America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (54 page)

Such leaders are surely screwballs, but they are wise in the uses of timidity. They have only to bring charges, no matter how ridiculous or improbable, of plots to disturb the delicate balance of the fixed and unearned income in order to arouse fear, which is the mother of ferocity. The poor, idle people sitting in the sun are drawn together in positions of furious defense. The leaders who feed and abet their anxieties are able to hit them with dues and contributions while adding new fuel to their fears. The stalking horror is “Communism,” with its thread of confiscation of private wealth, and “Socialism,” which implies that they might be forced to share their wealth with less fortunate citizens. Once they have been frightened into organization for self-defense, the Messiah who has planted the fear is able to use it for his own ends. He has only to bring some cruel, stupid, and untrue charge against an official, and particularly against any reform movement, to set these cohorts in noisy motion and to draw from them large amounts of money which, devoted to publications and radio and television programs, keep these poor people further off balance; and, as Joseph McCarthy proved, the more ridiculous the charge, the less possibility there is of defense.

What is the purpose of such leaders or stimulators or catalysts? Probably a simple desire for power. But their stated purpose is invariably patriotic—they promise to preserve the nation by techniques which will inevitably destroy it. They may even have convinced themselves of the virtue of their mission; and yet, over all such activities there is the smell that caused Doctor Johnson to say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Even more cynical are the screwball organizations which teach hatred and revenge to the ignorant and fearful people, using race or religion as the enemy. One of the oldest, most primitive and surviving of human groupings, after the family, is the totem; and the rules of the totem have never changed, from the beginning, when the animal totems branded and scarred their initiates, to the most recent activities of the Ku Klux Klan. The totem has certain rules, almost natural laws. It must be secret, exclusive, mysterious, cruel, afraid, dangerous, and monstrously ignorant. The mask, whether it be animal, skin, or sheet, is invariably present. The initiate must take a new name, thereby magically becoming a new, brave, shining person as opposed to the frightened, confused thing he knows himself to be. Spectacular, half-understood symbols must be used; and invariably torture and human sacrifice are appealed to as stimulants to release fear into ferocity. The steps never change; it is true there is less of it than there once was, but it still exists as a memory of our savage past and as an instrument on which the witch doctor, the wizard, or the Kleagle can play for his own profit.

Such are some of the ugly and evil aspects of American screwballery; but we have also pleasant, benign, and interesting screwballs who contribute to our gaiety. Of such was the gentle Emperor Norton, who lived in San Francisco and called himself “Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.” Of such is the man who runs for the Presidency on a vegetarian ticket, and of such was One Eye Connelly the gate crasher, and Leaping Lena Levinsky the lady prizefight promoter; of such was Canvasback Cohen, the prizefighter who was maintained by the Marx Brothers because he lost all contests.

We have poets in flowing robes, inventors of new religions, people who spend their lives warning us and painting on fences that the end of the world is at hand. Such screwballs are very valuable to us and we would be a duller nation without them, as our economy and our means of production gently shove us nearer and nearer to a dull and single norm.

One kind of eccentrics are the show-offs, who by outlandish costume or unusual gesture or speech spend their time drawing attention to themselves—some foolishly and some with a terrible mock dignity. But one must be sure, in observing such people, whether it is a true eccentricity or simply a matter of advertising. A number of years ago when I was working on a New York newspaper the police picked up a pretty young girl walking naked on Park Avenue, leading a fawn with a collar and leash. She was brought into the precinct station, booked, and then brought before a magistrate, who said that he found it eccentric but he wondered if she might not be opening in some show someplace; and it turned out that she was.

In addition to the show-offs there are the hiders—those who secrete themselves from society. I was twelve or thirteen years old when I became deeply involved with my first real eccentric. There are verities beyond question when one is thirteen—a haunted house is a haunted house, and there is no sense or purpose in questioning it. There is good luck and bad luck, and the penalty for inspection of these is bad luck. Then there are misers, and misers hoard gold. We had a miser; I shall call him Mr. Kirk. Kirk and his wife and daughter lived in a little, old, dark house in a five-acre orchard not far from the center of Salinas. Of course it had once been in the country, until the town crept out and surrounded it. The Kirk place was much too valuable as town lots to be left as a grove of apples and pears and plums, and even those trees so old that they were long past good bearing. The Kirks had been a decent, well-to-do farm family for generations, and it occurred to me only much later why Mr. Kirk was known as a miser. He couldn't be tempted, or bribed, or threatened into selling his valuable acres, to root out his trees, take his profit, and build a white house with a wrought-iron fence and a grave-plot-sized lawn. He hoarded his five acres; and he was peculiar.

Kirk dressed in a blue shirt and overalls like all farm people, but he left his orchard only once a week. On Saturday he came to a little feed store my father owned and bought ten cents' worth of middlings—about five pounds, I suppose. Middlings were simply ground wheat with the chaff left in; it would be called whole wheat now, but then it was sold for chicken and pig feed. His weekly purchase was remarkable because the Kirks had neither chickens nor pigs. Mrs. Kirk and the daughter were rarely seen. They never left the orchard, but we could peer through the black cypress hedge which surrounded the orchard and see two gaunt, gray women, so much alike that you couldn't tell which was mother and which was daughter. As far as anyone ever knew, the ten cents' worth of middlings was all Mr. Kirk ever bought. First the daughter faded and sickened and died, and soon after, Mrs. Kirk went the same way. The coroner said they had starved to death; we would call it malnutrition now—but there was no evidence of violence. People did mind their own business then. But I do know that after they died, Mr. Kirk bought five cents' worth of middlings a week.

Having a genuine miser of our own had a great impact on me and on the three other little boys I ran with. The dark and gloomy orchard and the little unpainted house, mossy with dampness, drew us. I remember being out at night a good deal and I can't for the life of me remember how I got out or back into my own house again. The four of us chicken-necked kids hid in the black shadow of the cypress hedge and looked at the lighted window glowing among the trees, and eventually, by boasting and daring one another, we overcame our cowardice and moved quietly into the orchard and crept with held breaths toward the uncurtained window. Mr. Kirk's face and his right hand and forearm seemed to hang in the air, yellow-lighted by the butterfly flame of a kerosene barn lantern. He was writing feverishly in a big old ledger with red leather corners, his face twisted and contorted with concentration. Now and then his upper teeth clamped on his lower lip. Suddenly he looked up, I presume in thought, but in our timid state we thought he looked right into our peering faces. All of us jumped back, but one boy's foot slipped and fetched a heavy kick on the wall of the house.

Mr. Kirk leaped to his feet, and we froze in the darkness. He did not look at the window; he addressed a presence to his left so that his profile stood against the lantern. Through the closed window we could hear his voice; he cried out on Satan, on the Devil, on Beelzebub. He argued, pleaded, threatened, and after a few moments collapsed into his chair by the table and put his head down on his arms while we trembled in fear and ecstasy. Nothing there is in nature as thoughtlessly cruel as a small boy, unless it be a small girl. As we hid in the deep shadows, our terror abated and we felt that our entertainer had let us down. Then one of us, and I don't know which of us it was, crept back to the house and struck the wall three great, portentous raps. Instantly Mr. Kirk was on his feet again, fighting his brave and hopeless combat against Satan, while we glowed with excitement and a sense of power. Again he collapsed, and again we roused him, until finally he fell to the floor and did not get up. Now I am horrified at our wantonness, but I cannot remember that we felt any pity whatever.

In the ensuing weeks we ranged the darkness of the orchard every night, so that our parents wondered at our sluggishness in the daytime and put it down to what was called “growing pains.” Since Mr. Kirk was a known miser, we began to dig about the roots of the fruit trees, searching for his golden hoard, while, to keep him busy, one of us would crouch under his window and with measured knockings employ him at his job against Satan.

We found no gold, but we were making a horrid mask of paper mounted on a stick to stimulate our victim to new heights of despair, when Mr. Kirk disappeared. No light glowed in his window, and a strange, sweet sickliness hung over the night orchard. Two weeks later we heard that Mr. Kirk had not gone away. He had died in his house, probably helped on by us, and he was in very bad shape when the sheriff and the coroner took him out and splashed the house with creosote.

We could hardly wait for the darkness to fall; we invaded through a window, our pockets full of candles. Every cranny we inspected for his gold; we dug up the earthen floor of his cellar, knocked on walls, searching for hidden hiding places, and we found nothing but his big ledgers. I took one away and read it: gibberish; words and word sounds repeated, “read, reed, wrote, rotten, Robert,” or, “sea, sky, sin, sister, soon.” I know now that these were symptoms of his sickness.

In the end we were fortunate, but it was long before we knew it to be good fortune. We found no gold, but when Kirk's distant cousins took over their inheritance and prepared to sell off the orchard for building lots, they found a canvas bag wedged in a U-pipe of the sink trap, and in the bag were gold pieces—over five thousand dollars' worth. If we had found them, we would have tried to spend them and—well, it's better we were unlucky.

This was our eccentric; every town must have one or more—strange, hidden, frightened, half-mad people are always with us. Only when they hurt someone or die do we discover them.

IN NOTHING are the Americans so strange and set apart from the rest of the world as in their attitudes toward the treatment of their children. In most Americans this is more than a symptom—it is a syndrome which often becomes trauma; and it is not surprising that even Americans are often frightened by their child-raising activities, and even more by the products. Indeed, in America paedotrophy has caused what amounts to a national sickness which might be called paedosis. Americans did not always fear, hate, and adore their children; in our early days a child spent its helpless and pre-procreative days as a child, and then moved naturally into adulthood. This was true across the world. I have studied the children in many countries—Mexico, France, England, Italy, and others—and I find nothing to approximate the American sickness. Where could it have started, and is it a disease of the children or of the parents? One thing we know: children seem to be able to get over it; parents rarely.

Maybe it might be this way—for the X millions of years of our existence as a species, the odds against a child's surviving to adulthood were very great. Germs, malnutrition, accidents, infections made the bringing up of a child to manhood or womanhood a kind of triumph in itself. My own grandparents thought themselves lucky to save half the children they bore. In parts of Mexico it was true that until recently the infant mortality was five to one. Miscarriages caused by overwork and too little food were far more numerous than they are now, while the plagues of smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, cholera and finally colic were not unknown. It is possible but not provable that this screening for manhood and womanhood weeded out the weaklings, the whiners, the chronic failures, the neurotic, the violent, and the accident-prone; but we know from history that these factors did not eliminate all the stupid. Anyway, before American paedosis appeared, parents were delighted to have children at all and content that they might grow up to be exactly like themselves. The children also seem to have had no quarrel with this. Soldier begat soldier's son, farm boys grew to farmers, housewives trained their daughters to be housewives. Population explosion was taken care of by wars, plagues, and starvation.

The great change seems to have set in toward the end of the last century; perhaps it came with the large numbers of poor and bewildered immigrants suddenly faced with hope of plenty and liberty of development beyond their dreams. Our child sickness has developed very rapidly in the last sixty years and it runs parallel, it would seem, with increasing material plenty and the medical conquest of child-killing diseases. No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible change from his father's trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national. Since it was demanded of the child that he or she be better than his parents, he must be gaited, guided, pushed, admired, disciplined, flattered, and forced. But since the parents were and are no better than they are, the rules they propounded were based not on their experience but on their wishes and hopes.

If the hope was not fulfilled, and it rarely was, the parents went into a tailspin of guilt, blaming themselves for having done something wrong or at least something not right. They had played the wrong ground rules. This feeling of self-recrimination on the part of the parents was happily seized upon by the children, for it allowed them to be failures through no fault of their own. Laziness, sloppiness, indiscipline, selfishness, and general piggery, which are the natural talents of children and were once slapped out of them, if they lived, now became either crimes of the parents or sickness in the children, who would far rather be sick than disciplined.