The Anti-Tribalist
Fayetteville, AR (1987)—As a member of the University of Arkansas pep band, one of the on-the-road gigs was to play for the area Special Olympics. It was cool and felt good to support these brave little kids with terrible disabilities overcome them and compete. Inspiring, even.
We'd roll up in the band bus, unload our instruments, and take our place in a section of the stands surrounding a track and field set up. There were parents, grandparents, coaches and kids—ranging from the little boy born with no legs to the kids with Down Syndrome. Once we set up, we'd play fight songs, Gary Glitter-stuff, random upbeat pep band stuff in between events.
It was a good time. The kids were serious and pushed themselves. It was like watching the best of what humanity can bring out of people—spirited competition, everyone regardless of the outcome of a race was rewarded in some for getting out there and rising above their disabilities to challenge themselves. The crowd was inspired and cheered for every kid.
About halfway through the day, there is this 100-yard dash competition. The kids start running and this one glowing child is in the lead. The joy on his face to be winning is almost more than I can take. Behind him by a considerable distance is another child, equally joyful and sort of hop-jumping the race due to a stunted leg but, man, he's in it. Our director lifts his baton and we start playing the Theme from Superman.
All of sudden the kid in the lead trips. I mean, he falls like a bag of bricks—hard—and the crowd gasps. He is physically fine but you can see from the stands that the joy of the moment has evaporated from his face. He looks equal parts sad and angry. The band stops playing, the notes dissipating like rain in Arizona. He lies there and looks back. The hop-jump kid is going to pass him up. He reaches out his hand and jerks the second kid to the track, face first. Again, the crowd gasps but there is one sound barking out from the onlooking public. I started laughing so hard I missed that everyone around me couldn't decide which was worse—the poor sportsmanship of the kid or my guttural laughter. In a fit of uncontrollable guffaws, chortles, and giggles, I laughed and laughed as a third kid deftly avoided the first runner's grasp and won the race. Coaches ran to the track to help the two lying on the ground. And still I cackled with tears running down my face.
What was funny? Not the kid who face planted into the track but the fact that these children we had anointed as somehow angelic, struggling past a shitty hand life dealt them, competing like their more advantaged peers, could exhibit the exact same sort of pettiness and selfishness as the rest of us. He wasn't a special olympian as much as he was a completely normal human being. I laughed so much the band director made me go back to bus.
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We 'dated' for nine months. I wasn't her type necessarily—I had no car, I was a classic liberal rather than a social justice fundamentalist, I dressed in monochromatic blacks and grays, I was educated but not thatmuch. I was also vulgar, opinionated, and in the arts.
The sex, however, was off the chain.
She worked as an advocate for men on death row whose confessions had been coerced. Defending and assisting the wrongfully accused took up most of her time and she was damn good at it. A strange combination of neo-Marxist with a taste for expensive clothing and vacation resorts. I was a bit intimidated by her line of work—she was a bona fide do-gooder with serious street cred in the intersection of actually helping people in need and making it a sustainable profession.
After nine months I realized I was a hidden booty call rather than a boyfriend. She had never introduced me to any of her friends or family, in fact none of them even knew I existed. Perhaps I was an embarrassment to her but I wasn't one to whine about it so I broke up with her. She went ballistic.
She started coming over to my place late at night, drunk, looking to reconcile which really meant some horizontal boogie and off to do the work of the angels. I resisted until I couldn't. After some bedroom athletics, she refused to leave. I told her to leave my home. She became unhinged. Finally, when I phoned a friend to swing by thinking that someone else in the room might shake her out of her rage and she lost it. She slugged me a number of times, breaking my glasses, knocking my phone across the room and giving me a fat lip.
I called the cops. She sat, defiant. "I'll wait for the police."
When they arrived, this paragon of virtue who spent her days in defense of men who had been locked up for crimes they did not commit immediately lied. "He assaulted me. I'd like to press charges."
My blood ran cold in an instant. All of her work was instantly exposed and the very human desire for vengeance and punishment of someone who discarded her punched me in the face again.
One cop took her outside, the other stood in my living room taking it all in.
"Did you hit her, sir?"
"No. What does it look like to you?"
He looked at my broken glasses and my fat lip.
"Do you want press charges?"
"No. I just want her to leave. That's it."
≈≈≈
Arlo is black. I mean, black black. He is originally from a tiny county in Georgia and laughs as I tell him how much he fits the stereotype of a sixty year old black man from Georgia.
"You could be played in a movie by Louis Gossett, Jr." and he cackles.
Arlo has a love/hate relationship with his cultural bedrock. He loves the food. "Barbecued pork, collared greens, black-eyed peas. My gramma's kitchen table was what I think Arab suicide bombers dream of instead of virgins." He loves the music. "Mississippi John Hurt, John Hooker, Buddy Guy? Sh-eee-it." He hates the drug culture which he was surrounded by growing up. He hates the idea that all black people can dance. "No one in my family had any of that. No dancing."
Jim (his Korean name is Junghoon but everyone who knows him calls him Jim) tells me he feels out of place when he sees his family. "I guess I'm like a self-loathing Jew in that I'm Korean but by way of Decatur, Illinois." Culturally, he is a "no zone" in that his parents tried to instill the cultural markers of a second-generation Korean kid but he was never really into it. "I always hated kimchi. Hot Pockets. Pepperoni. Keep your Bibimbap to yourself. Give me a bag of Doritos, please."
What the three of us all have in common is comic books. All three of us claim to have learned to read courtesy of Stan Lee.
The Fantastic Four. The Avengers. The Amazing Spiderman. The X Men.
The difference between the DC world and the Marvel world was that the heroes in DC were gods and the heroes in Marvel (mostly) were humans with godlike power.
These were the legends and fables of growing up. These were the morality tales of my youth.
From Peter Parker I learned that with great power comes great responsibility. From Logan, his mantra that "The pain lets you know you're still alive" resonated. Daredevil showed that any liability can be overcome (with the help of some radiative waste).
On the surface and even in our cultural divides, we were very different. Underneath, there was a commonality that transcended the differences.
≈≈≈
The current embrace of tribalism is in the same ballpark as sports affiliation. Fans of sports teams are loyal and exclusionary. They get angry when their team loses and castigate the other teams. It's a sad, high school version of belonging to something and the push to further segregate ourselves from one another is just as petty and small as that.
I was taught growing up to avoid as best I could judging people by the stereotypes at play. This is not the same as being color blind. I see the colors. I see the differences between men and women. I see those myriad things that make each one of us an individual beyond those costumes of culture, sex, and race. I try to see beyond the political differences as well.
I'm not anti-tribalist because I disdain or disrespect those differences but in service of the other myriad similarities we all share. People are far more complicated than the posters tell us. The disabled kid can be just as big an asshole as I am. The social justice fundamentalist can, in a moment of desire, fear, and anger, do that one specific thing she's dedicated her life to combat. The Cubs fan can go to a White Sox game and enjoy some baseball. The liberal can laugh at the t-shirt on the cowboy that says "I Have PTSD—Pissed off at The Stupid Democrats." The devoted Christian can blaspheme. The fifteenth-wave feminist can suddenly decide that treating sex the way the worst men do is maybe not a great approach.
Oh, but I'm judgmental. I wish I could curb that some but it's a feature, not a bug. I don't judge people on those outward facing markers but I definitely judge them for their behavior, for their ideas, for their quest for power or money or glory.
I'm anti-tribalist because I would rather be judged—because you're judgy, too—by my ideas rather than my random affiliation at birth with men, with white, with heterosexual, with my age. Ideas. Behavior. Judge me because I'm vulgar and hopelessly confrontational and don't have a pair of dress pants. I'm OK with that.
