Organized Anarchy

Our town has an anarchist bookstore. Recently it moved a few blocks, and is now across the street from my office. The Friendly Jerk didn’t know they’d been around before that, so I went across the street to ask them how long they’d been in business. (The answer: 8 years.) When I returned, I sent the Friendly Jerk this IM: “Excerpt from my 2045 memoirs: ‘Until that moment, I'd never given thought to becoming an anarchist. However, after a chance conversation with a coworker, I wandered into the shop to ask simply how long they'd been in business. Within weeks the new ideology took root in my heart and I slipped my capitalist chains for good.’”

But that sort of raises an interesting question: if you were to write a memoir in 40 or 50 years, what would the chapter about 2009 say? The “big” events of this year might not really be that important, and the “small” ones end up being of primary importance. I’m always struck by the way memoirists write of their failed marriage. The good ones take the blame, like Alan Greenspan in “Age of Turbulence” and Bill Veeck in “Veeck as in Wreck,” but even then they barely make note of it. Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, “An American Life,” is nearly 1,000 long, yet his only mention of Jane Wyman is one sentence that basically says, “I married Jane Wyman, but it didn’t work out, and we got divorced.” At the time of his marriage, though, I bet it didn’t seem like a one-sentence throw-away. Here I am living my life, thinking it matters, but really I could sit down to write an autobiography and completely skip my entire time in Kansas. “In 2005 we moved to Kansas, and in 2009 we moved out.” Or maybe even, “We got married in 2001, and after stops in a few states, found ourselves in [future home state] by [future date].” No mention of Kansas at all. Or maybe, like Theodore Roosevelt said of North Dakota, I’ll say, “I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in Kansas.”