Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Maybe all they want are Eddie Murphy movies or sets that sing,” he said. “Maybe all they want is shit. Maybe it’s over for people like me.”

But he was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, probably with Madonna, or something completely new. During the summer, we talked a few times about his experiences during the Second World War, when he was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; he was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and was still horrified at the scale of the destruction in Tokyo and the stupidly brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women. “It still makes me sick,” he said. “That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American.” The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but Fosse was uneasy about it. “That world is gone, that music, the way people were.…Most of the country wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

Now we’ll never know. The night after we all got the news, there was a small gathering at Gardner’s apartment, a kind of secular wake. Some wept; others told the old stories, with examples of Fosse’s dark humor; all were in shock, because Fosse had been looking better than at any time in years. Later, wandering through Broadway in the rain, I thought that for Fosse, who so perfectly expressed a certain vision of New York, the worst thing about dying in Washington might have been that he closed out of town.

VILLAGE VOICE,

November 3, 1987

These are pieces about certain aspects of American society in the last decade of the century. They were written by an American liberal who had come to distrust all dogma, including liberal dogma. For me, liberalism must be tolerant, generous, intelligent, and humane or it is no longer liberal. If social systems created by liberals — the welfare system, for example — no longer function for the good of human beings, it is stupid to defend them simply because they have been entered into some aging liberal catechism. They must be changed, gradually and humanely, and replaced with something better.

It is also foolish for liberals to refuse to recognize uncomfortable truths. They need to look at racism as it exists now, not as it did while Martin Luther King was marching in the streets of the American South. They must identify and condemn white racism and black racism. They must separate the race hustlers from those seriously concerned about growth and progress. They must move beyond habits of complaint and blame to the creation of enduring solutions.

Above all, they must reject grim sectarianism, whether practiced by radical feminists, the Christian Coalition, or Louis Farrakhan. They must be wary of exclusively legalistic solutions to deep societal problems. They must laugh at any insistence that an individual human being can be completely explained by the group to which he or she belongs. Liberals can’t be the thought police or the speech police or the gender police. They can’t go around all day telling strangers to put out their cigarettes. They can’t call the district attorney to solve problems of manners. They have to lighten up. They have to recover the confident, exuberant style of the liberal America that once believed we could have justice and the racetrack too. They have to do it soon. The other guys are at the three-quarter pole and pulling away.

PROVIDENCE, R.I.

When I was young and laboring as a sheetmetal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I sometimes imagined myself as a student on a college campus. This impossible vision of the Great Good Place was constructed from scraps of movies and magazine photographs, and was for me a combination of refuge and treasurehouse. The hard world of tenements and street gangs was replaced in my imagination with buildings made of red brick laced with ivy, and a wide, safe quadrangle where ancient oaks rose majestically to the sky. There was an immense library, offering the secrets of the world. The teachers were like Mr. Chips, at once stern, wise, passionate, and kind. And, of course, there were impossibly beautiful women, long of limb and steady of eye, talking about Fitzgerald or Hemingway, walking beside me on winter evenings with snow melting in their hair.

I never made it. I went to other schools of higher learning: the Navy, Mexico, newspapers. I had absolutely no regrets. But when I walked onto the campus at Brown University recently, that old vision came flooding back. There before me were the buildings, the trees, the open quadrangle that I had ached for as a boy. There were the lights, like molten gold, in the library. There were the fine young women. I wondered how anyone here could be unhappy.

But I knew that at Brown, and on many similar campuses around the nation, the malignant viruses of the outside world had proved impossible to resist. The worst of these was that ancient curse: racism. Last year, the Justice Department reported racial incidents on seventy-seven campuses, from state universities to the most elite academies, ranging from jokes to full-scale brawls. This was an increase of almost 50 percent over the year before, and Brown, the most liberal of the eight Ivy League schools, was not immune. This struck me as a heartbreaking phenomenon. I grew up believing that racism was a consequence of ignorance. But 8o percent of the students at Brown had finished in the top io percent of their high schools. If they were racist, the nation was doomed. I went to take a look.

At the Wriston Quad, everyone I saw was white. At the other campus, called Pembroke (it was once a separate school, for young women), blacks chose to “hang” with blacks. On a visit to a cafeteria, I noticed blacks generally sat with blacks, whites with whites. I heard tales (from whites) of pledges from one of the black fraternities marching around campus in paramilitary style (“They look like the Fruit of Islam, for Christ’s sake”). I heard blacks complain about white “insensitivity,” or outright racism (shouts of “nigger” from white fraternity houses, watermelon jokes). Whites who called themselves liberals complained about black separatism, symbolized by the hermetic clustering of blacks around the college’s Third World Center. One white student said, “It’s self-segregation, and they’ve chosen it, not us.” One black student said, “When the whites see more than two blacks at a time, they think about calling the cops instead of saying hello.”

None of this, of course, was like Mississippi in the ’50s, when the White Citizens Councils owned the night. But it wasn’t trivial, either. Many of the discussions here referred to two distinct series of events: The Incidents and The Attacks. The Incidents took place last spring. In April racist graffiti appeared in the West Andrews residence hall on the Pembroke campus. The message NIGGERS GO HOME was found in an elevator, MEN and WOMEN were crossed out on lavatory doors and replaced by WHITES and NIGGERS. Racist words were also written on the doors of minority students’ rooms and on posters.

Then, on April 28, a flyer appeared on a bathroom mirror, again in West Andrews. It said: “Once upon a time, Brown was a place where a white man could go to class without having to look at little black faces, or little yellow faces or little brown faces, except when he went to take his meals. Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom. Keep white supremecy [sic] alive! Join the Brown chapter of the KKK today.”