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‘Tis the season for depression — tra la la la la — tra la la la. When I was younger — in my early teens perhaps — and just learning about things like depression — I thought that the Holidays made me feel depressed. I was wrong about that. They made me feel very depressed, a question of kind rather than degree.
When I got to be a little older — in my late teens maybe — it occurred to me that I was not alone — that thousands of ordinary people like myself, despite their frenetic activities, their meticulous planning, and their outward cheeriness were very depressed as well. I was wrong about that also — there weren’t thousands, there were millions.
I’m not very depressed anymore — just depressed. The reason for my improved condition is that I discovered what causes depression. I can hear the sneers as you read this. “Oh, so you know what causes depression? You know something that philosophers and rabbis have been wrestling with for thousands of years?” Yes, I’m afraid I do. Not only do I know it, but I am going to share that knowledge with you, so you can be depressed too. If you aren’t already.
The cause of depression is the recognition of reality. It begins at an early age — five or six or seven maybe — when we first become aware of death and decriptude, the Ultimate Reality. We see Walter Johnson, greatest pitcher of them all maybe — struggling to lift his right arm to shoulder level, still throwing, as he did throughout his career, for a last place team. We see Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, fat and helpless on those skinny legs of his. Was this the Babe that launched a thousand hits and built the topless towers of Ruppertville?
We see our grandparents, so young and radiant in their wedding photos, sitting silently in rocking chair or wheelchair, staring vacantly into space. We tell ourselves and the rest of the world that we feel sorry for them, but the real truth is that we feel sorry for ourselves, because we know that if we live long enough, it must happen to us. That cunning survival mechanism, the human brain, deceives each of us into thinking that we alone, of all the people who ever lived, can escape this process, but in our heart of hearts we KNOW that it must come.
With this awareness always in the back of our minds, we can find plenty to be depressed about in the front of our minds as we grow a little older. Will we make the football team, or even the chess team? Will the girl of our dreams be attracted to the perfect dimple in our necktie? Will we get a job we like? Will we like the job we get? Will we get a job at all? No job without experience; no experience without a job. How do you get around that?
No segment of our lives is more depressing than the teen years, when we feel (and almost always are) stronger, wiser and more attractive than the dried-up old prunes who will have control over our lives for the next three, five, or ten years, and who complain about our hell-raising and our sexual indulgence. What could be more depressing than a lecture on teen-age promiscuity from someone who ain’t never had it, or never had it when it was gooooood. What the hell God give it us for if we ain’t suppose to use it?
So we go into gangs (sometimes called sports), or into petty thievery (sometimes called business), or into part-time prostitution (sometimes called havin’ a good time), or into full time prostitution (sometimes called early marriage). Or into drugs and gambling, not necessarily the hard stuff the government goes to war against because they get no tribute from it, but from government sponsored drugs — alcohol, tobacco, coffee and state-organized lotteries. Do you ever hear those intrepid Warriors on Drugs say a word against alcohol or tobacco, or that most regressive of all regressive taxes, the state lottery? Never! These are free enterprise. Only they ain’t free.
As we move on through life we find ourselves in circumstances even more depressing. Where do we go when we can no longer count on sex or drugs to provide our escape from reality? For most of us there are only two choices — some army or some racket, the education racket, the insurance racket, the automobile racket, etc. Only the very rich, the very cunning, the very crazy, the very talented or the very lucky can escape the jaws of this massive nutcracker, and even they have to do time for at least part of their lives.
Take the Army, for example, what we have been taught to think of as the Army, the uniformed military personnel. Servicing this vast horde of boys and girls (Being All They Could Possibly Be) are ten men and women in mufti for each one in uniform. During the war this back-up army darn near cost us Victory, filling the backpacks and footlockers of the Fighting Force with Christmas fruitcakes. Only General Patton’s brilliant idea of using them for ammunition during the Battle of the Bulge turned the tide in our favor. “Vee giff up,” hissed the Germans vith won woice, unable to get their Blutvorsht und Kopfkase ready to fire back.
In addition to the vast hordes in uniform and the even vaster hordes ministering to them is another vast bureaucracy dedicated to those who were formerly in uniform, and to the relatives of those who died in uniform. Still another bureaucracy devotes itself to recruiting still more desperate, lonely, hungry boys and girls. If this sounds like a lot of people engaged in unproductive labor (not making consumer goods) you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Millions more are making rations for the military, and making trucks for the military, and making clothing for the military, and making birth control articles for the military. These articles we hope are used. Additional millions are employed developing, building and deploying implements we hope and pray are never used — hydrogen bombs, and Stealth Bombers, and MX Mobile Missiles with Second Strike Capability, designed to decimate Their population but only in retaliation for having decimated Ours.
Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach. Not this army. This army marches on OUR stomach.
Other armies are out there, not as visible, not as deadly, not as devouring, but every bit as depressing. There is the army of the permanently unemployed, 5% or more of the population, whose nutritional , educational and inspirational deficiencies in their formative years have rendered them unfit for anything but the most rudimentary and routine labor, the kind of labor most easily and most often displaced by machines.
Other armies are out there, not as visible, not as deadly, not as devouring, but every bit as depressing. There is the army of the permanently unemployed, 5% or more of the population, whose nutritional, educational and inspirational deficiencies in their formative years have rendered them unfit for anything but the most rudimentary and routine labor, the kind of labor most easily and most often displaced by machines. Another formidable army is the army of housewives, now mobilizing for the first time into a militant strike force, demanding compensation for labor that male-dominated governments formerly stole. Some say their numbers are shrinking because so many women are in the work force, but there aren’t fewer female householders than before — it’s just that so many of them are working two jobs and getting paid for one, and often not so well paid either. That in itself is depressing enough, but even more depressing is the dimunition of the feminine element in our society, the element that tolerated and cared for children, the artistic, emotional, intuitive element so disdained by dominant males whose brute force and brute logic made us what we are today.
To me, the most mysterious army of all is the corporate army. A while ago I was having trouble with the ribbon feeder on my typewriter. I found the part that was defective, removed it with a screwdriver, and took it to a few typewriter repair shops where the attendants just shook their heads sadly. One of them took pity on me and sent me to the official IBM Repair Shop. So I went to the official IBM Repair Shop and put my part down on the counter in front of a freckle-faced lad with a sunny disposition. “Hey, Ole Fella,” his countenance seemed to say, “we’ll fix you up here in a minute!” Beaming with self assurance, he fiddled with his computer, then fiddled some more, and then some more again while face took on an unaccustomed aspect of puzzlement.
“Hey, Charley, take a lookadis, willya? I can’t get nuttin’ onnit?” Charley was pretty busy but when he finally moseyed over and looked at my part he reacted as if he had just found a black widow spider in his lunchpail. “Jesus Chris’, I ain’t seen one of these in 20 years!”
My feelings were hurt, but did I pick up my part and leave in a huff? I certainly did not. I didn’t come in a huff and I wasn’t going to leave in a huff. In fact I wasn’t going to leave at all until got some satisfaction, and Charley and his helper seemed to sense that. Charley finally broke the ice. “There’s only one place you might find that. You might. I’m saying you might, now. That’s at the old repair shop in the IBM Building, on the third floor.”
So I went to the IBM Building and took the automatic elevator to the third floor. My heart sank when I emerged, because this was not the kind of floor that had a repair shop. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to me — no quizzical mascaraed eyes looked up at me from a switchboard, no middle aged ladies with stainless steel gray hair blocked my path demanding that I sign in and sign out, no club-toting security guard asked to see my pass or my credentials.
I nosed around that 3rd Floor — a city block square it seemed — looking for something that resembled a repair shop and finally found it — more like a large stockroom closet it was. An old geezer was sitting inside reading something — THINK! maybe, or The Collected Love Poems of Thomas B. Watson. I showed him my part, he nodded, took a box off the shelf and handed it to me. I removed the small part from the large box and compared it with mine. They looked the same. “That’s it,” he offered reassuringly, thinking I needed further assurance, which I certainly did. I put them both in my pocket.
He pulled a catalog out from under a massive stack of catalogs and looked up the price. 36 cents. He made out an invoice in triplicate — I signed the blue and the white, indicating that I paid 38 cents (2 cents sales tax) in consideration wherefor I received IBM Part #SX32964451. He snapped the yellow copy out smartly and handed it to me. “Can’t get out of here without this.” Actually I could walked out of there with a computer under each arm and the doorman would have called a taxi for me.
When I emerged from the “repair shop” I took a good look at my surroundings. There were hundreds and hundreds of metal desks, all of them exactly alike, and all of them the exact same distance apart. On each desk was a computer (I guess they get them wholesale from a cousin in the business), at each desk was a living human being, male or female, and unlike the world I lived in, I could tell them apart at a glance. The men all wore white shirts, business suits of conservative cloth and mein, and neckties that did not say “Kiss me in the dark, baby”. The women were all dressed as though they were in the reception line at the Inaugural Ball. There was a generous sprinkling of black faces among the females; IBM was, and probably still is, an Equal Opportunity Employer. I didn’t see a single black male, not even the languid security guard. Probably they were all in the cubicles on the perimeter where the upper echelon personnel hung out. I did peer into a couple of cubicles; the desks were the same but the computers were larger and had tables of their own.
What do all these people do, for gosh sakes!And this is only the third floor! And this is only Philadelphia! What the hell does it look like in New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? What the hell do all these people do? Judging by the way they were dressed, nobody there was getting less than seventeen five. More like twenty-one five. How about thirty-three five, or thirty-eight five. “What do they do?”, I wondered as I shuffled through the stainproof, noiseproof, dustproof carpet. Dust? Did I say dust? There was no dust in that place, except what I brought in. There were no windows. There was no light but artificial light, no air but artificial air, no people but —
What right do I have to say that, or even think it? I was the oddball there, with my worn shoes, my bluejeans, my plaid shirt, and my coat of many creases. Nobody wondered what I do, or even what I was doing there. I wished I had had the nerve to sidle up behind one of those slick chicks and ask “What are you doing, Miss?” She would probably say, “Well, gee, I’m busy tonight and tomorrow night, but wyncha call me Monday after work?” And then she would throw me a toothy smile which I would return if I had any teeth.
To me the most depressing of all armies is the Space Army, because I can’t help comparing the magnitude of the achievement with the banality of the environment it is achieved in. The human race doesn’t seem to have the emotional maturity to handle its technological accomplishments, like a four-and-a-half-year-old chess champion or something.
A friend invited us over to watch the Outer Space Flyby on his 45-inch High Resolution Japanese television. Cost us $1000 a head — one thousand dollars for every man woman and child from Passamaquoddy to Pearl Harbor and Cape Canavaral to Valdez, but it was worth it. My heart leaped up like any loyal American’s when I saw our spaceship — my spaceship — passing through the rings of Saturn and nosing around among the nine moons of Jupiter. We did it! We beat them! It wasn’t until some months later that I realized the Russkies licked us again. Their Empire broke up first!
Whatever euphoria I might have experienced in the rarified atmosphere of Jupiter was dispelled and reversed when the network cameras returned to Mission Control and I saw thousands of styrofoam cups half-filled with a transparent brown liquid jestingly callee coffee. Alongside these cups were thousands of men and women in shirtsleeves and loose neckties, running their fingers through their hair, pushing buttons on their $25,000 computers, and pretending to be overjoyed at squiggles on them that no kindergarten child would dare hand in for his homework. How many of the soldiers in this army are pulling down 35K per a? How many 45K? 65K? 95K? One twenty five? I couldn’t add it all in my head; I had to go back for my portable pocket calculator. The city streets were dark and deserted as I shuffled wearily among them, unmugged and unmolested. Even the burglars were at home watching the Flyby on their stolen Sonys and pilfered Panasonics. OUR home.
And A Merry Christmas To You Too, Tiny Tim!