Smile, When Your Heart is Breaking? Liar!
The essential hypocrisy and vulgarity of modern life is summed up by the leering grin all Americans and increasing numbers of Europeans affect whenever they meet someone or face a camera. Starlets do it, jocks do it, even bishops in their BVD’s do it. All my nieces and nephews and great nieces etc grin like terrified apes as soon as some yokel with an iPhone bleats “cheese!” And to make things even worse no one but pretty good actors manages to look any better than grotesque. Monkeys grin when they are terrified and the only excuse for the good old American grin is not idiocy—though that certainly plays a part— but the fears and anxieties of people who don’t know who they are or whom they are encountering; “Please, sir, do not hurt us,”. sing Gilbert’s feminist fairies in Iolanthe. It should be our national anthem.
Not that there is anything wrong with smiling or laughing. On the contrary. Laughter and smiling as a sincere reflection and expression of joy, pleasure, friendship is an important part of life. For some blithe spirits, it is perfectly natural and a delight to others. When I fake a grin, my wife and daughter tell me it would frighten children. Then again, it does not happen often. My mother had a lovely smile, but in photographs people say she is frowning, simply because she is not smiling. There is a funny Wodehouse story about a shy young man whose doctor tells him to smile when he meets people. "Like this?" says the young man grinning, and the doctor mumbles "something like that" and recalls cheating on his taxes. I won't spoil the story by giving away the rest of the story.
To fake such sentiments is not only inauthentic but degrading. I've seen Evangelical preachers grinning at a funeral and had to "turn away until the darkness goes." Years ago, I had a Serb novelist working for me. He only smiled when he was happy or had heard something funny. In photos he looked ferocious. My friend George Garret, the fine novelist, observed after meeting the Serb that he had a beautiful smile, when it appeared. Exactly. The photo-grin is to the real smile what whoremongering is to marriage.
I come from generations of, not non-smilers, but non-grinners. We all seldom showed the teeth. The exception is my younger brother, but then he has been a real estate agent and a hotel receptionist, so his grin is at least understandable. And like all of us, he knows what a grimace is.
Do you want a lot of pictures of frowny Cornell kids in Athens? Because this is how you get a lot of pictures of frowny Cornell kids in Athens!
Honestly, I feel like we should get a pass because our Korean heritage encourages obsessive photo taking. I think we’re lucky that the urge seems to lessen with each subsequent generation – I only take half the pictures my mom subjected me to when I was growing up.
I enjoy pictures of the Cornell kids. They grin naturally when thy are happy. I am not much of a photo-snapper, never have been. This habit has actually won friends with European writers who told me that that the American writers they met were always snapping photos and buying postcards. I am trying to take more pictures for the website, so I ask you and the kids–frowny or grinny–to take pictures of the group, including me and my wife, and send them to me so I can post them.. There are places where flash photos or even all photos are forbidden, and the Greeks can be uncharacteristically severe, especially in the museum in Delphi.
This habit seems to me to be an exterior expression of the New Deal/Great Society ideology of “progress”; every moment of every day is the most serendipitous of one’ life and one should go through the entire day, and probably sleep, with a Frank Sinatra-style smirk. Is the first step of selling something to a stranger to suggest that he or she is in a happy mood? Was FDR the first president to have a habit of smiling in photographs? Do certain victims of crimes perpetrated by the underclass ever notice that following certain trends invite disrespect from the unscrupulous? (For example, if “Jakwon” feels like being a bully will he go after “Billy Bob” or “Timmy”?
Or is waiting to be a victim the preferred mode of living for the general public in the wishes of the establishments of Madison Ave., Hollywood, and Washington D.C.?
Even as a child, despite my grandparents adoration of him, I always found Franklin Delano Roosevelt (see, I’m improving) to look sinister, especially when he was smiling, which reminded me very much of Boris Karloff plotting a rampage.
At one time, long ago, I was tasked to regularly pick up a niece after college. I would show myself at the door of the computer lab where she was waiting (it was meant to be a quiet space) then withdraw while she collected her things. One day she said that her friends were all scared of me and would it be too much for me to smile a bit. The next time I picked her up I poked just my head around the door jam grinning like a maniac while flicking my eyes back and forth wildly until she noticed me. She laughed, but was also furious. Needless to say, her friends fear only increased to terror. I don’t think that I could get away with it now.