Published this less than two months ago. Must be the quickest I’ve ever re-posted a thing I’ve written. But this post isn’t made in preening self-regard—hey check out this smart thing I wrote a long time ago—it’s done in a spirit of humility, after a simple comment from a dinner companion the other night made me feel a little dumb. As you’ll (re)see below, I set myself apart from young people who “absorb and try assiduously to respond to all the injustices and absurdities and embarrassments” that rain down upon us always and have been pouring down lately.
I expressed a similar sentiment to my friend, almost 20 years my senior. He said he figured young people have a harder time filtering out the terribleness because “they have more at stake.”
Why did they have more at stake? I asked.
Because they’re going to be around here longer a lot longer than we are, and will have to deal with the implications for a long longer, too, my friend said.
Of course.
I don’t take back what I say below … but I want to say it again, this time in the context of the my friend’s self-evident observation. —DM
***
Just because I acknowledged sometimes wishing I was dead, some people thought yesterday’s post was negative.
Yesterday’s post was not negative. The historian Paul Fussell was negative. When told to have a nice day, he would typically respond: “Thanks, but I have other plans.” Here’s Fussell, talking about horrors he witnessed in World War II.
During the war and after, Fussell developed what George Orwell called “a power of facing unpleasant facts.” In a 1988 essay, Fussell laid some of those facts out (as The New York Times recently reported):
Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can’t have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out not to be the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and the world will go on as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else’s expense or do and undergo things it’s not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of the innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It’s also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets or knives, if not in Germany, Italy or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.
The other night on a long Zoom chat, a Baby Boomer friend was trying to tell me that his Millennial son and daughter cannot and do not try to do what my mother advised us to do (but rarely managed to do herself): “Wear the world like a loose garment.” Quite the contrary, these young people absorb and try assiduously to respond to all the injustices and absurdities and embarrassments, as they prioritize them, that rain down in and from a capitalist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, ableist, essentially culturally conservative country that tramps drunkenly upon the meeker people in the world on a good day, let alone the run of bad days we’ve been having lately. Only unlike Paul Fussell, these folks don’t want to face such atrocities rarely, they want not to forget them for a moment, because their victims can’t escape them for a moment, either.
I think that’s what my Boomer friend was telling me. It was a boozy Zoom chat. I told him that I understood. He seemed to question whether I really understood. I assured him I understood, though I came up short of saying I agreed emotionally or intellectually with this orientation. (Because I come up short of knowing whether I do.) And he came up short of saying he thought I probably face the world’s injustices too rarely myself—between too many rounds of golf and Sunday baseball games and motorcycle trips. We left it at that, and maybe we always will. Or maybe we’ll talk about it on our next Zoom chat.
In any case, I have thought about how happy it’s morally okay to be, of course. Lately, and over the years.
As the creative director of an ad agency in the 1960s, my dad once interviewed a priest who wanted to be a copywriter. (Dad was desperate to recruit folks to his agency in Detroit, a city that New York creative hotshots perceived as “two Newarks.”) The priest opened the interview with a lecture about the kind of advertising he saw, and hated—too lighthearted, too whimsical, too silly. “Now Mr. Murray, I am here to tell you,” the hopeful clergyman-turned-copywriter intoned, “Life is not a bowl of cherries!”
I think I know that, Father. Just personally: My mother was at once my purest inspiration and also an alcoholic and dangerously depressed due to long shadows of incest and suicide, and she died from complications of all that (but not all the shadows disappeared). I was in a locked drug ward myself, as a teenager. My father has died, some of my friends have died, some of my dreams have died, my wife’s had cancer (everybody’s had cancer), many of my friends are getting fucking old and my own get-through-the-dwindling-days mantra swings from, “you know, maybe things are going to be okay after all,” to “we’re all gonna die!”
So how am I supposed to regard the sorrows and indignities of dozens and hundreds and millions and billions of others who share with me what Robert F. Kennedy called “the same short movement of life” and “seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can”?
When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, a stranger told me solemnly, ominously: “You’ll never be any happier than your least happy child.” Am I also supposed to be no happier than my least happy fellow citizen?
I don’t know. And yes, as yesterday’s post betrayed, sometimes the problem makes me weary—lately, especially. Not you?
“Life is short,” Garry Shandling once said, “but not short enough!”
***
Postscript, and one more thought: from my dad, who published an op-ed in the Middletown Journal—Middletown, Ohio—every time a school levy came up and all older Middletonians said they weren’t paying for it because they no longer had kids of their own in school. I wish I had a copy of this perennial piece, but the essential question Dad asked his fellow retirees to ask themselves, “Do you believe in the future?” (Or do you not?)
