“Don’t get mad,” Mary
Iacocca counseled Lee as Henry Ford II threw more and more of his dynastic
weight around, “get even.” Lee learned this lesson from his late wife well.
When Mafiosi contacted him to offer to break the auto tycoon’s bones, he
politely refused the offer, adding he’d prefer to break those bones himself.
“It’s not that I believe in
turning the other cheek,” Lee explains in his best-selling autobiography, “Henry
Ford destroyed a lot of lives. But I got revenge without resorting to violence.
Because of my pension, he still pays me a lot of money to go to work every
morning to see if I can knock his block off. It must drive him crazy.”
Surprisingly, the reviews
of the book almost never comment on the anomaly of the Roman Catholic immigrant’s
son taking vengeance on his former boss. Mary’s espousal of American folk
wisdom takes precedence over his otherwise pervasive Christian ethic.
And the “getting even”
phenomenon is more than an aberration in our executive suites. It is fast
becoming a major life style in an America trying to adjust to a two-tier system
of rewards and remuneration. The Encyclopedia Britannica recently exposed “a
mole” in its computer room—a disgruntled employee who had replaced the word “Allah”
for the word “Jesus” in the 1988 edition of the prestigious reference book.
Only the most sophisticated electronic countermeasures exposed this “getting
even” tactic. “Tampering” indeed.
The tampering scare this is
harrowing the boardrooms of every manufacturer and distributer of food and
drugs in the United States is explainable only as part of the getting-even
syndrome. Disgruntled employees, fuming over slights at work, scheme to bring
Goliaths down by threatening to poison, or by actually poisoning, the firm’s
customers. The conspirators care not who gets hurt in this form of corporate
terrorism: they only want to “get even.”
A related getting-even
syndrome is the mass killings that more and more often disfigure the American
scene. Take the recent massacre in the Edmond, Oklahoma, post office. All of us
feel outrage and frustration at the helplessness of “decent citizens” before
the “unexplainable” outbursts of loners that cut down innocent people. But Rose
Roney of Philadelphia recently disagreed with a typical outrage editorial in
the Philadelphia Daily News (Sept. 8) in a letter that makes sense:
“Your editorial of August
22 is the most senseless, inhuman article I have read in some time. This man
had a problem, so every one of his fellow employees said, probably as you did,
he is a psycho. So what did they do to help him? He was given no encouragement
and no help. His chances for future help were nil.
“It is fine for you—an
editor on a newspaper, sure of his salary and evidently sure he’s right about a
man he never even saw. Well, I think you’re a cruel, heartless person. How do
you know if this man suffered from depression or some other kind of mental
illness or even just loneliness? How unkind! As long as unfriendly and unkind
people are in the world, there will be people who will go berserk.”
Not exactly, but true
enough.
The world has been “unfair”
from time immemorial, and the seven capital sins were not invented yesterday.
But what gives the getting-even syndrome in America its special savagery is
what I call the Expectations Gap. The American Dream is a kind of open-end
promissory note assuring one and all that a rainbow awaits them around the next
corner. And there have been so many rainbows around so many corners that the
Dream retains its semi-official legitimacy. But the psychological burden the
Dream exacts on the losers (and we seem to be at a point in our economic
development when losers are rising exponentially) is frightening and fraught
with anti-social dynamite.
Even more revealing in the
Edmond affair is a letter written the same day by a postal employee in
Philadelphia, a veteran of 13 years’ service, a former steward in the American
Postal Workers Union: “I am surprised,” writes Frank J. Mori Jr., “that the
incident that occurred in the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office hasn’t happened
sooner.
“The U.S.P.S. doesn’t
understand that an employee’s personal life is a priority, and the job comes
second. But postal standards, production comes first and your personal life
comes second. As a former shop steward, I have witnessed that if any employee
is not liked by management, they give him a history of disciplinary problems. I
have seen many employees blackballed by U.S.P.S. managers.
“Management will not tolerate
any employee who makes waves, right or wrong.
“It’s a tragedy that 15
postal workers were killed. My heart bleeds for all of them, including Patrick
Henry Sherill. Maybe Sherill’s rage will wake up the U.S.P.S.
“It doesn’t have to beef up
security, it must start improving working conditions.”
There are those who would
pish-posh such humanitarianism. The wages are good, the hours are regular, and
in America a worker can always move on to a new job if the going gets really
tough. But that is an increasingly dated scenario. Blue collars put up with
monumental guff, including racial harassment—black on white in some cases where
power has shifted—because there are no well-paid openings elsewhere. But the
real pinch in American remains psychological—the gap between what the system
grandly promises and what it delivers to most people most of the time. The gap
is growing—and at a faster and faster clip.
The final example comes to
mind. Shortly after finishing Tim Cahill’s Buried Dreams (1986), about the Chicago
building contractor who stuffed over 30 of his homosexual victims under his
house (he was really only caught when he ran out of crawl space and started
dumping them in a nearby river), I read a review of the book in the Wall Street
Journal, the self-styled diary of the American Dream. It contended “the mystery
of evil” was the only way of explaining that mini-holocaust. Nonsense.
The killer’s father was a
Polish immigrant who took “dumb Polack” abuse at work every day; he came home
and retired to the basement workshop where he tinkered and drank himself into
daily intoxication. When he surfaced, it was to pass the stupidity charge to
his son. Cahill diffidently passed on the psychiatric hypotheses that the crawl
space murders were a symbolic acting out of the son’s utter frustration. I buy
it. The ethnic counterpunching that defaces our workplaces is a monstrous boil
that every so often is lanced by “random” compensatory acts of violence. We’re
getting even all right, but as Pogo said, the enemy is us.
From Welcomat, October 14,
1986.
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