Monkey in the middle

November 18, 2007

Filed in: The Way We Live Now

Know how sometimes you’re blinded to your own bad habits until you see them reflected in someone else?

How, say, you’ll be driving somewhere with your teenaged son sitting next to you chewing up the inside of his cheek till it bleeds, and you’ll go, oh God, I know where he got that from? Or at the end of a too-long family party you’ll see someone you love swaying over your children with the over-solicitousness of the slightly, slowly drunk, and you’ll go, ick. I don’t come off like that, do I? 

I had a similar ugly jolt a few weeks back, when, in the middle of an online tempest-in-a-teacup over a Brain,Child article, someone tossed off the word “mainstream” in a tone that was so super-snarky, so vomitrociously superior that all I could think of was…well…me. 

Never mind for the moment that calling B,C mainstream is just plain silly—oh, girlfriend, you have no idea how wide and deep that stream is—the bigger point is this: I too have been known to use “mainstream” as an insult with the utmost of snottiness. But the more I pay attention, the more I’m coming to see how this I’m-not-one-of-those attitude is blocking us from being able to talk to each other or from getting anything freaking done. 

Am I mainstream? Not a chance. Consider: Our household subscribes to 17 different magazines, and we actually read them all. My kids know who Igor Stravinsky is, and they can reliably pick Shostakovich out of a lineup. We do not own a microwave, a gas grill, or a working air conditioner, and we keep our house at 64 degrees all winter long. Nobody in our household plays a team sport. We drink maybe 2 six-packs of beer a year. Not one person in my family has ever seen a complete episode of Survivor, or Deal or No Deal, or CSI:Anywhere or Oprah. Thanks to the awesome puke scene in Supersize Me, not one of the four of us has consumed so much as a French fry from McDonald’s in the past three years. We mow on foot and we rake by hand. We have grass in our yard, but we do not put anything on it, ever, not even water. Owing to our awesome CSA, six months of every year we eat vegetables that are both organic and 100% local. We understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.

On the other hand, mainstream? Oh yeah. We have a dog that eats diet dog food (only in America, people). We watch the Super Bowl every year, and the ads, and we like them both. We buy mustard and mayonnaise in squeeze bottles that stand on their heads in the fridge, not because we need this feature, but because someone marketed it to us. Every December, we reliably dig ourselves into a credit hole that takes us most of the spring to dig ourselves out of. We spend too great a percentage of our income on housing, we save too little for retirement, and we laughed after our babies were born and they showed us the graph of how much money we were supposed to be putting away monthly for the time when that teeny tot would start college. That day is now 4 years away, and we’re not laughing any more. We do not personally know any African-Americans, which make up way, way less than 1% of Swellville’s population. We want out, but no, we cannot articulate an exit strategy.

It’s always the other person who’s fat and racist and dresses like a loser and drives a gas-guzzler and isn’t smarter than a fifth grader or whatever this month’s new show is. We all kill ourselves to be something other than mainstream—hipper! holier! smarter! richer! more religious! more righteous! more left! more right! greener! better!—and then tsk-tsk at the breadth and depth of our shared acrimony and disdain. Nobody wants to be the monkey in the middle anymore. So now he’s on everybody’s back instead.