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Everybody Knows

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I’m reading the Mexican writer Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, who is a Mexican ultra-nationalist. Detests the US. Adores Mexico. Yet he dedicates several pages of his book The Tyranny of Ideas to describing how Mexicans are congenitally incapable to embark and disembark from a plane without trampling over the heads of everyone else.

Only in the US is it treated like a heresy to point out that patient, polite, orderly lines exist only in a small number of cultures. Everybody else stampedes over others like a herd of hungry buffalo.

5 responses to “Everybody Knows”

  1. bluebird of bitterness Avatar
    bluebird of bitterness

    I wonder why this is?

    (That was sincere, not snark.)

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    East Asian cultures have orderly queuing, but then we knock them for overconformity and lack of independence and originality 😉

    I suspect this is why all my VN acquaintances are so gung-ho about dance lessons. Not dance lessons like in the US, where you learn ballet or tap or tango or something. A style of dance. No, the kids are *constantly* rehearsing for whatever the next carefully-choreographed public pageant thing is at church or school. I’ve attended a couple of them (memorably, for Tet), and they’re just as awful as dance recitals back home, but with louder music. Why do we all torture children like this?

    For them, I think, it’s a big part of learning the quick, tidy, precise, unthinking choreography of completely everyday things like lining up for communion, getting on and off of trains, and driving motorbikes on insanely crowded streets: everybody has to be good at moving together, or you instantly get a traffic jam. I’m pretty sure participation is voluntary, but *every* kid in the town participates. Even the clumsy ones.

    Somehow, doing this a zillion times:

    Results in this crazy miracle:

    -ethyl

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The traffic video is insane. A better expression of cultural difference couldn’t be found. I am whatever is not that. My brain works differently.

      Which doesn’t mean I want that model of being to be eradicated. Absolutely not. It’s beautiful in its own way. And should exist in its own place.

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        I was in complete awe of it when I was there. No traffic lights or signs or speed limits or anything: massive densely-populated city, and somehow it just… works. Cooperative chaos. Nobody runs over anybody, nobody dies, and traffic almost never comes to a halt. I see more traffic accidents here in a day than I saw the entire time I was in VN. It’s remarkably safe.

        I could probably never adapt to it enough to drive: I suspect you have to acclimate to it from childhood and it seems extremely high-cognitive-demand. But I did learn how to cross the street by myself, which is one of those wild leap-of-faith things. You wait until there are no buses, and then just sail out into the road and whatever you do *keep going*. The xe-mo-to will go around you, as long as you’re predictable. Hello 100 strangers on motorbikes: my life is in your hands. Thanks ever so much for not making me flat.

        From what I hear, it’s kind of the opposite side of the square from Germany: German roads, and German drivers, are very orderly and rule-following. It works because everybody knows the law and everybody follows it, rigidly. In VN there is no rule-book, but there are… customs. They are not rigid. It works because everybody keeps track of the vehicles around them, nobody goes too fast, and *everybody yields nimbly* — you have to be flexible to have motorbikes, bicycles, pushcarts, oxcarts, cars, and tour buses all sharing the same badly-paved road. The beep-beep-beep in the videos is not aggressive, it’s how drivers signal that they are coming up behind you, and are about to pass.

        -ethyl

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  3. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    OT: Foreign agents Bari Weiss and Larry Ellison are a bigger threat to democracy than a thousand Candace Owens.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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