One mans meat, p.34
One Man's Meat, page 34
It happens that I thoroughly approve of the Bang’s test. I like it so well I had made certain before buying the cow that she had recently been tested by a veterinary. (The men in my barn didn’t ask about that.) I also thoroughly approve of the old idea that a man’s home is his castle and that anyone who arrives with a needle is expected to knock before entering. Seeing the hook in Sukey’s nose and the look of pain in her eyes gave me the same sort of start a person might get from suddenly entering his own home and finding his wife trussed up with sash-cord. I think it was probably a very lucky thing indeed that I thoroughly approved of the Bang’s test, otherwise the State might have found itself with one less control.
The incident sticks in the mind. The dismal thing about controls—which Mr. Kiplinger failed to put in his letter—is that they seem unable to make our lives more agreeable in some particulars without making them insupportable in others. In its zeal to wipe out undulant fever in my neighborhood, the State had caused me to run quite a temperature in my own barn. I was patient and helped the State restore my health, but it will never be the same again, and I can imagine the effect the incident might have had on a cow owner who was unsympathetic toward the whole idea of cow testing.
I suppose the tightening of the controls round our lives is punishment for our early waywardness, but it does not make us feel any better about the matter. The reason there were a couple of men in my barn this morning, annoying my cow, is that some farmers had been dilatory about testing cows even after science had made such tests easy and practical and doctors and undertakers had made the alternative plain. And the reason there will be a couple of strangers in all your barns and offices from now on, poking through your piles of accumulated trouble, is that somewhere in the past there were those vast untested herds spreading their fevers through the world. This is a sad outlook but one we shall have to face with what cheer is left in us.
On the whole the most alarming thing about control is the time it takes. Here, in war, with our emergency measures and our ration books, we are beginning to learn something about that. In peace it will be a proliferation and an extension of the same. Life will be paper work; death will be a questionnaire.
I have a little half-ton truck that I wanted to keep rolling, to carry dressing to the fields and to run the interminable errand that is farming; but when I came to apply for the certificate that would permit me to use this vehicle I found a government instruction book as long as a modern novel and ever so much more plotty. It took me two solid days of study and inquiry before I was ready to fill in the blanks, and I am a man with one of those college educations that you hear about. And it will take me much more than two days additional if I am to write the long journal of my trucking life now required of me as a holder of the certificate. My truck has come to be like the State in my life—it is no longer my assistant, it is my boss. Under the circumstances, my tendency is never to go near the thing, which is unenterprising in me and full of serious consequences, eventually, for the State.
The most challenging control that occupies the attention of our social architects and designers is of course the control of wealth. Observe the manly attempt that is being made, here and abroad, to keep the profit system alive by artificial respiration. In England, Sir William Beveridge has completed a magnificent edifice of general insurance in which everyone will contribute toward a common fund designed to minimize the hard luck of everyone else. Here is the actuary’s dream. England becomes a nation of bookkeepers, and a man walks from the cradle to the grave hand in hand with the claims adjuster and the notary public. Even the author of this notable plan by which the ultimate risk is calculated admits that the whole business will collapse unless the policy-holders, in their myriad enterprises, prosper.
This is super-control. It is the end of forests and the beginning of files. In America we shall presumably devise a similar system, as well as other comical expedients such as placing a $67,200 limit on income.
I sometimes think that the profit system, which today is undergoing such extensive alterations that it will emerge unrecognizable, might easily have been made to serve everyone rather well if it had been given a fair trial. The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people. The profits went to the few, the work went to the many. I think our phrase “common man” came to mean the man who never managed to get his hands on anything but a pay envelope, and sometimes not on that. You became uncommon when you had capital to invest or an idea to develop. Usually you had neither, and were common as dirt. Profits flowed into closely guarded channels that led into a mysterious sea.
The system of private enterprise, our scapegrace yet beloved system of profit and spoils, might have been made to fit the common man like a glove if the designers had taken a good look at their man. I believe what he wanted really was a sense of participation. This he never had. This he will not have in the new revised system of mutual benefit. He will become a policy-holder in the most intricate firm on earth, but even a policy-holder feels no sense of participation in anything much but death. What he wanted, back there in the days of free enterprise, was a share in the profits. He wanted the excitement of fluctuation, the agony of risk, the rewards of black ink. But nobody ever cut him in. Well, hardly anybody. He worked for a flat fee. It was flat when he started as a boy, it was flat when he ended as an old man. He worked and toiled, he sickened and died, but he never participated. He had no capital and he had no ideas; he was just a man with time on his hands.
Today this common man is said to be on the threshold of a century designed specially for him, like a custom-built suit. I hope he is not going to have the same trouble with fitters that I do. Fitters always assume that I wear suspenders to hold my pants up, and although I tell them plainly that I do not and show them how I allow my pants to hang from my hipbones like an old dead vine from a wall, they shake their heads and cut the trousers to suit their idea of a man, instead of the man himself. As for the common man and his century, I am not sure the fitters have got him either. Right now the common man is probably as uncomfortable and suspicious as is any man who is standing while the fitter runs the tape up into his crotch to get the inseam measure. I notice by reading my newspaper that the designers of the new century are allowing for a bigger stomach, but I think their man is going to bulge in other places too. And I am worried about the sleeve length: the common man has been reaching for something for many, many years and has exceptionally long arms. It will be a tragedy if this new century skimps him in vital spots.
So far, the persons who are constructing the century have agreed on certain fundamental points. They have agreed that their man must be secure. He must hold insurance. He is not to be permitted to starve to death, or run up hospital bills, or dodge a midwife, or be buried without proper rites. They have agreed that he is to be allowed to compete freely with other common men who hope to become president of the company. And finally they stipulate that if he does get to be president (and here they sigh a tiny regretful sigh) he is not to make a yearly sum of more than $67,200, or $25,000 after taxes are paid. The century has gone to the cutter. It may come out all right, but I am uneasy.
The true shape of man is an elusive thing. One thing I am sure of—he is a natural-born gambler whose normal instincts in this regard have long been frustrated. He has commonly been interested less in security than in gain, less in safety than in risk, and he has always been a fool for anything that gave him a chance at the jackpot. (He forms public safety societies in order to keep up his interest in safety, but he never has to whip himself in the direction of danger.) Wages bore him. Low wages infuriate him, but all wages bore him. The trouble with the profit system, as far as this man was concerned, was that he seemed to bear no relation to the result. It could prosper without his prospering too. He felt lonely and out of things. It could fail and he still felt lonely and in need of another job. No one thought it worth while, or sensible, to try to express, by mathematical means, the true relationship between the common man and the unusual returns. After all, he was only contributing his time—plus what little skill he possessed. Why should his fortunes improve merely because the enterprise succeeded? This was always the answer to a question that was seldom asked.
In many ways the system of free enterprise, the spoils system of yesterday, uncontrolled and predatory and unfair, was a peculiarly hopeful and desirable affair. Its tyrannies and abuses became so great we are likely to forget this—that in essence it was a good thing that might have fitted people like a glove. It quickened them, it kept them on their toes, it had the curious elasticity which made it compensate quickly in a society in which every individual was up to a different trick. It recognized private property, thus endearing itself to all; since to own something is an abiding satisfaction of our most primitive desires. But it was a chancy system of life, and because man is not a generous animal but has to arrive at generosity the hard way, it failed to include the majority of people in the winnings. You can see the effect of this today. The terrible urge of the multitudes to participate in the chancy side of life, to recover the gift they were cheated out of by their lack of capital and their lack of initiative, is everywhere discernible. It accounts for the enormous preoccupation with pinball games, number games, bingo, race horses, stock markets, pools, lotteries—millions of people called “common” trying to make up for the fact that their normal activities still bring them only a flat and unchangeable payment in a world that is neither flat nor unchangeable. Even in a last extremity, with neither money nor hope, a man seizes a deck of cards and tries to win at solitaire, to restore himself and taste the wine of luck.
Luck, I think, is a distributable commodity. We have never tried it because we have never tried profit sharing—except of course at Christmas, season of generosity and remorse. Luck is not something that you can talk to economists about, because it does not fit into the hard-earned grooves of social thought. (Actually it is at the bottom of the actuary’s mind; only he thinks in terms of hard luck instead of good luck—which is a negative and roundabout attitude to take.) Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men. The Society of Movers and Doers is a very pompous society indeed, whose members solemnly accept all the responsibility for their own eminence and success. Nothing could be more ridiculous really. In every tablet there are as many grains of luck as of any other drug. Even intelligence is an accident of Nature, and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he alone is entitled to be lucky. Maybe he is, but I sometimes wonder.
It would be a very fine thing for the world if everyone were entitled, in some slight degree, to be lucky. In free enterprises profit is a way of stating luck in easy terms. There should be a glass through which we could see, to show us what would have happened to the common man (how he would be feeling today) if all persons employed in bold and profitable enterprises had been included in the luck—that is, if they had been paid, in addition to their simple fee, a royalty based on results. I once mentioned this heretical nonsense to a business man at luncheon and he crinkled up like a strip of bacon. Obviously the idea was one of unparalleled odiousness. I felt as though I had deliberately proposed that he take the eighty-five cent lunch instead of the breast of guinea fowl. (Perhaps I had, without knowing it.) It was around Christmas time and I was dreamily trying to translate the bonus into pure economics, to establish an honest ratio between pluck and luck. Here in the bonus was good luck arrived at by toil and yet expressed so whimsically that it seemed almost indecent.
The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor. If there is any justification for it at all mathematically, then it should be given a ring and a name and made into an honest woman. Meanwhile the stockroom clerk haunts the pinball parlor, the churchman worships the gods of chance at the bingo board, and the common man turns to the dog tracks and chancy places of the earth, driven there because he has never been admitted to the large council chambers of Chance and to the spoils system in his own office and factory. He has never known what it feels like to bet two dollars on his own horse.
I am not pretending that a general profit-sharing system would work but am merely pointing out that it has never been tried. In isolated cases it has been flirted with, but it is obviously not one of those journeys where you can go alone. It has to be everybody or nobody, all or nothing. I tried it once myself, on the only occasion when I have found myself the agitator of a business venture. The venture was a book that involved the already published works of other writers. I was editor and boss. Much to my surprise I discovered that there were really no ground rules for this sort of thing: I could take all the profits and merely buy the material, or I could get material for nothing and share the profits, and in that case I could take ninety per cent and share ten, or take ten and share ninety. This was most revealing. But although I elected to share the rewards with the other persons according to a ratio that I arrived at mysteriously, it wasn’t really profit sharing, I realized, because it didn’t include the publisher’s telephone operator and my own cook. In short, the common man, as usual, didn’t make the cut. Of those who did, almost all were delighted to be included in the risks and the rewards. The case convinced me, though, that profit sharing was an innocent and simple affair, easily arranged provided you wanted to arrange it.
However, the day of minimums and other dreary controls is here, for better or for worse. Probably we have lost our chance of making an honest woman out of a Christmas bonus. We shall instead receive the benefits of a kindly state, and we shall receive them the hard way—luck through hard luck, prosperity through adversity, profits through taxation, and paper work for all.
[ January 1943 ]
COLD WEATHER
There is always the miracle of the by-products. Plane a board, the shavings accumulate around your toes ready to be chucked into the stove to kindle your fires (to warm your toes so that you can plane a board). Draw some milk from a creature to relieve her fullness, the milk goes to the little pig to relieve his emptiness. Drain some oil from a crankcase, and you smear it on the roosts to control the mites. The worm fattens on the apple, the young goose fattens on the wormy fruit, the man fattens on the young goose, the worm awaits the man. Clean up the barnyard, the pulverized dung from the sheep goes to improve the lawn (before a rain in autumn); mow the lawn next spring, the clippings go to the compost pile, with a few thrown to the baby chickens on the way; spread the compost on the garden and in the fall the original dung, after many vicissitudes, returns to the sheep in the form of an old squash. From the fireplace, at the end of a November afternoon, the ashes are carried to the feet of the lilac bush, guaranteeing the excellence of a June morning.
Even the small tufts of wool that the sheep leave around on the fence rails where they have rubbed find their way back into circulation. I save them for surgical dressings. At docking time when I chop off a lamb’s tail I put a little wool on the stub to start the clotting of the blood.
There has been more talk about the weather around here this year than common, but there has been more weather to talk about. For about a month now we have had solid cold—firm, business-like cold that stalked in and took charge of the countryside as a brisk housewife might take charge of someone else’s kitchen in an emergency. Clean, hard, purposeful cold, unyielding and unremitting. Some days have been clear and cold, others have been stormy and cold. We have had cold with snow and cold without snow, windy cold and quiet cold, rough cold and indulgent peace-loving cold. But always cold. The kitchen dooryard is littered with the cylinders of ice from frozen water buckets that have been thawed out in the morning with hot water. Storm windows weren’t enough this winter—we resorted to the simplest and best insulating material available, the daily newspaper applied to north windows with thumbtacks. Mornings the thermometer would register ten or twelve below. By noon it would have zoomed up to zero. As the night shut in, along about four-thirty, it would start dropping again. Even in the tight barn, insulated with tons of hay, the slobber from the cow’s nose stiffened in small icicles, and the vapor rose from the warm milk into the milker’s face. If you took hold of a latch with ungloved hands, the iron seized you by the skin and held on.
There is a fraternity of the cold, to which I am glad I belong. Nobody is kept from joining. Even old people sitting by the fire belong, as the floor draft closes in around their ankles. The members get along well together: extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive. It is rather soothing when existence is reduced to the level of a woodbox that needs filling, a chink that needs plugging, a rug that needs pushing against a door.
I remember that first morning. It was twelve below just before daylight. Most of us had realized the previous afternoon that we were in for a cold night. There is something about the way things look that tells you of approaching cold—a tightening, a drawing in. Acting on this tip, I had laid a fire in the old drum stove in the garage, a few feet from the car’s radiator. Before I went to bed I lit it and threw in another stick of wood. Then I went down to the sheep shed, whose door ordinarily stands open night and day, winter and summer, and kicked the snow away with my boot and closed the door. Then I handed the cow a forkful of straw instead of her usual teaspoonful of sawdust, and also threw some straw down through the hatch to the hog. We didn’t open our windows much when we went to bed. (The windows in this house have to be propped up with a window stick, and on nights like this we don’t use the window stick; we just take a piece of stove wood and lay it flat on the sill and let the window down on that.)
