Have You Ever Wanted To Change Your Citizenship?

Millions of immigrants to the United States would be very happy to have American citizenship.  They no longer can be deported to back to the war zones, poverty, ethnic and religious repression, and abusive governments they left.  They travel under the protective umbrella of the United States, and enjoy social and economic benefits undreamed of back home. Yet most, if they could, would return to their homelands. No matter how impossible the circumstances – Cuba under Castro, Revolutionary Iran, or chaotic Somalia – the sentiments are the same. “I want to go home”.

I know an Iranian woman who waited almost 20 years for a permanent visa to the US, but has no intention of residing here.  She needed the visa to be able to visit her children in Canada, and eventually will apply for residency there. She did not flee Iran and has a reasonable and comfortable life in Tehran despite the hardships and the mullahs.  Citizenship whether in the United States and Canada was for her a means to a very personal and practical end.  Iran will always be her home.

We hired a Salvadoran nanny a number of years ago, and over time helped her get her working papers, Social Security Card, green card, and citizenship. An American passport gave her the security of never having to leave the country which gave her employment, security, and freedom; and allowed her to visit her home country whenever she wanted. However, it soon became clear that once she became too old to clean houses and take care of children, she would return to El Salvador and live out her years there.  I once asked her if she liked America.  Surprisingly she said no – surprising because I thought everyone loved America - and although she could not articulate her reasons, she was never really happy here.

I have a close Chilean friend who has spent over 40 years in the United States.  Her husband and one of her children are Americans.  Yet she never ceases to talk about Chile and Latin America.  Four decades have done nothing to erase the memories of childhood or pull up the roots of culture.  She is Chilean to the core, and someday soon  I am sure she will return to Santiago.

The Sixties were years when many young Americans hated their country.  It was waging an unnecessary, brutal, and criminal war in Vietnam.  It was racist, misogynist, and homophobic; and its capitalistic excesses consigned millions to desperation and poverty. Not only to escape the draft but to flee the depredations of a country gone bad, many considered going to Canada, a reasonable, rational, peace-loving, and moderate place where everyone seemed to be happy; and while they might miss the hurly-burly of American life, they would do anything to live far from its demonic core.

Few people ever actually went to Canada or any other country for that matter. While many on the East Coast dreamed of moving to Europe – a civilized idyll compared to the Wild West, murderous United States – they stayed put.  They talked longingly of France and envied its month-long vacations on the Cote d’Azur; long, leisurely lunches and endless high-brow chat in the cafes of the Latin Quarter; its universal health care and free education.  More than anything, they admired its sophisticated diffidence.  The French had seen the worst that human nature could do, suffered all the wars, pestilence, marauding, conquest, and penury of 1000 years of history, and emerged with an appreciation for the good things of life.  After all, the French said, what else is there?

Many children of the Sixties went to India, fleeing the unctuous priests, Bible-thumping preachers, and religious sanctimony of the United States.  In India spirituality was refined, sophisticated and sensible; and also had passion and ecstasy. Young Americans trekked to Hardwar, Varanasi, and Allahabad to live the Hindu life of meditation and asceticism, leaving all the comfort and pleasure of America behind.  India was, like France, a country which had evolved over thousands of years and had much more to teach them than upstart, wild and crazy US.

They all came back, and few went to France to live.  When all was said and done, they couldn’t turn their back on their mother country, their native place, the place that gave them them their cultural identity.  As all these young people got older, they realized that nationality was not something easily exchanged; and that the allure of Parisian life would eventually irritate and anger.  Its formalism, traditionalism, and implacable insistence on the primacy of French culture would become intolerable. There are too many irrelevant expectations in France.

India was a place of spiritual sojourn and short-term psychedelic-like experience.  Sooner rather than later, however, the disease, poverty, social immobility and heat-and-dust would kick in. An American could no sooner become an Indian than the Man in the Moon.

In today’s insecure world, changing citizenship is more difficult than ever. Even if one were to want to become an Italian or a Spaniard, it would be a long and painful process.  At the same time globalism and easy tourism have provided windows into the world and we can see that France is not all that it is cracked up to be.  It is going through the same paroxysms of racial and ethnic insanity as the United States once did. Paris, while still in many ways old European, has become as globalized as any.  Once you get out of the the old-line 7th or 16th and head out to the outer arondissements the neighborhoods are like ours – African, Asian, and Caribbean.  The little butcher shops and boulangeries are still there, but far fewer than ever. Paris is not New York by any means, but what had attracted us all in the Sixties has inevitably changed beyond recognition.

In other words, even if one might have notions of changing countries, why bother in this globalizing, international world?

Although I would never describe the United States as xenophobic, all this terrorism and concern for national security has certainly closed minds more than ever before.  Ironically, at the same time that the world has become a universal marketplace for goods, services, and ideas, it has become a darker, more threatening place.  More reason to stay at home.  American democracy, for all its warts and blemishes, looks better than ever.

These temporal concerns beg the question, however.  We cannot shed America no matter how hard we may try because it is in our bones.  How could I be French after drive-ins, Saturday afternoon Yankee games on the radio, playing in the sprinkler, cowboys-and-Indians, Yale, the Lower East Side, and slavery? My humor is American, my reflexes are American, my politics are American, and my spirit is American.

I remember a lunch I had at the World Bank with some British colleagues.  I was particularly enthusiastic about a new idea I had about development or simplifying the maddening bureaucracy. “My, my”, one of them said sniffingly. “Aren’t we very American today.” I had no British reserve according to which one was never enthusiastic, but quietly sanguine.  Americans were absurdly optimistic, open, and silly.

They were right of course, and had hit on one of the things I could never change even after decades of English-style country day schools, boarding schools, and Oxford and Cambridge look-alike universities – optimism, practicality, and enthusiasm.

I always used to think that only lovers who shared the same mother tongue could truly know each other.  How could you express your attitude, personality, or worldview if you couldn’t do it with the full range of humor and subtlety afforded by native language. I changed my opinion over the years.  I didn’t need French, Spanish, German, or Urdu to love and be loved; but I am still convinced that language – i.e. culture – enhances any relationship.  How can I notice a peculiar American oddity – a way of walking, tone of voice, accent, demeanor – and convey it humorously in Russian?

So, in addition to the fact that personality and character are hardwired by the time we are 5, culture is also programmed not long afterwards.  We become American sooner than we think, and changing cultures would mean somehow ripping out and changing the circuitry that makes us run.

Am I patriotic? No, at least not in the flag-waving, love-it-or-leave it sense; but in a hardwired, ineluctable sense.  I cannot do otherwise than be an American.  I have been lucky.  I have been able to revel in it.

Are Women Funny?

In an interesting article in The Guardian (10.2.13) Bridget Christie, a comedian, comments on the question ‘Are Women Funny?’.  She of course concludes that they are, especially because she makes her living from making people laugh, but cites some contrary references. Perhaps the most interesting was that of Christopher Hitchens who famously said that women didn’t need a sense of humor because they have nice hair to lure men.

A well-known British comedian, Lee Mack, went further.

There are no women standups on panel shows, he said, because women are less competitive in conversation and less likely to want to show off…and added "It's actually a compliment, I think, to women that there aren't as many female standups because they are far more interested in what each other has to say than standing there on their own and showing off."

There may be more than a grain of truth in what Mack and Hitchens said.  It’s not that women can’t be funny; it’s just that they don’t because of vestiges of a traditional female culture of quiet deference which, despite the radical changes of the late 20th Century, still remain.

Freud said that  one can't express aggression and sexual drive directly, as it is prohibited in the society, so these desires get sublimated in telling jokes, many of which are either about somebody getting hurt, or they have sexual connotations.

H.W. Fowler (1937), the academic who developed a typology of humor, suggested that it can range from the gentle to the harshly aggressive; but that much humor revolves around satire, sarcasm, cynicism and invective – all of which have specific targets in mind.  Morals and manners, faults and foibles, and misconduct are the usual targets.

In the not so distant past, it would have been unseemly at best for a woman in polite (influential) society to be so aggressive.  An indirect and muted reference was all that was acceptable.  Although women might have wanted to pillory the obtuseness, pomposity, and arrogance of men, they held their tongues.  Some of the more gentle categories of Fowler’s typology were acceptable.  What he called humor – light references to human nature; or wit – playful ways with words - were permissible; but these often went unnoticed, and men’s braggadocio-fueled broad humor ruled the day. 

Some social scientists have gone further and suggested an evolutionary preference for male humor. Nichole Force, a social psychologist, has written:

Psychologists Eric R. Bressler and Sigal Balshine found that men expressed no preference for funny women, but that women tended to choose funnier men as partners. Rod A. Martin of the University of Western Ontario elaborated on this discrepancy between the preferences of the sexes when he said, “Although both sexes say they want a sense of humor, in our research women interpreted this as ‘someone who makes me laugh,’ and men wanted ‘someone who laughs at my jokes.’”

Evolutionary psychologists have theorized that a sense of humor is a sign of intellect and strong genes and that women, the more selective sex due to the burdens associated with pregnancy, are attracted to funny men because of the genetic benefit that could be bestowed upon potential offspring (Humor’s Hidden Power)

There are many funny female comedians today – Wanda Sykes is absolutely hilarious, and Lily Tomlin was a comic genius.

I have met women with a knee-buckling comic storytelling instinct. Houleymata was a close Malian friend who had been a medical student in Russia in the early 80s, and her stories of being the first black person that anyone in her remote Siberian medical school had ever seen were the funniest I have ever heard.  Without hesitation she elided vignette after vignette, paused with comic timing, made the ridiculous funny, pilloried the Russians while not demeaning them, and went on and on until we could take no more.  She was a natural, a genius; and whether or not this said anything about the African storytelling tradition, the more dominant role of certain socially superior African women; or whether Houley was simply funny down to her bones, I will never know, but I will never forget her.

The point is that women of course can be funny, but that historically they have tended not to be; and although Bridget Christie dismisses the likes of Hitchens and Mack out of hand, they had a point.

Super-Strollers And The Lost Art Of Simplicity

There is a tendency among older people to insist that ‘things were better back then’.  Burt Lancaster had a great line in the movie Atlantic City by Louis Malle.  Lancaster plays a 70-something small-time gangster who, saddened by the destruction of the old city to make way for new, Las Vegas-style mega-casinos, reminisces about the dance halls, the amusement parks, piers, cotton candy, Victorian hotels, enjoyed by both the swells of Philadelphia and petty but respectable hoodlums like him. Everything was better.   Looking out over the water he says to a young friend, “You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days. That was really something”.

Things of course were never in times past.  Most Americans of a certain age are happy to see the Fifties go. No one ever talks about the good old war years or the way it was back in the Depression.   Every successive decade has had its ups and downs. The Sixties seemed to have more highs and lows than most, what with the wars, riots, and assassinations on one hand; and free love, free speech, and free drugs on the other.  It was a seminal period for baby boomers who still talk about it as the best time of their lives.  Perhaps every decade is the most transformative and best ever if you are 20 and have your life ahead of you.

A close friend of mine, child of the Fifties and young adult of the Sixties, left most of the excess of both eras behind but retained one important lesson from both – simplicity.  No more chrome-and-fin Cadillacs.  No more diamonds and minks, floral perfume and canapés.  No more cotillions, tuxedos, carnations, and crinoline. He dressed simply, ate simply, and behaved simply.

However, he neither sought nor valued a primitive life and only wanted to rid his life of unnecessary accouterments and fancy. 

He was intrigued by Hindu asceticism. Since the world was only maya, or illusion, Hindus said, there was no value in adornment or luxury.  If the only purpose in life was to leave it forever behind, then tchotchkes had no place.  Accouterments were distractions.  Adornments vain and unnecessary.



In the remake of The Fly, Jeff Goldblum’s girlfriend asks him why he never changes his clothes.  He is shocked and replies that he does, every day.  “Then why do I see you always wearing exactly the same thing?”.

Goldblum goes over to his closet, opens the door, and shows her a rack full of suits, shirts, ties, socks, and shoes – all identical. Having to choose an outfit every day, he explained, was an unnecessary, distracting, and irritatingly bothersome chore.

There is nothing simple about America today. Take baby buggies, for example:


                          www.bensbargains.com 

Then there are bicycles.  Most people only need this, but buy $2000 Italian racing bikes instead.



All you really need to ride on a bike path or a country road is shorts, a tee shirt, and Keds.



The arguments are well-known.  The old-fashioned single-purpose stroller is of no use to young parents who jog, multi-task, and co-care; and tight Lycra biking outfits reduce wind drag, wick sweat and help to maintain muscle tone.

My friend's kitchen is simple.  Basic stove, modest counter space, and a few good knives.  He keeps his  knives sharp, his cutting boards clean, and his two iron skillets well seasoned.  No need for marble-top islands, Viking industrial ranges or refrigerators.



My niece spent hours as a child playing with old spools and plastic spoons, a bucket, some pots and pans, and a shovel. She built things, arranged them, and made noise with them.  She made rivers and rivulets, crossed them with drawbridges, and dug gardens.  Not today:


                     www.vanitymom.wordpress.com 

The problem with having a clothes rack with a few identical suits, wearing them until necessary replacement; or buying basic strollers, Walmart all-purpose shorts and cut-rate Dollar Store sneakers is that the American economy could never survive.  The high-end Mercedes strollers, the $2000 30-speed racing bikes, the logo-ed touring suits, spacious shoe closets, makeup, handbags, and hair styling; filled-to-excess playrooms, and Viking stoves keep the economy humming.

Simplicity frees the mind, saves money, and avoids clutter.  The more things you have, the more cluttered your mind is. Imagine how peaceful, untroubled, and pure your mind would be if you lived in a Shaker room like this:



The Japanese have made simplicity an art



Big-box stores encourage us to buy more things. Extra cheese graters, tackle boxes, warming trays, underwear, hairnets, bows, knee socks, and girdles.  Lawn chairs, grill accessories, and acne cream.

Simplicity is a virtue, and we have lost it.