Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  But I had been born in America. We made history here; we didn’t need to know it. To get away from all that depressing tonnage (which even then threatened to become my legacy), I did what Americans have always done: I ran. I moved as far west as I could without coming around again, stopping, finally, so close to the edge of the continent—the very lip edge of the millennium—that, from my door, a well-kicked soccer ball would have landed in the Pacific.

  And yet here I was, a mere decade later, strangely famished yet not quite sure what it was, precisely, that I craved, what nourishment I hoped to derive from the experience. After all, what did all this have to do with me?

  On a ramble through the forests of Moravia, three days before we left, we found ourselves eating our rohlíky and cheese in a walled country churchyard next to a nondescript white-plastered building topped by a wrought-iron skull. “That? That’s the kostnice,” said the pimpled young man in soccer shorts, desultorily scratching at the grass with a rake. The charnel house. He agreed, grudgingly, to let us in. We stepped inside. Our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Behind a small, gaudy altar to the Virgin were two columns so massive that for a moment I didn’t understand what I was seeing: not stone, or mortar, but thousands of human shin bones, stacked lovingly each to each, forming ledges, pediments, smooth and cool as marble. Perhaps ten feet in diameter, topped by a delicate frieze of crania, the columns towered over us. For decoration, at regular intervals in the curving wall of bone, a skull had been lovingly set inside a human pelvis. Someone’s mother. Someone’s son. Like a bud at the center of a wide, white rose.

  “V Jičíně jsou lepší”—there are better ones in Jičín—said the youth, impatiently shuffling his feet. I had no doubt it was true.

  We returned home on September 4, walked out into the humid air and familiar lingo of New York. A week later, the Old World, so to speak, came to us. The kostnice was here now.

  In the months that followed, we erased it, carted it off in trucks. It had nothing to do with us. There was nothing to learn. We were still innocent, apart.

  Separateness from the world, for individuals as for nations, comes at a price, and it matters little if the isolation is physical or metaphysical. Our abiding sense of ourselves as a nation “under divine influence,” as a recent letter to the New York Times put it, has already cost us a great deal. Perhaps, therefore, if we are to thrive in this not yet American century, if we are to prove capable of the kind of self-scrutiny necessary for survival, we may need to consider a reversal of direction.

  Perhaps what we need to do is leave the City upon a hill, walk out of Canaan. Return to Egypt, filthy with history. The crowds thicken as you walk east—the crowds of the living and the dead. The doors of the kostnice are open. Enter it. You know this place, these bones. They are yours. Admit it.

  1. Is all this talk of covenants and destiny merely a vestigial limb, a speechwriter’s rhetorical trope? Hardly. To understand the power of the myth in America today, we need only recall the recent reaction to the attempt by those godless liberals in the U.S. Court of Appeals to deprive us of our divine patrimony by excising the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

  2. Robert J. Tamasy, writing in USA Today after the recent furor over the Pledge of Allegiance, was the exception. Noting that “our nation is hurting deeply… in the aftermath of September 11th,” he went on, like any minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to assume that we had somehow been backsliding as a nation, and therefore should seek atonement for our sins. “Instead of seeking ways of removing God from everyday discourse,” he wrote, “it might be better to consider the admonition of 2 Chronicles 7:14, ‘If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.’”

  Democracy and Deference

  On the Culture of Obedience in America

  2008

  As this is in many ways a personal essay, it seems fitting to begin in the confessional mode. I suffer—have always suffered, I believe—from what is euphemistically referred to as “a problem with authority,” by which I mean less an inherent distrust of it, though there is that, than a nearly absolute lack of respect for it. Authority conferred by money, position, connections, fame, etc., means slightly less than nothing to me. Should it happen to arrive accompanied by some genuine talent or virtue, it will be this I acknowledge, not the authority. At bottom, I just don’t feel it—you know, that subordinate feeling, that acolyte’s awe in the presence of the known—“Ohmigod, it’s Brad!”—that overwhelming desire, when one is introduced to the Boss, to roll over and show him one’s nippled belly, and though I’ve learned to compensate for this handicap the way autistic individuals learn to function “normally” by memorizing the gestures appropriate to particular social situations, I have to be constantly vigilant lest I miss my cue and salaam too late, or not at all.

  I blame my parents, which is trite but traditional. Refugees from doubly battered Czechoslovakia, and therefore trained to measure with micrometer accuracy the gap between political rhetoric and lived experience, they knew better, much better, than to take the pieties of a liberal democracy straight. Nonetheless, six years after stepping onto the troubled shore of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s America they had a son and promptly began to fill his head with nonsense. In America, they taught me, wealth and title and station alone meant nothing; talent and hard work were all. In America, allegiance was automatically owed to no one; respect had to be earned. In America, the president worked for us, and knew it, and the house we allowed him to live in for a time—that great white outie of the republic—was known as the People’s House.

  Would that I had been suckled by wolves.

  The damage this training did was considerable, particularly as I, when faced with the obvious truth that only fools spoke their mind and the boss was always right, chose, perversely, to remain loyal to the lie—or the dream, if you like—thereby instantly cutting myself off from most avenues of advancement in America. Cemented into a posture of outraged denial, like the child who continues to believe in Santa Claus even after he’s seen his father’s wristwatch beneath the cotton-ball cuff, I became a writer, condemned to spend my days arguing for a vision, an antique notion of how things should be, in the face of a warehouse of evidence suggesting that the democratic spirit in America is a sentimental crust, no more, and the once-proud democratic self a cog—hardly noticeable, machined to a high level of tolerance—designed to catch and spin the gears of power.

  Do I overstate my case? Perhaps. Once exposed, however, the deference factory’s business, and its inevitable effects, are clearly visible. There’s nothing particularly subtle about it; the construction of this New American, so wonderfully attuned to power, so heartbreakingly quick to heel or roll over (and bite those who don’t), follows a three-step process—classroom to boardroom to political sphere—quite elegant in its simplicity. And make no mistake: though the process has no center—no coordinating cabal, no politburo—it clearly serves the interests of our new corporate ruling class, whose members, taking note, hurry ahead of the curling disk, frantically polishing and smoothing its course, assuring that all is friction-free.

  Turn on the television to almost any program with an office in it, and you’ll find a depressingly accurate representation of the “boss culture,” a culture based on an a priori notion of—a devout belief in—inequality. The boss will scowl or humiliate you because he can; because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong… because, well, he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.

  This is the paradigm—the relational model that shapes so much of our public life. Its primary components are intimidation and fear. It is essentially authoritarian. If not principally about the abuse of power,1 it rests, nonetheless, on a generally accepted noti
on of power’s privileges. Of its inherent rights. The Rights of Man? Please. The average man has the right to get rich so that he, too, can sit behind a desk wearing an absurd haircut, yelling “You’re fired!” or pitch telephones at domestiques, or refuse to take any more questions; so that he too—when the great day comes—can pour boiling oil on the plebes clustered at the base of the castle wall, each and every one of whom accepts his right to do so, and aspires to the honor.

  You say I’m tilting at human nature? That the race of man loves a lord—and always has? That the democratic instincts of the so-called lower classes invariably dissipate as they rise in the world? That power (and what good is power if it can’t be abused a little, no?) has always been one of the time-honored perks of success, and that, of all the lies told, the one about all men being created equal is the most patently absurd? Perhaps you’re right. But surely one could argue that the American democratic experiment was at least in part an attempt to challenge this “reality,” to establish a political and legal culture from which would emerge, organically, a new sensibility: independent, unburdened by the protocols of class, skeptical of inherited truths. Willing to be disobedient. To moon the lord.

  Alas, if that was the plan, it went sideways a long time ago. In today’s America, the majority is nothing if not impressed by power and fame (its legitimacy is irrelevant), nothing if not obedient. As for mooning the lord, the ass to the glass these days is more likely to be the lord’s, and our own posture toward it, well, something short of heroic. Worse yet, should someone decide to take offense, and suggest that it is not the lord’s place to act thusly, he will be set upon by the puckering multitude who will punish him for his impertinence.

  At a White House reception a couple of years ago, President George W. Bush asked Senator-elect Jim Webb how things were going for his son, a marine serving in Iraq. “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb replied. “I didn’t ask you that,” the president snapped back, according to a piece in the New York Times. “I asked you how your boy was doing.”

  Freeze the frame and pull back for a bit of context. Webb, a former secretary of the navy and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, had not only risked his own life in the service of his country but now had a child in harm’s way, serving in an ill-conceived and criminally mismanaged war sold to the nation under false pretenses by the man standing in front of him. That other man—who over the course of his first forty years had shown no ability and little desire to distinguish himself in much of anything despite all the advantages that birth could offer—had sacrificed nothing. Called to serve in an earlier, equally ill-conceived and mismanaged war, he’d opted out of the principled stand (which would have required either saluting or protesting the war’s injustice), cut the line to enter the National Guard, then declined to show up for attendance. In time, having winked and smirked his way to the presidency (a political miracle due, in no small part, to a bit of electoral sleight of hand and the timely aid of political hacks in the nation’s highest court), he began his own war and people began dying at a fast clip.

  Given all this, one might expect this second man to be nice. To show a modicum of respect. If a Lincolnesque moment of genuine reflection and anguish was a bit too much to ask, one might still have legitimately expected some small expression of sympathy, or—the slimmest paring of decency—a graceful evasion: “Maybe we can talk about this later, Jim.” Should he still fall short, one could at least take comfort in the certainty that the American people would hold him accountable for his rudeness and presumption.

  Which is precisely what many of them did—they held Jim Webb accountable. “I’m surprised and offended by Jim Webb,” declared Stephen Hess, a professor at George Washington University, in a New York Times article titled “A Breach of Manners Sets a Tough Town Atwitter.” Admitting that the president had perhaps been “a little snippy,” Professor Hess went on to extol the democratic virtues of decorum and protocol, interrupting himself only long enough to recall a steel executive named Clarence Randall, who, having once addressed Harry S. Truman as “Mr. Truman” instead of “Mr. President,” remained haunted by it for decades.

  Hess wasn’t the only one to be shocked by Webb’s behavior. Letitia Baldridge, the “doyenne of Washington manners,” termed the whole thing “a sad exchange.” Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, made the point that “even discussions of war and life and death did not justify suspending the rules,” then declined to comment on l’affaire Webb-Bush, saying, “It would be rude of me to declare an individual rude.”

  But it was left to Kate Zernike, the author of the Times article, to place the cherry atop this shameful confection in the form of a seemingly offhand parenthetical: “(On criticizing the president in his own house, Ms. Baldridge quotes the French: ça ne se fait pas—‘it is not done.’”)

  To which one might reply, in the parlance of my native town: Why the fuck not? Répétez après moi: It ain’t the man’s house. We’re letting him borrow it for a time. And he should behave accordingly—that is, as one cognizant of the honor bestowed upon him—or risk being evicted by the people in favor of a more suitable tenant.

  But let’s not kid ourselves. The outrage over the Webb-Bush exchange was not really about decorum. Or manners. Or protocol. It was about daring to stand up to the boss. Rudeness? Stop. This is America. We’re rude to each other more or less continually. We make mincemeat of each other on television, fiber-optically flame each other to a crisp, blog ourselves bloody. No, rudeness, as deplorable as it is, is not the point here, particularly as Webb, judged by any reasonable standard, wasn’t remotely rude.

  But wait—maybe rudeness is the point after all. Maybe rudeness, in our democratically challenged age, has morphed into a synonym for insubordination. If true, this explains a great deal. It suggests that in America today, only something done to those above us can qualify as rudeness. Done to those below it’s something quite different—a right.

  Which brings us to the case of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose dueling careers as soldier and statesman fought it out before the Security Council on that memorable day in March of 2003 as the nation prepared for war. The soldier, not surprisingly, dispatched the statesman, to our ongoing grief and Powell’s everlasting shame.

  We didn’t know that at the time, of course. We trusted the man, though why, precisely, is hard to say. Was it his sonorous voice? His statesmanlike manner? His erect, soldierly carriage? Was it the fact that, unlike his bosses, he appeared to be a man of some substance, intelligence, and integrity? Whatever it was—and what does it say about us that we would base our trust on such airy ground?—he abused our faith in him. In a nutshell—or shell casing, perhaps—it came down to this: despite his doubts about the “intelligence” he had been provided, despite the fact that (as he himself admitted in his book, published long after any risk to his own career had passed) he spent days preparing for his pivotal speech by “trimming the garbage” from Vice President Cheney’s “evidence” of Iraq’s weapons programs and its ties to al Qaeda, Powell went ahead and shilled for the liars anyway. Why did he not threaten to expose the whole thing publicly? Because, as he has said, to do so would have betrayed the ethic of the loyal soldier he believed himself to be. Betraying the country—the nation as a whole as well as the thousands of front-line grunts from El Paso to Albany, never mind the tens of thousands likely to be caught in the cross fire—was judged the lesser offense.

  What kind of culture defines “maturity” as the time when young men and women come to understand that adulthood means sacrificing principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss—any boss—in the name of self-promotion and “realism”? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war,2 it is disastrous outside it.

  The notion of loyalty as inherently antidemocratic—indeed, the very
mortar of the totalitarian state—is a tough idea to swallow, so let me be as precise as possible. On the personal or familial level, loyalty is not only generally admirable but in all likelihood evolutionarily hardwired into our genes. To the degree that it is institutionalized and mixed with power, however, it is toxic. Why? Because loyalty, all too often, is a buffered term for obedience, and obedience a euphemism for cowardice. Because loyalty qualifies individualism by discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal and sacrificing individual responsibility to an easy expediency. Because, finally, loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true, or right, can lead to the most horrendous abuses. Powell’s excuse—that he did not want to betray the ethic of the loyal soldier—was precisely the one used by the defendants at Nuremberg, and if you say that the analogy is a reckless one, that Colin Powell is no Rudolf Hess but a generally decent man—an A student, a team player, a loyal employee, a good soldier—I’ll agree, and say only this: God save us from men and women like him, for they will do almost anything in the name of “loyalty.” And have. And will again.3