The Savage Innocent Ch. 02

Shipman was paid to teach us the intricacies of military science, things like global geopolitical strategy and how to field-strip an M-1 with one's eyes closed, but I don't think he ever once for a moment considered himself obliged to share his worldview or experiences with us. Even when asked by eager students to recount war stories Shipman seemed to slip away to a place of his own choosing and carry-on silently with whatever he had been assigned to teach. I think I mentioned earlier that he had made his peace with the world, and I think that night on the Chosin reservoir had a lot to do with this epiphany. Whatever, I think it's fair to say Shipman held no illusions about the basic nature of humanity. When a man can go from being immersed in taking care of the dying in a Buddhist monastery outside of Hiroshima a month after the city had been atom-bombed to machine-gunning and bayoneting five-hundred-plus Chinese soldiers in one night I suspect you develop a fair sense of the basic nature of man.

When Rand and I came in his classroom that next morning I could tell that fishbone was still lodged deeply in his throat. He was sitting at his desk gripping the edge of the old black Formica desktop with white-knuckled intensity, his eyes cast down but his head moving from side to side like he had been quietly wrestling with pissed-off demons all night long.

The man had something to say, and as most of the people in that first period class had been at our dinner table the night before he had decided to have his say right then and there. The man had a tendency to talk like an M-14, by the way, loud, sharp, short bursts, each volley well timed and on target, and the effect of his words were ultimately as withering. You paid attention to what he said lest you get your legs shot out from under you, and unlike a lot of people who have the capacity to maim he knew just what force his words could have.

"Lieutenant Crist made a comment last night at dinner," he began, "which has been bothering me ever since." He looked up and around the room as if to measure the strength of those who opposed him before he continued. "He said something that I feel needs to discussed, and I'd like to do so for a few minutes if you gentleman don't mind."

That last was a real curveball if ever there had been one. Shipman wanted to discuss something. The flavor of the idea took a little getting used to.

"Crist said, if you all will excuse my summary, that man is essentially a well intentioned creature, good and decent, I believe Mr. Crist said, and I wanted to know what you men thought of that statement."

He looked around the room, his eyes a high powered radar tuned to track incoming ICBMs.

No one said a word. We all cherished our legs, our ability to walk unaided.

He looked down at his desk and nodded, took stock of his accumulated reputation while he sighed immense regret, then looked at Rand as a drowning man might look at distant shore. Then:

"McDougall?" he asked plaintively to a kid on the front row. "What do you think?"

Ian McDougall seemed to shrink low in his seat and Shipman turned to me.

"Todd?"

This to a boy who had just found out his father had been fucking his sister for the better part of the past ten years.

"Sir?"

"What's your take on that? Is man basically good or evil?"

"I'm inclined to say evil, Sergeant-Major," I barked.

"Why?"

"I think human beings are, sir, for the most part selfish and insensitive to other people's pain and suffering."

He nodded his head, turned to my roommate: "Rand? What about you?"

Rand must have been waiting for somebody to ask him this question, perhaps for his whole life, yet I think he was a little taken back now by his feelings for Shipman and the intrusiveness of the setting he found himself in. "I think the question itself is specious and irrelevant," Rand said as he leaned forward in his seat. To me it looked as if Rand had challenged Shipman to disagree with him, like he wanted to pick a fight with the universe.

"Specious?" Shipman replied. "Why so?"

"What possible difference could it make? Good people do bad things, evil people end up doing great things. There isn't a straight line to truth, is there? All time is a circle. Thus spake Zarathustra. The Second Coming, eternal recurrence. Humanity is what it is, what it was, what it always will be. We can't change human nature so why get caught up in quasi-religious morality plays. Why not just accept that humanity is nether perfect nor flawed. We just are."

"Zarathustra?" Shipman asked. "Nietzsche?"

Rand nodded defiantly.

"And are you referring to Yeats?"

Rand nodded: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be reborn?"

"Yet that sounds like an affirmation of evil, Mr. Rand?"

"The first stanza, sir. The first line of the poem: 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre;' that's the key point, sir. History is cyclical, we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, all within the widening gyre of an ever expanding universe. To borrow from Santayana, sir, we'll never learn hence we'll repeat our history over and over and over. We are on a merry-go-round from which we can never get off. In effect, sir, we are the merry-go-round."

Shipman nodded, tried to reconcile the kid's words with his own experience.

"I think humanity is flawed, evil," Shipman said softly, quietly, at long last. "And doomed to suffer."

"I think suffering is a choice," Rand said, and the words tore into Shipman like the blast of a mighty bomb.

"That sounds to me, Rand, like the thinking of a person who has never had to peel dead, irradiated skin from their arms after having had an atomic bomb dropped on their back yard."

"Yet even so, sir, the choice remains the same. That person can suffer in an existential sense or they can accept their fate as they accept their own humanity. Suffering will not change the outcome, nor will it prevent future outcomes. Man cannot learn from his mistakes and so it doomed to repeat them. If you cannot learn you are in effect choosing to suffer."

Shipman blinked several times as he tried to digest Rand's words; finally he shook his head and turned away, opened a textbook while he turned to the chalkboard. He spent the next hour covering the creation of the National Security State in 1947.

__________________________________

Back in May 1970, Madeleine roared eastward in her little two-seater accompanied by a bespectacled, long-haired freak who called himself Frank Lloyd Wrong. He fancied himself an architect of anarchy and he might have found some modest measure of success in his chosen profession had he managed to face the world from time to time with at least a mild state of sobriety on tap. He was a stoner, big-time, and a raging nut-case who had flunked out of Berkeley a few years before but who had so far resolutely refused to grow up, or at least get a job. When Nixon reinstituted the draft in the process of revving up the Vietnam thing Frank Lloyd Wrong found Jesus and decided to get involved; he burned his draft card, pissed on the sidewalk in front of an Army recruiting office and, having thus proved his manhood to no one but himself, had decided to take the war to Washington.

All he needed was a ride.

He had attached himself to the periphery of the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society and there ran into a radical chic who had a nice car and nicer legs. A quick 'hey, going my way' had been enough to secure the ride of a lifetime and Maddie and Frank were eastbound on Interstate 80 early in the morning of May 5th; Madeleine's hysterical roommate called Grampa who called my mother who called Tom Shipman who came 'round to our room just after dinner that night to let us in on the state of play. Shipman was concerned, he said; I was merely freaked-out. Rand was soon going out of his mind, furious that his soul-mate was sharing her ride with another dude and possibly sleeping with the sonofabitch too.

Again, fuck irony, fuck Nietzsche, fuck eternal recurrence and the widening gyre; Rand was raking himself over the coals and fuming and hissing all the while like a snake about to be stepped on. It was just too much for him and he started to come unraveled.

Why?

It seemed so obvious while he talked through that night. Why he had attached himself so furiously to Madeleine. Seemed so obvious that his mother had abused him for years, that his father had betrayed him by keeping silent. That his brother had known about the abuse and tried to act, only to be forced from their little French chateau and onward into war, and death.

That on meeting Madeleine two lost souls came together, obviously. Like-charged particles adrift in the chaos, their attraction absolute, their ability to repel nonexistent; all left to them by an unflinching universe was the simple question: Why?

And now Rand, alone but for me, thought about Madeleine racing across deserts and prairies toward some vast confrontation and all he had left in his soul was that one word: Why?