What is the ultimate defeat?
Trust me, it is not losing an election to a bunch of ignorant right wing Tea Party know nothings. It is not a nation descending into political madness and gridlock. It is not even death. No, the ultimate defeat is never to have lived.
It is easy in the face of overwhelming odds to despair. I know. I have faced such odds myself as a person who failed at two marriages before, one of which I brought on myself because of my abuse of drugs. I have witnessed it in friends who attempted suicide, and in my wife in her struggles to regain her life after the devastating toll that pancreatic cancer and the chemotherapy drugs that destroyed her short term memory and other brain functions ending her highly successful and promising career at a major corporation before she was 50. I succumbed to it again myself after my own chronic illness forced me to retire a few short years after i made partner at my law firm.
To feel that your life is over before it began and that you have not accomplished all the goals you set for yourself can be devastating to both mind and spirit. Collectively, many of you today, activists who have invested your time, money and efforts into electing Democrats to Congress and President Obama in 2008, may be feeling deep despair and anger.
Many of you believed that your votes and your hard work had ended the long national disgrace of corrupt Republican rule and the piecemeal destruction of our democracy which occurred over the course of the Bush/Cheney years. You can still remember election night on November, 2008 when hope was not just a four letter word.
Yet less than two years after President Obama and the Democrats assumed control of Congress, and however fitfully and inconsistently began to repair some of the damage done to our nation’s economy and its people since the Reagan years, you are confronted with what to many of you must seem incomprehensible: a major defeat at the polls for Democrats and the loss of any chance to use government to help the millions of people in need.
Many of you may be in deep despair over the course of the last two years and the end result: the election of some of the most extreme, hateful, bigoted, racist, anti-science, anti-government, anti-civil liberties, and anti-everything but what’s good for Wall Street and Big Business candidates in American history. Many of you in dire circumstances yourself may feel betrayed by the media, by the Supreme Court, by the White House and by the Democratic Party. Many of you may feel a part of you has died.
Well, I am not here today to lay blame today for what happened. There’s enough blame to go around and enough finger pointing. While criticism of the Party and the President as part of an analysis of what went wrong and how to change it may be a useful exercise, now is not the best time to make those assessments and determinations. Anger and despair cloud judgment, and provide opportunists to use those emotions to foster our worst, most self-destructive impulses.
No, I have a much simpler purpose for writing this post today, to tell you an essential truth about how to deal with defeat and despair. In order to provide you with that truth, however, I need to tell you a story. It’s not my story. It is, actually, a completely fictional tale. But as many have observed before me, unlike the lies of politicians whose purpose in telling their lies is to hide the truth, the lies of fiction can often reveal a deeper truth.
The story I’m going to tell you comes from the 1952 film Ikiru, a cinematic masterpiece directed by the great Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa. The title is a Japanese word that, roughly translated into English, means “to live.” I believe it has great relevance for all of us at this moment in time. Let me borrow the words of the premier American Film Critic Roger Ebert to help me provide you with the basic outline of the story which Kurosawa and his cinematic collaborators put on film:
“Ikiru,” [is the story of] a bureaucrat who works for 30 years at Tokyo City Hall and never accomplishes anything. Mr. Watanabe has become the chief of his section, and sits with a pile of papers on either side of his desk, in front of shelves filled with countless more documents. Down a long table on either side of him, his assistants shuffle these papers back and forth. Nothing is ever decided. His job is to deal with citizen complaints, but his real job is to take a small rubber stamp and press it against each one of the documents, to show that he has handled it. […]
The opening shot of the film is an X-ray of Watanabe’s chest. “He has gastric cancer, but doesn’t yet know it,” says a narrator. “He just drifts through life. In fact, he’s barely alive.”
Watanabe is a widower and parent of a single child. As head of the “Public Affairs” section of the local town government he has accepted the lie that nothing is possible, and that the bureaucracy of which he is a long time servant, is not meant to help his fellow citizens. He has even told himself the further lie that he participates in this sham, and goes to his dull monotonous job of shuffling papers and giving people who need his help the run around, because by doing it he is at least making the life of his son better.
In actuality, after the death of his young wife (observed in a flashback) he has submerged his grief and despair in his work. He has risen to his current position of authority precisely because he never made any waves – he just did what the corrupt politicians and the system in which he is enmeshed wanted from him: obedience. He has become what a young girl who work in his office calls him behind his back: a mummy; literally a man with out a soul, one who is dead to any real feeling or compassion for others.
Now, however, he is faced with the worst crisis of his miserable life:
There is a frightening scene in his doctor’s office, where another patient chatters mindlessly; he is a messenger of doom, describing Watanabe’s precise symptoms and attributing them to stomach cancer. “If they say you can eat anything you want,” he says, “that means you have less than a year.” When the doctor uses the very words that were predicted, the old bureaucrat turns away from the room, so that only the camera can see him, and he looks utterly forlorn.
So now he really is a dead man walking, yet for the first time he realizes it. Now he understands that he wants to find some way to finally live before the death sentence of his stomach cancer ends that last chance. But what is there to live for?
(cont.)
He stops going to work and begins to drink saki though he knows it is bad for him. He meets a stranger at a bar in whom he confides his imminent death:
“I just can’t die — I don’t know what I’ve been living for all these years,” he says to the stranger in the bar. He never drinks, but now he is drinking: “This expensive saki is a protest against my life up to now.”
This stranger, a novelist, tries to show Watanabe how to live by taking him to pachinko parlors, jazz bars and dance halls. The novelist hooks Watanabe up with a prostitute but Watanabe’s one night of debauchery ultimately provides no satisfaction or relief from his despair. It ends with an intoxicated Watanabe in pain, vomiting up all the saki he drank in a back alley while the novelist watches him helplessly from a distance.
The next day, the young girl from his office who nicknamed him the “Mummy” finally seeks him out so she can quit her job, and instead becomes the focus of Watanabe’s next attempt to reconnect with his own humanity:
He asks her to spend the day with him, and they go to pachinko parlors and the movies. She tells him her nicknames for everyone in the office. […]
She encourages him to go see his son. But when he tries to tell him about his illness, the son cuts him off — insists on getting the property due him before the old man squanders it on women.
Watanabe is so estranged from his son and daughter-in-law, and cannot make himself tell them of of his predicament after they accuse him of their an indecent relationship with the young woman and demand their “rights.” Nonetheless, he continues to see the young woman, trying to live vicariously through her experiences, but in the end that one platonic relationship with a younger, more vital person isn’t the answer he so desperately needs, either. Frustrated, she agrees to see him one last time seting up one of the most harrowing scenes in modern cinema.
At a dinner in a fancy restaurant where a party of upper class young people is occurring simultaneously, Watanabe finally tells the young woman of his cancer. He regrets that he has no time left to do anything of importance in his life, because the bureaucracy in which he works makes accomplishing anything impossible, even though he is supposedly the head of a major department.
As he sits next to the young woman in abject despair, she takes out a wind-up toy bunny which she makes at the factory where she now works. She tells him offhandedly that making these toys makes her feel productive knowing that it will make little children happy. As the white toy bunny hops past Watanabe and he sees it he suddenly has an epiphany.
He remembers one project by a group of working class mothers to clean up a pool of stagnant, polluted water in their neighborhood which is a breeding ground for pests and disease among their children. Previously he had ignored their request as had all the other departments at City Hall.
The project to drain the waste water and make a park for the children now sits in limbo, in large part because these lower class women have no insider to help them push their project through, nor any politician willing to commit to help them. Led by the odious Deputy Mayor, the politicians on the City Council (Watanabe’s ultimate bosses) are only interested in assisting real estate developers backed by the Yakusa who want to use the City’s funds to create an entertainment district.
But in that flash of insight, Watanabe commits himself to the nearly impossible struggle to clean up the waste area where the poor women live and get a park for children to play in built there, despite the corrupt politicians and the bureaucratic system that rewards inaction.
Watanabe becomes a madman, personally escorting the case from one bureaucrat to another, determined to see that a children’s park is built on the wasteland before he dies. […]
The scenes of his efforts do not come in chronological order, but as flashbacks from his funeral service. Watanabe’s family and associates gather to remember him, drinking too much and finally talking too much, trying to unravel the mystery of his death and the behavior that led up to it. And here we see the real heart of the movie, in the way one man’s effort to do the right thing can inspire, or confuse, or anger, or frustrate, those who see it only from the outside, through the lens of their own unexamined lives.
In the end Watanabe succeeds through sheer persistence and will, and I might add, a vision of what can be accomplished that he refuses to allow others to deny. As is usual in such cases, the corrupt Deputy Mayor takes all the credit when the park is finally built. But Watanabe and the women for whom he built it and their children know who was responsible. Watanabe, played by Takashi Shimura in perhaps one of the greatest scenes in cinema, finally succumbs to his cancer, but he is no longer in despair. He is no longer defeated.
Here, watch the scene where, after the ceremony to commemorate the park is over (with Watanabe’s contribution never once having been mentioned by the Deputy Mayor in his speech), Watanabe sits on the park’s swing set at night in the snow, singing to himself an old song about the brevity of life:
We have all been Watanabe at one point in our lives. For some of you now may be one of them. You are perhaps feeling a mixture of anger, depression, and hopelessness.
You may want to lash out at Republicans and Democrats both, or at the media, or the ignorance of many of your fellow citizens who fell for the lies told so skillfully and relentlessly by the right wing media and the financiers of the Tea Party. You may feel that nothing is possible, and that the Democratic Party collectively is dead in the water.
But you would be wrong. For the truth is you are only defeated when you accept defeat. Our nation has faced hard times before and will again, but as Jon Stewart noted they are “hard times, not end times.” Our time on earth may be brief but it need not be filled solely with the sense of helplessness and inaction. Nor should it be filled with hate.
For as Watanabe said in the film when asked why he wasn’t angry at being stymied and turned down over and over again by the politicians and bureaucrats who preferred the status quo of doing nothing rather than taking action to help others:
I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.
None of us knows how much time we have. But wasting that time on recriminations and anger will not help us. We don’t have time for such useless and self-defeating emotions. Leave that for the Tea Partiers. Their hatred has not made them happy or given them satisfaction because it will only return, time and time again no matter how many elections they think they have won. Why did I say that? Because the people they elected will always disappoint them, and when that happens, Tea party people will be left with only their bitterness and more hate.
I can’t tell you what to do to reach that epiphany that Watanabe achieved in Ikiru. But I do know wallowing in self pity and playing the blame game, or losing oneself in escapist entertainment, will not provide the answer each of us needs at this moment. Watanabe tried those “solutions” and none of them brought him relief from his suffering.
So may I humbly suggest, to quote Bob Johnson: GET SERIOUS PEOPLE! ATTACH YOUR ASSES!
In other words, don’t let despair or lack of enthusiasm or anger get in the way of discovering whatever action you can accomplish which will advance the causes you support. Whether that means getting involved with your local Democratic party, or becoming an activist for one of the many worthy progressive organizations fighting for justice and equality, or donating money, or simply blogging, I know you can find it if you have the will to do so.
Let me leave you with this quote from Eugene Debs, a great American who suffered many defeats but was never defeated:
Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.
That quote was a statement Debs made made to the Federal Court in Cleveland after he was tried and convicted of Sedition on charges brought by President Wilson’s Department of Justice. Think about that for a brief moment and then if you are encumbered by the cloak of despair or anger, throw it off. If Debs could say that in the face of imprisonment what are you capable of accomplishing this day and each day that follows?
