I said, But can we live this way.
A moment here. A moment here for a topic. Sentimentality in the work of Gertrude Stein. A real contempt and aversion for sentimentality, too, of course, an attempt to expunge the conventional and easy from her work. But, say what you will, A rose is a rose is a rose is not an unsentimental line. All right, on the other hand, Thomas Wolfe. Obviously, unremittingly, concededly sentimental, Look Homeward, Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again. But Gertrude Stein, I suspect, rather despised her life, and Thomas Wolfe was rather proud of his. Free of constraints, reserve, hesitations, he was free to go sentimentally on and on. She went on and on, too, of course, but only in a state of tension: drawn to the sentimental rhythm and the sentimental substance, but mocking and concealing it, reining it back. A rose is a rose is a rose is a joke, after all, and a truism, and a pointing out of something. But whatever else it is, it is not in spirit so remote from a stone, a leaf, an unfound door, and all the forgotten faces, which is Thomas Wolfe’s. A great hollow wind blows through both of them, and both are on the verge, undeniably, of tears.
All right. I can’t read her either.
This is my little disquisition about footbalclass="underline" the quarterback, the center, and the towel. On the rare occasions when I went to football games in high school, they were night games. Saturday nights, of course, when it was cold and dark, with a little rain or snow perhaps, while people huddled under their blankets and drank beer. In those days, I wore my glasses only when I had to, and my sight was better than it is now; but even with my glasses on, and no matter where in the stands I sat, I could not see or understand a single play. It seemed to me there were moments when the players stood about, moments when they crouched in opposition, a moment of rising tension, then a thud or scuffle, and they all fell down. After each play, I usually knew what must have happened, either because somebody told me or from the changed position on the field. But that was it. I never saw the ball or knew who had it, even on passes or the longest runs. With television, naturally, I can see and understand the play; and even in the days when I couldn’t see it, I had always liked the game. But as often as I’ve watched football on television, and as much as I’ve come to appreciate some of the beauty of it, there is always, inevitably, repeatedly, a moment that strikes me as wonderfully bizarre. It is the moment, at the line of scrimmage, when the quarterback wipes his hands on a towel draped over the crouching center’s rear. I understand it, obviously; the quarterback, to be sure of getting a firm grip on the football, needs to dry his hands. But, as often as I’ve asked about it, nobody has gone beyond that explanation, delivered, always, as though nothing could be more ordinary. Whereas what interests me, what I simply cannot imagine, is how the particular custom came into existence, the history of it, the history that is, of the quarterback, the center, and the towel. My brothers admit that they remember no such custom in their day, others have said the same. Was there, then, a moment, on a very wet day, when the first quarterback, muddy and soaked through, saw no further avail in wiping his hands on the back of his own uniform? The ball kept slipping out of his hands, say. Then, the center having perhaps been injured, another center, in a fresh, dry uniform, ran out onto the field, crouched at the line of scrimmage. This happened, perhaps, many times. Many times, on soaking wet days, with second-string centers in fresh, dry uniforms, quarterbacks began, perhaps absently and in desperation, to wipe their hands on the back of the centers’ pants instead of their own. And the first center, or perhaps many centers, startled, said, Hey, cut that out; or perhaps, though they were not startled, they were embarrassed; or with the advent of television, somebody, the center, the quarterback, the coach perhaps or the television producer, thought it looked embarrassing, maybe that’s what happened, to have one man wiping his hands on the seat of another man’s uniform. Or maybe, since the first-string center, presumably as wet as any of his teammates, could not serve in this drying capacity, maybe someone thought long and came up with something dry, a towel. Where to put it? And the answer was what we have. Or maybe the first quarterback said to the first center, when they were both soaked through, Look, Mo, I know this sounds silly, but could you carry some Kleenex or something? And Mo said, Are you out of your mind? The fact is, I just can’t imagine it. The conversation that produced the first few instances of what subsequently became that particular custom on the field.
Look here.
This is about the old couple, weaving back and forth across the road, looking for eagles, who told us about the air controllers’ strike.
Before I resume my torts songs, I’d like to mention what I did not always know: what an act, what a prolonged state, of bitterness, hatred, stamina, rage, grim aggrieved persistence it requires to sue. More often, people mention money. It is true that, here, lawsuits are expensive. In Germany, a woman leaning over her back fence insults a neighbor with an epithet. The neighbor sues for slander. At issue may be twenty marks. The loser pays the winner’s legal costs. The lawyer takes his cut. And that is that. Here, on the other hand, with an ingenuity that should take an entrepreneurial schemer’s breath away, there has evolved the following proposition: that a legal job no sooner comes into existence than it generates, immediately and of necessity, a job for a competitor. I can think of no other line of work where this is true. Even in something as apparently two-sided as, say, tennis, where you would think one competitor’s initiative inevitably entails work for another, there is not the same degree, or relation, of necessity. It is always possible, that is, that a tennis player will serve a ball and no one will return it, or issue a challenge and no one will respond. But, if a lawyer has been employed to sue, you must employ another to defend, or else you lose. And to have such a profession highly paid, and paid for the most part not on commission but by the hour, meaning the longer it takes the more it costs, with no objective measure (as in mining, say, or the construction of a house or of a coronary bypass) of just how much work is done; well, it is a dream.
Freudian analysis had, for a time, its own inspired market thesis: that the cost was part of the treatment; that part of what you were paying for, in other words, was the overprice. And surgeons are thought to be well paid, particularly when the surgery is unsuccessful and the patient dies. But in neither case is what the professional is paid to do the undoing of what is being done, at the same time, in the same forum, by an equally well-paid professional. And even in fields where there exists a symbiosis, or at least an ambivalent dependence, between what are, professionally, antagonists — crooks and detectives, prisoners and prison guards, in one sense social workers and the poor — the dependence is one way. Detectives and prison guards need criminals, social workers require that people should continue to be poor; there are, in short, many workers with a vested interest in the failure of institutions that employ them, and in the insolubility of problems they are paid to solve. The perfect instance occurs in the narcotics laws. A substance, cheap to manufacture, is addictive. It is outlawed. Being outlawed, it becomes rare and expensive. Immediately, and for the first time, it becomes profitable for someone, the seller, to make people addicted to it. The law generates a criminal apparatus which in turn generates a law-enforcement apparatus. With time, their personnel become the same. But the nearest analogue, as a business, to the law lies not in business but in the military, as it prepares for war. If I build a bomb I virtually assure that my adversary must build a bomb; but no one would maintain that anything valuable, conceptual or moral, within our system rests upon this symmetry, as it is said to rest on the adversary system in the law. Last year, the amount spent on lawyers in this country was approximately eighty billion dollars. Much more, of course, was spent upon defense. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine.