Influential Disconnections

People often ask me for  the secret which helped me attain my present station in life. Of course, talent and hard work had a lot to do with it, but let's be realistic -- there's always more to it than that. The truth is that while I was making my way through the world, at critical points I had the good luck to meet some of the movers and shakers. And I failed to bond with a single one of them.

Even before I was born, my parents had become good friends with a man who was later to become a nationally-prominent politician. Unfortunately, that man was Eugene J McCarthy, whose 1968  presidential primary campaign has caused him to be hated with a bitter hatred by every Democratic Party pro that has walked the earth since then. Not much oomph there.

Another prenatal disconnection was with John Hospers, one of the founders of the Libertarian party, who was my mother's first cousin once or twice removed. Alas, for me libertarianism is perhaps the least appealing of political ideologies -- the more so in Hospers' case, since he was one of the Randians in the group. So scratch that one.

There's a certain pattern in my disconnections which showed up first in the John Hospers example. With a very few exceptions, all of my important disconnections have been with right-wingers.  I'm sure that I easily could have become a successful garden-variety right-wing opinion-maker by now, if I had been able to want to. But I just couldn't do it.

My most influential disconnection came after my junior year of high school in 1963, when I was selected for a national Talented and Gifted summer school at an Ivy League university. (I later found that I was selected to provide balance as an affirmative-action rural honky). In the first  session we were given a hypothetical question: "Would it be OK for the U.S. to send troops to, say, Indonesia, to preserve democracy by overthrowing a democratically-elected Communist government?"

Anyway, it turned out that this was a neoconservative recruitment center, and this was before the word  "neoconservative" even existed. It worked. No one in the group immediately agreed that invading Indonesia in that case would be a good idea, but in the course of time many of the people I met directly or indirectly through this program (the most famous being Paul Wolfowitz) ended up studying under Leo Strauss (or his avatar Allen Bloom), and at least half a dozen of them have become famous in the neoconservative world.

But I missed the boat. I even became pretty good friends with one of them, though we drifted apart after about 1966. (He introduced me to a family friend named Saul Bellow, and also to the  horrifyingly phony tall blond wife about whom he wrote so nastily in one of his novels.) Looking at things from the broad philosophical perspective, we can fully understand the caliber of the disaster:  my former friend now makes his living, in part, by handing out juicy grants for a right-wing political foundation.

Next I went to college. There I met (astonishingly enough, given my own tendencies) still another future Undersecretary of Defense to add to the three or four that I had met earlier. I also met several major American poets, one of whom even sort of liked some of my stuff, and another of whom liked my ass, but the life of the poet didn't appeal to me, and while I liked the music department at that school, I didn't really have the talent.

This takes me up to my 21st birthday in 1967.  And this was the end of the story, or almost. I'd been given my chance at the big time, and I'd dropped the ball. Promising young fellows don't have much shelf-life, and I'd passed the use-by date.

Well, I did get one more mini-chance. After about ten years of countercultural and parenting activities, I returned to school and got my BA from a much less prestigious school than the first one. And after teaching myself Classical Chinese, I established my final, doomed connection with one of the biggest fish in the small pond of Chinese Philosophy, getting his recommendation to his own teacher in Taiwan.

But when I went there to study, I was not able to conceal the fact that I just didn't like the guy. (I don't think that his visit from the Taiwan intelligence services regarding me made things any easier). I made two permanent enemies right then and there, and even though I did eventually succeed in publishing a few papers on the topic (two in refereed journals), professionally speaking my name has been mud ever since. 

My conclusion is that God wanted me to be a marginal R. Crumb / Charles Bukowski type -- living in my crummy apartment, being alienated and cursing a lot, and writing internet screeds that no one will read. So may God's will be done. (And yes, I forgot to mention it, but I have some big-time disconnections in the Christian Right too.)

P.S. There's another one. The nephew of an old school friend is now a figure of some importance in Democratic Party politics. As it happens, awhile back through my friend I ended up getting involved in internet political discussions which included his then-young nephew. I recent read an interview in which he said that early on he had made a decision to steer away from embittered Sixties types. Perhaps I'm conceited and self-obsessed, but under the circumstances, I can only conclude that he meant me. (At least this guy wasn't a right-winger.)

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All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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