. And they were tired of being marginalized in their own country; and they were gradually growing more and more angry, with an anger that I eventually could understand without any problem. That anger led to the social upheavals of the 1960s and, though much of that was not pleasant, not good, not happy, it certainly was understandable.

 

But the old guy in the airport the other day: him I don’t get. And he was on vacation in Alaska, had just enjoyed a dream cruise, had had spectacular weather for the spectacular scenery. And yet, he was just pissed. Go figure.