by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
After. In a long story, “A Plaque on Via Mazzini,” the Italian-Jewish writer Giorgio Bassani adopts as his narrative voice the amiable coarseness of a commonplace citizen of Ferrara, the north Italian town that before the war had four hundred Jews, one hundred eighty-three of whom were deported. One of them comes back, in August 1945: Geo Josz, bloated with the fat of endema starvation, with hands “callused beyond all belief, but with white backs where a registration number, tattooed a bit over the right wrist . . . could be read distinctly, all five numbers, preceded by the letter J.” Not unsympathetic but intent upon going about their business, the citizens of Ferrara speak through the narrator: “What did he want, now?” Ferrara does not know what to make of this survivor, unnerving in his initial quiet, with his “obsessive, ill-omened face” and his bursts of sarcasm. In his attic room Josz papers all four walls with pictures of his family, destroyed in Buchenwald. When he meets an uncle who had fawned upon the fascists, he lets out “a shrill cry, ridiculously, hysterically passionate, almost savage.” Encountering a broken-down old count who had spied for the fascist police, he slaps him twice—it’s not so much his presence that Josz finds unbearable as his whistling “Lili Marlene.”
As if intent upon making everyone uncomfortable, Josz resumes “wearing the same clothes he had been wearing when he came back from Germany . . . fur hat and leather jerkin included.” Even the warmhearted conclude: “It was impossible . . . to converse with a man in costume! And on the other hand, if they let him do the talking, he immediately started telling about . . . the end of all his relatives; and he went on like that for whole hours, until you didn’t know how to get away from him.”
A few years later Josz disappears, forever, “leaving not the slightest trace after him.” The Ferrarese, remembering him for a little while, “would shake their heads good-naturedly,” saying, “If he had only been a bit more patient.” What Geo Josz thinks or feels, what he remembers or wants, what boils up within him after returning to his town, Bassani never tells. There is no need to. Bassani sees this bit of human wreckage from a cool distance, charting the gap between Josz and those who encounter him on the street or at a café, no doubt wishing him well, but naturally, in their self-preoccupation, unable to enter his memories or obsessions. His very presence is a reproach, and what, if anything, they can do to reply or assuage they do not know. For they are ordinary people and he . . . The rest seeps up between the words.
Aftermath. On the face of it, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” by the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade, is an ideological dialogue between a badly shaken skeptic, evidently the writer himself, and a zealous believer, Hersh Rasseyner, who belongs to the Mussarist sect, “a movement that gives special importance to ethical and ascetic elements in Judaism.” But the voices of the two speakers—as they meet across a span of years from 1937 to 1948—are so charged with passion and sincerity that we come to feel close to both of them.
Like Grade himself, the narrator had been a Mussarist in his youth, only to abandon the Yeshiva for a career as a secular writer. Yet something of the Yeshiva’s training in dialectic has stuck to the narrator, though Grade is shrewd enough to give the stronger voice to Hersh Rasseyner, his orthodox antagonist. What they are arguing about, presumably, are eternal questions of faith and skepticism—the possibility of divine benevolence amid the evil of His creation, the value of clinging to faith after a Holocaust that His hand did not stop. In another setting all this might seem an intellectual exercise, but here, as these two men confront one another, their dispute signifies nothing less than the terms upon which they might justify their lives. For Hersh Rasseyner the gas chambers are the inevitable outcome of a trivialized worldliness and an enfeebled morality that lacks the foundation of faith. For the narrator, the gas chambers provoke unanswerable questions about a God who has remained silent. Back and forth the argument rocks, with Hersh Rasseyner usually on the attack, for he is untroubled by doubt, while the narrator can only say: “You have a ready answer, while we have not silenced our doubts, and perhaps we will never be able to silence them.” With “a cry of impotent anger against heaven”—a heaven in which he does not believe but to which he continues to speak—the narrator finally offers his hand to Hersh Rasseyner in a gesture of forlorn comradeship: “We are the remnant. . . .”
In its oppressive intensity and refusal to rest with any fixed “position,” Grade’s story makes us realize that even the most dreadful event in history has brought little change in the thought of mankind. History may spring endless surprises, but our responses are very limited. In the years after the Holocaust there was a certain amount of speculation that human consciousness could no longer be what it had previously been. Exactly what it might mean to say that after the Holocaust consciousness has been transformed is very hard to determine. Neither of Grade’s figures—nor, to be honest, the rest of us—shows any significant sign of such a transformation. For good and bad, we remain the commonplace human stock, and whatever it is that we may do about the Holocaust we shall have to do with the worn historical consciousness received from mankind’s past. In Grade’s story, as in other serious fictions touching upon the Holocaust, there is neither throb of consolation nor peal of redemption, nothing but an anxious turning toward and away from what our century has left us.
7
The mind rebels against such conclusions. It yearns for compensations it knows cannot be found; it yearns for tokens of transcendence in the midst of torment. To suppose that some redemptive salvage can be eked out of the Holocaust is, as we like to say, only human. And that is one source of the falsity that seeps through a good many accounts of the Holocaust, whether fiction or memoir—as it seeps through the language of many high-minded commentators. “To talk of despair,” writes Albert Camus, “is to conquer it.” Is it now? “The destiny of the Jewish people, whom no earthly power has ever been able to defeat”—so speaks a character in Jean-François Steiner’s novel about a revolt in Treblinka. Perhaps appropriate for someone urging fellow-prisoners into a doomed action, such sentiments, if allowed to determine the moral scheme of Holocaust writing, lead to self-delusion. The plain and bitter truth is that while Hitler did not manage to complete the “Final Solution,” he did manage to destroy an entire Jewish world.
“It is foolish,” writes Primo Levi, “to think that human justice can eradicate” the crimes of Auschwitz. Or that the human imagination can encompass and transfigure them. Some losses cannot be made up, neither in time nor in eternity. They can only be mourned. In a poem entitled “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car,” the Israeli poet Don Pagis writes:
Here in this transport
I Eve
and Abel my son
if you should see my older son
Cain son of man
tell him that I
Cry to heaven or cry to earth: that sentence will never be completed.
Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times
{1986}
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S NEW DEAL constituted, let us say, a quarter-revolution. It introduced the rudiments of a welfare state and made “the socialization of concern” into a national value. It signified not a society egalitarian or even just, but at least one that modulated the harshness of “rugged individualism.” All later administrations, at least until that of Reagan, more or less accepted the New Deal legacy. Under Reagan, America experienced, let us say, a quarter-counterrevolution.
Segments of the American bourgeoisie had never accepted the general premise or sparse practice of what passed in America for a welfare state; they lived with it faute de mieux, waiting for a chance to shake off trade unions, social measures, and economic regulations. Ideological in a primitive way, they would have stared with incomprehension if you had suggested that their survival as a class might well have been due to the very social measures they despised. And then their moment came—with the inner disintegration of liberalism under Carter that opened the way for Reagan.
The more hard-bitten
and fanatic Reaganites brought to office a maximum program: to undo the New Deal, which meant to demolish the fraction of a welfare state we have. When the limits of this perspective became clear to Reagan’s managers (most starkly after his administration’s defeat in Congress when it tried to tamper with Social Security), the Reaganites fell back, shrewdly enough, on their minimum program. They would weaken, reduce, cripple, starve out the welfare state. And in this they often succeeded. While leaving intact the external structures of certain programs, they proceeded, with firm ideological malice, to cut out and cut down a good many other programs. They brought about a measurable redistribution of income and wealth in behalf of the rich, and they repelled any attempt to pass further social legislation—not that the chickenhearted Democrats made much of an attempt. Perhaps most important, the Reaganites managed to create a political atmosphere in which the social forces favoring the welfare state were forced onto the defensive. The very idea of a national health act, for example, was no longer even mentioned by the few remaining liberals in Congress.
Now there were sectarians—the right is blessed with them as well as the left—who complained that Reagan did not go far enough. David Stockman judged Reagan to be “a consensus politician, not an ideologue.” This was a dumb remark, since it has been Reagan’s peculiar skill to combine the two roles—consensus politician and ideologue—just as he has put the politics of theater at the service of ideological politics. After all, to be an ideologue doesn’t necessarily mean to commit political suicide; as a Washington hand is quoted, “Reagan has never been one to go over a cliff for a cause” (Newsweek, April 7, 1986). The shrewder Reaganites understood that if they clung at all costs to their maximum program, they might not even get their minimum. When it comes to political reality, Stockman has nothing to teach Reagan.
But the main achievement of the Reagan administration has not been institutional or programmatic. It has consisted of a spectacular transformation of popular attitudes, values, and styles, though how deep or durable this will prove to be we cannot yet know. In a country where only two decades ago a sizable portion of the population registered distrust of corporate America, the Reaganites have largely succeeded in restoring popular confidence in the virtues of capitalism, the mystical beneficence of “the free market,” and the attractiveness of a “minimalist state,” even though that state, faithfully attending to corporate needs, has never been close to being minimalist. In the long run, the brilliant manipulation of popular sentiment by Reagan and his men may turn out to be more important than their economic and social enactments.
A certain worldview, not exactly fresh but with some clever decorations, has come to dominate public discourse. Let me try briefly to sift out the main elements of the Reaganite vision.
The primacy of “success,” the release of greed. For the segment of Reaganite operatives and backers that came from or represented the new rich of the West and Southwest—real estate developers, oil millionaires, movie magnates, in short, the arriviste bourgeoisie—the policies of the Reagan administration were immediately helpful. Still more important was the largesse with which these policies sanctioned appetites of acquisitiveness and greed that had been present, of course, before Reagan’s presidency but not quite so blatantly or unashamedly. It was as if J.R. had found spiritual comrades in the White House, or even an office next door to, say, Michael Deaver. The inner circles of Reaganites and their managerial supporters throughout the country were sublimely untroubled by the cautions of certain skeptics (Felix Rohatyn, for one) in the Eastern financial establishment. Deaver’s squalid story—his exploitation of White House connections in behalf of his lobbying firm—was just a minor instance of the by now commonplace shuttling between high governmental posts, especially in the Pentagon, and corporate boardrooms. It will take some years before we know the whole story of this jolly interpenetration between officialdom and corporations, but it takes no gifts of prophecy to foresee that, in its subservience to big money, the Reagan administration is likely to equal or surpass those of Grant and Harding.
The new rich, tasting power and light-headed with a whiff of ideology, could now have it both ways. They could persuade themselves that it was quite legitimate, indeed “the American way,” to grab as much as they could, and “Screw you, Jack,” if you suffered the consequences; while they were also morally comforted with the fairy tale that the sum of their selfishness would, through a sleight of “the invisible hand,” come out as a public good. The corporate buccaneers who now felt free to act out the ethos of Social Darwinism could also preach that “the free market” brought plenty to all (which didn’t, however, keep corporate America from pressing for every form of governmental handout that would further its economic interests). After all, few human experiences can be as satisfying as the simultaneous discharge of low desires and high sentiments.
The fever spread. While industrial America was being devastated and thousands of farmers trembled on the edge of bankruptcy, the corporate and financial “community” indulged in a spree of raids and mergers, almost all of them unproductive, sterile, asocial, but decidedly profitable. New terms entered our language: arbitrage, asset-shuffling, golden parachute, junk bonds, among others. New generations of profiteers, yuppies with clever brains and no minds, flourished in investment banking. A few may end in jail for “insider” trading. Newsweek (May 26, 1986) quotes a disillusioned Wall Streeter: “We have created two myths in the 1980s. One is that you need to be smart to be an investment banker. That’s wrong. Finance is easy. Myth number two is that investment bankers somehow create value. They don’t. They shuffle around value other people have created. It’s a parasitical industry.”
Reading about these young Wall Streeters, baby-faced creatures of the Reagan moment, one feels, almost, a kind of pity for them. Caught in illegal maneuvers, which in pleading guilty they now say were known to the top people in their firms, they seem like petty scapegoats, small fry who had not yet learned what the big fellows know: that you can evade the law without breaking it or can make yourself a bundle while remaining just this side of the law since, after all, it’s your kind of law.
A psychiatrist, Samuel Klagsbrun, who treats “a lot of lawyers handling mergers and acquisitions,” says that for these people “business is God” (Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1986). A young arbitrager reports that everyone “seems to want to make the quick buck. [They] move out into the left lane, put it into overdrive and hope the brakes don’t fail when they hit the first curve” (Newsweek, May 26, 1986).
And more sedately, Ira Sorkin, the New York director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, says, “Greed knows no bounds. There’s always someone who makes more than you do. Investment banking is the new gold mine” (New York Times, June 2, 1986).
Earning around a million dollars a year, some of these arbitragers and dealmakers live by a scale of values that can only repel Americans who still keep a fraction of the republic’s animating values. Here is Hamilton James, thirty-five, of the firm Donaldson Lupkin, who shovels in over a million a year but says that “if we [his family] want a library and a room for an au pair girl, it could cost a couple million dollars. If it’s anything fancy, four or five million” (Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1986). Any bets on what he’ll pay the au pair girl?
None of this is new. There were Drew and Fisk, Morgan and Rockefeller in the days of and after the robber barons. There were the boys of Teapot Dome. There was Calvin Coolidge, who declared, “The business of America is business.” There was Charlie Wilson, who said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.” Yet something is new, at least for the years since 1933, and that’s the social and moral sanction that Reaganism has given to the ethos of greed. The Reagan administration did not “cause” the Wall Street shenanigans I’ve mentioned; Reagan himself need not say, like Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook,” since no one supposes he is; but the bent of his policy, the tone of his rhetoric, the signals of his response have all en
abled, indeed encouraged, the atmosphere of greed.
A few years ago our national heroes were men like Jonas Salk and Martin Luther King and Walter Reuther, but now it’s an industrial manager like Lee Iacocca, of Pinto fame, whose book is supposed to show even morons how to become millionaires. Iacocca stars in a television commercial that wonderfully articulates the spirit of the times: he strides through a factory in heroic style, blaring out the virtues of his product, while behind him follows a group of autoworkers, mute and cheerful, happy with the beneficence of Lee the First.
The lure of an earlier America, or the corruptions of nostalgia. Whether intuitively or by calculation, the Reaganites grasped how deeply the collective imagination of this country responded to “pictures” of an earlier, often mythic America—“pictures” of small towns, rugged personal virtues, family stability, and sturdy yeomen cultivating their own farms. The less such “pictures” correspond to social reality, the greater their appeal, for it is obviously more pleasant to reflect upon the America of Franklin and Jefferson than that of Exxon and IBM. And while much of this pastoral nostalgia is manipulated by political hucksters, who have apparently learned something from the commercials of Marlboro cigarettes and Busch beer, there is still, it is important to remember, something authentic being exploited here, a memory prettied up and sweetened but a genuine memory nonetheless.