We read another depressing story in Spanish class today.
Tangent: I cannot prove it, but I believe that Americans have an excessively optimistic character when compared to other national cultures. I want to attribute this to a combination of leftover manifest destiny, sustained high levels of economic growth, and (perhaps most crucially) the fact that US (alongside Canada and Australia) is pretty much the only country that didn’t experience any wars or large-scale domestic violence in the past century. As a result, even when American authors write about depressing topics, there is usually a sort of ‘aw-shucks’ optimism (or, my personal pet peeve, compulsive calls-to-action, even when the author has no particular solution in mind) I think this is particularly true of White Americans.
I bring this up because Mexican literature is different. All of the stories I’ve read start with something depressing, then it gets worse, and then, in the end, the narrator or protagonist just accepts that life is worse now. In sum, “sucks to suck”. The only American I can think of who writes like this is Cormac McCarthy, but even his stories rely on the audience having optimistic expectations that he can subvert. For the most part, every living generation of Americans (aside from maybe the youngest ones) has seen their economic prospects improve greatly ever their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. We don’t really know violence; 9/11 is considered a national tragedy, but by the standards of the past century in pretty-much any other country, 3000 deaths is really not that many. Quick examples off the top of my head: between 100,000 and 300,000 people died in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; conservatively, the war or terror killed 900,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least 400,000 of whom were civilians); World War 2 killed 27 million Soviet citizens. Our culture hasn’t really had to reckon with this scale of mass tragedy (again, mostly talking about White people here), and as a result, I think we have a somewhat-naive and deeply-ingrained cultural belief that things must always be getting better. It’s hard (and risks oversimplification) to define a culture from just the handful of books you’ve personally read, but the American literature of the 20th and 21st century seems to have a really distinctly-optimistic outlook. If you have a counterpoint, or a piece to add, leave a comment.
Slight tangent on the other tangent: On a related note, I don’t think our country is taking climate change seriously enough, in part because it’s just not nice to think about. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I’m fucking scared, and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day by forcing you to think about it, but the outlook is almost certainly worse than you were thinking before: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#SPM. Now, despair isn’t a very good problem-solving strategy, but neither is avoidance.
Another tangent: I think this optomism is also prt of the reason that even when 2000+ Americans were dying of COVID everyday, a sizable portion of the country insisted it wasn’t happening. Because bad things are unthinkable here.
Back to the main thread: Regardless, after class, I found out that my Spanish teacher writes short stories, so I’m hoping she will let me read some. Other than that, a pretty normal day.
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