A few years ago, a couple who lived across the hall from us in New York came to Sunday dinner at our apartment and during dinner the husband felt dizzy and excused himself and went back across the hall where he had a stroke. His wife found him, dazed, unable to speak, a few minutes later and called me and I went over to sit with him as we waited for the ambulance. It was a long wait. Malcolm was a handsome old Scot who was quite dashing in kilts at the annual Robert Burns Night and loved their vacations on the Isle of Harris, and in his last long minutes of awareness, he lay across his bed with great dignity and looked at the door, waiting for the angel. Eventually, the paramedics arrived and bundled him over to the East Side to the hospital. By the time we arrived, forty minutes had passed. Perhaps a swifter response wouldn’t have made much difference. I don’t know. He died a few days later.
A Democrat knows that the leaf turns and in the human comedy we are one day spectators and the next day performers. The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for years to get your life the way you want it and buy the big house and the time share on Antigua and one afternoon you’re run down by a garbage truck and lie in the intersection, dazed, bloodied, your leg unnaturally bent, and suddenly life becomes terribly challenging for six months. In the Prairie Home office, one summer evening a woman walked out the door to go home and was swarmed by wasps and staggered back into the building, bitten so badly that her air passage was swollen half shut. She was almost unconscious, going into shock, and collapsed in the hallway. Luckily, a colleague had stayed late at work and she called 911, and in came the St. Paul paramedics to save Deb’s life. Every day at work, I see a bright capable charming woman whose memorial service I might have attended had circumstances been ever so slightly different.
Two blocks from the office lived a brilliant young professor of Middle East studies who had given birth to a little girl with Down syndrome who could not nurse and needed to be fed through a tube stuck down her nasal passage. One morning, the mother, depressed though already on antidepressants, feeling hopeless, broken-hearted at the child’s misery, exhausted to the point of derangement, cut the infant’s throat with a butcher knife. The mother was arrested and put in Ramsey County Jail where, a few weeks later, she managed to get a plastic garbage bag, place it over her head, tie it tight around her neck, and suffocate herself. This happened in St. Paul, Minnesota, two blocks from the office where I sit and write silly songs and Guy Noir sketches. In St. Paul, people could not get this tragedy off their minds for a long time. Long after we stopped talking about it—what more could be said?—it haunted our consciences, these two souls who had slipped through our fingers and plunged to their deaths. Somehow we could have saved them. What else, dear Lord, should we have done?
The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. Men and women make love and have babies in the knowledge that if the baby should be born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or a hole in its heart and require heroic care, the people of Minnesota and of St. Paul will stand with you in your dark hour. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances.
This is Democratic bedrock: we don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor’s car won’t start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who’s been through treatment.
To the hard-ass redneck Republican tax cutter of the suburbs, human misery is all a fiction, something out of novels, stories of matchstick people. He’s doing fine so what’s the problem? He is oblivious. George Custer knew more about the Sioux than this guy knows about the world around him. He is heavily into postponement for short-term savings and long-term disaster. He and his fellow Republicans slash the funding of social welfare programs—which has instant political appeal: ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBILITY, CUT WELFARE, SAVE $$$$$—and lo and behold, children in abusive homes can no longer be removed from those homes by social workers because there’s no money to pay for alternative care, and one morning, the rednecks read in the paper about a child locked in a closet for weeks, half-starved, lying in its own feces, and they don’t make the connection between their politics and the evil done to that child. The child’s suffering has nothing to do with them. So the kid goes to relatives who also have a history of abuse. It’s no skin off the redneck’s nose. He’s got a giant TV, 99 channels of cable, a snowmobile, a Hummer, a collection of guns, a boat, Jet Skis, he’s sitting pretty. The demise of somebody else’s kid at the hands of a drunken uncle is nothing but roadkill to him. This is the screw-you philosophy that festers under cover of modern Republicanism.
Part of the civil compact is the government that we install in office: if you and I subscribe to the compact, then I cannot tolerate a government that brutalizes you on my behalf. If suddenly on a Friday night the red lights flash and the cops yank your teenage son and his little envelope of marijuana into the legal meatgrinder and some bullet-headed prosecutor decides to flex his muscle and charge your teenager, because he had a .22 rifle in his upstairs bedroom closet, with a felony involving use of a firearm, which under our brutal sentencing code means he can be put on ice for twenty years, and the prosecutor goes at him hammer and tong and convinces a passive jury and your boy’s life is sacrificed so that this creep can run for Congress next year—this is not your cross alone to bear; this violates the compact between you and me. Our war on drugs is a religious war against a pleasure-seeking minority and if your son is caught in it, like a raccoon in a bear trap, this gross injustice makes it hard for you to sit in a café with me if I turn a blind eye to what happened. If your life is blighted by rank injustice and I don’t care, then you can’t be happy in my company. That’s why it’s unpleasant to set foot in Texas. They execute human beings there with gay abandon. They railroad them through with a dimestore defense and the governor glances at the appeal and denies it and the defendant is tied to a gurney and put down like a dog. This fact leaves a sour cloud over Austin and Fort Worth and San Antonio, a grain of sand in the burrito, a lurid orange glow at the dance.
Narcissism and cruelty are twins: we expect God to cut us slack and hold others to account. And our criminal justice system easily turns sadistic: those people in handcuffs are not us. The state of Wisconsin has brought back the old chain gang and put radio-controlled stun belts on the prisoners so that a guard or trusty can flick a switch and impart a jolt of electricity that knocks a prisoner off his feet. You would not do this to anybody you knew personally, but when it comes to despised groups, we are capable of great cruelty in the name of toughness. Call a man a terrorist and you can lock him up for a long time without a trial, torture him, sodomize him, kill him if you wish. People campaign for office on their ability to be vicious to select groups of people unlikely to vote in large numbers. Teenage dope smokers, for example.
There is a basic faith here in this café: if you work hard and pay attention and don’t let the greasy tentacles of alcohol or drugs wrap around you and don’t take stupid shortcuts that land you in jail, you can thrive, and if catastrophe falls on you, earthquake or drought or flood or fire, the others will come to your rescue. If a wrong is done to you, it will be addressed. To right-wingers, this is the sentimental reflex of an
old liberal that he got from Thomas Hart Benton murals and the songs of Woody Guthrie and old Hollywood flicks about the Little Guy, but not to me. What I feel in this café is the social contract by which people pledge comfort and support to each other in time of need, which each of us will sooner or later come to. If this contract is torn up, we’d have to buy a .357 pistol and a junkyard dog and head for the woods and stock up on dried foods. I have drawn on this contract often. My education at the U. My child has been blessed by loving teachers whose gifts were nurtured at state expense and she was rescued by the fire department. Three years ago after I suddenly turned into a wheezy old man who woke up in the night feeling suffocated, Dr. Orczulak at Mayo opened up my thorax and sewed a leaky valve in my heart, a dramatic procedure whose perfection over the past fifty years was heavily subsidized by the taxpaying public. Dr. Walt Lillehei of the University of Minnesota was a giant in the field, operating on blue babies and hopeless little kids with bad hearts—I saw pictures of them on the front page of the Minneapolis Star in the Fifties, smiling wanly from their hospital beds—a major news item back then: the heart of a living person stopped and opened with a knife and the bunged-up part mended as you would cobble a shoe—and despite high casualty rates and the enormous cost of each attempt, the open-heart operation was brought (thanks to public assistance) to the point of utter ordinariness, which my operation was. Everyone and his cousin has had a by-pass, or a double, or a quadruple with a one and a half gainer. No more traumatic, on the whole, than a broken leg. Thank you, America. How could I, whose life has been extended by this largesse, turn into an angry right-winger, a knee-jerk tax cutter, flogging public employees and the very idea of public service? How could a graduate of the University of Minnesota turn around after graduation and become a No New Taxes Republican and reduce his alma mater to the level of a community college? What towering ingratitude lies at the heart of the Republican Party! What a mean-spirited betrayal of the common life of this country!
Chapter 9
ORDINARY DECENCY
A dying liberal of Berkeley
Whose mind still functioned, but murkily,
Rose up and said,
As he dropped dead,
“Will somebody please tell Studs Terkel he—”
THIS MORNING in the café, a man is telling about a pane of glass that, I gather, fell out of a tall building and sliced down into the street and landed fifteen feet away from him: he has to tell somebody because this is news, it just happened half an hour ago. Someone else saw Sophia Loren. In northeast Minneapolis. A few years ago. True. She was making a movie. She stood this close to me. Someone tells about his cousin, a botanist, who got back from Iran where twenty-five thousand people died in ten minutes in an earthquake. The cousin loves the Iranian people, the culture. How old is Sophia Loren? Sixty-five? She is one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful women. You have to wonder about how they’re constructing these office buildings nowadays if the windows are falling out.—So goes the conversation over coffee.—I couldn’t live in a country where strangers don’t talk freely to each other and tell stories and air their grievances and joke and gas about this and that, and George W. Bush is trying to give us that country, where taxes are cut and services are stripped and the schools go to a four-day week and the local library depends on bake sales and user fees and police and fire are outsourced to a company that provides those services and soon 10 or 20 or 30 million Americans realize they are living in the rye on the edge of the cliff. This helps cut labor costs on the plantation. The field hands line up for work and Mr. George offers them 18 cents per hour and a cold potato for lunch and they accept his generous offer. He is the boss and under him are the managers, and then there are the field hands, who live in treehouses or the backseats of cars. The bosses have their country club, and the managers have the Elks and Kiwanis and Rotary, and the field hands are allowed to sit in the public park so long as they don’t spit or use bad language or play cards or speak to women. Sometimes the boss stops by and says, “Morning, Chester,” and the hand looks down at the ground and says, “Morning, Mass’ George” in a low tone of voice. There is an oppressive set of reticences that apply, depending on your social calculus. You stay on your side of the line. That’s not America as I know it. A house divided against itself cannot stand; we cannot long endure, half predator, half prey.
If you forgot your billfold on the table of this café in St. Paul, you could come back an hour later and the girl at the counter would hand it to you, all the cash still in it. If you need a light, a smoke, directions, a quarter for the pay phone, the use of a pen, the name of a famous movie you’ve been trying to think of, you can get those here, no problem. That’s because we know each other here. If we become a nation of strangers, this will change. On the streets of New York right after 9/11 people talked to you or talked in your vicinity and you leaned over and listened—and you heard about the cousin who stayed home from work that day, and the man with the office on the 93rd floor of the north tower who lingered over his coffee and Times in a diner and missed being killed that day. Republicans have no shame about exploiting 9/11 but like most catastrophes, it was democratic—the busboys and dishwashers in Windows on the World died along with the executives—just as war used to be. On Memorial Day, the men and women of the American Legion and VFW place little flags and flowers at the graves of veterans. There isn’t a Platinum Class flag for those whose families pony up more. All soldiers are unknown in the end, death is anonymous, and the old men who troop the colors are contemptuous of the chicken hawks who never fought but enjoy speechifying about American honor to a degree that is indecent. The old men know about the terror and confusion and stink and evil of war. The most fitting memorial observance is silence. The honor guard stands, the breeze rippling the leaves, and we think our thoughts about those boys and their real sufferings and the bugler plays Taps and we turn and go home.
All those dead boys and millions of the rest of us went through the draft board physical, which once was a powerful democratic checkpoint. If you were a 17-year-old boy, you thought about the approach of your 18th birthday, it had significance. If your draft board called, you went. Even a Rockefeller had to drop trousers and spread his cheeks and bend over. Of course, the great checkpoint was military service. In the U.S. Army, my dad and his buddies learned to stand in line and accept their place in the bigger picture, and they met people utterly unlike themselves and bonded with them and thereby learned something about decency.
Back in the democratic Fifties, if I needed a ride home from Anoka, I could stand on the West River Road with my thumb out and cars would come around the bend and I’d look them straight in the windshield and think positive thoughts and smile pleasantly and most cars would whoosh past but one driver would see that my clothes were clean and my posture good and he’d stop and pick me up and I got to meet interesting people that way, people utterly unlike me, and hear some of their stories. People might say things to a kid they’d never meet again. Let me tell you something. Don’t ever get married. Okay. I mean it, don’t get married. It’s grief from morning to night. Yes, sir. There is nothing you can do to make them happy. Nothing. I see. There is nothing you can do to please them. You go the extra mile and they’re mad because you’re an inch short. And you got your ride to downtown Minneapolis. This doesn’t happen much anymore. It represented the trailing edge of the Thirties spirit of mutual assistance—disaster can strike anyone at any time so we do not turn people away who need something that we can provide. Downtown, in my youth, you saw little strips of paper stuck in the cracks of brick walls or telephone poles by the streetcar stops. My mother explained that they were streetcar transfers, left by people who didn’t need them for people who did. No more. In Mr. Bush’s America, it’s screw you all the way.
America has a democratic heart. It is a generous and redemptive land where you can lift your head and know that justice and equality and a decent sympathy for the underdog are part of the music and poe
try of people. We honor openness of heart, a democratic style. You are polite to the checkout girls at the Piggly Wiggly and to the shoeshine man. You do not lord it over them as if you were the grand panjandrum of Mushti and they your serfs. You don’t expect people to bow in your direction. Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, once ran into Frank Sinatra backstage at the Grammys and said, “And what is it you do?” He honestly didn’t know. Sinatra wasn’t insulted. It’s a big country, not some little comic-opera aristocracy, and if people don’t tip their hats when you walk into the room, well, don’t take it too hard. My wife was walking down upper Broadway one afternoon and saw a familiar face approach and racked her brain for the guy’s name—had she played in an orchestra with him? Was he an opera singer?—and smiled at him and he smiled back at her—“How are you? Haven’t seen you for a while,” she said. “Fine,” he said. “How are you?” “Good,” she said. “You been busy?” “Yes,” he said, and so it went, and as she turned away, she realized she’d been talking to the actor Robin Williams, not just another violinist.
Homegrown Democrat Page 9
