Seven Games of Life by Richard Smoley

Author:Richard Smoley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G&D Media

Waugh is looking back to his youth in 1920s Britain, but with the change of a few details, the picture remains accurate.

We then have to ask the unanswerable question: how many people like champagne because they are supposed to like champagne? We could say the same of many other refinements. Despite the virtuosity and beauty in ballet and opera, how many people like these arts because they are supposed to?

Writer Ling Ma describes a similar sentiment in a story about a young Chinese girl who has just come to America and tastes ice cream for the first time. “Breyer’s French Vanilla. It’s denser and sweeter than I expected, eggy in flavor, fuzzy with freezer burn. To my surprise, I don’t like it at all and feel nauseated by its smell. But I have to like it, because I saw ice cream on TV back home, where all my friends and I fantasized how wonderful it must taste.”

Indeed pleasure is a standardized commodity—issued in off-the-rack form, with some variations for social class. In an early issue of the National Lampoon, humorist Roger Price skewers the “Roob”—not the old-time hayseed rube, who “in his own environment … possessed many virtues: courage, loyalty, honesty and the basic virtue from which all others must stem—pride.” But “once the rube … went to the City, he became a misplaced person and began to act badly again. He found himself in an anonymous urban society which neither threatened nor challenged him and which made no demands on him except as a Consumer. He became a Roob, with a capital R.”

Over fifty years later, the type remains familiar:

You must understand the awesome importance to Roobs of the Vacation or the Weekend Trip. An exhausting and dangerous drive on a crowded thruway to an equally crowded and over-priced resort is their claim to membership in the Leisure Class. They go in search of the Pepsi People, the Ale Men, the Swingers; and they live in deadly fear that they may take the wrong road, read the wrong travels and not see the turnoff to Marlboro country. They are afraid they will miss something.

The Roob believes with all his heart that somewhere along Route 12A all the Fun People are having a Fun Time under the benevolent eye of a recreational counselor. No right-minded Fun Person would ever isolate himself or seek his own diversions, for a Roob’s identity is based on attendance at mass functions that require standing in line, such as a company barbecue or the opening of a snake farm.

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