Pond Scum
By Steve Finbow
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On a chair in the middle of a room stands a woman. The woman is naked. She begins to dance. A bare bulb above her head is the only light in the room. Slouching around the edges of the room, spaced out so as not to touch each other, are twenty men dressed in raincoats. Underneath the raincoats, the men wear various national costumes. The woman cannot see these men. The woman dances in time to the slow jazz playing. The woman is not at all self-conscious. The woman is of indeterminate race. As they watch the woman dancing, the men touch themselves. Although the dance is rhythmic, it is not overly provocative, not overly erotic, yet the men become sexually excited. Maybe it is the nakedness. Maybe it is the sleaze. After about five minutes, there is the sound of low yelps of pleasure and exhaustion. After ten minutes, the noise is of the rustle of handkerchiefs, the scrabble for trousers, and the whoosh of zips. The woman stops dancing. The lights come up. The woman stares at the men. It is high on her right forehead where the first egg strikes, the second strikes below the naval. The woman looks forward at a point in the room no one else can see. Her body, covered in eggs and eggshells, tomatoes and banana skins, beer and saliva, trembles as it settles, like an engine cooling. A few half-smoked cigarettes bounce off her, the animal eyes of their coals expiring on the sodden floor. The woman does not attempt to cover herself. I, unseen by her and by the men – and by you, dear reader – step forward. I reach up and help her down from the chair. I ask her name. She looks at me, her eyes tearful yet sparkling with pride, "America," she says.
"Oh, come on," I bet you’re thinking. That’s a little melodramatic. Well, yeah, guy, of course. That’s what it’s all about these days – melodrama – the simple conflict between good and evil, emotionally exaggerated, excessively sentimental, and implausibly sensational, and with a happy ending to boot. However, I think there is another side to melodrama, the melodrama not of television soaps or airport novels but of "literature," of "politics," and I think it is more of an American trait than a British one. Do you want to know what I think melodrama is? Well, it is being frank; being honest. Telling it like it is, no matter how mawkish, how violent, and how black and white. It is like this, mate. Yes or no. I am telling this story. In melodrama, personal horror illuminates government obfuscation. State violence is seen for what it is only when it touches the individual. It is the metaphoric link between the melodramatic and the politic that America does so well yet, inevitably, gets so wrong. It is the Iraqis, hooded, naked, tortured, and sexually abused by our American milk-and-cookies next-door neighbours at Abu Ghraib, who have become the oppressed heroes of this melodrama. America, by fault, has turned itself from the hero into the moustache-twiddling evil landlord it set out to confront and overcome. The invasion of Iraq has turned into pure Gothic melodrama. Iraq, like so many airport novels, is thick with plot, yet has very little in the way of characterization. Good/Evil. Right/Wrong. USA/The World. Melodrama and the future of the American nation are ‘dramas and contrivances of God's providence’ – Sharp – but only as America would have us believe.
Let us look back at my first paragraph. The prostitute/dancer (America) dances on a chair under a bare light (the media) watched by men in raincoats (the rest of the world), they masturbate (leisure/stimulation, consumer society/simulation), and then begin to abuse the dancer (guilt/truth). This is not how I think of America. I think this is how America thinks of America. If America lost its cherry in Vietnam, America is now selling itself on the street. America is wearing cheap make-up, America’s pantyhose have runs, and there are sweat stains under the arms of America’s red, white, and blue sequined top. The cars are driving by and no-one's stopping. No one is buying, babe. No one wants to spare his or her dollars.
In American politics, in American wars, in American literature, in American song, there is an insistence on the extravagance of emotion. That is why the (old) world has a problematic relationship with America. America puts itself out there in the open, for all to see, for all to admire, for all to masturbate over and the result of this is envy, then guilt, then embarrassment, and then piss-boiling hilarity that we ever took America seriously in the first place. Yet America continues to seduce us with its youth, its exuberance, and its give-it-a-go attitude; and in the face of this, the old world smiles, pays it lip and hip service and remains old, laconic, and reticent. I mean, check out that semi-colon.
Whatever America does, whatever way America does it, will be good for America, will feel good in the short term. America is still mapping out its A-Zs, its mandalas, constructing its horoscopes, and Britain has folded its once pink-stained map back into its tweed jacket pocket and is ready to make America the navigator of the future. Trouble is, America doesn’t know where it’s going, and we are bloody following. But that's what the British enjoy about America – we like watching you fail. We want to laugh at your naïveté while admiring your spunk (as they say). “Westward the course of empire takes its way; the four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last” (– Berkeley).
We will join in, if given the chance. We will copy your food, your clothes, your music, and your art. We will copy your literature. The ‘maximalist’ novels of Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith are called ‘post-colonial’ but aren't they ‘new-empire’? Aren’t Smith, Rushdie, and even Martin Amis, novelists of the new sound and glory, the fame and fury that are American by nature? We have our stand-ins in literature. But forget culture (as a lot of Brits think that’s just what you have done), we are also your stand-ins in the “drama of war” (– Thackeray).
Is that how it is? Is it “meladrama” (melas = black) rather than melodrama? Is America heading for darkness? Is darkness already here? Has America reached that point? Where pastoral dreams have turned into urban nightmares – see Milton. From the forests of New England to the streets of Baghdad; from dumping tea in Boston Harbor to clamping electrodes on Iraqi gonads. Is terror a universal response to impotency? Is torture a universal prerequisite of power?
I have lived in London and I have lived in New York. I find the differences between people I know in these cities minimal. But from this side of the pond, America seems to be enacting some sort of psychological revenge on the world, as if guilt for its past and its parents' past is bubbling up inside. Watching America from this side of the pond is like spying through a keyhole on a therapy session. Watching America from this side of the pond is like watching Oprah or Jerry 24/7. America wants a happy ending, not just to the Iraq situation, but every day, every hour, every minute, no matter how artificial. Under melodrama – see sentimentality, see burlesque, see farce.
And how do I see America? I could argue that the British are a calmer people (mellowdramatic?) – phlegmatic rather than phlogistic. Just look at the difference between the criticism of James Wood and that of Dale Peck.
Again, I ask, how do I see America? Me, personally? What is my angle? Where am I coming from? Do I have another vision, one that differs from the melodramatic? Why, yes. It goes like this. I'm looking through the biggest telescope in the world and it is looking through the second biggest telescope in the world and it is looking through the third biggest telescope in the world and so on, and through this mechanical snake-like magnifying contraption thingamajig, I can see a world very similar to our own, and it is pivoted so I can make out an outline of a continent that resembles North America, and on that continent is a country that looks like the USA, and that country is all lit up in neon lights, and, as I adjust the telescope apertures, I can see that the millions of neon lights are in fact cloned and shining Marilyn Monroe-shaped Tinkerbells waving their tiny wands in my direction. Trouble is, from where I’m standing, those wands look like guns.
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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel. (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
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2004 Me Three