Thresholds: Initiation Rituals in Modern American Culture

image taken from the How Stuff Works article on Dry Cleaning.

Over the summer, I’ve had a small handful of jobs. This isn’t terribly uncommon for adjuncts, though most seem to go for freelance work, which doesn’t carry the awkwardness of having to give notice at the end, but does come with a 1099, something that I have tried to avoid since my last bout of 1099 work in 2015.

The most recent of these is at a dry cleaner. It’s the first time I’ve worked at a small regional chain, and it’s been a bit unusual – different from a mom-and-pop operation, a franchise, and a large chain. The particulars of that are neither here nor there, but one thing has occurred to me while working there: one of the important initiation rituals of middle class America takes place at your local dry cleaner.

Shortly before my marriage to Edgar, their mother – my mother-in-law, who is a delight – came into town and worked on clothes for the attendants at the wedding. An act of immense charity on her part. However, a part of this required taking our clothing to be dry cleaned, and so she came along and walked me through how to do it – I most likely could have figured it out on my own, I’m not so dense as to be incapable of doing these things, though I can be very dense at times.

Since I’ve worked there, on more than one occasion, I have seen mothers and elder friends walk people through the task of dropping clothing off at the dry cleaner. On a small handful of occasions, people have done it themselves, but they clearly are familiar with the act of dry cleaning and are simply starting up a new account. On these occasions where someone is walked through the process, there’s a skittishness to them (I know I had it,) and a measure of care on the part of the older party.

Now, this is a very strange and unexpected grounds for a ritual. However, I think it’s an important one to note: ritual helps us mark the passage of time, and marks thresholds between states of being. There are rituals around birth (baptism, bris, the sip and see party, naming ceremonies, etc.) and around death (the funeral, the wake, the visitation, shivah, etc.) and small ceremonies for everyday occurrences. There are, however, momentous occurrences between birth and death, and some of them are marked with rituals. Marriage is the most obvious, but many cultures also have an initiation ritual at the end of childhood and beginning of adulthood.

I can’t find it now, but it seems that there’s discourse to the effect of America lacking initiation rituals, which honestly couldn’t be further from the truth when you get down to it. The dry-cleaner-ritual is an informal one, but consider the following.

Prom

image of a pre-prom gathering, taken from wikimedia commons. Photo by Ken Stoakes in May 2005, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

In the late spring and early summer, when birds are forcing hatchlings from nests, Americans have prom – something that has been exported around the world recently, but which started here. The name is short for “promenade dance”, and features a “prom king” and “prom queen”, elected to cement their status as most popular child.

Or, they would be, if prom weren’t a sort of democratized debutante ball, meant to signal the sexual maturity of the people involved. This is, of course, part of the prurient American fixation on adolescent sexuality (consider the popularity of television in a high school setting, and consider how many of these are concerned primarily with the romantic fortunes of the characters). This often begins with a cod-wedding-proposal – asking someone to go to prom is considered a major sign of romantic interest, and there is the assumption that sexual contact will happen. In short, it is a small town’s worth of population pairing off for something like a temporary matrimony, with all that entails in the short term, largely approved of and supported by the parents.

Donald Glover as Troy Barnes in the sitcom Community — Barnes is portrayed as a jock whose identity is defined largely by having been prom king. The King/Queen thing of the festival has much older roots than prom.

I recall going to pick Edgar up from work at the art museum – a popular location for wedding photos – during prom season, and the street immediately next to it was jammed up with traffic, as all of the suburban parents drove in to take pictures of their children in evening wear. Usually these parents would simply drive far too slowly, but I remember one occasion where a pair of mothers put on their hazard lights, got out of the car and began to unload snacks and other supplies from the trunk, mouthing sorry at us while they did so.

It was important enough to inconvenience strangers, but the mothers had to perform this sacrifice to make the event happen. There was familial buy-in for it. This, to me, seems like a clear initiation ritual.

Graduation

Over their thousand-plus-year-history, Universities have built up many rituals, and most of these have been copied in one form or another by American high schools. Chief among these is graduation: the point where one’s identity as a student ends and post-student life begins.

Consider all the trappings: special attire (plastic bags worn as academic robes, various hats and cords,) the music, the address by a distinguished elder, the presentation of a talismanic object that is meant to bring good fortune, the ritual act of flipping a tassel from one position to the other like you’re throwing a switch, and the fact that – like many American rituals – it often happens in a gymnasium or equivalent space.

There is a great deal put forward in this ritual to mark it as a transitional one. The speech given is often about what the students just did and the “real world” beyond it. It presents a theory about the world, and it’s generally a long and obtuse one (the only graduation speech I’ve ever seen that is worth anything is “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace, and a big part of that is that it was about five minutes long, but there are dangers in reading too much David Foster Wallace.)

After a certain point, the only reason to participate in the rituals is to secure more and more bizarre regalia.

Most of this, is admittedly, had second hand: I slept through every graduation I ever had, only waking up to walk at the end, as my last name is nearer the end of the alphabet than the start.

At the Master’s level, though, perhaps the biggest sign of having achieved the appropriate level of maturity is simply not attending.

Menstruation

I believe that the model for most of these is the treatment of menstruation. It’s the most clearly-demarcated of the transitional points between child and adult, and is marked in a number of cultures by special tasks and purification rituals that need to be done.

To be fair, I’ll take King of the Hill as a picture of American culture over Family Guy or similar. Image taken from the King of the Hill wiki.

The most I know about this comes from sitcoms – the place most American’s knowledge of and theories about the world comes from – specifically episode 5 of season 4 of King of the Hill, entitled “Aisle 8A”. Edgar, however, has more firsthand knowledge of things and explains that if the discourse around menstruation is an initiation ritual, it comes too early: one can’t simply tell a twelve-year-old who started bleeding unexpectedly that she’s a woman now. That’s demonstrably not true, and to weigh a child down with that seems decidedly unjust.

Retrospective

For me, the closest thing to a proper initiation was moving away from my family, leaving Kansas City and settling out in a small New Mexico town for graduate school – I found myself with a model version of a home in the form of a tiny apartment, a stocked kitchen, the use of a car, and a job. I thought I had arrived, honestly, though I was less than enthusiastic about the dry air that split my skin and made my nose bleed, or the isolation from the amenities I had taken for granted.

This was also the town in which Red Dawn and No Country For Old Men were filmed.

I thought I could hack it, honestly.

A few weeks into that first semester, I came down with a 106 degree fever. I laid down on the couch in my apartment, unable to think straight enough to take myself to the hospital, had a cup of tea (into which I had poured a bit of whiskey, extremely inadvisable) and sat with the concept of my own mortality, my brain boiled by the fever.

In many ways, this is what an initiation is: not just being shown what adulthood is – whatever “adulthood” is supposed to mean in that culture – it’s understanding the historicity of your own life. I don’t say this in the sense of one’s life necessarily needing some grand narrative arc, a great love or a great battle, or something like that. I say it in the sense of understanding that your life is embedded in history. You were born at a time, and you will die at a time, and adulthood comes from knowing that the span of time outside of the tiny moment of your consciousness is going to be much longer and more expansive.

This doesn’t make your life insignificant, because you are a part of a whole. This is also what initiation rituals are for. To connect you as a link in a great chain that stretches back into the undefined mists of the past.

It’s also supposed to give your life a trajectory. To show you something important about who you are and what your life is. While I suffered that fever, I was alone, without help. I decided that – as much as I liked having privacy – I didn’t want to live alone, because having that help, and giving that help, would make life better.

Since I left New Mexico, where I stayed on my own for two and a half years, I haven’t lived on my own. Much better, I feel, to be part of a group.

Diagnosis

It seems to me that – far from having no initiatory rituals – America has a profusion of them. I went to Catholic school – we had first communion and first confession, but I got off the ride before confirmation – and beyond that there were various school dances (the first and last of which were somehow important,) getting a job, getting a driver’s license, going to high school and college and graduating them, there was moving into a first apartment, there was getting a credit card – all of these little signposts as I collected the regalia of adulthood. Now here I am, pushing thirty-five and I’m not a home owner and working an hourly job for a large chunk of the year.

Like most old money rituals, the whole Veiled Prophet Ball has a whiff of Carcosa about it. (Image taken from St. Louis Magazine.)

Many of the initiation rituals we have are class-based. I mentioned earlier that prom is a sort of democratized debutante ball, because those balls are used to signal certain things in a certain social class (for more information, look up St. Louis’s “Veiled Prophet ball” – that kind of slipped out of the popular consciousness a few months ago, but it’s still there.)

It seems to me that the collection of this regalia is the process by which someone joins a particular social class, ultimately ending in the beige Valhalla of suburbia (though, of course, this being inaccessible has led many purportedly-adult men to adopt the garb of the hipster and move into a luxury five-over-one that will have to be torn down in eight years because of black mold.) Of course, this is only the social effect – there is also what I expect to be the psychological effect of this change: if there is always another initiation ritual to go through, that means that adulthood is permanently, indefinitely deferred, and so none of these rituals really matter.

The “You Tried” star — a parody of participation trophies.

Call it the participation trophy problem, after those little totems of insecurity that older people like to bring up – forgetting that they’re the ones who spent money on those trophies and no one my age cares about any of the participation trophies they received: because if everyone got one, that means that they don’t matter. We don’t feel that we earned them, we feel that none of them actually signify anything, and so praise is fake.

So it is with these initiation rituals: they make you feel like an adult for a moment, and then the realization that your situation hasn’t actually changed sets in.

And so you go to bed early, because you have to teach in the morning, and then quickly eat lunch before you go and work your hourly job after that.

Or maybe that’s just me.

So?

Okay, so that’s a diagnosis. What’s the takeaway, what’s the point? There should be some pearl of wisdom, or some call to action here, what is it?

I honestly don’t know. Were you expecting me to say otherwise?

However (and there’s always a however,) there are forces at work in our culture that prey upon the insecurity that this always-deferred adulthood brings about. I’ve talked about how fascism – and reactionary politics in general – has an infantilizing element. How easy is that to slip into if you can’t say, fully, that you’re an adult?

There’s really no quantification there. It’s easy, though.

What you need to do, I think, is this: if you haven’t achieved what you think is “adulthood”, pick a milestone. Something hard, but achievable. Tell your close friends about your goal. Focus your efforts and attention on that milestone. Fight for it, scramble for it.

Then, to the degree that you and your friends are comfortable, celebrate.

Because you have not only achieved your goal – passed your milestone – you have picked for yourself, and self-determination is one of the key traits of adulthood. If you can practice that, then you don’t need any of the other trophies in your case. Simply decide for yourself, and do.

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