It’s worse now. Horribly worse. It’s been eight years of Reagan. That drove the spikes home. Susan and I were doing a lecture gig at State University of New York, Stony Brook, oh, maybe a year ago. And during a midnight session—packed to the wall—I was babbling on about something or other, and I said:
“Blah blah blah blah Dachau blah blah blah somethingorother.” And I went on. But after a few seconds, a young woman—maybe nineteen, twenty, like that—raised her hand. I said, “Yes?” She said, “Who was that person you named?” I was confused; I hadn’t named any person. “Which person?” I asked.
“That dak-ow person.”
(To their holy credit, about half the students in the auditorium turned around and stared at her, their hair on end, disbelief on their faces.)
“Do you mean Dachau?” I asked. She nodded, bewildered at the stares of the assembled. The other half of the audience kept quiet, but it was apparent they didn’t know who that “dak-ow” guy was, either.
Utterly unmanned, I sighed, and felt such a pain in my chest that tears started to well up. I said, very softly, “Dachau wasn’t a person, Miss. It was a death-camp where they cremated millions of people. World War Two.”
It’s worse now. I know it’s not all students, it’s not all teenagers. But it’s oh so damned damned many of them. They seem to know nothing earlier than last week. And they’re smug about it. As if the essence of cool is to be tabula rasa. I’ve made gags out of it: they listen to rap music…which is an oxymoron; for them, nostalgia is breakfast; they’re the clone-children of Dan Quayle, the first Stepford Wife vice-president in the history of the United States. But the tears well up.
I am hardly the model of moral exemplar. More the crank, if truth be known. But I live by pride in reason, even when reason makes no practical sense. David Denby wrote a sentence in a film review in New York magazine last year, that says it best: “He can be petulant and whiny, a hero who is also a pain in the ass.”
And Hunter Thompson summed up my kind of fool when he referred to “…the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.”
So I don’t hold myself up as the intellectual conscience of rats and mice, much less the human race.
But the tears do, yes they do, they do well up.