29th June, 2006

Dear T,

As an “American-to-be” whose descendents, if they will be any, would only be able to make a less romantic claim of a Boeing 747 arrival, I can understand your concern and distress on hearing criticism of America, which in your opinion is either mistaken or born out of ignorance. After all no one, even the people offering criticism, would like it when a central part of their strongly held identity gets criticized. I also agree with you, to a point, that the “others” (which I will, partly, always be) really “don’t get it”.

I say this, because even though I am still an “alien”, I find myself helping the others “get it” at VILLA, especially when I hear broad and general criticisms of America. The quick explanation I can come up with is that they haven’t been here long enough after all to see what it is all about. As for the rest of the “others” ( many of who would also like to be ‘we” who “hold these truths to be self-evident”) beyond the tightly guarded (except the slightly more porous Mexican) borders, America, and the ideas regarding America arrive in one of two packages: 1) culture (McDonald’s, Hollywood, CNN, consumer goods, fashion, and in less common cases such as myself, as the novels of Steinbeck, Faulkner, Mark Twain and poetry of Whitman and Dickinson) and 2) geo-politics & military interventions (cases, historically and popularly, considered good: World War II; (few) cases considered less than good: Kermit Roosevelt run CIA boondoggle in Iran in the 1960s, the still painful Vietnam war – I suppose a significant number of Vietnamese didn’t exactly see GI Bill as their best hope against Communism, and the current situation in Iraq).

Thus as I see it, the “others” view America, primarily through these twin Pavlovian lenses, desire and fear. The desire, at an individual level, to be and to do, what Americans do routinely here without a second thought (when I was a kid, and had encountered America via Archies’ comics, one of my intense desires was to taste this thing Jughead, one of the characters, routinely liked to have in his high school cafeteria: a sundae), and then the fear, at a collective level, of America’s awesome military prowess. A cruise missile sadly is indifferent to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, and resembles something that The Old Testament god might have hurled at one of those pesky tribes who chose to disobey him (or her or it), or even more heretically, chose disbelief.

Given this, my understanding of this place I have come to love (I can tell you, it is quite difficult to write ecstatic hymns in many Indian cities unlike over here at Lullwater) has become more ying-yang like, and less dualistic (darkness vs. light or good vs. evil), as the speech (or rhetoric) writers to various American politicians would like the “others” to believe. For me personally, America (for that matter any other ‘real’ country, which will be necessarily composed of multiplicities and opposites) in symbolic terms is similar to a large expanse of white with a black dot of time-variable size embedded in it. Yes, there will always be “others”, some of them quite murderous, who will choose to see this black dot as America entire, as there will be those within, who will want to superficially whitewash this black dot away.

Finally, invoking Whitman’s line “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”, I would ask you to please take this letter, with its gentle dissent, as one of those “varied carols”, in response to your “carol”, even though for now I can only claim to be an aspiring Whitman’s “rough”.

Love, S

Back in the Mofussil ages, when Doordarshan reigned supreme over the Indian eyeballs with its programming of kitschy Ramanand Sagar's epics, Sunday evening Hindi movies peppered with too many advertisements for Lux Beauty soap, Cinkara tonics, Lalitaji's Rin Detergent etc (I leave it to the more talented mimics I know to write a cultural history of those early TV years in India), the powers to be managed to slip in some subversive programming such as Tom & Jerry cartoons, German detective soaps (I forget the name now), which I distinctly remember had a 'shocking' episode on busting of an amateur porn ring (now you know why!), and also the comedy of the Great Chaplin.

However it was "Laurel & Hardy" that held my attention and allegiance then, as they do so now. I was thinking about them late last night in bed as I was reading this in Kurt Vonnegut's latest acerbic and funny book A Man Without A Country (for the interested, this book is basically an eighty two year old socialist-humanist's chataqua on comedy, creative writing, fossil fuel powered thermodynamic whoopee, the Chosen One's, i.e., Small B's Administration of Guessers etc, and because of its slenderness can be comfortably read in an afternoon) :

"Humor is an almost psychological response to fear. Freud said that humor is a response to frustration - one of several. A dog, he said, when he can't get out a gate, will scratch and start digging and making meaningless gestures, perhaps growling or whatever, to deal with frustration or surprise or fear.

There is a superficial sort of laughter. Bob Hope, for example, was not really a humorist. He was a comedian with very thin stuff, never mentioning anything troubling. I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy. There is terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could be so easily killed."

While one can find separate biographies of thin Laurel (most interesting fact: he was British, and was an understudy to Chaplin as he was starting out in comedy) and plump Hardy (he was born in Harlem, Georgia, not far from where I currently live), their lives might be more insightfully treated as a set of Siamese twins, in which the two confused heads are at constant war with each other. Or as Vonnegut again put it in the prologue of his novel "Slapstick",

"The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account".

Anyway, here you can watch a short documentary on these fellas. Finally, we come to the comedy itself. YouTube has plenty of choice morsels for belly aching laughs. Here are some of the longer ones:

Soda Fountain Skit

Reelin in the Sailors

<a href=”www.youtube.com>Big Business: Selling Christmas Trees

<a href=”www.youtube.com>You Gave It To Me

<a href=”www.youtube.com>Laurel Visits Hardy at the Hospital