Zombie Apocalypse Now

As soon as it became apparent that the Covid virus posed a problem and we were advised to “shelter in place” – my neighbor boarded up his tattoo shop. First, he boarded up his display windows, fitting the ply-board tight against the sidewalk below the windows. The next day he boarded up his front doors, the boarding again reaching tight against the pavement so that no crowbar could be wedged underneath to pry the boards loose. Finally, he even closed off his mail slots, making the front of his building one big impregnable barricade.

When we asked him what he was doing, a sort of gleam came into his eyes, like the gleam of sly triumph that illuminates someone who feels himself to be in possession of secret knowledge. The young man didn’t fully divulge his purposes, but intimated that this virus might signal “The Coming.” The coming of what – the apocalypse, end times, hordes of the kind of disease-crazed cannibals who populated Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

Oh dear. And here I had thought the young man was a sane, sound artist, etching beautiful rose tattoos onto his customers’ arms. I thought of a lunch I’d had with a 90-year-old friend of mine – just before the virus hit. As we were finishing off our plates of pasta at the Olive Garden, we had drifted into some darker conversational waters – the war-torn Europe she’d known as a child, the cruelty of her first few years in America when her classmates had chanted “DP, DP, ain’t even got a place to pee” at her. Thinking back on what had been her general experience of life, she leaned over the remnants of our salad bowl and ominously whispered to me, “People are insane. I don’t mean some people. I mean all people.”

I tried to make a joke of it. I quoted that clichéd observation, “Everyone is crazy except you and me – and sometimes I wonder about you.” I laughed, hoping my laughter would put a lightening spin on my friend’s earnest take on life. But she didn’t laugh in return. Her seriousness chilled me. I privately knew that my own experience of life, even in the seeming smiling security of my lifelong Chicago neighborhood, had brought me to much the same conclusion. When I scratched the surface of people who appeared in passing to be upright, grounded individuals, I’d found all too often that they harbored a dangerous crookedness in their thinking.

Was my neighbor another illustration of that absolute my friend had claimed – all insane? Did that cheerful fellow who so helpfully collected my packages from UPS when I wasn’t home, really expect an assault from the resurrected dead?

Or should he be so readily dismissed? He eventually painted the ply-board he’d hammered in place, making an attractive façade of his hoarding. But for a week or so, the bare panels made the street truly look like something out of a post-nuclear holocaust movie. There was his board-up on one side of me, an overgrown lot on the other side of me, and abandoned storefronts scattered along much of the rest of the way. And then, the final apocalyptic touch was added to the scene late one night.

I was walking across the street in the A.M. – going to return a movie at the neighborhood Redbox. When I got in front of my neighbor’s forbidding new blankness, I saw a figure coming towards me. It was a shockingly thin man, dressed in shabby, threadbare work clothes. He was wearing a standard Covid mask. But his eyes, visible above the mask, were sunken, red-rimmed. He lurched towards me, stopping just inches in front of my face, hardly observing the 6-foot distancing. He spoke. “Where Troy?” he demanded. “You know Troy? Where, where Troy?” his demand turned into a strange, pleading in broken English.

I went almost numb with the oddness of this approach. Troy? I searched my brain. With complete irrelevance, the only Troy that came to my mind was Troy Donahue, the popular actor from the 60’s. I was about to tell the man that I was sorry, but that I thought Troy Donahue had died some years before. But then it hit me. Of course! Troy was the next street east. I’d lived in this same place since I was a child, with Troy Street being adjacent the whole time. So why had my mind jumped to the obscurity of Troy Donahue? In my defense, the reason might have been the way the man had worded his question. When he’d asked, “You know Troy?” it sounded as if he was referring to a person.

Still, it was a sign of the whole weird incongruity of the scene that my mind had jumped to Troy Donahue rather than to the obvious. I had made a comic, hysteric leap to an absurd association. I straightened up and told the man that Troy Street was the next street over. I crooked my finger, pointing east.

The man thanked me, jerked a nod, and shambled off into what was – of course – a gathering mist. He rounded the corner and was gone.

Who was that masked man? Or what was he? Was it possible that my neighbor hadn’t been veering into the crazies after all by boarding up his building, expecting marauding gangs of the undead? Had his precautions been all too prescient? Was he perhaps the exception, the one sane person whose existence both my friend and I had denied? Had I just seen the start of what my neighbor had correctly anticipated – a Zombie Apocalypse – now?

McCarthy Come Full Circle - Part I

Lately I’ve been steeped in the McCarthy era. One book on the subject has led to another and another – and so on. After reading for a while, I was inspired to look up what videos there might be available of the Army-McCarthy hearings on YouTube. I was only able to find a few hours of video out of what had been thirty-six days of those Hearings. For the rest, I will probably have to be content with reading the transcripts.

When I started to watch those few available hours, I did so with a somewhat fearful, haunted feeling. My father had bought our first TV set so that he could watch the Hearings. It was a Wells-Gardner set in a beautiful oak console that included radio and phonograph. Before that, I had only seen TV a few times, when we went to friends’ houses and I caught glimpses of “Uncle Miltie.” Now here I was, sixty-six years later, sitting in the same spot, watching those same Hearings. They had been the first things I saw on TV, and I nervously wondered if they might be the last. I peered over my shoulder to see if a figure carrying a scythe might be emerging from the shadows to collect me. But I saw no spectral lowering, so I went ahead and started to watch.

Almost all the segments of the Hearings available on YouTube feature that defining moment when Joseph Welch, Counsel for the Army, withered McCarthy by asking him, “Have you no sense of decency?” Welch was provoked to deliver this historic put-down after McCarthy, apparently feeling on the defensive, had flung out the name of Fred Fisher, a young attorney on Welch’s legal staff, and had announced Fisher as having Communist affiliations (through his membership in the Lawyers Guild).

Welch went on with his world-weary rue, asking what on earth young Fisher had ever done to McCarthy to provoke him into making such an unwarranted attack. Welch profoundly regretted that now Fisher would be scarred for life, his legal career nipped in the bud. McCarthy did seem to be chastened, although he came back with a few rephrased repetitions of his charge.

I was a toddler then and scarcely understood what the Hearings were about. But, like most of America at that moment, I sided with Welch, feeling that he radiated a sort of gentle, avuncular wisdom as opposed to McCarthy’s “recklessness and cruelty.” It’s likely that even people who generally sided with McCarthy’s determination to root out Communism wherever it was having crypto influence in the U.S. – probably felt McCarthy should have indeed been ashamed of himself in that instance.

But one of the books I recently read cast that famous exchange in a whole new light, turning the tables on right and wrong. In his book, Blacklisted by History, Stanton Evans makes a telling correction on this point. He reprints a page from an issue of the New York Times that came out two weeks before that pivotal Welch-McCarthy exchange. The featured article on the page was an interview with Joseph Welch in which he himself said he was suspending Fred Fisher from his team on the Hearings because of Fisher’s affiliation with the Lawyers Guild, presumed by some to be a Communist front.

So actually, it was Welch himself who outed Fred Fisher as a possible Communist sympathizer! In any event, Fisher didn’t seem to have been scarred by either Welch’s or McCarthy’s revelation of his leanings. Fisher went on to have a very successful career. He continued his employment with Hale and Dorr, Welch’s legal firm, and went on to hold many distinguished posts, including President of the Massachusetts Bar Association – seemingly without a scar. Some might argue that if anything, this exposure in front of the Hearings advanced Fisher’s career by eliciting sympathy for him and putting him in the spotlight.

After reading author Evans’ remarks on this and other points about Welch’s behavior in front of the committee hearings, I have somewhat changed my opinion of Welch. Evans points to aspects of Welch’s behavior that make it seem as if he had carefully staged his confrontations with McCarthy, casting himself as the simple, honest country lawyer going up against city slicker McCarthy (although McCarthy actually came from the farming town of Appleton, Wisconsin). It seems as if Welch might have had Clarence Darrow in mind as his model. He advanced his points with a rumpled display of profound aggrievement, emoting even to the point of seeming to turn away in tears over Fisher’s fate. Meanwhile McCarthy was left in the disadvantageous position of being merely himself.

Whether Evans generally leans too much in McCarthy’s favor or not, he still sets the record straight on several other key points about which I was confused, and about which I think most Americans have remained confused.

Most of us associate McCarthy with The House Un-American Affairs Committee. When we hear McCarthy’s name, we think of a variety of our favorite Hollywood stars being grilled before HUAC, being forced to “name names.” Actually, McCarthy had little or nothing to do with HUAC or with accusing any Hollywood stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall or any Hollywood scriptwriter such as Dalton Trumbo. Evans points out what should have been obvious to all of us. HUAC operated under “House” auspices and McCarthy was a Senator holding authority on committees only within the Senate. But in any case, the principle Committee responsible for putting Hollywood actors and authors on the spot and for curtailing their careers was an early incarnation of HUAC, more specifically called the Dies Committee, which operated from the late 1930’s through the mid 1940’s, and then beyond, under different names.

McCarthy didn’t start his hunt for Communists until 1950 and shortly thereafter when he became Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – in the Senate. The primary aim of this Committee was to ferret out Communist infiltration in the State Department. As head of this Committee, McCarthy didn’t challenge any celebrity artists about their Communist affiliations, with the exception of a few such as poet Langston Hughes and composer Aaron Copland. He questioned them only as a result of some connection they’d had with State Department programs overseas.

So on the whole, when the term “McCarthyism” is used as a pejorative to condemn the way in which Hollywood artists were stifled – the term is a misnomer. People should refer to “Diesism,” after the name of the Democratic Representative from Texas who did officiate over most of the inquiries into Communist influence in Hollywood. But that makes for sort of a messy term. McCarthy had a name with a much easier handle.

Similarly, the act of “blacklisting” these celebrities shouldn’t be pinned on McCarthy. McCarthy did wave a lot of lists around in the course of his investigations. The lists were often an unwieldy conglomerate of people that the Dies Committee had investigated, people the FBI had reason to suspect, and people who had been named as having Communist affiliations by individuals such as Whitaker Chambers. Most of these lists were lists of government employees. Some of the lists that McCarthy waved were just lists of numbers with accompanying suspected acts or affiliations. McCarthy often refused to attach names to these numbers because he said he didn’t want to smear people without sufficient evidence.

It’s true that the kinds of activities that had landed people on one or the other of McCarthy’s lists were very trivial participations. Sometimes simply subscribing to The Daily Worker landed an individual on a list of “unreliables.” In one startling case, I saw a person listed because he had favored going to war with Germany – in 1937. It seems in 1937, we were still trying to take a conciliatory stance toward Germany, so advocating war with them was not the thing to do.

The point though is that none of these lists that McCarthy brandished were the famous “blacklists” with which his name has, again, been wrongly associated. The famous blacklists were compiled and enforced by the Hollywood studios themselves. When it got bruited around that someone was a Communist sympathizer or when someone had been questioned by the Dies Committee (or was scheduled to be questioned by some such committee) – that individual was viewed as “box office poison.” The studios usually failed to stand up for these actors and writers and simply, by tacit agreement, blacklisted them. In most cases, no actual written lists existed. The studio heads just agreed that certain individuals were likely to mean trouble, and they didn’t hire them.

Most of the people who were blacklisted don’t seem to have suffered too much. Lucille Ball and Edward G. Robinson were among those who landed on one or the other of these lists and one can hardly say that such listing plummeted them into permanent obscurity. Also, the most famous of those who were blacklisted, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, generally continued to work under pseudonyms. Then in some sense, when the veil was lifted, one could say he was compensated for the years of obscurity he suffered by the fame and admiration he received for having remained so defiant and stalwart in the face of his victimization.

One of the stars who suffered a definite gap in her career was Lee Grant. She says she missed all her “ingenue years.” She wasn’t able to get work through her twenties. However, then when the red scare passed, she did become an acclaimed leading lady and has been getting almost more work than she can handle.

But again, most of what Hollywood talent suffered wasn’t due to any of McCarthy’s actions. His probes came later and focused mostly on concerns over infiltration of State Department programs, the diplomatic corps, and the Army (particularly the Army base at Monmouth, New Jersey).

Similarly, McCarthy is largely innocent of the charges of suppressing freedom of speech and of book-burning that have become attached to his name. It seems the charges of book-burning were the result of some actions taken by overseas librarians in the wake of a visit paid them by Roy Cohn (McCarthy’s legal counsel during the Army-McCarthy Hearings) and Cohn’s friend David Schine.

The two young men went on a junket through large parts of post-war occupied Europe. Although they no doubt did a lot of partying along the way, they had an official assignment. They went there to inspect the Reading Rooms that the State Department had set up with taxpayer dollars to give Europeans access to writings that presumably represented American ideals. Those Reading Rooms were much like Christian Science Reading Rooms in that they were established for the express purpose of promoting a particular point of view. In the bubbling cauldron of ideologies of Communism, socialism, etc. that was postwar Europe – America hoped to gain converts to the American way of life.

However, Cohn and Schine were disappointed to find that these Reading Rooms weren’t doing a very good job of advancing democratic principles. They found the rooms heavily stocked with the works of far-left and outright Communist authors. Most of the books on China that they found there were pro-Mao. They found books extoling Lenin. In several locations they found Langston Hughes’ book of poems prominently displayed, with an early poem entitled “Good Morning Revolution” proclaiming:

Better that my blood makes one with the blood the blood

Of all struggling workers of the world…

Until the Red Armies of the International Proletariat

Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown

Unite to raise the blood red flag that

Never will come down.

This was hardly the Little House on the Prairie sort of fare that the Government had intended the Reading Rooms to project. So when Cohn and Schine got back home and gave their account, McCarthy and other Committee members moved to have certain listed authors and books removed, just from those Reading Rooms. It was NOT ordered that these books be burned. It was suggested that they be taken to public and private libraries in the various European towns where they were found. The point was simply that the Government did not want to sponsor such opinions with U.S. tax money.

McCarthy and some of his colleagues did spread their net a little too wide when it came to which authors should be extracted from the government shelves. For example, McCarthy included Dashiell Hammett (author of the Thin Man series and The Maltese Falcon) on the “Remove” list because of Hammett’s presumed participation in some Communist front organizations. But on the whole, most of the books that were to be removed were blatantly pro-Communist. Even at that, there was considerable discussion before the decision was made to remove them. Some thought it would be good to leave them on the shelves to demonstrate how open-minded and welcoming of all viewpoints America was. In the end though, the decision was made to have the books put – somewhere else.

The managers and librarians of many of these individual Reading Rooms sometimes took shortcuts in the matter. They took down the listed books and either threw them away or, yes, in some cases, just got rid of them by burning them. This had not been the Government’s intention though and it was not anything that McCarthy had ordered.

In fact, McCarthy is on record as saying he believed everyone in America should have the right to express any opinions they wanted to and to espouse any political views, whether they be Republican, Democratic, Communist, or anything else. What he objected to was people who flew under false colors, entering public life and positions of influence pretending to hold one set of beliefs but actually working to advance another set. He generally only persisted in grilling those individuals coming before his Committee who denied having any current Communist affiliations but for whom he believed he had proof to the contrary – (although, again, sometimes his “proof” consisted of rather trivial signs such as a subscription to The Daily Worker or attendance at parties where other suspected Communists were present).

His general philosophy on this point though was a reasonable one, supported by many scholars such as Sidney Hook. In several of his noted essays, Hook stated that in a free society such as ours, people ought to be able to hold any beliefs and ought to be able to openly express those beliefs in any way they choose. They only transgress and ought to be stopped when they conceal their true ideology. He felt it necessary that candidates for office or any position of authority or influence expose their ideas in the public marketplace of opinion. Let voters and would-be supporters get genuine knowledge of the candidates’ views. Democracy is only endangered when people hide their true philosophies and mole their way through society, weakening its foundation with their subterranean machinations.

McCarthy probably would have agreed with Hook about this and would have said that matched what he was hoping to accomplish with all his committee hearings. He wanted to root out underground Communists. He wanted, not to banish them, but to make them have to advance whatever opinions they held in an aboveboard, open forum.

So, McCarthy was not really guilty of some of the worst charges that have been leveled against him. He was NOT connected with the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee as many academics continue to this day to insist that he was. He was NOT responsible for blacklisting Hollywood’s creative people. He did NOT advocate book-burning or the suppressions of free speech. So he does NOT deserve to be labeled with many of the extreme appellations that are commonly attached to him – appellations such as “Oppressor, Demagogue, America’s Hitler.”

All of which leads me to a number of questions about the way history has treated him. And it leads me to consider a number of criticisms that I think can legitimately be made against him. But I’ll save these speculations for one or more sequels to this article.

Meanwhile, I’m still wary about what might be lurking in the shadows behind me. With my life having been bracketed – from childhood to considerable maturity – with those Army-McCarthy Hearings, I’ve come full circle, and usually when a story comes full circle, it ends. But so far, I’m still here and I’ll write those follow-up essays

Thanks to the Flu

The current flu pandemic has many positive aspects about it and might leave our world a better place. Of course, it has its tragic side. We should remember those who died before their time because of it.

But there are ways in which the flu might inject new life into our lives. Some commentators have mentioned how this period of self-isolation might bring families closer together. Instead of scattering in all directions each day, with children going to different schools, then off to different soccer fields and socials, and the adults rushing off to separate high-rise jobs as admen, madmen – families are forced to gather close together around that old metaphoric home-fire. It’s possible that each family member will retreat to his or her own room to tweet and watch separate TV shows. But it’s also possible that this enforced togetherness might spark a few conversations between family members. Children and adults might get to know each other a little better, and for the first time find out, for better or worse, who is really aboard those other ships that previously just passed in the night.

Some people might get cabin fever with this enforced isolation. But that was never my problem. I always found the times I had to stay quietly at home to be delicious reprieves from social obligation. When the Great Snowstorm of 1967 hit Chicago, I was a teenager and the surrounding piles of snow cast me as Queen of my own Ice Castle. I iglooed in place; I cocooned in the wonderland of my thoughts. I could quietly metamorphize into my own fated maturity.

Not that I wasn’t generally able to be more unto myself than most people my age. I was largely homeschooled, (or more accurately, I was a learner-at-home) in a time before there was a word or a movement for that practice. Almost invariably, when people who are imbued with the necessity of going to school hear about that philosophy, they ask, “But what about socialization? Don’t you miss out on learning how to interact with other people?”

Well, one could observe how most teens interact, and see that their social skills haven’t really improved as they’ve advanced from first grade through high school. In reality, it seems as if, during that time, many of them have only honed their techniques of cruelty to others – and to themselves. If anything, I would argue that the world is suffering from too much socialization. What people need, especially young people, is more time away from social pressures, more time to be themselves, or rather, to become their best selves. They need time away from bullying, peer pressure, and pressure to conform.

To interject a somewhat sadder, more world-weary note of wisdom into these considerations, I think of what a handyman once surprisingly said to me – or rather, to my dog. After my father died, my mother and I went through a difficult series of handymen enlisted to do odd jobs around the house. Most of these catch-as-catch-can itinerants proved to be rather incompetent or unreliable. Some proved to have positively sinister ulterior motives for coming into our house, motives other than repairing the leaking faucet. However, for a while, there was one capable stalwart of a fellow we could count on. He had the weathered, raw look of a ship’s figurehead. He generally concentrated on his work, not seeking to engage in any small talk.

I’d just acquired a new puppy then, a little mutt who was proving to be an incessant yapper, a little bundle of uncontrollable energy who wanted to dart into any household activity she saw going. Our handyman was remarkably tolerant of this noisy interference most of the time. But one day, he paused to address this fur-ball cavorting around him. “You have to go off by yourself and be quiet now, little one,” he said. “That’s what growing up is. It’s learning how to be alone.”

And so this period of sequestration that the flu is bringing upon us might be an opportunity to practice that larger lesson. Maybe we can all grow up a little.

But simply considering the cozier, more down-to-earth aspect of this enforced enclosure - English writer J. B. Priestley expressed it well in his essay “Not Going” in his collection of delights. When he was young, he said it was horrible not to get an invitation – to the party, the dance, the excursion. But as he got older, he realized he wasn’t missing anything by being at home. As he would ensconce himself in his favorite chair, people would ask him, “But don’t you like to enjoy yourself?” To which he’d reply, “On the contrary, by Not Going, that is just what I am trying to do.”

However, there’s another boon this period of stoppage can confer, a boon that I oddly haven’t heard any news commentators remark on so far. This widespread slowdown in industry can give the environment a brief respite, a brief time of healing. I’m surprised that this advantage to the earth’s ecology hasn’t been widely heralded as something positive that can come out of this epidemic.

A couple of decades ago, there was a lot of regret about the loss of our Sundays. Environmentalists noted how Sundays used to be a time of rest, a time when people didn’t go to work. They stayed home and slept late, then read the Sunday newspaper over a second cup of coffee. Scientists noted how CO2 levels in the atmosphere sharply dropped on Sundays. There wasn’t the dredging, the drilling, the extracting, the in-putting. The levels of all kinds of pollutants in the atmosphere declined – on Sundays. Our atmosphere got a breather.

But then Sundays stopped being so sharply marked by cessation. With flex-work schedules and with a more general ambition to get the job done around-the-clock, Sundays weren’t as quiet as they used to be. They stopped being Kris Kristofferson’s “sleeping city sidewalk.” People were almost as much up-and-at-it on Sundays as they were on other days. So the earth hasn’t had quite that same one-day-a-week to recuperate and rejuvenate.

But now with the shutdowns the flu has enforced, the earth might be getting a whole swatch of time to recover, perhaps its first since the industrial revolution really got rolling. Again, when scientists look back at this time, they will probably record a steep down-turn in effluents being dumped into the atmosphere. It probably won’t be enough to allow the glaciers to start to accumulate inches of ice again, and not enough to make our next winter noticeably colder again, like Victorian winters used to be. But it will probably make some difference, however small.

What’s more, mortality rates from a variety of usual causes will be seen to have declined during this period. The police in big cities have already been noting the decline in crime. One report said there were 30% fewer street murders in Chicago this month than there were in the same month last year. Although, some worry that for every street crime prevented by our encouragements against congregating – there might be a domestic crime committed in the created hothouse of indoor togetherness. But so far at least, that kind of offset doesn’t seem to have happened.

Meanwhile, the reduction in sheer levels of activity must surely have a net positive effect in other areas. With sporting events postponed, there will be fewer sports injuries. With fewer people rushing to get to and from their jobs on time, there will be fewer car crashes, fewer highway fatalities.

And then there are the animals. I know I should be more concerned about humans than animals, and yet, the life and death of animals has been made so much a matter of human whim that their injury can be so much more guilt-producing and heart-breaking. I feel somehow complicit in each such death, with my presumption of need to go somewhere or consume something. So when I see a deer hit on the road, left to limp off bleeding and broken to almost certain torturous death, I feel a more piercing sadness than I feel over the death of many humans.

But with the slowdown of the world in the wake of this Covid pandemic, there will be fewer such killings. The world will be less splattered with dogs, cats, raccoons, squirrels… If it’s true that “not a sparrow falls but that our Father sees,” there will be a lot less carnage for Him to see.

When this is over and the scientists go back and calculate the decrease in pollution and bloodshed that marked this period, I wouldn’t be surprised if some leaders don’t consider making a regular event of such cessation. Let one week out of every eight be a “Faux Flu” week – a week in which everyone whose job isn’t absolutely essential for life support stays home. For that week, stop the “getting and spending” and coming and going, and simply abide in quiet appreciation of what we all already have.

A Born Atheist

I’m the only person I know who was born an atheist. I never went through any crisis of faith, so I’ve never had anything to say when I’ve been with a group of acquaintances who, in the small hours after a number of drinks, have started to confess the wrenching feelings of desolation they experienced when, in their teens or beyond, they slowly began to realize there might not be a God.

I’m not sure about the reason for my precocious lack of belief. Neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned the word “God” as I was growing up, or ever observed a religion in any way, with one exception for each of my parents. My mother had perhaps not completely abandoned her Catholic upbringing, which she said she had done when her favorite aunt died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, despite all my mother’s fervent prayers. But I don’t think my mother quite made it all the way to absolute atheism. I remember she had me baptized when I was a toddler, rather late in the game. I think she might have been pressured into it by her brother and other still devout relatives. But she told me she had finally agreed to the baptism… “Just in case.”

Then when I was in my late teens, I happened to drift through the kitchen where my father was sitting while I matter-of-factly muttered some statement of disbelief to myself. My father caught my under-the-breath remark. He startled up from reading the newspaper and said to me, “What? You don’t believe in God?” I said “No, of course not. What? Do you?” In a shocked tone, he answered, “Yes.” We looked at each other in wild surmise for a moment, realizing how little we’d known of each other all those years. Then, in resignation, my father went back to reading the paper. And I went on out the door to go sit in the yard and read.

Those were the only two times that religion was mentioned in the house. But I knew from the start that all my other relatives were religious, and I knew that included an over-arching belief in an omnipotent God. Before I started kindergarten, I would often stay the weekends with my grandmother. We would sleep together in her king-sized bed. But she’d set the alarm for 5:00 A.M. so that she could get up and go to early Mass. One of my earliest memories is of me thinking, at the moment that alarm clock went off, “Thank goodness I don’t believe in all that. I can go back to sleep.” I’d snuggle back under the covers while my grandmother trudged off through Chicago’s wintry streets to St. Michael’s.

I’ve wondered about this lack of any religious feeling on my part, this lack of any sense of a directing higher power. Perhaps, in addition to the fact that there was no religious atmosphere in my house, I grew this way because there was a lack of any hierarchy in my house. My parents talked with me as they would talk to an adult from the start. I can’t remember a single instance when they told me what to do, when they issued an order or made a rule. They never told me to go to school or do my homework. I went to bed whenever I was sleepy. I ate whatever I wanted. I watched anything on TV for however long I wanted to watch it.

My parents had started a small mailing business just before I was born, and I became a full partner from the start. By the time I was 2-years-old, I was amazing passers-by as I sat in our front display window on my little chair, collating flyers and stuffing them into envelopes at lightning speed. We had a financial struggle. I think it must have been like growing up on a farm where the children often become needed partners from the start. At the dining table, family conversation centers around how they are going to bring in the harvest against daunting odds, rather than around the delivery of orders and options to the children. So our family conversation centered around our customers’ foibles and demands. There was no hint of, “OK, you can either do your homework tonight and skip the movie, or else you can get up early tomorrow and do it.”

This pattern of treating me as an adult was carried down to the smallest detail. How different other families were from mine in this regard was brought home to me with a seemingly insignificant incident. I had never liked toys or playthings of any kind. I almost dreaded Christmas because it meant more distant relatives would be bringing me novelty gifts that I really didn’t want but that I’d have to seem delighted with for a long period of time in order not to hurt anyone’s feelings or squelch their joy of giving.

But there fell one brief exception to this opinion about the tawdriness of toys that I held. For some reason, a little Farmer in the Dell musical contraption that Art Linkletter was hawking on TV caught my attention. You’d turn the handle on the tin box, and as you turned – farmer, farmer’s wife, child… mouse and cheese would pop out in succession. They’d advance around a little proscenium stage, then would go back into the recesses of the box again, all to the ditty of “The Farmer in the Dell.”

I expressed a desire to own such an animated box. My mother was rather surprised by this. I’d almost never wanted anything before, and this seemed an unworthy object on which to expend such an exceptional longing. My mother did mention that the toy would likely become boring in a short time. It had very limited versatility; it allowed for a very limited play of the imagination. I could see a bit of regret shadow my mother’s face – and perhaps also a bit of fear that I might be turning into a trivially demanding little brat. She had almost never signaled any kind of disapproval over my actions before. So this in and of itself was a departure of attitude for her. But I persisted. I made a case for the enjoyment this type of toy could offer.

So at our family Christmas gathering that year, the duly wrapped Farmer in the Dell appeared “from Aunt Hazel and Uncle Carl.” Sitting off to one side of the adult circle, I eagerly started to crank the handle of the box and bring the farm family onto stage one-by-one. I went through the “Hi-ho the derry-o” ditty once. Then I launched the parade a second time. When I showed signs of cranking into a third go-round, my uncle leaned over and somewhat sternly ordered, “Ok, you can play it one more time. But then you have to put it away.”

This assumption of command over me sent a shock wave through me. I was torn by a multitude of emotions. I suddenly realized that the repeated rattling of the ditty was annoying the people around me trying to hold a conversation. How thoughtless I’d been! I also realized at that moment that I’d have made that third go-round the last one of the day of my own accord. I had already realized how right my mother had been about such a toy. I could myself already see how tedious the toy would soon become.

Most of all though, the emotion that gripped me was one of utter shock over being issued what was tantamount to an order. Since I hadn’t started school yet, I’d never before been addressed that way. My utter equality had always been assumed, as well as my capacity to intuitively know what was right and proper. My parents would no more have told me how many times I could do a thing than they would have ordered their own parents or an adult guest to stop indulging in a relatively harmless enjoyment. How strange!

Of course, when I started school, I was hit with the pervasiveness of that pattern of adults telling children what to do. Children had to be lined up, had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, had to comply with an endless stream of instructions, rules, orders, commands. I never came even close to getting acclimated to that alien way of relating to people. Not that I was ever a rebel or a trouble-maker. I became a slavishly meek, compliant person – not always so much out of niceness as out of sheer fear of that drive I saw in other people to assume dominance and control over others, or else to be dominated and controlled.

My point in relating this piece of autobiography is that I’ve sometimes read that there’s a correlation between the degree of people’s religiosity and the amount of dominance they experienced growing up. People raised in an atmosphere of strict hierarchy, particularly within the intimacy of their nuclear families, often seem to become the most fanatically attached to fundamentalist religions. Those who have experienced households in which the father is boss over the mother and in which both parents are in agreement about the need to boss their children, to the point of controlling them with harsh physical punishment – quite often become people committed to the concept of a punishing God. They grow up convinced of the need for discipline in the form of continuously imposed rules and order from above. What they experienced in microcosm, they project onto the macrocosm.

Whatever led to my assumption of atheism, it’s provided me with the only answer I can give to Oprah’s interview question, “Tell me one thing you know for sure.” My one thing is, and has always been – there is no God.

Meghan and Harry - The Dying Swans

I’ve never taken too much of an interest in the doings of the Royal Family, so I don’t have a lot of emotion invested in their defaults and defections. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time tweeting either praise or criticism of Meghan and Harry for dropping out of the continuous round of royal duties. And yet, and yet – I do sort of regret their decision. In the British Royal Family, the world has one last long view back down a colonnaded succession. The British Royals are the last Royal Family that can capture the imagination and make a stand for life-long duty to tradition.

I wish Meghan and Harry had watched the movie The Swan before making their decision. It’s an almost lost gem of a movie. Grace Kelly found the perfect, prescient role for herself there. She plays a Princess in a branch of a royal family that was side-lined by Napoleon. The Crown Prince is scheduled to pay a visit to her family’s manor house, reputedly in search of a suitable wife. This has sent her mother into a flurry of preparation and hope that a union might be secured for her daughter and that the family might thereby be restored center-stage to the Court.

When the Prince arrives though, in the form of Alec Guinness, he is a distinct disappointment. He is rather dismissive, almost rude. He seems to take no interest in Grace Kelly whatsoever. He makes himself scarce about the house, generally registering his presence only when he needs to be waited on.

When it seems he’s not going to court Grace Kelly, her mother hatches a plan to spark his interest. She advances Louis Jourdan, Grace Kelly’s handsome tutor, as a likely love-interest for her daughter in order to make the Crown Prince jealous. The plan backfires though. Grace Kelly sincerely falls in love with her tutor and plans to elope with him, even in the face of Guinness’ rather back-handed proposal after all. This decision sends her mother into a tizzy of despair and entreaty. The audience is bound to side with the eloping young couple at this point. But even as a child, watching the movie for the first time, I didn’t feel drawn to root for that commoner conclusion. I felt something rarer should prevail.

And indeed, it likely does. As Kelly is all packed and ready to take flight, Guinness approaches her with a sadder, restraining wisdom. He proves himself to be a much better man than we took him for in this unexpected turn. His speech to her then stands out for me as one of the most moving moments in movie history. He likens her to a swan – a creature who floats beautifully out on the water. But he reminds her that if that swan should choose to wade out on land, it becomes a mere goose, waddling along in a gaggle. So it is the lot of that swan to never make its home on solid ground. It is the swan’s lot to maintain a commitment to that more distant beauty, out on the water, essentially silent and alone – through to the end.

This is a memorable rendering of Ferenc Molnar’s play and it confirmed me as a monarchist. Again, I don’t mean that in the sense that I take an interest in what the Royals wear for their weddings or in the details of their peccadilloes. I certainly wouldn’t collect Royal Wedding plates or scan People magazine for tidbits of gossip. But that movie, that speech, made the final case for there being somewhere, always, at least one last persistence of duty to tradition.

When Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII stepped out of the procession – they most decidedly became mere geese. After that one stirring moment of abdication, their lives became dull and devoid. Well, they probably were essentially geese all along. But if they had maintained the mantle of royalty, they would have had the stirring bearing of authority that comes with kingdom. They would have meant something, to onlookers and to the world. They would have meant history. As it was, they dwindled through shallow, listless lives, making the scene, going to the casinos in Monaco, appearing as prize catches at socialites’ parties.

The Prince of Wales became Governor of the Bahamas for a while, but really didn’t do much of anything. In a late interview done with the couple when they were older and the Prince of Wales was ill (available on YouTube), this sense of wasted lives becomes apparent. When the interviewer asked the Prince why he never took a job, he implied he’d thought about it. But for some reason, he said, “I never did. I don’t know why, but I never did…” and he trailed off in regret.

Jerry Seinfeld more cruelly summarized the couple’s later life in one of the episodes of Seinfeld. When the gang briefly discusses Wallis, the Prince, and the abdication, Jerry finishes them off by pronouncing them, “Euro-trash.” I hope that’s not the kind of vacuity that Meghan’s and Harry’s lives become.

There’s a quote from another play that rings back to me now and that seems as if it also might have informed Meghan’s and Harry’ decision. It’s spoken in Act V, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry V. After Henry’s stunning “We few, we happy few” victory at Agincourt, Shakespeare changes the mood to what’s generally rendered as a comic scene set in the French Court. It’s already taken for granted that Henry will now take Katherine, the French Princess, as his wife. It’s his right as the victor to consolidate the English and French royal houses in this way. But Henry wants to make a more personal proposal, not as a matter of form, but as a matter of the heart. Much of the scene centers on Katherine’s humorous attempts to speak English and on Henry’s attempts at a few French phrases.

But in one outstanding presentation of the play, Richard Burton rolls the proposal to a more serious, sonorous bidding. After having listed both his good and bad points as just a man, he concludes, “If you would have such a man, take me. Take me and get a soldier. Take a soldier and get a king.”

It’s entrained as one inevitability that must be honored. And so one feels it should perhaps have been when Meghan accepted Harry’s proposal. The world doesn’t need another cute Yuppie couple dabbling in charity and then drifting among the coffee shops and boutiques of some upscale Canadian neighborhood. The world needs those last, lonely swans who in their remote beauty seem not to be flesh and blood at all but who have assumed a lifelong commitment to being symbols – symbols of tradition, Country, and Majesty.

Who Was That Masked Man?

An intruder got into my house. I’d fallen asleep on my couch, with my face buried in the couch's back cushions. I was in that sort of twilight doze, between sleep and wakefulness - when I heard a long, low sound of exhalation right in my ear. I drowsily thought it might be my own heavy breathing. I was just getting over a cold. I tested it. I took a breath. No - it wasn't me.

The heavy breath came again. Now I woke a little more, but I still thought I might be dreaming, hallucinating. No. It came again, a heavy, resonant exhalation, a long “Whhhooooooooo.”

Now I was fully awake, rigid with fear. Someone or Something was definitely right behind me, breathing into my ear. It wasn't any of my cats. They never make a sound like that. What? A serial killer who’d quietly crept into my house somehow, and now hovered over me before striking – toying with me as he pondered, “Where shall I make my first cut?”

Well, there was nothing for it. As much as I didn't want to, I knew I had to turn around and face whatever it was. I rolled over and came nose-to-nose with - an enormous raccoon!

The raccoon was on the footstool right next to my sofa, and had been leaning over, breathing directly into my ear. Had it been snarling? Had it been salivating, ready to start feasting? Or had it been trying to communicate with me?

About a dozen years before, I had befriended a raccoon I’d named Ricky That raccoon would often come into my house through the pet door, play violently with my feather duster, whipping it around back and forth as if shaking a bird it had caught. Then it would settle down on that same footstool and watch TV with me. I’d give it popcorn or peanuts or other tidbits and it would sit there, picking the crumbs of food off its paunch. Once it had held out a paw, and briefly, (I know, against all warnings about the dangers of raccoons) - we'd held hands/paws. But I hadn’t seen Ricky in over a decade.

It was hardly likely though that this raccoon was Ricky. It would be very unusual for a wild animal like this to live that long. As this raccoon stared into my eyes, it seemed mild-mannered enough. It wasn't snarling at the moment. We just looked at each other. Then, after a few more seconds, it matter-of-factly jumped off the footstool and made its way back to the cats' pet door. It stopped to peer in my garbage pail on the way (which I had luckily just emptied before starting my nap).

Then when the raccoon got to the pet door, it had a problem. Like Winnie-the-Pooh after over-indulging in rabbit's honey-pots - this furry 40+ pound creature also got temporarily stuck in the opening. For a moment, I thought I might have to risk going over and giving it a push on the derriere to get it unplugged from the door. But that didn’t seem as if it would be a good idea. The creature’s friendliness might be strained by being delivered of a good shove in the rear.

So I just watched as it wiggled and wriggled. It eventually contorted itself, Houdini-like, through the opening, and was gone. I went out in the yard every night for a couple of weeks after that, looking for it. But I never saw it again. It had just materialized to breathe ominously in my ear - and then had vanished. Had it been Ricky saying a last good-bye to me? Or had it been the transferred spirit of Ricky? I was left with the question - Who was that masked man?

Wisdom in Passing

Sometimes just wisps of things people say, remarks made in passing, stick with me and influence me more than whole tomes of philosophy. Two such throw-away lines have been particularly haunting me lately. One was a mild reprimand issued to my dog decades ago. The other I heard just recently.

The long-ago comment was uttered by an itinerant handyman my mother hired to do odd jobs after my father died. We had a variety of handymen we called on in those disoriented, posthumous days. I’m not sure why we had such a parade of workmen through the house then. My father had been neither handy nor interested in making any repairs about the place, and we seemed to get along without calling in much help. Why suddenly, after my father’s death, did we feel the need to fix leaking faucets, replace broken tiles, etc., etc. Those things had been leaking and broken for years.

Maybe it was because when my father was still around, we felt we had a safety net. If a minor problem should suddenly explode into disaster – there was at least someone else around to psychologically share the fright of it. Now that he was gone, we felt vulnerable to such dire eventualities. So we bestirred ourselves, getting the little things repaired in hopes that we could prevent any of them from mushrooming into catastrophe.

Most of the local handymen available to do odd jobs turned out to be disasters in and of themselves. Some proved to have very limited knowledge about making any repairs. When one undertook to change the washer on a faucet, he didn’t think it was necessary to turn off the water supply to that sink before starting. Water gushed. Unbelievably, another handyman thought the instructions had said to moisten your hands before working on the fuse box. He had somehow failed to see the NOT featured in bold type in all the warnings that preceded how-to instructions on working with electricity. “Do NOT work in standing water or with moist hands or clothing.” Electric shock ensued.

Then there were a couple of lechers whose primary motive for “helping out” had been the access it would afford them to a new, and therefore presumably lonely, yearning widow.

Finally, there were the teenagers whose parents had insisted they earn some money before heading off to college in the fall. The teenagers didn’t want to be working at our house, or anywhere. They wanted to be out having a last dating fling before buckling down to the books. They oozed resentment. One managed to dislodge part of our gutters in his angry, aggressive attempts to clear that gutter of leaves as quickly as possible. So irate was he at having to go back up and reattach the gutter, he slammed the ladder against our building with such force that he smashed our yard light.

However, after all this mishap and mayhem, we did find one reliable workman who knew what he was doing and who went about the jobs in a steady, professional way. His name was the Presidential “John Adams,” and indeed he looked as if he might have been born a New Englander. He was tall and thin, with a somewhat wooden, weathered look, like the figurehead on an old whaling ship. He also had a New England kind of taciturnity and reserve about him. We somehow gathered that he might be a recovering alcoholic who found sketchy lodgings in various shelters.  But he didn’t bring any of his life problems onto the job. Except we did get a glimpse into the hard-scrabble road he must have travelled in that one memorable stone of philosophy he cast in the direction of our dog.

Actually our dog was more of a puppy, or a dog on the cusp between puppyhood and adulthood. During the times we were too distracted elsewhere to keep her strictly in check, she would follow Mr. Adams around, yapping in a mixture of playful eagerness to participate in his energetic doings and of resentment at the intrusion of this obvious interloper.

Mr. Adams took this pesky tag-along in good part for a while. But finally, when the dog’s company threatened to become actual interference, Mr. Adams addressed her directly. “You have to be quiet and go sit by yourself now,” he instructed her. “That’s what growing up is. It’s learning how to be alone.”

The melancholy truth of that hit me. I was a teenager then, but I suddenly knew that he was right. I knew that’s what awaited me. Adulthood was a matter of entering into an essential aloneness. It was a shouldering of responsibility without the likelihood of any true companion to share it. Adulthood would certainly be devoid of the unconditional love some of us know as children. Instead it was a setting sail into a vast ocean - without another soul in sight.

The second piece of wisdom that I’m sure will stick with me was not uttered as an article of philosophy. It was just a casual personal observation. I happened to catch it as part of an interview with Angie Dickinson appearing on CBS’s Sunday Morning Show. Dickinson has largely retired from her career as actress and sex symbol. She has become an avid poker player and challenged her interviewer, Mo Rocca, to a card game. As they played, Dickinson reflected on her life. She felt her years of stardom had been a wonderful adventure. She didn’t mind having been known for her beauty and sex appeal. That had enabled and added to the adventure of it all.

After a little while, the two broke off playing cards. Mo Rocca walked with Dickinson to the balcony of her home to share her spectacular overview of Beverly Hills. After they had gazed together at the rolling vista for a moment, Dickinson gave a slight shrug of contented resignation. She said, “One day I won’t have all this.” (She didn’t inject the word “soon” into her reflection, although, since Dickinson is in her late 80’s now, that hint of soonness hung unspoken in the air.) But she just issued the truth of the matter bare. She said, “One day I won’t have all this…. but I won’t know it.”

She delivered that last line with an air of confiding triumph. Yes, we will all lose everything we have in the end, but we won’t know it. We won’t dwell in that desolation, experiencing it endlessly. Therefore, we can fling back defiantly, “Take that, Death! You’ve done your worst, but I’m not aware of it. So the joke’s on you! Ha HAAA!”

These two wisdoms bookend my own reflection on my span. There was Mr. Adams’ somber view at one end of all the packed activity. But then here came Angie Dickinson’s point – ultimately a happier thought about the other end of it all. She made me realize what a final invictus it will be.

Donald Trump and Al Capone

The impeachment of Donald Trump will probably be a fait accompli by the time I post this essay. But the process has reminded me of the conviction of Al Capone.

Everyone knew that Capone was responsible for many serious offenses beyond bootlegging. He was clearly at the center of a web of extortion and murder. But the FBI and local authorities felt they had no hope of pinning any of these crimes on him. He existed behind a fog of contrived alibis and forced testimony. It’s been widely acknowledged that Capone ordered the notorious 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre in order to eliminate rival Bugs Moran whom he thought was encroaching on his territory. But once again, Capone was like Macavity in the play Cats. There’s a crash, a bang, a shattering of some prized possession. But when you go and look, once again, “Macavity’s not there.” In the same way, Capone was in Florida on that St. Valentine’s Day – nowhere near the scene of the crime.

However, public opinion did turn against Capone after the gruesome violence of the massacre. The FBI increased its push to depose Capone from his throne as kingpin of Chicago crime. They hit on the idea of examining his income tax returns. He could hardly report the millions he was raking in on a regular basis. He couldn’t believably be earning that sort of money by selling second-hand furniture, the profession he claimed on his business cards.

The FBI was able to demonstrate how Capone’s spending, how his lavish lifestyle – indeed couldn’t be accounted for by the returns he reported from his “furniture business.” And so Capone was convicted for tax evasion and was finally neutralized by being put away in federal prisons such as Alcatraz and serving seven years.

It seems to me that Al Capone’s tax evasion is Donald Trump’s Ukrainian bribe. Trump’s withholding of funds from the Ukrainian President contingent on his investigating Hunter Biden’s role on a Ukrainian gas company board is indeed reprehensible. It had some obvious negative consequences in compromising the Ukraine’s ability to combat Russian aggression. It could have had even farther-reaching consequences. Capone’s withholding of tax funds from the public was perhaps somewhat less consequential. Still, failure to pay such a large amount of taxes is reprehensible. Whatever money Capone gave to soup kitchens and to other charities was more than offset by the money he failed to put into public coffers where those funds might have gone much farther to support those in need.

But in neither case were the infractions that the men were charged with the worst of what they had done. In Capone’s case, there were all those intimidations, felonies, and murders. In Trump’s case, there has been the total lack of knowledge about geography, history, the U.S. Constitution, or what constitutes true statesmanship. There has been the rain of random, irrelevant tweets, the schoolyard name-calling, the inconsistency, the illogic, the arrogance, the stupidity.

But it was hard to convict a man of well-deflected crimes and hired hits. It would be almost impossible to convict a man of utter inanity. So in each case, the authorities had to focus on something smaller, something better defined. Your total failure as a human being isn’t prosecutable. The long arm of the law has to pick something graspable. And so the charges are reduced to tax evasion, and the demand of a quid pro quo from the Ukrainian President – respectively.

Isn’t that the way it is with life in general? You yell at your spouse for not putting the cap back on the toothpaste. Well, it’s possible that transgression can itself be a major annoyance. Paste can ooze out over your comb, down the side of the sink, onto the bathmat – necessitating a massive, time-consuming clean-up. But usually the toothpaste cap is just the tax evasion of each individual household.

You can’t yell at your spouse for never helping around the house, at least not with any reasonable expectation of effecting any reform. Although what you’re really angry about is your spouse’s lazy disregard, that’s too big a fault to prosecute.

Similarly, you burst out in grievance after your spouse absented himself and left you to deal on your own with the burly, pugnacious handyman who failed to sand the windowsill before slathering paint over its lumpiness. In that case, what has really disappointed you about your spouse is his cowardice. But that’s too unwieldy a charge to bring to court.

You can reproach your spouse for forgetting your birthday, or for telling a demeaning story about you at a party, or for cheating on you. But you can’t reasonably convict him or her on the vast, intangible basis of being a bad person. You have no recourse against your spouse for being incapable of love.

And so the argument revolves around toothpaste – or a failure to pay taxes – or dishonorable actions in the Ukraine. 

Miraculous Transformation

I went to a performance of a new musical play, Parcel from America, at the Irish Heritage Center in Chicago last weekend. It had a heartwarming resolution, perfect for the Holidays, likely to become a kind of It’s A Wonderful Life tradition for smaller theaters around town.

I had a little trouble getting into the spirit of the afternoon though. Before the performance started, I was put in a grumpy mood by the gyrations of one of the audience members. I recognized her as being one of the regular hosts of PBS-TV’s pledge nights. Her appearances there irritated me. She always seemed to be so mindlessly bubbly as she solicited funds and introduced each new segment of the special programming. Her uniform boosterism and effervescence often seemed out of place. She would burst into the midst of a program about the Holocaust with her usual hyper enthusiasm. She’d gush, “Wow! Isn’t that great! What an important history lesson!”

None of the solemnity or grandeur of any of the programming ever seemed to register with her. Her predictable “Wows!” always smacked of a teenager’s babblings about who-likes-who in 5^th period English class. Now here was this woman again, characteristically flitting around the auditorium, greeting people in rapid succession, supervising who should sit where, changing her own seat repeatedly, laughing, shuffling people’s coats here and there. Just as her bubbly appearances on TV exhausted me, the woman was exhausting me here in person.

Her skimming flightiness was turning me into the perfect Scrooge. I was mentally grumbling “What an airhead! Sit down and relax already! Silent night, please!”

But then, a Christmas miracle. The woman oddly paused in mid-sweep down the aisle next to me. She paused, and looked down with intent friendliness at me for a moment. It wasn’t as if she seemed to think she knew me. We’d never met. I’d never volunteered at the local PBS station on any of the nights when she was hosting. But it was as if she suddenly realized some transcendent kinship between us. She paused – and lit up with a sincere, staying smile.

When she moved on, resuming her social butterfly briefness, I thought, “What a nice woman!”

Taking a Dim View - Part III

In Parts I and II of this series, I mentioned how I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about many facets of the political/social scene that I don’t follow on my own. However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. In the previous essays, I focused on lapses that occurred in the panel members’ thinking on the issue of abortion and on the issue of celebrating our true selves. Here I consider how dangerous their support of political correctness has become.

The women often deplore the excesses of political correctness (PC) that characterize our society. But then they go on to indulge in some of those excesses themselves. Some of what I regard as the worst and most dangerous examples of their commitment to PC involve their calls for various people to apologize for saying something viewed as being insensitive or reflective of a prejudiced attitude. All sorts of people from cooking show host Paula Deen to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have been called upon by panel members to apologize for having made insensitive, racist remarks or for having engaged in behavior seen as demeaning to people of color.

One of the panel’s most insistent calls for an apology involved Don Sterling, owner of the LA Clippers Basketball Team. A conversation that Sterling had on the phone with his mistress was recorded and eventually got aired by that mistress. In the conversation, Sterling asked that this off-again/on-again lady friend (herself of black ancestry) not bring any black people to his games. He apparently was saying this in the context of objecting to her flaunting her relationships with black men publicly in front of him.

No one comes off looking good in this exchange. Sterling’s attitude is plainly a narrow, dreary one. His mistress’ penchant for showing off her alliances with other men and then making public a private conversation in which Sterling objected to that, particularly when it came to black men – shows a relationship devoid of any love or regard on either side. The League officials’ resultant ousting of Sterling from his team ownership shows an over-reaction to a dim, befuddled fellow’s errant remark. It was an over-reaction prompted by society’s current irrationally punishing impulse towards anything deemed politically incorrect.

But it was The View panel’s indignant insistence that Sterling be made to abjectly apologize that represented the most disturbing aspect of PC. Haven’t any of the people demanding such apologies read the classic novel Darkness at Noon? In that book, Arthur Koestler vividly shows how tyranny was maintained in Stalinist Russia, and by extension, in all countries in which dictatorships prevail. People in Koestler’s world must be on guard against making even the most casual remarks in private that might be construed as critical of the current regime. Close friends and even family members can’t be trusted not to report them for such dissidence in order to gain credit with the powers that be for bringing noncompliance to light. After a transgression is revealed, the offending party is brought before a tribunal, is made to confess and to abjectly apologize for betraying the principles of the regime. After a sufficient public show has been made of the offending individual’s immiseration, that individual is brought into a back room and shot.

Such tactics prevailed in Russia even after Stalin’s era. They were also Mao’s way, Hitler’s way, and the way of almost all corrupt dictatorships around the world. Even those who haven’t read books such as Darkness at Noon are surely aware of these methods that dictators use to maintain power. Is that really the way advocates of political correctness would have America go? Do they really want us to make a common practice of encouraging the outing of people for the stupid remarks they make in private – then forcing these people to publicly wring their hands in apology and deposing them from whatever career success they might be having?

I don’t think that’s the American way. In order to maintain ourselves as “the land of the free,” people must be allowed to say anything they want to say, anywhere they want to say it, including the most stupid, insensitive things - as long as they don’t go beyond the very specific boundaries that the Supreme Court has established. Those boundaries include the famous injunction against yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater (when there is no fire). The Court also restricts what is regarded as “fighting words” That is speech addressed directly to an individual or to a group that a reasonable person can predict would incite an immediate, violent physical response from that individual or group. This clearly would not include a whispered request not to bring any “blacks” to a game, any more than it would include a whispered, personal request not to bring any “fat chicks,” any “Lithuanians,” or any “short people.” A bent toward such exclusions is indeed most often the sign of a limited, boring person, someone from whom intelligent individuals might want to dissociate themselves. But it cannot be the basis for any officially punitive action.

Furthermore, contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. has no laws against “hate speech.” As a recoil from horrific historic developments, some countries such as Germany now do have strict laws against publicly uttering defamatory remarks. It can even be punishable for a German citizen to anywhere call members of certain groups “freeloaders.” But there are no such restrictions in the U.S. Americans are free in theory, and should be free in practice, from official repercussions - no matter how mean and defamatory their remarks.

But there are more things wrong with demoting, firing, or demanding apologies from individuals who have vented their prejudices, besides the fact that it sets us on the slippery slope to tyranny. Another problem with such enforcements is that they don’t accomplish what they claim to want to accomplish. Making people apologize for racially insensitive words and deeds, or in fact for outright racism - never reforms these people. It doesn’t awaken them to the error of their ways. Forced apologies merely make hypocrites of them.

Beyond that, there’s a problem with these apologies in that they are being extracted in a lopsided way. There’s an inherent inequality in the way in which the PC society is trying to enforce equality. While white people are severely taken to task for any hint of insensitivity or offense to blacks, the reverse is not true. There is not the same level of criticism directed at anyone who makes defamatory remarks aimed at white people as white people – or indeed, until recently, remarks demeaning women. Quite the contrary. Hip-hop artists and rappers such as Snoop Dogg have become the darlings of the intellectual set, despite, or perhaps because of, their misogyny and racism. Snoop Dogg was invited to the White House as a result of President and Mrs. Obama’s enthusiasm for him. Martha Stewart appeared in a friendly roast of him where she was challenged to prove she could get as down and dirty as Snoop himself. (Stewart was generally approved as rising to the occasion.)

Essayist Theodore Dalrymple has observed how people used to try to imitate their betters, and often appeared ludicrous in the attempt. Now, the “betters” strain to imitate the worst, the most violent and vulgar elements of society. These wannabes appear equally as ludicrous in the attempt. While Don Sterling is stripped of his team ownership for his sotto voce request not to bring any blacks to the game – white fans of gangsta rap are bouncing in presumed energetic enjoyment of lyrics such as those by Dead Prez -

We gonna order take out and when we see the driver
We gonna stick the 25 up in his face......
White boy in the wrong place at the right time
Soon as the car door open up he mine
We roll up quick and put the pistol to his nose
By the look on his face he probably shitted in his clothes

The fashion for excusing, justifying, and hopping on the bandwagon of the rap culture goes beyond mere imitation and feigned, fawning enjoyment though. The internet is filled with professorial individuals interpreting the lyrics of Chance the Rapper and Snoop Dogg. These translations of rap lyrics by both black and white writers often include the imputation of profundity and actual genius to the songs under consideration. For example, there’s Chance the Rapper’s “Same Drugs” -

We don't do the same drugs no more
We don't do the, we don't do the same drugs, do the same drugs no more
Cause she don't do the same drugs no more
We don't do the, we don't do the same drugs, do the same drugs no more

When did you change?
Wendy you've aged
I thought you'd never grow up
I thought you'd never
Window closed, Wendy got old
I was too late, I was too late
A shadow of what I once was

Critics agree with Chance that the song isn’t about drugs. According to them, it’s a perceptive take on how Chance and his girlfriend aren’t on the same page anymore. What’s more, they hear the lyrics echoing the plaintive regrets of a Peter Pan-like reluctance to ever grow up. They find touching metaphor and literary synecdoche in the song.

Critics similarly praise the “literary legerdemain, the puns, the playfulness, and the sheer genius” of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics, such as those of his biggest hit, “Gin and Juice” –

Later on that day, my homey
Dr. Dre came through with a gang of Tanqueray
And a fat ass J of some bubonic chronic
That made me choke, shit, this ain't no joke

I had to back up off of it and sit my cup down
Tanqueray and chronic, yeah, I'm fucked up now
But it ain't no stoppin', I'm still poppin'
Dre got some bitches from the city of Compton

To serve me, not with a cherry on top
'Cause when I bust my nut, I'm raisin' up off the cot
Don't get upset girl, that's just how it goes
I don't love you ho's, I'm out the do' and I'll be

Rollin' down the street, smokin' endo
Sippin' on gin and juice, laid back
With my mind on my money

And money on my mind…

One critic again found telling metaphor here, metonymy and a loose-limbed, compelling chronicle of someone rolling breezily through life.

My goodness. Metonymy, synecdoche, playfulness, ingenious punning. It all puts the likes of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to shame. Apparently, such dead white songwriters can’t hold a candle to these modern hip-hop artists. Except, I say – “The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes! The Emperor has no clothes!”

This straining to impute brilliance to so many rappers who are just peeling off random fragments of these-mean-streets vernacular is a shameful display of PC. That’s all the more so because such praise is not equally applied to both white and black performers coming from their respective colloquial cultures. While ghetto performers are praised in intellectual circles, the predominantly white country music performers are seldom seen as displaying any literary genius, playfulness, or astute use of metaphor. Lyrics such as “I’ve got friends in low places,” and “My baby is American-made, born and bred in the U.S.A.” are looked upon with sneering condescension or else ignored altogether by the politically correct.      

Most professorial people, when discussing music, are quick to spurn country music. If they don’t always go quite so far as to instead claim deep enjoyment of Snoop Dogg, they certainly impress upon listeners their appreciation of jazz, the kind of jazz that comes from the soul of the black experience. Forget about the soul of the Appalachian auto mechanic. Such a person ostensibly has no soul.

Despite Ken Burns’ efforts to confer a certain respectability on country folk music by tracing its historical context in his recent PBS series, it’s unlikely that any of the intellectual elite will be moved to embrace it. Political correctness will continue to demand that they dismiss its corn pone whiteness in favor of Snoop Dogg’s presumed gritty, anarchic cogency.

The trouble is, this kind of PC pressure leads people to abandon all standards, all striving towards goodness in art and in personal conduct. They excuse and even affirm any violent, misogynistic, racist attitude when voiced by blacks. They continue to see profundity where there is only mediocrity. They betray what likely would be their true feelings and their essential humanity in favor of their forced affirmation of sentiments such as:

“Kill the white people; we gonna make them hurt; kill the white people; but buy my record first; ha, ha, ha.” (Apache, Time Warner) – or

“It’s time to rob and mob and break the white man off something lovely.” (Dr Dre, Time Warner)

Any white performer singing such lyrics with the word “black” replacing “white” would not be praised; he would be condemned.

But the final problem with PC is that it constrains all normal, friendly human relations. It puts everyone on a hair trigger, cocked to take offense or to accuse the other of some PC infraction. Slamming people out of a social circle because of a narrow expression deemed to be non-PC hardly helps to create a less prejudiced, more welcoming atmosphere. You can’t fight for inclusion by excluding people at the drop of a hat.

I have personally been both the recipient and the perpetrator of such PC flash-over. Quite a few years ago (the reign of PC has been going on for some time), I invited a woman from the Libertarian Party over for lunch. During the brief contact I’d had with her at Libertarian meetings, she’d voiced an interesting, informed mix of conservative/liberal ideas that were the best of what I thought Libertarian philosophy should be. I felt the woman might be good friendship material, someone to cultivate. Unfortunately, our lunch went cold very soon.

We happened to get on the subject of the Chicago public school system and the woman mentioned the fact that well over a third of elementary school students in the City were black. I registered surprise at this. Indeed, I was amazed. The woman angrily asked me why that should matter so much to me. I could see she had interpreted my astonishment as dismay – a skinhead’s revulsion at the thought of being surrounded by black faces, a fear of being outnumbered by “the enemy.”

Actually, my surprise over the statistic had an altogether different cause. I’d recently been at a meeting of a local teachers’ association and I recalled that almost all the teachers there had been white. So I wondered - if so many students in the system were black, why weren’t there more black teachers?

But the bad impression I’d left was irrevocable. It would have been useless for me to explain. Anything I said would have come off as backpedaling justification. We finished our lunch in stony politeness. The only other time I ever heard from the woman was when I received a form notice inviting me to a gathering at her house to stuff envelopes for the coming campaign.

But there were times when I was the rush-to-judgement accuser. I remember the last time I so heartily indulged in that form of haughty appraisal. I don’t exactly remember what had provoked my censure, but I was walking down the street telling my companion how stupid someone I’d met had obviously been because that person had uttered a slur against some other race or ethnic group. To my tirade I added the cliché observation that “People always seem to need to feel superior to some other group. They sense their own inherent inferiority, so they have to fish around for some way to feel superior. They really are inferior though,” I pronounced.

My companion, older and wiser than I was – winked at me and said, “It’s enough to make you feel superior, isn’t it.”

“Epiphany” is a much over-used word, but I had an epiphany at that moment. Yes! What I had really been doing with my little speech was feeling superior to all those benighted others who were prone to making prejudiced, non-PC remarks. Of course there are standards that should be maintained. I’m not someone who believes all opinions are equally valid or that all actions should be allowed. Certainly, anyone poised to make some violent attack against the target of his or her prejudices should be stopped. But indignant rants such as the one I made that day against people who have simply voiced stereotyping remarks - is not the way to change things for the better. My criticism, even if I’d made it directly to the offending parties, would certainly not have turned anyone into a more loving human being. I knew that. So I’d indulged in that criticism merely for the purpose of getting a charge. I was energizing myself with a sense of my own superiority and I was intent on demonstrating that superiority to others.

I realized then that that’s what most PC is about. It’s self-serving. Its only purpose and its only result is to make a display of how much better the accuser is than all those left-in-the-dirt others. The critic gets to feel oh-so-superior to those who feel superior to black people, or Lithuanians, or short people, etc., etc.

If anyone truly wants to bring about a more welcoming, inclusive society, declaring others to be stupid, prejudiced Neanderthals is not the way to do it. Countering other people’s name-calling with name-calling of one’s own won’t accomplish anything. If will only tend to entrench those other people in their prejudices. So how could you go about changing others’ opinions? How would it be possible to deflate others’ prejudices?

Someone posed just that question in the Quora forum recently and Michael McFadden gave an interesting, reasoned answer. He suggested that you give people a chance to simply listen to a different idea. Give them a chance to listen - quietly, alone, unsurrounded by challenge. Any personal confrontation will put others on the defensive, forcing them to defend, justify, retort, and up the ante of hatred. But just give them a chance to sit silently exposed to a better way.

For example, if someone has notoriously been spouting some negative stereotypes about Jewish people, you might give her a ticket to a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. That shouldn’t be done as obvious rebuttal to her floating anti-Semitism. Just present the theater ticket as a gift to a popular production that has been legitimately praised by critics. Similarly give someone who has expressed a fear of black people moving into his neighborhood a ticket to a production of A Raisin in the Sun, the acclaimed Lorraine Hansberry play about a black family moving into a white neighborhood. On the other side of the coin, if a black person seems locked into characterizing “poor white trash” as his enemy, you might give him a DVD of the documentary Harlan County USA. That documentary shows the struggles of Kentucky coal miners to wring some safety measures and a living wage out of the mine owners. In the same vein, literally, the John Sayles’ documentary Matewan shows West Virginia coal miners initially clashing with the black men brought in as “scabs” to break their efforts to unionize. But ultimately the blacks and whites join forces to make the mines less deadly places. Moving along to another kind of non-PC attitude, you might give the man who is ever-ready with a sexist joke a DVD set of the TV miniseries Human Trafficking. This dramatization graphically shows how a young Czech mother thinks she has finally found love only to be brutally initiated into the sex slave trade.

While using these kinds of gifts, the non-PC individuals can sit alone in the dark, watching, listening, without any pressure to feel or to react a certain way. Their mental pores can open and in this unthreatening atmosphere they can perhaps relax into learning something new, into feeling a different way. Their presumed nemeses can be humanized. Perhaps the recipients of such gifts can be moved off their set point of prejudice to see that we all have a common struggle to make this a better, kinder world.

Self-important denunciations of those deemed to have broken PC rules won’t do anything to accomplish such a goal. Political correctness becomes like a barbed wire fence between people. Until or unless people prove themselves to be imminently dangerous or riddled with truly homicidal anger, we should approach them with understanding – and perhaps more. Perhaps we should even go so far as to follow Goethe’s advice when he wrote that the only opinion worth voicing about the choices of others is one that springs from “a certain… enthusiasm, or from a loving interest in the person… All else is vanity.”