Player Piano

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles—the fruits of peace.

Paul sometimes wondered if he wouldn’t have been more content in another period of history, but the rightness of Bud’s being alive now was beyond question. Bud’s mentality was one that had been remarked upon as being peculiarly American since the nation had been born—the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer. This was the climax, or close to it, of generations of Bud Calhouns, with almost all of American industry integrated into one stupendous Rube Goldberg machine.

Some people, including Paul’s famous father, had talked in the old days as though engineers, managers, and scientists were an elite. And when things were building up to the war, it was recognized that American know-how was the only answer to the prospective enemy’s vast numbers, and there was talk of deeper, thicker shelters for the possessors of know-how, and of keeping this cream of the population out of the front-line fighting. But not many had taken the idea of an elite to heart. When Paul, Finnerty, and Shepherd had graduated from college, early in the war, they had felt sheepish about not going to fight, and humbled by those who did go. But now this elite business, this assurance of superiority, this sense of rightness about the hierarchy topped by managers and engineers—this was instilled in all college graduates, and there were no bones about it.

“It seemed very fresh to me—I mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.”

[…]

“Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn’t it? It was so ridiculous to have people stuck in one place all day, just using their senses, then a reflex, using their senses, then a reflex, and not really thinking at all.”

“[…] Hangovers, family squabbles, resentments against the boss, debts, the war—every kind of human trouble was likely to show up in a product one way or another.” He smiled. “And happiness, too. I can remember when we had to allow for holidays, especially around Christmas. There wasn’t anything to do but take it. The reject rate would start climbing around the fifth of December, and up and up it’d go until Christmas. Then the holiday, then a horrible reject rate; then New Year’s, then a ghastly reject level. Then things would taper down to normal—which was plenty bad enough—by January fifteenth or so. We used to have to figure in things like that in pricing a product.”

There were a few men in Homestead—like this bartender, the police and firemen, professional athletes, cab drivers, specially skilled artisans—who hadn’t been displaced by machines. They lived among those who had been displaced, but they were aloof and often rude and overbearing with the mass. They felt a camaraderie with the engineers and managers across the river, a feeling that wasn’t, incidentally, reciprocated. The general feeling across the river was that these persons weren’t too bright to be replaced by machines; they were simply in activities where machines weren’t economical. In short, their feelings of superiority were unjustified.

“Sick of it,” he said slowly. “The pay was fantastically good, ridiculously good—paid like a television queen with a forty-inch bust. But when I got this year’s invitation to the Meadows, Paul, something snapped. I realized I couldn’t face another session up there. And then I looked around me and found out I couldn’t face anything about the system any more. I walked out, and here I am.”

“Just to sort of underline what you’re saying, Paul, I’d like to point out something I thought was rather interesting. One horsepower equals about twenty-two manpower—big manpower. If you convert the horsepower of one of the bigger steel-mill motors into terms of manpower, you’ll find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population of the United States at the time of the Civil War could do—and do it twenty-four hours a day.”

“[…] The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to. Remember, Baer? And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.”

“And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately,” said Finnerty.

[…]

“That was the war,” said Kroner soberly. “It happens after every war.”

“And organized vice and divorce and juvenile delinquency, all parallel the growth of the use of vacuum tubes,” said Finnerty.

“Oh, come on, Ed,” said Paul, “you can’t prove a logical connection between those factors.”

“If there's the slightest connection, it’s worth thinking about,” said Finnerty.

When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality. In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.

“Ah haven’t got a job any more,” said Bud. “Canned.”

Paul was amazed. “Really? What on earth for? Moral turpitude? What about the gadget you invented for—"

“Thet’s it,” said Bud with an eerie mixture of pride and remorse. “Works. Does a fine job.” He smiled sheepishly. “Does it a whole lot better than Ah did it.”

“It runs the whole operation?”

“Yup. Some gadget.”

“And so you’re out of a job.”

“Seventy-two of us are out of jobs,” said Bud.

“It’s the loneliness,” he said, as though picking up the thread of a conversation that had been interrupted. “It’s the loneliness, the not belonging anywhere. I just about went crazy with loneliness here in the old days, and I figured things would be better in Washington, that I’d find a lot of people I admired and be- longed with. Washington is worse, Paul—Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men. [...]”

“[…] When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out—most of them—that what’s left is just about zero. A good bit short of enough, anyway. […]”

“Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity. […]”

Paul was amazed. By some freakish circumstance he’d apparently clinched the job—after having arrived with the vague intention of disqualifying himself.

Kroner looked at him with surprise. “Look, you know darn good and well history’s answered the question a thousand times.”

“It has? Has it? You know; I wouldn’t. Answered it a thousand times, has it? That’s good, good. All I know is, you’ve got to act like it has, or you might as well throw in the towel. Don’t know, my boy. Guess I should, but I don’t. Just do my job. Maybe that’s wrong.”

Of all the people on the north side of the river, Anita was the only one whose contempt for those in Homestead was laced with active hatred. She was also the only wife on the north side who had never been to college at all. The usual attitude of the Country Club set toward Homesteaders was contempt, all right, but it had an affectionate and amused undertone, the same sort of sentiment felt by most for creatures of the woods and fields. Anita hated Homesteaders.

“What am I going to do? Farm, maybe. I’ve got a nice little farm.”

“Farm, eh?” Harrison clucked his tongue reflectively. “Farm. Sounds wonderful. I’ve thought of that: up in the morning with the sun; working out there with your hands in the earth, just you and nature. If I had the money, sometimes I think maybe I’d throw this—”

“You want a piece of advice from a tired old man?”

“Depends on which tired old man. You?”

“Me. Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dreams, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.”

“Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation in such enterprises.

“I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold:

“That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God.

“That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, and Man is a creation of God.

“That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God.

“That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God. […]”

“What distinguishes man from the rest of the animals is his ability to do artificial things,” said Paul. “To his greater glory, I say. And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.”

“You know,” said Paul at last, “things wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d stayed the way they were when we first got here. Those were passable days, weren’t they?” […]

“Things don’t stay the way they are,” said Finnerty. “It’s too entertaining to try to change them.”