A voice in the distance

by David Benjamin

 

“Back then, it was students against the institution. Now it’s very different because it’s student against student.””

—Paul Brest, professor emeritus, Stanford Law School

 

MADISON, Wis.—When I was matriculating at a little liberal arts outpost called Rockford College (pop. 450), there were two noticeably outspoken right-wing students. One, from Boston, could be easily diverted from spouting conservative drivel by changing the subject to the Red Sox. The other was a buzzcut John Wayne-size John Bircher named Ramsey, who had a lot to say to anyone within roaring range and the foghorn to broadcast it. 

I remembered Ramsey with a mixture of irony and nostalgia while reading Pamela Paul’s lament in the New York Times about the breakdown of civil discourse on American university campuses. She was in New York (pop. 8,500,000). To support her thesis, she quoted a professor at Stanford University (pop. 17,000). I agree with her overall perception of the crisis in broadmindedness in higher education. But it occurred to me that this problem might not be quite so prevalent on the campus of what they’re now calling Rockford University (pop. 950). I cite what I call the Ramsey Factor.

For all his strident conviction, Ramsey had no pulpit. He addressed his listeners not from the mountaintop but in the cafeteria, in corridors or amongst the abused furniture at the Men’s Living Center. He was able to buttonhole us, his fellow students, largely because on our little patch of campus we were too closely packed to effectively avoid him. You could turn a corner and, oops! There he was, poised to preach. We were destined to hear—in bits and pieces—his entire aria of McCarthyite predation and Ayn Randian scorn. By the end of my first freshman semester, although I fled Ramsey on sight whenever I saw an escape route, I’d heard everything he had to say on any topic contemporary or historical. 

Had Ramsey been receptive, I might have warmed to him, after a fashion. But he was an obelisk, deaf to a kind word, numb to a brotherly chuck on the arm. He recoiled even from small talk—sports, weather, campus gossip, Carl Sandburg—with anyone he deemed “liberal.” The only coherent response to Ramsey was a sort of bemused tolerance. We applied various ploys to forestall, interrupt or abbreviate his rhetorical outbursts. We saw him coming and drowned him out in a chorus of hail-fellow insincerity. We broke into his flow by finishing a sentence we had heard a dozen times before. Pretending he had a sense of humor, we kidded him about his conspiracist ravings and made like he was in on the joke. 

As best we could, we treated him like one of us. We accepted him into a community of which he wanted no part but—because we were isolated from any larger society beyond our hilltop—to which he inescapably belonged. Over time, Ramsey quieted down. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was fatigue, perhaps despair. No one asked, lest he start talking again.

A decade later, I edited a weekly newspaper in Massachusetts, a forum to which I applied one inflexible rule. Anyone could say anything they wanted in my pages, but they had to do so by name. I allowed nothing anonymous, no shouting from a safe remove. One of my most rabid critics tried to violate this rule, assailing me—unsigned—with ad hominem diatribes against my youth, my liberalism, my gross incompetence, my smiles, my frowns, my ups, my downs. I suspected the perpetrator to be a curmudgeon named Elwyn, whose heritage dated back to the town’s founding. He embodied the community’s suspicion of any “newcomer” who had moved to town within the last century.

I summarily discarded every nameless missive from Elwyn—several of them cleverly composed and almost poetic—’til he could no longer stand it. Once he had finally signed a polemic and I had dutifully published it, I had him. He became a regular visitor to my office. He despised and disparaged me while angling for my approval. Mixing cordiality with mendacity, I allowed that, well, heck, Elwyn, you just might have a point there. Like Ramsey, Elwyn was a lonely person who needed someone to listen. Unlike Ramsey, Elwyn had a sense of humor.

In both relationships, the force that made me familiar with these two “antagonists”—who were truly not my “type”—was proximity. I could not readily dodge either Ramsey or Elwyn because the space we shared threw us together, regularly, haphazardly, inevitably. Ramsey had no choice but to rub elbows with the hippies he deplored, to endure our kidding and to suffer our sympathy. To be heeded in his community, Elwyn had to make peace, match wits and drink bad coffee with an upstart whippersnapper who didn’t know shit from Shinola. 

In close proximity, the dead-earnest ideologue exposes the redundancy of his message. He becomes a bore. In a month or two of constant contact, I knew exactly where Ramsey stood and I knew he wasn’t going to move. Not an inch. In a larger context, on a bigger campus, Ramsey would have had a vast pool of strangers to hear him holler. From these hundreds, enough would harken to his cause that he could surround himself with like-minded believers and he would never need to associate with skeptics, kidders and ironists like me. He might well rise to a position of leadership among his fellow extremists, atavists and reactionaries. He would have the space to dehumanize his enemies.

It’s possible, even likely, that the student vs. student clashes cited by Brest, the Stanford professor, are less prevalent at smaller schools where everyone gets to know one another, where the student body is more of a family than a city, where familiarity breeds tolerance and tolerance spawns humor. 

It’s not coincidental that demagogues prefer the company of large crowds full of strangers. I picture Charles Foster Kane posed in front of a fifty-times larger-than-life portrait of himself, his arms spread in a hygienic air hug of the adoring, untouchable masses below. I picture Mussolini on a balcony in Rome. I picture Donald Trump in an Alabama stadium strutting and fretting above a sea of redcapped MAGA junkies, holding hand to heart while the sound systems blasts a convict chorus singing the Horst Wessel, er … Star-Spangled Banner. 

Intimacy of the sort I experienced, reluctantly—but patiently—with Ramsey and Elwyn, is anathema to blowhards, despots and tinpots. They need to be  believed regardless of what they say, to be never doubted, questioned, joshed or derided. For that sort of unnatural reverence, they need distance, to know few people personally and, above all, be known by their faithful not as human, peer or friend, but as a vessel for inarticulate emotion.

Right now, America’s foremost gasbag is a notorious germophobe. He doesn’t like shaking hands, doesn’t like to be touched at all. Or to touch. He doesn’t like the people—he has said so often—to whom he bellows, “I love you.” His circle of intimates is always small and profoundly transient. One wrong move, one slip of the tongue puts you on his Enemies List. 

He’s most comfortable at a distance, seen by millions, known by none. His only true love is to be up there, way up high, above the crowd, ranging across the stage, applauding himself, lifting his chin, looking down his nose and spouting the first phrase that comes to mind, then repeating it twice, or three times, rendering it a Trumpian Chant, as meaningless to the ear as medieval Latin, but conveying blessed relief to believers weary of being overlooked, dismissed, mocked and never appreciated, not even by their own goddamn kids.

Up there, above them, he is what they would be if only they could get away from other people who know them, touch them, see through them … if only they could get a little distance.