Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Iceman Melteth Redemption Of The World Is The Goal of Liberalism

LARRY--(grinning) I'll be glad to pay up--tomorrow. And I know my fellow inmates will promise the same. They've all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows. (a half-drunken mockery in his eyes) It'll be a great day for them, tomorrow--the Feast of All Fools, with brass bands playing! Their ships will come in, loaded to the gunwales with cancelled regrets and promises fulfilled and clean slates and new leases! 

ROCKY--(cynically) Yeah, and a ton of hop!

LARRY--(leans toward him, a comical intensity in his low voice) Don't mock the faith! Have you no respect for religion, you unregenerate Wop? What's it matter if the truth is that their favoring breeze has the stink of nickel whiskey on its breath, and their sea is a growler of lager and ale, and their ships are long since looted and scuttled and sunk on the bottom? To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. And that's enough philosophic wisdom to give you for one drink of rot-gut.

ROCKY--(grins kiddingly) De old Foolosopher, like Hickey calls yuh, ain't yuh? I s'pose you don't fall for no pipe dream?

LARRY--(a bit stiffly) I don't, no. Mine are all dead and buried behind me. What's before me is the comforting fact that death is a fine long sleep, and I'm damned tired, and it can't come too soon for me.

From the beginning of The Iceman Cometh:  Eugene O'Neill


The statement I made a while back, that liberalism was all about moral absolutes got some objection on another blog.  After the reaction to previous posts on that topic,  I'm going to go a bit farther and point out that not only is liberalism about the far harder case to make, that people should personally sacrifice comfort and luxury to some extent for the good of other people,  it is about the far more difficult to achieve redemption of society.   Conservatism and libertarianism are far easier sells on the basis of both personal weakness, selfishness, and the cynical, lazy stand that all attempts to improve things is useless.

That cynical laziness is far different from the painful discouragement that plagues any real liberal, from time to time.  Cynics like to think the worse of people an society because it allows them to be off the hook for trying to make an effort to really change things in the way that the is required by liberalism.  If they don't find it, they make it up, attributing their cynicism to even the most obviously non-cynical, whose actions prove they are not cynics.    None of the great efforts to change things, abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, organized labor, etc. was accomplished without enormous sacrifice and an enormous effort to move public thought from where it was mired before.  Cynicism, a pose that has been the end of the effort as many a former alleged leftist has relaxed into the cynical conservatism that is such a small step from so much of what is mistaken for the left.  Christopher Hitchens' savaging of Mother Teresa would have been a giant step on his way to his neo conservatism if he had started from real liberalism.   From his pseudo-left it was just a tiny tip toe from that to where he ended up.

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In the list of characters in his play, The Iceman Cometh,  Eugene O'Neill describes almost all of the customers at Harry Hope's bar other than the prostitutes and the Harvard lawyer as being "one-time" somethings or other.   At one point, what comes as close to being the hero of the play as it has, Larry Slade - one time syndicalist anarchist, describes them to the recently arrived young Don Parritt, whose mother was arrested with her anarchist cell which Larry was once a member of.

LARRY--(stares at him almost frightenedly--then looks away and grasps eagerly this chance to change the subject. He begins to describe the sleepers with sardonic relish but at the same time showing his affection for them.) That's Captain Lewis, a onetime hero of the British Army. He strips to display that scar on his back he got from a native spear whenever he's completely plastered. The bewhiskered bloke opposite him is General Wetjoen, who led a commando in the War. The two of them met when they came here to work in the Boer War spectacle at the St. Louis Fair and they've been bosom pals ever since. They dream the hours away in happy dispute over the brave days in South Africa when they tried to murder each other. The little guy between them was in it, too, as correspondent for some English paper. His nickname here is Jimmy Tomorrow. He's the leader of our Tomorrow Movement.

PARRITT--What do they do for a living?

LARRY--As little as possible. Once in a while one of them makes a successful touch somewhere, and some of them get a few dollars a month from connections at home who pay it on condition they never come back. For the rest, they live on free lunch and their old friend, Harry Hope, who doesn't give a damn what anyone does or doesn't do, as long as he likes you.

PARRITT--It must be a tough life.

LARRY--It's not. Don't waste your pity. They wouldn't thank you for it. They manage to get drunk, by hook or crook, and keep their pipe dreams, and that's all they ask of life. I've never known more contented men. It isn't often that men attain the true goal of their heart's desire. The same applies to Harry himself and his two cronies at the far table. He's so satisfied with life he's never set foot out of this place since his wife died twenty years ago. He has no need of the outside world at all. This place has a fine trade from the Market people across the street and the waterfront workers, so in spite of Harry's thirst and his generous heart, he comes out even. He never worries in hard times because there's always old friends from the days when he was a jitney Tammany politician, and a friendly brewery to tide him over. Don't ask me what his two pals work at because they don't. Except at being his lifetime guests. The one facing this way is his brother-in-law, Ed Mosher, who once worked for a circus in the ticket wagon. Pat McGloin, the other one, was a police lieutenant back in the flush times of graft when everything went. But he got too greedy and when the usual reform investigation came he was caught red-handed and thrown off the Force. (He nods at Joe.) Joe here has a yesterday in the same flush period. He ran a colored gambling house then and was a hell of a sport, so they say. Well, that's our whole family circle of inmates, except the two barkeeps and their girls, three ladies of the pavement that room on the third floor.

Nothing much changes in Harry Hopes' bar until one of their favorites, Theodore Hickey, a traveling salesman and a man of boundless enthusiasm and confidence, a good-time guy who makes periodic visits comes for his regular visit.  However, instead of the good time they expect, he upsets them with his new program of honesty, which he applies to their lives so as to set them free of their delusions.   His boundless good-time energy and sardonic wit has been converted to spreading The Truth, due to a conversion experience we don't find out about until the denouement of the play.

Only it makes them miserable because none of them really wants to be free and take some responsibility for even their own lives.  The play ends when it's revealed that Hickey murdered his religious wife because he was ashamed of having infected her with Syphilus he got on one of his sales trips.   What he couldn't stand her for was that she forgave him.   In his most honest speech of the play, he declares that he hated her for exactly the Christian act of her forgiving him,  the reason he murdered her, which he is horrified to have said as soon as the words are out of his mouth.

It is a double denouement of confessions because Parritt, who sought out Larry Slade as sort of a father figure ( he'd been Parritt's mother's lover at one time) commits suicide with Larrys encouragement after admitting to having turned her into the cops along with the entire cell of anarchists she had raised him in.   He hated her because she placed her devotion to her absurd cause over him and, in the inverted values of her faith, he gives her the gift of hating him for his betrayal of her, he knows she will take enormous pleasure in hating and not forgiving him.

PARRITT--(leans toward him--in a strange low insistent voice) Yes, but he isn't the only one who needs peace, Larry. I can't feel sorry for him. He's lucky. He's through, now. It's all decided for him. I wish it was decided for me. I've never been any good at deciding things. Even about selling out, it was the tart the detective agency got after me who put it in my mind. You remember what Mother's like, Larry. She makes all the decisions. She's always decided what I must do. She doesn't like anyone to be free but herself. (He pauses, as if waiting for comment, but Larry ignores him.) I suppose you think I ought to have made those dicks take me away with Hickey. But how could I prove it, Larry? They'd think I was nutty. Because she's still alive. You're the only one who can understand how guilty I am. Because you know her and what I've done to her. You know I'm really much guiltier than he is. You know what I did is a much worse murder. Because she is dead and yet she has to live. For a while. But she can't live long in jail. She loves freedom too much. And I can't kid myself like Hickey, that she's at peace. As long as she lives, she'll never be able to forget what I've done to her even in her sleep. She'll never have a second's peace. (He pauses--then bursts out) Jesus, Larry, can't you say something? (Larry is at the breaking point. Parritt goes on.) And I'm not putting up any bluff, either, that I was crazy afterwards when I laughed to myself and thought, "You know what you can do with your freedom pipe dream now, don't you, you damned old bitch!"

LARRY--(snaps and turns on him, his face convulsed with detestation. His quivering voice has a condemning command in it.) Go! Get the hell out of life, God damn you, before I choke it out of you! Go up--!

PARRITT--(His manner is at once transformed. He seems suddenly at peace with himself. He speaks simply and gratefully.) Thanks, Larry. I just wanted to be sure. I can see now it's the only possible way I can ever get free from her. I guess I've really known that all my life. (He pauses--then with a derisive smile) It ought to comfort Mother a little, too. It'll give her the chance to play the great incorruptible Mother of the Revolution, whose only child is the Proletariat. She'll be able to say: "Justice is done! So may all traitors die!" She'll be able to say: "I am glad he's dead! Long live the Revolution!" (He adds with a final implacable jeer) You know her, Larry! Always a ham!

LARRY--(pleads distractedly) Go, for the love of Christ, you mad tortured bastard, for your own sake! (Hugo is roused by this. He lifts his head and peers uncomprehendingly at Larry. Neither Larry nor Parritt notices him.)

The play ends when the miserable drunks of Harry Hope's bar, relieved of too much truth in their midst go back to their daily round of stagnant forgetting.   All except Larry who was the most miserable of them to start with.

LARRY--(in a whisper of horrified pity) Poor devil! (A long-forgotten faith returns to him for a moment and he mumbles) God rest his soul in peace. (He opens his eyes--with a bitter self-derision) Ah, the damned pity--the wrong kind, as Hickey said! Be God, there's no hope! I'll never be a success in the grandstand--or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I'll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die! (with an intense bitter sincerity) May that day come soon! (He pauses startledly, surprised at himself--then with a sardonic grin) Be God, I'm the only real convert to death Hickey made here. From the bottom of my coward's heart I mean that now!

It's all so marvelously gloomy, though I prefer the one act Hughie that some say O'Neill wrote as an expurgation of all that despair.  But, as good as it might be as theater, he wrote about the worst prescription for a political program as possible.   No positive change could even be attempted by people so permitted to wallow in despair because everything is hopeless and useless and all aspirations to better things are a sign of stupidity or willful delusion.  O'Neill wrote the play during the Second World War, about the worst time there ever was to present the view of life which the play does, though I believe it wasn't produced until 1946.  It would be impossible to imagine any kind of progress in civil rights in the two decades after it was written coming out of it.  It's not what fought the misery of the depression in the previous decade and defeated fascism and Nazism on two fronts.

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O'Neill was associated with a group of New York City radicals of two decades earlier (Jack Nicholson played him in the movie), most of whom came to bad ends, some, like Max Eastman, devolving into bitter right wingers.   One who stood out was the great saint,  Dorothy Day (I don't recall her being in the movie, but I may be forgetting something).  I would say that she turned out to be the most radical of all of those I'm familiar with, certainly doing more actual good in the world than just about any of them.   Her radicalism was found in the source which just about all of the would-be radicals she was associated with hated above all, religion, more so the Christian religion, perhaps most of all in Roman Catholicism. Despite the few things which her conversion imposed on her that would be considered conservative, even oppressive, it gave her actions, he life, a radicalism that none of her former associates could match in the real world, in real time.   Their better life was in some distant future,  either through their faith in what was their substitute for God, the dialectic, or some such thing, or in their incredibly unrealistic anarchism.   Day was an anarchist, too, in theory.  Though her follows in the Catholic Worker movement used to say that she was all for anarchism as long as she was the anarch.   I've read that she thought it was funny, too.

But it was in her actions, feeding, housing, caring for the destitute and poor, providing them with medical treatment, of struggling against war and oppression that her real political and moral stands found their most undeniably real form. That is something you rarely get with ideological radicals and I think the real difference is found in her religion, which demands real action in real time and not just some attendance at the Left Forum or some other such social event.*

It is an irony that the pseudo-left that makes the most fun of religion as pie-in-the-sky is the left that does the least in the real world for real people and real living beings.  It is the left that is constantly demoting people and living beings to being unimportant, ephemeral physical amalgamations of atoms, whose lives are merely the emergent phenomena of physical forces and random, chance combinations of those atoms and molecules.   Though it's not ironic, it's what that pseudo-left consists of, it has nothing in it to make anything more out of.   That ingredient that can power a real left is only found, is only available in a durable, effective form in religion, the thing that the pseudo-left hates the most.   I have never read an alternative proposed by that pseudo-left that could or has demonstrably and successfully substituted for it.   I think it is exactly the demands that religion places on the pseudo-leftists that they hate, the requirements it makes on them, their time, their resources and efforts that it requires of them, that makes them hate it just as much as any capitalist**.

And the thing they seem to hate the most, to disdain the most is the requirement to work for universal redemption in place of the crushing defeat of opponents or merely those who are other than themselves.   That may be the most difficult teaching of all found in the Abrahamic religions, that you can't look on even your enemies as objects, of things to be defeated, subjugated, destroyed and obliterated. I could go on and on about what that entails but I will leave it at this.   The entire faith of liberal politics is the faith, beyond any wisdom or council to despair or cynically give up, that society can be redeemed and a better life is possible.  Not only possible but the only really good reason for politics to exist, the highest reason for governments to exist, their only legitimate motive for their actions, the only legitimate goal that should be allowed.  I have asked, over and over again, in different forms for some other basis of liberalism and no one has yet provided me with one.

* I have come to the conclusion that almost ever conference of academics and many of those of scientists are, primarily, a way for them to have fun socializing and partying, often at the expense of institutions and governments.   Having attended a few, I'm entirely cynical about them.

** Just as natural selection is inevitably all about the strong or "more fit" defeating and destroying the weaker in a struggle of wills to survive, capitalism inevitably contains that made more enticing through the additional feature of using the law to benefit the capitalist through letting substitutes do the struggling and taking the risk for them.  Neither of them is compatible with Christianity or real liberalism or democracy.

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