The Crisis-Eaters
Mayer, Milton
The Crisis-Eaters by MILTON MAYER Milton Mayer, a regular contributor to The Progressive, has just returned from a flying trip to eastern Europe, where he represented the American Friends Service...
...There they get what is "good for them": immersion in the crisis...
...Atheist man alone is capitalistic, there as here...
...If the Big Man wants and gets a car, why shouldn't the Little Man blunt the edge of his own resentment, there as here, by wanting and getting a scooter...
...and there is no way whatever for the West to come alive...
...We were eating in an expensive restaurant in Prague, and a non-Communist admirer of the Communist drive for social justice pointed out to me a woman with a shawl on her head...
...Their resistance reveals the resistance of the revolutionaries themselves...
...Who wouldn't rather have a hand—even if it be burned, as it might be—in the holocaust...
...Every visit one makes to the Communist world displays increasing prosperity all the way down the line— and up...
...And there the hallmark is the involvement of the individual in the crisis...
...it was five minutes to midnight again...
...The Dread Policeman enjoyed it as much as his father enjoyed beating a Jew...
...Now, by dint of keeping your mouth shut, or open, you are Vice-President of the First National at $50,000 a year, with a |51,000 house, with wall to wall carpeting, in a Gentile suburb...
...The Revolution is trying to foist a theory of human nature upon the ninety-five per cent to which the ninety-five per cent are resistant...
...Nobody else wants any part of what is going on...
...When there's a fire or a flood—or the President makes an important speech—they are used...
...To be a Patriarch of the Church or a Policeman of the People—to be involved at the perpetual brink, at any level, be it a wooden-sword-bearer or water-boy—is to live big, as big as you lived in knee pants playing King of the Hill...
...the only thing I have ever heard coming out of them is music...
...I like it here, where a man can duck the diversion with no greater penalty than social ostracism...
...This time it was a big exile-refugee "Day of the Homeland" rally of incendiary groups (like exile-refugees anywhere) calling for the return of Germany's lost lands in the East, which will never be got back without war (or with it...
...They are partisans of peace and/or freedom to whom either, should it materialize, would be worse than anathema...
...Braun of West Germany...
...The East German crisis-eaters responded—the way children used to and grown-ups do now—by forbidding West Germans access to East Berlin...
...The second principle here is (or was) that man's nature can be healed by the Second Adam called Christ...
...The only way for the temperamentally quiet man to live in Berlin—and name me the place that isn't Berlin—is to reject the crisis altogether...
...That's why the pressure is so much greater there than anywhere else, with meetings, meetings, meetings all the time, political slogans everywhere, and nothing allowed from the West (especially from West Germany...
...And there atheism is a virtue...
...Only extremely old (and more extremely young) Berliners know what it is not to live on, or over, the brink all the time...
...there was no room for individuals...
...That's when it occurred to me that the Eagle Scouts—the average age of the Dread People's Police must be well under twenty-five—would rather have the world this way than be selling yard goods or toting hods or punching street car transfers...
...The New Marx seems to be having an increasingly hard time competing with the Old Adam...
...I handed him my U.S...
...There all the engines of revolution are stuffing the current overproduction of history down the citizen, together with all past history soi that he will understand the necessity of the instant revolution...
...Freedom means freedom from having to hear about 'building socialism.' " Did this mean that they were counter-revolutionary...
...We call it apathy, but it is very energetic rejection...
...The East is planting its seed, which as it sprouts produces more and more tares of free enterprise and freedom among the rigid rows of healthy socialist wheat...
...the middle income people get plenty of work and discussion and a bit of representation...
...How have they done it...
...Different brackets of income mean different kinds of life...
...The rockets were at the ready all over the world...
...The second principle there is that man's nature can be healed by socialist production...
...He was frustrated...
...That is, to reject the world...
...There is no real difference between Teddy Roosevelt and Teddy Khrushchev, or between either of them and Florence Nightingale or Trader Horn or Al Capone or me...
...He also spent some time in the other Communist countries (including East Germany) which he has visited before.—The Editors During last month's Berlin crisis I was waltzing between the two besieged sectors of the city and I discovered what those three eminent students of human nature, Tom, Dick, and Harry, had known all along...
...And even those who have would rather forget it than try to keep up with Laos, Lumumba, and the Lama...
...The supreme privilege in the revolutionary society is the privilege of privacy...
...The old Opera Square is Karl Marx Square—twenty years ago it was Hermann Goering Square—but the people talking among themselves call it Opera Square...
...And it is at this point, not at counter-revolution, that the pressure is most intense, here that the "police state," hell-bent on digging the ninety-five per cent out of their age-old cellers, is most active and offensive...
...Without the impending holocaust we selfless churchmen would be sitting in our separate holes and pasting up next Sunday's sermon to the hungover habituees who pay curled lip-service to their faith...
...If you ask a really ordinary East German what he thinks he would like best in the West, he says, 'To be let alone.' " It is hard to see, in the Communist countries, how any member of the five per cent gets any work of his own done...
...To be chosen a delegate from a factory or a school is an honor which—well, which is not declined...
...But the East may be stopped—by its own contradictions...
...On the whole, he doesn't...
...And in the East...
...He never knew, or wanted to know, what went on in Hungary, or exactly what Hungary was, but he will cheer reflexively when you tell him that Imre Nagy is fighting the Reds there...
...It is the second of the two Marxist principles which seems to be falling on its face there—not the second of the two non-Marxist principles which is being validated...
...They would rather dance on hot coals than be wallflowers...
...The first principle there is that man's nature was corrupted by bourgeois production...
...you drive him back to the apathy from which you had just aroused him...
...Why should the Little Man—the absorber of Marxism, not its purveyor—be different...
...A world which is producing more history than it can consume has got to be rejected by the ninety-five per cent who prefer (however mildly) the harness to the fire-alarm...
...Can socialism be built by either the Marxist atheist materialism of the East or the non-Marxist atheist materialism of the West...
...So you don't tell him...
...the Communists don't fool around with loyalty oaths...
...they had to stand outside and the delegations filled the hall...
...Atheism (in theory there, in practice here) believes that man can be changed by man...
...I discovered that there is a kind of man—including all journalists, all welfare workers, all social scientists, all statesmen, and, of course, all soldiers—who simply could not bear to go on living if a detente ever occurred between warring worlds, nations, races, classes, or baseball teams...
...The Crisis-Eaters by MILTON MAYER Milton Mayer, a regular contributor to The Progressive, has just returned from a flying trip to eastern Europe, where he represented the American Friends Service Committee at the third Christian Peace Conference in Prague...
...Everybody else wants to be let alone and let other people alone...
...A refrigerator here, a motor scooter there, television everywhere (in the towns), and even (in the most prosperous areas) a private car, privately bought and privately owned...
...The crisis there has been unbroken since 1914 (except for the breather between the deflation of 1923 and the collapse of 1929...
...The rockets sank into their pits...
...they eat crisis and feed it so that they will have something to eat...
...To visit West Germany, even after a few months' absence, is to get a newly exacerbated impression of deepening cynicism and bottomless despair...
...The revolutionary society is unfree...
...They are nearly always silent...
...One has the feeling that he'd better be...
...more all the time...
...Lenin's cap has been discarded for the homburg...
...The West is going to seed, miserable as it sees itself forced to surrender both its free enterprise and its freedom to the interaction of technology and revolution...
...The man they all differ from is Dwight David Eisenhower, who would like to practice his putting...
...There he can't...
...You do him no favor when you tell him that Nagy is a Red himself...
...They are the crisis-eaters...
...Everywhere there, it is 'Karl Marx Street,' 'Karl Marx Park,' and so on...
...To which I could only have said—if I enjoyed argument with my meals—"And impossible today if she didn't have the money...
...And this is really the whole of the matter in all the 'socialist' countries except the D.D.R...
...True, too, there is an insistence upon some show of social equality there, but the insistence, compared with the first years of the revolution in Russia, seems to be declining, and perceptibly, as the opportunities for ostentation increase and the Old Adam remains...
...How do they do it...
...not a new kind of human society, but a revolutionary reform of volcanic violence and stupendous, superficial proportions...
...There, as here, he fights it off as best he can...
...passport...
...A big majority—young and old—support the system...
...He may have to look at the placards and the proclamations, but he doesn't have to read them...
...Here an able-bodied man can starve...
...Their behavior is symbiotic...
...Theirs is the continuous titillation of brinkmanship...
...They are the jump-ing-jacks-of-all-trades...
...In these poor lands, where, of course, real want still exists, and where primitive living conditions are still the rural characteristic, there are women in the cities buying expensive furs and jewels...
...Most of them have no stake in the lost lands—in any lost land...
...A peasant," he said, "just a peasant...
...Communism is daily more triumphant—in capitalist terms...
...And its triumph is the ruin of socialism...
...So the capitalist expression is less crude there than here...
...a privilege as narrowly confined as the Revolution can make it, ordinarily to eminent specialists the importance of whose work transcends participation in the crisis...
...Here he (or she) may think he hates the Reds and loves the Whites, but that is only a reflex...
...The five per cent have their reward, win or lose...
...But where the average income is two thousand dollars, a paltry income five times that high is enough to procure all the symbols of capitalist status essential to capitalist man...
...The elegance—and pomposity—of a Communist reception equals that of a bourgeois France or England...
...like any scheme, and like any man...
...Communism seems to be purest when it is fighting for its life, and progressively less capable of purity as it achieves success...
...Identity papers," said the Dread People's Policeman, and the rockets all over the world came up from their hidden pits...
...The heart of man remains locked—certainly in the West, where the dream does not ask to open it...
...Is it "building socialism...
...It is not the fault of the counter-revolutionary segment that it is not socialism that is being built in eastern Europe...
...Is this socialism...
...But there are always meetings, always crowded with delegations...
...Who wouldn't rather be in Prague for a day than at Petosky's Resort for a month...
...Every Czech village has a string of loudspeakers on the light poles, from one end of the village to the other...
...In Prague last month I was one of two hundred selfless churchmen having themselves a ball, as one after another called upon God and man to save creation from the impending holocaust...
...The West German crisis-eaters use Berlin for a slow burn—just as the East Germans would if they had a city in the West...
...The ninety-five per cent are vaguely aware—just as they are when the Freedom Fighters show up outside or inside the United Nations—that there is so much more than meets the eye in all these remote and unpronounceable matters that the only way to get any sleep is to shut the eye...
...Berlin is their dish—aye, their ambrosia— on both sides and at every level of importance...
...This is what an Eisenhower does in the White House, sneaking out the back door with his putter...
...only these lifelong Eagle Scouts...
...The poor get lots of work and a bit of discussion and no representation...
...if they weren't thinking up liberty, security, and the like, they'd be thinking up Father's Day or penicillin or packaging...
...The West, to "stop" the East, would have to be alive, like the East...
...True, there's a floor (if only a dirt floor) and a ceiling there, as there isn't here...
...Your putter in Pinsk or your old lady in Oskaloosa at heart hates the Whites as much as the Reds because they are both ringing the fire-alarm...
...I asked a bright young man in a Communist city—not in Russia—to tell me about the young people...
...There's a cryptogram — with the incomes translated into something like American terms—quietly going the rounds in the Communist countries on a large scale...
...Withdrawal from the five per cent's hurly-burly—rejection of the crisis— is the ninety-five per cent's way of defending the status quo...
...These people are ninety-five per cent of all people...
...Is the New Man emerging—or the same Old Adam...
...That would have been impossible in a restaurant like this in the old days, even if she had the money...
...This is their escape...
...Fancy food and sports shops and luxury restaurants and hotels are proliferating in the national and provincial capitals...
...a man will drive a hundred miles at a hundred miles an hour to get away from it for a half-hour at the slot machine...
...you don't want him to be apathetic, do you...
...The first principle here is (or was) that man was corrupted by Adam's fall...
...I was careening around the East sector of the city in a car with West German license plates, and I made a wrong turn...
...The Big Man- in the revolutionary society (as it becomes stabilized) cannot resist displaying his Bigness to other Big Men and, willy-nilly, to the Little Man...
...It is the fault of the ninety-five per cent whose self-interest is undisguised (unlike that of the five per cent) and takes the primary form of mere rejection of the crisis...
...What is being built in the East—at least in the "satellite" countries, where bourgeois life was wider spread than it was in Russia—seems not to be a revolution at all...
...Here we get what we "want": diversion from the crisis...
...Of course not...
...It is the Communist test of loyalty...
...No matter what his profession, he always seems to be free to engage in public work...
...At a great peace meeting in Leipzig (imagine a great peace meeting here...
...But 'support' means 'accept.' Half of them because they accept every system, the other half because conditions are really so much better than they were...
...There was nothing he could do but stand me against a wall and deliver a long lecture on how to drive a car...
...The theory — dogmatically intact and incessantly intoned — only half sustains the practice...
...every revolutionary society (including ours, when it was revolutionary) always is...
...The man is lucky who is allowed to bury himself in his craft...
...This is the hallmark of the established society in a world revolution...
...Their interests and their objectives are accidental...
...And you need not be a clod to do the first (your artist rejects it, not just your yard-goods salesman) or a crook to do the second (your pacifist exploits it, and not just your Dread Policeman...
...the rich get lots of representation and a bit of discussion and no work...
...non-revolutionary neutrality, "apathy," is the enemy the Revolution cannot cope with...
...You were once King of the Hill, you ninety-five per center...
...The cryptogram is a libel on the actual state of affairs, but a symbolic libel...
...And he is free to do it, in the established society...
...The tension in Berlin was acute last month...
...Nobody else cares about liberty or security, peace or justice, capitalism or communism...
...Thus —except for the exempted specialists—creativity seems to be as dead there as here...
...You have seen Ike and the old lady, and not just in Washington or Berlin but also in Oskaloosa and Pinsk...
...Life is divided into work, discussion (or "culture"), and representation in the control of society...
...The papers were in order—but they had been issued to a Mr...
...From Saturday noon until Sunday night they drink and dance and go after the girls," he said...
...It can be turned up to a fast boil whenever the awful threat of a lull occurs...
...it would compel them to face the humdrum, yard-goods reality of life and find something to do on a long-term basis, such as punching street-car transfers, and confess to their pillows that they were sent here only to swell the crowd after all...
...The most un-American suggestion ever made was Henry Mor-genthau's in 1942—Roosevelt put the quick kibosh on it—that dividends be limited to six per cent and salaries to |25,000 for the duration...
...And so it is, not just as regards money, but as regards leisure...
...A carload of the Dread People's Police came down on me, and I was told to get out and produce the car papers...
...A man either rejects the crisis altogether or exploits it...
...But it must not crowd the ninety-five-per-center too far too fast...
...the ninety-five per center, that is...
...There he can't...
...This is what the old lady does crossing Potsdam Place, between the East and West sectors of Berlin, with a baby carriage containing three cats...
...East Germany...
...Here a man can have a million-dollar income (and hang on to half of it, via the tax dodges...
...He may have to buy Pravda, but he doesn't have to read it...
...The Revolution is hell-bent on involving him, preferably on the side of the Revolution, but better a counter-revolutionary than a neutral...
...This self-interest unveils the high-falutin-ism of the five per cent and ultimately dominates it...
...It is not the fault of the counterrevolutionary segment—a very small one—of the five per cent that the Communist revolution has failed...
Vol. 24 • November 1960 • No. 11
