When the American dream comes true despite everything in its way
What a young Japanese student taught me, plus, a tour of the new site!
Greetings, Friends.
Hello to our new friends who subscribed recently.
I’ll explain those two sweet Japanese kids in a sec. First…
I took a little break to deal with chronic migraine that turned into one seemingly endless hellacious headache, and was looking forward to writing to you all over the weekend when, yes, another headache. I am still foggy now, but this is getting ridiculous so I am typing through the fog. Let’s hope there’s nothing for me to smack into with such low visibility.
Indeed, I know that I need to have some medical attention for these migraine malaises, but when I went to the doctor this past week, the clinician (a NP, I think), had kept me enclosed in the waiting room for an hour with no explanation so that when she finally did appear, I. was. hot. I mean furious. I know someone who works at the clinic, who indicated the woman had been doing paperwork that whole time. I am well aware that medicine in America is a business more and less a calling anymore, but there are rules to business, and stranding someone with out communicating to them what is going on is not best practice.
If you have had bad service at the doctor’s office, feel free to share your stories in the comments. I feel like I need friends to commiserate with.
Here’s what I promised you!
I signed off from docu-mental recently, with the intention of creating Small Town, Big Picture as my primary publication on Substack, with everything else folded in. I had misgivings, though. Have you ever read any Paul Theroux? I so enjoyed The Mosquito Coast when I read it in college. Also, Half Moon Street, the film adaptation of Doctor Slaughter, with Sigourney Weaver as a call girl (!) was unexpected.
But when, about ten years ago, I picked up his travelogue, Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, I was not just disappointed. I was irritated. Why is it that the late Jan Morris, an excellent observer of people around the globe, seems to have liked the book? When I read it, I could not get past the fact that Theroux, a New Englander who now lives in Hawaii (if Wikipedia is correct, and you never know…), objectified every Southerner he met which I found objectionable.
So, that was in my mind. I don't want to objectify my small town community, and even if I didn’t commit such a sin, I am sure I would be accused of it anyway. I mean, if Lake Woebegone had been a real place, do you think Keillor’s depictions of its residents would have been so successful? I doubt it.
Instead, we have a Field Guide to Americans, because I can confidently write under that banner knowing I run the risk that I will offend everyone, which ultimately means it will much offend no one sane, and it is a topic I know a lot about and enjoy thinking about…
Tabs
docu-mental
…However, docu-mental is still a tab because it is one of the oldest urls on substack, given that I was among the first to take up residence here in 2018, when I secured “documental”. And small towns are part of America, so I can still talk about the big picture there.
Gen X, etc
I mean, if I know anything it’s that I am getting older, and as a member of this generation, I have thoughts. I also am a parent to Gen Z, so thoughts about that, too. I know you all have your own views. We can discuss here.
Habitat
Where we live, the homes, the environment, the nests we make or ourselves, the places we end up and maybe stay.
Behavior & preoccupations
Well, this will be a free for all on how and why we think what we think, obsess over what we do, and how we spend our time.
Confessions
Mine, yours. Honestly, we are far more interesting than the weirdos celebrities, politicians, and billionaires, and their strange predilections that we read about in People Magazine or Vanity Fair. Just not as wealthy. (Although there still might be some of you private equity guys that used to read me still hanging about…)
Reading List
Self explanatory, but okay, a list of books or other written material I am reading or just read, and which I reckon you might enjoy, or be intrigued by, too.
Reviews
Once a critic, always a critic. A nice one, though. But still honest. (I have been a theater, opera, and classical music critic at various points in my career.)
Japanese-American dream
In between the stretches of extreme pain in my noggin, I have been feeling weary and even sad about our incursion into Iran specifically and about who we are as a nation generally. You know I don’t pay any attention to the corporate news because what about it is ever verifiably true, and what could we ever possibly do about any of it anyway? But a war is unmistakable, and we started it. Could we not parse the details, please? The US, because we are beholden to Israel and to energy, started this war.
It’s just the latest in a litany of actions that now describe our nation as a chaotic bully. I’m long past reckoning with all the dark truths about the propaganda we’ve all been raised, fed, and sustained on until we weren’t, either because we woke up to the truth, or because we never believed any of it in the first place. I know who we really have been in this world. I understand empire, and I have observed the truth of critical race theory in my society—no formal instruction about it necessary, and I know what the CIA really does.
That is to say, I have grieved and moved on from the lies. But I am still an American and I still am represented in this world by this class of possessed lunatics who decades go now surpassed being able to claim sanity by way of being the “better” political party. Which is why I tend to just keep to myself, live in my small town, and do things that seem to need to get done. What I don’t do is think much about what I have no control over.
But in that light, I felt such a lift of air beneath my wings this weekend when, as the publisher of a small news outlet in town, I attended an exchange program dinner held in honor of our high school guests from Hokuto City, Japan. That we have this exchange program has to do with the late Paul Rusch, a Kentucky missionary, who, after WWII, was on a mission to Japan and found that the people of Hokuto City were starving. He taught them American farming techniques and saw to the delivery to the city of several dairy cows. He taught the people there how to milk and care for them. He also somehow gave the people there a John Deere tractor so they could farm larger crops.
Years later, in the 1980’s, so goes the story I was told, the people of Hokuto City wanted to learn more about farming, and since they now believed the people of Kentucky to be angels from heaven, a delegation of Japanese people arrived in Louisville, asking for help. Eventually, someone in that pack of bewildered Louisvillians figured out that where they needed to go was our town, Berea, Kentucky. And that is where they went. They met with our city officials, and that meeting resulted in an exchange program that has not only endured, but has spread to become a countywide effort.
Each year, a delegation from one of the Japanese town’s two high schools visits a high school in Richmond, our county’s largest of two cities, in March. In October, the same happens with the other high school and ours here in Berea. And also twice a year, we have either an adult Kentucky delegation go to Hokuto City, or vice versa.
When the Japanese delegation comes to town, it’s a huge party. We have a Folk Center here, built in the style of a Danish gathering place (another nationality we have commerce with here), it’s where we vote and where we gather for square, contra, and other antique dances. It is also the place where we welcome the Japanese with a meal of fried chicken, of course, and then they teach us a Japanese dance or something about their culture. Last year, they taught us something closely resembling the Hoky Poky. I was laughing to see City leaders bounding up and down shaking their things.
Earlier this year when the adult delegation returned from Hokuto, they shared their photos of the prefecture’s annual fair: it is always done in the theme of Kentucky. Photos showed that on the arch above the fairground, with Mt. Fuji standing in the background, there hung the flag of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and all manner of Kentucky-themed things were featured in the fair’s booths. Surreal.
This dinner I mentioned was an American Thanksgiving. Those two boys were about to eat their first-ever turkey drum sticks. It was so good, let me tell you. I ate just like it was November, and loved every bite, especially the green bean casserole and banana pudding. The festivities took place in the library of a local school. Afterward, the students were asked to come to the podium where they were given a bag of gifts and asked to make a short speech, in English, telling what they enjoyed most about their visit, and what Kentuckians should be sure to do when in Japan. A lot of them want us to eat matcha candies, and to visit Shinto shrines.
Many of us when we were younger participated in foreign exchange programs. For me, it was with a town outside Paris, France. I went there, and Claude came to stay with us. But in the war, the US saved France, not bombed it like we did Japan. And not just bombed it, decimated it.
One of the girls who spoke at the Japanese event caught me off guard. She talked of how she had been watching American movies to help her learn about us and our language. She always wanted to attend an American high school prom, she said. And without any knowledge of that, the kids in our town had planned for their guests a “Japrom”, a high school prom for their Japanese visitors, complete with formal attire, just like in the movies. “Thank you for making my American dream come true,” said the young visitor in her impeccable English.
After what we did to her homeland. After how the lunatics are behaving now.
I teared up. We are not who our leaders represent us to be. We are made up of the elements around us, and by how the land has shaped us, and how we have formed ourselves around what we have been given and what we offer others. People see who we really are. And I know we see them. The rest is just noise.
Thanks for being here,
Whitney