From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [162]
It must be a great temptation though, he thought, being top dog. Of course you dont know. You have never been one. But you can imagine how it would be. All you have to do is imagine you are an officer. You can imagine that.
It was, he realized, a very flighty philosophy, a chameleon philosophy always changing its color. You were a Communist one day and the next day you were an anti-Communist. But then this was a very flighty age, a chameleon age in which the chameleon lived perpetually upon a bright Scotch plaid.
So that so what if maybe today you are a Capitalist and tomorrow an anti-Capitalist? And maybe this minute cry over downtrodden Jews and the next minute cry against sadistic Jews? So what? It is a very irrational and emotional philosophy. Well, this is a very irrational and emotional age. I think that your philosophy puts you right in step with life in these United States and life in this disunited world.
But where, you ask, does it put you politically? What are your politics?
I think we can dispense with that question, he told himself. It is a wrong question, one that implies you have to have some kind of politics, and is therefore an unfair question because it restricts your answer to what kind of politics. It is the kind of question a Republican or a Democrat or a Communist would ask you. And anyway, you cant vote, you are in the Army, they wouldnt be interested in you.
Yes, I think we can reject that question. But if we had to answer it, truthfully, under oath (let us suppose that Mr Dies and his Un-American Activities Committee called you up because you refused to go out for boxing), then I would say that politically you are a sort of super arch-revolutionary, the kind that made the Revolution in Russia and that the Communists are killing now, a sort of perfect criminal type, very dangerous, a mad dog that loves underdogs. Thats what I would say you were.
But you better not tell that to anybody unless you have to, Prewitt. They’ll put you in the nut ward. Because here in America, he thought, everybody fights to become top dog, and then to stay top dog. And maybe, just maybe, that is why the underdogs that get to be top dogs and there is nothing left for them to fight for, wither up and die or else get fat and wheeze and die. Because they no longer got anything to fight for but to stay top dog, to keep what they already got.
All of which, Prewitt, does not do you a whole hell of a lot of good—except to make you feel a little better—since the way things look now it is very unlikely that you will ever get to be top dog and have to worry about getting fat and wheezing. If you were worrying about getting fat and wheezing, all this doubletiming that is sweating you like a nigger at election would ease your mind of that. Maybe they are doing you a favor and do not know it. Well, dont tell them, thats all. Dont ever let them know it.
What a business. You go along trying to mind your business and be yourself and bother nobody and look what happens to you. Yes, look what happens. You get mired in up to your ass in something. Grown men, seriously pushing each other around, over the burning question of whether or not a certain man should or should not go out for a boxing squad. It seemed so silly, suddenly, that it was hard to believe that absolutely serious results for you could ever come out of it.
Yet he knew that those results could and would come out of it for him. You cant disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out