Bacon, Grapefruit, and Other American Lies
Germans know more about America than Americans know about Germany—this is established, inarguable, and vaguely embarrassing for everyone involved. We learned about Columbus in school, how he was actually looking for a shorter route to India and stumbled onto a continent instead. If you wanted to be that kid, the Vikings got there first. Who discovered Germany? Some barbarians, presumably. Nobody’s made a prestige miniseries about it.
Day after day the news delivers American presidents and American protesters and whatever the latest American catastrophe is. We watch American sitcoms with American families in American cities living American problems. King of Queens. Modern Family. That ’70s Show. It’s fashionable to bash the nation of the fat and the perpetually at war, and fair enough, but there are moments—I’ll admit it—where I’m genuinely, specifically jealous of not having been born into it. Almost entirely because of the school system.
Not the actual school system, with the underfunded classrooms and the standardized tests and whatever’s happening in gym. The television one. While I spent years dragging myself out of bed before 6:30 in the dark, surviving eight hours of math and German and whatever educational cruelty had been scheduled for that particular Tuesday, then coming home grateful to reach the couch or my friend’s sister’s place—American high schools on TV were stuffed with options. Yellow school buses in the sunshine. Extracurriculars. A whole taxonomy of ways to belong. At least on television.
The TV version runs like this: before the bus arrives, the whole family sits down to a full breakfast—bacon, grapefruit, some cereal with apparently miraculous properties. At school you slot yourself into whichever social category the cooler kids have designated. Best case: football player, cheerleader, the guy with the leather jacket. Worst case: loser, emo, the face no one remembers. If you’re genuinely, unremarkably normal, you’re probably the future victim of something terrible that hasn’t happened yet. But that’s rare. At least on television.
My school had two extracurricular activities. A theater group that attracted roughly three unusual children per year, from whom nothing further was ever heard after the first break. And the third-floor bathroom, which served approximately the same social function and carried roughly the same reputation.
What I wanted was the version where I’m in the bleachers watching cheerleaders scream animal names across a sunlit field, waving stupidly at one of them who might be my girlfriend—or at least will be, in my head, just before I fall asleep. After the school newspaper meeting (the cool one, the one people actually read), a cafeteria food fight at 1pm as scheduled, then debate club, or baseball practice, or everyone inexplicably bursting into choreographed song like it’s Glee and nobody finds this remotely strange. Anything. Just not what I had.
In this fantasy I have two best friends. One is a funny nerd—big glasses, some kind of absurd print on his pants—who knows how to get into the school’s grading system and burns me whatever I want. The other is a sharp, red-haired girl with a snub nose who’s lived next door my entire life, and who, in the season finale, I’ll finally kiss properly for the first time.
I know this is built entirely from years of television overconsumption and applies to approximately zero public schools in New York City, and probably exists in anything like its full form only in the suburbs that Disney built. But even a bad photocopy of that fantasy would be an improvement on what German students actually sit through, day after day, for what feels in the memory of it like a geological epoch.
If reincarnation has an options menu—not livestock, not Boris Becker’s kid—I want one shot at that school. The bus, the locker covered in photos, the cafeteria smell. Just, please: nothing from the trash TV pile. I’ve had enough of that already.