U.S. citizens taxed at dancing, personal space

I’m a taxpayer in Argentina. There’s a 21 percent value-added tax built into the price of… I’m a taxpayer in Argentina. There’s a 21 percent value-added tax built into the price of everything I buy. The Old Country, America, is the only industrialized nation without a VAT. We prefer our 35 percent corporate tax, because no one tells us when we pay it through lower wages and higher prices.

Since immigrating, I’ve realized the United States charges other invisible taxes: social taxes. What I call a social tax is really a prejudice about a certain way of doing things that makes your life harder for no reason. Here are a few U.S. social taxes that I’ve noticed, as well as how things are a little different here in Argentina.

1. Personal Space

You can fit 100 Argentines in the space it takes to hold 20 Americans. Partly because Americans are way fatter. But also, Latinos feel comfortable with less personal space. Here is a situation that happens every day here:

The subway train brakes, the doors slide open, and I can see that the car is full. People are spilling out onto the platform like worms from a bait can. But then the well-heeled business man and the poor pregnant lady beside me both chuckle and press into the mass until we, too, become a part of it all. People even clear a path to let the pregnant lady sit down. Inside the train, I count that I’m touching at least eight people at the same time. And the Argentines, they just laugh and make obvious comments to ease tension, ‘A lot of people, no?’ ‘Ay!’ ‘Look at all the people!’ ‘That’s a lot!’

How would this situation unfold in the United States? Americans wouldn’t even stand for this sort of intimacy in an evacuation. We’d be indignant and obsessed with catching pickpockets or nervously trying to recall the facts about TB transmission. Also, if you’re American, you’ll know what I mean when I say that a lady with eye makeup and a Tweety Bird sweatshirt would start pushing and calling people ‘buster.’

The American idea is: ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,’ but once you get here, it’s time to unhuddle — by ‘breathe free,’ we literally mean expanding your lungs as far as they go.

Our social tax on proximity is so high that, when we heard about global warming, the only question raised was, ‘What’s something clean to put in our trucks for fuel?’ No one had the gall to tell Americans — who rode boats to Ellis Island, wagons to Oregon and bombers to Dresden — ‘You might be asked to ride trains. Keep heart, oh pioneers!’

2. Dancing

You’re probably familiar with Buenos Aires as the city that gets blown up by the aliens in ‘Starship Troopers.’ But if that movie didn’t get made, you’d probably know it as the city of tango.

I would say, ‘I tango like it’s my job, man,’ but I have never had a job 18 hours per week. I take classes at a place where hundreds of people come together five nights a week and divide up into six levels. Each level takes a one-hour class to learn one move and a variation. During the class, we switch dance partners constantly and practice with everyone, laughing every time we knock knees or crash with another couple. Afterwards, we have a free dance that lasts until 5:00 a.m.

Dancing is a cultural weak point for America. We’ve lost the ritualized tradition whereby people learn actual dance moves — not grinding — and then have fun trying them out while meeting people along the way.

I believe Americans don’t dance because to learn to dance, you occasionally make a motion that looks stupid. And we fear looking stupid, even if we’re having fun. In our heads, we’re all on reality TV that comedians pick apart in clips: ‘What was that hand swipe? He thinks he’s MC Hammer!’ Our social tax on dancing, in this case, is really a tax on messing up.

That’s why Americans like the ‘dance teams’ you find at WASPy high schools, where the kids dance in lines, like soldiers, to moves memorized beforehand. When the dance isn’t improvised, it can’t be your fault. But neither can it really be dancing.

When Americans do actually dance, it’s an athletic event, and if we dance with other people, it’s a ‘battle,’ a competition. Our dances — C-Walking, Harlem Shake, Hardcore Dancing, Crumping — are ways to show off strength, stamina and reflex, not to experience how you can make something pretty even with a total stranger.

Compare our dances with tango, salsa, meringue and even the cumbia from slums and you’ll see the difference in ethos: They’re making relationships. We’re making fodder for YouTube.

Still, highlighting these social taxes isn’t so much a criticism of America as an affirmation of how smart the United States has been to open our doors. Immigrants shock us at first with their brazen disregard of codes we don’t know why we have. But as they run through our melting pot and adopt our traditions, they add in their own customs that make no sense. That process, more than our norms and habits, might be our proudest tradition of all.

E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu.