Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  When George first arrived at Syracuse to study creative writing in graduate school, straight from Amarillo, he had the impression that his unusual, more rural background would be valued by the mostly urbane, Ivy League classmates among which he found himself. He was mistaken.

  They derisively would say things like, “Amarillo? Aren’t there a lot of currency exchanges there?”

  George said, “I kept trying to get it through to them that, like, these are people living [in Amarillo]. There’s real life going on there.” To me, he added, “It was never anything but a joke to them, but to me it was hurtful. I said, ‘I know I’m right. I know that they’re blind to this whole part of the country.’”

  And so, indirectly, the Ivy League snobs helped George along as well, by influencing him to galvanize his vision of the America he would feature in his stories; those living in the not-inconsiderable acreage between the cities of “tastemakers” on either coast. Despite the erudition evident in his writing, one can’t help but feel his feet (and his point of view) rooted among the people of Amarillo and Illinois and Colorado and so on. The People.

  His gift for effective storytelling involves an uncanny ability to examine all sides of every question without judgment. I don’t know about you, but I’m a human being, so my default setting is to absolutely come down on one side of any issue, depending upon how the question affects my well-being. I believe that’s called human nature. Because he loves us, George Saunders respects every opinion, leaving his own ego out of it, which makes even his scariest scenarios palatable.

  Another topic upon which we spent a good deal of Joaquín’s twenty-dollar table time was a mutual appreciation for our redoubtable fathers. George shared this story, which seems to me to have laid the foundation for his ever-expanding generosity toward the human race: At Oak Forest High School, in the 1970s, the food was apparently terrible. “They had the hamburgers in the plastic bags that you would microwave and whatnot.” So the students decided they would organize a walkout. “We were very much in the thrall of Abbie Hoffman and the whole thing [re: the 1969–70 Chicago Conspiracy Trial].” So everything was set to stick it to the man on a Friday morning, but the Thursday night previous it occurred to George that maybe he would tell his dad about it, just in case. So he did. He honestly told his dad they were planning a walkout because the food was so bad.

  “‘Oh, yeah. Sure, that’s great,’ said Dad. ‘Could I ask you something, though?’”

  George said to me, “Just like Columbo.”

  “‘Just one thing. You’ve let the principal know that this food is an issue, right?’”

  “‘Nah, he wouldn’t listen.’”

  “‘Oh. Okay. Although you’re kinda setting yourself up a little bit. Because if you walk out and you never tried to solve the problem . . . Anyway, just think about it.’”

  The next morning, George went in to speak with the principal, Toby Hightower.

  “‘George, uh, what? What’s goin’ on?’”

  George hadn’t known that Principal Hightower even knew his name. He soldiered on and explained that the food in the cafeteria was really bad.

  “‘Well, that’s not acceptable. I’m gonna appoint you head of a commission. Now, I want you to go out to— Would five days be enough? Five different school districts, every Friday you go out and— Pick a panel, three or four kids—and we’ll send you out to these schools. You tell us which one you like and you wanna hire.’”

  “Anyway,” George said, “that little move that my dad did there was like—don’t assume your enemy is beneath you.”

  Pretty badass dad skills right there. I began to understand how such a man as George Saunders could come to write stories with such a sincerely fair and balanced perspective, not to mention a measured examination of modern American society that requires backing up only the slightest step before the purview shows us to be clearly hilarious, heads buried in our phones, scrutinizing who might “like” us, fashion trends swinging recently from “heavily tattooed and stretching irreparable holes in the earlobe with gauge rings” to “lumbersexual,” which apparently entails growing a beard, wearing flannel over pre-distressed work dungarees, and posing for photographs with an axe of any stripe. (I have been mortified to be even tangentially mentioned by “the press” in association with this, or any such fashion trend, but I can rest easy. I looked like that twenty years ago, and I’ll still look like that twenty years from now, if my luck holds.)

  At this point in our chin-wag, George and I left the scrutiny of Joaquín’s hawklike gaze and set out across Central Park. No locomotion by carriage, sadly, just perambulating. I greatly enjoyed the commingling of my subjects, rambling with Saunders toward the west side of Olmsted’s park, under the beneficent Dakota windows of Yoko, as George revealed to me that not only was he a Wendell Berry fan, but he had set one of his poems, “The Wild Rose,” to music! Reminder to self—score that track for audiobook. (I actually said to George, “We may have to lay that track down,” and he said, “Yeah, lay it down and cover it up.”) We arrived right on time for our lunch at the newly refurbished Tavern on the Green, the history of which I delightedly explained to George as we sat to steaks and beer and fellowship in the former sheep barn for Olmsted’s pacifist flock.

  As it so often does with me, the subject turned to religion. It’s funny—I have been on the receiving end of a good deal of knee-jerk reactions from followers of various Christian denominations regarding my religious material. They don’t seem to comprehend my commentary, a blindness that is, I suppose, the way of the zealot? What such critics don’t seem to glean is that I am probably thinking about their religion much more than they ever have. The religions of the world are generally founded upon deep wisdom and beautiful notions that have been carefully wrought. Much as I have done for our founding governmental documents, I would just like to suggest that we always continue to freshly examine the truths at the foundation, rather than just accept our televangelists’ interpretation at face value. Sometimes when I speak to people about Wendell Berry, they ask, “Don’t you know he’s religious, though?” I answer that, yes, he is my favorite kind of religious person: one who knows what the hell he’s talking about. You won’t catch Mr. Berry blindly following the people who are leading their flocks in all sorts of disparate directions, some few of them decent. Mr. Berry also has enough respect for his fellow man and woman to refrain from attempting to recruit us into his church. By removing these confusing modern church habits from the conversation, he is able to shine a light on the heart of the matter: the writing. It’s not the text of the Bible that’s troublesome (with a few notable exceptions—please see my previous book), but what people are doing in the name of that text that bothers me, as well as Wendell Berry.

  George Saunders agreed that such blind adherence to rote dogma creates the false impression among church folk (and political parties) that matters of the soul (or government) can be rendered neatly in black-and-white terms. The thing I love about these great thinkers by whom I am inspired is that they understand the imperative of coming from a place of ignorance, which will never change. The mysteries of the universe can literally never be decoded, and so the task before us is not in the solving but rather in accepting the ambiguity in the parts of our world where unknowable magic, also known as nature, resides. George started out Catholic, as discussed, but was soon disillusioned by that brand of solace. Now he is a practicing Buddhist, and it shows.

  He said, “What I’m trying to understand is how Christianity—if you could be sitting with Jesus, okay, the guy. You know, that guy . . . How did it then [go from that] and become, like, no swearing and no fornication? . . . Well, I do know how. The culture said, ‘Hey, that’s good. Let’s lay our shit down there.’” Wendell Berry just published a new book of essays in which he addresses the folly of such an approach—by refusing to consider the whole of all the complexities of human life as one and instead hav
ing the hubris to think that we can control individual actions like premarital sex or blasphemy as though they can be separated cleanly from the whole organism. Should these indiscretions be the recipients of some of our focus? Absolutely. No question. But to simply, flatly forbid these inexorable acts of nature takes about as much smarts as the enacting of Prohibition did, and we all know how that turned out.

  Mr. Saunders (hell of a good rib eye at Tavern on the Green, by the by, plus local craft brews) made yet another perceptive point. He said, “Somehow it’s weird that all these thousands of years of human thought have gravitated toward those questions and those approaches, and now here we are with not much, really. We’re extreme materialists. So I’ve just been trying to figure out a way to think about those things. I say that in a positive way, meaning, as your doubts come up—totally allow them in the room.” Allowing one’s doubts to exist “in the room” requires courage. These religions have flourished, in part, for centuries exactly so that we don’t have to stay in the same room with our misgivings, our elemental comprehension of what H. P. Lovecraft illuminated so succinctly: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

  This has really become a refrain with so many of the great scholars profiled in this book. Own your doubts. Recognize our fallibility as humans, admit we can never possibly know even half of everything about the natural world, and so then embrace the unknown and, thereby, embrace one another. There is comfort.

  George continued. “It’s funny to go back to the Catholic stuff with some of that in mind. They had a beautiful thing that they kind of covered in crap, and if you could tear all that [dogma] off, there are incredible principles at the center of it. But it’s almost like if I was gonna give you a gift, and I put it in the middle of six rooms full of Styrofoam. [You] would be like, ‘What’s all the Styrofoam for?’”

  An excellent point that I would reiterate. Most all religions have terrific and valuable principles at their centers. The owner’s-manual quality of the values they have to teach us is sublime, or it can be. But by the time you get down to simply meditating upon the principle, you have had to slog through a great number of self-serving, man-made rules.

  George: “It’s that people get habituated to certain ways of thinking and they associate, for example, Christianity with a legitimately positive feeling they’ve had in church or whatever. But then it gets locked in, so they take all the Styrofoam as well. They accept it. So the enemy becomes the habituation.”

  He talks good, this George Saunders. Super good. We agreed that this conundrum is very similar to the state of politics in most households as well. Habituation sets in, and we citizens no longer feel the need to stay on top of every issue coming down the pike. Thanks to the “Styrofoam” around our political leanings, we can simply (and lazily) vote down party lines and never miss a wink of sleep. George pointed out that it’s just like Wendell Berry’s take on the programs of optimism and pessimism—our “programs” put us in the dangerous position of complacently siding with “our kind,” whether it’s Catholic or Muslim, Democrat or Republican, Caucasian or Cherokee.

  George and I reemerged into the park after lunch, enjoying a bracing stroll as he walked me to the subway, but he had thankfully not quite finished chewing on his theme. That is (to paraphrase him), that these habituations that have become deep ruts in which all our wheels will run without a need for steering are a sort of philosophical slavery. Quoting Abraham Lincoln (yes, he’s like that, and what’s more, he later sent me the full quote for accuracy), he laid this on me as we arrived at Columbus Circle: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” That guy Lincoln also talked pretty good.

  From this, I would suggest that since many of our politicians are by now being rather openly paid by corporations to shape our nation’s laws to serve their profits above our individual rights, we have all become slaves of a different sort. Are we not slaves (me included) to the messaging that controls much of our prodigious consumption? How else do we explain our insistence on blithely purchasing an endless stream of unnecessary goods, sending each previous generation of disposable purchases to the landfill?

  In 2006 George was hired by GQ magazine to write a series of pieces about the contentious border situation between Mexico and the United States. He loaded up his car and began to drive along that imaginary line, and, as he puts it:

  It was so amazing because every time I’d start [writing] with some idea, usually a liberal idea, then go in, and in the first couple of days of reporting it was totally destroyed. [I] come back and start writing them, and [I’m] like, I’m not going to write according to some notion. I’m gonna see what my best bits are, polish them, put them together, and then see what light comes off. That’s the closest to the truth, and it’s always gonna be contradictory. . . . By the end, I couldn’t think of a thing to say, and I thought—that’s the truth. Right there. The individual things are all true but the truth is the composite of all those with [me] not choosing.

  You should buy all of George’s books. They are immensely enjoyable but also rife with food for thought in the vein of the topics in this chapter. His most recent book of stories, Tenth of December, is a masterpiece of prescient social commentary, packed with the uncomfortable laughter of self-recognition.

  I’ll end by recommending to you his smallest book, Congratulations, by the Way, really just a printed version of the convocation speech he delivered to the graduating class of Syracuse University in 2013. It would make a great stocking stuffer or certainly would be well received by any graduate in your own life. He takes the opportunity, in addressing the shiny, hopeful, collected students, to advise them, above all else in the impending adventures of their lives, to practice kindness. That’s it. The fact that this very successful, richly lauded writer chose that sentiment as the focus of his address—be kind—moves me profoundly. As I say good night, George, let’s end with a lovely excerpt from that address:

  Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters.

  Because, actually, nothing else does.

  19

  LAURIE ANDERSON

  As it turns out, I’m writing this chapter in Istanbul, which used to be called Constantinople—a turn of events that is melodically described in a swinging number by the Four Lads, later covered by one of my all-time favorite bands, They Might Be Giants.

  I have often expressed my gratitude to those friends in my life who have been responsible for pointing me in the direction of “the good shit,” in terms of books, records, plays, and films. One of the most formative instances of this benevolence occurred in 1989 when my dear pally Joe Foust sold me on They Might Be Giants. Their first few records, in fact, could serve as the soundtrack to my personal transition from ignorant but curious small-town athlete to ignorant but curious college theater student with better taste in music.

  Joe hooked me specifically by using their cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” as the front-of-house music when he did a college production of Constantinople Smith, by Charles L. Mee, the self-same prolific fellow who wrote The Berlin Circle, the play in which I met my wife. Near the end of that show, the entire cast sings the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” in German (“Alle Brauchen Liebe”), bringing me around to Yoko. I do so appreciate such turns of serendipity, and I like to notice when the strands of life connect in such a fashion.

  On their albums They Might Be Giants, Lincoln, and Flood, the band displays myriad examples of musical styles, rendered with the whimsy of the most sublime jesters. With lyrics hilarious, strange, and educational, backed by instrumentation ranging from baritone sax and xylophone to accordion, to literally the kitchen sink and a refriger
ator being struck with drumsticks, the charismatic Brooklyn duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell funded our young, burgeoning imaginations with artistic possibilities both richly detailed and patently absurd.

  On their third release, Flood, considered to be their definitive recording (although they have many varied and excellent subsequent records), track six stood out to me as something special. “Your Racist Friend” is sung from the point of view of a partygoer who refuses to stand by while another reveler engages in racist language. It’s a catchy tune with a thoughtful heart: “This is where the party ends / I can’t stand here listening to you / And your racist friend.” This was an eye-opening moment for me—a song from a fun, weird band that I loved could also have a powerfully relevant social message? Say. I liked where this was going.

  This epiphany, it turned out, was merely the appetizer for the work of another artist who was about to change the trajectory of my creative development. Mr. Foust and the rest of the gang who would go on to form Chicago’s Defiant Theatre company with me took me to see a woman on tour at the University of Illinois’s magnificent Foellinger Auditorium. It proved to be one of the most astonishing live performances I have ever witnessed. The tour and album were called Strange Angels, and the woman’s name was Laurie Anderson.

  When performing live, especially in that era, Laurie Anderson loved to employ technology, or as it became in her hands, toys. Please bear in mind that in 1990, technology was not remotely as advanced or ubiquitous as it is today. The Sony Discman was cutting-edge, and computers were generally still monstrous hard drives with a TV monitor—and not a flat-screen TV, but the kind that was as deep as it was wide. An entire rock concert of the day, replete with projections and video components, probably used less memory than your iPod Nano.