So there was this guy at my college. Walking home late one night, I saw him spying on a floormate of mine, standing on a railing outside and peering in her window. Now maybe he was just checking to see if she was home, but...still. There are, you know, easier and less invasive ways to do that.
I never told my floormate what I'd seen, but she got the picture in other ways and sort of gently floated and wriggled away from him like a guppy.
A few years later, I saw that he'd married a different classmate--a foreign-exchange student.
I learned a major lesson.
Think not just twice, but three, four and five times before you marry someone from another country. There is an extremely large chance that they're at least slightly creepy. And unless it's at Charles Manson levels, you're not gonna be able to tell.
Why, you may ask, is that relevant to this fascinating review of a book comparing British and American culture? Well, because I watch "Doctor Who," of course.
(Folks, I'm a card-carrying Green Personality Color/Quick-Start-Insistent [that'd be the bottom section, "Improvise," on the green cylinder] crunchy flaky artist hippie type. Do not try this sort of reasoning at home. Or, like, work or school.)
But seriously, it really does make sense. See, I think I understand that show. When, in "The Parting of the Ways," the Dalek taunts the Doctor with the question of whether he wants to be a coward or a destroyer of worlds, and he defiantly says "Coward. Any day" and refuses to carry through his genocide of the Daleks, I thought that was about the Doctor. But no! It's actually British culture carrying on an argument with itself! Because look here:
"The world wars, she continues, created generations of men with a horror of cowardice [emphasis mine] and the strong connection between emotional repression and manliness."
Who knew!? That single moment represents Britain trying to pry itself away from values that don't really serve it anymore, trying to wake up from a trauma-induced nightmare, trying to say that "cowardice"--pathologically defined as a refusal to kill--is better than the alternative. (In "Family of Blood," too, one boarding-school student calls another, more intelligent one "a miserable coward." "Oh yes, every time," he responds, slipping away to save the day behind the scenes.)
The real significance of those moments was totally lost on me until, completely by accident, I stumbled on that article.
Similarly, the real significance of the moods and sayings and affect of even very "close" sets of foreigners (Austrians and Germans, British and Americans, Belgians and French, Uruguayans and Argentines, Russians and Ukrainians) is almost certainly lost as well. Context is so subtle. So deceptive. There's just enough overlap to get us all in trouble. Make us marry a creep.
Or maybe save us. Who knows.
