The All-White Elephant (Running in Place, Part 2)

We deplore or laugh at those who try to arm themselves against the apocalypse, but we arm ourselves emotionally against the onslaught of everyday life.

—Lasch, The Minimal Self

Not long ago I was (yes, absentmindedly) standing at the checkout counter of the Yale University Coop in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. As I waited my turn to pay, I noticed that the person in front of me in line was seriously handicapped. She made her purchase, and, with some difficulty, started for the door. About to take my merchandize, the clerk (a young, black businessman in this whiter-than-white place) noticed her need, suddenly dropped his task, and ran to the door to hold it for her. A few moments later he returned, trying as best he could to regain his composure and resume his routine without drawing attention to his momentary absence.

But I couldn't resist. Being who I am, I had to tell him that I thought his politeness commendable. I said something unimaginative like, "that was very kind of you...." However, before I could regain my distance, he raised his head, looked right at me and said, "You see, my younger brother was murdered by a gunman in this town, and I feel I have to do something, because I know that he is forever gone."

In fact, the conversation continued well after these words, for he was noticeably taken aback by my being as ruled by my own compulsions as he clearly was by his. I have other memories of our brief encounter, but I mention what I have because the incident brought into high relief the emotive disjunction between the relatively mannered lives of all of those seriously well-educated folks in white lab coats at the nearby medical school, and this guy who, in light of his misery, had to work hard just to look good behind his counter. The incident also brought forward another disjunction—this being between an institutionalized system of shared value, on the one hand, and a personalized domain of private, homemade meaning that this local response to tragedy represented.

So, am I rendering his experience exotically? You bet I am. Because no matter how much I may "feel" for him, he remains behind his counter, while I end up writing this very opinionated essay. In fact, he is moved by his experience to a domain of meaning that I would in no way wish to relive. To say that such experiences—even several of them—have brought me "closer" to New Haven street life would be hypocritical in the extreme. And to offer them up in literary form as "stories" from my "fieldwork" among the socially disenfranchised would be singularly elitist. I want no part of what he experienced, but I am moved by his optimism nonetheless. I'm not, in other words, soliciting your sympathies here any more than he did mine. I'm only asking you to acknowledge the idea that reality—the experience of the present—changes in sudden ways that can make an obsession about either the "lived worlds" of those nearby university people, or all of the theories that justify the complacency of institutional life, seem...um...trivial.

This is not to denigrate directly any individual's institutional loyalty, or to belittle the human passion for routine, but merely to note that the glamorization of the everyday (disguised as it so often seems to be in a cloak of false humility) induces both an inflated sense of self-importance, and that concomitant disinterest in real difference that is myopia's favored bedfellow.

To extend the argument, one might say that it is easy within a bureaucracy to feign a respect for the diversities of the everyday when the obedience of drones sustains a prevailing hierarchy within which one is richly rewarded. Such complacency, after all, accounts for the fact that most academic departments more represent priesthoods than...