We in remorse are a radical minority within the social-work community. We believe that not every wrong in our society is the result of complex factors such as poor early-learning environment and re-sultative dissocialized communication. Some wrong is the result of badness. We believe that some people act like jerks, and that when dealing with jerks one doesn’t waste too much time on sympathy. They’re jerks. They do bad things. They should feel sorry for what they did and stop doing it. Of course, I’m oversimplifying here, trying to state things in layman’s terms, and I should add that we are professionals, after all, who are trained in behavioral methodology including remorse, but also a lot more—if you’re interested, read “Principles of Deductive Repentance,” by Morse and Frain, or Professor Frain’s excellent “Failure and Fault: Assignment and Acceptance. ”
I did my training under Frain and graduated in 1976, just as remorse was coming to the forefront. People in the helping professions had begun to notice a dramatic increase in the number of clients who did terrible things and didn’t feel one bit sorry. It was an utterly common phenomenon for a man who had been apprehended after months of senseless carnage to look at a social worker or psychologist with an expression of mild dismay and say, “Hey, I know what you’re thinking, but that wasn’t me out there, it wasn’t like me at all. I’m a caring type of guy. Anyway, it’s over now, it’s done, and I got to get on with my own life, you know,” as if he had only been unkind or unsupportive of his victims and not dismembered them and stuffed them into mailboxes. This was not the “cold-blooded” or “hardened” criminal but, rather, a cheerful, self-accepting one, who looked on his crime as “something that happened” and had a theory to explain it.
“I’m thinking it was a nutritional thing,” one mass murderer remarked to me in 1978. “I was feeling down that day. I’d been doing a lot of deep-fried foods, and I was going to get a multi-vitamin out of the medicine chest when I noticed all those old ladies in the park and—well, one thing just led to another. I’ve completely changed my food intake since then. I really feel good now. I know I’m never going to let myself get in that type of situation again!”
It wasn’t only vicious criminals who didn’t feel sorry, though. It was a regretless time all around. Your own best friend might spill a glass of red wine on your new white sofa and immediately explain it—no spontaneous shame and embarrassment, just “Oh, I’ve always had poor motor skills,” or “You distracted me with your comment about Bolivia.” People walked in and stole your shoes, they trashed your lawn and bullied your children and blasted the neighborhood with powerful tape machines at 4:00 A.M. and got stone drunk and cruised through red lights, smashing your car and ruining your life for the next six months, and if you confronted them about these actions they told you about a particularly upsetting life-experience they’d gone through recently, such as condemnation, that caused them to do it.
In 1976, a major Protestant denomination narrowly defeated an attempt to destigmatize the Prayer of Confession by removing from it all guilt or guilt-oriented references: “Lord, we approach Thy Throne of Grace, having committed acts which, we do heartily acknowledge, must be very difficult for Thee to understand. Nevertheless, we do beseech Thee to postpone judgment and to give Thy faithful servants the benefit of the doubt until such time as we are able to answer all Thy questions fully and clear our reputations in Heaven.”
It was lack of remorse among criminals, though, that aroused public outrage, and suddenly we few professionals in the field were under terrible pressure to have full-fledged remorse programs in place in weeks, even days. City Hall was on the phone, demanding to see miscreants slumped in courtrooms, weeping, shielding their faces while led off to jail.
Fine, I said. Give me full funding to hire a staff and I’ll give you a remorse program you can be proud of. Mitch sneered. “Ha!” he said. He said, “Get this straight, showboat, ’cause I’ll only say it once. You work for me, and I say remorse is Number Last on the list around here. Cosmetics! That’s all City Hall wants and that’s what we give them. A few tears. You can twist arms, step on toes, or use raw onions, but forget about funding.”
His insensitivity shocked me. Remorselessness is a fundamental flaw, a crack in the social contract, and repair requires a major commitment. One man simply couldn’t keep up with the caseload.
I spent two months on the president of AmTox, who was sent to me after his conviction for dumping tons of deadly wastes into a scenic gorge and killing thousands of trout and who took a Who—me? attitude toward the deed until finally I elicited a small amount of shame by requiring him to spend Saturdays panhandling in the bus depot, wearing a sign that said “Help Me, I’m Not Too Bright.” But meanwhile hundreds of others got off scot-free. I’d put the screws to the guy who enjoyed touching pedestrians with his front fender, but meanwhile the guys who bilked hundreds of elderly women of their life savings walked out the door saying, “Hey, what’s the big deal? So we exaggerated a little. No need to get huffy about it.”
It depressed the hell out of me. Here I was, swimming in paperwork with my hands tied, and out on the street were jerks on parade: unassuming, pleasant, perfectly normal people except that they had an extra bone in their head and less moral sense than God gave badgers. And the ones I did put through remorse didn’t improve a lot. Six months ago, thirty-seven former clients of mine filed a classaction suit against the state demanding millions in restitution for the ethically handicapped and arguing neglect on the state’s part in failing to provide remorse counseling earlier. “We have suffered terrible remorse,” the brief said, “as we begin to recognize the enormity of our sins, including but not limited to: pure selfishness, vicious cruelty, utter dishonesty, blind insensitivity, gross neglect, overweening pride, etc. And that’s fine. But where was this program ten years ago? Nowhere to be found! That was the Me Decade! Is that our fault? Therefore, in consideration of the vast black abyss of guilt to which we have been suddenly subjected, we demand that the court order ...” My heart sank as I read it. They had even quoted my speech to the Council on Penitential Reform in 1981:Criminal nonremorse is the tip of a very large iceberg, and unless we initiate broad-based remorse reforms on the community level and start talking about an overhaul of our entire moral system—church, media, education, the parental system, personal networking, the entire values-delivery infrastructure—and recognize that it requires major investment by private and public sectors in professional training and research and that we’re looking at a time frame of years, not months, and that we must begin now, we simply must, because, believe me, if we don’t, that is a mistake we’re going to live to regret!
The state, they said further, had failed to exercise due care in neglecting to warn them earlier and to inform them of the urgent necessity of changing their ways.
Three days later, the order came down that I was reassigned. By offering remorse assistance, it said, I had needlessly raised people’s expectations of inner peace.
“That means you, lamebrain,” Mitch cackled, leaning across his desk and poking an index finger into my rib cage. “Let’s see how you like it in the basement. ” He assigned me to “assist in the assembly and assessment” of ancient and dusty ascertainment files in a dim, airless room deep in the bowels of Human Services—useless and demeaning work that left me weak and dispirited after only a day, but I held on and did the work and didn’t complain. He plugged the ventilator, reduced light-bulb wattage, denied me a radio. I spent three weeks in that hellhole, reading lengthy case histories of clients long since deceased and sorting them into meaningless piles and attaching gummed labels that tasted like dead socks.
Suddenly, one afternoon, he appeared in the doorway, his face drawn, his eyes filled with tears. “I read Frain last night,” he said. “All night. Why—I—You should have told me. Oh God, oh God! What have I done to you? How can I make it up? You want my job? Take it.”
“No, thanks. That’s all right. No problem,” I said. “I’m quitting.”
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He begged me to stay. “I can’t live with my conscience if you won’t let me do something for you. Let me at least take you to lunch. There’s a terrific little seafood place a block from here that I’ve been keeping to myself—”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “Come five o’clock you’ll never see me again.”
I was true to my word. I’m a vice-president of Yakamoto now, where I’ve designed a remorse program for assembly-line workers to build stronger emotional responses to poor workmanship, tardiness, false sick days, and excessive lunch breaks. The job is challenging, the people pleasant, the fringe benefits outstanding, and the salary is three hundred and ninety-five thou a year. The Japanese place a high premium on shame. You don’t see them treating other people like dirt. They even feel contrition for things that someone standing next to them did! They treat me like a prince. I’m a lucky man. I’m extremely happy here.
THE PEOPLE VS. JIM
Q: JIM , I’D LIKE YOU TO LOOK at this magazine article entitled “The Twenty Best Hash Browns in Town” and tell me if you wrote it.
A: Yes, I did.
Q: How about this? “Fifteen Great Ideas for Putting New Life in Those Dingy Stair Treads.” Was that the second “list” article you wrote for a magazine?
A: No, that was my tenth. That was after “Eleven Restaurants You’ll Remember the Rest of Your Life,” “Ten All-Time Greatest Half & Halfs,” “My Ten All-Time Favorite Racquetball Partners,” “Ten Ways to Lose Four Pounds in Two Days,” “Ten Celebrities Show Off Their Basements,” “Eight Methods of Beating a Midlife Slump,” “Seven Terrific Marriages,” “Six Meaner Dogs Than You Ever Saw Before,” and “Five Kids Who Make Your Kids Look Sick.”
Q: What happened, Jim? Why couldn’t you quit then? You knew it was wrong.
A: I know, but look at it my way. First of all, I think that—
Q: “Thirty People Who’d Like to Be Your Friend,” “Ten Famous People’s Breakfasts,” “Eighteen Best Red Things,” “Six Best Tops of Things,” “Twelve Biggest Unnoticed Things,” “Twenty-one Places Where Famous People Were Seen Doing One of Two Things”—the list goes on, Jim.
A: I had a house, I was married, we had two children, pets, a summer place, a boat, a membership in a health club, and a good investment program. But more than that, I found it satisfying. I was a child of the forties, and through the fifties, sixties, seventies, and into the eighties my life seemed confused, purposeless, ill defined. Lists helped to center me a little, calm me down. I took out a clean sheet of paper, numbered it from one to fifteen or twenty—I got a feeling of accomplishment.
Q: You went crazy, Jim. You wrote for sixty-eight different lifestyle magazines, including Des Moines, The Boisean, The Orlandan, The Albuquerquer, The Wichitan, Los Angel, The Quad Citian, The Bethesdan, The Hobokener, The Duluthist, The Renoite, Oakland, The Queenser, Bismarck, The Baton Rougist, The Omahite, The Pittsburghast , and you wrote lists of best artists, best music videos, best hamburgers, quiet restaurants, noisy restaurants, bourbons, aluminum foils, dining-room sets, wallets, American novels, cheese snacks, hotel lobbies, movies, women named Diane, burritos, “Ten Most Exciting Elevators,” “Ten Cures for Winter Arghhhs,” “Ten People Who Have Something You’ll Never Have,” “Ten Things That Look Very Unusual but Really Aren’t,” “Ten Things You Don’t Need to Worry About,” “Ten Places Nearby That You Ought to Drop Everything and Go Look At Immediately,” “The Thirty-nine Most Successful, Restless, Desperately Unhappy People in West Virginia,” “Fifty Top U.S. Businesses Run by Methodists”—surely, Jim, there must have come a point when you thought, That is enough. I can’t do this anymore.
A: I had filled up sixty-one floppy discs by then. I wanted to reach a hundred.
Q: So you filled your hundredth disc, and you collected everything in a book, The Fatal List, and it reached No. 8 on the Times list, and then—?
A: I was ready to retire, but the editor of Milwaukee told me to cough up ten more, otherwise he would include me in “Fifty People Who Were Once Hot and Aren’t Anymore for One Reason or Another.” So I did them.
Q: Do you have any idea what damage you’ve done, Jim? You’ve made people more stupid. Some of your readers now find it hard to read paragraphs that aren’t numbered.
A: How many? A lot?
Q: Jim, we’re going to have to put you in a little room by yourself for a while, I think.
A: Will I ever write again?
Q: No.
THE YOUNG LUTHERAN’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA1
TO EACH PERSON God gives some talent, such as writing, just to name one, and to many persons He has given musical talent, though not as many as think so. For the young Lutheran, the question must be: Do I have a genuine God-given musical talent or do I only seem gifted in comparison to other young Lutherans?
If your talent is choir or organ, there’s no problem. Choir members and organists can be sure their gift is from God because who else but God would be interested. Just like nobody gets fat on celery, nobody goes into church music for the wrong motives.
But for a Lutheran who feels led to play in an orchestra, the first question must be: Are you kidding? An orchestra?
In the Bible, we read about people singing and playing musical instruments, the harp, trumpet, psaltery, but always in praise of the Lord, not for amusement. We do not read that our Lord Himself ever played an instrument or enjoyed hearing others play theirs. The apostles did not attend concerts, or go to dances. Are you sure this is what you want? Do you know what you’re getting into? Opera. Is that anyplace for a Christian? Don Juan and Mephistopheles and Wagner and all his pagan goddesses hooting and hollering, and the immorality—I mean, is anybody in opera married? You play in an orchestra, you’re going to wind up in opera, and the next thing you know, you’re going to be skipping Sunday mornings.
If you steer clear of opera and stick to orchestral concert music, where are the Christian composers? Modern ones are existentialists, the Romantics were secular humanists, the eighteenth century was all rationalists, and the seventeenth was Italians, except for Bach, and you can’t make a living playing Bach. You go in an orchestra, you’re going to be devoting your life to a lot of music that sort of swirls around in spiritual mystery searching for answers that people could find in the Bible if someone showed them where to look.
But if you’re determined to play in an orchestra, then you ought to ask yourself: Which instrument is the best one for a Lutheran to play? If our Lord had played an instrument, which one would He have chosen? Probably not a French horn. It takes too much of a person’s life. French-horn players hardly have time to marry and have children. The French horn is practically a religion all by itself. Should a Lutheran play the bassoon? Not if you want to be taken seriously. The name says it all: bassoon. Maybe you’d do it for a hobby (“Let’s go bassooning this weekend, honey!”) but not as your life occupation.
Many Lutherans start out playing clarinets in marching band and think of the clarinet as a Christian instrument, clear and strong and almost human, but a symphonic clarinet is different from the band clarinet: it’s sardonic, skeptical, and definitely worldly. The English horn sounds Christian, maybe because we think of it as the Anglican horn, but it’s so mournful, so plaintive. And so are English-horn players. They all have incredibly complicated problems, they’re all depressed, especially at night, which is when concerts are. The oboe is the sensualist of the woodwind section, and if there’s one wind a Lutheran should avoid, it’s this one. In movie soundtracks, you tend to hear the oboe when the woman is taking her clothes off, or else later, when she asks the man for a cigarette. The flute is the big shot of the wind section. Jean-Pierre Rampal, James Galway, both millionaires (how many millionaire bassoonists are there?), because everybody knows it’s the hardest to play. To spend your life blowing across a tiny hole—it’s not really normal, is it. The flute is a temptation to pride. Avoid it. The last member of the woodwind family is the flakiest, and that’s the piccolo. No Salvati
on Army band ever included a piccolo and no piccolo virtuoso ever did an album of gospel songs. This is not a devotional instrument.
We come now to the string section. Strings are mentioned in Scripture and therefore some Lutherans are tempted to become string players, but be careful. Bass, for example. An extremely slow instrument, the plowhorse of the orchestra, and bass players tend to be a little methodical, not inventive, not quick, not witty or brilliant, but reliable. This makes the instrument very tempting to German Lutherans. And yet, bass notes have a darkness and depth to them that, let’s face it, is sexual. And when bass players pick up their bows, I don’t think there’s any doubt what’s going on in their minds back there. The cello section seems so normal, and cellists seem like such nice people. The way they put their arms around their instruments, they look like parents zipping up a child’s snowsuit. They seem like us: comfortable, middle-range. And yet there is something too comfortable, maybe too sensual, about the cello. The way they hold the instrument between their legs: why can’t they hold it across their laps or alongside themselves? The viola section is not a place for a Lutheran and here you’ll have to take my word for it. I know violists and they are fine people until, late at night, they start drinking a few bottles of cheap red wine and roasting chickens over a pit in a vacant lot and talk about going to Yucatan with a woman named Rita. Don’t be part of this crowd. The violin is a problem for any Christian because it’s a solo instrument, a virtuoso instrument, and we’re not solo people. We believe in taking a back seat and being helpful. So Christians think about becoming second violinists. They’re steady, humble, supportive. But who do they support? First violins. You want to get involved with them? The first violins are natural egotists. The conductor looks to them first, and most first violinists believe that the conductor secretly takes his cue from them, that he, a simple foreign person, gets carried away by listening to the violins and falls into a romantic, emotional reverie and forgets where in the score he is and looks to the concertmaster, the No. 1 first violin, to find out what’s going on: this is what violinists believe in their hearts. If the conductor dropped dead, the rest of the orchestra would simply follow the violin section, while the maestro’s body was carried away, and nobody would notice the difference. Is this a place for a Lutheran to be? In the biggest collection of gold-plated narcissists ever gathered on one stage? No.
We Are Still Married Page 4