I am old

Every year the folks at Beloit College put out the Mindset List, as Joy Cardin at NPR reminded me this morning.  The list represents the mindset of incoming freshmen for that year, and tells us what they don’t take for granted, what they might not get as an allusion, and points to their areas of ignorance.  It’s an entertaining list.  The 2011 Mindset List includes the following, and much more:

  • What Berlin wall?
  • Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
  • Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
  • They never “rolled down” a car window.
  • Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
  • They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
  • They have grown up with bottled water.
  • General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
  • Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
  • Pete Rose has never played baseball.
  • Rap music has always been mainstream.
  • Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
  • “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
  • Music has always been “unplugged.”
  • Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
  • Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
  • They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.
  • The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.
  • Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.
  • Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.

Indeed, I think this is more than entertaining, but that’s perhaps because I was, in a former life, a teacher of English.  Allusions meant something to me then, and they still do.  But about a half hour after I heard the WPR spot about the Mindset List I returned to reading my Nook (which will be part of some Mindset list in the future, no doubt) and the novel Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford.  It is a novel about a Chinese American in Seattle who, when he was just 12 in 1942, experienced the racism against Japanese Americans in this country.  I came across this paragraph, and it made me wonder how many people within a few miles of me would understand the paragraph’s allusion based on their “Mindset.”  I used to live in Philadelphia, where I could be relatively confident of a shared knowledge whereby many folks would understand the allusion.

The main character here is looking for his friend and her family, who are being rounded up for transportation to a concentration camp.  Here it is, transcribed by me, so please excuse the typos:

Watching the crowd mill by, he heard the nin o’clock whistel go off miles away at Boeing Field.  He’d been searching the crowd for–what–forty minutes now.  Henry knew time was slipping away, and he was beginning to panic.  “Keiko!” he shouted from atop the mailbox.  He felt people’s stares on him as they passed by.  They must think I’m mad.  Maybe it’s okay to be mad.  “Keiko!  Keiko Okabe!”  he shouted until a soldier looked at him as though he were disturbing the peaceful reverie of the morning.  Then he saw something.  A familiar sight.

Yes, there he is!  Mr. Okabe’s Cary Grant hat looked regal even as he crossed the street carrying his only remaining belongings.  Henry recognized his dignified posture, but his charming demeanor had been replaced by a detached stare.  He walked slowly, holding his wife’s hand.  She in turn was holding onto Keiko’s.  Keiko’s little brother was walking in front, playing with a wooden airplane, spinning the propeller, unaware that today was unlike any other day.

There it is, an allusion probably none of my Wisconsin students last Fall would have gotten at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.  Oh yeah, they’d all been born after Cary Grant died, but this isn’t about some cultural timeline, upon which the good Professors at Beloit College base their “Mindset List.”  I’m talking about cultural awareness that allows the reader of this passage deeper insight into the text, that forces that insight.  And I wonder whether in the Wisconsin of today, whether among Republicans or Democrats, how many folks share in the cultural intertext enough to have gotten it, to have this passage EXPLODE with resonance.

Let me say that I had to explain the allusion to a schoolteacher at the local Starbucks this morning.   I know from conversation yesterday that I would have had to explain it to my neighbor, as dearly as I love her.  I wonder which of the readers here will get it.  Perhaps I should hint that you should focus on the second paragraph.

Alas.  Is this political?  I’ve seen a progression in my years being politically active towards less inclusion, and even respect for a narrowing of inclusiveness, at least among Republicans.  To me the arc of history has to be towards providing more rights to all citizens, but I worry about Tea Partiers and Republicans, and the power they seemingly strive for so they can use it to restrict rights.  All of those groups will claim to know the cultural touchstone involved here, but won’t know until I tell them, and certainly will draw the wrong conclusion.  Alas.

One thing for sure. . . my son will know, about slavery and about who he is named after.  Elijah.  Yes, that’s also part of the riddle.

 

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1 thought on “I am old

  1. My son is named Eliahu, after his grandfather, Elijah, who was named after the prophet Elijah. Is that a big enough hint?

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