Subsections below:
1. The Housekeeping staff: How could I forget?
2. A broader “GW-related” question than about the MC: What is a JAP?
Sub-categories and derivations of the JAP
concept—e.g., “JAP science”
My becoming self-girding in the face of the
Jewish concepts and ethos I encountered
How did the concept start?
How relevant is the concept today?
1. The Housekeeping staff: How could I forget?
“Housekeeping to Unit 1,
Housekeeping to Unit 1. Come in Unit 1.” (May be repeated one or more times, if
Unit 1 doesn’t answer quickly.)
You don’t know how that’s
engrained on my memory. That was a standard line used by Smitty, when he called
one of us building managers—whoever was assuming the role/radio of “Unit 1” for
the night—when he called on his walkie-talkie.
I should say a few words on the
Housekeeping staff. There was (as routinely scheduled) a different set of
workers at night than during the day, and I’m by far most familiar with the
night crew. The main ones I remember are Ronald Smith, or “Smitty”; Calvin,
whom I mentioned in a previous entry (the second one on Andy Cohen), whose
surname, I believe, was Williams; Philip Powell, a younger man who came on
after I’d been a student manager for a little while, but who became an
essential (well engrained) member of the crew; and there were at least two
women, and I remember their faces well, but am sorry I can’t remember their
names, though one was referred to as Mrs. ____. Almost all the housekeepers
were Black; there was one white guy among them for a while.
The Housekeeping crew, per their
duties, didn’t just clean, but they set up furniture and other such
infrastructure for rooms that were going to have events—they did all the
blue-collar stuff. We managers did the more white-collar stuff, like setting up
AV equipment, putting up easels, etc.
When I see the movie The Royal Tenenbaums (2001; see my November 25 review), there is a funny moment involving a man who is really an
elevator attendant—he is employed this way as is Royal, the Tenenbaum paterfamilias
and a disbarred lawyer, who previously had just lived in the hotel. This man is
pretending to be Royal’s doctor while Royal is (pretending to be) sick. While
the man is pretending to be checking Royal out and issuing medical advice to family
members, he gets a call on his beeper, and looks at its readout; as family
members present can’t see, it says, “Smitty worked a double last night. Could you
sub for him?” This reminds me both of the days of “working doubles” (as building
managers did) and of the MC’s Smitty (who, of course, wasn’t involved in the
same scheduling metes and bounds as were we managers, though within the
Housekeeping milieu he may have worked “doubles” now and then).
Smitty was the most colorful
character among the Housekeepers. He was about six feet tall and very
heavy—maybe he was well over 250 pounds. He had problems with his feet, due I
would suspect either to his weight causing them harm, or maybe to diabetes,
which I wouldn’t be surprised he had in the mid-1980s, if he didn’t have it
later. He had some humorous pet sayings, and on occasion (though someone else
first heard this; I don’t think I did) he would muse about the idea of what was
apparently a choice breakfast for him, “scrapple and eggs” (he had a mild
Southern accent, so he pronounced this “scrapple and aigs”).
Calvin was quieter, seeming
almost a little sullen, but he always did his job diligently and well. Philip
Powell was a sort of earnest youth compared to these men. Philip liked to
engage one or more of the other building managers in sports bets, which I don’t
think any higher-level managers objected to, though I don’t know if they knew
about it.
2. A broader “GW-related” question than about the MC: What is a JAP?
Among the references to college
culture I’ve made in my MC entries, one that may seem more unfamiliar to modern
readers is that of the JAP (“Jewish American Princess”—or “…Prince,” for
males). This was a concept I had never heard of before I got to GW in 1980,
though I believe I was aware of Frank Zappa’s song “Jewish Princess” on his
1979 album Sheik Yerbouti.
(Incidentally, the Zappa song is an amusing, cluttered collection of ideas, not
all of them empirically valid perhaps, but aside from exemplifying his
sometimes manic way of assembling a comic jumble of concepts that may or may
not be accepted as relevant, this song didn’t squarely represent “JAPs” as I
came to know about them at GW, though I don’t begrudge fans to stand by it. But
here’s a funny little story: there was a woman down the hall from my dorm room
in freshman year, Susan ___, who seemed to fit the JAP category [at least by
appearance and some of her manner] but was a very nice person, and one of my
roommates thought it was amusing to play the Zappa song for her, and after
giving it a listen [apparently for the first time], she made a motion as if she
wanted to scratch the record, but in a sort of good humor.)
The concept, to all appearances (and there were many appearances), was
developed by Jews. I heard it used by Jews (about other Jews) much more
than by non-Jews at GW. It essentially meant a spoiled, shallow,
fashion-conscious young Jewish woman (or man, though the male version was less
often used). There were certain “accessory”-type attributes such as, often, the
color purple within a female JAP’s clothing color scheme (and their clothing
was typically fashionable, of course). Certain designer names were big among
them, like (I believe) Gucci. There were certain mannerisms like the “JAP
kiss,” which was essentially an air kiss. All these attributes I learned from
hearing Jewish fellow students employ the concepts.
Apparently a sort of aloofness
to sexual “accessibility” was part of the image/stereotype, but at the time I
myself never really saw this as essential or worth making an “issue” of (there
were probably numerous more or less “dating-apt” young men who did). Another
thing I recall is that they typically lacked a sense of humor about themselves;
they might have bonded on the basis of shared values, but they certainly
wouldn’t have shared in the ironic view that non-JAPs had about them.
(There was a Norman ___ who
lived down the hall in my dorm freshman year, and one day he got dressed up in
order to demonstrate to someone else what a male “Long Island JAP” was, and he
had garish red on with some other vivid color, and dark sunglasses. It’s hard
to describe this in its full esthetic punch, but it was amusing.)
One thing about JAPs at GW was
that they seemed to matriculate there in cliques that had been at the high
school they had come from; or if a select set of some were originally from
different high schools, then at GW they coalesced as a clique (this latter is if
I remember rightly). Such a small group was easy to spot in part because they
were similar in clothing style, makeup, and such. In any event, there were
definitely small groups of JAPs who always seemed to move together…this sounds
schematic, I know. (I am thinking in particular of girls I used to see who
lived in the dorm Thurston Hall, the biggest dorm at GW and where I lived for my
first two college years.) (I was a freak in that I was the only person from my
specific area of New Jersey
who was in my class at GW. The person “next nearest to me” geographically from
New Jersey, whom I met, was from Essex County, I believe.)
Sub-categories and derivations of the JAP
concept—e.g., “JAP science”
There were a variety of ways the
JAP concept could be employed. Marlon Jahnke, a fellow student manager at the
MC (who I mentioned in this series’ Part 2), once remarked on having gone
to X place and had a “JAP attack” because of the number of JAPs there (for the
moment).
The concept had enough wider
currency that it is even mentioned in Joseph Heller’s lesser-quality novel God Knows (1984), where—in a
first-person narrative that overall is a kind of literary shtick, making
anachronistic use of material from the Old Testament—King David refers to his
wife Michal as a JAP (hardcover version, p. 142).
One of the amusing things about
this concept is that, once I left GW and D.C. in 1986 and moved back to New Jersey, I almost
never heard use of the term (and I never really had need to use it myself). It
became, for me, something that, if I might encounter someone who knew it, had
“some commonality” with me the way you might with a person who had been in the
same colorful, peculiar social milieu you had been in “way back when,” which
had seemed to go by the board. (This is similar, I would assume, to people who
meet others who had been at Haight-Ashbury in 1967.)
I would discover someone who
knew the JAP concept, in an unusual way….
One of the funny adaptations of
the term was a reference to “JAP science”—a term that has occurred to me
frequently in recent times, as (for blog purposes or not) I brew up an
“academic” way to discuss things of more recent relevance. There was a
beginners’ astronomy class taught at GW when I was there, by a professor whose
name I think was Herman Hobbs—he was a veteran professor in his field, but he
was elderly and, almost as if to have a relatively easy task, he did this survey
course—and it was apparently one of the very easiest science courses taught at
GW. Students who needed to meet [whatever the GW term was for being
well-rounded in your choice of non-major classes] and thus had to choose a math
or science to meet part of that criterion, chose this survey-of-astronomy
class. Thus, apparently, so many JAPs took it (because, the prevailing wisdom
went, they typically weren’t looking to take hard courses, at least in science)
that some referred to the class as “JAP science.”
In 2006, I was working at the
medical-promotions place Cardinal Health in Wayne Township,
N.J., and I crossed paths with a fellow freelancer there (who worked at
Cardinal through a placement agency I had last been employed by in 2004); she
was a woman whom I’d never met before and who was roughly my age. We chatted
about a range of things, but in some ways we didn’t share a whole lot in
common; but interestingly, she was well acquainted with the concept of JAPs—and
she got a laugh when I mentioned the idea of “JAP science,” which she had never
heard of before but could well understand.
My becoming self-girding in the face of the
Jewish concepts and ethos I encountered
At GW, there are two things that
impressed me about Jewish fellow students—a competitive drive that wasn’t
necessarily among those students regarded as JAPs, and the whole set of JAP
concepts (as employed by fellow Jews). What I took to heart regarding my own
personal competitiveness was the former.
Aside from the parochial
qualities of JAPs, I think it’s very true there was a communal aspect to people
at GW—whether this obtained respectively among those JAPs who were associating
in cliques or in other Jews who formed certain generalizing views of fellow
Jews. Overall, the air there certainly was thick with a sort of set of “preordained”
cultural assumptions; a will to criticize (and you could be the target of this
if you seemed to them passingly intellectually lazy or careless); (among some) a
will to take a (generally) political stand; and a sense of competitiveness (not
necessarily a JAP thing) that could be so hard-nosed in manner, that I felt as
if I’d come to college rather ill-prepared—I hadn’t learned to be so
competitive as these supposed peers were. (Of course, JAPs themselves were
typically less given to hard-nosed criticism than were some among the non-JAPs;
JAPs more typically showed their “aspirations” in a sort of cool aloofness.)
So, with regard to work
interests (and hardly regarding social styles, as some valued), I battened down
and worked harder, pretty much, than I had in high school. I would find later
that with some of these fellow students, when I was surprised that they hadn’t
done as well as I had grade-wise, they had more hard-nosed manner (and
aloofness)—more posturing, you might say—than real technical ability as a student
(and I’m not talking about the JAPs, by and large). Amid this, what was more
genuinely important—as I adopted into my own ethos—what you really learned at
college was to develop your own virtue as an individual worker.
Still, when it came to what I
would have considered (and still do) matters of petty lifestyle choices, or “badges”
of socioeconomic status or aspirations, the thick atmosphere among GW students of criticism (of a range of things),
opinionatedness, sarcastic humor, and (in their contexts) concepts summing up
JAPs—and certainly, alternatively, ideas about “goys” (Gentiles), all sorts of
ways of measuring non-Jews that I had never heard before I got to GW—was all
something to learn from, whether I might incorporate certain specific ideas
into my own way of having an ethos or not. But with the distance of time, you
learned there was also a certain parochial and rather defensive quality to a
good amount of this. This may seem the case to you in retrospect. It took me
some time (I started to “decompress” from this in a first big effort in 1986)
to learn to not have the GW “criticism/politicizing attitude” define so much of
what I felt a need to measure up to. (This enters a territory I didn’t mean to
get into.)
How did the concept start?
How did the concept of JAPs get
started? For one thing, though it has been referred to (probably usually by
Jewish commentators) as anti-Semitic, it
wasn’t anti-Semitic in the early 1980s. I heard it overwhelmingly used by Jews.
There was even a derivative concept of the “Christian JAP”—which helped me
understand the concept as to explain it to outsiders: it wasn’t a swipe at Jews per se, it was a swipe at shallowness, almost
a “betrayal” of what some held the ethnic group should really be about—which
in those days, I supposed, was seriousness, authenticity, and committedness (in
the political sense).
The Wikipedia article on the concept suggests it was potentiated by economic conditions (though its particular
take on this goes into an ethnic and time-period territory I don’t have much
expertise on). I think this economic basis is true of the period I was in school (whereas the
economic underpinnings for the concept held by such writers as Philip Roth and
Herman Wouk aren’t something I can readily comment on). The late 1970s and
early 1980s, when I was aware of the concept most flourishing, was a time of
economic stress for the middle class—following the later gasoline crisis in
about 1979, when gas stations had to use differently colored flags to show
whether they were open, had limited gas, or closed.
Also, it’s possible (I’m going
out on a limb with this) that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was
consciousness among Jews of a recent political situation for them that led to the
fermenting of the concept: the Middle East as a world-politics hotbed was first
erupting in the 1970s, following the 1967 Israeli war, the 1973 Yom Kippur
crisis, and various Middle East–related terrorist acts of the 1970s (such as
the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics at Munich). Young Jews
in the U.S. by the late 1970s were children or grandchildren of Jews who had
come here in appreciable numbers during the earlier and middle part of the
century, and perhaps the pros and cons of their cultural assimilation to
standardized U.S. morés were leading to a sort of sui generis version of the
Americanized Jew among some (which others who didn’t subscribe to this would
criticize very tartly), which became the JAP: a rather-quietly posturing,
shallow sort who was self-protective, heavily oriented to fashion and
lifestyle, and interested in social-climbing without necessarily wanting to
become hardworking professionals. (Somehow, from past reading, I think Philip
Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus might have something to say on
this, but I haven’t read that for many years, so I defer further explication based
on that story.)
This is all a stab at
explanation; my main intent here is to describe a style (and a style of talking
about it), not so much explain its roots.
To some extent, at GW, even the
major of psychology was a sort of “JAP science”—there were quite a few students
in this major, and numerous of them seemed like JAP-py types (“JAP-py”: another
1980s derivation of the concept). Psychology was a major that could be hard for
you if you took a large set of courses including the harder ones that I did,
but if you took the line of least resistance with what set of courses you took
to qualify for the major (and you had no other major), then it could be
not-too-hard.
But there were also hard workers
in the major—I remember a Suzie [sp?] Jurist who was the one other student than myself who got
top honors in that major in 1984, and there was a Janice [can’t
remember her last name right now] who headed the local chapter of the psych
honor society Psi Chi. I was the only male, I think, who was a top student in
the psych major that year—and the only Gentile with that distinction, if I
recall. I’m not complaining (or bragging) by any means.
How relevant is the concept today?
The reason all this comes up is
that, I think, more than at any other time in my post-college work history, I
would suggest that the JAP-type person, to the extent anyone somehow has that
identity (apart from fellow Jews applying it as a scorning category), has made
a comeback as a figure in some social contexts—such as certain workplaces.
(Whether the concept has returned to college campuses, I can’t say with
authority, but there appears to be some journalism on the matter—see the Wikipedia article on JAPs, where a 2005 article seems to look at this.)
This whole subsection makes me
think that, once I close out the MC series, it would be good to do an occasional
blog entry on “GW memories,” because the more I delve into this period, the
more fun stuff I come up with—and aside from when I simply forget certain
things, the “fuzzy-grained,” “analog” quality of this stuff from ~30 years ago
may make it more palatable for you if you don’t like my more “digital,”
sharp-focused memories of recent years.
