Ugly Elf

I’m feeling bad—really guilty—for something I did today. I said something that “crossed the line” and was “rude.” So I’m feeling awful. But honestly, I shouldn’t. And It’s taken me way too long to realize why I shouldn’t.

I was in a class earlier, a nearly empty class, and the teacher said she might just cancel the class since no one was showing up. I said it was probably because of the price, and if she lowered it a little a lot more people might show up and she would make more money.”

She got pissed.

I apologized. She had a right to be angry, and she explained it to me. She has an unusual relationship with her students: she’s a friend and a teacher, and it’s really hard for her when one of us, like me, tried to “nickel and dime her to death.” That we needed to understand that “just because we were friends didn’t mean we could try to take advantage of her.” Those were the words she used. She also said that so many friends were “rude” like this, and she couldn’t be friends any more because of it. I didn’t, and still don’t know if she was talking about our friendship.

I’ve had female friends give me the silent treatment and stop being friends with me for less. For Tapas even (the fucking tapas).

Anyway, she said she’d been running her own studio for more than two years and people should know that she knew how to run it and she didn’t want to talk about money with them.

Needless to say, I apologized profusely. She was right. I had been rude. She’d asked me to drop it, so I did. I tried to make small talk. I forced cheeriness. But ten minutes later, half an hour before the class was supposed to end, she dismissed me and ended the class abruptly.

I sat in my car feeling horrible and brutish for ten minutes before I could drive. How could I have been so rude? How could I have shoved my foot so far in my mouth, again?! Why was I unable to see it coming?

And slowly I started to realize why: because All Laws are Local.

Bear with me.

Now I’ve had friends that I’ve bought cars from. I’ve sold cars to friends. I’ve sold and bought furniture. At its base, I’ve had a commodity and I’ve sold it to friends. Or my friend has had a commodity and I’ve bought it from them. Did we talk about money? Hell yes. Did we negotiate prices? You bet your sweet bippy.

And finally I started thinking about my friendship with this and other teachers I’ve had. I realized this was not a special or unusual relationship at all for this sort of thing. Across most of my circus, music, dance, climbing, and body-weight conditioning classes I’ve formed friendships with teachers. In many cases even close friendships that have lasted much longer than my interest in the subject they taught.

Have we talked about the price of classes? Yes. Has it ever been a problem. No. I had to think long and hard about that one, but no. I’ve never had an issue talking about money with any of these teachers & friends. No one has ever taken it as me trying to nickel-and-dime them before.

So based on my previous experiences, hundreds of them, I couldn’t have foreseen her reaction.

But then we come back to it. Was she wrong to think what I had done was rude?

No.

No really, she wasn’t wrong. Why? Because all laws are local. Because the mores of a group or the sensibilities of an individual are always local, and in this case, really local. Most of my friends who are teachers compartmentalize. They deal friendship in one area of their brains, and business in another. They don’t have any trouble separating the two. This teacher couldn’t do that. There was no compartmentalizing. I was a friend, friends have your back, her back is her business, by mentioning a money thing I had stabbed her in the back.

So she wasn’t wrong to think of this thing as rude. But honestly, she was wrong to get mad at me. She was wrong in assuming I would know what would offend her. She was wrong to believe that her mores were more right than mine.

all laws are local

Stay with me on this one. It comes up all the time. When I was in France this summer, I discovered (the hard way) that the French think it’s very rude for you to ask them something in English without first asking in french if they speak any english. A friend who was with me, and was a French-American, said of course it was rude. Didn’t I know anything? Even in America it’s rude to ask somebody for directions in a foreign language. And I had to think about it. Was she right?

By and large, for the specific cases of America and France, she was. We both have a majority population that believes you shouldn’t come to this country unless you speak the language. This is less true for America than for France.

Many of you are probably revolting at my saying it’s largely true; you yourselves having given directions, aid, or at least a comforting smile to strangers speaking spanish or german and not even trying for english with you. I have too. But we’re the exception here, not the rule. Think about how many people have cried for, or voted against ESL support in public schools. Think about the “anti-brown” laws that have plagued the central U.S. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re flattered when someone assumes you speak their foreign language, here on U.S. streets. But you’re the exception. Most people are offended.

So if my own country is offended by this behavior, why didn’t I anticipate the French reaction? Because I’d already traveled too much. From Central America, to the Polynesian islands, to Indonesia, I’d spoken english first and never offended anyone. The reaction I would later experience in Iceland was the typical one, if they didn’t speak my language, they would still, happily, make comforting “poor-lost-tourist” noises while I pointed at the place on the map I was trying to get to, and with a mixture of pantomime and language that was lost on me, tell me how to get where I was going. It’s the more common reaction in the world. But the French, and the Americans have forgotten that all laws are local.

The author Cory Doctorow recently did a much better job of explaining this than I’m doing. In his Locus Article, A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web Doctorow essentially defines being cosmopolitan as being aware that all laws are local.

You should hop over there and read the whole article, but I want you to especially consider these two paragraphs:

Behind every torturer’s mask, behind every terrible crusade, behind every book-burning and war-drum is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local. Forgetting that all laws are local is the ultimate in hubris, and it is the province of yokels and bumpkins who assume that just because they do something in a particular way, all right-thinking people always have and always will. For a mild contemporary example, consider the TV executive who blithely asserts that her industry is safe, because no matter what happens in the future, the majority of us will want to come home, flop down on the sofa, and turn on the goggle-box – despite the fact that TV has existed for less than a century, a flashing eyeblink in the long history of hominids, most of whom have gotten by just fine without anesthetizing themselves with a sitcom at the end of a long day.

Which is not to say that cosmopolitans don’t believe in anything. To be cosmopolitan is to know that all laws are local, and to use that intellectual liberty to decide for yourself what moral code you’ll subscribe to. It is the freedom to invent your own ethics from the ground up, knowing that the larger social code you’re rejecting is no more or less right than your own – at least from the point of view of a Martian peering through a notional telescope at us piddling Earthlings.

Read that second paragraph again. I agree with it one-hundred percent. It was perfectly right for my teacher to invent her own ethics, her own code of what was rude and what was in the friend’s domain. But then she went exactly wrong, and for a moment there, so did I. She shouldn’t have forgotten that all laws are local. That she invented her law, and I may not know the local custom.

It would have been fine for her to tell me that she didn’t want to talk about it, but she shouldn’t have gotten angry with me the very first time I unknowing blundered across her invisible line. Believe me, I won’t talk about it again. And wouldn’t have even if she’d been nice when she explained it. I guess I just hope I haven’t lost yet another friend this year just because they don’t understand that all laws are local, and I’m a freaking alien.

And if you’re one of my many, many friends or erstwhile friends who I’ve offended. I’m sorry. I really didn’t know. And believe me: I still feel guilty anyway. I always will. I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings.

But as for what I did?

Je ne regrette rien.

-Ugly Elf