When we were at the Do'a concert on Sunday (see Music And The Ants), we were surrounded by people we recognized. Not that we knew them outright as friends or acquaintances, but they were "our kind," an odious phrase, smacking of parochial bigotry, but still true. They were white, mostly middle-aged (around 40 or 50), and prosperous-looking. They all appeared self-assured, like people who simply expect outdoor concerts on Sunday afternoons as part of their lives, as part of life itself. We were wrapped together by more than our chance meeting at the concert; we all expected life to give us good food, comfortable quarters, the blessings of wisdom, and above all possibility. We were not at the mercy and knew it. Whatever existential strife anyone had was merely a mild perturbation on a mostly calm sea.
But then there is Salisbury Beach. Just over the New Hampshire/Massachusetts border, it's a gritty, sticky, steamy amusement park full of the kind of people who do not go to Do'a concerts on Sunday, who would think Do'a meant "door," and who, in many ways, are extra-terrestrials to me. Why? Don't we all share the same basic emotional equipment? Do we not, like Shakespeare's Shylock, bleed the same, weep the same, laugh the same? Aren't we all concerned with the same ends in life, to be happy, secure? On the macroperson level, yes. But it's on the lower levels of particulars that the strangeness creeps in.
I don't use "extra-terrestrials" blithely, to cash in on the bumper crop of silliness raised by Spielberg's movie. I use it for its accuracy. They are "extra" as in "outside," sharing the same earth but filled with quite different and sometimes incomprehensible thoughts and emotions.
Salisbury Beach is full of those glittery tinsely rides that don't so much scare people as make them mildly nauseous and fun-houses that aren't fun and haunted houses that aren't scary. I go there sometimes when I want to get away from the cloistered seriousness of the Academy, truthfully to see how the other seven-eighths live. The people who go there aren't smart. They don't drive BMWs (except as motorcycles), but pick-ups. They don't stroll but clomp around. A lot of them have dirty hands from working with them, and the hair is not expertly coiffed and the clothes tend to jeans (not denims with labels on them) and tee-shirts without animals over the hearts.
They even look different in the face, what my friend calls rough around the edge. The girls and women have hair that is stringy and unSassooned. Their faces are pinched, hard-edged, just lacking the fleshiness that might give them a chance for prettiness. Or they are heavily made-up, with eyeliner strongly stroked over and under the eye, with a mild eye-shadow and noticeably colored lips. The boys and men have the same hard-edge to their features. Sometimes thin moustaches, hardly beards. Hair that will fall into the face like two valves from a part down the middle.
I've had these kinds of people in classrooms. They don't for the most part read, don't like reading at all. They don't reflect much or deeply. They think and reason and calculate, but shallowly, for advantage. They see no utility in thinking for its own sake, no beauty in simply teasing an idea apart. They want a kind of immediacy out of life: quick drunks on the weekends, cars that move fast, fights when they can be had, a man or woman to be with. Their world is not filled Do'a concerts or books or any of the proud accouterments we call civilization. They take from the banquet of life straight doses of technology and not philosophy, urgency instead of reflection, hardliving instead of soft possibility.
I share this country with them, even a kind of overall humanity, but we don't share much beyond that. The shame of that is also the strength of a democracy, that we can all inhabit our niches without having to justify our existence. Yet I belong, for want of a better word, to a class who has the power in this country and who tends to see the country in its own image, as full of educated people mindful of the accomplishments of society who want to be engaged in the exercise of power and the fashioning of the world. Yet the world that gets fashioned are those people at Salisbury Beach. They are the "hard-working decent Americans" Reagan loves to conjure, yet they share little with him, with his ranch and china and perquisites. They are used, not understood, and therefore swept to the side, the fossil of a stereotype.
We are all, then, extra-terrestrials to one another, none of us especially more in tune with the music of the spheres than anyone else. Yet our politics can never really take cognizance of this equality of strangers, can't reflect it in its polity except for the divisive representation of single issues. If industrial policy or any of the other catch-policies is going to work, if social theorists are to have any bedrock, then they must work with the people at Salisbury Beach, must be in a sense initiated by them. But until politicians and the rest of us in that class spur ourselves to know these people instead of ignoring them or using them as pawns, or as clay to be re-made into our own image, then all our sophistication and knowledge and supposed superiority will be a cannon rolling on the deck, maiming by good intention, killing by willed ignorance.