Our Tarnished Brass

Twenty-Six Years Ago, I was a lowly private on the western front in Korea. I lived with a few other privates in a sand castle made of sandbags, a so-called hootch (from uchi, the word in Japanese for maison) on the mountaintop on the safer side of Old Baldy. In our man-made cave, the only light was a pale gray shaft of sunlight from the one embrasure (or, after dark, from a candle in a C-ration can) and the dim furniture was in the fashion of early ammunition crate--it said Explosive on every splinter-ridden table and chair. On our shelves, we had our own commissary of tamales, pumpernickel, anchovies, sardines, shrimps, kippered herring and two cans of after-dinner mints from the Gourmet's Club of Goshen, Indiana. And there beneath the almond eyes and the 82-millimeter mortars of our enemies, we sat around (continued on page 254)Tarnished Brass(continued from page 143) (in the words of e. e. cummings)in the deep mud etcetera(dreamingetcetera ofYour smileeyes knees and of your Etcetera)

and looking at pinup pictures of girls whose arms, legs and faces were visible flesh, and listening to Dear John (Oh, How I Hate to Write) on radios rigidly tuned to Radio Station Nomad.

One day in March, our idyl was interrupted by a surprise visit by three great generals. Now, I had read many books, and I was aware that a general was no less susceptible (was more susceptible, historically) to a man's weaknesses than a private was. Alexander had thought that a one-yard snake was his father, and he had killed 13 men for not saying yes, you are right, sir, and Caesar had taken care at his own assassination to tighten his tunica laticlavia (he used his left hand, we're informed) under his toga so his dingdong wouldn't show when he told everyone in Greek, "Then fall, Caesar." Invariably, Napoleon had eaten in 15 minutes (his preference was the poulet à la marengo) and, in the 45 minutes saved, he had collapsed on the floor complaining of gas, groaning and vomiting until the empress came with a cup of thé avec des herbes. He tried to kill himself once ("Goodbye, Louise. Kiss my little son for me," he wrote to Marie-Louise. "Goodbye, Louise."), but he just vomited up the opium, hellebore and belladonna.

I had also heard of the generals there in Korea. The one who had thrown typewriters out of the window, saying, "They're dusty!" The one who had built the toilet seats in the shape of Thunderbirds, saying, "Well, this is the Thunderbird Division, isn't it?" The one who had run around and around his $30,000 hootch in hot pursuit of Marilyn Monroe. Our absolute rulers in Korea did not have their heads screwed on any more securely than the men in the trenches, rumors were. So why--why--were the other soldiers and I so wide-eyed at noon on March 25, 1953, to see our division commander, our corps commander and our army commander come up the 100 sandbag steps to our unimportant hootch? A two-star general, a three-star general and a four-star general--what was it that made soccer balls of our eyeballs as we saw them approach us? Was it the sun, perhaps, on the 45 stars on their right shoulders, left shoulders, right collars, left collars and on their furlined caps?

"Jumping Jesus! Look outside," a boy hollered at us as he ran into the hootch. "Look outside!"

We weren't, thank God and little fishes, eating the kippered herring. On the other hand, we weren't scrubbing our belt buckles, either--we were just watching the goings-on on Baldy and listening to Grandma's Lye-Soap on Radio Station Nomad. For many months, we (and everyone else in Korea) had requested it one, two, three times every hour, and the announcer at Nomad--on the edge of a lye-soap-occasioned insanity--was now trying to silence us by broadcasting it nonstop since five on that early-spring morning.

Mrs. O'Malley! Out in the valley!

She suffered from ulcers, I understand!

She swallowed a cake of Grandma's lye-soap

And had the cleanest ulcers in the land!

So let's-----

And snap! I turned the radio off as the four-star general (a man who played tennis every day in Seoul and was steps ahead of the two other generals) presented himself in our dim potato bin in his starch-saturated fatigues. Now, remember: I was just 22, and I was every bit as tongue-tied as a boy would be who won some contest in Stars and Stripes for tea for two at the White House. My only thought was, Oh, there's mud on my boots, though there was mud (and a number of pine needles) on the general's pair of clodhoppers, too. By the grace of God, a boy with presence of mind in our crowd cried out, "Attention!"

"At ease, gentlemen," the four-star general said to us. "Can you see Old Baldy?"

"Yessir, out the window, sir," a boy replied.

"Appreciate it." And strutting there, the general began to look single-mindedly out of the six-inch slit. And that indicated to our indescribable relief that he wasn't there on any inspection of anchovy cans but of the treeless, shrub-less, flowerless and, in words of one syllable, dirt-dump sides of Old Baldy. All that morning, the hill had looked like the mise en scène of some fast-paced farce--in scene one, the GIs were running into the trenches there; in scene two, the GIs were running out and the Chinese were running in; in scene three, the Chinese were running out and and and and--and, truthfully, the battle on Baldy did seem something out of the Comédie Française.

"Uh, where do you think the front line to be? The most advanced troops?" the four-star general asked.

"I think, sir," a boy replied, "I think they're at that bunker with the large aperture with--oh, God!" As he was talking, an artillery shell fell on that very bunker.

"Uh, that round is pretty short there," the four-star general said.

"That's incoming, sir," the boy replied.

"Oh," the four-star general said. He went athletically to the two other generals (the two other tottering generals were at our eagle's nest now) and declared. "We should go down there to stimulate those boys. Well, shouldn't we?"

The two-star general grinned as if he were saying, "Oh, how jolly, General." But the three-star general, a man whose face was a bag of butter beans, sat on an ammunition crate as though the bell had rung, panted for air and spat, sometimes, into the cartridge case of a 175-millimeter artillery shell--a knickknack like an umbrella stand. He was silent, otherwise--he was clearly hors de combat at that moment in Army-Navy time. And that meant a question of etiquette that no one could answer short of transmitting an international cable to Dear Abby. To appreciate this, do you remember when the artillery shell fell out of the ten-meter cannon--plop--in the first reel of The Great Dictator? The colonel, remember, told the lieutenant colonel to please pick it up. The lieutenant colonel told the major, who told the captain, who told the lieutenant, who--to relieve everyone of the hot potato--told it to Charlie Chaplin. See, the Army's unwritten etiquette is that every order is issued by a four-star general to a three-star general to--but, whoops, the three-star general was a missing link in the daisy chain that day. "Uh," the four-star general said to the two-star general, unable to order him to do this, that or the two together at the biggest battle of that winter in Korea--"Uh, I'm not here to announce how to run this operation," the four-star general said. "It's your show here, but if I were you-----"

"Yessir?"

"I suppose I'd pull everyone off of Baldy," the four-star general allowed. "I'd send in some smoke today," send in some artillery today, "and I'd, uh, I'd really work it over tonight. And then attack tomorrow."

"Yessir," the two star general answered.

In our dimly lighted room, a bear rose slowly out of its winter sleep. The three-star general stood up and hobbled (he used a cane, honestly) to the two-star to reinstate himself, immediately, in the great chain of being. "Now, General," the three-star general said so threateningly that the two-star general came to Army-academy attention, "the attack has failed, General. All you're doing is fooling around on Baldy. Is fooling around! Is fooling around! Is," spitting into the un-umbrella stand, "is fooling around on Baldy!"

"Yessir," the two-star general said. He stood as stiff as an old cigar-store Indian.

"Do you follow me? Is fooling around, General," the three-star general shouted, the spit dripping out and his face going from butter beans to the red of kidney beans. "So call your people off Baldy! And pound it with your artillery! And when you're ready, call me and we'll attack it!"

"Yessir," the two-star cast-iron general said.

"But stop the fucking fooling around!"

The two-star looked unhappy. The three-star looked as though he wanted to hammer his knot-covered cane on the two-star, shouting. "Du Dummkopf! Das ist nur Spielerei," and the four-star, forced by his officer's code of conduct to dissociate himself from the two men's delirium, looked out of the six-inch slit as preoccupiedly as one who had spotted a rare olive warbler on Baldy. We peons, we privates, stood in the shadows of our little citadel like the hoi polloi that the noblemen seem so oblivious of in Shakespeare.

Why, look you, I am whipp'd and scourged with rods,

Nettled,

Hotspur is screaming to the turrets themselves with no nevermind to the pages, heralds, beadles and other sundry attendants whose ears (we must assume) must be as big as wassail bowls. In our more modest hootch, the sound of our loudmouthed leaders did the same metamorphosis, converting our eyes, ears, noses and open mouths into ears--we were entirely ears. To us, the cane-carrying general seemed to be no less immune to the lower passions than a man with three yellow stripes instead of three silver stars, and to listen to his hysteria was to be reminded that the rank is but the guinea's stamp, as we're assured by Burns. A man's a man, unquote.

Our sympathies were with the little fellow, the two-star general. Our own closest commander (as of the day before: He had just arrived in Korea), he was a gentle-looking man who now looked as if he wanted to cry--yes, really. His eyes were wet, as my own eyes had been a year earlier when an old master sergeant shouted at me ("Now sound off!" "Sack!" "Louder!" "Sack!" "Do you unnerstand me, Sad Sack? I said louder!" "Sack!" "Louder! Louder! Louder!" "Sack!" "You little fruit! You have a cunt where a cock oughta be"). Even today, I can feel for the two-star general. In my imagination, I can see what might be the outcome if he weren't taught at his military academy that a big boy doesn't cry. In my inward eye, I can see the tears rolling down his fatherly face and I can hear him say, "Oh, sir, don't shout at me. It hurts to be shouted at."

"Crybaby," the three-star general shouts. "I wouldn't shout if you weren't fooling around on Baldy! If you pounded it with your artillery, instead!"

"But, sir," the two-star general says. "Sniffle, I've already pounded it with twenty thousand artillery shells."

"So, dummy! So pound it with twenty thousand more!"

"I can't, General, sir," the two-star general cries. "I can't because-----"

"I say you can! I've half again as many stars, and I say you can! You little fruit!"

"I can't, I can't, I can't," the two-star general cries. "Oh, sob, you aren't smarter than me just because you're bigger than me. I can't because-----"

"You can because-----"

"I can't because there aren't any, sir," the two-star general cries, the tears rolling down and the salt-streaks scarring his soft-skinned face. "The army is almost out of artillery shells."

"What?" At the six-inch slit, the four-star general turns as athletically as a man returning a backhand overhead, saying, "Are you alluding to my Army, General?"

"Yessir, General, sir," the two-star general says, and he blows his red-rimmed nose in a Kleenex. "It's almost out of shells, General, sir."

The four-star general glowers. "Now, General, there are hoi polloi in our presence here, and you are not stimulating them by suggesting that."

"Sob," and the two-star general starts to cry once more. "Oh, General, I've tried to behave like a model major general-----"

Enough. Let the record show that the Army was, in fact, practically out of artillery shells, and the more chrome-covered stars one of those generals had, the more wrongheaded the general was. Oh, those crewcut clowns in Korea! We stood up (our heels together and our toes at an angle of 45 degrees) in their awesome presence. We sirred them, we saluted them and we didn't use our bore patches as the cleaning tools for our earwax in the presence of one-, two-, three- and four-star generals. But, honestly, can it be argued that we were such utter incompetents that we really needed them?

All right, it can be argued, friends. And was argued in the mid-17th Century by Thomas Hobbes.

•

Now, Hobbes (I have looked this up) was just 12 years old at the start of the 17th Century, and, as a gentleman's secretary, he did nothing to boast about (oh, he did learn to play the cello pretty well) for the next 30 years. In 1630, though, while a guest at a minister's home in Geneva (or some say in Paris), he experienced what was a bolt from the blue above in his uneventful life. In the minister's library, the finger of fate directed him to an open book and a simple sentence in Greek,

[unclear]

and, reading it, he just gasped. "By God," Hobbes is recorded as having said, "this is impossible!" The book was by Euclid, and the sentence alleged that in any right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse equaled the sum of the squares of the two other sides.

Now, that wasn't bulletin news to the Western world. Twenty-two centuries earlier, it had occurred to Pythagoras, who had sacrificed an ox (or, according to Galileo, a whole 100 oxen) in honor of that quadratic equation, but to Hobbes (who hadn't majored in mathematics at Oxford), it was like lightning from Mount Olympus. And poring over the proposition, he was referred to the 46th, the 41st, the 14th and the fourth propositions and--as he went backward, backward, and the sun started to set on Burgundy--to the very first postulate and its indisputable statement that a line could be drawn from A to B. All right, agreed--and Hobbes, his red goatee trembling, his fingers a family of fat brown bookworms on all that geometry, started to go ahead again into the many cheerful facts about the hypotenuse, and, God! It was accurate what was in Euclid! Life, for Hobbes, had begun at 40 and at the perception that, ahhh, indeed, squared and squared equaled squared! His face, which so far had been yellow, became (and for 50 years remained) a ruddy red, for he had been born again as a convert to plane and solid geometry.

At dinner that day, he didn't cut his petit pain into a cone, cylinder or parallelogram as the people on the flying island did in Gulliver's Travels. But that same night, he did, indeed, sit in bed drawing a little pinkprint of triangles on his thighs, just as Archimedes had drawn them (in the olive oil on his thighs) at the baths at Syracuse, Sicily. He did that night after night, and Hobbes--in the course of many months--came to look at our good green earth as nothing but a concatenation of lines, triangles, rectangles, of rigid geometry as reliable as any watchmaker's watch in Geneva. It was efficient--or, rather, it would be efficient but for the endemic incalculability of one little element. And that little element was so addicted to spilling out of its proper sphere that no rulers or compasses in all creation knew how to circumscribe it. A living thing, it went about on our planet on four legs in the morning and two legs at midday and--you have guessed it!

People! The people (as our man would write in Leviathan)--the men, women and children of our own silicone sphere are, in the last analysis, madmen, for, like madmen (or like drunks, he would continue), we are often possessed by our passions, and our passions unguided are, for the most part, madness, unquote. As closet lunatics, we become pale if we love someone and we become black if we hate someone--we laugh and cry in any six-hour afternoon to a degree that no right-angled triangle would, and to laugh and cry in our clockwork world is just double trouble to Hobbes:

The passion which maketh ... laughter ... is incident most to them that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves. ... On the contrary [there] ... is the passion that causeth weeping ... and they are most subject to it that rely principally on helps external, such as are women and children.

To love, to hate, to laugh, to cry--to feel is to let ourselves overflow the mathematical measures of the six-foot fathom and the 60-minute hour. It is generative of everything evil, like "war, which is necessarily consequent ... to the natural passions of men," and is corrosive of the golden goal of society: efficiency, in the considered opinion of Mr. Hobbes.

Well, what can one say? All people do have passions--sorry, there is no prescribing them not to. Accordingly, it appears there is no solution to the people problem but the final one of the Queen of Hearts in Alice, "Off with their heads," or of the lieutenant at My Lai, "Waste them." But our man, Hobbes, was more tenderhearted (he had also learned the six-stringed lute) and he wanted to institute efficiency by some other means than one of benevolent genocide. Accordingly, he moved to Paris, and for the next 20 years he woke up at seven o'clock every day and (after his breakfast of bread and butter) went walking in the jardin, thinking, thinking, dipping the tip of his quill into the inkwell in his walking cane, and, in spite of his palsy, writing, until by the mid-17th Century he had concluded and, in Leviathan, had announced that to have farms, factories and other desiderata of his century--to have efficiency--we must subordinate ourselves and our mad, mad, mad, mad passions to some absolute authority, "as if every man should say ... I give up my right of governing myself," and I am yours, sahib. All right: I do agree. No one can harbor doubts that the one thing wrong in the world (as the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries see it) is that there're people in it, or that something--anything--has to smother them if they're ever to be as efficient as an Accutron. Nor can anyone fault the logic of our philosopher until, in his 17th chapter, he swallows a so-called camel in his announcement that the absolute authorities are to be people, too.

What? What? the blind to be leading the blind, sirrah? No, I can accept that I must accept a vegetable--a summer squash in my refrigerator, say--as my absolute authority, or even some species of dull, listless and passionless animal like the hippopotamus who, a few years ago, was nearly elected to the state legislature of São Paulo, Brazil. But people? Is it not circular to reason that if I'm human and if I'm mad, accordingly, it behooves me to surrender myself to a creature of the same human condition? Of the same species as the two-, three-and four-star neurotics in my once-halcyon home in Korea, the men who were standing at catatonic attention, shouting at Mad Hatter-party pitch and staring out the six-inch window at the spring plumages of the birds on Old Baldy? I, who don't drink (and Hobbes, who was drunk a total of once every year), am to sir and salute a creature that he himself likens to a drunken bum? Oh, you're putting me on, Mr. Philosopher!

Of course, that is easy enough to say with 20--20 hindsight. For, unlike me, Hobbes did not sit--correction, stand--in the mad generals' presence, although, having done a satisfactory translation of Homer,

Tell me, O Muse, th' adventures of the man

That, having sack'd the sacred town of Troy,

Wander'd-----

he ought to have known from the poor sportsmanship of Ajax, the peevishness of Achilles and the prattle of Nestor what an accumulation of fools those generals could be. And doubtless, if Hobbes (or the cavalier-collared ghost of Hobbes) had floated up to those hotheads in our wobbling hootch in Korea, he'd have resolved his cognitive dissonance by saying, See--it is as I've said! The generals, he would say, are such irremediable madmen that a really--really--absolute authority has to have sovereignty so as to enforce efficiency on those Keystone Cops. Alas, the President of the U.S.A. and overlord over the two-, three- and four-star generals was, in that month, a five-star general himself. The next President (the big-toothed President) was one who once called the Pentagon to complain that a sailor didn't stand at attention for him; and the next President (the big-eared President) sat and put his feet in his administrative assistant's lap; and the next President (the big-nosed President) sat in his oval office, looking at his own autobiography, saying, "It makes fascinating reading."

"Yeah," his administrative assistant said.

"I want you to reread it," the President said.

"OK," his administrative assistant said.

"And everybody else," the President said. "I want them to reread it."

"Sure," his administrative assistant said.

"The book reads awfully well," the President said.

Oh, God's wounds, did Hobbes ever actually see any absolute authority? We are informed that he did, indeed, in the very year--1651--of the first edition of Leviathan. On the seventh of September, the sun in Paris was shining and Hobbes was looking out his oriel window when the most absolute authority in one-and-one-half thousand years of Western history went by on his yellow horse--an Isabella, so called from the yellow color of the archduchess' sheets. The man wore so much golden embroidery that no one knew what, if anything, he wore underneath it, and magnanimously he kept tipping his indescribable hat to the hoi polloi on the rooftops, at the windows (and at the new windows cut for the great parade) and at his horse's feet in the stone-cobbled streets of Paris. Oh, I can almost see Hobbes in his linen and lace at his own open window, shouting, with all of Paris, "Vive Louis Quatorze! Vive Louis Quatorze! Vive-----"

The king was 13 years old. His mother was (or was until recently) spanking him, and for saying merde she was shutting him in his room for 48 hours. At l'école, he had sat writing,

A king can do as he pleases

A king can do as he pleases

A king-----

in his schoolbook, but he was still awarded a "dull" on his royal report card. A few years earlier, he had absent-mindedly spat on his younger brother's bed and--oh, his brozzer, he spitted on Louis's bed, and Louis, he spitted again on his brozzer's bed, and his brozzer, he did his oui-oui (et pissa dessus, my sources say) on Louis, and Louis, he did his oui-oui on his brozzer, and Louis, he hitted him in the bouche, and Louis-----

And that was the man without whom (to listen to Hobbes) our whole lives would be nasty, brutish and short.

•

Well, I say that's bullshit. For even a one-eyed look at human history (a hand clapped on the other eye in horror, like the lost soul in The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel) is quite enough to suggest that the kings, queens and big cheeses were at the very least as nasty as anyone else ("A great inconvenience," Hobbes allows). Nor were the rulers themselves in all ages ignorant of their existential incompetence. As many as 5000 years ago, Gilgamesh, in what today are the Arab lands, wanted to make war against the king of Kish. I'm serious. "Gaammasigendeen!" ("Let's smite him!") he cried in his mud-walled chambers, but he didn't take up his war spear until all his men unanimously voted with him, "Gaammasigendeen!" Gideon, on being urged to be ruler of Israel ("Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son's son"), said in one-syllable words, "I will not!" Alas, there isn't anyone now as modest as Cincinnatus, who 2500 years ago was the dictator of Rome but--after telling everyone to do this, do that, for the better part of a day--said to just forget it, and abdicated. No, the only known parallel in the 20th Century (and one that would hardly qualify for Plutarch's Parallel Lives) is a Mr. Gumbert of Omaha, Nebraska. A nominee for state senator, he withdrew on being enlightened that it was impossible to represent the men, women, white, black, rich, poor--the 20,000 individuals of the Ninth Legislative District. "I recommend," he announced to the open-mouthed reporters, "the voters refrain from voting, in the hope that no one will hold this office."

Amen. And with those trumpet-tongued words, let us seize the opportunity to return at last to the western front in Korea. Our own loud absolute authorities--the two-, three- and four-star window-rattling generals--departed by the sandbag stairs, and a day later (the generals, remember, had to tell some colonels to tell some lieutenant colonels to tell some captains to tell some lieutenants to tell us) and a few dead soldiers more, it was announced that the men in the trenches were to stop fooling around and get themselves off of Old Baldy. To no one's astonishment, they did and (one, two, three) as fast as cottontail rabbits, too. In utter refutation of Hobbes, the men didn't decide to go on making war and go mad, potted and passionately to the crest of the hill, yelling, "E pluribus unum! And death to the yellow belly!" As we are reminded by Koestler, a man who thinks war is consequent to our natural passions is a man who was never a private himself--a private like us, who killed or were killed on Baldy only because the authorities told us to. Abolish authorities and

We will live,

And the war will end,

promised a prior philosopher to Hobbes: Chuang-tzu of China.

And silence. For ten minutes, there were no sudden sounds on Old Bald-Headed Mountain. A balloon--red, round, model 51--a round balloon rose to the blue abode of Korea's god, Hananim. No doubt, it had been released by a soldier in charge of ascertaining the wind direction and of reporting that to the artillerymen. For suddenly--boom--we heard the big bass drum and the tin whistle of a 155-millimeter shell (a shell a half foot across) on its way overhead to Old Baldy. It was followed, like a snow goose, by another 1000, till it sounded as if the whole primum mobile were in fragments, falling, like the 1908 meteor, on the poor Communists--boom, boom, boom. And then, suddenly--silence, the cupboard was bare. We turned on Radio Station Nomad,

Mrs. O'Malley! Out in the valley! She suffered from-----

and we looked out the six-inch window to see squad after squad of godless Communists in the fresh shell holes of Baldy. And digging, digging, digging in: but our orders were to ignore it if we saw one, two, three or any number of Communists short of 15 at any one time together--not to telephone the Army artillery, for the Army was almost out of 105-, 155- and 175-millimeter shells. On the brighter side, it still wasn't out of red balloons, and at sundown one of those floated as at a birthday party over the enemy trenches on Old Mount Acomia. Hail to thee, blithe spirit.

Of course, the order that no one should shoot if he didn't see the whites of their 30 eyes was a secret one. I myself didn't tell (I am no tittle-tattle, to quote the immortal words of a fivestar general: of General MacArthur) but I am sure someone did, as it soon appeared at the top of The New York Times. The secret was out, and, reading it, the Secretary of the Army himself flew to Korea to see if there were no ammunition in our only ongoing war. An ex-textile executive, the man was chewing gum as his chopper dropped on a boy whose name was Dabravalskas at the 630th Ammunition Company. And, popping out, the secretary asked him, "Do you have plenty here?"

Well, Jesus! What is he supposed to say to the secretary and all the four-star generals in the Far East Command? "No sirree, sir, the situation is all fucked up"? One morning, a mere lieutenant colonel came to our own area, saying to us Willies, "Is the food satisfactory, men?" "Oh, yessir," we chortled in our response, though it was noon and we had had nothing but a hard-edged quadrilateral of toast apiece, black as a brick in a chimney--there was a food shortage, too. I mean, honestly! A man is mad to run every risk of 40 lashes by telling the truth to his massa, and it was in self-defense that the soldier said at the 630th Ammunition Company, "Yessir. We have the normal number of artillery rounds."

"Thank you, sir," the secretary said, and he departed at noon--or two hours before the deadline for The New York Times.

The reporters asked, "Did you see any shortages there?"

"One," the secretary answered. "An enlisted man told me he had trouble getting color film. And that was the only shortage-----"

Oh, fuck you, Mr. Secretary! On that whole western front, there wasn't a Pfc. (a chicken on his knee, kippered herring on his crates, whatever) who wasn't more of a real authority on the being and nonbeing of 105-, 155- and 175-millimeter shells than you. But thank you, too (and thank you, two-, three-, four-star, fourflusher generals), for the timely reminder that an expert is--to quote from The People, Yes, by Sandburg--a damned fool a long ways from home, and an authority is not our rock and our redeemer, necessarily. Oh, God, in the groans of T. E. Lawrence. Send us no more saviors, please!

When will Thou teach the people, God, to save themselves?

And when will the people learn to put not their trust in these pashas, princes and Presidents?

•

Well, I think they've learned it. Hey, hey, L.B.J., Tricky, Jerry and Jimmy--Christ, a man must be 40 years old to have voted for a President and to be unembarrassed about it. In these sordid Seventies, we have learned what the Army taught me at a more tender age. As the Twenties began with the Armistice, the Thirties with the Crash, the Forties with Pearl Harbor, the Fifties with the Senator's speech in Wheeling, West Virginia ("I have here a list of 205 Communists") and the Sixties with the Peppermint Lounge, so did the Seventies begin with the strip of adhesive tape on the door in the Watergate. In ten years, we were taught the truth of Presidents, of Vice-Presidents, of Congressmen, of FBI agents ("Get rid of the pinhead," the director said, and the FBI, obedient, got rid of the agent with the smallest hat) and the CIA's hallucinogenic agents. By now, we have so little trust in authorities that (to go by opinion polls) the only lower occupation is the used-automobile dealer's, and the television itself is not ginger at giving us Washington Behind Closed Doors or Grandpa Goes to Washington. Or those incompetent authorities, the mayor in Carter Country, the principal in Welcome Back, Kotter and the radio and television executives on WKRP and W.E.B.

"If our destruction comes, it will be because [of] our faith in men who were only flesh and blood," said the press secretary, retired, to one President of the United States. It isn't that the authorities are a party of evil, wicked, irredeemable people--it is that they're people, period, and the best and the brightest of those creatures are as imperfect as I am at administering my one and only life. In fact, they're worse, for they haven't even met me.

Now hear me, America! I learned long ago and I've learned again, I won't indenture myself to any authorities but me, myself, my shadow and I So, long live me! The most efficient ruler of me! Viva John Sack!

"Our absolute rulers did not have their heads screwed on any more securely than the men in the trenches."