Idiot America

The second fall after I graduated I went back to Amherst for homecoming. I was living in Washington, DC, working as a clerk for an HMO ( I thought I might use the university tuition benefit) by day, bussing tables at night. I flew to Boston, where my brother lived and took a bus out. I didn't have a pair of glasses and I'd run out of contacts. There was someone I wanted to see. That night, as I was about to cross the common to go the big party in one of the old frat houses I ran right into a bunch of guys I knew from my class. "C'mon," they said, and we all went to a bar. They made me do shots with them. I got free of them and made my way to the party, suddenly realizing I was drunk. The person I wanted to see was at the party. I saw her from a distance. I asked a friend of hers if it were her and what I got in return was a rather loud and insistent "Leave her alone." So there I was, having come a long way just to see someone, and that's pretty much how it went the rest of the time, 'til I got a ride back to Boston by the same guys who'd gotten me drunk drinking shots when there was a girl I wanted to see. Maybe there had been signals I missed, being near-sighted, the night after the first party, seeing Miss Leave Her Alone pass right by me, but I figured I'd made an idiot out of myself, and so I left Amherst, my old hometown, the place of my learning and erudition, the place of President Kennedy's great speech of the power and place of poetry a month before he died. It was cold and rainy when I got back to Boston and the house where my brother lived near Inman Square. And I had my history of being a jerk to think over. And whether or not one deserves to be forgiven, well, that's a good question, or maybe not.

My brother was going to the Kennedy School at the time. We went down to see a new movie a Guggenheim had made remembering JFK as it was in the latter part of November. We crowded into a small amphitheater and the movie proceeded. Old campaign footage from the early congressional and senatorial run, on up to the lively fellow being unloaded in a metal casket off of his plane, the numb awkwardness of his men lowering it off the lift into a Navy ambulance. And the next day I flew back to Washington and to my jobs and to Idiot America.

Being judged, if you didn't know, is a painful thing. You know you're being judged only because you're being judged. It's against your will. You want nothing to do with it. But it has its effect. You never wanted the stakes to be so, but somehow they got racheted up. "Wait, you're missing something," you want to say. "You've misunderstood my intentions, my style..." But, if you make some form of protest, you only get dragged in deeper.

My brother had an interesting thought the other day taking me out to dinner. He wondered if a JFK could ever be elected President in these times of Idiot America, quick to judge, quick to the negative, quick to take dislike to anyone of culture and learning and poetry, as those are regarded as weaknesses in times it seems "you gotta fight." JFK was elected (narrowly), he speculated, because of belief in the voting populous that they shared the experience of being a veteran of WWII with him. So he was palpable and even understandable and inspiring, just as his "Ask Not" was commemorated very recently. Fondly remembered, at least by some in our cynical selfish times. (The author of a book, Ask Not, interviewed on MSNBC by Chris Matthews, remembers grown men, veterans themselves, breaking into tears before the television.)

Idiot America, fostered so well by Ronald Reagan (himself a backlash against the excesses of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and seeing perhaps too many of his own sins in the hippie culture afterward), has grown up quite remarkably and robustly in the years since. Seeds were planted. So we are quick to judge, quick to bully, quick to shout our own 'opinions' without the slightest sense of respect, and tarnish just about everything. (Even in my last years at Amherst, I didn't feel particularly supported and fostered by the highly-competitive exclusive world of specialized scholastic higher education enough to have much faith in their shelter.) Do we think anymore? Do we consider matters carefully, or do we just throw on thing after another, as if on a trash-heap?

I too can be blamed for dumbing things down, for not doing enough, not reading enough, not being part of the dialog and the process of the political. Maybe I am too dumbfounded by my exile to be efficacious. I hide in literary dreams.

But there most be hope. There must be belief in common sense and in the spirit of humanity. There must be some way that being cultured and aware of arts and literature and learning, of the kind found at the old public library, have a positive effect upon us, to 'make gentle the ways of man,' as RFK put it, quoting from the Ancient Greeks.

I wrote a book, yes, about a place called Amherst and the time when young people embrace learning, hopeful that it will stay with them as they go out into the world. It was a way of keeping a sense of poetry and careful thought alive, an expression of some hope that people would not be hasty to judge another.