There is one slogan this steroid-driven year of politics will not let Americans forget: that no matter at what level their lives begin there is no limit how many levels can be clImbed. Candidates hammer us with their modest middle class orIgins or childhoods of tortured poverty. Americans are used to success stories and tend to accept this social and economic elevator casually. They shouldn’t.
Other people don’t live like us. France is not run by those who have struggled up from penury but by graduates of several elite schools, one in particular. The Germans are masters of stratification. If lawyers and doctors are licensed everywhere, In Germany so too is every trade, craft or describable job. If you want the legitimizing title “Diplom IngenIeur.” in front of your name you go to school, pass exams. If you are a married man your wife becomes “Frau Diplom Ingenieur” thus cementing your life into place.
There are benefits. The public is assured of master wielders of mops and broom while the street sweeper’s troubled dreams of higher things are smoothed by free health care and other public goods, also a safe and reasonable career and retirement. Social elevators are fewer. I knew a Viennese doctor —a cancer surgeon, late 30’s, nice income, nice car, plenty of leisure time to see the world. His assignment – number two man at a small suburban clinic. His boss, not much older than he, had his life also in place. Where was my friend to go? Advancement might come in 20 years. Assassination could be contemplated. My friend might never know where his ambition could take him. Yet he had an assurance of his place in life few Americans know.
In America no one knows his place. It is both an enriching and terrifying advantage. Maybe that is why so many of us are nervous, self-doubting, neurotic, overly aggressive. Having no established future and no government to catch us when we fall. we are imprisoned by our freedom. Years ago with a few extra dollars in my pocket I wanted a rug for my living room. It took three minutes for dealers around the corner on Second Avenue, brothers from the Middle East, to descend from $8,000 to a thousand. They were liquidating. Their promising business of a year ago had gone south. “Yes,” said one to me. “America is the land of opportunity but we have an equal opportunity to fail.”
So what do we fear more – the discrete jaws of security or the terrors of sudden collapse in a society where we are both free and condemned to seek out our own future. I came home from years in Europe landing in a mid-American city. I found a shabby apartment on a chic residential street. (My view of them was pleasanter than theirs of mine.) My first job was making coffee for graduate students at a local university. My modest sight-singing skills were enough to become a paid semi-professional plant in a high-end Episcopal church choir. (I hope American singers realize how much is owed Episcopalians.)
No one tried to license my future. No one asked me who I was, leaving the last for me to figure out myself. People were happy when I had something to offer, kind to me when I had fewer talents to contribute. I was poor but never hungry. Gradually came private teaching, writing about music, etc. Private piano teachers in Germany are guaranteed paid vacations — a dream of paradise for former private teachers such as myself. Still any attachment to German bureaucracy gives me a serious itch. Is security worth the rIsk?
BERNARD HOLLAND