John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“So it is with policemen. Detached from mankind — thrust back with sharp insults or, simply, blank stares by those whose activities he indifferently impedes — fawned over by fools who, in an analogous situation, cannot walk past a sleeping dog without calling to it and holding out their fingers — smiled at by children who tomorrow will frown or fawn, like their parents — the policeman little by little slides away from whatever comfortable humanity he may once have shared with his neighbors. Every stranger is a potential excuse-maker or gratuity artist, if not an outright enemy, and every friend is a potential favor-seeker. Men of some stature in the community, who might conceivably make good their threats to ‘break you for this,’ as the saying goes, are tin cans on the social watchdog’s tail. Men of no stature are merely a quiet annoyance. The policeman resists this inevitable tendency of his thought, if only because human beings are by nature social creatures, even policemen; nevertheless, the subtle pressure toward cynicism is everlastingly there. It is of course primarily for this reason that police departments hire family men, when possible. The bachelor policeman inevitably turns more and more for friendship to others of his own Jesuitical kind, that is, fellow policemen; and out of such friendships, out of membership in that proud and exclusive club, he draws precisely the confidence and security, almost bigotry, which, in a man with a gun, can be dangerous. In your truly Protestant department, where after his day of professionally indifferent justice (strained, bent, dented here and there by the age-old hammerings of low pay and temptation always too ready-at-hand, by anger, boredom, and the despair which comes with dealing out more justice than any policeman gets), the man of the force goes home to a wife who involves him, as soon as he crosses his threshold, in excuse-making and bribery and pointless anger of his own; and lest he begin to slide into a comfortable self-hatred, a schizophrenic separation of the policeman in him and the tawdry man, she kisses him on the cheek and, sooner or later, unmans him in his bed.

“But either way, bachelor or married, the policeman is lucky if he does not eventually (however subtly) go mad. It begins in disengagement. It is not the man but the uniform that makes the arrests, takes the insults or the fawning or (most common of all) the averted faces, the stares that pass through him. Like a man in a hypnotic trance, he moves not by his own power but by the force of a thing outside himself, his badge. Like the hypnotist’s subject, and like a true schizophrenic, he must regularly deny to himself — far below the level of conscious assertion — that the voice with which he speaks is his own. Standing with his foot on the bumper of a reckless driver’s car, writing down the license, he no more writes, himself, than the hypnotist’s subject raises the arm he has been told he cannot raise: it is the Law that writes. It is the Law that bangs, like God on Armageddon day, at the debtor’s barbican, or holds up one glove to impatient traffic at an intersection, or dispassionately — for all the pounding of the policeman’s heart — fires a bullet through the murderer’s head, or pulls the power switch at Sing Sing.

“All men, admittedly, play artificial roles. A doctor is not the same man when he’s wearing his stethoscope that he is when he sits at the breakfast table across from his wife, reading his paper and picking with the tip of his fork at the yolks of his eggs. But here, for the most part anyway, the professional and the common mortal can live comfortably and harmoniously together. If a doctor withdraws from his humanity — closes off his emotions, for instance, while performing an operation — he does it in the name of his humanity. Only small children hate a doctor when they require his ministries, and sometimes even the most recalcitrant children can be persuaded. For the policemen, whom only small children love with a pure heart (and the recalcitrant among them are not quickly persuaded), there is no such pride and pleasure. He can be proud that he is, as he is frequently told, ‘an efficient, modern machine’; he can be proud that he is indispensable to civilization — however little the word may in fact mean to — as Plato says — a man of silver. He may be proud, when he looks in a mirror, to see that his tie is straight and his shirt neatly pressed, as the tie and shirt of the silver imitation of a man should be. But he cannot take much pleasure — any more than his nearest analogues, the artist and the saint — in his everyday communion with good, plain men. He meets the world and gets along with it by means of a conjuring trick inside his brain.

“His situation, we are sorry to say, is worse nowadays than it used to be, and worse in large cities than in smaller towns or in the country. The cop on the beat — an old-fashioned curiosity as impractical and inefficient today as the hand-crank butter churn or the medieval gisarme — could come to know his neighborhood, protect it and be protected by it: he could be as well liked as the grocer or mailman or launderer. (His position was not merely a function of his walking unarmed except for a nightstick.) He could usually stop a riot before it was thought of — or so most authorities on crime now believe. And if trouble did start, whatever its nature, he knew at once whom to look for, whom to let pass and proceed about his business, as one uninvolved. The cop on the beat had another advantage, more subtle and yet even more important: he need not be bored. As he made his way down the streets assigned to him he could talk with people or fall away into the abstruse speculations of a soul turned inward, whichever he pleased. If the day was quiet, he could bask in the quiet, speaking casually of this and that, or he could praise the Lord by eyes rolled up and over. Not so the man in the prowlcar. There is no quiet for him, but a steady hiss from his radio, like horsemeat frying or seas rolling through bones and grits, or like snakes and steam contending with the feet of the damned. Or else voices come in with that nightlong leak of trivialities — addresses, names, every once in a while some cautious little joke — whereby the soul of man is overthrown. Alas, he has neither the peace and isolation of the Gnostic, sweating in the prison of his flesh but dreaming nevertheless grand dreams, nor the fitful joy to be had from the earthly communion of, loosely, saints. In comparison to the casual turning of the head and a pleasant Good-morning, there is a certain offensive obviousness about pulling over to a curb in a car with a silver-throated siren and a big red light like a basilisk’s eye, and calling out to the man who stands on the sidewalk waiting for his bus. The man in the prowlcar is thus cut off both from outer reality and inner, from communion with men and from communion with himself. No message comes over his radio directing him to a corner where he will find a man whose conversation would be worth gold and silver and all one’s best linen. Outer reality is represented by boys who have just knocked down old ladies, by prowlers, reckless drivers, exhibitionists, peeping-toms.

“The man in the car, for his sanity’s sake, becomes something of a diner-hopper, and since he cannot hear his radio while sitting with whomever he finds there to talk to, the radio which he of course must hear if he’s to go where he’s needed in the large patrol area one prowlcar covers, he learns to live not only with the isolation of the new man of silver but also with guilt.

“There, ironically enough, is the crux of it: guilt. The policeman cannot be perfectly sure he is doing his best for the department that has won from him his loyalty (it is interesting that in police slang, headquarters is known as ‘the house’); he cannot be sure he is doing the best he might for his family (the pay is bad, there are risks, and the work wrecks one’s nerves); and to the extent that his original selection and training have done their job, the old civilized man within him cannot always be perfectly content that the job is civilized.