The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (67 page)

Like Roosevelt, Willkie died before the war was over. In his fourth term wartime election, Roosevelt was opposed by Thomas Dewey, an upright, hard-working, uniquely unexciting politician whose Hitler-style mustache was as great an electoral liability as was his crisp, unconcealed intelligence, for the American voter prefers his leader to be a reg'lar fella, not one of them uppity egg-head intellectuals with ideas and vision and all that sort of crap.

During the golden age of the founding fathers, when an intellect as sharp and a mind as lofty as Jefferson's was at the service of our republic, we were so rich in potential leaders that such men as Webster, Clay, and Hamilton were never called to the presidency. The tyranny of mass mediocrity over American politics began with that most common of all common men, Andrew Jackson, with whom we entered the era of the professional politician, the bought candidate, and the political 'boss'. Not until Wilson and Roosevelt would men of superior education and intellectual quality overcome America's rural-fundamentalist tendency to equate breeding, refinement and intelligence with evil and trickery. (It must be admitted in passing, that from a civil rights point of view, Wilson was a pretty nasty piece of work.) After the Depression was over and the nation no longer felt the need for a superior man like Roosevelt, we returned to our historical mistrust of leaders who were culturally or intellectually superior to the 'common man'. Willkie and Dewey, now largely forgotten, were the Republican Party's last ventures with men of intellectual capacity. Starting with Eisenhower, the Grand Old Party sought to satisfy mid-America's preference for candidates of limited intelligence and narrow culture—reg'lar fellas—and went on to provide the anti-intellectual mass of the voting public with such cerebral pigmies as Gerald Ford and James Danforth Quayle before coming up with the risible but painfully earnest George W. Bush.

Both Nixon and Clinton were fairly intelligent... guileful and crafty, at any rate. This is proof that intelligence alone is not sufficient to make a worthy president; there must also be a modicum of character, personal dignity and respect for the office.

In Reagan's case, it was always difficult to differentiate among intellectual paucity, mythomania, and paranoia when one sought the source of those nutty confections 'star wars', 'trickle down economics', and 'the evil empire'.

* This was before the Republican Party fell into the hands of the anti-cultural mob of religious fundamentalists that is always simmering out there on the edges of American civilization, eager to inflict their views and limitations on their fellow citizens. These people represent a greater danger to our liberal traditions because they are not without intelligence. Their lack of high culture makes them seem stupid to liberals of the northeastern establishment, but the liberal community dismisses them at their risk. On the level of square peg in square hole, many of these people are clever... wily, in fact, and perfectly capable of snatching an election from over-confident liberals, even burdened with the current president.

{NB: When these words were written, Trevanian had no idea that exhibitionist elements within the gay community would throw a crucial election away with their insistence on being allowed to throw bridal bouquets at one another, much as the Greens had thrown the previous election away. The liberal establishment has its burdens and its embarrassments, too.}

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46. '...substitute for whipped cream' (p. 276)

Kraft seemed to specialize in the ersatz with Kraft Velveeta, a cheese substitute, Kraft Miracle Whip, a mayonnaise substitute, and Kraft Parkay margarine, a butter substitute.

Flash: I have been informed that within the liberal definitions of the American dairy industry, Velveeta qualifies as a cheese. And it's true that if you close your eyes and concentrate, you can tell that it is flavored in the direction of a very bland, very smooth, Somerset cheddar. So I suppose that with this product we have a real cheese masquerading as an industrial ersatz. Who could ask for more?

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47. '...withstand the power of...?' (p. 276)

Our attitudes towards our Axis opponents varied widely. Few of us were even aware that the Axis included Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria. The generally acknowledged enemies were Germany, Italy and Japan. Of these, the Germans seemed the most formidable, and not only because Hollywood had for several years been showing us the sneering, arrogant Prussian. There was also the fact that, despite Germans being part of our preferred, northern European immigrant stream (as differs from our more recent, but mistrusted and resented. Slavic, Jewish, and southern European streams), they had been our opponents in the First World War, when Italy and Japan had been our allies. We were accustomed to the idea of Germans as the enemy, and 'Butchers of Belgian Babies', World War I propaganda that still clung to them*.

Right from the first, we dismissed the Italians as third-rate fighters dragged into the war by the strutting, pouting, opera-buffo figure of Mussolini, whose army had had a hard time with pre-industrial Ethiopia. The almost universally held assumption that the Italian wasn't a natural fighter is another example of the victory of cultural stereotype over experience and evidence. The most violent and aggressive men of America's recent history were the Mafiosi. And any kid living on the streets of big-city America knew that Italian kids were among the roughest. In addition, Italians were beginning to show their toughness as professional boxers that would bring them to dominate the sport in the 'Forties and 'Fifties.

But while our Italian enemies were viewed as clowns, and the Germans as evil automatons, we reserved our detestation and revulsion for the Japanese, who were obvious targets for racial hatred because, like Blacks, they were easy to pick out in the passing parade. Their values and behavior were outside our Christian, Eurocentric ideals of civilization. While we could hate and fear the Nazis, our feelings towards the Japanese were of a lower, more visceral sort: we loathed them. We were grudgingly obliged to grant that the Germans were efficient and well-organized, but, despite the obvious quality of the Japanese fleet and aircraft, and the sophistication of the military planning that allowed them to surprise us and destroy the greater part of our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, we never believed they could beat a great industrial power like America. The very word 'Japanese' was evocative of cheap, tinny merchandise. Furthermore, they were all tiny, all bow-legged, all extraordinarily near-sighted, and much given to leering and to grinning toothily. Our cartoonists drew them to resemble monkeys.

But Americans weren't alone in their racism. Most Japanese viewed, and still view, other cultures and peoples, even their nearest Asian neighbors, with dismissive contempt. It was our shared racism that allowed us to treat one another as sub-humans, and this led to inexpressible cruelties and barbarism on both sides. It made the horrors of Japanese prison camps possible, and Hiroshima.

* Positive roles were also carried over from the First World War to the Second. It explains France's position as a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations, which is composed of the countries that won the Second World War... and France.

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48. '...the last year of peace' (p. 282)

What a great crop of popular songs 1941 produced! I Hear a Rhapsody, My sister and I, Chattanooga Choo Choo, Amapola, Marie Elena, Daddy, The White Cliffs of Dover, I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire, The Wise Old Owl (said who? who? who?), It All Comes Back to Me Now, There'll Be Some Changes Made, High on a Windy Hill, Green Eyes, and two of my favorite Ink Spots hits: Do I Worry? and Whispering Grass. (? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/songs/songs.htm” ?explore these here?)

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49. '...was out of pocket.' (p. 286)

I have always been glad I had this early encounter with Capitalism as seen from the angle of the exploited. Over the years, my understanding of the essential spirit of Capitalism was broadened and deepened by experience. In my time I have worked from Texas to Canada as a migratory crop picker. I've been a loading-dock grunt, and a waiter in both family-style troughs and opulent restaurants (this last because I was able to read the French menu). I have worked in a cannery on repetitious, mind-numbing twelve-hour shifts, and one winter I blasted dirt off passenger cars with a high-pressure steam hose, my overalls and eyebrows stiff with frozen mist so that my walk was a waddle and my glance an unblinking stare. For a time I was a factory hand doing piece-work with so low a unit value that one had to risk his fingers in the hungry machinery to make a living wage, and later I was a metal-cleaner obliged to breathe acid fumes and a hanging fog of minute iron filings and asbestos dust. I have sold shoes in Oregon and encyclopedias in Washington, D.C., and I've punched cards on a proto-computer. I was a night-shift watchman in a freight yard, picking my way through complex networks of slippery, glistening railroad tracks, always listening over my shoulder for 'creepers', those single freight cars that are set in motion by mule engines then left to coast to their destination in the darkness of the yard, with only a soft click-click, click-click to alert the fatigue-dazed worker to the danger of being crushed. These experiences honed my sense of social injustice and made me a committed socialist, although never an advocate of the nationalization of industry, because politicians and government time-servers are at least as corrupt as capitalist entrepreneurs, and much less competent. Without these personal experiences of capitalism, I might have ended up with just the middle-class liberal's self satisfied fellow feeling for the exploited underdog.

So I know the vicious capitalist scramble up the ladder of success in which the sign of the loser is a finger crushed on the ladder rung, and the sign of the winner is a gory heel. And I observe with considerable interest today's generation of slave-meat in the big business abattoir. The exploited workers of my day were expendable 'hands' paid as little as possible to make, move, and sell the Product, then discarded. We were easy targets, under-educated, jealous of one another, weak, often cheated by the gangsters who ran our unions.

But the exploited workers of today are not semi-literate working class 'hands; but middle-class, largely college-educated 'minds' employed by faceless international corporations that suck their energies and talents dry by constant 'down-sizing', by out sourcing, by project-based hiring that avoids the cost of health insurance and retirement plans, and by devices that force the staff to compete among themselves for survival. Then, when the workers are in their forties, they are cast aside and replaced by younger, less expensive minds, which in their turn will be sucked dry of their energy and youth, and cast aside. This new generation of exploited workers consists of people who, addicted to the narcotic of consumerism, work long hours without the dignity of job security that is the natural right of a free person. 'Success' in such rat race involves being willing to become a manager who will drive others around the treadmill; but even this debased and debasing kind of 'success' is no guarantee against dismissal when a yet more desperate and bloodthirsty manager comes along.

Abused workers of my day could defend themselves only with the strike and violence... violence that was met by shutouts and scabs wielding ax-handles. But the abused workers of today, if they can muster the guts and the organization, are better equipped to protect themselves or, that failing, to avenge themselves. They are skillful at using—and destroying—the computer programs and data bases upon which their oppressors rely.

I anticipate the new electronic revolution with great interest.

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50. '...H. V. Kaltenborn' (p. 289)

Considering the hate propaganda against Germans, it was perhaps just as well that few people knew that H. V. Kaltenborn's initials stood for 'Hans von'.

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51. '...therefore praiseworthy... also spooky' (p. 289)

When many of their best musicians went into the army and navy, the Big Bands could no longer produce that broad-front, locked-up sound that was the essence of the Swing era. (Swing was a formulated off-shoot of jazz that featured, not soloists emerging from the joyous anarchy of the jazz band to do improvised licks and solo riffs, but full orchestras under the control of a leader/arranger who contributed well-rehearsed lead riffs on the instrument with which he was identified. Tommy Dorsey played a trombone and bore the syncopated nickname 'The Sentimental Gentleman of Swing'. His saxophonist brother, Jimmy, was a less popular but more innovative musician. As a kid, I got the idea there was some connection between playing the trombone and wearing glasses, because Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller both wore glasses. Miller, whose theme song was 'Moonlight Serenade', died in a plane accident during the war (the kind of death that attracts highly embroidered conspiracy theories, like the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Kennedy). Miller's sound was among the most easily recognized, a melting blend of saxophones with a clarinet on top that owed a lot to the arranger, Tex Beneke. Benny Goodman 'The King of Swing' played the clarinet as did many of the great Jewish swing and jazzmen. Goodman's band was a fertile breeding ground for future band leaders like the drummer Gene Krupa and the trumpeter Harry James, whose theme song was 'Ciribiribin', and who was much envied by soldiers during the war because he was married to the Second World War's hottest pin-up, Betty Grable.