John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Nevertheless, you will say to me, we should do what we can, and your theory, Mr. Sunlight, does offer certain hopes. Recognizing the distinction between body and spirit in social affairs — recognizing that the exact nature of the connection between the two is mystical and unimportant, an idle speculation — we might put emphasis on each culture’s understanding of itself — an unsentimental understanding of both virtues and defects, and we might minimize concern with the other culture as foil. If individuals want to intermarry, let them. If minority groups want to borrow majority values, even ridiculous values, let them. But let every man know, moment by moment, who he is. It is true (you would grant) that knowing who you are can sometimes entail hatred of the man who is not you and whose identity requires a modification of your own. Well, we must simply put up with that, you will say. Stress cultural pride, as modern Irishmen, Jews, or Welshmen in America do, and as for bigotry, the flip side of cultural pride, make laws against it. Ah yes! I answer. But the gods are indifferent to the beauty of your having been born Czechoslovakian or French or Bantu or Greek. Babylon has fallen, and Troy has fallen, and no trace remains of the work of the greatest of sculptors.

Then farewell politics! The waves of Asian history roll toward waves of American history and strike, crash together and blend and subside to a trough where new waves will crash and merge and subside millennia hence. In the valleys at the bottom of the sea, layer on layer, sunken treasure ships. Istaru! Food of the gods!

CLUMLY: Can you honestly say you’ve got no feeling whatever for your country?

SUNLIGHT: I have no feeling for anything. I am waiting.

CLUMLY: To act.

SUNLIGHT: Exactly!

CLUMLY: Completely free.

SUNLIGHT: Yes, free!

(Abruptly, rapidly, as if shocked by what he is saying) : I’ll tell you the truth. I wasn’t always free, as I am now. I’ve given myself to many causes. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, I used to put out a newsletter for Krebiozen. I believed in it implicitly, and as an ophthalmologist — hah! you see, my profession’s slipped out! — I knew for certain that the AMA was rotten to the core. I attacked them brutally, brilliantly, in issue after issue. I told about their shocking tactics against Medicare — the banquets for doctors’ wives, for instance, where the wives were given a speech that was an absolute tissue of lies, a speech that ended with outrageous rhetoric, more moving than any account of a lynching, and the final line: DO YOU WANT THAT KIND OF WORLD FOR YOUR DAUGHTERS AND SONS? I showed them why the doctors and their wives were hit in separate meetings which took place at the same time and where each was asked for a family pledge; I specified times and places, named names. And lest any man make the foolish mistake of thinking the??? was a merely systematic evil in which the participating doctors had no part, I set down in cold print, with facts and figures, the inhuman collusion of doctors and hospital administrations — the kind of collusion which results in thousands of deaths per week throughout this country: Negroes left to die in hospital waitingrooms, indigents not admitted or inadequately treated, outpatient cases not followed up because of bills unpaid at discharge. Every word I said was true. I’d seen things myself that would make your hair turn white. In Filer, Idaho, there was an Indian family that drove two hundred miles to the nearest hospital with a child who had peanuts down her windpipe. The hospital refused to admit them, and the child died. I was there on a fishing trip. I could do nothing! Enough. You’ve heard such stories. You refuse to believe them, or you think them exceptional. Insanity! You refuse to see what’s right there in front of your eyes! Read the magazines! You think they exaggerate? I give you my word as a professional doctor, they hear nothing, they print a mere tenth of the horror. One story in a hundred! I tell you, read the magazines and tremble! So all I said was true, my attack on the profession was wholly just, my facts and figures unassailable. However, I was wrong about Krebiozen, and I became a laughingstock.

I had another cause, later. A student of mine who opposed the war in Vietnam and marched against it was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Being young and foolish, and knowing he was right, he rejected the possibility of taking the Fifth Amendment, or the First, or the First and Ninth and Fourteenth, or any other of the usual options, and instead he made a speech. They crucified him, needless to say, and I attacked them masterfully in a series of articles for the Oregonian. I became a target for the Rightists — they burned my house and drove my wife from me, poor child. It turned out in the end that, though I was certainly right, my student was, as it happened, a Communist.

Another time I fought the professional Educationists, the most dangerous, wasteful, and thoroughly ignorant single group in America. They creamed me, of course. I got twenty-seven of them fired, before I was through, but in the end they creamed me. If I’d had time I’d have gotten them all, every one. But one never has time, finally, and in any case they weren’t really the heart of the matter, I realized later. If the public wants cheap and worthless education — not schooling but a sop for the public conscience — someone will come to provide it. And so I became, at last, an anarchist. In Houston, Texas, I dynamited the F.B.I. building. This was in October, 1964. I did it at night, killed only an elderly burglar who was there. I had not yet entered my violent period, you see.

But the most spectacular cause in my whole career — I’m telling you the truth — was Muntz TV. I was out of work, owing to various financial reversals, and I was living in the basement of a fraternity house at Harvard — unknown to the fraternity, of course. One of the boys in the fraternity had an old red car, in terrible condition. One day he came home and the car had been repainted — quite handsomely: green and yellow and blue, I think. Across the side it said MUNTZ TV. I was impressed. It seemed a beautiful thing, a kind of symbol of the American way: a poor, battered car in need of paint, a great corporation in need of advertising. I resolved to work for them, support what was best in our heritage. I went to their main office — the only office they had in Cambridge, Mass., as it turned out. A first-floor office on a scruffy street — I forget the name. An office that had clearly been many things in its time, one fly-by-night outfit after another. Muntz would be different, of course. TV was new, at this time, and the Muntz TV, with its miraculous single knob, was destined to make that scruffy street a place of prosperity. I was sure of it. I went in. Everything in the office was on wheels — desks, chairs, filing cabinets, everything — but of course it didn’t occur to me that it was all designed for get-away. I was broken in, taught the virtues of the set and, in short, made a salesman. Then came meetings. Daily. Sales meetings. Selling Muntz TV’s was a religion. First we sang the Muntz TV hymns—“The Muntz riders in the sky”—things like that. Then came confession and inspiration. A salesman would stand up, wringing his hands and trembling. He’d lost a sale. He had both the man and the woman convinced, the lady even had her pen out to sign the check. But then the man said, “Lovey, maybe we ought to think this over. Why don’t we talk about it and—” The salesman telling the story bowed his head. “I lost the sale.” We were silent. Shocked and grieved. Then up stood Ace. The bold and swift-tongued Ace. He was our leader, the Ace of Aces. A little Italian with a smile like a spider’s. “Ridiculous mistake,” he hissed. “Don’t make it again. Now look, the minute the man starts talkin, you just say, ‘I’m sarry, I don’t think I can take a check.’ Zap. You got ’em. ‘You can’t take my check? Why of course you can take my check!’” Smiles. Leers. “Now lissen,” says Ace. He ducks his head half into his collar and out again and rolls his eyes. “The customuh,” he says — he squeezes his fist together—”the customuh is … a fly. He’s a mosquito. You push him into the corner little by little and then you— squash “im!” Cheers! Applause! Blessed be God. Those TV’s had a half-life of maybe two months. And when your set went pow and you took it to the store, no store. As soon as I found out, I was furious, of course. Betrayed again! I thought about it for three days and I made up my mind, and the next meeting I went to I took a Browning automatic. I was going to kill every one of them, clean them out. But I was too late, when I got to the meeting the store was empty, they’d all lit out. Well, needless to say, I didn’t give up. It took me three years, but one by one I tracked them down and shot them.