The Sunlight Dialogues (35 page)
She reached for her drink.
“Put it down,” he said.
She ignored him, and suddenly—out of empty air, it seemed to her—the man had conjured a gun. Her heart stopped cold.
“Put it down, Madam. We’re going to make you a saint.”
“You’re insane,” she whispered.
“Not yet.” The pale lips smiled. “These things take time.”
Ach, unsre Taten selbst so gut als unsre Leiden,
Sie hemmen unsres Lebens Gang.
—Goethe
1
Chief Clumly ate in his office that night, and as he ate, alone for the first time in hours, he looked over the article Judge White had made him take. It was not the kind of thing he’d have read past a sentence or two, normally, and it wasn’t an easy thing to get through with the radio on in the outer office. But he read attentively, straining to catch any possible hint of why the Judge had made him take it. It was conceivable that the Judge had merely thought he’d be interested, but Clumly did not read as though he believed it could be that. He had the shade pulled and the office door locked, and he sat hunched forward, spectacles low on his nose, left hand reaching blindly to the white bag of hamburgers and Sanka from Critic’s, and when the writer made allusions he couldn’t catch he felt panicky. He’d have worse news the next time he came, the Judge had said. Was the article a clue? Flies buzzed, up by the lightglobe. The fan on the cabinet moved back and forth slowly, hardly stirring the muggy air.
“Policework and Alienation.
“Insofar as we view the whole matter abstractly, nothing in the world, not even abject poverty, is more degrading and, ultimately, dehumanizing—at least in potential—than police work. Against the poor unlucky policeman all the physical and spiritual forces of the universe seem to conspire. It has always been so—though it was less so in simpler societies, including our own fifty years ago, than it is in America today. And no doubt it will always remain so, for all the labors of psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and so on, and for all the honest effort of those most directly involved in the problem—law-enforcement agencies themselves. The subject is a difficult one to treat frankly without appearing to sink into petty fault-finding or name-calling or, worse, melodrama, and, worse yet, cheap exposé. But the subject is worthy of attention. Police work has so often been sentimentalized, both by those who make policemen old-fashioned heroes and by those who would soften and domesticate them into weary, hard-working custodians and clerks—and the qualities of the police mind have so often been polished and ornamented, much as coffins are, and made to seem not only tolerable but downright commodious—that it behooves us to take stock of what police work does to the human body and soul.
“We could speak, if we were seeking dramatic effect, of that paradox so frequently pointed out by psychologists and sociologists who have interested themselves in the policeman: ‘The defender of peace is a trained killer.’ The phrase is not altogether unjust, for all its mercantile ring. One cannot watch the training of a police rookie without realizing, perhaps with some horror, the extent to which his profession removes him from the ordinary run of humanity. The targets on a police firing range are not innocent circles or
x’s
but silhouettes of men, and the familiar saw of police training, ‘Never draw your gun unless you’re prepared to use it,’ is not mere air. More than one man has died needlessly in demonstration of the truth in that saw, both criminals who should not have been drawn on, and policemen who drew and were not ready to shoot or, stymied by their partisanship with the human race, failed to shoot in time. Among psychologists there is no debate as to whether or not the loaded gun the policeman carries with him constantly has any effect on the structure of his personality. It does, and the effect tends to be bad. The plain truth seems to be that the men who go into police work are society’s needful sacrifice for order.
“But to focus on the gun the policeman wears is to miss the complexity of the problem. A gun is, after all, a tool, and can be used, like a shovel or a frying pan, in more ways than one. It need not kill, and it need not give the man who wears it nightmares or result in his estrangement from his wife. All that goes into the selection and training of a modern policeman is designed to minimize the likelihood of the tool’s destruction of the man. The forced-choice questionnaires he fills out when he first applies are designed to rule out any man not a good deal more stable and mature than the common human run, and the training he goes through—unlike the training of, say, a soldier—emphasizes not the efficient use of the power society has given him, but the responsibility involved. There is no denying the powerful symbolic significance of the gun at his hip, but it is not just in the policeman’s mind that the symbol burns: in the darkness at the bottom of consciousness, the man who passes the policeman on the street knows as well as the policeman himself that the gun is there. And it is in the relationship, or rather the gap, between the policeman and the rest of mankind that the trouble has its genesis.
“Though every man wants law and order, at least up to a point, most men want it mainly to keep other people in line, not themselves. Nobody wants his child run over; nevertheless, nothing is more infuriating for a man with serious business in the world than hearing behind him, as he hurries his car through congested traffic toward his office (late through no fault of his own) the yawl, like the yawl of a big angry cat, of a siren. That is, indeed, the least of it. One doesn’t last a day in police work if one wears one’s feeling on one’s sleeve; and the man who takes very little personally, who with mild eyes and a stern jaw accepts all abuse, threats, mockeries with the indifference of a man born deaf and blind—who puts insult away as quickly and lightly as he drops his ball-point pen back into his pocket—that man grows tougher yet with experience. Often the lamb turns tiger when he comes before the judge; and often those who howl loudest at the time of arrest, on the other hand—who call down on the poor policeman’s head the most terrible curses, and take the lowest view of his generation and lineage—are the same men who, when the trial comes up or the fine has been paid, are most generous with their forgiveness of what seems to them, even now, the policeman’s small-mindedness. Remembering this, the policeman learns such patience as would shame old Job. He learns to stand lightly in the present moment, at once committed and detached, like a true philosopher or like an old-time Christian who knows this world no home, but a wilderness. So much the better, some opine. Only young lovers and elderly fools mistake the moment’s passions for equal in value to the ups and downs, the larger illuminations, of a total action. What is police work, some may inquire, but a new approach to old-fashioned
caritas—
the heart’s concern with, not simply some part of the cosmic bog, but the whole? Ah, true! The ability to rise out of one’s narrow cell of time and place—to behold and admire not simply some particular woman or campaign or golden vase but the total order into which all particulars must necessarily fit—is not only the beginning but the true end, both the purpose and the method, of wisdom. But alas,
caritas
has never in this world had much charity in it. The man who loves with a pure heart, who loves his friend for the virtues he embodies, does not love his friend very much—as women understand. Thus saints love mankind but do not much care for men. The man deeply mired in cupidity, who so greatly enjoys, say, lemon drops that he walks in front of trains without seeing them, all his wits curled up around the sour-sweet sensation in his mouth, is no doubt a poor miserable unfortunate who deserves our pity here and, hereafter, hell. But the man who leaps past the mere lemon drop to the glory of God there figured forth—that is to say, the man whose eye is on the larger order of the universe, both the lemon drop and the freight train he stops to watch rush past—is more pitiable yet, from a certain point of view, and richly deserves the eternal tedium of Heaven.
“So it is with policemen. Detached from mankind—thrust back with sharp insults or, simply, blank stares by those whose activities he indifferently impedes—fawned over by fools who, in an analogous situation, cannot walk past a sleeping dog without calling to it and holding out their fingers—smiled at by children who tomorrow will frown or fawn, like their parents—the policeman little by little slides away from whatever comfortable humanity he may once have shared with his neighbors. Every stranger is a potential excuse-maker or gratuity artist, if not an outright enemy, and every friend is a potential favor-seeker. Men of some stature in the community, who might conceivably make good their threats to ‘break you for this,’ as the saying goes, are tin cans on the social watchdog’s tail. Men of no stature are merely a quiet annoyance. The policeman resists this inevitable tendency of his thought, if only because human beings are by nature social creatures, even policemen; nevertheless, the subtle pressure toward cynicism is everlastingly there. It is of course primarily for this reason that police departments hire family men, when possible. The bachelor policeman inevitably turns more and more for friendship to others of his own Jesuitical kind, that is, fellow policemen; and out of such friendships, out of membership in that proud and exclusive club, he draws precisely the confidence and security, almost bigotry, which, in a man with a gun, can be dangerous. In your truly Protestant department, where after his day of professionally indifferent justice (strained, bent, dented here and there by the age-old hammerings of low pay and temptation always too ready-at-hand, by anger, boredom, and the despair which comes with dealing out more justice than any policeman gets), the man of the force goes home to a wife who involves him, as soon as he crosses his threshold, in excuse-making and bribery and pointless anger of his own; and lest he begin to slide into a comfortable self-hatred, a schizophrenic separation of the policeman in him and the tawdry man, she kisses him on the cheek and, sooner or later, unmans him in his bed.
“But either way, bachelor or married, the policeman is lucky if he does not eventually (however subtly) go mad. It begins in disengagement. It is not the man but the uniform that makes the arrests, takes the insults or the fawning or (most common of all) the averted faces, the stares that pass through him. Like a man in a hypnotic trance, he moves not by his own power but by the force of a thing outside himself, his badge. Like the hypnotist’s subject, and like a true schizophrenic, he must regularly deny to himself—far below the level of conscious assertion—that the voice with which he speaks is his own. Standing with his foot on the bumper of a reckless driver’s car, writing down the license, he no more writes, himself, than the hypnotist’s subject raises the arm he has been told he cannot raise: it is the Law that writes. It is the Law that bangs, like God on Armageddon day, at the debtor’s barbican, or holds up one glove to impatient traffic at an intersection, or dispassionately—for all the pounding of the policeman’s heart—fires a bullet through the murderer’s head, or pulls the power switch at Sing Sing.
“All men, admittedly, play artificial roles. A doctor is not the same man when he’s wearing his stethoscope that he is when he sits at the breakfast table across from his wife, reading his paper and picking with the tip of his fork at the yolks of his eggs. But here, for the most part anyway, the professional and the common mortal can live comfortably and harmoniously together. If a doctor withdraws from his humanity—closes off his emotions, for instance, while performing an operation—he does it in the
name
of his humanity. Only small children hate a doctor when they require his ministries, and sometimes even the most recalcitrant children can be persuaded. For the policemen, whom only small children love with a pure heart (and the recalcitrant among them are not quickly persuaded), there is no such pride and pleasure. He can be proud that he is, as he is frequently told, ‘an efficient, modern machine’; he can be proud that he is indispensable to civilization—however little the word may in fact mean to—as Plato says—a man of silver. He may be proud, when he looks in a mirror, to see that his tie is straight and his shirt neatly pressed, as the tie and shirt of the silver imitation of a man should be. But he cannot take much pleasure—any more than his nearest analogues, the artist and the saint—in his everyday communion with good, plain men. He meets the world and gets along with it by means of a conjuring trick inside his brain.
“His situation, we are sorry to say, is worse nowadays than it used to be, and worse in large cities than in smaller towns or in the country. The cop on the beat—an old-fashioned curiosity as impractical and inefficient today as the hand-crank butter churn or the medieval gisarme—could come to know his neighborhood, protect it and be protected by it: he could be as well liked as the grocer or mailman or launderer. (His position was not merely a function of his walking unarmed except for a nightstick.) He could usually stop a riot before it was thought of—or so most authorities on crime now believe. And if trouble did start, whatever its nature, he knew at once whom to look for, whom to let pass and proceed about his business, as one uninvolved. The cop on the beat had another advantage, more subtle and yet even more important: he need not be bored. As he made his way down the streets assigned to him he could talk with people or fall away into the abstruse speculations of a soul turned inward, whichever he pleased. If the day was quiet, he could bask in the quiet, speaking casually of this and that, or he could praise the Lord by eyes rolled up and over. Not so the man in the prowlcar. There is no quiet for him, but a steady hiss from his radio, like horsemeat frying or seas rolling through bones and grits, or like snakes and steam contending with the feet of the damned. Or else voices come in with that nightlong leak of trivialities—addresses, names, every once in a while some cautious little joke—whereby the soul of man is overthrown. Alas, he has neither the peace and isolation of the Gnostic, sweating in the prison of his flesh but dreaming nevertheless grand dreams, nor the fitful joy to be had from the earthly communion of, loosely, saints. In comparison to the casual turning of the head and a pleasant Good-morning, there is a certain offensive obviousness about pulling over to a curb in a car with a silver-throated siren and a big red light like a basilisk’s eye, and calling out to the man who stands on the sidewalk waiting for his bus. The man in the prowlcar is thus cut off both from outer reality and inner, from communion with men and from communion with himself. No message comes over his radio directing him to a corner where he will find a man whose conversation would be worth gold and silver and all one’s best linen. Outer reality is represented by boys who have just knocked down old ladies, by prowlers, reckless drivers, exhibitionists, peeping-toms.
