Buddhist Marketer

We are all mixed

As a kid I got picked on for a number of reasons, the top two being my non-whiteness and my then-atheism.  As I flummoxed (solecism alert!) into adulthood, I reworked my victimhood badge in one of honor, and made myself feel special because I Was A Member Of The Brown People’s Club.  My membership has made me feel anything from smug haughtiness at its worst to gentle relief (that I can wiggle my way out of ever feeling White Guilt) at its best.  Add to this the Woe Is Me I Am A Misfit Toy dirge of the half-n-half and what you get is a very flat view of self and humanity.

Which is to say: the notion that competing loyalties exists only in the domain of race is nincompoopery. Of course I don’t actually feel that way, but it’s easy for me to forget that just as my life’s journey is and continues to be a complex one, so too is your journey and the journeys of all our fellow humans.

I was reminded that being mixed does not just mean checking more than one race box whilst sucking down coffee and reading Kathleen Spivack’s nonfiction piece “Language” in the Winter 2007 issue of The Massachusetts Review:

Half German and half American, we had acquired a split which allowed us to be totally comfortable in neither realm.

She continues by sharing a childhood fantasy of metaphorically receiving a trophy for her victimhood:

We were Americans really, after all.  We wanted to be sloppy and free.

I invented the persona in which I was an American girl who went to war and killed Germans and Austrians, and I put myself to sleep at night with that fantasy.  The fantasy always concluded with me lying, wounded and bleeding, bayonet still in hand, on top of a pile of dead Nazi soldiers, and my mother sobbing over my impending death, realizing what a true heroine her daughter was.  In my fantasy she begged God for forgiveness for not appreciating my true heroic nature, her only daughter, and for having constantly bothered me with such trivia as bad posture, table manners, and general disorderly conduct.  “How could I have wronged you so, my darling daughter?”  In the final delicious scene I would close my eyes, a true American patriot, and expire.  When that did not give me enough satisfaction I would proceed to the funeral scene, a fantasy in gorgeous color.  And I would sob myself deliciously to sleep, in mingled sorrow and delight, imagining how much my family would miss me.

I am split, torn!  I suffer for this!  See my suffering!  Love me for it!

If and when I feel myself starting to re-mount the high horse of I Am Mixed And Have A Monopoly On Feeling Different, I need to remember:  we are all mixed.

Faux-reedom

In the original Back To The Future, our predominantly-intrepid hero Marty McFly finds himself back in 1955 from his native 1985.  He’s about to have dinner with his mom (who, in 1955, is his age) and her family.  He crouches down to greet his Uncle Joey in his playpen.  Marty knows that thirty years from this moment, Joey will fail to make parole yet again.

MARTY:  Better get used to these bars, kid.

JOEY’S MOM:  He cries whenever we take him out so we just leave him in there.

Marcel Proust lined his bedroom walls with cork.  A friend of mine married the single mama he was dating instead of quitting his job and roaming the world the way he wanted.  People living below the poverty line continue to sink money into lottery tickets.

From “Epilogue of the Cigar Divan” in The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson:

These are my politics:  to change what we can; to better what we can; but still to bear in mind that man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions; and for no word however sounding, and no cause however just and pious, to relax the stricture of these bonds.

All of which is to say, as we draft policies, enact legislation, and push for reform, let us just keep in mind that when it comes to humanity, as Christine’s Darnell once biliously uttered, sweat stains mottling his thinning short-sleeve button-down:

You can’t polish a turd.

You can, however, use it as fertilizer.  So unfetter, unchain, uncork, unbar, and use that which once jailed you as a kind of soul-nourishing riboflavin.  But let’s not go fooling ourselves into thinking that any of us, or government, or any third party can do anything to truly better the lot of our fellow man.

That said, I am still totally running for God.

L’enfer, c’est les autres

We’re spanning time.

–  Vincent Gallo’s character to Christina Ricci’s in Buffalo ‘66

I have to wonder how long the human condition has been the human condition.  Were little cave girls and boys sullen, reticent little rascals du temps en temps, or were they so crazed and in search of slow-moving meat that they didn’t have time to ferret for belly-button lint?

Has moping about one’s condition been something that humans have been up to across the span of time?

I ask the question as I recently saw 1957 Cary Grant flick An Affair to Remember, and was struck by the following exchange:

Her:  What makes life so difficult?

Him:  People.

So it’s not just me making my own life difficult?!?!  Is all humanity simply a thrumming mass of self-saboteurs in ill-fitting pantalons jamming fried chicken into their spittling maws?!?!

Wait, I should know this one already.  I’m in marketing.