Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  What the freethinkers were are now called humanists. I am one. A humanist believes, because of Darwin, whose truths were so shocking, in making the most use of good science as possible. Humanists behave well without any expectation of either reward or punishment in an afterlife. We serve, as best we can, our community. When I was growing up, nobody ever said anything about Heaven, about an afterlife. They said that this life was enough.

  I have experienced what happens when I die, and so have you. We call it sleep. We had a fire in our apartment in New York last February. I was unconscious for three days, in a coma, and I had a near-death experience. I had already written God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian at that time, and I was talking about the blue tunnel into the afterlife. People who are interviewed on TV every so often tell about their near-death experiences. Some talked about the blue tunnel and it seemed like a good, funny idea to me. It’s not a blue tunnel, it’s a railroad train—probably because railroad trains used to play such a big part in our lives. When I left Indianapolis to go to the University of Chicago, I got on a train to Chicago. When I came home from the army, from the war, it was on a railroad train—so they’re very important symbols. It was parked near the hospital. I could see it. There was a railroad siding. It was just a regular passenger train with a diner and all that. There didn’t seem to be any people in it, but it was all lit up inside. I knew that if I died, I’d be put on a gurney, I wouldn’t have to walk to the train. Off I’d go. It wasn’t a terrifying image at all.

  I wish I’d died on D day, it would have saved a lot of trouble . . . [Laughs]

  If you’d died, we wouldn’t have had Slaughterhouse-Five, we wouldn’t have had . . .

  You would have had so many good books. [Laughs]

  My parents certainly relieved me of all terror of death just by their own attitudes. They never made death seem a threatening thing at all. And, you know, I look at the Sistine Chapel, with people going to Hell and all that, I have to wonder, could a man as intelligent as Michelangelo believe this? [Laughs, wheezes] It’s hard for me to give credence to that. But as a humanist, I’ve never tried to talk anybody out of religion. We don’t proselytize at all. My particular war buddy, who’s dead now, is a guy I put in a couple of stories in the book, Bernard V. O’Hare. When you’re in the army, in the infantry, you’re essentially married to somebody else, you look out for each other, you pair off—particularly prisoners of war. O’Hare was a Roman Catholic, but when the war was over O’Hare gave up on Catholicism. We parted company in Newport News, where the troopship finally put us to shore. He said he was through with God and with Catholicism. I didn’t think the war was that bad, and I knew that Catholicism was a very nourishing, helpful thing. And honorable. I was very sorry to have him take the war that hard. He lost something I’d never had. God is a shorthand for everything. Like tout le monde, there’s the whole universe. What I’ve said about humanists is that we sure as hell know something very important is going on—we just don’t know what it is.

  Einstein’s E = mc2 is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There’s only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  The whole idea of revenge was so reputable that Hammurabi, a great leader somewhere in the Middle East, wrote the Code of Hammurabi: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Somebody pointed out this was in fact a peaceful proposal. He wasn’t recommending that somebody take an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. He was saying, “Take that much and no more.” [Laughs] But then came this radical idea: If you are injured, don’t avenge yourself. What kind of a person is that who doesn’t seek revenge? E = mc2, try this: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. The Lord’s Prayer, of course.

  You were a prisoner of war, and you were in the cellar there in Dresden, being bombed by the Allies. Weren’t you scared?

  There’s no point in being scared—you’re just asking what kind of animal is a human being? You just sit there with hands over your head to avoid the plaster falling. And try not to start crying or yelling or anything. The reason we didn’t suffocate is the slaughterhouse was full of open areas for penning the animals. So there wasn’t that much combustible there.

  About five years ago I got a letter from a woman who said she was about to have a baby and did I think it was a terrible thing to bring such a sweet, innocent animal into a world this terrible. So I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was saints I met—people who behave decently in an indecent society. They’re all over the place. I ran into them in the army, and I ran into one just today. Think about the saints you meet in the course of an ordinary day. And then I tell people, “Perhaps some of you will be saints for this woman’s child to meet.”

  You know what Sartre said? “Hell is other people.” It’s a threat. I have said that inconvenience is other people, and inconvenience can be Hell. People are in the way all the time. That’s Hell enough.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber set new music to a requiem that came out of the Council of Trent in 1500, something like that. The Reformation had begun, and the Catholic Church was really quite pissed off. This requiem came out. It was at St. Thomas Church—this is on Fifth Avenue in New York; it has its own boy’s choir. It was by invitation only. I had to wear a tuxedo, my wife had to wear an evening gown. We were lucky enough to be invited. We sat there and heard these boys singing in Latin. These lovely high voices, boys whose voices hadn’t changed. They were looking up at Heaven and loving God so much and everything. I happened to look at the English translation of what they were singing. Terrible things were going to happen to people after they died. [Laughs] One line was, “Even the innocent may be punished.” People were going to be fed to lions and thrown into lion pits and all that after they were dead. And the sheep were going to be separated from the goats. It was a horrible, sadistic document and there was no reason to love God at all. So I went home and that night wrote a new requiem, a secular requiem. In it I said there will be a moment of great hilarity when people find out that nobody’s going to be punished. There are people who want a whole lot of people punished and then they get to Heaven and there aren’t going to be any punishments. [Laughs]

  What about a guy like Hitler?

  In one of my books, I wrote about Hitler’s last words. As he’s down there in the bunker and the Russians are right up above him, and if they catch him they’re going to put him in a cage and show him around and humiliate him, piss on him. So he’s definitely gonna have to kill himself. The whole question is what his last words should be. There are other witnesses to hear his last words. Goebbels is there, and Martin Bormann, to hear what this great man’s last words are. And Hitler says, “I regret nothing.” Goebbels points out to him that this is in fact a song by Edith Piaf. People are going to see the similarity. She was called “the little sparrow.” His last words are going to be the same thing the little sparrow says. Finally he says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.” And he blows his brains out. What are you gonna do? You know what the punishment was for counterfeiting in the time of Henry VIII? Being boiled in public. [Laughs] That was how much they didn’t want anybody to mess with the currency. [Laughs]

  The fact that forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us isn’t honored more—I blame that on writers. Because the easy story to tell is the vengeance story, and it’s known to satisfy. This guy shot my brother. How’s the story gonna wind up? And what does a reader think? OK, that’s settled. So it’s just the easiest of all stories to tell. So it in fact encourages, makes reputable vengeance.

  What about physician-assisted suicide? Your view of Kevorkian is, of course, an affirmative one.

  Yes, because I think that’s good medicine too. There’s no murders prevented by our keeping doctors from putting people out of their misery. My mother committed suicide right before I went overseas. She was so unhappy she thou
ght it was time.

  Has the thought ever occurred to you?

  Of course. I have attempted it. One of the legacies is that suicide is a way to solve problems. In one of my books I said, if Farmer A can harvest seven pecks of potatoes an hour, and he’s joined by Farmer B, who can harvest three pecks of potatoes an hour, and there are one thousand potatoes to every square acre, how long will it take Farmer A and Farmer B, working together, to harvest five acres? My answer is: I think I’ll blow my brains out. [Laughter]

  I’ve told my lawyer and I’ve told my oldest son what I wanted for a funeral service. It’s not to be in any holy place, it’s not to take place in New York City. I don’t want a Viking funeral where they put a guy on a boat with treasure and set it on fire. I want it to be on Cape Cod, where I raised my family, and I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered over Barnstable Harbor.

  I’ve seen grand funeral services in New York City, even with videos and famous people speaking and all that. If I’m to be remembered, the work’s all been done, that’s the final ceremony. [Laughs] I just want a farewell.

  In Slaughterhouse-Five, every time somebody dies, and when a bottle of champagne loses its bubbles and is dead, I always say, “So it goes”—that’s all. Whenever anybody has died—and this would be my sister, my brother, my father, my mother, and I was nearby for those events—that’s how I felt . . . That was that . . . I had nobody to appeal to, to get mad at. [Laughs] When somebody dies, it’s wholly unsurprising and so it goes. What could be more ordinary?

  The Boomer

  Bruce Bendinger

  During the seventies, he was a wunderkind in the world of advertising. He had been Gerald Ford’s creative director during his 1976 campaign for the presidency. Our first conversation was in 1986: “I’m a hired gun for a couple of companies fighting the warfare of the marketplace. I’m an eighties version of Paladin. The battlefield is corporate America. I’m still fast on the draw and I’m quick to pick up trends. One of the things is called pattern recognition: it’s the ability to pick up quick little bits, out there in the environment, and come to the right answer ahead of the rest of the pack. They pay me enough to do it that I can’t afford to take time off and tend my garden.”* Today he is the director of marketing “for a company that stands a good chance of making a bit of money in the new economy.”

  MY MOTHER’S GENERATION, there you’re really watching just everybody kind of wear out. My stepfather is a retired submarine captain. He sank boats in World War II—he was a hero. A bright man, a smart man—burned out. There’s just a lot of parts that are not happening. Some of the software’s going in the system—you know, memory. When I’m talking about software, I’m talking about the software between your ears. My stepfather can talk to you about how atomic reactors work and battles he fought in World War II, but he can’t remember what time his doctor’s appointment is. It’s just, the stuff’s wearing out. I think that we’re all gonna be, as a species, living a little longer, a little healthier. But some of it, we just . . . Right now, my generation is seeing our parents’ generation just wear down. And we see that as our fate, maybe, but we still think we’re thirty. I’m not sure that we’re really aware.

  My generation has been a self-absorbed one. It’s totally unprepared for this next stage of life—leaving life. You have a drink or two in the evening and somebody talks about what’s really on his mind, the end of some career path, the end of unfulfilled expectations. They’re really very much at sea as to where things are going. It’s something I see all around me.

  From a marketing standpoint, our generation has been the straw that stirs the drink. Every moment in history, whether it was new schools for the new baby boomers, new colleges, new cultural changes, new voting blocks, new markets moving from Volkswagens to SUVs, is determined by the boomer generation’s taste, conditioned of course by very media-sophisticated marketing people. It is absolutely startling to me how marketing has taken over our society. What you do in marketing is: you plan for next year. Whatever business you’re in, whatever plans you make, the conclusion for next year is always: Do it faster, more, cheaper. It’s always some intensifying of what’s going on. The frenzy in which we live is, in many ways, a result of this kind of increasing flywheel effect. Everybody’s multitasking. Things are flying by. You got a hundred channels and nothing’s on. The pace of life right now has been accelerated past our ability to live it.

  I was born during World War II, a baby boomer. We’ve had our foot on the gas for fifty years. And now, as we hit the twenty-first century, we have really accelerated past, I think, what is good for people. What the baby boomers have done by putting all of our children in front of Sesame Street with channel changers in their hands and then in their heads, we have made intense but disconnected audiovisual images, just like MTV, the dominant mental processing of this generation. We’re getting these children to have these short, disconnected attention spans—not verbal, highly stimulated. Television is like calorie-free food: everybody sitting in front of the television has only one thought, I wonder if there’s anything else on. You’re not really thinking. So how can we think about such a thing as death? Suddenly we start to lose people our age. These things are coming closer and closer to us. This is something that’s happening to this particular demographic. Because of the speed of things, if you are of a certain age and you haven’t been able to regularly update your software, you’re in a lot of trouble. If your only skills are in old industries, you’ve got yourself a real situation. If you didn’t update your software, you’re still running old programs, you’re not going to be having a very good time.

  Right now, the topic most people deal with is either an upcoming retirement or with seriously aging parents. A lot of us right now are in the role of parenting our parents. Both ourselves and our parents are a little startled at this new set of circumstances. I think we’re making the best of it. In many cases it’s a chance to get reacquainted with our parents in a whole different way.

  My first memory of death was in fifth, sixth grade. The biggest, strongest kid in the class, Peter Jansen, was going to be the fullback. He got blindsided by stomach cancer at about the age of twelve. And I watched the strongest kid on the block leave us. It wasn’t the last time I cried, certainly, but that was the moment where it all really got nailed for me. I was eleven or twelve. He didn’t even have time to have a prime of life. I’m startled by how vividly and clearly I remember sitting on the living room couch and coming to grips with the strongest kid on the block being gone. A good-hearted kid—he wasn’t a bully. He was the guy that would have protected you if somebody was trying to push you around.

  If there’s a spirit, if there’s a God, you know, hey, I’m a fan. I don’t know if there is a God—it’s not central to me. I believe in life, I believe in how we should live. I believe we’re here, each of us is here, to answer the big question—which is to figure out why we’re here. I look at you, and I’ve figured out why you were here. I talked to you earlier about various times you touched my life, really, from like sixth, seventh, eighth grade on . . . How I got touched by Division Street. How I got touched by Working. How you touched my life was part of why you’re here. Why am I here? I’ve got my own little job to do. I do books that help the young and women learn about the business that will help them make a living. It’s like I’m teaching people how to fish—I’m teaching people how to fish in the marketplace. How to stay in touch with a world that has gotten dangerous and fast-moving.

  I wrote a book about an advertising guy who died, Howard Gossage. He was one of the founders of Ramparts magazine.* He introduced Marshall McLuhan to the world. I was involved with the trail he left, putting together the puzzle of his life. Howard had disappeared from sight and from the minds of people in the ad industry. I put this little book together, and his memory lives again. They named the hundred top people in the advertising industry in the twentieth century, and a guy who was off the charts four years before we put the book out is n
ow the thirtieth most important person in advertising history. His daughter was six months old when he died. So thirty years later, this book shows up. She said, “If it weren’t for your book, I never would have known who my father was.” That’s a good reason to figure out why I’m here.

  I believe there’s something going on out there that’s bigger than us. Just the whole mystery of life is, like, holy smoke! The way people are built, the way our minds work, the way our hands connect with our eyes and our brains, the amazing creativity of nature . . . I make my living in what they call the creative department. What I do to sell a box of detergent—it’s really incredible. I don’t know what Hell is down the road, but it’s Hell on earth if you hate how you spend your days.

  I had a very good friend, this guy—well, let it ride . . .

  We live in a world where you’ve got to keep updating the software. I think we’re finding out that a lot of what we thought were defects of character, it’s really that you got yourself dealt a little bit of a strange hand in terms of your body chemistry, your mental chemistry—a bug in your software. If you’re schizophrenic, you’ve got an organic software, a problem in your brain that doesn’t have anything to do with you having a bad attitude, or how Mom and Dad raised you.

  We’re all going to be victimized finally when this wonderful life we have just kind of wears out. I’d say that if you’re getting towards that age, write something down and take the burden off the people who love you.