COLONIAL THEME PARKS

[This piece has nothing to do with the purported theme of the blog, but it's summer and Massachusetts is awash in colonial tourism. JB]

We Americans love our mythic history more than our actual history.  This is understandable since real history is ambiguous and unpleasant while national myths are reassuring and optimistic.  They are feel-good fantasies promulgated to boost civic pride and, like all myths ancient and modern, give insight into the national character without necessarily being true..  I have nothing against these myths provided that they are not passed off as actual history and more importantly, are not incarnated in "historical" recreation villages.

Perhaps it's insecurity about our country's short lifespan that makes us yearn for some theatrical embodiment of an idealized past.  Neapolitans have yet to set up Ye Olde Volcano Village amid the Vesuvian ruins to reenact the natural disasters of first-century Rome.  They take pride in the actual Pompeii and Herculaneum and constantly debate the trade-offs of restoration, conservation, and tourism.  They prefer displaying the rock-encased bodies of the original inhabitants to having toga-clad actors run from imaginary showers of ash.  Americans, in contrast, will travel hundreds of miles to watch a bonneted high school girl churn butter just off Exit 9 of the Mass. Turnpike.

Old Sturbridge Village and Plimoth Plantation are two very big attractions on the East Coast colonial circuit.  To be fair, these sites do have historical roots, and Sturbridge Village does have many buildings and artifacts that date back to the time frame they try to reanimate.  The activities, crafts, and costumes are said to be accurate, and I don't question their scholarship.  It's what isn't shown that bothers me.

Where, for example, are the recreations of 17th century surgery?  As a grade school student, I went on several field trips to these places, and I don't recall a single exhibit where a leg was amputated without anesthesia and cauterized with a hot iron.  I don't remember hearing the blood-curdling screams that must have been common while undergoing the dentistry of yore.  The staff may dress appropriately, but I bet they bathe more often than their colonial counterparts did.  The smell of Mennen Speed Stick gives lie to the reality of Puritan-era hygiene.

If the goal is to give the visitor a real feel for colonial life, forget about candle-making and weaving classes.  Hook them up to an ox-drawn plow and let them break up rocky fields for twelve hours.

By ignoring the more distasteful elements, these sites minimize the actual hardships undergone by our American ancestors - well, perhaps your American ancestors as mine didn't arrive from Latvia until 1904.   That they survived and prospered is a testament to their strength and resolve, and it is a disservice to their difficult and dangerous lives to pretend they can be encapsulated in theatrical displays, 9 AM to 5 PM, March through November.  What about winter?  My understanding is that winters were particularly hard on these folks.  Perhaps a group of actors wearing insufficient period garb could demonstrate starving and freezing to death using a walk-in refrigerator.

I don't want to be overly disingenuous about these places - they are first and foremost tourist sites with their own hardships, primarily economic.  I know that they have to provide all the modern amenities to attract visitors and must balance authenticity with user-friendliness.  This might explain the "Plimoth Cinema," an indie art house on the Plimoth Plantation site.  Because when I think of colonial America, the first thing that pops into my mind is Jean-Luc Godard.

MOTIVATION II

About three or four weeks into a diet, the early withdrawal symptoms diminish or disappear.  This means I no longer have a handy excuse for my innate irritability.

At this stage, if you are a confident, well-balanced person, you’re well on your way to happiness and better health.  I don’t know who you are, but Godspeed.  For the rest of us, there is a shift from physical to psychological hunger.  Nutritional piety has lost its power, and the reinforcement of others, the “Gee, you’ve lost weight” effect hasn’t yet arrived.  We are in a whole new phase of the conflict.

The cause is simple.  You can accustom your body to smaller quantities of better food, use your brain to justify it, and canonize yourself for the effort, but as you do, your id will grow more insistent in its primal mantra: “Eat as much as you want, of whatever you want, whenever you want it.” 

The id, or as I like to call him, “The Little Chazzer1,” is the loudest and most belligerent of Freud’s mental triumvirate.  Until you decided to diet, he was in control of your eating.  Now he’s engaged in ruthless combat with your rational self-interest (the ego) and the demands and expectations of our weight-crazed society (the superego, or as I like to call her, “The Stern Governess.”) 

The Chazzer may be trouble, but he also makes life exciting.  And what do we do?  We spend our lives beating him down him.  Everything from toilet training to obeying traffic lights is an effort to suppress his madcap sense of fun.  I’m not opposed to restraint, mind you; society can’t function if its citizens are governed solely by their unbridled desires.  But loading another set of restrictions onto our already over-regulated and and over-scheduled lives seems criminally repressive.   It also infuriates the Chazzer and makes his demands more insistent.  This conflict is the root of our angst.

Not bad for a guy who barely passed Psych 1, eh?

To maintain any diet, a way must be found to mollify the Chazzer.  If he can’t eat whatever he wants, he must be offered something else to divert his single-mindedness and harness his boundless energy.  In short, you’ve got to find him a hobby.

That used to be easy.  Cigarettes.

Please understand that I am not endorsing the use of tobacco.  I myself have not smoked a cigarette since January of 1972, when a bout of bronchitis broke its magic spell.  But in college, I smoked, and while I smoked, I was fanatic.  After a shaky start learning the basics, mainly how not to puke, I embraced cigarettes with utter zeal, accelerating from 0 to 40 faster than a top-fuel dragster.  And it wasn’t just for show; I inhaled…deeply, all the way to my toes.

Not that I was immune to their stylish allure.  During the ‘60s, many of us who reveled in the social freedom, political tumult, and “mind expansion,” of hippiedom, were put off by its treacly, feel-good philosophy.  For us, there was the iconic Bogey, world-weary and cynical, with Ingrid Bergman or Lauren Bacall on his arm and a cigarette dangling from his lips.  Never mind that we looked ridiculous in snap-brim fedoras and bell-bottoms, our eyes burning from Camel smoke; we were, at least in our own minds, cool.

And thin.  Bolstered by faux-panache and nicotine, I smoked more and ate less.  Gradually, cigarettes surpassed, and then replaced food as my emotional tranquilizer.  I puffed for serenity and ate for sustenance.  The pounds came off.  It was the perfect balance - provided, of course, you ignored the bit about diseased lungs.

I'm not bitter that I gave up smoking and with it, my last neutral relationship with eating.  Had I kept going, I wouldn't be able to tie my shoe without a two-week stay at Mass. General.  But not a year has gone by since I quit that I haven't had two or three guilt-ridden dreams about smoking.  And if the Surgeon General were to reverse himself tomorrow and announce that smoking isn't bad for your health, I'd be up to two packs by noon.

So, no id-appeasement from RJ Reynolds.  Then what?

Some diet experts advise a system of rewards as weight loss goals are met.  Among the most common suggestions are mini-vacations, such as a weekend in New York, and new clothes for your increasingly svelte physique.  While sensible on the surface, this approach is fraught with potential disaster.

A weekend in New York?  In case the proponents of this approach hadn’t noticed, NYC is not only known for its theater and museums, but for its restaurants as well.  There are thousands of them serving an unimaginable variety of food, and they are located prominently on every block beckoning the unwary with their siren charms.  There are also battalions of food carts, the street whores of food desire.  Once, in one of my more depraved moments, I ate a Sabrett hot dog at every ten-block interval up 5th Avenue.  There is simply no way to avoid temptation in this city.  Do you really want to test your resolve against the best hand-cut pastrami in the world?

More insidious but equally disastrous is the idea of new clothes as a reward.  Initial joy at fitting into slimmer duds can turn quickly to despair when they bulge from even slight fluctuations in weight.  If perchance you have a small lapse in your diet, they become an uncomfortable and very public reminder of your pitiful weakness.  Living under the tyranny of the scale is bad enough, but at least you don’t have to wear the damned thing. 

As your diet progresses, more, and bigger rewards will be needed to achieve the same level of motivation.   What started with small vacations and clothes can quickly become sports cars and yachts.  Basically, you’re soothing your food addiction by becoming a reward junkie.  As your waistline shrinks, so will your wallet, and though you may be thin, you might also be on welfare.

There is a deeper problem with this system.  If you’re going to reward yourself when you’re successful, it follows that you should punish yourself when you’re not.  The logic is simple; ten pounds down gets you a weekend in New York, ten pounds up earns the same in solitary.

“C’mon warden, give a guy a break.  I was starvin’.”

“I’m sorry, Louie, you know the rules.  That piece of danish just cost you a deuce in the hole.”

What’s next? Law & Order: Weight Watchers Unit?

The simple fact is that diets are not fun, and any strategy designed to hide that fact is doomed to fail.  If you are the stoic sort, you’ll be able to live with this.  If not, you can whine, complain, swear, make yourself and everyone around you miserable, but don’t pretend that this process is anything but an unpleasant system of denial.

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1 Yiddish for pig or glutton.