Kvetching, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Gwen avocado (attribution), photographer unknown, n.d.
“Is this truth I’m delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching? Or is kvetching for people like me a form of truth?”
– Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint,1969
Form and content of the expat’s kvetch
Harriet knew it would happen eventually but was surprised it was so soon. Barely six months since our expatriation, she noticed I had begun to kvetch. (Harriet is gentile but learned the Yiddish word early in our relationship.) My complaints take the following, approximate form: “In the U.S., I used to…” succeeded by a past delight and current deprivation. For example: “In Florida, I used to get creamy avocados that I could smear on a bagel. Here in Norwich, they are often dry — and there are no bagels. Who wants desiccated avocados on crumpets?”
Here’s two additional examples: After agreeing that our small, white, Renault Clio was tan from the Norfolk mud, I said: “In Florida, I used to visit those big, automatic car washes. Here, they have little wash booths that only rearrange the dirt.” Then I began to ruminate on U.S. car washes of yesteryear.
“Some were shaped like paddle steamers or ocean liners, others had futuristic Jetson-style flourishes. You typically stayed in the car and experienced the suds, brushes, rinse, wax and dry through the windshield, as if you were sitting in a 3-D movie. I remember when I was a kid, my dad and I used to go to one on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park…”
My eyes grew misty from the reminiscence. Harriet looked embarrassed.
“I used to know how to park a car,” I said on another occasion. “In the U.S. there are clear rules. Here it’s anarchy! Park on the curb of a two-lane highway? Fine. On the side of the road facing oncoming traffic? OK. On a narrow street in a small town, with two wheels on the sidewalk (they call them pavements here)? No problem!
Sometimes my complaints take a different form but have similarly trivial content. They begin: “I can’t stand …” followed by, for example: overcrowded trains, yobs (young drunken louts), weak cocktails, littering, no coffee refills, and timorous reporters on BBC radio 4. I sometimes complain about the National Health Service, though I always preface it with the requisite: “Of course, they are doing the best they can, given the years of Tory austerity.”
Ever patient Harriet tolerates my kvetching, but sometimes directs at me a dubious gaze. When that happens, I stammer out something like: “These are just observations — constructive criticisms.” I then continue, pompously: “If enough people, said something about [xxx], maybe things would improve in this country!”
Somebody once said that without complaints, an expatriate is only a tourist. I understand that to mean visitors don’t feel the sting of absence like an expat does. Kvetching for me, however, is more fundamental than mere complaint; it’s a form of political speech, especially when the content is trifling. It isn’t American car washes, avocados, or coffee fill-ups I miss. Those are screens that hide the loss I really grieve but am ashamed to admit: belonging to the global hegemon, being a bigshot. Even for someone as critical of U.S. expropriation and exploitation as I am, that’s a feeling hard to shake. Kvetching about the small stuff forces me to confront the big, unspoken or unmentionable stuff. Kvetching, Portnoy says, “is a form of truth.”
Biblical kvetching
In Genesis 2:19-21, God invited Adam to name all the newly created animals, including “every beast of the field; but… there was not found a helpmeet for him.” The Bible is silent as to whether Adam complained to God about the absence of a woman, but he must have — unless the creator read Adam’s mind — because Eve was soon born from Adam’s rib. In Paradise Lost, John Milton is more explicit. After admiring God’s creation, Adam kvetches:
Thou hast provided all things: But with me
I see not who partakes. In solitude
What happiness? who can enjoy alone;
Or, all enjoying, what contentment find?(viii, 363-66)
God becomes a bit defensive here, pointing out the wonderful non-human beings he has created, but finally concedes:
What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.(viii, 449-52)
Kvetching paid off big-time!
In Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew bible, there’s additional complaining:
“And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.”
(Exodus 2:23)
Soon after, Moses too complained to God. Why had he encouraged him to plead to the new Egyptian king on behalf of the Jews, only for the Pharoh to administer even harsher treatment. Moses’ kvetch worked — God agreed to let his people go. But that only led to more complaints. When the people of Israel crossed the desert, they kvetched that they lacked food, so God provided them meat in the evening and fresh bread (mana) every morning for 40 days. The diet must have been pretty boring (and constipating) but had they asked for more they likely would have been punished. To take or demand more when you have enough was the sin of arrogance condemned by the ancient pastoralists who inhabited biblical texts. That’s still true among foragers and pastoralists, as the anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee famously argued in his studies of the !Kung people of the Kalahari in Southern Africa. But in most places in the world today, taking more than you need is a way of life; it’s the very foundation of the modern economy and society.
Capitalist kvetching
The word kvetch has a curious etymology. It derives from the Middle High German questschen, which in turn comes from the medieval French esquasher meaning to squeeze, crush, bruise or apply pressure. That’s still one of its meanings in Yiddish. Thus, to press a button is kvetch ah knepel. How exactly it assumed its more common modern definition is not entirely clear, except that kvetching is to press a point or to squeeze somebody or something to gain an advantage. A kvetcher therefore might whine and wheedle to obtain money (thereby becoming a schnorrer as well) or else squeeze a donation or loan from a person or institution. Kvetching is this sense is fundamental to modern business. Profit is obtained by wringing every cent from a worker (“surplus value”), parcel of land, machine, patent, copyright, or license. In a retail operation, profit comes not from the first units sold but from the last. The same is true in extractive industries requiring high initial investments. Oil companies are determined to sell the last ounce of petroleum from every rig and leasehold, regardless of the environmental consequences, because that’s the source of their biggest profits.
Private equity firms succeed by sucking – vampire-like — every drop of capital from a business (inventory, machinery, patents) and then liquidating the rest and firing the workers. Bankruptcy protection is a form of kvetching: after accumulating maximum value for management and shareholders (if it’s a publicly traded entity), you declare bankruptcy and squeeze the creditors. Donald Trump is the U.S. kvetcher in chief by virtue of his frequent bankruptcies and cons, and his whining complaints that he is being picked-on by prosecutors, judges, juries, Democrats, journalists and the women he has sexually abused. Trump is a man of his time: Kvetching is the highest stage of capitalism.
Kvetch dialectics
Last week, I was a champion kvetcher. The weather turned frigid, and I felt the absence of our former home in rural Florida. In addition to the cold, I complained about the lack of kosher pickles, satellite radio, and vegan cream cheese. While changing a bulb, I kvetched about Direct Current (quite dangerous). During a walk into the city, I kvetched about the ubiquity of chewing gum splotches on pavements. Twenty years ago, Parliament proposed the development of non-sticky gum, but so far, there have been no breakthroughs. Recently, it established a Chewing Gum Task Force. Again, there has been no progress. I suggest putting gum-littering offenders in the stocks.
I miss pickles, vegan cream cheese, alternating current and gum-free sidewalks. But what I miss most, I now understand, is something I am also at pains to renounce: an association with empire. The U.S. is both a global hegemon and a complete disaster. Its military bullies supposed enemies and allies alike. Its geopolitical prerogatives are unchallenged, and yet it can’t adequately feed, house, educate, or protect the health of its population. It abuses the immigrants who help grow its food, build its houses and care for its children, old folks and gardens. The U.S. cultivates and imports delicious avocados but can’t protect its own water and air from contamination. Non-farm animals are threatened with extinction and children with death from gun violence. Empire be damned.
The open roads and endless horizons of the American landscape remain intoxicating. They conjure both theft (from their original occupants) and emancipation. The narrow, winding roads that snake across Norfolk, often hedged high on both sides, are less conducive to myth and dreams. If you take your eyes off the road even for a few seconds, you could wind up in a ditch or in the path of oncoming traffic. But whenever Harriet and I visit my parents-in-law in Burnham-Overy-Staithe on the North Norfolk Coast, we glimpse vast tidal marshes and culminating dunes that are as intoxicating as any American vista. The U.K. is a middling European state with an ineffectual Labor government little different, so far, from the Tory regime it replaced. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of overbearing financiers, tech entrepreneurs and rentiers who are bleeding the country dry. In its foreign policy, the U.K. tragi-comically plays lapdog to the American behemoth. As an expat, I can consider all this without blinders. When we next visit the U.S., I hope I’ll remember that North Sea coastline as I kvetch about my temporary separation from Marmite, mushy peas, warm beer, roundabouts, BBC4 and the National Health Service.
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