Friday, July 22, 2005

Tables of Discontent

Dinners at the Sylvia Beach Hotel are served in the Tables of Content Restaurant on the lowest level. You eat at tables with other travellers and share stories and delicious food with them. It's quite social and reminds me of how much of our evolution as individuals comes through conviviality. The self develops through social self-hood. We are literally social animals.

They suggest that the diners play a game during dinner in which each person says two truths and one lie and the rest of the table has to figure out which was the lie. I was terrible at lying, but Claire told a passable lie about breaking her brother's finger as a child. Our companions were an engineer and his wife who both seemed overjoyed to be there and a couple from South Carolina who had been married for 25 years. The husband was an excellent story-teller and, impressively enough, fooled us all with a story about winning $41 million in the lottery.

They were both quite charming to eat with, but I have to admit that the fellow sort of rubbed me the wrong way as the meal wore on. His conversation became quite limited in that he just kept relating to us how totally scandalized he was by those crazy non-conformist kids today. He kept getting louder and more indignant and pausing before every word to emphasize how shocking these facts were that he was relating. I'll try to transcribe the speech pattern.

"So you went to Portland? Man, do they... ever... have... their... freaks!!"
"We saw people there whose arms were... Covered... By... TATTOOS!!"
"And how the HELL do you think you can get a job with those tattoos?! HUH?! Where we come from, They. Will. NOT. Hire. You. With. TATTOOS!!"

(So, tattoos are still quite the scandal in South Carolina. Since, you know, they were only invented a few years ago. But, that's not all...)

"You live in Canada? I heard that people were running up there because they were afraid they'd get drafted to go to Iraq. And that's. Just. Not. Right! Where I come from, They'll. Come. Git. You!! YOU DON'T DO THAT!"

(Actually, nobody does do that. There's no draft on. But, I didn't want to interrupt.)

The conversation varied from these theoretical draft-dodgers who outrage him, to people with tattoos who outrage him, to France, which outrages him (naturellement!) , to (I'm not making this up) teenagers who outrage him by having parties. There is this psychological need I used to see in people when I was in Virginia to be defenders. They would get obsessed with "bums" or "liberals" or "homos" or whoever it is that is undermining our society this week and they would talk in exactly the same way about horrors like teenagers bleaching their hair or reading strange books as they would about al-Quaida. There was no nuance, just a continuum of "no-good-bums" versus the "good folks" like them and they were the front line in this war to preserve provincialism.

But, what do you possibly have to look forward to in life when everything outrages you?

In case I've never said it before, I believe that people should never be afraid to think things that make them uncomfortable, or say things that make others uncomfortable.

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