I felt a powerful obligation to keep my legal residence within the United States because the nation had given me a free education from elementary school through postdoctorate work in the finest universities and I thought that in return it was entitled to a share of whatever I earned. I have never deviated from that decision.
The more practical reason was that as I watched the actors and writers who took advantage of the free life overseas, I was distressed by its effect upon their work. If the expatriate was an actor he received only junk parts in films made overseas: ‘He’s already over here. He’ll have to take the role and we can get him for peanuts.’ Such actors were never summoned home to take on a really important role or one that would enhance their reputation. They demeaned themselves in movies thrown together by marginal Italian or Spanish companies or by underfinanced American adventurers shooting in those countries. With each year they remained overseas their reputations declined.
Writers tended to suffer in their own way. They lost touch with America and American themes. They wrote trivially, or under pressure from distant agents, or in areas they would not have touched had they been back home under the eyes of publisher and counselor. In the worst instance, they became rootless expatriates, yearning for home but afraid to go back lest they lose a temporary tax advantage. They and the actors saved money, but they did so at terrible cost to themselves and their careers. They had made a bargain with the devil and he paid them with counterfeit.
The problem of allegiance is more complex. If a man becomes a citizen of the world, which many do, as he travels and works abroad and sees the merits of lands other than his own, he must, if he has any sensitivity at all, ask himself: ‘To what entity do I owe my allegiance?’ and it will not be preposterous for him to reply: ‘I really owe my debt to the entire world, for I am as at home in London or Tokyo as I am in Sioux Falls, and I am just as obligated to the people of those areas as I am to those of South Dakota.’
With me this question surfaced constantly because I have been at ease in all lands. I was once extremely happy in the Indonesian city of Bandung in Java; I have rarely been more content than I have been while working in Seville; London is a constant lure and Tokyo is incomparable. I felt a deep affinity for Singapore, a positive identity with Cracow in Poland and have been able to do consistently worthwhile work in places as diverse as Teruel in Spain, Djakarta in Indonesia, Rangoon in Burma, Lahore in Pakistan and Nome in Alaska. Apparently I can work anywhere and in any climate, so it would be feasible for me to settle wherever my fancy dictates.
In ancient legend there was the mighty Antaeus, son of the god Poseidon and Ge (Mother Earth), who successfully challenged every stranger he met to a wrestling match. He derived his extraordinary power from keeping one foot in solid contact with his native earth; Hercules, learning of his secret, defeated him by lifting him high in the air and killed him. Many artists are like Antaeus: Deprive them of contact with the particular corner of the earth where they were born and they become aimless and in some instances powerless. I am one of those people. For better or for worse I was reared in a small rural town in eastern Pennsylvania near low mountains, a wonderful canal and the Delaware River, and when I am absent too long I begin to diminish. My terrain has been enlarged to include all the United States, especially places in which I’ve worked like Hawaii, Colorado, Texas, Alaska and Florida. My affinity is with the American soil: I need it, I am nourished by it, and I am faithful to it.
That I am a citizen of the world is quite clear, but I have never been willing to adopt an affiliation with something vague and amorphous. My home is only one nation within the greater entity, but I serve the whole much more effectively when I serve my homeland best. Like Antaeus, I lose power when I lose touch.
· · ·
As I approached the age of eighty-two I was confronted by a savage rejection of everything decent I had ever stood for. In the 1988 election President Reagan announced that anyone who was a liberal—he used the phrase ‘the L word,’ as if it were fatally contaminated—was outside the mainstream of American life and intimated that the liberal’s patriotism was suspect. Vice President George Bush went a lot further by shouting that anyone who did not wish to recite the Pledge of Allegiance was probably false to the honored traditions of our nation, while Senator Quayle declared: ‘Michael Dukakis is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, but George Bush is a member of the National Rifle Association,’ as if that made the former a loathsome traitor and the latter a great patriot. I found all this denigration of liberals personally offensive.
As I was being ejected from the mainstream of American life, I stumbled into a situation that forced me to evaluate all aspects of my political life. I was living in Florida so as to be near the Caribbean Sea, about which I was doing extensive research. Because I wanted to catch the flavor of the area, I not only read newspapers and watched television but also listened for the first time in my life to what was accurately termed ‘talk radio,’ keeping my set tuned permanently to Station WNQS, which provided a running report on the topics that really concerned the local citizens. What I learned from this listening was invaluable.
Tuesday and Wednesday nights were assigned to a soft-spoken, congenial, well-informed man named Norman Neem in Juno Beach. He conducted a call-in show that became a must for me, because in it he abused, vilified and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life. It seemed to me that he was against any law that sought to improve the lot of the poor, any tax that endeavored to improve the quality of our national life, any act in Congress that hoped to better the condition of the nation as a whole, any movement that tried to lessen police brutality, any bill that struggled to maintain a fair balance between the contending forces in our society and any move to improve education, protect public health, or strengthen the supervision of agencies running wild.
His scorn for all Democratic politicians was boundless, with Kennedy, McGovern, Carter, Mondale and Dukakis bearing the brunt of his vilification week after week. It seemed that he saw nothing wrong with Nixon, Ford, Bush or Quayle, while his admiration for Reagan verged on the worshipful. I could never quite determine what kind of government he was for, but at various intervals I guessed that what he really wanted was some version of either Robert Welch’s United States or Lyndon LaRouche’s. It also seemed that if he had his way blacks, women, children and the poor would suffer even worse constraints than they do at present, and the millionaires, tycoons, big businessmen and generals would prosper as never before. Every man in our public life whom I distrusted I heard him enshrine as a hero; and every cause for which I had worked he denigrated with a scorn that was brilliant.
It was extremely fortunate that I had come upon Neem, because he possessed such a strong native intelligence that he made his positions almost palatable; sometimes after I heard him sign off on midweek nights I started my evening walk with considerable fear: God, I hope no one who listens to his show and agrees with him knows I’m a liberal, because if he did he could shoot me.
Neem’s weekly diatribes were the best thing that happened to me in Florida, for they made me stop, take a long hard look at myself, and determine where I might possibly have gone wrong. As I engaged in this introspection, I learned one valuable trick: ‘Listen carefully to Neem. Identify exactly what he’s saying. And then adopt a position one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, as far from him as you can get, and you’ll be on the right track.’ This simple rule forced me to define my beliefs and renew my opposition to all the things I intuitively detested; had he been a lamebrain or a mere ranter I could have dismissed him, but because he was so able in his marshaling of facts, street rumors and inherited positions, such as reverence for the Pledge of Allegiance and maniacal hatred of the A.C.L.U., I had to clarify my own thinking, and thus confirmed who I was and what I believed.
I decided that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type, and so I shall be increasingly until I die.
I am, in other words, a humanist, and if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind, a secular humanist, I accept the accusation, but I do not want to be accused of atheism. No man who loves Deuteronomy and that first chapter of James can be totally antireligious.
A charge that can be lodged against me is that I am a knee-jerk liberal, for I confess to that sin. When I find that a widow has been left penniless and alone with three children, my knee jerks. When I learn that funds for a library have been diminished almost to the vanishing point, my knee jerks. When I find that a playground for children is being closed down while a bowling alley for grown men is being opened, my knee jerks. When men of ill intent cut back on teachers’ salaries and lunches for children, my knee jerks. When the free flow of ideas is restricted, when health services are denied whole segments of the population, when universities double their fees, my knee jerks, and when I learn that all the universities in Texas combined graduated two future teachers qualified to teach calculus but more than five hundred trained to coach football, my knee jerks, and I hope never to grow so old or indifferent that I can listen to wrong and immoral choices being made without my knee flashing a warning.
Why does it jerk? To alert me that I have been passive and inattentive too long, to remind me that one of the noblest purposes for which human beings are put on earth is to strive to make their societies better, to see to it that gross inequities are not perpetuated. And to halt them requires both effort and financial contributions, usually in the form of taxes. The best expenditure of money I have made in my life has not been for what made me either happier or more comfortable, but for the taxes I have paid to the various governments under which I have lived. In general, governments have spent their share of my money more wisely and with better results than I have spent my own funds, and one aspect of my life about which I am most ashamed is that I spent most of a decade living in three states that had no state income tax—Texas, Florida, Alaska—and the deficiencies that the first two suffered because of that lack were evident daily. I like states like New York, Massachusetts and California that do tax and try to spend their income wisely.
One of the sickest economic preachments has been ‘the trickle-down theory’: ‘If you allow the very rich to make as much money as they can without governmental restraint, they will magnanimously allow some of their largess to trickle down to the peasants below.’ Most advocates of the theory do not express it in those blunt terms, but I have found that that is what they mean. I am not for across-the-board redistribution of wealth, and I know that rich people invest their money in enterprises that create employment, and I can cite a dozen other constructive uses of great wealth; but I still believe that society prospers most when there are laws to bring that wealth back into circulation, when there are taxes to provide social services that otherwise might not be available, when there is governmental surveillance to ensure proper business practices and prevent manipulation of financial markets, and when profits are plowed into research and the education of new generations.
When I have been dead ten years and a family comes to tend the flowers on the grave next to mine, and they talk about the latest pitiful inequity plaguing their town, they will hear a rattling from my grave and can properly say: ‘That’s Jim again. His knee is still jerking.’
* * *
* After decades of analysis, preparation, checking and infuriating delays, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in April 1990. By June 27 NASA realized that a trivial flaw in grinding the mirrors would make it impossible to send back to earth photographs of astronomical phenomena. Why had the mirrors not been tested? It would have cost too much.
† In the August 1991 coup that tried to drag Russia back to strong-armed Communism, while Mikhail Gorbachev was under house arrest in the Crimea, his courage was sustained by foreign shortwave radio broadcasts, including those from the station our group had worked so diligently to preserve for just such an emergency. When the coup was defeated, Boris Yeltsin, mindful of the stout support our Radio Liberty had provided in recent years, invited us to open an office in Moscow—an amazing victory for truth, freedom and human decency.
‡ Every principle that our committee recommended was ignored and violated in the Gulf crisis, where the military opted for the terribly dangerous strategy of fighting an overseas war without allowing on-the-spot press coverage. If our military persists in this arrogance, it will inevitably lose essential support.
§ For a dozen years I served as chairman of a committee devoted to helping Afghan freedom fighters sustain their battle against the Russian invaders, and we collected substantial funds to help keep our men in the field. But when victory was achieved, I had a sad feeling that I had supported and helped to put in power the same kind of fanatical Muslim mullahs who were behaving so abominably in Iran, and I could visualize myself in the years ahead collecting new funds to oust the very fanatics I had helped place in command of this savage, wonderful nation, which I remember with such affection.
VII
Ideas
During a lifetime of study and speculation, I discovered solely on my own only three ideas, but two were of such universal applicability that they stamped my thinking life. The third applied to only me, but it determined how I would spend my productive years.
The speculating I did was not upon raw data, or new data that called for some new organizing principle or explanation; I was not challenged by frontier facts. What I speculated upon was data already in being, the great range of human experience. I was concerned with what man had known, not with what he was about to know, and I was not unhappy with my choice, for it placed me early and deeply within the great movements of man’s history and thought.
The books I have carried with me wherever I have moved for any considerable working stay have been invariable. Among them is Karl Ploetz’s great piece of German scholarship, his Epitome of World History, in its 1915 English version, which I have referred to constantly throughout my working life. I doubt that I could think constructively without it, because it summarizes what was happening simultaneously in various parts of the world during whatever period I may be studying.
I carry with me also a good atlas, preferably one of those admirable ones published through the years by the great Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew and his successors. Because of some magic touch the mountains and elevations on these maps seem to spring up from the page. I have met many scholars who are not entirely happy with other maps, but from childhood days I have also respected the fine maps of America’s National Geographic Society and have in my permanent study a collection of some sixty of them dating back to 1915.
And of course I carry a dictionary, the best available. Sometimes when I have to look up a word, I waste a great dea
l of time because I start to read the dictionary as if it were a novel that makes me eager to see what comes next. The words of English have been endlessly fascinating for me and I would judge that I have mastered not more than a sixth of them. If the total runs to something like 550,000, that would be 92,000, and that figure might be far too high. But my word chase goes on and the interest never flags.
Utilizing these tools and others, which out of the world’s accumulation of ideas have been most important to me in building a life?
Concerning religion, about whose outward forms I have no deep conviction, I have revered the Book of Deuteronomy while rejecting the older codification of laws, Leviticus, for which I have no feeling of identification. I have liked Thomas Aquinas and his thoroughness, finding him in that regard much like Maimonides, whom I treasure. I have never been much moved by Saint Francis or any of the other Catholic saints except Sebastian, with whom I developed at an early age an intense identification. Whenever adverse forces seemed to combine against me, I would visualize myself as Sebastian, standing calmly against a pillar while my enemies’ arrows pierced my extremities without ever striking a mortal spot or making me wince.
The New Testament has caused me great trouble, because by nature I ought to have identified with Saint Paul, and I have wrestled with him all my life, finding him in the end just another Aristotle. He is not my man, so I missed entirely the greatness of the Pauline letters, but I studied his words constantly and found two passages that affected me deeply but in contrary ways. In First Corinthians, Paul spoke tellingly of athletics, saying: ‘Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run that ye may obtain.’ I read this long before Vince Lombardi uttered his version of the same principle: ‘Winning isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing.’ Early in life I decided that I would never battle to be first, or aspire to be first, or bend either my life or my attitudes in order to be first, and the older I got and the more I watched other men strive inordinately to be first, the more satisfied I was to settle somewhere else. Saint Paul’s and Lombardi’s pronouncements made me decide on my priorities, and I am more at ease with my own doctrine now than when I first framed it.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 31
