Dare to Be...Wrong

Fucking up is not what it used to be. Sure, there are plenty of people around these days whom you could call fuck-ups; but I'm talking about celebrative, life-enhancing, go-get-'em fucking up, a traditional male imperative. There used to be politicians like Big Jim Folsom, governor of Alabama in the late Forties and the early Fifties, Folsom was a liberal redneck who snorted at segregationist blowhards, drank with Adam Clayton Powell and once fell out of the gubernatorial jeep while inspecting R.O.T.C. troops at the University of Alabama. Would you vote for a man who would inspect R.O.T.C. troops sober? When accused of involvement with an attractive blonde not his wife, he said the whole thing was (continued on page 200)Dare to be Wrong(continued from page 177) political, and if his enemies were going to stoop to using such bait, "they're going to have to catch Big Jim every time." Many another indiscretion was laid at his doorstep, and he said, "I plead guilty. I always plead guilty. Now, why don't we get on with the issues here?"

Big Jim's career ended when he went on television during a re-election campaign, began to introduce his family and affectionately forgot all of his children's names. "He was a combination of genius, moron and alcoholic," said a supporter, "and the thing that made it exciting was that each morning when he woke up, you never knew which one it would be."

America was built on unpredictable combinations. Big Jim fucked up royally--and generously. People still tell stories about him with pleasure.

Today, across the land, that kind of thing is down the drain. A thin, self-serving Republican order prevails, and it is hard even to see any potential great fuck-ups on the horizon. Prince Andrew? He's British. Francis Ford Coppola? He created an idiosyncratic, overextended Hollywood studio, to be sure, but it has produced some extraordinarily under-extended movies--as if Napoleon had marched his armies into Russia in order to seize the "Style" section of Pravda.

How did this country's great fuck-up tradition become so attenuated?

I blame the economy. "There are men in the world," said Winston Churchill, who was one of them, "who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin as others from success." But who can afford disaster and ruin today? The stakes are too high, because of inflation, and it's too hard to bounce back, because of recession. Outfits that venture greatly today rely so heavily on market research that it doesn't matter, except in terms of money, whether they succeed or not. For an individual to survive today, he just about has to work for a corporation. How can you fuck up with any flair for a corporation?

I blame cocaine. The state-of-the-art fuck-up fuel is too expensive and dangerous. People don't fuck up amiably on, or in connection with, cocaine. Look what it's done to sports, Hollywood and John De Lorean. Most people I know have stopped trying to keep up with getting high. Many of them have stopped drinking--even stopped eating meat. You can't fuck up on tofu.

I blame the legal profession. When a cave man fucked up, he would whang and wiggle his way out of it, fucking up further in the process and learning new lessons for himself. And the community would learn from his example: "Well, boys, I guess it ain't a good idea to try cooking a live mastodon so close to the house. Glad I got to see it, though." When a person fucks up today, it means raising $300,000 for the lawyers. Then you get thrown in jail, anyway, with a bunch of crazy fuckers who couldn't afford lawyers and have been lifting weights for 15 years. And your lawyers say, "Well, we fucked up. Interesting case, though." The lawyers get all the fun. And the only thing the community learns is not to get out of line.

I blame the Reagan Administration. Have you ever seen The Killers, Ronald Reagan's last movie? He plays the kingpin crook, prune-faced and prim-lipped but with a certain calm presence. It appears that what he is doing--even when he is knocking Angie Dickinson flat with a right hand--is clear in his own mind. And yet everybody in the movie is constantly fucking up. John Cassavetes keeps letting Angie fuck him up, Reagan fails to shoot either Cassavetes or Lee Marvin completely dead and, in the end, everybody dies and the money blows away. But, hey, crooks in movies are supposed to fuck up. John, Lee and Angie get a bang out of the screwing and the shooting, but Ron doesn't. When he reaches the end of the line, he looks at the wad of cash that has entangled him in all this human sloppiness, and he shakes his head irritably. In this, his last movie scene, you can see him thinking, I am tired of this business. There are bound to be easier ways to make a lot of money. I believe I will become President ... of a land where major corporations are in charge and there is absolutely no charm in fucking up.

•

One way to keep fucking up down is to keep unemployment up. Every person who is out of work is one fewer person who finds stories of fucking up on the job entertaining. People are either looking for security or trying to keep it. In the Sixties, college students tried to fuck up the system. Now they're afraid they'll fuck up and not find a slot in it.

If you stay in a slot, there are things you never learn. Fucking up brings people into contact with the world's actual contours and forces, as in "I fought the law and the law won." Unemployment does the same thing but with no thrill involved. When you're fucking up, you know you're not just coasting along and losing momentum. You're venturously finding out what you can't get away with. The difference between fucking up and being unemployed is the difference between tackling a lion and being gnawed on by one. There just might be a way that tackling a lion would work. If nobody ever fucked up, how would human progress be made? I once heard it said of a strait-laced, cautious man that "he don't know anything, because he's never done anything wrong."

Fucking up is part of heroism. It entails leaping to conclusions. King Lear and Oedipus spring to mind. The hero is always primed for situations in which most people would be moved to shut their eyes tight and say, "Ohhhhhhh, shit!" Heroes come through frequently, fuck up often, sometimes do both at once. Fucking up is trying things that probably won't work, just in case they will and because, at any rate, they bring adrenaline.

The great writers--Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens, Twain--are not those who never depart from elegance but those who can be awful and who tend to fuck up largely in life as well as in art. Fucking up comes from going into the unknown for the challenge of it and is, thus, a very American thing. "We are all American at puberty," said Evelyn Waugh, and puberty is prime fuck-up time. Europeans don't fuck up or venture as greatly as Americans (they used to, back when they were discovering and fucking up the New World).

Fucking up also comes from doing things that deep down inside you know better than. America has had the requisite mixture of innocence, which gets you into trouble, and conscience, which makes you recognize that you are in it. Russia is too innocent to fuck up--innocent in the sense of lacking qualms. Vietnam was a fuck-up, but invading Afghanistan wasn't. Two thirds of the American consciousness was saying, "This seems like the thing to do; what the hell," and another two thirds was saying, "This is a horrible thing to do," and the overlap started out saying, "We are only doing this for the sake of those poor peasants" but finally swung around to "Well, we have fucked up." Russia's values aren't complicated enough for fucking up. Russia calculates and moves, and if the move turns out to be too costly, the national calculation is adjusted; historical inevitability prevails throughout. The Reagan Administration's values are also uncomplicated.

Democrats fuck up more than Republicans, with the exception of Nixon--an unusual Republican in that he wanted to do new things and in that he gave (instead of just calling) new things a bad name. Coolidge, for all his passive contributions (continued from page 252)Dare to be Wrong(continued from page 200) to the Depression, didn't fuck up; L.B.J., a man of boom and bathos, did. Roosevelt fucked up the system enough to save it; there was something wicked in his grin that made him believable. Since Nixon, no President has been able to get away with an up-to-something look. Carter tried to take bold steps and yet assure everyone of the essential sweetness and rationality of them; fucking up and Sunday school don't mix.

The Reagan Administration doesn't fuck up. When we learn that the Environmental Protection Agency has been sucking up to chemical companies, our reaction is "Well, of course." That, by the Reagan Administration's standards, is the EPA's mission. (Similarly, the Department of the Interior's current role is to spread the interior's legs.) Here is the kind of goal that the Reagan Administration has: to pour more money into the arms race. How can you fuck that up? It's like letting the water out of a tub. A child could do it. Another thing the Reagan Administration is keen on is saying nasty things about Russia. Anybody in the world can think of nasty things to say about Russia. What takes imagination is thinking of things to say about Russia that aren't nasty and yet make sense. Still another trick the Reagan Administration has managed to pull off is to make the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If the Reagan Administration were a refrigerator, it would say that its purpose was to let ice melt. And people wonder how the President manages to stay so relaxed.

•

It's almost enough to make a man feel depressed. Recently, I heard a woman author tell an audience that men know nothing about friendship because they never have lunch together to tell each other how depressed they are. Well, depressed may be a word that women feel more comfortable with than men do. Men don't generally like to say they're depressed, not in so many words. I think you have to give men some credit for that, because there are no more boring--not to say depressing--words in English than "I am depressed." That's one of the shortcomings of being depressed.

Men would rather have lunch together to tell each other how bad they have fucked up. But I like to be progressive when it comes to male-female roles, so the other day, at lunch, I said I was depressed. My friend Fletch said, "Well, don't feel pregnant," and my friend Kirby said, "Join the fucking club."

"I knew a guy was so depressed once," my friend Chet put in, "that he took his bowling ball and swung it into his TV screen, and when it stuck there, he dragged the whole thing to the window and dropped it onto the top of his car, where it stuck. Then he went outside and drove his car into his picture window, where it stuck. Then he climbed up on top of his car, put his fingers in the bowling-ball holes and now he had a grip on everything he owned, except for his catfish pond. So he tried to roll it all down the hill into his catfish pond. But, of course, it wouldn't budge. So then he went down to the pond and dynamited all the fish and loaded them into garbage bags and dragged them up the hill and put them in his car and then he rented himself a pump and---"

"Kiss my ass if that ain't depressed," said my friend the Dipper.

"I knew an old boy was so depressed, he took a wood-splitting maul and busted every toilet in the house into chunks and threw them at the police car when it came," mused Kirby.

"Shit, you call that depressed?" exclaimed Chet. "I remember a time---"

"If that was all he owned, how'd he round up all the dead fish?" interrupted Fletch. "He must have owned a boat."

"I'd like to get me one of those overland car-boats," said the Dipper. "A man had one of those, he could just take off. Any direction."

"Who makes one of those?" asked Fletch.

"What do you want to know for?" I asked. "You'd just run it off a cliff."

"Do they make one that flies?" asked the Dipper.

I'm not saying that busting up all your toilets is a good idea. But I can see how it might be more gratifying to a man than seeking sympathy for being depressed. It wouldn't be gratifying worth a damn to anybody else in the house, especially anybody who was looking forward to a few minutes of quiet bathroom relaxation, but at least it would keep people busy, stimulate the economy. What the male mid-life crisis amounts to, probably, is a man's heaving and thrashing against having to admit to himself that he knows what depression means. When a man gets depressed, it's doubly depressing, because he knows he's not supposed to get depressed at all. He's supposed to be out vigorously fucking up. Women blues singers voluptuate in the blues more than men blues singers, who are more likely to sound like they are keeping one eye and a couple of incisors up out of the feeling.

There is a difference between "I have fucked up" and "I am fucked up." There was a time when a man might enjoy using "Boy, am I fucked up!" as a dope-and-liquor reference, because that meant he had fucked himself up. It was something he had done. A man feels obliged to represent himself as having acted, even if only upon himself. Lately, however, self-intoxication is also not what it used to be.

Well, I gotta get drunk

And I sure do dread it,

'Cause I know just what I'm gonna do.

I'll start to spend my money,

Calling everybody honey,

And wind up singing the blues.

So sings Willie Nelson, and so, once, did country singers carry on. Now Hank Williams, Jr., sings All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down. Richard Burton has quit drinking. So has Billy Carter. America is in a sober period. Fucking up is not reinforced by the culture. Famous people do sit-ups and curry their investments rather than raise hell and explore the forbidden. It got to the point, I guess, that the only forbidden things left were things that only a complete damn fool would do. But does that mean we have to put all our energy into aerobics?

It seems only yesterday that going out on a limb for an unstable convict with a dark view of the underside was exactly what serious people were supposed to do. When Norman Mailer--long a fuck-up genius--did it for Jack Henry Abbott and Abbott killed a man, it was a fuck-up that multitudes leaped to denounce and disparage. Multitudes applaud when Ronald Reagan speaks of locking people up and throwing away the key. Doesn't anybody remember when multitudes thought that there might be a sense in which criminals held a key--a key to evil, to sheer freedom? Remember when the culture wanted to delve into evil, into anarchy? Now it doesn't. Now it wants to see movies about the Force, Gandhi and sweet-natured E.T., who tells the granddaughter of John Barrymore (talk about a guy who could fuck up!) to "be good."

•

Famous athletes used to fuck up extravagantly, entertainingly. The team would be huddled in pregame locker-room prayer and somebody would look up and Joe Don Looney would be dancing the mashed potatoes. Tim Rossovitch would open his mouth in a fraternity meeting and a live bird would fly out. Now athletes either carry briefcases or get into grim trouble over drugs or both. I don't mean to suggest that I am in favor of drinking problems or that I don't take them seriously. But hasn't there been an amazing rash of reformed alcoholism in sports today? When Neil Allen was pitching for the Mets, he announced that he had a drinking problem, and the doctors said no, he didn't. The first case of hysterical alcoholism I ever heard of.

Sure, you have sports figures misbehaving today. John McEnroe pouts and snarls and curses at tennis judges twice his age, on television, and gets his wrist slapped occasionally and makes about $75,000 a night for exhibitions. George Steinbrenner hires and fires Billy Martin over and over in a numbing drama of subordination and insubordination. That kind of thing is not fucking up. That kind of thing is jerking off.

There doesn't seem to be any real heart to public fucking up today. When was the last time anybody did anything outrageous that was also funny? Or even stimulating? When Richard Pryor fucked up freebasing, he found that "when you run down the street on fire, people get out of your way." But he also toned down his act. The last I heard, he was considering not saying motherfucker anymore. And he was looking miserable on Oscar night, reading an unfunny, industry-prepared script. You hear people say now that Richard Pryor is yesterday's great black comedian, Eddie Murphy is today's. Eddie Murphy is upscale. He is on top of things. But he has yet to produce the kind of desperate, rallying exhilaration that Pryor snatched out of deep, beat-down, fucked-up blues.

Is there any bohemia anymore? Are there any crazy-poet, piss-in-the-fireplace characters like Maxwell Bodenheim? I'm not saying such characters are necessarily good poets. I'm saying we need such characters in the arts. To live in Greenwich Village or SoHo today, you've got to have two accountants. Artists are big businessmen. Remember when the pop-cultural scene was Jack Nicholson and the Saturday Night Live guys and Hunter Thompson and Kris Kristofferson and various British actor-rounders carousing? I guess John Belushi ran self-destructiveness into the ground. Belushi was a hell of a guy. What would a guy like that be doing speedballs for? He must have been kind of fucked up. That's chilling.

A man does not want to say, "Boy, am I fucked up!" to mean that there is something deeply wrong with him psychologically. Especially if there is. You never hear John Hinckley, Jr., for instance, say, "Am I fucked up!" Why you ever hear John Hinckley, Jr., say anything is beyond me; but, at any rate, your basic assassin-nebbish is driven to fuck up, big, so he won't have to admit that he is just, ingloriously, fucked up.

When you say. "I am fucked up," the person you are talking to feels called upon to say, "Oh, no, you're not," in a nice way. Men resist saying such mollifying things to each other, because mollifying has "Molly" in it. Men like to say things like "Roger wilco" and "Jack Daniel's." Men may enjoy accusing each other of being fucked up, in an obliquely complimentary way, but they would rather hear each other say, "Boy, have I fucked up!" because then they know a story is coming.

For instance: "I wake up all of a sudden and jump off the train, and I'm already in the parking lot before I realize that Jo Beth and the kids were riding with me, and they were asleep, too, and they are probably now halfway to Wilmington, Delaware. I figure, I'm this close to the car, I'll go ahead and get a drink somewhere and figure out how to track them down. So I jump into the Firebird---"

"You've got a new car?"

"Yep. Wrote a check for the whole thing. Had $320 in the bank. And I owe $19,000 in back taxes. If somebody calls you looking for me and you hear banking or IRS noises in the background, don't tell him anything. Anyway, I figure I'll have a couple of pops and think about the train thing, because I remember Jo Beth doesn't have any money with her, because I took the cash out of her pocketbook after she went to sleep because I was a little short.

"Fortunately, I get stopped for going 95 on the beltway on my way to the bar. But when I give the cop my license, I ask him whether he can't read it a little faster, because I'm in a hurry to get a drink, which is not a good move, because it turns out my license is expired and he gives me some shit and I'm not in the mood for it, so I give him some shit and, the next thing I know, he's got me out with my hands on top of the car, frisking me, and he finds this illicit substance my lawyer's wife gave me and one thing leads to another and I'm running down the median strip, you know, and I hear warning shots and the whole deal.

"So I run down the on ramp there, where it comes in from Turlbut Boulevard, and jump down and grab a light stanchion and climb down onto the lower level and hitch a ride with this Italian woman named Donna in a leopardskin van who takes me to this joint where I use the phone to call my lawyer, figuring I might have some legal problems, but when I get to the part about the illicit substance, he says 'Where'd you get that?' And I say, 'This broad I'm seeing, Ceci ...' about to say, 'Cecily gave it to me,' but then it hits me Cecily is his wife and there's this awkward pause--I should've said 'Cecilia' or something right quick, but I had so much on my mind--and he hangs up on me. I think I've really fucked up this time."

Well, that kind of story doesn't go over as well as it used to. For one thing, people have come to realize that it is no wonder that Jo Beth and Donna and Cecily are depressed.

•

Why is it that I think of fucking up, in the flamboyant, exploratory sense, as mostly a male thing? It may be because women have that nicely balanced XX chromosome, whereas men have that wild-hair XY. Or it may just be because men have traditionally had more opportunity to fuck up. Women traditionally have been home taking care of hearth and kiddies so men could have the latitude to fuck up. When you fuck up in the oil business, it's kind of exciting and you can start over. When you fuck up raising children, it's just bad. One way women have been kept in their traditional place is that when women fuck up, men don't slap them on the back. Men fuck up; women go wrong.

That is changing. But modern women who take control of their own lives (and so on) aren't interested in fucking up. They are interested in proving that they can run a tight-ship software firm. They are looking for 20-year-old guys with nice pecs to have some fun with, and then for stable mates who do housework and can keep track of their own socks. One thing women are definitely not interested in is becoming characters in men's fuck-up stories.

I also think there is a deep feeling in the land that nobody wants to be a character in a Ronald Reagan fuck-up story.

Personally, I think that the President's great gift is for seeming to be less out to lunch than he looks. He can play unruffledness well. And we feel that we have a stake in keeping him unruffled, because if he ever decides that being President is as messy a business as crime was in The Killers, he's also likely to decide that the whole world would be better off in heaven.

Reagan is very good at putting himself on the side of the angels. Whereas the patron saint of fucking up is Satan. Satan started out as an angel. But was he satisfied? No. He rebelled against the Almighty and, according to Paradise Lost, got himself

Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire.

"Headlong flaming." All right! It sounds so much more bracing than sitting around with nuns and Albert Schweitzer playing harps. Maybe nuns are completely different in heaven, but I wouldn't count on it. And Schweitzer is probably lost in hard-to-share nostalgias.

"You want to play some hoops for a change?" you ask Schweitzer, and he just mumbles "Ach"--not because in heaven the ball always goes in but because what he really wants is to be down putting poultices on the damned. And, hey, you've got to respect the guy. You've got to respect the nuns, too.

I seem to have written myself very nearly into an identification with the Prince of Darkness. (Milton did the same thing in Paradise Lost.) I want to back off from that. Sympathy for the Devil was a callow song (especially at Altamont, when The Rolling Stones were singing it while somebody was being stabbed to death by Hell's Angels). People who actually enter hell, prison, an asylum, the courts or delirium tremens invariably report that either heaven or workaday life is gravely preferable. I'll take their word for it. But isn't there some middle ground? Why do we have to draw back so far from the abyss?

Well, we've got this Nuclear Shadow problem. Not a devil-may-care issue. Let some general fuck up with the buttons and.... Vietnam was coupled with antiwar high-jinks and consciousness expansion, Watergate with dashing journalism. People don't get psyched up when they contemplate the fucking up of the universe as a whole.

But, hey, come on. Nature's little building block is a wild and crazy thing. All those quarks and electrons bounding around. Here's the Ultimate Fuck-up story: Morning after the world exploded, right? Millions of souls, in no mood for levity, stand at one gate or the other. Saint Peter (vexed) and the Devil (impressed, in spite of himself) exclaim simultaneously to the multitudes, "You people are really something! Who'd've thought you'd fuck up the atom?"

The Creator, hovering over the new void, intones:

"Oh, It Figured.

"I Probably Should Have Used Something a Little Smaller.

"Maybe I'll Wrap It a Little Tighter Next Time.

"Or Looser.

"But There's Always Going to Be a Little Kicker in There."

"Fucking up is trying things that probably won't work, just in case they will."