College Scene | NR Extra | Letters | Current Issue | Subscribe | Archive | Marketplace |Home
K I N G
Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.
OF all the self-defeating things Americans do, our practice of renaming eternal verities to make them sound more user-friendly wins the booby prize.Like all societies, we acknowledge the need for certain people to ``set an example'' so that others will have someone to ``look up to,'' but we don't dare put it that way. Instead we call them ``role models,'' a compound now so deeply embedded in our cliche lobes that no one stops to think that both words connote superficiality, ephemerality, and pretense.
Earlier generations of Americans looked up to Better Thans, as in ``better than we are,'' people who were a cut above them, such as teachers or business owners, and those who were several cuts above them, such as doctors, lawyers, and clergymen, once known as the ``learned professions.''
It's all over now. Better Thans preserved the stability of black neighborhoods in the Jim Crow era, but now the only blacks who call them role models are those who attend conferences on ``Role-Model Flight and the Creation of the Underclass.''
Among whites, the loss of esteem for the learned professions has been less dramatic in that it has not resulted in actual mayhem, but the psychological shocks mount daily. The doctor who cut off the wrong foot plays golf with the lawyer who advertises his services in commercials that open with the deafening crunch of a head-on collision and a close-up of a teddy bear on a rain-drenched road. Both say ``Between you and I'' and neither has any Latin -- nor does the clergyman who confessed to molesting boys: the difference between ``Noli me tangere'' and ``nolo contendere'' now escapes him.
It could be argued that these male Better Thans have self-destructed under pressure from the flood of women into the learned professions. It certainly can be argued that women have damaged the Better Than Mystique by fritzing the ``not-rightness'' wire in our brains. This is the wire that makes children insist that their favorite bedtime story be told exactly the same way each time; leave out the pig's hat and the child will wail, ``You didn't tell it right!''
The not-rightness wire remains connected throughout our lives, governing our expectations and pre-conceived opinions and giving off a hot sizzle when they are thwarted. Like most unfair reactions, this one is universal and immutable, and hence important.
My not-rightness wire sizzles when I see an Episcopal priestess in a reversed collar. When I see the politically correct commercial with the middle-aged construction worker who says: ``My doctor told me to take Dynamitol for my constipation. I trust her [wink], she's my daughter.'' And when I see a picture of the full Supreme Court containing two huge white spots -- the jabots worn by the lady members to lend a feminine touch. Justice O'Connor's lacy number reminds me of the fanned-out handkerchief pinned to the shoulder of a friendly Midwestern waitress, but Justice Ginsberg's stark, foot-long Geneva bands are even worse: she looks like John Calvin gone wrong.
Most Better Thans are no longer better, and many are not even equal. Two messages left on my answering machine are a case in point. Both were from local public-school teachers unknown to me. The first one sounded like a 911 call, a rush of words from a woman with a shrill, cawing voice just this side of hysteria.
``I'm calling Florence King! I have a high-school English class that needs your help fast! A workshop, a speech! Something, anything!''
The other message was a wrong number. Thinking she had reached the mother of a student, this teacher launched into a long, rambling explanation about a schedule change. Again I was struck by the voice: flat, whiny, unconfident, muddy diction. Different in temper from the first frantic caller, yet they were alike in one way: they both sounded common.
I felt oddly betrayed. The teacher as grande dame was a fixture of my school days, and lest you think I'm warming myself in the glow of nostalgia, cold mathematics bears me out. All of my elementary-school teachers were born, roughly speaking, between 1885 and 1910, meaning that they came of age when college was still a preserve of the comfortable class. Teaching was the only career open to women then, and so generations of ladies became teachers. They had a way of speaking and a general demeanor that their public-school charges, who usually did not belong to the comfortable class, instinctively recognized -- and so did our parents. The effortless discipline these women maintained and the automatic respect they commanded had less to do with school prayer and other touted traditional values than with frank class-consciousness.
THE truth about role models that we go to such lengths to hide can be summed up as ``Sweet are the uses of elitism.'' A role model is someone who is superior in a worthwhile way, whose power of example transcends the fickle transports of hero-worship. He cannot be too far above us. He must be someone we don't actually know but do come into contact with, or at least see from time to time as the old-world villager saw the squire.
Thus, a valid role model is an accessible Better Than from the comfortable class. That used to mean the middle class when we had only three classes, but democracy works in mysterious ways its chaos to perform.
Today's middle class is yesterday's ``blue-collar class,'' which was the New Deal's ``working class,'' who were Huey Long's ``little people,'' who were Bryan's ``simple people,'' who were Lincoln's ``common people,'' who were Hamilton's ``masses,'' who were Marie Antoinette's ``them.'' Thanks to government scholarships, college loans, educational tax credits, and affirmative action, millions of would-be Better Thans are pouring into the fake middle class convinced that everybody's got a right to be a role model -- which is Hillary Clinton's ``It takes a village.''