There is a family I have never met that I came to know quite well over my years as a college teacher. They are the Greenwalts, once of Birmingham, Michigan, a wealthy bedroom community outside Detroit, who were the subject of a documentary entitled "But What If The Dream Comes True?" that appeared on CBS in l970. Unlike other family portraits of the time, such as that of the Louds, where a hand-held camera picked up the wife telling her husband to move out, the portrait of the Greenwalts was not given to titillation or uncovering family ghosts. Nor was this a video blog pretending to be the real life of a celebrity with all but selected warts edited out. Its method was that of a standard documentary: interviews with the protagonists and film on the settings in which they lived their lives. Its purpose was an exploration of the American character, and its narrator, Charles Kuralt, brought his usual mixture of amusement and appreciation to an hour-long human interest story that was and is more than a sidebar.
Read MoreBeing Comfortable & Self-sufficiency
Dogs show themselves to be comfortable. My dog lies on his back under the air conditioner, the breeze going through his whiskers and onto the hairless part of his undercarriage. He has just been walked and so has relieved himself and he has been fed. His social nature is also satisfied in that I am present in the room with him while he stares out into space doing nothing but being comfortable. He exudes his comfort even though he doesn’t know he is comfortable, is not self-aware of his comfort. Maybe the dog is close to Nirvana, though I am not big on thinking it is better to be unconscious rather than conscious of one’s state. People, for their part, know when they are comfortable and knowing so is itself a pleasure and a satisfaction. I am ever more conscious of this self sufficiency as I get older even though I don’t think there ever was a time for me or for anyone else when we did not both sense and know when we were comfortable. I wake up in the middle of the night, aware of the silence, of the fact that I am breathing comfortably, that my bowels are untroubled, that the temperature is just about right, and that my thoughts can wander whichever way they care to. It is like when my wife slept next to me before she died though not as good as that, my listening to her unlabored breathing and touching her warm skin though not with so much pressure as to wake her.
Read MoreA Nazi Dedication: How hHistory Can Be Normalized
Here is a dystopia that came awfully close to coming true and which shows how history can be normalized by rhetoric and so come to be just the substance of the familiar and the everyday.
Remarks at the Dedication of the Berlin Center for Judaic Studies (1994):
In the Spring of l950, when the Fuhrer was taken from us, worn down by his years of service to the European peoples, it would have surprised the world that the international system he put in place would still be in place, stronger than ever, half a century later. His dramatic and memorable declaration of l945, "The Channel is deeper than the Atlantic", had allowed the British to accept the bitterness of their inevitable defeat: their armies decimated in Africa; their cities devastated by the Luftwaffe; their population demoralized; and a grand army about to be lifted by the then newly invented jet transports in an invasion by airbridge over the now militarily meaningless Channel. Let the British and their American and Commonwealth allies control the intercontinental oceans, the Fuhrer was saying. They shared a similar bourgeois way of life-- and a similar set of economic problems. The Continent, however, would achieve its rightful unity as the Federal Republic of Europe, a destiny which had eluded it since the collapse of Christendom as a unifying ideal some five hundred years before. Fratricide in Europe was finally over.
Read MoreCab Confessions: Ethnic Ripostes & Making Assumptions
Memorable conversations with cab drivers are an emblematic New York experience available to both tourists and long time residents. A few days ago, I climbed into a cab whose driver began by telling me how crowded with traffic were New York streets because of all the construction of new residential buildings. I demurred that new building was a sign that New York was prosperous, whatever the state of the Great Recession, and the new residents supplied more business for cab drivers such as himself. He said he would prefer less traffic and fewer customers. He said that the city was filthy and stank, which I readily agreed was particularly true in the summer, but a small price to pay for living in this glorious city. He said he was going back to his native Armenia after his thirty years here so that he could live in comparative quiet and calm. I said no one had to live here.
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Silences
There was a newspaper report of an armed gunman who said, when told by his victim that it was a policeman that he was holding up, “You know, now I have to kill you.” That is the stuff of gangster melodrama, and may even be true. The exchange reminded me of "The Asphalt Jungle" which was a remarkable movie because, among other things, it violated the movie convention whereby people who have others at gunpoint keep talking until the person with the gun pulled on him finds a way out of the situation. Rather, Louis Calhern just starts to sweat and lose his game face as he realizes that his erstwhile comrades in crime are going to kill him. However much they talk, the gangsters in "The Asphalt Jungle" don’t talk about what they are doing while they do it.
Why does the movie convention violated by "The Asphalt Jungle" make sense? Why do characters say what they are going to do rather than just do it? That is the same thing as asking why such dialogue occurs in real life, because the movie convention is simply exploiting and adopting a usage of everyday life, in that dramatic tension arises from whether an assailant will speak or not. So why did the gunman in the newspaper report act the way he did? (Here, I am engaged in applying Georg Simmel’s dictum, which is contrary to the accepted wisdom, that the sociologist can analyze fictional as well as real situations because both make use of the formal properties of social life.)
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