Beer Bottles and America

I crossed under the interstate and steered my bicycle through the cold streets of South Boston last week for the first time in a year. Passing by broken beer bottles, I remembered the last time I swung under that bridge, cycling through the shattered remains of somebody’s Corona Extra. At the time I was concerned about a flat tire, which came about soon enough, but the discarded Corona confronted me with a problem larger than the glass shards my tires repelled.

Because I was born in 1982, I grew up in the United States of America. This does not strike many people as newsworthy, but it is a development of the latter half of the 20th century and it is odd to me.

When my parents were children—and it’s true, the 1950s were ages ago—people grew up in cities or towns or even neighborhoods. They self-identified with these places, these distinctly different hometowns, and were tied irrevocably to them. More than just Americans, they were citizens of their hometowns.

Our attachments to hometowns have faded as the strongest bond of all—money, tied to our American Brand Names—has finally United the States in something more powerful than just war and football. All of America is held in common now—a McDonald’s on every corner, a Wal-Mart in every county, an American consumer life that we can share if nothing else binds us together.

And despite the glory of Nike-sponsored athletic teams and school cafeterias Brought to You by the Coca-Cola Corporation, I am not convinced that the benefits of growing up in these Branded United States of America outweigh the unique experience of a childhood really spent in places like Kingman, Arizona or Waco, Texas—my father’s childhood hometowns.

I know it’s good that children in these two towns can fly through information on the Internet and gain an understanding of the world outside their 20-mile-wide lives. But they haven’t gained anything from MTV or McDonald’s except for mass-produced crudeness and fat. Not to say that 40 years ago my father was empty on crudeness in his humor or fat in his food, but there is something excusable about the homegrown crudeness of second-generation seniors at the high school and fat-dripping burgers at the local diner.

The idea of growing up with a unique experience, the idea of being defined in part by your hometown, has all but disappeared from American cities and is well on its way to leaving the last of the small towns and urban enclaves. Kingman’s population has eclipsed 30,000 and Waco is now a burgeoning metropolis of over 100,000 so there is little escaping the Americanization of America there.

I taught in South Boston for a while last summer. Southie has gained tolerance and diversity in the past 20 years. But as MTV and America have moved in, the neighborhood has lost much of its Irish character. It’s sad to see it go, though I was never there to see it anyway, and have to content myself with reading about the old neighborhood in residents’ memoirs and undergraduate social science theses. The only evidence of the old neighborhood that I can still hear is in their accents—the parents’ are strong and at times indecipherable to the untrained ear, but their children’s speech has lost its Irish edges, refined by television, which I guess is progress but does not feel like it.

It has been extraordinarily important for Southie, of all insular communities, to open up and allow the outside world in. Its ethnic integration, though painful and unfinished, is a blessing and a step forward for social justice.

It is sad that so much of the “old” South Boston character was tied to ethnicity—so much so that in the mid-century, even kids with last names like Dobowskl, Spezzini and Lopez would claim Irish heritage. As that unity has faded, none has taken its place, and South Boston too has faded into America. Its defining lines are blurred now, grayscaled and dot-pixeled like the rest of the country.

The old world is gone now and though kids still write Southie on their backpacks in pen ink and claim neighborhood allegiance, it all feels somehow inauthentic. I know it’s over because of the kids without accents and the BMWs on East Sixth St. but was reminded of it when I rode under the interstate at West Fourth and over a broken bottle of Corona Extra, not the first one that I’d seen in the gutters and alleys around the neighborhood.

I grew up watching my parents drink Coronas under the Arizona summer sun, a short drive from the Mexican border. I associate that light white script, even in shards, so readily with my own hometown that it is disconcerting to see it in such easy supply all the way across the country.

And though regular bar patrons have long gotten used to the idea of St. Pauli Girl in Los Angeles and Foster’s in Minneapolis, there is a part of me that would rather fend off flat tires on West Fourth from broken pieces of Boston’s own Sam Adams, not Corona. There is a part of me that still wants to feel something distinctive about the town that I’m walking through. I want to know that it is unique, it is different, and it is not Anytown, USA.

Lucas Tate ’05-’06 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.