So This is Depravity Read online

  So This is Depravity

  Russell Baker​

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1980 by Russell Baker

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition August 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-320-5

  Also by Russell Baker

  All Things Considered

  An American in Washington

  Growing Up

  The Good Times

  Looking Back

  No Cause for Panic

  Norton Book of Light Verse

  Oour Next President

  Poor Russell’s Almanac

  The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams

  Russell Baker’s Book of American Humor

  Some Cause for Alarm

  There’s a Country in my Cellar

  The Upside Down Man

  Nemo repente fuit turpissimus.

  —JUVENAL

  Asylum

  Recently I discovered that I was going sane. It was surprisingly pleasant. There were weeks unbroken by fits of melancholia, rage, anxiety, despair, hypochondria or terror. Life, inexplicably, seemed worth living again, and I went through my daily rounds whistling “Redwing” instead of bristling with hostility and perspiring with fear that my deodorant might not keep me safe all day long.

  Pleasant, yes. But—

  “If you permit yourself to sink into sanity and continue whistling ‘Redwing’ like this,” the doctor explained, “you will be unfit to function in American society. You could very well end up in—”

  “In a sane asylum?”

  He gravely fingered commitment papers.

  I had placed myself in his hands after being found in a traffic jam whistling “Redwing” at the steering wheel. It seemed obvious that no car locked into that vast immobilized ocean of machinery would escape before the next weekend, and whistling seemed a pleasant way to pass the time.

  All around me, other motorists were mashing their horns, grinding their fenders and bursting blood vessels. The notes of “Redwing” intensified their rage. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you crazy or something?” they shouted at me.

  A policeman came. “If everybody just sat here whistling ‘Redwing,’” he said, “how would we ever get any fenders smashed while nobody’s going anyplace? You mustn’t be some kind of nut.”

  One must function, after all. How else can America fulfill its destiny? How else can fenders be smashed while going noplace? The doctor prescribed strong treatment—television and newspaper immersion.

  All of one day I sat straitjacketed at the tube being doused periodically with torrents of newspaper. Hypochondria burst into full flower almost immediately.

  “You’d better quit whistling ‘Redwing,’ Buster, and get your blood pressure checked,” said the box. “And while you’re at it, don’t forget—you could be diabetic, have muscular dystrophy, be suffering from alcoholism without even knowing it and drop dead any instant of heart disease, stroke or failure to contribute to the Arthritis Fund.”

  The newspapers suggested that early death was probable unless I jogged five miles a day in unpolluted air (presumably in the Antarctic), quit eating beef (bowel cancer), stopped sleeping more than eight hours at a stretch (cerebral hemorrhage) and quit kissing women (influenza).

  Tension. Fear. Anxiety. Only by changing an entire way of life could I survive to old age. Could I do it? Not likely. Why not? Too set in my ways, perhaps? More sinister than that—maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to kill myself.

  Feelings of self-loathing and misery. Then—another dousing of newspapers. Ah, what despair! “So you live to old age,” the newspapers laughed. “Know what that means? Unemployment. Sleazy pension boardinghouses. Shuffled off to play shuffleboard, starved on Social Security peanuts, ground down by inflationary cost rises, stuffed away in fire-trap nursing homes.”

  Intense desire to weep, melancholia rampant. Sense of hopelessness.

  “Ah, there is bad news tonight.” (The box has taken over again.) “The ozone layer of the atmosphere is being destroyed by gases emitted from aerosol cans.”

  Despair, sense of imminent doom. Guilt. Who is emitting those doomful aerosol gases? Me. And for what? Shaving. Destroying the earth for whisker removal.

  Intolerable sense of futility to go with guilt. After all, why give up beef, kissing and eight and a half hours’ sleep, why move to the Antarctic to jog in good air, if the ozone layer is going to be wiped out anyhow by shaving cream?

  The box attacks from the blind side. That graying hair—yes, it could indeed cost me my job as well as the love of ungray women. That early evening fatigue—could it really be iron-poor blood?

  I shall not go on. I require only the first hour of television and newspaper immersion, but the full therapy lasts all day and, in some cases, a full lifetime. At the end, one is normal again. Depressed, enraged, anxiety-ridden, desperate, terrorized—normal.

  I no longer whistle “Redwing.” I have forgotten the tune. The doctor says this is because I am again well adjusted to society.

  Hey, I know an island far away. Let’s go.

  Cooped Up

  ​I go to the movies. Gary Cooper is in the next seat as usual, wearing his badge and Stetson. I am sick and tired of him. He grins and offers popcorn. “What are we going to see tonight?” he asks. “The Sting,” I say, “and this time stay out of it, Coop.”

  “Shucks,” says Cooper. “You know me.”

  I know Gary Cooper all right. The previous week he embarrassed me at Chinatown. The unprincipled cop was just about to let John Huston get away with murder, on account of Huston’s being a millionaire, when Coop threw his popcorn box on the floor, strode down the aisle and drew his six-shooter on Huston and the cop.

  “Get off the screen,” the audience yelled, but Gary Cooper paid them no heed. “I’m takin’ you both down to the U.S. marshal’s office,” he said.

  “You can’t do this,” Jack Nicholson objected. “The whole point of this picture is that good guys never win.”

  “You better get on your buckboard and get out of town fast, son,” Cooper told him, “before I take you in for interfering with an arrest.”

  It was a long speech for Cooper, so without another word he marched Huston and the cop off the screen and the movie ended with Nicholson heading for Laramie.

  “I hear this is a real good one,” Cooper says of The Sting.

  “Just stay out of it, Coop,” I say.

  After a while he begins stirring unhappily. “These fellows are nothing but a bunch of crooks,” he whispers.

  “They happen to be Robert Redford and Paul Newman,” I say. “Even if they are crooks, they’re charming and lovable, and the audience loves them, so stay out of it.”

  It is too late. He is already striding down the aisle and is up on the screen with the drop on the whole roomful of swindlers, before Newman can get away with the loot.

  “Get those hands up,” he says. “We’re all going to take a little walk down to the marshal’s office.”

  The audience boos as Cooper rides them all off into the sunset, manacled aboard cayuses. I am fearful that someone will know Cooper was with me and beat me for being an accessory to the triumph of law.

  My analyst is no comfort.

  “You are merely hallucinating Cooper as
an agent for fulfilling a childish desire for heroes who are honest,” he says. He suggests staying away from movies in which criminality and corruption prevail until I become less infantile.

  So I go to Deep Throat. Cooper is there. After ten minutes he says, “Whew.”

  “Stay out of it, Coop,” I plead. Futilely, of course.

  “Miss Lovelace,” says Cooper, towering over her on the screen, “you need a little church training.”

  He throws her over his shoulder, covers her with his badge and says, “I’m taking you down to the schoolmarm so she can introduce you to the Ladies Aid Society.”

  The audience pelts the screen with comic books and dark glasses.

  My analyst loves this report. He asks me to commit myself for study at the Institute of Incredible Sexual Repressions in Zurich. I run.

  To the movies, of course. But this time it’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which I know in advance is merely about an ambitious young man.

  Cooper is there. He even likes the movie. “This is okay,” he grins as Duddy goes into the business of making home movies of bar mitzvahs. But what is this? Duddy is behaving rudely to grown-ups. Yes, very rudely. He is laughing at them and ordering them off his land. Cooper is in the aisle before I can stop him. “Stay out of it, Coop.”

  It is useless. Up on the screen Cooper has Duddy under his gun arm and he is saying, “Young fellow, I’m taking you over to old Judge Hardy’s book-lined den for a man-to-man talk about good manners.” End of picture.

  Quickly, I run to see Going Places, figuring Cooper will be tied up giving Andy Hardy some quick-draw tips, but he arrives in time to see the movie’s two utterly charming heroes engage charmingly in burglary, kidnapping, car theft and casual thuggery. “Those fellows are nothing but a pair of skunks,” he says, striding down the aisle.

  “Stay out of it, Coop!”

  The audience is enraged to see him rescue a lovely mother from ravishment, but Cooper takes the charmers to the marshal’s office anyhow.

  My analyst says Gary Cooper is dead and I am too immature to accept reality. Cooper looks at the analyst without expression. “I could take him down to the marshal’s office for taking money for useless explanations,” says Cooper.

  “Stay out of it, Coop,” I plead.

  The Great Forgetting

  1973

  What the country needs now at the end of the Vietnam war is not amnesty but amnesia.

  It is time to put the whole thing up in the attic, to store it away up there with the snapshot of Granddaddy as a young man, foot up on the running board of his Model T Ford. Up there where we keep the old Blue Eagle (NRA, kiddies) window decal, the 1945 newspaper with the headline about Roosevelt’s death, the stamp collection we started that year we had the mumps and couldn’t leave the house. The Vietnam war ought to go up there very first thing in the morning, so we can start forgetting about it right away. The sooner the better.

  What a protest that’s going to produce, what an overpoweringly reasoned lecture of right thought, summoning Freud, history, Founding Fathers, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Joseph Pulitzer and the memory of Heinrich Himmler, among others, to prove that forgetting is bad for you, particularly if you are a heavily muscled superpower half mesmerized between Cotton Mather and Krafft-Ebing.

  The great forgetting wouldn’t be forever, though. The attic isn’t for things we want to forget forever. Things get put up there because we don’t know what else to do with them this year, or because they are in the way right now, or because we want to get them out of our lives for a while without throwing them away.

  Later, when we have changed and become different people, we will go up there and examine this or that on the chance that it will tell us something about who we were once, what sort of times we lived through, what kind of people we have become. Granddaddy’s snapshot is up there for that reason. Years ago, it just looked dully and depressingly old-fashioned—that straw boater, those sleeve garters, that Model T—but we didn’t want to throw it out. Later, we sensed—being too young to know it then—we might want to come back to it when we ourselves were twice as old as Granddaddy was when the snapshot was taken, come back to it and try to grasp something about time, change, youth and the grave.

  That is why we now need a great national forgetting. Nobody knows what to make of Vietnam right now, and it is in our way. We try to get back into the old American habit of liking ourselves again, and we keep stumbling over Vietnam.

  Politicians keep shoving it into our shins. People with axes to grind keep using it to win this argument or clinch that. There is evidence that office seekers intend to use it for the next generation, as politicians after the Civil War used to “wave the bloody shirt,” whenever it is in a politician’s interests to bring out the absolute worst in us.

  We need time to forget, to let it yellow in the attic, to get on with tomorrow’s things. And how will we win this time? It will cost everyone something.

  It will cost both the hawks and the doves a concession on amnesty. So let it be. Let there be amnesty for the draft runners, deserters and refusers who went to jail, if that will bring us the quiet that helps forgetting.

  There must be amnesty too for Lieutenant Calley, and an end of accusations against war criminals. Fair is fair. If justice is to be suspended in the higher need for amnesia, it must be justice equally suspended for all sides, or there will be no justice, and certainly no quiet.

  The doves will also have to grant the Government’s points about the morality of the war and the excellence of its conduct. Until they do, the Government will never give us quiet.

  Let all doves who look to the future shout out loud, therefore, the following declarations: to wit, that there was good and just reason for the war, that the Government fought it honorably, that President Nixon was always right about how to end the war while almost everybody else was consistently wrong and that this is really peace with honor, and plenty of it, which he has brought us. A hard dose for doves, assuredly, but worth the swallowing if this Government, and other governments to come, quiet down about the war for simple lack of someone to argue with, and let us have sweet forgetfulness.

  And what of the dead and the wounded? Shall they be forgotten with the rest? The question can only be answered with another. Are they honored in this endless ugly snarling about whether or not they died to no purpose, or are they simply forgotten in the gratifying emotional binges Americans experience in the uproar?

  Later we shall be able to come back to them and make more sense of their deaths and mutilations, but we must age before we can do that, and become different people. We must put more time between this business and the people we are to become, so that those people can come back to it, some remote day in the attic, with the maturity and detachment to grasp what it was about, this war that made them older and perhaps wiser.

  No Kidding

  We started school back in the Middle Eisenhower Period, toddlers’ paws in ours, crossing at the marked intersection under the stern benignity of good Officer Riley, who was doomed a dozen years later to become bad pig cop to a lot of those kids—we always called them kids then—to whom he taught survival. The 1960’s were lurking out there, though we didn’t suspect it, of course, never guessed at the future of hair, grass, Beatles, cop hate, Vietnam, televised state murders waiting out there in the future to shame us and shape the people our toddlers were going to become.

  We didn’t suspect then that they were going to become people. That was something else we had to learn, and the learning was hard, because—well, they were kids. In the Middle Eisenhower Period kids were really the point of life.

  We were all young then, if I recall correctly. “Young marrieds,” we were called, and we had “kids,” and we enjoyed “togetherness,” just us young marrieds, and kids. Pregnancies were as commonplace as Volkswagens are now. And you went to cookouts with other young marrieds, a lot of them pregnant, and burned beefstea
k, drank martinis and talked about the kids.

  So we were primed for school. Slim, young, unwrinkled about the eyes, unfallen about the waist, undisillusioned about the nature of happiness, we gave our kids to schools at the ages of five and six, with achievement-minded parents pushing four-year-olds to start cutting the mustard in nursery school, get a jump on admission into Vassar, Yale, Radcliffe.

  I think—this has been a long time ago, remember, but I think we expected school only to process those kids—that is, swell them a bit in size and add social poise without really changing them from kids, the point of our lives, into something alarming, as school did. They were fated to become people, alas, and they did it without our even noticing for the longest while.

  Later, when the famous sixties began to get brutal, we discovered it with shock or sadness mostly, I suppose. “Look what they’ve done to our kids!” we must have screamed silently. “They’ve turned them into ordinary, disagreeable, impossible people just like everybody else!”

  We were so distracted by what had happened to the kids that we failed to notice that we young marrieds had also become something else. A lot of us probably took longer to discover that than to learn that our kids had been led away by pipers. Electric guitarists, to update the myth.

  We had lost track of time’s pace in that struggle to get the kids safely through school, securely honor-rolled, safely SAT’ed, firmly admitted into Harvard for a secure future which would recapitulate our own eternal young marriedhood.

  School had subtly aged us. It worked silently, like carbon monoxide in a closed garage, taking the life out of us without giving us the slightest reason for suspicion. It is hard to explain the process.

  We met Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot with tolerant amusement at first, but those who had three or four kids—and who didn’t in those days?—must have begun to age quickly on second and third meeting, particularly since the oldest kid by that time would probably have moved on to “new math.”