Hikikomori (of a sort)

Via Salon:

When I first brought home our sleek, silver, double-deck, Panasonic stereo cassette player during the summer of 1993, my then-wife, Gitty, frowned.

“It has a radio,” she said with an accusing glare.

The device, fresh out of the box, lay on the chintzy oilcloth on our kitchen table, and she stuck her index finger at a spot on the top, near the volume control. Tape, AM, FM, printed in tiny white letters along the ridge of the circular switch. There was no denying it. And in our all-Hasidic village in Rockland County, N.Y., radio — along with TV, movies, newspapers and other sources of secular influence — was verboten.

“We’ll do what everyone does,” I said, slightly annoyed at the suggestion of impiety. Many of my friends had cassette players, and when the device came with a built-in radio tuner, there was a standard procedure for it: Krazy Glue the switch into the tape-playing position, paste a strip of masking tape over the channel indicators, and put the antenna out with the next day’s trash…

That seems sad to me, but there it is…

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4 Responses to Hikikomori (of a sort)

  1. GTChristie says:

    But his prose is so clear, grammatically correct, perfectly punctuated and completely uncluttered by static.

  2. hanmeng says:

    Small violations lead to bigger ones.

  3. John says:

    When someone is in an abusive relationship, a classic tactic of the abuser is to try to isolate the abused, preventing contact with other people. When a whole community does it…

  4. Jeeves says:

    Secularism poisons everything, I guess.

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