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Tag Archives: John Steinbeck

‘We Don’t March’: Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck on the Evils of Militarism

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Political Philosophy, War

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, America and Americans, Bertrand Russell, conflict, democracy, England Your England, Eugene Debs, Fascism, Genus Americanus, George Orwell, Government, John Steinbeck, March, Marching, Military, nonfiction, Pacifism, Patriotism, peace, politics, protest, Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism, Spectacle, Walter Isaacson, War, Why I Write

Albert Einstein

“When troops would come by, accompanied by fifes and drums, kids would pour into the streets to join the parade and march in lockstep. But not Einstein. Watching such a display once, he began to cry. ‘When I grow up, I don’t want to be one of those poor people,’ he told his parents. As Einstein later explained, ‘When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.'”

Albert Einstein, as described in chapter 2 (“Childhood, 1879-1896”) of Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

George Orwell

“One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim.

Why is the goose-step not used in England? In the British army… the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.”

George Orwell, reflecting in a segment from his essay “England Your England,” which is published in his collection of essays Why I Write.

John Steinbeck

“It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don’t have to. Every holiday draws millions marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march… but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers.

Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed…”

John Steinbeck, writing in his essay “Genus Americanus,” which can be found in his last published book, America and Americans.

__________

If you have additional references or ideas relating to this topic, please send them my way or post them in the comments section.

During the First World War, prominent public figures in all three of these men’s home countries were jailed for not marching in lock-step into the conflict. Because she opposed the war and had become one of the figureheads of the German socialist movement, Rosa Luxemburg spent most of the war in prison and was eventually murdered by German soldiers in 1919. In England, Bertrand Russell was thrown into Brixton Prison for six months for “passive resistance to military or naval service.” And in the United States, the famous union leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene Debs was charged with ten counts of sedition for making an anti-draft speech on June 16th, 1918. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and was disenfranchised for life.

If you’d like to read more from Steinbeck, check out another selection from America and Americans, in which he points out a curious paradox at the heart of how Americans appraise their presidents: “The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else…”

Steinbeck

Or, see more from Isaacson’s biography of A.E., including a page describing Einstein’s obsession with identifying the causality behind the laws of nature. “When I am judging a theory… I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way?”

Albert Einstein

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A Newspaper Is A Business Out To Make Money

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism, Literature, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Apology for Smectymnuus, cynicism, Edward S. Herman, free press, Government, Harlan Potter, John Milton, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Manufacturing Consent, Mark Twain, mass media, media, news, newspaper, Noam Chomsky, NSA, Philip Marlowe, Philip Roth, politics, press, Raymond Chandler, Somerset Maugham, The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, early 1950s

“‘We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’…

‘There’s a peculiar thing about money,’ he went on. ‘In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation — all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family.

In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”

__________

A monologue from the multimillionaire Harlan Potter, speaking to detective Philip Marlowe in chapter 32 of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye.

Like many of the best novelists, Chandler can effortlessly slip canny and credible observations like this into the mouths of characters who inhabit an otherwise plot-driven story. John Updike, Philip Roth, Somerset Maugham, and John Steinbeck are some of the other modern novelists who, at least according to the top of my head, possess this same subtle gift.

I would, however, suggest a small addition to the above monologue. After the hinge sentence, “A newspaper is a business out to make money off of advertising revenue,” there should be a declarative phrase: “Nothing more, nothing less.” The reason: I think there’s a crucial corollary to the fact that a free press within a market economy will run on advertising revenue (and to a lesser degree, private donations or public subsidies). If there is consumer demand for news which is superficial, trivial, and tawdry, then that is the content which will generate the most advertising revenue — and will therefore be supplied. If enough consumers demand exhaustive coverage of the new NSA infrastructure in Cyprus — instead of, say, Ms. Cyrus —  then the former will quickly flood the airwaves as the latter recedes. In this sense, the Harlan Potters (and Rupert Murdochs and Ted Turners) of the world are not completely deserving of our condemnation, or at least may not be the first to blame for our ignorance and delusion en masse. No, what might first deserve indictment are the skewed economic incentives themselves, the educational system and cultural institutions which make us unreceptive to sober journalism. Perhaps, most fundamentally, the responsible party is the one hardest to hold accountable — ourselves.

One beef I have with the thesis of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s famous 1988 analysis of the American mass media, Manufacturing Consent, is that it incriminates elites for the sensationalism and superficiality of most U.S. journalism and network news. Of course these issues have been reconfigured by the advent of the internet, but according to my take, a different premise — that I the consumer is ultimately driving what passes as “content” — is what obtains. If we crave insubstantial and easy-to-digest news coverage, then, like junk food, that’s what we’ll be served. Milton famously declared that, “they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness”; in our case, if we’ve lost the ability to see, we may have no one to blame but ourselves.

As Twain would later observe, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” Surely there is enough blame to go around — but who’s most fundamentally at fault?

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Our Relationship to Our President

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Different Kind of Father, America, America and Americans, Government, Government of the People, John Steinbeck, Jonathan Franzen, leadership, Life as a Terrorist, President, public opinion, The United States, William Vollman

Steinbeck

“The relationship of Americans to their President is a matter of amazement to foreigners. Of course we respect the office and admire the man who can fill it, but at the same time we inherently fear and suspect power. We are proud of the President, and we blame him for things he did not do. We are related to the President in a close and almost family sense; we inspect his every move and mood with suspicion. We insist that the President be cautious in speech, guarded in action, immaculate in his public and private life; and in spite of these imposed pressures we are avidly curious about the man hidden behind the formal public image we have created. We have made a tough but unwritten code of conduct for him, and the slightest deviation brings forth a torrent of accusation and abuse.

The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”

__________

From John Steinbeck’s essay “Government of the People,” published in his 1966 book America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction.

I had never heard about this lesser-known work of Steinbeck’s until yesterday, when I read William Vollman’s essay “Life as a Terrorist: Uncovering My FBI file” in the newest edition of Harper’s magazine. In this account, the FBI’s bumblings and hysterical misappraisals of Vollman and his friends are counterposed to the sagelike voice of Steinbeck, that most native of American authors, whose understanding of the American project — especially its sincerity and idealism, and how it may be cynically twisted by the powerful — still echoes into our own age.

I highly recommend Vollman’s essay as well as Jonathan Franzen’s “A Different Kind of Father”, a look at literature and paternalism, in the September edition of Harper’s.

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