"But contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive. One of two things may happen: those who are innocently credulous may be come easy prey for those who are less scrupulous and who seek to 'lead' and 'inspire' them. Or those whose credulity has led their own society into stagnation may seek a solution, not in true self-examination, but in blaming others for their backwardness."
--Christopher Hitchens
One of my imaginings of Heaven, has been that you get up in the clouds and they tell you the truth about all the things you had wondered about, been deceived or deluded about on Earth. "Oh, so that's why I got that cancer! It was that radon in my basement." Or, "Oh, so that's why that girl would never go out with me--she was in love with my room mate!" That sort of thing.
The trouble is, the enlightenment comes too late. It's that old saw about the pathologist, who does the autopsy--he knows everything, but too late.
Often, it comes down to that observation of Bill Clinton, who noted how liberating it was to be done with his Presidency so now he could say whatever he really thought, without having to parse every sentence with some constituency or interest group in mind. "The trouble is," he noted ruefully, "I can say exactly what I think, but now nobody cares what I think."
This is the position of most every codger, like me, out there. This is why people like Warren Buffet and Mitch McConnell hang on to their jobs into their 70's and 80's. Once you give up power, that is the capacity to put your opinion into action that affects other people, you become irrelevant, invisible.
This may be why some elderly men fantasize about becoming professors at universities, where twenty somethings will hang on their every word, as so many idiots hung on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's words, words which had the power to move markets, at least for a day.
Of course, the problem with that fantasy is precious few of people in their 70's and 80's have any real wisdom to impart, and even if they did, the twenty somethings would be no more interested in it than they are in listening to Bill Clinton. Who's he? What does he matter?
I'm not sure this is as true in other countries--Japan comes to mind. Maybe even England. But from my worm's eye view it looks to be the case in America, at least among my circle of friends. Teenagers and twenty somethings have little or no interest in me or anything I have to say, and I can't blame them. They are either polite but itching to move on to more interesting people, or they completely ignore me.
I wonder if I did the same when I was their age?
I think there were some older people I was interested in, but mostly because they seemed at least passingly interested in me. There was a woman, who must have been all of forty years old, who used to come to the swimming pool where I was a lifeguard and she would sit in her aluminum folding chair next to me in my lifeguard stand and we would chat about things. I was maybe 18, and she was a MUCH older woman--forty, one foot in the grave, but she seemed amused and interested in my questions and answers.
I really cannot recall what it was we talked about. She must not have had a job, because she was there during the day. But she was a sort of summer friend, across the generational divide.
There were also friends of my mother, who were school teachers, who seemed interesting in some ways, but guarded because they were school teachers.
There was a neighbor who had been an Army Air Force pilot in World War II. He had been shot down and captured in Europe and spent a year in a prisoner of war camp. His name was Jim Juntilla. He was from Minnesota originally but he became a lawyer and worked at the Federal Communications Commission. I know that because he was somehow involved in a case involving Playboy magazine, and laws relating to mailing Playboy though the U.S. Postal Service. He had lots of Playboys around his house, which his kids read avidly.
He read Catch-22 lying on his couch in his living room, laughing so hard tears ran down his face. "This is the closest thing to what it was really like," he said. "So true."
This was 1957, you have to understand. The war had only ended 12 years before. That would have made him about 32. I was 10.
I read the book and it was disorienting. It was not at all like the other war books I had read or the movies about the war I had seen, and aside from Westerns, everything in those days was about The War. The book had no heroes like the fearless, grim, determined, admirable heroes I was familiar with. I tried to get him to tell me more about his war, but he wasn't interested in sharing that with some kid.
A gardener came to work at our house one day, two years earlier. I hung around and watched him dig holes, as he swung his pick and uprooted things. He was a Black man, who must have just tolerated this curious white kid watching him work.
Turned out, he had been in the war.
What branch?
Army.
Oh, I said. The Army. I liked the Marines. The Marines had the really tough fighting in the Pacific. The Army only had to fight the Germans. The Germans weren't as fanatical as the Japanese.
He said something I didn't quite catch.
My father happened to have walked by at that moment and caught this exchange.
I didn't understand the man because he spoke in a deep South dialect, and he didn't look at me when he said it. He was looking at the soil as he let loose his pick. He might have half smiled. Maybe not.
"What'd he say?" I asked my father, trailing after him.
"He said:They fought like Hell," my father said, smiling at me.
"Who?"
"The Germans."
"But, they didn't have Kamikazes."
"He was there," my father said. "He knows things you don't."
I went back out and sat down and watched the gardener work. He knew stuff I did not know.
He was a Black man. Hard as my parents tried to teach me, I had absorbed the conventional beliefs of where I grew up, and in those days Washington, D.C. was most definitely a Southern town. Most people were from the Carolinas, Georgia, the deep South. My parents were part of the influx from the North. But for me, in those days, I assumed if he was a Negro, which is what we called them then, he was likely to be uneducated and not very smart.
But he knew something I did not know.
Of course, he knew quite a lot I did not know, like how he had to fight in a segregated regiment because the American Army did not think it proper for Negroes to be fighting alongside White men. Bad for "unit cohesion." And he did not mention that no matter how brave he had been fighting "for his country" when he got back to America, he was just a Negro again, and the only work for him was digging with a pickaxe.
But I did not know any of that. I just knew he had been in that great adventure I had been so enthralled with: World War II.
I watched him.
"Where did you fight?"
Another clunk of the pickaxe.
"Europe, mostly."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"Did you get to Germany? Berlin?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Wounded. Got sent home."
"You look okay now."
"I was lucky. "
"Lucky? You got wounded."
"Got home with both arms and legs, and hands and my balls."
"You like being a gardener?"
"It's a living."
"But you're a hero."
"Weren't no heroes. Just dead guys and guys who go out alive. No heroes at'all."
I had no idea what he was talking about, until I read Catch-22.
--Christopher Hitchens
One of my imaginings of Heaven, has been that you get up in the clouds and they tell you the truth about all the things you had wondered about, been deceived or deluded about on Earth. "Oh, so that's why I got that cancer! It was that radon in my basement." Or, "Oh, so that's why that girl would never go out with me--she was in love with my room mate!" That sort of thing.
The trouble is, the enlightenment comes too late. It's that old saw about the pathologist, who does the autopsy--he knows everything, but too late.
Often, it comes down to that observation of Bill Clinton, who noted how liberating it was to be done with his Presidency so now he could say whatever he really thought, without having to parse every sentence with some constituency or interest group in mind. "The trouble is," he noted ruefully, "I can say exactly what I think, but now nobody cares what I think."
This is the position of most every codger, like me, out there. This is why people like Warren Buffet and Mitch McConnell hang on to their jobs into their 70's and 80's. Once you give up power, that is the capacity to put your opinion into action that affects other people, you become irrelevant, invisible.
This may be why some elderly men fantasize about becoming professors at universities, where twenty somethings will hang on their every word, as so many idiots hung on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's words, words which had the power to move markets, at least for a day.
Of course, the problem with that fantasy is precious few of people in their 70's and 80's have any real wisdom to impart, and even if they did, the twenty somethings would be no more interested in it than they are in listening to Bill Clinton. Who's he? What does he matter?
I'm not sure this is as true in other countries--Japan comes to mind. Maybe even England. But from my worm's eye view it looks to be the case in America, at least among my circle of friends. Teenagers and twenty somethings have little or no interest in me or anything I have to say, and I can't blame them. They are either polite but itching to move on to more interesting people, or they completely ignore me.
I wonder if I did the same when I was their age?
I think there were some older people I was interested in, but mostly because they seemed at least passingly interested in me. There was a woman, who must have been all of forty years old, who used to come to the swimming pool where I was a lifeguard and she would sit in her aluminum folding chair next to me in my lifeguard stand and we would chat about things. I was maybe 18, and she was a MUCH older woman--forty, one foot in the grave, but she seemed amused and interested in my questions and answers.
I really cannot recall what it was we talked about. She must not have had a job, because she was there during the day. But she was a sort of summer friend, across the generational divide.
There were also friends of my mother, who were school teachers, who seemed interesting in some ways, but guarded because they were school teachers.
There was a neighbor who had been an Army Air Force pilot in World War II. He had been shot down and captured in Europe and spent a year in a prisoner of war camp. His name was Jim Juntilla. He was from Minnesota originally but he became a lawyer and worked at the Federal Communications Commission. I know that because he was somehow involved in a case involving Playboy magazine, and laws relating to mailing Playboy though the U.S. Postal Service. He had lots of Playboys around his house, which his kids read avidly.
He read Catch-22 lying on his couch in his living room, laughing so hard tears ran down his face. "This is the closest thing to what it was really like," he said. "So true."
This was 1957, you have to understand. The war had only ended 12 years before. That would have made him about 32. I was 10.
I read the book and it was disorienting. It was not at all like the other war books I had read or the movies about the war I had seen, and aside from Westerns, everything in those days was about The War. The book had no heroes like the fearless, grim, determined, admirable heroes I was familiar with. I tried to get him to tell me more about his war, but he wasn't interested in sharing that with some kid.
A gardener came to work at our house one day, two years earlier. I hung around and watched him dig holes, as he swung his pick and uprooted things. He was a Black man, who must have just tolerated this curious white kid watching him work.
Turned out, he had been in the war.
What branch?
Army.
Oh, I said. The Army. I liked the Marines. The Marines had the really tough fighting in the Pacific. The Army only had to fight the Germans. The Germans weren't as fanatical as the Japanese.
He said something I didn't quite catch.
My father happened to have walked by at that moment and caught this exchange.
I didn't understand the man because he spoke in a deep South dialect, and he didn't look at me when he said it. He was looking at the soil as he let loose his pick. He might have half smiled. Maybe not.
"What'd he say?" I asked my father, trailing after him.
"He said:They fought like Hell," my father said, smiling at me.
"Who?"
"The Germans."
"But, they didn't have Kamikazes."
"He was there," my father said. "He knows things you don't."
I went back out and sat down and watched the gardener work. He knew stuff I did not know.
He was a Black man. Hard as my parents tried to teach me, I had absorbed the conventional beliefs of where I grew up, and in those days Washington, D.C. was most definitely a Southern town. Most people were from the Carolinas, Georgia, the deep South. My parents were part of the influx from the North. But for me, in those days, I assumed if he was a Negro, which is what we called them then, he was likely to be uneducated and not very smart.
But he knew something I did not know.
Of course, he knew quite a lot I did not know, like how he had to fight in a segregated regiment because the American Army did not think it proper for Negroes to be fighting alongside White men. Bad for "unit cohesion." And he did not mention that no matter how brave he had been fighting "for his country" when he got back to America, he was just a Negro again, and the only work for him was digging with a pickaxe.
But I did not know any of that. I just knew he had been in that great adventure I had been so enthralled with: World War II.
I watched him.
"Where did you fight?"
Another clunk of the pickaxe.
"Europe, mostly."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"Did you get to Germany? Berlin?"
"Nope."
"Why not?"
"Wounded. Got sent home."
"You look okay now."
"I was lucky. "
"Lucky? You got wounded."
"Got home with both arms and legs, and hands and my balls."
"You like being a gardener?"
"It's a living."
"But you're a hero."
"Weren't no heroes. Just dead guys and guys who go out alive. No heroes at'all."
I had no idea what he was talking about, until I read Catch-22.
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