Louder!

THE United States was founded on a complaint. It was, as the framers of the Declaration of Independence were at pains to point out, a reasonable complaint, and one that took time to ripen: "All experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses . . ." That complaint got action. In fact, in an adversary proceeding that is the essence of democracy, every election poses a complaint and offers a remedy of sorts. This process of criticism is supposed to hone down, and largely has, those principles or procedures or institutions that have proved structurally sound, like towers that withstand the tempest, but need the remorseless shaping that criticism alone can provide.

Americans are, of course, still as vociferous as ever in complaining about their government; the whole antiwar protest movement is an example of that tendency. In recent years, their complaints about the private sector of the economy have received a considerable boost from the rise of consumerism in the U.S. Consumer Crusader Ralph Nader has successfully taken on big targets--the auto companies, food industry, etc.--that have long seemed impervious to the complaints of individuals. The institution of the ombudsman, long familiar in Europe, has begun to crop up in the U.S. to represent the interests of beleaguered citizens in contention with government bureaucracy. In many U.S. cities, radio and TV stations have set up special sections to deal with audience complaints about everything from landlords to late Social Security checks.

But the very fact that the common complainer feels the need for a champion is a demonstration that he feels ineffectual as an individual. When he feels like griping, the average American faces an adversary that the framers of the Constitution did not envision. It is the burgeoning mass society, a creature with a remorseless, faceless, self-declared efficiency that intimidates many Americans and renders them silent when they should be talking louder. Too many people still doubt that complaining will do any good. Those ultimately responsible for this state of affairs seem baffling and remote. Is anybody listening when an individual--as distinct from a powerful, publicity-seeking group like Nader's--seeks to air his grievances?

Department stores, city governments and auto companies all have complaint bureaus, but they are too often designed to blunt the complainer's anger, calm him down and send him away with a vague sense that he has made himself heard. In the vast distribution system, redress is lost in the ever-receding levels of responsibility. The salesgirl shrugs and says: "I just work here." A car owner takes his new-model, newly purchased car back to his dealer to complain that, say, the trunk lid no longer latches shut when slammed down. The dealer cannot fix it; it is a manufacturing defect. Is it worth the bother of writing to the Detroit manufacturer, which may or may not give satisfaction? Too often, the car owner curses, slams the lid eight times for every time it latches, and resigns himself.

Then there are the woes of city living. When the hot water goes off for the umpteenth time, the landlord's answering service (no one gets to speak to the landlord) explains smoothly: "We are working on it." A week later, the hot water fails again. The roar of garbage trucks and the clangor of manhandled galvanized garbage cans wake whole city blocks at dawn. An unidentifiable smokestack spews smoke into your bedroom window at erratic intervals. Whom to complain to? There is a bureau (whose phone number can be determined with some effort), and it promises action, even while pleading that it has only a limited number of inspectors. No doubt they try, but in most cases nothing happens, and the chimney smokes on. Better in the country? Try to get the license number of the snowmobiler who roars through your back pasture, or the motorcycling gang that snarls through a quiet country lane with many a boisterous shout.

Perhaps one of the most pressing--and frequent--struggles is man's battle against demented computers, which relentlessly ask questions that have already been answered, demand payments that have already been made and, in their vast mechanical judgment, may have already ruined your credit rating forever. The skilled complainer suggests that all you have to do is produce your records, get them copied, send them in to the computer's controller, and all will be well --but who wants to keep that kind of record? "Nobody was ever meant/ To remember or invent/ What he did with every cent," Poet Robert Frost once pointed out.

As if it were not enough to be bullied by the monstrous economy he has helped build, the American is also bullied by those who are paid to serve him. Hamlet complained of the insolence of office. Americans, in another time and in another country, can justifiably complain of the insolence of service. That insolence is real enough--the waiter who slaps down the silverware with a loud clatter, the indifferent sales-clerk who chatters with a friend while customers fidget, the taxi driver who demands that riders refrain from smoking because he suffers from asthma (or, the cab driver who insists on smoking when the passenger suffers from asthma).

The average American endures these affronts in aggrieved silence. Why? Because he knows that the waiter/clerk/driver hates his job, is studying at night school to become a lawyer, doctor, priest. Or at most he is working only in order to put his son/daughter through college. As an upwardly mobile society, the U.S. has no tradition of menial service jobs well done. There are no Jeeveses in U.S. folklore. And in the back of his mind, even while he suffers their affronts and discourtesies, the American knows that he too would hate that job, that the worker hates him because he is the man with the money, and is thinking, some day I will be sitting where he is. As a believer in the U.S. as the land of opportunity, the American cannot easily dispute that view.

The only solution to the affronts handed the citizen by manufacturers, service industries, government bodies--and, yes, neighbors--is for more Americans to complain more loudly. One complainer can easily be dismissed as a crank or a fussbudget, but the power of the complaint grows mightily with numbers. The burgeoning consumer organizations have discovered that millions of Americans want desperately to complain, but have kept silent out of either fear of rebuff or a sense of futility. The organizations have given the citizen the happy feeling that he has found a sympathetic ear and also relieved him of the awkward burden of having to make himself individually conspicuous.

That such organizations tapped a sadly stifled need is evident. Ralph Nader has received millions of letters since he set himself up as the consumer's champion. When the city of Los Angeles created a Bureau of Consumer Affairs early this year, it was inundated with 7,000 complaints in its first month. "I think that people always had complaints," explained Administrator Michael Koire. "It's just that they didn't know where to take them. Somebody would tell them to sue, they'd add up their lawyer's fees and court costs and the time it would take, and they'd just forget it. Now, if we get enough complaints about one outfit, we'll get the district attorney or the Los Angeles police in on it."

In recent years, five states--Hawaii, Nebraska, Iowa, Oregon and South Carolina--have established ombudsman offices to field citizens' complaints. A whole new category of "class" actions has become popular, as citizens go to court to sue federal, state or local governments, frequently to prevent them from despoiling the environment. Call for Action, an organization founded in New York, has put out a book indexing what number to dial for what complaint, ranging from noisy jackhammers to flooded basements (it runs to 134 pages). By happy chance, the group's founder, Mrs. Ellen Straus, is the wife of the owner of a local radio station (WMCA) and gets added clout by airing the group's most poignant complaints on her husband's radio station. The essence of the group's service is that it follows up on a complaint, calls back the city department concerned to see if anything has been done. Says Mrs. Straus: "If the complaint hasn't been taken care of, we can harass the agency involved more effectively than the complainer." Call for Action now operates through local radio and TV stations in 48 cities across the U.S.

In Boston, an outfit called Infact Systems Inc. has put out a paperbound "complaint kit" with tear-out forms declaring that this is my SECOND complaint, then THIS is MY APPEAL TO A THIRD PARTY. Another booklet, published in New York, lists the presidents of a wide range of companies, with their addresses, to whom the complainer is advised to address his complaint (the theory being that the complainer gets more action if he goes right to the top). But in this day of the form reply, that advice can be dubious. One unhappy patron who discovered bedbugs in his hotel bed and complained bitterly in writing to the company received a mollifying reply to which had been attached, accidentally, a scribbled note from some executive to his secretary that said: "Alice, send this guy the bedbug letter."

Most of all, complainers as individuals should not lose heart. They should learn to suppress that feeling of embarrassment, the worry about what other people will think of them. If the neighbors are playing their radio at a level that suggests that they are deaf, pound on the wall. Or ring their doorbell and expostulate in calm, well-reasoned tones. If a bargain gadget advertised for sale turns out to be not as advertised, arm yourself with the advertisement and demand redress. Faced with an outrageous bill for a crankcase repair, demand to see the "flatrate manual" used in the trade to standardize prices for parts and the mechanic's estimated time per job. If a taxi driver or a waiter is obnoxious, do not just give him a meager tip--give him none at all. If you are elbowed aside by some pushy character in a queue or at a counter, ask his name--it has a surprisingly sobering effect on aggressiveness. If a merry crew of jokesters and shouters make it impossible to sleep on an overnight flight, call the stewardess, and if that doesn't work, call her again, and again, and again.

Even though Americans are uneasily aware that by demanding their rights they may be discommoding other people (an overbooked hotel can only make room by evicting some other tenant, an overbooked airline by bumping some other passenger), they should complain anyway. It may not do any good this time, but maybe next time the airline/hotel will stop overbooking. There is probably no need to resort to such dramatic ploys as that of one airplane pilot who, informed by a Paris hotel that his long-booked room was not available, stripped to his underwear and lay down on a lobby sofa until the hotel management capitulated.

In fact, complaining is enhanced by a touch of imagination. The late Saul Alinsky was a master of the technique. He had his minions dump garbage on the driveway of a Chicago alderman who had refused to support improved sanitation in the northwest district and deposited dead rats on the step of Chicago city hall to dramatize the infestation of the Woodlawn neighborhood. One Eddie Campos, a plasterer from Whittier, Calif. (Nixon's home town), bought him self a $10,300 Lincoln. The ignition fell out, the air conditioning failed, the front end waggled. One day Campos took the Lincoln to the front lawn of the Ford plant in Los Angeles, set it to the torch and planted a potted lemon tree atop the charred wreck. Tenants at 210 Central Park South, about as elegant an address as one could aspire to in Manhattan, have been feeling abused ever since they moved in 3 1/2 years ago. Last month, frustrated by constant evasions by the building's management, the tenants draped their balconies over looking Central Park with bed sheets inscribed with pictures of lemons and legends of protest. A TEPEE IN THE PARK is BETTER, was one. Another proclaimed: $8,500 PER YEAR. NO HOT WATER. NO AIR CONDITIONING. NO HEAT.

Complaining can be fun, and it releases bile, which can sour the mind and the times if repressed. Above all, complaining may be important to the American spirit. The republic was founded on the principle that the common man can be heard. Lack of faith in complaint has something to do with loss of faith in justice under law, in equal treatment for the faceless man. To give up on complaint is to give in to the feeling that the distant and impersonal state or corporation has taken away a bit of the American Dream. Every complaining man or woman is reasserting that value -- the refusal to accept what is given from above, a reassertion that the common man has his rights, and all else is only to serve him. It is a -- perhaps the -- democratic boast: I will not be cowed.

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