The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 1996, Page 7, Image 7

PAGE 7
FAMILY VALUES
STORY AND ART BY HELEN PATTI
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts."
-PAUL EHRLICH
SUMMER, 1954
Anne knew she was going to give up her baby the minute she figured out what was
happening. It was the only thing to do. It was 1954, after all. She wasn't married. Giving away
your baby was even a fad, all the major newspapers carried advertisements for the competing
"hospitals" in Kansas City, Chicago and St. Louis. These ads were piled together on the back
pages and promised cleanliness, secrecy and professional assistance. Adoption was a popular
experiment in the post-war years, it went hand in hand with the efficient technology that wan the
war for America, it was a mechanical solution to a human problem in an age when mechaniza­
tion was the cornerstone of prosperity and success. All the members of the adoption drama were
separate, isolated, interchangeable parts that had only to be rearranged to create a working
vtfiole. Pick up a connecting rod, a piston and a drive shaft from a comer of the wecking yard,
brush them off and install in an engine missing these same parts. Turn the ignition. Engage the
motor. It should go.
The two parent model family machine was absolute and despotic in its rule as the
automobile or the television. There could be no exceptions, exceptions were a threat to the
integrity of the machine. America's victory in Europe had trickled down the chimneys of living
rooms and through the open side windows of parked cars where heavy breathing from inside
fogged them over. There was a boundless sense of hope and power in the air, a puffed up right­
ness, all questions were answered in the affirmative for the time being. Yes, we are a nation
of good people yes, this is a sign that we are well intentioned and our fixed working parts are
followng a determined course of action. We should, we shall carry on and continue to raise solid
nuclear families that conform exactly to the model.
Hardworking family values were at a premium and though there was an illusion of
independence, of standing on your own two feet, the middle class working family unit was in
reality heavily subsidized by the ghost of a war chest. There were Gl Bills, government housing
loans, plenty of jobs in factories fat wth federal aid just gearing up to supply the god blessed
families wth all the trimmings of ari industrial age. There wasn't much for someone looking in at
all these trimmings, someone who had committed an "indiscretion" and wasn't wiling or able to
conform to the inescapable model just yet. There wasn't much but some ads in the back of the
Kansas City Star or the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
Not to wed was unpatriotic. To keep a child outside of marriage was unthinkable.
America was on a roll and she called her abundance of families to participate in the upward
surge in a clearly delineated way Mom was in her spotless kitchen, her lovely children dressed
in new clothes hung on them like a shroud of mirrors. Dad was hard at work bringing home
money to buy a new lawn mower or kitchen gadgets, labor saving devices so mother would have
more time to keep the floor spotless. When every bit of housewxk was done, vtfien the clothes
were hot, clean and crisp out of the Maytag and a fruit pie was bubbling in the Admiral Flex-O-
Heat, it was time to diffuse the house wth the eerie blue tube-light of a Philco 26-inch swvelet
tuned into the good news, the right news; good guys dressed nice, working hard, and trim
women, not a hair out of place, behind a mop and bucket filled wth miracle cleansers. And vtfien
Dad came home from the cash register regional office and Mom took a break from making the
floors so clean her family could eat a tuna casserole off them, it was time to relax and open up
the bourbon bottle and tune in to documentary shows like Make Room for Daddy and I've Got
A Secret. Like Richard Nixon said in 1955: "Sincerity is the quality that comes through on
television." And there were millions of families ranged around the blue glow of this sincerity like
electrons around a nucleus, safe in the welded framewjrk of a subsidized family.
Safe too from the bomb. Those Alphabet bombs: A bombs, H bombs and N bombs that
Harry Truman seemed to understand and use sparingly and well like seasoning on a pork chop.
A nuclear family safe from the nuclear bomb. We made it, we dropped it, and we had more hid­
den underground in case a threat ever came to the American order that was so clearly an edict.
The song Love & Marriage was recorded this year..."love and marriage go together like a
horse and carriage." Campbell's Soup picked up the tune and made a jingle out of it: 'Soup and
Sandwich....’ And if you were sitting in front of a bowl of thick sweet tomato soup on a Sunday
evening with a butter sandwich split neatly like an atom and arranged on a plate on either side of
your bowl then you were like one in a million photons lined up and pointing together in a unified
laser ray of light that split and bent off slanted mirrors, projecting an elusive holographic image,
of a typical family on Sunday evening. It was an impression you could pass your hand right
through.
The members of the nuclear family of the 50s had no idea that what they were really
doing was holding on to the last gasp of a way of life, white knuckled and wth all the tenacity
they were capable of. It was in the bottom of the bourbon glass, if anyone cared to look.The end
of the picture book family. The end of specific social answers like these. Deep in their subcon­
scious the very families sitting around the living room wth their closets stuffed wth Hoover
vacuum cleaners and miracle fiber mop heads were actually reeling from the consequences of
the splitting of the atom. The firestorms and fallout were far away, the hot sucking wnd of white
ash and obliteration was away across the ocean in two cities of slanteyed foreigners. No one
guessed the direct relativity of the splitting of the atom to the splitting of the model, mechanized
American family. No one guessed yet how knowledge of the behavior of subatomic particles
could rewrite the social history of the American family and perhaps save it from terminal
fragmentation, from a self-detonating loneliness.
The 1950s family was the beginning of the last gasp of independent, isolated expression
and the illusion of standing alone, of pulling the family into a circle like pioneer wagons defend­
ing themselves against the unbridled, savage forces of chaos. The '50s family revolved around
each other like clockwork, law abiding planets around the sun of a static universe, like New
Departure ball bearings in a lawn mower. Even Albert Einstein in uncharacteristic stubbornness
tried to twist around his relativity theory to accommodate the comfortable order of a static
universe. He couldn't quite believe in an unpredictable, dynamic universe although all his equa­
tions, his entire life's work, pointed exactly to chaos. His search for the cosmological constant
was as impossible as the last chapter in an elementary, outdated science book about separate
molecules and atoms bouncing and colliding in a self-contained, limited world, obeying specific
rules handed down by Almighty God and pursuing their own self-interest.
The American family was the last expression of loyalty to the mechanical rules of a static
universe. Susie sits here, Danny sits there, Mommy is at one end of the table dishing up peas
and roast beef while Daddy folds his paper and picks up his fork. Never mind that is an illusion
that buries secrets and ruins lives along the way. Never mind that Mommy is reeling drunk by
9 o'clock, that Daddy is lonely and molesting little Susie at 10 and that there is a mess of dirty,
homeless Cubans in a New York ghetto that wll never make it on the 11 o’clock news. The
Cuban refugees are only local to New York City, they are over there and we are here. They are
unrelated, they are under the glare of a separate electron scanning microscope. That is v4iat we
thought was the truth, back in the '50s.
And a young woman unmarried and pregnant? Her task was clear, she went away to
where these parts of her were removed and reprocessed. Clean and simple. They cleaned out
her womb like a clogged fuel filter, rearranged the fragmented parts, the isolated units of a dying
Newtonian universe and replaced them in another machine.There was no configuration, no para­
digm for multiplicity in this universe, no room for paradox or broken lives that marred the land­
scape like wrecked automobiles rusting in a yard, missing essential parts. There was no room
for random fluctuations quite yet, for the unpredictable, chaotic leaps of disorganized lumps of
energy discovered recently at the atomic level. The classical order, the measured, ordered flow
of life still defined the American family. There was no acceptance yet of a God who had let the
universe get away from Him and run itself randomly and with ghostly, absurd rules. There was
no acceptance yet of the beauty of luck and random, senseless uncertainty and the way in which
this ties us all infinitely to one other, from ghetto bums to motherless babies to CEOs.
Practice numbness Anne. Someday decades later in another age exponentially flooded
wth automobiles, you might by chance happen to follow one on a clogged free-way and see a
bumper sticker that is assisting in the birth of a new science. It will say, "Practice Random Acts
of Kindness." But for now, practice numbness Anne. When in doubt, follow the trail of the
bourbon glass and hold on till all the machines break down or run out of available fossil fuels and
only then will we be forced to reconsider that we are awash in a sea of decidedly unmechanical,
uncertain principles. We are enmeshed and colliding with our own and each other's possibilities,
we are smeared out across time wth everyone who has ever lived and died. We wll see that we
were never contained in a "nuclear family," neither before nor after detonation. We are Quanta
Babies from the Family of the Universe. We were each of us conceived at ground zero, the
instant of the Big Bang; the Creator's version of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Your illegitimate child
con-tains the same borrowed dust from an exploded giant red star as a Cuban teenager sleeping
in a cardboard box. Sir Isaac and Hitler and me and you and your baby all pissed in the same
river one day and drank it dowi the next.
But for now, pretend to be glad for you and your unborn child, soon to be motherless,
that the "problem" of the basic unit of heredity has been "solved." There is a Nobel prize ribbon
pinned just in time, nine months from now in March of 1955, to the double helix model of a DNA
structure, the spiraling balls and twsting ropes have been constructed out of interchangeable
pieces like silver pin balls wound around plied steel elevator cables. What you can hand down
to your daughter that you leave behind in the shallow bed of the maternity hospital nursery is a
lovely spiral staircase wth a sugar phosphate backbone twisting around hydrogen bonded base
pairs. Heredity has nothing really to do with a full proud song in the blood, unscored, or a sense
of self, a sense of belonging that has no coordinates. It has nothing really to do wth anything
but this mechanical construct that you see reproduced in the pages of Scientific American.
Pretend to be glad for then you can give her up more easily, you can lose each other between
the elevator shaft and the pinball machine, between the flywheel and the skyscraper.
Helen Patti lives in Manzanita Writer, artist and dollmaker, she is also the founder,
producer and director of Klootchy Theater.
THE SELF-INDULGENT SIXTIES
Someone recently told me that the revolution of the ‘60s
was a failure, caused by self-indulgence.This is not the first time
I've hea.d this point of view, and I wsh to respond.
Define self-indulgence. Before the '60s, college for
w»men was considered indulgent; not self-indulgent, because
the woman in question was indulged by her father, husband,
brother, etc. Indeed, any kind of education that did not contribute
directly to securing and maintaining a career (earning "good"
money) was considered indulgent. Women were expected to
shave their legs and armpits and to wear "foundation” garments.
If that sounds like something made of bricks, you're getting the
idea. Women, especially young women, should not jiggle in an
unseemly fashion. By the late ‘50s, women were wearing pedal­
pushers and toreadors, but not to the office. Waitresses wore
high heels to work. I had an aunt whose house slippers had a
three inch heel because it hurt her to wear flat shoes. Working
every day of her life in heels had deformed her feet. Men wore
military haircuts and were, generally, clean-shaven; the except­
ions were the occasional small closely trimmed mustache In
certain rare circumstances, a professor of anthropology wore
a beard, again, neatly trimmed. This was not allowed by the
rules, but certain people were considered exempt, the way a
foreign ambassador is exempt from our traffic laws. And all men
dressed alike. "Rednecks" wore Levi's, flannel shirts and boots;
"business men" wore white shirts and suits, of neutral colors.
Well, Texas business men wore suits, and cowboy boots.
Take the issue of 'free love." The whole thing about free
love was it gave a woman permission to do what men have
been doing for centuries, i.e., making love when, where and with
whom she chose. The idea of decisions about a woman's sex
life being made wthout the input of her father, doctor, priest or
policeman, was damn near blasphemous before the ‘60s. It's
really too bad the concept of safe sex had to wait for the advent
of AIDS. A doctor who performed an abortion (and got caught at
it) during the 50s and early ‘60s went to prison. We're not all in
agreement about this issue, but I treasure a woman's right to an
abortion. If men carried babies, this would be a whole different
thing. In ancient times, when people lived in hunter/gatherer
tribes, babies bom at a time when they could not be fed and
cared-for were exposed or killed outright so that the adults and
children already claimed by the tribe would have a better chance
of survival. No one in our society makes this kind of decision;
we just breed like there is no responsibility attached. I realize
that the right to abortion was achieved by the woman's move­
ment, but the "indulgence" to do so was suggested during the
‘60s
Then there's the drug thing. First of all, I don't believe
that intelligent well-adjusted young people, or for that matter
stupid well-adjusted young people, became addicted simply
because it was the thing to do. Addiction is part of a life-long
process and it does not suddenly occur at age 17 because of
bad company And frankly, experimentation wth marijuana, at
least, is not my idea of disastrous. Nobody ever died because
of overdose, or withdrawal from, marijuana. It's not as if we did
not use drugs before the ‘60s, but our drugs had social sanction
BY MARY PERALTA
Smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol were so prevalent there
were jokes. What are the three best things in life? A drink before
and a cigarette after.
Last, but not least, I believe the 60s exposed us to
certain kinds of information we preferred to keep hidden. One
example of this was conspicuous consumption. Automobile
advertisements bragged about how long a car was, as opposed
to such qualities as ease of parking, gas mileage or how much
space was required to turn around in. Another well-hidden fact
that was exposed during the ‘60s was police brutality My sister's
minister told her that the power welded by a policeman was
God-given. Policeman, after all, are human, subject to the same
foibles and blunders as the rest of us. Sassy "love children" who
grew up believing 'The policeman is my friend" were shot, beat­
en and dragged to jail for doing things like talking back and sit­
ting dowa ("sitting in"?).
Certainly in the area of spiritual growth "indulgence"
made great headway The minister of my church never says,
"Give 'till it hurts." She says, "Give ’till it feels good." Instead of
teaching the idea of original sin our church teaches original
divinity: you are a child of God Christ said, "I came that you
might have life and have it more abundantly." How about "Know
ye not that ye are Gods?" Nobody taught this stuff when I was
a kid, at least not vhere I ever heard it.
The whole concept of individual value and the validity of
self-direction required us to make that change in our definition of
"indulgence " Society's attitudes were challenged and changed,
not as much as I'd like, but at least some Nobody will ever con­
vince me that the ‘60s were a failure, a waste of time, etc. It did
commence the erosion of traditional family values, and all I can
say is, thank God.
Mary Peralta lives in Astoria