A man after my own heart, Peter Kramer of Hillsborough, North Carolina, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review questioning the novelist Philip Roth for describing George W. Bush as “a man unfit to run a hardware store.” Mr. Kramer’s point is that Roth could not have chosen a poorer comparison, and in his letter he remarks that his own local hardware-store owner, a fellow named Wesley Woods, is one of the most trusted and helpful men in the community and that perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea if he, Mr. Woods, ran for president. I had the same thought when I read Roth’s misguided statement: Nowhere is competence more on display in America than in our hardware stores. What most of us bring to these stores is our vast ignorance about the small mending tasks that life puts before us and that we, left to our own devices, could easily turn into catastrophes, possibly even felonies. Almost always this ignorance is met at the hardware store with patient good sense and magisterial know-how.
Roth’s ignorance on this point suggests that he himself doesn’t go in much for home repair. His comparison reminds me of a telephone conversation I once had with the economist Thomas Sowell, in the middle of which I told a joke about a plane in trouble whose pilot has to call on a single passenger to jump out without a parachute so the plane can be landed safely. The captain, over the loudspeaker, remarks that he and the crew have decided to ask that person to jump who is of the least importance to society. At which point, the punch line goes, a disc jockey and a used-car dealer get up in the middle of the aisle and start fighting.
Complete silence from Professor Sowell. When I asked him why he didn’t like the joke, he replied, “I should have preferred it if the punch line were ‘at which point a psychotherapist and the curator of a contemporary art museum got up in the middle of the aisle and started fighting.'” In this same Sowellian vein, I should have preferred Philip Roth to say that George W. Bush hadn’t the competence of a university English teacher or a political pundit.
Competence is a quality I much esteem. I reject the phrase “merely competent,” considering it either an oxymoron or possibly an ironic witticism, like “merely dazzlingly beautiful” or “merely a genius.” My own pocket definition of competence is quiet mastery.
Encountering incompetence in quotidian dealings–when, say, one has to call a repairman back three times to get one’s refrigerator fixed properly, or a physician has badly misdiagnosed an illness or injury with serious consequences–inevitably gives me those terrible decline-and-fall feelings that lend life an unpiquant air of hopelessness.
I have known a few admirable people who seem omnicompetent. Whether the job is prose composition or building bookshelves, playing guitar or putting up preserves, they see what has to be done and calmly do it.
Admiration in my case is also close to envy. I envy them because I don’t have lots of competence myself.
When I lived in the South I came across a number of people immensely competent at things I wouldn’t even attempt, lest I maim myself. I knew men who could tune their own cars, do their own electrical work; in one instance, I knew a man who, on weekends, was building his own house, from, as they say (certainly I’m not entitled to say it), scratch.
As no one confidently thinks him- or herself brilliant or beautiful, I wonder if many people are deservedly confident of their competence. Lots of people–consultants, psychoanalysts, pollsters–have to put up a strong show of confidence in their competence if only because it is the basis on which they get paid. A deeply hesitant brain surgeon would be greatly nervous-making. Nor do you want a plumber who tells you he’s never had much luck fixing toilets like yours.
When one runs into real competence, the world seems a fine place. After making a few hopeless calls recently to obtain two mildly obscure classical music CDs–one of the piano music of Reynaldo Hahn, the other of Judeo-Baroque music sung by the Boston Camerata–I found a man named Eduardo, at Tower Records, who not only knew the music I wanted but was able to supply me with the phone number of the producing company of the Reynaldo Hahn recording because his store didn’t stock their products. Ah, I was in the secure embrace of competence.
Eduardo ought to join with Wesley Woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina, to form a ticket for the 2008 presidential election. I can’t of course speak for Philip Roth, but they’d have my vote.
–Joseph Epstein
