By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 26, 2017
I have lost touch with my friend Mark, and, assuming he
is alive, it will be some work to track him down, because he is periodically
homeless or semi-homeless. My first impression was that his economic condition
was mainly the result of his having been for many years a pretty good addict
and a pretty poor motorcyclist, a combination that had predictable neurological
consequences. I never knew Mark “before” — there is something in such men as
Mark suggesting an irrevocably bifurcated life — but the better I got to know
him, the more I came to believe that he probably had been much the same man,
but functional, or at least functional enough.
Like many people with mental problems, Mark tended to be
repetitious. His rants were as well-rehearsed as any stand-up comedy routine.
“My dear, sweet mother said I was a rebel, a troublemaker, and a hoodlum,” he
would say. “But she was wrong. I ain’t no hoodlum!” Mark’s conception of
himself as a rebel was central to his outlook on life, and it was reinforced by
the amusing decision of the local social-services agency to put him into a
subsidized apartment in a narrow strip of commercial and retail properties
abutting two of the wealthiest communities in one of the wealthiest
municipalities in the United States. He reveled in the fact that his mere
presence on the street was sufficient to épater
le bourgeois.
Part of it was an act, but not all of it. If you saw him
on the street and called his name, he’d spin around on you, fists balled up,
half enraged and half afraid, ready to fight, until he recognized you, which
could sometimes take a few seconds longer than it should have. But then he was
all smiles and wry commentary on the passers-by and the police. He’d gesture at
passing police cars (he lived about two blocks from the police station) and
say, “They all know me,” which was true. We talked about motorcycles and his
longing to ride again, and he’d explain to me all the reasons why that was
never, ever going to happen. “They’d lock me up,” he’d say darkly, which also
was true. He’d sometimes ask to borrow mine, and I’d explain to him all the
reasons why that was never, ever going to happen. “You’re a maniac.” This was
an approved line of argument. “That’s right!” he’d thunder. Maniac was fine, but he objected to lunatic. He didn’t like bum very much, either, but he was a
realist.
Mark was in his fifties at the time, and was still angry
at his parents, his teachers, his family, society, and others he thought had
failed him. He curated his resentments with the care of a sixth-century
monastic archivist. I was in my thirties at the time and resolved to stop doing
that.
(I am still working on it.)
The inability to move on from adolescent resentments is a
strangely prominent condition among American men, as indeed is the inability to
move on from adolescence in general. That is one of the unhappy consequences of
the low-stakes character of American middle-class life, by which I mean the
fact that the difference between being in the 50th percentile and being in the
55th percentile of whatever index of socioeconomic status you think most
relevant is not that consequential in terms of one’s real standard of living.
The price of being a little bit of a slacker is not very high in the United
States, though the rewards for success can be staggering. Life is pretty
comfortable, and you can take six years to finish your bachelor’s degree in art
history while working at Starbucks, and it isn’t miserable.
Necessity used to be what forced us to grow up. That was
the stick, and sex was the carrot, and between the two of them young men were
forced/inspired to get off their asses, go to work, and start families of their
own from time immemorial until the day before yesterday. A 20-year-old man with
adequate shelter, cheap food, computer games, weed, and a girlfriend is apt to
be pretty content. Some of them understand that there is more to life than
that, but some do not. David Foster Wallace’s great terror in Infinite Jest was entertainment so
engrossing that those consuming it simply stopped doing anything else. (Is it
necessary to issue a spoiler alert for a 1,000-page novel that’s 20 years old?
Well, spoiler alert: It’s Québécois separatists.) He revisited the idea later
in “Datum Centurio,” which is one of the all-time great short stories, one that
is written in the form of a dictionary entry from the future for the word “date.”
Over the course of the definition (and the inevitable footnotes), we learn that
pornography has become so immersive in the future that conventional sexual
behavior has been restricted entirely to procreation. The final footnote reads:
“Cf. Catholic dogma, perverse vindication of.”
As our collective standard of living gets higher, the
cost of individual failure gets lower. This is, we should appreciate, a good
thing, especially for people like Mark, who sometimes fall right over the edge
of adult life. (I can’t help but think of Wallace again here and his bitterly
ironic treatment of a porn outlet called “Adult World.”) The old men who sit in
chairs and rail about how peace and prosperity are making us soft and what we
really need is a “good war” — as if there were such a thing — are wrong, as
they always have been.
But it is the case that the stakes of life are higher in
India and China, where the difference of a few points on a test or a few
degrees of scholastic prestige can have radical consequences on one’s life. The
stakes are higher in a different way in Karachi or Lagos.
Tyler Cowen considers some of this in his new book, The Complacent Class, in which he argues
(in the words of Walter Russell Meade’s review) that “the apparent stability of
American society . . . is an illusion: behind the placid façade, technological
change and global competition have combined with domestic discontent to bring
forth a new age of disruption.”
That seems to me likely to be true, though I have no idea
what “disruption” is going to look like, and I do not think anybody else really
does, either. I suspect it is going to be very hard on the 40-year-old
teenagers among us. But we should be thoughtful in our judgment of them. It
isn’t that they have got over on us and gained some sort of unfair access to a
life of ease. Mark’s life did not look easy to me, no matter how late he slept.
Extended adolescence does not represent something that has been gained, but
something that has been lost. That’s more obvious in some men than in others,
but the principle is universal.
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