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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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