Jocks vs. Pukes and Superman and Me
Jocks vs. Pukes and Superman and Me
In America today there exists a great cultural divide that has less to do with race, ethnicity and class (although these can certainly be factors) than with an almost Calvinist hierarchy of those who belong and those who do not. There are certainly examples of “otherness” in the black vs. white, straight vs. gay issue that surround us, but two prime examples of the more philosophical problem are at the heart of Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me” and Robert Lipsyte’s “Jock Culture”. The two authors are extremely different in writing style, background, and aesthetic, but their essays explore what being “the other” means to each of them and explain how one can be an outsider from both sides of a group or culture: one is the side of exclusion on the periphery and the other is the side of alienation from within. Both are powerful and serve to illustrate how people experience life outside the mainstream.
In “Jock Culture”, the author, Robert Lipsyte explains what it means to be not just an athlete but an elite in any field in contemporary American culture. He describes a conversation with a rowing coach who is more than willing to classify men in two categories: Jocks and Pukes. Remembering of course that the year was 1968 so women didn’t enter in to the discussion and the terms seem very outdated now, the coach easily laid out the case that the jocks were the desirables and the Pukes, the undesirables. The elite athletes were considered “brave, manly, [] patriotic” while the Pukes were “wooly, girlish, and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning.” (Lipsyte, 2011) In 1968 the author felt these were silly and stereotypical classifications, but he admits that it does seem that American culture has been divided into two camps: the winners versus the losers, the believers versus the non-believers, the Jocks versus the Pukes.
This culture of competition and elitism, once reserved for men alone, has now extended to women and even young children as it moves further away from what was previously just a sports reference but now extends to boardrooms, symphony orchestras, and grade schools. Women are encouraged and pushed to be more like men – more aggressive, more outgoing, more cutthroat – in order to succeed and be counted as winners. Young children are playing sports not for the fun and exercise of it, not to learn about teamwork and togetherness, but rather to triumph, to escalate the “war”, and to eliminate a competitor. He writes, “A once safe space to learn about bravery, cooperation and respect becomes a cockpit of bullying, violence, and the commitment to a win-at-all-costs attitude that can kill a soul.” (Lipsyte, 2011) To not engage in the activities at this level is to risk being called a sissy, a faggot and be treated as the “other”- the outsider who does not belong and cannot win.
Sherman Alexie approaches this idea from the other side in his essay, “Superman and Me.” Born and raised on a reservation he lived the life of the ultimate insider, surrounded by Native American culture and its strange realization in America, having a typical reservation upbringing with its stigmas vis-à-vis white culture, and yet being the other within the context of education on the reservation. While Lipsyte posited that education and opportunity are what is used to shape the elite class in America, Alexie explains that education is what makes him the untouchable among his people and classmates, as though he is trying too hard, trying to assimilate into a culture that doesn’t want him simply because he loves to read. How heartening it is to read about a young boy with insatiable curiosity about books, but it seems that he would be the outsider in both essay’ cultures.
“A smart Indian is a dangerous person.” (Alexie, 1998) One of the strangest images in Alexie’s essay is of his classmates and how they relate to their white teachers. The degrees of “otherness” are very richly layered here: there is the white teacher on the Indian reservation, and there is Alexie who loves to read when the others do not; but then there is the group of Indian children who accede to the stereotype of the “dumb Indian,” while bullying the author because he is participating in school. He writes, “As Indian children we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.” (Alexie, 1998) Alexie himself was the only one to break out of that particular pattern of otherness, but by doing so he creates his own-the smart, confident Indian who writes novels and poetry, who doesn’t hang his head in the presence of whites. As he returns to the reservation he acknowledges that he can possibly change the lives of these children who are trapped in the “otherness”, while realizing that he cannot save the ones he recognizes in the back who have already accepted defeat. Seen in terms of Lipsyte’s essay, the added dimension of race confuses the idea of winners and losers because it depends on cultural perspective.
Both Lipsyte and Alexie share insights on outsider culture seen form different points of view: the former as an educated white professional pondering the phenomenon from an academic perspective, the latter as a racial minority ostracized not only by the institutionalized system but by his own people from within, then rising above it to success. So it also changes the idea of success as has been noted so many times throughout history. The elite athletes who are supposed to be the winners have a harder time coming to terms with a real life: the reservation children who fail in school are raised up and accepted by the community, albeit in a ghettoized setting. If the word has more people like these two writers to document these experiences perhaps current and future generations can find less of this polarizing categorization and more of a sense of community and togetherness.
Works Cited
Alexie, S. (1998, April 19). http://articles.latimes.com/print/1998/apr/19/books/bk-42979. Retrieved Jan 27, 2016, from Los Angeles Times: www.latimes.com
Lipsyte, R. (2011, July 27). Jocks vs. Pukes. The Nation (August 15-22, 2011).
