"You don't know about me without you have read
a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer...That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain,
and he told the truth, mainly."
-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
And you don't know about America without your having read a book by the name of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth. Entirely.
Twain was an artist who knew more than he realized he knew about this country. Huck Finn is a book that tells you more every time you read it, because the more you know about yourself and about America, the more you see new truths inside it.
I used to think that this was a book about one profound moral decision. Huck, after all, is a young boy who believes his society is right. He accepts that niggers are born to be slaves, and that helping one to escape is not just a crime but a sin. But he has come to know and love and respect Jim, and to understand that, as unnatural as it seems to him, Jim misses his wife and children just as much as any white person could. And so he helps Jim escape, certain he is wrong in doing so. "All right, then," he says, "I'll go to hell."
Looking back on the book now, though, I realize that Huck's second moral decision was in some ways more profound, and far more revealing about our society. He doesn't much like the society he's in, and he has no power to change it, to prevent Aunt Sally from "sivilizin" him, so he lights out for the territory.
We Americans are a society of people who light out for the territory when problems come along. It stands to reason. After all, we are a nation of people who fled here from famines and pogroms and poverty and persecution. Of course we believe life will be better somewhere else.
And it is wonderfully liberating to light out. If you're born into a small, closed society, where everybody knows you and your family, and nobody ever forgets or forgives your faults or sins, lighting out for a place where you are unknown is a way to make a fresh and honorable start. It's certainly the reason I didn't want to go to the same college most of the kids in my high school went to--I didn't want to start my college career as an outcast there too.
The problem is that we leave behind only our circumstances. Not ourselves. Not human nature. "Wherever we run, we never get far from what we leave behind/We can run, run, run, but we can't hide." So saith the Grateful Dead, whose lives (and deaths) demonstrated this truth.
White Americans have abandoned our cities, allowing a massive investment in infrastructure to decay. They hide behind locked gates in walled communities, a society of the frightened middle and upper classes, unwilling to share any common space with the dangerous, crime-ridden, largely black, poor.
This is not new. It began in the early 1900's, when all of a sudden the masses of immigrants were not only overwhelming in sheer number, but poor and largely Jewish or Catholic besides. These people liked living in squalor, said the media and politicians, as the immigrants clustered, often several families to a flat, in the only places where they could afford even this wretched housing. They were stupid, said the army, testing their intelligence in a language most of the immigrants had not yet learned. They were overburdening the taxpaying citizens, who had to educate the immigrants' children.
Never mind that some of the great minds of the 20th century came out of these crowded city schools; never mind that these immigrant children grew up to teach and practice medicine and start businesses and increase the nation's wealth and knowledge. The children in the schools were majority "foreign," and the taxes were paid by majority "American citizens"--that is, the Americanized sons and daughters of previous immigrants. As one, they rose up to oppose spending money on other people's children.
And two historical events allowed them to vote with their feet. One was the automobile, the perfect vehicle for a nation that had decided it did not want to mix with people who were not like them. Instead of rubbing shoulders on the subway with people who smelled of sweat or worse, they would ride in splendid isolation; later the car radio would make it possible to simulate artificial, likeminded company inside that tightly-sealed miniature universe-on-wheels.
The other was the federal government. It provided cheap mortgage money, through the VA and the FHA, making it possible for people to afford homes in the suburbs. And then the government built the roads to get people from their homes in the suburbs to their jobs in the city.
That's right--these same people who cheer Rush Limbaugh on as he demands that government get off our backs, could not live their comfortable cushioned lives without subsidies from the federal government.
Of course, after a while, even going into the city to work became unpleasant. Because when they left, they took their tax base with them. They left behind a city full of people who still needed public services, but were far less able to pay for them. So taxes went up a lot for the few people still able to pay any property taxes, and they began to spend their lives plotting so that they too could escape the city someday.
Meanwhile, public services were stripped down. The streets were cleaned less often, the police came by less frequently, the potholes in the streets stayed there longer, and the fire department took a little longer to get there. So crime increased, and businesses began to shut their doors, and jobs became fewer and the city became poorer still, and even more people needed public assistance.
But there wasn't anybody left who cared. The people who paid taxes and supported political candidates and helped the city get things done had all moved to the suburbs. The people who were left, many of them decent, hardworking people, could not influence their government. They had no clout. The governments began to serve themselves instead, as civil service bureaucracies flowered and civil services declined.
Then those upstanding suburbanites completed the vicious circle. They moved the jobs out to the suburbs too.
This meant that those who had been abandoned no longer even had hope to sustain them--the American dream that by working hard and playing by the rules, your life and your children's lives would be better. There was no longer any hard work available to be done.
It also meant that those who no longer ever went into the city, except for the occasional concert or baseball game, had zero remaining interest in the well-being of the city or its residents. After all, they would build good schools in the suburbs for their own children; why then should they care about someone else's children?
Except for one thing.
Other people's children will pay our social security. And how much social security we will have to live on depends a lot on whether the people paying into it are slinging hamburgers or writing computer programs. Or working at all.
Because they will still be there, jobs or no jobs, and they will still need to survive, welfare or no welfare. They will make money. Maybe by selling dope to middle class suburbanites. Maybe by robbing suburban homes. But they'll still be there. We can pay to keep them in school, or we can pay to keep them in jail, but pay we will.
And what does it do to our souls, as we become so good at not noticing things? Not noticing homeless children. Not noticing hope and intelligence die out of children's eyes and being replaced with sullen despair and anger. Not noticing how this changes our politics and makes us mean and hostile, too, because the ones who lit out for the territory are now running the government. Not noticing that we are wasting people whose talents and brains could save us. Not noticing how much we're starting to look like Brazil, where the police simply execute the inconvenient abandoned children, because the rich people don't want to see them or worry about them or, God forbid, pay for them.
Maybe I didn't understand this in Huck Finn before because I used to believe that we could fix our messes by working together. But not when the people in charge are the very ones who use stuff up, throw it away, and don't worry about the messes they leave behind.
That isn't what Washington and Jefferson had in mind. And Lincoln was not celebrating a government of the selfish, by the selfish, and for the selfish.
I really hope it's not too late to come back from the terrritory.
Previous Columns: Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought
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