One rainy morning this past spring, Colin Powell went home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for thirty-seven years. But now Powell was one of the most famous generals in recent American history, thanks to the crisp poise and tough intelligence he displayed on television during the seven months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and he was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again. He stepped briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly. He smiled. He shook hands. He ignored the small crowd of black and Latino men across the street, huddled in front of a methadone clinic. And he didn’t seem to notice the abandoned hulks of gutted buildings down the slope of Boston Road. As a man tempered by Vietnam, he has taught himself to ignore the defeats of the past. He glanced up at the school entrance, shook his head in an ironic way, and went in. I walked across the street to talk to the junkies.
“What the hell he know about bein’ down?” said a man named Roderick. “I seen him on the TV. That man’s whiter than George fuckin’ Bush! Talk so pretty! Man got everything he want, college boy, all that shit.”
Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing. They’d drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made. Their fathers had run off when they were young, or their mothers, or their girlfriends. They’d been locked up by bad cops, beaten up or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses. Look at us, they said: Look what has been done to us. By Vietnam or racism or capitalism. I stood there for a few minutes, listening to the old familiar litany, and then fled across the street to see Powell talk to some kids.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive. The core of his twenty-minute talk, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes: Stay in school and get a diploma; don’t take drugs, because that’s stupid. But such bromides were given some renewed power because Powell now spoke with the authority of success. In addition, he was a black man who’d come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag. Certainly Powell had arrived here with luminous cards of identity. But then, after the clichés, he delivered what was probably the morning’s most important message — and its most subtle.
“If you’re black, if you’re Puerto Rican or Hispanic,” he said, “be proud of that. But don’t let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else’s problem.”
Thus spoke a man who clearly has spent his life refusing to become a victim.
To hear Colin Powell that morning was refreshing, even moving, because we live now in a nation that is sick with what I call victimism. Since the collapse of communism and the continuing mistrust of capitalism, victimism might now be the dominant American ideology. Many whites insist that they are innocent victims of vengeful blacks, who are portrayed in their fearful fantasies as marauding bands coming to get their wives, sisters, mamas, or selves. Meanwhile, Hispanics in big cities claim to be the victims of whites and blacks, while I’ve heard blacks claim that AIDS was invented to kill blacks and crack cocaine was invented as part of an antiblack conspiracy set up by the CIA and the Medellin cartel, both of which are pumping it into the ghettos to debase black society.
At the same time, all sorts of people say they are victims of Asians, from the professional Japan-bashers in Washington to those on the street who believe the Korean greengrocer must be engaged in some nefarious plot that will end with a takeover of America. And there are Asians among us who believe they are victims, too; they are angry because someone once called them the Model Minority; they’re mad because some universities are creating quotas to keep out Asians and Asian-Americans; in the Miss Saigon uproar, they were furious because the part of a Eurasian went to a Caucasian.
This peculiar American capacity for anger seems without limit. Millions of women claim to be the victims of men, while men cite alimony laws and stake claims to their own status as victims of feminist hypocrisy (“How can they claim I’m oppressing them,” one divorced friend said, “and then take my money?”). The American day seems to begin with one long and penetrating whine: Look what they are doing to me! And “they” are Catholics or Protestants or Jews, liberals or conservatives, northerners or southerners, eastern bankers or western oilmen, members of the NAACP or the NRA, slaves to the AFL-CIO, with occasional believers in the remaining power of the International Communist Conspiracy or the Trilateral Commission. Life in these semi-United States often seems to be an illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that hell is other people.
In the end, all adherents of victimism have a few things in common. Most of them are miserable. They hate their jobs, their wives, their husbands or kids or dogs, the cities in which they live, the food they eat, the politicians who lead them, the newspapers, Peter Arnett, their mothers and fathers, and almost all foreigners. For a few brief weeks, they were happy hating Saddam Hussein. But then they noticed that people they hated also hated Hussein, so they retreated back into life as gray, throbbing muscles of resentment.
More important, victimism has one overriding slogan, the response to almost all questions about the source of their misery and victimhood: It’s not my fault! Dropped out of high school? Not my fault. Started shooting heroin or smoking crack when others passed up both? Not my fault. Married the wrong people, got caught robbing stores, crashed the car with a load on? Not me, man, not my fault. Victimism implies that nobody is personally responsible for the living of a life. The defeats, disappointments, and failures that were once thought to be part of each human being’s portion on this earth are not only unacceptable now, considered soul-killing, career-bruising, life-threatening, but they are always the fault of somebody else.
I’ve heard the endless complaint on all levels of society. In a ghetto, I see a woman point to a hole in the bathroom wall and demand to know why the landlord won’t fix it. Well, I ask, how’d it get there? It just appeared, she says. Why doesn’t she fix it herself? What? What? Are you crazy? It’s not my fault! This could be explained as the heritage of fifty years of welfare. But I hear the echo out in East Hampton on a summer afternoon, where one of those captains of industry is complaining about the Japanese. We shouldn’t even let their cars in here! Why not? Because the Japanese are unfair. In what way? He mumbles about rice, cigarettes, other items not easily admitted to Japan, and how the Japanese won’t let Americans into the construction business, and how they insist on writing their documents in Japanese, the crafty buggers. I say, What does all that have to do with car sales? The captain of industry glowers: Well, he says, what would you do about our car sales? Make better cars, I suggest. He looks at me, eyes widening. What? Don’t you understand? The Japanese are giving us the shaft! We are falling behind, but hey, fella, get on the team! It’s not our fault!
On the silliest level, victimism disguises itself with the sophomoric rigidities of political correctness. Surely, the demand for PC is one of the more comical developments in American life. We have people eating out of garbage cans while humorless brigades of ignorant kids are combing language, literature, and the corner bar for evidence of expression that will offend, hurt, or enrage somebody. They warp, bend, fold, spindle, and otherwise mutilate words that they find offensive, and in the process throw out all notions of freedom of speech. The slogan of these incipient Stalinists seems to be: I’m offended, therefore I am.
But the sad comedy of victimism usually plays on a wider stage, and in some cases the scripts are straight out of the theater of the absurd. The drug raid on three University of Virginia fraternity houses was partly in response to complaints that the local cops only went after drug dealers and users in the black part of town. In Los Angeles, one accused drug dealer is claiming that his arrest in a sweep of dealers working near public schools was a “separate and unequal” prosecution, targeting minorities. Both charges are loony; imagine the outcry if the police stopped policing minority neighborhoods, leaving the crack dealer to operate under the commandments of laissez-faire capitalism. Victimism insists that the police can never be decent; if they do the job, they are hurting and offending people; if they refuse to do the job, they are contributing to genocide. God bless America; it’s a laugh a minute around here.
But there is a darker, more dangerous aspect to victimism. It can be used as a license. Bernhard Goetz was a statue in the park of Victimist theory. So are all the other nerds who shoot first. All they need is the perception of being victims. In the past few years, we have seen a number of cases in which battered wives have burned, shot, or stabbed their husbands and then been acquitted on the grounds that they were the victims. I have no doubt that many of these women were abused by the idiots they married. Was murder really the only solution? At what point does the claim to victimhood serve as a license to kill?
Watching Colin Powell, I thought about the world in which he was young and how hard he must have worked to make the journey of his life. He graduated from Morris High School in February 1954, a few months before Brown v. Board of Education. He didn’t need the Supreme Court to get him into college; he’d already been admitted to the City College of New York, where you needed a 90 average to get in. But Colin Powell didn’t brag to the assembled students, and though he reminded them that they had greater opportunities than he did, he didn’t whine about the timing of his life. He was another tough guy who didn’t need to show how tough he was as he played the hand he was dealt. So he’d already learned some lessons from his parents about work and struggle. And he must have been free of self-pity, that most corrosive of human emotions. He was shaped by forces now almost forgotten: the immigrant work experience, the Depression, the tradition of hard work.
I’m not sure when — or more important, why — self-pity was elevated into the great all-encompassing American whine. One possible explanation is the presence in our collective imaginations of two gigantic twentieth-century events: the Holocaust and Hiroshima. These were real, with millions of true victims, but they also live in most of us on the level of hallucination and nightmare. They were not problems of manners. They were not offenses of language. Even today, it’s difficult for many people to deal with them. There is a valid argument that no words, no pictures, no movies can ever fully express the horror of the Holocaust or the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But an awed silence can’t satisfy everyone. Some Americans might be adapting the robes of the victim in solidarity with the victims of this century’s horrors; others might don them in annoyance, saying in effect, Yeah, that’s terrible, but / have my own problems. And some might be trying to relieve some tangled feelings of national guilt; for the incineration of so many Japanese civilians, for failing to act to save the European Jews when it was clear that the Holocaust had begun.
I don’t pretend to have the answers to such cosmic questions. But I do know that Americans, who once worshiped in the church of self-reliance, have moved to another house of worship, where they are in the grip of a fever of victimism. Its whining propagandists insist upon respect without accomplishment, while its punitive theory of society is enforced by lawyers. The amount of energy consumed by the furies of victimism is extraordinary. The wasted lives of those who buy its premise add up to a genuine tragedy that is made worse by being a self-inflicted wound. In this state of mind, the nation can never heal itself; it is too busy blaming others to look into its own heart. But all of us, including the most damaged, would be helped by a moratorium on self-pity. We need less Freud and more Marcus Aurelius, less adolescent posturing and more stoic maturity, less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horselaughs in the face of adversity.
In all the cities of America, the young are now being introduced to the world through the shaping ideology of victimism. How sad. I wish Colin Powell could talk to all of them, black, white, or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and tell them: Be proud, live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey, man: Make it someone else’s problem.