Big Red One

There's a scene in Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, a movie about World War II, that takes place in an insane asylum. The Germans have set up an artillery observation post on the top floor of the asylum, and the ensuing artillery fire has been creating issues for the American army. For those of you who are not familiar with these issues, what happens is the observation post says, “The Americans are over there! I can see them!” And the cannons blast away, and the Americans are unhappy. All this, of course, requires much speaking in acronyms, and the relaying of map coordinates, and that sort of thing.

Anyway, Lee Marvin’s infantry squad gets the job of going into the asylum and killing the Germans. They’re not happy about this, because it means at least some of them may get killed in the process. They’re much fonder of the idea of American artillery simply blowing up the asylum, or perhaps our air force flattening it with bombs. But it appears there are public relations issues about murdering insane civilians, so in they go.

They have help from a beautiful female insider, who slits a German throat or two. The whole movie has a thing for knives. Marvin himself, playing a sergeant, carries three knives that I counted – a bayonet, a hunting knife, and a World War I trench knife, which includes brass knuckles on the handle.

Anyway, the operation soon proceeds to the noisy phase. In the refectory, the Germans and Americans battle it out over the heads of inmates who are trying to eat lunch. Finally an insane person picks up a discarded Schmeisser and starts spraying the room with 9 mm bullets, saying, in the throes of his epiphany, “I am one of you! I am sane! I am sane!”

After a while Marvin shoots him. Un-aimed fire tends to annoy sergeants.

Sam Fuller, the director, is making a point here, as only he can. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I think it has something to do with war being crazy.

However, as I was watching the movie recently, I found myself thinking about suggestible individuals and the shootings in Tucson earlier this year. At the time, there was a lot of talk about how nobody told the shooter in Tucson to shoot anyone. And I’m fine with that. But our entire culture has been suffused with violence for a long time, and in recent years our political rhetoric has been accelerating rapidly to keep pace. I’m thinking this may have something to do with the rapid decline in the number of politicians who have actually fought in a war. John McCain, God bless him, is becoming something of a relic in this regard.

There’s an old line that goes back to a senior church official in the Albigensian Crusade, which took place in southern France during the Middle Ages. He was reportedly asked what the troops should do with prisoners from a town that was about to be conquered, and according to a contemporary writer the churchman said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”

As the 2012 presidential campaign gets under way, I have some advice for our current leaders: Be careful what you say. People may take you literally. They have done so in the past.

(With apologies to those who hate footnotes, I need to add one. Whether the church leader, Arnau Amalric, actually said what Caesarius of Heisterbach says he said is much in dispute. However, the massacre at the town of Béziers, in July 1209, is not in doubt. You can look it up. Arnau Amalric happily wrote to the pope that 20,000 people were killed. But it seems unlikely that there were that many people living in the town at that time. Welcome to the study of medieval history, where indisputable facts can be hard to come by.)

No Fear

“I think some runners just like the pain,” said Katy. We were on our bikes, heading up Martin Luther King Drive in Philadelphia, almost at the Falls Bridge. It’s a pretty piece of parkland, a sylvan bubble just feet from an expressway and a railroad line. You can’t see either one at this point, because of the trees. And then there are the fields of grass and, on the right, the river with its rowers.

Not a bad place to be skewered by a very honest young woman who knows how to speak her mind with diplomatic indirection. I hadn’t been able to go running for a while because of an injury I had basically inflicted on myself. Running injuries are almost always overuse injuries, and I’m an artist at joking about obsessive-compulsive disorder and simple fanaticism. But I’d never looked myself in the mirror while shaving and said, “I like pain.”

I’d helped Katy train for her first two marathons. In the beginning, I had felt faster, and I had been wiser – at least about preparing for a marathon. The faster thing changed early, when she decided I’d be okay with it. And now the tide had shifted in the wisdom river.

As children we’re taught to fear pain. It’s an easy lesson. After all, pain hurts. But I prefer to think of pain as a language. The body has things to tell us. If we listen, we will learn. It’s hard to listen to something you fear. You’re too busy running away.

I remember, I think it was my second marathon, in 2002. I was in mile 26, coming down Kelly Drive past Lloyd Hall. The finish line was just up a slight rise and around a curve, in front of the Art Museum. And I remember feeling that my lungs were very tired from all the breathing they had been doing. It wasn’t really pain, more just a sensation that the surface fabric, down inside my lungs, had been worn down by all that air. I’ve never had that sensation since, possibly because of better training. And I think it’s also true that, in mile 26 of a marathon, the definition of pain has shifted a bit.

What did this sensation tell me? It told me I was okay. It told me I was very tired. And it told me to do more long runs next time.

The idea of liking pain takes you to some very strange places – self-flagellation in the Christian church, and masochism for the psychologically inclined. None of this works for me. It would help if people talked about this more, with a little more depth than, “Boy, that really hurt.”

I do have certain pains that are old friends. There’s one in my right knee. It’s from an old injury. Every once in a while it just shows up for a visit. Doesn’t mean any harm. Goes away after a while.

So I have some old friends, and I do seem to make new acquaintances on a fairly regular basis. But do I like pain? I don’t know. But I do know that I don’t fear it. When it shows up, I don’t run away. I listen.

There: Now You’ve Got Something You Can Eat!

My cousin Butch was a few years older than me, so he was probably in high school when this story took place. Butch grew up on his parent’s dairy farm; his paternal grandparents lived on a farm less than a mile away. I don’t want to romanticize the farmer’s life, which is full of hard work in all weather and, in the case of dairy farming, involves shoveling huge amounts of cow manure. But farmers do have a lot of contact with nature, and I’m inclined to think that’s a good thing.

Butch’s father, my Uncle Ed, was a gregarious fellow who loved to tell stories, and listen to them, and who made friends easily. Among these were the hunters from Queens, in New York City, whom my brother refers to as the Woodchuck Brigade. They just showed up one day and asked Uncle Ed if they could hunt his land and possibly kill a few woodchucks. Uncle Ed was thrilled. Farmers don’t like woodchucks, by and large. Neither did Henry David Thoreau, although he puts a reasonably good face on it in Walden.

They were nice guys. They weren’t very good shots, but they became good friends and frequent visitors. Eventually Uncle Ed even encouraged them to park an old trailer in the woods behind his house, so they wouldn’t have to pay for motels.

So here’s the story. One day Butch was out walking the woods with one of the hunters, who happened to be a Sanitation Department police officer from Queens who was armed with his trusty .222 rifle with telescopic sight and also had his .38 service revolver strapped to his hip in a holster.

I’m a bit vague on how they came upon the rabbit. Butch isn’t with us anymore, and my brother says he doesn’t remember the story. Were they in a pasture or on a dirt road? Why didn’t the rabbit run away? Had it been caught in a trap, or injured by a vehicle? My brother, who has no memory of any of this, suggests that the rabbit might have been rabid, which adds self-defense to mercy killing. Then my brother did something truly useful. He suggested that I ask our cousin Mary Lyn, Butch’s sister.

So I did. She too had forgotten the story, but it came back to her. Like me she’s not certain of all the details. She thinks Butch may have been out with several hunters, and that one of them had shot at the rabbit and wounded it.

Anyway, there they were, standing around trying to figure out what to do. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to use a rifle with a telescopic sight to shoot an animal that was lying at your feet. So the Sanitation policeman drew his service revolver and prepared to put a .38 slug into the rabbit’s skull.

Clearly our hunter had seen too many movies where cowboys dispatch broken-down horses and cows with their trusty .45s. My favorite is Jack Palance, in City Slickers, who blows away an injured cow and tells an aghast Billy Crystal, “She was sufferin’.”

Rabbits are rather frail creatures compared to cows, and a .38 slug would basically cause the animal to disintegrate. So my cousin Butch intervened. He picked up the rabbit and twisted its neck until it was broken. Then he held the dead critter out to the policeman and said, “There. Now you’ve got something you can eat.”

Now that I’ve told you that story, I have to tell you that it’s only one version. Butch’s daughter Andrea, whom Mary Lyn brought into the loop (never say that email isn’t a wonderful thing) heard the story a lot more than the rest of us, and what she says makes sense. Apparently the Woodchuck Brigade managed to shoot the rabbit in the woods behind Uncle Ed’s house, but just winged him, so he fled (I envision a kind of panicked hobbling) to the dirt road in front of the house, where it seems locomotion failed him.

Meanwhile the Woodchuck Brigade was in hot pursuit. Andrea says, “Dad put extra flourishes on describing how foolish the boys looked running after the rabbit as though it had just robbed a bank.” And she reports that the hunter with the pistol (I do believe he was with the Sanitation Department) actually raised his rifle – the one with the telescopic sight – to dispatch the poor beast at a range of ten feet.

That was when Butch “stepped in front of the pointed rifle and scooped the rabbit up to twist its neck before there could have been any opportunity for debate.”

Andrea adds, “Sometimes the moral was a sort of ‘country mouse v. town mouse’ angle while other times it was more about remembering the simple solution is often the best, no sense in coveting the fancy shiny toys of others.”

Andrea adds that her father “was a man of few words, but if you knew how and when to get him started with stories it was just like putting a quarter in a jukebox.”

But back to the shiny toys – in this case the guns. I was going to say that Uncle Ed didn’t own one. Mary Lyn says he did, and would occasionally hunt woodchucks, in his own way. There was a pond near Uncle Ed’s house where the woodchucks liked to frolic, and Uncle Ed would occasionally shoot at them, as Mary Lyn says, “from the dining room window!!”

Mary Lyn reports that Uncle Ed had also tried deer hunting once, many years before: “He had a big, beautiful buck in his sights, and then the deer turned and looked straight at him. He put his gun down and went home. He always supported his neighbors’ right to hunt for food, but couldn’t do it himself.”

Thanks, Mary Lyn and Andrea. I loved these two men, and these stories are part of the reason why.

Finding an Analogy for the Health-Care Mandate

Dear me. One in three federal judges feels that the new health-care law’s individual mandate – that everyone is required to buy health insurance – exceeds government’s powers under the Constitution.

The new health-care law is really complicated and abstract (a lawyer’s dream, in other words), so a lot of people have been using analogies to help bring the issues into focus for us simple folk. I’d been fond of the states’ uncontested right to force automobile owners to buy insurance for their cars. However, it turns out that really smart lawyers can distinguish this analogy into oblivion.

Those of us who remember our childhood civics classes will recall that the federal government only gets the powers enumerated in the Constitution. All other powers remain with the states (except when they don’t, but that’s another story). So the states can require insurance, but the feds can’t.

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that there’s another flaw to the analogy with car insurance – compliance. We do know that there are people on the road in Philadelphia who actually have car insurance. We’re not entirely an endangered species, but if you have a collision at an intersection in this town, the likelihood of the other driver having insurance probably isn’t much better than a coin toss.

If compliance with the new health-care law looks at all like compliance with car insurance, we might as well go home now.

So the car insurance analogy is pretty much mangled. And with compliance levels being what they are, conservatives are unlikely to mount a 50-state push to repeal car insurance laws as an infringement on our liberties. Why bother? They’ve already won.

I thought for a while about the military draft. I had thought, when I was younger and there was a war in Vietnam, that the draft might be considered involuntary servitude, and therefore unconstitutional. But then it was explained to me that, in this country, government has a right going back to colonial times to call all adult males to the common defense of the community. How the right of the states to raise militias got transferred to the federal government is something I’m still a little hazy on.

But I’m thinking if we can force an 18-year-old man to charge a machine-gun nest, we really ought to require him to buy health insurance.

Or maybe conservatives should get a judge to declare the military draft unconstitutional. I’d love to see that one go to the Supreme Court.

Here’s another analogy that I came up with – the tax deduction for charitable giving. Government, as a matter of policy, encourages charitable giving. Remember those Thousand Points of Light? So if you give money to a qualified charity, Uncle Sam lets you pay less in taxes.

Well, they say charity begins at home. So if you buy a health insurance policy for yourself, you’re doing a good deed, and Uncle Sam doesn’t make you pay a penalty.

Apparently the distinction between a tax break and not having to pay a penalty is a big deal. I’m afraid I don’t see it. And there’s apparently a feeling that we shouldn’t be forcing people to give money to private organizations. Well, charities are private. And apparently the government has never punished people for not doing something. On this last one, I just have to laugh. Let’s do a little thought experiment. You receive a telegram from the United States government, one that begins with “Greetings.” It’s an invitation to attend a form of summer camp run by the government. You decide not to go, and you’re a bit rude and you don’t bother to respond to the invitation. What happens next?

A Cure for Anger

A few days ago I was running my eleventh marathon, and I did something I’d never done before: I dropped out. It was a gradual decision. Early on I noticed a certain, highly uncharacteristic, listlessness, and then I started coughing, and feeling short of breath, and then a bit light-headed, and it occurred to me that I still had the cold I thought I’d shaken off a week previously. As I passed the 14-mile mark I decided it wasn’t worth it, and I stopped.

I wasn’t in a lot of pain, but running has taught me that pain is a language, and sometimes the messages spoken softly are the ones you need to listen to most carefully.

You might think I’d be upset about my first DNF (Did Not Finish), but I wasn’t. A few years ago I was reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and I came across this line: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” My son thinks this is very Buddhist, and I’m inclined to agree.

I confess I’d never given much thought to the distinction between pain and suffering. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the guy to be providing exact definitions of terms that clearly mean a lot of different things to different people. But here are some thoughts that have worked for me. I see suffering as a psychological reaction to pain. That’s why suffering is optional. With pain, you don’t get to choose: It just shows up.

I hasten to add that pain can be physical or mental. Years ago the grandmother of a friend said this to me about children: “When they’re little they tread on your toes; when they’re bigger they tread on your heart.” And in both cases, it seems to me, there is pain.

But is there suffering? Well that’s up to you, or, in the case of my first DNF, it was up to me. I decided not to suffer. I’ve been doing that a lot since I read Murakami’s book. It feels good. There’s a freedom and a clarity to not suffering. Also it allows you to focus on dealing with the pain.

There is a downside, though. Suffering clearly buys you quite a lot in America today. First of all, it makes you a victim. And everybody in America seems to want to be a victim. Even billionaire hedge fund managers feel free to announce that they’re victims. It turns out that people like me think the taxes hedge fund managers pay are too low. So I’m the oppressor, and they’re the victims.

And suffering gives you something else – anger. Which you are free to hurl at your oppressor whenever and wherever you choose.

I remember, during the last World Cup, watching soccer players unaccountably drop to the ground and start writhing as if in pain. This is apparently, on the world stage, how you try to convince an official that a foul has been committed.

It seems we’re a lot like that now. You might almost call suffering a national addiction.

I prefer the baseball player who gets hit with a pitch and trots nonchalantly to first base. Getting hit by a thrown baseball hurts quite a lot – I know this. I also know that that baseball player is not going to rub his arm while he’s standing at first base. Not gonna happen.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about lowering the level of vituperation in our public discourse. We all need to calm down and be less angry, we’re told by a variety of self-appointed hall monitors. But how exactly are we supposed to do that? Once you’re a victim, once you’re suffering, anger is pretty much inevitable.

Here’s my thought. Anger proceeds from suffering. Strong link, pretty much unbreakable in my opinion. Suffering proceeds from pain. It’s a psychological reaction, remember? And, I think, a pretty weak link. Cut that link, and nip the whole victim syndrome in the bud.

If you want to. It’s up to you.

So how do you do it? How do you slay the suffering monster? I suspect that each one of us is different. I’ve found laughter is very useful, and I’m planning to do a lot more of it in the coming months. And maybe I’ll enter another marathon.

Rummaging in America’s Attic

A while ago, before the heat of summer, Lois and I were spending the weekend down in Wilmington, visiting her cousin Bobbie and Bobbie’s husband, Andre. After dinner on Saturday night, Andre mentioned that he hadn’t been up to the flea markets in Lancaster for a while. I mentioned that I liked flea markets and enjoyed going to the Brooklyn Flea when we were up in New York visiting the children. So then Andre asked if I’d like to go up to Lancaster Sunday morning, and I said yes and asked when we would be leaving.

Maybe I should have asked about the departure time before I said yes. Anyway, the sun did rise before we got to Lancaster, and Andre loaned me a warm coat that he kept in the back of the car.

I’m glad I went, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was fun. Andre is very good company, and he’s as fascinated by old tools as I am. The Shaker Museum in Old Chatham, N.Y., used to have a table of old tools whose use the museum had been unable to identify. Anybody could play What’s This For? Just fill out a slip of paper and put it in the box.

I’m terrible at figuring out the purpose of old tools. Andre’s quite good at it.

Anyway, we spent a good amount of time at the outside tables, rummaging through the contents of people’s attics and barns. Then we went inside, where the more established dealers have their stalls, and where the prices are a bit higher. I have never seen so many roll-top desks in my life. This was more like wandering through living rooms – grandma’s and grandpa’s living room, to be exact. I glanced at a handsome table and the bric-a-brac that covered its top. I’ve often wondered how the grandmas of the world managed to dust all these things, but they did. Near a corner of the table there was a small black & white photograph in a standing frame. I looked a little closer. It was a young couple, happy and well-fed – perhaps newly married some 70 or 80 years ago.

The SS at Home

I looked a littler closer. The man, presumably the husband, was round and smiling. He was wearing a military uniform – an SS uniform. Hitler’s Waffen-Schutzstaffel.

I decided not stare at my little discovery, and instead moved on. Around another corner was a stall given over largely to old firearms, mainly deer rifles that had seen better days. In a glass case, though, was the pride of the collection, lovingly cared for, recently oiled. There was a Luger – standard German army issue in World War I, and tons of them saw service in World War II. Next to it lay a Mauser. The Mauser is an even older pistol than the Luger. It’s one of the first automatics, and it looks clunky and hard to handle. Still, it also saw active Wehrmacht service in both world wars.

I was a little shocked. I don’t believe I’d ever seen an actual Luger before – just in the movies – and it had not occurred to me that I would ever see an actual Mauser. I looked a bit and then, not wanting to stare, turned around and looked across the aisle.

And that’s how I came to the flag shop. There it was, across the aisle from the guns. A festival of colors, and in the corner, on a table, under a bunch of flags I didn’t recognize, there was a red field peeking out, and just a bit of a white circle, and there, vanishing under the other flags, just a sliver of a square of black. The foot of a swastika. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t see it. Time for lunch.

James Carville has described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. Things are a little more complicated than that. There aren’t a lot of Confederates in the attic – Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania, after all. Instead we have in our attic – what? Well, we’ve got some paintings by Andrew Wyeth of his friend and neighbor Karl Kuerner. Kuerner was a farmer who had served in World War I as a machine gunner, and been wounded. He fought the war in a Wehrmacht uniform, and when he emigrated to the United States, he brought the uniform with him.

And Wyeth painted him in his uniform – the all-encompassing greatcoat and the iconic steel helmet made famous by two world wars and innumerable movies. My favorite is a late painting, from 1989, which I discovered a few years ago when I visited the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford. It’s called Snow Hill. It’s winter; Karl in his uniform and a number of Wyeth’s other regular models are dancing around a Maypole. It’s a bit out of season for a Maypole. There are a lot of weird things about this painting, but for me the weirdest thing is the old German guy dancing around in a uniform that those of us who are a certain age will never forget.

The Molly Maguires

I confess I’m not an expert on Pennsylvania history. I grew up in New York, where William Penn did not loom large in the grammar school curriculum. It was more Peter Stuyvesant – Peg-Leg Pete, we children called him. And, later, Boss Tweed and Jimmy Walker, all the lovable rogues who probably weren’t so lovable in person.

So I find that I regularly have the opportunity to learn something new about my adopted state. Here’s another example: The Molly Maguires. I’d heard of them, but that’s about it. It didn’t help that I kept confusing them with the Wobblies, who are something entirely different. There’s a 1970 movie called The Molly Maguires. It stars Sean Connery, Richard Harris, and Samantha Eggar. Appearing in a small role is Anthony Zerbe, better known to my daughter for his work on The Young Riders, where he played the old guy.

The Molly Maguires reminds me a bit of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, a work of fiction inspired by an unrecoverable past. That’s the basic problem with the Mollies. We don’t know much about them, and we’re not going to know. Pretty much everything we do know comes from the people who were trying to kill them. It puts me in mind of the Albigensian heresy in France, which led to an actual Crusade in the thirteenth century. Virtually everything we know about the Albigensian heretics comes from their Inquisitors. Talk about a thick filter. Nor were the Crusaders and the Inquisitors always concerned with the fine points of legal procedure. This is where we get the quote “Kill them all; God will know his own.”

Anyway, the Molly Maguires were Irish coal miners in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, which is not very far from Philadelphia. Today the area is probably best known for the town of Centralia, which has been plagued for several decades by an underground coal fire that has resisted all attempts to put it out.

The events for which the Mollies are known took place shortly after the Civil War. Trade unions were in their infancy, and after the Panic of 1873 the country found itself in the midst of one of the worst business downturns in its history.

It was the era of robber baron capitalism, and even in gentler times the bosses have been known to hand the hardship of recession on to the workers, rather than keep it for themselves. The Mollies took exception to the practices of the boss class. In this they were hardly alone. But their response cut to the chase, as we say in the movies. While union organizers were talking about negotiations and strikes, the Mollies took to sabotage – apparently they sometimes used explosives, which look very pretty in the movie – and to intimidation and murder. They didn’t just kill underlings, either. They offed the mine bosses.

That is, if the Mollies actually existed. There are those who think they were thought up by the bosses, as a way to crush the nascent union movement. I’m inclined to think the Molly Maguires did exist. The mine bosses definitely died. If you want to organize an assassination program, you don’t necessarily need the CIA (although the Phoenix program in Vietnam is a classic of its type – it gave us the phrase “terminate with extreme prejudice”), but still such a program requires some planning and direction, and even I am not prepared to believe that the bosses organized the killing of quite so many of their own class.

I’m not convinced the Mollies ever dressed up as women, although that may have been the source of their name. Frankly, after watching Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks, rising from the tall grass to commit mayhem, all while dressed as a pioneer woman, it occurs to me that travesty, to use the technical term, requires both talent and an appropriate context. So I think the Mollies should leave the cross-dressing to Philadelphia’s Mummers, who dress up in odd costumes and parade on Broad Street on New Year’s Day. (The Mummers, by the way, used to be called the New Year’s Shooters, because they would wander around shooting off firearms – this after imbibing impressive amounts of alcohol.)

We must remember that it was an inchoate era. On the workers’ side, the various elements of entertainment, social welfare, trade unionism, and political assassination had not yet sorted themselves out. On the management side, Fortune 500 corporate management and the Harvard Business School have yet to put in an appearance. Instead, we have a clear nostalgia for England, where the local squire would be named justice of the peace as a matter of course, thereby binding economic with political power. Perhaps not so different, as a practical matter, from what we have today, but still the atmospherics are from a completely different place.

Interestingly, the two main characters in our drama are not Mollies. Instead, they belong to the management side. The protagonist was Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad, which in addition to hauling coal was a major owner of coal mines in the anthracite region. His Sancho Panza was an undercover agent in the employ of the Pinkerton detective agency, James McParlan. Both of these men were Irish.

McParlan penetrated the Molly Maguire organization and forwarded regular reports to the Pinkerton agency, which as a matter of course forwarded them to Gowen. The information then seems somehow to have gotten into the hands of the local vigilantes, who proceeded with their very own assassination program.

I’m a little uncertain as to why Gowen didn’t just stick with the vigilante murders. They seemed to be going well, although the vigilantes did manage to shoot a pregnant woman to death. I think today we would call that collateral damage. At any rate, the vigilante approach avoided the nuisance of trials and the possibility of not-guilty verdicts. Perhaps winning wasn’t enough. Perhaps Gowen felt the need to be right as well, and to have his righteousness validated by the community. It seems that even robber barons can have their weak points.

For some time, Gowen had been engaging in a propaganda campaign against the Mollies that makes the run-up to the Iraq war look like an exercise in dispassionate policy analysis. So the ground was prepared and the show trials began, with Gowen himself serving as a special prosecutor (he had previously been district attorney in Schuylkill County). McParlan was the chief witness. In the end, 20 men were hanged to death, and the Mollies did a slow fade-to-black.

The world moved on. Or did we? I find the Molly Maguire story deeply unsettling. It seems that we in America are never many steps away from pure savagery, and we forget this at our peril. The Mollies themselves strike me as a personification of the unrestrained id, what someone with a more ideological bent might call the righteous anger of the proletariat. The bosses, on the other hand, seem to possess the righteous anger of the rich, and very little in the way of a superego that might restrain their baser impulses.

There’s something about the bosses, and their lust for unfettered power. I’m a city boy, and I’m used to things being run by a sclerotic oligarchy. But at least oligarchs have to answer to one another. Out in the country, in the coal fields, I see a yearning for true autocracy – unilateral control by one man, who answers to nobody.

Franklin Gowen, Autocrat of the Anthracite. And he just about was that, for a few years, until J.P. Morgan knocked him off his perch.

Muhammad Islam

The Germans and the Irish are the two largest ethnic groups in the United States, and it occurs to me that I don’t know them very well. Come to think of it, I’m no longer sure that I understand America very well. There are a lot of internal narratives out there; they can be highly particularistic and, it seems, extremely persistent. So much for the great American melting pot. And if we all agree on less than we were told in grammar school, then one casualty is the concept of the United States as a fundamentally middle-class country. Clearly there are those, like Franklin Gowen, who yearn for a country of rich and poor, with very little in the middle. By the way, Gowen wound up committing suicide by shooting himself in the head.

I’m thinking of a little boy named Muhammad Islam. I tutored him last spring, at an after-school program in South Philly called Mighty Writers. Muhammad is bright, cheerful, a hard worker, an all-around nice kid. He’s also black, and a Muslim, and, as my daughter remarked, Muhammad Islam – that’s a heavy name to put on a little kid.

Maybe he’ll be okay. Years ago, Johnny Cash did a song called “A Boy Named Sue.” Sue’s father gave him the name because he figured that a boy named Sue would have to learn early to stand up for himself. That sounds like a better strategy than relying on the kindness of strangers.

Some Things Actually Get Better

Francis has been cutting my hair for several decades. He likes to talk, and I admit I keep going back for both the haircuts and the conversation. The other day he said something that startled me. In between snips with the scissors, he suggested that, as we get older, our world gets smaller. We talked about it a little bit - the comfortable daily routine, dinner out at the same places, seeing the same friends. A few years ago, a friend of mine said, "I don't really want any new friends. I like the ones I have."

My initial reaction was that I liked the idea of a world that gets smaller, or at least more predictable. The familiar routine, people you like who are unlikely to surprise you. I didn't get very far, though, before I remembered my mother, who, around the age of 80, pointed out that friends have the unfortunate habit of dying.

And then there was also my own experience over the last year or so. Since I left CIGNA, my employer of 16 years, I think my world is larger, and, dare I say it, I think my life is better. Certainly it's more fun.

Is it the most fun I've ever had? Maybe, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for journalism. Before I went to CIGNA, I had spent most of my career as a magazine editor. I loved it. My job allowed me to talk to anybody about virtually anything. In my enthusiasm, I failed to recognize for many years that magazines were, in fact, a dying industry. By the time I got to CIGNA, I was just grateful for a steady paycheck.

My gratitude was tempered by the strangeness of this new corporate world that I found myself in. One morning, when I was still very new on the job, I got on an elevator in the CIGNA building and said good morning to the man who was standing next to me. He looked over impassively, as if I were a stone in the road, and said nothing. It turned out that he was a vice president, and I was not.

The class structure at CIGNA was overt and rigid, enforced at strategic points with locked doors and uniformed guards. Most of the people I worked with were very nice, but we engaged one another on a very narrow range of subjects. And at the end of the day we went home and didn't talk much about work.

The situation wasn't helped by the fact that our chairman, Bill Taylor, was so introverted that he would habitually get on the elevator, back into a corner, and look at his shoes.

I remember one occasion in particular. Our little group had managed to coopt an executive conference room for a wedding shower (yes, we did have small victories). The conference room was behind two locked doors that were guarded by a disembodied voice. To gain access you stood in front of the locked door and spoke to the voice. We had a lovely party, and when it was done we all went back to the elevator lobby. I believe our boss, Denise Hill, was carrying the remains of the cake. It could have been Todd Lane, but I think he was in charge of the silly hat made out of a paper plate and all the bows from the presents.

Anyway, the elevator opened, and it was empty except for a man standing in the corner, staring at his shoes. It was our capo di tutti capi, Bill Taylor. He didn't look up. We got on. I think I was carrying several shopping bags full of presents for the bride, who likewise had her arms full of loot. Denise had some rank in the organization; the rest of us weren't about to speak to Mr. Taylor, who continued to examine his shoes. Then, as I recall it, Denise turned on her thousand-watt smile, and I knew she was going to do something.

"Hi, Bill," she said. "Would you like a piece of cake?"

Bill Taylor, who could easily fire us all before we got to the ground floor, shuddered slightly and looked up a bit in Denise's general direction. "Um, no, thanks," he said bashfully, and resumed examining his shoes.

That was life at CIGNA. I do like things better now. Sorry, Francis. My world is bigger than it was, it is full of people who are often very different from me, and we talk about everything under the sun, from the trivial to the important. It's sort of like getting my hair cut, but I get to do it every day.

Recently I was part of a group visiting with a Pennsylvania State Representative in his district office. The Blue Cross organizations in Pennsylvania, as part of their charitable mission, had been funding a medical program called adultBasic, which provides coverage for people who, for one reason or another, don't qualify for Medicaid (or Medical Assistance, as it's known in Pennsylvania). The Blues, in a move of oafish high-handedness that borders on the despicable, announced that they planned to end their funding for adultBasic at the end of the year. The result will be the closing of the program, and 40,000 people, many of them desperately ill, will lose their medical coverage on December 31.

I don't think this is exactly what President Obama had in mind when he signed the federal health-care reform bill. In fact, you can look at the killing of adultBasic as a form of communication - the Blues giving their opinion of the new law. We had come to the Representative's office to ask him if something might not be done to rectify the situation. At one point in the meeting I found myself saying to the Rep, who was very nice and wanted to be on our side, "Sir, if we don't fix this, people are going to die."

In 16 years at CIGNA, I had never said those words, or anything like them. It felt good.