America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (58 page)

The films of the early days, like the great European cathedrals of medieval Europe, opened a glory to people who had none in their lives. For the price of a ticket, a person whose life was dull, sad, unexciting, ugly, and without hope could enter and become part of a dream life in which all people were rich and beautiful—or violent and brave—and in which, after the storied solution of a foretellably solvable problem, permanent happiness came like a purple and gold sunset. These films helped to create in the minds of foreign people a dismally untrue picture of an America of gangsters, penthouses, and swimming pools and an endless supply of elegant and available houris very like those promised by the Prophet to the faithful in heaven. The least informed American knew that he would emerge from the glory, the vice, and the violence, and return to the shrieking street, the eventless town, or the humdrum job; but poor immigrants were drawn to our golden dreams and the promise of happiness.

This naïve time is over, but it has left its mark—perhaps a deeper mark than we realize—both at home and abroad; for advertising has taken over where the dream film stopped. And any night of television commercials can convince a plain and lonely girl that a hair rinse, along with false eyelashes and protuberances, can magically transform her into an exciting, magnetic sex kitten and guarantee her entrance into the garden of happiness.

But these frills and trappings are believed and not believed at the same time. What all these exploding dreams have contributed, it seems to me, is a kind of sullen despair and growing anger and cynicism, which is another kind of escape. Perhaps the urge toward happiness has taken the place of the urge toward food and warmth and shelter.

I FIND I have been avoiding or at least putting off one of the most serious problems, if not the most serious one, that Americans are faced with, both as a people and as individuals. In very many people this problem is a gray and leaden weight heavy to all and unbearable to some. We discuss it constantly and yet there is not even a name for it. Many, not able to face the universal spread and danger of the cancerous growth, split off a fragment of the whole to worry about or to try to cure. But it seems to me that we must inspect the disease as a whole because if we cannot root it out we have little chance of survival.

First, let us try to find something to call this subtle and deadly illness. Immorality does not describe it, nor does lack of integrity, nor does dishonesty. We might coin the word “anethics,” but that would be too scholarly an approach to a subject that is far more dangerous than anything that has happened to us. It is a creeping, evil thing that is invading every cranny of our political, our economic, our spiritual, and our psychic life. I begin to think that the evil is one thing, not many, that racial unrest, the emotional crazy quilt that drives our people in panic to the couches of the psychoanalysts, the fallout, dropout, copout insurgency of our children and young people, the rush to stimulant as well as hypnotic drugs, the rise of narrow, ugly, and vengeful cults of all kinds, the distrust and revolt against all authority, political, religious, or military, the awful and universal sense of apprehension and even terror, and this in a time of plenty such as has never been known—I think all these are manifestations of one single cause.

Perhaps we will have to inspect mankind as a species, not with our usual awe at how wonderful we are but with the cool and neutral attitude we reserve for all things save ourselves. Man is indeed wonderful, and perhaps his gaudiest achievement has been to survive his paradoxes. He is not a herd animal, nor has he any of the built-in rules which permit the ruminants to graze and mate and survive together, reserving their fear and their ferocity for protection against foreign species. Mankind seems more nearly related to the predators, possessive, acquisitive, fearful, and aggressive. He is omnivorous, can and will eat anything living or dead, two endowments shared by the cockroach and the common rat. He is aggressively individual and yet he swarms and goes to hive in the noise and discomfort of his tenements and close-packed cities. Once, when enemies roamed the open, there was a reason for thronging in caves and castle courtyards, but with these dangers removed he is drawn to packed subways, crowded streets, howling traffic, and penal quarters in apartment houses. And in America this human tendency seems to be increasing. The small towns grow smaller so that men and women can breathe poisoned air and walk fearfully through streets where violence does not even wait for darkness. We are afraid to be alone and afraid to be together. What has happened to us? Something deep and controlling and necessary.

I'm not going to preach about any good old days. By our standards of comfort they were pretty awful. What did they have then that we are losing or have lost? Well, for one thing they had rules—rules concerning life, limb, and property, rules governing deportment, manners, conduct, and rules defining dishonesty, dishonor, misconduct, and crime. The rules were not always obeyed but they were believed in, and breaking them was savagely punished.

Because of our predatory nature, the hive or the herd were always beyond us but the pack and the crowd were open to us. When two humans get together rules are required to keep them from stripping or killing each other. These rules are simply pragmatic brakes on our less than fraternal instincts. Early on to make the rules effective they were put out as the commands of a God and therefore not open to question. By this means, it was simple for obedience to the rules to be equated with virtue or good, and disobedience with bad or evil. Since so many of our instincts lead to rape, rapine, mayhem, and plunder, it was necessary not only to punish the bad, or natural, but to reward the good people who lived by the rules in peace and safety. Since it was impractical to make these rewards in physical form, more and more of the payments were put over into a future life.

In many of our activities, opposites in the world of rules are placed in juxtaposition one to another. It is said that the convict and the keeper are more alike than they are different; that cop and robber are skin brothers. All armies, regardless of their missions, carry death and destruction in their hands, and this is so frightening to us that the rules we make for armies are rigid beyond all others, while punishment for infringement is immediate and savage. In this way we show our awareness of the dark danger lurking in us always. Over the millennia most of us have learned to obey the rules or suffer punishment for breaking them. But, most important, even the rule-breaker knew he was wrong and the other right; the rules were understood and accepted by everyone. At intervals in our history, through unperceived changes usually economic, the rules and the enforcing agents have come a cropper. Inevitably the result has been a wild and terrible self-destructive binge, a drunken horror of the spirit giving rise to the unspeakable antics of crazy children. And this dark maze-mania has continued until rules were reapplied, rewritten, or reenforced.

Once Adlai Stevenson, speaking of a politician of particularly rancid practices, said, “If he were a bad man, I wouldn't be so afraid of him. But this man has no principles. He doesn't know the difference.” Could this be our difficulty, that gradually we are losing our ability to tell the difference? The rules fall away in chunks and in the vacant place we have a generality: “It's all right because everybody does it.” This is balanced with another cry of cowardice. In the face of inequity, dishonesty in government, or downright plundering the word is “Go fight City Hall!” The implication is, of course, that you can't win. And yet in other times we did fight City Hall and often we won.

The American has never been a perfect instrument, but at one time he had a reputation for gallantry, which, to my mind, is a sweet and priceless quality. It must still exist, but it is blotted out by the dust cloud of self-pity. The last clear statement of gallantry in my experience I heard in a recidivist state prison, a place of two-time losers, all lifers. In the yard an old and hopeless convict spoke as follows: “The kids come up and they bawl how they wasn't guilty or how they was framed or how it was their mothers' fault or their father was a drunk. Us old boys try to tell 'em, ‘Kid, for Chrise sake do your own time and let us do ours.' ” In the present climate of whining self-pity, of practiced sickness, of professional goldbricking, of screaming charges about whose fault it is, one hears of very few who do their own time, who take their rap and don't spread it around. It is as though the quality of responsibility had atrophied.

It is hard to criticize the people one loves. I knew this would be a painful thing to write. But I am far from alone in my worry. My mail is full of it—letters of anxiety. The newspapers splash so much of it that perhaps we have stopped seeing. How is one to communicate this sadness? A simile occurs to me again and again. Our national nervousness reminds me of something—something elusive.

Americans, very many of them, are obsessed with tensions. Nerves are drawn tense and twanging. Emotions boil up and spill over into violence largely in meaningless or unnatural directions. In the cities people scream with rage at one another, taking out their unease on the first observable target. The huge reservoir of the anger of frustration is full to bursting. The cab driver, the bus or truck driver, pressed with traffic and confusion, denounces Negroes and Puerto Ricans unless he is a Negro or a Puerto Rican. Negroes burn up with a hateful flame. A line has formed for the couches of the psychoanalysts of people wound so tight that the mainspring has snapped and they deliver their poisons in symbolic capsules to the doctor. The legal and criminal distribution of sleeping pills and pep pills is astronomical, the first opening escape into sleep and the second access to a false personality, a biochemical costume in which to strut. Kicks increasingly take the place of satisfaction. Of love, only the word, bent and bastardized, remains.

It does remind me of something. Have you ever seen a kennel of beautiful, highly bred and trained and specialized bird dogs? And have you seen those same dogs when they are no longer used? In a short time their skills and certainties and usefulness are gone. They become quarrelsome, fat, lazy, cowardly, dirty, and utterly disreputable and worthless, and all because their purpose is gone and with it the rules and disciplines that made them beautiful and good.

Is that what we are becoming, a national kennel of animals with no purpose and no direction? For a million years we had a purpose—simple survival—the finding, planting, gathering, or killing of food to keep us alive, of shelter to prevent our freezing. This was a strong incentive. Add to it defense against all kinds of enemies and you have our species' history. But now we have food and shelter and transportation and the more terrible hazard of leisure. I strongly suspect that our moral and spiritual disintegration grows out of our lack of experience with plenty. Once, in a novel, I wrote about a woman who said she didn't want a lot of money. She wanted just enough. To which her husband replied that just enough doesn't exist. There is no money or not enough money. A billionaire still hasn't enough money.

But we are also poisoned with things. Having many things seems to create a desire for more things, more clothes, houses, automobiles. Think of the pure horror of our Christmases when our children tear open package after package and, when the floor is heaped with wrappings and presents, say, “Is that all?” And two days after, the smashed and abandoned “things” are added to our national trash pile, and perhaps the child, having got in trouble, explains, “I didn't have anything to do.” And he means exactly that—nothing to do, nowhere to go, no direction, no purpose, and worst of all no needs. Wants he has, yes, but for more bright and breakable “things.” We are trapped and entangled in things.

In my great-grandmother's time things were important. I know, because I have read her will, and the things she found important enough to bequeath by legal instrument we would have thrown away—such things as four pewter spoons, one broken in the handle, a square of black cotton lace. I had from Grandmama the little box of leaves from the Mount of Olives, a small bowl carved from one piece of onyx and beautiful to see, twelve books, and eight sheets of music. These were valuable things.

It is probable that the want of things and the need of things have been the two greatest stimulants toward the change and complication we call progress. And surely we Americans, most of us starting with nothing, have contributed our share of wanting. Wanting is probably a valuable human trait. It is the means of getting that can be dangerous.

It's a rare morning when our newspapers do not report bribery, malfeasance, and many other forms of cheating on the part of the public officials who have used the authority vested in their positions for personal gain. Of course we don't hear of the honest men, but the danger lies not in the miscreants but in our attitude toward them. Increasingly we lose our feeling of wrong. Huge corporations are convicted of price fixing and apparently the only shame is in being caught. It is a kind of a game. On the other hand, these same corporations, if Senate testimony is correct, offer bribes to members of other corporations, install listening devices and use all manner of spying methods against each other. I am dwelling on these clandestine practices not as wrong but as impractical. Businesses must not only watch rivals but must constantly spy on their own people to forestall treachery. And this is regarded as normal. Actually the use of both espionage and security in business is unworkable, expensive, and indicative of the collapse of the whole system, for any system which cannot trust its own people is in deep trouble.

When students cheat in examinations, it may be bad for them as individuals but for the community it means that the graduate is traveling with false papers and very shortly the papers—in this case the college degree—lose their value. When military cadets cheat it is in effect a kind of treason, for it means they have not learned to do the things they will be assigned to do. John Kennedy said his famous lines “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” and the listening nation nodded and smiled in agreement. But he said it not because this selfishness might become evident but because it is evident, and increasingly so. And it is historically true that a nation whose people take out more than they put in will collapse and disappear.