There are certain passages in much loved and much read and re-read books that have the power to show us how much has changed while they’ve remained the same word-for-word.
It’s an experience like paying a visit to the town you’re from for the first time in years. All is familiar and nothing is. Everything is smaller except what has changed, and it stands out as if somebody had put it under a magnifying glass and drawn a circle around it.
In place of some nondescript stretch of street you once hardly noticed, a hospital or university has arisen. Or a familiar old landmark has become a vacant lot. Those features of the landscape that haven’t changed bring out all that has changed around them. Like signposts in a strange land.
It’s like looking at the fashions of a long-past era and realizing: My, how we’ve changed! Or like coming across a telling passage from Walker Percy’s 1960 novel The Moviegoer, and being struck by how much the country has changed,and hasn’t.
A certain turmoil is only to be expected in the ever changing American ethos, mood, culture, spirit, mentality, circus . . . whatever is the right word for the sea of ideas in which we all float unmoored at times.
Walker Percy’s hero, or at least protagonist, good old Binx Bolling, the moviegoer of the title, is struck by the feeling that all the nice people he deals with in his day job as a stockbroker are, well, already dead. Everything they say is so predictable, so expected, one genteel cliché after another, it’s depressing. But our man Binx knows what to do to feel alive again:
“Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.” And so ol’ Binx will sit down at one of those big, commodious tables in a library reading room and go through one separate but equally partisan magazine after another, nodding in agreement as each scores its rhetorical points. (“Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them.”) Then he selects a journal of the diametrically opposite persuasion and is just as approving. (“Oh, ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.”)
It’s not the opinions that delight Binx so much as their conviction-their energy, force and absurd certainty . . . their life. They rise like lush islands in the sea of conformity he feels all around him.
Those were the days, at the tag end of the great Eisenhowerean consensus, when haters seemed rare enough to be invigorating and civility was so common it was just boring.
Even the haters had to adopt euphemisms back then: Racial discrimination was known as States’ Rights and Communists called themselves Progressives. As in Henry Wallace’s short-lived third party and front group. You know, the way pro-abortion groups now call themselves pro-choice. Calling some things by their right name, like abortion, might prove embarassingly honest. Euphemism is the first resort of any ideology that dare not speak its name.
Back then you had to go looking for ideologues left or right-just to make sure the country’s political reflexes were still in working order. The way Binx had to check out the magazines from afar off. The Nation was still being published in some dingy office somewhere, William F. Buckley’s National Review was still in its infancy, but all else was peace. All was right with the world. Nice if boring. Children were taught not to discuss politics, religion or other unfit subjects. Or so it all appears in retrospect now that Joe McCarthy is history and Pete Seeger and the Weavers are remembered for their folk music, not their fellow-traveling.
Americans by and large felt we could safely tolerate our crazies, for here stability reigned. Franklin Roosevelt’s grand coalition of interests had held while the rest of the world was swept by war and revolution. Even if it was really more of a grand menagerie, with types as disparate as Southern racists and Northern labor bosses safely on display in separate cages.
What FDR began, Ike finished. His wide grin and invisible hand papered over a multitude of ideological differences. There is no solvent for old ideologies like new prosperity, which reduces them to only intellectual abstractions. They become entertainment for the delectation of the Binx Bollings strolling down the American midwaylike a gawker from a different world.
It was different, the largely self-satisfied and self-absorbed world of 1960, certainly in hindsight. The political climate, like an undeveloped negative out of an old box camera, was the reverse of today’s. Today it is the temperate and civil who stand out as exceptional, and the ideologues who seem everywhere, usually throwing verbal darts at each other. Which can get boring. Or as a letter writer with mental problems once wrote the Pine Bluff Commercial, “It gets boring not having peace of mind all the time.”
What happened? Nothing new, really. The country just reverted to its revolutionary self after the brief and unnatural consensus that appeared in the 1950s and was mistaken for normalcy.
Today the kind of free-for-all envisioned by those who wrote the First Amendment is the norm once again. The old trigopoly of the television networks is a thing of the past in this Age of the Internet, when anything goes and usually does. Ol’ Binx might still be bored today, but it would be by today’s wild profusion of ideas, not their rarity.
The moral of this story, if it has one: Beware of what you wish for. It just might come to pass. Do you find peace and tranquility boring, which was Binx’s complaint? Very well then, they can be dispensed with easily enough. Just reach for your iPhone, iPad, iPod or iTune on your 24-7 distraction app, your portable little manufactory of trivia, of News and Entertainment that is neither. You can walk down the street with it and never have to look up at God’s sky or a human face. Till all is a partisan jumble and nobody needs to think, only react, in the great wave of nothingness that washes over us, leaving the impression that This Is Important.
It isn’t.
But some things don’t change. Education, the real kind rooted in the liberal arts and the sciences, in solitude and study, in perspective and tolerance and in the humility that true scholarship fosters, still conquers all. With a little help from Providence. Or as Bismarck might put it, and did: God looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 10/30/2013