I’m part Pilgrim on my dad’s side: this one goes out to my readers who are dogs
“Does the name Hans Gruber mean anything to you?” — this line, this character has followed me since the debut of the maybe-Christmas, definitely-violent, certainly-stupid 1988 film Die Hard in which Alan Rickman plays a German . . . corporate terrorist? . . . named “Hans Gruber” who ruins Christmas for Bruce Willis by blowing up a mall.
The storyline is something like this. I think.
I don’t exactly remember.
What I do remember is that as a kid, in the 1980s and early-90s, most of my Gen-X peers knew only one other “Gruber” before me: the fictional Hans Gruber, a German businessman-come-terrorist (?).
The Hans Gruber to whom I am, in fact, related — and whose name does, sort of mean something to me — was a man whose surname probably reflected the work that he did which in turn informed the place where he lived. He was alive when the most “technologically advanced” weapon on Earth was a musket . . .
This is my theory, anyway, based on some novice genealogy sleuthing conducted on Christmas Day 2021 when I was home sick, and keeping myself out of the “gen pop.”
The name “Gruber” doesn’t even figure into my family lines until the 1700s and my current working theory is that the name came about as a result of capitalist belief systems taking firm root, belief systems such as “you are what you do” . . . the essential caveat (in Capitalist transactions all caveats are “essential”) you are only what you do in so far as what you do might (or in fact does) benefit the capitalist machines — literal or proverbial.
Is there such a thing as “bi” when it comes to political affiliation? Can you be a little Capitalist and a little Communist? We have endless acronyms and names and language to attempt to describe the experience of living outside Western gender norms, outside of Western sexual norms, but virtually no language to describe those who exist outside of American political norms. I’ve currently got three books I’m bouncing between (ADD, I swear to God), and all of them have me thinking about the experience of being philosophically, politically, spiritually “unmoored” from what appears to be the majority of your society, your peers, and how we have almost no language (yet) to describe this (I assume common) American condition. Like most days, when I bother to check in with national news, both the Republicans and Democrats have me thinking “Huh? Wha? Pffft.” This is not to say in America the two parties are equally horrendous. The Republican Party in the US has become a Fascist freakshow on par with something creative writing professors might have told you or I, in the 1990s, was “too far flung” to be believable — even in fiction. The Democrats are not just not there . . . yet.
Home sick (not necessarily “homesick” — though I was a bit that, too) during a pandemic on Christmas Day like Tiny Tim or some shit, I found myself wondering how Hans Gruber, who was born in rural Germany and died in probably more rural Pennsylvania hundreds of years prior to the advent of motor travel, understood his own communal responsibility not to get other people sick, and having found her records, I wondered how often my 12th-great-grandmother, who lived to be 85 in the 1600s, in the fucking Plymouth Bay Colony, thought of germs or how she understood disease.
Like how do you live to be 85 in Massachusetts in the 1600s without knowing just a little something about how to care for yourself? She had to have known something essential that I do not know.
There are too many “first cousin” marriages hanging from my tree. As far as I’m concerned, one “first cousin marriage” is way too close-for-comfort, but my British fore-bearers were, apparently, comfortable with the practice. Gross, but I’m trying to keep compassion toward my ancestors because their decisions — however calculated or random — resulted in my having the unlikely opportunity to have a go at this life, in this world, at this time.
And most days, as a woman with stage iv cancer in a pandemic, I am glad that I am not having stage iv cancer in a pandemic during my 12th great grandmother’s time because I would have been dead . . . well, probably I would have been dead long before I lived long enough to develop cancer.
I had Scarlet Fever as a child. In the 1980s. Not the 1880s. Or the 1780s. Or else I would be dead now.
I would have died during my childhood had I been born at any other time or in any other place than the time and place of my birth.
I would not have had an opportunity to experience life probably beyond seven years of age.
That’s roughly 38 extra years I have been granted as a result of the decisions of my ancestors.
Not one decision by one ancestor, though it is fun (sometimes) to want to see history this way, but an accretion of decisions made by multiple ancestors over vast stretches of time, decisions I will never know anything about because they pre-date recorded history.
And the same is true for you and your ancestors, reader.
What I’m trying to tell you, reader, is that I might be part Pilgrim on my pa’s side. Wild, drunken pilgrim, and probably not even capital-P-pilgrim but instead captial-S-Stranger. There is no evidence my ancestors were devoutly religious, idealistic folks. On the contrary, it seems they were a scrappy lot who wanted to make some money in the “New World.” The entire journey for my ancestors, as far as I can tell, was about material comfort and gain and had nothing to do with God.
As I told a friend, yesterday, in the past, I was looking to my ancestry to figure out what “my problem” is — i.e. find out where I can trace “it” all back to, where I can logically, formulaically, scientifically “pin” all the blame of my many failings. And, damnit, reader — there is no such person on most of our family lines upon whom we can foist the burden of our shortcomings. Unless, maybe, you were related to Hitler. Like, I worry about being related to a Confederate soldier, but can you imagine the psychic trauma of finding out you were directly related to Hitler? Are counseling services available to people who might have this happen to them? Is that in the fine print of the Ancestry.com user agreement? Ancestry assumes no responsibility for emotional distress caused by discovering you are a direct descendant of Adolph Hitler . . .
Anyway. I am not looking at my ancestry to “place blame” anymore, though I can’t help but notice the pattern of alcohol “issues” among my ancestors that reach back to, and probably before, Plymouth Bay. I’m not looking, though, for “problems” per se. Problems are endemic to the human experience. Problems are common — what’s interesting, what’s unique, what’s catching-to-my-eye, right now, is not the problems my ancestors had but how they survived lives that were full of problems I cannot, as a 21st century American, fathom.
And it’s all stupid — genealogy research. It’s stupid and privileged and self-absorbed. We don’t do this with plants or dogs. We’re not like “Wait! Is that . . . I think that’s the cat from Gone Girl! Seriously! It’s the cat!” Because no one fucking cares where that nice cat is “from.” We just recognize that it’s a nice cat, a pretty plant, a good doggo. We don’t need to know the being’s pedigree to know it is good just because the being simply is gentle and alive.
All humans are stupid. Gruber is human. Ergo, Gruber is stupid. And so are you, reader, unless you’re a cat or dog or trailer-dwelling-mountain-gorilla-living-on-the-UC-Berkeley-campus who has learned to read. In which case, good for you fellow mammal. Reading is great, and I’m totally in support of dogs becoming literate. I’d have much more to discuss with my dachshund (thanks, weird German ancestors!), Abrahambone, so that maybe our inter-species dialectics could slip the surly bonds of inquiry such as “walkie?”, “you hungry?” and “who’s a good boy?” . . .
I’m editing this while on hold with Optum Specialty Pharmacy, a company that has overseen my distribution of chemo pills for nearly 2 years, and a company that, in those entire two years, has never been able to remember me as a customer. Today, they told me my oncologist was “no longer my oncologist” and I had a nervous breakdown until I called my oncologist’s office where it was confirmed that Optum is wrong, and I do in fact have a cancer doctor . . . These are the moments that test my compassion, my character, and my resolve. Instead of calling Optum back again today, to sit on hold and explain my entire medical history (again), I have cleared the matter for my own sanity and will call Optum again tomorrow, when I have another hour or two of my life I’m willing to give them.
And these experiences test my compassion toward my ancestors, my white, European ancestors who no doubt had a hand in creating these bullshit systems under which you, I, and everyone else in this country now suffer: corrupt corporations, and corrupt governments, and in this country, the two are only faintly distinguishable — corporate, government — from one another; mostly, you have to squint to tell them apart anymore. Optum sometimes feels like a terrorist corporate entity in my life — holding all the cards, disregarding my humanity, frightening me, and causing me to wonder when my fellow Americans will wake up to this fact of our New World: there is an “us” and there is a “them,” but these groups are not what you have been conditioned, by Capitalism, to believe they are. Anyone who hoards power and money (money hoarding is grosser and power hoarding grosser still than any cat or human waste “hoarding” you might know from Old World shows like Hoarders), are “them.” The sowers of misinformation and mistrust are “them.” Those who put political or religious ideology over the objective good of the whole (get a fucking vaccine, wear a fucking mask) are “them.” Maybe Elon Musk, but probably not your weird Uncle Frank, or your great-great-great aunt Helen (though maybe her), even though the latter two may have/had paper-money wealth. I don’t know anyone who holds great sway in this New World, but for perhaps subversively, artistically, locally, and no one who holds great sway politically, corporately can see me (or you, either — unless you’re Elon Musk or maybe Joe Biden or possibly Angela Merkel) . . . the decrepit, rotting scaffolding of the Old World, held up by those aforementioned and a handful more, stinks to high heaven and some of us, in microcosmic bursts, are beginning to have this conversation. The initial conversations are the seeds of any good (or not) revolution. And I’m vaguely hopeful, some times, about the possibility that this country could change and become a better, healthier, freer place. We just won’t live to see it that way. Or I won’t. Maybe you will, reader. Shit, my crazy 12th great grandma lived to be 85 in the Plymouth Bay Colony — maybe there’s hope for me, too. Then again, as this country moves further along inside of time and space, I am not so entirely certain that living much past 80 is wise or necessary. Luckily, I have no control over such matters as life and death. That’s God’s territory. I can only do the little human things I’m able to do — like fight Optum Specialty pharmacy again and again and again for a common drug used to treat a common human affliction.
So those of us who have little paper money wealth can only start the conversation, that’s our oar in the river, that’s our simple contribution to the boat’s direction: one row of one oar on a gigantic bigger-than-the-Mayflower-or-Titanic-combined boat that, for whatever stupid or amazing reason, we are all cosmically stuck in together.
On that note, I’m off to take my dog for a walk.
I’ve been remarking for the past two days how “freezing” it is here in Tucson. It’s damp and in the fifties. How quickly our perception of climate conditions (much less histories) shift.
Be good, hooligans.
