The Tale Of A Mediocre Man - 'Taxi Driver', Ordinariness, And The Roots Of Bloody American Mayhem

The former Fashion Editor of the New York Times, Vanessa Friedman, wrote an article about mediocrity and how we seem to be mired in it.  Everywhere she looks, she sees nothing but reruns and cultural retreads in art, fashion, and literature.

That feeling of browsing your Kindle, or standing in your local Barnes & Noble, faced with yet more young adult trilogies about dystopias and tough-girl heroines, or soft-porn-for-grown-ups trilogies (or just trilogies, period), and thinking, “What is there to read?” The new mediocre.

That harrumph when you peruse the movie listings and find yourself choosing between comic-book-hero action films and old-guy action films — unless you want to go way, way across town to the one surviving and obscure art-house cinema that values conversation over abs? The new mediocre.

America has been the joke of fey, sophisticated Europeans for decades.  We are a land of universal bourgeoisie.  Our profit motive and embrace of competition, success, and financial reward; and our consequent mistrust of high culture, brilliance, and artistic achievement have made us a nation of Babbitts, self-assured, insular, and doggy followers.  

The irony of the American zeitgeist - a clawing, incessant, hardwired drive to the top while embracing mediocrity (the nice guy, the well-groomed guy, the ordinary Joe) - is not lost.  Individualism is the ethos, but the standard for ultimate recognition is slow, deliberate, unannounced regularity.  

America is the land of the Robber Barons - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan - but also a nation of bureaucrats.  There is nothing more American than the bank of government department buildings lining Independence Avenue with the warrens, mazes, and indecipherable procedures which guarantee longevity and untouchability.  Washington is a metaphor for sedate, predictable, uninspiring American life. 

 

And there is nothing more American that the rapacious, voracious capitalist hunger of the Captains of Industry, men whose desire to dominate, crush, and humiliate the opposition on the path to great wealth was legion. 

A nation of contrast, and one of perpetual frustration.  To be born with the mind, mentality, and conditions of a Walmart greeter and consigned to live in a brutally indifferent, bloody competitive environment is hell on earth.  

Arthur Miller, premier American playwright and lifelong socialist blamed capitalism for the tragedy of Willy Loman.  He, an ordinary, mediocre man was trapped by competition and the American notion of success, rising to the top of the ladder, looking down on those who have failed.  There was no way that this simple, naive, weak and idealistic man could possibly have attained the American dream.  

The system was built to accommodate him - to sweep the streets, work the lathes, collect the trash, drive the busses - but never to promote him.  America, said Miller, was an unholy, inhuman, devastating place and only the immoral, the amoral, and the emotionally deranged could succeed. 

An exaggeration perhaps, or at least the passionate idealism of a disappointed man.  America might seem that way to someone looking up, but the Darwinist jungle which produces the best and the brightest while leaving the overmatched and unable behind and which is the enabler of fabulous wealth, is the human enabling force, and the country has risen to and remained at the top because of its embrace of it. 

In Albee’s The American Dream he explores not only the falsity of the American Dream but also the status quo of the American family. As he states in the preface to the play, "It is an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen." 

 

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a film about an ordinary man who commits violence, one of those caught between the capitalist devil and the shallow waters of the ebb tide. There are more than a few suggestions of the mayhem to come - two tours with the Marines in Vietnam, driving the streets of New York alone in an insomniac prison, no education to speak of, obsession with the sewage, filth, and garbage of New York - but there must be a thousand such loose-ended, upset, and lost New Yorkers, the mediocre, impossibly outclassed, disregarded, and forgotten of the city.  Why did Bickle change from an ordinary, troubled man to a psychopathic killer?

America seems to have more than its share of the violently unhinged.  It seems as though every year brings mass, random shootings in schools, churches, and post offices.  Many of these shooters kill themselves before capture suggesting a profound mental illness, but one cannot escape Miller's enabling environment - not the capitalist one that he suggested, a socio-political economic construct contrary to and obstructing the path to a progressive Elysium; but the Darwinian one, geniuses swimming out of pools of mediocrity to rule. 

There were no serial killers among the European feudal peasantry - a system of immutable place, work, fealty, and dogged sameness - nor were there any within the old traditional Hindu caste system where prescription not independence was the ethos.  Modern societies like China and Japan have retained a socio-economic system of moral rectitude and civility within which individual creativity is recognized; and they too have managed to keep their societies sane and respectful of universal order. 

The cult of identity, so championed by the American Left, is the enabler of the country's epidemic of unhinged serial killings.  A mediocre man, living in an impossibly demanding society, and told that he, regardless of inferior breeding and intelligence, is a person of esteem and deserving of recognition is set up for the most violent antisocial behavior. The cult of identity, self-esteem, and limitless self-expression in a society which values none of that is a deceptive, deceitful, corrosive factor disassembling American social cohesiveness. 

Children are told that everyone is equal, endowed with different intelligences, abilities, and talents all on a horizontal axis none better than any other; and suddenly when they hit the adult American world, one of brutal, no-holds-barred competition, they are lost, desperate and flung back on adolescent dreams. 

No one claims that this dissolving cult of identity is uniquely responsible for mayhem, but it is certainly a precipitating factor.  The Travis Bickle character drives the streets of New York and sees the bottom of society - endless blocks of filth, insanity, and hopelessness.  He is not many steps away, he feels, and his anger is but the first step to turning his hatred into action.  It isn't just the filth and ordure around him that upsets his delicate balance, but the fact that he is already mired in it. 

Most ordinary, mediocre Americans lead predictably sedate and uninvolved lives; but there are many for whom the stark contrasts of American society are disassembling and unfathomable.  A bit of twisted DNA, some indifferent parenting, low intelligence, and the seductiveness of identity and self-esteem, have disastrous consequences, out of which serial killers emerge.