TV Note: "Being There" (8/31)
David Shasha
"Being There" will be screened on Turner Classic Movies Wednesday, August 31st at 5:30 PM
We Are All Chauncey Gardiners!
Many years ago, when I was still under the seriously mistaken impression that it was possible to be accepted by the Jewish community as a Sephardic intellectual who lived with decency and integrity, I had a meeting with one of the big-wig movers and shakers in the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community; a player well-known to those in the loop.
At our meeting he droned on and on about the movie “Being There”: it was absolutely necessary, he asserted, that I learn the lesson of Chauncey Gardiner who presented the perfect model of how an ambitious person should go about their business. Gardiner was always “there”; in the right place at the right time, saying little and never ruffling feathers. Such a person, the big-wig insisted, would always succeed.
For those unfamiliar with “Being There,” it is a 1979 movie based on the 1970 novel by Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski. The story – and its protagonist! – is quite simple: an elderly gardener – played brilliantly in the film by the great Peter Sellers – has lived since he was a child in the house of a rich man who has just passed on. Chance the gardener has never learned to read and write or to do much of anything. He is a simpleton dolt whose only skill is to tend his master’s garden. He has no idea how to live in the outside world.
When the old man dies at the very start of the movie Sellers is unceremoniously made homeless by a couple of young probate lawyers who are bemused by the idiot child-man as they discover that there are no provisions in the will for his care. He seems not to exist in any official way and thus has no legal claim to remain where he is.
Chance then aimlessly walks the mean streets of Washington, DC until he is finally involved in a minor car accident while standing in front of a store window watching TV – his favorite pastime outside of gardening. A limousine is backing out of a parking spot and traps Chance between it and the car behind it. The woman who owns the limousine – played by Shirley MacLaine – takes pity on Chance and decides to bring him back to her mansion where her octogenarian husband maintains his own private medical facility.
Chance is treated by the house doctor, and by means of his glazed-over ignorance is able to stay over in the home indefinitely. As the movie lurches forward we learn that MacLaine’s aged husband, Benjamin Rand, is a rich and powerful figure who wheels and deals in both the business and political world(s). He is a primary go-to man for the president and wields enormous influence in the American economic system.
Chance is immediately ushered into this new and exciting world and re-named Chauncey Gardiner through a series of misunderstandings prompted by his shy reticence and mindless ignorance. Chance is mistaken for a rich man with some very profound ideas. As the story continues we see Chauncey meeting with the president and eventually becoming a national sensation. MacLaine’s sexually-starved trophy wife is attracted to him and the illiterate idiot is offered a book contract even though he cannot read and write.
“Being There” is a biting satire on an American system that is run by corrupt rich people who want nothing better than to have their every whim catered to. Kosinski’s story, first published in 1970, was a bitter pill directed at the American penchant for material excess and the obsequious bootlicking of the rich and powerful.
Chauncey Gardiner – unbeknownst to him and to those who believe him to be a genius – is a reflection of what others want him to be. But the moron has no idea what he is doing and the whole thing becomes one big comedy of errors worthy of a Mr. Magoo episode.
The story is rather clear and does not have much complexity to it. Any intelligent person will be able to figure out just how such a tale functioned in the post-Watergate universe where toadies and crooks were until recently running amuck in Washington, led by a president who sought to undermine our Constitution and the Rule of Law. Useful idiots were demanded by a system whose corruption tore apart the socio-political fabric of the country.
The story is also quite prescient when we consider that the Ronald Reagan era was just a year away from the movie’s release. Many of the debased values of Ben Rand and his gospel of wealth with its unhinged contempt for the poor would be instituted during Reagan’s two terms in office; policies that continue to plague our Bushworld society.
What is significant to understand is that “Being There” is a deadly serious critique of ignorance and corruption. To take ignorance and corruption as positive values is a perversion of the moral lesson of the story.
Returning to my original point, the big-wig Brooklyn Syrian Jewish leader was telling me – a young married man trying to make his way in a very dangerous community – that in order to truly succeed I would have to pretend to be an ignorant moron. The reason for this – as was the case in the movie – is that it is necessary to stroke the egos of the rich and powerful in order to gain their confidence and trust.
This is an important lesson that has sadly, over time, turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy: when a community develops legions of Chauncey Gardiners in an intentional way, the end result will be a corrupted system that has little chance of maintaining any truly substantive accomplishments. Such a community will be organized and run by incompetents and pretenders who have no real idea who they are and what they are doing. Malice is a natural corollary to the process.
When educators and community activists are forced to adhere to the Chauncey Gardiner model they have lost the opportunity to maintain their innate rational sense, ethical standards, and intelligence. They will have nothing to offer the community and will in the end become slaves to a group of vile and mercenary leaders whose only concern is to get whatever they want.
Chauncey Gardiner was an idiot who had no idea what he was doing. He had no education and no common sense. The empty platitudes that he repeatedly articulates during the course of the movie serve to impress the venal power brokers whose chief aim is to perpetuate their own greed and self-serving corruption. They have in Chauncey a useful idiot who reinforces their malignant unscrupulousness.
So when a community leader promotes Chauncey Gardinerism as a means to get ahead, we must ask whether our system is inexorably broken.
The paradox here is that when everyone becomes Chauncey Gardiner, there is no possibility of self-reflection or critical discussion. Chauncey Gardiner is incapable of rational thought; something that benefits those who wish to retain their power with the least possible resistance. When the system breaks down in this way it is impossible to introduce reforms and solve problems to achieve an efficient working order in the community’s institutions.
The corruption of such a process is self-evident; but it can never be seriously addressed by the insiders because they have already taken on the persona of Chauncey Gardiner which resists thoughtful reflection and critical thinking.
In spite of appearances, the useful idiots now have no idea who they are and what it is they are doing. They have been conditioned to serve the rich and powerful and become violently apoplectic when confronted with wisdom and integrity. They are like the House Negro who was trained to serve the master and think of themselves as an appendage to their oppressor.
This denial of self-consciousness is intimately connected to remuneration: those who are able to profit from being Chauncey Gardiners or House Negroes have sold their souls to the highest bidder and have signed on to perpetuate the dysfunction by pretending to be ignorant boors. Only they count, there is no one else to be concerned about. “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” is just a bunch of hot air.
At some point this in-bred in-festation of stupidity and aggressive maliciousness will produce atrophy and maladjustment.
A community of Chauncey Gardiners becomes a laughing stock to those who pull the strings. To willingly relinquish your intelligence and moral sense is the mark of the pathetic and the enfeebled.
Sadly, the advice I received so many years ago was indeed accurate: the only way to “make it” in the Jewish world as a proud Sephardi was to become Chauncey Gardiner.
And today we see many Chauncey Gardiners who are in control of our religious institutions and schools. They maintain the blank stare of the Idiot Sephardim in homage to their model. Such individuals have been trained well by their mentors and have ensured that the wheels of the rich and powerful are greased and no friction is allowed to obstruct them from protecting their rapacious interests.
But as we see in “Being There,” the rich and powerful aim to subvert the moral system by undermining the Rule of Law and duplicitously imposing their interests on the rest of society; even at the expense of an orderly system. Anarchy is loosed on the community in an orgy of nihilism grounded in materialist excess. Things are irremediably broken and there is no way to repair the mess.
For the Sephardim this has meant that our heritage is to be jettisoned while the depredations of the Ashkenazi elites against us and our tradition are to be welcomed. Like Chauncey Gardiner we are expected to sleepwalk through life and act in a way that will affirm the interests of those who have for so long been persecuting us.
In a world of Chauncey Gardiners the Sephardim do not stand a chance.
David Shasha
From SHU 655, October 15, 2014