Success(ion)

Giftedness, Zapotecs, Rousseau, bacon

Elena in Frick Park. Photo by Jorge.

We finally joined 99.8 % of the United States in watching Succession. I was very reluctant because it seemed like a show about a) business b) corporate America and c) a bunch of rich entitled assholes, and I find all of those things incredibly off-putting! And yes, in fact, it is about those things, but what ended up sucking me in was the way in which it is really a story about success: what success, and the relentless pursuit of it, does to humans. It is really a story about American values: the hunger to have it all, and then more of it, and then more, and how this is antithetical to pretty much everything that makes both human beings and the planet happy and functional. It is a story about work: how we define it; how we organize our lives around it; how we attach our identities to it; what we give up for it.

“What do you do?” is probably the most standard, intro party question in the U.S. If you aren’t sure where else to begin and get shoved next to a stranger over the canapés, that’s likely where you’ll default. When you break it down, the question is revealing. It’s not where do you work, although sometimes that comes into play, or what kind of work do you do, or the awkward straight-from-the-ESL-textbook what’s your job, it’s the most basic, global iteration, what do you do. That could encompass a whole life, morning until night. I do _______. That’s me. I write.

But really a lot of what I do is: agonize about the state of my own life and that of the world. Worry about my kid/the future. Buy food and cook it. Water my garden. Pet my chicken’s little head and watch her teardrop eyes flutter shut in contentment. Clean the picnic table with a rag. Run. Meditate. Gaze at the trees in Schenley Park. Try and figure out what kind of bird that is. Call my mom. Call my sister. Feed the dog. Draw the moon in my journal. What do we do?

“Successful people don’t know how to do anything,” I told Jorge the other day. No one on Succession cooks. No one gardens. No one knows what phase the moon is in. No one clears a trail. No one shifts the weight of her hips just so to get a horse to trot. No one cradles a baby so she finally sleeps. No one cleans up animal poop. No one makes anything, other than money – the ideal and passion at the heart of the show, which we never actually see. How strange is that – the core of it all, invisible, intangible, abstract? What does that tell us about priorities? Most of what successful people do is this: invisible, intangible, abstract. The value and the products are entirely of the mind. Like the show itself: a product of the mind, produced for other minds, where most of us live all the time. We have our bodies tended to like cars; we feed them like machines. And notice, sometimes, that the world is burning.

Recently all the third graders at Elena’s school took a test to assess for giftedness. This term: “gifted.” It almost sounds godly, ordained, as if it were not something intensely cultural and cultivated. One can imagine a divine hand descending from a cloud, bathed in light, touching the brains of the gifted, who just happen to all be healthy and hearty American white kids raised on Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies and Roald Dahl. It made me recall my time working as an intern at Harper’s. I was the one token woman, the one token non-Ivy-leaguer: the three other male interns had gone to Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, a nice little East Coast loafer-wearing trio. At first I just wanted so badly to fit in: to prove I could talk just as quickly and engage in all the witty repartee and glide seamlessly between Alexander Von Humboldt and Judith Butler. Then I wanted to be contrarian: to ask why we were so quick to publish the hot twenty-four-year-old Columbia grad with a mustache who’d moved to Afghanistan and written one New York Times piece over the thirty-year-old woman on a prestigious fellowship in Bolivia who’d written 8,900 stories. Then at some point, I started to ask myself why this framework? What is this valuing? And the answer was: giftedness. Always the same top 5% of test-takers, asking the same questions from the same knowledge base in the same way. Some with more “voice” and flair, some more traditional, but always ensconced in that same intelligence matrix: a hall of mirrors going back to ancient Greece, Aristotle proclaiming that the woman actually does not form the fetus, it comes fully formed in sperm.

When friends and family used to come visit us in Oaxaca, we’d often take them to Monte Albán: ruins of an ancient Zapotec city. Walking around, marveling at the temples and plazas from which the Zapotecs ruled over a vast empire starting in 500 B.C., they would marvel at how they knew nothing about this place. Most had never heard of Zapotecs, despite the fact that these people formed a major civilization that ruled for thousands of years just a stone’s throw south of our contemporary border. Yet almost all had heard of, say, the British philosopher David Hume, who discoursed on the superiority of European men to all other races, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who proclaimed that African man “was completely black from head to foot, a distinct proof that what he said was stupid,” and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who married his housekeeper, forced her to give up all five of their children to a foundling home, and argued that women possessed not true reason but only the “reason of obedience.” I was thirty-nine years old before I knew calendula dies back in the winter but will return in the spring, but I could’ve discoursed on the symbolism in The Great Gatsby by the time I was 15.

My dad told me a story recently about a plumber who’d come out to the house to do some work. The plumber’s grandma had just gotten her first microwave, and she was so excited that every time the plumber would visit, she’d make him bacon in it. The bacon was chewy, rubbery, and inedible. Grandma, the plumber wanted to say, please stop making me bacon! But she was so proud of that microwave that she insisted on using it, nuking the bacon into tasteless oblivion.

It seems we are a society endlessly committed to making bacon in the microwave. Kendall, the middle son on Succession, throws himself an extravagant fortieth birthday party that likely costs into the millions, featuring a glass-walled labyrinth of music and entertainment and installations and alcohol and drugs, many of New York’s elite, a bevy of supplicant waiters and servants, and a stage for him to perform his most epic egoist fantasies, and he ends the night desperately searching for his children’s handmade birthday present and collapsing in the fetal position on a couch. More bacon, please.

Last week, Elena was restless after school, and I suggested we walk up the street to see if her friend Vera was around. Elena and Vera met when they were three years old, on the playground. Back then, Vera’s mom – also named Sara – and I would take the two of them to hike barefoot through the creek in Schenley Park and climb waterfalls. Vera’s family moved away to D.C. for a few years, then moved back, and Elena and Vera became friends again. Now the two are quirky, funny, bilingual, athletic nine-year-olds who can jump for hours on the trampoline. We found Vera biking around her street. “Wanna play kickball?” she asked Elena.

The two rounded up a crew that included three Orthodox Jewish girls, barefoot and wearing ankle-length skirts; a tiny Orthodox three-year-old in long black pants and white button-down despite the heat; two Italian brothers, aged 12 and 10; an Indian kid around Vera and Elena’s age; and Vera’s little brother, Tomás. The crew assembled at a small park at the end of the street and set out establishing the rules of the game and making teams. I sat nearby with the dog and watched.

The Orthodox girls cursed. A lot. Especially the beautiful, long-haired older one who was clearly flirting with the Italian boy. “What the shit!” she kept shouting, and Elena would look at me wide-eyed and starstruck. The older Italian boy was surprisingly kind, despite his clear advantage athletically over everyone else, and would give the younger kids second tries if they whiffed or bunted. Vera and Elena ran after every ball in unison despite this making zero sense as a defensive strategy. It was delightful to watch. At some point Vera’s mom meandered down and we talked about school, work, life.

This, I thought, is success. It has taken a long time to build up the community that made this moment possible. Years of interactions, friendships, play dates, shared dinners, favors, conversations, witnessing, confessions, connections. Years for a game of kickball at the start of summer. This is as worthwhile an effort as any I have made for my career. What do you do?

We adore Succession because it gives us the shivers: it hits a little too close to home. That’s not us, we laugh, outraged and titillated by the 1%, but it’s also kind of us – a warning. When Logan tells one of his kids, “You’re not worth anything,” it sears. It’s the voice not only of a father but of the culture at large: what do you do? We all know the weight, the pressure behind that question. The answer better well not be sit on the cabin porch and watch the clouds or hold a baby’s hand while she walks up and down the stairs 796 times or you’ll be laughed right on out of the room, right on out of the culture, and maybe that’s for the best, because that’s where life is, out there: under the oaks, in their long shadows, where the kids are making it up as they go along, delighting in the big round boing of a rubber ball, the slip of the grass, what the shit, the bases rounded again and again, and no one remembers the score.

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