Reviews | The Perfect Response

She was stunned that the news that came to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel produced little more than a shrug from other vacationers.

Since it was formed, citizens of the United States have demonstrated that they have diverging ideas about the true animating force of their nation. Is it enough to have a shared interest in maximizing personal freedom? What does it mean when others are indifferent to a national tragedy?

Full citizenship and its protections were withheld from many over most of our history. But even with more enfranchised, it is apparent that a nation that spans a continent contains many differing values that can eclipse shared beliefs. Members of the European Union occupy another wide continental swath with some of the same challenges. Danes and Poles have cultural characteristics that are at least as wide as those separating native Texans from lifelong New Yorkers. Can citizens in so big an expanse still feel like that are part of the same tribe?

A picture of a culture that is more frayed quilt than a tightly-woven blanket came to mind in reading a revealing piece of literary detective work. It described the little-discussed dive into despair of the writer Joan Didion, a trenchant chronicler of American life. She was a leading American cultural critic who had the rare capacity to offer highly readable accounts of destructive forces swirling just beneath the surface calm of the American experience. Didion knew how to use a literary wide-angle lens to capture the national mood, noticing convulsions that others missed. Because she thought in terms of events laid out in oppositional narratives, she shed insight into alternate perceptions that others missed.

As Timothy Denevi notes in a recent piece in the New York Times, Didion and husband John were vacationing in Hawaii in 1968 and about to head into a sudden existential storm. In this unlikely place her natural California cool gave way to real symptoms of physical illness.

The Trigger

The specific event was June 4, the day Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded while leaving Los Angeles campaign appearance. She was stunned that the news penetrating the bubble of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel drew little more than a shrug from other vacationers. How could other Americans not recognize the loss of so temperate a voice while facing the morass of the Vietnam War?

Kennedy was very much a part of her stormy America she chronicled in collections of essays like The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and After Henry. Many saw him as an idealist that might pull the U.S. back from some of the national convulsions in the same year. Martin Luther King has been shot to death in April. Thousands of American servicemen were dying at a rate of 2800 a month in Vietnam. And the once outsized President Lyndon Johnson had slowly shrunk behind a vail of sullenness. He said he would leave after just one term. The “battle of Chicago” between protesters and the army at the Democratic National Convention was still to come a few months later.

It was during a performance in the hotel by singer Don Ho that Didion’s experienced a full realization of nation that had torn loose of its anchors. The singer had just stopped in mid-performance to pass on the breaking news of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, pausing to offer a spontaneous prayer he sung to mark the moment. But others in the room were apparently having none of it, shouting to the singer to “quit the hymns” and jeering his response to the shock. They still wanted the faux Hawaiian spectacle they had paid to see. The experience made her ill. In the aftermath she could not keep food down. But she still had the crystalline insight of a nation at war with itself.

No matter what your political feelings are, if you’re attached to the idea of the nation as a community—if you feel yourself to be part of that community—then obviously something has happened to that community. . . .  It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community.  They came from another America.”

A Warning of Things to Come

We are left to see an obvious pattern. This moment resonates because Didion’s sense of dislocation seems to have become a continuous sensation for many us. Like the shocking loss of a genuine American idealist, the daily conduct of many political figures today asks us to keep reliving the eminent dismemberment of the tribe. We must now experience the feeling that many within the culture occupy “another America:” less tied to the customs and norms that had defined the nation.

Didion died just weeks before the failed January 6 coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election. But in 1968 she already had the insight that the United States would not find its way back to the sturdy narratives Americans used to share. Even then it was clear that a kind of national self-sabotage was becoming the new normal.

Many of us may thoughtlessly intrude in the sonic space of another, using all kinds of sonic disrupters. Others could write extended catalogues of sounds that need to be avoided.

For most of us, sound is redemptive. As with music or a child’s laugh, it often purifies the air of our cluttered world. But when a particular sound triggers instant and disproportionate aggravation in a person, a strong negative reaction may result. The condition is little more than a nuisance for most of us, but the psychological discomfort of what is sometimes labeled misophonia can be very real. In theory, almost any sound can be a trigger. One auditory assault for many were the shrieking strings composer Bernard Hermann built into Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). We can argue about whether it is actually music. But if it was meant to repel, it usually does its job except for the few that have it as a cell phone ring. Play it and cringe.

Acquiring Sound Sensitivity

Those directly affected by offensive sounds may go to great lengths to avoid them in the future. I suspect this is especially true for sound centric individuals who thrive on auditory content such as music or other aural stimulation. As organized sound, music is especially sabotaged by the unorganized dross coming from the spaces and streets of some human habitats. To many of us may thoughtlessly intrude in the sonic space of another for little benefit, using devices that test our patience. As this is written, I’m sheltering from an onslaught of professional lawn mowers who will cut the grass this week so they can do it again to what hasn’t burned out next week.

Misophonia is perhaps best understood as less of a diagnostic category for serious mental illness than a handy label for any noise sensitivity that is seriously disruptive. Industrial engines and lawn mowers, leaf blowers, cement and metal saws, are among the common tools that may send others fleeing an area. But sometimes we are the transmitters of audible noise that, while not so loud, others still find obnoxious. They include obnoxious vocalisms we dread to hear yet again from others. Loud chewing, endless pen-clicking, throat-clearing, or vocal tics can function like aural red flags.

It works out that, in everyday life, the person with certain aural sensitivities is frequently–if accidentally–matched up with a manic producer of them. It can be a signature of a long and ongoing and sometimes testy relationship.

Part of the fun of Neil Simon’s classic play, The Odd Couple (filmed in 1968), is how Felix’s oral tics begin to grate on the laid-back Oscar. Neither of the divorced men sharing an apartment has made a match that is any better than in their failed marriages. And Oscar’s endless throat-clearing provides a ready example. He had an obsessive-compulsive thing going with his sinuses: the kind of annoyance easily recognized by any couple living under the same roof.

We usually don’t set out to annoy another with the aural refuse we spread so freely. Until we do. The intention to annoy is a break from our best selves, usually in the form of passive-aggressive behavior that provokes but can also be denied. Such sonic mischief may involve letting a barking dog loose as “payback” to a complaining neighbor, or perhaps playing a music system extra loud to answer the circus of noise that never ceases next door.

Audio engineer Brett Houston “solved” the problem of lead feet incessantly moving around in the apartment upstairs by putting loudspeakers in the ceiling cavities that he had inadvertently broken through by pounding on the ceiling once too often. In the hole Houston placed a large speaker between the joists and directly under the neighbor’s floor. He then put microphones at different points along the underside of the same floor, routing the sound through an amplifier with a short delay. So there was karma in every instance of aggravating foot noise that came back amplified and delayed. The neighbors eventually moved.

If there are lessons here, one is simple. When purchasing any device that creates a noise, seek information on the decibel level it produces when on. OSHA considers noise pollution a significant health risk, and the primary cause of why most teens have the diminished hearing acuity of their grandparents. If the manufacturer is ashamed of the racket or excluded from having to disclose the decibel level, they will omit the measurement. One example; Honda makes some home generators that are quiet and a bit more expensive. Most other manufacturers of home units have lower prices but higher sound levels.

The Perfect Response

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Category Archives: Reviews

“They Came from Another America”

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