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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=palast@gregpalast.net href="mailto:palast@gregpalast.net">Greg Palast</A>
</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=unionyes@ameritech.net
href="mailto:unionyes@ameritech.net">unionyes@ameritech.net</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, February 01, 2010 2:34 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Kvetcher in the Rye</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><B><FONT size=4>Kvetcher in the Rye</FONT></B> <BR><BR><I>by Greg
Palast</I> <BR><BR>
<P style="WIDTH: 100%"><IMG style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 7px" alt="Catcher in the Rye"
src="http://www.gregpalast.com/images/salingercatcher.jpg" width=150 align=left>
In the sixth grade, the Boys' Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from
school unless I stopped carrying around <I>The Catcher in the Rye</I> I think
because it had the word "fuck" in it. Since the Boys' Vice-Principal hadn't read
the book - and I don't think he'd ever read <I>any </I>book - he couldn't tell
me why. <BR><BR>But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk
and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.
<BR><BR>I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save
me from the world's vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in
obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment.
Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free. <BR><BR>That's,
of course, how the word <I>fuck</I> got into Salinger's book. For the 5% of you
who haven't read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to
erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn't want little
kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an
irreversible loss of her childhood innocence: </P><BR><BR>
<CENTER>
<P style="WIDTH: 50%" align=left><I>I thought Phoebe and all the other little
kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then
finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant,
and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of
days.</I></P></CENTER>Which is where the title came from. Salinger's Caulfield,
pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job
market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He
imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a
cliff's-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the
edge, Caulfield's job would be to catch them before they fell. <BR><BR>Any other
job would just turn you into a "phony," that is, an adult. <I>All</I> adults
were phonies, even the nice ones, who took jobs they hated, taught textbooks and
catechisms they didn't believe and lived lives of self-inflicted
disappointments, while pretending it was all OK. Then with phony grins, they'd
demand that you join their painful parade of delusion and decay. <BR><BR>Nearly
half a century after I covered up Salinger's book in a carefully folded brown
wrapper, I thought I'd read it to my twins. They were now eleven, in the 6th
grade. <BR><BR>But I couldn't. In his 1956 book, Salinger had railed against a
post-war world of boys in school blazers trying to get to "first base" with
their steady dates. America itself was an adolescent, and despite the police
beatings of marchers in Alabama, despite the "<I>drop, tuck and don't look at
the flash!</I>" drills we did weekly in Mrs. Gordon's class to prepare for the
Russian nuclear attack, America was still weirdly, optimistically child-like.
<BR><BR>We knew then that the world could only get better: we would go to the
moon and eventually, vacation there. JFK announced the Alliance for Progress and
poverty would end in Appalachia; and Paul McCartney wanted to hold our hand.
Every nasty meanie, like the police in Selma, was met by a legion of victorious
innocents led by Martin Luther King. So we all held hands in a circle while Pete
Seeger strummed "We shall overcome." Everyone would get a scholarship; and we
really, truly believed we <I>would</I> overcome. <BR><BR>Even the social critics
- Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac - were just big, mischievous kids.
<BR><BR>Yes, there were a bunch of old phonies like Joe McCarthy and the Boys'
Vice-Principal, but their days were numbered. <BR><BR>Then we fell over the
cliff. <BR><BR>A bullet through the skull replaced Kennedy with Nixon. <I>We
shall overcome</I> was replaced with the vicious "Southern Strategy;" the Cold
War exploded in hot jungles; then came the idiot wasteland of the regimes of
Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bushes, a degenerative march as the
machine of America rusted and died. <BR><BR>And here we are today, begging for
spare parts from China and my daughter glued to YouTube videos of Lady Ga-Ga's
crotch, and my son slicing off a cop's head in Grand Theft Auto and a President,
telegenic and painfully hollow, playing the lost and ineffectual shepherd over
an electorate divided between the terrified and the greedy. In place of
prophets, we are offered a caravan of kvetching clowns piling out of the
Volkswagen on MSNBC. <BR><BR>There's no way to wipe the <I>fuck</I> off this
smeared planet. I'm supposed to try. I'm an investigative reporter, meaning I
have a professional commitment to the childish belief that if I shout loud
enough, I can warn people away from the cliff's edge. <BR><BR>Well, it's better
than a real job, but no less "phony," no less of a petty illusion. <BR><BR>I'm
holding this book, the brown wrapper lost who the hell knows when, and I know it
would just be laughable, inscrutably ancient to those wisened, worldly children
of mine. <BR><BR>I've put it back on my shelf. <BR><BR>You stand on the cliff
edge and there's no one left to catch. <BR><BR><BR><BR><I>Jerome David Salinger
1919-2010.</I> <BR><BR><I>Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times
bestsellers <I>Armed Madhouse</I> and <I>The Best Democracy Money Can Buy</I>,
is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative
reporting. Sign up for Greg Palast's investigative reports at <A
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