I remember the day I started in on my career as an angry young man. In the summer of 1955 I was passing the hours between fishing and dinner on the veranda of Sunrise Camp, the rustic fishing resort outside Minocqua, Wisconsin, where my parents had met. We all went up there for a week or two at least once every year.
The veranda ran the length of the building, its windows looking out on Gunlock Lake. The long wall behind held three sets of French doors that opened into the big dining room, between each set a wall of bookshelves. They held the random books abandoned by thirty years of guests, and I could always find something that looked interesting in them. At 13, I’d been an obsessive reader for years. I had already run through most of the kids’ books by then and graduated to the “adult” category.
On the day in question, browsing along one of the shelves, I saw a nauseatingly pink dust jacket, barred with black panels that bore the author’s name in script and one of those cartoon pointing fingers you used to see in old buildings, indicating the way up the stairs to Doctor Smudge’s or Lawyer Crank’s office. Opus 21, read the title. The author was someone named Philip Wylie. Intrigued by some aspect of that jacket spine, I followed the pointing finger into the book.
As I found later, Opus 21 was typical Wylie fare, part novel, mostly Wylie’s diatribes about the various aspects of contemporary American society he despised. That added up to plenty of aspects, among them our Victorian pretenses to sexual abstinence. That one held particular appeal for a 13-year-old boy still wrestling with church teachings, incessant tumescence, and guilt. When our week came to an end, I took the book home with me, read and re-read it and others by Wylie. I’d found an adult who found adult society phony and contemptible. I found other such authors. Pretty soon, I was one very angry teenager. (I recently came on a wonderfully accurate description of myself in those years in Donna Leon’s Death at La Fenice: “He had discovered, by himself, that the world is corrupt and the system unjust, and that men in power were interested in that and that alone. Because he was the first person ever to have made this discovery with such force and purity, he insisted upon showing his ample contempt for all those not yet graced with the clarity of his vision.” That was me, all right, for about the next sixty years.
Not that the world failed to provide plenty of support for my darkest accusations. The parade of lies that various Presidents and their henchmen trotted out to justify the war In Vietnam, the revelations of Kennedy’s collusion with mobsters like Mooney Giancana in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the crimes of the Nixon administration, Watergate the least of them, the blatant lies of corporate flacks and advertisers, the revelations of ecclesiastical outrages and their coverups – each decade’s evening news offered a rich smorgasbord of outrages. Volunteer work in the criminal justice system provided further fare for my anger.
How much of that anger was a matter of generational fashion? Plenty, I now believe. In the 60s, you were supposed to be angry, to scorn The Establishment, to be a part of The Revolution. I and my immensely privileged fellow students at Claremont Graduate School in 1968 felt obliged to join the rebellious, and organized a meeting with some faculty members willing to listen to our Demands. After the meeting had gone on for a short while, the only Demand we found ourselves able to formulate was that the faculty should quit calling us “Mister” or “Miss,” and use our first names. The pillars of Empire trembled.
I think my anger peaked On September 8, 1974, When Gerald Ford, the new President, pardoned Richard Nixon after Nixon resigned in disgrace. (Ford had achieved the vice-Presidency when Spiro Agnew, his predecessor, was driven from office for various crimes; he pled nolo contendre to one felony count, was fined $10,000 and served 3 years unsupervised probation.) Ford rationalized the pardon in the most passive of passive voices:
It is believed that a trial of Richard Nixon, if it became necessary, could not fairly begin until a year or more has elapsed. In the meantime, the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States. The prospects of such trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.
Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.
It seemed to me that this language essentially stated that a criminal President was, in fact, beyond the reach of law, and therefore pronounced a death sentence on the rule of law in the United States. (Subsequent presidencies have done nothing to change my view.) I felt I must take action.
I don’t think I stole the idea from Johnny Cash, but in any case my action consisted of wearing nothing but black each day I went to work – black shoes, black socks, black trousers, a black polyester shirt. I let it be known among my colleagues and students that I was wearing my funereal gear to mourn the death of democracy. They were unimpressed, though increasingly awed by the cloud of polyester mixed with body odor I left in my righteous wake as the months wore on.
The 80s brought Reagan, the beginning of the end of the New Deal, the transfer of the economy to untouchable thieves in three-piece suits, the elevation of Greed to a cardinal virtue. The 90s brought Clinton and the final dismemberment of the New Deal, and so on. I stayed angry. I wrote letters to Congress creatures and editors. I began to notice that I had more and more company, although most of the new angry ranting was coming from far to the right of mine. That raised the first hints of doubt in me about my anger, doubts crystalized by my late brother Jerry Mosier one day. I forget what I’d been running on about, but after I ran out of gas, Jerry leaned back against in his chair and observed, in his West Texas voice, “Will Rogers used to say that when you point your finger at someone, there’s always three fingers pointin’ back at you.” I knew it was an old saw, but the image was so clear and so inarguably true that it shut me up, at least for that day.
But what really shut me up was the gift I received in August of 2016, a stroke that put me in the hospital for a few days, then in rehab for a few months. While it took its toll on my hearing, vision and manual dexterity, the stroke left me fully mobile and no less rational than usual. It also prompted me to start writing a memoir (and later another) for my daughter and grandkids, and during that project I became much better acquainted with those other three fingers. As I wrote about the various political and social campaigns I’d engaged in, reviewed the self-righteous screeds I’d produced, I kept running into the guy who’d been doing all those things, and into all the other things he’d been doing that had hurt the wonderful people in his life, all the hypocritical selfishness . . . . I could go on, but I needn’t. I think most of us keep a corner in the attic for our personal Hall of Shame.
What I’d begun to see was elegantly summarized by the writer Edward Hoagland in his essay “Running Mates”: “Not villains or traitors or scam-men populate the world: just ordinary, evasive, self-absorbed jacks and jills hamstrung by modest miscues committed years ago, like us.”
I”d also, after a long love affair with crime fiction, the endless wrestling match between Good and Evil, begun reading history. At first I stayed within the last century or so, but one disaster led back to another, as they do, and before too long I found myself a millennium deep in madness, short-sighted self interest, fully legal cruelty, one utopian scheme after another leading to one hell on earth after another; history. Leafing through one of the innumerable collections of quotations, all attributed without any documentation to one famous sage or another, I found a perfect expression of the conclusion my reading had led me to, supposedly uttered by Gustave Flaubert: “Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.”
But I’d been reminded, over and over, that if people had always been “like this,” they’d always as well produced their own antitheses. In a long piece about the “War on Terror,” I had written, “My own experience has also taught me that we are not entirely a nation of used car dealers. I have known far too many Americans who lived by the principles Jesus and Lincoln taught and lived, whether they called themselves Christians or Republicans or not, to see all of America as represented by a cheapjack used car hustler, or by the current administration, or by the Kenneth Lays who call the administration’s martial tunes. I have known men and women who’ve taken the most terrible blows life has to offer and marched through them without a whimper. I have known men and women devoted to improving the lives of everyone their lives touched, without any sort of public recognition or support. I have known men and women who’ve never stopped working to perfect their art or craft, without any sort of public recognition or support. I’ve known men and women who cared for their friends more than they did for themselves, and who cared as much for utter strangers in need. I’ve known men and women who lay down successful careers because they cared more for non-human life than for their own individual lives.” I’d discovered more such people wherever I looked in history.
The horrors and outrages of human behavior have scarcely abated over the past five years of my life, nor have I come to find them any more acceptable than I ever did. It’s just that reviewing my own outrageous conduct throughout my life has left me with no taste for condemning that of others. I find I have plenty to do trying to keep a lid on my own baser nature. This realization has rendered anger irrelevant. (James Kunen, bemused by the news medias’ fascination with plane crashes, observed that plane crashes resembled stepping in dog shit, in that, “You can’t say, ‘I’ll never do that again.” The same goes for human mischief.)
I have no certain ideas about what human life is all about. It seems to me now that the Seneca perception of this cosmos and our little piece of it as the site for a battle between twin brothers is accurate – reliably predictive. Thomas Perry, in Dance for the Dead, described it this way: “Hawenneyu, the Right-Handed Twin, creates people, birds, trees. Hanegoategeh, the Left-Handed twin, makes cancer, number-six birdshot, Dutch Elm disease. For every measure, a countermeasure: Hawenneyu makes fire and houses, Hanegoategeh makes the fire burn the houses.”
So now I choose to spend whatever days remain to me on the side of Hawenneyu, passing back to others as many as I can of the gifts of love and compassion and joy and laughter I’ve received throughout my life. That’s battle enough, and one that requires no anger at all – in fact, precludes it.
I couldn’t put my conclusion better than did the great baseball man Dusty Baker: “I honestly believe that what you learn in this game is not yours to possess, but yours to pass on. I believe that, whether it’s equipment, knowledge, or philosophy, that’s the only way the game shall carry on. I believe that you have to talk, communicate, and pass on what was given to you. You can’t harbor it. You can’t run off to the woods and keep it for yourself, because it isn’t yours to keep. And what you teach other guys is the torch you pass. I don’t make this up – it was passed to me.”
