Prejudiced Against Prejudice (Part 2 of 2)

The Hoosier hayseed as I was on my first day of 8th grade, I might have qualified for the subject of one of Norm Peterson’s (George Wendt in the 80s hit comedy Cheers) favorite quips.

Milkbone Underwear
This is another story I’ve related before — the one about my first day of school in California in September of 1969. We had literally just rolled into town two days prior, on Saturday afternoon, arriving in Long Beach at the conclusion of our cross-country journey from Middletown, Indiana. It was the first Monday morning of 8th grade; I didn’t know a soul and probably hadn’t made direct eye contact with anyone until the memorable moment that occurred while I was sitting in my first class.

There I was, arriving on the scene at Leland Stanford Junior High; a thirteen year-old boy who could have easily passed for ten, sporting a bowl-type haircut, a rather loud short-sleeve madras print shirt (top button buttoned, of course), and a pair of yellow-gold polyester pin-striped Sears Tuff-Skin bell-bottom trousers that gave way to about 3-4 inches of black socks and exposed ankle.

I might as well have been wearing a big ol’ bull’s eye on my back.

Norm Peterson of the classic TeeVee comedy Cheers might well have described my circumstance as, “livin’ in a dog-eat-dog world — and AJ’s wearin’ Milkbone underwear.”

On that early September Monday morning, after locating my 8th Grade homeroom in the 800 building, I took a seat on the far right-hand row of desks, about two or three seats from the front of class. I stared straight ahead as we all awaited the appearance of our homeroom teacher.

The class was abuzz in muffled conversation as excited adolescents described to one another what they’d been up to since June. I heard a few giggles coming from behind; I had an idea but didn’t want to turn around to see if they were being directed at me. It wouldn’t be too much longer before I’d find out.

“Hey…” a voice from the desk behind me whispered, accompanied by a pair of bony taps between my shoulder blades.

“Hey, kid…”

I sheepishly turned to my peer back over my shoulder, where a pair of maniacal blue-black eyes flashed back at me. They were attached to a freckle-faced boy with wildly mussed, long and stringy hair, featuring a grin that would have left Alice’s Cheshire Cat with an inferiority complex.

He didn’t appear to be much bigger than me, but more than made up for his lack of size with attitude. He wore an oversized plaid Pendleton flannel shirt, which I would later learn to associate as the uniform of the ‘hard guys’ as I referred to them; boys whom you definitely wanted to be on the right side of, socially.

Long before my first social studies class, I would be faced with my first social test in this brave, new world.

“Hey, kid,” my leering classmate continued, “Are you…a GEEK?” The peanut gallery behind him and in the row to my left erupted in laughter.

“No. No, I’m not,” I replied, as I turned back around, mortified, once again face-forward in my seat.

Fitting in — in a hurry
The good news is, I can now look back on that first day of school and laugh — almost hysterically. I would indeed find my way around in the social jungle that was junior High school, and before the year was out, I’d have the hard guys in their Pendletons coming to my defense on the thankfully seldom occasions in which I was picked on by other boys around campus.

By the end of the school year I would run for student council (for a term beginning the first semester of the following year) and would win. My personality blossomed and so did my grades. I went from C’s and D’s in Indiana to A’s and B’s in my new home — appropriately for me — nicknamed, The Golden State.

I opened up as a person in the 8th grade. I was transformed from a shy, introverted, often angry little boy into a socially confident, semi-gregarious, um…little boy.

I may not have been one of the ‘cool kids,’ but I was close.

Fortunately, I was a quick study. I learned from day one how to adapt; I lost the accent, unbuttoned that top shirt collar button and never fastened it again. Even later, in the 1980s, when the buttoned-down collar-look became fashionable, I resisted adopting it for the longest time; and for nothing more than that very silly connotation of geekdom that was still branded into the hide of my childhood psyche.

Funny thing though, in looking back on it all with the retrospection of now having lived in the south for 20 years, I realize how insidious that kind of thinking can be — and how needlessly damaging. Why did it matter that I spoke with a regional accent? Why did it matter that I wore ‘floods’ because my parents couldn’t afford to replace my pants before I out grew them? Why did it matter that the label on the back of my jeans said Tuffskins or Towncraft instead of Levis?

And why THE HELL did I, only months later, actively begin deriding and judging other kids for committing the same social sins that I had been guilty of?

Goin’ To, Music City, Music City, Here I come...
When we made the decision to move to Nashville, in my mind, it was for one reason and one reason only: to continue my career in the music business. The more-affordable cost of living and allegedly better environment in which to raise our two children were Michelle’s reasons, not mine.

I’d be lying to say that I was at all looking forward to the culture shock I knew was waiting for me. I did not want to leave California, but nonetheless, deep-down inside, I knew that it was something we needed to do as a family. So I went willingly, but with plenty of trepidation.

My social training told me that I was going to a very strange place; one that I was conditioned to look upon with disdain. You see, I had been this way before, but in reverse.

Given how I’d gotten to California in the first place, you’d think I would have known better. Sheesh — talk about reprogramming!

I guess I didn’t really know how prejudiced I was until I got here.

Again, I’m not talking about racial prejudice. I was raised to be colorblind. I can honestly say that race has never ever been an issue with me. However I’m ashamed to say that the same kind of social prejudice that was used against me as a thirteen year old coming into that brave ‘cool’ world of Southern California was something that I in turn would incorporate into my own worldview for many, many years.

I can clearly remember my biggest reticence to moving to Nashville was my perception of leaving the world of ‘enlightenment’ and plunging myself headlong into the land that intelligence forgot — or so I’d been told. I mean, everybody knows that Hee-Haw was the first reality show on TeeVee, right? People in Nashville really do walk around in overalls, wearing straw hats and hanging out in cornfields all day, telling each other silly jokes, don’t they?

And surely the only music they play in that town are those twangy Country songs about somebody’s long-lost hound dog with perhaps an occasional Johnny Cash tune thrown in for good measure.

These were the things that I was more-or-less convinced were either true or pretty close to the same. And as ridiculous as that is, to some degree, it’s at least the flavor of Nashville’s perception in other parts of this country. I know it was pretty much my pervading impression, despite the fact that deep down I knew how silly it was for me to acknowledge such bullshit.

But what if it was?

Imagine my surprise when I arrived here only to find that most everyone I met actually had teeth and lived in houses with indoor plumbing!

I’m obviously exaggerating here just a bit, but in my experience, the spirit of my little jibe was pretty accurate. People believe what they’re told — and sold; and this stereotype of Nashville and the deep south in general is one that hopefully in recent years has finally begun to die down. However, it never ceases to amaze me — largely via comments I read and hear associated with the assumptions of hockey fans from other NHL cities — that this derisive image still seems to abound in people’s minds, despite loads of evidence to the contrary.

Social stereotypes work in every bit the same way that racial ones do. Prejudice is the quintessential definition of ignorance because it not only presumes things that aren’t necessarily so, it promotes those beliefs as fuel for fear.

If political correctness is ‘correct,’ then it’s correct for everyone. No one person or group has a monopoly on the truth or the right to infringe upon another person’s political conviction, short of that conviction denying one’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

And while the aforementioned credo of the Declaration of Independence is said to be of broad interpretation, we know as well as its authors did some 235 years ago just how narrow it is in spirit. We can wrangle all we want about political ramifications surrounding the notion, but that’s all it is: wrangling; rhetoric; words whose intent is ultimately purposed to attain or maintain control in a political context, even when real politics aren’t even involved.

It’s the same for the ridiculous notion of social superiority based on geography, dialect (or the lack thereof), relative income, or other trappings of social status.

Nope, ya really can’t mess this one up, folks. It’s obvious that the preamble of the Declaration is all about respect — one human being for another; nothing more and nothing less. It’s the giving of respect that generates freedom, not the other way around; true, it’s a two-way street, but if it doesn’t start with me, it may as well not even exist.

It’s up to us to turn the other cheek; it’s up to us to respect others before demanding that they respect us; not to exclude and castigate them for being different, unless there’s real evidence that that difference is destructive and not merely a departure from prevailing opinion.

Apart from that, true freedom is a myth; and the pursuit of happiness is nothing more than another device we use to get our own way.


* * * * *

finis

Prejudiced Against Prejudice (Part 1 of 2)

TeeVee producer J.J. Abrams is along those who have made it cool to be a geek these days, but it wasn’t always that way.

I know this sounds like a broken record, but…
I may not post very often, but I write all the time — really; although you’d never know that from my online output. The problem is, I do write often but I rarely finish what I start.

My more-than-occasional penchant for distraction applies to reading books as well. I’ve mentioned it before, but I honestly believe I’m at least mildly ADD, which might account for the fact that the only novel in my entire life I’ve ever read from cover-to-cover was The Good Earth, which I was forced to do a book report on in the seventh grade. It took me for freakin’ ev-ar. Truth be told I probably read it three times based on the number of instances in which I’d catch myself daydreaming and then, ten pages later, have no comprehension whatsoever of I’d just read. I’d have to go back and re-read the section and typically repeat the same situation in the next chapter or on the next page.

It’s a problem I’ve had for as long as I can remember and in the case of the colossal headache that was The Good Earth, it was sufficient to ruin me on book reading, period. That’s silly, I know, but really, that was it. Any subsequent books I was ever assigned in school I merely skimmed through and hoped for the best when it came to proving that I knew what they were about.

In recent years I’ve attempted to read books for pleasure, but nearly every time they’d end up sitting on a shelf, their bindings barely cracked. The most ridiculous example of this to date is my copy of Tom Brocaw’s wonderful work on my parent’s peer group called, The Greatest Generation. I wanted so badly to have it that I dropped numerous hints to Michelle suggesting it would make an excellent Dad’s Day gift; then once it was mine I read the forward and then proceeded to park it on a shelf for a month before even thinking about picking it up again. In the more than seven years since, I’ve read a grand total of two chapters of that book I supposedly wanted so desperately. And the worst part is that I really enjoyed those two chapters! I just couldn’t get myself to sit back down and finish the rest.

In subsequent years I have managed to successfully complete a few very short books (i.e.: 75 pages or less), but the number of those occasions I can count on one hand.

But here’s the weirdest thing of all in reference to my apparent reading hang-up: I’ve always loved to read the Sunday paper each week, and stranger still, I read and have read voraciously on the Internet for years. There just seems to be something — and I’d love for someone to clue me in on what that something is — that makes reading onscreen easier for me than focusing on a printed page for more than 15-20 seconds before losing concentration, my mind wandering, etc.

I just seem to have the hardest time staying on task when it comes to reading a freaking book — or making a freaking point, apparently — as my lack of book-reading prowess is not even remotely related to the subject of this post.

The only reason I mention it here is only because the subject of this post somehow sprang up in the midst of another post I was writing in the spring of 2008, which strangely enough, was about a concert I’d attended that April.

The more I expounded upon that maverick thought the longer the post grew and more off-track of its original subject it became. So I basically cut the post in half and set the off-kilter portion aside to re-visit as a separate story subject at another time; it‘s taken me three years, but here it is.

I believe that now, three years later, particularly in light of the fact that we elected of our first African-American President in U.S. History, the subject is as germane as it ever will be.

If your guess is now that my story has to do with prejudice, you’d be right.

But if you’re assuming that it’s racial prejudice I’m referring to, well, AHHHHHHNTTT! Sorry; no cookie for you.

There’s another kind of prejudice in our society that doesn’t merely single out differences in race as its target, but is just as damaging for what it does to our social sensibilities, in my opinion. It’s just as wrong as racial prejudice but far more subtle; and chances are, regardless of the color your skin, you’ve probably been not only a victim of it, but a perpetrator as well.

The ‘P-word’ comes in all flavors
As I’ve mentioned numerous times previously in concert-related blog entries, I feel extremely lucky to be where I am right now, especially with regard to the music scene here in Nashville. However Music City has been more than simply a place to indulge my musical appetites; it’s been a great teacher as well, particularly in light of where I came from.

Now before I get started, allow me to assure those of you SoCal’ers whose neck hair is already standing on end, this isn’t going to be an L.A. bash-fest. I believe my record is clear concerning the consummate love I have for my former homeland. This is about me, and the observations of my own change in attitude over the past 15-20 years; the way I saw things when I lived in SoCal, versus the way I see them now, just shy of twenty years after my family and I relocated to Nashville. It’s about what being away from life in the fishbowl has taught me about the rest of the ocean.

The only person I actually plan to bash here is myself, along with, to a lesser degree, the society and local worldview I grew up with from late adolescence in the early 70s through mid-adulthood in the late 80s/early 90s.

It’s the ooonly way to fly
Upon relocating to Nashville from L.A. over Christmas Break in 1991, nearly everything I thought I knew of my new home turned out largely to be lies and all-out prejudice — not the racial kind, but much more a cultural bigotry that ultimately required removing myself from its source to truly have its ugliness revealed. I certainly couldn’t have seen it for what it was while being indoctrinated in it as a teenager; my social programming was subtle, as is usually the case with any sort of learned behavior.

As is the case with most any great locale, Southern California not only exudes pride in being a great place to live, but in the 70s and 80s at least, local society there would have you believe that it was the only place to be.

However it went beyond mere regional partisanship; it wasn’t just about the way you looked, it was also about the way you spoke. Californians are proud of their lack of any kind of readily detectable regional accent, as opposed to those typically found in other parts of the country. In school, if you ‘talked funny’ you were definitely branded as ‘different.’ Even among adults, regional accents were often ridiculed in private conversation. This was particularly true of southern accents. It was almost as if folks believed that anyone who spoke with a southern accent was somehow lower on the evolutionary scale than ‘normal’ people.

“WHOAH…” you might be saying, “Isn’t that just a LITTLE judgmental on yourpart, AJ?” Perhaps; but it absolutely was, by implication, the indoctrination I was given throughout my late adolescence-to-early adulthood, an age period in our development as societal beings in which I’m convinced we are the most subject to suggestion, outside influence and ultimately, prejudicial opinion.

Welcome to FauxCal
Having spent the first thirteen years of my life in semi-rural Indiana, and accordingly having also carried with me a fairly strong regional dialect when we arrived in Southern California in 1969, I quickly learned the importance of losing that accent as fast as possible.

Indiana isn’t Tennessee, of course, but in the late 60s, pretty much anything that was linked to the south or rural midwest was cast in the light of ignorance and intolerance by those ‘enlightened’ members of the too-cool-for-the-room set in SoCal. It largely had to do to with south’s pronounced resistance to the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and early 70s, an extremely hot-button topic of the day. And being the ‘melting pot’ that L.A. had become, they prided themselves on being better than all those erstwhile confederate bigots down there in the south.

Oh yeah…there’s no racial prejudice in Southern California. Um…hello? Ever heard of the Watts riots of ’65? Rodney King? Yeah, everybody just gets along, right? Whatevs.

The fact is that there’s plenty of racial prejudice just about everywhere in America, and it comes in many different flavors. La-La land may have it better-hidden than other locales, but just like that old spaghetti sauce commercial used to say, “It’s in there.”

The good news is I honestly believe that racial prejudice as a social constant is on the way out in this country. A new, much more ‘colorblind’ generation is growing up and assuming more and more influence in the rethinking of race relations in the United States of America.

President Barack Obama is the proof of that puddin.

So will we — could we eventually become a nation of true racial equality? I hope so. I don’t know if it will happen in my lifetime, but I definitely see it in the offing for my children’s generation and beyond.

However that other kind of prejudice — the social kind — that’s the one that troubles me even more at this point; that’s the one I still consider just as dangerous, just as wrong, and just as insidious as ever.

Oh, and it’s not just about accents and making fun of hicks either.

It permeates everything; it raises ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ to an art form — one that I particularly allowed myself to be sucked into.

While the locals patted themselves on the back because they lived in stucco crackerboxes instead of the kind that have wheels and attract tornadoes, I gathered their cloaks at my feet and stood by, silently nodding my head in agreement. I drank the Kool-Aide alright; even though I knew in my heart that the punch was tainted.

Hey, I just wanted to be one of the cool kids, yo.

But country wasn’t cool, and country sensibilities were even less so. ‘Hick’ was every bit as derogatory a four-letter epithet as anything else one could be called back then. And after someone asked me if I actually was one on my first day of 8th grade, soon after our arrival in Long Beach, I was pretty damned sure that was not the way to go.


Next: Milkbone Underwear