John Snider
Humanities
Northern Montana College
In order for a nation to dispose of a million or even a thousand souls by blast or fire, it is first necessary that it has trained its population in the toleration of a hundred lesser indignities. Before we can become so much cordwood neatly stacked beside the crematorium, we must first prepare ourselves for such a destiny. We must become like a block of wood: pliable, easily moved from place to place, and supremely unconscious. I refuse to believe that such traits are innate in human beings; they are vices we learn. In America there are dozens of places where we learn to sacrifice our dignity, but nowhere do we learn it as effectively as we do in school.
When I was eleven years old and in the sixth grade, I had for a teacher Mr. Smith, a short, sadistic, petty man who was a master of the art of humiliation. I might add here that whenever I recall an episode of cruelty from my schooling, my friends are quick to recall similar episodes in their past but seem eager to conclude that such cruelty is always the exception and never the rule. I believe we should trust our memories more completely. We remember cruelty from school not because it was the exception but because it was the rule and, therefore, more likely to make up the stuff of our remembrances. In my sixth grade class, however, we had a poor boy named Vincent. He wore shabby clothes and was our pariah and scapegoat. One undeniable fact about children is that they will imitate the adults they are around, and therefore, we hated Vincent with precisely the same hatred our parents showed toward poor people. And so it was inevitable that Mr. Smith selected Vincent to teach us our civics lesson.
Vincent, no doubt because of his poverty and our cruelty, had developed a nervous twitch about the mouth. He moved his lips about as if he were chewing on his gums and he compulsively pulled down upon his upper lip and picked at his nose. For some imagined fault Smith would pick on Vincent and punish him in the following manner. First Smith would grab Vincent and throw him along with his desk to the front of the room. Next Smith would force Vincent to sit at his desk facing the class. Not satisfied with this, Smith would stand behind Vincent and imitate his facial twitch until the entire class was howling with laughter at Vincent who could only try to cover his embarrassment by a more spectacular display of his peculiar habits.
Such an astounding act of cruelty surprises me today as I recall it. My first impulse is to find excuses for Mr. Smith's behavior which would mitigate such a disgusting act of violence. And my second response is that of a person who suddenly finds a misplaced object--suddenly and clearly I know how demeaning and cruel school has always been; suddenly I realize that Mr. Smith is as pervasive and inevitable as the asbestos in the school buildings themselves.
Today I remember vividly that as I sat in that schoolroom I knew how mean Mr. Smith was. But like the other children I hated and feared Vincent. I hated him because I knew that his suffering and humiliation were necessary to protect me. I had learned early in my schooling that every class needed a scapegoat, and as long as Vincent was our class nigger, I was safe. This same false feeling of safety and superiority, the same smug feeling when one reads of families who are driven to eat dog food or to toss their children out the window, is what allows relatively prosperous Americans to ignore and hate the poor. They cannot help but feel that if the poor get something, then they may be called to the head of the class. And this was the civics lesson that Mr. Smith taught us. We learned that safety--in this instance our safety, our anonymity, our ability to be quiet in the herd--depended upon Vincent's debasement. By witnessing his suffering we grew to hate him more, for he reminded us of our cowardice. For even as children of eleven, I believe we knew what our responsibilities were. We knew we should have denounced Mr. Smith, placed our desks next to Vincent's, and adopted his twitch as our own. But we were afraid. Although I fantasized about standing up to Smith, I never did, and I have never forgiven myself for standing by and allowing Vincent to suffer alone. It was the first time in my life when I understood clearly what my responsibility was and I failed utterly in it.
My fear and cowardice, though unflattering even to a child of eleven, were not without foundation. Smith was a man capable of a frightening physical violence. Talking was, of course, the greatest crime. Smith was, in fact, teaching me a valuable lesson. Every job I have been fired from has been the result of either a letter or a comment. For the students it is talking in class that is the crime, but for professors it is talking outside of class. In any event, in Smith's class he would creep up behind you, clamp his hands down upon your shoulders, then he would move his hands to the top of your head with his thumbs on your sideburns. After he had waited for your anticipation to get the better of you, he would slowly wrench his thumbs upwards until you felt as if your scalp were being torn off. After this he would throw you to the front of the class. In the case of the more spirited students he was not satisfied unless they lost their balance and fell down. Finally, Smith would seize the offending student's desk and send it after him with a vicious shove. For a time the student would sit next to Smith's desk but was never forced to face the class. That special punishment was always reserved for Vincent.
Mr. Smith's violence was directed only at the boys. In fact there were only five girls in our class. The rest of the sixth grade girls were segregated into a separate class. But although Smith never threw the girls around, he would shout at them, placing his face close to theirs. As I have said before, we must understand that Smith was not a crank. He was doing his job. Smith taught us passivity and cowardice: virtues which are essential to a nation which must from time to time invade smaller nations and assault their populace. Smith taught us to subordinate our natural impulse for fairness; he taught us to laugh at the poor and unfortunate, and he taught us that great safety lay in anonymity. By doing so he was really teaching us civics--all classes in American schools are classes in civics.
I always knew on some level that what happened to Vincent could happen to me, and one day while playing baseball I became suddenly and painfully aware of the fact that I was no different from Vincent. Vincent and I were on the same little league team; we were not very good players and so we were seldom on the field. This particular afternoon, Vincent asked me to play catch with him, and I condescended with the air that I was performing a charitable act. As we threw the ball back and forth, it suddenly struck me that Vincent threw the ball harder than I did and seemed less afraid of the baseball than I was. At that moment I considered for the first time that Vincent might not be inferior to me or different from me. It struck me how easy it would be to be the object of constant ridicule. I thought that if I were to put on Vincent's clothes, I would be Vincent. I felt even a bit dizzy as if I had nothing to hold on to to prevent my inevitable metamorphosis. Of course there were things that made me different from Vincent, or rather one thing, my family was not poor and his was, for there is nothing in America, no physical or natural object or no feeling or emotion that cannot be had for a dollar. And so my unpleasant identification with Vincent was brief, but I still think of those days in the sixth grade with a sense of failure and shame and with a longing to have them back to set the record straight.
There are in this world too many people like Mr. Smith. They are the people who indulge in petty tyranny for petty rewards, and they are the indispensable guardians of the American system. They are the foremen who check the clock to see that the workers are not one minute late; they are the supervisors who notice who goes out to the bathroom; they are the inevitable gym teachers or assistant principals or guidance counselors who roam the hallways of high schools making certain no one is smoking or kissing a boyfriend or girlfriend; they are the social workers who snoop around the apartments of the poor to catch a lover or husband or father or to see if the stove is new or if the cookie jar has any money in it; they are the clerks everywhere who read directions as if they were holy writ, and in the universities they are the professors who, though shabbily dressed and poorly paid, desperately want to think of the trustees and their brethren business benefactors as their equals and who will shout quickest for the flames when the witch trials begin.
To see the sad nature of this class of Americans, consider for a minute what their rewards are. Take Smith as a typical example. What was his reward for torturing an eleven-year-old boy? Smith, if we can forgive his cruelty for the moment, was truly a man to be pitied. He was a school teacher in a land where school teachers are held in contempt. Certainly the willingness of school teachers to be sadistic in the class room and cowardly in public is met with a legitimate amount of scorn. Teachers by habit and long apprenticeship do what they are told, and no one can command respect if he can only say yes. Furthermore, Smith worked in a profession dominated by women and so he was held, in part, in the same contempt that women are held in our society. The little power and respect he commanded had to be wrenched from children by throwing them across the classroom. Since such a man cannot have any true self-respect, Smith's reward was a daily escape, however false and transparent, from his own self-hatred. And more than this, Smith was given an audience who was forced to listen to him and whom he could enlist in his own plans to redeem something of his lost dignity. We can be desperate for an audience even if it is only one of children. In his class Smith was prince of all he surveyed; he strode about his room no doubt imagining like Walter Mitty that he was a sea captain on a perilous journey. And indeed Smith played his civic role much like the class brownie or tattletale running to the teacher every five minutes with news of a transgression on the playground, for if there are not petty tyrants who exist off petty exploitation, there cannot be real tyrants who live off fabulous exploitation. A Hitler demands a thousand lesser Hitlers in order to exist.
The willingness of a whole class of Americans to sacrifice someone less fortunate in order to save their own skins does offer us an encouraging revelation. When the witches are burned, the fire has an insatiable appetite. We are safe when someone else is burned, but only temporarily. Soon the petty tyrants themselves must be burned so that others can take their place. I knew not too long ago a group of college professors who refused to stand up for the secretaries and janitors who were being fired at their college. They made fine distinctions between academic and menial work as they sided with the trustees. Not long after the secretaries and janitors were fired, these same professors were on the street with bewildered looks on their faces, much like the old Jews who got out of the cattle cars blinking at the glare of the crematorium and looking about, asking where they could lodge a protest.
You may be wondering why such a dreary scenario cheers me up. It heartens me because except for the very few Americans in this country who own everything, we are all in it together. As much as my former colleagues hate secretaries and janitors and as much as I hate my former colleagues, we have more in common than not. Even a few months without a job is a marvelous source of democracy. Sitting in the unemployment office, even if it is a brief visit and even if one has family and friends to fall back on, still gives one the sense of familiarity, a sense of "Oh, I have belonged here all the time." It is never a pleasant feeling but it has all the naturalness and certainty about it of a trip home. When I see the pettiness in the world, I am optimistic; perhaps I can afford to be. After all I am not Vincent; I have not had my turn at the head of the class.
And so what do we do when the desks start flying? I think our task is to daily challenge the petty tyrants and confront them with their own cringing efforts to please those in power. We should do something everyday to let them know that we are on to them, that we know how and why they are debasing themselves. This is a healthy tonic, for cringers and petty tyrants must deceive themselves and others about their complicity with those above them. Their task is to disguise the fact that there are actual tyrants, and so they must forever pretend that they enforce rules for some noble or democratic reason. The petty tyrants simply cannot admit to themselves that they are the first line of defense against any mass assault upon power and privilege. Their regard for this incessant rule-mongering is usually a monetary one or a dingy symbol of authority. But we should take heart, for when the ship starts to sink even the petty bosses will be kept from the lifeboats. For they are expendable and their servility is but a vain attempt to deny their expendability.
Our complicity with injustice is often won by the sheer stupidity and pettiness of the affronts offered to our dignity. We are assaulted in a thousand different ways, but each instance is so trivial that we feel foolish protesting it. We go to a public bus station and find that the toilets will cost us a quarter. Instead of ripping the door to the stall off its hinges--no doubt the only honorable and effective response--we dig about for a quarter and so pay to have our own shit dumped on our own heads. In the course of our work we will go to an entirely pointless and stupid meeting and instead of saying out loud that the meeting is pointless, we remain silent, rationalizing to ourselves that we would only add to the stupidity by speaking up. But each time we remain silent, something happens to us. We become more likely to remain silent in the future, and we become more willing to believe that indeed we should pay to take a crap. It is this habitual cringing and shuffling along that is dangerous. The more we do it, the more it seems inconceivable to us that we could do anything else. The Nazis discovered in the process of killing six million Jews that an incremental assault upon their freedom was more effective than simply trying to seize them all at once and stuff them into the ovens. A person who has walked with head bowed down and a yellow star on his clothing will more easily see the cattle car as his proper accommodation. If as human beings we have dignity, we will have to struggle everyday to win it.
Just as it is out of habit that we cringe, it will be through practice and habit that we rebel. Time and again we are advised that today is not the proper time to speak, but the simple, sad, and frightening truth is that there is only one time and only ever has been one time to speak up, to say what is on your mind, to expose a con when you spot one, to shout that the emperor is naked--and that time is the present. Our vocal chords are after all only muscles which will atrophy through lack of use. When babies come into the world, they are screaming; they know something we spend our lives trying to forget, that life and breath and food come to us through struggle.
One of the difficulties that keeps us from rebelling is that we live in a world in which nearly all the men and women we see as our teachers are crawling before the desk of Mr. Smith, at the feet of the monster. And so we think that crawling is our proper posture. When we do see a woman or a man who is standing upright, we are so surprised that we suspect that he is a freak or at least a different species. We have learned to compromise so thoroughly and so completely that our entire relation to the world is that of a person perpetually doomed to ask directions. We do not take a step on our own. The majority of the population thinks it is a criminal offense to criticize the government, a crime to vote socialist, a felony to look the boss in the eye. After nearly fifteen years of teaching I have had one student in a thousand who was willing to challenge a decision I made, one in a hundred who was willing to ask a question. My colleagues are even worse. I have known only a handful of teachers who would open their mouths and only two or three who were willing to speak if it cost them a dollar.
The greatest barrier to our self reliance is not that we are afraid; we are all afraid especially when we behave decently. Instead the barrier is our longing to imitate the Mr. Smiths of this world. We know that if we open our mouths we will not have our petty domain. We will not be able to get up in the morning and scrawl our words across the blackboard for eleven year olds to dutifully copy down. We will not have the comfortable illusion that we have risen in the world. As Paulo Freire tells us, we want to be oppressed ourselves so that we can oppress others--a shameful apprenticeship. I notice with disgust and some sadness the eager new teachers at the university where I teach. They will first of all go out of their way to look professional. The men wear ties, the women severe suits. Their talk is of the violations and infractions of the students: the footnote garbled up, the comma misplaced, and so on. Their talk is so like the tattle-tales of my grade school years. (I will confess here to some pomposity when I teach and to carrying a briefcase from time to time as well as to being a safety patrol with badge and all when I was in the sixth grade.) Indeed, I blink to remind myself that I'm not dreaming I'm back in Smith's class.
In our lives we will sit in a room while a stupid and often cruel proceeding goes on about us while our response will be to imitate the furniture. We avoid our responsibility by inventing ways of not thinking. We know the proceedings are stupid and we know that serious thought will lead us to a conclusion we cannot face up to. Let me take one example. Anyone who has been in a union or just among a group of workers knows how convoluted their meetings can become. Seemingly trivial details will take hours to resolve. The real reason for this obfuscation is that the more time and effort spent on trivia means the less time that can be devoted to the one irreducible fact of work in America, which is that work serves the interests of the rich and powerful while the masses are given the crumbs off the table. We are not quite nerved enough to admit that, so we invent endless debates in an attempt to salvage our already lost dignity.
And so what good will it do us if we expose the petty tyrants, if we make fun of the rule mongers? Certainly such an exercise will not guarantee us financial security; it will sooner or later cost us a promotion or even a job. It will in innumerable ways make our lives more difficult. The few truly honest and straight-forward people are not rewarded for their honesty, they are scorned. And more depressing than that is an honest remark at work is not likely to galvanize other workers into action. So what possible reason is there to speak up? I think we must speak because we are human beings and not objects. George Jackson spent virtually his entire life in prison but managed to demand freedom for his people. At one point he spent months on end in a cell nine feet by four feet. He was permitted to leave twice a week for ten minutes to take a shower. How can we remain silent in our offices and living rooms when Jackson's voice reaches us?
We falsely think of ourselves as human beings. Because we are told every night on the television that we live in the free world and that we are the greatest country on earth, we begin to believe it. But whatever dignity we have will not be conferred on us by the television; it will have to be grabbed and taken a hold of the way a person clasps a child to himself. To be human is to be conscious, to know what is happening. To speak up when one sees a Smith, to challenge the stupidity of a meeting, is to act like a human being, no more, no less.
There is no monetary reward, no job security, but there is an undeniable satisfaction in knowing that at least for the duration of our comments that we have not been fooled, that we know what is going on and who is making money off the enterprise. There is great satisfaction in knowing that at least for a short time we are not part of the lie. This pleasure is fleeting enough since we soon realize that an occasional protest is not sufficient; we will have to shout fraud loud and long before everyone catches on.
If we do not speak, we surrender our consciousness to someone else. We relinquish that part of ourselves that makes us human; we willingly become inanimate. And it is an inanimate state that Mr. Smith truly longs for. He wants his students to be like the desks he threw to the front of the room. There is, of course, in the world and especially in the universities a great show of consciousness. There is at every meeting I go to the pretense of a willingness to answer questions. The person in charge will always ask for questions, and there will be a flurry of such questions. Workers will ask about the renovations in the bathrooms, about the upcoming picnic, or they will make a joke about the losing football team. They will not ask why so and so was fired or why the secretaries make minimum wage or why the company has pulled out of a northern town stranding hundreds of families or why the university has money for football and computers but not for books in the library. Anyone who has asked a serious question at such a time is familiar with the response. The others present groan or laugh uncomfortably. When you ask a question, you will be treated like a child or a freak. Your friends will roll their eyes as if they had just spotted a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses coming down the sidewalk to their door. People who are largely unconscious must respond this way, for if the questions are taken seriously the consequences are too terrible. Once it is understood why one worker, a woman, makes $4.35 an hour working forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year while a professor, a man, teaches two classes a week and makes $56,000 dollars, it is harder to walk about the university with elevated thoughts about the great humanistic tradition. And so teachers and students who have glimpsed this fundamental injustice will sublimate their natural desire for justice by zealously studying some ancient text. They will write with great indignation about the tyranny of Creon who will not let Antigone bury her brother; they will wax poetic over the relative merits of the Petrarchan versus the Shakespearean sonnet. They will oppose two wholly trivial and inconsequential critics and imagine that they are giants battling for the heavens.
I do not think our lives have changed much since the sixth grade. Most of us wait quietly for Mr. Smith to start the show, and we are relieved and ashamed that we are not to be victimized like Vincent. But we are like Vincent, liable at any time to be hauled in front of the class, to be slapped and publicly ridiculed. You have had the dream common to us all that you are back in high school and that in order to graduate, you must pass a course you have forgotten about, or you must get to your locker and you do not remember the combination. Understand that this is a warning of what we actually face. For we are back in high school, we have never left, we must raise our hands to go to the bathroom, punch a time clock. We can still be given a detention for talking. We can lose our jobs and even be sent to a tropical land to fight. Another Palmer will be appointed and raid our homes while we are sleeping, and we will be deported to the land of our ancestors.
We are like the dogs that are randomly shocked in experiments. We become listless and no longer try to avoid the shocks. It is precisely this listlessness that the petty tyrant aims at creating. The simple fact is that a populace that is listless and silent, walking about as if at any time they will be seized and sent flying, makes it easier for profits to be made, for bombs to be built, for small countries to be invaded, for women to be raped, and for blacks to be shut in prison. Such listlessness means more money in the pockets of the rich. We are truly the silent majority, and for the rich our silence is truly golden.
Perhaps the dream of being back in school is not a nightmare after all. It is ironic that in our dreams we can acknowledge our deeper fears of America; in sleep we can wake up while during the day we are sleep walkers. We need a general awakening, a collective opening of the eyes. We need a vigilance, a discontent, a stirring up, a rudeness, a vulgarity, an absolute and steadfast refusal to be cowed in any way. Walt Whitman boasted that he wore his hat indoors and out as he pleased, and Ishmael, when down at the mouth, thought of knocking people's hats off. We should do no less. When we see the petty tyrants, we should send them packing as if they were so many encyclopedia salesmen. We should ask ourselves who makes money off the petty rule that is being stuffed down our throats, and we should be as stubborn as Bartelby the Scrivener who says, "I'd prefer not to." I must confess that I walk about too much with my mouth shut, but I am learning to speak up, and when I do, I offer my words as a belated and inadequate apology to Vincent.