Laika in a mock cockpit – Public Domain
I arrived by boat and there she was AMERICA (big and fat and beautiful like a cow)…what the fuck am I doing here with my beat-up suitcase at my feet with my stuff spilling out of it like a pile of dirty laundry on the platform (and AMERICA in front of me nervous excited ready) and I suddenly feeling like jerking off!
—Raymond Federman, Take It Or Leave It
My old pal, the novelist and Beckett scholar Raymond Federman, had an experience when he was young that became the central meaning of his life. He was born to a Jewish family in 1928 in Montrouge, a Paris suburb. His father was a tailor. During the German occupation, his family was taken by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz where they all died. Federman survived because his mother hid him in an upstairs closet, instructing him not to make a sound, no matter what he heard. He spent the rest of the war hiding among farm families. And yet, he would say wonderingly, for him personally the war was a good thing because in 1947 he moved to the United States where he became a jazz musician, a university professor, and a literary provocateur, a “surfictionist.”
He once said to me, “Curteess, I became a professor and a writer, and now I have a pension, I live in San Diego, and I can play golf every day. I have a million dollars. Without the War, I would have been a tailor in a little shop in a dirty corner of Paris. How can I not be grateful for that? I don’t understand my life.”
At the time, I didn’t see anything of my own experience in what Ray told me. But now I think something similar about not only my experience but the experience of millions of others of the New Deal generation. Had it not been for the War and the Cold War that followed, there would have been little need to educate the children of the American working class, thus opening, for those who chose, a new world of possibility.
We like to say that there are special moments in life—events, decisions—because of which “my whole life changed.” In this case, not only my life but the destiny of my generation changed when a stuffed dog appeared in my first–grade classroom hanging its head (and a pink tongue from its mouth) out of a tin-foil space capsule that hovered enigmatically above us. It was, of course, supposed to be Sputnik II with its stray mutt space dog, Laika.
Our teacher, Miss Priscilla Evelyth, explained that the Russians had launched a rocket with a dog in it and that from now on everything at our school was going to be exciting. It was as if we’d all had a profound religious experience but were too dumb to recognize it, so now it was the teacher’s job to point it out to us.
“Think for yourselves, kids! Isn’t this exciting?”
If any of my young peers thought it was exciting, it’s unlikely that they could have said why. But if Miss Evelyth said it was exciting, that was good enough for us. Next thing you know, we were painting a mural of a moonscape. Was this where the dog was going? And, by the way, was Laika home with her family now? Surely, they didn’t leave her in outer space! (Yes, they did.) Surely, she didn’t boil in her own blood during the capsules fourth orbit! (Yes, she did.)
The real purport of what Miss Evelyth was showing us was this: our little public elementary school and many hundreds of little public elementary schools like ours had billions of dollars dropped on them from on high, thanks to the largesse of the 1958 National Defense Education Act, all with the hope that a few of us would prove to be rocket scientists or mathematicians capable of resisting the brilliant but evil Soviets (cue Rocky and Bullwinkle with two “nogoodniks,” Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, trying to “catch moose and squirrel”).
If our teachers had received this military/industrial message, they had understood it badly. Because, of all things, they said that they wanted us to be curious, and thoughtful, and even a little bit skeptical, but most of all they wanted us to be happy and creative humans, not useful automatons. After all, they liked us! We had been freed from the obligation to work for survival on a farm in Kansas, say, where my father’s youth was spent, or in Oregon, where my mother was raised on a subsistence farm. We had been placed in their generous hands, and they had no reason to carry baggage for the defense department. In hindsight, it’s clear that the moment was not only about the needs of the military and corporate industry. Nota bene, it was also one of the few times in human history, perhaps the first time, that peasant children were given resources nearly equal to the resources given to the children of the rich.
Or so it felt.
The enormous historical irony was that the military–industrial complex had paid for our schooling, but through that gift some ofus learned to hate that complex and everything it stood for. We grew smart enough to see through patriotic guff, liberating ourselves while horrifying our families. “Generation gap” didn’t say enough. We were, in that moment, wiser than the world that surrounded us.
To put it simply, some portion of working-class children of the New Deal era, among whose number I was, had been blessed with the opportunity to be “equal to one’s possibility,” in Theodor Adorno’s revealing phrase. We were for a moment stateless, or, as the Mothers of Invention put it in 1968, we had “discorporated.”
Unbind your mind, there is not time
To lick your stamps and paste them in
Discorporate and we will begin.
But discorporating was not what the world had in mind. Later, our masters realized their mistake, and, beginning in the Reagan era, state support for education was steadily withdrawn, year after pitiful year. Tuitions rose while state governments pled poor. Something else had been devised to keep the peasants in their place, nose to the cyber grindstone: henceforth, higher education would be funded through personal debt. Our vehicle of possibility had become merely another means for rent extraction.
But for those of us who had been lucky enough to grow up under the dispensation of the New Deal, the glad feeling of “possibility” was in later decades mixed with something darker. We felt a strange regret, as if we had something to apologize for. We had experienced the exhilaration of flight, but what of those who were not so lucky, who hadn’t been able to hide in Federman’s closet, or hadn’t experienced the opportunity of flight from the reigning economic order? Adorno, another Holocaust survivor, expressed this feeling powerfully in his 1965 lecture series at the College de France, “Metaphysics, Concept and Problems:”
Unless one makes oneself wholly insensitive one can hardly escape the feeling that just by continuing to live one is taking away that possibility from someone else, to whom life has been denied; that one is stealing that person’s life...If we knew at every moment what has happened and to what concatenations we owe our own existence [my emphasis], and how our own existence is interwoven with calamity, even if we have done nothing wrong. If one were fully aware of all these things at every moment, one would really be unable to live.
Just so.
And yet there was always an ineradicable spark of Nietzschean “cheerfulness” in Adorno’s meditation on survival. As he said at the close of his 1965 lectures:
You may think me an old-fashioned Enlightenment thinker, but I am deeply convinced that there is no human being, not even the most wretched, who has not a potential which, by conventional bourgeois standards, is comparable to genius.
Adorno’s 1965 lectures are grim, but they are also luminous.They are filled with the consoling light of the arts which have long provided “the joy of elevation, the joy of rising beyond what merely is.” The lectures anticipated a catastrophic end, but they were also the declaration of a joyful beginning. Adorno joins Kierkegaard who wrote in Fear and Trembling, “No generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point but the beginning.” After all the announcements of doom, and even in his old age, even after having seen what Hitler had done to Jews and Marxists, and what capitalism had done to hope, Adorno stood at the beginning.
It is 1965. The cradle is rocking. The next generation is beginning. Adorno looks out from the lectern and awakens at last to the presence of people in his audience. Young people. He smiles, of course.
