Good news! My murderous friend’s murderousness is in remission. This has been going on for a while now: that roving look is gone and I don’t wake in the night fearing his whereabouts and intentions. His drinking has lessened, too, is normal, and he’s laid off the cryptic remarks, so I’m going to name him. I’m going to call him Jason, which is a nom de livre.
I suspect I’ve given the impression that Jason and I have a friendship based in extremity. We seem to meet only when he’s gloomy or lethal or mad and my role is to temporize with him. It’s not like that, really.
Jason and I became friends because he’s one of the few men I know who consider conversation an event. Most men—all kinds of men: straight, gay, neuter—see discussion as a more or less bitter way station on the path to personal gain. It’s like the compulsories in the Olympics: all those dreary figure-eights, but you have to do them to get what you want.
He and I talk about most things, though not about everything. We never discuss, for instance, who’s secretly sleeping with whom, no matter how explosive that information is deemed to be. Make of this what you will, that sort of thing holds no interest for us.
We will discuss cultural effluvia—Twitter wars, TV reality crap—and we’ll discuss other things that everyone discusses: recipes and that sort of topic.
We spend a lot of time talking about politics. Talking about politics is about all we ever do with politics, other than to vote on those odd occasions when we can remember where the polling place is, but we can talk with some heat. We get really riled up and in doing so consider ourselves highly moral. A minute later we’re mortified that we felt virtuous because we’d said some words.
He and I belong to a sort of shadow generation—the much younger siblings of the engagé children of the sixties (though he is an only child). We had an example to look up to and we failed to emulate it, is the way we see it. There was a halo around those kids, created in large part by a popular culture industry that knew a great deal of money was to be mined from pandering to them. As we now know, much of that generation would shed its commitments and become greedy or remorseful, self-mocking or self-flacking, but their dissolution does little to make us feel better about our apathy. We knew ourselves to be apathetic even before we attained our majority. My high school newspaper was always publishing editorials decrying our apathy. Nobody ever read them (rim shot).
Jason and I were discussing this the other day, how we feel self-conscious when we try to be committed, to emulate the people we still respect: cussed city councilwomen and underpaid community organizers and the like. I reminded him of the time in the nineties when I joined a group on a bandstand in a rally that had been organized in support of the embattled National Endowment for the Arts. We were introduced as “some of the most talented artists in the country” and were seated in a block, facing the crowd, to express the strength of our solidarity. This was fictitious. Among us was this pissy bunch of self-identified provocateurs who kept loudly calling out slurs against the people whose side they were supposed to be on but who struck them as insufficiently something-or-other. Their jokes weren’t funny and they weren’t smart, only mean. And relentless. That was all it took to sour me for all time on rallies, and it shouldn’t have been. It should have emboldened me. But I am not bold.
Usually, it’s my role to appease Jason. That day he was trying to make me feel better, reassuring me that it was a good thing I was so politically abstemious. The gist of his argument was that I am not talented in those ways.
“First of all, there’s your love of the concessive clause. No one sticks a pin in his own argument the way you do. And that’s how you open. By the time you let anyone in on what your point is, you’ve already trashed it. That doesn’t work on a rostrum, buddy. Believe me, Che Guevara never said ‘perhaps.’ You’re too non-doctrinaire! You’re always seeing the other side. And no matter how wonkishly you’ve studied up on a subject, you still imagine you’re underinformed. Somewhere, sometime, someone in the Czech Republic or someplace did something that proves you’re full of shit. That doesn’t get the signatures on the petition, my old. And you clam up in public. It’s like you’re physically disabled—you can’t get the words out, you’d need hypnosis to stop stuttering. And, frankly, it’s not worth undergoing treatment just so there can be another self-righteous shrekker at the hearing. Also, you have too elusive a relationship to the tangible. The world really isn’t your priority. Writing about it is. You go places and do things not for the going and the doing but to bring back nouns. You come back and you get to write ‘coal hauls’ and ‘hawsers’ and ‘oubliettes’ and ‘darning needle’ and that’s what gets you going, not realpolitik. It’s your temperament. Temperament is irreducible. The thing is, you’re essentially a nostalgist. You can’t agitate for the past, buddy. You can’t polemicize Weejuns or eating clubs or those lyrical afternoons at—which the fuck school did you go to—Princeton? Harvard? Yale? All of them, was it? That’s ridiculous. The problem is your philosophy and your aesthetic contradict each other; politically, you’re this progressive, but you have a helpless attraction to the decorating schemes and the pullovers of the sorts of people who still say ‘darky.’ Also, you’re intrinsically nonplural. You use the word ‘we’ only in the most restricted ways. There’s never a hint of ideology about it or an edge of solidarity—if it’s used to describe more than three people doing something prosaic, you think it doesn’t fit you. What it all comes down to—and I know you hate this—is that you were marinated in the middle class. You are irremediably bourgeois—which is to say, fear-driven. So what? Does it mean you’re not a world historical figure? Of course you’re not a world historical figure. Are you less useful, strictly speaking, than another sort of person? Obviously you are. Big deal! You’re here. The protoplasm can’t be refunded. You make the best of the gifts you have. You’re obsessed with the sump two blocks from where you grew up and the treeline on your property. Go in health. Don’t worry about it. You’re neither the problem nor the solution (pace the sixties). Just do what you do.”
I was feeling a little abused by his compassion so, feebly, but in as snippy a voice as I could muster, I shot back, “What about you?”
“Me?” he said. “Jeez—puh!—me!”
We took leave of each other a few minutes later. Although not sorry to have had the talk, we were frustrated with our characters.
I was reminded of the conversation this morning when I opened the New York Times—obituaries first, as always—and learned of the death of Jane Byrne, who, for a short time, had been the mayor of Chicago.
Before that, she’d held other prominent civic posts and in one of them, she’d earned the animus of a neighbor of mine who was a noted student revolutionary.
By “noted” I don’t mean famous—he was never famous. His impressiveness derived from his having nabbed a high slot on Mayor Daley’s enemies list, despite attending a college that more or less slept through the ructions of the sixties and early seventies.
He was universally acclaimed the nicest person in the neighborhood, as well as the brightest, and had been my babysitter and, later, something of a teacher to me. For example, in my early teens I thought of the sixties as an undifferentiated psychedelic mass. It was he who explained to me that a strong antagonism existed between the highly disciplined New Left and the hedonistic counterculture—albeit coming more from the left than the counterculture, who were always too stoned to stay mad at anything for very long.
I was twelve, I think, when he told me of a protest he’d spearheaded—or perhaps just attended—in which everybody had held signs—placards—that read “Byrne the Witch.”
I, being a pretentious brownnose, said, “Why, that’s—that’s Shakespearean!”
And though I was only a child and of no account, he was pleased by this bit of flattery. “It is Shakespearean,” he whispered.
Once he had told me that within five years, the country (the United States) would be either socialist (good) or fascist (very bad). Absolutely no way around it.
When he said this, there was no maniacal glint in his eye, nothing supernatural or shifty about him. He was matter-of-fact. He was suburban. It was like hearing the Rapture being forecast by an accountant.
I was given to believe anything anyone told me if it was asserted with confidence. If two people asserted diametrically opposed ideas with equal confidence, my role was to have a nervous breakdown.
This was what was meant by “politics.”
Life was barely tolerable for me in those days, but I imagined that any deviation from things as they were could only be cataclysmic. I started to worry about fascism the way people in high-crime neighborhoods worried about break-ins. Not if, but when.
This neighbor continued to drop by pretty regularly during school vacations, and it was always the same. He’d sit with the family, sipping tea, eating Entenmann’s sour cream chip nut loaf, and predicting imminent social collapse in a pleasant tone of voice. He didn’t cause panic in me—I was already a panicker—but his preachments reminded me that panicking was a good idea. And though he liked me, he couldn’t see that the attitude of sangfroid I affected in his presence was a hoax, because he was a true believer.
Decades later, I dwell in a world of nuance and I no longer think that “Byrne the Witch” is Shakespearean.
And just for the record, if you advocate the immolation of heretics, who does that make you? Torquemada? A magistrate of Salem?