business, the devotional poems in Sunday supplements, Mother’s Day, Congressmen, and the suburban imagination. In college he had been too apathetic to find this out, confined in the circle of self as he was then. Beneath the surface pall there was meat in the political and economic disciplines; as approached by these acute young men, they were adventurous and splendid and, he soon saw, were far fitter areas for the mature moral effort than the gross physical projects he had earlier honored.
For example, one’s build. These men, by his earlier standards, were usually physical wrecks, if small, skinny, if large, flabby, shoulders slumped, belly, if they had one, bulging, the whole man hung with garments as a point of merit shabby as the Army would allow. And no pride of carriage even in the shower, where if he met one of them Reinhart was thrown into confusion: embarrassed by his undulating biceps as he soaped the scalp, yet unwilling to loose the arm’s tension if there was also present one of the common sort of soldier who didn’t applaud intellect.
It was stupid, perhaps mean, to be a good soldier in any manner, although he had been right to get appointed to the medics on motives of nonviolence. All these people had been drafted, so that they had no choice, but they would have chosen the medical department. Some even had friends immensely admired who would not serve in anything but conscientious-objector enclosures; some others confessed that while that was going too far for them, it was a thing most noble for a man to hold fast at any sacrifice to what he believed right and true, against the mob, by which they certainly did not mean the people, who were always r. and t, but rather the crowd who ran things. Reinhart would earlier have supposed the latter meant Roosevelt and his entourage, with everything but Maine and Vermont, four terms without hindrance, no end in sight, but he soon found this a misapprehension, the situation being precisely the reverse, with all such good folk victims. Indeed, the persons to be admired were invariably victims, and the degree of their victimization was the degree of one’s approval. The unfortunates even included some staggeringly rich men, who however were “liberal” and therefore smeared, earning the herohood into which poor men were enlisted at birth.
Reinhart had never used his head for much but dreams, he knew, and this new employment of the brain was exciting as well as good, for neither did it ignore the heart as it surveyed the vast panorama of the evil that men had made in the world and recommended sensible alleviations. The underfed coolies of Asia alongside the oversated warlords; the black and twisted miner deep in the earth’s entrails, considered with the flabby oyster of a mineowner in his house on the hill; the poor little have-not, next to the arrogant, pudgy have. These contrasts were inexcusable in a world where education should be within everyone’s reach, where it was now technically feasible for every man to be served by the machine rather than vice versa; they were wicked and what was worse, silly, most of the wrong people not wishing to be bad so much as not understanding what was good.
You take the Germans, for example, or really to test these intelligent new ethics, take Hitler. You at least had to grant that, terrible as they were, he had stuck to his ideals. If that awful energy could have been diverted into virtuous channels, if he could have stopped after solving the problem of unemployment and building the wonderful net of highways!—No, you most assuredly did not take either the Germans or Hitler; and if you did, there were strong grounds for popping you in the booby hatch. At least, so said without words the faces of the others to whom Reinhart, breaking his long silence, introduced this application of the theory they had so generously trained him to use. The trouble was that they had forgetfully omitted one clause from the grand code: no
For example, one’s build. These men, by his earlier standards, were usually physical wrecks, if small, skinny, if large, flabby, shoulders slumped, belly, if they had one, bulging, the whole man hung with garments as a point of merit shabby as the Army would allow. And no pride of carriage even in the shower, where if he met one of them Reinhart was thrown into confusion: embarrassed by his undulating biceps as he soaped the scalp, yet unwilling to loose the arm’s tension if there was also present one of the common sort of soldier who didn’t applaud intellect.
It was stupid, perhaps mean, to be a good soldier in any manner, although he had been right to get appointed to the medics on motives of nonviolence. All these people had been drafted, so that they had no choice, but they would have chosen the medical department. Some even had friends immensely admired who would not serve in anything but conscientious-objector enclosures; some others confessed that while that was going too far for them, it was a thing most noble for a man to hold fast at any sacrifice to what he believed right and true, against the mob, by which they certainly did not mean the people, who were always r. and t, but rather the crowd who ran things. Reinhart would earlier have supposed the latter meant Roosevelt and his entourage, with everything but Maine and Vermont, four terms without hindrance, no end in sight, but he soon found this a misapprehension, the situation being precisely the reverse, with all such good folk victims. Indeed, the persons to be admired were invariably victims, and the degree of their victimization was the degree of one’s approval. The unfortunates even included some staggeringly rich men, who however were “liberal” and therefore smeared, earning the herohood into which poor men were enlisted at birth.
Reinhart had never used his head for much but dreams, he knew, and this new employment of the brain was exciting as well as good, for neither did it ignore the heart as it surveyed the vast panorama of the evil that men had made in the world and recommended sensible alleviations. The underfed coolies of Asia alongside the oversated warlords; the black and twisted miner deep in the earth’s entrails, considered with the flabby oyster of a mineowner in his house on the hill; the poor little have-not, next to the arrogant, pudgy have. These contrasts were inexcusable in a world where education should be within everyone’s reach, where it was now technically feasible for every man to be served by the machine rather than vice versa; they were wicked and what was worse, silly, most of the wrong people not wishing to be bad so much as not understanding what was good.
You take the Germans, for example, or really to test these intelligent new ethics, take Hitler. You at least had to grant that, terrible as they were, he had stuck to his ideals. If that awful energy could have been diverted into virtuous channels, if he could have stopped after solving the problem of unemployment and building the wonderful net of highways!—No, you most assuredly did not take either the Germans or Hitler; and if you did, there were strong grounds for popping you in the booby hatch. At least, so said without words the faces of the others to whom Reinhart, breaking his long silence, introduced this application of the theory they had so generously trained him to use. The trouble was that they had forgetfully omitted one clause from the grand code: no
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