From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith, 2009 - So I ended up much as I started: the kid they sent to right field because he couldn't or wouldn't play the game right.
I didn't plan it this way. I didn't want it this way. In truth, a large part of me still would like to have been one of the popular boys in the class, but things kept getting in the way—some addictive confluence of moral aggravation, periodic accident, undisciplined imagination, sporadic and unpremeditated courage randomly suppressing chronic shyness and cowardice, sloppy romanticism, episodic existentialism, recurrent hope, stultifying stubbornness, and an abiding intolerance for the dull. A child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding tide after tide on the rock of reality, thinking that maybe this time I'll float off.
Some people take it personally, as though I rebelled simply to annoy them. They make little jokes about the fact that I'm different, as if I had a moral obligation to be like them. When they see someone like me coming, they close the doors of their institutions, their imaginations, and their hearts. We are, after all, thieves who might abscond with their most precious possession: the tranquility of unexamined certainty.
So you become the charming stranger from a strange place, you tell jokes first and then change the subject when it starts to get too close to the real. Better yet, you fool them into thinking that you are one of them, even though you really blend better with those whom the urban itinerant Joe Gould once described as the "cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats."
Among the illusions of my life has been that if I stuck it out long enough, time would provide the acceptance that my words and thoughts had prevented. I. F. Stone used to say that when you're young you're blamed for things you didn't do, and when you're old you get credit for them. It hasn't worked out like that, in part because just when I should have started coasting, the world around me took a nasty, greedy and dangerous turn. America began destroying itself. It was the wrong time to start fitting in. My country—without debate, consideration, or struggle—had decided it really didn't want to be America anymore.
I have tried to help keep alive the beleaguered tradition of plain speaking and truth-seeking that I understood to be at the heart of good journalism. But in a time when much of the media prefers perceptions to facts, bullet quotes to understanding, and spin over reality, such efforts are seen as eccentric at best, apostasy at worst. Truth has little to do with it anymore. It is as if we are living in a new Middle Ages, only with the myths being driven by cable TV rather than by the church.
In the melancholy that descends from time to time, in the loneliness that lies like a desert between reality and my imagination, I think about opportunities and offers that have come my way that I brazenly—wantonly, some might say—rejected. But then, as a friend once noted, if I had accepted such things, I probably would have ended up broken or fired. And a drunk as well.
As best as I can tell, my real impetus was not masochism but a truly manic, grandiose, and cockeyed optimism—the faith that I could do something on my own that would be even better than if I just did what was expected of me.
Saul Alinsky was once asked by a seminarian how he could retain his values as he made his way through the church. "That's easy," replied Alinsky. "Just decide now whether you wish to be a cardinal or a priest." It was a choice I made early.
I don't regret it; much of it's been wonderful. But I can’t really justify having tried it. A lot of it doesn't make sense. I spurned the normal icons of ambition, yet was so ambitious that I sought the unattainable. I was like a bad comedian: I got the punch lines right but my timing was way off. And I gave the outward impression of a radical but, in my heart, was just a moderate of a time that has yet to arrive.
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