Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Read online

  “When you say it to children, kiss them,” she advised.

  The thought of actually kissing America’s gross national product upset me so much that I made a mistake in the checkout line. Thinking to get even change for my $44.61 purchase, I gave the clerk a fifty-dollar bill and what I thought was a penny but which was in fact a dime.

  “Trade you this for a penny!” she cried gaily.

  She gave me a big American smile involving both rows of teeth. It isn’t a smile, it’s a rictus; the mouth simply drops open like a crocodile’s. The banks of the Wabash have turned into the banks of the Amazon. Farrah Fawcett started it and now it has spread across America, along with hands and kisses and God knows what else. No normal jaw can manage it; I am convinced that these people have an operation to remove a piece of bone from each side.

  I didn’t take in what the clerk said. I was staring at her mouth, wondering if I could find a stick to prop it open before she got me.

  “Trade you this dime for a penny?” she repeated, smiling harder.

  Finally I realized that this was her friendly way of telling me I had made a mistake. As I fished out a penny I remembered that she was the same clerk who always said “What can I do you for?” instead of “What can I do for you?” because inverted wording is warmer—like bad grammar. The soft round sound of loaned is friendlier than the harshly linear but correct lent.

  I went home, mixed a martini, and turned on the television. Three commercials in a row assured me that Eastern Air Lines, Allied Van Lines, and Ex-Lax—movers and shakers all—were my friends. Moreover, Ex-Lax was my family friend because it’s gentle.

  The phrase “gentle laxative” is oxymoronic to the sane mind. The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with “a spoonful o’ gunpowder in a cuppa ’ot tea.” Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling “Get out of the way!” In no other country could Cascara, Syrup of Pepsin, and Citrate of Magnesia cause hurt feelings, but they could in America, so we have invented the gentle laxative to help us practice Nice Guyism of the bowels.

  Sipping my martini, I watched a community service show. The guest, a psychologist engaged in discovering new minority groups, recommended that midgets be called “persons of reduced stature.”

  Next, some public service announcements. A lumber company claiming to be a friend of forests presented a celestial chorus singing “Thank a Tree.” A woman in a grocery store stood beside a sign reading “Please Don’t Squeeze the Tomatoes” and squeezed a tomato; the camera shifted to the seething grocer as the whispery voice-over said, “An ounce of love is worth a pound of anger.”

  Finally the news. Dan Rather, obediently sweltering in a V-neck sweater so he would be “perceived as warm,” recited the ballad of Stephen Brill, New York City plant eater, who had been arrested the previous week for picking edible plants in Central Park. This unfriendly action drew so many citizen complaints that Fun City relented and gave Brill a job taking other herbiphiles on guided tours of edible plants at a salary of fifteen dollars an hour, compliments of New York taxpayers.

  The Nice Guyism in the Brill episode is nothing compared with a 1980 story—one of my most cherished newspaper clippings—about a lad of seventeen who tried to hijack a plane at Seattle-Tacoma airport. After he was captured, a reporter interviewed the flight attendant, who said: “He was very cooperative, he’s been almost a model hijacker.”

  In the spring of 1987 the United Methodist Church announced that it was placing a warning label in their hymnal beside the last stanza of “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood” because it might offend the handicapped. In the spring of 1988 we had the radio listeners who sent in $240,000 to Dallas disc jockey Ron Chapman simply because he asked them to. He didn’t shill anything, didn’t promise anything; he just asked people to send in twenty dollars and they did.

  Like medievalists keeping track of good and evil spirits, we divide people into “threatening” and “nonthreatening,” the foremost example of the latter being that careful knee-crosser, David Hartman. Our favorite stances run the gamut from the characterless “nonjudgmental” to the meaningless “we’re all human.” Our friendly banks are robbed constantly because we reject the notion that an ounce of fear is worth a pound of love; all you have to do to get past a security guard is be human: the password is “Hi.” Despite twenty years of feminism, women still get into trouble with strange men because they would rather be dead than aloof. Lest a bad mood be interpreted as a sign of sexual frustration, legions of singles (including the strange men) adopt an air of relentless cheer to prove they’re getting it regularly.

  Old people are so afraid of fitting the crotchety stereotype of age that they are suckers for bunco schemes that would fail in any other country. Doctors formerly in general practice are now in “family practice” because it sounds warmer. A few years ago, the Los Angeles police chief urged his officers to adopt a “warm and cuddly approach” to civilians to improve community relations. Not long after, Secretary of the Interior James Watt defended himself against charges of “insensitivity” by holding a press conference in which he announced, “I’m really warm and cuddly.”

  If you don’t believe we’re warm and cuddly, ask Canada. When she rescued six of our Iranian embassy hostages, our galumphing appreciation left Canadians reeling in shock. Later, when Algeria negotiated the release of the rest, we tried to snuggle up to her. Anyone who is nice to us is marked for death-by-slurp.

  We are so dependent on the Nice Guyism of strangers that the first question American tourists ask about foreign countries, even before the exchange rate, is “Are the people friendly?” Leading the No list is that cradle of premenstrual tension, France, from whose shores Americans regularly return pale and trembling and lashing themselves with the masochistic question “What did I do wrong?” The simple truth—that the French are Friday farts at a Saturday market—never gets voiced. It’s too unfriendly.

  Nice Guyism produces a strange form of treason in the American heart. In our desperation to believe that we are not hated personally, we grasp at the political straw of anti-Americanism and blame French nastiness on American foreign policy. It works like a batty charm. Soothed by the belief that foreigners still like “us” regardless of what they may think of the the U.S., we relax and grow secure whenever terrorists and foamy revolutionaries say “It’s the American government we hate, not the American people.”

  During the 1980 presidential campaign, Joseph Kraft wrote: “The emergence of President Carter and Ronald Reagan as the nearly certain nominees of their parties expresses not a failure of the system, but a true translation of how much the majority prefers nice men to effective measures.

  We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference.

  That the Ayatollah Khomeini did not fall for this panacea but lumped the American government, the American people, Hollywood movies, miniskirts, and Playboy under the same mantle of “Great Satan” traumatized us more than the coming Russian invasion is likely to do. After all, the Russians will have sense enough to teach their occupation troops how to say “Hi, I’m Ivan,” which will make everything all right.

  Why are Americans the Newfoundland puppies of the New World?

  Our obsession with friendliness began when the first settlers wondered “Are the natives friendly?” and shortly found themselves looking at stoic Indian faces. The nat
ives were friendly, at least at first, but they didn’t look it. Unsmiling faces have struck terror in the American heart ever since.

  Next we acquired the melting pot. There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don’t know how to fight with each other. The set piece that shapes and contains quarrels in homogeneous countries does not exist here. The Frenchman is an expert on the precise gradations of espèce de and the Italian knows exactly when to introduce the subject of his mother’s grave, but no American can be sure how or when another American will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.

  The aloof warmth that makes life so pleasant in socially confident countries is not available to us, so we are forced to leap feet-first into cloying intimacy whether we like it or not. The tender formality of “gnädige Frau” makes old ladies easy to respect, and stiff Englishmen long ago learned to express intrasex affection with “my dear Smith,” but Americans have nothing to call each other by except first names. There is no way to get a stranger’s attention without sounding servile (ma’am, sir) and so, committed as we are to equality at any price, we insult him. Ironically, our Smile Button egalitarians have yet to grasp the fact that indiscriminate friendliness is a democratized version of the obsequiousness practiced by the lower classes in hierarchical societies throughout history.

  Friendliness is a matter of life and death to people who live by the maxim, “The country is full of nuts.” The chance victim and the innocent bystander have replaced the plucky newsboy and the whore with the heart of gold as the protagonists of American folklore. We have no idea “who’s out there,” so smile your way to safety. If you are cool to someone, he might tell the FBI lies about you, or send an anonymous letter to the IRS, or report you for child abuse, or haul off and shoot you—all because he doesn’t like your face, so give everybody the Nice Guy treatment. Bridges of understanding are good but walls of friendliness are better.

  Compulsive hugging is an excess whose time has come, but sensitivity workshops should not take all the credit for it. Much of it is simply an offshoot of America’s transition from a Wasp to an ethnic culture. We have taken up studied emotionalism in the belief that everything will be all right if only we shed our bad old Anglo-Saxon ways. But there’s a catch. Sang-froid is an indispensable quality to have when trying to obey the commercial that says “Never let them see you sweat.”

  Which way do we want it? Anglo-Saxon cool or Latin heat? We don’t know; stripped of our old national persona yet lacking a fully developed new one, we’re like analysands whose doctor has died suddenly in the middle of the analysis, or Marine Corps recruits halfway through boot camp, or recently molted crabs.

  Fortunately, several commercials permit us to experiment with the national character. There’s nothing like a thirty-second New You. If “Never let them see you sweat” is Wasp, the consumer protection ad “Don’t take being taken” is ethnic, a leftover portion of the old greenhorn complex that emerged when immigrants just off the boat fell for the scam of buying the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Our confusion over what to do about emotion may account for the many statements that are made and then immediately withdrawn, like Edwin Meese’s hunger count. “There aren’t any hungry people in America” (cold Wasp) followed by “There are hungry people in America” (warm ethnic) produced a hot-and-cold running Meese who typified his fellow countrymen.

  A situation that requires the ultimate in Nice Guyism is one that I’ve had to endure on a regular basis.

  Told that her latest London performance was a tour de force, Mrs. Patrick Campbell replied, “Then why am I forced to tour?” The purpose of a book tour, in the stunning logic of publishers, is “to reach the people who don’t read books.” I’ve reached them. They are the truffle hounds in America’s hunt for threatening personalities, the same insecure pests who bawl “Whatcha lookin’ so sad about?” or “Smile! It can’t be that bad!” every time they see a pensive soul gazing into space. When not bothering strangers in airports, they hang around television stations, where they either host studio audience shows or serve as members of the audience.

  On my early tours I was able to masquerade as warm and friendly provided my television spot lasted no longer than five minutes, but the last time out a kind of madness came over me and my mask began to slip.

  “Why do you wear your hair like that?” asked a Birmingham interviewer, warily eyeing my skinned-back chignon.

  “It gets me out of jury duty,” I said. “The defense takes one look at me and says ‘Challenge.’”

  On another show a few days later, we were discussing the girlish games played at Southern bridal showers when suddenly the hostess interrupted with a reminiscence.

  “The engagement ring my husband gave me was such a teeny-tiny, little ole stone that everybody thought it was a wedding ring and asked me if I’d eloped. I mean, it was the littlest stone I ever did see!”

  “It must have been a recondite,” I said.

  Nobody got it, but they all knew that something had happened. Silence. Dropped-pin time. Dead air. Waves of hostility. The audience turned into Madame Defarge and I was the last of the Evremondes.

  The most threatening image a touring writer can present is one of seriousness and depth. I was too tired to make this mistake but I can just imagine the smile-button assault it would trigger.

  “Well, Ed, you’ve been pretty hard on the barbarians, but don’t you think that extending the frontiers of the Empire gave the Romans a chance to meet new people?”

  “Oswald, you can’t mean all those things you said about the West. Don’t you really think it’s God’s country?”

  “Tom, what’s it like to go year after year without talking? We want to hear all about your vow of silence. Tell us about life in a Trappist monastery and then we’ll take some calls from our listeners. We’ve got some great listeners, Tom.”

  If you think the hosts are friendly, wait till you meet the escorts. Publishers are so busy being thoughtful that they never stop and think. Hiring a local resident to drive a touring author around to television and radio stations is an excellent idea because all call letters sound alike after a while. What publishers fail to consider is the kind of person the escort is likely to be.

  Those who choose to work in a hospitality or official-greeter capacity do so because they “love people,” which means they talk the hind legs off a mule. Thus, in addition to the four scheduled interviews you have that day, you also have a fifth, unscheduled, running interview with the escort, who asks the same questions asked by the friendly hosts at WXXI, WIXX, WXIX, and WIIX.

  “Where do you get your ideas?”

  “Do you write every day or just when you’re inspired?”

  “Do you use a typewriter or do you write by hand?”

  Escorts wouldn’t dream of sitting in the car and reading while the writer is performing in the studio. So you won’t get lonely, they go in the Green Room with you and chat you up while you’re waiting to go on.

  “Just how do you go about getting an agent?”

  “How does the copyright law work?”

  “People have always told me I should write. ‘If you could write the way you talk, you’d have a bestseller,’ they always say.”

  Do you ever write poetry? I love poetry. ‘When lilacs last in the door yard bloomed … .’”

  “I love a good mystery. Have you ever thought of trying your hand at murder?”

  “Yes.”

  Does it end now? It might not if it’s a radio interview. When the gregarious host saw the escort sitting there with me, he invited her into the sound booth to sit in on the show, because a stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet.

  That was the show on which I said, “Sex is rough on loners; you have to have somebody else around.”

  No citizenry can practice Nice Guyism without some respite. Resisting car pools is an excellent way to be American and unfriendly
at the same time; nobody will criticize you for loving your wheels. Other cracks in the Smile Button include the Tylenol poisoning, the Los Angeles freeway shoot-outs, the highly successful “People Hate Drunk Drivers” campaign, and of course, the knock-down, drag-out vituperation aimed at smokers.

  But that’s not all. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the treacly bands of molasses-across-America that connect them one to the other, they can always get off on a coffee commercial.

  “Fill it to the rim with Brim” is the most violent expression of anal sadism this side of Krafft-Ebing.

  8

  DEMOCRAZY

  At the Japanese war trials of 1946, the defunct empire’s former propaganda minister, Shumei Okawa, inadvertently made a good pun. Leaping to his feet in fury, he screamed in his uncertain English: “I hate United States! It is democrazy!”

  We get democrazier by the minute. The only things we discriminate against are smokers and bad hugs. Our blood is so rich with equality that we have come to hate uniqueness of any kind, no matter how noble. By having a Tomb of the Unknowns, we really don’t have an Unknown Soldier—more than one destroys the concept.

  We even hate the unique hatred. If, for example, someone hates gays, we suspect him of also hating blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Orientals, and Indians—and get mad if he doesn’t.

  Chi-chi liberals mourned the death of the Orient Express in a reverent “60 Minutes” segment, yet it is egalitarianism that has destroyed the kind of world that justifies luxury trains: Princess Dragomiroff needs Drawing Room A, and Drawing Room A needs Princess Dragomiroff.

  It was only to be expected that the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank should have triggered such Lear-like rage. Particularly upset was Mary McGrory, who suggested that breeding reliable home repairmen would benefit society more. Her reason? “Workmen do not hear unless you scream at them, like police dogs who only respond to a certain high, piercing whistle. It is only when a certain level of frustration has been reached that he is able to judge the sincerity of the consumer and the persistence of his notion that the work may be done. He may oblige if he is persuaded that apoplexy or a lawsuit is not far away.”