All Uprighteous People

by RIXFORD KNIGHT

RIXFORD KNIGHT, who lives on a farm in Jamaica, Vermont, has written on a variety of subjects in these pages. His most recent Atlantic article dealt with the etiquette of walking with a cow.

I SHOULD like to get in touch with two or three editorial writers, or congressmen, or high school valedictorians who have never claimed that “all thoughtful, well-informed people” supported their views. I am thinking of starting a league.

There are dozens of variants to this circular argument. The authority of “all decent, right-minded men and women” is often invoked. “All responsible citizens” is another favorite. Once in a while you still run across “anybody with a grain of sense in his head.” And one beaut I heard recently is “all God-fearing, lawabiding denizens of the free world.” But never yet has anyone come (Hit frankly and said: “All proper stinkers agree that the facts are as I have staled.”

When I was young and impressionable I was taught that all good boys remembered to put on their rubbers, used their handkerchiefs, and got high marks on their report cards. Lord Fauntleroy and the neighbors’ boy should be my examples. If I hoped to succeed in life and become a respected citizen I should try to be like them.

But because of some inherent perverseness the result of these teachings was the opposite of what was intended. I developed a willful and powerful aversion to those qualities which distinguished proper young men. I acquired an even more powerful distaste for the young men themselves and whenever I could I avoided such playmates and chose for companions vulgar, low, lying, deceitful fellows who had no respect for property rights or social amenities. like them I came to have a sly, furtive appearance, and nice girls crossed the road when they saw me coming.

This unfortunate aversion to the good, the true, and the beautiful, acquired in my formative years, has stuck with me still, so that now, whenever I am told that all righteous, respectable people are on one side of a question, I find myself automatically taking the opposite side. And since I hear this at least once in every debate,

I always end up on the side of murder, robbery, rape, peculation, and theft. This animosity toward everything proper has even affected my gardening habits — as when a government expert contended that all careful, foresighted growers always staked up their tomatoes.

This time-honored practice of invoking the authority of the angels would not be so bad if I could line up with the devil and stay put. But I can’t. No sooner have I adjusted myself to iniquity than my chosen side proclaims: “The whole world knows that the principles of justice for which we light will win out in the end.” It is the shuttling back and forth which is frustrating. I crossed to the side of the water witches when I was told that all intelligent, scientifically-minded people knew that the whole thing was a fake. Then my new friends assured me that only fools would deny anything so scientifically demonstrated. Reading the speeches made in the United Nations keeps me so busy dodging “all democratic, peace-loving peoples” that half the time I am carrying the ball in the wrong direction.

All intransigent scoundrels must have this experience. We should get together and do something about it.