An American Story (21 page)

Stateside, as my Bootstrap application was pending, I was working with a few of my competitors. The contestants were Air Force–wide; however, there were six or seven people in my unit who'd applied in the same cycle. A large percentage of linguists have at least two years of college, so it was unsurprising that so many of us bucked for a commission. All my competitors were white men, which I found unsurprising. At office parties and the like, we tended to drift together and update each other on any scuttlebutt we'd heard about the selection process. As announcement day loomed, one of them said to me with patronizing magnanimity, “You'll win since you're black and female, Debra, and that's as it should be, I guess.” Oh! the look of noble suffering on his face.

“I'll win because I'm better than you!” I shouted. “Right now, we compare GPAs, evaluations, test scores, letters of rec, awards and decs. I'll be back with my file in five minutes and I better find you standing right here with yours.”

I left him standing there red-faced while I ran back to my desk, where I kept a complete copy of all pertinent records, probably in triplicate and cross-referenced. Needless to say, he wasn't there when I got back.

For far too many white people, the existence of affirmative action means never having to consider that you're just not good enough. Worse, I got it from both directions: successful military women are routinely believed to have slept their way to the top.

Concomitant with my Bootstrap application, I applied for a spot at Officers' Training School and won it. I couldn't sleep at night with all my planning. I went home on leave then and ran into all my cousins and neighbors who weren't living their lives as they should.
That
started keeping me up at night. I was so tired of black people who wouldn't face reality and take control of their lives. There were lots of black admin personnel at Fort Meade and I was constantly trying to motivate the bright ones to take advantage of degree and commissioning programs. Enlisted then could get 75 or 90 percent tuition assistance, yet all I ever got were excuses. They never missed a party, but they never made it to class.

CHAPTER FOUR

———

BEGINNING AGAIN

I was accepted at the University of Maryland, College Park. It never occurred to me to apply to Georgetown or American, or one of the Ivys. There, I evaluated my credits with a guidance counselor whom I would not allow to wiggle out of doing his job like his Mizzou predecessor. I was closest to a degree in government and politics. I had no interest in government and politics, but no matter. I knew by then that whatever formal education I got, I had always been and would always be an autodidact. No one at College Park was going to work me harder than I'd work myself.

My existence was spartan. For the six months while I waited to be relieved of duty, I rose at 4:30
A.M.
each morning, worked at the NSA from 6
A.M.
to 2
P.M.
, worked out from 2:30
P.M.
to 5
P.M.
, carried a full load of night classes at College Park, and was in bed by 9 or 9:30
P.M.
I spent the weekends studying, doing research, writing papers, and doubling my workouts. I wouldn't allow a TV into the apartment. To my running regime, I'd added hard-core bodybuilding.

I immersed myself in nutrition, supplementation, and metabolic studies and evaluated every morsel that entered my body. I scoffed at those who ate for pleasure, and took carefully coordinated doses of vitamins and supplements throughout the day. I must have inherited my father's propensity for muscles, because I got results. My biceps were so big and my waist so small I had to have my uniforms tailored. I couldn't get strong enough, couldn't run fast enough, couldn't get high enough grades. I took a tumble down a gravelly hill one day and finished my untruncated run exultant, arms and legs bloody.

Aside from my baffled roommate, I saw no one. Finally, I broke things off with my hapless boyfriend and sautéed my soul with a very conscious hatred of men; I took a vow of celibacy that lasted years. My youngest sister was deputized to ask me if I was a lesbian.

One day at the height of a humid Maryland summer, I was walking down the street wearing as little as possible—miniskirt, halter top, sandals. From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a guy with a great body. My anger at men notwithstanding, I couldn't help stopping to check him out. But it was me. I was looking into a plate-glass window and I was the guy with the great body.

MY LEFT TURN

At that point, I'd rarely read a magazine, a newspaper, or a work of (non-Randian) nonfiction. The 1984 elections were coming up, so I assigned myself the task of following the election closely. A staunch Reagan supporter, I relished the notion of following his every move. I began reading the
Washington Times
and the
Washington Post
every day, very much looking forward to using the former to prove how duplicitous was the latter.

Reagan was the first president I was fully aware of, and his decision to bomb Grenada, instead of merely yelling at it, impressed me greatly. In my simplistic mind, the president came as a package deal with the military, the institution I lived and breathed, the institution that saved my life. His conservatism and blame-the-victim ethos resonated squarely with my GI world. Based solely on the word of mouth of those around me, I bought his whole tough-talking, lock-em-up, cut-em-off-welfare shtick. Or, I did before I paid anything like close attention to him. A month later I was reeling with confusion. A month after that, I was howling with anger. Another month—I was laughing uncontrollably. The man was a moron. A sexist, a racist, and a howling elitist to boot, but by far his biggest crime was his imbecility. I was learning that my hero was neither honest nor bright.

I went out of my way to see him on television, the vaunted Great Communicator, hoping that would change things for me, but that actually made it worse. Though it would take more time before I gave up the ghost of my conservatism, I scoffed at the notion of his communicative genius. He talked to the nation like we were idiots or toddlers or toddling idiots. It was so obviously contrived, so obviously the grade B ham reciting the lines his controllers wrote for him.

The
Times
and the
Post
were not enough; I had to have more.

After I sucked all the knowledge I could out of my textbooks, I got recommendations from my professors for extracurricular nonfiction reading. Soon, I couldn't get enough news and analysis. I began reading newsmagazines. I was appalled by the state of the world. I'd had no idea.

Shielded by my parents, lost in books and my own misery as I grew up, overseas for two years, and insulated from the Reagan recession by my government job, I'd had no idea how bad things were for working people. With my new wide-focus perspective and all those pesky facts, as a college student in 1984 and finally thinking for myself, I began to see my relatives' layoffs and evictions differently. Maybe every detail of life was
not
completely within the control of the individual. Not that I gave in easily. There were spirited, even book-throwing arguments in my classes between us military conservatives and the civilian liberals. For the first time, none of the right-wing things I spouted went uncontested. My professors and classmates made points I had never considered before and could not easily dismiss. I had to fight for my rhetorical life in the classroom, and I argued the conservative cause far longer than I actually wanted to simply because I was still a bad loser. A prelaw course, especially, made it impossible to argue that individuals exercise anything like the unfettered freedom of will which justifies leaving every man for himself.

I began to view my relatives' struggles with more complexity. Every time I called home, another one of them would have been summarily let go from a job and be frantically scrabbling for a new one. They wanted to work, even though the jobs they were able to get barely afforded them a decent living. The long lines to apply for menial jobs that I saw on TV and in the papers told me that most people want to work. It maddened me that they wouldn't break the cycle with a degree, investments, or entrepreneurship, but for the first time, it occurred to me that some people just want jobs. You need money to live, so they work simply for money and look elsewhere to find the meaning that humans need to survive. They don't aspire to be CEOs, they don't aspire to work that fulfills or challenges—some people just want to exchange labor for money in a pleasant environment and get back home to their families.

One of the most arresting images I've ever seen was of those thousands of people shivering in a Chicago snowstorm as they waited to apply for hotel lackey jobs. Soon after, when the millionaire aristocrat Reagan thumbed through the want ads to prove that people could work if they really wanted to, I almost had an aneurysm. How could an honest person say such a thing? It was patently obvious that people were being buffeted by forces much larger than themselves, but I couldn't get my military friends to make that simple acknowledgment. We could disagree about what our societal response to that should be, I argued, but not about that basic reality.

But no, I had to sit through pious stories about their poor immigrant grandparents who came here with nothing, or about the guy from their hometown who sold tomatoes door to door from a little red wagon rather than accept government handouts. They posited a world wherein every individual was completely autonomous and in control of his environment. Their analysis was that some people just don't want to work or that people have to live with the consequences of their actions. It was Joe Six-pack's fault that Reagan ballooned the deficit, that he broke the unions, that he deregulated everything? Even if some people chose poorly and, for example, dropped out of high school or had an illegitimate child—should one teenage mistake doom them for the rest of their lives? Is that really what's best for America? I could never understand liberal opposition to workfare—there is no dignity in handouts, I've always believed. Also, people are rational; they'll factor the specifics of any given welfare regime into their choices. However, workfare, as usually espoused, is more punitive and humiliating than loving but strict. If a welfare mom has the brains to be an astrophysicist, are we really better off forcing her to pick up trash on the highway in exchange for her welfare pittance each month? Some will aspire no further than manual labor and every society needs manual laborers—but others pine for more. People from the lower socioeconomic classes need direction and support to aim high; they don't need the government to help them underachieve. Why not help as many citizens as possible maximize their potential and then require them to pay the cost of it back either monetarily (like my college loans) or through substantive community service (like working for low pay in underserved areas)? My conservative coworkers just rolled their eyes, called me a bleeding-heart liberal, and sermonized about giving people “something for nothing.”

Even if your marginal existence is your own fault, I couldn't help wondering, is it really in our societal best interest to let people starve, to poorly educate them? Hopeless people commit crimes, so let's feed and educate them so they don't climb through our windows at night. Incarceration is so much more expensive and just about guarantees that the incarcerated will remain predators unable to support themselves legally: educated people commit white-collar crimes, the illiterate draw blood. What could be more conservative than crime prevention? But in response to my arguments about the relationship between lack of education and crime, all I'd get were sanctimonious non sequiturs like “Nobody ever gave me anything” and “Build more prisons.” I couldn't even get them to concede the bare-bones notion that crime reduction and prevention were preferable to high prison occupancy. Some people belong in prison, they'd sniff. I actually had a four-against-one debate once wherein my coworkers argued that inmates should be offered only the Bible during their incarceration. No exercise, no classes, no TV, no work—just sitting on their beds reading the Bible from five to ten. The fact that prison guards would resist such a regime more than any goo-goo liberal fell on deaf ears. My continued reading of the right-wing press only hastened my looming defection. I was used to the intellectual dishonesty of the left and black apologists—they pushed me right. But then, the intellectual shamelessness and moral clay feet of conservatives pushed me left. The left annoys me but the right insults my intelligence.

I was in a constant state of intellectual and emotional turmoil. It was my college angst all over again: who am I? What's my relationship to other blacks, to America? How am I supposed to figure out what to do with my life? Why can't I stop thinking about politics? I felt strong and confident but . . . toward what end? All I had were questions; I needed answers. When my commander called to tell me I'd been accepted into Officers' Training School, all I could think was, Now what? My coworkers were cheering and clapping and tossing papers at me like oversized confetti. I was faking a smile and thinking, Now what do I shoot for? Why isn't this enough? I was happy, just not satisfied.

I lay in my bed one night all alone, my mind whirring with plans and counterstrategies, when a sudden thought imprinted itself on my brain. Apropos of nothing, I said aloud, “I feel like I've been mugged.” I realized what my Osan malaise had truly been about. I was exhausted. Worn out by my own life. The effort of dragging myself from the working class to the middle class, though successful, had nearly killed me. Even my fixation on physical fitness had been just another way of simultaneously gaining control over my life and expressing a deep-seated anger. I never had to consciously decide between conventional attractiveness and the female bodybuilder's stylized look because once I started dealing with the root of my behaviors, I never again worked out with the same intensity. I couldn't.

Where I'd once had a “let them eat cake because it's their own fault they don't have bread” attitude about those I'd left behind, by the time I graduated in December 1984 I was feeling not so much vindicated as humble. No wonder so many people give up or never try at all; it shouldn't have to be this hard, I realized. But even if it has to be this hard, society should acknowledge the structural disadvantages so many face and ameliorate them as much as possible. What could be more conservative than abetting each citizen in maximizing her potential so she can contribute as much as possible? I tried and tried, but I just couldn't be satisfied with my own individual success. I knew I'd just been lucky.

DRIVEN TO ACTION

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who realizes that she can't have what's being conserved. The final experience that changed my worldview was buying my first new car.

Military bases are full of concessions. As I planned to rotate back from Korea at the tail end of 1983, I bought, sight unseen, a Chrysler/Renault Alliance, the 1983 Car of the Year. That and the implicit military seal of approval were enough for me.

As I drove home from the dealership, the car died in the middle of the highway. It continued to die, for no discernible reason, for the rest of the time I owned it. The dealership tried repeatedly to locate the problem, but couldn't. Finally, they told me to have my car towed off their premises. The Chrysler representative laughed at me when I asked for a refund.

I was frantic. The car payment and insurance consumed most of one biweekly paycheck; I couldn't afford to buy another car, nor was Laurel, Maryland, an area well served by public transportation. How was I going to get to school?

I appealed to the military for assistance but was told it was none of their affair. I was, however, ordered to continue making the payments and reminded that I'd lose my security clearance for “financial irresponsibility.”

Those were the days just before lemon laws; I was booted out of one lawyer's office after the other. Not only that, they did so in a manner which suggested personal disapproval of me. Just as had Lieutenant Colonel Davis when punishing me for having been raped, several of these lawyers failed to offer me a seat and snapped at me.