Two Kinds of Men

Two Kinds of Men

   The title above is partially taken from the opening of the recent issue of Esquire (the magazine will post the link next month), a powerful short piece written by Lisa Taddeo and a feature of the magazine simply titled, "The Cold Open."  And the piece is dark, the death of her parents leading to a swirl of emotions as she moves a U-Haul into a wintery New York and happens to side-swipe a car, tearing off its mirror and leaving a definite gash and paint stripe down its side.  The car was a Maserati, the Quattroporte model, $100,000+.  And it belonged to a mobster.

   The article balances the perceptions one would have of such a confrontation, one which could have gone a dozen ways.  The anger, the sobbing, the change of emotions, the attraction.  But mainly, it went the way of breaking the usual pattern.  A "great escape," if you will, the title of another recent piece in Smithsonian, detailing the efforts of Max Kenner trying to get education --college level education-- to prison inmates.  The response, somewhat expectedly, has been mixed, some people questioning why there should be such effort, one Congressional campaigner saying he was struggling to send his own son to college (Congress ended funding for Pell grants for prisoners, thus having the majority of funding for the program coming from the Ford and Soros Foundations). In a 2010 study of 30 states, it was found that the normal rate of reincarceration for inmates is around 70%;  those who received this new education degree while in prison has a return rate of 2%.  The magazine credited the program with one of its rare American Ingenuity Awards last year.

   This breaking of views also emerged from the recent NPR broadcast of its Alt Latino program with co-hosts Felix Contreras and Jasmine Garsd.  In the show, Jasmine Garsd remarked at how surprised she was to hear so many indigenous languages --Mapuche, Tztotzil, Guarani, Quechua and Tz'utujil from Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala and Mexico-- emerging in song, some even in rap, and some of the languages dating back to one of the many, many Mayan languages. As one of the hosts, she is fluent in several forms of Spanish but with such a swirl of languages, some dating back centuries, she was basically lost, hinting at what she thought each of the songs were trying to convey.

   One of my friends, formerly a professor of African history, explained it to me this way, how the rise of some many unique languages emerged, coming and going as time moved on.  The lands being discussed are sparsely populated, and often quite distant from any nearby tribe or culture (think warring groups when one crosses into another's tribal lands).  Peoples were distinct, separate, tightly knit but only among themselves.  Some populations grew immensely while others were captured or taken over and dissolved.  Languages came and went, year after year, century after century.  Even among such large cultures as the Mayan, the languages splintered off into separate and individual qualities, protective and identifying the speaker as one of them or not one of them.

   So it's a bit ironic that in today's almost overly-connected world, we are finding it more and more difficult to find these small pockets of ancient or undiscovered cultures, cultures that have evolved enough to develop a working language.  And as the host Garsd pointed out, even when such a culture is found, it has already reached into and been affected by the outside world (she was less-than-surprised that some of songs featured rap, despite being understood by only a limited audience).

   In the future, perhaps we as a species will indeed blend into just "two types of men" or two types of women or animals or insects or cancers (on a side note, scientists have so far named at least 14,000 unique species and subspecies of ants alone, but they also recognize that there are many, many more species of ants waiting to be found).  We are a world of ones and zeroes (the concept of zero is historically a relatively recent one), ones and twos; and perhaps it's easier to simply say two types of men, two types of Spanish, two types of bees.  Life here and life hereafter.  But underneath it all, we may discover that there is layer after layer after layer of life just evolving, growing.  We might only need to dig.