Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  POLICE BRUTALITY

  For some time now our leaders, both demagogic and honest, have been telling us to rouse ourselves to greater purpose, national and private. Walter Lippmann suggests that the United States behaves like a society which thinks it is complete, with no more to accomplish; that, for better or worse, we are what we are, and the only danger to our comfort is external. President Kennedy’s exhortations to self-sacrifice are becoming ever more urgent, even shrill. Yet his critics point out that he has not done much to show us how we might best serve our society. To which the answer of the Administration, at least privately, is that until Americans understand those things that threaten us, both from without and within, any presidential program demanding the slightest sacrifice would be demolished by Congress and the jingo press. After all, things do look all right if you don’t look too carefully, and no one can accuse us of ever looking carefully at an unpleasant sight, whether it is Soviet superiority in space or chronic unemployment at home. Now I don’t want to add my voice to the general keening. American society has many virtues which we should never underestimate. By fits and starts, we are attaining a civilization and, barring military accident, we shall certainly attain one before the Soviets. “Be the First into Civilization!” Now there’s a slogan for the two competitors.

  Yet for those who are puzzled at how to respond to Presidential cries for action, vigor and movingaheadness, I propose that there are certain very practical things we can do in a society that is by no means complete. I might add that those professional patriots who trumpet that this is the new Eden and only traitors would change it or downgrade it are declaring, of course, that the society is closed and therefore decadent and soon to fall. I vote No to “perfection,” and Yes to change and survival. Most of us spend too much time solving international problems at cocktail parties, rather than dealing with those things which we might affect and change, the tying up of the loose ends in our own society. There are many of them, ranging from the abolition of capital punishment to school integration. On either of those great matters any citizen can be usefully engaged. He can also be useful in social and moral legislation, where there is much work to be done. As for civil liberties, anyone who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city. Now I will tell a horror story which has haunted me for several months, something that, I am told, is common but which I witnessed for the first time, reacting as deeply as the writer in Angus Wilson’s novel Hemlock and After.

  I was in Washington for a few days last spring. At about ten o’clock in the evening of my last day in town, I took a taxicab to the Union Station. It was a mild, drizzly night. Traffic in the side streets near Pennsylvania Avenue was tied up. My cab was stopped in front of the YMCA, a large building a half-block from the Old State Department and two blocks from the White House. The sidewalk was deserted. As we sat there, out of the building marched four men, wearing light raincaps with upturned brims and trench coats. There were two men with them. One was well dressed, perhaps sixty; he wore a white raincoat. The other was young and thin and shabby, and he wore no raincoat. I watched as this odd company moved seven or eight yards along the sidewalk toward the traffic light, which was now red. In front of a deserted shop, the trench-coats stopped and methodically began to beat up the two men with them. I sat there stunned. There had been no provocation. As suddenly and pointlessly as a nightmare, the attack began; and there, right in front of me on the black wet sidewalk, the older man lay as two men kicked him, while the other two shoved the young man into the doorway of the shop and began to beat him across the face.

  The cab driver, an old Negro, said, “I hate to see anybody do that to another man. I do.” The light was now green, but I told him to wait. I got out and crossed to the nearest trench-coat. He was, at the moment, disengaged. He had been working the younger man over and he now stood a few feet away, breathing hard. I asked him who he was and what he was doing. He turned on me and I have never seen such a savage, frightening little face. It was plump, flushed, with popping eyes; the face of a young pig gone berserk. He began to scream at me to get out of there or I’d be arrested. Threats and obscenities poured out of him in one long orgiastic breath. I looked away and saw that the older man was now on his stomach, trying to shield his head from the kicks of the men standing over him. His raincoat was streaked with mud. The younger man was silent, except for the whacking noise his face made when it was struck—first left, then right, like a punching bag. In my hardest voice I said: “You’re going to be the one in trouble if you don’t tell me who you are.” The dark one came over to me at this point; he showed me his detective’s badge, and suggested I get lost. Then he returned to his sport. The plump one was now longing (and I do not exaggerate by using a verb of judgment) to get back to the man in the doorway. But before he could, I asked him for his name. He started to curse again, but a look from his companion stopped him. He gave me his name and then with a squeal leaped on the man in the doorway and began hitting him, making, as he did, obscene gasping noises.

  I stood there dumbly wondering what to do. Right in front of me, two men were being knocked about by four men who were, quite simply, enjoying their work. I was also witness to the fact that the victims had not resisted arrest, which would of course be the police explanation of what had happened. Cravenly, I got back into the cab. I asked my driver if he would be a witness with me. He shook his head sadly. “I don’t want no trouble. This is a mighty dirty town.”

  At Union Station I telephoned the Washington Post and Times-Herald and talked to the night editor. I gave him my name. Yes, he knew who I was. Yes, the story interested him. I gave him the detective’s name, which I had thought was probably false. He said no, there was such a man. I gave him the cab driver’s license number, in case the driver changed his mind. Then the editor asked me what I intended to do about it. I shouted into the receiver, “This is your town. Your scandal. Your newspaper. You do something about it, I’m catching a train.” He asked if they could use my name. I said of course, and hung up.

  But that was the end of it.

  I got back to New York to read that a Southern editor had written an editorial attacking the John Birch Society. In the course of his editorial, he quoted the F.B.I. as saying that the Birchers were “irresponsible.” Some hours before the editorial was published, two men from the F.B.I. arrived at the editor’s office and asked him on what authority he could quote the F.B.I. as terming the Birch Society “irresponsible.” The editor’s sources were not, as it turned out, reliable. But then the editor, quite naturally, asked how it was that the F.B.I. knew the contents of his editorial before it was published. He got no answer.

  Now the point to these two stories is that here is something we can do: guard our own liberties. We may not be able to save Laos; but we can, as individuals, keep an eye on local police forces, even if it means, as some have proposed, setting up permanent committees of appeal in every city to hear cases of police brutality, or to consider infractions of our freedom to speak out in the pursuit of what our founders termed happiness—two rights always in danger, not only at the local but at the Federal level.

  Esquire, August 1961

  NASSER’S EGYPT

  “Are you German, sir?” A small, dark youth stepped from behind a palm tree into the full light of the setting sun which turned scarlet the white shirt and albino red the black eyes. He had been watching me watch the sun set across the Nile, now blood-red and still except for sailboats tacking in a hot, slow breeze. I told him that I was American but was used to being mistaken for a German: in this year of the mid-century, Germans are everywhere, and to Arab eyes we all look alike. He showed only a moment’s disappointment.

  “I have many German friends,” he said. “Two German friends. West German friends. Perhaps you know them?” He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and read off two names. Then, not waiting for an answer, all in a rush, he told me that h
e was a teacher of Arabic grammar, that he was going to Germany, West Germany (he emphasized the West significantly), to write a book. What sort of book? A book about West Germany. The theme? He responded with some irritation: “A Book About West Germany.” That was what the book would be about. He was a poet. His name was Ahmed. “Welcome,” he said, “welcome!” His crooked face broke into a smile. “Welcome to Luxor!” He invited me to his house for mint tea.

  As we turned from the bank of the Nile, a long, haunting cry sounded across the water. I had heard this same exotic cry for several evenings, and I was certain that it must be of ancient origin, a hymn perhaps to Ikhnaton’s falling sun. I asked Ahmed what this lovely aria meant. He listened a moment and then said, “It’s this man on the other side who says: will the ferryboat please pick him up?” So much for magic.

  Ahmed led the way through narrow streets to the primary school where he taught. It was a handsome modern building, much like its counterparts in Scarsdale or Darien. He took me inside. “You must see what the children make themselves. Their beautiful arts.” On the entrance-hall table their beautiful arts were exhibited: clay figures, carved wood, needlework, all surrounding a foot-long enlargement in clay of the bilharzia, a parasite which is carried by snails in the irrigation ditches; once it invades the human bloodstream, lungs and liver are attacked and the victim wastes away; some ninety per cent of the fellahin suffer from bilharzia. “Beautiful?” he asked. “Beautiful,” I said.

  On the wall hung the exhibit’s masterpiece, a larger than life-size portrait of Nasser, painted in colors recalling Lazarus on the fourth day. A somewhat more talented drawing next to it showed students marching with banners in a street. I asked Ahmed to translate the words on the banners. “Our heads for Nasser,” he said with satisfaction. I asked him if Nasser was popular with the young. He looked at me as though I had questioned the next day’s sunrise. Of course Nasser was loved. Had I ever been in Egypt before? Yes, during the winter of 1948, in the time of the bad fat King. Had things improved? I told him honestly that they had indeed. Cairo had changed from a nineteenth-century French provincial capital surrounded by a casbah to a glittering modern city, only partially surrounded by a casbah. He asked me what I was doing in Egypt, and I told him I was a tourist, not mentioning that I had an appointment to interview Nasser the following week for an American magazine.

  Ahmed’s house is a large one, four stories high; here he lives with some twenty members of his family. The parlor is a square room with a high ceiling from which hangs a single unshaded light bulb. Two broken beds serve as sofas. I sat on one of the beds while Ahmed, somewhat nervously, ordered mint tea from a sister who never emerged from the dark hall. Then I learned that his father was also a teacher, and that an uncle worked in Nasser’s office; obviously a prosperous family by Luxor standards.

  I was offered the ceremonial cigarette. I refused; he lit up. He was sorry his father was not there to meet me. But then again, puffing his cigarette, he was glad, for it is disrespectful to smoke in front of one’s father. Only recently the father had come unexpectedly into the parlor. “I was smoking a cigarette and when he came in, oh! I bit it hard, like this, and have to swallow it down! Oh, I was sick!” We chuckled at his memory.

  When the mint tea arrived (passed to us on a tray from the dark hall, only bare arms visible), Ahmed suggested we sit outside where it was cool. Moonlight blazed through a wooden trellis covered with blossoming wisteria. We sat on stiff wooden chairs. He switched on a light momentarily to show me a photograph of the girl he was to marry. She was pretty and plump and could easily have been the editor of the yearbook in any American high school. He turned off the light. “We modern now. No more arranged marriages. Love is everything. Love is why we marry. Love is all.” He repeated this several times, with a sharp intake of breath after each statement. It was very contagious, and I soon found myself doing it. Then he said, “Welcome,” and I said, “Thank you.”

  Ahmed apologized for the unseasonable heat. This was the hottest spring in years, as I had discovered that day in the Valley of the Kings where the temperature had been over a hundred and the blaze of sun on white limestone blinding. “After June, Luxor is impossible!” he said proudly. “We all go who can go. If I stay too long, I turn dark as a black in the sun.” Interestingly enough, there is racial discrimination in Egypt. “The blacks” are second-class citizens: laborers, servants, minor government functionaries. They are the lowest level of Egyptian society in every way except one: there are no Negro beggars. That is an Arab monopoly. Almsgivers are blessed by the Koran, if not by Nasser, who has tried to discourage the vast, well-organized hordes of beggars.

  “To begin with, I had naturally a very light complexion,” said Ahmed, making a careful point, “like the rest of my family, but one day when I was small the nurse upset boiling milk on me and ever since that day I have been somewhat dark.” I commiserated briefly. Then I tried a new tack. I asked him about his military service. Had he been called up yet? A new decree proposed universal military service, and I thought a discussion of it might get us onto politics. He said that he had not been called up because of a very interesting story. My heart sank, but I leaned forward with an air of sympathetic interest. Suddenly, I realized I was impersonating someone. But who? Then when he began to talk and I to respond with small nods and intakes of breath, I realized that it was E. M. Forster. I was the Forster of A Passage to India and this was Dr. Aziz. Now that I had the range, my fingers imperceptibly lengthened into Forsterian claws; my eyes developed an uncharacteristic twinkle; my upper lip sprouted a ragged gray moustache, while all else turned to tweed.

  “When the British attacked us at Suez, I and these boys from our school, we took guns and together we marched from Alexandria to Suez to help our country. We march for many days and nights in the desert. We have no food, no water. Then we find we are lost and we don’t know where we are. Several die. Finally, half dead, we go back to Alexandria and we march in the street to the place where Nasser is. We ask to see him, to cheer him, half dead all of us. But they don’t let us see him. Finally, my uncle hears I am there and he and Nasser come out and, ah, Nasser congratulates us, we are heroes! Then I collapse and am unconscious one month. That is why I have not to do military service.” I was impressed and said so, especially at their getting lost in the desert, which contributed to my developing theory that the Arabs are disaster-prone: they would get lost, or else arrive days late for the wrong battle.

  Ahmed told me another story of military service, involving friends. “Each year in the army they have these…these…” We searched jointly—hopelessly—for the right word until E. M. Forster came up with “maneuvers,” which was correct. I could feel my eyes twinkling in the moonlight.

  “So these friends of mine are in this maneuvers with guns in the desert and they have orders: shoot to kill. Now one of them was Ibrahim, my friend. Ibrahim goes to this outpost in the dark. They make him stop and ask him for the password and he…” Sharp intake of breath. “He has forgotten the password. So they say, ‘He must be the enemy.’ ” I asked if this took place in wartime. “No, no, maneuvers. My friend Ibrahim say, ‘Look, I forget. I did know but now I forget the password but you know me, anyway, you know it’s Ibrahim.’ And he’s right. They do know it was Ibrahim. They recognize his voice but since he cannot say the password they shot him.”

  I let E. M. Forster slip to the floor. “Shot him? Dead?”

  “Dead,” said my host with melancholy satisfaction. “Oh, they were very sorry because they knew it was Ibrahim, but, you see, be did not know the password, and while he was dying in the tent they took him to, he said it was all right. They were right to kill him.”

  I found this story hard to interpret. Did Ahmed approve or disapprove what was done? He was inscrutable. There was silence. Then he said, “Welcome,” and I said, “Thank you.” And we drank more mint tea in the moonlight.

  I tried again to get t
he subject around to politics. But beyond high praise for everything Nasser has done, he would volunteer nothing. He did point to certain tangible results of the new regime. For one thing, Luxor was now a center of education. There were many new schools. All the children were being educated. In fact he had something interesting to show me. He turned on the lamp and opened a large scrapbook conveniently at hand. It contained photographs of boys and girls, with a scholastic history for each. Money had to be raised to educate them further. It could be done. Each teacher was obliged to solicit funds. “Look what my West German friends have given,” he said, indicating amounts and names. Thus I was had, in a good cause. I paid and walked back to the hotel.

  On the way back, I took a shortcut down a residential street. I had walked no more than a few feet when an old man came rushing after me. “Bad street!” he kept repeating. I agreed politely, but continued on my way. After all, the street was well lit. There were few people abroad. A shout from an upstairs window indicated that I should halt. I looked up. The man in the window indicated I was to wait until he came downstairs. I did. He was suspicious. He was from the police. Why was I in that street? I said that I was taking a walk. This made no sense to him. He pointed toward my hotel, which was in a slightly different direction. That was where I was supposed to go. I said yes, but I wanted to continue in this street, I liked to walk. He frowned. Since arrest was imminent, I turned back. At the hotel I asked the concierge why what appeared to be a main street should be forbidden to foreigners. “Oh, ‘they’ might be rude,” he said vaguely. “You know….” I did not know.

  In the diner on the train south to Aswan I had breakfast with a young government official from the Sudan. He was on his way home to Khartoum. He had a fine smile and blue-black skin. On each cheek there were three deep scars, the ritual mark of his tribe—which I recognized, for I had seen his face only the day before on the wall of the Temple of Luxor. Amenhotep III had captured one of his ancestors in Nubia; five thousand years ago the ritual scars were the same as they are now. In matters of religion Africans are profound conservatives. But otherwise he was a man of our time and world. He was dressed in the latest French fashion. He had been for two years on an economic mission in France. He spoke English, learned at the British school in Khartoum.