Monday, July 25, 2022

A Brief Defense of the Dull


A couple of years ago, just before the Lost Time, I completed a work-related survey. It did not go well. Not that I was unenthusiastic about the work I do -- I like my job, like the people, and I respect the venerable institution in which we do what we do. I consider myself lucky in this. I know that not everyone is so lucky. I also know that not everyone with just a high school degree and a book-habit is likely to find such an accommodating employer hereafter. Bookstores are getting to be as rare as haberdashers and shoe-repair shops nowadays. So when I say the survey did not go well, I don't mean I had anything much to contribute in the way of "negative feedback." (Ghastly phrase. Something to do with guitar-amplifiers originally? Anyway, chillingly mechanical when applied to humans. Noise.) It was not the subject of the survey that put me off. Nor do I have an issue with surveys. It's true, I have no interest in finding out which Gilmore Girl I'm most like, and I don't answer the land-line at supper-time, but I don't mind answering a few written questions now and again about something that matters to me. No. It was the language used in the questionnaire that put me right off.

You probably know the sort of thing I mean. Not my first rodeo either. Business jargon as usual perhaps, but shocking to see it deployed in a bookstore setting nonetheless. Begin then with a loaded question:

Q: "A coworker comes to tell you that the Revolution has arrived and says, 'It is time to burn this mother down!' What do you do?"

Just here I should point out that this was not an actual question on the survey I completed. The tone however is not far wrong. Pause for a moment and consider what kind of interactions our inquisitor seems to think go on in the break-room and or in the staff restrooms. Had a lot of jobs. Worked in a lot of bookstores. Never had this conversation. To my knowledge I've never worked with an actual Fidelista from an early Sixties episode of Mission Impossible. To my knowledge. So to call such a question merely loaded is to understate the case, but then, as you can see, understatement was otherwise not a feature of the survey.

By way of answers, there seem always now to be five. I have only just learned via the Intertube that this model is known (more rightly than they knew) as a "closed-ended question." The survey employed something called the Likert Scale -- named for the creator of this model, American social scientist Rensis Likert. (Pictured above, leaning on a library card-catalog, to give a rough idea of how long this sort of thing has been around.) Evidently a "psychometric scale" of this type is not meant to solicit suggestions or practical information, but rather to "measure people's attitudes." Glass houses, may I say. Anyway, the answers to the above question runs something like this:

1) Our blood flows through our veins only to be spilt for the Glorious Leader!!!

2) Give me a gun and I will shoot the traitor dead.

3) I would ask my immediate supervisor to shoot the traitor dead.

4) I am unworthy of mercy and long for death.

5) I will one day watch the world burn, and I will laugh.

Now that first answer in particular does not in any way seem to address the question being asked, but this answer, or something very like it, seems to be the first choice for every question. Hmmmm. But then, none of the answers that follow are recognizable as polite conversation, are they? Nobody not in a re-education camp has ever talked this way. And whatever the question, I've noticed that the two final options seem to be there only to weed out potential insurance risks and or actual sociopaths. Come on, survey-makers, who picks:

4) Yes, I am fascinated by box-cutters.

or

5) I am responsible for the death of many small pets.

Who ticks those boxes?! 

These surveyors, please note, are never directly confrontational. Clearly the problem isn't me, it's Lauretta in accounting, or that new kid in receiving with the covered tattoos and the shifty eyes. It is always a coworker or worse, a "colleague" who's makin' trouble, the bastard. The willing survey-taker is never  cast as the provocateur in these scenarios. Just another dumb bunny led by bad company on a merry dance down into the netherworld of theft, drugs, and unjustifiable revolutionary violence, that's me. It's all about being influenced. Also note, no one in these surveys is a good influence. The nearest they come to decency is the narc and the snitch. ("Betty saw Joe light a spliff in the parking lot and asks you what she should do.") Who doesn't love a tattletale? But remember, other people are always the occasion of sin, so even agreeing with the obvious lackey might be wrong. There are no right answers, only measurable attitudes. Best not to talk anyone at work then, I guess?  That would seem to be the underlying message. Maybe don't talk at all. By the time one gets to the end of the survey, it would seem one is not safe from the dreaded influence anywhere. Communism, delinquency, disloyalty, everywhere. Honestly, after I took the survey I kind of thought we might all be better off if we never left the house. (That was me. My bad.) Still, one has to eat, and capitalism is presumably an absolute good in survey-country, so maybe I can just hum the National Anthem all day. That won't be weird, right? (But I'm good, right? I mean, I took the survey like they asked. And just so you know, in case I failed to make this clear, dear surveyors, I swear I don't burn things down or randomly shoot pigeons for fun, or plot the violent overthrow of... stuff. I'm just another harmless old dear in a bookstore, takin' another perfectly harmless survey, right? Right?! Did I get it right?! I will never know. All such surveys ever say at the end is a rather chilling, "Thank you, Mister Bond," just like in the movies, right before someone cold-cocks James and suspend him over the sharks.)

Seriously, who writes these survey questions?! Who talks this way? Who ever did? Who thinks we common folk talk this way on our lunch breaks? What person who has actually ever had a bookstore job thinks we talk on our lunch breaks? Even before we all had phones, we read books in part to avoid lunch conversation. And what genius with an MBA thinks that these wretched surveys will tell them more about us than they tells us about them? What might be learned if we were to be asked a civil question about a plausible hypothetical? (Q: "What would you do if you saw someone taking change from the till? Kicking a customer? Running with scissors? " A: Tell. Who wants to work with violent, sticky-fingered dolts? Thanks for asking.) Mostly what the content and format of these anonymous surveys and self-evaluations and the like tell us is that we are evidently not to be trusted. The clearest message from whichever consulting chop-shop cobbled this nonsense together is that someone thinks someone needs to be keeping a better eye on someone, like maybe the humble if clearly unstable masses. What their research must show is that maintenance workers, retail cashiers, and book clerks are all just waiting for the opportunity to murder all the graduates of the Harvard Business School in their sleep. How hard must it be to be them, poor darlings. One eye open, Scooter. You too, Midge.

"Conflict is viewed as the active striving for one's own preferred outcome which, if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility." - Rensis Linkert

Indeed.

Anyone else remember Chick Tracts? (It seems they still exist, by the way, like colonialism, the John Birch Society, and syphilis.) Amazingly, the late cartoonist/publisher/childhood-nightmare-goblin Jack Chick only passed to the boozoom of Abraham in 2016, aged ninety-two. He invented his evil brainchild, Chick Tracts back in 1960 with Why No Revival? He followed up that blockbuster with the much catchier A Demon's Nightmare in 1962.  If you haven't seen these things, congratulations on having grown up in a better world made possible largely by unions, feminism, democratic socialism, and the blessedly pernicious cultural influence of fags and Jews in Hollywood. (You can thank us by voting in off-year elections and frequenting your local, independent bookstores when you buy your copies of Karl Marx and the latest gender-fluid wizard fiction.) If you grew up anywhere near a Baptist missionary society, you will remember Chick Tracts; those little cartoon booklets warning of the various routes to Hell in boldly draw black and white. They were obviously designed to fit in the back pocket of a child's dungarees and or to be left atop the urinals in low places. The thrust of nearly every Chick Tract was that Catholicism, television, secularism of every stripe, the Easter Bunny, basically anything that wasn't straight-up fringe-whacky Baptist fundamentalism was all part of the vast, Satanic conspiracy to lure the unwary off The Path to eternal life in the great-church-basement-Sunday-school-in-the-sky and straight to cartoon H-E-double L!

In the world view of the classic Chick Tract, nothing not Chick is harmless. Nothing. Santa Claus? benign old Coca-Cola ad-copy, or just another lie from The Pit? Well, you teach an innocent child that those Christmas presents came from the North Pole and not from the bloody suffering of Our Lord and Savior and you are just lying to them babies, sewing the kind of doubt and that eventually makes atheists. (I am reminded of Shirley Temple explaining that she ceased to believe in Santa Claus when he asked her for an autograph. Pretty sure Shirley didn't end up a godless communist.) The truth is important to the true Chick Tractarian, so long as they remember there's just the one: the devil gonna get ya if you don't watch out! As dear Richard Hofstadter put it, "... many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination." Could be Santa. Could be a UFO. Probably Satan. The late Mr. Chick was the paranoid imagination of American fundamentalism, writ small, in words of no more than two syllables, and with helpful illustrations throughout. Seems that in addition to overthrowing capitalism as mentioned above, the overriding goal of the rest of us is to be "a snare unto thee," Jack. 

"In truth, Jack Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of American cartooning. Like the Nazi filmmaker who made Triumph of the Will, Chick was an artist of genuine skill who put his talent in the service of an odious ideology." - critic and journalist Jeet Heer

One used to be able to differentiate the conservative from the crazy. The conservatives were an overtly, proudly dull lot. Nothing more straightforwardly coded visually, in conversation and attitude than a genuine, old school Republican. I speak here of my experience growing up in a small Republican town in western Pennsylvania, back in the day. My Republicans taught school, sold insurance, ate at the diner and left a nickel-tip. They generally looked just like Democrats but smoked better cigars and kept their shoes clean at work. They still missed MacArthur if not McCarthy. They were polite in public, however they spoke to one another while golfing or at the Elks Lodge. They drank as much or more than Democrats, but they always used a glass. The only Lincoln with which they were much concerned was purchased once a year at the dealership. My people were not of them, but neither thought anything much of breaking bread with the other or working together at the poles. When we mocked them it was as much for their reserve as for their politics. Republicans then, bless 'em, were boring. That was the point of them. That was the summation of their policy and of their personalities. Taxes are too high. Things used to be better. Change is bad. Got it. Real Republicans were uniformly, reliably uninterested in and uninteresting to the rest of us. Not a few were perfectly nice people, otherwise. Some still are. (The old school Southern Dixiecrat was an altogether more colorful and overtly dangerous beast, and luckily avoided by me except on the rare occasions that the Texas relations came north.) 

So whence this surprisingly wide-spread conviction now that people like me, people who work in a bookstore and drive a twenty-four year old car with a "check engine" light that never goes off, just another queer ol' liberal, that I am looking to overthrow the existing capitalist world order and end Christianity? I mean, I wouldn't necessarily mind either terribly, but why would anyone think I'm likely to do it? Are revolutions and anti-clerical riots and religious massacres usually engineered by homebodies who spend their evenings frying chicken and reading the letters of Edward Fitzgerald? Even when I was marching a great deal more than I hope ever to march again, I still usually took the bus home before dark. In short, I am nearly as dull as a genuine Republican and probably always was.

I still remember one lady in line at the bookstore for the big release day of one of the Harry Potter books. Big crowd, much enthusiasm. This was when I was living and working in Orange County, California, or as we called it in my house, The Land of Exile. (See where this is going yet?) Everybody was just so tickled by the sense of occasion and pleased to see all the wee ones dressed up in their wee costumes and even I had to admit, it was kind of a fun day. Due to limited supplies -- it was a small bookstore -- each customer was limited to two copies.

"I wish I could buy EVERY COPY!" the smiling lady shouted. Applause. (Surely, you know what's coming by now?!) She inevitably continued, "So I could BURN THEM ALL!" And only then, when she had a copy clutched to her empty rib-cage and was braced for her inevitable martyrdom, did she begin loudly explaining, for some reason directly to me, the dangers of witchcraft on impressionable young minds, the power of Satan hiding in Harry's cupboard, etc. The crowd groaned and tittered. Nobody moved. Of course she didn't buy a book. They never do. Eventually she just let the book fall from her white-knuckled hands into my lap, stopped shouting just long enough to catch her breath, and was ever so gently shown the door by a coworker. I am pleased to say she was roundly, if rather shyly booed. 

Even then, even there the crazy lady was notable for being unusually vociferous in public.

You'd have thought that after the Byzantine Emperor signed on, and later European colonialism plundered the globe, the Christian church as a body wouldn't insist to this day that the lions are snapping at their asses. Hard to spot an actual Pagan outside of a Renaissance Faire now or an atheist in say, Congress, but it seems the heathen are just waiting around every corner to make some faithful soul bake a "gay" wedding cake, and really, isn't that just another kind of crucifixion? That anticipation of persecution seems to be baked into Christian (and American) exceptionalism. Jesus is King, Capitalism is the only workable economic model, and America is the best country on Earth, and yet I am evidently trying to spoil everything. Me. I get it, sort of, because every story requires an antagonist, and in this world view I guess that's me. I'm gay, working class, I read actual books, I'm married to an actual black man. Scary, right? Some people need that. Fear seems to be the corollary to their faith. What are these fundamentalist Christians anyway without their sense of constant peril and potential martyrdom but just so many Episcopalians at a picnic? Likewise the billionaire capitalists scream like pinched babies every time anyone tries to part them from a nickel they earned -- fair and square -- from factories full of cheap child labor overseas and or the intellectual wage-slaves in Silicon Valley. Socialism! I guess if one has even the rudiments of salvation in hand, and or a proper stock portfolio, it can all be snatched away. The SUVs, heaven, golf, tax-shelters, the flag, The Bible, guns, real estate earthly and celestial, it can all be had by the likes of me the minute I get in there and wrestle it from their cold, dead hands. (Never a wrestler, me.) Their father's kingdom has many mansions and I evidently want to tear them all down and put up abortion clinics and gay bars. (Cool.)

Clearly I am the problem?

When the Holidays roll around again and The War on Christmas resumes, as a retail worker I will be right back in the trenches, lobbing faith-neutral Season's Greetings and getting the full force of many an aggressively pointed "Merry CHRISTMAS!" right in the face. And I will deserve it. I will have had it coming, for taking the you-know-who out of you-know-what. By foolishly assuming that the population of a mid-sized American city in the twenty-first century may not all have been saved, id est, washed in the blood of the lamb, aka numbered among the saints, etc., I will once again have struck a nerve if not a death blow to The Shining City on the Hill and all who sail on her. I obviously subvert the American way.

And come the height of the shopping season, when I am busily hustling the goods in a retail shop, and ringing up team-approved sports gear, and selling cookbooks by television millionaires, and locating the latest James Patterson for Papaw, and finding socks with irreverent slogans for that hard-to-buy-for sister-in-law, in my heart of hearts I will somehow be subtly undermining the 1% and the Republic for which it stands. When I am pitching in at the wrapping counter in order to get grandma's unwelcome present of papal sayings and the latest Ann Coulter off in the mail on time, I will also be pining for Mao and counting the hours until the next meeting of the gay coven. (Have you ever met any of the actual queer witches? Wax, tarot, cat hair.) 

Nope.

See, I am not nearly so dangerous, or interesting as the Right would have me be. None of us are. How could one do, honey? Maybe once upon a time, but now? Now the dull Republicans have gone the way of the dodo and the cuckoos are in charge. Compared to that shit-show, my crowd is downright upright and maybe even (gasp) a little boring. Maybe just me. Like Iris Murdoch's aging writer in The Black Prince, "I seem doomed to quietness," and I am very much reconciled to my fate. The nice part of not being terribly invested in paranoid fantasies of gold hoarded up in heaven or at Wells Fargo is that one is free to enjoy more of the real world, no? It's not always so nice, reality, but as Groucho said, "it's still the only place you can get a decent meal."

So come The Holidays (provocative!) I will still be working, offering Season's Greetings, selling books. I will still be driving my ancient car and cursing at the slowness with which they are repairing the West Seattle Bridge. I will read Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory aloud. I will listen to Johnny Mathis and read Dickens and I will again "honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year long" and I will doubtlessly fail as I always do.

I will try not to let the triumph of paranoia and dithyramb of the dolts and the demented drown out the carols and shatter the punchbowl. I will not be much of a problem, whatever those assholes think. It ought not to matter to them what I do, but weirdly it seems to. My existence is evidently enough set them aquiver with suspicion and rage. So be it. It seems even in my dullness my life is now a radical act. In my utter predictability, even in a cheery mood I am a provocation and a spur. Cool. Maybe it's time to make more noise? Let's nettle 'em. Who knows what we might yet do to absolutely ruin their Christmas just by enjoying our Holidays. I plan to decorate gaily. Ours will be a fully interracial Christmas dinner. I might take some paid vacation and not spend any money or do anything on black Friday. The nearest I'll get to church will be my library. Yeah, I'm going to read more than the one book. None of the ones I do read will probably have a single passage in red. I will be mixing textiles, maybe eatin' shrimp, and watching Santa Claus Is Coming to Town without irony. I might even light a cigar, in memory of my beloved, brilliant Groucho, but also in tribute to all the noble dull who went before me. And maybe, just maybe I will try to do more to live up to my reputation. Maybe add a little of The Internationale to my Christmas music mix. Maybe a Beatles tune? You say (I) want a revolution, Well, you know...

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