Chautauqua

Time is a funny thing. A lot can happen in 13 years. Or absolutely nothing can happen in 13 years. There’s no way to tell. Sometimes you just have to look back to see how far we have or haven’t come.

I was reminded of that because of some recent news. It made me go back to a report I recalled seeing some time ago. I didn’t remember it had been 13 years since I saw it. But with some digging, I did manage to turn it up. The report, published here, turns out to have been a cautionary note to our legislators and us about the declining reading levels in the United States. It was published in April of 1996. Its message went unheeded for three reasons: (1) Some people ignored it because it was published by the Heritage Foundation. In 1996, the Heritage Foundation was disained almost as much as it is today because of its reputation for being conservative. That means the information it presents doesn’t come packaged with promises to remedy the problems identified therin with no work, no responsibility, and no cost to anyone, especially taxpayers. (2) Some people ignored it because it was considered academic. In 1996, we had an attorney in the White House, not an intellectual, you know, like we have today. That means the report was perceived then in the same way in which economic reports are perceived now. That is, they must make sense to someone. They might even contain some truth. But attention doesn’t have to paid to them because they’re some kind of exercise that has no bearing on our lives. Our intellectual President has that whole money thing covered anyway. He said so. And when it comes to learning to read, our kids are the responsibility of public schools. Isn’t that why God invented them? Let them take care of it. (3) The rest of us ignored it because we couldn’t read it.

Then, those 13 years elapsed. Those of us who were wondering if that report might have had any real consequences are trying to figure out where to look for them. Our kids seemed to grow up okay. We heard stories now and then of college students here and there who couldn’t read proficiently at high-school levels. We heard about high-school students who couldn’t read at middle-school levels. But that’s more academic stuff, right? I mean, those kinds of skill studies are based on bars that always get set too high because they’re based on average students – and nobody’s really average. Come on. Isn’t that right? And the public schools passed those kids we heard about to the next grades, didn’t they?  So, where’s the fallout?

The fallout, it turns out, is in the places in which some of those non-reading kids who were passed through school landed. The ones who took employment in the private sector endured the myriad travails of performance appraisals, proficiency tests, productivity metrics, and the other means of measure in the workaday world. You cut it, or you don’t. If you don’t, you move on, by your choice or your employer’s. Dog eat dog. Life goes on. It’s the way of the world. Well … not the whole world.

Some of those non-readers took employment in the public sector. And some of them were lucky enough to land in legislative positions in which they don’t have to read. They’re members of Congress. They have bills to pass, promises to make, costs to ignore, and consequences to overlook. Read? Even if they could, when do we think they’d have time for that? The whole reason we condoned the creation of the career politician is to take some of the  pressure off. These people don’t have time to contemplate or comprehend the nature or substance of the legislation they’re passing. They have to worry about getting re-elected after every term. Do you think their schedules allow for anything other than promising voters what they want to hear during those terms? Read the bills they’re passing? Consider the implications? That’s just silly. And it gets dangerously close to work.

In fairness, we shouldn’t be too hard on our esteemed legislators. Reading requires study, practice, and refinement. It requires cognition and acuity. It requires critical faculties for interpretation, comprehension, and retention. Most important, it requires a particular kind of intelligence. So, let’s cut our Congressional leaders some slack if they don’t read the bills they sign. We expect them to be intelligent enough to learn governing. We can’t expect them to be intelligent enough to learn grammar, too.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with all of the evidence flying at us indicating that we’re headed down the tubes. And the extent to which we’re falling for political rhetoric – instead of dissecting it and making the rhetoricians answer for it – is becoming overwhelming. Today’s case in point: because it’s no longer acceptable to teach what used to be referred to as American History in our union-controlled public schools, we’ve put things like popularity, political correctness, and self-defeating revisionism in place of other, less important things like constitutional fundaments, underlying principles, and … oh, yeah … history. That’s how and why we’re not terribly concerned with remembering that the liberty we used to enjoy in the very same United States we now find so disdainful and politically incorrect was bought and paid for with the blood and bone of those who thought they’d rather die in a war for independence than live under a government that imposed taxation without representation. Wow. Those guys had some screwy ideas, didn’t they?

If they’d been a little more clever or clear-headed – and if they just hadn’t been so darned idealistic – they might have thought of short-cuts like the prestidigitation Barack the Beguling is performing with healthcare. Right? It’s beautiful. Not only does Obama the Omnipotent not have to deal with that pesky and dilatory Congress, he doesn’t have to bother getting any elected officials to agree with him. He hires his lackeys. They do what he wants. If they don’t, he fires them. Nice and clean.

Well, no, those folks aren’t our elected representatives. No, they don’t have any responsibility other than to do what the boss wants them to do. And, no, Barack the Beginner doesn’t have any experience with healthcare, with running a business, or with governing even one of the 50 States with which he’s now playing fast and loose. But we elected him because [insert favorite promise here]. He’s cool. And talk about efficiency. Barack the Businesslike clearly is not a guy who would have wasted eight years fussing about self-government (he’s already self-governing), squawking about independence (he’s completely independent, especially from the legislative branch; we’re the dependent ones), and getting his shorts in a bunch about some aristocratic muckety-muck like George III. Given the way they operate, those two probably would have been buds. If they’d lived at the same time, it would have saved the National Education Association a lot of time and trouble tossing and re-writing all those misbegotten history books, wouldn’t it? Time and trouble is all that would have mattered. Neither of the kings – Barack or George – would have cared about the money involved.

Why or how does any of that matter? Like this: hot on the heels of Barack the Brilliant’s decision to side-step the federal legislature (what are rules to a guy like him?), we (remember us? those the elected representatives are supposed to serve?) welcome another stooge into the Senate; although, this one happens to be a professional stooge. And what does this stooge have to say? He tells us he’s going to assume the solemn responsibilities of his office by acting as the people’s proxy. And among the first of those solemn responsibilities? He’s going to participate in the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

It’s entirely possible this particular stooge is so sharp, his proxy comment is a gag so incisive, that it went right over our heads. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say it is. What a cut-up, huh? But for what people was he talking about acting as proxy? He wasn’t exactly specific on the subject. Just this much is clear: he can’t be a proxy for the people who aren’t being represented in Barack the Bold’s healthcare plans. In case you’re curious, that too would be us – all of us.

Could we take a few minutes out from all the rights we’re always inventing – from all the things to which we think we’re entitled, for which we used to expect we’d have to work – to defend this right? Yes, kids. It’s true: we still have the constitutional right to have our legislative decisions made by elected representatives. But we’re so busy crying about all the things that haven’t been handed to us yet – all the things we’ve been promised that haven’t been delivered and won’t be – that we’ve abdicated one of the few things to which we’re legitimately and uniformly entitled by law (at least for the time being). Why? What are we doing?

If we still had any of those horrible history books around, we might be able to find out why we thought elected representation was a good idea. But they’re gone now. At the rate we’re going, our right to elected representation will be right behind it. When that happens, let’s at least not be hypocritical enough to act like victims. That right will not have been stolen from us. We will have given it away in favor of a new form of government: adication by proxy. Shame on us.

This story – and this one – came out the same day. The former story is important because it suggests the electorate that didn’t do its reading before November 4, 2008, is catching up now. That means the house of cards is crumbling even before its architects imagined it would. And those of us who are trying to live affordably in that house are trying to figure out why the price keeps going up, even though the place is caving in.

The latter story is important because it suggests how desperate the architects are becoming. Shanghaiing a Senatorial election in attempt to bring comic relief to disaster is intriguing enough. The possibility that the clown’s butt will hit the 60th seat too late to stop the tsunami that’s heading for the house of cards is even more engrossing. The cult of celebrity might be disastrous in its political consequences. But as a form of entertainment, it would be tough to beat if the price weren’t so devastatingly high.

Here’s the problem for the Delirious Democrats, as Professor Zelizer reminds us:

With 60 votes, a united Democratic Party can obtain cloture and end attempted Republican filibusters. But the problem is that 60 votes does not make the Senate “filibuster-proof.” That would require 60 votes, plus Democrats sticking together.

Aye, there’s the rub. Sticking together would require the Democrats to have plans to correspond with their promises. To extend the earlier analogy: if any of the various subcontractors involved in the construction of a house are unfamiliar with the direction the house is intended to take, or what it’s supposed to look like, they consult the blueprints that all of the subcontractors share. Blueprints, to state the obvious, would be the renderings drawn by the architects to unite the subcontractors in fulfillment of the common plan. You sense where this is headed, right? Good.

The term, architect, derives from the Latin architectus, as well as from the Greek arkhitektōn, meaning builder or craftsman. Architects evolved from being builders and craftsman to being planners and renderers when prospective occupants of the houses they were building stopped falling for promises like this: “We’ll take care of everything. The place will keep you dry when it rains and warm in the winter. It’ll keep you naturally cool in the summer. It’ll be the envy of the neighborhood. And no wolves will be able to huff and puff and blow it down. Really. We promise. Cost? Don’t worry.”

Ironically, the term, democrat, also derives from the Greek, dēmokratikós; although, our derivation of it comes more directly from the French démocrate. In the form of a common noun, democrat is defined as an adherent or advocate of government by the people. In the form of a proper noun, however, Democrat means an adherent or advocate of government inflicted on the people. That’s why Democrats believe they don’t need plans – and why they’re too short-sightedly power-hungry to know the house will crumble without them. That’s also why, taking their cues from Barack the Builder (no architect he), plans for the new American house were dispensed with in favor of promises, all manner of promises.

Banking on the probability that we – the ever more gullible and complacent occupants of said house – would ask no questions about the absence of plans or the proliferation of cards passing for construction materials, the Democrats promised to make it ever more grand, as beautiful as any one and every one of us could want it to be, all-sheltering, and all paid for by … well … they haven’t quite gotten there yet. Big talk. Bigger promises. Lovely vision. No plan. And now, in an attempt to preclude debate on the construction of the new American house of cards and its flimsy fallibility, we have the guy in the white pants in the Senate – ready, willing, prepared, and eminently qualified to cast his vote with his fellow Democrats.

It can’t be any wonder, then, that three of the top five best-selling nonfiction books on Amazon.com last week were Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, Mike Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny, and Dick Morris’s Catastrophe. Houses of cards can’t stand. They can be disguised. They can be hidden. They can be called other things. They can have things attributed to them that we might not choose to examine, at least initially. But they cannot and will not stand.

Another charasmatic leader, Malcolm X, said: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” And so we shall … maybe. Last week’s book sales are promising. A comedian in the Senate is not. The outcome is up to us. Construction materials dealt from the bottom of the deck do not a house make. We need not buy it if we don’t want to live in it.

In November of 1992, Lewis H. Lapham, who lost his brilliant, discerning mind in the first term of the Presidency of Bush the Younger, wrote an enduringly insightful piece in his “Notebook” section of Harper’s magazine. He called it, “Deus ex machina”, a literary device defined this way in C. Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to Literature:

In the ancient Greek theater when gods appeared in plays they were lowered to the stage from the “machine” or the stage structure above. The abrupt but timely appearance of a god in this fashion, when used to extricate the mortal characters of the drama from a situation so perplexing that the solution seemed beyond mortal powers, was referred to in Latin as the deus ex machina (”god from the machine”) … the employment of the deus ex machina is commonly recognized as evidence of … an uncritical willingness to disregard the probabilities.

In “Deus ex machina”, Mr. Lapham was commenting on the effect of mass media on the political process in general – and on perceptions of individuals therein, in particular. He was, of course, writing during the Presidential election season that pitted Bush the Elder against Clinton the Shameless. He might just as well have been writing about – and warning us against – our present Deity-in-Chief:

The authors of the American Constitution recognized in themselves and in their fellow citizens the familiar vices of vanity and greed, but they preferred the risks of freedom to the assurances of monarchy … the mechanism of checks and balances preserved the principle of liberty against the promise of miracles and the comforts of despotism. The proposition was as courageous as it was optimistic, but it doesn’t meet the expectations of an age the worships celebrity and defines itself as the sum of its fears … the rising levels of perceived risk lower the levels of tolerance for the norm of human fallibility … Authority invested in institutions gives way to authority vested in persons, and the less that people understand of what it is that politicians do, the more urgent the desire to appoint them to the ranks of the immortals …

The primitive vocabulary of the mass media doesn’t lend itself to the discussion of complicated political issues, much less to moral ambiguity or moments of doubt. The television camera demands prophetic certainty and a sentimental script … The rule of love supplants the rule of law, and instead of attracting voters the postmodern politician recruits fans … The sentiment is profoundly anti-democratic, but then so is the trend of the news. If the hope of civilization defines itself and an advance toward impersonality – toward an idea of justice that doesn’t depend on the whim of a judge or the favor of the White House – the pagan worship of rock singers or movie directors, like the pagan worship of stones and trees, implies the joyous return to the what the history books of the moment still describe as barbarism – a word that the new political dictionaries certainly will amend or delete.

At the time, Lapham was describing a dawning phenomenon, an evolution of perception precipitated by the advent of mass media, of 24-hour news, of the indiscriminate informational onslaught of the Internet. He imagined his words might be a wake-up call, an invitation to critical thinking, a peeling away of the superficial critieria of personal popularity, rousing rhetoric, endless repetition, false promises, falser gods, and our uncritical willingness to disregard the probabilities of giving ourselves over to such promises, such false gods. He could have had no idea that just 16 years after writing them, his words would come to be proven literal by a nation, this nation – would come to a life of mindless adulation in yet another Presidential election, would come to be embodied by a a false god who would seduce a nation and anesthetize a national consciousness. But it happened. And so it is that authoritative institutions – the Executive branch of the federal government, the auto industry, the banking industry, the healthcare industry, the Supreme Court – fall under the rule of the one and the power of the popular.

When Neville Chamberlain returned from signing The Munich Agreement in 1938, Winston Churchill said to him, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Likewise, we had the choice between taking care and being taken care of. We chose to be taken care of and we had better take care. We have seen fit to forgo our risks of freedom, choosing to embrace, instead, the assurances – and the promises of miracles – of Obama the Omnipotent. As a result, we have consented to despotism. Because it’s been packaged as compassionate, protective generosity (it always is), we’ll never see it coming. Universal healthcare. New jobs. Clean energy. Friendly foreign relations. Handouts instead of hands out. Don’t we wonder how and why all of these Utopian ends haven’t been achieved before now? We’re right to be afraid of living in a world without all those things. But we’ll never be delivered from our fears until we confront them and take back the responsibility for overcoming them. There’s a difference between a showman and a shaman. Barack the Entrancer is the former; although, he managed to convince a majority of us he’s the latter.

What King Barack the Bewilderer calls “the audacity of hope” is, in fact, the sham of the new barbarism, the promise of miracles and the comforts of despotism. We will deny it. But we will not regain the right to call ourselves civilized, independent, and at liberty until we defy it.

If we don’t determine to do so today – 233 years after the first Independence Day – we should prepare to fight for the next one.

What follows is actual correspondence between yours truly and his duly elected representative. Not a word has been altered. Names have been deleted to lessen the strain on credulity:

Dear Senator X,

Please oppose the Employee Free Choice Act.  It will not be free.  It will cost an unaffordable measure or our liberty.  It will not constitute choice.  It will institutionalize coercion and corruption.

The secret ballot is a tenet of American democracy and privacy.  This legislation usurps that tenet, eliminating a secret ballot overseen by the NLRB and placing undue and unwarranted power in the hands of union organizers.  It’s hard to imagine legislation deliberately leaving employees and employers vulnerable to those who respect the interests of neither.  If the role of the federal government is to support that kind of usurpation, I have an entire life as a U.S. citizen to re-examine.

Federally supervised, private-ballot elections ensure a union has the support of a majority of employees.  In contrast, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled: “It would be difficult to imagine a more unreliable method of ascertaining the real wishes of employees than a card check.”  The Second Circuit ruled: “It is beyond dispute that the secret ballot election is a more accurate reflection of the employees’ true desires than a check of authorization cards collected at the behest of a union organizer.”  The Sixth Circuit ruled: “An election is the preferred method of determining the choice by employees of a collective bargaining representative.”

Why in the world would Congress fix something that ain’t broke?

As my elected representative, please oppose the Employee Free Choice Act and support the Secret Ballot Protection Act.

Thank you for doing right things.

My pal’s reply:

Thank you for contacting me regarding union rights for workers. I appreciate hearing your views on this important matter.

I understand and respect your concerns about this issue. In my view, when workers are able to play a role in negotiating their wages and working conditions, the result is fewer work-related injuries, better employee morale, and greater efficiency.  I believe that labor unions have long been instrumental in strengthening the American middle class and improving the lives of millions of working families by ensuring basic workplace protections, decent and livable wages, and secure pension and retirement benefits.

While your reservations are understandable, I am a cosponsor of Senate bill 560, the Employee Free Choice Act, because in my view it will better enable employees to exercise their right to form or join a union. Rather than letting employers decide the process by which a union is certified, the Employee Free Choice Act would shift that determination to the employees, who can choose either majority sign-up or a secret ballot election.

I am also supportive of the Employee Free Choice Act’s provisions that would deter employers from wrongfully terminating employees who favor unionization. While the great majority of employers act responsibly and treat their workers well, there are still many well-documented cases of worker abuse … that are of great concern to me. I believe that the reforms of S. 560 represent reasonable policy that would promote a safer, fairer workplace for employees, regardless of their sentiments towards forming or joining a union.

Thank you again for contacting me. If you would like to stay in touch with me on this and other issues of importance, please visit my website … and subscribe to receive my regular e-mail issue alerts. Please do not hesitate to contact me again if I can be of assistance to you in any way.

Since that made it clear my initial correspondence had been neither read nor understood, I replied:

Dear Senator X,

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my correspondence.

Out of respect for the time constraints imposed by your schedule, I apologize for not having made the point of my earlier correspondence more clear.  I have no concerns about the specific right of workers to choose a union through a “card check” process.  Rather, I have grave concerns about the specific right of workers NOT to choose a union and, by extension, their right not to be coerced, manipulated, or victimized thereby.

I’m only concerned because labor unions already have the power to annul employees’ freedom of choice.  FDR and your forebears in Congress ensured infringement on workers’ ability to work for — and to make their own agreements with — willing employers in 1935 with the passage of the Wagner Act.  That’s why Arthur Goldberg, a former attorney for the United Steelworkers Union, JFK’s secretary of labor, and former Supreme Court justice wrote in 1956, “Technically speaking, any labor union is a monopoly in the limited sense that it eliminates competition between workingmen for the available jobs in a particular plant or industry.”  It’s also why unionization in the private sector dropped from 17 million in 1970 to 8.8 million in 2002 — and is lower now.  Like bobby socks and hula hoops, the time for labor unions — except as channels for corruption from government and organized crime — has passed.  If you can find a copy of Stephen Fox’s book, Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America, you’ll understand two things: why S.560 is a disastrously bad idea and why Fox’s book is out of print.  (Hint: Neither government nor organized crime wants you to read it.)

I know I’m getting sentimental in my advancing age.  But I really miss the secret ballot, especially for those who harbor illusions of democracy and free choice.  Those illusions get harder and harder to sustain.  Then again, I’m a guy who’s nowhere near ready to admit — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that we’ve entered the golden age of political promise, adulation from the gullible, and retribution for the empirically astute.

I’m all for doing things right.  But I ask you again to reward my vote by doing right things.  Please oppose the Employee Free Choice Act of 2009.

Thank you.

So much for elective representation. Is Don Quixote in the house?

You really have to wonder if gullibility can be epidemic. You have to wonder if our desperation to abdicate personal responsibility and to be “taken care of” is so profound that we’ll abide anything, even the complicity of the media on which we ostensibly rely to keep us informed (unless we’ve abdicated even our responsibility to be informed). You have to wonder if we’re so willing to be placated that we’ll accept the packaging of political agendas as moral pronouncements without question or logic. And you have to wonder why The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times chose not to quote “moral imperative” in their headlines, to say nothing of why they buried the story.

Let’s take a critical look at some terminology, shall we? Taking care of ourselves is a responsibility. Taking care of each other might be a moral imperative – but only if there’s a cultural consensus to do so. That’s what morality is: a cultural agreement to do this, but not that. Helping our neighbor is a good thing.  Rolling a grenade under his door is not. We’re pretty much in agreement on cut-and-dried things like that. But not everything is quite so clear, especially when viewed through the clouded lenses of political promises, entitlements, and rights. Providing health care as a government mandate might be a cultural imperative – not a moral one – if it doesn’t precipitate the economic ruin of the culture. (”The operation was a success, but the patient died.”) But insurance is positively not a moral imperative. It’s a voluntary financial transaction based on The Law of Large Numbers: the small contributions of the many protect against the large losses of the few. And health insurance most certainly should not be a commercial imperative imposed by the federal government.

Do we honestly believe that if Ted Kennedy had ever worked a private-sector second in his life – or if he ever founded a business – he’d be prescribing this? How many would-be entrepreneurs – private-sector job creators – are likely to go for this deal?

Yeah, you can start a business. But you have to insure your employees medically, even if they have pre-existing conditions. Wait. There’s more. You can’t refuse to hire people because of those conditions because that’s discrimination. To make things even more interesting, we’re going to tax the business to Kingdom Come just because we can. This is not knee-capping, we promise; but if you make more than we think you should (Barney Frank’s working on that), we’re going to take that, too. Finally, if there’s any of it left after we get through creating government programs and government jobs – no, not private-sector jobs and certainly not wealth – we’re going to spread it around. Okay?

Right. Sign me up.

By the same logic – or the utter lack thereof – do we think that if Barney Frank had ever worked a private-sector second in his life, he would have avoided these questions, let alone consented to the provisions he’s trying to defend, or stormed out of the interview in a self-righteous snit? A government agency overseeing the executive compensation of commercial enterprises? If those enterprises took TARP money, that’s one thing (setting aside the reprehensibility of TARP). But purporting to act in the interest of shareholders in private-sector businesses when you’ve never worked in one? Is that anything other than a shameless power grab? Have we really gotten to the point at which it’s more important to count our perceived slights (”Why should she make that much money when I don’t?”) than it is to strive for our own opportunities? Have we actually concluded it’s better to depend on the government to define our opportunities and give them to us? Has any government, anywhere, been able to do that? Why do we believe it’s different this time? How did we lose our pride in earning our own keep?

A long time ago, in a land far, far way, we used to go to war over things like taxation without representation. We used to take umbrage when what belonged to us was taken. We used to think self-reliance was a good thing. We used to think boot-strapping, risk and reward, and equal opportunity were things to which we should aspire. Now we’ve succumbed to career politicians, paid to create more power for themselves, telling us what’s good for us when they’ve never actually done what we do, attempting to legislate equality (not equal opportunity), and wanting to take more of our money for the privilege of sustaining their pomposity and their ostensible intellectual superiorty. On the final frontier, they understand clearly why that’s a bad idea.

There are differences between rose-colored glasses, self-induced blindness, and the unwitting acceptance of opacity. In turning a blithe eye to the media’s political predilections for the first, let’s not contract the second. And let’s be careful we don’t have the third imposed on us, however unwittingly.

For those who don’t know his work, Frederick Exley’s passing seventeen years ago (June 17, 1992) will be as the great preponderance of the world’s myriad events – unknown, unseen, unremarked. For those of us who know and love his work, his passing marked the loss of trusted eyes; of a keen and long-suffering intellect; of a voice as plaintive and hopeful as our own; of a painfully courageous honesty that even transience, alcohol, and loneliness could not extinguish; of an excruciating insight that would not have let him live or die any other way. Now that he no longer watches the world for me, I take comfort in knowing his books still hold his vision.

Aside from the occasional article and periodic piece, the body of Exley’s work comprises a novelistic trilogy. Billed by the author as “autobiographical fiction”, A Fan’s Notes, Pages From A Cold Island, and Last Notes From Home traverse the fuzzy line between reality and fantasy, observation and imagination, history and lies. And they draw an unsparing depiction of, as Exley characterizes it in the epigraph to A Fan’s Notes, “that long malaise, my life”.

That life was, and Exley’s work reflects, an abiding struggle – eminently noble, abjectly futile, ultimately existential – to come to terms with an America so full of obscene abundance and corrupt opportunity it rendered any meaningful choosing of one’s options unimaginable, and any thought of personal fulfillment absurd. In Exley’s America, captured in all its confounding, contradicting complexity in Last Notes From Home, “if nuclear arsenals had eliminated one’s need to ponder a possibly nonexistent future, they had also eliminated the need to encumber oneself with literature, history, art, music, all those things we lump together under the sweeping banner of culture”. All one can do in a place so devoid of the cultural languages that define and connect us is what Exley – both man and narrative persona – did so bravely: never quit, in the hope that coping can be an acquired skill.

But my affinity for and connection with Exley is best captured in another passage from Last Notes From Home. It describes my reasons for self-preoccupation; for bouts with depression and psychotherapy; for the often tireless need to write, to cry, to scream into keys, paper, and ink. And it explains why, for all the progress he made, Frederick Exley never mastered the skills of coping:

There is a hateful, baleful, alienating darkness in all good writers that can never be disguised by a Brooks Brothers suit, and whenever I see a good writer so got up, he always seems to me to exude the notion of soiled undergarments and fouled socks.

This sentence sums the difference between good writing and bad; that is, seasoned versus sophomoric, informed versus pretentious or superficial, visceral versus mechanical. The argument can surely be made that good writers hate nothing and no one quite so much as themselves, hence their relentless compulsion to write, to get themselves off their own chests. But good writers measure and test us, challenge our complacencies, and remind us that peace is the province of those without critical faculties, or those who choose not to use them.

With his own acute faculties, his vigilant distrust of even the most innocuous (or necessary) complacencies, and his ceaseless desire to write and be recognized for it, Exley never tested anyone as severely as he tested himself. He recognized in A Fan’s Notes, “Though it is indeed best to keep one’s devils within, one still has to learn to live with them”. For him, writing seemed to be a means of pulling those devils from his guts, hauling them out into the light where their hideousness might diminish, where they might be more thoroughly tested, tolerated, and perhaps transcended.

While he struggled to the end to learn to live with those devils, he seemed to hold even that learning at bay, lest lessons learned precipitate complacency. Though he longed for the world to hail him as a “good writer”, he seemed to fear even that acclaim, contemplating later in the same novel, “how fantastically inventive life was, how terrifying really in that it sometimes does give substance to our airy dreams. And really, what good are dreams if they come true?”

Finally, for all the compulsive passion in his writing, though he could no more prevent his writing than he could force it, he never admitted to its being his calling. For this, too, A Fan’s Notes has an explanation, one that kept Exley forever in the category of fan, never pushing him over the line into the dreaded realm of the participant, never causing him to commit to anything that might later prove mundane or unworthy:

If it comes at all, Emerson has cautioned that one’s call might not come for years. If it doesn’t, he remarks it as only a reflection in the universe’s faith in one’s abstinence, nothing to move the heart to fret. And if, moreover, one is unable to do the world’s work, sell its murderous missiles or cigarettes, as a poised, mute, and motionless man, one need not propagate the world’s lies.

In the light, then, of his alienating darkness – got up in my Brooks Brothers suit and wondering if it disguises my airy and unfulfilled dreams any better than it hides my soiled undergarments and fouled socks, as unwilling to propagate the world’s lies today as I was at 18 – I write these notes as a fan of Frederick Exley.

And as I reflect on his work, as I ponder the relationships between dreams and self-defeat, as I search vainly for direction signs in the frozen limbo between choices in which Exley also lived, as I wonder at my own calling, I think of him often … and watch the world alone.

In his book, Language as Symbolic Action, the late Kenneth Burke wrote this:

The ultimate origins of language seem as seem to me as mysterious as the origins of the universe itself. One must view it, I feel, simply as “the given.” But once an animal comes into being that does happen to have this particular aptitude, the various tribal idioms are unquestionably developed by their use as instruments in the tribe’s way of living (the practical role of symbolism in what the anthropologist, Malinowski, has called “context of situation”) … Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must also function as a deflection of reality.

So, then, what must our dear Canadian friends be thinking about this? If they know Kenneth Burke, they’re thinking we Yanks are as mysterious as the origins of language. They’re wondering at our tribal idioms and trying to imagine the way of living those idioms symbolize. They’re trying to imagine the context of a situation in which more than 3,000 of our tribesmen would be blown away in a single September act, thousands more would be killed in the resulting war, we’d round up affiliated killers and cohorts and detain them offshore, the chief of our tribe would decide to release them, and then we’d try to get another country to take them when we won’t allow them in our own. They’re trying to fathom the nature of the realities we’re reflecting, selecting, and deflecting. And they’re no doubt trying to plumb the depths of the stupidity we must attribute to their own tribe.

Is it possible that righteousness can cause blindness? Can it induce audacity, even if unwitting? The reality being deflected is clear: we’re desperately trying to deflect the fact that we’re desperately trying to fulfill a domestic political promise that can’t be fulfilled without palpable domestic risk. In the face of that self-imposed risk, as our commander-in-chief is wont to do with our earnings, we’re trying to “spread it around”. The reality being reflected is fuzzy but clear enough to be terrifying: we’re reflecting the impression that we’re arrogant enough to think others will blithely take our bitter pill – or we’re reflecting our assumption that others are so ignorant they won’t recognize the taste or discern the poison.  But what kind of reality is being selected in which we would actually ask a nation with which we share a continent to take people so potentially dangerous we won’t have them here? How dizzying are the heights of arrogance – how deep the valleys of ignorance – that we would attempt to sicken another tribe with a “cure” our own tribesmen refuse to self-administer?

Grandpa O’Brien was taken as humorous when he used to say, “Strange things are happening.” He wasn’t joking. And he didn’t know the half of it.  We don’t, either. The rest of the world is learning. Albert Einstein, who’s almost as famous as Grandpa O’Brien, said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the former.” For the latter, there is an ample and growing body of evidence. And we certainly seem determined to validate and add to that body of evidence, just as we seem determined to symbolize our contemptible actions through our constant efforts to exploit and abuse language, at the expense of others, while ignoring its symbolic action.