Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  Do you believe that, confronted with the incontrovertible fact of American superior military might, Khrushchev would risk World War III over Egypt or Africa or any other piece of geography far removed from the Russian homeland?

  We should be prepared, I suggest, to exploit our present power advantage in every area of the world threatened by Communist subversion.

  True disarmament will be possible only when, one, Russian Communism has been destroyed as a world force or, two, Russian Communism renounces its avowed purpose of world conquest. Since the second condition would most certainly mean the first condition has been fulfilled, isn’t it time that we in America put aside wishful thinking and took up the business of defending freedom?

  The columns were written by Barry Goldwater, and I was amazed that there could even be a United States Senator who held such beliefs. I began to suspect that I was the one who’d grown up in the provinces.

  I thought of giving it all up—the job, my writing, my girlfriend—to join the Freedom Rides which were taking place at the time, but I didn’t. My political activities and education remained private, and I seemed to like it that way. The longer my thoughts remained unspoken, the more special they seemed to become. I don’t recall ever trying to talk with anyone in Indianapolis about anything serious.

  I remember, sitting in my living room at The Meadows, the noises of a party from next door blasting through the walls, seeing Malcolm X on television for the first time. Believing deeply in Martin Luther King’s nonviolent campaigns, I had been prepared to despise Malcolm—the spokesman, I’d been taught, for a violent black extremism which paralleled that of the KKK. One thing he said reached me: for black Americans to use their bodies to march, to petition from white people for what should already have been theirs could be described in only one word—“begging.” And Afro-Americans, Malcolm said, should not be beggars.

  In the fall and winter of 1960–61, the Indianapolis papers were denouncing James Baldwin—William Buckley, I recall, making an invidious comparison between him and Adolf Eichmann—and Martin Luther King as irresponsible extremists. If I found, then, that Malcolm’s description of things seemed true, where did that leave me?

  My way of seeing things, I noticed, came more and more from the black man’s point of view. If you were black, I reasoned, what good was the right to vote, the right to protest, the right to free speech—even when such rights existed—when the law of the land was the law of the majority, and when this majority was white? If you could not convince even the most enlightened and best-intentioned of men (e.g., New Yorkers who read the Times and Post) that it was both immoral and impractical to counsel moderation, what chance would there ever be to convince the American People (e.g., my neighbors and colleagues in Indianapolis) that things should be changed?

  The appeal to work through the orderly democratic processes began to sound to me like just another way in which bigotry, injustice, and the status quo would be preserved. New York was not America, Indianapolis was—and in America, I concluded, the possession of power determined all.

  I read voraciously, seeking out and discovering writers who agreed with such thoughts, who could articulate my sense of things. My bibles that fall and winter were C. Wright Mills’s Listen Yankee and The Causes of World-War III, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, Edward Sapir’s essays in Language Culture and Personality, and some essays by a man I’d never heard of, Paul Goodman, which were appearing in Commentary magazine (and which would later become part of Growing Up Absurd).

  By the end of my fourth month at Chevrolet-Indianapolis, I had paid off my debt to the Business Men’s Clearing House, and I began to believe that escape was a genuine possibility. By this time, and for the rest of my days at GM, I was also, while I walked the aisles of the factory, talking to myself: cursing, analyzing, theorizing, plotting revolution.

  Nobody around me—executives or union men-seemed to feel that the hours spent inside the plant were too high a price to pay for what the money earned during those hours could purchase. The few times that I made faint suggestions to the contrary, people looked at me as if I were crazy. So I read, I talked to myself, I constructed theories, I lived well, ate well, put away money—and began to fear that I was, quite literally, going mad. More: as the split between the outward progress of my life and the inner tumbling grew, I sensed the dividends that madness would have to offer: attention, drama, escape, sympathy…if I could not write a new novel, I could, at least, become a character for one.

  It was not that things grew worse during my months at GM; they didn’t, really—but the duration of my confused feelings, of the conditions which provoked them—these wore me down. Feelings of sickness and rage alternated with feelings of impotence and hostility. Inside, the effect was violent, terrifying. If what was good for General Motors was good for the country, then they were both in need of revolution. Without it, I told myself, we were all doomed.

  At the time there was, for me, only one truth: that if the price paid for having cars was the work done at the factory for the better part of a man’s life, then the only hope for mankind was in a world without cars.

  The thought was exhilarating; the moral (Destroy—!) thrilling. In my mind, the world came to be constructed—driven—by what were abstract, allegorical forces: Racism, Capitalism, Industrialism, Imperialism, The System, The Status Quo, Ignorance. What I had said to Whyte became more and more true: all compromise was error. You could not make life on the assembly line more humane—you had to destroy the assembly line.

  I copied out, at the time, passages from an essay by Edward Sapir and carried them with me. That Sapir had written the essay (“Culture, Genuine and Spurious”) in 1924—and that, as I thought, nobody now knew about it—made its truth more powerful, my possession of it more beautiful:

  The major activities of the individual must directly satisfy his own creative and emotional impulses…[They] must always be something more than a means to an end. The great cultural fallacy of industrialism, as developed up to the present time, is that in harnessing machines to our uses it has not known how to avoid the harnessing of the majority of mankind to its machines. The telephone girl who lends her capacities, during the greater part of the living day, to the manipulation of a technical routine that has an eventually high efficiency value but that answers to no spiritual needs of her own is an appalling sacrifice to civilization. As a solution of the problem of culture she is a failure—the more dismal the greater her natural endowment. As with the telephone girl, so, it is to be feared, with the great majority of us, slave-stokers to fires that burn for demons we would destroy, were it not that they appear in the guise of our benefactors.

  …No harmony and depth of life, no culture, is possible when activity is well-nigh circumscribed by the sphere of immediate ends and when functioning within that sphere is so fragmentary as to have no inherent intelligibility or interest. Here lies the grimmest joke of our present American civilization. The vast majority of us, deprived of any but an insignificant and culturally abortive share in the satisfaction of the immediate wants of mankind, are further deprived of both opportunity and stimulation to share in the production of non-utilitarian values. Part of the time we are dray horses; the rest of the time we are listless consumers of goods which have received no least impress of our personality. In other words, our spiritual selves go hungry, for the most part, pretty much all of the time.

  What seems fascinating to me now—and pleasantly so—is how much more real than reality the written and printed word was to me during my last months at General Motors. Books, articles, letters, company literature—they seemed to have engaged, aroused, depressed, and enraged me more than people or events. Unable to write, the writing of others became all important, all powerful. Quotes from Sapir or Mills or Goldwater would, for days at a time, become the most important parts of my life—I would carry them with me until, without having tried, I would find that I could recite them aloud, almost verbatim.

&nb
sp; The most significant piece of writing for me during that time was a company pamphlet which I picked up from the information rack at the exit to the factory on my way out one day. It was entitled “My Blessing Not My Doom,” and it was “Published For GM Men And Women” by the “Information Rack Service, General Motors Personnel Staff.” (Ralph—and his superior, the Director of Personnel—knowing I had been an English major, and praising me for the quality of my reports—had suggested that I might someday work in this division of GM.) The titles in the racks changed regularly—“What We Must Know About Communism,” “Handbook of First Aid,” “The Untold Story of OUR FLAG,” “Easy Ways to Better English,” “How Reliable is 99.9%?”—and I used most of them for toilet-reading. This one, however, even more than The Organization Man or the editorial pages of the News and Star, possessed me.

  It began with the proposition that “people need work almost as badly as they need food; without it they’re devoured by restlessness and discontent.” A few paragraphs later: “Realizing that you actually enjoy working is part of growing up. But many people never learn it; they never achieve the peace of mind and contentment this knowledge brings. They spend their lives in a prison where work is the eternal punishment.

  Others wake up to the fact that they like to work only when the time comes to retire. As their daily job comes to an end, they suddenly realize how much it has meant to them, and what a vacuum will be left in their lives without it. Then they belatedly try to develop hobbies and pursuits that will keep them active.

  The central section of the pamphlet advanced the major argument:

  How can we avoid the feeling of compulsion that makes work a burden? To some extent, we can’t escape it. Most of us have to work for a living. There’s no use trying to kid ourselves about that. Nevertheless, there are two things anyone can do to take the edge off the feeling of compulsion and make his job more pleasant.

  One is to do more work and better work than you have to. Don’t do only as much work as you have to. Do more! Don’t do work that is barely good enough to get by. Do better work than you have to. Do the best job you know how.

  “That idea,” some people will snort, “is strictly for the birds.” But it isn’t. It’s practical. Take a look around you and judge the truth of it for yourself. To whom does work seem a greater drudgery, to those who do only as much as they are forced to do, or to those who throw themselves into the job and do more than they have to?

  Why does a good workman fret when there isn’t enough work to be done? Because he finds it more tiring to work half-heartedly than to work hard. He knows the day is longer when he tries to goldbrick. And the end of the day leaves him with no warming sense of accomplishment.

  The man who does only as much as he has to turns his job into a prison. Compulsion hangs over every move that he makes. Everything he does, he does only because he is forced to do it.

  Here there was a drawing: a worker, bent over, is unhappy at his machine—a machine which punches an endless series of holes in an endless strip of metal. He is frowning. Tied to his leg is a ball and chain. Two policemen, with rifles, stand guard on either side of him.

  The man who does more than he has to clears the walls of this prison in a single bound. He does whatever he is doing not because he has to but because he wants to. He is working of his own free will. Compulsion has been left behind.

  Another drawing: the same worker is at the same press, only now he is smiling as the sheet of punched holes moves rapidly along. There are no policemen. His ball and chain lie in a nearby trash basket.

  This may seem like a subtle mental distinction. But it’s real. You can see it reflected in the happiness and satisfaction—or lack of it—in those around you.

  The second way to circumvent a feeling of compulsion in your job is to realize this fact: even if you didn’t have to work, you would probably want to work anyway.

  If you don’t believe this, stop and think a moment. If you didn’t work, what could you possibly do with yourself? Would you like to join the idle rich? Study their faces sometime. Do they reflect peace and contentment? They are the most bored and empty people on earth.

  Can you think of any adult who doesn’t work whom you believe to be happy? I can’t. Countless men—born rich—have spent millions of dollars to buy or create enterprises in which they could have the pleasure of working. They could not stand a purposeless, workless existence.

  We need work desperately. We need it to absorb our mental and physical energies. If these energies are not expended in constructive fashion, they turn inward and poison our minds and bodies with restlessness and dissatisfaction.

  We need work to give us a feeling of being needed, wanted and useful. We also need it to have balance to our lives; without work, rest and relaxation have no meaning.

  The pamphlet ended with the narrator’s reminiscence:

  People who think they don’t like to work remind me of an officer I knew in the Navy. For four years he griped about everything connected with the Navy. Then when the time came to get out—he signed up for four more years.

  Don’t wait until you retire to realize you like to work. Start enjoying your job today!

  I was obsessed by the pamphlet (in the years since, I’ve used it in every English class I’ve ever taught—junior high school, high school, college—still trying to account for its hold on me, for the feelings it was once able to arouse), and I brought it back to the factory with me on subsequent days, showing it to the workers I knew. They would laugh at it, then shake their heads, and admit that even though the pamphlet had “the same old bullshit” in it that all the others did, there was “a lot of truth” in this one. Again—and this seemed to me the most terrible thing—even though they admitted that there was a lot of truth in it, they continued to laugh.

  My life became increasingly interior. As it did, I told myself that I was at last doing what my father had always wanted me to do: I was, with a vengeance, reading the front pages of the newspaper before the sports pages. More than this, I was, if only in my mind, developing a social and political consciousness, social and political theories.

  At the least, I told myself, I was, for the first time in my life doing something I’d never done before: I was questioning, not a particular policy or action, but what I perceived of as the system underlying that policy or action.

  The logic and reason with which I supported my call to revolution seemed to me irrefutable—and the theory I evolved at the time became, for many years and through many actual political activities, my working hypothesis. In basic outline, it went as follows: men could not perform inhuman tasks eight hours a day for the better part of their waking lives and live meaningful human lives in the time which was left over. It was absurd to put one’s faith in the men who possessed the power to work change, whether in industry, unions, or politics, for even the best of them were concerned only with matters of expediency. They might object to certain forms of injustice, they might work to correct certain problems, but none of them questioned the basic assumptions, structures upon which, within which, everything was built. Rather the opposite: they questioned, and sought to change, in order to reinforce the system, to sustain the status quo.

  Everyone, I believed, sold and defended the products of whatever company he happened to work for. If and when one changed companies one did the same for the new employer, and this loyalty was named morality. If one meant to succeed, and all those with the power to work change had obviously meant to, one criticized, one initiated changes only when these would lead to greater stability, to expansion, to the furtherance of self-interest.

  For a man to have spent years working his way up in a corporation and to have retained by the time he reached the top any kind of radical vision, he would have to have harbored in his day-to-day encounters during those years, a schizophrenic state of mind that would have made the split which was developing in mine seem, by comparison, nonexistent.

  Moreover, the situation was critical
precisely because those I worked with enjoyed the benefits of life that I felt should be shared by all men—decent salary, good working conditions, leisure time, adequate food, clothing, shelter—; they would, it followed, do everything within their power (and they were the ones with power) to resist those forces which threatened, or which they thought threatened, their way of life. There was nothing specifically wrong with a new car every third or fourth year, or a house in suburbia, except that there seemed to me to be a direct, inevitable relation between the affluence such things represented and the lack of them in the poor parts of Mississippi, New York, Brazil, South Africa, India, et al. (In 1965, speaking to American troops in Korea, Lyndon Johnson was to sum up what I’d been getting at: “Don’t forget,” he told the soldiers, “there are only two hundred million of us in the world of three billion. They want what we’ve got, and we’re not going to give it to them.”)

  The devil, as I perceived it, was inertia: nobody in a position to change things would dare question, for example, what seemed to me most important: the quality of daily life involved in the jobs most men worked at—they would only question (as Kennedy and Nixon did in their TV debates that fall) how many jobs were needed to keep an economy moving. The good will of honest men, liberal reforms, etcetera—as good as some of these might be in themselves, they only maintained the illusion of progress, the hope that all change was possible through the systems, the leaders available. The opposite seemed true: specific reforms only helped minimize discontent, only came into being to gird, to strengthen what I perceived of as The System. The System itself caused suffering, injustice, oppression, waste; it was, literally and figuratively, destroying lives—and, since it contained the seeds of its own preservation, would continue to do so. Immediate and revolutionary transformation, therefore, was imperative. Without it, I said to myself again and again, we were all doomed.