The Great Fear of 1986 In which Winston Churchill and Dagwood Bumstead meet the King of the Slave Traders.
Griffin, Bryan F.
"The Great Fear of 1986 In which Winston Churchill and Dagwood Bumstead meet the King of the Slave Traders." You are all familiar, are you not, with the Five Telltale Symptoms of Diabetes? We won't ask for a show of hands, this time, but if there are any offensively healthy Americans in the room who...
...The wood was green, and there wasn't enough of it, so the first flames barely singed the prisoner...
...Poison control kits...
...In some respects physical pain has been mitigated by advancing medical science, and increasing comforts have been placed at our disposal by scientific invention...
...Like everything that happened to Mr...
...and lo, unprepared for such a poisonous gospel, the children turn—ever so naturally—to bigger and better drugs...
...Do you suffer from . . . ? Do you know how to tell if you have...
...The faculty club just spent five hundred bucks on a compact disc player from Bloomingdale's and now you tell me I'm going to diel It just can't happen, that's all...
...If at any moment in this long series of sensations a grey veil deepening into blackness had descended upon the sanctum I should have felt or feared nothing additional...
...Churchill's heart from any man (though the erratic policies of a lifetime are fair game...
...The Last Line of Defense I s it safe to say that no one reads John Newton anymore...
...What thou wilt, when thou wilt, and how thou wilt...
...His power has been the power not of comprehension, but of stoicism— of bravery in the face of wcomprehension— and as such it is untrustworthy...
...So the fire was lit a fourth time...
...But when he was black in the mouth, and his tongue swollen, that he could not speak, yet his lips went till they were shrunk to the gums: and he knocked his breast with his hands, until one of his arms fell off and then knocked still with the other, what time the fat, water, and blood, dropped out at his fingers' ends...
...Are you a victim of Chronic Fatigue...
...the fellow was, after all, the Curate of Olney, Bucks...
...Nor has scientific alleviation of physical pain meant any reduction in the place of man's most acute suffering, that of pain in the spirit...
...Indeed no nation will ever make a dent in its "drug problem" until it stops staring at the consequences of the intoxicant and starts asking itself why so many of its working-class citizens prefer the passing glory of that intoxicant to the prospect of a constructive life...
...We Care...
...We hear you, as they say at Bloomie's...
...Koppel will be assuring us just one more time that Exposure To The Sun Can Kill Us, or that Statistics Show that nine out of ten Americans may be dead someday...
...You'll find an official wall poster there—it's the one with the threatening red headline asking the musical question...
...In a more polite mood we might note parenthetically that it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of wellmeaning liberalism, and one of the primary reasons for its perpetual failure, that it always attacks the symptoms— in this case, a youthful tendency to intoxication—rather than the disease, which is almost always fear itself...
...surely we should be doing the work that needs doing, before the night comes when no man may work...
...Hey, this isn't just another routine memo, cupcakes, this is a direct order: "Don't Be In One Of Them...
...A coy remark, to hp sure: they weren't even reading him a hundred years ago, if we may take the word of a reigning literary butterfly of that day, who noted with characteristic condescension that "Newton's prose works . . . simple in style, sincere, fervid, and soulsearching, were long popular, but are now little read...
...It was Norman Vincent Peale, of all people— not the Norman Vincent Peale of today, the popular prophet of Positive Thinking and Feeling Good About Yourself, but the Peale of fifty years ago, the earnest young clergyman struggling in the chaotic wake of the first Great War and the last Great Depression...
...The assistant professors will say that we've somehow lost track of the point here, in the smoke of the Battle of Omdurman and the Boer War...
...Muggeridge notes, "there is an element you could almost call decency in us which says...
...But though difficult, it is practicable and attainable, and actually attained by believers...
...Churchill—he becomes afraid to get in an airplane, afraid of inactivity and disease, sullen at the thought of extinction...
...Child Abuse...
...Several unsuccessful escape attempts and subsequent floggings convinced our hero that a major career move was in order...
...And who will say then, that it was better to have "lived" scared and shriveled in the urban womb, than to have burned in glory like John Hooper...
...accidents happen within thirty miles of the home...
...The bottom line here is one that was drawn with poetic efficiency by the Shropshire Lad himself, A. E. Housman, during the first public address he ever made...
...if he did not try to hide his distaste for what was left to him of life, I cannot forget the anguish of that time "when he was the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral...
...Winston Churchill, in the wake of a street accident in the winter of 1931...
...How can you sleep at night, you brute, with all your problems...
...In sum, said John Newton, "the most that opposers can do is to kill the body...
...though he, of course, would have denied it...
...According to Hooper's friend John Foxe, the ceremony didn't go smoothly...
...But we're different today, insists the assistant professor...
...Well, we admit it, and we're embarrassed, and we're very sorry...
...He would be so . . . so bored...
...Memorize those warning symptoms...
...And yet, not such giddy stuff, if we recast the proposition...
...For the rest—live dangerously...
...For myself," wrote the Scotsman Alexander Whyte, "I keep John Newton on my selectest shelf of spiritual books...
...Stephen, though apparently given up to the power of his adversaries, and cruelly stoned to death, was no less happy than those who die in composure upon their beds, with their friends around them...
...If there's nothing drippier available we can always wrap up the evening with that "Nightline" thing from the American Broadcasting Company...
...And so forth...
...The final question, then, is obvious: How are we to give the suburban Oagwood the heart of the British lion...
...entries that could never have appeared in any biography of the younger hero...
...and by the time he was twenty-three he was one of the established stars of the African slave trade...
...Job was a faithful and approved servant of God, yet for a season his trials were great, and his confidence was sometimes shaken...
...Muggeridge recommends the testimony of some of these remarkable individuals, to wit: "I think in our time it's been marvelously demonstrated by Solzhenitsyn and the other heroic people from the Soviet lab?r camps,.all of whom say the same thing—the ones that have achieved spiritual perception through it—that there they learned this point, that it's through the affliction that you can see reality and that, therefore, as Solzhenitsyn himself says in his Gulag book, 'Thank you, prison camp, for bringing this illumination into my life which otherwise I would have lost.'" There's an intersection of perception here, an alliance of the centuries: Mr...
...Have you thought— long and hard—about what it's going to feel like to die from the effects of radioactive fallout...
...Of course the point of the horrible anecdote (for which sincere apologies are offered) is that John Hooper chose to die this most terrible death, at the age of sixty, rather than to speak the few innocuous words that would have freed him to enjoy another ten or twenty years of useful life...
...In the very typical words of a very typical assistant professor of our own sad day, Newton's works "were characterized by unction and intensity, but they have no Uterary value...
...Malcohn Muggeridge put the matter with cheuacteristic lucidity, in a recent conversation with William Buckley, as follows: You know, as an old man, Bill, looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly—that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering...
...nursed and perpetuated by the teased and perfumed mice in human form who have discovered that the prospect of sheer terror possesses a fatal attraction for the simple folk who watch their antics on a billion flickering screens: tune in tonight at seven and hear about the latest Warning Signals, lest ye die...
...Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass...
...Bet you have them all...
...they do so out of an exaggerated regard for the authority of death...
...It's The Law, you know...
...In truth it must be said that John Newton became one of the most adorable and warm-hearted old gentlemen who ever graced the face of the earth...
...department's Rolodex, in search of the telephone number of the campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union: we've tricked them, we've savaged the Peace of Academia, we've sneaked some of that religious muck into the discussion in the m o ^ irresponsible and intolerant way, without fair warn-' ing, in violation of the most basic statutes of the contemporary American Inquisition, and we're going to pay for it...
...Muggeridge is getting at, or you don't...
...And who's going to pay your bills after you're dead...
...Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), will show us what happened to the lion's confidence in old age: To do nothing, day after day, when he had done so much, is a searching test of character, and it found Winston's will undermined by age and infirmity...
...Do you have smoke alarms in your place of residence...
...We'll just be Off Camera...
...That is to say, what's the point...
...The nasty little message that is being hammered home, day by day and hour after hour, is that it is only the foolish who suffer and die...
...The good times can't last forever, however, and—to make a long and exciting and occasionally sordid story short and sweet—Something Happened, as it so often does...
...And how they'd shrink from the implications of the sentence that concludes that longago letter, the endearing little prayer that wraps up the Newtonian case in forty words: "Let me have his presence and his Spirit, wisdom to know my calling, and opportunities and faithfulness to improve them...
...If God permits his people to be thus treated, still they are not forsaken...
...We may seal ourselves up tight, and repair all those faulty gas connections and replace all those tired arteries and execute all our psychopathic muggers and shut down all our Careless Corporations...
...And so fear replaces sex as the most reliable hook for snaring the largest numbers of slack-jawed vacanteyed viewers and "readers" and bowed and bloodied suckers...
...Somehow it all made sense, in the midst of plague and revolution and tyranny...
...Poverty...
...The latest warning comes, not so incidentally, from the HQ of a mammoth chain of Socially Conscious department stores: the high command wants to sell us whimsical little gadgets for our automobiles that will free us all from the debilitating fear of Costly Damage, High Insurance Rates, and Disabling Whiplash, forever and ever...
...How will you support yourself during that long, long old age you're planning...
...Therefore—while praising the rightminded hero and cheering his increasingly rare appearance among us—we may agree that his self-imposed bravery is no reliable or universal defense in an age of unprecedented terror...
...But then, many will say that it is one thing for a Winston with a Mission in life to believe that he will somehow be spared the worst pangs—as Churchill's aunt wrote to him after the accident, "Of course you have been spared to still do great things in the future'^—and quit« another thing for the missionless Dagwood in the suburbs of Detroit to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of all the whirling mechanical and emotional dervishes of modern life, lying in wait for him at every turn of the twentiethcentury screw...
...Oh, look at the brethren, then, in the house of liberty and the home of the brave: buckled up, helmeted and sealed, walking the anxious line, chanting the never-ending chants in honor of the Seven Warning Signals of this andthe Sixteen Hidden Symptoms of that, feeling themselves here and poking themselves there, studying every imperfection in the mirror and wondering if This Is It, fighting for a piece of territory in the crowded waiting room of the national hospital, keeping their eyes peeled for a thousand different dooms and a million possible inconveniences, surrounded on every side by nuclear winters and Libyan terrorists and Joggers' Knees and Stress and Burn Out and Other People's Cigarette Smoke and the possibili-ty of Injury And Loss—and by the way do you have sufficient Renters' Insurance and Homeowners' Insurance and Life Insurance and Liability Insurance and Credit Card Insurance and Automobile Insurance and Marine Insurance and Health Insurance and special policies to cover random Acts Of God and Catastrophe and cancer and dentistry and pregnancy and pain?—surrounded on every side, we say again, by the possibility of Something Going Wrong, by the possibility of sorrow, of hurt, of poverty, of tribulation, the possibility of . . . the possibility of life, and death...
...but we won't be dead, or anything like that...
...and in the course of his hell-raising he was captured by a press gang and put into service aboard a British man-of-war...
...Lord, help me to say...
...How is the unpretentious victim of the democratic tyranny to learn to accept death and pain and sorrow quietly again...
...Still— speaking strictly in historical terms, mind you—the conclusion is unavoidable: in previous centuries, the protected life—no, the confident life, the peaceful life—was the directed life...
...One might say that he, like the millions who have died equally brave deaths, had his priorities in order...
...Do you know how John Hooper died...
...Rather it was the other side of the coin: it was a faith in the value of tribulation itself, a faith in the propriety of the ultimate unseen outcome, a common understanding that, in the long run, suffering was a good thing for all concerned...
...Now it is at this point in the sermon that some earnest soul out there in television land—it's usually an assistant professor of sociology in eastern Long Island—is going to remind the congregation in tearful tones that diabetes does exist and that people do get maimed and that many of us are ill with this or that fatal disease and that Sunspots Can Kill...
...But he was supported and at length delivered...
...Tempting fate is risky...
...Weird stuff, hey...
...The high priests of the faculty lounge feel betrayed, ambushed, violated: some things just aren't done, if you know what's good for you, and at the very top of the list of things that aren't permitted is any serious public reference to—to that, you know, to that . . . that archaic word with the three letters in it—in other than historical terms...
...And so we see that the apprehension and final despair of the natural man who is not lucky enough to die with his boots on is the despair of the man who knows that there is no possible existence, for him, after death, or even after retirement...
...The only thing that really teaches one what life's about—the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what it really signifies—is suffering, is affliction...
...And who was John Newton...
...And please...
...My Ecfrty Life: A Roving Commission was published just one year before the near-fatal accident on the streets of New York...
...What we see here is that the courage of our best ancestors was the courage of long-suffering, of submission rather than bravado or defiance: a courage born of faith, to be sure, but not the FeelGood faith of our contemporary televised evangelists, the easy faith that calls upon the Almighty Sugar Daddy to decorate his selfappointed children with health and wealth and wisdom and worldly happiness...
...Someone up there knew what he was doing, and all was for the best, even if you could rarely see it at the time...
...Do You Have Diabetes?—and there will be a perspiring pack of your fellow citizens gathered anxiously in front of it, memorizing telltale symptoms...
...rarely if ever have they been permitted to listen to the voice of the prophet teUing them that life is merely a means, not an end...
...Indeed it is precisely in the region of his moral certitude that we catch the unmistakable whiff of the past, and the apparent source of his daily strength: No opposition can prevail against us, if God be for us...
...dread naught, all will be well...
...And oh, before you leave for the drugstore, just one more thing: Buckle Up, cookie...
...Is there a defense against it—a prescription for common bravery...
...I think he was a lonely man, as I suppose he had been always...
...Will you end up in a lovely nursing home or in one of those horrid dungeons As Seen On Television...
...But—here's that message we mentioned—it is a still greater mistake for the citizens of a great nation to spend their lifetimes looking for polished floors and pools of asbestos fibers to avoid...
...The accident occurred in New York City, of course, and it was a nasty one: Mr...
...it fails because the man himself sees that he has always created his own providence, and that he cannot put a name to that providence, or distinguish its purposes from his own...
...And yet it is not always easy to maintain the persuasion of it in the mind, and to abide in the exercise of faith, when, to an eye of sense, all things seem against us...
...Have you been exposed to high levels of mercury...
...and no doubt you know how and where-to start looking for your own fragment, if you haven't found it already...
...and that it is only the life that feels itself to be worth living—only the life of purpose, if you will—that is able to feel that hedge of protection...
...Throw out that venison...
...It is not necessary for me to live long, but highly expedient that whilst I do live I should live to him...
...Do you know who seiid that...
...Sound good to you...
...We care because John Newton was a very "ordinary" man who was not afraid of life, and because he spoke for other ordinary men—our predecessors on earth—who were not paralyzed by the thought of death...
...take things as they come...
...Well, I haven't had to suffer that myself' and therefore it ill behooves me to point to it as a blessing...
...He, like most worldly souls, was therefore able to believe in the existence of a special providence that was keeping tabs on one ambitious lad, and sparing that lad for greater things...
...Lead...
...Always suspect the presence of deadly germs or other contaminants...
...and so the parental fear of death and disability is handed on, ever so self-righteously, to the innocents...
...and eventually— like Mr...
...And when the adolescent generation is called into the national auditorium to receive yet another warning about the dangers of drunkenness and drug addiction—sorry, that should be "substance abuse'^—the appeal will not be to what we used to call The Better Instincts, not to youthful hopes of someday doing one's part in the world, or the embryonic standards of right and wrong...
...We are convinced then that the fortitude of the natural man must always fail, when the lights are low...
...This is interesting: I found that whatever I might think and argue, I did not hesitate to ask for special protection when about to come under the fire of the enemy: nor to feel sincerely grateful when I got home safe to tea...
...And do get a move on, my lambs, or you'll have to bite your way through the rush-hour crowds of worried middle-aged gentlemen waiting in line for a chance to test themselves on the Check Your Blood Pressure Here machine (and you have checked that blood pressure today, haven't you...
...Do you have any of these symptoms...
...We, on the other hand—we smart little cookies, we who have learned to look after our own skins—we can go on forever...
...And all this while his nether parts did burn: for the faggots were so few, that the flame did not burn strongly at his upper parts...
...If, in those sad years of mounting decrepitude, he seemed to be fearful of the future of mankind and grew to hate change and btcame intolerant of criticism...
...though he is very aware of the fact, and very grateful for the fact, that—as with every other human—his narrow shaves have far outnumbered his actual tumbles (the remarkable thing is not that some of us get hurt but that any of us survives the first five seconds of life...
...How are we to get this damn country to calm down now that the sky is falling...
...We have called Winston Churchill "the natural man" but he was a Natural Man with a particularly high opinion of himself, and long before he had a "mission'^— a mission beyond the promotion of Winston Churchill, that is—he regarded himself as the sort of fellow who would, someday, have such a mission...
...Even as a lamb, patiently he abode the extremity thereof, neither moving forwards, backwards, nor to any side: but he died as quietly as a child in his bed...
...And—increasingly— It's The Law...
...even more difficult, he knew, "to live superior to the fear of man, as becomes us, if we know whose we are, and whom we serve...
...A ruder spectator might be tempted to address the same question to an obese and satiated nation, in love with its own false securities and stifling nightmares...
...This assurance is in essence nothing more than the natural self-confidence—call it valor, if you will—of the natural man (as opposed to the spiritual man, or the gentleman...
...All will be well...
...And there was a punch line, too—a...
...For Safety...
...to be healthy, or admired by my fellow-worms...
...through that crucial issue of Life magazine—'Now No One Is Safe From AIDS'2—before the curtain rises on tonight's television fare (and don't forget: no American, anywhere, is excused from television duty, ever...
...hat's the core of the panic, one suspects: the fear of death...
...suffice it to say that the reader who looks up the word "Churchill" in Lord Moran's index will find appended to it dozens of entries under such headings as "indecision," "fear of air travel," "procrastinator," "general apprehensiveness," "petulance," and the like...
...An endless moving picture in which one was an actor...
...I mean my God this is the twentieth century and the idea of the necessity of pain and Death, Black or otherwise, is so . . . so medieval...
...but one glance at the badly written diaries of the P. M.'s bitter little physician...
...From the beginning of 1895 down to the present time of writing I have never had time to turn round," he chortled in 1930, ten years before the real fun started...
...But how can we be so callous...
...For our part, we keep coming back to a line we saw somewhere, can't recall exactly where—on the side of a stalled bus, probably, or maybe scrawled across a questionable photograph in People magazine (scrawling is encouraged around here...
...and as to the rest...
...Simpering, whining, weeping and cringing, I Don't Want To Die, I'll do anything, anything, if you'll just let me live forever, down on our knees...
...how is he to overcome the infantile tendency to rebel against authority, to rage against the night, to kick against the pricks...
...There is neither the time nor the strength for self-pity...
...He was also something of a hell-raiser, in his youth...
...Already in the distance we can hear the outraged chants of the assistant professors, as they scrabble frantically through the poli...
...It has to be said first—and indeed it would go without saying in any century but our own—that the courage we're after is, like every other virtue, the product of its opposition...
...It is only when the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear...
...They didn't Plan Ahead, they didn't Take Precautions...
...Easy enough for you to say, cries the assistant prof, his sensitive features arranged in the familiar lines of academic compassion: you're young, and relatively undamaged...
...The First Line of Defense Very well, then, this religion of cowardice is evil stuff...
...surely that nice Mr...
...and he himself, growing old in London, refused awards and honorary degrees from as far away as Princeton, New Jersey ("Prince-town," he called it...
...What was he getting at...
...There will be parades of wheelchairs, and hideous photographs of brain-damaged classmates, and little melodramas set in graveyards...
...Their death is precious in his sight...
...Scary enough for you...
...Are you quite sure you don't already have the disease of the month—^Alzheimer's or dyslexia, herpes or leprosy...
...Did you know that most...
...What's all this to us...
...None is unendurable...
...You will not save your children— from beer or dope or lust or money or the Red Army or atheism or AIDS or the Lifestyle Of The Rich And Famous or anything else—until you stop trying to scare them out of their britches and start telling them just what it is that they are being saved for...
...Buckled Up For Safety, Buckled Up, surely we do stink—to borrow a phrase—surely we stink, in the nostrils of God...
...Churchill himself believed—and surely all of us, whatever our religion, or lack of it, must yield to him on the point—that Winston Churchill ceased to be when Winston Churchill's worldly activity ceased to be...
...but we'll beg to differ, because this is the point, precisely the point: that it is the Churchillian sense of special protection— that constant awareness of some ever-vigilant providence—that finally frees a soul from fear...
...question, really— that seemed to hint at the price the coward pays, every day of his anxious life: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul...
...Now, you either understand what Mr...
...And boy did he have a lot of explaining to do—volume after volume of it, for the next forty years...
...In other words, as we say in the literary community, it don't come easy: "It is difficult to stem the torrent, or to avoid the infection of the world," conceded John Newton...
...We've gone too far...
...Indeed all timidity—all shrinking from the vicissitudes of life, all moral cowardice, all insecurity—may be traced to that one elemental fear...
...That nifty gadget he was imagining—the one that would take the anguish out of the human heart— hasn't been invented yet, and it's no good pretending we've got it when we haven't...
...The Itauma Of Bad Sex...
...Do you know where your children are...
...and surely that proposition would not have come as an enormous shock to the kids who charged with the Light Brigade at Balaklava, or to the millions of Europeans who succumbed to the Black Death in the fourteenth century, or to the simple Jews and Christians who were boiled alive during the Neronian persecutions...
...So the professors must not misunderstand the message here...
...Let us pray always to be spared anything of Literary Value, let us look always for unction and intensity: modern assistant professors speak only to other assistant professors, but real and honest souls—and John Newton was such—can speak more usefully to one another across all the aching centuries...
...Surely life is short...
...Nothing can excuse our behavior...
...but to cowardice...
...Have you Waited Too Long...
...and lo, death—even premature death—will still get through, through some crack in the technological barricade...
...a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come...
...It was Newton's goodness rather than his greatness that rendered him so especially attractive," said the historian Josiah Bull...
...He—-like all goodhearted natural men—was so much a part of, and a lover of, this world, that it strikes us as improbable that any great portion of him should be living on somewhere in some exalted state...
...Or maybe in syndication, if we play our cards right, and avoid Stress Situations...
...And now we've done it...
...Indeed let's balance those sUces of Muggeridge with a final quotation from Mr...
...On the whole Great Fun...
...If you'll just tune in, booby— if you'll just read all about it, if you'll just get Frequent Check-Ups, if you'll just fork over enough cash, if you'll just worry enough—maybe It won't happen, maybe you won't die . . . tonight...
...Don't speak to strangers...
...And what will happen to you if you lose your job next year...
...It's an old story, too: like so many others, Mr...
...And indeed in one sense at least the objection would be well taken...
...Makes the latest media hysterics about the dangers of sunburn to middleaged socialites look just a little shabby, doesn't it...
...In some respects these are the very best words to live and die by...
...Pull down thoSe blinds...
...It's not a pretty story, but one worth telling, in our present context...
...Do you suffer from headaches...
...How are simple men and women of average means and limited influence to be convinced that Someone up there is watching...
...Newton, who sketched the crucial connection—the connection between the settled spirit and the stalwart life—in the closing passages of a letter he wrote to a good friend in the pivotal summer of 1776: It is not necessary for me to be rich, or what the world accounts wise...
...but trying to escape fate is—how shall we say it—always fatal...
...But not you...
...Now look at us, we Americans, we who spend our days checking ourselves for signs of Stress and Aging and Sexual Dysfunction, we who call ourselves "heroes" whenever we're taken hostage by disturbed Bedouins (atid eight out of ten Americans will be taken hostage in their lifetimes), we who call ourselves "survivors" if we make it through a divorce trial in one piece...
...Man's amazing discoveries and inventions have failed to relieve him of sorrow...
...and then he begins to be afraid at last...
...and in the second place, as Mr...
...Live dangerously...
...When the second fire had almost burned itself out, the prisoner wiped his eyes with both hands and called for more wood...
...in sum, he does not know in whom, or what, he has trusted...
...We thought we'd start out with that Jogging Injuries special on Channel 7, flip over to Channel 9 for the rebroadcast of the old favorite, "The Seven Warning Signals of Cancer," and still have time to catch five or six hours of this evening's AIDS orgy on the local public television station...
...Worm-theology," they call it today, with the righteous sneer of the fat and happy Rugged Individual...
...We won't ask for a show of hands, this time, but if there are any offensively healthy Americans in the room who have not yet memorized the latest symptoms, we'd like to suggest— soon we will be insisting upon—a quick trip to the corner drugstore...
...In the first place, you're a creature of the flesh like other men, and, though you know what's good for you, you'd rather not be hurt just the same, thanks very much...
...This fellow Newton was no theoretician, no special heroic case, no resident of the ivory tower or the mEu^ble hall...
...He realizes that whatever has been watching over him in the heat of battle has no reason to be interested anymore...
...And don't you like that "up to...
...Fire extinguishers...
...It's got to be stopped, do you hear me...
...So do your duty, honchos: "Prevent Dangerous Accidents...
...which is in itself a consequence of guilt and unacknowledged shame, the constant companion of a frivolous life...
...The lesser—that is, the less reliable in times of darkness and danger—may be thought of as the Churchillian Assurance...
...Has your reporter never known sufferingl And the answer is: yes he has, and he'll know more of it before he's through, and so will you...
...Hey, how long has i<^V,\ > • '• x^^, mm jmm fmT *»^^^^^23[^^*^^ v m^ ll T^P^EP^^^S^^ J A !^^^BF ^flVE^nS 1 hV - f > 5^ rjMlV^lB it been since you had a physical checkup anyway...
...This man Newton can show us how unexceptional men and women in all previous eras used to face life, and stare pain and death down...
...Which is to say that any prolonged attempt to escape the experience of living (and dying) is not only contemptible but futile...
...What's your Cholesterol Coiint...
...And you deserve it, cupcake...
...The evasive life is not really a life at all, but a preparation for life...
...Still we do not quite see just why it is a more admirable or a better thing for a man to spend the waking and sleeping hours of a long lifetime worrying about and planning for the worst that can happen—only, perhaps, to be run over by that proverbial truck while preparing for Nuclear Winter—than for a much younger man to lose his head to a Russian saber on the plain of Balaklava...
...Indeed we see the point of Balaklava—though they chatter about Needless Death these days, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one— but see no point at all in the undirected life, perpetuating itself in a womb of false security, in defiance of its inevitable end...
...The hero is not soul, but flesh...
...Now this particular spectator will hear no criticism of Mr...
...So that'll give us six or seven solid hours of good worrying time before morning...
...It is second-rate because there comes a time in the hero's life—in old age, or retirement, or after the last war is over—when he begins to suspect that the heroic mission is over, too...
...Aren't you afraid of losing your traveler's checks in a foreign land...
...never have they seen a vision of a future based on anything finer than the worship of mere existenceincessant, dreary living—and the perpetual fear of death...
...Not yet has been invented a gadget to take the anguish out of a human heart...
...It is impossible to deny, or even to doubt, this truth, upon the principles of reason: for who, or what, can injure those who are under the protection of Omnipotence...
...If remedy does exist, it's to be found in two hundred and fifty million little fragments, resting all too quietly in the cores of two hundred and fifty million little souls...
...Do you think there will be a third world war in your lifetime...
...he can show us the courage we've lost, and he can tell us how to tap its source again...
...There is only one possible rejoinder to such a compassionate reminder, tmd it's not a graceful one, to wit: So what else is new...
...And yet there were happier times in the affairs of men, almost two hundred years ago, when John Newton was one of the bestknown and best-loved authors in the English-speaking world...
...or indeed to any of our ancestors...
...anyway the thrust of the thing was that he who seeks to save his life shall lose it...
...How is the grandchild of the freed serf to defend himself and his family against the oiled and painted politicians and "anchorpersons" and Consumer Advocates with their crazyhouse statistics and their shrill warnings of impending doom and their high-pitched celebrations of mass hysteria...
...That will give us time to get Bryan F. Griffin is the author o/Panic Among the PhiUstines...
...Be clear about it, then: this is a wicked gospel, this new gospel of fear...
...we're enlightened: we have indoor plumbing and mutual funds and tapedecks and VCRs and subscriptions to Esquire and children to support, and it's just not fair for our' Career Plans to be interrupted by Accident and Injury and Death...
...he spoke to and for the Dagwoods, not the Churchills, of his day...
...This practice seemed perfectly natural, and just as strong and real as the reasoning process which contradicted it so sharply...
...But all these questions will be answered, and sooner than we think...
...bet everybody you know has them, too...
...After a while some dry faggots were brought, and the fire relit: this time it did some damage to Mr...
...And don't worry, okay...
...Indeed Mr...
...We believe in prudence, and temperance, and rational behavior, and personal responsibility, and we don't believe in tempting fate: it's a mistake for women wearing high heels to go running on wellpolished floors, and it's a mistake for any of us to go bathing in pools of asbestos fibers if we can possibly avoid it (sometimes we can't, of course, especially if our host insists...
...Radiation...
...and by the time he turned forty the king of the slave trade was ready to begin life anew as a sincerely Calvinistic curate in the established Church of England...
...to pass through life in a state of prosperity and outward comfort;—these things may be, or they may be otherwise . . . but it is necessary for me to be humble and spiritual, to seek communion with God . . . and to yield submissively to his disposal, in whatever way, whether of service or suffering, he shall be pleased to call me to glorify him in the world...
...and it was given most glorious expression by that best example of the natural man, Mr...
...Enough, we^U quote no more...
...Reputable theology, in 1786...
...I even asked for lesser things than not to be killed too soon, and nearly always in those years, and indeed throughout my life, I got what I wanted...
...His providence withdraws its protection from him as his mission is accomplished (or abandoned), and his battles won (or lost...
...Churchill had been looking for Bernard Baruch's house, thought he spied it on the other side of the street, leapt out of his cab to make sure, and—ignoring the tendency of Americans to drive on the wrong side of the road—looked right when he should have looked left...
...Dread naught...
...It is the feeling in these quarters that the ancient assurance of the natural hero—live dangerously, dread naught, all will be well—is not only demonstrably irrelevant to the enforced wimpery of modern urban Hfe, but also ultimately second-rate...
...Join them...
...The Natural Man—even when he's a Great Man— can never be anything more than that, and if and when the "Great Fun" stops being quite so much fun, he has nothing to show for it but a mess of pottage (and a grateful civilization...
...who among us is fit to lick John Hooper's boots...
...So bear with us for a moment while Mr...
...Thus was he three quarters of an hour or more in the fire...
...So the third fire was kindled, and John Hooper spoke his last words, asking his God to have mercy on him...
...and his hand did cleave fast, in knocking, to the iron upon his breast...
...When at the end of November, in the year 1964, he came to the great age of ninety, the long chronicle of boredom and despair was hardly broken by the celebrations...
...On second thought, don't get a move on: the crisis control center has just received an urgent communication from the front reminding us that "up to eight rear-end collisions happen every minute...
...Do you know how many Americans die in their bathtubs each year...
...Newton (now Captain Newton) was able and anxious to pursue, in the words of his nineteenth-century biographer, "a reckless, debauched, profane and infidel life...
...Tkke things as they come...
...Why, spiritual confidence, of course, as the indispensable cornerstone of physical and moral fortitude...
...When these most pathetic heirs of the wild frontier warn themselves not to Drink And Drive, they do so not out of a conventional regard for moral conduct or "self-respect" or social responsibility or God...
...Is there a history of heart disease in your family...
...Don't tedk to strangers...
...Never have they heard a voice telling them just why their horrid little lives are so worthy of undiscriminating preservation...
...by far the best kind of books in the whole world of books...
...And why on earth not...
...Oh, there were setbacks—he spent two years as a slave himself, in the service of the African mistress of a rival entrepreneur—but in general Mr...
...and surely we render ourselves offensive if our work become nothing more than a feverish effort to evade that appointed night...
...There is no room for remorse or fears...
...and the directed life was the virtuous life— or, if you must (you zealot, you), the godly life...
...Carbon Monoxide...
...Look out for Number One...
...Oh, sure, there may come a time when we're not photographed as much as we used to be, a time when we begin to fade away, like . . . like Walter Cronkite...
...In examining the absence of courage in our own time, we find ourselves looking, as so often before, at that old standby of History 3101, The Loss of Faith...
...I could count almost on my fingers the days when I have had nothing to do...
...And surely, too, the thing we fear will come upon us with a greater vengeance, just as it came upon us in 1939, just as it came upon the old empire in the fifth century, just as it comes upon little boys and girls who won't take their medicine, just as it always comes upon quislings and sycophants and special pleaders of every stripe, just as it has always come upon the cowards who die a thousand deaths...
...Those five million Russian youths who fell fighting the Kaiser in 1917—the German kids who bled on the other side of the fence—the saintly ISar who went so meekly to his beastly death in Ekaterinburg—those Victorian gentlemen who died trying to raise Africa (and New Zealand and India and Arabia) from the swamp of barbarism— the European ladies who went so unprotestingly to the gas ovens—the Pathan tribesmen who are bleeding even now near the Khyber Pass—your grandfather who succumbed to cholera—your aunt who died in infancy—even that Nazarene who called himself the son of man—they were all just dumb, you see...
...Mental illness...
...because now, as then, one of the great divisions in the world is the division between those who have learned the most elementary lesson of life—that all growth comes through affliction—and those who are mystified by the very idea of beneficent pain...
...Because We Care...
...The chubby warrior who had emerged unscathed from half a dozen Victorian wars was knocked to the ground by what is usually described as "a large vehicle travelling at a high rate of speed," with predictable consequences...
...Hooper's legs and groin, but—^'saving that it did burn his hair, and swell his skin a little'^—it left the rest of the poor fellow intact...
...Buckle Up...
...In sum, your reporter is just as distressed as the next man when he hears of innocents being maimed and killed by faulty gas connections or malfunctioning arteries or psychopathic muggers or—everybody's pet—Corporate Carelessness...
...The thirty-three-year-old classicist was talking about the materialism of 1892 but he might just as well have been talking about the cowardice of 1986: Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries...
...So you'll find no remedies here...
...In those days there were half a dozen rival editions of his collected works, which sold in huge numbers around the world, from Caernarvon to Boston to Sydney...
...At the same time, many of these inventions, such as airplanes and machinery of war, have probably brought a greater sum total of human misery to the world than ever existed in history...
...Newton gets religious, and says things that may not be said in polite company in 1986...
...Everybody else is going to die, Dagwood...
...But giddy stuff, in 1986...
...Solzhenitsyn, meet the late John Newton...
...Has your reporter never known pain, or grief, or sickness...
...Why do we care...
...Newton's character was beautiful in its entireness...
...And when he wasn't writing books or preaching sermons he found time to compose some of the most popular and representative ecclesiastical music of the eighteenth century—including, incidentally, the timeless Protestant hymn, "Amazing Grace...
...Drive carefully, but do try to make it back alive by seven o'clock at the very latest...
...and that he who loses his life shall save it...
...Nor was he less composed...
...Churchill, the adventure became an article for the Daily Mail: I certainly suffered every pang, mented and physical, that a street accident or, I suppose, a shell wound can produce...
...In the meantime, put out that cigar...
...Well, he was a Londoner, born in 1725, the son of a prosperous and high-minded sea captain...
...not success, not happiness, not anything like that...
...somehow it no longer makes sense, in the wake of the Great War and the death camps...
...What better defense do the babes have against the encroaching fogs of institutionalized terror...
...Drop that glass...
...Listen, professor: we have even heard it claimed, in eccentric circles, that death and sorrow must come to all men...
...You're going to live forever...
...How can we tell the old man who did not get his blood pressure and his cholesterol and his plumbing checked—and is suffering the physical consequences, confined to his wheelchair, perhaps—that he did the right thing...
...Hooper found himself on the wrong side of the religious debate, just a few centuries ago—it doesn't matter which faction he sided with, now—and his fellow behevers decided to bum him alive, in the spring of 1555...
...And even if you do understand it—perhaps one should say especially if you do understand it—you're not very likely to embrace the cause of suffering in public...
...in fact there are two of them...
...If we wanted to speak with uncharacteristic roughness we might say that these dead-headed young rock and rollers were the very last gasp of a panicstricken civilization bent on mere survival and nothing more, and we might say too that the civilization had asked for everything it was getting, in spades...
...Some among us, however, have earned the right to put in a good word for misery in public...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
