| Wednesday, July 28, 2004 |
15:03 - And all this time I've been smoking harmless tobacco
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I've written a couple of times before about an e-mail correspondent that I've been talking with for over a year now. This is a character with whom, if it weren't for the valuable nature of the meat of the conversation, I'd never have had the heart to keep the exchange going so long; see, he's of the so-far-left-you-can't-see-Left-from-where-he-is neck of the spectrum, and over the course of the conversation, in which the messages have routinely topped 30K as they've explored matters philosophical and animal and mineral, I've seen glimpses of how I used to think, back in high school. Though the guy is in his 40s or 50s, massively overweight, on the edge of financial ruin, and chronically spiritually and emotionally unfulfilled, talking to him is like talking to a younger version of myself, albeit a much more volatile and schizophrenic version (or so I hope).
Because the main point of the conversation focuses on a project I'm working on and into which he seeks to add his observations and critique, I've studiously avoided bringing up a certain delicate subject: the fact that if he and I were to meet on the field of political battle, we'd be on staunchly opposite sides. He assumes, because of the context in which he knows me (suffice to say, it's one of those sides of me that I'm not about to publicize in this forum), that I'm the kind of guy who'll cheer at his aspersions against drivers on Texas roads with Bush/Cheney bumper stickers, his claims that the invasion of Iraq was worse than Hitler's invasion of Poland, his contention that society demands too much responsibility of people (this in the age of McDonald's lawsuits, even), and his rejection of gay marriage on the grounds that "marriage" itself is an oppressive Western conceit developed by those evil straight people in order to spite gays in the first place. I hate to burst the pleasant(-ish) bubble by telling the truth about how I feel on these issues—I just sort of smile and nod and move on to the next paragraph.
I have, however, been able to chasten him on a few issues—without delving too far into politics, I managed to make him rethink some of his vitriol toward the people around him by telling him that I prefer to think of the world, and the thousands of people I meet every day on the road and at work and elsewhere, as so many individual, unique, complex stories, each as valuable as mine or his; the trust inherent in our interactions with each of these people, whether they do things we think are "stupid" or not, is the very core of our society—and if I see someone cut me off in traffic or forget to signal or something, I think of all the times I've done things on the road that I'm not proud of, the excuses I'd have offered, the extenuating circumstances I'd have cited, and remembered that as likely as not, everyone else on the road has exactly the same innocent and lucid story to tell behind every driving error. After a few paragraphs waxing lyrical along these lines, he admitted to being flummoxed—here he was, the touchy-feely liberal, learning lessons in tolerating his fellow man from someone he hardly knew! So I scored a few points there, but whether the thoughts took root or not remained to be seen.
But he's a small-time fantasy author (and a poet at heart, naturally, though with some grudging familiarity with actual marketable skills such as printing and networking) who's had some modest success with his books, and he's sent me in-progress chapters of a story he's working on, for my own edification—and aspects of his thought processes that don't come across in direct conversation are easily betrayed by his writing. For example, one character—written in that clearly "autobiographical" sense, with just a little too much self-awareness to feel quite right as a character—soliloquizes about how unfair the modern world is in basing its mercantile system on money. How wonderful it would be, his character croons, if we could go back to the barter system, where a customer could trade a poem or the performance of an original song for, say, a cup of coffee. How far we as a people have fallen! We no longer see the value in a simple expression of creativity, and worship only the almighty dollar!
Keeping quiet under the barrage of these kinds of thoughts is not easy, not in the least. All day and most of the night I find myself composing merciless responses which I know I'll never deliver, or—worse—which I suspect that someday I might, if the truth about my thoughts on these subjects should bubble to the surface. To the chapter in which the barter-system rant appeared, I responded in e-mail with careful structural critique; but in my mind and on the street as I walked Capri, I was rehearsing my rebuttal. Look at this, I'd hiss, holding up a $1 bill. See this? "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Do you understand how powerful a statement that is? Do you realize the depth of the concept behind it? A form of currency that's completely worthless in and of itself, yet that anybody you meet is guaranteed to accept as payment for a dollar's worth of goods or services. You want to sing a song or read a poem to the Starbucks clerk? Well, who's to say she'll like the song, or think it's worth the price of a cup of Joe? And if she does, how does she explain it to her manager? Does she try to recite the poem to him, so he can write it down on his ledger and recite it in turn to the guy with the clipboard on the loading dock delivering his monthly shipment of supplies? What's the CFO supposed to do for the edification of the stockholders—tote up the number of songs performed, bushels of wheat grown and harvested, sidewalks swept, sweaters knitted, lawns mowed, and favors owed in the "credit receivable" column? Look—this little statement on this little piece of paper is one of the most profound developments in the history of humanity. It means that all you have to do is hand it over, and you can get one dollar's worth of coffee, Starbucks can get one dollar's worth of beans, the clerk can get one dollar's worth of pay, Starbucks' stockholders can recognize one dollar's worth of revenue—all 100% convertible with no questions asked, no subjective judgment of worth or character necessary, no exchange fee, no bribe, no cajoling, no threat of violence. You could be a bum off the street or you could be Elton John—the dollar in your hand buys you a cup of coffee, whether you're capable of singing a woeful ballad to the cashier's eyebrow or not. There's never been a symbol so powerful of the equality of all men in the eyes of the market as the phrase "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private", and never has there been a more inherently unequal, abuse-prone, inefficient, and judgmental system as the barter system you pine for in your lavish prose. ...But I never say these things to him, because I figure, hey—I've got a blog where I can let off steam like this, if I have to.
So: in his latest message, which I just received after a six-week period of silence during which I figured anything from suicide to the sudden loss of 300 pounds and election to public office could have happened to him, he says this:
I could go into dreadful quantities of detail, and some of it
might even rival Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. It would also be lengthy and,
if you'll pardon me sounding as if I'm insulting you by saying so,
probably would put you into a coma out of sheer boredom. Suffice it to
say that I've had enough psychological and financial trauma to damn near
land me in hospital, poor house, and/or jail for going postal and doing
my part to eliminate any and all registered, avowed, or potential
Republicans in a hundred mile radius.
(...and the body count gets larger...)
And, later in the message, after a painfully lame joke he's putting into a story:
Yeah, I know: If I'm that fucking clever, why ain't I rich?
Answer: I'm a Democrat.
He knows, because I told him early on, that I have a terrible, horrible secret that I'm keeping from him, something that if he knew it would ensure he'd never want to speak to me again. But naturally I can't help but think that one day in the not-too-distant future, I'll have to clue him in. I don't look forward to it... but then, I sort of do, in that morbid kind of way you fantasize about telling off your mother-in-law, because you know that once you've committed to it, you're in up to your neck and nothing you can do can save you—so you may as well just unload with both barrels and hope to emerge on the other side, charred but alive, rather than pulling back and continuing with the charade. So I rehearse the Moment of Revelation too:
What's that secret about me? What's this big mystery? It's got something to do with giving the people around me the benefit of the doubt, acknowledging that all people have their own lives and their own valid opinions, and believing firmly that very few people are as stupid as we might like to call them. It's about trusting my fellow man to do the right thing. It's about believing that every person is entitled to exactly the same opportunities, regardless of how they might act upon them—nobody should have any externally-imposed handicaps OR advantages over anyone else. It's a conviction that people are fundamentally competent, and that furthermore we all ought to be held to a higher standard of conduct and conscience that is within the reach of all of us if only we commit to stretching ourselves upward to meet it. It has to do with respecting others' beliefs and opinions, spiritual and political, even if I disagree with them—and not fantasizing about visiting violence upon them or banning their thoughts because I don't find them agreeable. It's about the belief that equality, fairness, and opportunity arise from the natural evolution of society left to its own devices, rather than from undemocratic rulemaking that seeks to restrict the way in which we conduct our lives. It's about understanding that increased wealth is a boon to all people, and technical innovation and the value it creates reduces the divide between rich and poor, especially in the public's estimation of the value of a person's character. It's about realizing that self-determination is the key to the uplift of a downtrodden stratum of society, and alms and pity are no way to dispense self-determination. It's about a belief in earning your claim to freedom and wealth and happiness, not blaming others for withholding those things from you, and it's about taking personal responsibility for failure and recognizing it as a risk that's fundamentally inseparable from the freedom to succeed. It's about the realization of a world where success is and remains the touchstone of a life well lived, for a successful person will inspire, encourage, and invest in those around him, out of self-interest, civic responsibility, friendship, and because human beings are, I believe, good at heart.
...In other words, yes: I'm a Republican.
(A bit glib, as readers will know, and not a conclusion I'd encourage anyone here to reach about me; but the only possible way to end the above thought, as I'm sure you'll agree.)
Now... I don't know if the day will come when I have to say that to his face, or what his reaction will be if and when I do. There's no way I can see it being good, or indeed the conversation lasting more than one very brief message further. But on the infinitesimal chance that, horrified but undaunted, he should try to engage me on it, I can imagine him charging me as follows:
But you're successful. You own your own house; you have a great life. Your job pays for your health care. You have the leeway to say these kinds of things, because it's no skin off your nose to stand behind these kinds of ideals. So, admit it: Republican rhetoric is just a justification of success. Right?
Sure, I'd say. And Democratic rhetoric, then, is just a rationalization of failure.
I can see how he thinks. I see where he's coming from. Being stuck in a hot and humid state with no air conditioning, no steady job, three hundred extra pounds, the constant threat of eviction, and no marketable skills, who wouldn't see such a world as being unfair? No matter how often we might say that "everyone has a unique gift to offer the world", there's always the stark truth that lots and lots of people either never find theirs, or never find a way to capitalize on it—or don't have such skills to begin with. I know dozens of people who can produce visual art that makes your eyes roll back in your head at how great it is—but they're stuck in dead-end jobs, unable to make a living off what they really enjoy and can uniquely offer the world. There are people out there who will buy their songs; only they'll do so with slips of paper that say This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private on them.
But it's hard, really hard, for someone in that kind of position to vote in such a way that shuns things like universal health care, cushy welfare, affordable government-funded housing, and laws to prevent people from being condescending toward them—an umbrella that covers all derisive language from "hate speech" to sexual harassment to un-PC television shows—thus placing the gag of the social contract over the ability of the privileged to reinforce their separation in society from the unprivileged by their choice of words. All that looks very tempting to someone who's a have-not: it's the promise of a slightly less uncomfortable world to live in, plus a little well-earned knife-twisting at those accursed demons who have dared to place themselves at a higher level in the social strata. "Success", then, becomes a dirty word—the symbol of selling out, of cashing in, of hawking your soul for the allure of those little green slips of paper.
The problem, though, is that this is all a distortion, and a pernicious one. American society, despite this tendency to demonize success, is one that celebrates the "self-made man". Reading Old World perspectives such as James Herriot's books, I learn that his Scottish upbringing (from which we get much of this same up-from-the-muck spirit) clashed with the English sensibility into which his career injected him in the hills of Yorkshire. The self-made man was looked on with deep suspicion. "Nothing was more damning," Herriot wrote, "than the darkly uttered statement: He had nowt when he fust got here." I'll never forget that, because it's as alien to me, and to most Americans, as it was to his mind, honed in the Highlands that gave us Adam Smith and other such luminaries whose very spirit—if not their actual words—are what guide us even in the present day.
It saddens me to see someone so eloquent as this correspondent of mine, with such obvious creativity, driven to such a dismal, vindictive, nihilistic philosophy. But the real kicker is that I know that even if all his socialistic wishes were to come true—even if everyone made the same wage, even if he had free health care, even if all personal responsibility were lifted from every person's shoulders (especially his), even if we skipped down the sparkling manicured streets each morning to pick flowers and perform street theater in exchange for rent and gourmet meals, he would still not be happy. I know this is true—his capacity to be happy is limited only by his willingness to be happy, and once you've embarked on the victim-mentality slippery slope, it doesn't matter how good or how bad your surroundings actually are: you're going to find them intolerable. He could have been born in Afghanistan, where the things he complains about here and now would be not only meaningless, but the source of such cognitive dissonance that the people around him would kill their own siblings to be given the chance to have "problems" like bad drivers on the Texas interstate or there's a Christian in the White House or nobody loves a guy who's morbidly obese, the shallow bastards. But instead, he was born here, and he's determined for everything to be the fault of some heartless Other—anything to keep his failings from being his own.
History is full of people who start from nothing, coming to a new country with three dollars and a ball of lint in their pockets, and despite not knowing the language or being part of the prevailing ethnic group, reaching pinnacles of personal excellence that makes them into folk heroes for anyone who worships at the shrine of the Self-Made Man. That's the model to which America aspires, even those of us who cheapen the impact of the lesson by demanding that life pander to us and make our lives easier. Life has never been easy. The difference in people lies between those who accept that truth as part of the nature of this Earth, and make the best of it; and those who refuse to accept it, believe ease and comfort and security are the natural state of existence, and harangue anyone and anything they see as standing in its way. Such people as the latter seldom make history.
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Brian Tiemann
