For decades I declared myself the rightful heir to one particular item in my father’s house, and that was the Harry Truman collector’s plate. When the old man meets his demise, I insisted, the plate is mine. I announced this loudly and frequently, as if my siblings would pull switchblades to challenge my claim, but they weirdly prioritized inheriting the house itself, and its bloating market value, over the sentimental worth of its decorative geegaws. More plate for me then.
The plate had been a souvenir, I’m told, of my father’s trip to a fire chief’s convention in Missouri, home state of our thirty-sixth president. Whether or not my father had purchased this as a totem of his esteem for Give ‘Em Hell Harry (he struck me more as a Thomas Dewey guy) or simply as proof that he had once traveled outside of his home state (no small feat for an agoraphobic) I can’t say, but the plate had been proudly on display, centered on the dining room china cabinet, since the reign of Chet Huntley.
For me, the Truman plate had simply been a fixture of domestic kitsch, like glass grapes or a macrame owl, a tacky gimcrack I passed by on my way to the fudgesicles when I was eight. Obtaining that heirloom, as I finally did last year, was an effort to honor my suburban cracker heritage, not necessarily the night school dropout farm boy with the failed haberdashery who was enshrined on the dinnerware. I wrapped the plate securely in my luggage and toted it back to Germany, intending it to have a place of honor on my wall, where it would radiate American gift-shop-trash irony.
I’m sure you veterans of the Twitter trenches in today’s culture wars have anticipated the “problematic” problem. A Harry Truman collector’s plate, hanging on my office wall in Deutschland, does not signify a shared heritage of shag-carpeted, oak-paneled, Bob-Barkered hominess to my German houseguests, but clearly denotes my American pride in the full-scale destruction of Hiroshima. I must be, they would reasonably conclude, a fan. A pure-hearted Truman enthusiast. And this is because, unlike for we snotty connoisseurs of sardonic, so-bad-it’s-good paradoxery, for the Germans, things actually mean things. This means they would fail to see the further, absolutely hilarious irony of hanging my ode to history’s biggest bomb dropper in a house with a WWII bomb shelter in its basement. They might find this so offensive, in fact, that they’ll forget to thank me for the Marshall Plan.
This throws a monkey pox into my life philosophy, seeing as I have always considered the perception and exercise of irony as the primary test for separating society’s brainiacs from the cud chewers. And I’m certain I’m failing this test in my new country, where the locals do, in fact, traffic in their own ironic observations, which I cannot understand due to the umlauts. We simply do not share the same signifiers of snark. When I first set up my studio here in Wuppertal, I displayed on my shelf a treasured artifact I’d found in an American antique store years earlier. It was a framed snapshot of actor Frank Sutton, dressed in his uniform as Sgt. Carter from Gomer Pyle, USMC, posing with a group of homely office gals during a public appearance at some military facility or other. Its kitsch value is through the roof. A German visitor spied this objet d’art in my room one day and asked if the man in the photo was my father. I tried to explain, in vain, that the sentimental significance of framing a picture of some guy from an American TV show I never liked took precedence over displaying photos of my actual family.
My father, who was not Frank Sutton, had no ironic intentions when he exhibited the Harry Truman plate in our home, which naturally only adds to my ironic appreciation. He didn’t have a head for camp or sardonic wit, not likely to enjoy an evening of guffaws during a Herschel Gordon Lewis marathon. John Earl Holt took his cultural values of God, country, and military formation, the foundations of his upbringing, very seriously, and never understood acerbic jerkoffs like my friends and me, who would fall down in weed-induced laughter over an afternoon viewing of Laurence Welk. Perfectly fine music program, he would discern. Those boys are insane.
We did not understand each other because, in this regard, I am not a Holt. I am a Threadgill. My mother’s side of the family, with minimal regard, if not contempt for the stuff of my father’s values, is genetically predisposed to a level of sinister, high-volume sarcasm and bloodthirsty ridicule that can be genuinely traumatizing to outsiders. No sincere emotion exposed to a Threadgill, no sign of sensitivity revealed, will be left unstomped by merciless mockery. A family gathering is a Mankiewicz-scripted Bette Davis barnburner, in deep Southern drawl, where the clothes, musical tastes, physical malformities, personal beliefs, and career failings of every member of the bloodline are joyously berated for everyone’s amusement. Notably, in true Southern fashion, especially irritating neighbors may often be engaged and interrogated by a Threadgill for the express purpose of obtaining ammunition for their character assassination when they are out of earshot. This is not a family of huggers.
And it’s with this group that I’ve developed my first-hand experience with Sarcasm Sickness. This is where the droll, side-eyed delivery of any statement may be so dripping in practiced sarcasm that one loses all perspective as to what, if anything, is a genuine sentiment. My mother is a terminal case.
“Oh yeah, you really love that lemon cake,” she will sneer.
The problem being, of course, that I actually do enjoy the lemon cake. And whether or not my mother intended to acknowledge this truth sincerely is uncertain even to her, drowning as the remark is in a lifetime of sarcastic tone and ironic perception.
It is, in effect, the end result of having developed no substantial respect for any person or idea, a view of the world in which everything, even (or especially) the development of a doomsday weapon capable of wiping out whole civilizations in a flash, is simultaneously contemptible and hilarious. Personally, I consider this an exalted state, one which I am proud to have attained. It is a day of enlightenment, I contend, when one concludes that, if no one can figure out if they should take what you say seriously or not, it is their problem and not yours. It is ironic nirvana.
My German friends may not comprehend the specific brand of irony and heartwarming misanthropy I’ve projected onto Harry Truman’s ceramic-glazed image, but I believe this is because irony has not been necessarily weaponized in Germany as it has been for my people. America being a two-team nation, with only the Miami Bookburners and the San Francisco Abortionists to choose from, the only sensible option for anyone remaining sane is to jeer derisively from the sidelines. The concussion-addled players have a monopoly on belief systems, cult hysterias made manifest by the same market forces who made us believe in “the dirt you can’t see.” Thanks to generations of con jobs by the carnival barkers who run the United States, that which appears meaningful is inherently suspect.
And so a survivalist cynicism develops in the comparatively thought-prone, whereby the mere suggestion of significance or universal truth is met with a collective “that’s what she said.” We must keep our emotional distance, an ironic remove; because Truth™ is probably a trap. After all, fall victim to what seems like genuine sentiment and you may well find yourself getting E-metered for Thetans or hunting for kidnapped kids in a pizza restaurant.
Many years ago, my American mother-in-law also had a fine set of collector’s plates displayed in her home. Four plates, featuring painted scenes from Gone with the Wind, a pioneering achievement in “problematic” cinema that she honestly adored. In keeping with my lineage, I needled her relentlessly about these hideous ornaments, suggesting that we have a steak dinner served on these masterworks so I could grind a steak knife into Clark Gable’s collectible face. As with the Truman plate, I demanded the inheritance of these Franklin Mint classics and joked that my mother-in-law should rewrite her will to ensure that they would be mine upon her passing.
A few years later, after a long and brutal illness, she died, far sooner than expected. And there, on the reading of the will, were the horrible Gone with the Wind collector’s plates, bequeathed to me, the only specific item mentioned besides the house (and its bloating market value).
They’re hanging on the living room wall today. Wouldn’t give them up for the world. When our unknowing German friends visit, they will assume that Gone with the Wind is this clueless American immigrant’s favorite film. “Oh, it definitely is,” I will agree, my voice oozing with Threadgillian sarcasm.
Then I will use the plates to serve lemon cake. Oh yeah, I really love that lemon cake.
- A.H.
I should add that there was one other collector’s item classic I found in the old country that I was regrettably forced to leave behind: A collector’s plate signed by the attendees of a collector’s plate collectors convention.
Incidentally, I’m named after Gone with the Wind character Ashley Wilkes, the light-loafered poof everyone wants Scarlett O’Hara to dump.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)
Frank Sutton was a fine man. I still have the Playbill from when my parents saw him in a theater-in-the-round production of The Odd Couple. In 1974 I was at my brother-in-law's parents house in a Detroit suburb when his death was announced on the news.
Also, my parents' house was decorated with many many plates, including the Gone With The Wind set. We did not get the Ashley Wilkes plate.