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November 17, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Movie-Made Me
[ Note to TomDispatch Readers: Copies of my book, The United States of Fear, have just arrived. They will soon be winging their way toward those of you who have offered such generous support for TomDispatch by sending in $75 donations for personalized, signed copies of the book ($140 for a two-pack, including a signed copy of my previous book The American Way of War). If you meant to do so but haven’t yet, here’s your chance. Just go to our donation page and check out the offers. For the rest of you, if you are already Amazon.com customers, consider pre-ordering the book there via any TomDispatch book link like this one. Since we get a cut of any purchase as long as you arrive at Amazon from this site, you’ll be making a small contribution to us at no extra cost to you.Today’s post offers, I hope, a taste of the new book. It’s a memory piece about my childhood and, in its own way, an explanation of how TomDispatch came to be. It originally appeared -- always a thrill -- in only slightly different form in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which I discuss American exceptionalism in my childhood and now click here, or download it to your iPod here. By the way, American-style protest from Ohio to Wall Street will be the subject of the next two posts by Andy Kroll and Rebecca Solnit.Tom]
Seeing the World in Black and White (With Subtitles)
By Tom Engelhardt
Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face pucker, as mine did when challenged by any food out of the ordinary). I was neither a daredevil nor a chance-taker, and by my teens scorned myself for being so boringly on the straight and narrow. I never raced a car, or mocked a cop, or lit out for the territories.
Still, by the luck of the draw, as a child of the 1950s, I was plunged into a landscape more exotic than most American kids could then have imagined. It was still devastated by war, populated to a startling extent by present and former enemies, and most amazingly, the Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Russians (not to speak of the French and English) I encountered there were thrillingly alive in a way everything in my life told me we Americans weren’t.
Let me explain, geographically speaking and as personally as I can. I grew up at 40 East 58th Street, just off Madison Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan, two blocks from the Plaza Hotel, where Eloise got her hair cut. Apartment 6D -- “as in David,” we always said.
My parents moved there in 1946, just after World War II. It was two doors down from the Plaza movie theater, and getting to 6D was an exotic affair. You exited a small, gated elevator into a modest-sized corridor, apartments on either side, only to find yourself on a catwalk in the open air looking down on what might have been the low roofs of Paris. A stroll along that catwalk and a right turn into another corridor got you to our rent-controlled duplex with its living-room skylight under which my mother -- “New York’s girl caricaturist,” as she was known in the gossip columns of the war years -- regularly set up her easel. My room was upstairs.
The fifties are now recalled as a golden age when Americans, white ones anyway, burst into the suburbs, while all the consumerist gratifications deferred by the Great Depression and World War II were sated. It was the age of the television set (“Bigger screen… Brighter picture… Better reception”) and pop-up toasters, of Frigidaires and freezers big enough “for the whole family” (“holds 525 pounds!”), of “extension” phones, wonder of wonders, (“I just couldn’t get along without my kitchen telephone”), and cigarettes so “soothing to the nerves” that doctors and baseball players alike were proud to endorse them.
With good jobs and rising wages in a still war-battered world, the United States stood so much taller than the rest of the planet, manufacturing the large items of the peaceable life (cars, above all) and the advanced weaponry of war, often in the same dominant corporations. It was a world in which Bell Telephone, that purveyor of extension phones, could also run upbeat ads aimed at boys extolling its weapons work. (As one began: “Chip Martin, college reporter, sees a ‘talking brain’ for guided missiles... ‘Glad to see you, Chip. Understand you want to find out how our Air Force can guide a warhead a quarter of the way around the world. Well, look here...’”)
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