THE PRICE IS WRONG
Mayer, Milton
The Price Is Wrong by MILTON MAYER It has been said (by Samuel Butler, I believe) that the question whether life is worth living is a question for an embryo, not for a man. A man must live. But it...
...In my old age I have had to dispense with decency, philanthropy, and the hope of heaven as luxuries which I could afford to indulge thirty years ago when I could trade two free White Sox tickets to a butcher on Wells Street for five pounds of hamburger containing meat...
...I care...
...The choice is clear...
...The issue is not moral, but financial...
...A telephone call (or a cup of coffee) doubles in price because it would be an imposition on the consumer to ask him to break a dime...
...No more...
...The wholesale price of bacon or beans—or steel ingots—goes up three cents and the retail rise is "rounded off" at five cents...
...I am all in favor of Dean Rusk's Free World Crusade against the Godless materialists far away, but I simply cannot afford it...
...I have got to steal bread or starve because I have not been able to tie myself to the cost-of-living index...
...A colleague said he had discovered a nice little unpretentious place in New York where you could get a nice little unpretentious dinner—I lifted my ears—for not a cent more than $20 for two...
...I steal it from a poor organization —which wants me for a weekend's work at $25—by convincing myself that I can't make it that weekend however much I'd like to...
...The impression is irresistible that the situation is so far out of hand that nobody cares as long as it's handy...
...The problem," he says, "for both Washington and Moscow is not to stop missiles but to stop war...
...Nobody who is anybody ever turns off the lights any more...
...At the dairy store a half gallon of skim milk in a bottle (which has to be returned) is thirty-five cents...
...As recently as two years ago my sophomores still brought their own mugs to the class coffee break rather than pay the house a nickel for a paper cup...
...only the professor does it now...
...I care because I was closer to heaven when I was further from the grave, and richer when I was poor...
...Who cares...
...I steal indifferently from rich and poor...
...I have to pull out of Vietnam and let Southeast Asia and Northwest Africa slide into the maw of Godless materialism...
...I love war, but I have got to stop it...
...They never have yet, and they never will, because they are timid: They're waiting for the Restons and the Mayers to stop it first...
...But it is getting to be difficult...
...There are no Boy Scouts to collect old papers, and no strong man to help you lift an I-beam at less than $4.50 an hour and he won't get off the bar stool for less than a day's job...
...Each can still destroy the other...
...All unavailing I have become an avaricious old b-----d (saving your presence, madame) and sold my soul to the devil, and it's all I can do to keep body together...
...What I steal is the money to buy the bread...
...I have to choose between having coffee this morning and having Vietnam any time now...
...An anti-missistic-balissile system would be nice to have on the front lawn, but I have got to get something into the ice-box and, until the price is right, let the landscaping wait...
...at the supermarket it's fifty-five cents in a paper carton...
...and a place down the road sells the same Old Bridgewalk at $1.94 and makes an unconscionable profit...
...My ears dropped...
...My tobacconist sells my favorite tobacco—Old Bridgewalk, composed of horse manure and splinters—at $2.95 a pound...
...I hate to see it go, but $75 billion is $75 billion, and, while I've got that kind of money, I don't have that amount...
...An earlier book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45," was recently republished as a paperback by the University of Chicago Press...
...James Reston says in The New York Times that the antiballistic-missile (or anti-ballisticmissile) project will cost the Americans and the Russians $40 billion apiece and leave them both "more powerful and less secure...
...Who cares...
...The world's worst bread is thirty cents a loaf...
...Like other things I love almost as much, it's gotten beyond my means...
...So I have to withdraw from the New Socialism—Production for the Prevention of Use—under which the warfare state operates...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do?/' includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...
...The Mayer family motto, "Quidvis pro Pecunia— Nihil pro Quovis Alio" which, in the vulgate, means, "Anything for Money—Nothing for Anything Else," used to be a joke...
...and I said No to the organization which wanted a weekend's work for $25 and renewed my demand for more money from the $14,400 institution...
...The question for a man is whether life is livable...
...I steal it from a rich institution which pays me $14,400 for hearing myself talk six hours a week for nine months...
...my heart broke...
...MILTON MAYER is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts...
...It cost me $1 ("minimum charge") to get the handle spot-welded back on to my 99-cent coffee pot...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
