…beginning a bi-yearly column, devoted to that little irritation which is hardly, like Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy, insupportable, but which has a way of getting under one’s skin, and itching there, day after day, week after week, year after year, actually reaching the point—is there a doctor in the house? — where one begins to ignore it, like leprosy. Thus do societies become tyrannizable. A sharp observer of the human condition remarked to me a few years ago that the Communists had reached their final domestic success when, in 1957, for the first time since the heyday of Lenin’s popularity, the dictator of the Soviet state could walk among his own people without risking physical injury. See, he observed sadly, wisely, how a people become inured to atrocity? Way, way back before reaching that stage when atrocities became a way of life, when people can cheer and applaud such manifest and unapologetic butchers as Khrushchev, a psychological preconditioning had begun: people had failed to react nervously against tiny, seemingly insignificant impositions upon their dignity, their independence.
I played this theme a few years ago, in an article for Esquire Magazine called “Why Don’t We Complain,” which statement, to my chagrin, is more widely remembered by those who read it than any of my galactic pronunciamentos on the disorders of the social universe. I dealt there with little things; the conductor who lets the heat climb up to 90 degrees in the commuter train; the projectionist who lets the movie go just a little bit out of focus, and nobody does anything about it; the garage attendant who dawdles over the telephone making twit-twit with his paramour while your radiator is boiling over. . . .
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