XPost: alt.arts.poetry.comments   
   From: vze1sar1@verizon.net   
      
   An ode to failure   
      
   Feb 24th 2005   
    From The Economist print edition   
      
      
      
   Here's to the great American loser   
      
      
   THERE will be plenty of cuddlier films at this weekend's Oscars than   
   Clint Eastwood's “Million Dollar Baby”. The film tells the story of a   
   young woman, played by Hilary Swank, who escapes from a life of drudgery   
   by spending her every spare hour in a boxing gym. For a while, it looks   
   as if she is talented enough to escape. Then the fates deal her a   
   terrible blow: she loses her championship fight, is horribly injured and   
   persuades her trainer, played by Mr Eastwood, to kill her.   
      
   Dirty Harry's former friends on the right have reacted with horror to   
   the film's unAmerican enthusiasm for euthanasia. In fact, the film is   
   most remarkable as an extremely American parable on success and failure.   
   When Ms Swank gets injured, her trainer is eaten up with guilt. But she   
   tells him not to be so hard on himself: she is far happier to have   
   tasted a little success and ended up a cripple than to have remained a   
   nobody.   
      
   Americans have always been excessive worshippers of what William James   
   called “the bitch goddess success”. Self-help gurus have topped the   
   bestseller list since Benjamin Franklin published his autobiography.   
   Americans are much more likely than Europeans to believe that people can   
   get ahead in life so long as they are willing to work hard. And they are   
   much more likely to choose a high-paying job that carries a risk of   
   redundancy than a lower-paid job that guarantees security.   
      
   But you can't have winners without losers (or how would you know how   
   well you are doing?). And you can't broaden opportunity without also   
   broadening the opportunity to fail. For instance, until relatively   
   recently, blacks could not blame themselves for their failure in the   
   “race of life”, in Abraham Lincoln's phrase, because they were debarred   
   from so many parts of it. Now the barriers are lifted, the picture is   
   more complicated.   
      
   All of which creates a huge problem: how exactly should a   
   hyper-competitive society deal with its losers? It is all very well to   
   note that drunkards and slackers get what they deserve. But what about   
   the honest toilers? One way to deal with the problem is to offer people   
   as many second chances as possible. In his intriguing new book “Born   
   Losers: A History of Failure in America” (Harvard), Scott Sandage argues   
   that the mid-19th century saw a redefinition of failure—from something   
   that described a lousy business to something that defined a whole life.   
      
   Yet one of the striking things about America is how valiantly it has   
   resisted the idea that there is any such thing as a born loser. American   
   schools resist streaming their pupils much longer than their European   
   counterparts: the whole point is to fit in rather than to stand out.   
   American higher education has numerous points of entry and re-entry. And   
   the American legal system has some of the most generous bankruptcy rules   
   in the world. In Europe, a bankrupt is often still a ruined man; in   
   America, he is a risk-taking entrepreneur.   
      
   American history—not to mention American folklore—is replete with   
   examples of people who tried and tried again until they made a success   
   of their lives. Lincoln was a bankrupt store-keeper. Henry Ford was a   
   serial failure. At 40, Thomas Watson, the architect of IBM, faced   
   prison. America's past is also full of people who came back from the   
   brink. Steve Jobs has gone from has-been to icon. Martha Stewart has a   
   lucrative television contract waiting for her when she comes out of prison.   
      
   A second way to deal with losers is to celebrate them—or at least sing   
   about them. Perhaps in reaction to the relentless boosterism of business   
   life, American popular culture often sympathises with the losers. In   
   Arthur Miller's “Death of a Salesman” Willy Loman chooses to commit   
   suicide rather than spend the rest of his life “ringing up a zero”. John   
   Updike's “Rabbit” Angstrom is a lecherous car salesman whose best days   
   were on a school basketball court. Scott Adams's Dilbert is a diminutive   
   Everyman trapped in a cubicle. Where would country music be without   
   broken hearts and broken-down trucks?   
      
   The loser now will be later to win   
      
   But even in the loser-loving bits of popular culture, the American   
   obsession with success has a habit of winning through. More often than   
   not, born losers turn out to be winners in disguise. In one version of   
   this idea, the loser turns out to be a winner by virtue of his very   
   ordinariness. The hero of Frank Capra's “It's a Wonderful Life” is a   
   small-town plodder who hovers on the edge of ruin; but in the end the   
   film concludes triumphantly, “No man is a failure who has friends.”   
      
   In another version—the one that burst on the scene with James Dean and   
   was rapidly institutionalised by the counter-culture—the loser turns out   
   to be a winner because he is a rebel against society's repressive norms.   
   He is freer than the average American because he isn't encumbered with   
   property (he has nothing to lose); or he is more genuine because he   
   lives according to his own lights, rather than artificial conventions.   
   Bob Dylan was a master of counter-cultural inversion. “The loser   
   now/Will be later to win”, he rasped at one point. “She knows there's no   
   success like failure/And that failure's no success at all”, he moaned at   
   another.   
      
   H.L. Mencken had a grumpy verdict on this attitude to success and   
   failure: for him, the typical American was “vexed, at one and the same   
   time, by delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex”. Delusions of   
   grandeur are certainly common: “American Idol” presents a limitless   
   supply of talentless narcissists, each convinced he is the next Frank   
   Sinatra. Inferiority complexes are common too: America is also full of   
   perfectly successful people who are obsessed by their failure to live up   
   to their self-help manuals. But Mencken still seems too cynical. The   
   worship of success inspires not just extraordinary achievements but also   
   worthwhile failures. That is the unsettling but very American message of   
   “Million Dollar Baby”.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)