Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (17 page)

It's interesting that even though all the talk is about how wonderful the country is, most people choose to live in the cities. This could be attributed to better chances of making a living in a crowd, but something happened this morning that made me wonder about that.

I was sitting at my desk, staring idly out a window in my office, when a bird of undetermined species came and sat on the sill. All I can say for sure is it was neither a robin nor a pigeon. I don't know whether the bird had been south for the winter or not but he must have come from somewhere because it's the first I've seen him … or perhaps her.

I looked at the bird for a while and then watched it soar away. “This bird,” I thought to myself, “is free as a bird. He could go anywhere he wants but he chooses to be here in the city with all the evil, corruption and misery. Why?”

Why does any bird choose to land on my cement windowsill when he could just as easily go to the country and live under the eaves of a barn?

The bird suggests to me that living in the country is not always all it's cracked up to be. Farmers may be leaving the farm in droves because they borrowed a million dollars from the bank and can't pay back the loans, but birds don't come to New York because they're head over tails in debt. They come because they want to live here. It gives me some hope that I'm not crazy for wanting to live here myself.

Spring has sprung in New York City. Signs of it are everywhere. It is light now at 6
A.M.
and the rumble of the garbage trucks begins earlier. The loud sounds of honking horns being blown by irritated drivers of cars trapped behind the garbage trucks on narrow streets can be heard all across the city an hour earlier too.

The sirens and flashing lights of the police cars going for coffee are just a little brighter, just a little louder and moving just a little faster because it's spring.

And don't tell me about the little shoots from the spring plantings that are beginning to push their little heads up through the soil on the farms of America. What do you think that green stuff is emerging from the dirt that has become trapped between the divisions of the cement sidewalks? We may call them weeds in the city but they are clearly related to the growing things the farmers are borrowing millions to encourage in their fields.

The homeless emerge from the city shelters at this time of year and sleep, once again, on the sidewalks, warmed only by the hot air coming up through the grates covering the basement power centers of the tall buildings.

The street peddlers emerge and spread their wares in everyone's way on the sidewalks; tens of thousands of city buses that crisscross Manhattan, which for months have been too cold, suddenly become too hot.

Don't tell a city person that spring is a country phenomenon.

College students are protesting the fact that their college administrators have invested some of their money in companies that do business
with South Africa. College students are always protesting something and the rest of us don't pay much attention to them.

Most of us are busy with our personal things, like making a living or keeping our family in one piece, so we leave the world problems to government officials in Washington and the college students. Sometimes, though, an important issue is brought to our attention so forcefully that we can't avoid thinking about it.

South Africa is a good example. I hope South African student protesters, both black and white, who were beaten recently with clubs and metal-tipped whips, know how much the beating they took did for their cause. Millions of Americans, who are normally disinterested, watched, and if they had been disinterested before, they no longer were after watching the storm-troop behavior of the South African police.

For several months, reporters have been barred from covering police activity in putting down the rebellions in the black townships in South Africa. We haven't heard anything but the statistics on how many protesters police killed, because the government won't allow reporters to go watch. Reporters and television cameras were there during this recent horror story because the action took place in the central part of Johannesburg. It made the rest of us more aware of why our college students are protesting the situation in South Africa, just as the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl made us sensitive to the cause of the nuclear protesters.

The students' protests at some of our best colleges put college businessmen in a difficult position. A lot of them don't like South African government policies any better than the protesting students do, but they're more practical about it. They invest the money to produce the most it can for their colleges without regard for how those companies conduct their business. Some college administrators have no sympathy for demonstrating students because those students often accept scholarship aid from the same college endowment funds whose investment policies they are protesting.

Milton Friedman, the economist who makes Ronald Reagan look like a pinko liberal, says that college students who demand that their colleges sell stocks in companies that do business with South Africa should first make some sacrifices themselves.

“Few temptations are so irresistible,” the brilliant Mr. Friedman says, “as doing good at someone else's expense.”

Friedman says that the students should first get rid of any personal possessions they have that were made by companies that do business in South Africa. He points out that this would mean “no
more radios, electric clocks, hair dryers, etc. from General Electric. No more cars from General Motors or Ford or, for that matter, Honda or Nissan …”

It's a catchy idea. I imagine a lot of protesting students would be less ready to give up their record players made by a company that deals with South Africa than they are to have their college give up their stocks in those companies. Still, Friedman, in writing it, and I, in finding it catchy, are wrong.

There is something wonderfully pure and naïve about campus protests. The one thing they have in common is that they're always on solid moral ground. The students are usually right. Forget that what they demand may not be practical.

Americans are moral people. Our foreign policy should conform to our moral standards. When the President makes a decision on a weapons treaty, he should be thinking not of outsmarting the Soviet Union but of what's right, like protesting students do.

Doing what's right is where America's strength lies.

Someone is always suggesting that doctors ought to be tested regularly to make sure they're still competent to practice medicine.

I suppose it's a good idea even though I'd trust my doctor if he never took another test. The trouble with testing doctors is, the doctors who are best at passing tests are not necessarily the best at diagnosing and treating their patients' problems. Taking tests is an expertise all its own.

Good doctors are embarrassed enough by the bad ones so that they'd probably go along with the idea even though they don't like it.

When they test the doctors, I hope they check out the people in their offices who do the billing. It would be interesting to see if any of them still remember how to subtract or divide. We know they can add and multiply.

Bosses get away with murder. Half the bosses in business don't know what they're talking about. There are a lot more incompetent bosses than there are incompetent doctors. Furthermore, we only see a doctor once every couple of years, if we're lucky. A lot of us see bosses every day.

If those lawyers who make a living off suing doctors for malpractice want to get really rich and do the rest of us a favor at the same time, they ought to start suing bosses for malpractice. Bosses are among the biggest malpracticers of all time. They can do the same kind of damage an inept brain surgeon can do.

If every boss in the country had to take an exam once every six years, I'll bet half the bosses would be barred from the practice of bossing. I've had as many as ten bosses in my lifetime who would have flunked bossing if they'd been tested. Some of them should never have been granted a license to boss in the first place.

The tests for doctors are usually administered by other doctors. This is probably wrong. Certainly a test for bosses should not be administered by other bosses. Bosses, like doctors, stick together. They tend to protect the incompetents in their ranks. They're protective and probably would never bar one of their numbers from bossing.

There are several questions I'd put to bosses on an examination:

There are a great many other people in our society in addition to doctors who should be tested for competence periodically. There are always some teachers who need to be checked. I think automobile mechanics and television repairmen need it.

The only people I'd exempt from these periodic checkups are writers. Not knowing what we're doing is part of the business.

Religion ought not be used by anyone as a sales tool. God doesn't do endorsements. If he did, Coke and Pepsi would have signed him up years ago.

If God listens to political speeches, He must be pretty surprised and probably a little annoyed at how often His name is used in a way that suggests He's a registered Democrat or Republican.

When a politician mentions God half a dozen times in a speech, it's to appropriate for his campaign the name “God.” He's suggesting that God has endorsed the ticket and given permission to have His name used in promotional material in exchange for certain considerations, like school prayer. There are lots of cheap tricks used in political campaigns, and evoking God's name is one of them.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention George Bush, then a candidate, said:

“I am guided by certain traditions. One is that there is a God and He is good and His love, while free, has a self-imposed cost: We must be good to one another.”

That's what I'd call a legitimate statement by a candidate. He's just telling us where he stands. He isn't pretending God wants him as President. Unfortunately, not many politicians running for office, including George Bush, stop at that. He used God's name constantly in relation to himself.

President Bush made an exception of Michael Dukakis in his pledge to “be good to one another” during that campaign by suggesting that, in addition to having God in his camp, he also loved America more than Dukakis because Dukakis opposed making the pledge of allegiance mandatory.

No number of compulsory pledges of allegiance has ever guaranteed the love of a person for his country, and endless repetition of prayer does not promise immortality.

Mr. Bush, like many politicians, often ends a speech with the phrase “God bless you.” Do politicians think this will help? Do they think God may forget to bless us if they don't remind Him to do so? Or are the politicians saying, “
I hope
God blesses you.”? If so, are they suggesting that they think you deserve it? What if God disagrees and doesn't think you have a blessing coming?

No matter what the case is, it doesn't seem as though a serious politician should use God's name so lightly and end each speech by saying “God bless you” with the same intonation and depth of feeling he'd use saying “Have a nice day.”

It's difficult to understand why Americans accept the way people use God for their own purpose. Samuel Johnson said patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel, but maybe patriotism is only next to last. The least admirable people among us often hide behind a newly acquired religion when they're in trouble. On his way to the gas chamber, the murderer invariably announces he's found God. In the 1970s, several of the principals in the Watergate scandal “found God.” They should have looked for God first instead of for those papers they stole.

The Middle Eastern terrorists don't call themselves terrorists. They call themselves names like “The Islamic Holy War.” It is for God, as they see God, that they commit what the rest of the world sees as a crime. They are certain, as religious people, that what they are doing is right in the eyes of God. Religious people, no matter what religion, are always certain they're right.

We don't know whether the God that conservatives want in our public schools here is the same God to which Islamic Holy War members pray or not. Whose God, of all the gods of all the world's religions, should be the official one?

Religion doesn't belong in politics. The decision to protect the privacy of religious belief was not made lightly when the First Amendment to our Constitution was written.

“Believing with you,” Thomas Jefferson said, “that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for this faith and his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with reverence that act of the whole American people … building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Conversation may be disappearing along with good writing. In the average week, we hear hundreds of people talking but we don't hear much conversation.