I had to go to literature to survive. It was through literature such as Black Spring that I came to a deeper understanding of my place and time and allowed me to come to where I am today and to achieve what I’ve achieved today.
Hopefully, it will continue to allow me to go forward. I have a few plays left in me.
What I came to understand while taking some time off from my show is that when you’re as immersed in radio and writing as I am, almost to the point of exhaustion, it takes something out of you. And then when you have that blank time, when you have nothing to do, you realize what it took out of you.
It’s easy to get caught up in the fervor of work, work, work, until you don’t even know what you’re doing and how hard you’re working. And then when you get four days off, as I did, a bottom falls out of you. You’d better have a place to land.
Luckily, I landed where I started when I was a teenager, which was reading literature. That has given me the understanding in my meditation on where I’m at, which is having a few plays left in me. You may be very surprised when you hear what’s coming in my professional life in the coming months.
It’s a rebirth. I’m like a born-again Savage. Some huge things are in my future, but I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do them. But now I know I want to do them because God wants me to do them. I have a mission to save America. That’s why I’ve worked for almost a quarter century to awaken America, before we lose America.
And the child grew, and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.
—Genesis 21:8
Indignation
While writing this book, I had a rare four consecutive days off from The Savage Nation. And just by chance, I caught the movie Indignation, based on the novel of the same name by Philip Roth. It’s about a guy who goes to college in the 1950s, coming from a background very like mine. His father was a butcher; he worked in the butcher shop with him. My father was an antiques dealer; I worked with him. The main character is a very dutiful son. He gets straight A’s.
I couldn’t believe they were showing that movie while I was writing this book. The movie wasn’t that good; it lacked all the great elements of the book. But I’d read the book, and the movie reminded me about how relevant it is to the book you are reading, believe it or not.
Philip Roth is one of the great American novelists, a true gift to humanity. Sadly, many people in our time don’t even know who he is anymore. He is very satisfying to read because of the depth of his stories, even though they’re usually based on a sexual theme. But he takes the sexual theme and turns it into something much deeper. Sex doesn’t have to be shallow.
In the novel, the main character wants to leave his father to go to college. His father is oppressing him. Plus, the Korean War is raging and the protagonist believes that if he doesn’t get straight A’s and get into college, he will be drafted, sent to Korea, and killed.
So he applies to a small Midwestern college to get away from the butcher, who is driving him crazy. His father isn’t driving him crazy just to hurt him. Rather, his father is mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the war, the danger he sees everywhere, in every corner, for his beloved son. And he doesn’t leave his boy alone.
The boy wants to be free. He doesn’t realize his father’s fear arises from love and pride. But it produces so much anger in the boy that he leaves his father and gets as far away from Newark as he can. And he must adopt the customs and culture of another American world, the Midwest.
In the book, the nineteen-year-old protagonist has a relationship, if you want to call it that, with a beautiful young girl he meets in the library. The girl performs a certain sexual act upon him the first night, in the car. And he’s freaked out. He doesn’t understand it. He thinks she’s a slut. And then he sees she has a scar on her hand, that she’s a cutter. She cuts herself.
Later in the book, the reader finds out that the protagonist is dead. He has been drafted, sent to the Korean War, and killed. And he is speaking from the grave. That was so daring for Roth to do. That is the difference between literature and the dreck most people consume, pulp fiction.
But the protagonist has a series of arguments with the dean of the college, who doesn’t understand this kid because he’s a rebel. The kid can’t get along with any of the roommates they put him in with. He moves out twice. They think he’s a malcontent. He can’t fit in.
At that college, in those days, you had to go to chapel forty times a year to graduate. The protagonist doesn’t want to do this. He’s a lover of Bertrand Russell, who wrote “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Russell, a total rationalist, is one of the protagonist’s heroes. The boy is an atheist, doesn’t believe in a higher power. The dean doesn’t understand how he can get through life without believing.
In one of the protagonist’s arguments with the dean, who is trying to understand him or at least get him under control, he says to the dean about Bertrand Russell:
He says, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, itmay just as well be the world as God.” Second, as to theargument from design, he says, “Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?”
The young student goes on to regurgitate Russell’s critiques of Christ and his teaching, along with Russell’s doubts about Christ’s very existence. Russell condemned Jesus Christ for believing in Hell, calling it inhumane, and blamed the Church for retarding human progress. He said that religion is based primarily on fear of anything unknown, including defeat and death. And because fear begets cruelty, he says, religion and cruelty have “gone hand in hand” throughout history.
The young man is especially enamored by Russell’s association of atheism with freedom. Russell believes that pure reason or intelligence should govern one’s life but that fear of the unknown, of life itself, keeps men “slavishly subdued.” So belief in God is a manifestation of man’s fear, “unworthy of free men.” The student arrogantly tells the dean, “These are the thoughts of a Nobel Prize winner, renowned for his contributions to philosophy and for his mastery of logic and the theory of knowledge, and I find myself in total agreement with them.” He goes on to say that he not only agrees with and intends to live by Bertrand Russell’s principles but believes it is his right to do so. You can see the seeds of today’s politically correct campuses, where any mention of God is banned.
The dean counters him. Of course, it’s the writer taking the dean’s side in the argument. He tells the young man that he admires his spirit, confidence, and tenacity and believes the young man will be an outstanding lawyer. “I can see you one day arguing a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. And winning it, young man, winning it,” he tells him.
But for all his admiration of the student’s intelligence and ability to internalize Russell’s arguments, he is dismayed by the young man’s willingness to accept those arguments without question. This is a great insight into the revolutionary ethos, especially insofar as it is found in the minds of the young. The college campus rebel bravely questions the existence of God or long-standing societal customs but never thinks to question that which he seeks to replace them with. The dean takes the young student to task for precisely this:
“I admire your ability to memorize and retain abstruse reading matter even if I don’t necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist, dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities.”
“What about the Nobel Prize!” demands the student, hammering his fist on the desk and pointing his finger at the d
ean. The dean again commends the student for his fighting spirit, adding that he wishes the student were moved to such passion for a worthier cause than Bertrand Russell, whom the dean obviously believes the British government was justified in labeling a subversive. But then the dean makes one of the more insightful comments in the book:
“To find that Bertrand Russell is a hero of yours comes as no great surprise. There are always one or two intellectually precocious youngsters on every campus, self-appointed members of an elite intelligentsia who need to elevate themselves and feel superior to their fellow students, superior even to their professors, and so pass through the phase of finding an agitator or iconoclast to admire on the order of a Russell or a Nietzsche or a Schopenhauer. Nonetheless, these views are not what we are here to discuss, and it is certainly your prerogative to admire whomever you like, however deleterious the influence and however dangerous the consequences of such a so-called freethinker and self-styled reformer may seem to me.”
As I read that, I said to myself, “My God, is he ever describing the attitude of the pseudo-intellectuals on television and in other media. They truly are ‘intellectually precocious youngsters.’” That would be especially a person like Macho Madcow, who is like a precocious college kid, with that sneering face, always sneering to her girlfriends in the sorority, to show how she’s superior to the average person out there.
So when you think about “elitists,” think about them as not so elite after all. They’re not so elite. They’ve ruined the world, not only in the media but in everything they’ve touched.
Reading this dialogue did something good for me. It made me think very hard about this book and revise my thinking about it, as literature has done in my life before. When you associate your mind with greats, your mind improves, your mind goes to new places. As the Jewish Kabbalists said, it’s the white between the letters, not the black ink you see, that is important. That’s something very hard to comprehend unless you’ve thought about mysticism.
But it’s the spaces and the breaths I’ve taken, between what I’ve said on the air, that carry the meaning of what I’ve tried to say. I can’t explain it. I wish I could.
Without trying to be too clever or too tricky, let me explain what happened to me when I read Indignation again. It brought me back to a new place that I had lost. I had wandered away from my own depth. It has a lot to do with the radio business and what’s gone on in talk radio. It has evolved to a point where I almost couldn’t take another day of it. I was reaching a point where I couldn’t do one more day of that trite garbage.
If I had to listen to one more day of people bashing liberals, as if it were something brand new that no one had ever said before, every day the same thing, “Democrat bad, Republican good,” I don’t know if I could have gone on. I’d rather retire and spend the rest of my life reading novels and taking care of dogs and elephants and whales and giving money to animal causes. I didn’t even want to talk. I wanted to take a vow of silence. I didn’t want to live in that polluted stream of triteness. I couldn’t take it.
But after rereading the novel, I felt like I could go back to my audience and bring them something worthy of their ear time. I could feel that my connection with my audience was back. I could feel it, and I know the audience could feel it. The old Savage was back.
So man lieth down and riseth not;
Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake,
Nor be roused out of their sleep.
—Job 14:12
Dinner with an Atheist and a Buddhist
I recently had dinner with a psychiatrist who is a stone-hearted atheist. He has told me on several walks together that he doesn’t believe in the hereafter and doesn’t believe in God. He believes that when the electrical energy in the brain stops, that’s it. It’s over.
Interestingly, he asked me at dinner when this book was coming out. I told him it would be out just in time for this year’s holidays. I learned for the first time that as a child he had been taken to church every day by his very religious mother, which I found to be very interesting.
Also at the table was an Asian friend of mine, who disclosed to me his Buddhist belief system. Unto itself, that’s not such a great revelation, but what follows is. I asked him and his wife if they believe in a hereafter, if they believe in reincarnation. He said he does believe in reincarnation and went on to explain the following.
He told us that his own mother says his wife being married to him is her penance for a past life sin against him in another form, in another place.
I said, “What? Say that again?”
He said, “Oh yes, my mother says that my beautiful wife has put up with me all these twenty-some odd years as part of her penance for a sin she committed against me in another life.”
I started to laugh and said, “I didn’t know Buddhist mothers were more condemning of their sons than Jewish mothers,” which is quite funny in its own way. I continued, “How does that work?”
His wife then said, “In the next life, we may come back where I’m the husband and he’s the wife. Or he could be my son, I could be his mother.”
In other words, from the Buddhist point of view, it’s a way of balancing everything out through time. I don’t know if this makes sense to a non-Buddhist, but Buddhists believe that everything is balanced through time and reincarnation. I thought that was a great insight into Buddhism. I had never heard it explained in that way.
As for the atheist doctor, I’m still not sure if he really believes that life is finite and ends when the electrical energy in the brain ends, having learned that he went to church with his mother every day.
I ran this whole story by a friend of mine, who interpreted it in an opposite way. My friend said that the Buddhist man’s mother was not putting her son down by saying, “Whatever you do to her or have done for twenty years is payback for what she did to you in a past life.” My friend said she interprets that to mean that the wife so hurt him in another life that whatever he does to her is okay. So the mother was actually justifying his behavior toward his wife. It’s her fault! What he meant by, “has put up with me,” whether it was gambling, running with other women, or God knows what, it’s her fault. In other words, it’s okay to do it.
It’s Impossible to Prove That God Does Not Exist
Why does God do this to us? It’s not a question of proving that God exists. All I can think is that it’s impossible that He doesn’t exist. It’s as though my mind has reached the point of saying it can’t all be an accident. It can’t be. It’s impossible.
There’s no possibility that we’re a National Geographic creation run by a bunch of crazed leftists, anyway. Almost every show on the National Geographic Channel seems to try to show that God doesn’t exist, that there was a speck of dust in the universe, then carbon fell down and mixed up with the oxygen in the swamp and the slime, and other molecules, and here we are trying on clothing in department stores. It doesn’t make sense to me.
No matter where my mind goes on a scientific level, I am a total believer. What does that do for you? Nothing. What does it mean for me? Everything. Because I’m confident that this is the way it’s supposed to be, even when bad things happen. Let’s go into bad things.
I’ve had minor bad things happen to me, not major ones. Major bad things include losing a child, God forbid; getting cancer; having a heart attack; not being able to talk; having a stroke; or developing Alzheimer’s disease. Those are bad, bad things. Going broke after you have a little money is another. One of the most devastating things that could happen to you is to have some success, lose it all, and wind up back where you started or worse. That’s probably one of the worst things that could happen.
What is God’s plan? I don’t know. How do you deal with bad, bad things? How do you deal with a child dying of leukemia in a cancer ward? What are you going to say? It was his karma? He was a bad person in another life? I don’t want to accept that.
That’s why the book Peace
of Mind stayed with me. If God is omnipresent but not omnipotent, He does not control every aspect of our lives. He doesn’t control our every breath. We have free will in that regard.
In other words, God starts the clock and then the clock runs. You are the clock. Where you go with what you are given is another story.
And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.
—Jeremiah 29:13
Papers in the Street
I have in my hand a well-worn, brown, almost worn-out little business card from my father that I recently received from a family member. It has his name and antiques store address, 137 Ludlow Street, New York 2, New York. And on the back of it is my grandfather’s name, the petition number from his citizen papers, which say Russia and Poland, and also the names of the three children he brought with him.
Apparently, my father made notes on the card for his immigrant father, who I assume couldn’t write for himself. I look at the card, and I wonder what their struggles must have been. My grandfather Sam was the astronaut of the family, having left behind the old world and come here without his family, eventually bringing over his wife and then his three children. He died of a heart attack very young at age forty-seven, no doubt from struggle, worry, and cigarettes. God knows what.
I mention his card in this book because I wonder how much God played a role in Sam’s life. As far as I know, I do not come from a religious family at all. My father, Benjamin, was an atheist who didn’t believe in a greater being. He was very cynical about religion.
God, Faith, and Reason Page 3