I woke up thinking about "The Plot Against America". Roth's books sure stay with me. If there's one overarching thing I can think of that's a theme, it's that the Jews in his books work together. They barely know any Hebrew and only go to shul for weddings and the High Holidays but that essential part of Judaism, the part where I like to think God is real and He gave it to the Jews, is the idea that they really are their brother's keeper and that "family" is not some vague concept but a real thing.
The paterfamilias in the story takes in his deceased brother's son, and then the son of a couple of which the father had died of cancer and then the mother, displaced in the new fascist regime's plan to scatter Jews out of Jewish neighborhoods into goyische, rural areas, was killed in a pogrom. The Roth family, for that is the name of the family in this book, stretch themselves 'way out, in both cases, to rescue the boys, to take them when one some back from war missing a leg and nearly dead, the other something like 700 miles away and they drive down there to fetch him and he becomes a member of the Roth family.
Uncles and aunts and half-brothers and so on are all through the story. They don't all get along, and sometimes they don't work for each other as much as is ideal, but when push comes to shove they are there for each other.
Hawaiians are like this, and Japanese are like this, in fact pretty much everyone but the Iks and Americans are like this. The American ideal, the one I grew up with, is the family must be the "nuclear" family, of parents and kids. Relatives must be far away physically, ideally, but at least not interacted with. Everyone's on their own.
And this is why Jews are hated in the US. Because they're going against Americanism. The ideal under Americanism is to become as rich as possible, and to be rich, and alone.
After I'd put my parents being born on the correct years but the 4th of July of those years for lack of more information, I emailed my youngest sister, thinking she might have the actual birthdays, and told her how I'd put in the 4th of July thinking she'd get a laugh out of it. She emailed back, telling me the months so at least I know those now, and said, sourly, that "Lying isn't patriotic". I bet she's fun at parties.
Haha who am I fooling though? She doesn't go to parties. She's Christian and they have hate-fests. A basic belief under Americanism is that, not only does God love you if you're rich and hate you if you're poor, but that if you are rich, then everyone else is a danger; they might take it from you. So the richer you are, the more fearful and suspicious you have to be. Hence my wealthy relatives, for whom paying for my college would have been like a bar tip, keeping us at a distance. Hence my nearly falling off my chair when I read, in a book about Einstein for a high school book report, that the Einsteins always invited a poor Jewish student to their Friday night dinner, the best dinner of the week.
So: The youngest married a guy who's part Hawaiian and was working in a warehouse but because of his race, was able to become a cop and then because of his race, is now a police chief. Not only is the pay very high, but the police in Hawaii are even more corrupt than the ones in New Orleans, so let's just say the money's freely flowing. So it's natural that she's likely the most Karen of Karens.
The next youngest served in the Army and later got in with a credit card company, nagging people on the phone to pay up. It's a good match for her personality, and I'm sure she's gone far. When I last interacted with her, she was in a rented apartment and just getting ready to buy a house. The vitriol with which she talked about "renters" was really something. And she knew I was a renter at the time too. All she's have to do is routinely max out her 401k and she's probably sitting on a fair pile of money now. So if I ever have the misfortune to meet her again, I can expect the Karen to be extra strong with that one.
Then there's me. Poor as fuck. If I'd just chosen a solid profession like being a watercolorist or weaving baskets or doing mime, but no, I just had to choose electronics. I'm trying to make up for lost time, saving, and am doing well in that department. But to my family I'm that thing they fear the most: a non-wealthy person.
Then there's my older brother. He served in the Navy then worked for Grumman I guess for his whole career and I've narrowed him down to, I think he lives in a 55+ place in Oxnard. Back in the 90s he'd gotten into shooting and we were going to get together and shoot at a range near him. But then it got out that I was quite a bit better than him at this hobby, and the whole thing was called off. I just don't get it; he was always better than I was at skateboarding and that didn't make me hate him. He's probably saved up a fair pot of money and between that and my being better at something than he is, makes me eminently hate-able under the rules of Americanism.
Then there's the oldest. The one whose whole personality is that she went to Punahou School. Kind of like Crossfit, there's no need to ask her if she went there, she'll tell you. There are a lot of really nice people who went there, who are not insufferable snobs, and I loved their carnival and the grounds are beautiful, but geeze, she's a one-person campaign to make ordinary people hate the place. She married "money" in the form of, naturally, a guy who also went to Punahou, who didn't have a lot of other prospects for partners due to his personality. Their marriage was kind of arranged with the stipulation that his family paid for her tuition at Punahou. They were friends so it wasn't as bad as it sounds, but money's what matters in Americanism and even when we were on speaking terms there seemed to be an undercurrent of feeling on her part that I had intentionally sabotaged my life by not marrying money.
Like any good wealthy Fascist, she's very delicate and thin-skinned. Probably her husband also but I believe he's taken Dale Carnegie courses and such things, and he can at least sound and seem affable. My older sister and I had been close, I thought, but being around her was always tiring and when I was really poor, living on $350 a month, mopping floors at the Blue Cross Animal Hospital and taking night classes, she was nowhere in the picture. She only buddied up when it looked like I was going to get a degree in electrical engineering, a thing everyone just "knew" would amount to big money.
In fact, for someone who was "close", her regard for me has tracked 1:1 with how well I was doing financially or at least perceived to be. This is someone who looked at a young Asian girl selling T-shirts on the sidewalk in Waikiki, and said the young lady should be clapped right into jail for doing such a thing. When she herself had sold puka shells the same way when she was young.
She will remember and hold onto the slightest grudge. I was at her apartment and hungry, and asked if she had anything and she went through what she had, and mentioned she had some sardines, skinless and boneless, and at least a year before we'd discussed, on email, the book "Class" by Paul Fussell in which Fussell had said that skinless boneless sardines were a typical upper-class food and I'd said I like 'em with the skin and bones, and so in her apartment there she said I could not have them because I had called them "Fussellian" etc. (I did try them years later and they're actually not bad.)
The thing is she's got to be the Karen-iest of Karens these days as her husband's money grows and he continues in his law practice and she plays the hausfrau, spending $20 a day on fresh cut flowers for her cats to mangle and saying in snippy tones that young Asian gals trying to make $20 to feed their families by selling T-shirts on the sidewalk ought to go to jail.
This is why I want to get out of America; the Americanism.
I had these grandiose dreams of being back with family, the people I'd grown up with, but when you're kids money's not really in the picture. We were a lot more human then, little humans, being taught to "not be a spoil sport" and to "be nice and share" and so on. When we got an allowance it was something like 10c or 25c and food and clothing and so on were just kind of taken care of. For all the modern appurtenances, it was a life that resembled, more than American adult life, the lives of the Pygmies so lovingly written about by Colin Turnbull or the Bushmen written about by Laurens van der Post.
Of course Americanism requires that human-ness be trained out of you. Thus, we had a cousin (daughter of my mother's sister) come to stay with us, who was in her teens. 15, maybe. She saw how poor we were and spend her "fun" money feeding us. She lived with us so she could keep her expenses way down, and she did the human thing: Fellow family humans are hungry and I have resources so I'll feed them.
Her mother, my mother's sister, told me much later that if she had known how poor we were, she'd have yanked that girl out of there and had her on the next plane home. Feeding poor people! The nerve! Yes, my aunt had married money and lived/lives alone in a huge mansion in a wealthy part of Southern California. She also drinks like a fish, her daughter does not seem to like her very much, and when I got in contact with her daughter in the late 90s, she wanted me to drop the business I had and everything, and come work for her for free. She sounded rather nasty and needless to say I told her I can't do that. She was no longer the nice teenage person but was fully Americanized.
Humans are not evolved to deal with money. Humans are not evolved to deal with the rich/poor thing the way it's dealt with under Americanism. I note that in the old religions, the really old ones like Buddhism, the ideal is to note care about money so much. And to help the poor. Judaism is one of these. Christianity is not - I believe it's a thin layer of half-understood Judaism over the old European pagan religion, the "might makes right" and "rich good, poor bad" belief system of constantly warring savages.
It's kind of dumb writing about this since no one reads this (thank goodness!) but I guess I'm trying to figure things out for myself. For instance, we moved a lot. The longest we stayed in one place was about 7 years, on Portlock Road. After that we never stayed in a place longer than 3 years and often we moved sooner than that. My siblings and I were not able to keep many things, but the oldest got to keep everything. Her "cat collection", books and jewelry stuff, clothes, you name it.
This, I think, explains why, although I was expected to become an artist, I got interested in music instead. Because moving as much as we did, and my mother selling any of my works she could (and keeping the money, in good American style) I was not able to have the things and the settled existence an artist needs. But music was perfect for me. I could store it in my head and no one knew I had it, so they couldn't take it away and couldn't anyway.
Being a hated "haole" I could not "make noise" by actually playing music, but I could "play" it in my head, and once I was here on the mainland I didn't have to worry about being evicted for playing a musical instrument anyway. I'd also have gotten in deep shit for doing art back in Hawaii too, except for maybe - maybe - pencil drawings.
But on the mainland I can get away with doing these things. And music wins because with a lot of instruments, most notably trumpet, it can be done even if I live in a pup tent.
That's the bright spot for me - music. There's no other reason to stick around, really.
I packed 2 things and took them to FedEx, then decided to go to Nijiya and check out the SoFa Street Fair, and make a Walmart run. That all went well, and I tried a new thing from their Kosher section, Tam Tams, which are basically kosher Ritz crackers. I'd had a beef bowl at Nijiya first off, so when I got back my dinner was the rest of the kosher whitefish spread I'd gotten at Whole Foods for Friday-Saturday, and a sleeve of Tam Tams.
