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Rebel
From
"Multitudes:
An Unauthorized Memoir"
By
Sam Smith
So I ended
up much as I started: the kid they sent to right field because
he couldn't or wouldn't play the game right.
I didn't
plan it this way. I didn't want it this way. In truth, a large
part of me still would have liked to have been one of the popular
boys in the class, but things kept getting in the way - some
addictive confluence of moral aggravation, periodic accident,
undisciplined imagination, sporadic and unpremeditated courage
randomly suppressing chronic shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism,
episodic existentialism, recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness
and an abiding intolerance for the dull. A child's dreams and
an adult's faith pounding tide after tide on the rock of reality,
thinking that maybe this time I'll float off.
Some people
take it personally, as though I rebelled simply to annoy them.
They make little jokes about the fact that I'm different, as
if I had a moral obligation to be like them. When they see someone
like me coming, they close the doors of their institutions, their
imaginations, and their hearts. We are, after all, thieves who
might abscond with their most precious possession: the tranquility
of unexamined certainty.
But it's
really more like Vaclav Havel said long ago when he was still
a rebel:
You do not become
a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this
most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal
sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external
circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and
placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt
to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of
society . . . "
Those
dissidents who somehow remain connected to the normal find themselves
alone in the crowd. Even in my home town, I often feel an exile
- as though all had emigrated except for me, as though somehow
I had missed the ship.
It's often
not easy. Albert Camus spoke of the tremendous energy some must
expend "merely to be normal" and added:
The rebel can never
find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does
evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once
and for all - he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
Emerson
also understood the problem:
You will always
find those who think they know what is your duty better than
you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's
opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the
great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect
sweetness the independence of solitude.
Still,
you can't talk about such things because it would further confirm
the belief that you are best ignored, dismissed, or considered
absurd. So you become the charming stranger from a strange place,
you tell the jokes first, and you change the subject when it
starts to get too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them
into thinking that you are one of them even though you really
blend better with those the urban itinerant Joe Gould once described
as the "cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens
and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats."
Still,
among the illusions of my life has been that if I stuck it out
long enough, time would provide the acceptance that my words
and thoughts had prevented. I. F. Stone used to say that when
you're young you're blamed for things you didn't do and when
you're older you get credit for them. It hasn't worked out like
that, in part because just when I should have started coasting,
the world around me took a nasty, greedy and dangerous turn.
America began destroying itself. It was the wrong time to start
fitting in .
True,
the best period for a revolution of the good is when one is young.
To be twenty or thirty and part of an uprising of the collective
soul is a rare gift of life. It does spoil you, though, for you
go through the rest of your time wondering why that moment went
away and why nothing seems able to bring it back.
What was
unexpected, both in timing and intensity, was that I would not
only live through one of America's great revivals but during
a subsequent era when my country -- without debate, consideration,
or struggle -- decided it really didn't want to be America any
more.
Few even
talked about it, but, as a writer and as a child of segregation,
I knew that in the silence could be something as telling and
evil as words. After all, the language of the old south was most
descriptive in what it didn't say - and what wasn't allowed to
be said.
Much later
I would come across the words of a German university professor
who described to journalist Milton Mayer what it had been like
under the Nazis in the 1930s:
To live in the process
is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me --
unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness,
acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step
was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion,
'regretted.'. . .
Believe me this
is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but
only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You
wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such
a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.. . .
Suddenly it all
comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have
done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was
all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You
remember those early meetings of your department in the university
when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but
no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or
that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything
now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond
repair.
William
Shirer noted something similar in Nightmare Years:
What surprised me
at first was that most Germans, so far as I could see, did not
seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away,
that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and
replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work
were becoming regimented to a degree never before experienced
even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of
regimentation . . . Yet the Nazi terror in those early years,
I was beginning to see, affected the lives of relatively few
Germans. The vast majority did not seem unduly concerned with
what happened to a few Communists, Socialists, pacifists, defiant
priests and pastors, and to the Jews. A newly arrived observer
was forced, however reluctantly, as in my own case, to conclude
that on the whole the people did not seem to feel that they were
being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the
contrary, and much to my surprise, they appeared to support it
with genuine enthusiasm.
Shortly
before his death in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern
Are Dead, Rosencrantz says:
What was it all
about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? .
. . We've done nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we?
. . . There must have been a moment, at the beginning, when we
could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.. . . Well, we'll
know better next time.
I didn't
want to miss the moment. This wasn't an act of nobility; it came
more from fear of shame. Consequences can't be wholly unintentional
once you've imagined them. Successfully deny or ignore them and
you'll die happy. Open your eyes and you become irrevocably responsible,
with all the pain, doubt, and fear that goes with it.
And now
the stakes may be even higher than just for better or for worse.
This time the stupid things we have done to this planet may not
be forgiven. This time democracy may be not only staggering,
but gone.
Still,
this is not something you talk about over dinner and get invited
back. And so, "you wait for one shocking occasion, thinking
that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting
somehow."
But it
doesn't happen and you know it's not happening and you don't
have the slightest idea of what to do about it except to use
the archaic tools of your trade and the stores of your mind as
best you can, not permit the hostility towards the effort depress
you too much, and try to enjoy the countervailing virtues and
strengths of the struggle, as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of Hester
Prynne in the Scarlet Letter:
"She had wandered,
without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as
intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest. . . Her intellect
and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places. . . The
tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free."
o
I have
tried to help keep alive the beleaguered tradition of plain speaking
and truth-seeking that I understood to be at the heart of good
journalism. But in a time when much of the media prefers perceptions
to facts, bullet quotes to understanding and spin over reality,
such efforts are seen as eccentric at best, apostasy at worst.
The proper journalist has become, wittingly or not, the accomplice
of a system in which news, advertising and agitprop are hopelessly
mingled and the facts fatally adulterated. Truth has little to
do with it anymore. It is as if we are living in a new Middle
Ages, only with the myth being driven by cable TV rather than
by the church.
Further,
where once saying unconventional things was regarded as hip,
it is now considered 'inappropriate.' Hipness has become a fashion
statement - a consumer selection carefully synchronized with
corporate intent rather than outward evidence of a state of mind
free of the corporatized state. And so it is easy to feel ostracized,
alone and ineffectual. Such feelings are bad enough at 26, but
far harder at 66 if for no other reason than that you have less
time to recover from them.
I know
because I've had the feelings at both ages. And at both ages
the despair has often been exaggerated, self-defeating, and self-fulfilling.
Which isn't to say unnecessary, for wrestling with the pain of
living is one of the surest signs that you are still alive. The
problem is that you never know when you're exaggerating and when
you've got it right.
o
Part of
my love of the craft of journalism has been the simple joy of
possessing the license to go wherever curiosity leads, to consider
no place in the planet alien to my inquiry, to use words as a
child uses little plastic blocks. Part of it has been the pleasure
of deliberately learning more about something than any reasonable
person would want to know.
Tina Hobson
once said of her husband, the civil rights activist, "The
trouble with Julius is that he takes the Constitution personally."
I suffer from a similar debility. But sometimes people credit
me with a sense of justice when in fact I am just titillated,
fascinated or surprised. In such ways I have also disappointed
some of my more didactic allies who expected me to stick to business
and not be distracted by the noise of news and the search for
better words with which to describe it.
George
Orwell faced something similar and wrote:
Anyone who cares
to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda
it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant.
I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world
view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive
and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style,
to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid
objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying
to suppress that side of myself.
I also
want to walk away from it at will. Back in the 60s, I was sitting
in an office on 8th Street SE in Washington talking with one
of the sergeants of the War on Poverty. It was shortly after
the riots of April 1968 and our conversation drifted in the shadows
of those smoky and charred days. Then the community organizer
stopped in mid-sentence and said, "Look, Sam, all I really
want to do is to sit on my front stoop in the sun, drink beer,
and shoot craps."
His words
keep coming back, a reminder that even the best politics are
a pretty poor substitute for life and that the worst politics
compound their felony by forcing us to leave the front stoop
to do something about them. Our quarrel with the abuse of power
should be not only be that it is cruel and stupid but that it
takes so much time way from other things -- like loving and being
loved, and music, and a good meal and the sunset of a gentle
day. In a nation ablaze with struggles for power, we are too
often forced to choose between being a co-conspirator in the
arson or a member of the volunteer fire department. And, too
often, as we immerse ourselves in the terrible relevance of our
times, beauty and happiness seem to drift away.
That community
organizer in the dingy office on 8th Street understood that the
proper end of politics was not a policy, not a budget, not an
ideology, not even worthy abstractions like peace and justice,
but rather good places, and good days and healthy and happy people
-- the collective little republics of our individual hopes and
dreams.
In the
melancholy that descends from time to time, in the loneliness
that lies like a desert between myself and my imagination, I
think about opportunities and offers that have come my way that
I brazenly - wantonly, some might say - rejected. I think I knew
in my heart that if I had accepted such things, I would have
ended up broken or fired. And probably a drunk as well.
And as
best as I can tell, my real impetus was not masochism but a truly
manic, grandiose, and cockeyed optimism - the faith that even
in late 20th century America I could do something on my own that
would be even better than what I could if I just did what was
expected of me.
Saul Alinsky
was once asked by a seminarian how he could retain his values
as he made his way through the church, "That's easy,"
replied Alinsky. "Just decide now whether you wish to be
a cardinal or a priest." It was a choice I made early.
As far
back as high school, when I first read of Thoreau's preference
for sitting on a pumpkin and having it all to himself to being
crowded on a velvet stool, I had rated freedom ahead of power.
Raised in dysfunctional luxury, I have placed an abnormal emphasis
on things I could do without benefit of social standing, money,
or power, such as writing, playing the piano, . . and imagining.
I would come to suspect that I had spent a lifetime trying to
finish the script of a radio show first concocted under the covers
as a child - a lifelong broadcast in which I was the stumbling
protagonist. I have tried to live a daydream - one that began
because I didn't like what was going on downstairs. And still
don't.
I can't
recommend such a way; I can't even justify having tried it. A
lot of it doesn't make sense. I spurned the normal icons of ambition,
yet was so ambitious that I sought the unattainable. I gave the
outward impression of a radical but in my heart was just a moderate
of a time that had yet to arrive. I constantly sought change
but was most happy enjoying the changeless virtues of music and
conversation and returning to the mooring after a long, happy
day on the bay.
Sometimes
I would think of myself as a reluctant draftee, called up to
serve in the struggle that Albert Camus described: "It is
those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against
history who really advance its interests." I didn't really
want to do it. I just had to. What I wanted most was that the
struggle be won so I could live in a land where people laughed
and made new friends and were gentle with one another. So I could
return to that place where the sun hit the front stoop just right
on a quiet morning, reminding me that this was how good everything
else could be as well.
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