Free Andersen, Kurt by True Believers

Americans are dopes who believe they are very clever. While clowns, of course, are very clever people pretending to be dopes.” I laughed really hard, which pleased him a lot. My mother didn’t like it when he made broad generalizations about “Americans,” because it reminded her that he wasn’t one, even though in reply he always reminded her that he earned a living—in marketing—by making broad generalizations about Americans.
    I remember going out to dinner at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Wilmette just after it opened. It was a special treat, and I complained that Sabrina got to come, since she’d stayed home sick from school that day with an upset stomach—an illness that I, in my egregious junior-litigator fashion, wasn’t buying. I remember my father ordering the “Danish apple pancake” and then laughing so loudly when it arrived that people turned and looked at us. He’d expected the delicate little sliced-apple popovers of his youth, æbleskiver, not this steaming two-pound LP-sized thousand-calorie hillock of apple and cake drenched in melted butter and brown sugar and cinnamon. “God, I love this country,” he said, more sincerely than not, staring at the giant pancake as he cackled and shook his head. Although a ten-year-old, at least in 1960, couldn’t precisely parse his reaction—disgusted and delighted?—I thought I more or less understood. My eager little brother wanted to guffaw along with his dad. “It looks,” Peter shouted, “like a pile of barf. ” Mom said, “ Peter! It does not, it looks scrumptious. And the polite word, young man, is ‘upchuck.’” At which point Sabrina vomited all over the table.
    I remember almost every weekend, usually Saturday night around seven-thirty but sometimes Friday, my dad mixing two big Tom Collinses and putting his precious old Ink Spots 78 on the hi-fi. It was the last record he’d bought in Denmark, in 1942, during the Nazi occupation. The opening guitar riff of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” was the weekly cue that my mother and he were hereby ignoring us for the rest of the night, that we were meant to scram—go to our bedrooms to read, or to the basement to play Monopoly or watch television (our family’s single most un-American oddity: no TV in the living room), or, once we were older, get out of the house and wander off.
    I also remember things like watching American Bandstand and Kukla, Fran and Ollie a thousand times. But so what? In that way, my life was the same as your life or your parents’ lives. Everyone my age has more or less the same checklist of the same moments, the package of entertainment-and-TV-news highlights that the entertainment-and-TV-news industry has cherry-picked and recycled continuously since people my age took over. Whereas each of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents all the way back filled their mental attics with memories derived from their own idiosyncratic real lives. Almost all of our ancestors’ meaningful memories were theirs, custom-made, no more than occasionally supplemented by a dazzling scene from a movie, or a memorable bar of music, or a line from a sermon, or a famous old poem about a barbarian invasion. Nowadays our authentic memories, except for vague recollections of mood and aroma and shimmer, and a few extreme moments—finding a hidden bird’s nest made from your mother’s hair, breaking your brother’s arm, your sister puking in a restaurant—have been squeezed into a second-rate mental ghetto, supplanted by the canon of slick universal media memories.
    I’d barely finished living my childhood when show business started replacing my private and odd and fragmentary memories with its special, shiny reconstituted versions. It started suddenly, the moment I became an adult, with the movies Woodstock (1970) and American Graffiti (1973) and the musical Grease (1971). Artists and audiences have always done this, I suppose. But Homer and