Piecework

Watching Colin Powell, I thought about the world in which he was young and how hard he must have worked to make the journey of his life. He graduated from Morris High School in February 1954, a few months before Brown v. Board of Education. He didn’t need the Supreme Court to get him into college; he’d already been admitted to the City College of New York, where you needed a 90 average to get in. But Colin Powell didn’t brag to the assembled students, and though he reminded them that they had greater opportunities than he did, he didn’t whine about the timing of his life. He was another tough guy who didn’t need to show how tough he was as he played the hand he was dealt. So he’d already learned some lessons from his parents about work and struggle. And he must have been free of self-pity, that most corrosive of human emotions. He was shaped by forces now almost forgotten: the immigrant work experience, the Depression, the tradition of hard work.

I’m not sure when — or more important, why — self-pity was elevated into the great all-encompassing American whine. One possible explanation is the presence in our collective imaginations of two gigantic twentieth-century events: the Holocaust and Hiroshima. These were real, with millions of true victims, but they also live in most of us on the level of hallucination and nightmare. They were not problems of manners. They were not offenses of language. Even today, it’s difficult for many people to deal with them. There is a valid argument that no words, no pictures, no movies can ever fully express the horror of the Holocaust or the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But an awed silence can’t satisfy everyone. Some Americans might be adapting the robes of the victim in solidarity with the victims of this century’s horrors; others might don them in annoyance, saying in effect, Yeah, that’s terrible, but / have my own problems. And some might be trying to relieve some tangled feelings of national guilt; for the incineration of so many Japanese civilians, for failing to act to save the European Jews when it was clear that the Holocaust had begun.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to such cosmic questions. But I do know that Americans, who once worshiped in the church of self-reliance, have moved to another house of worship, where they are in the grip of a fever of victimism. Its whining propagandists insist upon respect without accomplishment, while its punitive theory of society is enforced by lawyers. The amount of energy consumed by the furies of victimism is extraordinary. The wasted lives of those who buy its premise add up to a genuine tragedy that is made worse by being a self-inflicted wound. In this state of mind, the nation can never heal itself; it is too busy blaming others to look into its own heart. But all of us, including the most damaged, would be helped by a moratorium on self-pity. We need less Freud and more Marcus Aurelius, less adolescent posturing and more stoic maturity, less weeping and gnashing of teeth and more bawdy horselaughs in the face of adversity.

In all the cities of America, the young are now being introduced to the world through the shaping ideology of victimism. How sad. I wish Colin Powell could talk to all of them, black, white, or Latino, male or female, of every class and religion, and tell them: Be proud, live life in your own skin, and whatever is bothering you, hey, man: Make it someone else’s problem.

ESQUIRE,

July 1991

LETTER TO A BLACK FRIEND

Though you are black and I am white, we have been friends now for most of our adult lives. All friendships are difficult, but until the last few years, ours endured some of the most terrible strains of the past three decades. Somehow, for all that time, it didn’t matter that I was the son of bone-poor Irish immigrants and you the descendant of African slaves; we usually saw the world the same way, were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity.

Yes, the accident of race was always an unavoidable presence in our friendship; after all, I met you in 1955, the year that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for the terrible crime of whistling at a white woman. As the years passed, there was even more awful evidence of man’s apparently infinite capacity for stupidity and murder. But for each of us, our racial and cultural differences were a mutual enrichment, uniquely American. The country was an alloy or it was nothing. And between us there was a splendid exchange: Yeats for the blues, Joyce for Charlie Parker, O’Casey for Langston Hughes; both of us claimed Willie Mays. Somehow, we remained optimists. As young men, we had read our Camus, and we believed that it was possible to love our country and justice, too. That simple faith, with its insistence on irony, was at the heart of our friendship.