Thursday, 29 November: . . . Jonathan Raban, from Hunting Mr. Heartbreak: A Discovery of America [handout]

·        Text-objective discussion leader (Raban article): Cheryl Voskamp

Objective 3. To compare and contrast the immigrant narrative with the minority narrative—or, American Dream versus American Nightmare:

These differences between immigrant and minority histories lead to different “social contracts.” Since immigrants voluntarily chose to come to America, they are expected to conform to the American Dream story of freedom and opportunity. Minorities did not freely choose the American Dream and may speak of exploitation instead of opportunity.

            Minorities remain distinct or maintain distinct communities.

Pg. 349: middle paragraph to end of page:

      By night, they scavenged.  Returning home late after dinner, I would meet them on the cross-streets around East Eighteenth, where small knots of them went tipping over trashcans in search of a bit of half-eaten pizza, or the lees of someone’s can of Coors.  They flopped and stumbled, far too feeble to be figures of menace, even on the darkest street—and at this hour none of them spoke to me; they knew that well-fed middle-class men take to their heels when strangers talk to them after dusk in Manhattan. 

      The current term for these misfortunates was “street people,” an expression that had taken over from bag ladies, winos, and bums.  The Street People were seen as a tribe, like the Beaker Folk or the Bone People, and this fairly reflected the fact that there were so many more of them now than there had been a few years before.  In New York one saw a people; a poor nation living on the leftovers of a rich one.  They were anthropologically distinct, with their skin eruptions, their wasted figures, poor hair and bony faces.  They looked like the Indians in an old Western.

      The term was too easy by half.  It casually lumped together the criminal and the innocent, the dangerous and the safe.  It included long-term mental patients discharged from hospitals under what was called, in a sublime euphemism, the “de-institutionalization program,” along with crack addicts, thieves, alcoholics, hobos, the temporarily jobless, the alimony defaulters, rent-hike victims and everyone else who’d fallen short of the appallingly high standards that Manhattan set for staying properly housed and fed.

This passage highlights Objective 3 because it shows the “social contract” when “none of them spoke to me” and in the label “Street People” that categorizes the poor from the rich.  It also shows the Street People to be a separate minority community who were “anthropologically distinct…” regardless of the physical threat they pose to society.

Objective 6. To contrast the “New Immigrant Model” with the “Old Immigrant Model.”

·        “Vertical immigration”: as immigration has increased and trade and national barriers have fallen, societies may be becoming less identified by nationality and more by economics and technology: first world-third world, upper class-lower class, highrise-street, electronic media-manual labor.

Pg. 351: 2^nd paragraph:

      There were the Street People and there were the Air People.  Air People levitated like fakirs.  Large portions of their day were spent waiting for, and traveling in, the elevators that were as fundamental to the middle-class culture of New York as gondolas had been to Venice in the Renaissance.  It was the big distinction—to be able to press a button and take wing to your apartment.  It didn’t matter that you lived on the sixth, the sixteenth or sixtieth floor; access to the elevator was proof that your life had the buoyancy that was needed to stay afloat in a city where the ground was seen as the realm of failure and menace.

Pgs. 352-3: last paragraph through second paragraph:

      Extraordinary.  All I ever heard in New York was the barbarous wailing of police sirens; in Diane’s soap bubble, the sound of the city was of solitary ships at sea, riding downtide in the early-morning mist.  Perhaps it did matter what storey you were on, after all.  The higher up you were, the more free you were to live in a world of your own imaginative making.  By the thirtieth floor, you could probably tear loose from reality altogether.  By comparison with Diane’s apartment, Alice’s seemed flatly realistic, dragged down by the gravitational field of the street and its people.      

Here you had to stand with your nose pressed against the double-glazing to see the street at all.  Far below—a world away—was turmoil.  Down around the knees and ankles of Diane’s tall block,  nineteenth-century tenements were being torn down by cranes and bulldozers in a low cloud of red dust.  Stores were boarded up.  Cabs were stalled at a light in an unbroken line of dirty yellow.  With a really powerful telescope, you might be able to pick out the sprawled beggars, the crack dealers with telephone beepers in the back pockets of their jeans, the addict sweating off his high in the doorway of the derelict warehouse; but on the twenty-ninth floor you had no more reason to pay attention to these things than you would have to go rubbernecking down the sewage system of the city.

In her apprenticeship as an Air Person, Diane had learned how to stay aloft for days on end.  Every morning her Romanian maid would arrive with bloodcurdling news from ground-level.  A secretary came to type in the afternoons.  At sunset, friends presented themselves to the guards and showed up—ears popping from their ascent—for drinks.

I chose these passages because they highlight the extreme difference in culture between the rich and the poor in this article.  The rich Air People live high above the real world in the midst of an ideal while the poor live “down around [their] knees and ankles.”  In Diane’s case, there is a perfect example of vertical immigration as she works her way to the top as an apprentice.

Questions:

1)      How do “social contracts” in this story reinforce the reality of the American Dream vs. the American Nightmare?

2)     How can we combat the categorization imposed on people by vertical immigration that composes individual identity as that of individual financial worth?