The Braindead Megaphone

by George Saunders

  After a while, because I liked the idea of being wounded, but didn’t much like the idea of actually having that pink flipperlike thing flapping around on my arm, a world-famous surgeon from France would arrive in the Boston in my head and fix my hand, and I would go back to class, face chapped from the wind, holding the book in my now-perfect hand, Newbery Medal facing outward.

  “Good book?” Sister Lynette would say from her desk.

  “Good book,” I would say.

  Before Johnny Tremain, writers and writing gave me the creeps. In our English book, which had one of those 1970s titles that connoted nothing (Issues and Perspectives, maybe, or Amalgam 109), the sentences (“Larry, aged ten, a tow-headed heavyset boy with a happy smile for all, meandered down to the ballfield, hoping against hope he would at last be invited to join some good-spirited game instigated by the other lads of summer”) repulsed me the way a certain kind of moccasin-style house slipper then in vogue among my father’s friends repulsed me. I would never, I swore, wear slippers like that. Only old people who had given up on life could wear slippers like that. Likewise the sentences in Amalgam 109 or Polyglot Viewpoints seemed to have given up on life, or to never have taken life sufficiently personally. They weren’t lies, exactly, but they weren’t true either. They lacked will. They seemed committee-written, seemed to emanate from no-person, to argue against the intimate actual feeling of minute-to-minute life.

  Forbes suggested that the sentence was where the battle was fought. With enough attention, a sentence could peel away from its fellows and be, not only from you, but you. I later found the same quality in Hemingway, in Isaac Babel, Gertrude Stein, Henry Green: sentences that had been the subject of so much concentration, they had become things in the world instead of attempts to catalog it.

  A person can write: “There were, out in the bay, a number of rocks, islands of a sort, and upon these miniature islands, there resided a number of gulls, which, as the sun began to rise, gradually came to life, ready to begin another day of searching for food.”

  Or she can write: “On rocky islands gulls woke.”

  The first sentence is perfectly correct. There is, strictly speaking, more information in it than in the second. But is the increased information justified by the greater number of words? The second sentence credits our intelligence. Where else would the islands be, but in a bay? The plural “islands” implies that there are “a number” of them. If the rocks are “islands of a sort,” let’s call them “islands.” Gulls search for food every day, no need to point it out.

  The second sentence has been loved by its creator. She has given it her full attention. That missing comma? She meant it. There was, to Forbes, I expect, a world of difference between, “On rocky islands, gulls woke,” and “On rocky islands gulls woke.”

  Standing around the school yard, I tried out sentences meant to describe, with Forbes-like precision, whatever I happened to be seeing: “Sister Lynette was eating lunch in the doorway while watching the third-and fourth-grade kids running around in the parking lot at recess and as she watched them, she thought of her home in Kansas.” That wasn’t very Forbes-ish. Sister Lynette wasn’t actually standing in the doorway at all. She was…she was “standing on the sidewalk that ran between the school building itself and the parking lot on which the children played.” Or actually, she was “standing with one foot on that sidewalk and one foot in the parking lot.” Did we need all that? Was her exact position worth the resulting sentence-bulk? Why did we care where she was standing anyway? Did it affect what came next? Also, she wasn’t watching “the third-and fourth-grade kids.” She was watching some of them. Actually, on closer inspection, she wasn’t. She was looking across the street, at a run-down house. What did I mean by “run-down”? What were the specific characteristics of the house that might cause me to think of it as “run-down”?

  I remember those times with great affection: the bitter Chicago cold, the vast parking lot, the world, suddenly and for the first time, transformed into something describable, with me, the Potential Describer, at its center.

  The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

  The difference between Esther Forbes and the authors of Polyglot 141 was that Forbes had fully invested herself in her sentences. She had made them her own, agreed to live or die by them, taken total responsibility for them. How had she done this? I didn’t know. But I do now: she’d revised them. She had abided long enough with each of them to push past the normal into what we might call the excessive-meaningful; had held the prose up to sufficient scrutiny to turn it into something iconic, something that sounded like her and only like her.

  What happens when this attention is not paid?

  Well, Polyglot 141 happens.

  But worse things can happen than Polyglot 141.

  A petty bureaucrat writes to his superior: “The lighting must be better protected than now. Lights could be eliminated, since they apparently are never used. However, it has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them as soon as darkness sets in. This is because the load naturally rushes toward the light when darkness sets in, which makes closing the door difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. It would therefore be useful to light the lamp before and during the first moments of the operation.” The bureaucrat was the ironically named “Mr. Just,” his organization the SS, the year 1942.

  What Mr. Just did not write—what he would have written, had he been taking full responsibility for his own prose—is: “To more easily kill the Jews, leave the lights on.” But writing this would have forced him to admit what he was up to. To avoid writing this, what did he have to do? Disown his prose. Pretend his prose was not him. He may have written a more honest version, and tore it up. He may have intuitively, self-protectively, skipped directly to this dishonest, passive-voice version. Either way, he accepted an inauthentic relation to his own prose, and thereby doomed himself to hell.

  Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility (“On structures not unlike rock masses, it was observed that certain animals perhaps prone to flight slept somewhat less aggressively than previously”), or something more diabolical (“The germ-ridden avatars of evil perched on their filthy black rocks in the otherwise pure bay, daring the clear-souled inhabitants of the city to do what was so obviously necessary: kill them before they could infest the city’s hopeful, innocent children”); the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most important of all, tells us what we really think. But this process takes time, and immersion in prior models of beautiful compression.

  Forbes was my first model of beautiful compression. She did for me what one writer can do for another: awoke a love for sentences. Behind her prose I sensed the loving hand of an involved human maker. Her thirst for direct, original language seemed like a religion of sorts, a method of orientation, and a comfort, in all countries and weathers, in happiness and sadness, in sickness and in health. Reading Johnny Tremain, I felt a premonition that immersion in language would enrich and bring purpose to my life, which has turned out to be true.

  So thank you, Esther Forbes. I never knew you, it turned out your Boston never existed, but that nonexistent town, and that boy made out of words, changed things for me forever.

  A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

  The Patriotic Studies discipline may properly be said to have begun with the work of Jennison, et al., which first established the existence of the so-called “fluid-nations,” entities functionally identical to the more traditional geographically based nations (“geo-nations”), save fo
r their lack of what the authors termed “spatial/geographic continuity.” Citizenship in a fluid-nation was seen to be contingent not upon residence in some shared physical space (i.e., within “borders”) but, rather, upon commonly held “values, loyalties, and/or habitual patterns of behavior” seen to exist across geo-national borders.

  For approximately the first five years of its existence, the Patriotic Studies discipline proceeded under the assumption that these fluid-nations were benign entities, whose existence threatened neither the stability nor integrity of the traditional geo-nation.

  A classic study of this period was conducted by Emmons, Denny, and Smith, concerning the fluid-nation Men Who Fish. Using statistical methods of retro-attribution, the authors were able to show that, in a time of national crisis (the Battle of the Bulge, Europe, 1944), American citizens who were also citizens of Men Who Fish performed their duties every bit as efficiently (± 5 Assessment Units) as did members of the control group, even when that duty involved inflicting “harm” to “serious harm” on fellow citizens of Men Who Fish who were allied at that time with the opposing geo-nation (i.e., Germany). During this battle, as many as seventy-five hundred (and no less than five thousand) German soldiers who were citizens of Men Who Fish were killed or wounded by American soldiers who were citizens of Men Who Fish, leading the authors to conclude that citizens of Men Who Fish were not “expected, in a time of national crisis, to respond significantly less patriotically than a control group of men of similar age, class, etc., who are not citizens of Men Who Fish.”

  Significant and populous fluid-nations examined during this so-called “Exoneration Studies” period included Men With Especially Large Penises; People Who Say They Hate Television But Admit To Watching It Now And Then, Just To Relax; Women Who When Drunk Berate The Sport Of Boxing; and Elderly Persons Whose First Thought Upon Hearing Of A Death Is Relief That They Are Still Alive, Followed By Guilt For Having Had That First Feeling.

  A watershed moment in the history of the discipline occurred with the groundbreaking work of Randall, Cleary, et al., which demonstrated for the first time that individuals were capable of holding multiple fluid-nation citizenships. Using the newly developed Anders-Reese Distance-Observation Method, the authors were able to provide specific examples of this phenomenon. A Nebraska man was seen to hold citizenship in both Men Who Sit Up Late At Night Staring With Love At Their Sleeping Children, and Farmers Who Mumble Soundless Prayers While Working In Their Fields. In Cincinnati, Ohio, twin sisters were found to belong to Five-Times-A-Week Churchgoers, as well as Clandestine Examiners Of One’s Own Hardened Nasal Secretions. An entire family in Abilene, Texas, was seen to belong to Secretly Always Believe They Are The Ugliest In The Room, with individual members of this family also holding secondary citizenships in fluid-nations as diverse as Listens To Headphones In Bed; Stands Examining Her Breasts In Her Closet; Brags Endlessly While Actually Full of Doubt; Makes Excellent Strudel; and Believes Fervently In The Risen Christ.

  At the time, awareness of our work among the general public was still low. This would change dramatically, however, with the publication, by Beatts, Daniels, and Ahkerbaj, of their comprehensive study of the fluid-nation People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction.

  In this study, 155 members of the target fluid-nation were assessed per the Hanley-Briscombe National Allegiance Criterion, a statistical model developed to embody the Dooley-Sminks-Ang Patriot Descriptor Statement, which defined a patriot as “an individual who, once the leadership of his country has declared that action is necessary, responds quickly, efficiently, and without wasteful unnecessary questioning of the declared national goal.”

  Results indicated that citizens of People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction scored, on average, thirty-nine points lower on the National Allegiance Criterion than did members of the control group and exhibited nonpatriotic attitudes or tendencies 29 percent more often. Shown photographs of members of an opposing geo-nation and asked, “What sort of person do you believe this person to be?” citizens of People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction were 64 percent more likely to choose the response “Don’t know, would have to meet them first.” Given the opportunity to poke with a rubber baton a citizen of a geo-nation traditionally opposed to their geo-nation (an individual who was at that time taunting them with a slogan from a list of Provocative Slogans), citizens of People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction were found to be 71 percent less likely to poke than members of the control group.

  The authors’ conclusion (“It is perhaps not inaccurate to state that, within this particular fluid-nation, loyalty to the fluid-nation may at times surpass loyalty to the parent geo-nation”), along with the respondent’s professed willingness to subjugate important geo-national priorities, and even accept increased national security risks, in order to avoid violating the Cohering Principle of their fluid-nation (i.e., not killing for an abstraction), led to the creation of a new category of fluid-nation, the so-called Malignant fluid-nation.

  At this time—coincidentally but fortuitously—there appeared the work of Elliott, Danker, et al., who made the important (and at the time startling) discovery that multiple fluid-nation citizenships did not occur in random distributions. That is, given a known fluid-nation citizenship, it was theoretically possible to predict an individual’s future citizenships in other fluid-nations, using complex computer modeling schemes. The authors found, for example, that citizens of Over-Involved Mothers tended to become, later in life, citizens of either Over-Involved Grandmothers or (perhaps paradoxically) Completely Disinterested Grandmothers, with high rates of occurrence observed also in Women Who Collect Bird Statuary and Elderly Women Who Purposely Affect A “Quaint Old Lady” Voice.

  The implications of these data vis-à-vis the so-called Malignant fluid-nations were clear. Work immediately began within the discipline to identify and develop innovative new technologies for the purpose of identifying those fluid-nations most likely to produce future citizens of Malignant fluid-nations. The most sophisticated and user-friendly of these tools proved to be the Rowley Query Grid, which successfully predicted the probability that citizens of Tends To Hold Him/Herself Aloof From The Group (previously thought to be Innocuous) would, in time, evolve into citizens of People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction. Subsequently, dozens of these Nascent-Malignant fluid-nations were identified, including Bilingual Environmentalists, Crusty Ranchers, Angry Widowers, and Recent Immigrants With An Excessive Interest In The Arts.

  Needless to say, these findings resulted in dramatic improvement in both the National Security Index and the Unforeseen Violence Probability Statistic.

  Entire research departments have now embarked on the herculean task of identifying all extant fluid-nations, with particular emphasis, of course, on links to known Malignant fluid-nations. The innovative work of Ralph Frank, in which fifty individuals waiting for a bus in Portland, Oregon, were, briefly and with their full consent, taken into custody and administered the standard Fluid-Nation Identifier Questionnaire, indicated the worrisome ubiquity of these fluid-nations. At least ninety-seven separate fluid-nations were detected within this random gathering of Americans, including: Now-Heavy Former Ballerinas; Gum-Chompers; People Who Daydream Obsessively Of Rescuing Someone Famous; Children Of Mothers Who Were Constantly Bursting Into Tears; Men Who Can Name Entire Lineups Of Ball Teams From Thirty Years Ago; Individuals In Doubt That Someone Will Ever Love Him/Her; and Individuals Who Once Worked, Or Considered Working, As Clowns. A closer analysis of the fluid-nations identified indicated that nearly 50 percent of these had been, would soon be, or very possibly could eventually be linked to People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction, or to another Malignant fluid-nation.

  It is thus no longer a question of whether a large number of Americans belong to problematic fluid-nations; it is, rather, a question of how willing Americans are to freely confess these citizenships, and then undergo the necessary mitigative measures, so that the nation need have no doubt a
bout their readiness to respond in an emergency.

  One need only imagine the catastrophic results, should the American membership of one of the more ubiquitous fluid-nations (Parents Of Children Inclined To Cry During Thunderstorms, for example, or Inseparable Married Couples Who Whisper Together Late Into The Night) pause during some national crisis to consider the effects of the national protective action upon their fellow fluid-nation members who happened to be residing within the geo-nation which was at that time posing the threat to American security (i.e., the “enemy nation”).

  Although much work remains to be done, most Americans now recognize the tremendous danger posed by these fluid-nations, are energetically examining themselves and their acquaintances for the residual presence of any questionable loyalties or allegiances, and have come to recognize that national security issues are most efficiently addressed, not by the average citizen, who is (understandably) somewhat underinformed and distracted, but by the well-trained, highly skilled professionals working within the Patriotic Studies discipline.

  This is not, of course, just an American issue; leaders of other geo-nations have now begun to recognize the potential gravity of this threat. Throughout the world, at any given moment, the justifiable aims of legitimate geo-nations are being threatened by reckless individuals who insist on indulging their private, inscrutable agendas. The prospect of a world plagued by these fluid-nations—a world in which one’s identification with, and loyalty to, one’s parent geo-nation is constantly being undermined—is sobering indeed. This state of affairs would not only allow for, but require, a constant, round-the-clock reassessment of one’s values and beliefs prior to action, a continual adjustment of one’s loyalties and priorities based on an ongoing evaluation and reevaluation of reality—a process that promises to be as inefficient as it is wearying.