The Secret Knowledge Read online

  Everything, it seemed, was political, and their job was to inform the ignorant of it. The Ignorant, in this classroom, were myself and the young woman who suggested the Pakistanis. A young Idealogue broadened his thesis, it was not only the responsibility of the dramatist, he taught, to refrain from stereotyping, but to use every aspect of the drama to enforce upon the public a humanitarian view of the world. Homosexuals, for instance, he said, should be seen kissing onstage whenever possible, was it not an outrage that the part of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire was always played by a woman? Why could it not be played by a man?

  “Well,” I said, “it could be played by a man. Streetcar is essentially a gay fantasy written by a gay writer, and clothed in straight terms.” This gave the young fellow pause, for he was not sure if my comment supported or opposed his thesis.

  For, in fact, he was not sure what his thesis was, but I think it could be reduced to this: all speech should be susceptible to his review on the basis of a series of precepts which, while they could not be cogently enumerated, might be inferred from the generalized precept that all people are equal, and anyone from whose actions a dedication to this principle could not be constantly inferred was a subhuman swine.

  “Well, all right,” I asked, “are homosexuals human?” He answered that of course they were human. “Being human,” I asked, “are they entitled to the same rights as any other human?” “Of course,” he replied. “Well, then,” I said, “if one of those is the right to entertainment, might we not study to entertain them, by learning how to structure a play?”

  But the class had ticked over into what I recognized was a usual stage of progression; someone had taken the high ground and shouted “racist,” or “homophobe,” first and loudest, and all who did not wish to be so branded must submit to his dominance, for did he not speak in the name of all the Good?

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s my favorite joke: What did Custer say when he saw the Indians coming?” (PAUSE) “ ‘Here come the Indians.’ ” This was met with that pause we all know, within which the right-minded search for a clue as to the comment’s indictability. Was it a criticism of the Native Americans? How could it be otherwise? On the other hand, were not these people actually called Indians? “Here come the Native Americans,” of course, does not scan. And so on, ran that dreary brutally foolish pause which was the end of the class and is the end of Liberal Education.

  What is Liberal Education? It has become an indoctrination in aggressive Identity Politics, a schooling, that is, in the practice of indictment, assault, exclusion, and contempt, all of which contradicts the statement of Universal Humanity upon which all its educational “ideology” rests.57

  But here was my question: On leaving the university, what would these Young Stalinists do? Who would pay them for the ability to bravely proclaim, “That’s not funny?” In what society could they live?

  They were and are the children of privilege—in some the privilege is inherited, and the cost of college meaningless, in some the cost is huge, and families suffer; but in all cases the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a “liberal arts education” is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete—to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called a developmental difficulty.

  A nine-year-old boy is rowdy—he needs to run, to subvert, to climb, to misuse, to expend his energies and explore.

  Our civilization, incapable of dealing with this natural phenomenon through immemorial means (discipline, order, sport, parental punishment, the military) deems the behavior pathological, and administers wholesale diagnoses, sanctions, and drugs.

  Boys are boys and need both to discharge and to learn how to correctly discharge and moderate those impulses appropriate to this as to any stage of their development. The strong, wise, or trained teacher or parent must learn when to say, “Sit down,” and when, “Go out and play”; when “I’m calling the police,” and when “Knock it off.” But we have lost the power to discriminate.

  A woman on a transcontinental flight was having problems with her three-year-old twins. She swatted them, the stewardess came over to correct the mother, and the mother and she had some words. On landing, the mother was taken off the plane, indicted and convicted of terrorism, and served three months in prison. For she had disrupted a flight, and had spoken rough to a flight attendant and that, it seems, is now a Federal Crime.

  The wise society must deal with transitional periods of youth. The young are confused, frightened, energetic, and require not stringency, neither laxity, but guidance, which will consist sometimes of the one and sometimes of the other. The guidance required by the rowdy nine-year-olds is also required by college students: They are full of idealism, but have no experience. They may so easily be subverted into sloganeering, for it gratifies the ego and, more importantly, obviates the fear of the unknown (adulthood). If everything one needs to know one knows now, there is no need to learn discernment, or to choose—there is no wisdom greater than “people are people.” And if all oppression must be stopped and there is nothing further to learn, then you are the fellow to do it. This demagoguery looses the student from the very constraints of thoughtfulness, courtesy, respect, circumspection, and patience, which, at age twenty-one, it is his final chance to learn. These habits, even absent a marketable skill, may help him begin to earn a living. But the recitation of aggressive, invidious slogans meant to shame stand little chance of doing so.

  It is not that this Liberal Arts Student has too much leisure, he has nothing but leisure. I have spent forty years sitting alone at a typewriter, and will report that it takes time, and effort, trial and error, to learn how to structure one’s day productively when there is no one there but you.

  It is impossible that the eighteen-year-old, in the laissez-faire of the Liberal Arts courses of Identity Politics, can do so. Of course he will look for certainty, and he will find it in the herd. Being equipped with neither experience nor philosophy, he will adopt the cant of those around him; and his elders, far from correcting him, endorse him, and, indeed, charge him for the experience, and call it “college tuition.” But it is Socialist Camp, and creative not of productive Citizens, but of intolerant, uneducated, and incurious graduates, who now, at age twenty-one or twenty-two, must either look for work bagging groceries, or defer the trauma of matriculation by a further course of “study.”

  “Are gay people people too?” I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. “Are they aware of that fact?” I asked him. And he responded similarly. “Then why,” I asked, “as they are aware of the fact, would they find its repetition on stage entertaining?”

  “Ah, but,” he said, “the straight people should see it.”

  “Ah, but,” I said, “the straight people don’t care. They may reward themselves for the ability to be bored by a play with a Good Message, but they, just like the gay people, come to the theater to be entertained. Your enlightenment is insufficient to capture the audience’s attention for two hours. Would you like some hints on how to do so?”

  But the class was over, and I left feeling like a fool, and sad. For the class members were not stupid, they were, as they should be at that age, idealistic; and the university’s disinterest in educating them to be of use in their society had turned their natural energy and idealism into a developmental difficulty. They were being drugged with self-indulgence.

  I believe that the Liberal Arts University has had it. Like bottled water, the expense and the illusion of exclusivity are still attracting buyers, but what do they buy and what is it worth? The elite schools sell certification, which perhaps has some theoretical value in some theoretical marketplace, though littl
e in the institutions into which these graduates pour.

  What family or graduate is going to benefit from a degree in film or gender studies or, indeed, English literature? What are these people going to do, save spread the gospel of the use of their particular discipline in the hope of obtaining a place in the continuation of the farce?

  We scoff at the hereditary Mandarin positions as “Keeper of the Buttonhook,” or “Strewer of Rose Petals in the Back Garden,” but what else is “Associate Professor of Gender Studies”? It means the particular institution wishes to display status by the conspicuous waste of treasure and time and so inveigle the insufficiently investigative (parents and students) to come, buy its hogwash, and swell its coffers. But as the economy implodes, there will be fewer and fewer students and families blinded by the display, and more and more sitting down at the kitchen table with paper and pencil, asking the question, “What do I give, and what do I get?” which is the essence of responsibility, and it’s a question of which the developmentally challenged youth are unaware.

  Scrooge asked, “Are there no Prisons? And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” and I might ask the same of the Trade School, the ROTC, the Military, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Synagogues and Churches which have, traditionally, functioned to aid the youth toward a matriculation into society, and so to an actual sense of self-worth. But the sloganeering of the Liberal Arts school teaches the young not self-worth, but arrogance, and much of the rage and rancor these sloganeers project against the supposed unenlightened oppressors is uncathected rage against the adult generation which has abandoned them to the rowdy and inappropriate disruptiveness of their own devices.

  Children crave discipline. Its absence frightens them, for they know themselves incapable of independent function; and the placards and “revolutionary Humanism” of today’s college students are nothing other than the four-year-old’s tantrum: he throws the tantrum in front of and for the benefit of his parents; he acts out his aggression in a protected setting. The child whose parents are absent, who is in the care of others, will not throw a tantrum, for he recognizes no one cares, and he had better figure out how to get his needs met in an environment not disposed to tolerate his nonsense.

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  OAKTON MANOR AND CAMP KAWAGA

  In the fifties, Camp Kawaga was the Chicago Jewish summer camp. At Camp Kawaga (D.M., summers 1955–58) they played a recording of Taps each evening. It was preceded by a recording of “Ave Maria,” sung by one of the counselors with artistic ambitions. But the Camp was Jewish exclusively.

  And on Sundays we had “Chapel,” at which, in the spirit of the Jew endeavoring to intuit the content of Unitarianism, the camp director read a poem by Douglas MacArthur.

  The General had written, in love, a poem not to, but about his young son Arthur, and the poem had, somehow gained a wider distribution.

  “Build me a Son, Lord,” it ran, “who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid,” et cetera, closing, after the conclusion of the recipe, with, “And then I, his father, may dare to whisper ‘I have not lived in vain.’ ”

  I remember thinking, aged eight, that this was hot stuff.

  I came across the poem after fifty-some years, in William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur, American Caesar, and found, reading the first few words, that I could quote the whole from memory. So I suppose it had made an impression.

  But, on reflection, it’s a poem not about the General’s relationship to his son, but about his relationship with God. It is a direction to God from his superior, General MacArthur. Perhaps if the General wanted such a son (as I am sure he did) he might have taken a hand in the process himself, asking God for guidance rather than for expedited delivery.

  Much later I discovered Kipling’s “If,” a note not from a man to God, but from a man to his son.

  As an American I was spared this poem’s ruination by its, to the British, outrageous ubiquity, it holding a place in the British literary consciousness like that held over here by The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick but not, unfortunately, by “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”58

  I found Kipling’s sentiments marvelous, an exhortation to his son to be strong and brave, careful and considerate.59 This is advice I give my own son, my profound desire for its reception colored by my knowledge of my own shortcomings.

  Like that speech by Polonius, it is the plea of every father watching his son leave home: “Forgive me, I’ve done everything wrong, I have done nothing right. I was, as a model, insufficient, and as a preceptor, hypocritical. Here is what I wish to have said: Our time is almost done, and I have taxed you with my pomposity and garrulousness and officiousness, and you have been supremely patient with me. But perhaps you might listen for just this last time, in the hope that these words might aid you.”

  I have learned from my old German friend Ilse various helpful old-world phrases. One is: “Boys are different.”

  And, indeed, they are. Very like each other, and very different from girls.

  After three daughters, a son is a revelation. Watching him and his friends one both sees and remembers, boys want only to explore, to fight, to test, to climb, break and rearrange everything they see. They will find a way to ruin a featureless, titanium chamber.

  Our American school system (public and private) is against them. It is no wonder the boys have developed or been diagnosed (which is to say marginalized) as possessing a whole alphabet full of acronyms, which may be reduced to “I give up, drug them.”

  But here is a truer view of boys, from Tolstoy.

  He described Karenin’s impatience with his young son Sergei. Sergei is looking out of the window, and Karenin is trying to get him to describe, “a verb of action.” But Sergei, we are told, is patiently trying to remove his attention from the progress of a butterfly, and his ruminations about the nature of air, sun, and the world, in general. Sergei is trying to be polite to his father, and his father is berating him as a dunce, but the boy was wondering at the nature of the Universe.

  A blunter writer might conflate our school’s anti-male bias with a societal inclination to cease exploration and production, and let the land revert to fallowness. We seem to be taxing ourselves to death in an effort to arrive at a magical formula which will allow us to survive without either production or exploration.

  Traditionally women dealt with the home and men dealt with the World. Men and women are both parents, but only one of them is created to be a mother. That there is no difference can be asserted only by those who have not raised children.

  Boys are born to contest with the world, and if we are going to breed out of them that ability, the land is going to lie fallow.

  The other aspect of our Jewish Chicago Summer was Oakton Manor. This was our marvelous, knotty-pine equivalent to the Catskills, just over the Wisconsin Line. Here the kids had activities every day under the supervision of counselors, while the wives got a break from motherhood. The men came up on the weekends, and the adults smoked, drank, danced, and were entertained. Do such resorts exist anymore? It was a Jewish Haven, both catering to the human preference for recreation in the midst of one’s kind, and redressing the contemporary exclusion of Jews (Restriction) from many hotels and resorts.

  Our lives today seem more stratified, or contained, by wealth than race. This is, thermodynamically, a shame, for one needs more energy to relax sequestered by wealth, than protected in simple settings by one’s clan; for wealth, as opposed to race, certainly has degrees, and so these differences, even in seclusion, may create envy and anxiety.

  Being among my people is a delight.

  Jews associate exclusively with Jews. Though we may identify the momentary agglomeration as based on wealth, politics, location, profession, or avocation, a quick check will reveal the group (even if made of enemies of Israel, or of the Jewish Religion itself) is made of Jews. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it. And all the carping about Israel, or moo
ing about the Palestinians, or about the emptiness of Religion, is a constant in Jewish life, and is, in fact, the descant of the Torah.

  The Jewish proclamation of disaffection is like the constant head and body movements of the blind called “blindisms.” The blind use these to locate themselves in space.

  Our Jewish bitching is, similarly, a proprioceptive maneuver, used to locate in space our wandering, border culture.

  Many Jews are confused about or opposed to the existence of the Jewish State, and, in their ignorance or muddleheadedness, wish it away. Much of this disaffection is laziness, for if Israel were gone, these anti-Zionist souls believe they might dwell in an unmitigated state of assimilation, any pressures of which might conceivably be combated by an effortless supineness.60

  We were strangers in a strange land, and we are still strangers in a strange land—but the land is less strange than any in which we have dwelt. How to make it less strange still? To cease pretending and enjoy the benefits of liberty, security, and success, and defend them as an American, rather than posing as a “citizen of the World.”

  For here the assimilated (Liberal) Jew simply expands the neurosis of Diaspora thinking: the United States offers Freedom to all, and there is no one here I need to placate; but this position suggests self-examination: “If this is so, why do I feel dislocated?61 Perhaps there is a wider polity whose ‘Good wishes I must seek.’ I will call it ‘the World,’ or ‘World Opinion.’ Or, ‘What might I apologize for . . .’ ”

  Why would any American Jew wish to become a “citizen of the World”? This fantasy is akin to one who believes in the benevolence of Nature. Anyone ever lost in the wild knows that Nature wants you dead.

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