I Think You're Totally Wrong (15 page)

DAVID:
Natalie went to TOPS, an “alternative” public school, for kindergarten through fifth grade. For a while it was a great school, supposedly among the best or at least “highest-performing” elementary schools in the state, even the country. Every parent was required to volunteer thirty hours a year. Many parents gave much more. I'd come in to Natalie's class and talk about themes in Jerry Spinelli or
Junie B. Jones
or whatever. I gave a class on Ichiro. It was a kick. Then the school district came to resent that there was this school of mainly white, educated, professional, UW-ish parents who had taken a public school and made it a model. They brought in different teachers, a black principal, bused in Asian-immigrant, black, and Hispanic kids, most of whose parents didn't even pretend to be interested in fulfilling the volunteer requirement. They didn't have the time, the flexibility at work, they didn't speak the language, or they just didn't place a very high value on education, if that isn't too racist a thing to say.

CALEB:
At Ava's school we have to pay $2,300 a year for kindergarten. Kids whose income falls below a certain level don't pay, and they also get free hot breakfast and lunch.

DAVID:
You guys can afford it.

CALEB:
I'm not complaining. It's not the kids' fault their parents are single parents, foreigners, low-income. Kids who otherwise wouldn't have a better diet: their families can be helped financially. I'm okay with socialism as charity. Not as social engineering.

DAVID:
I'm okay with that. If there are thirty-two kids in Ava's class, and Ava isn't learning anything because the teacher's spending half of her time teaching Gabriel to sit in his seat, I'm not cool with that.

CALEB:
These mountains—I'm going to take some pictures …

CALEB:
What is it with you and Ichiro?

DAVID:
What are you—a big anti-Ichiro guy?

CALEB:
I respect him as a ballplayer.

DAVID:
Not as a person?

CALEB:
There's a scene in
Lost in Translation
when a Japanese man is asked a question through an interpreter and responds at length. The interpreter turns and says, “He agrees.”

DAVID:
So?

CALEB:
That's what I think is happening with Ichiro. He just wants to take a shower. You ascribe poetry to him which I don't think exists.

DAVID:
Have you read the Ichiro book? You read all those quotes and you still think he's not up to something interesting? You don't think he's pushing back quite hard against the melodrama of American sports clichés?

CALEB:
No.

DAVID:
If I'm overreading him slightly here and there, then what the hell, you know, 'cause otherwise there wouldn't have been a book.

CALEB:
There are inferior and superior cultures.

DAVID:
Wow. You're saying that as a fact?

CALEB:
It is a fact.

DAVID:
I basically agree, but I don't think you're supposed to say that.

CALEB:
That should change. I've got to be careful with semantics, because culture and race overlap, so let me qualify. Racism creates unequal cultures and becomes self-perpetuating. Don't get me wrong: I love cultures. Mix, integrate, travel, discover, but the idea that cultures are equal is nonsense. People have equal rights and abilities. Cultures aren't equal, though. A culture of wealth is, by definition, not the same as a culture of poverty. Wealth correlates with better life expectancy, lower infant mortality, less violence. U.S. Southern culture in 2011 is superior to U.S. Southern culture in 1832. European culture of today is superior to the Europe of the Dark Ages.

DAVID:
How do you define culture?

CALEB:
Society's collective modus vivendi: what a given people generally believe and practice. “The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism.”

DAVID:
Adorno.

CALEB:
Preceding the oft-quoted “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno isn't saying, “Don't write poems.” He's questioning the conflict between the culture of poetry and the culture of barbarism: namely, solve Auschwitz, then solve art.

DAVID:
That's wrong. That's not how art works. You don't solve questions first, then turn to art to embody the answers. The art is where you investigate the questions.

CALEB:
But Adorno's asking, Does art offer solutions? If so, then you solve both. And that, I think, gets to what I'm trying to say. In other words, when a society, a culture, collectively believes that it's okay to butcher Jews or purchase
and own another person, that society is inferior. When a society believes that it's okay to force sex on a woman, sell a woman, stone her for adultery, rape her, or kill her for honor, that society is inferior. Culture underlies society.

DAVID:
I wouldn't call that culture, but politics and governance.

CALEB:
Politics reflects society. In most places an honor killing is treated as murder. Pakistan reports eight hundred honor killings a year. Hey, it's dangerous territory, because when race and culture correlate, then to attack one you attack the other. By confronting culture, you risk being branded a racist. That's a risk I'll take. It's an argument worth having. Oscar Wilde went to prison for two years for sodomy. The British court that condemned him came from an inferior culture.

DAVID:
I support reparations for African Americans—forty acres and a mule?—but I'm somewhat ambivalent about affirmative action. Why are so many African Americans still poor, and why do so many grow up without a father? Is it post-slavery stress disorder? History moves—1865,
1964, 2008—but does the clock ever run out? Obama has said as much, or at least tried to ask questions along these lines. I tend to romanticize the work ethic of Vietnamese, Koreans, Jews, whereas other cultures—Hispanic, African American—don't appear to place quite as much value on advancing up the social ladder. Can one say that? Why couldn't one say that?

CALEB:
It's not race. It's not ethnicity. It's the culture. One culture dominates another: the oppressed has a disadvantage. It correlates more to poverty and class, racism exacerbates this, and cultures become unequal.

CALEB:
Are you familiar with the Ted Turner/Robert Olen Butler/Elizabeth Dewberry brouhaha?

DAVID:
I don't know who Elizabeth Dewberry is.

CALEB:
She was Robert Olen Butler's student in the graduate program at Florida State. Robert Olen Butler was almost twenty years older. Evidently, she was heavy, lost a lot of weight, became a very attractive woman, married Butler, and she's published a few novels. I was talking with Rosemary Daniell at the Faulkner Festival in New Orleans when this attractive couple walked by. The woman shrieked greetings, hugged Rosemary, and then Rosemary introduced me to them: Elizabeth Dewberry and Ted Turner. At first, I didn't know it was him. He's six-three and big, like a linebacker.

DAVID:
Why was he at the Faulkner Festival?

CALEB:
He was being given some award or other: $10,000 for a billionaire. He was also there to promote his book
Call Me Ted
. And Elizabeth Dewberry had dumped Butler for Ted Turner.

DAVID:
What does she look like?

CALEB:
She's tall, blonde, svelte. Gorgeous. So Ted and Elizabeth walk off, and Rosemary tells me that evidently during the Dewberry/Butler divorce Robert cc'd an email to his MFA grad students about the breakup. One of the students posted it online and it went viral. This letter got mentioned in the
New York Times
, everywhere. NPR even did something on it.

DAVID:
What was in the letter?

CALEB:
That Elizabeth had been sexually abused by her grandfather, had an abusive first marriage, and Robert saved her life by his presence, but she never could overcome that he was a successful author and so, according to Robert, the reason they divorced was that she was envious of Robert and his Pulitzer Prize. The letter goes on to say how Elizabeth is now Ted Turner's girlfriend, but that Turner cannot be monogamous. Elizabeth will spend only one week a month with Turner while he rotates women. Elizabeth is attracted to the type of men that abused her, older men, and Ted is like that except he's not abusive. The awards banquet starts and Ted Turner accepts his award and makes a speech.

DAVID:
And Robert's there?

CALEB:
Near the podium.

DAVID:
Oh no.

CALEB:
So Ted says a few words about his memoir and then he says, “I've got a flight to catch, so I have to leave. Success is about class. Remember that, Bobby boy.” Ted walks out.

DAVID:
What did Elizabeth do?

CALEB:
She followed Ted out.

DAVID:
What's the point?

CALEB:
What do you mean, what's the point?

DAVID:
It's just another one of your stories.

CALEB:
Okay, what do you think the point is?

DAVID:
We're all blind as bats.

CALEB:
To me, the point is we all suffer. No matter how high you climb, someone will be punching you in the gut.

DAVID:
Finally, we're in agreement about something.