574
PAl~
TISAN REVLEW
through graffiti or boom boxes or personal hygiene - the dissatisfied "I"
demands, the politically correct listen . "Look at me!" The cry echoes
throughout the city. Presence commands acknowledgment.
Even style, traditionally the domain of the young and rebellious, ac–
cepts the fiat of the politically correct and the socially acceptable. A
golden ring in ear or nose is a cultural statement; graffiti and orange
spiked hair are decorative arts. Yet style is neither freewheeling nor spon–
taneous. Style, too, must prove itself correct.
It
toes the line - a cautious
daring, a calculating defiance.
A nd therefore neller send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
And it tolls for your moment in the New York sun. Hard times feed
the city's growing sense of itself as ultimate victim in a nation of victims.
And the only question we allow ourselves to ask is, whose suffering is ac–
ceptable?
Has there ever been a time when political life in New York seemed
so tired and brittle? A city in which the sense of victimization is a source
of identity is not going to feel very patient with the meliorative com–
promises of politics. Even our politicians view themselves as victims. Their
world is too ordinary. Like poetry, it possesses too many real toads in
too many real gardens. All choose to be victims. Dinkins and Stein,
Woody and Mia, the cop on the beat and the faro dealer in the street–
everyone is eager to serve.
In
the court of PC, to be a victim justifies the
self in its manifold needs.
A buck for fear alld conscience.
''I'm too proud to steal, mister," the man in the torn gray shirt says.
"Can you give me something?"
Maybe it's always been like this in New York. Only now, the entire
city seems to view victimization as a source of true legitimacy. The old
struggle for social justice gives way to the demands of the unregenerate
"I."
If
there is any such thing as a New York growth industry, it is the
victimization we New Yorkers are willing to live with. Everyone suffers.
The trick is to suffer for a purpose.
"I suffer for you," says Malamud's grocer to his young assistant. But
in the city of the politically correct, Morris Bober would be forced to
take a means test to prove his worth as a sufferer. And Morris
would
have so much in the way of competition. Politicians, opera stars,
ballplayers earning five million per -
all
eagerly join the victim's swim.
"Everybody dies," says John Garfield, playing the defiant boxer in
Body
and Soul .
But not everybody dies with his sense of victimization intact.
