Nonconformity Read Online Free Page A

hopeless as a spiritual void, would be only to lose that twenty an hour to a competitor with a more flattering tale to tell. After all, a doctor has problems too. Particularly when he’s in the same secret trap as the patient—his sole advantage being, as in dealing blackjack, that he’s on the side of the house.
    The more daring man decides to throw over hisjob and get howling drunk: success is for squares, have a ball while you can, tomorrow be damned and all of that.
    Yet Monday morning finds him back at his desk pushing that real good goo, the crazy kind with the special flavor, the hair oil that leads to early promotion, the cologne that makes the girls want to take you to stag parties or the booze that affords every Clark Street lush with his fly unbuttoned a certain distinguished air.
    “When something does not go well with us, we seek for causes outside of ourselves,” Chekhov observed. “Capital, masons, the Syndicate, the Jesuits, bugaboos, are ghosts.… If the French start talking about the Yids, the Syndicate, it is a sign that they feel all is not well with them, that a worm is gnawing at them, that they need these ghosts to appease their disturbed consciences.” 45
    Something is gnawing, so somebody has to be punished. For those who need to rebel, but cannot afford it, the scapegoats who live at the bottom of a whiskey bottle will do. For those to whom drink or drugs or dice are unthinkable, Joe McCarthy is the boy with the proper answers.
    Some rebels.
    The addict’s revolt has a special grace. When he shoves a needle into his vein it is, in a sense, to spare others. Somebody had to be punished all right—and he’s the first who’s got it coming. Things are going wrong in the world, so, in a sort of suicidal truculence, he impales himself.
    That the truculence of the witch-hunter is something else is evidenced by the ferreting into all our hearts.
    When Faulkner fitted out his workshop, being a good American didn’t mean just being a good non-com. Now the notion seems to be that what matters most is how to pilot a jet or strip a bazooka, and that that is all that really matters.
    “I went into the army,” I heard the teenage volunteer explaining himself, “because that’s where they can’t fire me.”
    “All I want,” another decides, “is a job with a pension to it.” But why the undertone of disappointment, the dull unacknowledged pang, as though everything he had ever done was only what he had been told to do and out of it all he had yet had nothing all for himself? As if, each time he took an order, he felt that same dull pang.
    “I know right from wrong,” a girl in trouble tells me, “but I don’t seem able to get a foot on the ground either way.”
    They’d rather take their chance in the full light of the taverns or the half-light of the lounges, these days, then among men. The teenager feels, as often as not, that there is no longer much point in knocking himself out to be a good surgeon, architect or engineer when there seems so little chance that he’ll ever be able to put real skill to work. Our idealists aren’t calling for those crafts as they did in Faulkner’s America—they’re calling for good officers andreliable non-coms, in civvies as well as in uniform.
    Indeed, by packaging Success with Virtue, we make of failure a moral defeat. And rather than risk such failure, the less daring now take it to be the part of wisdom to sit it out in the booths and the bars. They do not wish to commit themselves, they are reluctant, in this sick air, to let themselves be engaged. Not realizing that the only true defeat is to be capable of playing a part in the world, and playing no part at all.
    They aren’t drinking, as did Faulkner’s folk, out of a deep sense of personal loss, because they never had anything of their own to lose. They aren’t getting drunk, like Hemingway’s losers, out of disillusionment, because they never had any. They grew up in the ruins and they