Misanthrope's Corner - ethnic relations: changing attitudes - Brief Article

Did I ever tell you about the time I was shocked, shocked, by unabashed bigotry? It happened when I lived in Seattle. The Arab oil embargo was on, and between that and Seattle's steep hills, I decided it was time to forego the convenience of an automatic and learn how to shift gears.

I called a driving school, made an appointment, and waited outside my building for the instructor. When he pulled up and I started walking toward his car, I noticed that he was staring at me with an expression of curiosity mingled with relief. I found out why when I introduced myself.

"The secretary must have got your name wrong. I've got you down as Miss Ling," he laughed, tapping his clipboard. "Whew! I thought you were a slant!"

Having attended racially segregated public schools that classified Asians as white, I was understandably fascinated. Needing no encouragement to expound his views, he explained that all Asians were terrible drivers, but some were more terrible than others. Filipinos were the worst because they were the smallest, and being Catholic, kept taking one hand off the wheel to bless themselves. The Japanese were in the middle ("Ah-so-so. Get it? Ah-so . . . so-so!"). The best, if you could call it that, were the Chinese and Koreans, who were terrible drivers too, but at least they were tall enough to reach the pedals.

"Last slant I had put us both in the hospital," he assured me.

After a couple of lessons I was able to shift gears at quiet residential crossings with no trouble. Encouraged by my progress, the instructor decided to show me how to do something that Seattle drivers took great pride in. I forget what he called it, but it meant holding the car on a hill without touching the brake by alternating gas and clutch in precisely coordinated feedings. It was, he said reverently, the sign of an expert driver.

That was the day I rolled backwards down Queen Anne Hill and plowed into a van that turned out to be the Bloodmobile. The inscrutable F. Ling strikes again.

We've come a long way since 1974. Back then, whites could still assume it was safe to say such things to each other. If you picked the wrong person to sound off to, you were merely diagnosed as "simplistic" -- a condition of pre-bigotry something like HIV -- and dismissed with an earnest little sermonette or a supercilious sniff. Nowadays, however, my instructor would automatically assume that the white stranger beside him was an avenging angel of diversity tuned to a perpetual frequency of High Snitch. He would know that one little "hate speech" is all it would take to get fired, sued, and condemned to wander through the secular purgatory of community service while the talk shows debated his status as Satan Incarnate.

Actually, the perfect place for him would be radio. Whenever I think of him, I remember those regular stock characters who used to wander in and out of the Jack Benny and Fred Allen shows of the 1940s, saying outrageous things in comical ways, setting up situations, and being so predictable that we listeners could supply the dialogue ourselves. We had only to hear their signature lines ("Pardon me for talking in your face, senorita") to know what was coming next, and millions of us in living rooms across America recited it right on cue. If the golden age of radio could create "Digger O'Dell, the Friendly Undertaker," it could have immortalized a terrified driving teacher. I can hear it now: a wrong turn into Chinatown in the middle of a tong war, somebody saying "Chop-chop" at a bad time, a mix-up involving "Confucius say" and a traffic cop named Cornelius O'Shea. The possibilities were endless back when our Great Diversity really was a gorgeous mosaic, but MultiCulties have crammed comedy into the narrow end of a funnel: When everybody's got a right to be Top Banana, there's no room left for fall guys.

Maybe it's because I remember old-time radio, or maybe it's because I was raised by people who remembered vaudeville, but I relish ethnic humor, the more slapstick the better. One of my favorite parlor games is giving titles to those novelty books the size of sugar cubes: Who's Who of Irish Libertines . . . Great English Chefs . . . An Unabridged History of the Presbyterian Church of Spain. Another is answering the question, "How to Avoid Getting Run Over When Crossing the Street in Foreign Countries":

Italy: Take a pregnant woman with you.

Germany: Take a soldier with you.

France: Take an intellectual with you.

England: Take a dog.

I also relish the unconscious ethnic humor of MultiCulties, as when they slip up and say, "Americans of all nationalities." They do their best pratfalls with an ingrained pre-political correctness phrase they can't avoid, which juts out of their rosy scenarios like a blurb for a disaster movie: "white flight." And their best punchline is the knee- jerk commitment made not just by politicians but by everyone with a public role, however minor: PTA presidents, directors of recreation centers, student-exchange guides, and ladies' garden clubs all promise to "end racism."