by the Editor
One of our mottoes here at the Press is “Happiness is not just a right: it’s a duty.” And the most cursory look around will prove the wisdom of that position. Ever noticed how when someone gives you some grief about something that’s pretty much (when you think about it indignantly later) none of their damn business, that if you look a little closer, you can see that they are, well, not to put to fine a point on it, a pretty miserable bastard. It’s a rule of life that if you’re not getting what you need from your surroundings, you’re going to make everyone else around you miserable until you do.
Now this is much worse if you are that miserable bastard and you’re not getting what you need even though you CAN get what you need. So I’m not talking about people who are authentically starving, or tortured, or cold, or unloved. I’m talking about people who are perfectly healthy, have enough to eat and a warm place to sleep, have the possibility (if not the actuality) of love and friendship. You people need to listen up. All of us need to work hard on being happy, on being content — because, trust me, only then will we have the entirely natural urge to spread it around. In fact, only then will we have a natural feeling of indignation that not everyone is similarly happy. Because healthy happiness knows it’s not alone. It knows it can’t be alone. It knows that the only real happiness is when that happiness is constantly widening, spreading out…and that generalized discomfort we’re all feeling? Could that be because our fellow human beings aren’t happy, and we’re deep down worried that somehow that’s our own fault?
I thought about this a lot in the years that I lived and worked in Liverpool. Now Liverpool has many things going for it — that was why I went there in the first place — but one of its marked characteristics, aside from a kind of hilarious bombast, is that it’s a very unhappy place. When I first got there, which wasn’t that long ago, there were hardly any trees outside of the parks, there was nowhere that sold fresh juice or food that hadn’t been bashed into submission by chemicals and artificial flavors, the restaurants were without exception either posh pretension or absolute outright ghastliness, and everybody’s idea of a good time, rich and poor, was to go out and drink as much as they possibly could, go home, and wake up complaining about the hangover, and then start all over again.
By the time I’d left, there were a few places selling good food and drink. And there were one or two new trees. So that was forward movement, of a kind.
But the whole time I was there, I could never get over how unhappy everyone was. That seemed never to change. More than that, I could never get over how unhappy everyone wanted everyone else to be. The place (and many a place like it) was consumed by envy and resentment, and this fascinated me. Because it didn’t have to be. It had everything going for it. It had talent and energy and decent beer. But something stopped it from taking advantage of these God given gifts. There was a kind of belief that unhappiness was the moral position, that anything comfortable or comforting or nurturing or kind was somehow weeny…and therefore suspect. There was a feeling about that happiness was a weakness — although to an outsider, it seemed clear that there was some kind of collective guilt going on that was making everyone act like they, and everyone else, deserved nothing but misery and gloom.
(Mind you, there are Scousers who surge forward energetically on a different path — a lot of them have been seen in this pages. This month, check out Sue Cullen, a Liverpudlian who refuses to be unhappy no matter what, in her Dystonia Diary that chronicles her fight against that rare disease, and Mat Capper with his Mumblings of a Scouser.)
I can’t tell you how many conversations I had where guys — usually after a few pints — wanted to make clear to me how horrible their lives were. I remember one in particular: he tearfully recounted how he had lost touch with the great love of his life.
“Oh bullshit,” I said cheerfully, ever the blundering American. “She can’t have been the Great Love of Your Life or you’d know where she is.”
“No,” he said, “You don’t understand. She’ a teacher and…”
“She’ a teacher? Oh god, that’s easy, then. A teacher in the UK? Just give me her name and I’ll find her for you tomorrow.”
Naturally, this can-do West Coast spirit was greatly resented. He wouldn’t tell me her name, and I doubt he ever forgave me from that moment on. He really, really, really wanted to cling to his misery. And I found that over and over. And I also found — no surprise — that those who cling to their misery are not content to hug it alone. They want you and me in on it, too.
This has its application to foreign policy, of course. Those drunk, coke-snorting, gun-toting, overeating, miserable Senators and Congressmen of ours have traded real human happiness for prestige and good seats at the Superbowl. Does this make them happy? Well, all you have to do is look at how they act. It’s not a coincidence that Dick Cheney thinks it’s fun to get drunk and go kill animals, or that he actively works for policies that will disenfranchise his own grandchild — not a coincidence that he’s a misery guts of this type and that his most subtle contribution to our national foreign policy is “Bomb the bastards.” And that his domestic philosophy is, “If you don’t control them, they sin.” This is a devilish position — literally.
The Devil is very, very, very unhappy. This is why he needs bright lights and perfect teeth and lots of girls and attention and this is why HE WILL NOT LEAVE YOU AND ME ALONE just to get on with it. (Which come to think of it, is probably just as well: if the Devil left me alone to get on with it, I probably would leave him alone, too.)
So we have a moral obligation here. We have an actual obligation to be as happy and kind and content and self-sufficient as we possibly can. And then we have an obligation to pass that around. And this obligation, though it takes some doing in the beginning, and though there’s not a lot of support for it around, ends by being a pleasure, ends by being an end in itself.
This is not a popular position, for some reason. (Which if you ask me, is just proof that the Devil is an entity that actually exists.) But it’s a good one. And the more of us that take it up, in EAP’s opinion, the better.
In this month’s EAP, everybody’s fighting the good fight on Happiness’s side. Hannah Mermelstein doesn’t just sit around wringing her hands about what our policies are doing to the Palestinians…she gets off her butt and goes and mucks in. Carolyn Myers glories in the theater. Lauren Randolph works hard to figure out who she is and what she should be doing. Dan Osterman works hard to figure how who WE are and what WE should be doing. Linda Eckhardt wrestles with her Writers Block and wins. Julia Gibson keeps on trucking. Harvey Lillywhite and Jayne Lyn Stahl glory in a form the mass media ignores. And Chuck Poling sees more in Country Music than meets the usual eye.
The daughters of the Red Camp, and Snotty do their bit, too.
Not to mention Ask Wendy. And Jam Today argues that how much you enjoy your food is as much a political issue as a personal one.
Onward!