During the Civil War, Walsh recounts, there were roughly 500 courts martial for cowardice. The last, and the only, American soldier to be executed, by firing squad, for cowardice (he deserted) was Eddie Slovik during World War II. Some 15,000 Germans during the same war were executed for dereliction of duty, and the Russians under Stalin are thought to have killed hundreds of thousands of their troops for the same reason.
Courts martial for cowardice in England and in the United States decreased radically when the cowardice shifted categories from the moral to the medical, from, in other words, being thought a sin to being thought a sickness. “The link between the moral and the medical,” in Walsh’s phrase, greatly lessened if it did not altogether remove the onus on cowardly behavior. One cannot, after all, accuse a man in shell shock of cowardice, nor can one, in our day, feel anything but sympathy for soldiers claiming to have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which long ago made it into the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental illnesses. In the brave new world department, Walsh mentions that work is in progress on a pill to defeat fear. The age of therapy, the age in which we currently live, is doing all it can to eliminate cowardice as an act of moral failure.
With an all-volunteer army in place, fewer and fewer Americans will have their courage tested by the fire of war, which, as Walsh points out, has taken the question of cowardice, at least in its military context, off the big board of pressing issues. A lingering doubt nevertheless remains. In this connection, he prints a photograph of a graffito scribbled on a wall in the city of Ramadi in Iraq that reads: “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the mall.” If that doesn’t leave a touch of citizenly guilt, nothing will.
Boosters of military courage, once ubiquitous, are no longer prominent. Walsh reminds us that Teddy Roosevelt accused Woodrow Wilson of being the leader of “a cult of cowardice”; General George S. Patton caused a public-relations crisis when he slapped two enlisted men in psychiatric wards whom he accused of goldbricking; Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publisher Charles Scribner accusing James Jones of cowardice for even bringing the subject up in his novels; and Richard Nixon, during the Cold War, called Adlai Stevenson an “appeaser.” Today, when politicians who have not themselves served in the armed forces suggest the need for a greater military presence in the Middle East, they are written off, at least on the left, with the contemptuous phrase “chickenhawks.”
Not all courage has a military context. Walsh mentions Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., the first the founder, the second the foremost American proponent of non-violent resistance, both of whom, interestingly, declared violence a lesser evil than cowardice. (Gandhi fought in the Boer War.) Those who have had the courage to face down violence other than on the battlefield seem, at least to me, quite as impressive as those who succeeded in doing so in war. In my twenties, living in the south and working as the director of an anti-poverty program in Arkansas, I met a man two years younger than I named Bill Hansen, who was the head of the local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, at that time the leading edge of the civil-rights movement. Hansen was married to a black woman, which was then against state law, and had been arrested for sit-ins and protest demonstrations no fewer than 45 times; on one of these occasions, a prison trustee, viewing him as a race traitor, broke his jaw and some of his ribs. Once, at lunch in a black dinner in Little Rock, after I picked up the check, he left a tip; but when I informed him that Trotsky never tipped, he picked up the three quarters he had left on the table. Not high on humor, Bill Hansen—who is currently working in Nigeria at the American University as a professor of international relations and comparative politics—yet I admired him unstintingly for his physical courage, and still do.
Is physical courage also required of women? Some women in the military are lobbying to insert themselves in combat missions, and some are already fighting. If this continues, cowardice may soon, if it is not already, arise as para-sexual issue. “Eligibility for cowardice,” Walsh writes on this point, “is eligibility for courage,” by which I take him to mean that courage consists in good part of the avoidance of cowardice. Outside a military context, I should say that any woman who has gone through the tribulations of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth can never be thought cowardly.
Not all courage of course is in the realm of the physical. In his final chapter, Walsh takes up, glancingly, cowardice preventing love, the energy for entrepreneurship, the engagement of moral imagination, and much more. The German people of the World War II generation, he charges, apropos of the Holocaust, with “the unavoidable example of the cowardice of silence.” Aligned with this, all death-camp survivors, in my view, qualify as courageous for not letting go of life under such extended heinous torture as they went through. He mentions the extended use of irony as a screen for cowardice. He cites Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle” as an example of the cowardice of hesitation. Hamlet suffered from this same cowardice, and Walsh quotes Kierkegaard on this point to good effect:
What cowardice fears most of all is resolution, for a resolution instantly dissipates the mist. The power cowardice prefers to conspire with is time; for neither time nor cowardice finds any reason for haste.
In 1979, my friend Edward Shils gave the Jefferson Lecture at the University of Chicago on the subject of government interference in the contemporary university. After it was over, I stood near him on the podium when a young man came up to tell him how courageous he was for speaking truth to power. “I’m not in the least courageous,” Edward said. “Fighting apartheid in South Africa is courageous. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is courageous. No one is coming after me for what I said in this lecture, and, not only that, but I’ve been paid ten thousand dollars for saying it.”
Yet cowardice can and often has played a strong role in intellectual life. Out of cowardice, fewer and fewer intellectuals and academics are prepared to go against the grain of their times. Cowardice of this kind today is found among those who defend or go along with the program of political correctness in our universities, or who are terrified (not too strong a word) to comment on the shoddiness of victim studies in higher education. Fear of unconformity reigns in large sections of university life.
The only person I have ever accused of being a coward was a colleague, and a close friend for more than a quarter of a century, in the English department at Northwestern University. He supported a radical woman who was on record for being against free speech. I told him that I could see only two reasons for his doing so: one, he was fearful of alienating his fellow teachers in the department and the university at large; and, two, he was equally fearful of losing his following among graduate students. “Are you calling me a coward?” he asked. “Since you don’t deny it, I guess I am,” I replied. We’ve not spoken since, and probably never shall speak again.
Old Age and Other Laughs
(2012)
What shall I do with this absurdity—O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tale.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Tower”
I recently bought something called catastrophe health insurance for my college-student granddaughter—a policy that has a high deductible but is in place lest, God forfend, she needs to undergo a lengthy and expensive hospital stay. The insurance agent who sold it to me is a man named Jack Gross, whom I occasionally see walking around the streets of my neighborhood and who always greets me, often with a new joke. Being an insurance salesman and having me there in his office, Jack couldn’t resist asking me if my wife and I have assisted-living insurance, a policy designed for older people that pays for caregivers (or minders, as the English, more precisely, call them), thus allowing those suffering from dementia or other devastating conditions to avoid nursing homes. Assisted-living insurance is very expensive, especially if one first acquires it in one’s seventies, which my wife and I are.<
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“Thanks all the same, Jack, but we have no need for assisted-living insurance,” I said. “We have pistols.”
“Great,” he replied, nicely on beat. “I just hope when the time comes to use them you are able to find them.”
The problem with that amusing response is that it has an uncomfortably high truth content. Memory lapses, sometimes significant ones, but often quite as maddening trivial ones, are, as everyone knows, a standard part of the problem of getting old. Why the other day could I not recall the name of an old Expos and later Mets catcher (Gary Carter), or the hotel in San Francisco that my wife and I favor (the Huntington), or the actress I used to enjoy talking with occasionally when we were both on the Council of the National Endowment for the Arts (Celeste Holm)? Where are my glasses? Why have I come into this room? I opened the refrigerator door for . . . what, exactly?
The word “old,” I have been informed, is now politically incorrect. I recently read a book on the aging of the baby-boomer generation, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age by Susan Jacoby, that introduced me to the words “wellderly” and “illderly.” Not very helpful. “Aging” isn’t much help either, for newborn babies are, ipso facto, aging the moment they emerge from the womb. “Old,” “getting old,” “being old”—these are words I prefer, and in this essay I’m sticking with them.
The difficulty enters in deciding who qualifies as old. Unless brought badly down by serious illness, in the United States one isn’t any longer considered old at 62 or 65, the years Social Security allows a person to begin collecting what used to be considered old-age benefits. Some people, owing to a good ticket in the gene-pool lottery, or through being scrupulously careful about their health, begin to get old ten or so years later than do others. But old we all get, that is if we are lucky enough not to have been crushed by disease, accident, or war, and taken out of the game early. Next only to death itself, old age is the most democratic institution going— nearly everyone gets to enjoy it.
Enjoy is not the word most people would use in connection with old age. Many fight off old age through cosmetic surgery, strict exercise and stringent diet regimens, pills beyond naming, hair plugs, penal implants, even monkey glands (the useless remedy attempted by W. Somerset Maugham and W. B. Yeats). More struggle against old age with the aid of one or another form of positive thinking: keep your mind active, look on the bright side of things, remember life is a journey, you’re only as old as you feel, and all that malarkey.
The first physical signs that one is getting old are those slight alterations in your body that remain permanent. Sometime in my late fifties, I lost the hair from my shins and calves, to which it has never returned. Not much later a few brown spots appeared on my forehead, never to depart. Capillaries burst, leaving parts of one’s body—in my case, my ankles—nicely empurpled. Bruises take longer to disappear than when one was young, and the scars from some of them never quite do. Time is a methodical and cruel sculptor.
Conversations among friends take up new subjects. When young, my male friends and I talked a fair amount about sports and sex. Later, conversation about food and movies came to loom large. Nostalgia—“the rust of memory,” Robert Nisbet called it—began to set in around 60. Sleep is currently a hot topic, and by sleep I do not mean whom one is sleeping with, but instead how long is one able to sleep uninterruptedly.
The first time one cannot make love twice in one night, I have heard it said, is disappointing, the second time one cannot make love once in two nights can be the cause for despair. Viagra and other aids have helped solve this problem, but pharmacology has yet to come up with the pill to make one physically appealing. Few things sadder than to watch a man in his seventies, forgetting what he looks like, flirting with a waitress in her twenties. Women are not without their own problems in this realm. I once heard a woman roughly my age tell a female friend that her bra size was now 34” long.
Things once done easily, even blithely, suddenly require taking second thought. Coming down a staircase, I seek the banister. Walking on slightly uneven pavement, I remind myself to lift my feet. Don’t drive too slowly, I say to myself. The safety bar in the shower is there for a reason. Put on sunscreen. Virtue consists of ordering a salad for lunch; disappointment, in eating it.
I used to consider myself a Jewish Scientist, like unto a Christian Scientist, if only in my avoidance of physicians. Proust says that to believe in modern medicine is insane, and that the only thing more insane is not to believe it. My body forced me out of the church of Jewish Science in my late fifties. When once I had a single doctor—a primary and in my case only physician—I now have what feels like a medical staff: a gastroenterologist, an ophthalmologist, a cardiologist, and a dermatologist. In the past fifteen years, I have been diagnosed (not always correctly) with Crohn’s Disease, auto-immune hepatitis, Celiac Disease; have had a triple-bypass surgery (though not a heart attack), cataract surgery, and a detached retina; and finally a charming skin disease called—and best pronounced in a W. C. Fields accent—bulous pemphigoid. Such a rich buffet of health problems eats into one’s former feelings of personal invincibility.
At 70, in fact, one awaits both shoes to drop: the tumor to form, the strange pain not to disappear, the aneurysm to show up on the CAT scan. Hypochondria, at this age, is the better part of valor, for as paranoids sometimes have real enemies, so do hypochondriacs sometimes drop dead. One awaits the results of “blood work” like a prisoner on death row awaits a governor’s reprieve. Preventive medicine, with its various specialists and panoply of tests, in old age can be as exacting as an illness.
Fatal illnesses often strike older people without clear—make that any—reason. An acquaintance of mine who spent his life staying in shape—weight lifting, jogging, competing in triathlons, the works—recently died of lymphoma. Everyone knows of someone who never smoked getting lung cancer. Alzheimer’s blasts the most active and well-stocked minds. Immune systems break down, causing major problems no one could have predicted; body parts wear out, not all of them replaceable. It’s a minefield out there, with deadly darts falling from the sky.
Physical change is accompanied by mental change. When old, time begins to register differently. Did this or that incident happen eight or was it 11 years ago? Years back, I met a long-unseen uncle, then about my age now, and asked him how old his son was. “Thirty-seven,” he said confidently. “He’s 45,” his wife corrected him. I ask an acquaintance if his daughter got into Stanford, and he tells me that she graduated two years ago from the Yale Law School. The minutes, the hours, the days, weeks, and months seem to pass at roughly the same rate; it’s only the decades that fly by.
Then there is the matter of repetition. Have I done this, said that, written the other before? Some things refuse to stick in the mind. Movies are high on the list. I seem to have arrived at the place in life where I can watch The Pelican Brief as if seeing it afresh every eighteen months. One of the saddest things an old person can hear is a younger friend saying, “You already told me.” Friends one’s own age are more likely to say, “You may have told me, but I’ve forgotten, so tell me again.”
One begins to notice that contemporaries have, in their garrulity, become bores. As there is no fool like an old fool, neither is there any bore quite as tiresome as an old bore. How close am I myself to having achieved accreditation in this line? In too many conversations, I note that I wait patiently to slot in one of my standard jokes or sure-fire (I think) anecdotes. Have I arrived at my anecdotage, the stage of mental decomposition that precedes full dotage? Do I break into too many of other people’s monologues? Have I become like the man who, returning from a party, when asked by his wife if he enjoyed himself, replies: “Yes, but if it wasn’t for me, I would have been bored to death.”
Crankishness, complaint division, sets in. How is it no man born after 1942 carries a handkerchief in his back pocket? Why is the membership of the entire U. S
. Senate so bloody undistinguished? Might it be because the vast majority of its members are younger than I? One of the reasons the old complain about the world, Santayana wrote, is that they cannot imagine a world being any good at all in which they will not be around to participate.
One of the standby subjects of the old is how much richer, less gruesome, altogether better life was when they were young. The problem is that, when old, things genuinely do seem this way, and, who knows, they may well have been. Forty years ago, in my own line of work, universities seemed more serious, intellectuals more impressive, culture more weighty. I do not allow myself to lecture the young on how much better life used to be. I only talk about the old days with contemporaries, which is to say, with fellow cranks.
With age, curiosity is curtailed, attention attenuated. This is especially so in the realm of advancing technology. I have friends my age who, even ten or fifteen years ago, could not make the jump to learning how to use computers. Even among those of us who love e-mail and have a heavy reliance on Google and adore smartphones, the continual refinements on digital technology tend to swamp us. Do I really require Apple’s new app that will allow me to replay the entire Russian Revolution on my phone and store all my photos in my navel?
In classical music concerts, my mind, like musical notes in a hall with poor acoustics, wanders all over the place, though the fact that the median age of the audience for classical music appears to be roughly 114 does make me feel refreshingly youthful. My stamina for museums and art galleries is now almost non-existent. Less than halfway through a play, I ask myself why I have paid 85 dollars to listen to the lucubrations of a fellow even more stupid than I. Confronted with the prospect of travel, the effort seems greatly to outweigh the prospects of pleasure. More and more I feel like the poet Philip Larkin, who when asked if he wished to visit China, answered yes, indeed, if he could return home that night.
The Ideal of Culture Page 9
