Source: What Time's the Next Swan? (1962), Ch. 1, p. 3
Context: In that wonderful musical show Knickerbocker Holiday Maxwell Anderson defined the outstanding characteristics of an American as "one who refuses to take orders!"
I think that I qualified for that, my chosen nationality, at an early age. As far back as I can remember, an expressly given order triggered instant defiance. My little mind started functioning like an IBM machine; signals flashed in my resistance center, lights flickered around my resentment glands, bell and buzzer alerted all the cunning of a five-year-old.
Strategy and tactics went to work, not to rest till they had circumvented or defied that specific order.
I don't know if that character trait was deplorable or laudable; I only know that I have never been able to lose it. And I am extremely grateful that I was too young to serve in the First World War and too old for the Second; I surely would have been court-martialed for insubordination, and expired in front of a firing squad.
Even today, at my ripe old age, if someone suggests I do something and this suggestion is tinged with an excessive amount of authority, I immediately turn into a bristling fortress of resistance.
