by W. E. Gutman
TWILIGHT IN THE MOJAVE
Heretics are given us so we might not remain in fancy.
-- St. Augustine
In 1999, I set out on a five-day, 3,000-mile westward drive across America. Its vastness and awesome beauty filled me with exhilaration and appeased for a while the emptiness within. The emptiness returned when I reached the California desert. Behind me was the narrowing perspective of an arrow-straight road merging into the horizon line. Ahead lay a barren, petrified expanse. Alone in its vast, sallow bosom, overwhelmed by the immensity and desolation around me, I stopped, got out of the car and looked at the limitless blue vault above, at the tawny, arid earth at my feet. Everywhere, clumps of sparse, stunted shrubs and contorted Joshua trees clung stubbornly to life in this lifeless citadel. I felt lost. I wanted to scream. The scream died in my throat as I set eyes on a lone yellow poppy, its dainty petals quivering in the breeze. I remembered the wild blood-red poppy fields of Abu Gosh, outside Jerusalem, where I’d gamboled as a boy, taking in their heady aroma, napping under a blanket of undulating crimson blossoms and dreaming Technicolor dreams. I remembered the wistful French song of my youth, “Comme un petit coquelicot,” (Like a little poppy) made famous by Mouloudji. I remembered being swept in a stream of indescribable emotions every time I heard it. Poppies are still my favorite flowers -- the blood-red ones of my youth. And I remembered Paris. Words, images, colors and aromas danced inside my head, faint, disjointed, stranded at the limits of consciousness. I felt my tongue forming silent thoughts, like prayers or mantras. Emboldened by self-discovery, delivered from their cerebral bonds, the words gushed out. I let out a monologue of stupefying candor and pathos, part confession, part supplication, words driven by longing, by despair, by a fear of madness, words one only dares to utter in the desert’s deafening silence. I looked at the sky. Then I looked at the poppy and the babble ceased. It had wilted in my hand. But its subtle, intoxicating scent still lingered on the tip of my fingers, in my nose, on my lips.
“I should have never plucked it. I should have never set eyes on it.” Then I heard myself asking the same question I’d asked at dawn, on January 30, 1956, as the USS Constitution sailed into the Port of New York:
“What the fuck am I doing here? Is there no end to this senseless peregrination?”
And then I heard myself sobbing as my eyes now strained against the milky glare of day.
I was 62.
*
In the spring of 2000, I went to work as a copy editor for the Antelope Valley Press, a privately owned daily covering the vast “High Desert” region of Los Angeles County, and a self-avowed vector of arch-conservatism. In time, I would also contribute essays, features, news analyses and opinion pieces.
In October 2001, I published a three-part article detailing the history of chemical and bacteriological warfare, the global proliferation of biochemical weapons -- which nations had them and which were shopping for them -- and describing the effects of various agents on the human body. Readers lashed out, calling me a doomsayer and accusing me of deliberately creating a climate of fear. No one protested, in hilarity or outrage, when “Homeland Security” -- as America readied to go to war against Iraq -- ludicrously urged Americans to protect themselves against deadly chemicals and pathogens with duct tape and plastic sheeting. (A codicil, an updated version of a previously published feature chronicling the illegal experimentation by the U.S. government of toxic substances, including LSD, on unwitting Americans, was rejected by the AV Press.)
In November, two months after the tragic events of September 11, and in a climate of fervid nationalism, I wrote “Our College for Killers,” an essay supportive of a demonstration that had just taken place at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Georgia. Protesters had come by the hundreds as they do every year from all corners of America, students and sexagenarians, professionals and blue-collar workers, young mothers with infants in tow, veterans festooned with combat ribbons, priests and nuns and agnostics with an unambiguous lust for justice. They had come as they do every year to denounce state-sponsored terrorism and to demand the closing of an institution that for the past 60 years had trained and coddled, at U.S. taxpayers’ expense, a rogue gallery of dictators and thugs. They had come to awaken and revitalize America’s sluggish conscience. They had converged on Fort Benning, where the School (now rechristened the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) is billeted, to pay homage to the hundreds of thousands of victims of political repression, dispossession, wrongful arrest, unlawful imprisonment, torture, extrajudicial executions and “disappearances.” They had gathered to be arrested if need be, as scores do every year (actor Martin Sheen among them) in a show of defiance against the existence and preservation of a college for killers. And they had assembled, this time, to urge the Bush administration not to allow our neighbors to the south to use the dastardly assault on America as a pretext for committing atrocities against their own people. It is human nature, I reasoned, to recoil against injustice. It was my duty, as a journalist, to revisit the scene.
Few readers shared my perspective. Days later, I learned through the grapevine that my piece had been greeted with “extreme displeasure.” Someone in the front office had sent word that “persons drawing a paycheck from the Antelope Valley Press are not entitled to voice opinions that conflict with those of management.” I never found out who had issued this directive but I took it as a warning and I lay low for a while. Subsequent columns wisely expressed centrist views on issues that either transcended party politics or clearly met “bipartisan” criteria for political correctness.
Self-censorship, which the press had exercised in one form or another in America, was now in full swing.
In April 2002, I responded with unusual petulance to a guest commentary written by Janice Hall, a local college professor, in which she attacked “the corrupting influence of leftist thought” on education in America. Her citation of literary works she may or may not have read but deemed suitable for young minds unpolluted by “socialist propaganda,” reeked of conceit and pomposity and came off as a gratuitous display of erudition, the kind that bulimic egos need to flaunt. The works Prof. Hall extolled and those she panned were poles apart: the former well to the right of center, the latter predictably well to the left. Her casuist attempt to politicize the decline of academic excellence in America by blaming it on “liberal agendas,” I felt, was spurious and abhorrent. Yes, I conceded,
“… Schools keep breeding successive generations of marginally cultured, not to say semi-illiterate, adults, but no, this is not the result of some sinister liberal cabal. If the masterpieces of yore are neither taught nor read, it’s because few in this sunbaked fortress of conservatism -- teachers and students -- have the intellectual capacity to recognize their greatness, let alone savor the messages they send. If anything, the anti-intellectualism that permeates this “Valley” is inspired by diehard obstructionists fearful that free thought and enlightenment will subvert the conservative core. Prof. Hall’s tirade echoes those on the far right who would freeze the free flow of ideas, foster a world view filtered through the thick lenses of conservatism, prevent inconvenient un-beliefs from interfering with ossified convictions, in short, keep society in the miasmic darkness and stifling conformity of reactionary doctrine.”
Don’t tamper with Shakespeare unless you ARE Shakespeare.
Petulance gave way to open hostility in response to Prof. Hall's fatuous deprecation of Elie Wiesel's oeuvre and, by extension, of the Holocaust. Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, and a Nobel laureate, I argued, had been an unassuming but tireless champion of human rights. His books had been hailed around the world. By dismissing Night, the third in Wiesel's acclaimed trilogy about the bestiality of man, as “undeserving a place in world literature,” Prof. Hall, I declared, “makes a mockery of all scholarship.” I concluded by suggesting that far too many people on this windswept desert plateau shun the truth for fear that it may interfere with the perpetuation
of America’s “feel-good” mythology.
“There are those among us who cling to an idealization of America that is as flat, saccharine and fake as a Norman Rockwell painting. Sadly, these love-it-or-leave-it flag-wavers are bent on diverting the current of thought, arresting the free flow of ideas and fostering a world view filtered through the narrow-mesh netting of diehard ideology.”
Prof. Hall never responded. Petty demagogues tend to shoot off their mouths in the sanitized vacuum of an obliging public forum but they rarely defend their own pronouncements when challenged. They get even. It should have come as no surprise when my next column, slated for publication in an upcoming edition, was first delayed than scrapped without explanation.
*
Extreme displeasure in the front office turned to indignation. A week later I was “laid off.” The reasons given were so vague, and so outlandish that I did not bother to contest them. Both the editor and the owner/publisher had reasons to silence me. My views, openly counter-cultural and disquieting at a time of scorching patriotic fervor had apparently irked large numbers of readers and advertisers. The editor had obliquely and in long-winded perorations rebuked what he perceived in my irreverence to be the result of vexing socialist leanings. I made no attempt to challenge this faulty assessment but I would come to work the next day in my black-and-red CCCP T-shirt, a souvenir of my travels to Russia, just to piss him off.
“Gutman,” he would say with a hint of annoyance in his voice, “I always knew you’re a pinko.”
“Let’s just call it a paler shade of red.”
Neither portrayal was accurate, not his of me, nor mine of myself. Lacking the capacity or the urge to embrace, let alone champion, any political cause, I was content to agitate against the rigidity of all extreme convictions, whether from the right or the left. Character, upbringing and circumstance had protected me from entrapment by irrevocable doctrines. Patriotism, “the last refuge of scoundrels,” however, was an incongruity, a hideous emotion from which I recoiled. Truth is I never felt the remotest allegiance for any state, prince or potentate. I love France the way a child loves to rummage through a toy chest, with wonderment and anticipation. I love Paris with every hedonistic fiber of my being. But this infatuation is wholly Epicurean, not tribal. It evokes no special loyalty or feelings of indebtedness. To this day, ancestral Romania, where I lived for four years, elicits distant and disturbing memories of a vacillating, mercenary nation given to political harlotry. Israel, where I spent five gloomy years as a teenager, inspires no feelings of kinship. I resent its theocratic power base and deplore its leaders’ inability (or unwillingness?) to make peace with the long-suffering Palestinian people. Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, maddening and electrifying, New York, where I meandered for 40 years, has done little more than contribute to an “Americanization” of habit and convenience. Like Paris, New York fascinates, titillates, captivates and bewitches. Like Paris, it kindles the senses and galvanizes the intellect. But I would never fully embrace it, feel a part of it. It could never be, it never was home. On those rare instances when I’m asked to disclose my origins (or allegiances), I respond, without affectation, that I’m “stateless.” No swagger or romanticism is implied, only an admission of alienation from the world’s constituent parts. In this self-view is encapsulated a fierce rejection of any form of nationalism. Of all synthetic human emotions, chauvinism frightens me most. Deep inside me linger indescribable and omnipresent sentiments reaffirming a Jewish identity. But I have no religion and the feeling, nebulous, impalpable and unlikely to culminate in some exalted state, must die with me. For reasons I cannot explain, my “Jewishness” is personal, not communal. I admit feeling sorrow at this alienation but since the core values of Judaism rest on a belief in deity (I don’t believe) and on the shared observance and celebration of its laws and traditions (I don’t observe or celebrate) there is little hope for me of a transformative epiphany.
My sons, born in America, hopelessly assimilated, maddeningly “American,” overwhelmed by life’s labors and constraints, will not likely return to their roots. I recognize this insensitivity, this detachment from ancestral values for what it is -- a sickness of the soul. I take no pleasure in this infirmity.
*
Dennis Anderson, the AVP editor and I got along well. I knew him to be a decent human being even if he seemed wed to a set of convictions that, by their very nature (or the manner in which he articulated them), betrayed a fossilized right-wing view of reality. Conservatives rarely defect, I reckoned. It’s against their nature. Whenever they do, it’s usually to assume an even stiffer rightist stance. Who knows, perhaps Anderson, a former AP writer and a man of culture whom I genuinely liked, secretly shared my freethinking views. Perhaps careful not to bite the generous hand that fed him, he, like the RCA dog, dutifully echoed his master’s reactionary voice. Juggling mortgage payments, feeding a family and sending kids to college are incompatible with ideological adventurism.
When he summoned me to his office, claiming to be at the mercy of “fiscal constraints” beyond his control, he said something about “economic Darwinism” making my layoff inevitable. I accepted the empiricism of this dastardly doublespeak as readily as I endorse the Theory of Evolution. But I argued that Darwin's premise, freed from its “survival of the fittest” equation, also accounts for adaptation and acculturation in the face of challenge and opportunity.
“It’s one thing to lob off an atrophied or gangrenous tree limb. It’s quite another to prevent a healthy bough from producing more and juicier fruit,” I said.
Anderson didn’t bite. I knew that the paper was replacing its archaic computer hardware and software system, and was making a multimillion-dollar investment in a new desktop publishing network. I also knew that “fiscal constraints” notwithstanding, no one else on staff had been laid off. I was being lied to, or royally bamboozled, and I was mad as hell.
I wrote the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York and subsequently spoke to Jeremiah S. Gutman (no relation) a noted attorney specializing in First Amendment issues. Quoting from A. J. Liebling, Gutman, now deceased, reminded me that freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses. Inherent in such freedom, he added, is the right to filter, sanitize or exclude any material that does not harmonize with a publication’s doctrine or agenda, or to sack anyone who openly challenges that doctrine or agenda.
“A private publisher can publish what he likes and censor what he does not like and, in our capitalistic structure, either you work for him and play the tune he calls or quit and sing your own lyrics and tunes. The First Amendment protects and entitles a publication to promote only those opinions it adheres to and not provide a forum for anything else.”
Fair enough. In a subsequent telephone conversation, Gutman conceded that freedom of expression is a self-limiting standard. It includes the freedom not to publish -- or to abridge or impede the free flow of ideas.
“There are risks in this subterfuge but in these times of ‘controlled’ free speech and shameless allegations that dissonant views can hurt business, even the high courts would side with your employer, not you.”
In June 2002, two months after I’d been laid off, and as mysteriously, I was rehired and went back to work on the news desk. The OP/ED Page editor, once overtly supportive of my views, was enjoined to keep me out of his lineups. Mortified and apologetic, he complied. I didn’t add to his discomfiture by asking him to reveal who had issued the order. It didn’t matter.
It was a sad epigraph for someone who’d spent a lifetime excavating the ugly truth to discover that even in America-the-Beautiful there are those who will forcibly keep the ugly truth entombed. Free speech, susceptible to erosion when it’s most desperately needed, is no match for the calumnies, innuendoes and outright falsehoods peddled by the merchants of myth. There is great irony in the eagerness to immolate constitutional principles even as the U.S. grants itself the right to impose them on others in the name of democracy.
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“The whole aim of practical politics,” H. L. Mencken, the acerbic social critic wrote, “is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” The “liberal” press, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party, the Washington Post, Maureen Dowd, Michael Moore, the welfare system, “socialized medicine,” Cuba, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch figure prominently in a bestiary of menacing bugaboos. By focusing on them, by fabricating or exaggerating the threat they allegedly pose, newspapers like the Antelope Valley Press stubbornly aim to conceal or whitewash America’s failures and excesses.