LAUGHING AT THE RUBES

LAUGHING AT THE RUBES

I just finished a short story, Pastoralia, by George Saunders, a writer I’ve heard of through friends, and perhaps nibbled around the edges of, but not actually read before. It is grossly unfair to judge a writer by one story, but as I started the second story in the collection, I felt that perhaps it was typical. And the fact that it is the first story in an eponymous collection, it must be one he and his editors feel is strong and typical. In any event, I did not like it on an emotional level. I found it dryly amusing, and full of a cold hearted sarcasm and easily achieved irony that left me as a reader with nowhere to go. But this is not a simple reaction, it is complex. I love the metaphysical and physical prisons created for hapless protagonists by Philip K. Dick and Kafka. I’ve written quite a few of these myself. And I enjoy both creating and consuming art that is cruel and satirical. In Patoralia we have two people employed by a giant, nameless, sinister corporation in a theme park of human history. They live in their diorama and their job is to portray ‘cavemen’. This means grunting and pretending to eat bugs. They are not permitted to talk. They must file reports on each other. The man is obedient. The woman is not. The man is hapless. The woman is annoying. They are both victims, but the man is trying to do the best for his family, and must turn on the woman, whose family is a wreck. She needs the job, but can’t obey. One of them will be fired. It is a box, a trap, and it’s one many of us are caught in. And Saunders is clearly, even didactically, trying to tell us, isn’t this horrible? And his parody is dead on. Like Lydia Millet’s Everyone’s Pretty and Helen Dewitt’s Lightning Rods, this is savage, anti-corporate satire, and I should love it. But it lacks a dimension of empathy that I find disturbing, because for me, it is an essential quality of narrative art. I felt like I was being asked to do something I do all the time: laugh at the rubes. If you are intelligent and somewhat counter-cultural in orientation in America you spend a lot of time laughing at the rubes. The rubes believe in god in a silly, Sunday school white beard kind of way. They wear polyester and shop at Walmart. They watch reality TV and vote for idiot Republicans. They get abortions when they need them, and oppose abortion when others need one. They get pregnant at 15 and attend promise keepers ceremonies where they wed their fathers and pledge to be virgins until marriage. If they’re boys, they rape cheerleaders. Football is God. No government takeover of my Medicare. Etc. You can stereotype Americans in this way and feel comfortable and amused in your Manhattan or San Francisco apartment because everyone you know shares these feelings. I do. I live in a town full of people who feel this way. Most are university professors or work for the university, but many are artists and professionals, or people living outside of or on the edges of the corporate system. We are generally intellectuals in some loose sense of the word and if we are poor or middle class this could, I repeat COULD, be seen as voluntary. (I’d dispute that: I’m smart enough to be a corporate lawyer, but the thought of that makes me want to shoot myself). The problem is one of class, partly. But many of the rubes make good money. In fact, it is their decent income, the insecure basis for it, their aspiration for more, their decadent lifestyle, their BUY IN, that we are mocking, even if we share the income. Those rubes don’t even know that they advocate their own destruction! Haven’t they read Marx? Gramsci? Does their false consciousness prevent them from diagnosing their own false consciousness? What the fuck is the matter with Kansas? But let’s face it. Most of us, or at least I, meet the same rubes at work, in my community, in my own family. They are parent’s of my kid’s friends. Neighbors. The people who work in the stores, who work on my house. Who I work with and for. And when they are people in my orbit, when they have a name, they stop being rubes. Because they are good at their jobs. They are kind, charitable, generous people. They care about others. They believe in the things they do. They struggle with addiction, unemployment, alienation and know it. Many of them are liberals. In short, they are individuals, complex humans I care about and can’t laugh at. As a fiction writer and reader, that is the experience I am after. And as a political person, how can I be for justice if the world is full of a bunch of contemptible rubes? The stories in Pastoralia ALL appeared in the New Yorker. The New Yorker is prime anti-rube territory. It makes me feel kind of sick to share in this joke, even though I am part of it, I am one of THEM, the people who laugh at the rubes.