You usually hear him before you see him; his voice, like a fisherman’s net, is thrown well-wide of his immediate listening audience. He casts out upon any and all in his vicinity and then, with a slight of hand, hauls the hapless multitude in towards his incessant monologue. Unfortunately, the monologue is usually not immediately obvious as such. Instead, he regales his captives with spectacular “life stories,” including, but not limited to, daring feats, money made, acts of justice, trials overcome, insignificant minutiae that extrapolate into a poignant moral– all this and more form the brickwork of his pathway. He is self-made, self-reliant and self-righteous. If Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman had procreated together, this man would be their offspring.
This man is a type. He is, first and foremost, American. And, of course, he is male. He is always over fifty years old, hovers about 5’8’’ tall and is, invariably bearded. He is also an expat– an American living overseas. He is the American Renaissance Man.
I have met three so far. Admittedly, I have a rather small pool of data, but the fact that I have met each American Renaissance Man in three different regions of the world, leads me to deduce their universality.
My first was, as the grade school ditty goes, the worst. I met him in the Dominican Republic at an orphanage where I was volunteering. He claimed to be an Old Testament scholar, having made his name by uncovering a hidden library of ancient texts in modern-day Syria. He spoke 14 languages, was the only non-Greek to have ever been ordained a minister in the Greek Orthodox Church, and had been tortured by Islamist militants. He had also served tea to the Dalai Lama and just happened to be in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s house the night Mandela was released from prison. He was also lying (at least in part), as I found out later.
Of course, the discovery of his falsity was somewhat humiliating for me, considering the degree to which I admired him. Without context, the above list does seem preposterous, but he told his stories damn well; I’ll give him that much. Naturally, I’m more wary of the type now.
My second was a millionaire (or so he loudly broadcasted) whom I met in a backpacker hostel in Central America. Though he could have stayed anywhere else in town, he felt that by bunking down with the rabble he was having a far more “real” experience. Since, of course, the rest of us were there because we couldn’t stay anywhere else in town, he deemed us to be in need of wisdom from the other end of life’s trajectory. And he dispensed liberally. His monologue filled the lounge space and weaved in and out of his varied decades, of which the 60s was the most offensive. As he talked of his peripheral role in the civil rights movement (did I mention he was white?), he began to passionately claim that he had always ridden at the back of the bus. His monologue, here, hit its crescendo when he roundly declared, “I WAS FUCKING ROSA PARKS!” At first I thought he was alluding to an improbable sexual tryst with the famous black resister but no, as he repeated himself three more times, I grasped that he was drawing a ludicrous, associative equality between the roles he and Ms. Parks had played in the black liberation struggle.
At this point, Colleen and I decided to escape his mad clutches, whereupon the man handed us his business card. I don’t remember the name, but the card did list “Life Coach” and “Judo Master” as his profession, along with the (unexplained) letters, “PhD”.
Finally, my third. He greeted Colleen and I from the shadows of a bus stop in Daejeon, South Korea. He showed us to our place and then took us out for dinner. Over the course of our meal, we learned a great deal about him and he learned almost nothing about us. He is an investor of sorts; he solves people’s problems; he owns a house on the Virgin Islands; he’s a free lance photographer, on the side, and a writer of books, on the side; oh, and he has stepped out of retirement to develop the ESL market in Korea. My questions pertaining to his interest in photography and writing, which were attempts to generate conversation out from some of our mutual interests, served only to fuel his monologue.
The monologue continued ad nauseam this week when he took Colleen & I and our fellow Korean teachers out for lunch in order to call us on board to some significant changes taking place at our school. He took the opportunity of a captive audience, like the previous two American Renaissance Men, to mete out story upon story. Most infuriating, however, was the moral morsel he wrung from each minute aspect of every tale; they were pearls of wisdom and he offered them generously through the yellowed, smoky hairs of his white beard. He talked of carrying invalids up staircases and hauling watermelons home for Korean housewives; he also told stories of splendid financial success (at which point he leaned in towards my Korean counterparts and defined it more narrowly– “that means I’m rich” — in case something had been lost in translation). And throughout it all, he continually repeated the refrain, “if you have a problem, on the job or off, I will solve it for you.” Great. Much appreciated. Except that he forgot to even ask the very simple question, “do you have any problems?” The whole purpose of our lunch meeting, which was to open a space for communication just as changes are to be implemented, was utterly lost in the American Renaissance Man’s complete inability to interrupt his monologue with one honest, open-ended question.
They’re a suffocating lot, these Men. Their self-mythologizing, which is meant to inspire the more humdrum lives of others, serves only to insult or depress. Also, drunk on their own wisdom, they forget to actually stop speaking and listen for a change; were they to do so, they might actually begin to relate rather than simply relay. Maybe then they might begin to truly connect to people (their stated goal), and possibly transform their experiences into the stuff of wisdom.
