Fat, Ignorant, and Crazy

Walter Agnew Moore II, Roving Reporter
30 December 2001, Back in Old Austin Texas

It is exactly 718 miles from the circular driveway of my mama's house in Selma, Alabama, to the front parking area of The Crown and Anchor Bar in Austin, Texas. They had my space waiting for me right by the nautically-themed front deck. The little red Tracker's engine ticks with escaping heat as I flex my sore right ankle and cramped back by the open car door.

I can hear the Old 97's playing on the speakers. "Busted Afternoon". It is a scene from yet another self-conscious self-referential too-hip Austin movie yet to be shot. I smile. I'm finally home.

There's nothing quite like spending a few months out of what you're familiar with to make you really see it again. In my case, I have been in France since October.

It reminds me of when I taught for 2 years at the Black (sorry, I know "inner-city" is the proper code-word) High-School. After a few weeks of seeing only Black people, I quit seeing them, if you understand me. I saw the kids as groups of individuals with all their particular quirks. I, who could star in movies about the history of Norway, forgot what White people looked and acted like.

When I accompanied my students to a concert involving several other, predominantly White schools, I had a shock: I looked at the White kids, and they looked *funny*. it was as if they had been powdered or bleached, and their expressions, they were severe and immobile. When they spoke, it seemed unfriendly.

So that's what White people really look like...

Now it's not a Black/White thing, but rather I am seeing Americans as they must seem to people of other countries, and I am frightened.

No wonder people are scared of us: we look fat, ignorant, and crazy.

I am speaking, of course, in general terms. Many Americans, such as the readers of this piece, the ones who are my friends and family, are reasonably fit, educated, and sane. Well, I'll leave some close relatives out of that "sane" category...

But to support my case:

FAT

All too often the last few days, I have seen people hogging down at buffets, bellies tucked under the table, people for whom "exercise" is something extra or occasional like cleaning the gutters or waxing the car. Chowing down on vile, greasy, over-salted food. Circling the mall three times rather than park somewhere that is not next to the door. Proud of a handicapped sticker that they do not deserve. Gigantic guts and asses.

IGNORANT

A Country song I heard somewhere around Vicksburg proclaimed "I may not be able to tell Iraq from Iran...". Now, the Country genre is famed for its aura of stultifying skull-density, real or assumed, but I submit that you could put that line in any style of song, and most Americans would grin sheepishly when hearing it. We are not supposed to know things. It is strange to know things. If you are an American who speaks another language or knows anything about history, you are automatically assumed to be CIA by the average European.

I don't think people in other developed nations are this ignorant. In the dancing-in-the-street amoebic-dysentary nations, yes, but I don't think we want to take those places as our yard-stick. An example: I have a pal in Amiens back in France named Remy. A beer-drinking buddy. Remy talks about everything: machine-guns, music, sound-systems, linguistics, sculpture, architecture. Remy is not ignorant. Is he a PhD? No. Remy works construction. This is not rare. I am not sure whether people in France know more things than Americans, or if it is just that they feel no shame for knowing them.

CRAZY

What's up with flying the cutesy little flags from the car-antennas until they tear into shreds? Does that make Americans think they are doing anything? Not one enemy of the USA has fallen over dead because a fat ignorant American plastered yet another smarmy feel-good bumper-sticker on the back of the mini-van. Maybe "crazy" is too broad a word. Maybe "smuggly-complacent-to-the-point-of-living-in-a-fantasy-world" is more accurate. A sense of the saccherine fills the air. Like those damn yellow ribbons back during the Gulf War. I was in the Army then, and I heartily despised those yellow ribbons. But not as much as I hated that Lee Greenwood song that they played all the time: "Cuz um proud t'be an amurrican, whar at least ah know um free." As if Lee Greenwood could even find the US on a globe of the world.


Fat, Ignorant, and Crazy. Most of my observations on this trip were made in the Deep South and the Pseudo-South (Texas), but I feel that you could give the people nasal accents and call it the Midwest or California, and it wouldn't be so different.

I sit in the Crown and Anchor and laugh and joke with my old pals (the Cajun) and (Gojira) and (Bella Ciao), and (the Good Witch), the new friend of (the Cajun). These are cool people, and I wish they represented our stereotype to the world. Well, all I can do is work on myself. I have already quit eating fat, which can be pure torture driving across Louisiana, the one place in the nation with good food. I can fight Ignorance by keeping an open mind and trying to keep learning new things.

As for Crazy? I'm afraid I'm stuck with that one.