Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  Milton Friedman, the economist who makes Ronald Reagan look like a pinko liberal, says that college students who demand that their colleges sell stocks in companies that do business with South Africa should first make some sacrifices themselves.

  “Few temptations are so irresistible,” the brilliant Mr. Friedman says, “as doing good at someone else’s expense.”

  Friedman says that the students should first get rid of any personal possessions they have that were made by companies that do business in South Africa. He points out that this would mean “no more radios, electric clocks, hair dryers, etc. from General Electric. No more cars from General Motors or Ford or, for that matter, Honda or Nissan …”

  It’s a catchy idea. I imagine a lot of protesting students would be less ready to give up their record players made by a company that deals with South Africa than they are to have their college give up their stocks in those companies. Still, Friedman, in writing it, and I, in finding it catchy, are wrong.

  There is something wonderfully pure and naïve about campus protests. The one thing they have in common is that they’re always on solid moral ground. The students are usually right. Forget that what they demand may not be practical.

  Americans are moral people. Our foreign policy should conform to our moral standards. When the President makes a decision on a weapons treaty, he should be thinking not of outsmarting the Soviet Union but of what’s right, like protesting students do.

  Doing what’s right is where America’s strength lies.

  Questioning the Boss

  Someone is always suggesting that doctors ought to be tested regularly to make sure they’re still competent to practice medicine.

  I suppose it’s a good idea even though I’d trust my doctor if he never took another test. The trouble with testing doctors is, the doctors who are best at passing tests are not necessarily the best at diagnosing and treating their patients’ problems. Taking tests is an expertise all its own.

  Good doctors are embarrassed enough by the bad ones so that they’d probably go along with the idea even though they don’t like it.

  When they test the doctors, I hope they check out the people in their offices who do the billing. It would be interesting to see if any of them still remember how to subtract or divide. We know they can add and multiply.

  Bosses get away with murder. Half the bosses in business don’t know what they’re talking about. There are a lot more incompetent bosses than there are incompetent doctors. Furthermore, we only see a doctor once every couple of years, if we’re lucky. A lot of us see bosses every day.

  If those lawyers who make a living off suing doctors for malpractice want to get really rich and do the rest of us a favor at the same time, they ought to start suing bosses for malpractice. Bosses are among the biggest malpracticers of all time. They can do the same kind of damage an inept brain surgeon can do.

  If every boss in the country had to take an exam once every six years, I’ll bet half the bosses would be barred from the practice of bossing. I’ve had as many as ten bosses in my lifetime who would have flunked bossing if they’d been tested. Some of them should never have been granted a license to boss in the first place.

  The tests for doctors are usually administered by other doctors. This is probably wrong. Certainly a test for bosses should not be administered by other bosses. Bosses, like doctors, stick together. They tend to protect the incompetents in their ranks. They’re protective and probably would never bar one of their numbers from bossing.

  There are several questions I’d put to bosses on an examination:

  1. Do you remember back to the days when you were not a boss?

  2. Do you remember what your boss was like when you weren’t one?

  3. Which do you like better, working or bossing?

  4. Do you think people have to be bossed full-time or can you let them alone sometimes?

  5. Can you do what you’re telling other people to do?

  6. Do you enjoy firing someone once in a while?

  7. If you didn’t come in tomorrow, would it matter?

  8. If you had to give up your reserved parking place in the company lot, would you cry?

  9. What’s more important about being a boss, power or money?

  10. What would you like to be when you grow up?

  There are a great many other people in our society in addition to doctors who should be tested for competence periodically. There are always some teachers who need to be checked. I think automobile mechanics and television repairmen need it.

  The only people I’d exempt from these periodic checkups are writers. Not knowing what we’re doing is part of the business.

  God Is Not a Republican

  Religion ought not be used by anyone as a sales tool. God doesn’t do endorsements. If he did, Coke and Pepsi would have signed him up years ago.

  If God listens to political speeches, He must be pretty surprised and probably a little annoyed at how often His name is used in a way that suggests He’s a registered Democrat or Republican.

  When a politician mentions God half a dozen times in a speech, it’s to appropriate for his campaign the name “God.” He’s suggesting that God has endorsed the ticket and given permission to have His name used in promotional material in exchange for certain considerations, like school prayer. There are lots of cheap tricks used in political campaigns, and evoking God’s name is one of them.

  In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention George Bush, then a candidate, said:

  “I am guided by certain traditions. One is that there is a God and He is good and His love, while free, has a self-imposed cost: We must be good to one another.”

  That’s what I’d call a legitimate statement by a candidate. He’s just telling us where he stands. He isn’t pretending God wants him as President. Unfortunately, not many politicians running for office, including George Bush, stop at that. He used God’s name constantly in relation to himself.

  President Bush made an exception of Michael Dukakis in his pledge to “be good to one another” during that campaign by suggesting that, in addition to having God in his camp, he also loved America more than Dukakis because Dukakis opposed making the pledge of allegiance mandatory.

  No number of compulsory pledges of allegiance has ever guaranteed the love of a person for his country, and endless repetition of prayer does not promise immortality.

  Mr. Bush, like many politicians, often ends a speech with the phrase “God bless you.” Do politicians think this will help? Do they think God may forget to bless us if they don’t remind Him to do so? Or are the politicians saying, “I hope God blesses you.”? If so, are they suggesting that they think you deserve it? What if God disagrees and doesn’t think you have a blessing coming?

  No matter what the case is, it doesn’t seem as though a serious politician should use God’s name so lightly and end each speech by saying “God bless you” with the same intonation and depth of feeling he’d use saying “Have a nice day.”

  It’s difficult to understand why Americans accept the way people use God for their own purpose. Samuel Johnson said patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel, but maybe patriotism is only next to last. The least admirable people among us often hide behind a newly acquired religion when they’re in trouble. On his way to the gas chamber, the murderer invariably announces he’s found God. In the 1970s, several of the principals in the Watergate scandal “found God.” They should have looked for God first instead of for those papers they stole.

  The Middle Eastern terrorists don’t call themselves terrorists. They call themselves names like “The Islamic Holy War.” It is for God, as they see God, that they commit what the rest of the world sees as a crime. They are certain, as religious people, that what they are doing is right in the eyes of God. Religious people, no matter what religion, are always certain they’re right.

  We don’t know whether the God that conservatives want in our public schools here is the same
God to which Islamic Holy War members pray or not. Whose God, of all the gods of all the world’s religions, should be the official one?

  Religion doesn’t belong in politics. The decision to protect the privacy of religious belief was not made lightly when the First Amendment to our Constitution was written.

  “Believing with you,” Thomas Jefferson said, “that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for this faith and his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with reverence that act of the whole American people … building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

  Talk, Talk, Talk

  Conversation may be disappearing along with good writing. In the average week, we hear hundreds of people talking but we don’t hear much conversation.

  Conversation involves an exchange of ideas, and hiya-how-you-doin’-today-fine-thanks-how-about-you does not involve exchanging any ideas.

  There’s a place for pleasantries like “Good Morning. Nice day, isn’t it?” but not if the small talk drives out serious conversation. When we talk, we use our mouths. In conversation, we ought to use our brains.

  People are often reluctant to talk about anything serious. It’s probably because they don’t want anyone arguing them out of the things they believe for no good reason.

  Two subjects that often are considered out of bounds are politics and religion. It’s difficult to exclude those two important topics if we’re going to have many genuine conversations. Why shouldn’t we talk about politics and religion? Why shouldn’t we argue about those subjects and expose ourselves to other opinions?

  People are somewhat more willing to argue about politics because they can argue personalities, not issues. Personalities are easy. If a person dislikes the President, he or she can rant and rave about what an idiot Bush is without ever making any sense. This is not a political conversation, and most of us avoid serious political conversations for the same reason we avoid religious conversations. For the most part, we know what we believe but we don’t know much more than that.

  In the case of religion, most people have known since they were young what they are expected to believe by their parents and friends. They are Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Christian Scientist, Muslim, Jew. They don’t want to talk about it.

  No subject is more interesting to discuss than religion but people are so uncertain about the details of their beliefs that they’d rather not have the subject brought up.

  We like to talk to each other so we keep finding new substitutes for real conversation. These days sports have driven out the weather as the number-1 topic when we don’t want to think much about what we’re saying.

  “Hey, how about those Dodgers!” has temporarily replaced “Is it cold enough for you?”

  A real conversation takes too long for most of us. We greet each other on the street, in an elevator or pushing a shopping cart. This is no time to talk politics, the economy or whether we’re spending too much on arms.

  There are several other reasons why conversation may be a dying art. First, good talk takes time and we aren’t willing to spend it on something that seems like doing nothing. Second, the best conversations are between two people, not among three, four or ten. The best conversations are those in which the participants can’t wait to say what they have to say and, if there are more than two conversationalists, they don’t get a turn often enough.

  There’s a third reason for the deterioration of good conversation. We’re all more aware of how careful we have to be about what we say. We’re nervous about being quoted in the newspaper or having our friends tell other friends, and enemies, what we’ve said. We can’t be careful in a good conversation. We have to let the thought pop out of our mouths before we’ve finished having it. Good conversation is often a little irresponsible. We say things we don’t really mean. We can’t have the feeling it’s being recorded because that makes a conversationalist careful and care kills conversation.

  I’d like to have a serious talk with you about this sometime.

  The Nuts

  I like the nuts. We owe them a lot.

  The nuts are the people who know everything about one thing and almost nothing about anything else. There are art nuts, wine nuts, stamp nuts, car nuts, baseball nuts and there are political nuts. You name it and there are people who are nuts about it.

  Marty was a political nut. Marty lived in Albany, New York, and we were related but I don’t want to talk about how. All during the forties, fifties and sixties, Marty got half a dozen newspapers from all over the country. He liked the Chicago Tribune best. It was indisputably the worst major newspaper printed in the United States during those years, but Marty loved it because no other newspaper was right wing enough to suit his political taste. We always hoped Marty was kidding but I don’t think he was.

  There wasn’t any sense getting into an argument with Marty about politics anywhere in the country because he knew more about it than you did. His politics were never the same as mine but I had to admit he knew and I didn’t. Marty was the kind of guy who could prove that Hitler was kind to dogs.

  I’m not really a very political person. Most Americans aren’t. Like people who watch baseball games only when the World Series is being played, most people pay attention to politics only during the last days before an election. That’s me.

  For better or for worse, average citizens leave the nitty-gritty of politics to those few people, like Marty, who are fascinated with the process. Fortunately for all of us, wherever there was a Marty reading the Chicago Tribune back in those days, there was some other nut reading The Daily Worker, and they canceled each other out.

  While it may be the ambitious men or women who decide to run for office in the first place, it is the people who follow politics closely who pass on the candidates’ potential for success, and they let the rest of us know who the promising people are.

  Those political nuts among us who read everything and know everything have served us well. They’re the people who walk door-to-door with the petitions and attend endless council meetings and neighborhood planning sessions. They know. The rest of us are guessing.

  It’s the people who are nuts about anything that bring the obscure things in their specialty to our attention. The art nuts recognize a good new artist whom the rest of us would live our whole lives without appreciating. If it weren’t for the handful of people who know what they’re talking about when they talk about art, Picasso would never have been discovered. He certainly never would have been discovered by me if he’d lived next door.

  It doesn’t matter what the subject is, it has to have some nuts of its own. Most of us don’t know how to dress until the fashion nuts let us know.

  Everyone would still be doing the minuet or the waltz if the dance nuts hadn’t taken dance in a new direction that no ordinary dancer would ever have thought of or dared do.

  We wouldn’t know who to vote for in the Heisman Trophy competition if the sports nuts didn’t give us some choices.

  The wine nuts tell us ’83 was a good year and we believe them and they’re right.

  I’ll take a nut’s advice on what he’s nuts about every time.

  The Devil Makes Them Do It

  You have to feel sorry for the traditional little neighborhood churches across America.

  The pope gallivants around the world attracting attention and money for the Vatican but very little of either for the local churches; the preachers on television skim the cream off the top of the Protestant collection plate. In both cases, the Little Church Around the Corner has to take the leftovers.

  The good, solid small-church Protestant ministers and Catholic parish priests must detest the neon evangelism of the TV hucksters. If these ministers and priests believe what they preach, they must worry about the perverse pleasure they take from the scandals in which so many of the big-money television pray-for-pay preachers have been invo
lved.

  It seems so unfair and yet inevitable that the most ignorant and the poorest people in America pay the most for nothing. It is, for the most part, the ignorant and uneducated who respond to the appeals from the television ministers. They are the same people who buy lottery tickets.

  There is a correlation between buying a lottery ticket and sending $10 to Oral Roberts or Pat Robertson, because the results are the same. There are none. In each case the person putting up the money is looking for some disproportionately wonderful return on the money.

  In the case of the lottery ticket, the person hopes to win $1 million a year for life. In the case of the money sent to the television ministry, the sender hopes to get back in return life everlasting or, at the very least, forgiveness for his sins. I’d give $10 to Oral Roberts myself for a little of that.

  The television evangelists are good at what they do. Words flow from their throats like sugar from a bag. They never seem to be at a loss for words, and when they are, they say, “Praise Jesus.”

  Their talent is like that of the vaudeville performers who can juggle eight balls in the air or draw two rabbits out of a size 6 hat. Preaching is a trick they’ve mastered. It’s sleight-of-mouth.

  I was in the audience during the performance of a faith-healing minister in Philadelphia several years ago. Some kind of mass hypnosis took place. Many in the largely black audience actually fainted when he pressed his hand to their foreheads and shouted, “Heal this woman, God!”