From our archives
Sam Smith- A few years back, Mark Plotkin started an interview with me
on WTOP this way: "How do you respond to those who say you're just
outrageous, off the wall, beyond normal?" Here's part of what I told him:
If you go back and read what I wrote ten, twenty or thirty years ago it's hard
to see what the problem was. The FBI, in a rare of moment of literary eloquence
labeled those who fought in the Spanish Civil War as "premature
anti-fascists." In DC timing is everything. Phil Hart once described the
Senate as place that does things 20 years after it should have. I think I was
like a bad comedian; I got the punch lines right; I just delivered them too
soon.
I didn't plan it this way. I didn't
want it this way. In truth, a large part of me still would have liked 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.
But it's really more like Vaclav
Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:
You do not
become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most
unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of
responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are
cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with
them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded
an enemy of society . . . "
Those dissidents who somehow remain
connected to the normal find themselves alone in the crowd. Even in my home
town, I often feel an exile - as though all had emigrated except for me, as
though somehow I had missed the ship.
It's often not easy. Albert Camus
spoke of the tremendous energy some must expend "merely to be normal"
and added:
The rebel
can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil.
The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all - he must
fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
Emerson also understood the problem:
You will
always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know
it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in
solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the
crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Still, you can't talk about such
things because it would further confirm the belief that you are best ignored,
dismissed, or considered absurd. So you become the charming stranger from a
strange place, you tell the jokes first, and you 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 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."
Still, 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
older 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 .
True, the best period for a
revolution of the good is when one is young. To be twenty or thirty and part of
an uprising of the collective soul is a rare gift of life. It does spoil you,
though, for you go through the rest of your time wondering why that moment went
away and why nothing seems able to bring it back.
What was unexpected, both in timing
and intensity, was that I would not only live through one of America's great
revivals but during a subsequent era when my country -- without debate,
consideration, or struggle -- decided it really didn't want to be America any
more.
Few even talked about it, but I knew
that in the silence could be something as telling and evil as words. After all,
the language of the old south was most descriptive in what it didn't say - and
what wasn't allowed to be said.
Much later I would come across the
words of a German university professor who described to journalist Milton Mayer
what it had been like under the Nazis in the 1930s:
To live in
the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me --
unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most
of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential,
so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted.'. . .
Believe me
this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little
worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion,
thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting
somehow.. . .
Suddenly it
all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more
accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most
of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your
department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood,
perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that,
and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your
heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Shortly before his death in Tom
Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Rosencrantz says:
What was it
all about? When did it begin? . . . Couldn't we just stay put? . . . We've done
nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we? . . . There must have been a
moment, at the beginning, when we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed
it.. . . Well, we'll know better next time.
o
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. The
proper journalist has become, wittingly or not, the accomplice of a system in
which news, advertising and agitprop are hopelessly mingled and the facts
adulterated. Truth has little to do with it anymore. It is as if we are living
in a new Middle Ages, only with the myth being driven by cable TV rather than
by the church.
Further, where once saying
unconventional things was regarded as hip, it is now considered
'inappropriate.' Hipness has become a fashion statement - a consumer selection
carefully synchronized with corporate intent rather than outward evidence of a
state of mind free of the corporatized state. And so it is easy to feel
ostracized, alone and ineffectual. Such feelings are bad enough at 26, but far
harder at 66 if for no other reason than that you have less time to recover
from them.
I know because I've had the feelings
at both ages. And at both ages the despair has often been exaggerated,
self-defeating, and self-fulfilling. Which isn't to say unnecessary, for
wrestling with the pain of living is one of the surest signs that you are still
alive. The problem is that you never know when you're exaggerating and when
you've got it right.
o
Part of my love of the craft of
journalism has been the simple joy of possessing the license to go wherever
curiosity leads, to consider no place in the planet alien to my inquiry, to use
words as a child uses little plastic blocks. Part of it has been the pleasure
of deliberately learning more about something than any reasonable person would
want to know.
Tina Hobson once said of her
husband, the civil rights activist, "The trouble with Julius is that he
takes the Constitution personally." I suffer from a similar debility. But
sometimes people credit me with a sense of justice when in fact I am just
titillated, fascinated or surprised. In such ways I have also disappointed some
of my more didactic allies who expected me to stick to business and not be
distracted by the noise of news and the search for better words with which to
describe it.
I also want to walk away from it at
will. Back in the 60s, I was sitting in an office on 8th Street SE in
Washington talking with one of the sergeants of the War on Poverty. It was
shortly after the riots of April 1968 and our conversation drifted in the
shadows of those smoky and charred days. Then the community organizer stopped
in mid-sentence and said, "Look, Sam, all I really want to do is to sit on
my front stoop in the sun, drink beer, and shoot craps."
His words keep coming back, a
reminder that even the best politics are a pretty poor substitute for life and
that the worst politics compound their felony by forcing us to leave the front
stoop to do something about them. Our quarrel with the abuse of power should be
not only be that it is cruel and stupid but that it takes so much time way from
other things -- like loving and being loved, and music, and a good meal and the
sunset of a gentle day. In a nation ablaze with struggles for power, we are too
often forced to choose between being a co-conspirator in the arson or a member
of the volunteer fire department. And, too often, as we immerse ourselves in
the terrible relevance of our times, beauty and happiness seem to drift away.
That community organizer in the
dingy office on 8th Street understood that the proper end of politics was not a
policy, not a budget, not an ideology, not even worthy abstractions like peace
and justice, but rather good places, and good days and healthy and happy people
-- the collective little republics of our individual hopes and dreams.
In the melancholy that descends from
time to time, in the loneliness that lies like a desert between myself and my
imagination, I think about opportunities and offers that have come my way that
I brazenly - wantonly, some might say - rejected. I think I knew in my heart
that if I had accepted such things, I would have ended up broken or fired. And
probably a drunk as well.
And as best as I can tell, my real
impetus was not masochism but a truly manic, grandiose, and cockeyed optimism -
the faith that even in late 20th century America I could do something on my own
that would be even better than what I could 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.
As far back as high school, when I
first read of Thoreau's preference for sitting on a pumpkin and having it all
to himself to being crowded on a velvet stool, I had rated freedom ahead of
power. Raised in dysfunctional comfort, I have placed an abnormal emphasis on
things I could do without benefit of social standing, money, or power, such as
writing, playing the piano, . . and imagining. I would come to suspect that I
had spent a lifetime trying to finish the script of a radio show first
concocted under the covers as a child - a lifelong broadcast in which I was the
stumbling protagonist. I have tried to live a daydream - one that began because
I didn't like what was going on downstairs. And still don't.
I can't recommend such a way; I
can't even 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 gave the outward impression of a radical but in my heart was
just a moderate of a time that had yet to arrive. I constantly sought change
but was most happy enjoying the changeless virtues of music and conversation
and returning to the mooring after a long, happy day on the bay.
Sometimes I would think of myself as
a reluctant draftee, called up to serve in the struggle that Albert Camus
described: "It is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment,
against history who really advance its interests." I didn't really want to
do it. I just had to. What I wanted most was that the struggle be won so I
could live in a land where people laughed and made new friends and were gentle
with one another. So I could return to that place where the sun hit the front
stoop just right on a quiet morning, reminding me that this was how good
everything else could be as well.
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