Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  It wasn’t the Negroes’ problem that Bayard Rustin described that night, although that was the problem I had come to hear about. What I heard about instead was an impending crisis that engaged black and white equally, involved the white liberal every bit as much as it involved the white bigot. What I had not seen from my liberal do-good white perspective was that my own fate, and the fate of my children and grandchildren, was tied up in this drift toward what seemed to be an enclaved and colonized America. If we didn’t act—and didn’t act soon—by the end of the struggle, the U.S.A. would prove to be a myth. The F.S.A. would be the reality: the Fragmented States of America, the Fearful States of America.

  Village Voice, September 5, 1963

  THE WARRIOR LIBERAL

  Liberal. It was not a bad word in the fifties and sixties, not yet the L word, not yet rejected for its scary image and succeeded by more favored terms, middle of the road or moderate. As I write this in 2008, liberals have come to favor the word progressive, a delicious irony if you’ve been around as long as I have.

  When I was a boy in the forties, liberals reviled progressive. They thought it meant “fellow traveler.” But Communism died back in 1989. Now fellow travelers had no Communists to fellow travel with. Socialism soon followed Communism into the grave. Since the Soviet Union was no longer a threat to scare voters away, it wasn’t effective politics to label someone a Communist or a socialist anymore, and so it only made sense for phrase makers on the right to find a new term of fear: liberal.

  Now, liberals had long hated Communists and Communists had long hated liberals, but no matter. In the forties and fifties, the political party that was formed in New York to combat Communist and fellow-traveling influences in city and state politics called itself the Liberal Party, but no matter.

  ADA, Americans for Democratic Action, was organized back in the forties by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and James Wechsler and other well-known anti-Communist liberals to fight the influence of Communists and fellow travelers in the Democratic Party. But no matter.

  Conservatives under attack deny and retaliate, liberals under attack defend and retreat. Jimmy Wechsler, the liberal editor of the then-liberal New York Post, was intent on proving that his liberal anti-Communism was not to be confused with the ideology of liberals who were soft on Communism. He did not wish to compromise his paper’s strong opposition to Senator Joe McCarthy, so he testified before the McCarthy committee. And just to prove that he was pure of heart, he named names. Wechsler had been a member of the YCL, the Young Communist League, when he was a student at Columbia back in the thirties. He gave McCarthy some of the names of his fellow members. He gave McCarthy the name of Murray Kempton, the Post’s legendary liberal columnist. As Murray noted to me with regret some years later, “Jimmy didn’t know me in the YCL. The only reason he knew I was in the YCL was that long after we both quit I told him.” The liberal Wechsler offered up his friend and colleague Kempton because he wanted to prove to McCarthy and company, people who couldn’t have cared less, that he was an anti-Communist.

  So, under attack by the Reagan right, liberals stopped calling themselves liberals and soon thereafter stopped having the politics of liberals. The purer—cleaner—term they prefer now, progressive, was the label used in the late forties by the left wing of the Democratic Party, fellow travelers and Communists who ran former vice president Henry Wallace for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket. In life there is nothing but irony.

  Isolationists who campaigned to keep America out of World War II up till minutes after Pearl Harbor were not bothered by the names liberals or Democrats called them. Call them fascists, and it didn’t faze them. Call them reactionary, they didn’t see it as a problem. On the right, they don’t care what anyone who is not on the right calls them. They are concerned only with the opinions of people who think as they do.

  Liberals, on the other hand, anguish over the opinions of people who don’t like them. Liberals fret over the image stuck on them by enemies on the right. They wish to be thought well of. Often enough, being thought well of takes priority over principle. Eventually principles lose weight as principles; they are scaled back to attitudes. Almost any position can be modified in the search for agreement and agreeableness.

  Called soft on Communism, liberals quieted down about witch hunts and loyalty oaths. Called eggheads, they dumbed themselves down. Displays of wit were repressed as too highbrow, humor had no place in governance. Accused of cowardice in the Cold War, liberals began appraising countries to invade.

  Vietnam was a liberal war. The Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to be sucked in. But Eisenhower was a general, a war hero, he didn’t have to prove his manhood. John F. Kennedy, although a war hero, was unfortunately a liberal Democrat. He had to prove his manhood.

  In addition, JFK had screwed up royally in his first year in office with the Bay of Pigs operation, trying to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist government in Cuba with a gang of Cuban émigrés who couldn’t shoot straight. Kennedy couldn’t afford to let the Russians think that he was incompetent and inconsequential, which they might well have concluded after the Bay of Pigs. The Soviets might move on Berlin because of Kennedy’s perceived weakness. Before they could make such a move, JFK moved on Vietnam. It made a Cold War sort of sense. Confronting the Soviets over Berlin could lead to World War III. But by using Vietnam as a Berlin surrogate, by substituting a small war that we thought we could handle, we could sidestep the ultimate showdown.

  Vietnam, however, turned into a small war that we could not handle. And the more we could not handle it, the more men, the more ordnance, the more deadly the engagement. It undermined the administrations of three presidents and proved to be a mistake we have yet to recover from.

  Yet as much of a disaster as the war proved itself to be, Kennedy could not get out and Lyndon Johnson, after him, could not get out. To cut and run was not an option for Democrats because it would make them open to attacks from the real enemy, Republicans.

  But once the Republicans took power and tried escalation themselves and found, with Nixon, that it didn’t work, what did they do? They cut and ran. Exactly the same thing Ronald Reagan did in Lebanon. Presidents Reagan and Jerry Ford cut and ran. But no one was going to accuse them of cowardice because Republicans were not about to attack a president of their own party. Cutting and running is criticized only when it is done by Democrats. The American electorate does not question the manhood of Republicans. They can cut and run without a downside. Not so for Democrats.

  Unlike Democrats, Republicans are seen as real men. John Kerry, who fought in Vietnam, is not a real man. Dick Cheney, who shot a friend on a hunting trip and saw no reason to apologize, is a real man. It makes no difference that the Democrat is a war hero and the Republican is a draft dodger. Image is all, and real men don’t apologize. Republicans own the real-man image.

  But, for God’s sake, George W. Bush married a librarian! His vice president married a novelist, and one of her novels is an erotic novel! And he and his wife have a daughter who’s a lesbian!

  If Bush and Cheney were Democrats, these affiliations would have ended their political careers. But they’re not, they’re Republicans. So it didn’t matter that this Republican candidate, married to a bookish woman, picked for his vice president a draft dodger with a lesbian daughter and a wife who wrote erotic novels. They were given a pass. To conservative and evangelical voters, “values” are an issue only when they are the values of Democrats.

  Village Voice, January 18, 1962

  THE ADJUSTMENT

  My first public lecture was at Sanders Auditorium at Harvard in 1961. An amateur dramatic society was putting on my first play, a one-act called Crawling Arnold, about a young man in his twenties whose seventyish parents have announced they’re having a baby. So Arnold, their son, a thirty-five-year-old businessman, reverts to crawling. The play is about children and parents, air raid drills, fallout shelters, and black nationalism. All of that in twenty
-five minutes—and why not? For five years I had been squeezing everything I knew into six to nine panels.

  After the performance I was scheduled to give a talk. To an audience of over a thousand in this dark, cavernous auditorium. At Harvard! Just because I was famous didn’t mean I knew how to speak in public. It hadn’t been that many years since I learned how to speak in private. Still and all, the play had gone well. I had a script, a speech that I had written with some great lines in it. I was absolutely certain it would get a good response if only someone else would present it, someone who knew how to speak before a stadium-sized crowd of Harvard students and faculty.

  I felt small. I felt insignificant. I felt that everyone in the audience, all two or three or five or six thousand of them, would know as soon as I opened my mouth that I hadn’t gone to college.

  “What?”

  “You have the nerve to step on a stage at Harvard and you never went to college?”

  “What? He never went to college?”

  “What was he thinking that he never went to college?”

  “Not thinking is more like it.”

  “As soon as he opens his mouth with his Bronx accent, thus revealing to us that he never went to college, let’s stand and boo and walk out.”

  “And you know what we can shout as all fifty thousand of us exit?”

  “What do we shout?”

  “YOU NEVER WENT TO COLLEGE!!!”

  A couple of days before Harvard, I ran into Elaine May at a party and confessed how nervous I was about my impending talk. “What do you think I should do?” I asked. And Elaine, whose work showed such a profound comic understanding of the human condition, said, “Do what I would do. Think to yourself that this entire audience is made up of fools. And you’ll do fine.”

  I didn’t think Elaine’s adjustment was going to work for me. I had to find my own. And I did. Then I didn’t. Then I did. Then I didn’t. Dozens of adjustments were chosen and discarded.

  Crawling Arnold had ended. It had gotten big laughs and thoughtful silences. And there I was backstage, in the act of being introduced. But where was my adjustment? I heard my name, followed by receptive applause. I stepped out onto the stage, suddenly knowing, at the last moment, how to make this work. I arched my back the way he would. I tilted my shoulders at an angle the way he would. I wore a small self-confident smile on my face as he, my adjustment, approached the microphone.

  I moved slowly, without hurry, without nerves. I waited, grinning, for the applause to die. And one thought, one thought only, was in my head. I am Cary Grant.

  Cary Grant spoke into the microphone. They listened intently. How could they not? They laughed in the right places. What do you expect, with Cary Grant’s timing? Actually, I don’t know how he got away with it. We don’t look that much alike.

  Village Voice, May 14, 1964

  HALL OF FAME

  In 1962 I was elected to the James Monroe High School Hall of Fame, an honor I had been plotting my response to for twenty years. One June day every year the student body, all twenty-five hundred of us, was assembled in the auditorium to fete, and be inspired by, the three honored graduates who had achieved prominence, and in some cases celebrity, in the outside world. They were doctors and judges, attorneys, business leaders, state legislators (one later indicted), and even a Metropolitan Opera star.

  Their presence was supposed to prod us, the student body, into applying ourselves harder to schoolwork, goaded by the idea that someday we too might be up on that stage, the biggest stage in the world, bigger even than the famous Radio City Music Hall stage.

  But the speeches these Monroe graduates gave were not inspiring; they were banal and soporific. Year after year for four years, three boring speakers, one at a time, instructed me and my peers to work hard, toe the line, don’t take the easy way out, respect our teachers, listen to and learn from our elders—I put myself to sleep as I write this.

  And indeed, I did doze as I heard these life-eroding homilies, first wondering, as I slipped into a semicomatose state, what had become of the kid who used to live inside the body of these corpselike grownups? There was no sign that these well-dressed, well-groomed, seriously unpersuasive adults ever had lived through childhood. Each and every one of them looked as if he had come out of the womb as he appeared that day: grave, humorless, pompous, and having nothing of interest to say.

  And as I sat there, year after year after year after year, one thought occurred, awakened every spring with the advent of the Hall of Fame assembly: that someday I would be famous, someday I would be up on that stage. I would be honored. And I would not sound like these dead-on-arrival mentors. I would reveal to these kids that I was one of them and had not forgotten.

  I would talk to them from the vantage point of famous cartoonist and tell them what it was like to be a kid forced to sit out there where they were sitting and listen to all this crap. I would make it clear that I was not one of the tight-lipped honorees and assembled faculty with their properly clasped hands and discreetly crossed ankles, dying by inches onstage. For the first time in the history of our high school, they would hear a graduate tell the truth.

  And one spring morning in 1963, I was there. Actually up there onstage, just the way it was in my fantasy. And just as in my fantasy, my parents were there, and Mimi and Alice and my wife, Judy. I had spent most of the past week working on my acceptance speech. I was exhilarated, chomping at the bit, and scared silly. I knew what I was going to say. Was I going to get away with it?

  For a very long time I had fantasized this moment. In high school I was too cowed to allow myself an adolescence. Afraid to speak out, afraid to argue, terrified of letting anyone know what I thought, I stifled my rebelliousness. I pretended that I was one of them. But now I was thirty-three, in the middle of my postponed adolescence. I was famous. I stood for something. As I perceived it, this gave me the right to run amok.

  I began my speech by recalling my memory of sitting out in the assembly during these ceremonies and my puzzlement over the honorees: What had happened to the kid in them? I began to speculate. Was there a magic cutoff line that was drawn in one’s psyche when time ran out on being a kid and one had to opt for grown-up, moving on from who you were and wanted to be and becoming, instead, what they were? Was there an unconscious decision made after a certain number of disappointments and screwups that informed you that you were getting nowhere fast, that you no longer could afford to go on missing the boat? You had to straighten up, cut out the juvenilia, stop being a smart-ass, stop responding to your elders as if they didn’t know what they were talking about, even if they didn’t know what they were talking about.

  I said that this business of being a grown-up, a parent wasn’t easy, I was not here to disparage the advice you got from teachers and parents. It was unvaryingly good advice. But it was also unvaryingly safe advice: don’t take chances, don’t risk failure, don’t quit one job until you’ve found another better one, don’t behave on impulse, don’t expect too much and you won’t be disappointed.

  That was certainly good and responsible advice, I told them. And for anyone under thirty, if you weren’t supporting a family and a couple of children, every word of it was wrong.

  I began to hear cheers.

  The problem with good advice, I said to the students, was that because it was good, it was safe advice. That’s because it was coming from people who loved you and were afraid for you and wanted to protect you from disappointment and failure. But being young was all about disappointment and failure. It was about taking chances, risking everything.

  What better time to risk it all than when you’re young and don’t have a family to support? What better time to take chances and discover, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t? What worked best for you, and not your parents or your teachers or others who wanted the best for you when their definition of the best was not yours. The applause was deafening. Shouts and cheers from young people. I looked over at my parents. The
y were clapping too, beaming at me.

  “Uh-oh,” I thought. “Here it comes.” When I started out as a cartoonist, I said, I got all this good advice from my mother and father and it was good advice. And I followed it. And I got nowhere. I was cautious, as they suggested. I didn’t take chances, as they suggested. I played it safe, as they suggested. I stayed within the rules. And then one day I decided it was time to try a different approach. Each time an opportunity arose, I thought, “What would my mother say?” And, concluding what her advice would be, I did the opposite. And that was when things began to break for me. And that was how I got to be famous enough to be elected to the James Monroe Hall of Fame.

  The kids were on their feet, screaming. The sixties, as we have come to know them, were still half a decade away. Never had they heard anything like this—from a grown-up. Or in my case, a pseudo-grown-up.

  And my parents? They were laughing and applauding. Tears were in their eyes, not tears of mortification because they had just been humiliated in public. These were tears of pride. Their son was popular, a crowd-pleaser. Who knew he could make such a good speech?

  What had meant the most to them for all our young lives was that we, their children, be met with approval. And signs of approval were all over the place. Laughing, shouting, cheering. This was before the revolution, before the youth movement, when fifties conformity still held sway, before the corrupt authority of the grown-ups was replaced by the doped-up rebellion of their children.

  From the stage I could see that my sisters and Judy were in a state of shock at what I had gotten away with. But Dave and Rhoda? I was their son whom this audience of students had taken to their hearts. That was all my parents cared about.

  On the other hand, the principal and some members of the faculty were notably restrained. A few glared daggers at me, more couldn’t look at me. But other faculty members in the audience and even on the platform were applauding. And the former principal, Henry E. Heinz, retired for some years but always showing up on this occasion, down in the audience, square-headed, tight-lipped, as rigid out of power as he was in his autocrat days, glowered at me with pure venom.