Kvetcher in the Rye

Jerome David Salinger, 1919-2010

By Greg Palast · Wednesday, February 3, 2010

In the sixth grade, the Boys’ Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye—I think because it had the word “fuck” in it.

Since the Boys’ Vice-Principal hadn’t read the book, he couldn’t tell me why. But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon, who wanted to protect the need of a child to run free. That’s, of course, how the word fuck got into Salinger’s book.

For the five percent of you who haven’t read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn’t want little kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an irreversible loss of her childhood innocence.

Which is where the title came from. Salinger’s Caulfield, pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a cliff’s-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the edge, Caulfield’s job would be to catch them before they fell.

Any other job would just turn you into a “phony,” that is, an adult. All adults were phonies who took jobs they hated, taught catechisms they didn’t believe and lived lives of self-inflicted disappointments, while pretending it was all OK. 

Nearly half a century after I covered up Salinger’s book, I thought I’d read it to my twins. They were now 11, in the 6th grade.

But I couldn’t. In his 1956 book, Salinger had railed against a post-war world of boys in school blazers trying to get to “first base.” America itself was an adolescent, and despite the police beatings of marchers in Alabama, despite the drills we did weekly to prepare for the Russian nuclear attack, America was still weirdly, optimistically childlike.

We knew then that the world could only get better: we would go to the moon. JFK announced the Alliance for Progress; and Paul McCartney wanted to hold our hand. Every meanie, like the police in Selma, was met by a legion of victorious innocents led by Martin Luther King. So we all held hands in a circle while Pete Seeger strummed, “We shall overcome.”

Then we fell over the cliff. A bullet through the skull replaced Kennedy with Nixon. “We shall overcome” was replaced with the vicious “Southern Strategy;” the Cold War exploded in hot jungles; then came the idiot wasteland of the regimes of Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bushes, a degenerative march as the machine of America rusted and died.

And here we are today, begging for spare parts from China and my daughter glued to YouTube videos of Lady Gaga’s crotch, and a President, telegenic and painfully hollow, playing the lost and ineffectual shepherd over an electorate divided between the terrified and the greedy. In place of prophets, we are offered a caravan of kvetching clowns piling out of the Volkswagen on MSNBC.

There’s no way to wipe the fuck off this smeared planet. I’m supposed to try. I’m an investigative reporter, meaning I have a commitment to the childish belief that if I shout loud enough, I can warn people away from the cliff’s edge.

Well, it’s better than a real job, but no less “phony,” no less of a petty illusion.

I’m holding this book, the brown wrapper lost, and I know it would just be laughable, inscrutably ancient to those wisened, worldly children of mine. I’ve put it back on my shelf.

You stand on the cliff edge and there’s no one left to catch.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  Sign up for Greg Palast’s investigative reports at http://www.GregPalast.com