Are there dos and donts associated with sitting at a bar?
I live in a very small town of about 1500 in a county as big as the state of Rhode Island with a population of around 3500. It has one nice restaurant bar that also functions as the only big city type cafe. The other bars have food, but are mostly bars with lots of big screen TVs. I work at home all day all alone. I’m an extrovert and that makes the aloneness tiring for me by the end of the day. So each evening I go to the nice bar with the good wines and beers and stay for about an hour. I like to engage in some conversations with friends and recharge my battery. I used to bring my laptop, but now I bring the less clunky I Pad. (THANK YOU, STEVE!). That’s so I can have something to read if there is no one I want to talk to or to check my e-mail for last minute work. Actually the well lit I Pad is better than trying to read a newspaper when they begin dimming the lights.
So last night, I walked into the bar and saw two couples on opposite ends. One couple I knew. They were dressed up so they were probably on a date night and the husband has a tendency to engage me which often is more like picking a fight, so I sat a few seats away from them and also from the couple I didn’t know. I pulled out my I Pad and placed it in vertical position on the bar and hooked up my earphones so I could listen to Matt Taibbi who was going to be on a radio show on Sirius XM. Until he came on I decided to read the new Adbusters Magazine I had just bought in Bozeman.
Then the guy I know to the right of me, rather loudly, insisted to the bartender that people who sat at bars or even in booths and used electronic devices like I Pads, mobile phones, and computers were engaging in self-absorbed and anti-social behavior.
“Has the crowd changed here” he said to the bartender. “I see them as more self-absorbed. They are looking at their electronic devices and not communicating.”
“Hush, ” said his wife and rolled her eyes.
So he repeated the question three more times each time with his wife whispering, “Stop it.” or “Don’t go there.”
“Hmmm,” I said to myself, “Duh ya think he means me?” (Since he had accosted me a couple weeks ago while eating with my husband and told me, pretending to be joking, to put my I Pad back in my purse, I was pretty sure he meant me.) However, when I looked at the couple down the bar from me to the left, the man was looking at the baseball game on the TV and the woman, yes, was reading her I Pad. Then I glanced behind me and there was a couple in the booth. The man was reading a paper and the woman was, yes, on an I Pad.
No wonder my neighbor felt that he could proclaim loudly that there was a dangerous trend afoot. He was surrounded by women synced up to their I Pads. And in bars, no less. Decent people were becoming absorbed into their electronic devices and not engaging in conversation. And not just that high brow Hollywood hussy from New York City. But sprouting up all over the place. Perhaps he was thinking that my evil anti-social behavior had encouraged other women to engage in these horrific acts.
Here I was just reading a magazine and I’m getting grief. The woman down the way seemed to be on Face Book, so maybe she was engaging in a little conversation with some of her friends while her husband stared at the TV. I used to see women dutifully sit staring at their food as their husbands watched a game. Now the I Pad and smart phones at least gave them something to do. And maybe you can call that self-absorbed behavior or maybe it is pure survival when accompanying a sports obsessed or silent mate.
Just as he was really getting worked up, my friend Mary came in and I squealed with delight. We started talking away about belly button piercings gone wrong and then segued into a discussion of the difference between joy and happiness. There I was engaged in animated conversation instead of my self-absorbed staring at my I Pad. I even skipped listening to Matt Taibbi on the radio in order to talk to my friend. A great sacrifice on my part in order to participate in the more important act of communication and art of conversation.
Now he was just annoyed. His whole theory had been blown up. The I Pad hussy was engaging in conversation. Urg. I wonder if he will put two and two together and figured out that the real words here are “communication” and “conversation”. I know when it is far more peaceful and communicative to blog on my I Pad than talk to someone who wants to just pick a fight.
What got this guy so riled up besides the fact that he just likes to get riled up? Is it what I was doing or was it that I was there at all? Are women sitting at bars reading stuff the latest in the attack on the male and his kingdoms? Where and when I grew up, women did not go into bars and sit by themselves unless they were there to be picked up, or so I was told. And when I moved to this little town, the women sat with other women if that sat at a bar at all. Rarely did I see a career woman come in and sit alone at the bar. I tried sitting in a booth, but I felt that I was hogging a space made for more. So, after about 8 years or so, I couldn’t stand it any longer and didn’t want to go to the trouble of meeting my husband in town or finding a friend to meet. Besides, my psychological type doesn’t like to plan ahead. And I also wanted to talk to other people and I wanted to write. Didn’t writers often write in cafes? Hemingway and Tennessee Williams did. Couldn’t a woman do that too?
So I did and the first time I marched in and sat in the bar stool, I felt very Meryl-Streep-entering-the- all male-club in “Out of Africa” for the first few months, but then I just ignored the stares and whispers until it just became a normal thing. Only occasionally like this night am I reminded that some people still think I shouldn’t be there and doing what I’m doing.
So maybe that’s it. You go to a bar looking for a fight, chewing the fat, or to pick up women. If you sit at a bar you must be available for anybody and everybody to talk to. You do not go to a bar to read anarchist magazines and write on blogs.
Yes, I had broken some sort of hidden code of conduct. But then that’s what I was put on earth to do.
P.S. David Graeber in “Revolutions in Reverse” says “Women are always imagining what things look like from a male
point of view. Men almost never do the same for women.” Perhaps I should try and get into a guy’s shoes and do this story from his point of view. Or not.
Stop Preaching and Start Talking: “The Lost Art of Argument”
Most USAians think they are super smart. It’s kind of like being sophomores in the history of the world. We think we know everything. We bragged about what our rambunctiousness produced. But now we stopped making stuff and we think that being a weasel is our way out of everything. The new term for this weaselness is disinformation. And now we have retreated into bubbles babbling weasel phrases amongst ourselves in chat rooms.
Rudyard Lynch has a podcast called History 102. Rudyard is wise beyond his 24 years and approaches history from an anthropological angle. I was listening to the latest topic that he discusses with his co-host Austin Padgett. “Explaining the Age of Neo-Liberalism”. They explore the breakdown of society and bemoan the reality that nobody talks to each other anymore. Rudyard makes the observation “If you can’t talk about it, you can’t think about it.” These guys are addressing our current predicament of taking the same “facts” and coming up with two or more competing film stories.
One big reason for these muddled narratives is that we don’t engage in dialogue except amongst people who we agree with rather than at “a town meeting” or cafe or watering hole where one must look neighbors in the face and try to make a point and to try to see their point. The French, on the other hand, have their cafe society. They do their duty as citizens by talking “politics”. (“Politics” is a discussion, not a shouting match, of the way we wish to live our lives and what we enjoy and what gives our lives meaning). The French leave work and go out to a cafe and argue about life and art. They engage in conversation and often use dialectics in search of clues to the mysteries of life. Or at least that’s the way it used to be. When I was in grad school, after play rehearsal we would go to a bar, order pitchers of beer and discuss how we would save the world through art. When I did Off-Off Broadway theater in New York City, we would adjourn to Peter McManus’ Irish pub around the corner from the theater and argue about the choices our characters should make. We loved to look at all the angles and the contradictions.
But somewhere along the line those personal confrontations became fewer and fewer and didn’t seem to translate into our public lives as citizens. Historian Christopher Lasch in his book “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” has a chapter called “The Lost Art of Argument”. In it he writes that “what Democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Yes, we do need information but information that is “generated only by debate.” So, he takes the “information revolution” and turns it on its head. Information in and of itself is worthless without being debated. “Information, usually seen as the pre-condition of debate is better understood as a by-product.”
And how do we gather these clues? By asking questions. We take our ideas and subject them to somebody else’s arguments. If we passionately engage with the eagerness to learn, we may instead of changing somebody else’s mind find that we have changed our mind. So, we must listen carefully and be willing to challenge our own beliefs and to say “Maybe what I believe may be wrong.” How exciting and far less dull than passively taking in information from some newspaper or from so pundit.
Lasch gives a shout out to the social historian Ray Oldenburg’s “The Great Good Place” and with Oldenburg mourns the passing of the local watering hole, the cafe, the hair salon, the soda fountain steps and other places between work and home where conversations used to flourish. These were places like the soda fountain steps where kids listened to their fathers debate a local policy with vigor and good-hearted disagreement. Those places where professions mingled as equals are hard to find in the suburbs, but they still exist in small towns and big cities. I was lucky to spend many years in a small town where wisdom came from caring for cows and not from a book. Democracy dies if we hide in cul-de sacs furtively taking anxiety meds as we peer out of the drawn blinds or retreat to cocktail parties or book clubs where everybody is of the same class and tows the party line “Four legs good. Two legs bad”. So, I suggest this year that you get out and find a Cheers bar in your neighborhood or even better, a Star Wars bar and strike up a conversation with somebody who may see things differently than you do. If you don’t have one of those, then go to the nearest town that has one and adopt it as your own. And for heaven’s sake don’t get your information from a newspaper. You can get your questions there though.
Leave a comment
Posted in Bar Codes, Social Commentary, The Cowgirl Contrarian
Tagged communication, disinformation, Lasch, politics, saloons