Failure is Its Own Reward

The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.

--Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

Welcome to 1976, Year of the Turkey. As fife, drum and flag combos with chili sauce on their bandages march through the shopping malls of our fair land, I am here to say a few words about how everything and everybody has bombed, flunked, stiffed, flopped and otherwise gone down the tube. I'm talking about failure, friends and neighbors. That's right, the dirtiest word beginning with F in the English language. It's amazing that they'll let me write about it in a family magazine. I mean, you could get on Johnny Carson and say, "I had a drinking problem," and the audience would applaud. You could say, "I had leukemia," and they'd cheer. If you said, "I had V. D.," they'd all be shouting "Hi-yo!" But if you sat down, crossed your legs and said, "I am a failure"--absolute silence. Johnny would do his million-dollar deadpan take, clear his throat and tease a dog-food commercial. After the break, you'd be in the second seat, turkey.

Usually when I begin to think about whipping up a socioliterary confection, the muse is good to me and the information I need meets me halfway. If I need some material for a package on male sexuality, some stud will sidle up to me and confide that his chocolate bar has melted. If I'm looking for telephone tidbits, books fall open to ribald tales about Alexander G. Bell. But I was entirely unprepared for the pleonasm of helpful hints that the world gave me when I started thinking about failure. Commentary came out with a symposium on "America Now: A Failure of Nerve?" The Village Voice reviewed (continued on page 130) Failure (continued from page 113) Nashville and Ragtime under the banner, "Failure-of-America Fad." George C. Scott revived Arthur Miller's epic drama of failure, Death of a Salesman. Time started a section called "Failures." I opened Nestor Kraly's Amazing Sports Records & Other Oddities and read this quote: " 'I always turn to the sports page first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures.'--former Chief Justice Earl Warren."

So I turned to the sports page and there was a story about the record number of baseball-team managers that had been told to take a walk. I opened the New York Daily News and there was Linda McCartney, saying, "My dad went to Harvard, my mother went to Smith and my brother went to Stanford. They really thought I was a failure." You've never seen Linda on the Carson show, have you? I turned on the television for some karmic relief. Eric Sevareid appeared and started complaining to me about "failures and neurotics in the news." At first I thought he was talking about Henry Kissinger. Then I figured out that he was actually miffed at Sally Quinn for her book. It's all about failure--hers--with CBS Morning News. I escaped to a 65th-floor cocktail party at New York's Rainbow Grill, but my editor at Playboy cornered me and asked how the piece was coming. "Words fail," quoth I. I could not bear to tell him the awful truth: that my journey to the center of failure was proving to be an unqualified success.

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The hottest thing in showbiz right now is failure. Look at Sally Quinn. The Wall Street Journal says, "But despite the failure, she was already a star." Despite? Because! Before she blew her big chance, she was Sally Who? outside Washington. Wrote some column or other for The Washington Post. Then she bombed with such memorable klutziness that Simon & Schuster gave her a plump contract to write a book all about it. Quinn obliged with a volume titled We're Going to Make You a Star, which blames everyone with whom she came in contact at CBS for her fiasco. To hear her tell it, nobody even bothered to inform her that the little red light meant that the camera was on. (One wonders what she thought it did mean.) Quinn's book has done for failure what Norman Podhoretz' Making It did for success back in 1968; i.e., made it an approved topic for cocktail-party chic that. Reviewers were by turns as charmed and as nettled by Quinn's self-serving candor as they were by Podhoretz'. And readers lapped it up, because, in fact, there are more schleppers out there who want to be told that it's OK to fail, because it was probably everybody else's fault, than there are tycoons who need Podhoretz to tell them that they won't burn in hell for having striven. Besides, as a way of getting material for a first-person story, failing at CBS beats sailing alone across the Atlantic in a Sea Snark using only your teeth.

Or take Ken Russell, who has taken the title of World's Most Successful Film Failure away from Mike Nichols. In the past seven years, Russell has directed a series of flops d'estime--Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Devils, The Boy Friend and Savage Messiah. Watching Women in Love was better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick--how could Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked by firelight not be cute? But the rest of them! Get the hook! The entire paying audience for Savage Messiah could have fit into one Jerry Lewis Mini Cinema. And The Boy Friend--I'll never forget sitting in a huge provincial theater with three other people watching--all holy apostles and evangelists defend me--Twiggy, winging her way through the play within the movie of The Boy Friend. And if you think I was forlorn and depressed, that was nothing compared to how Ken Russell's backers felt when they saw the "Picture Grosses" page of Variety. London's Time Out opined that the movie was "a disease, a putrescent effluence of garbage encouraging and reinforcing all the most negative modes of existence." I wouldn't be so gentle. The Boy Friend is the worst motion picture yet made. It is very probably the worst motion picture that will ever be made. What could be lower than a flop about a flop starring a has-been? The Army's V. D. horror movie is easier to look at and you don't have to listen to Twiggy sing.

But Russell's cinematic failures have been so voluptuous, so extravagant that the critics and the audiences--and, more important, the financiers--keep coming back for more. "If this is how sumptuous his disasters are, imagine how our rods and cones would be tickled if by some bizarre mistake he ever made a good picture!" Russell has walked away from each clinker smelling like a Hitchcock; i.e., a director whose latest you'd go to see even if the heavens parted and God Himself appeared and told you that it sucked. The result is that, despite himself, Russell now has a palpable hit on his hands--Tommy, with a $10,000,000 gross, and I do mean gross. "I am interested in failures," says Russell. Fortunately for him, so are we.

Ten years ago, nobody would touch Lenny Bruce with a stick. His run-ins with the law had left the telltale odor of failure about him, and being a loser doesn't play so good in night clubs. At the time he posed for his famous postmortem snapshots, Bruce couldn't have gotten booked into Mitzi's Aurora Lounge in Pottawotamie, Nebraska. In part, this is because there was no such club and no such town, but as far as the world was concerned, there was no such comedian. So what difference did it make? Lately. Lenny has become a growth industry. There are Lenny plays, Lenny records, Lenny movies, Lenny books, Lenny posters and Lenny T-shirts. One of these days, I'm going to open my Wall Street Journal and see an ad selling franchises in Lenny Bruce Turkey Systems. The fast-food chain that asks the musical question, "Did you come yet?"

Why the sudden boom in Bruciana? It certainly has little to do with his humor, which has been there waiting--in books and on records--all along. A lot of people say that it's because he was a martyr. How so? He never did a day of time; and if he had held on a little longer, he would have lived to see his convictions reversed on appeal. No, what has gotten the public all hot and bothered about Bruce is that smell of failure. What stank in 1966 is now perfume. Everybody takes it for granted that Bruce was a pathetic fuck-up. The talk-show controversy is: Was he a nice pathetic fuck-up or a mean pathetic fuck-up? Lenny once said, "Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it." In America, success is failure plus time.

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Let us now praise famous turkeys. The Best and the Brightest get the Failure of the Era Award for the Indochina war, which, fortunately, closed out of town. The U. S. and its allies fought continuously in Asia starting in 1942 to see whether or not the West would get to boss the industrialization of the East. European civilization, which had been pushing Westward for nearly half a millennium, finally got stiff-armed once and for all in 1975. Vietnam is the focal point of American failure. Everybody who's anybody has failed there. The diplomatic corps failed to avert the war in the first place. The CIA failed to figure out what was going on. The press failed to drive home the reality of the war. The hawks failed to win the war. The movement failed to end the war. Two Presidents failed to convince us we were winning. The Justice Department failed to convict Daniel Ellsberg. The right failed to pin the blame for bugging out on the left. The airlift failed. Even the anticlimax failed: The Mayaguez incident's 41 dead was a grotesque price to pay for 39 captive seamen. And just to make sure we didn't mar our Vietnam record with even one small triumph, we failed to welcome the refugees.

Fortunately, we were distracted from the enormity of our failure in Indochina by the failure of the American political system. Watergate began with the failure (continued on page 136) Failure (continued from page 130) of George McGovern to make the break-in a campaign issue. After all, if McGovern had won, Nixon wouldn't have had us to kick around anymore, right? Nixon's attempt at an Executive coup failed. Hunt, McCord, Mitchell, Dean, Agnew, Strachan, Magruder, Young, Colson, Kalmbach all failed. Nixon's ugly career finally failed. The President failed the Presidency. The Presidency, which he thought of as a shield, failed Nixon. The Presidency, which we had thought of as the epitome of success, failed us. Congress' attempt to impeach Nixon failed. Jaworski's attempt to bring Nixon before the bar of justice failed. And the failed President was replaced by the first man in history to succeed to the Presidency without having to succeed.

America has only three international megastars--Muhammad Ali, Jacqueline Onassis and Henry Kissinger--and two of them have flubbed egregiously in the past year. Jackie O. performed a remarkable feat of failure: getting herself substantially disinherited by Ari. Wives who choose to be 3000 miles from their husbands' deathbeds don't usually fare too niftily at the reading of the wills. Henry's Vietnamization blew up in his face. It was, after all, the war--not California and Florida--that was supposed to get Vietnamized. The Greek dictatorship he was supporting was shown the door. Even his policy toward Turkey became a turkey.

The auto industry, which manufactures our favorite success symbols, has failed. New-car sales have stalled and Detroit's response is to shrink the Cadillac. The Edsel was an act of marketing genius compared with what Motown is pushing now. The Real Estate Investment Trusts, by which the big banks hoped to make a killing financing a housing boom, have failed, along with the real-estate-development industry. The stock market has crapped out. The mutual-fund industry, ditto--it's redeeming more shares than it's selling. Franklin National Bank failed and its top managers were indicted for fooling around with foreign currency. The banking empire of Nixon's buddy C. Arnholt Smith, Mr. Upstairs of San Diego, has failed. Westinghouse is on the ropes. A&P has WEO'd itself into big financial trouble. There were 9915 business failures last year. The Penn Central managed to fail at going bankrupt. Pan Am wants to go on aid to dependent airlines. Volkswagen has bungled in the jungle. You have to boil Good Humor ice cream before eating it. Litton Industries would be in bankruptcy right now if the Navy weren't bailing it out to the tune of half a billion dollars in cost overruns on 30 DD-963 destroyers. Even Litton's attempt to launch the first DD-963 was a failure--except as comic opera. It managed to sink the launch platform and mangle the ship.

The black-power movement has failed, from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Black Panthers; from Ralph Abernathy to Eldridge Cleaver--who even failed as an exile. The movement has failed--which could have been predicted from its canonization of such types as Ché Guevara, whose corpse may have been photogenic but who was, objectively speaking, a failure. The movement's founders are now out looking for new ways to fail. Tom Hayden, for example, scolded radicals during his Senatorial try for not appreciating the necessity of winning. "I am not a voice in the wilderness. The goal of this campaign is to win," he said. "If we lose, it will be a failure of organization." Leave it to a movement grad to define the inevitable as failure. Rock 'n' roll has failed as far as its pretensions go. I mean, when Bob Dylan, inventor of Desolation Row, asks Don Kirshner, inventor of the Monkees, to accept his prize for best whatever on the First Annual Rock Awards, I'm going back to Surf City, where it's two to one. The counterculture has failed, which is not really surprising, since its roots were in beatnikism, which considered success uncool--if you were a failure, it meant you had more integrity. Dennis Hopper knew that hippies were dippy--that was supposed to be the message of Easy Rider. "We blew it," says Captain America--get it? The youth market, whose tresses concealed onionheads, didn't. It thought the film was a celebration of youth and, to return the favor, made it boffo at the box office. Which enabled Hopper to go down to Peru and blow it himself. Moral: Don't ever call your movie The Last Movie or it might just turn out to be your last movie. In Liberal Parents, Radical Children, Midge Decter says the entire generation that nominally came of age in the Sixties has failed to take its place in adult society. When you get right down to it, everything that came out of the Sixties has flopped, from LSD to Max's Kansas City. We even have decades that fail.

Congress has failed to override Gerald Ford's veto so many times that the nation is to all intents being ruled autocratically by a nonelected pseudo President. The CIA has failed in its primary mission: to keep its own activities under wraps. The amnesty program for antiwar heroes has failed. The dumb-ass WIN campaign was a failure, but no more so than the Government's entire anti-inflation campaign, from price controls on down.

The system of Presidential politics is specifically designed to create a new crop of failures as we kick off the buycentennial. Remember that originally there was no also-ran. The runner-up became Vice-President and got the Senate gavel as booby prize. Then the 12th Amendment made the Veepdom a separate elective office. So the men who ran for President and Vice-President and lost were instantly transmuted into Nebbishes. The number-two and number-four best humans in America became instant failures. Now we've gone primary happy, which means that instead of one Presidential election with two also-rans, there are 30 elections and a platoon of almost-rans. So now every four years we make failures out of public citizens number two, four and five through umpteen.

Sonny Bono's TV show fizzled, but that wasn't so bad, because last season 29 out of 44 new prime-time shows clinked. Don Rickles' TV career sounds like a Don Rickles roast of Don Rickles. George Harrison's tour was a mobile disaster area. The former mop-top failed to browbeat arena animals into devoting their lives to Lord Krishna. Now, if Lord Krishna were a pop wine .... John Lennon looks like a failure. He can still get an occasional single on the radio, but then he shows up in a floppy beret and a white scarf, looking for all the world like a guy who lives out of two shopping bags and plays the cello on the street in front of Carnegie Hall for quarters. We're fortunate that so many rock stars of the Sixties killed themselves, because otherwise, our awareness would be crowded with even more high-energy failures. Requiescat in pace, Stephanie Edwards. And a word of thanks to McLean Stevenson for a manly, though failed, attempt to get her to admit on The Tonight Show that she was fired from AM America, which failed to provide any real competition for the Today Show, just like Sally Quinn and the CBS Morning News. Finally, of course, AM America itself failed.

And everything else has failed. For instance, New York has failed. Environmentalists have failed to stop the Alaska Pipeline. Squeaky failed, not to mention Sara Jane. In fact, it was the first two times in history that the Secret Service and a would-be assassin both failed. Paul Schrade's campaign to reopen the Robert Kennedy assassination case failed. England has failed. Ruffian broke down in the back-stretch. The state of North Carolina failed to convict Joan Little--things are getting bad when a Southern state can't even nail a black woman who stabs a white man in the back with an ice pick while his pants are off. With Joe Colombo crippled, Joey Gallo iced, Sam Giancana wasted, Meyer Lansky and Angelo Bruno of Philly sick, Raymond Patriarca of New England on parole, Cosa Nostra is now cosa fallito. The colleges and universities have failed. Ten years ago, they were riding high on post-Sputnik Federal largess and war-baby tuitions. Now they can't even pay their electric bills. And just when democracy is failing in Portugal, Italy, India--not to mention right here in America, where (continued on page 240) Failure (continued from page 136) the Presidency is now an appointive office--the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has failed. I used to get a futurist magazine called Fields Within Fields. Last year, I got a letter: Fields Within Fields has temporarily suspended publication. Even the future's a turkey! Remember the old joke about how tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest?

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One of the underlying reasons for the success of failure is that we no longer worship the Bitch Goddess Success as William James told H. G. Wells we did. James was right--we truly did make a religion of success, complete with saints and a liturgy. Exposure to the liturgy began in grade school with McGuffey's Eclectic Reader, full of hymns like:

Once or twice, though you should fail,

Try, try again;

If you would at last prevail,

Try, try again;

If we strive, 'tis no disgrace,

Though we may not win the race;

What should you do in that case?

(Three guesses.)

Elementary school kids today aren't exposed to that kind of reading matter--they're all in the bathroom pawing through Show Me! But back before the liturgy of success fell into disuse, the next step after McGuffey was Horatio Alger. Alger churned out novels for what the book trade would today call young adults. His typical hero is a "street boy" between the ages of 12 and 18, son and sole supporter of a widowed mother. Forced to scrabble for his living on the sidewalks of Manhattan, he is without hope of advancement. His virtuousness and hard work are rewarded by a chance encounter with a benevolent businessman who offers him a job with a future. Alger's books used to be as popular as whacking off among teenage boys, who bought over 100,000,000 copies and took them seriously, believing that by "luck and pluck," any boy could get ahead.

Alger is read today only by writers researching the American way of failure for Playboy. If a teacher ever caught a teenage boy reading Ragged Dick, he'd send him to Psychological Services for an electroencephalogram. ("The obvious castration anxiety implicit in the title of the book Christopher was found reading leads us to recommend that he be provided with psychiatric help immediately.") The holy of holies of the liturgy of success has become totally anachronistic. Dan, the Newsboy couldn't make it today, because he's been replaced by vending machines. A benevolent businessman doesn't have chance encounters with 12-to-18-year-old boys anymore for fear of being accused of pederasty. But say he wasn't worried that he'd have to buy back the Polaroids, that he did try to help the kid--who, incidentally, would most likely be black or Latin. He wouldn't offer him a job. He'd try to get the widowed mother on welfare. The child-labor laws wouldn't allow him to give a 12-year-old a job. Besides, if the kid had any brains, he'd be burning down apartment houses for insurance-hungry landlords. Jerome, the Arsonist.

When Dr. Benjamin Botkin, the folk-lorist, collected New York City children's chants for the WPA in 1938, one of the most popular was:

Take a local,

Take an express.

Don't get off

Till you reach success.

I haven't seen that sentiment spray-painted on any subway cars lately. Kids are no longer exposed to the liturgy of success. Nobody tells them to try, try again. There is no Alger telling them to Try and Trust or Do and Dare. Kids are tantalized by images of success on TV, but the culture doesn't give them the slightest hint as to what qualities they ought to cultivate if they want to succeed. In the old days, there was always The Saturday Evening Post, which featured a column called "Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son." Then, a decade ago, the Post became the most hashed-over business failure in American history. Several writers had successful careers just writing about what went wrong.

It is not merely that the Faith has fallen on hard times. We are also being inundated with images of failure. Michael Corleone fails in Godfather II. We discover in French Connection II that Popeye Doyle became a cop because he was a failure in professional sports. Jack Nicholson has built a career on playing failures. America lines up to see Jack fail as a concert pianist, see Jack fail as a radio personality, see Jack fail as a private eye, see Jack fail as a TV reporter, see Jack fail as a wife murderer. At this very moment, half the population of Brentwood is simmering in Jacuzzis, trying new ways for Jack to fail on each other.

Ragtime, which tacitly proposes itself as the epic novel of American failure, comes along when we're clinging to the ledge and stamps on our knuckles. Thank you, E. L. Doctorow. Nashville tacitly proposes itself as the epic film of American failure. According to The New York Review of Books--and it ought to know--director Robert Altman is the Zeitgeist, "because he represents a certain failure of nerve." Cecil B. De Mille specialized in representing triumphal entries into temple cities; John Ford specialized in representing the awesome grandeur of the trek West; and Robert Altman specializes in representing a certain failure of nerve. And here's a coincidence--guess who's going to bring Ragtime to the big screen?

Ah, yes, you will say, we decadent cognoscenti are being deluged with mythic images of failure. But the common folk--those who have fish decals on the backs of their cab-over campers, refer to beers as "cool ones" and dream in shades of avocado and mustard--surely these sturdy yeomen still cleave to success figures. Sure they do. Success figures like Evel Knievel. But as long as Evel succeeded at jumping his sickle over 100,000 midget gherkin jars or whatever, he was just another roadside attraction. What made him hotter than fresh goat shit was when he began totaling. His miscarriage at the Snake River in the fall of 1974 was the most extensively publicized, highest-grossing nullity in the history of mass culture. We've come a long way from the days of Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth in our search for popular heroes. The surest way to become a mobile-household word these days is to pick out an implausible feat that nobody has yet been so self-destructive as to attempt, come on as belligerent and cocky as possible, fail ignominiously and blame your detractors. Kids these days are "playing Evel Knievel," riding bikes off board ramps--probably the first time small children have played at being someone who cripples himself for money.

Failure fetishism is good mind-rotting fun, but isn't it time we stopped jerking off over the pornography of failure and got naked with the real thing? Rather than simultaneously denying and worshiping failure, wouldn't it be easier on our nerves to come to terms with it? To force ourselves to admit that failure isn't really all that bad--any more than it's all that good?

The first thing we've got to understand is that sometimes being a failure is preferable to being a success. We live in a world of beautiful losers. Whom would you rather be marooned with on a desert island--Orson Welles or Blake Edwards? In a society that makes a Ray Kroc a peer of the realm for gracing the landscape with 3186 golden arches, it shouldn't be surprising that the failures are more interesting than the successes.

Take the music business, for instance. When a record doesn't sell, it's called a stiff, as in corpse. As each new Elton John album ships molybdenum, the more I find myself becoming a connoisseur of stiffs. Wayne Cochran is a 6'3" singer/songwriter/bandleader with a prematurely platinum pompadour who will have to shuffle from one roadhouse to the next for the rest of his days because his album on Columbia stiffed. The next time his bus pulls into town, do yourself a mercy and discover that he is the most spectacular night-club performer of our time--an authentic religious experience for a two-drink minimum. You have my personal guarantee that your socks will roll up and down. But ozone can't be trapped in plastic, and Cochran ends up in the bins. Or take the New York Dolls, one of the finest rock bands in this galaxy. A couple of years ago, the insiders were saying they were the Next Thing. Then they did something unforgivable--they stiffed twice in a row. This is as unforgivable as not being able to get it up twice in a row. Tip-sheet hit pickers decide a record's fate by listening to it on the "little speaker"--just like a car radio, get it? If your music's too big to squeeze through the little speaker, it's Thin City. Not long ago, I saw the Dolls at The Sahara in Adams, Massachusetts. Let me tell you, the Fabulous Forum ringed with mounted police it wasn't. But the band was the answer to a teenager's prayer. As we were driving home, I said to my wife, "Ain't it a shame that the Dolls are a failure so we can see them up close in a place with good sound for three dollars? Too bad they're not a success so we'd have to schlep 200 miles to squint at them through binoculars from the second balcony of a hockey rink at $50 a ticket for which we had to do a simultaneous suck and fuck on a scalper." By the standards of the music industry, these performers are failures. So? By my standards, the music industry is a failure.

Many of the images of creative failure are the results of inflated expectations. Take everybody's favorite failed playwright, Tennessee Williams. Every so often, Williams manages to scrape himself together enough to get another play produced. Invariably, it's a bomb. Last year's Williams entry was put out of its misery in Boston. Pore, pore Tennessee. Tahm has passed him bah.

Recently, I had the experience of seeing, over the course of a few months, four of Williams' choicest--the movie of Suddenly, Last Summer, the American Shakespeare Theater's Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the movie of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Williamstown, Massachusetts, Theater Festival's Summer and Smoke. When the elevator descended in Suddenly, Last Summer as Katharine Hepburn ex machina delivered her opening speech, the normally blasé Williams College audience gasped and whewed so loudly I thought I'd faint from the carbon dioxide. The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof audience clapped until its hands were swollen amid yells of "Author! Author!" The audience for Streetcar at the Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, was the largest I'd seen there and it gave Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando the first standing ovation I've ever seen in a movie theater. As the curtain went up for Summer and Smoke to a packed house, there were, crowded around the guy with the waiting list, 50 people with looks on their faces like Vietnamese escapees at the Tan Son Nhut airport.

Williams' works still draw, still hit below the belt and, if anything, have improved with age. Meanwhile, their author has one lovely home in New Orleans, another in Key West, Tallulah Bankhead's apartment in New York's East 50s, a shelf groaning with awards, $750,000 in the bank and substantial royalties from the hundreds of productions of his classics that are mounted each year. Yet we are so afflicted with yes-but-what-have-you-done-for-us-latelyism that every time a visual of Tennessee Williams flashes across our consciousness, a subtitle appears that reads Failure. Williams himself is a prime exponent of his own loserhood, mind you. By him, not only has he not written anything worth while in 20 years but the stuff he did before that wasn't so hot, either. If there were any rationality to the American way of failure, a man like this--an artist who produced a body of work that stood the test of three decades, who is wealthy enough to live by clipping coupons, whose name is a household word throughout the civilized world--would be esteemed a paragon of success. His path would be strewn with rose petals. Young boys anointed with K-Y would be offered to him at every whistle stop. Instead, he is condescended to as a pathetic relic. The demand that artists churn out masterpieces at regular intervals until the day they croak or be chalked up as failures--thereby inhibiting their ability to churn out masterpieces--is so cruel and self-defeating that it sounds like something you'd find in a Tennessee Williams play.

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The most important thing we must come to understand is that failure isn't there just to annoy us and keep us from appearing in a Dewar's ad. It serves a crucial cosmic purpose: the elimination of everything that doesn't work. Any individual, any group, any institution, any theory that cannot hold its own in the world fails. This can be a brutal process. But failure is the way the cookie crumbles. Rather than be depressed by it, we can come to take bitter comfort in the way failure operates. Adolf Hitler said, "Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong." He was right, and that's why he ended up the most notorious failure of the 20th Century. Remember Murphy's Law, "Anything that can go wrong will"? Well, here's Karpel's Corollary: Anything that can go wrong should. There is a moral imperative to failure. If things that didn't work did not fail, they would plague us world without end. If failure itself failed, we would soon live in an incompetent world, a world in which the dysfunctional had equal opportunity with the functional. It is good that we failed in Vietnam: What business did we have exporting the American dream to Southeast Asia when we can't realize it in New York? It is good that Nixon's Executive coup failed: Its leader had a whoopee cushion for a brain. It is good that the movement failed: If it had prevailed, we'd all have to speak in translations from the Chinese. It's good that the Mafia failed: It was not all that romantic for a nightclub owner to have to eat his testicles because he didn't want a silent partner. It was good that Max's Kansas City failed: I have it on good authority that in ten years they never emptied the shrimp barrel--they just kept adding. It is good that Sonny Bono failed: He is too short.

As destructive as failure may be, it has a creative potential that is even stronger. The Renaissance couldn't have happened unless the Middle Ages had failed. The telephone came out of the failure to invent a hearing aid. Chemistry came out of the failure of alchemy. They failed to turn lead into gold, so they had to settle for turning mold into penicillin. The very discovery of the Western Hemisphere came out of the failure to find a westerly route to the Indies. "Chagrin is the honey and the teacher," said Edward Dahlberg in The Sorrows of Priapus. "Never to fail is a ditch and delusion."

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I subscribe to a $300-a-year economic forecasting service put out by Muriel and Louis Hasbrouck, seers. You won't find that category in the Manhattan Yellow Pages between "Seeds & Bulbs--Whol." and "Seguros." But what else can you call people who wrote in 1972 that the major economic turning point of the rest of the 20th Century would come in mid-October 1973? The Hasbroucks postulate a wave of evolutionary trend change that has a periodicity of 36 years. They say that after the wave crested in 1966, we entered the phase known as the "time of trouble." It is this time of trouble that the prophet Bob Dylan was talking about in 1961 when he said a hard rain was gonna fall, that the prophet Norman Mailer was talking about in 1964 when he said a shit-storm was coming. The effect of the periodic time of trouble is evolutionary because any idea, any institution, any system that cannot resist or adapt to its onslaught falls by the wayside along with the pterodactyl, knights in shining armor, mercantilism and the 409-cubic-inch V8. The time of trouble is the painful but necessary prelude to what the Hasbroucks call the "cosmic house cleaning" that must take place so the decks will be clear for the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness and civilization, so that we'll have the space to create the tools that will get us through the next 36 years. And the cosmic Electrolux with which that house cleaning is performed is failure.

The Hasbroucks insist with the same cheerful assurance with which they predicted a climactic event for midsummer 1974 that the length of the time of trouble is invariably nine years. Friends and neighbors, our time is up. 1966 plus nine equals 1975 of blessed memory. The hard rain has fallen. The shitstorm has finally blown over and we have all survived to tell the tale.