The Smart Culture. Robert L. Hayman Jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ It is a vision of a truly smart culture, one in which “smart” means all of us.

2 The First Object of Government Creation Myths

      It is the central contradiction of American life: the absurd divorce between egalitarian ideals and the reality of relentless inequality. It has been with us from the outset, and revolution, civil war, and two national efforts at reconstruction have succeeded more in re-stating the contradiction than in resolving it. We began by declaring all men equal, and a century later guaranteed all persons the equal protection of the law, and after yet another century ensured the civil rights of all Americans—and still our social, economic, and political life is dominated by inequity. There are no castes in America, and yet—maddeningly, undeniably—there are.

      The rationalizations have been with us from the outset as well. All men were equal, but, by nature, that principle did not extend to women, or men without property, or American Indians, or, of course, slaves. All persons were guaranteed equality under law but, in the nature of things, that pledge did not eradicate distinctions rooted in biology, and could not redress inequalities that were social, as opposed to legal. Civil rights are guaranteed all Americans, but, naturally, that secures only an equal opportunity to succeed, and cannot ensure equal outcomes. We are, formally, all equal, but we are, really, not equal at all: platitudes aside, there is no denying the natural order.

      We do not deny it; on the contrary, we have made it the law. At the founding, Rousseau’s communitarian vision yielded to an individualism that exalted, above all, the right to amass very unequal shares of property; protecting the “unequal faculties of acquiring property” became “the first object of government.” Over two hundred years later, it still is. Economic liberty leads inexorably to social inequality, and that is natural, that is just. The laws of nature have thus become our rules of law: both represent the same order.

      Some are, by nature, smarter; they should get, it is only natural, more. These are the myths of our creation, the essence of the smart culture.

       Prologue

      As a kid, I spent most of my summers living with my grandparents, which is even less of a big deal than it sounds, seeing as how my grandparents lived just across the highway. On the other hand, just across the highway sometimes seemed like another world: the houses there had yards on all four sides—“detached” is what we call them now; as kids, we just called them “huge”—and the backyards were big enough for any game any kid could ever want to play. I had a whole different bunch of friends over at my grandparents’, and we played a whole different bunch of games. For a kid, I guess, it really was a different world.

      I loved staying with my grandparents. It was a little bit because of the yard and the games but it was mostly because of them. My grandfather was a truck tire salesman and he made his living on the road, and he was great at it and he loved it, until somebody in some regional office somewhere decided that truck tires could not be sold efficiently by traveling salesmen, and they were not confused by the fact that my grandfather was already doing precisely what could not be done. So they moved my grandfather inside a store, and he became an automobile tire salesman, and he was great at this too, but he loved it a lot less. My grandfather was also a repairman—of all things mechanical and of many things familial—and he was like a father to me, and he was, I guess, one of my first real teachers. He taught me how to throw and hit a baseball, and later how to fix a car, and in between he tried to teach me how to ride a bicycle, but at this he failed, as he could not overcome my bike’s supernatural attraction to large inanimate objects like parked cars and brick walls and even, with an odds-defying accuracy, the goalposts on a football field. He also taught me my first complete sentence—“Pop-pop can fix any damned thing”—as well as my first lesson in manners, a lesson I proudly displayed to my mother on a city bus one Saturday morning, after a well-dressed man stumbled up the steps and fell to the floor: “Fall down,” I shouted helpfully, to my mom and all concerned riders, “and bust the ass!” For this, I had to wash my mouth out with soap, and my grandfather had to wash our new used car.

      My grandmother was my teacher too, and in a sense had to do double duty, as she had to help me unlearn a great many of my grandfather’s lessons. My grandmother was an executive secretary, and she could type and take shorthand and take minutes and balance books and edit correspondence and I hardly know what else, except that it seems to me a safe guess that she was as much responsible for her company’s success as was the company president she worked for, even if he got paid fifteen or twenty times as much. And if my grandfather could fix anything that was broke, my grandmother could heal anything that was hurt: there is no word big enough to describe the love she had for her grandchildren, and none good enough to describe the comfort we felt in her arms. She taught me a lot of things—little things like not to say “ain’t” (I still don’t), and big things like taking care of the people who need you (I try), but above all, she taught me what it’s like to feel safe, and that’s just about the best feeling in the world.

      I seemed to know all the people in my grandparents’ neighborhood, and they all seemed to know me. The Burkhardts lived on one side, and they were sometimes my baby-sitters when my grandparents were at work, and their house always smelled wonderfully like tomato sauce, which was, my grandfather explained, because Mrs. Burkhardt was an Italian. The Sanderses lived on the other side, and they also were sometimes my baby-sitters, and Mrs. Sanders always wore white clothes, and that was because, as my grandmother explained, Mrs. Sanders was a nurse. This simple order could have become mighty complicated on the day that Mrs. Sanders made spaghetti for dinner, but it was soon overwhelmed by a more fundamental truth. Mrs. Sanders, according to my grandmother, worked at St. Francis Hospital because she was a Catholic, and it turned out that Mrs. Burkhardt was also a Catholic, and Tommy Sidowski, who was a kid about my age who lived behind my grandparents, and whom I knew pretty well, and who was, according to my grandfather, a “Polack”—well, he was a Catholic too. Suddenly, the bewildering fragments of identity had yielded their common denominator, and that is why, at the age of six, I became a Catholic, a development that, unfortunately, went completely over the heads of my grandparents, who could not understand why I kept saying that I was a Catholic when, they insisted, I was hardly even a Methodist. My grandparents and I eventually reached an understanding on the matter, and it was agreed that I could become a Catholic later on if I still wanted to, and that arrangement was basically satisfactory to me, though it did not keep me from dipping into the ashtray for the next few Ash Wednesdays. My grandparents even let me be Italian—though only partly, and on my mother’s side, whatever that meant—but on my subsequent desire to become a Polack they remained uncompromising. Which was fine, because Tommy Sidowski wasn’t even my best friend.

      The Sanderses had two boys, Huey and Michael, and Huey was just a year younger than me, and it was Huey who would become my best friend in the world. We started playing together in my grandparents’ backyard when I was barely five, and for as long as I can remember, we were playing baseball and baseball-related games. Most of these games we made up, partly because, with just the two of us, it would have been difficult to field two standard teams, but also because it was our unspoken desire that in the games we played, neither one of us should really win or lose. We played some games that we copied from other kids—Wall-Ball was not one of our originals—but also some games that we made up from scratch over the years, games like Up Against the Wall, Off the Roof, Perfect Game, Double Play, and Rundown.

      For each of our games we made up rules. The object of Up Against The Wall was for the fielder—we always imagined we were some Phillie outfielder, usually either Johnny Callison or Tony Gonzalez—to make a great leaping catch by hurling his body against the brick wall of my grandparents’ house; the “batter” would accommodate by throwing the ball just over the fielder’s head. We had a scoring system for the catches: one point for a catch, two points if you juggled the ball and caught it, three points СКАЧАТЬ