The Capitol dome stands lit. It is July 1980. It is evening on the East Front, the marble still giving back the day’s heat. A black limousine waits at the curb with the engine running. A Capitol policeman holds a loose perimeter made mostly of his own boredom. An aide carries a leather case and a folded coat over one arm.
A family stands on the sidewalk. A father, a mother, a boy of fourteen whose feet hurt from a day of walking. A big man comes down toward the car, white hair, heavy in the shoulders, a rumpled suit, the wide face of a man who has eaten a thousand dinners he never paid for. He stands second in the line of succession to the President of the United States. He could pass the family without seeing them. Men at that height stop seeing the people on the curb. He stops. He looks at them. He says, “Good evening, folks.” Then the door, the car, the red lights going down the avenue.
The boy holds those three words for the rest of his life.
This is the thing a hero system does, and it does it so fast you miss the size of it. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the term. In The Denial of Death he argues that man builds his whole culture to outrun one piece of knowledge, that he dies, and that he carries under everything the suspicion that he is nobody, an animal who rots in the ground like the rest. A hero system answers the suspicion. It tells a man how to count. It hands him a way to feel he is an object of first value in a world that means something. Take the scheme away and the terror comes back. Give a man his place in it and he can stand at the edge of his own death without shaking.
Tip O’Neill (1912-1994) ran a hero system whose first article holds that no man is nobody.
He came up in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of a bricklayer who rose to run the city sewers and sit on the council. The parish set the boundaries of the world. The priest, the precinct, the wake, the union card, the family that had been on the block for fifty years. O’Neill went to Boston College and lost his first race, for the Cambridge City Council, in 1935. A neighbor he had known all his life, an older woman whose walk he had shoveled, told him afterward that she had voted for him though he never once asked her to. He had taken her for granted. The lesson stayed with him. People want to be asked. People want to be seen. A man who assumes them loses them, and he deserves to.
He won the next time and kept winning. He took the seat John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) left when Kennedy went to the Senate. He became Speaker of the House in 1977 and held it ten years. He fought Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) across the whole of the 1980s, called the budget cuts a war on the working man, and meant it, and then drank with Reagan after six o’clock and traded Irish stories, because the fight ran on the personal and so did the friendship and both men came out of a system old enough to hold the two at once.
Now name the value at the center of it. The word is respect. In O’Neill’s world respect lives in small acts performed in person. The handshake. The name remembered across thirty years. The wake attended for a man whose vote you lost. The favor done and the favor returned. Asking for the vote instead of assuming it. “All politics is local,” he said, and gave the line to his father, and what he meant runs deeper than electoral math. He meant that a man becomes real to you when you stand in front of him and grant him your attention. The greeting on the curb is the whole religion of the ward, pressed into three words and spent on a stranger who can do nothing for him. The boy casts no vote in his district. The boy cannot return the favor. O’Neill greets him anyway. In his scheme the strong hand recognition to the weak and ask nothing back.
But carry the word respect out of O’Neill’s world and watch it change shape in every other one.
A Marine gunnery sergeant hears it and thinks of something earned in mud and never handed over on a sidewalk. Respect runs up the chain by rank and down it by what a man does when the rounds come in. You salute the commission first and the man only after he has paid for the rest. A stranger’s good evening buys nothing on that ground.
On a trading floor respect is the number. It is the position that pays when the whole desk leans the other way, the call no one else had the stomach to make. Warmth is overhead. A man who stops on a curb to greet strangers has time he should put to better use, and the floor will price his softness within the hour.
Behind a monastery wall a monk hears the word and flinches at it. To want respect is the oldest vanity, the self stepping forward when the self should vanish. His order runs on the reverse move. He hollows out the place where the hunger to count would sit and gives the empty room to God. The small thing O’Neill spends on the boy, the thing of being seen, is the very thing this man has taken a vow to stop wanting.
On a hard corner a young man hears respect and reaches for it with his body. Respect is not being disrespected. It runs zero-sum and gets defended in real time and a slight cannot pass. The Speaker’s free greeting reads as weakness here, a thing thrown away by a man rich enough not to feel the loss.
In a quiet room a hospice nurse hears the word and thinks of a body she washes and a name she keeps using after the mind behind it has gone dark. Respect is the worth she guards in people the world has finished counting. She and O’Neill might know each other on sight. Both hand significance to the ones the powerful have stopped seeing. The same word that splits the monk from the trader closes the distance between the nurse and the Speaker.
So the word holds steady on the page and shifts underfoot. Each man speaks it with full conviction and means a different thing, because each stands inside a different scheme for how a life counts, and the scheme decides the meaning. There is no neutral respect floating above the systems. There is the gunnery sergeant’s and the trader’s and the monk’s and the nurse’s, and there is O’Neill’s, and a man raised in one of them can spend a whole evening with a man raised in another and never learn that the two of them were not discussing the same thing.
O’Neill died on January 5, 1994. The system he served has thinned since. The parish loosened its hold, the wake gave way to the cable hit, the favor lost its standing, and the personal touch he spent his life perfecting now reads to many as an old corruption dressed up as warmth. But the three words he gave the boy still do their work. The boy is a man now, and he writes, and he sets the evening down on the page. In setting it down he pays O’Neill back in O’Neill’s own currency. He remembers the name. He says it again where others can hear it.
That is the trade running both ways. The hero system grants the small man a moment of counting on a public sidewalk. The small man, holding the moment across the decades and writing it out, hands the great man a thin slice of the one thing every hero system is built to chase and none can keep. Three words on a curb at evening. A man dead thirty years. The whole religion of the ward, working at distance, working past death, doing the only thing it ever promised to do.
Good evening, folks.
