Mom needed her AOL address book exported to Yahoo. Dad needed audio cables plugged in. Plus we met with a realtor. Had lunch at the old folks home. Shrinking worlds, trivial conversation, relentles politeness except when some cranky old man forgot what he ordered for lunch and insisted they take that sh*t away. My pop ain't like that: as one of his friends there says, he's one of the few who still has his marbles.
Before leaving I sat with him, looking through various manuals he acquired when in the Navy, books put together when suddenly the service was overloaded with eager former civilians brought in to fight the Japs. Somewhere I caught a sentence to the effect that the Navy's job was to prevent the war from being fought on American soil. There's a reminder of how sheltered we have been.
(Is "Japs" impolite? To me it was always an abbreviation that people mysteriously disapproved of, in a far more serious manner than, say, "Russkies". Anyway I use the word as a relic of a former time.)
Of course, the Japanese knew they couldn't win if they didn't wrest from us an early capitulation. The immense weight of our industry would make sure of it. By the same calculation, if we go to war with China, we will probably lose. Let's not.
The Mothball Fleet as seen at seventy miles an hour from the new bridge
Yes. It's impolite. Even in retrospect.
ReplyDeleteYou mean even when alleging to quote people of another time. I accept that and apologize if I gave offense. (And leaving it unedited. Many many thoughts this one inspires, and interesting conversations.)
ReplyDeleteHave you ever been called a racist name? Ever had to put yourself between your 7-year-old brother and a group of bigger boys who are taunting him with a racist name? Ever had a store clerk say to your mother, "go back to where you came from?"
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm sensitive on this issue, and I won't apologize for it. So sue me.
Sorry if I got a little hot about that. Hot button.
ReplyDeleteYes, the standard dynamic between 5th and 8th grades was to get ganged up on and beaten by the black kids calling me honky, and spat on by the Hispanic kids (who had their own on-campus clubhouse), while Authority ignored it because, well, for obvious reasons.
ReplyDeleteHigh school on the other hand was racially very harmonious (I'd say about forty percent white, maybe thirty black, twenty Asian, ten Hispanic). In later years the same school was somewhat divided but in our day, not too bad.
But no, all that is different. I never heard "Go back." One of my best friends reports a bunch of yahoos saying that to his kids, even though his and his wife's families have been in CA since the 1800s (Chinese and Japanese respectively). Thought makes my blood boil.
The handsome child pictured earlier has grandparents who went to the relocation camps and I'd be interested to know his folks' opinion.
I honor your sensitivity and would like to make the poor excuse that the Naval Officer's Manual I was looking through had the word in it as well. I don't know if this is connected to that, but somehow I always associated the word with the World War II enemy only and not with anyone living this side of the ocean. Obv, your experience shows my outlook to be overly simplistic.
More patter deleted. I never run out of talk on this subject, for some reason.
I knew that kid was at least a hapa.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Judy is a native Angeleno who grew up in Compton, with parents who were Swedish Socialists, and all of her Japanese-American friends were born in the camps.
I dated a troglodyte who was fascinated by WWII, and we were at lunch at a restaurant on 10th Avenue and he was talking about the war in the Pacific in a very loud voice, and it was "Japs" this and "Japs" that, which felt like fists in my face. There was a young Japanese couple sitting at the table next to us, and when I looked over at them, the girl was looking at him and crying. I hated him a little after that.
http://lizarddreams.scribblinlizard.com/2010/04/ownership.html
ReplyDeleteDon, I "get" your usage, and I read it as such, perhaps by accident, but I have, over the years, read so much of your writing, that it struck me as so not-something-you-would-say that I get you were throwing it in as an anachronism in that context, as if you put quotation marks around it, only in this case, I had to supply them.
ReplyDeleteI feel like your friend Jane's reaction was perfectly normal. I can't begin to understand the experience of being a part of a often hated and mistreated minority--admit it, Don, our experiences in high school provide barely a glimpse of what it is to live in "someone else's world," as African-Americans, to some extent, still do, as do Hispanics, and so on, no matter what we like to say. Hopefully, that is not the reality for a growing part of these demographics, but I fear we may be too hasty to say "mission accomplished" on that particular sociological front right now, Obama notwithstanding. I digress, but you get what I mean, right?
As far as "owning" a hateful slur, I see that is an effective way to defuse stupid, hateful speech, but just as right to fight back in other ways, especially if the issue at stake is important or dear. Not everyone is the same. Besides, I wouldn't expect someone to own up to having some inaccurate, stereotypical characteristic, say. That would be like them saying, "Yeah, you're right, but I don't care." I would expect a fight, because that is usually what you get when you push someone in a corner.
"I would expect a fight..." So would I. I expect it too often, and of course that is giving to the hater what the hater most wants, and it's a shame, sometimes. Even when you win the fight, it's a shame.
ReplyDeleteWay mixed feelings here, in general, but I so dislike giving a despicable person what they want.
Good point.
ReplyDeleteI am that hapa kid's Dad. There are undoubtedly things that his Japanese American grandparents went through, even before they and their families went to camps, that I still don't know about and could never truly understand. My Irish American ancestors went through it in the early to mid-19th Century, but they never went to concentration camps.
ReplyDeleteDaring Dayton and the Princess Mariko will both understand these things someday, hopefully, just through talking with us and their grandma. Hopefully not through painful personal experience. We have hopes for the former. There are more and more mixed race kids in the schools, though not as much where we are now as where we were last year. It remains to be seen if tolerance builds as time goes by.
My wife has actually only faced open racism on a visit to Florida. She grew up in west Los Angeles. Not to say that there isn't racism there, but she first experienced that in Florida, then again in the SF Bay Area, that bastion of liberal thought (Ha!).
I've definitely been called "honky" and "white boy" and all the other things, but it didn't stick with me. Couldn't tell you why. It seemed ignorant to me then and does now, just as any racism does. I blew it off. Maybe I was able to do that because it had no material effect on me. I was never refused a job or a service because I was white, for instance.
I experienced the most open hostility in Hawai'i. It's understandable when you look back at what white Americans did to seize control of Hawai'i. Doesn't make it feel any better, but I can't say there's no rational basis for it. It's weird to ask a Hawaiian a question, and have the person scowl at me and address my wife with an answer, but that's the way it is. I still think it's ignorant to the extent that if they spoke with me, they'd find I wasn't a typical, racist white American, assuming that Hawai'i belongs to us. Perhaps bitter experience has led them to give up on any hope of communicating with people like me.
On the issue of "Japs" I must say that to me it always seemed derogatory. It's clearly not just an abbreviation. Even now, 65 years after the war ended, it's basically a racist expression. Being married to a Japanese American and being involved with her family has no doubt had an effect on my thinking, but even as a kid I couldn't have said that out loud. Things like that just seemed wrong.