Algren at Sea (31 page)

Other than being asphyxiated, struck mute, deaf, and staring blind by boredom, he has life by the tail.

“We have a feeling which has persisted for some time,” a
Chicago Sun-Times
hand tries to place a persistent feeling, “that squalor is going out of fashion in Chicago. Perhaps it's been largely due to our mayor's efforts in brightening up and tidying our streets, the popularity of cheering colors and the Schenley advertising display of modern masterpieces in the subway concourse—a step in dispelling the sordid gloom of our subway décor that adds a touch of brightness to the day for the weary homeward bound.”

That all depends upon which way you're bound home, Mr. Homeward. Chicago's streets were never so lawless and corruption never so common. Whenever is someone going to come along who'll say right out, “We
like
it this way?”

And yet what complacency a ribbon salesman can achieve when you give him a posture chair on which to put his behind down! The smugness begins coming out of his ears—if he can just keep it up he'll be a
Daily News
columnist advocating a return to old-fashioned spanking as a cure-all for juvenile delinquency.

Offer him a chunk of a Cicero whorehouse and he'll snap it up like a bass snapping a fly, and bank the bills in his wall safe without feeling a riffle in his morality.

Dying cries of outraged innocence, with which our local press was lately ringing, commonly follow disclosure that cops have been stripping stores of electric appliances again. They are in reality simply cries of middlemen protesting a retail operation being conducted wholesale. It isn't the thefts,
but the audacity of officers in raising their percentage from 50 percent to 100 at the cost of middlemen who have invested in trucks and crowbars which incense us.

Using their own vehicles, supplying their own labor and their own crowbars, the police were guilty on two counts—first, of jobbing professional movers of electric appliances who have served district stations faithfully, and second, of getting caught. When this occurs a shudder goes through the middle of Chicago's middle class.

During the following confusion as to who was the least crooked, crooks or cops (the cops offering the impregnable defense that the crooks had gotten as much as
they
had), an officer of the Patrolmen's Union was entrapped, by fellow officers, taking a bribe on the South Side. The union immediately went to bat for him, pleading the illegality of entrapment. Which it is and so he was.

But why does no one mention the use of entrapment by police when the entrapped party is a penniless whore trying to make her rent at the same time that an officer needs to meet his monthly quota of arrests?

Yet one can scarcely find the police culpable of entrapment when they see it practiced by the columnist crusading against B-girls. If it's a criminal offense for an officer to entrap a suspect, why not a criminal offense for a columnist?

And how can one decry police for being primitive while a columnist can come to his desk on the hawks for impaling somebody? Providing, of course, that she can't hit back.

The crusades conducted by Chicago columnists in the past two years against children born out of wedlock, B-girls, panhandlers, drag-car racers, and drug addicts probably broke every local record for unadulterated cowardice. In which a high standard among columnists had already been set by that patriot, who, caught selling cars on the black market in Detroit, volunteered for army service without mentioning what war. Presumably he wanted to fight the Blackhawks.

If our cops have gotten a bad name for bribe taking, columnists who take payola preserve an air of innocence.

Our corruption doesn't rise from stews below, but descends like a pall from air-conditioned offices above. Not with the girl waiting in the dim-lit cocktail lounge with a false-bottomed glass before her; but with the newspaper owner whose one reality is his circulation department.

Our corruption begins with the assumption that a newspaper owner, being a private enterpriser, has as much right to decide what will increase circulation as a delicatessen owner has to decide whether he will push pastrami or liverwurst.

When a member of an American medical commission in Mexico, who was earning six hundred a month and expenses, was asked, “How long will the epidemic last?” he answered, “As long as we can keep it going—maybe it will break out in South America.”

Pointing the finger of accusation at a crooked police department or calling in a convenient spectre called “The Syndicate” is simply no good. If the hand that holds the poison pen is what you're looking for, take a peek at your
Tribune
cartoons.

To believe that a newspaper's sole purpose is to reach as many readers as possible leads to the replacing of vital news by a mindless stackpiling of the names of “celebs.” The
Tribune
circumvents this problem by rewriting news to fit the views of the late Colonel McCormick, a man of such severe limitations that he once ordered a star cut out of the American flag in the
Tribune
lobby by way of reading Rhode Island out of the Union for not voting his way.

This point, at which pettiness verges on the idiotic, is also practiced by our courts. As was recently demonstrated by a judge of the Criminal Court who quashed an indictment, against detectives accused of thefts, because a semicolon was used where a common was more appropriate. It is not yet certain whether the judge was even correct grammatically.

The man who had obtained the indictment was a professional burglar, a stripling named Richard Morrison. When instructed by another judge that he was free to leave the courtroom, the youth held tight to the safety of the witness chair: he had been semicoloned into being a moving target, and he knew it.

“The way I feel now,” he confessed to reporters, “is that if what I did doesn't help, this city will never be cleaned up. Everything blew up in my face, as usual. No, I wouldn't do it again. Here I've spent seventeen months in custody, and that's time that won't be counted if I'm ever sentenced. And when I get out I'll be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life, even if I can go straight as I want to do. There are always going to be people who will want to look me up.”

They will, son. They will. When you wind up in an alley with the cats
looking at you, it will be one more step in dispelling the sordid gloom of our subway décor.

To add a touch of brightness to the day for the weary homeward bound.

“Police strategists Thursday huddled behind closed doors, pondering ways to deal with the recent rash of Gangland-style killings. Its participants conceded that liaison between unit detectives and the Organized Crime Division left something to be desired and may have hampered investigation of Gangland-style murders. It was suggested that officers of both groups might have information which furnished investigative leads but which was not exchanged because of a breakdown in communication. Participants agreed that some officers, hoping to make a score, had withheld information from fellow investigators. The passing around of stool pigeons from policeman to policeman was suggested.”
⁴

In what other city can I become a rotating fink?

And should not a fink, having been rotating faithfully for twenty years, be eligible for a fink's pension? Hasn't he done as much as anyone else to brighten our subway décor?

Thus, as above a widening universe, nuclear death draws nearer, I pick up the
Chicago Daily News
and find the front page divided by a reprint of Horatio Alger's
Luke Walton,
an exposure of the American League by an ex-manager, and a recipe for drawn butter.

Not to be surpassed in public service, the
Evening American
offers a new crusade by Chicago's most heavily decorated fink; one whose honors are all self-awarded. While keeping an eagle eye on the broken brutes of Skid Row's broken walks, he also finds time to expose mothers of illegitimate children found in movie houses while receiving state aid. This Malthusian revisionist's cry is, “They're multiplying like guinea pigs out there!” Implying that
his
kind of people have hit upon a method of reproducing themselves different from that of guinea pigs.

This is a nasty reversal of the morality of earlier Chicago newspaper-men, such as Lloyd Lewis and Finley Peter Dunne, who felt that the job
was to get the judge down out of the dock to get a look at
his
hands. The job today, as Ross, Mabley, Malloy, and Smith see it, is to see what his honor's fee is for the privilege of sitting beside him. They're multiplying like guinea pigs out there.

“But do you know it is impossible,” Dostoevsky inquired, “to charge man with sin, to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so meanly that he cannot help but perpetrate villainies—when economically he is brought to villainy and that it is silly and cruel to demand of him that which he is impotent to perform?”

Our contemporary columnists here are more demanding than Dostoevsky. Not enough people, as they see it, are turning the other cheek. “If you're not guilty of something what do you think we're doing here questioning you?” is their assumption. “Don't think you can scare
us
by bleeding. If you're not guilty of something you must be innocent of something, and that's far worse.” Trying to understand one's society by reading pietists like Malloy and Mabley is like trying to get perspective through the eyes of guards in a maximum-security penitentiary.

Since clocks first ticked, the captains and the kings have been demanding that writers uphold their authority; and, since the first tick, writers have been trying to bring that authority down. Yet today in Chicago it is the writers who most praise the captains and the kings—and Chicago runs from coast to coast.

Thus Europe's century-old fear of the American businessman, that he would level Western Europe's ancestral culture, takes this surprising turn: that the American businessman is not quite so busy at leveling as is the American writer.

The artist's usefulness has always been to stand in an ironic affiliation to his society, and every society needs him standing so. Though it gags, disdains, and dishonors him, it needs him to know truth from falsehood. The businessman is of no use whatsoever in this: his truth is always false.

Poets, philosophers, scientists, men of the cloth and court jesters are the people upon whom any society must depend for its survival. For these, if true to themselves, lend the perspective that the business and military mind, in its eagerness for profit and victory, loses.

Yet here we have no such poet to teach us. Our leading philosopher has no larger claim to distinction, by packaging and distributing other men's ideas, than if he were packaging Ma's Home-Made Noodles.

John Justin Smith and the Reverend Father Dussman are representative, respectively, of the press and the right-wing clergy. The former informs us, for example, that a cartoonist showing an American climbing into a bomb shelter shaped like a coffin, must be sick. Yet, if a fallout shelter
is
anything else
but
a coffin, that wasn't a firestorm that hit Hiroshima. It was a brush fire started by a careless motorist. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.

Smith feels people to whom nothing is sacred are sick. But as
everything
is sacred to Smith, I think Smith is far sicker. A cartoonist showing an American spaceman making a pass at another spaceman's wife while hubby is in orbit seems to me no more than an extension of an old human custom—one also indulged in by columnists when an other columnist is in orbit—yet here comes John Justin demanding a stop to satirizing of the Air Force. This eye-rolling ass has picked up a conviction that fallout shelters, spacemen, and a carnie-talking revivalist named Graham are beyond criticism.

This dour demand to stop spoofing, in a country that never needed spoofing more, is companioned by the urge to punish. What the Chicago press wants, basically, is a world where everyone has been printed and mugged. “If you aren't planning to steal for a living, why not let us have your prints just in the event you change your mind?” bespeaks the world of Ross, Mabley, Malloy, and Smith.

It isn't that these people believe in anything, one way or another. Whichever way the wind blows is the way
they'll
blow. Whoever is running things is right—a complete shift in the American dream. The fink, once disdained, becomes a heroic figure.

Nor are men of conscience lacking only in the press. Here is the Reverend Father Dussman addressing us:

“Should we forewarn Russia of its doom? We have no moral obligation to do so, since they may get the jump on us, if what they boast they have is true. Now you might say, What about all the lives of the innocent people of Russia, non-card-carrying citizens who may be as disgusted with their warmongering as we are? If our intelligence is as good as it should be in these perilous times, we should know the location of every last launching pad in Russia and its satellite countries. Those are areas that should be bombed without further ado, and without forewarning under the circumstances. You might say that would mean the demise of some
Americans, as the Russians would retaliate from submarines and the like. That is a calculated risk. Far better that a few of us pass into God's Eternal City a bit prematurely than that half or more of the human race perish a few years hence.”
⁵

Now, some people are going to say that if it's so much better to pass a bit prematurely into God's Eternal City, what is keeping the Reverend Father back? Just natural courtesy, I'm sure—it wouldn't look right for a man to be elbowing ahead of people who deserve to go as much as himself.