For those who are paying more attention to international
news than social media—or those who are reading this long after the momentary
hubbub has died down, and are searching through the cache of 24-hour media
viruses like Chocolate Rain and Overly Dramatic Rodents, allow me to describe
to you a seemingly trivial speck on the radar screen of cultural goings-on,
which might actually have a hidden meaning and provide an explanation of our
current cultural and political trajectory, and offer a solution to our present
state of division.
In mid-May, 2018, a young woman posted to her Instagram
account (that’s a wildly popular social media platform, for the uninitiated) a
short audio clip and a poll about people’s perception of that clip. The short clip was on a repeating loop and
bore one single word that was easy to hear, but inspired varying
perceptions. Some described a deep, male
voice in the clip which clearly said “Laurel”, in his best radio announcer
style. Others described a gravelly female voice in the clip which clearly said
“Yanni” (pronounced YANN-knee) in her best imitation of your 80 year old great
aunt who’s been a chain smoker most of her life. Reminiscent of the great gold
dress / blue dress meme debate of 2015, when this first came across my desk, I
initially scoffed at this, thinking to myself, “Could there possibly be two
words more starkly different and still come from the same audio clip?” So I
suspiciously opened the post and listened for myself. Immediately, I heard a
hoarse-voiced, elderly lady croaking in a moderately low pitch the neologism,
“YANN-knee”, with a seemingly Midwestern accent. I could not conceive of how
anyone could ever hear this as “Laurel”.
So I read an article in The
Atlantic by a linguist, which I found only marginally helpful in
explicating how two entirely different words and pronunciations could come from
the same audio clip.[1]
I even asked my wife to listen as well.
She perceived neither pronunciation at first, hearing something
in-between, but gradually agreeing with me on the Yanni interpretation, before
losing interest in the discussion and returning to her e-book on noted
philanderer and pioneering radio disk jockey, Richard Blade.
The next day, I came across a newer article in The New York Times, that included an
online tool which was developed whereby one could play the same, original clip
repeatedly, but modulate the output through an on-screen, mouse manipulated
slider, and hear, effectively, what the other party hears.[2] I tried it, and immediately—without even
changing the slider’s location—I heard “Laurel”, pronounced by a deep baritone
male voice, like those who spent their lives in suits and ties, enjoying male
privilege, and working as voice actors for advertising companies or educational
outfits. His deep, rich tones, reminded
me of the voice over from elementary school film strips and 16 mm movies from
the 1970s, telling me about the primary exports from the Amazon Rain Forest,
and why capitalism will always win over Communism. Remembering my statement of incredulity from
the day prior, I couldn’t believe my ears!
“Where’d Aunt Margie go?!” I asked myself, proposing that she may have
gone to the other room to retrieve her pack of cigarettes, or finding the pack
empty, took a quick trip to the QuikTrip to pick up more Camels, or at least
some Virginia Slims. I continued to play
with the slider, and Aunt Margie suddenly returned, now stronger than ever,
freshly quaffed with gin and tonic, and enjoying a puff of her cancer sticks.
As I moved the slider back and forth, adjusting the modulation as my curiosity
moved me, I heard Don—the suave and confidently masculine voiceover
actor—return from his trip to the Rainforest, only to share with Aunt Margie
about his new mistress who lived on a street called “Laurel”. Aunt Margie
retorted that she had been listening to that nice Greek musician who used to
date her favorite evening soap opera actress, Linda Evans, but she butchered
his name in the process, as if she were referring to a nanny goat. Aunt Margie’s voice sounded a bit tinny the
further to the right I moved the slider, but Yanni was still very clear. And as
I moved the slider to the far left, Don’s voice was quite clear in all its
traditionally masculine, martini-drinking glory, as fresh from a Madison Avenue
ad agency, or a safari in Africa. But then something strange happened. Don showed up on Aunt Margie’s side, and
occasionally, Margie took a sip of Don’s martini and languished on his side of
the room. And I realized that both were
always there, but depending upon which one I listened for, I heard one over the
other. If I shifted the slider to
Margie’s side, irrespective of how far into her domain I was, I began to hear
Don crooning, “Laurel” very clearly. And Margie’s raspy, gin-fueled and tobacco
burnished “Yanni” was harder to discern.
But I listened very specifically for it, and even recited the word in my
mind, I could hear it as Don’s Laurel took a momentary back seat.
I’m no scientist, but I have spent decades in a university
setting, and I do understand enough about shifting human perspective to see a
pattern emerging here. And with the help
of both articles I had read on the topic, it became clear to me that both of
these words were always and ever present amid the data and sound waves
recorded. Neither of them ever
disappeared. The sound waves were merely
sound waves. But depending upon how your
mind deciphered them, and which pulses and frequencies you were attuned to, one
word emerged in your consciousness while the other retreated. Such is the case with radio waves. They are always there. Millions and millions of countless impulses
travel through the air every day from various sources, such as radio stations,
television stations, wireless transmitters and otherwise. But only certain of these impulses or
frequencies are our particular individual devices attuned to receive or
decipher into comprehensible and understandable data to which we react. And so it is with the original recording of
what evidently started its life as an instructional vocabulary clip used by an
educational company for pedagogical purposes, probably to demonstrate the
proper pronunciation of the word, Laurel.
By tuning out background noise, we hear handsome Don crooning “Laurel”
in his three piece suit; but by tuning out the foreground noise, and only
listening to the background or other peripheral frequencies, we hear Aunt
Margie croaking something akin to “Yanni”, between puffs from her Newport Lites.
This discussion may seem trivial and insignificant in the
midst of national and international turmoil in the form of school shootings
nearly every month (even one in Texas as I write this), undeniable overfishing
and plastic pollution of our oceans, innocent children and adults being
murdered in Gaza alongside of protesters, and a shaky truce between North and
South Korea, among many other truly important current events. But this argument over Laurel or Yanni is
more than a mere distraction, unlike the gustatory choices of socialite Kendall
Jenner prior to her attendance of the Met Gala, or whether her half-sister Kim
Kardashian’s semi-nude photo for an online magazine in 2015 actually “broke the
internet” or not.
The debate over whether the actual recording empirically
presents the word Laurel or the neologistic Yanni is in fact emblematic of the
divisions that the United States is suffering under—and perhaps the world at
large. It is somewhat reminiscent of a
folk story from the Yoruba people of Western Africa, in which the archetypal
trickster figure, Eshu, indicative of his playful and pranksterish nature,
walks between two friends, while wearing a hat that is colored differently on
either side—deliberately stirring up trouble by causing an argument over the
actual color of the hat. The friend who sees
only the black side of the hat has a different perspective from the friend who
walks on the other side and only sees the red side of the hat, a difference of
opinion that needlessly causes both friends—obviously unwilling to entertain
the validity of the other’s individual perspective—to become bitter enemies.[3]
For many years, I have witnessed a tendency for people to
dismiss the opinions and life experiences of their political adversaries as
being irrelevant or unimportant. This is a common tendency, invalidating the
standpoints of “the other”. But in the
past few years, leading up to the 2016 election, and in the time since then, I
have seen a worsening of this, and from both sides of the political spectrum. In recognizing this sinfulness of “both sides”,
I am not purposefully detracting from the gravity of, or dismissing the very
real crimes and acts of hatred carried out by certain supporters of a major
political party, which include running over protesters with cars, pointing
semi-automatic weapons at Jewish synagogues, and all manner of bullying of
racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.
But the vast majority of people on either end of the political spectrum are
not engaging in this kind of lawless and despicable behavior. Yet, there are people on both sides who are in
fact rejecting the validity of the life experiences and socio-political and
economic realities of people who support either major party or platform, with
the result being that the other side is demonized as if they have no right to
their opinions and neither do they have any reason to exist.
I do, however, see a lot that the proponents of these two
sides of the larger discussion have in common.
And much of this they will never realize. And so they fail to recognize the inherent
humanity in the other, no less the validity of their lived experiences or the
kernel of truth in their viewpoints, regardless of the shortcomings of their
arguments. And I often see each side
twisting words of the other side, ignoring the central points and harping on minor
points of verbiage or peripheral aspects of presentation, and dismissing
anything helpful that could serve to unite or cause reconciliation.
Of the many things that I see in common, is that people have
a need to feel proud of their identities. People don’t want to feel as if their
heritage or their identity, either chosen or inherited, is invalid or
deprecated. And all too often they see in the arguments of the other, a pointed
disregard for their need for pride.
LGBTQ+ folk often feel that social and religious conservatives do not
honor their right to exist and to love those whom they choose to love. And we see people of a more conservative
mindset feeling reviled and bullied for holding more conservative social and
moral standpoints, and choosing to teach their children a certain conservative
theological doctrine. People of Hispanic
descent, or those immigrating from Latin American countries feel the need to
preserve their heritage and celebrate and promote their culture. People of Anglo descent, hailing from
Southern regions of the United States feel as if their entire heritage is being
equated with slavery and racism, and being personally and individually blamed
for the historical plight of African Americans.[4] Military veterans and active duty personnel
alike want to feel as if they are valued for their service and their
contributions to defending our nation; not to be labeled wholesale as
baby-killers or murderers and tools of global imperialism. Catholics, Blacks, Muslims, Jews, Native
Americans, people from the Coasts, people from Middle America; people from
larger, liberal, urban areas; and people from less populated and largely rural
areas; people that own and live around guns and gun culture; people who have
never held a gun and reject gun culture—all of these people have a need to
affirm their identity and their choices and to feel pride in who they are, and
to not have others seek to invalidate their lived experiences and cultural
expressions.
At the core of nearly every culture, we are taught to seek
justice. We are taught to desire peace.
We are taught that equal treatment under the law is an individual human
right and a just end. And every one of
us believes that we, individually, deserve these things; and we at least pay
lip service to the fact that others deserve them, too. Now, we may differ as to how to bring these
things about. We may have different
feelings about amnesty and permissiveness in the face of legalism, about
individualism versus collective identity, about authoritarianism versus libertarianism,
but we all seek to be honored and respected and understood—and to have our
voices heard. We all seek to preserve
the cultures and traditions we grew up with.
None of us likes when our long-held mores and values and icons are
exposed to the vicissitudes of historical revisionism or deconstruction and
reconsideration, leaving us in a limbo of cognitive dissonance. None of us likes when our core values and
identity are exposed to criticism, and it takes a very wise and self-aware
person to be truly open to this kind of criticism. But it needs to be conveyed
in a way that seeks growth, progress, and reconciliation; not the wholesale
tearing down and deconstruction of a culture’s or a people’s identity. There
needs to be a sensitivity to what is lost when we tear down an idol or an icon
for their fatal flaws and human shortcomings.
When we criticize or tear down a Gandhi or a Mother Theresa or a Martin
Luther King for their flawed and frail humanity, we need to put something up in
their place, or at least come to grips with the fact that no “saint” is truly
perfect.
A spirit of division has come upon our nation and between us,
as Americans. Whether it is Eshu, the Trickster of the Yoruba, or the Devil of the
Abrahamic Faiths, that plagues us, I cannot tell. But plaguing us it is, and it is making us
combative and irascible and even seemingly irreconcilable in our cultivated
arrogance that we are naturally correct.
We would do well to show gratitude toward those on the other side of the
slider, showing us how to modulate the sound that comes into our ears, and how
to understand it differently. One of the
key traditions shared by the Abrahamic Faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam—as well as many other world religions—is that of repentance. Even the
I Ching, an ancient Chinese Confucian text, states that “the mind should be
kept humble and free, so that it may remain receptive to good advice. People
soon give up counseling a man who thinks that he knows everything better than
anyone else.”[5] It is this advice, from a non-Western culture,
that serves as a testament to the ubiquity of such counsel. We must all be open to revising our
viewpoints and reconciling toward those who were our erstwhile
adversaries. We must be grateful to them
for showing us that there is a different way to perceive or interpret the sounds
that enter our earholes.
We are all Americans, whether we are native-born Americans,
indigenous Americans, naturalized Americans, or aspiring Americans of any sort
(documented or not). We are here for a reason and most of us want to be here;
and, as such, we have a responsibility, an obligation, to work for the common
good. We are the nation that was central
in defeating Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. We pulled together for that, and despite
our differences—even amidst terrible prejudice and oppression of certain racial
and ethnic groupings (namely Japanese-Americans and African-Americans begin
with)—everyone gave selflessly and played their part. That time, the enemy was an external
one. But this time, the enemy is within
each of us, and it is much wilier. It is
very insidious and divisive. The only
way to defeat this enemy, this trickster, this devil, is to be willing to slide
the modulator a little bit left or right and be willing to listen to what the
other party hears. Is it Laurel? Or is
it Yanni? It turns out that it is
both. Until we move that modulator a
little bit, we are going to keep on fighting and denying each other’s personal
truths and lived experiences out of our hubris, our overweening arrogance that
we know everything. And we will continue
to argue over Laurel or Yanni, or whatever is the issue of the month. We can do
better. We must do better.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/dont-rest-on-your-laurels/560483/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html
[3] Ken
Derry, in A Concise Introduction to World
Religions, edited by Willard G. Oxtoby, Alan F. Segal, et al, Third
Edition, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2015, p.49.
[4]
Note that the cultures and economy of colonial Latin America and Caribbean as
well as the Southern U.S. were built upon slavery and plantations and the
subjugation of and disenfranchisement of indigenous populations.
[5] The I Ching, Translated by Richard
Wilhelm, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, Hexagram 31, pg. 123.
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