Once again, I am down in So.
Cal. for Christmas. This time, I traveled by different means than I
normally use. Heretofore, I had always driven straight from Portland
to here and back, having developed something of an allergy to flying
several years ago. (Who wouldn't be allergic, what with TSA
checkpoints, pat-downs of grandmas and grandpas, full body scans,
deferred maintenance on aircraft, and pilots who make less per hour
than Pizza Hut drivers?) Unfortunately, driving from Portland to So.
Cal. takes about seventeen hours, assuming that a driver knows when
to judiciously drive faster than the speed limit, and that he doesn't
spend more than the minimum time necessary at gas stations, coffee
shops, and fast food joints. It takes a few hours longer if you
decide to drive at or below the speed limit all the way, although you
can shorten the time by driving a car with an extremely large fuel
tank and doing without bathroom breaks. Good luck with that!
Last time, I was not
judicious enough in knowing when to speed. I also made the mistake
of believing that since I had never been stopped by the California
Highway Patrol, they were therefore harmless. They got me about 25
miles south of Weed, California. My trip wound up costing an extra
$200. At least the cop who wrote the ticket was a nice guy, or the
trip would have been even more costly.
So this time I took the
train, a choice which provided a good opportunity to study some of
the features of mainstream American culture, as most of my fellow
travelers were Anglo-Americans. I like to use traveling time to
improve myself, so I brought my computer, my guitar, a copy of the
Good Book, a graduate level text on HVAC system design, and a copy of
the New Penguin Russian Course (Я ещё изучаю руский
язык).
Most other people also
brought computers and other hand-held data display devices, on which
the majority were watching movies or playing video games.
Occasionally I saw someone reading a book. In almost all cases, the
books being read were popular novels. The man sitting next to me had
his smartphone plugged into the AC power socket next to the window,
and he was following a football game involving the Seattle Seahawks.
A relative of his was sitting in the seat directly in front of him,
and was doing the same thing on his own smartphone. Occasionally the
two men exchanged comments on the progress of the game. About half
an hour out of Eugene, an elderly man sitting in the aisle across
from me looked over at my fellow passenger and said, “How 'bout
them Seahawks! Too bad they don't have a TV on this train.
Otherwise, we could watch 'em! I wonder if anybody has a TV or a
laptop we could use to watch 'em!” Suddenly feeling uncomfortable
in the presence of my company, I decided to move to the observation
car, where I busted out one of my books and started to read.
I chose a seat across a
table from a tall, thin, quiet blonde woman. She was also reading
(her book was a novel), although from time to time she looked at her
smartphone. She never spoke. However, most of the people in the
observation car were quite talkative, and as I read, occasionally I
focused my attention on the scraps of conversation reaching my ears.
Two conversations stood out on account of their extreme banality.
One conversation was between two men sitting at a table right behind
me, and concerned brew pubs in Portland and the opening of a
McMenamins pub out on the West Side (west of the Willamette River for
those of you who are unfamiliar with Portland). This led one of the
men to talk at great length (rather incoherently) about which brand
of beer was his favorite.
The other conversation was
between two young women at another nearby table, and concerned work
and career. It seems that one of the women works at a Starbucks and
the other works in a telemarketing call center, having worked in
Starbucks for a while as well. Both women constantly used two
particular four-letter words in describing the downsides and the high
points of their jobs, which included getting lots of free coffee.
One of them remarked to the other that she had wanted to work at a
Starbucks ever since she was a little girl. Then they discussed
their interest in creative writing and some of the writing classes
they had taken, using one of their two favorite four-letter words as
a noun to describe the things they wrote about.
The conductors announced
that they were taking dinner reservations, so I signed up for a time
slot. When my time came, I made my way to the dining car, where I
was seated across from a quiet, middle-aged married couple. I also
was quiet. For several minutes, I sat and continued listening to the
conversations of others. A couple of tables down the aisle, there
sat a big, burly young man wearing a baseball cap. Next to him was a
cute young blond woman. They were obviously attached to each other.
Across from them sat an elderly woman. The couple was in the midst
of delivering a long lesson in things Americans like to the elderly
woman, using lots of pronouns such as “I” and “we” as they
went down the list of favorite foods, sports and other things. I
wondered at them, because it had seemed to me that all three of them
were Americans (whenever the elderly woman managed to get a word in
edgewise, she did not speak with any obvious accent).
Directly across the aisle
from our table was another table, at which two couples were seated.
One couple consisted of an African-American man married to a
Caucasian woman. Both were middle-aged. Across the table from them
was a young Asian pair who were, I believe, at the
boyfriend-girlfriend stage. The conversation shared between these
four, and the conversation I had with my dinner companions, were the
most thought-provoking ones I heard during the entire trip.
My conversation began
slowly. The couple at my table started by sharing some ice-breaking
information about themselves. I found out that they had recently
sailed up the Amazon River in South America, and were now traveling
from Portland to Klamath Falls. This piqued my curiosity and got me
talking. “Klamath Falls? Isn't that where the Oregon Institute of
Technology is? I know a bit about their renewable energy engineering
program.” I informed them that I am an engineer. They then
informed me that they had both worked in the engineering field, the
husband as a civil engineer and the wife as a drafter. They asked me
how I liked engineering, to which I replied that there were parts I
hated – namely the attempt by employers to work us like dogs for 55
to over 70 hours per week, world without end. My comment led to a
general discussion of present-day life in America.
The discussion covered some
familiar ground, such as the fact that people in most other countries
– including many Third World countries – seem to be much
healthier mentally than Americans, the fact that most immigrants to
this country come here in much better mental health than most
native-born U.S. citizens, and the fact that immigrant mental health
deteriorates with increasing length of time in America and increasing
Americanization. The wife then asked rhetorically, “Why is it so
that we are so selfish here, so isolated from each other?” “I
think it's because of the myths on which this country was founded,”
I opined. “Other nations have realized for a long time that their
citizens lived in a land of limits, in which everyone had to
sacrifice certain prerogatives so that all might benefit. The
dominant culture in the United States has always believed that there
are no limits to what we can do or have if we want something badly
enough. Therefore we haven't learned effective strategies for
sharing limited resources with each other.”
That led us to talk about
where we believed this country is heading as undeniable limits are
beginning to bite us. It was also at this point that I began to tune
in to the conversation between the mixed-race couple and the Asian
boyfriend-girlfriend pair sitting at the table across the aisle from
my table. The African-American male half of the married couple was
relating what sounded like a belief that Asian (specifically Chinese)
culture, intellectual power and economic might would bring about the
end of American hegemony. It was with some effort that I managed to
remain focused on my own conversation. At my table, we reviewed the
spectrum of the most widely-held opinions concerning the future of
industrial society, and of the United States in particular. Then a
moment came when our food was all eaten, our energy spent, our words
all said. We all excused ourselves and said our goodbyes for the
night.
As I returned to the
observation car, I saw several new arrivals, including some
college-age guys enjoying a night of underage drinking. It occurred
to me that they, as well as most of the passengers, were so typical
of Anglo-American culture at present: unreflecting, sensual,
incapable of articulating anything other than the cravings induced in
them by our commercialized culture, and totally clueless about the
future. Later, as I tried to sleep, my thoughts expanded to consider
how the wealthiest and most powerful members of our society had
become utterly incapable of giving ground or sacrificing assumed
“rights” in order to benefit the common good. I was particularly
mindful of the statement of the president of the NRA to the effect
that guns were not the reason for the recent shooting rampages in
this country, and that instead of restricting gun access, we should
install armed guards in every elementary school in the United States.
I was thinking also of the most recent shooting rampage, in which an
older white male with a criminal history set some houses on fire and
then shot volunteer firefighters as they arrived to try to put the
fires out, before shooting himself. I thought of the lack of adult,
intelligent, realistic conversations on the part of media figures or
politicians to address the violent reality of mainstream American
culture, or the multifaceted predicament we now face. We are forced
by events to acknowledge that our society is killing us, yet nothing
is done to effectively remedy the causes of the killing, because to
do so would cause certain wealthy people to lose a lot of money, and
would force most of us to live far more simply. And that's something
that most people don't want to talk about.
