My movie last night (I finally stopped watching “Coco Before Chanel” over and over) was “Thin Ice” with Tom Selleck. This is part of the “Jesse Stone” detective series written by Robert B. Parker in the third person instead of the first person of “Spencer” and with a “much more damaged” protagonist. I liked it well enough to put the other episodes on my queue. But the point is that Jesse Stone is intended to be tough and knowing, which I think I am or try to be, and I found I was behind the curve.
A baby has been kidnapped. The detective, who is a tough guy, is told babies used to be kidnapped out of yearning for a child by someone who can’t produce their own. But nowadays babies are stolen to sell their parts for transplant into rich people's sick babies. In the end the solution to this plot turns out to be old-fashioned. A doubleback, a red herring. So motivations nowadays are a mix of old and new. But the point is that the commodification of babies has proceeded so far that their humanity is entirely lost. The fact that they are living doesn’t matter so long as their parts are “market fresh.” And, like the detective, we haven’t realized. People are interchangeable now. Statistics. Avatars in the global game.
All my life it has been my preoccupation to try to understand people of every kind, regardless of their appropriateness or social status, regardless of what they thought of me or indeed whether they WANTED to be understood. It’s a mixture of old motives (liberal inclusion) and new (simple curiosity -- or that the older motive?). Maybe I just got it from books.
I thought Unitarian Universalism, explicitly based on inclusion, would be friendly to that notion, but it turned out they only meant they would include people essentially like themselves regardless of nationality, skin color, LGBTWhatever, or income. But they would not tolerate ignorance, intolerance, cruelty, etc. And they find, I think, that tolerance for things that really don’t matter is not a strong enough motive to hold a group together. Anyway, why would anyone tolerate ignorance, intolerance, or cruelty? (Um, to understand them?)
Then I thought, “Well, a minister is like Jesus -- a person who can walk into dens of iniquity and sit down for a chat with Mary Magdalene without being rejected.” Be a good influence. Wrong. That notion was murdered long ago. The work of a minister is to be the ideal of the community -- irreproachable. If you associate with scruffy people, you will be reproached. (Did I say I’m reading “Gilead?”)
There is another theory: that only the person who is in a category (ethnic, victim, poor, gender, and -- I suppose -- also “up” categories: wealthy, gifted, educated) can truly write about it with meaning. Or indeed can be ALLOWED to write about it. Clearly, one would like to make money from one’s identity, whether it’s actually a disadvantage or an advantage. But how are they supposed to “write” or “paint” authentically when they have no tradition or opportunity to learn writing or painting? How do you educate people enough to communicate with the rest of us without changing them to be like us? This is the great Native American dilemma: assimilate or be authentic to a time that no longer exists. It's a conformity issue.
Anyway, how do you get the larger community to care or pay attention? By romanticizing, right? And that means faking. It also means guarding the borders so no one finds out you’re faking. If people find out that Indians are pretty much like everyone else, that women are not that different from men, that poor people are different from rich people because they don’t have as much money, then what is it all really about?
In the meantime we lose the careful attentiveness over time that is the source of intimacy. I used to have a friend, a big smart kind but action-oriented old cop who was a lot like that detective. He’d read a paperback mystery every night, but he never really finished them. As soon as he figured out who the perp was and why, he threw them aside. To him, life was a puzzle. He liked me. He never had any idea what I was about. He’d have liked me to be closer to him. If he’d figured it out, he’d have been closer but it would have destroyed his self-image, which was based on figuring things out quickly and dealing with them. But I could sit there reading the same page over and over, tasting the words, trying to see through the writing to the author’s world.
The contrast might be Dave Tebeau, a handsome multi-racial guy who was a building inspector when I was working for the City of Portland. (I think he still is.) His task, of course, was to make sure a specific building met the building code, but that was actually a matter of persuading the builder this was what he ought to do -- often the builder didn’t want to or he just didn’t understand. (It generally costs more.) Dave could get compliance while other inspectors would be run off the property or punched out. We asked him what the secret was. He said attentiveness. He read the builder’s body language, his facial expressions, his choice of language, and all that stuff -- then he adapted to it. If the man seemed uncomfortable with the distance between them, Dave moved back a little. If he wanted to come close, Dave let him. He watched the eyes, the level of tension, the gestures. And then he adapted, using the information he had gathered. There was never an “end” except when the job was done. He didn’t “solve” the man, diagnose him, or use a label. Instead he thinned out the boundary between them until he could sense what this specific builder was about.
People get married knowing a lot less. People know far less than this about their own kids. Hey, I’m understating. Some people would sell their spouse plus their kids to be “parted out” -- and do. They pay more attention to their dog and pickup. The temptation is to just avoid such people -- they are too reptilian to understand. But maybe the larger question is what dynamics in our society create and protect such people. This demands a lot more thought.
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