We Learn Nothing Read online

  The worst part, for me, is imagining how alone he was. This is the most poisonous thing that secrets do to us—they isolate us from everyone around us and make us feel even lonelier than we already are. I wish he could’ve somehow brought himself to talk to us. I sometimes fantasize about how I would’ve reacted—what I would’ve said to him, how I would’ve tried to help. As Kevin once complained, “I wish he coulda just told us so we could’ve mocked him for it!” But not everybody gets to be free. Some have to stand guard at their own prisons for life. Some secrets we must take with us, as the melodramatic old idiom has it, to the grave.

  And, after all, one never knew for sure. Once in a while one of Skelly’s stories would be proven true and you’d be forced to question everything. For some perverse reason, anytime I flew anywhere I would always leave my car with Skelly. It spared him from having to use Baltimore’s public transit system for a week or two, and it was pleasant to have him pick me up at the airport and stop off for a beer at the Midtown Yacht Club (not an actual yacht club). Once, when I got back from a trip, he gently broke the news to me over airport beers that my car no longer had a rear window. He explained that he’d just been driving it at a normal speed on Moravia Road when, suddenly and with no warning whatsoever, the rear window had simply fallen out and shattered into a million pieces on the pavement. I just nodded, understanding that I would never know the real story, whatever it may have been. I mentally wrote it off under cost-of-being-friends-with-Skelly expenses. Years later, driving that same car (window long since replaced), I was startled when, suddenly and with no warning whatsoever, the rear window simply fell out and shattered into a million pieces on the pavement. My immediate reaction, staring open-mouthed into my rearview mirror, was not Hey my rear window just fell out or What am I supposed to do now? but Holy shit—Skelly was telling the truth! I found this incident weirdly cheering. It not only vindicated Skelly but gave me a renewed sense of possibility in the world. Maybe there really was a daughter in France. Maybe Christianity was true! If the skies are ever rent asunder to reveal the archangel Michael raising his fiery sword to herald the return of Christ the King in all His glory, it’ll be some consolation for me, before my damnation, to find Skelly among the Resurrected so I can buy him a beer and say, “We should’ve believed you.”

  When we die, all our secrets are loosed, like demons departing a body. Whatever subjective self we protected or kept hidden all our lives is gone; all that’s left of us is stories. At Skelly’s funeral, all his carefully guarded boundaries and compartments collapsed, and everyone he knew, the people he’d kept separate in life—family, friends, coworkers—all got drunk and commiserated and traded stories about him. I sat an ex-girlfriend of his down over shots of Irish whiskey and said, “Karin, I’d like to ask you a series of nosy questions.” She smiled and said, “Go right ahead, Tim. I’d like to ask you some, too.” It emerged over the course of our mutual interrogation that what I’d always assumed had been an on-again, off-again affair had been a platonic friendship. “He was a perfect gentleman,” she told me, with a kind of defiant pride. His friends were bewildered to hear his employees describe him as super-organized, a perfectionist. “Wait, this is Skelly you’re talking about?” we asked. “The guy who just died?” We retold the stories, as well-known and loved and ritualized in the telling as the Homeric epics or Icelandic sagas, about his walking off the pier in the fog, his getting arrested for trespassing on a submarine, the story of the Smallest Horse in the World. The legendarily clueless Bill Frug asked me the same question that Renée had the night we’d learned Skelly had died, but in all innocence: “Did anybody reach Skelly’s daughter in France?” Incredibly, decades later, he still believed in her. It never occurred to me to disillusion him; it would’ve been like killing the last gryphon or chimera.

  “No, Bill,” I told him soberly. “We never found her.”

  How They Tried to Fuck Me Over (But I Showed Them!)

  I was a political cartoonist and essayist for the duration of the Bush presidency, so I was professionally furious every week for eight years. The pejorative Bush-hater always rankled me, presuming that my rightful outrage at that administration’s abuses was as irrational as misogyny or arachnophobia. And yet, looking back at my own work from those years, even I am struck by its tone of shrill, unrelieved rancor. No wonder readers who met me in real life seemed pleasantly surprised to learn that I was so polite; they must’ve been expecting someone more like Ted Kaczynski or the guy from Notes from Underground. Reading over my own impassioned rants now, my impression is, Jeez Louise, what a sorehead.

  A couple of years ago I realized something kind of embarrassing: anger feels good. Although we may consciously experience it as upsetting, somatically it’s a lot like the initial rush of an opiate, a tingling warmth you feel on the insides of your elbows and wrists, in the back of your knees. Understanding that anger was a physical pleasure explained some of the perverse obstinacy with which my mind kept returning to it despite the fact that, intellectually, I knew it was pointless self-torture. It is, come to think of it, not unlike lust, which I also seek out insatiably, even though it subjects me to the sufferings of Tantalus.

  Once I realized I enjoyed anger, I noticed how much time I spent experiencing it. If you’re anything like me, you spend about 87 percent of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place. You make up little stories to explain misunderstandings and conflicts, starring yourself as innocent victim and casting your antagonist as a villain driven by sheer, unilateral, motiveless malice. If you’ve ever made the mistake of committing your half of these arguments to print or email, you probably learned, as I have, that the other person’s half of the argument fails to conform to the script you wrote for them.

  It seems like most of the fragments of conversation you overhear in public consist of rehearsals for or reenactments of just such speeches: shrill, injured litanies of injustice, affronts to common sense and basic human decency almost too grotesque to be borne: “And she does this shit all the time! I’ve just had it!” You don’t even have to bother eavesdropping; just listen for that unmistakable high, whining tone of incredulous aggrievement. It sounds like we’re all telling ourselves the same story over and over: How They Tried to Fuck Me Over, sometimes with the happy denouement: But I Showed Them! So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.

  We tend to make up these stories in the same circumstances in which people come up with conspiracy theories: ignorance and powerlessness. And they share the same flawed premise as most conspiracy theories: that the world is way more well planned and organized than it really is. They ascribe a malevolent intentionality to what is more likely simple ineptitude or neglect. Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid.

  Obviously, some part of us loves feeling 1) right and 2) wronged. But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation.

  And, as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation. The more popul
ar and lowest-common-denominator the media outlet, the more naked and shameless the appeal: think of tabloid headlines, wailing and jeering and all but calling for the public stoning of their indispensable scapegoats: accused killers, criminal billionaires, whichever foreign dictators are out of favor with the government. The morning of a blizzard in New York City, the New York Post’s headline was “ICE SCREAM: Fury as City Is Paralyzed by Blizzard.” A subhead: “Outrage as Transit Stops in Its Tracks.” My own impression of the blizzard was that it was pretty and fun, like a harmless, soft apocalypse. Walking around the city, I saw people trudging down the centers of empty avenues, children and grown-ups screaming with delight while sledding down hills in Central Park, a bar full of people in Santa suits getting drunk in the afternoon. But none of this qualifies as news, I suppose. PRETTY and FUN don’t lend themselves to seventy-two-point headlines as well as FURY and OUTRAGE.

  It’s not just media specifically marketed toward the stupid that offer up this unwholesome diet, though they’re the most overt about it. I used to drive around every day ranting back at the genteel NPR—snarling at Diane Rehm for fawning over that sexy old war criminal Henry Kissinger, or sputtering in rebuttal to some conservative flack who was arguing that it was naïve to expect the president to act as an “objective broker of information” (his euphemism for honesty). When I scan the daily headlines of prestigious publications like the New York Times, I’m semiconsciously seeking out stories that will provide fodder for the sadomasochistic pleasures of outrage and vindication, being wronged and proven right, how-dare-you and I told-you-so. Throughout the Bush years my very favorite story, the one I couldn’t seem to read enough different iterations of, was “Republicans Ruining Everything”; a few months after Obama’s inauguration it was “Republicans Still Writhing.”

  Any drug dealer knows it’s bad business, and a fatal error, to start using your own product. I’m not immune to this stuff, even though I was a purveyor of it myself. I resisted the urge to draw any cartoons about fundamentalist Islam for years, less out of any PC sensibilities than for the same reason Bill Mauldin was loath to draw anti-Soviet cartoons: “I think of all the sons of bitches doing the same thing for reasons of their own and I usually throw the drawing away.”1 But in November 2007 the story of Gillian Gibbons, an English teacher in Sudan who was briefly jailed for allowing her students to name the class teddy bear Mohammed (a minor story in the mainstream press, but front-page news for a week in the tabloids), finally goaded me into drawing an absurdly blasphemous cartoon about other things being called Mohammed—a mixed drink, a hurricane, somebody’s penis.

  Afterward I was ashamed of my reaction, not because I’d offended anyone’s religious sensibilities or been roused to xenophobic rage or made myself a tool of the imperialist propaganda machine, but simply because it had worked on me; I’d let myself be taken in, like any other rube. It was the same kind of mortified resentment you feel when you involuntarily tear up over a long-distance commercial or catch yourself rocking out to Cher or end up giving a dollar to a con artist whose hard-luck story is insultingly implausible. It was as if someone had activated an electrode in the outrage lobe of my brain. What was so disquieting was not just that I’d reacted with the programmed emotion, but that I’d believed I was genuinely feeling it.

  It’s risky to pursue these stories beyond the initial quick hit of anger, because it invariably turns out that the more you learn about them, the more disappointingly complicated and ambiguous and depressing they become. At one point I thought that a good use of my time would be to work myself into a rage over the mistaken shooting of the composer Anton Webern by an American GI at the end of World War II. There is no fetish so specialized that the Internet cannot gratify it; see the website “I Curse the Soldier Who Killed Anton Webern.” But then I took my research a step too far and learned that the soldier who shot Webern, one Raymond Bell, was tortured by remorse for the rest of his short life. He died, an alcoholic, only ten years after the war. This story isn’t morally satisfying at all. It’s pointless and shitty and sad, a collision of victims. I’d been lured by a base craving into a finer, less comfortable feeling I hadn’t expected or desired. It was like trying to seduce a girl and accidentally falling in love.

  I’m not saying that we should all just calm down, that It’s All Good. All is not good. There is plenty in any day’s headlines to appall and infuriate any decent human being. The kind of piety that would have a schoolteacher whipped deserves to be mocked and vilified; my reasons for despising the Bush administration were sane and patriotic and moral. Outrage is healthy to the extent that it causes us to act against injustice, just as pain is when it causes us to avoid bodily harm. But pain can be perverted into masochism. And in my passionate loathing for the Taliban or the Bush administration, in my personal relationship to them, I’m really not much different from the kinds of housewives who used to write hate mail to the scheming villainesses on their favorite soap operas. The soaps refer to that character type, with dishy candor, as “the woman you love to hate”—one of the few contexts where you hear the love of hatred so frankly acknowledged. In political jargon, this sort of material is called “red meat,” which is pretty contemptuously up-front about the nature of the beast whose appetite is being appeased. As David Foster Wallace asked in his essay on talk radio: “Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?”

  One of the last news stories to elicit my uncritical outrage was the Somali pirate incident, a tense four-day-long drama in April 2009. Somali pirates seized an American cargo ship and held its captain hostage in a standoff with the U.S. Navy. What galled me was the presumptuous stance taken by the pirates that they, the maritime equivalent of a teen street gang, were negotiating from the same status as a legitimate nation-state. It only exasperated me further when the pirates’ colleagues (“colleagues”—as if they were endocrinologists) vowed to take revenge on any Americans they captured in the future. They were criminals who’d gotten caught—shouldn’t they be grateful we don’t still hang pirates at the gibbet? I have to confess that it gave me some sanguinary satisfaction when the navy resolved the negotiations with snipers instead. It was one of the few news stories in recent memory that ended the way a TV movie would, not to mention the United States’ first military victory in a decade.

  My feel-good ending got annoyingly deflated when I saw the lone surviving Somali pirate brought in manacles to the United States, a place where he did not speak the language and knew not a soul. He was not exactly Blackbeard: in fact he looked a lot like a kid, which is what he was, and he was also inappropriately grinning a rather disarmingly goofy grin, as if he mistakenly thought he was up for a Golden Globe award. (In some cultures smiling is a cover for embarrassment or fright.) It’s not as if he wasn’t still a thug, or I suddenly felt like we ought to give the poor kid a break; I was just forced to notice he was a human being. I felt the same helpless gut empathy for him that I used to feel, unwelcome and against my better judgment, for George Bush in those moments when even he seemed to dimly apprehend that he was in way over his head. One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.

  When They’re Not Assholes

  I never even learned the rules to most organized sports. I hid out in the art classroom during mandatory pep rallies and still avoid bars where a game is on because it scares me when people shout violently in unison at the TV. None of this helped much with my socialization as a male, but it has given me a certain outsider’s perspective on the culture of sports. I noticed, when I was still very young, that during outcries over disputed calls, spectators’ opinions about the play in question coincided, 100 percent of the time, with their team allegiance. As far as I could tell, no one was good-humoredly feigning their outrage for fun. They genuinely perceived the play to have gone the way that happened to favor th
eir side. Instant replays did not modify these opinions. It’s hard to imagine anybody saying, “Ahh, I don’t know, actually it looked out to me,” when all his pals are standing up from their bar stools yelling that it was in, the ref must be blind, it’s a fix. He’d be like that four-eyed, bow-tied geek in the old animated cartoon cheering, “H’raay—I’m fer de udder team!” his vim shriveling as the entire crowd around him turns to regard him with surly hostility. The only times I’ve ever gotten emotionally invested in any sporting events were when a friend suckered me into rooting for the Buffalo Bills circa 1990–92, an experience that had the effect on me that campaigning for McGovern in ’72 did on a generation of young voters, and once at a scripted jousting tournament in a Medieval Times theme restaurant, where, again, my fiefdom’s champion lost ingloriously, this time to a prancing dandy called the Blue Knight. During my brief career as a fan I learned that the difference between actually believing something and just going along with the crowd is a lot less clear, more of a continuum, when you actually care about the game. And that caring has less to do with any real stake in the outcome than with having picked a side.

  I endorse conservatives repealing health care reform in their own states, refusing to get flu shots for fear of government nanochips, carrying concealed weapons into bars. This is all just natural selection in action, elegant and just.

  That was me, writing in the afterword to my last book of political cartoons. Perhaps you can tell I was overdue for a sabbatical. After eight years of pretending to be meaner and surer of myself than I really was, I found myself recalling the old parental warning to kids making grotesque or cruel expressions: “Your face will freeze that way.” After Obama’s inauguration, I spent a year or two detoxing from politics, keeping myself ignorant of current events like some nervous invalid who has to be protected from any news of the outside world lest he have one of his spells.