Salinger Assassins

I just finished reading this new biography, Salinger, by Shields and Salerno. The book took ten years to write, has 699 pages with no index, a movie tie-in, and costs $37.50.

The book is so bad that I can hardly believe what I am seeing. It’s that bad. It’s almost as if some demon inhabited the authors and made them write the most violating and untruthful book that could be conceived.

I myself can not find words to describe it but here are a few from Amazon.com reviewers:

creepy, shallow, banal, mean-spirited, disappointing, parasitic, repetitious mess, ludicrous, peevish, vampiritic, phony, sloppy, shameful, wrought by carnival barkers, utterly awful, horrific, innuendo, ‘distortions, untruths and speculations.’

Just take Chapter 18, “Assassins.” The authors try to make the case that The Catcher in the Rye had agency in the assassination of John Lennon, and the near assassination of Ronald Reagan and George Wallace. There is a picture on p.478 of Lennon’s assassin with the caption: “Courtroom Sketch of Mark David Chapman, who stated that his defense can be found in The Catcher in the Rye.” Then there is a photo on p.481 of John Hinckley with the caption: “John Hinckley, who under the influence of The Catcher in the Rye, attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.” There is a photo on p.484 with this caption: “Robert Bardo, who, under the influence of The Catcher in the Rye, killed the actress Rebecca Shaeffer.”

And did you know this about the would-be assassin of George Wallace?!!! “A copy of The Catcher in the Rye was found in Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment after the shooting.” P.486.

I wonder if they found a Bible.

I think now of Salinger’s For Esmé – With Love and Squalor. Priceless, eternal Esmé. I’ll not forget you, or Salinger.

WalMart

If you go into the local WalMart now, as we are

getting near the end of the month, you notice right away that there are very few customers. People around here are poor and usually don't have any money until the first of each month.

The grocery stores are empty of people at this time, too. You go into Sears and there are not even sales clerks, never mind customers. These businesses are already getting subsidies in the form of tax breaks and food stamps for their Chinese-wage-level workers, so you wonder how much longer they can stay in business.

I am in WalMart yesterday with a friend and she says to me, “Everybody hates Walmart – the people who work here and the people who shop here and the people who don't shop here.” I engage the cashier on the way out and she definitely hates the place. “They're always criticizing me... I'm out of here in two weeks... Definitely,” all said in anger.

Many explanations have been given as to why WalMart failed in Europe but their US-style pay and treatment of employees was surely the biggest. It became a laughing stock as well as hated. It now looks to Latin America for expansion, thinking it should be able to get away with it there.

I spoke a couple years ago with an executive of a US company that outsources its manufacturing to China, and told him that there will come a point when most people in the US are not going to be able to buy your stuff from China, because they won't have adequate jobs and money. He was silent, didn't respond to me, but I know from other conversations with him that he still thinks it is a problem that doesn't concern him. He outsources his manufacturing to China because, he says, his competitors would put him out of business if he didn't.

But my question is still valid and perhaps more relevant than ever: How can the US businesses prosper if most people don't have any money?

My own observation, being poor myself as well as all my neighbors being poor, is that there are additional, unspoken, reasons why my question is not addressed by wealthy people like my above-mentioned executive friend.

One is that people who have money don't really believe that the poor do not have money. They think you're not telling them the truth when you say “I don't have any money.” They don't really believe it. I've seen it many times. It feels like they are thinking, well, if you don't have any money, why don't you go to the bank and get some? That blindness or denial is very clear and familiar to anyone who doesn't have any money.

Another unspoken reason for not answering the question is that wealth seems to be a relative thing. A couple, with no dependents and a million in assets, can feel that they desperately need more money even though their combined annual income is well over a quarter of a million dollars. They don't feel wealthy at all. They feel they need more, that no amount is enough, that there is not enough to go around, and that all that they have can be gone overnight. They feel a need to take all they can get. In fact, and I'm not the first to observe this, but one of our most remarkable cultural phenomena is that the rich now believe, not only that they are not given the respect and love due them, but believe themselves to be victims. This relative nature of wealth may also account for their animus toward poor people, that desire to prevent them from having health care and even food – if you can push someone else further down then you are relatively better off.

Reagan and the Working out of Old Assumptions

I recently ran across an “obituary” written about Ronald Reagan at the time he died. You can follow this link to the full article, but here is the essence of it:

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew up to become voters, and won. I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvinism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokes-models like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.

The main thing I took away from this, despite its articulate harshness toward a particular dead person, Ronald Reagan – sometimes really good insults are fun and have their literary place! - was that I have been making a mistake for the last forty years in thinking that the USA took a selfish turn somewhere in the mid 1970's. It had seemed to me that the Reagan-Thatcher era was a turn away from social justice, civil rights, concern with poverty and the well-being of other people to a conscious, programmatic, greedy, unashamed, selfishness.

I think it was the very vehemence of this obituary that made me feel that, no, it wasn't just Reagan. It was about the country that voted for him. It now seems likely to me that the USA did not suddenly make a deep change around 1975, plus or minus a couple years. It just doesn't fit, because a society's culture, like an individual's culture, is very old, I would even go so far as to say that it's probably true that the more one thinks one is new, independent, different, the more one is just taking for granted the traditional assumptions, unshakably and grotesquely because unconsciously.

The problem is old, but what is perhaps new, if anything, is that it is now becoming more stark than ever, with more direct discussion of it, more articulation of the consequences and nature and meaning of it. Current, astonishing, articulate and well-funded efforts, such as to have guns in classrooms and in churches, or to let people who don't have money die on the street, or to destroy public libraries and schools, sound new, crazy, murderous, monstrous, ultimately self-destructive. But they are just the working out of the consequences of very old assumptions.

The Public Library

One of the things in the USA for which I am most grateful is the local public library system. The main location that I use in downtown Dayton has this “new book shelf” that sometimes seems to me to be the best connection I have to the world.

Dayton Municipal Library

A public library is a socialist arrangement and yet the “there's-no-such-thing-as-society” and the “you're-on-your-own” people here clearly feel uncomfortable in trying to destroy it. There was a $187 million bond issue to improve and expand the downtown library on the ballot recently that was approved 2 to 1, despite tight-lipped, articulate arguments as to how people who don't borrow books shouldn't have to pay and those that do borrow should pay the whole cost.

I happened to be living in the U.K. at the time of Maggie Thatcher's flourishing and fall, when many public libraries were starved and drowned in the bathtub, as the phrase has it. I remember there was almost the smell of death around my little local library in southeast London when it shut down and there was actually dancing in the corridors of the school where I was working when Thatcher was finally ousted.

It is obvious that our whole literary heritage, as well as our language itself, is a gift to us from people in the past who created it, worked it out with others before and around them. The “you're-on-your-own” “there's-no-such-thing-as-society” approach clearly does not correspond to how the world works. It also feels so sad and selfish. There are times, yes, when love is abused by the selfish, but that it no way means that we should become the very thing we hate. That is a basic component of what happened during the Reagan-Thatcher years.

The Evening Star

The sound of your own footsteps on the snow on bitterly cold winter days in Montreal is a special music. It’s like a singing sound.

Earth's moon and the Evening Star

I often remember walking on a winter's evening down West Sherbrooke Street when I was a young and devastated student, that crunch, crunch, crunch, sound coming from beneath my boots on the frozen snow, and that Evening Star in the western sky, bright and clear.

Earth and Venus

The star hung out there and even though I had no conscious knowledge of its many meanings, I felt the solace and joy of it. If you can look at yourself from the point of view of the Evening Star, you realize that, far from being cold and alone, you are related to countless billions of people who have done the exact same thing, and who will do the same thing in the future.

Yes, I know it’s not a star, that it’s actually the planet Venus but we are talking here about something infinitely greater than astronomy, great as that may be. The stars have had immense meaning in the lives of people well before history.

The Evening Star in particular has received a lot of attention, being one of the brightest objects in our skies, and I find myself often thinking of how much it has meant to me and so many other people.

The literature, art, music, mythology, and unrecorded thought…too much…but right now come to mind Thoreau’s remark, “The stars are the apices of what triangles!” and the lines, “The stars in the sky looked down where he lay” and “Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by” in some old Christmas carols and Wagner’s “O du, mein holder Abendstern,” usually translated as “Hymn to the Evening Star” and “Romance à l'étoile du soir” and “O tu bell'astro incantator.”

Nicolas, - inspirer, music maker, bringer of happiness - showed me the Evening Star when he was only four years old and pointed out to me that it is a “wishing star.”

I think it even had a part in my decision to buy my last and best big truck, a Western Star. I often see that truck in my dreams as a symbol of the vehicle by which I can deliver whatever it is that is given to me to deliver.

There are many renditions of Wagner's song but here is one, composed by Liszt, that appeals to me right now, preceded by a translation of the lyrics into English.

Like a premonition of death, darkness covers the land,
and envelops the valley in its sombre shroud;
the soul that longs for the highest grounds,
is fearful of the darkness before it takes flight.
There you are, oh loveliest star,
your soft light you send into the distance;
your beam pierces the gloomy shroud
and you show the way out of the valley.

Oh, my gracious evening star,
I always greet you like happily:
with my heart that she never betrayed
take to her as she drifts past you,
when she soars from this earthly vale,
to transform into blessed angel!

Charles Rycroft on Dreams but Not Love

There are two paragraphs buried in Charles Rycroft's book,”The Innocence of Dreams,” that I think are worthy of reading at least a couple times every year. They summarize a fundamental problem facing us in our widely-accepted assumptions and illustrate their ultimate poverty and dead end.

Charles Rycroft (1914-1998)

Rycroft wrote clearly in the best British tradition, was a moderate, sensible psychoanalyst who even worked for a while with R. D. Laing, and was widely influential in the last half of the twentieth century. This particular book, “The Innocence of Dreams,” was not particularly valuable to me and seemed to be rather derivative, except perhaps in its opposition to hardcore Freudian dream interpretation. But here is a bit that I think is just a gem (pp. 68-69):

One of the obstacles to conceiving of dreams as having meaning and to recognizing that the images appearing in them are our own thoughts and not pseudo-perceptions is that, if they do have meaning, they must present the self to the self as its own object – an idea which seems puzzling and mysterious, since our usual tendency is to think of one's self as being the subject of consciousness, and whatever we are conscious of as being the object, and as being not-self just because it is the object not the subject of consciousness. Even when we look directly at a part of our own body or attempt to introspect some particular thought or feeling we have had, we seem to do so by dissociating that restricted aspect of our self from our self as subject and regarding it as temporary not-self. It becomes 'me' not 'I.' And to do anything else would seem as impossible as to see the back of one's head without using a mirror.

As Kant says somewhere, 'It is altogether beyond our powers to explain how it should be possible that “I,” the thinking subject, can be the object of perception to myself, able to distinguish myself from myself,' Yet this is what we seem to be able to do while dreaming.

…

According to Coleridge the function of imagination is precisely that of being able to convert the self into an object. 'The province (of the imagination) is to give consciousness to the subject by presenting to it its conceptions objectively.'

Now Val, you might ask, what is there about this “gem” that gets you so excited every time you read it? What is so earth-shaking about the idea that we are able to get outside ourselves and see our selves from distant viewpoints? Isn't that basically, simply, just good old common love – putting yourself in the place of an other, seeing and feeling what the other sees and feels?

Yes, yes, but it is entirely absent - “beyond our powers,” as Kant put it – from the dominant empirical and idealistic traditions.

Joe Cocker, So Beautiful

I suspect sometimes that everything I see is mythic, meaning-laden far beyond the glimpse I am getting.

That's the feeling I have right now as I watch Joe Cocker doing this song. It seems like sheer genius that he and his musicians could do this, and yet I know that there is a long history of countless people behind his being able to do it, being in a position to do it.