Economic recession as therapy: the Mighty Hand
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - march 09 ]
Have you ever noticed how we never find out how our common social problems get solved? For instance, some Mighty Hand lowered the price at the pump when exorbitantly expensive gasoline slowed distribution, put a brake on production, disrupted routines, and made everyone shun inverted-bathtub, carbon monoxide-exuding V-8 Sports Utility Vehicles [SUV]. We knew only the price per gallon, not why the situation was what it was.
When in the last few years we came face to face with ecological chaos because we kept on turning like the Big Wheel and burning like Proud Mary, spewing carbon dioxide in celebration of General Motors and what's good for the nation, some Mighty Hand put the quietus on our gluttony and our other deadly sins, and then seeing that the tactic worked, It called in all the loans, mortgages, credits, advances, frontings, markers, IOUs, and all the promissory notes everywhere. The Mighty Hand wrote that we were living on borrowed time as well as a dollar down and a dollar a week, and les jeux sont faits.
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) wrote that the number of people increases exponentially, that is, geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64), while the Big Macs and rice bowls they live on increase only arithmetically, one at a time (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), so before long there won't be enough Big Macs or rice bowls to go around. However, Thomas Malthus, like Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who were also heavy thinkers, lived in a world that had no useful electricity. He did not know that science and technology would compound the problems of overpopulation with the life-threatening collapse of our greenhouse Earth because of warming, pollution, contamination, desertification, deforestation, and soil and ozone depletion.
Things are worse and better than they knew or foretold, just as anything we predict today will be compromised by future developments. Nonetheless, if we cherish sanitation, predictable rainfall, clean water, regular temperatures and tides, and the absence of floods and droughts, and if we don't want to have to say like Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor, "What a dump!" we will have to go along with what the Mighty Hand hath delivered unto us: Global Recession.
Strange signs and portents indicate catastrophe is imminent. The oceans are afloat with plastics bags and used condoms. The fish are dying. Polar bears are often hermaphroditic these days. AIDS is eliminating the dirty people, the promiscuous and unwashed. Bottled water is contaminated. Processed food has bugs in it. A mulatto is president of the United States. Female hormones contaminate water and food supplies everywhere. Girls are dying from asthma. Boys are growing breasts. We escape living in filth only by making extraordinary efforts to get rid of our garbage and excreta, feces, scat, dung, poop, guano and crap. We ought to recycle it, but that costs scratch, moola, bucks, wampum, dough, and lucre.
The Mighty Hand hath written that economic depression is a cure for overpopulation. If we should allow the Chinese, Indians, Africans, Malays, Indonesians, Middle-Easterners, and North Asians to drive their new cars on modern highways and flush away their latest waste from Wal-Mart, then there will not be enough of anything to go around. So, the Mighty Hand hath pulled the plug in order to prevent them from becoming wastrels like us. Millions of Chinese factory workers have lost their rice bowls and don't know where to find them.
In any event, we cannot allow the developing world to morph into maniacal automobile totemists like us. We cannot have a chicken in every pot if we have a car in every garage. We cannot even have garages, except for places for the relatives to sleep when they come back from looking for work.
When the banks failed, when everybody owed more than they could pay, the party was over. No more living on credit means no money; no tickee, no washee, just like Bernard Madoff's contracts. There is no free lunch. It only seems free at first.
A southern American story
The folk expression, "No tickee, no washee," comes, I am told, from a humorous story of a hundred years ago, one of the earliest recorded stand-up comic routines on Edison cylinders and shellac disks, Calvin Stewart's 'Uncle Josh Stories'. Uncle Josh Weathersby, a resident of Punkin Center, was the original Redneck, an oaf often discombobulated by the modern world. My paternal grandmother, Delta Heacock (1888-1966), was a popular speaker in the old days before TV, an Evangelical Joan Rivers, when people used to gather to talk and listen to each other and play music together. She gave recitations, told stories, and played the harmonica, keeping traditional, that is, formerly popular, narrative verses and comical stories alive in front of school assemblies and social clubs. Uncle Josh was one of her characters too, in days when the political correctness was different.
In a beloved story about Uncle Josh, he takes his soiled linen to a Chinese laundry (the Korean grocery of its day).
Uncle Josh tells the story:
"...he giv me a little yaller ticket that he painted with a brush what he had, and I'll jist bet a yoke of steers agin the holler in a log, that no livin' mortal man could read that ticket; it looked like a fly had fell into the ink bottle and then crawled over the paper."
Convinced by a crook that the illegible receipt is a lottery ticket, Josh sells the ticket to him for ten cents. Josh goes on:
"...and in a couple of days I went round to git my washin', and that pig tailed heathen he wouldn't let me hev em, coz I'd lost that lotery ticket. So I sed ó now look here Mr. Hop Soon, if you don't hop round and git me my collars and ciffs and other clothes what I left here, I'll be durned if I don't flop you in about a minnit, I will by chowder."
Society is a criminal enterprise at bottom, and we are all Uncle Joshes, dupes, stooges, victims of resentment and aggression and the butt of jokes. Our laws maintain teachers, preachers, prosecutors, policemen, and courts, but all of them together cannot prevent the thousand wounds, seldom actionable, that we impose on each other.
When I was a young teacher in Romeo, Michigan, I attended an evening class in the modern novel taught by a young assistant professor sent out from the University of Michigan to carry knowledge to the masses by his boss Warner Rice, a Milton scholar and Chairman of the Department. Professor Rice thought himself the reincarnation of the sage Matthew Arnold, who was, you will recall, a school inspector.
It is the fate of assistant professors to have to do the dirty work, to teach the first-year students and, God forbid, the adult evening courses, so poor Jack Thygerson PhD came to the exurbs of Detroit to give, offer, administer and teach a course in reading William Faulker and Mikhael Sholokov. You too can learn to read The Sound and Fury and And Quiet Flows the Don, and be nourished thereby.
Jack Thygerson was a Minnesota native, a Norwegian bachelor teacher with a lisp, not only effeminate but prissy, self-important and supercilious, and he knew more about the craft of fiction and the creation of intersubjective realities than anyone I had met. It was a honor to sit at his feet. What he thought important was new to me.
Jack somehow knew the music teacher at Romeo High School, C Lynn "Cookie" Brown, a flighty fellow who was always meeting his friends at the bus station in Detroit. Like Simon Stimson, the choirmaster in Our Town, Jack Thygerson had "troubles." His enthusiasms met with derision. He once demonstrated his skill at flamenco dancing, clapping and hopping on the sturdy oak table at the front of the classroom, to the embarrassment and delight of the unwilling in the back row of the class. Ignorance and hypocrisy feed off each other, you know. The Puritan spirit informs every moment of American life, every thought and decision of the vilest and lowest of us because we are taught to hate freedom and pleasure. No punishment is strong enough to sponge away the envy and guilt of the stupid.
In those days I was as green as Kermit the Frog. Jack invited me to lunch at Stouffer's Restaurant in Detroit where I ate spinach soufflé for the first time. He said he wanted to get to know me, and I was flattered. He asked me about my life in Romeo where I was a new teacher. I told him about my friend, the Episcopal priest at St Paul's in Romeo. The Oxonian Father Williamson, a remittance man, had been exiled to Barbuda in the Caribbean, and then was befriended by a rich Texan who got him a parish in Ft. Worth, from which he was fired for inviting negroes to attend mass. One eveniing after his wife and son had gone to bed he had tried to embrace and kiss me, and I was shocked at his "familiarity." I could not even imagine anything beyond missionary sexuality. Jack lost his interest in the conversation, made his excuses, and left the restaurant. People are funny, they say.
Nor did I understand Jack's fascination with the actor Lawrence Harvey and Simone Signoret, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1959. Sure, she was beautiful and sexy, but too old for me. Jack met a few of us at a cinema in Detroit where we watched the film Room at the Top, "A Savage Story of lust and ambition", in which Simone's ex-prostitute character does not smoke cigarettes during a weekend date with Lawrence Harvey "so she can taste him better." Movies were getting to be sexier than ever, especially after Jack explained them.
Our neighbors, Robert and Vonnie Kost, were also in the class. Bob Kost was writing then, Scribners had just published his novel, A Girl for Me, and Arnold Gingrich of Esquire had bought several of his short stories. Bob had a lot to say to readers of literature, but not much to share with the rogues in the rear of the room who were there only to get college credits on their teaching certificates.
The fullness, vitality, and loud coloring of the characters that inhabit the world of Yoknapatawpha County and the struggles and suffering of the Cossacks through WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution did not make it to the back row of our classroom in the Old Junior High School Building. Our discussion of Faulkner's world in The Sound and the Fury and our deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in our even more perilous age were mocked by the good old boys and girls in the back row who treated our teacher, Jack, like a pariah, an outcast, an embarrassment. Stifled sniggers at his mannerisms and curt replies to his questions were all he got from them. The responses they gave to him, a representative of authority, learning, and the larger world outside Romeo were solely defensive. In effect, they were acting exactly like the recalcitrant, embarrassed, smartaleck pupils in their own country-school classes who felt out of place too.
Most of the teachers who were in the class were there because they needed the credits for certification, and the easiest way to get them was to drive to class one evening a week, sharing the work of reading and interpreting Cliff's Notes during the ride to and from class. Most teachers are prison guards, you know, childcare attendants and matrons who keep little kids out of harm's way while their parents work, and big kids out of the work force so they cannot compete with adults for dollars. Public education entails imprisonment. The prison guards eventually become like the prisoners emotionally and mentally so that, as the pupils gain social skills and knowledge, their teachers lose the skills and knowledge that they impart. A middle-aged teacher is left a mere husk, a piece of a person, all that is left of a feckless, deficient person who became a teacher in the first place by default. Teaching is nobody's first choice. It kills empathy, love, and joy. It fosters callousness, hatred, and misery.
Ever polite and forbearing, Jack put up with those adult delinquents in his own way, saying from time to time, quoting Faulkner, "A gentleman can live through anything," and "We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job."
When the faculty at the University of Michigan threatened to go on strike over a salary dispute, one of the wiseasses asked whether Dr Thygerson would drive to Romeo for the class if there were a strike.
Jack pondered a moment, and then replied, "No tickee, no washee." The wiseacres understood that.
Concerned about their grades to be determined by class attendance and a final essay, one of the guys asked about the criteria to be used, as if daring Jack to pull rank. He replied, "Faulkner wrote that a mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once."
I don't think they got that. Maybe they did.
At the final class meeting, Mrs. Kost invited all the class members to come to their grand home nearby after class for drinks and refreshments, and to say goodbye to Professor Thygerson. Miss Vonnie, like Bob and me, was from the South, so graciousness was expected. We were gathered, most of us, in the Kosts' front living room by the fire when Jack made an entrance.
"My god," he said." Come and look. Help me. There is something in the back seat of my car." He had parked in the driveway. We all went out. Bob Kost flung open the door and stepped back. In the seat was a large, moving burlap sack, the mouth tied with a cord and tag. Bob cut the cord, and out stepped a huge goose, shaking itself and waddling across the lawn. On the tag was written: "TICKEE." We all laughed.
We ate the goose for Christmas dinner with the Kosts. Their handyman and caretaker Ernie Maule, a Cornishman from the Upper Peninsula who lived with his wife and kids in the back of the 14-room Victorian house, killed and roasted it for Miss Vonnie.
Jack Thygerson hanged himself in Ann Arbor during the Christmas break.
