I am a Jesuit in Private Practice
Lately I have been contemplating the lives of college contemporaries who have predeceased me. We are all brothers and sisters, and when I reflect upon them in my memory, see their smiles, hear their words, I feel bad about their deaths. In their absence, I consider what they did, who they were, and I speculate what they might have done. Then I consider what I have done and failed to do and get lost in the sadness born from the obliteration of ideals. I started looking over my shoulder after I hit 60, to make sure no hooded figure was sneaking up on me, and I have been hearing tolling bells more often these days. If we place human lives against geologic time, I suppose I am going to be deceased myself very soon. A blink of an eye. A nanosecond. A what the hell? God damn it! Wait a minute! Then, I reconsider things when someone like Whitey Ford, best Bronx Bombers pitcher ever, dies as a nonagenarian, and I remind myself that my Pop-Pop made it to 94. I can do that! Look at Bronx-born Carl Reiner. Made it to 98! Surely, I have 30-something years left? But can I finance longevity? My Pop-Pop died in a nursing home in the late 1970s several weeks after his money ran out, and he would have to go on “welfare”. How deeply troubling is that? It raises questions. What is the value of a life? Is it worth it to stay alive? Is this or that person worth having alive? I guess it depends on your job, the work that you do. I guess it depends on whether you merit it. Or, as we now know, whether you are an essential worker. I guess it depends on the market. Isn’t that what we are sold? Do we have value in the “free market”? Can my thoughts sell in the “marketplace of ideas”? I guess it depends on whether there is value to be seen, and profit to be had.
Some people think people count more than profit. For example: My Papa Francesco. Jorge Bergoglio. First Jesuit Pope. His third encyclical, just released, condemns Neoliberalism, the death-cult ideology that is driving humans to extinction because it gives cover to unbridled, greedy, predatory Capitalism, which demands infinite “growth” in a finite ecosystem. Humans are commodities. The “market” rules.
168. The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of “spillover” or “trickle” — without using the name — as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged “spillover” does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society. It is imperative to have a proactive economic policy directed at “promoting an economy that favors productive diversity and business creativity” and makes it possible for jobs to be created and not cut. Financial speculation fundamentally aimed at quick profit continues to wreak havoc. Indeed, “without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function. And today this trust has ceased to exist”. The story did not end the way it was meant to, and the dogmatic formulae of prevailing economic theory proved not to be infallible. The fragility of world systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom. It has also shown that, in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance, “we must put human dignity back at the center and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need”. — -Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All)
Dignity was obliterated in the United States when a mobster game-show host became our first Fake President. This creature is the apotheosis of the Neoliberal Project, which relentlessly seeks to sell a bill of shiny goods to obscure a fascist Empire of greed, predation, and death. The mobster pretends to be president, and it is very weird because he is the president, as he perpetrates the con that he is doing the exact opposite of what he is really doing. This fact makes me realize that maybe I should not be too hard on myself for pretending to be everything that I have been, for hiding who I really am, for feeling like I am an imposter in my own life.
It is easy to condemn such a con job, but not so easy to decontaminate those who have been conned. We have been immersed in a toxic solution of fascist branding messages floating through a fizz of ersatz politics. For decades we have been soothed by a warm broth of platitudes cooked up by corporate media to dull the minds of the Precariat, the people too busy trying to survive, and to wipe the memories of the affluent professional managerial class, who are too busy planning their home improvement projects to consider the imperatives of citizenship.
Being a citizen is a demanding job. An important job. Do not jobs define us? Are they not the foundation of our dignity? Though, with all these other jobs we must do, jobs valued by the marketplace, jobs to just survive, it is easy to abdicate that citizenship.
In thrall to the dictates of Capital, I have had a lifetime of botched jobs and jobs worth doing, depressing jobs and jobs that were okay, I guess. I drove a forklift and stocked shelves. Filed paper, endlessly. I got my Actors Equity Card by doing the lead in The Golden Goose on 12 hours’ notice for an audience of 1,500 screaming children and their parents at Mechanics Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts. I sold photocopier machines that always broke. For $100, I dressed in a suffocating Captain Caveman suit at 7am with a fever of 102 to entertain a breakfast meeting of Nickelodeon honchos and their advertisers. I sold 5-star resort business conferences to C-level executives for E-Commerce and Telecoms, with 6-figure price tags. Tended bar. Waited tables. Been on many stages. Did some film and television. Hell, I have often done jobs that never paid me a dime. Served on boards pro bono. Wrote a bunch of scripts and essays. You would also be incredibly wise to let me handle your real estate deals. I know what I am doing. Managing Director, Chief Operating Officer, President, Drone. I am an actor who pretends on stage and off, but my expertise is real, and I always get the job done, thank you very much.
I am reasonably healthy, but I think we are all running out of time.
Should I feel bad for my friends who are already dead? Maybe they are in a better place. The place we living inhabit, if we are even in the same place together at all, has become an abattoir of ideals as our body politic is carved to chunks and joints to be devoured by an endlessly ravenous plutocracy. I am torn between amazement and dread every day, and sometimes I want it all to go away. It will, soon enough. Then, sometimes I want to stick around forever and watch the dramedy.
Many people and I went to Fordham, the Jesuit Harvard of the Bronx, that energized the minds of numerous Catholic Irish-and-Italian American young adults. My buddy Mike Leahey died at the age of 46 in 2002. I believe it was a latent heart issue while exercising. His family were huge Fordham alums. He preceded me by three or four years. We never knew each other at school, but got to know each other when I was financing my acting career through a maître d’ job at an Upper East Side saloon that Mike and even Marla Maples frequented in the late 1980’s. The Donald, that cheater, swooped in once or twice to hobnob, trickle-down, and chat.
People talk, incessantly, at bars. Mike, a poet and respected hospital administrator, and I talked on and on, solving the problems of the world. We compared notes on our common Bronx experience, and one night, abiding in the wisps of cigarette smoke, Mike proclaimed that, since we both took the Hegelian Quentin Lauer, S.J. (I for Plato’s Dialogues and 19th Century Philosophy) we had the right to call ourselves “Jesuits in Private Practice”.
The Society of Jesus was founded by the Spanish priest Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. Jesuits have been described as “God’s Marines”, and the order as “The Company”. They have also been condemned for their influence. The pejorative “Jesuitical” connotes craftiness, equivocation, and evasiveness. In fact, Jesuits are fearless intellectuals who, although obedient to authority, regularly challenge the assumptions of political economy and often get in trouble as a result. I mean, look at what the insistent demands of 18th Century slave economics did to the pretend Jesuits Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro in The Mission (1986), a Warner Brothers release of a Roland Joffe film with Oscar-winning cinematography by Chris Menges.
The imperatives of the market and the structure of the political economy dictate all that we do. Real Jesuits like Jorge Bergoglio and even private-practice Jesuits have negotiated a Vatican-esque maze of intrigue for centuries through the Hegelian dialectical motions of the conflict between Lord & Serf, Master & Slave, and Employer & Employee. All Jesuits use reason. They think. As Father Lauer told us, “what takes place in thought, then, is man’s own gradual self-possession or movement toward the freedom of self-determination.”* Yet what happens if the freedom of self-determination is an illusion? What if the real deal is that only a ridiculously small group of people have the freedom to prey upon everyone else? Wait a minute. Am I not self-possessed in my own right? I can do battle with them! Enter the fray! I think I need to review the Phenomenology.
Thus, sometimes Jesuits, the private-practice sort especially, lose their way, even in some impressive jobs. Look at crafty G. Gordon Liddy, FBI agent turned enabler of Nixonian corruption. Look at equivocator Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor who refuses to raise taxes on the plutocrats and enjoys squashing political opponents. Look at evasive John Brennan, CIA Director in service to an Empire driven by the appetites of the military-industrial-fossil fuel complex. Fordham men all.
The Donald went to Fordham for two seconds before he cheated his way into Wharton.
Hail! Rams of Fordham, Hail!
On to the fray!
Once more our foes assail in strong array;
Once more the old Maroon Wave on high;
We’ll sing our battle song: We do, or die!
My freshman year roommate James Petruzello died in 2003, age 44. Left a family. Yet another heart issue. We had also been high school classmates. Jim was a sweet, gentle kid. Loved Jethro Tull. He had a mind that moved frenetically around the boundaries of logic but always wound up in interesting places. I lost touch with him after school. Ultimately, he wound up in his hometown in Connecticut, doing whatever job it was that he had. I used to know what it was but have forgotten. I think he had rather been a rock star.
Frank Gadler, wonderful friend, like me and G. Gordon Liddy a member of the Fordham Mimes and Mummers theater group, passed in October 2018 at 61. My freshman year he played a wicked Conrad Birdie in Bye Bye Birdie. He usually had his face in a book, even as chaos swelled around him. He worked as a graphics developer and technologist for a design firm in an office on West 57th Street from the 1980s until the day he died. I think that he had rather invented a futuristic dream machine used by millions across the globe. I am not exactly sure what that is, but I am sure Frank would have understood it.
Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize winner, a marvelous writer whose profound explorations of the people, places, and events of New York City, just passed at 63.
Another Frank was killed in a car crash a long time ago. Sweet and lovely Gabi, imprisoned inside a depressed mind, took her own life.
The duration of my post-collegiate life is perfectly concurrent with the four-decade Neoliberal slow-motion corporate coup d’état that has reversed the progress of the New Deal and the Great Society and obliterated the best of our founding ideals. I had a bad feeling when Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed that government itself was the worst problem facing the people, took office during my last semester. Most of us Jesuits knew deep down that this particular actor was a tool for the program of the plutocrats. Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom were Neoliberal extremists who forced an inherently corrupt program of tax reduction for the rich, privatization and the dismantling of the reach and power of labor unions.
What dignity is to be had in a job of work, when the solidarity of workers is destroyed, and when every ounce of value they create is sucked into the maw of the owners of the country? Ultimately, how different, in its essence, is the employer-employee relationship from the lord-serf relationship when it is the employers who call all the shots?
Just forget about it. Carry on, nothing important to be seen there. Just worry about yourself. Watch Gordon Gecko. Greed is good. Look at Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Someday you can have it all too!
Thus were we dosed by spectacle and propaganda, Prozac and Viagra, and confined to silos of self-interest, isolated, de-politicized and memory wiped. If you live in a silo, you have no society. Maggie Thatcher told us there was no alternative to radical, fascist, racist Neoliberal Capitalism: The marriage of State and Corporation in a milieu of divide and rule Nationalism. “And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families,” she said.
Then the 1990s came and American families were further assaulted as we watched Bill Clinton, destroyer of FDR’s legacy, continue Ronnie’s job. At one of his early campaign speeches in 1992, a dog-whistle set-piece at Stone Mountain, Georgia, of all places, standing before ranks of black prisoners, he made it known that “New Democrats” weren’t going to tolerate any nonsense from the poor. After his election, lurching rightward, he proudly ended welfare “as we know it” (especially for all those darkies). He pushed through NAFTA to de-industrialize the nation, vanish labor unions, and slaughter the Middle Class. He advocated the Crime Bill that monetized the underclass — disposable people, chiefly males of color — through a deliberate program of mass incarceration. He gave the media barons the Telecommunications Act to turbocharge corporate consolidation and render journalism obsolete. He ended Glass-Steagall in 1999 and unleashed the rabid corruption of Finance Capital. This was truly a series of magical tricks performed by someone flippantly labelled “the first black president”.
Then the corrupted Supreme Court, via Bush v. Gore, foisted upon the nation a cabal of oil men to march like berserkers across the Middle East to secure the Muslim fields supplying Texas Tea for the perpetual motion machine. All prosecuted under cover of the War on Terror, which as Gore Vidal quipped, might as well be a “war on dandruff” for all the meaning the term has; an endless war against anyone, anyone at all deemed a terrorist, anywhere on the planet.
Then global unbridled Capitalism collapsed yet again, and people desperate for hope and change turned to the actual first black president to get us all out of the mess. More pretend. Obama was sold like soap. His campaign won the top Ad Age award. Citigroup dictated the key cabinet secretary choices, and what millions of foreclosed homeowners got was more despair, more of the same, while the banksters were made whole. The Federal Reserve pumped trillions into the machine, and the “job market” picked up, as college educated folk, many of them PhDs, and deeply in debt, were funneled into the Walmarts, Amazons and Ubers, the dead-end, endless debt treadmill of low-wage and gig work. So now we have millennials, who started to be born the year I graduated from Fordham, Americans between the ages of 24 and 39, owning only 4% of the wealth of the country.
Hillary suggested maybe we should all open our own bowling alleys, and then she said half the country were trash. Dignity in their work was already lost for most Americans, and a nation in denial, abused again and again by the plutocrats, puked out the pretend American Dream and collapsed into the American Nightmare.
Trump.
At Frank’s wake that Autumn we 60-somethings, his friends from Fordham, many who had not seen each other for years, blinked around in self-conscious confusion or consternation or concern. The general impression was of a cosmic game of musical chairs. A precarious solidarity, to be sure. Shy smiles. Laughter and tears. Death was approaching us all. Little could we imagine the season of pandemic lurking over the horizon. So, we talked the usual talk. How are you? You look great! So, what are you doing these days? What is your job? I forget. What do you do?
Let us face facts. They won, those lords and masters. Those of us in society with Jesus yearn for “recovering a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance”. But we are probably not going to get it. Our stories are not going to end the way they were meant to. We spend our years of education learning the ideals that would lead to an Advanced Human Society, then we spend the rest of our lives forgetting those ideals. We pray to Jesus, who taught us The Golden Rule. Yet we turn away from the misery, destruction, and death our Neo-Feudal system demands of the people and the planet.
What do you do?
We silence the Sermon on the Mount and hand Jesus an AR-15.
What do you do?
We fall for the propaganda and blame the Russians, or the rapist Mexicans.
What do you do?
We settle for less and wish to be left alone.
I wanted to do this thing. I had to do that thing. As the end approaches and my value in the marketplace evaporates, I am not sure how I got here. I am trying to remember.
I do what I do. I try to think about all these things and maybe preach to you. I pretend, but I get the job done. I am a Jesuit in Private Practice.
Thonx, Bronx!
*Hegel’s Idea of Philosophy, Quentin Lauer, S.J.; Fordham University Press (1971).