Paul Elmore was born in Petaluma and was a student and then a professor of sociology. He was president of the East Shore Planning Group for 11 years, and is still on its board. His essays appear on the Local Organon on KWMR and in the Tomales Writer’s Group publication TWiG. He has been a West Marin resident for over two decades, but has been coming to Marshall since he was a teenager. I was interested in how he came to view the world as he does.
Charles Schultz: I want to ask you about personal experiences that relate to your academic work or intellectual interests. The first is a story you told me about an encounter at a convenience store in Eagle Rock, when you were teaching at Cal State, Los Angeles in the early 1970s.
Paul Elmore: It was at a supermarket. They had a promotion: one bag of ice free with any purchase. There was a young man ahead of me in the check-out line. He was about 10 or 11, and he wanted two bags of ice. He didn’t have the money for the second bag, and so I grabbed it and said, “Here, I’ll get the free bag for you.”
Charles: You said he gave you a haunting look.
Paul: A look of distrust that said, “What do you want from me?”
Charles: How does that relate to sociology’s idea of norms of reciprocity—how we do favors for each other without a specific expectation?
Paul: Well, we recognize each other as human beings. The look the boy gave me… at the time I attributed it to L.A., but it spoke to me about the increasingly atomistic nature of everyday life, which sociologists have been talking about since the 1950s at least. Not recognizing the other as a human being, but everybody in their own fortress. If I had done something for this boy, then I wanted something back. With reciprocity, there is no expectation of a specific payback. This was a new mode in which everyone is exploiting everyone else.
Charles: We’ve regressed to pre-Kantian ethics: rather than seeing others as ends in themselves, we see them as means to the fulfillment of our own desires—what we often call our “needs.” How do you relate that experience to growing up in Petaluma?
Paul: At that time Petaluma was agricultural, and agriculture, especially before it became dominated by machines, was a much more cooperative activity, a social activity. You didn’t get the sense—of course this is a small town—of people trying to do you in.
Charles: There is some irony here, because you wanted to get out of Petaluma as a young man.
Paul: My father was the pharmacist—Antlers Pharmacy, corner of Western and Kentucky—and was on the school board. I couldn’t be my father, or escape him. He was an extrovert, very well liked, very engaging. I was looking for anonymity. It is ironic in the sense that I didn’t like this atomization that happened in society. But at the time I didn’t see it that way. I think the saying is, “Be careful what you wish for.” The city meant for me that I could have friends of my own choosing, that I could be lost in my own thoughts walking down the street and not say hello to somebody and not be seen as a snob. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people, but in Petaluma, everybody knew my father and they saw my aloofness as snobbish. It wasn’t, but that is how it was often received.
Charles: So the city of the 1950s freed you from that problem. Was it San
Francisco?
Paul: Chicago. I lived there for a year in Hyde Park, by the University of Chicago. I worked as a surveyor in a blooming mill for U.S. Steel, through the winter, with the wind coming off Lake Michigan, in steel-capped boots. I’d take my boots off at the end of shift, put my feet in cold water and they would feel like they were burning.
Charles: You were also an observer of the theater scene that was developing there.
Paul: There was Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, and Jimmy was like a father to all of the college students and a friend to all of the professors—that’s who drank in Jimmy’s. So you didn’t have punch-outs; there were two sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. If you had disagreements, you settled it with the encyclopedia. But the experience was more enlightening than just the presence of the encyclopedia, in that you could really talk about ideas. You could follow the idea wherever it went in your head, and you could learn from other people who were also talking ideas. That did not exist in Petaluma, California, or most of the U.S.A.
Charles: And you saw the Compass
Theater?
Paul: They were in the bar next door, the Compass Bar. There, in a back room, was Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris and a number of others. Many of that group moved north and became Second City, one of the first extemporaneous theaters known in the United States. They had incredible agility of mind. Amazing to watch those minds move.
Charles: So you encountered the life of the mind there in Chicago. Did you come back west and go to college?
Paul: No, I went into the army. But after Chicago, the army found me rather poor material, in the sense that I was too old. My head was too full already for them to shape me into a soldier. I knew how to conform, but I learned not to volunteer—which is interesting, given my present life.
Charles: You’re involved in about a half-dozen volunteer activities in West Marin in any given week.
Paul: Something like that.
Charles: I know you did have a dispute with a fellow soldier who refused to turn down Elvis on the radio.
Paul: The only dispute I ever had. One thing I realized in the army was that I did not want to become an engineer. Sociology was kind of the zeitgeist of the time; everyone was into Freudian psychology, and that was interesting, but I got into more academic psych. I read the clinical literature on marijuana smokers. It claimed that is was clearly “pathological”—a mother or a father had mistreated them, etc.
But then I read one piece based on participant observation by a sociologist who treated smoking marijuana as a learned behavior, like you learn anything else. And he went through the stages of this learning.
Charles: This is Howie Becker.
Paul: Yes, and unlike clinical psychology, which treated these activities as coming from innate qualities (there are different kinds of people given to different behaviors), social learning made a lot more sense to me. Psychological categories just seemed like putting people down.
Charles: You had decided in the army not to try to become an engineer, and now you are rejecting Freud because here is an engineering model of the self.
Paul: Freud’s image is of a hydraulic system: repressed memories here pop up over there as symptoms. The model of human psychology has progressed since then, but that was the Freud I encountered. For me, rather than our behaviors as some kind of internal condition, I came to see it as this: if people are doing things that you don’t understand, it is because they had different learning experiences. It seems to be the difference between analysis, or breaking things down to their simplest units, and synthesis, or seeing how things build up.
Charles: But this model of human beings as lonely machines is the dominant image of our time.
Paul: Self-contained, with definable diseases that can be diagnosed, with pills that can be prescribed to fix the machine and insurance to pay for them.
Charles: Even the people shelling out for Eastern this and that: it seems to me they still approach their problems as faulty internal mechanisms that can be repaired. They can be made perfect and healthy through various therapeutic regimes. Not as enlightenment, but get a new Zen carburetor and your chakras will pass smog.
Paul: If someone tells you that you need to be repaired, whose purpose is this serving? The question was not asked in that way in the culture of the ’50s. And not that I understood all the implications you bring up, but I chose sociology because it was more to my taste to look at people as normal within their own frameworks.
Charles: How does it relate to the way news is reported? There is a mass shooting, and you hear immediately about psychological categories.
Paul: He’s “psychotic,” or the old-fashioned version, “He’s a coward.” There is an immediate desire to attribute these actions to madness. A person has been radicalized, or maybe is a member of a group of radicalized individuals—as though the other side of the issue has no currency whatsoever. No conversation, no dialogue: just narrow, competing monologues. For instance, the wholesale killing of people in Arab states is not allowed to be discussed in the context of this violence and radicalization. Even bringing it up, you are accused of sympathizing with violence, with terrorism.
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Charles: For your dissertation, you studied the deaf. Did this give you an insight into the ear-bud culture, this atomized society you see today?
Paul: They had lost hearing very early or never had it, so they never had spoken language as you or I do. Sign language formed their culture.
Charles: Can you relate that inwardness, not hearing, to what is considered normal today—that one’s most intimate relationship is with one’s phone or laptop?
Paul: Actually, there was a very strong culture. I worked with two groups, 11 to 12-year-olds and 15 to 16-year-olds, and amongst both groups there was a very tight subculture. Within their group there was a lot of communication. One of the big taboos was communicating with someone with your back to the rest of the group. That just was not done, because the others couldn’t see what you were saying, signing. Their connectedness among each other was very good, but with the rest of the world it was very problematic. And attempts to “cure” their hearing are often rejected by them quite strongly.
Charles: In the Gospel of Mark, only the blind man can “see.” Is this the case, we have all of our senses, we have all of these digital devices supposedly to amplify and carry our voice and hearing, but we engage less. We make physical contact less, certainly with strangers; we’ve become blind to so much. I remember that the man who coined “nuclear family” wrote it as a criticism along the same lines you have—the life of the lonely atom. The mother and father nucleus and these little baby electrons whirring around, occasionally forming a molecule called soccer practice.
Paul: A majority of communication is nonverbal. It is in body language and demeanor. So we lose that in digital communication. It is kind of a new handicap. The digital generation has enough interaction to understand nonverbal cues, but they are less comfortable with them. They’d like to get away from that physical exchange. They are probably just more uncertain about what is being said or not said. And I think life is less reflective; there is no time or space for it, because of this technology that was supposed to offer time and space.
Charles: How long have you lived in Marshall?
Paul: My father built this house in 1950, but I didn’t live here fulltime until the last 25 years. I lived here briefly with my family earlier, though. In the ’80s, left over from the ’70s, there were the remnants of the counter-culture. And one by one, or two by two, they all went north. What’s it called, Fort Washington?
Charles: Port Townsend.
Paul: Port Townsend. Well, Marshall was a real community back then, but that progressively declined.
Charles: What do you mean by “community”?
Paul: It was the easy conversations we had, and the ability to ask for and get help from others. There were empty houses even then, but there were more people here, more full-time residents who with one line of work or another were able to exist. That is no longer true. The houses are empty. The cars belong mostly to tourists, except for the milk trucks, and fuel trucks, and water trucks, and the sewage trucks.
Charles: Why did it change?
Paul: The increase in money on the shoreline forced the counter-culture out. I remember when Marconi Flats used to be a huge camping ground. During the drought in the ’70s, my well ran out of water and my wife and children and I all went down to the campground to use their showers.
Charles: So where does this lead?
Paul: Well, the [government] owns lots of patches of land on the East Shore. I imagine they will continue to expand. In a bureaucracy, you rise by expanding regulations and restrictions, and by acquisition. So with the Dunn Ranch, if you can buy it and manage it, then it goes on the credit side of the ledger for the bureaucrats, the superintendent of the park, etc. That is how you come under good notice by the higher-ups—maybe get moved to a better job in another nice park.
Charles: It is gentrified nature. I found the same thing in universities. The administration is obsessed with new property acquisition and new buildings. The last President when I was an undergrad built a huge “life sciences” complex. I think it is just filled with 4 million unopened boxes of University of Michigan sweatshirts, but he got what he wanted: president of Columbia University, best cocktail receptions in the country. Columbia is of course eagerly gobbling up and gentrifying Harlem all the time—like the University of Chicago in Hyde Park.
Paul: I found that to be true of the universities I worked at. At U.S.F., the president, while I was there, had a big building project including Lone Mountain, which was a women’s college. He planted two big palm trees at the top; it really doesn’t fit the climate. Building after building. My statement at the time was that he had an “edifice” complex.
Charles: Were those palm trees planted on the grounds of the women’s college meant as defiant phallic symbols?
Paul: I never went that far. I told you: I’m not a Freudian.