“If you start taking what’s pure in a man, and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can’t help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don’t have anything left to give.”
— Sidney Bechet
Shortly before I began teaching at El Paso Community College, the US Army began enforcing a policy of “up or out,” meaning that career non-commissioned officers, if they hadn’t been promoted within some span of service, would be summarily discharged into civilian life. Quite a few men (women were not yet serving in the regular army) suddenly found themselves out of what they’d thought was a career, thrust into a civilian world that was undergoing major changes and that often viewed the military with anger or contempt. Some of these men had planned to retire from the military, and had given little or no thought to how they might make a living in “the world.”
The community college, sensing the birth of a new customer base, promptly assigned a number of teachers in the Developmental Studies division the job of creating a program to help prepare these sudden rejects for civilian life. Quite a few came to the college hoping to train for a new career, only to find that their basic math and English skills fell short of the levels required for the occupational programs they wanted. I and another English teacher, Mark Miller, reading teacher Jane Peterson, and math teacher Rich Harms put together a full, two-semester program, dubbed “Introduction to College,” designed to bring these prospective students up to college level. A mandatory course, also called “Introduction to College,” would, we supposed, introduce them to the ways of academic discourse.
I was fairly fresh out of grad school and still gravely ill with academic discourse. I also knew everything, plus, and believed it my duty as well as my pleasure to share my views with captive audiences.
It’s taken me about fifty years to do it, but I’ve managed to repress almost all memory of what sorts of wisdom I attempted to inflict on those poor students. The one thing I do remember is how we’d close the course at the end of each quarter, showing a short film called Art Is.
I haven’t repressed my memory of that film’s contents. I’ve just forgotten them, except that they included many interviews with practitioners of all sorts of visual and other arts and those artists’ remarks on what art meant to their lives. I also remember that this celebration moved me to a point near tears. The first time we showed the film, I was so moved that I felt I should announce the film’s moral, in case anyone had missed it. Voice hoarse with emotion, I allowed as how the film showed that everyone contained the seeds of creation, that everyone should try to find those seeds within, that creating art was valuable in itself, even if it never produced a dime. There were other values than monetary ones, I said, values of far greater value. . . . to emphasize my point, I pulled what proved to be a ten dollar bill out of my pocket and set it afire. It burned down until I had to shake it out, tossing the charred remnants to the floor. That! for your money, was my message.
Back then in 1971, a tenner was nearly equivalent to a hundred today – not big money, but big enough to be taken seriously. I don’t recall how my gesture was received by the students, though I do remember that another math teacher, not a member of our team, heard about it and was properly scandalized. It must have had some sort of effect, since I felt obliged to repeat it every time we concluded another session of “Introduction to College” in the years that followed.
Those little conflagrations didn’t seem to bring about the sweeping social changes we were all imagining were right around the corner in those days. Quite the opposite of the changes we envisioned were right around the corner, and by the end of my teaching days, early in this next century, the monetization of every aspect of American society, including the arts, including education, had been effectively completed. The oligarchs had gained control and their religion of limitless greed had prevailed. Marilyyne Robinson summed up our situation nicely in The Death of Adam:
We know that Communism was a theology, a church militant, with sacred texts and with saints and martyrs and prophets, with doctrines about the nature of the world and of humankind, with immutable laws and millennial visions and life-pervading judgments about the nature of good and evil. No doubt it failed finally for the same reason it lasted as long as it did, because it was a theology, gigantic and rigid and intricate, taking authority from its disciplines and its hierarchies even while they rendered it fantastically ill-suited to the practical business of understanding and managing an economy. It seems to me that, obedient to the great laws which sooner or later makes one the image of one’s enemy, we have theologized our own economic system, transforming it into something likewise rigid and tendentious and therefore always less useful to us. It is an American-style, stripped-down, low-church theology, its clergy largely self-ordained, golf-shirted, the sort one would be not at all surprised and only a little alarmed to find on one’s doorstep. Its teachings are very, very simple: There really are free and natural markets where the optimum value of things is assigned to them; everyone must compete with everyone; the worthy will prosper and the unworthy fail; those who succeed while others fail will be made deeply and justly happy by this experience, having had no other object in life; each of us is poorer for every cent that is used toward the wealth of all of us; governments are instituted among men chiefly to interfere with the working out of these splendid principles.
This is such a radical obliteration of culture and tradition, let us say of Jesus and Jefferson, as to awe any Bolshevik, of course. But then contemporary discourse is innocent as a babe unborn of any awareness of culture and tradition, so the achievement is never remarked. It is nearly sublime, a sort of cerebral whiteout. But my point here is that unsatisfactory economic ideas and practices which have an impressive history of failure, which caused to founder that great nation California, which lie at the root of much of the shame and dread and division and hostility and cynicism with which our society is presently afflicted, are treated as immutable truths, not to be questioned, not to be interfered with, lest they unleash their terrible retribution, recoiling against whomever would lay a hand on the Ark of Market Economics, if that is the name under which this mighty power is currently invoked.
***
After I retired from the community college, I kept on plugging for a few more years at DeVry University, where one of the graduating classes asked me to be their commencement speaker. I took the occasion to suggest that not all bottom lines had dollar signs in front of them:
It’s Not All About the Benjamins
(An Address to the Graduating Class of 2004, DeVry University, Colorado Springs)
First, let me thank you for asking me to talk to you on this happy occasion. I’m not sure what brought about your invitation, since I don’t think even those of you who know me are aware that, in another of my incarnations, I’m a minister of the Universal Life Church, and that I specialize in presiding at weddings – another happy occasion. So far, I’ve only had to preside at one funeral. We all hope this won’t turn into my second one of those. Whatever caused your invitation, I take it as a very high honor. I admire you all so much for enduring what you have endured to reach this point. I am now supposed to tell you the following: your whole future lies ahead of you, and now my generation has prepared you to accept the torch of responsibility from our flagging grasp; now that we have equipped you with the tools education provides, you should certainly be able to do more with them than we have.
I certainly hope so.
A brief and sour summary of my generation’s track record: we started out in the 1960s with high hopes that we could bring about justice and peace. We would create real communities, in which everyone cared for everyone else. We would become spiritually enlightened through the use of psychedelic drugs, and then generously share our enlightenment with the rest of a waiting world. It would be easy. The Beatles told us so: Love, love, love…Love, love, love…Love is all you need. Drugs make a lot of things look easy.
By the ’70s, we discovered that the waiting world wasn’t waiting for us or our message, and that bringing about peace and justice and universal free peanut butter would require a tremendous amount of hard, tedious work. So we decided to retreat into drugs and disco and glitter rock, which allowed us to keep shocking our elders with “unisex” styles of hair and dress. Guys wearing dresses and lipstick don’t really present a serious challenge to the Military-Industrial Complex, but if they stayed stoned all the time, it was easy to pretend that they were still engaged in some kind of revolutionary activity.
One problem with drugs, however, is that you build up tolerance – you either need to take more and more of the same drug to achieve the desired effect, or you need to take a stronger drug. Enter cocaine and other forms of speed.
But the problem with cocaine and its derivatives was stated nicely by the great American writer Robert Stone: “They discovered that the principal thing you do with cocaine is run out of it.” And it cost lots and lots of money to keep running out of it.
And so, in the ’80s, when “morning in America” was declared, we were quite ready to embrace the idea that the purpose of life was not really to bring about peace and justice, but to make lots and lots of money. Somewhere in the mid ’80s, a T-shirt became widely available that summed up the message: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” In the ’90s, the preeminent toys became the Computer and the Internet, by which we were all going to be turned into overnight millionaires.
Until we weren’t. But the great technology bubble of the ’90s burst without disturbing the beliefs it had encouraged: the belief that greed is good, the belief that everyone can and should make it on his or her own, the belief that our lives should be dedicated to acquiring material possessions. That’s the belief system that seems to have become something like a religious dogma. Republicans, Democrats, neo-conservatives, neo-liberals – nobody seems to questions the basic proposition: he who dies with the most toys wins.
This last semester, I’ve had a running argument with one of my students. He has a favorite phrase, his answer to any question about human behavior: “It’s all about the Benjamins.” The Benjamins he refers to are the portraits that appear on hundred-dollar bills. One night when I challenged his analysis, he replied, “Give me one example of somebody doing something that isn’t for the Benjamins, then.”
That was pretty easy. I told him that even if I didn’t need the money I was making teaching his class, I’d be doing it anyway. I told him that after I “retired” three years ago from teaching, I’d enjoyed doing other things for about three months, but that after that I’d begun feeling less and less like myself. I told him that I’d be teaching his class for nothing an hour if I could afford to.
All that was true.
It’s also true that the day of universal free peanut butter is not here yet, and not likely to be here. Keeping food on the table and a roof over the heads and a car that runs isn’t easy, and it doesn’t look to get any easier. So if I say, “It’s not all about the Benjamins,” I’m not advising you that “love is all you need.” I’m advising you that the Benjamins aren’t all you need, either.
In my very fortunate life, I’ve gotten the chance to work as a journalist, a playwright, a bartender, a performer, a musician, a criminal defense investigator. Everything I dreamed about doing as a kid, I’ve done – done enough of to know what it was about. (Well… everything except play left field for the Cubs. And when it comes to the Cubs, who knows – there may still be a call-up in my future.) But during all those experiences, I never stopped teaching. I never stopped teaching because what teaching is about is sharing everything you’ve learned from whatever you’ve been and done with other people. Some of them even want to hear about it, and all of them have something of their own to share.
One of my favorite writers, a guy named Dave Hickey who lives in Las Vegas, wrote in his great book Air Guitar about the way he learned the pleasure of talking about things you love by going into the little stores and art galleries and bookshops in Manhattan as a young man: “If you were a nobody like me, and didn’t know anything, you could go into one of them and find things out. People would talk to you, not because you were going to buy something, but because they loved the stuff they had to sell….And I love that kind of talk, have lived on it and lived by it….To me, it has always been the heart of the mystery, the heart of the heart: the way people talk about loving things, which things, and why.” I have been lucky enough to live on and by that kind of talk as well.
I had better say quickly that I’m not trying to talk you into giving up your day jobs and becoming teachers, although I wouldn’t try to talk you out of it. What I am trying to talk you into is to never quit trying to make your work into an occasion for humanity – for helping other people, for making your part of their day a little better, for passing on the things you know about that have been worth knowing – fun to know, useful to know, sometimes lifesaving to know.
As an example of the latter, I’ll tell you a story about Speedy Gonzalez. Speed was a short, very fat Sergeant in my company in Hoechst, Germany. Against all advice, I’d loaned this man a lot of money. Even on an E-4’s pay, I had money to loan, and I loaned it out at no interest to anyone who asked. Everyone told me that Speedy never paid his debts, and I might as well have thrown my money out the kaserne window.
One night I was walking downtown, toward a bar, no doubt, when I heard footsteps coming up behind me. They weren’t coming fast – just a little faster than the pace I was setting. As they got nearer, and I was deciding I might turn around, I felt the point of a knife between my ribs, just nudging me a little. I did a kind of modified, spastic ballet leap up in the air and landed facing my assailant. Who turned out to be none other than Sgt. Gonzalez, calmly folding his blade back into its case. He looked up at me, and said, very seriously, “Mac – don’t ever let somebody come up behind you like that.” And before I knew it, he was gone up a side street, whistling.
As far as I’m concerned, he paid me back with interest that night. Funny thing is, he also eventually paid me back all the money I’d loaned him, too. But the interest was worth a lot more, and I’ve been in quite a few places in the years since then that I survived because of that little lesson.
One of the things I’ve noticed over my sixty-some years is that people in general seem to be talking less and less to each other. Since the advent of e-mail and the internet, we don’t even tell very many jokes to each other any more. They come to us now when we’re by ourselves, sitting in front of the screen. Maybe we forward them on to a friend. But we no longer tell them. Our conversation has a lot less laughter in it.
And of course, there seems to be a lot less conversation, period. With every new labor-saving device, we seem to have less time and energy for each other. The laborsaving devices are constantly demanding our attention. The devices that bring us information are constantly bringing us more information, so we never have a chance to process any of it, to think about it, to compare it with the information we already had stored up, to see if it’s valid or useful, to talk to other people about it – there’s always another voice demanding our attention, another electronic pitch to listen to or try to ignore.
And yet, in the end, what does a life amount to but what you’ve given to other people? Those moments when you’ve stopped to laugh with someone, or to hold them while they weep, or to help them get something done they can’t do by themselves, or figure out something that’s keeping them miserable?
We’re all walking around carrying 32 pounds per square inch of atmosphere on our bodies all the time – and anyone who lives very long winds up carrying a lot more weight than that. Burdens of responsibility and grief and regret and uncertainty of all sorts. We need each other to share those loads, and help us forget how heavy they are, or sometimes even make them lighter. But it seems to me we more and more feel we just don’t have the time. Well. What exactly is time for? And who owns our time, if it’s ours?
Again, before I start sounding too much like a Beatles’ song, I know – I know, I know, I know – the pressures we’re all under to act as if our time belonged to somebody else. I know about the roof and the table, and the working two or three jobs because not one of them by itself takes care of the roof and the table, and the kids, and then the teenagers.
In a book called The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens, who was a heck of a writer but too conservative for the opinion-makers of his day, wrote a great passage about “everyday living.” A young lawyer named Abner Coates has spent the whole book learning that everything he’d been taught wasn’t exactly wrong – it just wasn’t quite what was really happening. His father, old Judge Coates, has had a major stroke. One night, Abner comes up to his room, complaining that things don’t work the way the books said they did, and Judge Coates says to him: “I don’t know who it was who said when we think of the past we regret and when we think of the future we fear. And with reason. But no bets are off. There is the present to think of, and as long as you live there always will be. In the present, every day is a miracle. The world gets up in the morning and is fed and goes to work, and in the evening it comes home and is fed again and perhaps has a little amusement and goes to sleep. To make that possible, so much has to be done by so many people that, on the face of it, it is impossible. Well, every day we do it; and every day, come hell, come high water, we’re going to have to go on doing it as well as we can.”
The Judge is right. Life’s impossible. That’s what makes it a miracle. And looking to lighten somebody else’s load is the best way to remind yourself that it’s a miracle. Also turns out to be the best way to lighten your own.
From talking with quite a few of you, I conclude that most, if not all of you, have come through the DeVry experience with one main goal: to find work that would pay you enough to take care of whoever you’re responsible for, and that might even leave a little over to have some fun with. It’s an admirable goal.
But I hope that somewhere in the general education courses you were obliged to take, you found some windows that look out at the world as the miracle it is, and gave you that feeling of really seeing or hearing or understanding something for the first time. And I hope that you’ll go back, at least every once in a while, and look through those windows again, and keep looking for others. Don’t spend your whole lives sitting in front of screens that don’t let you see for yourself, but make you see the product of somebody else’s visions.
The last thing I’m going to inflict on you tonight is part of a poem by Robert Frost. You probably got forced to read one or two of his poems at some point in your life “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or “The Road Not Taken.” What a nice, wise old codger, is the general picture of Robert Frost they sell. I got to be in the same room with him one time. It wasn’t like being in the same room as a nice old man. It was like being in the same room as a bear. He was a big man, and shaggy, and if he looked you in the eye, you’d better be there, or his force would blow you right over.
This is a poem of his you don’t hear as often. He wrote it during the beginning years of the Great Depression, and it’s about both working and caring about each other:
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard.
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily, “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.
Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.
The time when I most loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet.
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
Out of the woods came two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax,
They had no way of knowing a fool.
Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love, but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right – agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
“My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation.” I couldn’t think of a better Invocation than that. Congratulations to you all.
***
The graduation didn’t take place in the customary auditorium. DeVry had instead booked a chain Italian restaurant with a large banquet hall off the bar and regular dining room. In this hall I attempted to deliver the above diatribe for a while.
The graduation dinner was taking place on the same night as the final game of the Yankees-Red Sox playoff series, which you may recall as a thorough drubbing of the Yankees by the Red Sox’ self-styled “Idiots.” This long-awaited Justice occasioned pretty much constant hilarious cheering from the bar patrons watching it on several televisions. This racket, added to the dinner conversation of several dozen graduates and their families, proved impossible to override with my unamplified voice, and I delivered a severely edited-on-the-fly version of my remarks to resounding indifference.
This seemed an appropriate conclusion to my career as an advocate for humane values. I hadn’t even had to burn any money.
Later that evening, I got to thinking about the grim irony of Benjamin Franklin’s name and image becoming the shorthand for capitalist rapacity – the Franklin who wrote, “All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. . . . He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.” He didn’t think it was all about the Benjamins.
In my retirement, I’ve kept on struggling with what poor weapons I possess against the worship of the Benjamins, but it’s plain enough that a sufficiency of my fellow citizens have accepted the reigning myths of oligarchy. I comfort myself with the words that Pete Seeger, who also never quit, wrote in tribute to café owner Lena Spencer: “If there’s a human race here in a hundred years, it will be millions of unknown people and unknown things that will save us. The powers that be have got so much money that they do terrible things. They can destroy a legal organization or a think tank, but what are they going to do about millions of little things? If they break up three of them, four more will spring up to take their place.”
