The headline is a typo, I believe, one of those wonderful Freudian slips, where the copy editor uses “Intuits” instead of the Native American Inuit. The story was a small filler from The Boston Globe, circa 1999, but I’ve kept it in my files, along with the daily local weather forecast, in the best New England vernacular, on the front page of the local daily, which said: “Wicked hot today.” Who can argue with the Inuit tribal members? Who would want to argue with them?
“Our world is the story of men and women, women and men, arguing and agreeing, agreeing and arguing, joining together and falling apart, the true emotional physics, trying hard not to succumb to entropy of the heart.”
EVERYONE ARGUES. It’s our basic human condition.
Since the beginning, recorded history is the story of arguments, large and small.
Philosophers, historians and clinicians may argue and disagree with this premise, but I believe the art of argument defines our human dynamic.
All too often, it is more about dichotomy than dialectic, conflict rather than resolution. Yes or no, not thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Mostly, it comes down to this: “I’m right; you’re wrong,” when we disagree. If push comes to shove, we fight about it.
Rarely, will anyone admit, “I’m wrong; you’re right.” The amount of time we spend arguing about meaningless things – disagreeing about memories, she-said, he-said conflicts, seems directly proportional to our own inability to admit we’re wrong and the other person is right. We shout, we get angry, we stamp our feet (or we try to hide these emotions, repress them, but they still seep out, in our behaviors).
Sadly, it’s often about control and authority, and about certainty, which never really exists. Everything is relative, except in an argument.
Simple truths escape us, for the sake of argument: the Earth is round; the Earth revolves around the sun, we evolved; our climate is changing.
Law is the law, argues the judge in W. H. Auden’s poem, “Law, Like Love.” Law is my priestly words, the priest argues. Law is the sun, argues the gardener. Auden’s answer to them: “Like love we don’t/know where or/why/Like love we can’t/compel or fly/Like love we often/weep/Like love we seldom keep.”
Our world is the story of men and women, women and men, arguing and agreeing, agreeing and arguing, joining together and falling apart, the true emotional physics, trying hard not to succumb to entropy of the heart.
I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT AN ARGUMENT I LOST. The story is not about the argument, per se, but about my own reasons for remembering it.
But first, I feel a need to set the stage, to create a context for what happened.
Let me begin with this scene: Imagine a cramped faculty office in a dismal 1950s brick building at a large university. I am a scruffy, long-haired, bearded writer, my clothes probably have a distinct aroma of wood smoke clinging to them, a sweet-and-sour natural aftershave, because I was living in an old house that we heated with a woodstove. Underneath a parka I am wearing an infrequently worn sports jacket over a button-down flannel shirt. Fashion has never been my plate. It is late January 1978, a bitterly cold day, with temperatures hovering around minus 10 degrees. I am being interviewed for a job by a stern-looking, aging woman professor, her gray hair tied back in a bun. I was applying to be an adjunct instructor, teaching “rhetoric” at the University of Massachusetts. She has handed me a copy of the standard syllabus, and instructs me that a critical section of the curriculum is debating. Do I have any questions?
I ask: “At what point, when you teach debating, does the student say, “Gee, you’re making a good point, better than mine. I’m wrong; you’re right.”
The chair of the Rhetoric Department stares at me as if I were a brother from another planet. As Raymond Chandler might have written the exchange:
“Huh?” she answered, her eyes widening in disbelief, as her body, which had been slouched behind her desk, suddenly became upright.
“I bet you learned that dialogue from reading The New Yorker.”
“Huh?” she repeated.
I didn’t really say that, I just thought it, conjuring up a similar passage of Chandler’s, as his character, detective Philip Marlowe, responds with a similar retort to a thug’s “huh?”
I asked my question again. The Rhetoric Department chair frowned, the lines deepening in her forehead, and she answered, with one of those tight smiles that’s not a smile, enunciating each word for emphasis: “Because…it’s…not…part…of…the…curriculum.”
I answered back: “Then all you’re doing is teaching young students how to use words as tricks to persuade, not to think.”
But, I wanted the job, and they were desperate for people to teach freshmen Rhetoric, so I agreed to teach debating, and I was hired to teach two Rhetoric classes, which were mandatory for freshmen.
My syllabus included a section on debating; I used the question, “Resolved: A woman is justified in killing her attacker if she is being raped.” The required reading for the section was a selection from Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.
I think it proved to be a true learning experience for many of the young men and women in my classes, to have to go in front of the class and argue one of the two sides of the resolution. I did not let them choose sides by themselves; they had to pick which side, pro or con, by picking paper slips out of a shoebox. I’d like to believe that it helped them to think more critically.
BUT I'M DIGRESSING HERE. I really want to talk about an argument I lost. I am feeling a bit vulnerable about it, about going there along a direct path. So, please, bear with me.
Let me provide some additional context. I come from a family of arguers. At our dinner table, it was always no holds barred. Being the youngest, it was tough to compete with two older sisters, bright and articulate, who could talk much faster than I could, and who would always interrupt me to say: “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It wasn’t until I was 15 that I was able to contradict both parents and both sisters over breakfast. I left the table, gathered my evidence – a newspaper editorial, two magazine article, three books – and placed them loudly on the table. “Now, may I begin…”
My family laughed. I had come of age in my family tradition of arguing.
In high school, I often argued against the wisdom of authority. These were arguments that you could almost never win, and I recognized that. But I still persevered.
In college, argument was an intellectual art form, an academic mission, often carried out to inane degrees. I remember once, as a student member of Hampshire’s College’s School of Language and Communications, arguing for hours with faculty members, most of them linguists by trade, who wanted to drop “communications” from the name of the school, “because language implied communication,” making the name redundant. I don’t remember much of the actual argument, but as I recall, I said something like: “If you really think language implies communication, why don’t you just call the school the “tower of b-a-b-b-l-e,” spelling it out for them (pun intended).
Sometimes, in college, arguing could become a lens of human cruelty, as a kind of a sarcastic enforcement of the rules of class, wealth or coolness. Here, once again, I had been well schooled by my older sisters, with an ability to go for the jugular, if provoked and attacked verbally. I could be brutal, but I never enjoyed it. It was a self-defense mechanism. I found little pleasure in reducing people to tears and humiliation, even if I felt that they had brought it on themselves by attacking me first.
I was not always “tactful” when arguing, particularly when encountering smug arrogance or intellectual bullying. I was tenacious as a black Labrador clamping down on a stolen T-bone steak. I was fearless, often taking on formidable opponents, and sometimes prevailing.
Once, I was at the home of a family friend, where Eleanor Flexner, author of “A Century of Struggle,” was a guest. As I recall, her book had just been re-issued in paperback, and the gathering was a small luncheon in honor of that event. At the time, I was taking graduate writing classes at the University of Massachusetts in its MFA program. Flexner’s book is considered to be a groundbreaking history of the women’s rights movement in America. Flexner herself was a committed Marxist and had a reputation for being cantankerous and strident.
In the course of conversation, I was asked who I was and what I did. I told her. Flexner then dismissed me, with an off-hand remark, much as if she was swatting away a bothersome gnat, saying with that writing couldn’t be taught, it was an innate gift of genes possessed by good writers, like herself. You either could write, or you couldn’t, and clearly, if I was a student in a writing program, I couldn’t write.
I protested, saying that writers evolved, and learning to write was a process of learning to listen, to be able to capture the rhythms of language. She interrupted me, mocking what I had said. The others in the room laughed, and I felt as if I had been transported back at the family dinner table. I turned to Flexner, and asked, pointedly: “Are you toying with me? Is that the way you have fun? You’re not even listening to what I have to say.” Then we really got into it, much to the chagrin of the guests, who kept trying to interrupt and distract us.
Later that evening, out on a date with a woman friend from college, I retold the story, to her jaw-dropping amazement and disbelief. “You argued with Eleanor Flexner?” Not only that, I told her, but Flexner ended up admitting that what I had to say actually did make sense to her.
I have had some formidable opponents – shouting matches with Alan Dershowitz, who once threw me out of his office, and a screaming, curse-filled exchange with the writer Jimmy Breslin, whom I had caught being lazy, trying to pass off a recycled column written two years earlier as something new, while working in Washington, D.C. Breslin was unhappy, to say the least, when I brought it to his attention. And, I went nose-to-nose with the editor of The New York Times Magazine, even as one of the magazine editors was kicking me under the table, trying to get me to stop.
Once, the writer Marge Piercy and I got into it at a Christmas party on the Cape. I was on the verge of putting together a television production company, with the hope that the burgeoning cable TV industry would provide a new market for creative work, similarly to what had happened with the alternative newspaper industry. Piercy said that I was being short-sighted, that the industry would soon be co-opted by corporate behemoths, and they would own the airwaves. It was an illusion of opportunity, she claimed.
She was right, in part. But so was I; my own company didn’t succeed, but there was also another small production company, Florentine Films, starting up in Northampton, Mass., that was a success. You may have heard of the founders, Ken Burns and Buddy Squires.
THESE DAYS, I'VE MELLOWED. I don’t like to argue as much. I’ve learned to sidestep aggressiveness and belligerence in others, much as if it were a cold, icy puddle in winter. I don’t rise to the bait so easily; it doesn’t mean my beliefs are any less sincere or less strongly held. I’m more than willing to listen to folks who want to tell me that chocolate is the best flavor ever in ice cream. For them, it may be true. As long as they don’t impinge on my ability to order vanilla, there is no reason to argue.
In today’s world, with the Internet, we have often created separate, parallel universes of argument that are based upon faith, not fact, well-named as echo chambers, in which we can hear our own beliefs magnified and reinforced. It is, perhaps, a return to the bicameral mind, when tribal societies conjured up internal voices as guides and gods, as the brain further evolves. [Yes, let’s keep the subtext transparent here; this a reference to Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.]
Misinformation has gone viral; we might as well be trying to read animal entrails to discern the truth. Hucksters rule. When Tom Waits sang, “Step right up, everyone’s a winner, bargains galore!” did he ever imagine that Glenn Beck would answer the call?
Perhaps it’s a sign of my own vulnerability – my own uncertainty – about the argument that I lost, that I am avoiding going directly there. But, being able to show my vulnerability is a sign of my own maturity and confidence. One more digression.
THIS IS THE STORY ABOUT AN ARGUMENT THAT I WON through persistence – and probably saved my father’s life. The situation may sound more like a badly written TV soap opera. On Monday, April 1, 1980, my mother and father were in a terrible accident on the Tappan Zee Bridge, my mother killed instantly when a van hurdled the barrier and struck my parents’ car head on. My father was badly injured, but survived.
He talked his way out of the hospital the next day, and that Friday, the first funeral service was held in New Jersey. The actual burial was to be held Sunday in Springfield, Mass., and on Saturday, I drove up with my father to his sister’s home in Longmeadow, Mass., where about 50 of my parents’ closest friends had gathered. Just outside of Hartford, my father started to groan and moan and lurch in his seat. We stopped at a Howard Johnson’s, and I accompanied him to the men’s room. The pain kept getting worse; he asked me to take him back to the car, telling me: “I don’t want to die in a Howard Johnson’s.”
My father, however, wouldn’t let me drive faster than the speed limit, insisting that I maintain 55 mph as he continued to groan in pain.
The scene gets more comic – and tragic. We arrived at my aunt and uncle’s home, my father in the front seat, moaning in great pain. I had to go in and gather my two sisters, tell them the situation, and ask people to leave, because my father wasn’t feeling well. In the midst of this, my girl friend arrived, with her dog, which promptly split, taking off to explore the new neighborhood.
We went to a nearby home, belonging to family friends who were away. Somehow my father rallied, so we drove back to my aunt and uncle’s house, just as my girlfriend’s dog came trotting back. After a half-hour of conversation, my father was stricken again. He turned white as a sheet and started to have trouble breathing.
I urged him to call a doctor, but he refused. A doctor who lived down the street showed up with a bottle of Pepto Bismol, saying that it would cure him of whatever ailed him.
My sisters, as usual, ignored what I had to say. One called her shrink, to ask what they should do. The other said that everyone should go to bed, and my father would be better in the morning.
Like a Greek chorus, I kept saying, again and again: “Let’s call a doctor right away.”
No one listened, and I, falling into the familiar pattern of younger brother, deferred to my older sisters. So, we all went to bed. At about 2 a.m., one of my sisters woke me, worried. My father’s conditioning was worsening, he was gasping for breath. What should we do?
This time, I acted. I called our old family doctor, who had once saved my life when I was 10, during a severe allergic reaction. My body had been covered with hives, and he arrived late at night, giving me two injections of adrenalin. I learned years later, he had then said to my mother, “If he turns blue, he may have a hive under his windpipe, so call an ambulance.” So, she stayed up the entire night, watching to see if I turned blue.
I called Dr. Blake, waking him up, saying it was an emergency. I told him the symptoms. He immediately diagnosed what was wrong with my father, a ruptured spleen, called ahead to the hospital, to clear him for admittance, and we were off to the races. My father, in between groans, gave me permission to speed.
At the hospital, we had to deal with an emergency room taken over by the results of a gang fight. A young gang member had been hit over the head with a baseball bat, and his fellow gang members kept coming in, asking: “Is Tony all right?” To which the same answer was given: “No, he’s all fucked up.”
While we were trying to get my father admitted, a woman doctor in the next room was trying to get Tony into a wheelchair, so he could be admitted, too. “I ain’t sitting in no wheelchair. I can’t have anyone see me in a wheelchair.” Fine, the doctor answered him. “We’ll throw a sheet over you and pretend you’re a ghost.” And that’s the way she wheeled out of the emergency room, with a sheet over his head.
It was four a.m. when they finally admitted my father. The next day, as we buried my mother, my father underwent emergency surgery to have his spleen removed. There’s even more to this story, but the point I’m trying to make, I think, is that it was an argument I won, and it saved my father’s life. Winning and losing arguments can have important consequences.
ARGUING MATTERS. Just ask a lawyer for his or her opinion. It’s not that I like conflict, or strife, or arguing. But when you disagree, it’s helpful to know why. It’s not about being difficult, it’s about caring enough – and sometimes caring too much.
It’s an argument I lost that I really want to talk about.
It took place in 1973, with a young freshman; she was 17, I was a senior, all of 21. We were involved, so to speak, dancing around a push-and-pull relationship. I had even been invited to meet her parents, going to her home for Rosh Hashanah. The next weekend, my parents took us out for dinner.
The argument was about birth control. The young woman, let’s call her Wendy, was going to have an IUD put in by the school’s health service, which used the Dalkon Shield as the “menu du jour” for birth control. You could also get fitted for a diaphragm, but the health service recommended the IUD. The ob-gyn was actually named Dr. Clapp.
I told Wendy that I thought it was mistake, not about the IUD as birth control, but the kind of IUD, the Dalkon Shield. I had heard the Dalkon Shield was very dangerous, causing serious pelvic inflammation. I had read news stories about a U.S. Army doctor, who had testified about the problems his patients had encountered. The device would later be voluntarily withdrawn from the market.
I made a copy of the article and gave it Wendy. She told me, flat out, that it was none of my business, it was her body, not mine, and I was being, in the vernacular of the day, a controlling, sexist pig.
I persisted, and she asked me to leave her alone, not to call her, and said she wanted to stop seeing me. I cried, and told her how much I cared for her (whatever that meant), and I was concerned for her, and didn’t want to see her do something dangerous to herself. As a parting gift, I gave her the three volumes of published diaries of Anais Nin.
A few days later, after a class, a professor came up to me and said that a young woman, a freshman, had come up to him that day, wanting to talk about Anais Nin. Knowing that Nin was an author that I very much liked, he suggested that I meet her and talk with her. Her name was Wendy, he said. I laughed somewhat nervously, telling the professor thanks, that yes, I would call her.
Later that night, I called her, and I told her the story of what had happened, saying it seemed more than coincidence. Two days later, when she had the IUD inserted, I called her to ask how she was doing. She said it had been a bit painful, but she was OK. Afterwards, we never really spoke very much.
As the years went by, I occasionally ran into Wendy – once, at a no-nukes rally in 1978 at the site of the Seabrook, N.H., nuclear power plant. I was standing backstage when Wendy came up and gave me a hug. She was running an alternative school in Poland Spring, Maine, using her parents’ former summer home as a base camp. She invited me to come for a visit, which I did about two weeks later. By coincidence, a video crew making a documentary was there, people I knew and had worked with in Western Massachusetts. It was a platonic visit.
In 1980, I actually ran into her father at a funeral of an old family friend of my parents. He spoke at length with me, which surprised me, since when I had gone with Wendy to her home when she was a freshman, he had taken the opportunity to grill me for more than an hour about what my intentions were for his daughter and what I intended to do with my life. Afterwards, he told her that I was someone who had both feet firmly planted in midair – which I took as a compliment, though it wasn’t intended as such.
I had, at times, shared this story of the argument with other women who were my girlfriends, when we, as a new couple, had reached that stage of being together when we talked about other relationships and what had gone wrong, as a way of shedding the past and moving more deeply into the relationship.
When I retold the story of the argument, my girlfriends all agreed with Wendy, saying it was none of my damn business, and I was wrong to intrude. The story was a non-starter for continuing the current nascent relationship. On some things, I guess, I’m a slow learner, but I finally got it. I stopped telling the story, dropping it from my personal history.
Fast forward to 1999. I’m married, with a son. One Sunday I’m reading the magazine story in The Boston Globe, written by a husband, about how he and his wife had adopted a child from Kenya and sweated out the adoption, worried that the young girl was HIV positive. Their other child, a son, had also been adopted. The wife in the story was Wendy.
I couldn’t help but wonder: was the reason she couldn’t have children herself related to the IUD, the Dalkon Shield? My wife said sharply: None of your business.
I let the matter drop; I had learned my lesson. In a relationship, you need to choose your arguments well.
Now, more than three decades later, I still wonder sometimes about the argument Wendy and I had, the one I lost. Does it matter? Wendy appears to be happily married, she has adopted two children, she appears to have a very fulfilling life. Maybe it had nothing to do with the Dalkon Shield; maybe the problem was her husband’s, not hers.
If we were to meet, would I ever have the courage to ask her? Was it problems with the Dalkon Shield that prevented you from having children? I suppose it’s none of my business, really. Perhaps I should just let it go.
Still, I wonder if there was a way I might have prevailed in the argument.
Should I have tritely tried to sing the Beatles tune, “We can work it out?”
Should I, perhaps, have said something more pointed, employing the technique that therapists call the double-bind, such as: “Good choice, Wendy. Now, if you become sterile as a result of infection from the Dalkon Shield, you’ll never have to worry about birth control again.”
As I write this, I am trying to work out for myself why this argument should matter so much, that it lingers in my unconscious, almost 40 years later.
On one level, I can agree that Wendy was right – it was her body, it was her decision, and it was not my right to intervene with that decision.
To try and get her to change her mind was perceived by her – and by other women with whom I shared the story of this argument – as a young male’s insensitive attempt to control a woman’s choice.
No doubt, it seemed very close to arguments about abortion, and a woman’s right to choose, which I supported then and support now.
It is a woman’s choice; I wasn’t against birth control, I wasn’t against IUDs; I was against the Dalkon Shield, which I believed to be dangerous. And, it was very dangerous.
Perhaps what this is really about is my need to let go of the argument and its memory. The reality is: good people will do bad things to hurt themselves, and you can’t prevent them from hurting themselves – or others. Letting go in such a losing argument is a matter of survival, and a sign of your own strength. There is hardly ever a good reason to plunge off a cliff, or to careen into a snow bank off a highway in the midst of a blizzard to prove you are a good driver.
I began to write this dialogue with myself as I was about to descend on New Jersey to attend my 40th high school reunion. It started out entitled, “What we talk about when we talk about high school,” a play on the Raymond Carver book about love, or more aptly, Carver’s intense, often perverse view of love.
The title of the dialogue became, more aptly, “We can work it out,” in homage to the Beatles and our generation.
After the reunion, I had an epiphany driving back. Just as the Quebec province license plate reads, “Je me souviens,” or “I remember,” the New Jersey license plate, instead of “The Garden State,” should perhaps read, “J’oublie,” or, “I forget.” Fittingly, the title of Nora Ephron’s new book, after all, is: “I Remember Nothing.” Which, of course, isn’t true.
It would be easier to say, I forget. The argument, won or lost, makes no difference. Like a long-forgotten photo of a former lover stuffed behind a metal file cabinet. Just let go of it. I forget; I don’t remember.
The problem is, I do remember. And, I still think it matters. We are responsible for everything we do, for everything we observe, and for all our arguments we make, won or lost. And, “in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
