Your Great-Grandmother Will Win In The End, So Don't Even Bother Struggling

For some years now, I’ve been in the running for the title of Rudest Man in St. Louis. This isn’t an actual contest, but I wish it was, because it’s one contest I might actually have a chance of winning.

Dispensing with conventions of polite conversation has several advantages. One, it allows me to cut right through the conversational red tape of small talk and start talking about stuff that actually matters. Two, it weeds out the boring types with nothing BUT small talk at their disposal, so that I can move on swiftly. And three, it identifies kindred spirits. If, after the initial bewildered blink, they come back at me with gusto, then I know I’ve got someone I can do business with.

I get away with it because I look slightly goofy, and, thus, harmless. I may be rude, but it’s easier to take it from a smallish, slight, bald nebbish in glasses than from a huge hulking roidasaurus of a guy.

Having established myself as someone who gives a rat’s ass for social niceties, one of the first things I ask people about is their ethnicity. I’ve been known to ask a person of exotic appearance, “So what the hell are you, exactly, anyway?” or someone whose pronunciation differs enough from mine that it’s noticeable, “Where the hell do you pick up an accent like that, anyhow?”

I’m fully aware that it’s none of my business and that many people are sensitive about this. Please believe me when I say that I genuinely do not give a fuck. What I gain from doing it far outweighs the benefits of social convention. I ask because once you know someone's background, you’ve got them half figured.  

Those of a Deconstructionist bent out will disagree with me. Context tells you nothing,” they say. "What counts is what we make of ourselves." They’re wrong. Contextualizing people tells you everything, because there are two perspectives to use when sizing people up:  who they are, and what they are.  

Who we are is comprised of those characteristics that we control—the choices that we consciously make, the characteristics that derive from the picture of ourselves which we choose to present. Things like political opinions, the shows, books, or movies that we like (or say we like—lots of people say they like things that they don’t really like because they think it’ll make them appear to be smarter than they really are. For example, if anyone tells you what a huge fan of jazz they are, grab a blunt object and beat them for being a pretentious fuck), the clothes we wear, the neighborhoods where we choose to live. These are all the characteristics within our control—they reflect who we choose to be.

On the other hand, the characteristics that we cannot control make us what we are. The religion in which we were raised, for example, or the socioeconomic class into which we were born. The city or country where we’re from. Our physiognomy. Our chronology. These are all factors beyond our capacity to decide, and which make us what we are.

There is a significant amount of overlap between them—the choices that we make are frequently determined, sometimes unthinkingly, by what we are. And there are some characteristics that we can, with the right amount of effort, change. But there are many characteristics about which we have no choice. The painter James McNeill Whistler once said he’d been born in St. Petersburg, Russia—a little zingier a spot than his real birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. And when called on it, Whistler replied, “I do not choose to be born in Lowell, Massachusetts.” Sorry, James. As Tony Soprano once said, “You are what you are. You’re born to this shit.”

For the last four years, I’ve been working on a historical novel about my hero, Joseph Pulitzer. The point I’m trying to make, should I ever finish it, is that you can’t truly understand who Pulitzer was until you know what he was:  a Hungarian Jew born on the eve of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and none of his biographers have adequately taken that into account. If I ever finish this fucking thing, it’ll change the way we think about a man who changed the way we think. But I digress.

My reference above to Tony Soprano was not made simply because I enjoyed juxtaposing James McNeill Whistler and Tony Soprano. It was also a good segue to my next argument: organized crime.

The three ethnic groups most prominent in traditional American organized crime were the Italians, the Jews, and the Irish. More specifically, it was Mezzogiornese , or southern Italians (Sicilians, Neapolitans, Abruzzese); Russian Jews; and southern, Catholic, “shanty” Irish.

The predominance of these three groups led to a lot of nonsensical speculation about certain ethnicities having a genetic predilection for crime and violence, Catholicism and Judaism being religious petri dishes for criminals, and a lot of other horseshit propagated by numbskulls like Cesare Lombroso (the guy who also believed that phrenology was a legitimate science—thus my use of the term numbskull. Wasn’t that clever? Ironically, Lombroso was himself an Italian Jew. Double whammy). But while the early 20^th century criminologists were feeling the bumps on thugs’ skulls—most of which had been placed there by other thugs—and looking for signs of congenital criminality in the shape of the nose and jaw, they overlooked something far more basic: the persistence of cultural patterns.

What these groups had in common was a history of oppression. The English treated the Irish like dogs. The Russians treated the Jews worse than dogs. And the southern Italians suffered a centuries-long parade of oppressors—Normans, Moors, Spaniards, and, most recently, Northern Italians who still despise their southern brethren with a viciousness that wouldn't shame an Alabama Klansman. “The mezzogiorno is more like Africa than it is Italy,” I was once told by a straight-faced Venetian. “They really shouldn’t be considered Italians at all. Just look at them, they even look like blacks.”

Centuries of oppression taught these groups some similar lessons. One, authority isn’t your friend. Two, survival dictates that you HAVE to screw the system.  And three, they’d evolved pretty sophisticated ways of doing it. In the old country, bribery, intimidation, illicit production and smuggling of goods, and hiding your assets weren’t crimes. They were a matter of survival.

Emigration didn’t erase centuries of conditioning. They just carried these same patterns of behavior to Brooklyn, or Chicago, or St. Louis, or Philadelphia, or any other city where organized crime took root.

The fact that the old organized crime syndicates and families are going away has very little to do with law enforcement—it has to do with eventual acculturation and assimilation. But the persistence of the ethnic structure of American organized crime bolsters my contention that ethnicity and nationality has a hell of a lot to do with what we are, and, eventually, what we do. 

In a recent piece in the New Yorker on why Greece is utterly fucked, James Surowiecki points to an ingrained culture of tax evasion among the Greeks (having been married to one for twelve years, I can attest to their being a skeevy, yet lovable, bunch of swarthy little fuckers, God love ‘em). He cites a study by the economist Martin Halla showing that tax morale—our willingness to actually pay our taxes—among second generation American immigrants reflects their country of origin. If you didn’t like paying taxes in the Old Country, you won’t do it over here. Neither will your kids. Or grandkids.

Q.E.D.

We pass things down. We can’t help it. Often, what is transmitted across generations is encoded or encrypted in, or under, or behind, other stuff. It’s unconscious. But it happens. Let me end this post with an anecdote illustrating my point.

My daughter was recently having a disagreement with a little boy at her school. Because I am an enlightened and progressive parent, I discussed the issue with her instead of merely barking, “You’ll behave at that school I pay twelve large a year to send you to or I’ll break your head.” As we spoke, she flipped her hand dismissively—a gesture eerily reminiscent of my grandmother of blessed memory, olov hasholem—and said, “Him I don’t like.”

What struck me was that she’d put the direct object before the subject—a sentence construction that sounds a little weird in English, but would sound totally natural to a Yiddish speaker, in which language it is the norm to put the predicate before the subject: “Good I don’t feel.” “Beautiful her dress was.” “Milk we’re out of and we need to go buy.”

My daughter is precisely one-quarter Jewish and speaks not a word of Yiddish. But she’d used a very Yiddish-sounding grammatical construct. She did this because I do it; I do it because my mother does it; and my mother does it because her mother did it, because her parents were Yiddish speakers. That’s five generations, in case you’re counting.

Imagine what else we pass on to our children without noticing. Imagine what other echoes of the Old Country are encoded in our gestures, our language, our reactions, our values. We are palimpsests, we humans—we’ve been overwritten a thousand times, and yet, as the old Roman poet said, “Scripta manent”—what is written remains.