In this era of taboo-smashing, writer Michael Ventura--known for
his searingessays on everything from our culture of money to the vagaries
of romantic love--tells us why America is still, deep down, a country of
taboos, where we live our lives by what we cannot say, do, or
admit.
TABOOS COME IN ALL SIZES. Big taboos: when I was a kid in the
Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, to insult someone's mother meant a
brutal fight--the kind of fight no one interferes with until one of the
combatants goes down and stays down. Little taboos: until the sixties, it
was an insult to use someone's first name without asking or being offered
permission. Personal taboos: Cyrano de Bergerac would not tolerate the
mention of his enormous nose. Taboos peculiar to one city: in Brooklyn
(again), when the Dodgers were still at Ebbets Field, if you rooted for
the Yankees you kept it to yourself unless you wanted a brawl. Taboos,
big or small, are always about having to respect somebody's (often
irrational) boundary--or else.
There are taboos shared within one family: my father did not feel
free to speak to us of his grandmother's suicide until his father died.
Taboos within intellectual elites: try putting a serious metaphysical or
spiritual slant on a "think-piece" (as we call them in the trade) written
for the New York Times, the Washington Post, or most big name
magazines--it won't be printed. Taboos in the corporate and legal worlds:
if you're male, you had best wear suits of somber colors, or you're not
likely to be taken seriously; if you're female, you have to strike a very
uneasy balance between the attractive and the prim, and even then you
might not be taken seriously. Cultural taboos: in the Jim Crow days in
the South, a black man who spoke with familiarity to a white woman might
be beaten, driven out of town, or (as was not uncommon) lynched.
Unclassifiable taboos: in Afghanistan, as I write this, it is a
sin--punishable by beatings and imprisonment--to fly a kite. Sexual
taboos: there are few communities on this planet where two men can walk
down a street holding hands without being harassed or even arrested; in
Afghanistan (a great place for taboos these days) the Taliban would stone
them to death. Gender taboos: how many American corporations (or
institutions of any kind) promote women to power? National taboos: until
the seventies, a divorced person could not run for major public office in
America (it wasn't until 1981 that our first and only divorced president,
Ronald Reagan, took office); today, no professed atheist would dare try
for the presidency. And most readers of this article probably approve, as
I do, of this comparatively recent taboo: even the most rabid bigot must
avoid saying "rigger," "spic," or "kike" during, say, a job
interview--and the most macho sexist must avoid words like
"broad."
Notice that nearly all of our taboos, big and small, public and
intimate, involve silence--keeping one's silence, or paying a price for
not keeping it. Yet keeping silent has its own price: for then silence
begins to fill the heart, until silence becomes the heart--a heart
swelling with restraint until it bursts in frustration, anger, even
madness.
The taboos hardest on the soul are those which fester in our
intimacies--taboos known only to the people involved, taboos that can
make us feel alone even with those to whom we're closest. One of the deep
pains of marriage--one that also plagues brothers and sisters, parents
and children, even close friends--is that as we grow more intimate,
certain silences often become more necessary. We discover taboo areas,
both in ourselves and in the other, that cannot be transgressed without
paying an awful price. If we speak of them, we may endanger the
relationship; but if we do not speak, if we do not violate the taboo, the
relationship may become static and tense, until the silence takes on a
life of its own. Such silences are corrosive. They eat at the innards of
intimacy until, often, the silence itself causes the very rupture or
break-up that we've tried to avoid by keeping silent.
THE CANNIBAL IN US ALL
You may measure how many taboos constrict you, how many taboos
you've surrendered to--at home at parties, at work, with your lover or
your family--by how much of yourself you must suppress. You may measure
your life, in these realms, by what you cannot say, do, admit--cannot and
must not, and for no better reason than that your actions or words would
disrupt your established order. By this measure, most of us are living
within as complex and strictured a system of taboos as the aborigines who
gave us the word in the first place. You can see how fitting it is that
the word "taboo" comes from a part of the world where cannibalism is said
to be practiced to this day: the islands off eastern
Australia--Polynesia, New Zealand, Melanesia. Until 1777, when Captain
James Cook published an account of his first world voyage, Europe and
colonial America had many taboos but no word that precisely meant taboo.
Cook introduced this useful word to the West. Its instant popularity,
quick assimilation into most European languages, and constant usage
since, are testimony to how much of our lives the word describes. Before
the word came to us, we'd ostracized, coerced, exiled, tormented, and
murdered each other for myriad infractions (as we still do), but we never
had a satisfying, precise word for our reasons.
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