With Folktales, as with Comedy, Timing is Everything

Last week my wife Jen and I took the kids to North Carolina to visit relatives, including the family matriarch, my grandmother Bucky. Knowing my proclivity for east Carolina-style BBQ, which is vinegar-based and the champagne of BBQs, Bucky treated everyone to dinner at Bullock’s, the planet’s best BBQ joint. My younger daughters Sammi and Yael, 6 and 3, respectively, wanted nothing to do with sitting in Bullock’s dining room, so after wolfing down my plate of ridiculous BBQ, competent cole slaw and forgettable French fries (if Bullock’s ever pairs duck-fat fries with the BBQ I will be launching a campaign to convince Jen to move to North Carolina), I soon found myself minding the girls on Bullock’s front patio. The patio had an outdoor speaker, so as the girls alternated grabbing local real estate flyers and Auto Traders with jumping off the four-foot high brick wall that defined the patio’s boundary, I chillaxed to some country music. (Some, including Jen, might say that I am incapable of chillaxing, but how else should one describe obsessively stuffing the real estate flyers back into their bins, extolling Yael not to let the flyer bin door slam shut again because, my goodness, it’s loud, then racing back to the brick wall to prevent an ER visit?)

One of the great things about country music is that you can actually hear the lyrics and follow the arc of the almost unfailingly clear narratives. So when The Farm’s “Be Grateful” came on, I could hear every word:

The other day I caught myself complaining
How my boss has got me working overtime
Then the stranger who was sitting there beside me
Said, I spent all day in the unemployment line
Are there open shifts, are they hiring on
I'll work any hours even all night long
If you could put a good word in for me

Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful

We complain about how much it's gonna cost us
To fill our 20 something thousand dollars cars
And living in the land of milk and honey
It's so easy to forget how lucky we are
We can work hard and buy a patch of dirt
And on Sunday morning go to church
And pray for those who don't have it as good as you

Every time you think you've got it bad
You can find someone who's got it worse
All the things you take for granted now
They started out as blessings first
If you got someone who loves you
And a steady job that puts food on the table
If you're strong and able
Man, be grateful
(http://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/the-farm-inc/be-grateful-36292.html)

“Be Grateful” at first appears to be a retelling of the old Yiddish folktale, It Could Always Be Worse. The folktale tells the story of a poor man so overwhelmed with the chaos and stress of sharing his tiny one-room hut with his wife, their six children, and his mother that he visits his Rabbi in total despair. Counterintuitively, the rabbi instructs him to bring his chickens into the hut with his family. Befuddled, the poor man nevertheless complies. Things, of course, get worse in the hut. Upon returning to the rabbi he is instructed to bring in his goat, which leads to further misery and a third visit when he is told to bring in his cow. Finally, upon the fourth visit the rabbi sends the poor man home to put all the animals back outside. Which, as told in Margot Zemach’s version of the tale, leads to a fifth visit:

“ ‘Holy Rabbi,’ he cried, ‘you have made life so sweet for me. With just my family in the hut, it’s so quiet, so roomy, so peaceful… What a pleasure!’”

In “Be Grateful”’s retelling, the overworked narrator stands in for the poor man as he appears at the beginning of It Could Always Be Worse, with the unemployed, desperate stranger standing in for the chickens, goats and pigs, representing the specter of disastrous misfortune which could just as easily have befallen the narrator. It is as easy as 1,2,3 to imagine the chickens as the gutting of the narrator’s union via “Right to Work” legislation, the goats as the subsequent cut in the narrator’s hours to the precise amount that fails to qualify for benefits, and the cow as the coup de grace: the offshoring of the narrator’s job, rendering him indistinguishable from the hopeless stranger. Staring the annihilation of malignant unemployment in the face, the narrator’s 70 hour per week job suddenly seems so reliable, so doable, …. What a pleasure!

But something in the retelling is more than slightly off, in the same way that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Our first clue is that instead of inhabiting a house full of love like the poor man at the end of It Could Always Be Worse, the narrator is too busy working obligatory overtime to spend any time at home with a loved one who is thusly reduced to an anonymous “someone” who loves him. (In a real, joyful love song it would be “my baby” who loves me, or some such term of endearment.) But our best clue is that the humor of the Yiddish original, a humor found in the great irony that the only way out of suffering is through more suffering, that suffering is likely the very ground of happiness (echoing It Could Always Be Worse, the Buddha himself taught that suffering is at the very least the prior condition to liberation’s happiness), is missing. In fact, the song isn’t really a retelling of It Could Always Be Worse at all, but a cooptation of the old folktale as a decoy. In place of the original’s radical, redemptive existential humor is a thin coating of cloying treacle which tries and fails to cover a putrid core. That core is the song’s unconscious regurgitation of the fear-based message aimed directly at the shrinking middle class from the American oligarchy: If there’s safety in numbers, then you should be very afraid. But the oligarchs’ hubris doesn’t stop there. I used to think that fight or flight were the only two natural responses to fear. In fact, there’s a third option: freeze. Our direct orders are as follows: be very afraid, and keep doing exactly what you’re doing (i.e. freeze). Which is exactly what the song’s narrator does. Granted, he does go to church and pray for the less fortunate, but one gets the feeling that this prayer is rooted as much in the fear of losing what’s his as it is in compassion. In fact, the refrain’s last line, and the song’s title, makes a great deal more sense as “Be Afraid.”

As profound a tale as (the genuine version of) It Could Always Be Worse undeniably is, perhaps it is miscast in this historical moment, too prone to being hijacked by the reigning principalities and powers. In its place I suggest we turn to another story, Bone Button Borscht, a Jewish retelling of Stone Soup, which, just like the opening verse of “Be Grateful,” features a beggar. But instead of inspiring fear to dress up as gratitude, this beggar, in playfully enticing the embittered, frightened townsfolk (that’s us) to contribute their hoarded foodstuffs to the common pot, transforms fear into generosity. If there is a message for our time it is exactly this: Be generous.

There is No Do

Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that “Hell is other people.” In the ensuing years it has become fashionable to explain that the majordomo of French existentialism was misunderstood; even Sartre joined in the act:

“‘Hell is other people’ has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.” (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/07/most-famous-thing-jean-paul-sartre.html)

It is all well and good to hear what Sartre really meant. But what gets lost in his explanation is the tendency of language to escape intended meaning the second it leaves our lips or, as in the case of “hell is other people,” pens. Language, like one’s children, has a mind of its own, as does every member of the audience. So when, e.g., Shakespeare has Polonius utter “This above all: to thine own self be true,” The Bard very likely intended us to think Polonius a blowhard and, above all, an asshole. Instead, it turns out that Polonius rendered the founding statement of contemporary western civilization. (Making this, rather unsurprisingly, the age of the asshole, and, at best, a lateral move from what we smugly label the Dark Ages.) Just so, Sartre’s would be pithy synopsis of the intersubjective quality of human identity must instead be taken on its own terms, i.e. as an endorsement of the brute fact of social pain.

So, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” And if hell is other people, then it’s good to be king. Failing that, one can get by as an introvert. As to the former, I recall reading an interview with Baltimore’s king of guerilla cinema, John Waters, in which he explained that the very best thing about his success was that he no longer had to interact with anyone he didn’t want to, essentially supplying Sartre with the missing second half of his formula: “Heaven is the absence of others.” Alas, each kingdom can have but one king, leaving his loyal subjects stuck with one another. Except the introverts, because, as every introvert knows, “Heaven, or at least purgatory, is hiding in plain sight where other people don’t notice you.” While John Waters lives safely behind his moat, the introvert who works at Video Americain (Baltimore’s indie video rental shop, back when such things existed) hides safely behind the counter, from where she is happy to recommend a foreign film while practicing nonattachment, which is western Buddhist for not letting the customer who ignores her suggestions and instead rents Goonies, Gremlins, and Ghostbusters in nostalgia for the eighties and in celebration of the letter g know that he has cut her to the quick. As to those loyal subjects not equipped with the introvert’s native cloaking device, let’s call them every day extroverts, they make the best of hell by forming strategic alliances based on the foundational principal that the enemy of my enemy is my friend; the plot of CBS’ Survivor franchise could be boiled down to “Hell is other people.”

We are left with three primary social entities: kings, factions, and hermits. (Introverts are just public hermits, each introvert wearing the ring that binds them all, with its power of invisibility and all of the attendant side effects.) The people who are really screwed in such a landscape are what I would call the pure extroverts. Pure in the sense that their extroversion is untainted by strategy, because of the fact that they are Bizarro Sartres who find heaven in other people. Pure extroverts are this realm’s ultimate tragic figures, quickly becoming every faction’s sworn enemy. Factions operate by a very simple logic: you’re either with me or against me. And if you aren’t my enemy’s enemy, you are mine.

Roy Rogers’ declaration that he never met a man he didn’t like would seem to paint him as the archetypal Bizarro Sartre. Except that there can be nothing tragic about a man who had his own eponymous fast food chain. (Having your own eponymous fast food chain only to see it go bankrupt, a la Kenny Rogers and Kenny Rogers’ Roasters, is, however, almost as tragic as the end of Romeo and Juliet. Strange that Roy and Kenny share the same last name, as if Kenny’s explicit endorsement of sinful wagering in The Gambler symbolically crowned him in the villain’s black cap, in direct contrast to Roy’s virgin white, karmically sealing the fate of Kenny’s rotisserie while leaving Roy to continue raking in the cash as fast as he could get his burgers off the grill.) Roy Rogers was almost certainly an introvert, i.e. he never met a man he didn’t like because it’s hard to dislike someone who you do your very best to keep at arm’s length, often by being very nice to him. Note that Roy Rogers was famously nice.

A pure extrovert would never say “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Instead, she would say “I never met a man I didn’t love,” which guarantees the pure extrovert’s inevitable tragic demise at the hands of the factions, but also marks her as simultaneously damned and holy. Damned, because kings and (typical) introverts are too busy sealing themselves off from those they don’t want any part of to offer any help, and holy because “I never met a man I didn’t love” is just another way of saying “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Loving your neighbor as your self is, of course, impossible, which means there are no pure extroverts (though my Dad came close, as does my wife), which, ironically and paradoxically, means our only real purpose rests in the effort to become pure extroverts. (Or, for us incurable introverts, fearless and visible public hermits.) In the end, then, what is required is a reversal of Yoda’s famous credo: “Try. Or try not. There is no do.”

The Question

I have many happy memories of my late maternal grandmother, Grammy: sitting on her screened-in back porch during a central Florida evening thunder shower while playing Rack-O and eating fudge striped cookies with milk; the way she described anything she didn’t like as “unique”; her delight in escorting my sister Pailin and me to flea markets and all you can eat buffets, both of which seemed to offer a bottomless satisfaction unavailable in the mid-Atlantic. But one year, upon my arrival in DeLand via I-95, Grammy taught me the art of being human.

This may or may not have been the year I dug in my heels about the plastic sheet on my bed, and then, after it had been removed, proceeded to wet the bed that very night. But it was definitely the year my mother, who typically spent the entire week-long stay with Pailin and me at Grammy and Pop-Pop’s, was away for several days, for reasons I don’t recall, but which reasons were sufficient to leave us in Grammy’s care. The most important element of which care was, apparently, to keep Pailin and me regular. Or at least me, because Grammy would daily inquire of me as to whether I had “made a B.M.”

Grammy, you see, had been a pediatric nurse. And it turns out that before the advent of modern pharmaceuticals, a pediatric nurse’s primary duty had been the intensive tracking and charting of children’s bowel movements. What else are you going to do when, e.g., you can’t do a thing in the world to prevent the children on your ward from up and dying from polio. None of which changes the fact that Grammy was my grandmother and not my nurse, and that antibiotics had already been around for decades by the time Grammy and Pop-Pop relocated to the Sunshine State. Which would have made the only appropriate response vis a vis Grammy’s B.M. check-ins a hearty “None of your business,” but for the fact that it is never appropriate to tell one’s grandmother that something is none of her business, at least if one is still wetting the bed.

Because copping to constipation was unthinkable, the consequences of which constipation were as terrifying as they were opaque, I had a golden opportunity to tell someone I cared about exactly what she needed to hear, whether it was true or completely fabricated. Dressed up for polite society, this skill is known as empathy.

But for a few geniuses or brutes, the most important question most of us can ask the world is “What do you need me to be?”

“Regular, you say? Okay, got it.”

It is only by successfully and consistently decoding what the world needs you to be that love and work even becomes a possibility. I’ve been regular now for going on forty years, gainfully employed for nearly twenty, and happily married for ten, with no end in sight now that I’ve started drinking coffee. I’d say that’s the story of my life, and that it was written in stone the second I told Grammy “Yes.”