290. I Witnessed a Cultural Revolution!

I am so glad to be able to read the Sunday (4-26-15) NYT story  about cultural change in Cincinnati with a memory of that town in the thirties and forties.  How casually my father and his business friends told jokes about Jews.  How easily they used the N-word.  How sure they were that Roosevelt's handouts would bankrupt the country.

  Sheryl Gay Stolberg's front-page story is not about that.  It's about how this town in "one of the most traditionally conservative corners of  the Midwest," a town that as recently as 2004 was "the only city in the nation whose charter expressly barred ordinances related to gay rights," has made a 180-degree turn, and is now a city that "national gay rights advocates hold up as a model."  It's a miracle, and because I was there before it came, when the city was just another cripple moving toward Lourdes, I am able to testify to it. 

More than testify.  Realize it, feel it, translate words about it into images and sounds and sensed atmosphere.  I am now what historians, fighting for words that will get through, persistently hope for: a reader who will say, who is able to say, "Yes, that's the way it was.  I know what your words mean."

And you know who was the greatest meaning-supplier of the twentieth century?  Adolf Hitler.   We had that word "racism" in our books and thought we knew what it meant.  Hitler's street gangs and eugenics doctors showed us how little we knew.  Ours was mainly what Bertrand Russell called "knowledge by description" — what you acquired when Louis Agassiz anatomized a fish for you.  We needed "knowledge by acquaintance," the sight of the fish.  And acquaintance varied with distance.  We weren't nearly close enough to know the sheen, the slime, the stink of the fish.  Hitler rubbed our noses in it.

The metaphor is worth sticking with.  I think of myself as a child in a restaurant in the thirties, listening to my father and his business friends, telling jokes about Jews.  If I'd had the nose Hitler gave me I'd have recognized it.  "'Racism,' that's the word."  I missed it then in its early stages but I didn't miss it years later when a German tour guide told jokes about Poles.  Late-stage racism, or ethnicism.  Just a whiff, maybe, but I picked it up.

That's the way it starts, with demeaning words.  Not full-throttle racism yet but...what?  "Dehumanization."  The tour guide has given meaning to that ugly word.  Behind it are the Nazis, saying, "Take it seriously."

And then there's the over-sensitized nostril that smells dehumanization everywhere.  Identify anything that distinguishes one group from another — that is, "discriminate" in the other sense — and you are guilty of "discrimination."  It becomes very difficult to state facts that need to be faced.

How annoying the over-sensitive, the hyper-correct, have been!  But how gratifying to have had them as targets of our wit.  The dull good people, filling The Weekly Standard as they once filled Pope's Dunciad.  And the dull scholarly people.  Colley Cibber and Richard Bentley.  Dullness, dullness, dullness.  Wit seems to be on the side of the conservative, the literary.  "How much bourbon?  Oh, about a jeegroe," said the Southern litteratrice showing her surrender to Yankee liberalism.

No Swift will ever emerge from the office of a liberal activist.  No Aristophanes.  Just moral bullies and political correctness nuts.  Out in the world a sharp mind will choose a witty knave — my father's funny friend, the tour's droll guide — over those types every time.  How can a case made in sociological jargon ever be right and good?

What the sharp mind has a hard time believing is that the dull, the foolish, the righteous, can be right.  And that's what's found here, under all the foolishness, the rightness of sensitivity to racism and a score of isms that smell like it.  It's the rightness of care for others' feelings.

I think it's that rightness that slowly made its way to the surface in Cincinnati.  And that it's not a narrow outbreak.  I'd like to go back now to the playground of my elementary school.  Will I still hear names like "Fatty" and "Ears" and "Dumbbell"?  I did when our favorite Reds player was "Schnoz" on the sports pages, succeeding "Dummy."  If I don't I, a teacher knowing how hard it is to get a lesson really learned, learned by the masses, learned by children, I am willing to call that a cultural revolution, and believe it's a miracle.