An Educated Man in Reiwa 8

Growing up, I always seemed to have an internal voice, almost like a second conscience, telling me, “This is what an educated person does.” I can’t imagine I got it from my family, at least not directly. However, my parents seemed to notice when I was responding to the voice, and it was encouraged.
Educated people have to say and do and know a lot of things. And they need opinions. My goodness, do they need opinions. Because one part of being an educated person is having opinions, and having other people WANT your opinions. So sometimes, you’ve got to take shortcuts. And it’s a lot easier to hate something you don’t know about than to like it. And saying, “I don’t know,” is just bad form. Better to say, “I won’t know,” than, “I don’t know.” After all, that’s what educated people do.
Well, I liked musical theater, and that was a properly educated thing to like. But over time, I had to get more and more apologetic about it. After all, educated people know about things that other people don’t. And, to be fair, I didn’t know that much about the topic. I saw the shows I liked plenty of times, and any show where we had a soundtrack, I got to go and see. But, over time, as I got older, and as the world changed, it was important to hate the right things. Oklahoma! was always one of those things. It was important to know, cognitively, that it was structurally and historically important. But it was too kitsch. Too rural. Too Americana. To American. It was everything we were supposed to look down on, me and the other educated people. And so, I did. Never did I ever want to see the show, and I had strong opinions on the matter. Of course, I had strong opinions on a lot of things I didn’t know about at the time, and most of them were along these lines. Educated people need to have disdain for a lot of things. Especially the kitsch, the rural, and the American.
YouTube randomly started showing me Rogers and Hammerstein clips recently, and a few weeks ago, I actually encountered Oklahoma!. I was intrigued. And I was surprised that I was intrigued.
Aoi and I watched it last Sunday. And I loved it. I adored it. From start to finish, I adored it. I loved the music, I loved the lyrics, I loved the characters. I loved the dancing. I loved the orchestration. It was amazing. At times, so brash and unabashedly, unashamedly, American. And at times, delicate. Otherworldly. Surreal. It seemed to segue back and forth between the mundane and earthy to the sublime and otherworldly, and it stayed there. The whole thing played out more like a dream than like reality. I can’t say if or when I’ve ever encountered anything like it. But I’m hoping to find more like this. Because this is something worth discovering.
I have to admit, though, this has been a frustrating experience. Partly because I have a strong sense that I’ve been robbed of something, and partly because I’ve been reduced to talking about it here. I spend a lot of time talking to GPT these days, because it can answer wonderful questions and knows so many things. But when it’s asked to apply that knowledge, it gets very cagey. And that frustrates me. I, frankly, don’t know anybody to talk to about this sort of thing, or these sorts of feelings, and I’d normally sort everything out by talking to a person, or, barring that, a machine. But here I am, writing this out and submitting it into the ether. Because I don’t know what else to do to sort things out. Because I don’t know how to think without a sounding board. And I guess that I’ve got to be my own for a bit. Maybe that’s why diaries exist.
That voice, that educated person voice, the one that used to talk to me. My teachers also noticed when it was talking to me. And they loved it, well, the public school teachers anyway, when I did exactly what it said. They loved when I knew the right opinions. And they loved when I knew the right talking points. And it was proof positive, to them and all in their thrall, that I was an educated person when I learned to hate the things that “other” people liked. And we all knew what “other” people looked like. They looked like Oklahoma!. Not very much. Not anymore. But the stink remained. The stink of the cows. The stink of the frontier. We learned about Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier Thesis and all that, but we knew, we all knew somehow, that America was the cities. Was the melting pot. Was the huddled masses. Was the machines. Was the New England mystics. The frontier was an embarrassment at best and a shame at worst. Nothing good happened before the 1960’s, and there was no Hell below quite like the hell in our midst that was the 1950’s.
I remember having to hold my nose, as a child, to watch a western. How I collected the coats of the people stoning Country fans and cheered them on. It’s easy to write this off as being young. Being pretentious. Being easily caught up in things. And all of that’s true. What’s different is that it was all in service to something. In service to some cause. To some ideal. To some notion that everybody had, even though nobody really could, or would, articulate it clearly. But we all knew what I was trying to be, and the people whose opinions I was told mattered loved it.
I feel like those people took something from me. Or kept something from me. Something important. Something critical. Something formative. The legends of myths of the world that I was born into. An appreciation for something foundational. The myths and mythos of my people, the characters and archetypes of a way of being that I was taught to view with contempt as I embraced the distant and foreign over the homey and homely.
And it was kept from me. Maybe not by everyone all the time. But by enough people, and enough people who mattered, enough of the time. In pursuit of making me an educated man. My dad wanted sons who could look down on him. Only as I get older do I realize how much I ought to have looked up to him.