“There’s another thing I don’t understand. We always assume that we’re in the right, that we have the best government under the sun. How do we know—have we tried the others out? Is everything running so beautifully here that we couldn’t bear the thought of a change? Supposing I honestly believed in Fascism or Communism or polygamy or Mohammedanism or pacifism or any of the things that are now tabu in this country?
What would happen to me if I started to open my trap, eh? Why you don’t even dare to protest against being vaccinated, though there’s plenty of evidence to prove that vaccination does more harm than good. Where is this liberty and freedom we boast about? You’re only free if you’re in good odor with your neighbors, and even then it’s not a hell of a lot of rope they give you.
If you happen to be broke and out of a job your freedom isn’t worth a button. And if you’re old besides then it’s just plain misery. They’re much kinder to animals and flowers and crazy people. Civilization is a blessing to the unfit and the degenerate—the others it breaks or demoralizes.
As far as the comforts of life go I’m better off when I’m in jail than when I’m out. In the one case they take your freedom away and in the other they take your manhood. If you play the game you can have automobiles and town houses and mistresses and pâté de foie gras and all the folde-rol that goes with it.
But who wants to play the game? Is it worth it? Did you ever see a millionaire who was happy or who had any self-respect? Did you ever go to Washington and see our lawbreakers—excuse me, I mean lawmakers—in session?
There’s a sight for you! If you dressed them in striped dungarees and put them behind the bars with pick and shovel nobody on earth could tell but what they belonged there. Or take that rogues’ gallery of Vice-Presidents.
I was standing in front of a drug store not so long ago studying their physiognomies. There never was a meaner, craftier, uglier, more fanatical bunch of human faces ever assembled in one group.
And that’s the stuff they make presidents of whenever there’s an assassination. Yes, assassinations. I was sitting in a restaurant the day after the election—up in Maine it was—and the follow next to me was trying to lay a bet with another guy that Roosevelt wouldn’t last the term out.
He was laying five to one—but nobody would take him up. The thing that struck me was that the waitress, whom nobody had paid any attention to, suddenly remarked in a quiet tone that ‘we were about due for another assassination.’
Assassinations seem ugly when it’s the President of the United States but there’s plenty of assassinating going on all the time and nobody seems to get very riled up about it. Where I was raised we used to flog a nigger to death just to show a visitor how it’s done. It’s still being done, but not so publicly, I suppose. We improve things by covering them up.
“You take the food they hand us. . . . Of course I haven’t got any taste left, from all the booze I pour down my system. But a man who has any taste buds left must be in a hell of a way eating the slop they hand you in public places. Now they’re discovering that the vitamins are missing. So what do they do? Do they change the diet, change the chef? No, they give you the same rotten slop only they add the necessary vitamins.
That’s civilization—always doing things assways. Well, I’ll tell you, I’m so god-damned civilized now that I prefer to take my poison straight. If I had lived what they call a ‘normal’ life I’d be on the dump heap by fifty anyway. I’m forty-eight now and sound as a whistle, always doing just the opposite of what they recommend. If you were to live the way I do for two weeks you’d be in the hospital. So what does it add up to, will you tell me?
If I didn’t drink I’d have some other vice—a baby-snatcher, maybe, or a refined Jack-the-Ripper, who knows? And if I didn’t have any vices I’d be just a poor sap, a sucker like millions of others, and where would that get me? Do you think I’d get any satisfaction out of dying in harness, as they say? Not me! I’d rather die in the alcoholic ward among the has-beens and no-goods.
At least, if it happens that way, I’ll have the satisfaction of saying that I had only one master—John Barleycorn. You have a thousand masters, perfidious, insidious ones who torment you even in your sleep. I’ve only got one, and to tell the truth he’s more like a friend than a taskmaster. He gets me into some nasty messes, but he never lies to me.
He never says ‘freedom, liberty, equality’ or any of that rot. He just says, ‘I will make you so stinking drunk that you won’t know who you are,’ and that’s all I crave. Now if Mister Roosevelt or any other politician could make me a promise and keep it I’d have a little respect for him. But who ever heard of a diplomat or a politician keeping his word? It’s like expecting a millionaire to give his fortune away to the men and women he robbed it from. It just ain’t done.”
He went on at this rate without a letup—long monologues about the perfidy, the cruelty and the injustice of man towards man. Really a grand fellow at heart, with good instincts and all the attributes of a citizen of the world, except for the fact that somewhere along the line he had been flung out of the societal orbit and could never get back into it again.
I saw from the queries which Rattner interjected now and then that he had hopes for the man. At two in the morning he was optimistic enough to believe that with a little perseverance there might be sown in this rugged heart the seed of hope. To me, much as I liked the fellow, it seemed just as futile as to attempt to reclaim the bad lands of Arizona or Dakota.
The only thing society can do with such people, and it never does, is to be kind and indulgent to them. Just as the earth itself, in its endless experiments, comes to a dead end in certain regions, gives up, as it were, so with individuals.
The desire to kill the soul, for that’s what it amounts to, is a phenomenon which has an extraordinary fascination for me. Sometimes it lends a grandeur to an individual which seems to rival the sublime struggles of those men whom we consider superior types.
Because the gesture of negation, when pure and uncompromising, has also in it the qualities of the heroic. Weaklings are incapable of flinging themselves away in this manner. The weakling merely succumbs while the other, more single-minded character works hand and glove with Fate, egging it on, as it were, and mocking it at the same time. To invoke Fate is to expose oneself to the chaos which the blind forces of the universe are ever ready to set in motion once the will of man is broken.
The man of destiny is the extreme opposite: in him we have an example of the miraculous nature of man, in that those same blind forces appear to be harnessed and controlled, directed towards the fulfillment of man’s own microscopic purpose.
But to act either way one has to lift himself completely out of the set, reactionary pattern of the ordinary individual. Even to vote for self-destruction demands something of a cosmic approach.
A man has to have some definite view of the nature of the world in order to reject it. It is far easier to commit suicide than to kill the soul. There remains the doubt, which not even the most determined destroyer can annihilate, that the task is impossible.
If it could be accomplished by an act of will then there would be no need to summon Fate. But it is precisely because the will no longer functions that the hopeless individual surrenders to the powers that be.
In short he is obliged to renounce the one act which would deliver him of his torment. Our friend had delivered himself up to John Barleycorn. But beyond a certain point John Barleycorn is powerless to operate.
Could one succeed in summoning all the paralyzing and inhibiting forces of the universe there would still remain a frontier, a barrier which nothing but man himself can surmount and invade. The body can be killed, but the soul is imperishable.
A man like our friend could have killed himself a thousand times had he the least hope of solving his problem thereby. But he had chosen to relapse, to lie cold and inert like the moon, to crush every fructifying impulse and, by imitating death, finally achieve it in the very heart of his being.
When he spoke it was the heart which cried out. They had broken his heart, he said, but it was not true. The heart cannot be broken. The heart can be wounded and cause the whole universe to appear as one vast writhing place of anguish. But the heart knows no limits in its ability to endure
