The following is an excerpt from Douglas Coupland's Polaroids From The Dead, a collection of essays and short stories and one of my all-around favorite books. The pieces focus on all sorts of topics, from Grateful Dead concerts to bridges to Kurt Cobain, among others. This excerpt is from the essay "Washington D.C.: Four Microstories, Super Tuesday 1992".

Our Capacity For Amnesia Is Terrifying


Juanita has left the TV news office early this afternoon bored with manufactured news about manufactured candidates. It's spring! She wants to spend part of the day playing tacky tourist - walking the Washington Mall and inspecting the monuments. And she does so to the interior soundtrack of her mother's ambitious Spanish voice always urging her to push, to advance herself, to make sure Juanita doesn't end up as she did. This spice of guilt enhances the stolen afternoon. Juanita removes her blazer and drapes it over her shoulder.

Such a country. Juanita remembers first arriving here at age eight, suffocating underneath a trailerload of red bell peppers crossing the Arizona border at Nogales. She remembers later that same day eating a lemon Popsicle in a drugstore and seeing a woman with a blond beehive wig and an A-line dress stroll down the store's clean quiet aisles. She remembers purebred dogs and racks of dolls and signs selling cocktails. She remembers a gang of skateboarders outside the mall who taught her her first English word, which was "cool."

Even then she was surprised at the effortlessness of her new citizenship, which required only a dash of enthusiasm and the act of simply being there. And she has never forgotten this simplicity - and the calm abundance that nourishes its roots - the air conditioning, an aisle of pet food, the cool blonde.

Two decades and a Stanford MBA later, Juanita watches joggers pass the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. She catches fragments of what the joggers are saying - the usual: "What's wrong with the country is the way people don't really care." Blah blah blah.

As a news anchor, Juanita can't help but notice slightly more of this chatter about some type of national malaise floating about the air. Perhaps every election year is like this. And, being in TV, Juanita knows that certain people have much to gain by propagating such negative discussion.

But yet Juanita detects something else surfacing in people's discussions these days - a worry that something unnameable yet valuable is being forgotten - a knowledge of the formula for the invisibly glue that holds the nation together, that keeps the nation from shattering apart.

This glue - what is its recipe? The songs we sang as children? The pictures of founding fathers that adorned our classroom walls? The need to buy and sell real estate? Florida holidays? Campbell's soup? Mobile homes? It is as though the nation feels itself to be on the brink of some mass amnesia and is frightened by this very capacity for forgetfulness.

But this discussion tens to be overly intellectualized for Juanita. She just cannot feel the loss her fellow citizens seem to be feeling. She has felt American from the moment she bit into that lemon Popsicle in Nogales and she wonders how it is that such an easy and wonderful sensation as US citizenship can be so simply forgotten - like forgetting your sex.

She walks over the grass, still unmown so early in the year, over to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to the black marble V carved into the lawn. Clichéd but true how one can live in a city for years and never see those things that even the most transient of tourists will see.

Juanita admires the Vietnam monument's simplicity and joins the lines of people walking back and forth across its face. She tunes out the buzz, which may or may not be people recognizing her face from the News at Six. She stopped noticing that long ago. Instead she focuses on the names carved in marble - American names like those of the boys at Stanford, Chris and Donald and Scott and Norman. She traces out some of the letters with her precisely manicured and varnished nails. At her feet lie bouquets of roses, offerings of unfired fireworks and never-to-be-opened small parcels wrapped in American flags.

A hand taps her shoulder. Juanita turns around to meet an elderly woman wearing tan slacks, her hair in curlers under a red scarf. She is carrying a small bundle of blue carnations. She says to Juanita, "I know you. You're the TV lady."

Juanita says, "Hello," nods politely, and returns her gaze to the black marble. But the woman taps her again and says, "I want you to have a flower, TV lady." And so Juanita accepts a flower from the woman, who is then clasped around the shoulders by a younger woman, visibly her daughter, who makes apologies to Juanita with her eyebrows. After a moment the daughter steers her mother farther down along the monument's face.

Juanita watches the pair, and quietly moves down the slight slope toward them, to the apex of the monument's V. There, Juanita sees the older woman touching the stone with her hands, no doubt rubbing the name of her son carved there. Moved, Juanita ambles closer, whereupon she hears the daughter say, "Mom - stop playing with your reflection. David's name is up here. Mom - David's name is up here."

"Oh," says the older woman. "Who's David?"




Doug.
From Polaroids From The Dead, written by Douglas Coupland.
(c)1996 by Regan Books/Harper Perennial


Note to anybody from Harper Perennial who comes across this page: please realize that I am not making any money off of this page (nor do I expect to), so please don't get your shorts into a knot about it being here. It's just here cause I'm a fan (I bought the book, and several others, anyway), and I want to spread the word so more people will want to read our friend Doug's stuff. If nothing else, just think of it as free advertising. :)