[lit-ideas] Re: Status Quo
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:43:39 -0800
Had a conversation with an older Jewish lady today. I decided that a
brief break in the weather was ideal for trimming the bushes that got
whacked in the cold spell, butterfly mostly, but anything in need of a
trim got a quick short back and sides. That's haircut talk, in
English. So anyway, she was walking through the neighborhood, as
retired people do, and we got into a chin wag about her trip to Berlin
and Daniel Lieberskind's building and what's inside it and so on. And
somehow--through "Reading Lolita in Tehran" I think-- we got to talking
about how one prepares for a dire situation. I said that I remembered
how people talked, at the time of the Iranian revolution, about how
many Iranian women seemed to have gold teeth. The theory was that this
was the equivalent of Jews buying uncut diamonds before or in the early
stages of World War Two. Portable money.
So I said, "Money is whatever people believe money to be, and what's to
suggest that diamonds are going to continue to be, with gold, the
currency of last resort? People can make pretty good imitation
diamonds nowadays, imitating their hardness, their shininess, almost
all the qualities. Perhaps gold would be a better bet."
And she said, "Have you seen what gold's been doing lately?"
And I thought, "How ridiculous are those who buy great lumps of heavy
metal in the hope that it will help them survive. It is on other
people we must depend. Social contacts are as good as gold. Community
will get us through."
She said, "The camps?"
I said, "So what threatens us? The bird 'flu', the national debt,
having a wild president in charge, running out of oil, a terrorist
attack? Which of these will drain us down to diamonds or gold?"
We looked at one another and realized that she, with a life's
experience and I, with my knowledge of the past, were both ill-equipped
to answer. Katrina was predictable, I say to myself. I knew when I
lived in New Orleans that this was not a safe place. And yet here I
live, in Oregon, in range of three volcanoes. Am I packing? Am I
buying diamonds?
Change of subject. I have long thought that academics who pretend to
be groovy are silly. Literary people have climbed over one another to
prove that they know more about popular culture than the next stiff,
that they can "read" "Buffy" better than any civilian guppy.
I came inside after our apocalyptic talk and remembered that my record
player finally is mended, and thus the vinyl in our garage can once
again can be made to release sounds. So I went in search of Status
Quo.
Status Quo was as groovy as ever I got. I once went to a Led Zepplin
concert, put paper in my ears, practically vomited from the loudness.
I was impressed with the stage, stacked with speakers, and by Jimmy
Page's ability to climb. But my heart wasn't in it. So I found a home
with old jazz music and classical and some rebellious kinds of folk.
And then there was Status Quo.
Should you want to find out what I'm on about, try "On the Level,"
which nine bucks will get you from Amazon.Com.
It's not great. It's not American. But it's where I'm from, part of
my identity, and when I need diamonds, I guess as a last resort I can
sell my record player stylus.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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