(Over the coming weeks, I plan to serialize an essay I wrote in spring 1994 entitled “Whose Ass Do I Kiss?” By permission of the University of Maryland, I was then a full-time Visiting Student for a year at Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university in the world for deaf people. Using sign language, I gave an abbreviated version of this essay as a talk to a sociology class made up of deaf undergraduates at Gallaudet. I am hearing.)
“Morality has nothing to do with it. It’s about lack of balls.
So they’d come to the Mafia.” (Joe Gallo)
“Whose Ass Do I Kiss?” Because the question is not an academic one. Do I kiss a real ass? Do I kiss a mother’s ass, that puffy mound of gluteus maximus, that cellulite-pocked mass of jelly musculature, which stretches like a string of paper cutouts across a refrigerator door? Or do I kiss only a figurative ass—a boss’s, a friend’s, a father’s, or even—even an idea’s, a religion’s, a country’s: whose ass do I kiss?
What does it mean to kiss an ass? To me, the phrase goes up like an aroma or sinks like a greasy stench. It has one primary meaning and multiple secondary meanings. To flatter, unquestionably accept or support another person because of that person’s power or potential to influence the outcome of one’s future, is the primary meaning. The content actuality of the powerful person’s ideas or beliefs is of no importance. Whether one agrees or disagrees, the only important component of the other person’s reality is not the person but the person’s power. One flatters what one does not find flattering, one supports what one does not agree with, one praises what one does not find praiseworthy and one holds in very high esteem each chosen ass that’s bared and held up to the lips for the proffered kiss.
Kissing ass is an American disease. Why? Because power is so decentralized in American culture—a lot of it is spread around. Get-what-you-want psychology, although in and of itself not responsible for kiss-ass, is still an important contributor to it. In much the same way that prejudices and periodic scapegoatings within religion (the Inquisition) and outside of it (Nazi Germany) are in no way to be identified as a part of any religion’s founding ideology or dogma, they are a part of religion, just as scapegoatings within psychology—involuntary commitments, AA interventions, and the like—are a part of psychology. Kiss-ass often seems to be a way of escaping them. It has parallels in the hysterical behavior that led to witch hunts in Puritan New England. If you don’t kiss ass in American culture, you are in danger of being burned at the stake.
Now from a certain point of view, the deaf are a highly dependent and in many ways helpless people in society. They should be ass-kissers par excellence, but are they? They are not. Why? At least, they are not from the point of view that they kiss the hearing world’s ass, no. Sure, within their own community they play their favorites. They have their leaders who inspire uncritical devotion. But the fountains of true power are so far removed from them that even their leaders are not able to rise much higher than elders or peers. They do not have the necessary or requisite power to make ass-kissing either necessary or profitable. “Be yourself!” they say. With this philosophy, which is the opposite of kiss-ass, they could not possibly achieve that self-destroying inversion of the ego that the members of the hearing world go through to get ahead.
Actually, there is a laboratory-type environment for testing the phenomenon of kiss-ass: where? Nowhere else but the arts! For in the hearing world, it is said that true skill, true worth, true value in art will be recognized by merit alone. Is this true? It would seem to be an impossible hypothesis to test, whether it is true or not, for the arts are always held up to all as apart from science, an ivory tower, that is, the true chalice or receptacle of the human spirit. If an artist or writer sleeps around, goes to wild parties, fights with his wife and marries and divorces several times, having several illegitimate children, none of this is looked upon as a reason for his success. It is in no way looked upon as any form of hidden or concealed agenda in the performance of the public role: artist.
If this performance has the result of putting him in every desirable woman’s bed, or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, in the sanctuary of every church or synagogue across town, none of this social conformity or role-playing is looked upon as kissing ass. Yet, if skill were the only and deciding factor in the judging of great art, why is it that the deaf, who in theory should excel at least in a visual art like painting, are virtually absent from the rolls of society’s great artists? Why is this? Granted that Goya became deaf at the age of forty, when he was already famous, I know of no other great deaf artists, not a single one.
There may be some objectors that the absence of deaf artists from the rolls of great artists is not due to their refusal or inability to kiss ass at all, but only to their inability to communicate with others well enough to get their paintings sold. This theory would not contradict the most important point being made here—that true value, true worth, of art will be recognized, if not at first, then eventually, for surely there would be some well-known, if not world-famous, deaf artists, at least after they had died. If this principle were true also, however, the case for good communication in contrast to kiss-ass would likely have been made. We would then expect to find that universities would have encouraged artists to develop good communication skills as a regular part of majoring in art.
Since this has plainly not been the case, and art majors, like math and English majors, have traditionally been encouraged to concentrate only in the subjects thought to be directly relevant to their field, that is, in the development of specific skills like painting, drawing, sculpture, and so on, we can effectively consider that the logical choice of having artists become skilled interpersonal communicators in the business world turns out to be no choice at all. Instead, society all but ignores the whole possibility. The social stereotype of the artist as a rebellious womanizer, social buffoon, still stands before us; what are we to do with it?
(To be continued . . .)
Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic novel available as an eBook from Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.
