Echoes in a Hollow Space

I am an American, which is a complex thing. I know how some of us act in the world, and sometimes that makes me cringe in shame. I want to tell the world, “We’re not all like that.” But that’s a complex thing, too, because sometimes, in some moments, there is something in the American psyche which makes many of us go from 1 to 60 on the boorish scale in less than a second. Where does that American rage and boorishness come from? It’s entitlement, of course. I think it’s mostly a white middle to upper class thing. But sometimes even that’s a complex thing, an exercise in finger-pointing that no one, it seems, is completely immune to.

Some of us try hard not to be like that. I’m fortunate that I came from the lower classes, didn’t grow up thinking the world and everything in it was mine by right. Doesn’t mean I don’t snap sometimes and go into boorish mode. I’m human. And I’m American. And I’m white. But I’m always deeply ashamed and apologetic afterwards, so I try really hard not to go there—so I can live more comfortably with myself if nothing else.

I’ve been thinking about my last trip to England, in 2004. I’d been aware for some time how badly some of us acted overseas. So much so that if anyone asked if I was American, I would sometimes lie and say I was Canadian. It’s possible some rare Canadians act boorishly overseas, but I think it’s got to be much, much rarer than with Americans.

On that 2004 trip, there were three of us middle-aged ladies traveling together, and inevitably, inevitably whenever we overheard someone whining or complaining or acting childish in general, that person had an American accent. We decided we would go out of our way to be the polar opposite in every dealing we had with locals. This was about a year after the bombing of Baghdad and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, so Americans were even more unpopular at the time. Most people were decent to us, especially when we poured on the charm offensive, or when we voiced our own deep opposition to what Bush had done, but some were barely polite.

As I pondered all this, it occurred to me that Donald Trump is the Ugly American Made Flesh. He is the ultimate of loud-mouthed, ill-informed, corrupt entitlement boors. He is all American sins made manifest, a tulpa created from the worst instincts of the worst aspects of the American psyche, a thought-form embodying the American shadow. We made this tulpa—even those of us who would rather pretend to be Canadian. We allowed him to be elected, even those of us who voted for someone else. The 2016 election was the very embodiment of American arrogance and rage. How could we expect to have better candidates when we were all pulling so hard against each other? When we were all sunk so deep in our own arrogance that screamed, “My way or no way at all”?

Donald Trump isn’t just the worst president in American history, he is a reckoning for the American psyche, a lesson I believe we have failed to learn. Oh yes, he may (or may not) be on the ropes now, and good people are working hard to block him and bring him down, but have we truly learned anything from the last terrible years? I can’t say that I see it. Greed and arrogance and entitlement and “my way or no way” still abound. Americans have never been particularly good at self-knowledge, deep examination of our own souls, or acknowledging and working with the shadow. We’re still in denial. I fear we have learned nothing.

The ugly American lives on.

Random quote of the day:

"Everyone complains about their face, but no one complains about their brains."

—Jewish proverb

Here's an irony for you: Last night I got home and discovered my replacement book for the incorrect shipment had arrived. I opened it with eager anticipation. Yes, that's right. They'd sent me the same wrong book AGAIN. So I complained to the auto-customer service and this morning I had a note from them saying, "As it seems that the problem with this item is more widespread than we originally thought, we are not able to send another replacement. We will investigate and remedy the situation with the item; however, I cannot guarantee when the error may be fixed."

Yep, so widespread it's happened thrice. I guess the concept of different books in a series is beyond their shipping department, and obviously they've got a glut of this one book in the series and are trying to get rid of it any way they can. :-/ (Yes, yes, I know. It's an extremely busy time of the year for them. I DON'T CARE.)

What's really frustrating is that over the years I've collected each volume in the series as I've gotten spare cash or gift certificates and the one I've been trying to get is the last in the series, the only one I don't have. Perhaps I'll see if Barnes and Noble can do any better. Or perhaps the Universe is trying to tell me something.

(No, not ferrets. They're cool.)


Oh me. Here's the quote from the quote file which I forgot to add to this the first time around:

"Gain not base gains; base gains are the same as losses."

—Hesiod



So late Sunday/early Monday my car got broken into for the second time in two weeks—down in the bowels of our "security" garage. Two weeks ago they broke the lock on the driver's side and got in—but my car is old and crummy and I don't keep anything of value in it. All they got was the garage door opener. Of course, since I only have public liability and property damage on my car, the insurance company will not be reimbursing me for the cost of having the door lock repaired.

Yuri, our post-Soviet manager, reset the garage door code and fixed the "security building" lobby door which wouldn't lock and was, presumably, how the thief got in. How they got into the garage the second time is a matter of some debate, but no guessing as to how they got in my car: through the same driver's side lock. Then they popped the hood release inside and stole my old battery out of my car. I won't be reimbursed for the new battery I bought, either.

1. Perhaps the fellow at the Union 76 who replaced my battery is right and "they" have stolen the old battery because they know I'll have to replace it with a new one and they'll return some day soon and steal the new battery as well.

2. My car and one other that was broken into two weeks ago don't have car alarms. Easy marks. And my car is the first one in the garage leading from the lobby. So maybe it was just a target of opportunity.

3. It's personal—someone inside the building with easy access to the garage directing spite towards me.

You know, I'm trying hard not to be paranoid, but there are some indications that it might be personal. And Yuri likes this idea. He was speculating as much himself yesterday. "Inside job, Pamela." Of course, if it's an inside job and personal spite that lets him and the owner theoretically off the hook as far as liability for lousy security is concerned. That may account for some of his liking, but it also plays in well with Yuri's inherent sense of melodrama.

The only neighbors in the entire 30-apartment complex that I have had problems with live directly upstairs from me and they've recently received an eviction. They have until the end of the month to clear out. She works and holds down a steady job, maintains a discernible pattern—but there is not discernible pattern to Boyfriend's comings and goings. And Yuri told me he caught Boyfriend vandalizing apartment property once already and the Girlfriend broke the lease because, well, Boyfriend wasn't on the lease. He moved in afterwards without clearing it with the manager/owner first. That and the vandalism are a large part of why they're being evicted—but not the whole story. They've been a very noisy pair, often on weeknights late at night. Many have complained and for the last 4 months or so they've been fairly quiet. But I am not one of the people who complained.

However, I was stupid enough to go upstairs a couple of times to have talks with them about noise, thinking we could work this out as adults. But hey, they aren't adults. And Boyfriend often retaliated after these talks with even more noise. Until Yuri put the squeeze on them—which I'm sure Boyfriend felt was my doing. Boyfriend is a spud—an immature little spud who can't take responsibility for his own actions so he's got to strike out at someone. I may be paranoid, but I can't help feeling like something of a target.

On the upside, they'll be gone by the 1st. On the downside, that gives him 2-1/2 more weeks to hit me again if he's so inclined. On the other downside, it may not be him and this may not be personal.

Sigh. This feels like such a morass. I should move out of this apartment complex because it's been sliding slowly downhill, but. . . I'm $200 under market and not likely to get a comparable apartment on the Westside. For the first time in years I've actually been able to do something other than scrape by. This year I actually got to do some fun stuff. Right now the hassle/benefit scale is swinging up and down quite a bit. It's hard to know what to do. But if the problem isn't solved when Girlfriend and Boyfriend move out, the slow attrition rate on my car may tip the scale into negative balance. Only time will tell and I'm relatively helpless here. All I can do is pray—and look into getting a car alarm.

I also wanted to say something about how we tend to romanticize thieves in fiction.

When I pulled today's quote out of the quote file I thought it appropriate to what I'd gone through and had to laugh. Sometimes the synchronicity of my random quote file is just too funny. I illustrate the quotes and put them up on the bulletin board at work every day and folks like it enough that when I'm not here they complain to my office mate that there aren't any new quotes. I enjoy finding images, sometimes ironic juxtapositions, sometimes appropriate to theme. So today I was using google to find images relating to thieves.

I found all kinds of images, all right, many from the fantasy genre, and almost all of them portraying thieves as romantic anti-heroes; slightly bad boys with hidden hearts of gold; or else lovable rapscallions—always up to mischief, but dashing and handsome.

Furthermore, their victims are always portrayed as fat, complacent partridges just waiting to be plucked; or semi-greedy rich folk who deserve what they get. Unless, of course, our thieves are thieves of the heart, and then their marks are beautiful young women fainting longingly into their larcenous arms.

To repeat: thieves are people who get on in this world by victimizing others. Mostly they are venal little creeps—stupid, uneducated people who have only ever found one way of making themselves feel superior than others. By ripping them off, putting one over on the straight folks. I know because my family encompasses one or two of these venal little creeps and trust me, there isn't a damned thing romantic about them. They're bone-lazy and mean spirited and slimy.

There are other levels of thieves who aren't stupid, but not in the "boost a car battery league." They may have started out with petty larceny when they were thirteen or fourteen, but soon graduated to higher levels with a grander scale of victimization. Some of them are con artists. Some of them even have MBAs. But the basic personality type is the same no matter what level of thievery, what level of education, we're talking about. They are all venal little creeps who make themselves feel superior by victimizing others.

And most of those victims are not partridges, not greedy rich folk (who often have much better security systems in place). Mostly, they're just averaging working stiffs living from one pay check to the next, getting their car batteries ripped off, or having their pension plans suddenly disappear because the company big boys decided to use it to build themselves mansions on six continents. Although I will make a slight concession on the fainting young women bit. Some women are stupid enough to buy into the romantic thief archetype and believe that their victimizing, unemployed, bastard Boyfriends are naughty rapscallions, dangerous in an exciting way, but underneath it all have hearts of gold. Even after he causes them to get evicted from their apartment.

If I ever, ever write a romantic thief character in any of my fiction I am hereby authorizing all my writer and non-writer friends to rear up on their haunches and slug me good and hard.

There is nothing romantic about thieves.