MY COUNTRY, 'TWAS OF THEE
Mayer, Milton
MY COUNTRY, 'TWAS OF THEE MILTON MAYER Wasserwendi/Hasliberg, Switzerland—My neighbor Anderegg is a peasant. All my neighbors are peasants (and half of them are named Anderegg). Anderegg doesn't...
...People pay the prices (an extra $5 or $10 for the quaintness) and throw a continuous round of hundred-dollar or thousand-dollar parties besides...
...We wrote to them.—Gun wipers for Vietnam...
...They're quieter, whatever that means...
...The Junior High is full of Junior Junkies...
...New York, N.Y.—Every time I'm in New York I'm a rube on his first visit to New York...
...There are a few of us meeting regularly, from all the campuses...
...What time does it get to Santa Barbara...
...When George McGovern goes campaigning there are only three people left in South Dakota...
...Soft climates," said Cyrus, refusing to move his people to conquered Egypt, "make soft men...
...Steal from the telephone company and the comer grocer, from the government and the newsboy...
...Two-thirds of Harvard's June '71 class were graduated cum laude...
...The difference at home is that the quality of everything is terrible and everybody is spending like mad and going mad doing it...
...There are two, and only two, alternatives for society...
...Even when the country was rich and peaceful, it couldn't afford it, no country could...
...Here are the ashes of my fathers and the temples of my gods...
...New York, wonderful New York, where, at a price, a'nybody can get anything...
...Who that has flown over the poles or the tropics or the deserts said overpopulation...
...My oh so alma mater, the University of Chicago, has a white telephone on every corner around the campus, "Direct Line to University Security," which has twenty patrol cars of its own on the streets...
...As if a plague had carried away all the people, leaving only their artifacts...
...Don't pray—think...
...Except my beautiful Little Amanda, the Real New Yorker...
...All the evils that drove them wild abide...
...What time does the southbound train leave Salinas...
...Anderegg asks me how the weather was in America, and I tell him, and that's that...
...Jerry-built cracked and crumbling central Berkeley...
...Outside the bright-light areas Chicagoans lock themselves in of nights unless they have a big dog to walk...
...Nobody goes out at night for fear of being mugged, so the streets are empty, so there's still more mugging on them...
...Now I know that it's not (and so does Mayor Lindsay, who is moving, by stages, to Albany...
...When we left, ten years ago, doors were still left unlocked...
...It is written thus: 0. "Of course," says Amanda, "that's modern Japanese...
...At least that's what I think he said...
...They govern themselves and the Hasliberg pretty well, and they figure that's about all they can handle...
...Nobody's serious in California...
...In America he shoots the registrar...
...Do you know why you have to pay $24 plus $2.68 tax for the cheapest room anywhere near the place...
...In America we moved on and on without having to learn self-governance or self-government and in the process learned ungovernability...
...But no longer long bushy pipe cleaners anywhere: "Y'know what the factory's making now...
...Amanda's man Emil chuckles when I ask him if he still tries to look tough when he walks around town...
...Or have they simply touched down to refuel or retool...
...Now the same charming double is $10 and primitive...
...Carmel, California (or Calif, or CA...
...Got any ideas...
...Santa Barbara, CA.—From Carmel I called the Friendly Southern Pacific depot at Monterey and asked what the bus connection was to the train at Salinas...
...This season's separatist species is, of course, the female...
...A society under law is no society at all...
...Look, Mom—no tax base...
...They pay a lot of attention to their commune, the Hasliberg...
...in school they learn German, which they call Schrift-Deutsch, "written German," but when they have known you, as they have me, for twenty years, they tend to lapse into Schweezer-Duits and I have to pretend to understand them...
...Salinas is an Amtrak (or is it Amtrack...
...Silence around the table at the Student Union...
...How now, brown silk purse makers out of sows' ears...
...11:18...
...L 201 has been taken over for a black protest meeting...
...Liberty built this nation of shantytowns, built to move into and out of cheap and fast, a nation of eyesores and junk-heaps and fire-traps, a nation of portable roots carried in the tonneau of the wagon, the jalopy, the Cadillac...
...Quaint Carmel (there's gold in that quaintness) still has its trees and its unnumbered houses (and un-deliverable mail...
...Nothing does any good, no deterrent deters (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon please copy...
...in 1971 its security bill was $1,500,000...
...Junkieism, conducive to C. in the S., is a disproportionately black phenomenon, and why not...
...My old pal Bud Goldberg, who designed Chicago's Marina City, says the time has come when we can do anything we can think...
...But then we grew a little and got it through our skulls that whoever swiped sanctioned swiping and would, in the nature of the case, be swiped from...
...Do you know what they'd do in Moscow if, as they don't, they had Crime in the Streets...
...Don't Chain Your Bikes Here—11 stolen June 4. Billboard: Your Bread Earns Top Interest in Our 3-in-1 Passbook...
...They cleaned up and got out, and now they're communal pads...
...Are they beginning to realize that the moral idiocy, modeled by the My Lai trials (and the Penn Central bankruptcy and Jackie's marriage contract and the ITT rip-off), is nothing but conformity to those elements of the Establishment they thought they most detested...
...Are the students more serious...
...Think...
...Off-campus "unrest," too...
...Nixon's...
...For an hour at 650 miles an hour, and no cloud cover, there isn't a man or a beast to be seen...
...Chicago is a persuasive advertisement—never a LaGuardia in all its history— for municipal tyranny...
...But you will be distressed to know that their unhappiness, unlike ours, is not aggravated by disenchantment because they never expected to be rich or happy...
...Francis reports that Mr...
...But I wouldn't mind having neighbors who were willing to carry my coffin down the mountain to the graveyard, the way they do on the Hasliberg...
...California oranges cost the same as they do in Amherst...
...Grades are a gas now...
...To the hills, to the hills...
...The Student Association runs these things now, but they got mixed up on the date and the place, and this morning a good boy who wanted to hear you took over and did what he could...
...Amherst, Mass.—Campus "unrest" has subsided— Aristotle said that the passions of the young are quick to rise and quick to fall...
...Or you can find people who want to live together in common purpose and then you have a community, with traffic cops to help old ladies across the street...
...Our constituency in every college, every university, has been co-opted...
...All the way downtown the Real New Yorker hollers above the roar of the subway (and she has a small voice...
...It took her three years, but it's an unwise father who doesn't know more than his own child...
...In California three out of every four college-age kids are in college...
...It's this way," says Joe...
...Of course, no honkie would go into Niggertown any more—and Niggertown is half the city—but you're all right in the honkie neighborhoods...
...no honkies admitted...
...the true society is a society under the common weal...
...All somehow more portentous now than when they were throwing paving stones at the pigs...
...What will become of us...
...Every year they've got worse...
...no more...
...An occasional melanoid sneaks guiltily into a honkie course like Shakespeare (if he can find one still being offered...
...Carmel got to be a place where old folks came to live with their parents, and every time a writer-and-artist moved out a retired colonel moved in...
...Like my neighbor Anderegg in Wasserwendi, all he has to do is sell his land...
...Think fast...
...Long Beach was a loser when I first saw it going on fifty years ago...
...Maybe you can afford to stay home, but you can't afford to go home...
...No more than thinking about it, of course—but aren't there any right people around any more for the young to meet, or only Dickie Nixon and His Friends (and Dickie's brother's $200,000 "loan" from Howard Hughes) ? "Men govern themselves or they are ungovernable...
...The rich are still rich, the poor are still poor, and the thinkers are still thinking about the long term on their hilltop Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...
...Pray...
...Or have they quit and, if so, what will become of us...
...Maybe—a few of them...
...Then there's a pause, and somebody says, "Besides, it's the only place in America where elections are forecast on the basis of I Ching...
...When I ask Californians why they prefer California to New England, they say, "The climate...
...It's a Teufelskreis, or vicious circle...
...My neighbors on the Hasliberg got to be smug, rich, neutral, and irrelevant as the result of 500 years of penurious precision, mountainous ingenuity, and bone-bending effort...
...Because you can't get a taxi in New York in the morning rush hour or a bus to take you with your baggage to the town terminal...
...Now they are rich...
...Copied from absolutely everybody...
...We don't know that here—we're not an Amtrak station...
...Blackism is beginning to fade...
...Love It and Leave It—for a breather—and then go back...
...Meanwhile, back at the slave quarters, a half-dozen black fraternities have arisen at Wisconsin (and elsewhere), discriminating against honkies—and the University does not say a word lest somebody touch a match to alma mater...
...The unimpassioned old, like the passionate young, seem to have been conned by Mr...
...And this is the way American Man lives in 1972...
...here (Spiro is right) is where the signal goes out to Only in America...
...All able-bodied males A-F on the streets 10 to 11 p.m., G-N 11-12, O-Z 12 to 1, everybody in by 1. Would you rather live in Moscow or Chicago, or in neither, thank you...
...By night around the campus the streets are floodlit—and empty...
...But the Lord said pray, not think...
...Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, has just spent a month of travel in the United States...
...Mixed...
...That's the American idea of the long term...
...They do not pay much attention to their own Canton of Bern or to their own district of the Bernese Overland...
...They've given us everything superficial that we wanted...
...Everything everywhere is locked and double-locked and locked again...
...Is the idiotization beginning to totter...
...What has become of us...
...1969: "You kill a million innocents on purpose—we kill one by accident...
...Oh sure," and the Real New Yorker shrugs...
...Closed and battered and abandoned buildings, each erected on the tasteless taste of a liberty-lover...
...One of the "kids" who bombed the University's Army Mathematics Center in 1969 and killed a graduate student (who had nothing to do with Army Mathematics) is grabbed in Canada...
...Sweet peace—and the country is still going to hell in a tisket-a-tasket-a-green-and-yellow basket...
...Everybody takes it all seriously: grin or not, bear it...
...Only—I repeat—in America...
...Very bad scene, Mr...
...Little Amanda is over her shell-like ears in Asian Studies at Columbia...
...Dullsberg Ascended, smug, rich, neutral, and irrelevant...
...You're not a what...
...last month (I haven't been there since) it was thirty-five cents and Exact Change Only, Driver Does Not Have Access to Money...
...Some coaches are some better, some runs are on schedule, but they haven't got a nickel for the roadbed...
...What can we do...
...And it should have: It is inferior...
...Tell me, Mister, why can't we do something as simple as run the railroads in this country...
...Vandalism (which has subsided a little) is discovered to have been more furious on the higher floors of the twenty-two-story University dormitories, most furious on the highest...
...We called it swiping...
...Please Take Your Fur Coats Upstairs...
...Daring Dick Nixon promises—he doesn't deliver, of course—a generation of peace...
...In the year I've been hiding on the Hasliberg (where prices have gone up) and in Prague (where prices have gone up), prices have gone up and the dollar down...
...Rip off a $12 textbook, scratch your name and a few notes in it, and bring it back and get half-price for your slightly used textbook...
...The Hasliberger, like all the German Swiss, speak Swiss-German, or Schweitzer-Deutsch (which they call Schweezer-Duits...
...He has returned to Europe, where he is on leave from the University of Massachusetts and Windham College...
...Is it true that "they" now throw stones and bottles at the bicyclists for whom Lindsay closed Central Park to weekend auto traffic...
...Colder than alpine Wasserwendi...
...Idea, borrowed from Charles the Bold (or was it William the Silent...
...It is a spoken language...
...You've been hollering for a long time...
...What makes us think so...
...35,000 (or is it 45,000...
...The Santa Barbara UC campus is quiet, where the rioters rioted and burned the bank down twice...
...You can hang an honest policeman (if you can find one) around the neck of every first and last citizen and hold society together that way...
...Beautiful Little Amanda walks around Brooklyn and Morningside Heights day and night and rides the subways all hours in-between...
...False fronts all along the main street now...
...Now I know: the weather...
...I'm an ancient Japanese...
...Student Union barbershop: Haircut—$3.00...
...Zurich—The Limmathof is the cheapest little hotel in Zurich...
...The last time I had my hair cut there, which was the last time anybody but Mrs...
...If I sell any more to the builders," he said, "I won't have enough land for my boys to farm and they'll go to the city...
...On the Hasliberg the builders require the contractors to supply 200-year-quality building materials...
...I ask the white-haired brakeman how it is across the country, with Amtrak...
...Mario Savio, Mississippi, Selma— never heard of them—and Kent State is a song like Joe Hill...
...Americans can't imagine there being a long term...
...Everybody is heading for the hills, leaving the ruins to the despised and the downtrodden...
...There is a very thin scattering of walkers, and Amanda admits that people generally stay away from it...
...Just try being black sometime...
...The Real New Yorker and I take the subway downtown—it's the evening rush hour up, so we get a seat...
...Baby Mayer cut my hair, it was fifty cents...
...End of that juvenile snob racket, and a very good thing...
...And its unlit streets—in which "outsiders," always "outsiders" and usually "hippies," have made it inadvisable to do the only thing that was ever advisable to do there, namely, walk them at night...
...Nobody," and she shrugs, "has been in Morning-side Park"—between Columbia and Harlem—"in years, but it's probably all right there...
...We're co-opted...
...The ungovernability of X proportion of the people rises above X degree under crisis—and the society without an acutely conscious common weal is done for...
...Berkeley, CA.—Run-down scene...
...another Only in America...
...Chicago delivers to the Boss and the Boss delivers a little something back...
...John F. Kennedy International Airport—Do you know why you have to spend the night in a prepackaged megamotel at the airport, No Checks Accepted, air conditioning kaput, the thunder of the all-night trucks on Queens "Boulevard...
...Once I came back from Soviet Asia and Anderegg asked me how the weather was there, and I told him, and that was that...
...New-fashioned development: Madisonians now lock their doors against thieves, but there's no Crime in the Streets...
...Isn't any...
...The southbound (once again carrying sleepers from Portland, three times a week) arrives on schedule and stays on schedule...
...Nixon has packed the Federal bench with political hacks at the district court level...
...Everybody offers Black Studies, Folklore, Cinema, and Women in (History, Literature, Science, Education, Psychology— you name it, we offer it...
...In America we moved on and on without having to learn self-governance or self-government and in the process learned ungovernability...
...Who said overpopulation...
...1972, overheard: "Does that mean that every time they kill a million on purpose we're licensed to kill one by accident...
...Think...
...friends leave Berkeley for the hills after their third hi-fi is taken in three break-ins...
...Everybody goes to L 202—three graduate students and a professor...
...A vestigial survivor of the old Carmel, like Ephraim Donor, the artist, survives by bartering his productions for produce...
...And we've been thinking about that, on and off, since...
...Female faculty demand separate but equal treatment—we have a female deputy provost at my university to hear female complaints...
...They haven't much interest in the world they're sitting on top of, or even in Switzerland—certainly not in the Staedli, the people from the cities...
...The real estate sharks keep Carmel a Jim Crow town —a sotto voce operation—but the motels and the restaurants may no longer exclude uppity Nigras who don't care how much they have to pay...
...Twelve or fifteen years ago the University of Wisconsin gave the fraternities five years to clean up their racial and religious discrimination or get out...
...You will be consoled to know that though they are rich, they are not very happy...
...Above the bandstand a banner stares at them: Hear Milton Mayer Today in L 201...
...If everybody went out at night the streets would be safe...
...What are they doing, besides reverting to booze...
...When I was a little swiper, or snotnose, I used to wonder how it was possible to govern a great city like New York...
...But ungovernable men, when they can no longer move on and on, have no more liberty than men who are governable only by others...
...My pal Joe Schwab, bricking and barring his ground-floor windows, says it's this way...
...Spectacularly horrible now, it is still spectacular...
...I pick her up at the Graduate Library there and she leaves her books and things on her desk...
...Now it's California—the Gracious Living Belt, seedbed of implacable Ronnie and implacable Angela and fifteen million glad-handed dealers in sunshine in-between...
...station...
...Wonderful New York, the fascinating heterogeneity of its Four Million, so many so rich and so many so poor and hopeful, transformed now to the fearsome heterogeneity of its Eight, so many still so rich and so poor and all of them so hopeless...
...Discovery: the "hello" tradition, long ago done down by the card index and the computer, begins to revive on the campuses...
...And you, Big Boy, how are you doing...
...And nobody to say Please or Thank You or I'm Sorry or Come Again...
...The reason it is primitive is that we are twenty years older and softer and we think it might be nice to have a private bath...
...Go back because you can't go anywhere but home again...
...It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere...
...Madison, Wisconsin—Happy discovery—I have been away: The fraternities all over the country are Greek-letter rooming houses, "rushing" tenants...
...I ask Amanda what happens in Japan when a student flunks his exams for the university...
...The March primary results suggested that the Boss is slipping, but he's got a long way to slide and the graveyard vote in his pocket...
...In this one—I said "one"—respect the face of America has changed for the better, a precondition (not a condition) of our being able to live together...
...In the daytime...
...That was when we represented a silent minority...
...The coach interiors have been repaired (and cleaned up) and the coffee-shop car restored (ah, with its white-haired Negro waiters...
...Not as long as it's dog eat police dog...
...Anderegg doesn't have much in the way of tinted plumbing or, indeed, plumbing at all, but he turned down $65,000 for a corner of his pasture big enough to graze three cows...
...Go to L 202, everybody...
...Uh-uh—nothing scares anybody any more...
...We lived here at the tag end of Carmel's writers-and-artists days, and our shanty, which was falling down when we bought it for $14,000, has fallen down further and is worth $50,000...
...As of now one, count 'em, one, alderman out of the fifty, Leon Despres, still opposes him...
...My wife's services are worth $3.00 for twenty minutes...
...The good boy wants to hear me tell him what the radical students should do...
...Here's Anderegg, shoveling that good spring manure out of the barn...
...The garbage collected, the streets swept, the public transport safe, and commerce and industry stay in the city...
...This is the life-style (formerly way-of-life): rip off everything everywhere because the whole system's a rip-off, man...
...Why are the students "more serious"—and are they...
...You say that there is nothing to retrieve in Labrador, but the Lord says pray and the desert will blossom as the rose...
...Everywhere the blacks have come out of their holes, and though black is no more beautiful than white, this is a beautiful thing to see...
...Humphrey," says Francis, who doesn't love Humphrey, "wouldn't have done that...
...you used to be able to get a mistress for that, or six barbers...
...Are the sottish children of the sots who Made America What It Is Today beginning to recover from their premature second infancy...
...Wonderful New York, and on my first visit there, thirty-five years ago, public transportation was five cents...
...Too late...
...Nice old-fashioned development...
...I have learned the Japanese character for zero...
...Before I could understand a little Schweezer-Duits I used to wonder what my neighbors talked about among themselves...
...Occasionally somebody zaps somebody or blows a bank—"foreigners," "hippies"—but who needs crime in Switzerland...
...My oh so alma mater's student paper, the Maroon, is full of ads for abortions...
...Every time I go to New York, my first visit to New York, I say, "I'll come back in a year and by that time things will have had to get better...
...I have the deaf staggers when we get off, but I have learned some Japanese...
...No C. in the S., but the University bookstore is losing $50,000 a year on pilfering, closed-circuit television or no closed-circuit television...
...Long Beach, CA.—The universal crumminess of the American "inner city" is the consequence of the American passion for undisciplined mobility, a passion once mistaken by the Old World for the love of liberty...
...Five thousand students, all wearing the new bluejeans-and-sweatshirt uniform, on the greensward in front of a bandstand, where a rock group is playing...
...Even a German cannot understand them—which, legend has it, is why they invented Schweezer-Duits...
...I ask her if they'll be safe there, and she shrugs her shell-like shoulders...
...When we stayed there twenty years ago a charming double with breakfast, taxes, and service was $3...
...an occasional stranger greets you...
...28,000 plus 28,001 automobiles and motorbikes...
...If I'd been born a Switzer, why, man, I wouldn't know any better...
...The $50 (or $100) lunch settles the nation's hash...
...But hate (like love) laughs at locksmiths...
...One man's panic is another man's shrug...
...Nixon's noxious tricks...
...Our Sunday vigil for peace, now in its sixth year, used to attract 400 to the Common after church...
...The depression, of course, and you can't get a job without a degree (or with one...
...The Andereggs and their cows were poor on the Hasliberg for 500 years before the tourists and the skiers discovered them...
...All they ever intended to do was survive, and they've done it...
...I bow my head piously and say, "Where two or three are gathered together in his name, there is He...
...Mayer's new book, "If Men Were Angels," published last month by Atheneum, is reviewed by Nicholas von Hoffman in this issue...
...California, here I go...
...The Hasliberg has no policemen, of any kind, at all...
...Very...
...Think...
...In my time you could buy the University for $1,499,999.98...
...Francis Heisler is still here, still driving the courts up the wall on behalf of the despised and the downtrodden...
...It couldn't have got any worse, and it hasn't got much better and can't get much better...
...A terrible place to visit, but you wouldn't want to die there...
...Out in the hills Long Beach State College, pop...
...There are coppers everywhere, and sirens going, and a sign in the skyscraper lobby: Warning: Police Dogs Are Loose in This Building from Dusk to Dawn...
...Now we represent a howling majority and we have a half-dozen to a dozen hardies—no students—stamping their feet in the sub-zero wind...
...Wasserwendi/Hasliberg—For fifty years America has had an inferiority complex about Europe...
...Remember when the squares were pushing "togetherness...
...Pell-mell faculty re-emigration eastward of a few years back ended now with the academic depression...
...So all right: I tell you that I wouldn't want to die here, because I'm an Amurrikan born and half-bred...
...When I was young (but I mean young) we were all rip-off artists...
...I think of the fat cats holding down every juicy U.S...
...The life-style of the new Robin Hoods: Steal from the rich and the poor...
...Crime in the Streets belongs to the border between whites and blacks, and there is no substantial black working (or non-working) population in towns like Madison...
...There must be a few million who would not live anywhere else ("you can get anything in New York") and more than a few million who are chained to the job there—but everybody / meet wants out...
...No takers...
...Everybody please copy, just as I did from Plato...
...In Japan," she says, "he shoots himself...
...Take Zurich, capital of the world's most unimaginative money-grubbers: a serene, sedate, and beautiful city...
...Nobody professes to know...
...So all right: You tell me that Switzerland is the world's copout, Mt...
...We're land-rich (like my neighbor Anderegg on the Hasliberg...
...Labrador—The pilot says we are crossing the coast of Labrador...
...Up, up, and away from that tough town and that tough country, my own, my native land, Land of the Free-Fire Zone and Home of the Conscripted Brave...
...Men govern themselves or they are ungovernable...
...The dean once put me on probation for saying "damn" in it...
...students on one campus...
...embassy in Europe, and I think of FDR's appointment of my old history professor, William E. Dodd, to Berlin...
...I ask her to teach me Japanese...
...Pray...
...Island of non-wandering minstrels surrounded by Reagan country...
...I'd be smug, rich, neutral, and irrelevant, a small man sitting on top of the big world and watching, not the world, but the mountains go by...
...I had been away a year...
...Up, up, and away, after you have been searched and your baggage has been searched and nobody to say Please or Thank You or I'm Sorry or Come Again, or even Goodbye...
...And then we grew a little more and met the right people and heard that a man at his so-so best doesn't swipe—whether or not he might one day be swiped from...
...Chicago, III.—Here (I'm not bragging, only reporting) I was born and here I died and moved to (and from) California...
...It is Spring, even in New York, and Little Amanda, the Real New Yorker, walks me around in Riverside Park...
Vol. 36 • May 1972 • No. 5
