A little more than 60 years ago, conductor Arturo Toscanini gave his first televised concert, leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra. April 4 will mark the 52nd anniversary of his last public performance. It brings to mind the maze Toscanini left behind.
It starts and ends with music, of course, but in between, there's this man stamping his feet and waving his arms to get his way. There are powerful disagreements about his musical gift — as well as decades of musical tradition and remarkable history.
Perhaps the most internationally famous conductor ever, Toscanini rose to instant stardom when he put down his cello and jumped up to the podium to fill in for the conductor during a performance of Verdi's opera Aida. It was 1886; he was 19, and it was the first time he'd ever conducted.
The last time he'd conduct a live performance was in 1954, 68 years later. By then, he was the first conductor to have appeared regularly on television, and was certainly considered the first true media star of the conducting world
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31.3.08
Love Me, Love my Books
From Sunday's NYTimes.
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)
Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”
Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”
Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”
James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”
Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”
But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”
Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.
For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)
Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”
Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”
Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”
James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”
Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”
But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”
Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.
For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”
Elizabeth Drew
Molehill Politics
By Elizabeth Drew
The Democrats didn't expect so much pain. The assumption was that out of a patch of good candidates one would emerge to take on an inevitably weak Republican—the field was seen as lacking and George Bush as a drag on the party—and defeat him in what everyone knew was a Democratic year. But this has been the year of the unexpected. Now, anguished Democratic Party leaders fear that the increasingly bloody struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will continue until the end of the primaries or, worse, play out further at their convention in late August—which could only benefit the Republicans' putative, and unexpected, nominee, John McCain.
The Democrats' contest has changed from simply a fierce fight for "pledged delegates," who are elected in the primaries and caucuses, which Obama is winning, into a battle to convince the as-yet-uncommitted superdelegates which candidate would be stronger in the general election—regardless of who has won the most pledged delegates. This is an issue injected into the contest by the Clinton campaign. Mathematically, there now appears to be no way for Clinton to catch up to Obama in pledged delegates; the final decision will be made by the superdelegates, who are under extreme pressure from both sides.
In this fight, the Clinton camp is the more aggressive of the two, and it's adept at what might be called molehill politics: making a very big deal in the press about something that's a very small deal—such as a single word in a mailing or a slip-up by an aide. Clinton's strategists pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride. Clinton's approach resembles her tactics in the White House, in which her inclination was to attack (which caused a number of problems, and was one of the reasons her health care bill was defeated). The Obama camp has sometimes been slow, and even reluctant, to respond, because if he attacks her personally (which the Clinton campaign would like him to do), he's not Barack Obama anymore. Moreover, Obama takes care not to come across as the "angry black"—a stereotype he does not fit, but that could be imposed upon him by others.
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While it's true that the two remaining Democratic candidates have few substantive differences, they have very different approaches to campaigning, which give us clues about the differences in how they would govern—and that, after all, is what this whole thing is, or should be, about. It's useful to try to imagine these people in the White House, and, from their campaigning, to try to figure what they will be like there: how they will use power; how well they would sustain their appeal over a considerable period of time.
It's been long said among politicians that "the Clintons will do anything to win." Unfortunately, they are increasingly proving the point. As the primaries in Texas and Ohio approached, the Clinton campaign, which has a tendency to announce its next steps, said that it would use a "kitchen sink" strategy against Obama—and so it did: with the famous and apparently effective "red phone" ad questioning his fitness to be commander in chief; and in frequent and heavy-handed conference calls to reporters (an innovation), in which Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson makes charges against Obama, raises questions about him, or moves "goal posts" designating what Obama has to do to win. (Obama "has to win Pennsylvania," which few think is likely.) This propaganda makes its way onto cable and other news outlets. But where does, or should, a "kitchen sink" strategy belong in a presidency?
Hillary Clinton is employing conventional politics, while Obama is trying to create a new kind of politics. Similarly, as they respond to the country's desire for change, they have very different concepts of what "change" means: briefly, for Obama it means changing the very zeitgeist of Washington, creating a new way to get things done by building coalitions that transcend longstanding political divisions. For Clinton it means passing bills—though sometimes she has suggested that it means electing a woman president. ("I embody change," she said in a debate in New Hampshire.)
That Obama's style didn't work so well in Ohio and Texas, on March 4, is not surprising, although he is likely to end up with more delegates in Texas, thanks to the caucuses that followed the traditional primary voting. (The Clinton campaign is now challenging the outcome of the caucus voting.) Ohio in particular was not a welcome place for him. It's a meat-and-potatoes state (I grew up there) whose voters demand practical solutions and are not given to the romance or the leap of imagination that Obama's campaign involves.
The demographics there were not in his favor: it's older and whiter than most other states, and has a higher population of women (to whom Clinton played heavily) than any other state the two candidates had contested. A declining rust-belt state, it also has a larger number of discontented blue-collar workers than any other state in which the two candidates had campaigned before. And unlike, say, Iowa, it has a higher percentage of blacks and a history of racial conflict. Obama had had a streak of eleven straight victories, but there was always a question of how he would fare when he hit the industrial states.
Obama's victories in Maryland and Virginia on February 12, and then Wisconsin a week later, showed him gaining voters among Clinton's constituency of women, white men, and blue-collar workers, which suggested a major reshaping of the race; but that trend stopped in Ohio and in Texas—where Bill Clinton warned the voters that they had to keep his wife in the race. Obama did poorly with Hispanics, gaining only 30 percent of their vote in Texas to Clinton's 63 percent. If Obama could not win the votes of blue-collar workers and Hispanics in the general election—and this is not to say that he couldn't—that could seriously damage his chances.
That the presumed neophyte Obama has stood toe-to-toe with the Clintons (for all of Hillary Clinton's complaints about being "ganged up on," Obama has had to face both Clintons every day), has beaten them more often than not, and still might prevail is in itself remarkable. But in one important way his campaigning has fallen short. A great many people who follow politics closely simply don't "get" Obama, and can become quite angry about him. (This election is dividing friends and families like no other I've seen.) They see him as offering empty rhetoric, as simply building a movement, even a cult; the huge crowds he has drawn, his rock-star appeal, have only reinforced these suspicions. Actually, Obama is a serious student of policy—even, in the words of one adviser, a "geek"—and highly informed as a result. In Wisconsin, in some frustration—as Clinton was calling him "a talker, not a doer"—Obama said:
Everybody has got a ten-point plan on everything. You go to Senator Clinton's Web site, my Web site, they look identical.... The problem is not the lack of proposals. The question is, who can bring Democrats, independents, and Republicans into a working majority to bring about change. That's what we're doing in this campaign. This is what a working majority looks like. That's how we're going to move the country forward. That's what I offer that she can't do.
Obama has a big idea: he believes that in order to change Washington and to get some of those ten-point programs through, and to reduce the power of the lobbies and "special interests," he must first build a large coalition—Democrats, independents, Republicans, whoever—to support him in his effort to change things. He has figured out that he cannot make the kinds of changes he's talking about if he has to fight for 51–49 majorities in Congress. Therefore, he's trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the "old bulls," according to a campaign aide, "will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change." Thus, Obama talks about working "from the bottom up" to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it's not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he's building.
To understand Obama, one has to recognize the importance to him of his days as a community organizer in Chicago: he worked with churches, and "in the streets," to organize people to take on the powers-that-be in order to improve their living conditions and get jobs. An Obama adviser told me, "His being a community organizer is the fundamental insight and philosophy of his campaign." Thus, Obama has a fresh, even revolutionary idea about how to govern. The inspiring speeches have a far-sighted and pragmatic goal.
Being an organizer at heart—though he also practiced law in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for ten years—in the first quarter of his campaign Obama focused on setting up campaign organizations in many states and raising money, mainly through small contributions via the Internet. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, raised money from the top, so that many contributors "maxed out" early.
Obama's ability to inspire people, to draw tremendous crowds, has carried him a long way, but even though he began to season his speeches with talk about programs, he failed, in Ohio in particular, to clearly connect what he was saying to individual people's lives. He didn't bring the rhetoric down to earth, translate it into something real that voters could understand. And I think this is one reason he lost. Clinton, by contrast, got across that she was "a fighter" (her new self-description) who would produce "results for America" (her new theme) and would improve the lives of many Ohioans; she talked in specifics about what she would do, and made it all seem real. Since then, Obama has been dealing much more in specifics.
Obama's wonkish side led him early on to steep himself in position papers on numerous issues, from defense policy to health care to climate change, and from April to December of 2007 he gave speeches describing in detail how he would approach various issues. It was at this time that the press was describing him as "flat." And then he lit up the political world by giving an extraordinary speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 10, 2007. The last to speak, he roused the audience, and made some subtle digs at Clinton:
This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calculation, but by conviction; when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose—a higher purpose. And I run for the Presidency of the United States of America because that's the party America needs us to be right now.
Obama has been accused of being all flash, and of not having done much in the Senate. His record in the three and a half years he has been there suggests someone serious about the job: he worked on a nuclear nonproliferation bill that passed and backed a number of policy changes to help veterans, including more medical care for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, assistance for homeless veterans, and the extension of tax credits for military families. He pushed through the Senate a major bill on ethics reform; and introduced legislation in January 2007 to stop, or if that failed, limit funds for the surge. He also worked with the conservative Republican Tom Coburn in a successful effort to get Congress to impose transparency on government expenditures so that anyone can look them up. The criticism that he hasn't done more also overlooks the fact that during his first two years in the Senate, he was ninety-ninth in seniority and in the minority party. Already a celebrity when he reached Washington, he was in fact careful to be humble, and to seek the advice of his elders. (Just as Hillary Clinton did when she got to the Senate.)
As for Obama's often-questioned record as an eight-year Illinois state senator, James Warren, a managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, says,
The caricature of him as a neophyte legislator with a modest record is unfair. He was very hard-working and effective, often against significant political opposition and amid scant media attention. Through forging coalitions, he got bona fide, important legislation through on taping of police interrogations, racial profiling, ethics reform, and the earned income tax credit.
The Clinton campaign's false assumption—based on a 350-page, state-by-state study in the summer of 2007 by key strategist Mark Penn—that Clinton's victory was "inevitable" led to a series of mistakes: (1) presenting herself as the "inevitable" nominee; (2) prematurely running a general election campaign; (3) assuming that the race would be over on February 5—Super Tuesday; and (4) believing that a number of small states that held caucuses could be skipped. And if Penn's strategy didn't work there was no Plan B. It's never a good idea to have a pollster in an important policy position in a campaign, since he or she can design the polling to get the answers he or she wants, as some believed Penn had done in the Clinton White House. (Hillary Clinton brought him in after the electoral disaster of 1994.) The Clinton campaign has been divided and sometimes almost paralyzed by internal feuding among outsized egos. By contrast, this hasn't happened in the Obama campaign: Obama deliberately picked congenial people and instructed his staff that he wanted "no drama."
In early March, Clinton went from, in a debate, "I'm honored...to be here with Barack Obama...absolutely honored" to, a day and a half later, angrily, shouting, "Shame on you, Barack Obama." In that instance, she was engaging in molehill politics: a flyer on trade that the Obama campaign had sent out quoted her as saying that the North American Free Trade Agreement had been a "boon" to the United States' economy. The use of the word "boon," an accidental error, was taken from Newsday, which put in quotes the gist of her remarks.[1] Obama replied calmly. "Senator Clinton has...constantly sent out negative attacks on us, email, robo-calls, flyers, television ads, radio calls, and we haven't whined about it because I understand that is the nature of these campaigns."
Clinton's frequent switching of tactics and personas raises the question of who she is and why she's so changeable: employing a Southern accent in a Selma, Alabama, church; dropping her g's while touring in Appalachia; sounding something like a cowboy in Wyoming ("concerns that keep ya up at night"), and then back to a Southern accent in Mississippi. Clinton's variability does not mean that she lacks her own core belief about the need to help improve people's lives. But it suggests that she is not a natural politician and is willing to try almost anything, while her feuding staff gives her conflicting advice. As a result, her campaign has had no overall message, and her themes have shifted almost by the week. The disorder within her own campaign team raises questions about how she would govern.
Clinton believes that the issue of health care—in which there is one substantive difference between them—works to her advantage. She brings it up often and even harped on it in the last debate, in Cleveland, on February 26, where she came across as the dinner guest who just won't drop a subject. She argues that for health care to be universal, people must be required to participate in the plan. Obama argues that if the cost of the new insurance is low enough, people will participate. But the great debate on this issue is phony, for Clinton has refused to say how she would enforce her plan (and states that have tried enforcement programs have failed); moreover, everyone knows that campaign plans change once they reach the White House, and political compromises are made.
In debating NAFTA, the other big issue in the Ohio campaign, both candidates pandered to hard-up workers, whom the labor left has convinced that the treaty is the cause of their woes. Both pledged to renegotiate the treaty, which could cause large problems with numerous other countries, and may not even be possible. Clinton tried to disavow the treaty, despite her several past comments praising it—it had been one of her husband's major triumphs—while Obama chided her for being selective about which of her husband's achievements she wants to take credit for. But then the Clinton campaign was blessed by a report on Canadian television that one of Obama's advisers had met with a Canadian official and told him, in effect, not to worry about the heated rhetoric that Obama was using about NAFTA. Exactly what happened in this meeting—many foreign governments get in touch with campaigns to find out what's going on—remains unclear (though if the adviser did say this he was probably speaking the truth). But the Obama campaign mishandled the affair by denying for a few days that there had been a meeting. Meanwhile, Clinton pounded away, to her great benefit.
Hillary Clinton's ten-point victory in Ohio was a testament to her exceptional resilience (she sometimes went on only three hours of sleep, yet most of the time managed to look fresh and enthusiastic) and her determination when her back is to the wall. She seemed a more confident campaigner, and it helped her, as it had in New Hampshire, that before the voting there was much press babble to the effect that if she didn't win in Ohio and Texas she'd have to get out of the race. Such talk serves to bring out her followers, especially women, to rescue her. Also, race had a part in the Ohio results. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that race mattered more in Ohio than in any other primary thus far.
From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has suggested—first in whispers by Clinton aides and then, starting earlier this year, heading into the Iowa caucuses, aloud by Clinton herself, and it continues—that Obama hasn't been "vetted." This smear is intended to suggest that there are "things there" in Obama's past (left unspecified) that could cause him real problems. Yet despite their own efforts—every campaign has "oppo" (for opposition) research—thus far the Clinton campaign has turned up nothing new about Obama. Warren, the Tribune editor, says, "His life has been very rigorously inspected by the Chicago papers, and they've been pretty tough on him. The idea that he needs to be vetted a lot more by a heretofore compliant press is baloney."
In fact the Tribune had already revealed in November 2006 something that the Clinton campaign makes much of: that Obama made arrangements in 2005 with Tony Rezko, a Chicago businessman, which yielded the Obamas extra yard space for a house they were buying—an action that Obama has numerous times described as "a mistake," and "bone-headed." At the time of the Obamas' purchase, Rezko was under grand jury investigation, and Obama has admitted it showed poor judgment on his part to do business with him because Rezko was a contributor and Obama himself was in politics. Obama recently told the Tribune that Rezko had raised more money for his earlier races than he had previously disclosed: about $250,000 in all. Rezko has not contributed to Obama's presidential campaign; but unfortunately for Obama, Rezko's trial began on the day before the Ohio and Texas primaries. Wolfson had a field day with this in his conference calls, and the press showed a renewed interest in Obama's dealings with Rezko.
On 60 Minutes the Sunday before the March 4 primaries, Clinton said that Obama was not a Muslim, "as far as I know." And on the morning after the Ohio and Texas primaries, Clinton said, icily, that now there were "new questions" about Obama, which the superdelegates should know or should have known about. She did not specify which questions she had in mind.
Shortly after that, the issue of race, which had emerged only around the margins of the Democratic contest, exploded. Some reporters felt the Clintons were making sure that Obama, who is of mixed race, was known as the black candidate. Hillary Clinton commented in a debate, "isn't it wonderful" to have a woman and an African-American in the race. (Obama could only smile gamely.) She has made similar remarks elsewhere. And there had been Bill Clinton's comments in South Carolina, such as his saying, after Obama won by a huge margin, that Jesse Jackson had won the state, too. Also noticeable was the series of Clinton allies making what could most kindly be put as racially insensitive remarks—among them Bill Shaheen, husband of the former governor of New Hampshire and co-chair of Clinton's campaign (he stepped down); BET founder Bob Johnson; and Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.
And then, along came Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984, saying that Obama was "lucky" to be black, because that's how he'd gotten where he had. With Obama not running as the "black candidate," and not belonging to the civil rights generation, many people, perhaps naively, had thought that the issue of race could be avoided. But now this most painful subject in American life was squarely before the country.
Clinton, who had at first given a tepid response to Ferraro's comment, saying, "Well, I do not agree with that," and tried to equate both campaigns in "veering off" into the personal, had to go further. At a meeting on March 12 with a group of black publishers, someone brought up Bill Clinton's South Carolina remark and asked her how she could regain the trust of the African-American community. Mrs. Clinton replied that she was "sorry if anyone was offended," and then added, "We can be proud of both Jesse Jackson and Senator Obama."
Right on top of the Ferraro episode came—not coincidentally, some observers think—the release on television of some particularly inflammatory statements by Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—"No, no, no. Not God bless America. God damn America." Such preaching is not uncommon in black churches and Wright's is milder than some others. That Obama attended Wright's church—the biggest and most influential black church in Chicago, a church that had done a lot of civic good—does not at all signify that he shared these particular pastoral views. Obama has had no part in the angry-black world. The controversy over Wright was not a new issue, and Obama had dropped him from giving the convocation speech at his announcement that he was running for president.
But, as always, pictures made the difference, as did the reality of what Wright had been saying. Obama's speech on race, in Philadelphia on March 18, was both a necessity and an opportunity. His description of his background as Kansas white and Kenya black, of being raised by white grandparents, and his frank and searing description of the anger of both blacks and whites over the subject of race enabled him to define himself as not simply the "black" candidate, and to forcefully restate his position as the candidate of unity. His explanation that he found some of Wright's fiery sermons "not only wrong but divisive," while he refused to "disown" him, made both moral and political sense. "This time," he said repeatedly, the country must grapple with the issues that set the two races apart. He took on a big burden.
Many Clinton people feel that it was a disastrous mistake to skip so many caucuses, which allowed Obama to rack up delegates—this was in part a result of Penn's planning; in part it reflected the fact that Obama's campaign is better at organizing than Clinton's; and in part it was because Clinton herself, since her big loss in Iowa, has made it clear she dislikes caucuses, even portraying them as somewhat illegitimate. So, out of necessity, she and her husband campaigned hard for the Wyoming caucus on Saturday, March 8, and Obama beat her 59–40.
Particularly shameless after all their attacks on Obama, including the charge that he was unfit to be commander in chief, were the unsubtle hints by the Clintons, just before the Mississippi primary on March 11, that Hillary Clinton might put Obama—the front-runner—on her ticket. Their remark was demeaning to Obama, but also meant to suggest to Mississippi blacks and others that they could have it both ways. Obama made fun of their ploy, and sought to make it clear that this was a no-go.
In any event, Obama won 90 percent of the black vote in perhaps the most racially divided state in the country. Seeking not to undermine Obama's claim to be a new kind of politician, his campaign has so far been cautious in its response to kitchen-sink politics. His campaign leaders have called for the release of Clinton's tax returns and her White House records, but there is plenty of other material that could be telling, including Bill Clinton's pardons (the National Archives says that he is holding up the release of papers about them) and the contributors to his library and his foundation. There are also questions of Bill Clinton's curious business deals since he left office.[2] (So much for having been "vetted.")
Members of the Obama team have also been raising questions about Hillary Clinton's assertions of her "experience," particularly in foreign policy. They point out that she didn't have security clearance in the White House, and could not attend National Security Council meetings. They have also been taking apart her claims of specific foreign policy successes, for example her assertion that "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," a claim that even Northern Ireland officials debunked recently. Or her claim that "I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo." Of this Greg Craig, an Obama adviser and former director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning in the Clinton administration, who is now for Obama, has said that the borders were opened the day before Hillary Clinton arrived in Macedonia where she would have conducted such negotiations.
In her efforts to paint Obama as unfit to be the commander in chief, Clinton has recklessly gone so far as to argue that she and McCain are readier than Obama is: "Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience...I will bring a lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002." Thus she dismisses Obama's claim that he had shown better judgment in 2002 by opposing the Iraq war. She has never come up with a plausible explanation of her vote to authorize the war because there isn't one. It won't do to say, as she has, that "if I would have known then what I know now," because there was ample reason to know then. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew enough to strongly urge his colleagues to vote against the resolution; and he was one of twenty-two Democratic senators to do so. It was widely understood that Bush was intent on going to war. Clinton is known to have wavered on how to vote, and, like other Democrats, was advised by Democratic consultants to play it safe—to not cast a vote that might damage her political future. The irony is, of course, that she did just that.
Clinton took other steps, such as joining the Armed Services Committee, to protect herself from the sexist notion that a woman might be soft on national security. Early this year, Maureen Dowd reported that Clinton's aides were telling people that she would be a tougher leader than her husband, and "less skittish about using military power." A number of people, including former Clinton White House aides, worry that if elected Hillary Clinton might turn out to be a "Warrior Queen."
As of this writing, the Democrats are still trying to figure out what to do about the renegade voting in Michigan and Florida. A solution is complicated by Clinton's insistence on breaking Democratic Party rules by seating the delegates in those states, particularly in Florida. When I asked a close Clinton ally and adviser about this matter recently, he replied, "Rules? Rules? The rules are what people say they are. This isn't law. This isn't the Supreme Court."
At this point, Obama has about 150 more pledged delegates than Clinton, and the election expert Tad Devine says that even if Clinton wins Pennsylvania, on April 22—as she is expected to—and whatever happens in Florida and Michigan, when all the voting is done, in June, Obama will probably still have at least one hundred more pledged delegates. (Michigan is closer to settling the matter; several strategists are suggesting that Florida delegates be given a half vote, netting Clinton nineteen delegates rather than none—instead of having a civil war.)
Clinton leads in the superdelegates—having an estimated 248 to Obama's 212 (several of Clinton's signed on when she was "inevitable"); but she still lags behind Obama overall. A consensus is forming among leading Democrats that the nomination should be decided on the basis of who has the most pledged delegates; their main concern is that the outcome appear fair. If Clinton has won the popular vote, which is a possibility but difficult (at this point Obama is ahead by 700,000 votes), or most of the big states (including, presumably, Florida and Michigan), the Clinton campaign will argue, those factors should prevail. The Obama people argue that most of the "big states"—New York, Massachusetts, California—will vote Democratic in the general election anyway, and that Obama has won some important "swing states," such as Iowa, Missouri, and Virginia, as well as more states overall.
Most of the leading Democrats want to avoid a situation in which Clinton somehow wrests the nomination from Obama while he is ahead in delegates. This would leave the hundreds of thousands of people whom he has brought into the political system for the first time disillusioned—and an uproar could ensue. On March 16, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will chair the convention, said firmly, "It's a delegate race." According to Pelosi, "The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee." This translates into a preference, shared with many House Democrats, for Obama to head the party ticket. Pelosi was clearly unfazed by the recent storm over race.
The superdelegates, especially the elected politicians, are worrying that the party might be cleaved in two. A large number of them favored Obama early on, and still do. A senior House Democrat told me that support for Obama is based on three things: concern that the animosity of Republicans toward Hillary Clinton would motivate them to go out and vote against the Democrats; that Obama attracts independents, which the national ticket will need; and that Obama gets the votes of blacks in overwhelming numbers, which can help in many districts as well as nationally.
Being politicians, the Capitol Hill Democrats who hadn't already committed themselves waited to see what would happen on Super Tuesday; then they waited to see what would happen in Ohio and Texas on March 4; now they are waiting to see what will happen in Pennsylvania, and also Michigan and Florida. They are hoping that the delegate race will somehow resolve itself so that they won't have to deal with a messy situation.
By Elizabeth Drew
The Democrats didn't expect so much pain. The assumption was that out of a patch of good candidates one would emerge to take on an inevitably weak Republican—the field was seen as lacking and George Bush as a drag on the party—and defeat him in what everyone knew was a Democratic year. But this has been the year of the unexpected. Now, anguished Democratic Party leaders fear that the increasingly bloody struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will continue until the end of the primaries or, worse, play out further at their convention in late August—which could only benefit the Republicans' putative, and unexpected, nominee, John McCain.
The Democrats' contest has changed from simply a fierce fight for "pledged delegates," who are elected in the primaries and caucuses, which Obama is winning, into a battle to convince the as-yet-uncommitted superdelegates which candidate would be stronger in the general election—regardless of who has won the most pledged delegates. This is an issue injected into the contest by the Clinton campaign. Mathematically, there now appears to be no way for Clinton to catch up to Obama in pledged delegates; the final decision will be made by the superdelegates, who are under extreme pressure from both sides.
In this fight, the Clinton camp is the more aggressive of the two, and it's adept at what might be called molehill politics: making a very big deal in the press about something that's a very small deal—such as a single word in a mailing or a slip-up by an aide. Clinton's strategists pounce on whatever opportunity presents itself to attack Obama, and try to knock him off his own message, and his stride. Clinton's approach resembles her tactics in the White House, in which her inclination was to attack (which caused a number of problems, and was one of the reasons her health care bill was defeated). The Obama camp has sometimes been slow, and even reluctant, to respond, because if he attacks her personally (which the Clinton campaign would like him to do), he's not Barack Obama anymore. Moreover, Obama takes care not to come across as the "angry black"—a stereotype he does not fit, but that could be imposed upon him by others.
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While it's true that the two remaining Democratic candidates have few substantive differences, they have very different approaches to campaigning, which give us clues about the differences in how they would govern—and that, after all, is what this whole thing is, or should be, about. It's useful to try to imagine these people in the White House, and, from their campaigning, to try to figure what they will be like there: how they will use power; how well they would sustain their appeal over a considerable period of time.
It's been long said among politicians that "the Clintons will do anything to win." Unfortunately, they are increasingly proving the point. As the primaries in Texas and Ohio approached, the Clinton campaign, which has a tendency to announce its next steps, said that it would use a "kitchen sink" strategy against Obama—and so it did: with the famous and apparently effective "red phone" ad questioning his fitness to be commander in chief; and in frequent and heavy-handed conference calls to reporters (an innovation), in which Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson makes charges against Obama, raises questions about him, or moves "goal posts" designating what Obama has to do to win. (Obama "has to win Pennsylvania," which few think is likely.) This propaganda makes its way onto cable and other news outlets. But where does, or should, a "kitchen sink" strategy belong in a presidency?
Hillary Clinton is employing conventional politics, while Obama is trying to create a new kind of politics. Similarly, as they respond to the country's desire for change, they have very different concepts of what "change" means: briefly, for Obama it means changing the very zeitgeist of Washington, creating a new way to get things done by building coalitions that transcend longstanding political divisions. For Clinton it means passing bills—though sometimes she has suggested that it means electing a woman president. ("I embody change," she said in a debate in New Hampshire.)
That Obama's style didn't work so well in Ohio and Texas, on March 4, is not surprising, although he is likely to end up with more delegates in Texas, thanks to the caucuses that followed the traditional primary voting. (The Clinton campaign is now challenging the outcome of the caucus voting.) Ohio in particular was not a welcome place for him. It's a meat-and-potatoes state (I grew up there) whose voters demand practical solutions and are not given to the romance or the leap of imagination that Obama's campaign involves.
The demographics there were not in his favor: it's older and whiter than most other states, and has a higher population of women (to whom Clinton played heavily) than any other state the two candidates had contested. A declining rust-belt state, it also has a larger number of discontented blue-collar workers than any other state in which the two candidates had campaigned before. And unlike, say, Iowa, it has a higher percentage of blacks and a history of racial conflict. Obama had had a streak of eleven straight victories, but there was always a question of how he would fare when he hit the industrial states.
Obama's victories in Maryland and Virginia on February 12, and then Wisconsin a week later, showed him gaining voters among Clinton's constituency of women, white men, and blue-collar workers, which suggested a major reshaping of the race; but that trend stopped in Ohio and in Texas—where Bill Clinton warned the voters that they had to keep his wife in the race. Obama did poorly with Hispanics, gaining only 30 percent of their vote in Texas to Clinton's 63 percent. If Obama could not win the votes of blue-collar workers and Hispanics in the general election—and this is not to say that he couldn't—that could seriously damage his chances.
That the presumed neophyte Obama has stood toe-to-toe with the Clintons (for all of Hillary Clinton's complaints about being "ganged up on," Obama has had to face both Clintons every day), has beaten them more often than not, and still might prevail is in itself remarkable. But in one important way his campaigning has fallen short. A great many people who follow politics closely simply don't "get" Obama, and can become quite angry about him. (This election is dividing friends and families like no other I've seen.) They see him as offering empty rhetoric, as simply building a movement, even a cult; the huge crowds he has drawn, his rock-star appeal, have only reinforced these suspicions. Actually, Obama is a serious student of policy—even, in the words of one adviser, a "geek"—and highly informed as a result. In Wisconsin, in some frustration—as Clinton was calling him "a talker, not a doer"—Obama said:
Everybody has got a ten-point plan on everything. You go to Senator Clinton's Web site, my Web site, they look identical.... The problem is not the lack of proposals. The question is, who can bring Democrats, independents, and Republicans into a working majority to bring about change. That's what we're doing in this campaign. This is what a working majority looks like. That's how we're going to move the country forward. That's what I offer that she can't do.
Obama has a big idea: he believes that in order to change Washington and to get some of those ten-point programs through, and to reduce the power of the lobbies and "special interests," he must first build a large coalition—Democrats, independents, Republicans, whoever—to support him in his effort to change things. He has figured out that he cannot make the kinds of changes he's talking about if he has to fight for 51–49 majorities in Congress. Therefore, he's trying to build a broader coalition, and enlist the people who have come out to see him and are getting involved in politics for the first time because of him. If he can hold that force together, members of Congress, including the "old bulls," according to a campaign aide, "will look back home and see that there is a mandate for change." Thus, Obama talks about working "from the bottom up" to bring about change. When he says he will take on the special interests and the lobbies, to him it's not as far-fetched as most jaded Washingtonians think: he intends to do that with the army he's building.
To understand Obama, one has to recognize the importance to him of his days as a community organizer in Chicago: he worked with churches, and "in the streets," to organize people to take on the powers-that-be in order to improve their living conditions and get jobs. An Obama adviser told me, "His being a community organizer is the fundamental insight and philosophy of his campaign." Thus, Obama has a fresh, even revolutionary idea about how to govern. The inspiring speeches have a far-sighted and pragmatic goal.
Being an organizer at heart—though he also practiced law in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for ten years—in the first quarter of his campaign Obama focused on setting up campaign organizations in many states and raising money, mainly through small contributions via the Internet. The Clinton campaign, by contrast, raised money from the top, so that many contributors "maxed out" early.
Obama's ability to inspire people, to draw tremendous crowds, has carried him a long way, but even though he began to season his speeches with talk about programs, he failed, in Ohio in particular, to clearly connect what he was saying to individual people's lives. He didn't bring the rhetoric down to earth, translate it into something real that voters could understand. And I think this is one reason he lost. Clinton, by contrast, got across that she was "a fighter" (her new self-description) who would produce "results for America" (her new theme) and would improve the lives of many Ohioans; she talked in specifics about what she would do, and made it all seem real. Since then, Obama has been dealing much more in specifics.
Obama's wonkish side led him early on to steep himself in position papers on numerous issues, from defense policy to health care to climate change, and from April to December of 2007 he gave speeches describing in detail how he would approach various issues. It was at this time that the press was describing him as "flat." And then he lit up the political world by giving an extraordinary speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 10, 2007. The last to speak, he roused the audience, and made some subtle digs at Clinton:
This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calculation, but by conviction; when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose—a higher purpose. And I run for the Presidency of the United States of America because that's the party America needs us to be right now.
Obama has been accused of being all flash, and of not having done much in the Senate. His record in the three and a half years he has been there suggests someone serious about the job: he worked on a nuclear nonproliferation bill that passed and backed a number of policy changes to help veterans, including more medical care for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, assistance for homeless veterans, and the extension of tax credits for military families. He pushed through the Senate a major bill on ethics reform; and introduced legislation in January 2007 to stop, or if that failed, limit funds for the surge. He also worked with the conservative Republican Tom Coburn in a successful effort to get Congress to impose transparency on government expenditures so that anyone can look them up. The criticism that he hasn't done more also overlooks the fact that during his first two years in the Senate, he was ninety-ninth in seniority and in the minority party. Already a celebrity when he reached Washington, he was in fact careful to be humble, and to seek the advice of his elders. (Just as Hillary Clinton did when she got to the Senate.)
As for Obama's often-questioned record as an eight-year Illinois state senator, James Warren, a managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, says,
The caricature of him as a neophyte legislator with a modest record is unfair. He was very hard-working and effective, often against significant political opposition and amid scant media attention. Through forging coalitions, he got bona fide, important legislation through on taping of police interrogations, racial profiling, ethics reform, and the earned income tax credit.
The Clinton campaign's false assumption—based on a 350-page, state-by-state study in the summer of 2007 by key strategist Mark Penn—that Clinton's victory was "inevitable" led to a series of mistakes: (1) presenting herself as the "inevitable" nominee; (2) prematurely running a general election campaign; (3) assuming that the race would be over on February 5—Super Tuesday; and (4) believing that a number of small states that held caucuses could be skipped. And if Penn's strategy didn't work there was no Plan B. It's never a good idea to have a pollster in an important policy position in a campaign, since he or she can design the polling to get the answers he or she wants, as some believed Penn had done in the Clinton White House. (Hillary Clinton brought him in after the electoral disaster of 1994.) The Clinton campaign has been divided and sometimes almost paralyzed by internal feuding among outsized egos. By contrast, this hasn't happened in the Obama campaign: Obama deliberately picked congenial people and instructed his staff that he wanted "no drama."
In early March, Clinton went from, in a debate, "I'm honored...to be here with Barack Obama...absolutely honored" to, a day and a half later, angrily, shouting, "Shame on you, Barack Obama." In that instance, she was engaging in molehill politics: a flyer on trade that the Obama campaign had sent out quoted her as saying that the North American Free Trade Agreement had been a "boon" to the United States' economy. The use of the word "boon," an accidental error, was taken from Newsday, which put in quotes the gist of her remarks.[1] Obama replied calmly. "Senator Clinton has...constantly sent out negative attacks on us, email, robo-calls, flyers, television ads, radio calls, and we haven't whined about it because I understand that is the nature of these campaigns."
Clinton's frequent switching of tactics and personas raises the question of who she is and why she's so changeable: employing a Southern accent in a Selma, Alabama, church; dropping her g's while touring in Appalachia; sounding something like a cowboy in Wyoming ("concerns that keep ya up at night"), and then back to a Southern accent in Mississippi. Clinton's variability does not mean that she lacks her own core belief about the need to help improve people's lives. But it suggests that she is not a natural politician and is willing to try almost anything, while her feuding staff gives her conflicting advice. As a result, her campaign has had no overall message, and her themes have shifted almost by the week. The disorder within her own campaign team raises questions about how she would govern.
Clinton believes that the issue of health care—in which there is one substantive difference between them—works to her advantage. She brings it up often and even harped on it in the last debate, in Cleveland, on February 26, where she came across as the dinner guest who just won't drop a subject. She argues that for health care to be universal, people must be required to participate in the plan. Obama argues that if the cost of the new insurance is low enough, people will participate. But the great debate on this issue is phony, for Clinton has refused to say how she would enforce her plan (and states that have tried enforcement programs have failed); moreover, everyone knows that campaign plans change once they reach the White House, and political compromises are made.
In debating NAFTA, the other big issue in the Ohio campaign, both candidates pandered to hard-up workers, whom the labor left has convinced that the treaty is the cause of their woes. Both pledged to renegotiate the treaty, which could cause large problems with numerous other countries, and may not even be possible. Clinton tried to disavow the treaty, despite her several past comments praising it—it had been one of her husband's major triumphs—while Obama chided her for being selective about which of her husband's achievements she wants to take credit for. But then the Clinton campaign was blessed by a report on Canadian television that one of Obama's advisers had met with a Canadian official and told him, in effect, not to worry about the heated rhetoric that Obama was using about NAFTA. Exactly what happened in this meeting—many foreign governments get in touch with campaigns to find out what's going on—remains unclear (though if the adviser did say this he was probably speaking the truth). But the Obama campaign mishandled the affair by denying for a few days that there had been a meeting. Meanwhile, Clinton pounded away, to her great benefit.
Hillary Clinton's ten-point victory in Ohio was a testament to her exceptional resilience (she sometimes went on only three hours of sleep, yet most of the time managed to look fresh and enthusiastic) and her determination when her back is to the wall. She seemed a more confident campaigner, and it helped her, as it had in New Hampshire, that before the voting there was much press babble to the effect that if she didn't win in Ohio and Texas she'd have to get out of the race. Such talk serves to bring out her followers, especially women, to rescue her. Also, race had a part in the Ohio results. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that race mattered more in Ohio than in any other primary thus far.
From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has suggested—first in whispers by Clinton aides and then, starting earlier this year, heading into the Iowa caucuses, aloud by Clinton herself, and it continues—that Obama hasn't been "vetted." This smear is intended to suggest that there are "things there" in Obama's past (left unspecified) that could cause him real problems. Yet despite their own efforts—every campaign has "oppo" (for opposition) research—thus far the Clinton campaign has turned up nothing new about Obama. Warren, the Tribune editor, says, "His life has been very rigorously inspected by the Chicago papers, and they've been pretty tough on him. The idea that he needs to be vetted a lot more by a heretofore compliant press is baloney."
In fact the Tribune had already revealed in November 2006 something that the Clinton campaign makes much of: that Obama made arrangements in 2005 with Tony Rezko, a Chicago businessman, which yielded the Obamas extra yard space for a house they were buying—an action that Obama has numerous times described as "a mistake," and "bone-headed." At the time of the Obamas' purchase, Rezko was under grand jury investigation, and Obama has admitted it showed poor judgment on his part to do business with him because Rezko was a contributor and Obama himself was in politics. Obama recently told the Tribune that Rezko had raised more money for his earlier races than he had previously disclosed: about $250,000 in all. Rezko has not contributed to Obama's presidential campaign; but unfortunately for Obama, Rezko's trial began on the day before the Ohio and Texas primaries. Wolfson had a field day with this in his conference calls, and the press showed a renewed interest in Obama's dealings with Rezko.
On 60 Minutes the Sunday before the March 4 primaries, Clinton said that Obama was not a Muslim, "as far as I know." And on the morning after the Ohio and Texas primaries, Clinton said, icily, that now there were "new questions" about Obama, which the superdelegates should know or should have known about. She did not specify which questions she had in mind.
Shortly after that, the issue of race, which had emerged only around the margins of the Democratic contest, exploded. Some reporters felt the Clintons were making sure that Obama, who is of mixed race, was known as the black candidate. Hillary Clinton commented in a debate, "isn't it wonderful" to have a woman and an African-American in the race. (Obama could only smile gamely.) She has made similar remarks elsewhere. And there had been Bill Clinton's comments in South Carolina, such as his saying, after Obama won by a huge margin, that Jesse Jackson had won the state, too. Also noticeable was the series of Clinton allies making what could most kindly be put as racially insensitive remarks—among them Bill Shaheen, husband of the former governor of New Hampshire and co-chair of Clinton's campaign (he stepped down); BET founder Bob Johnson; and Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.
And then, along came Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984, saying that Obama was "lucky" to be black, because that's how he'd gotten where he had. With Obama not running as the "black candidate," and not belonging to the civil rights generation, many people, perhaps naively, had thought that the issue of race could be avoided. But now this most painful subject in American life was squarely before the country.
Clinton, who had at first given a tepid response to Ferraro's comment, saying, "Well, I do not agree with that," and tried to equate both campaigns in "veering off" into the personal, had to go further. At a meeting on March 12 with a group of black publishers, someone brought up Bill Clinton's South Carolina remark and asked her how she could regain the trust of the African-American community. Mrs. Clinton replied that she was "sorry if anyone was offended," and then added, "We can be proud of both Jesse Jackson and Senator Obama."
Right on top of the Ferraro episode came—not coincidentally, some observers think—the release on television of some particularly inflammatory statements by Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—"No, no, no. Not God bless America. God damn America." Such preaching is not uncommon in black churches and Wright's is milder than some others. That Obama attended Wright's church—the biggest and most influential black church in Chicago, a church that had done a lot of civic good—does not at all signify that he shared these particular pastoral views. Obama has had no part in the angry-black world. The controversy over Wright was not a new issue, and Obama had dropped him from giving the convocation speech at his announcement that he was running for president.
But, as always, pictures made the difference, as did the reality of what Wright had been saying. Obama's speech on race, in Philadelphia on March 18, was both a necessity and an opportunity. His description of his background as Kansas white and Kenya black, of being raised by white grandparents, and his frank and searing description of the anger of both blacks and whites over the subject of race enabled him to define himself as not simply the "black" candidate, and to forcefully restate his position as the candidate of unity. His explanation that he found some of Wright's fiery sermons "not only wrong but divisive," while he refused to "disown" him, made both moral and political sense. "This time," he said repeatedly, the country must grapple with the issues that set the two races apart. He took on a big burden.
Many Clinton people feel that it was a disastrous mistake to skip so many caucuses, which allowed Obama to rack up delegates—this was in part a result of Penn's planning; in part it reflected the fact that Obama's campaign is better at organizing than Clinton's; and in part it was because Clinton herself, since her big loss in Iowa, has made it clear she dislikes caucuses, even portraying them as somewhat illegitimate. So, out of necessity, she and her husband campaigned hard for the Wyoming caucus on Saturday, March 8, and Obama beat her 59–40.
Particularly shameless after all their attacks on Obama, including the charge that he was unfit to be commander in chief, were the unsubtle hints by the Clintons, just before the Mississippi primary on March 11, that Hillary Clinton might put Obama—the front-runner—on her ticket. Their remark was demeaning to Obama, but also meant to suggest to Mississippi blacks and others that they could have it both ways. Obama made fun of their ploy, and sought to make it clear that this was a no-go.
In any event, Obama won 90 percent of the black vote in perhaps the most racially divided state in the country. Seeking not to undermine Obama's claim to be a new kind of politician, his campaign has so far been cautious in its response to kitchen-sink politics. His campaign leaders have called for the release of Clinton's tax returns and her White House records, but there is plenty of other material that could be telling, including Bill Clinton's pardons (the National Archives says that he is holding up the release of papers about them) and the contributors to his library and his foundation. There are also questions of Bill Clinton's curious business deals since he left office.[2] (So much for having been "vetted.")
Members of the Obama team have also been raising questions about Hillary Clinton's assertions of her "experience," particularly in foreign policy. They point out that she didn't have security clearance in the White House, and could not attend National Security Council meetings. They have also been taking apart her claims of specific foreign policy successes, for example her assertion that "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," a claim that even Northern Ireland officials debunked recently. Or her claim that "I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo." Of this Greg Craig, an Obama adviser and former director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning in the Clinton administration, who is now for Obama, has said that the borders were opened the day before Hillary Clinton arrived in Macedonia where she would have conducted such negotiations.
In her efforts to paint Obama as unfit to be the commander in chief, Clinton has recklessly gone so far as to argue that she and McCain are readier than Obama is: "Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience...I will bring a lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002." Thus she dismisses Obama's claim that he had shown better judgment in 2002 by opposing the Iraq war. She has never come up with a plausible explanation of her vote to authorize the war because there isn't one. It won't do to say, as she has, that "if I would have known then what I know now," because there was ample reason to know then. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, knew enough to strongly urge his colleagues to vote against the resolution; and he was one of twenty-two Democratic senators to do so. It was widely understood that Bush was intent on going to war. Clinton is known to have wavered on how to vote, and, like other Democrats, was advised by Democratic consultants to play it safe—to not cast a vote that might damage her political future. The irony is, of course, that she did just that.
Clinton took other steps, such as joining the Armed Services Committee, to protect herself from the sexist notion that a woman might be soft on national security. Early this year, Maureen Dowd reported that Clinton's aides were telling people that she would be a tougher leader than her husband, and "less skittish about using military power." A number of people, including former Clinton White House aides, worry that if elected Hillary Clinton might turn out to be a "Warrior Queen."
As of this writing, the Democrats are still trying to figure out what to do about the renegade voting in Michigan and Florida. A solution is complicated by Clinton's insistence on breaking Democratic Party rules by seating the delegates in those states, particularly in Florida. When I asked a close Clinton ally and adviser about this matter recently, he replied, "Rules? Rules? The rules are what people say they are. This isn't law. This isn't the Supreme Court."
At this point, Obama has about 150 more pledged delegates than Clinton, and the election expert Tad Devine says that even if Clinton wins Pennsylvania, on April 22—as she is expected to—and whatever happens in Florida and Michigan, when all the voting is done, in June, Obama will probably still have at least one hundred more pledged delegates. (Michigan is closer to settling the matter; several strategists are suggesting that Florida delegates be given a half vote, netting Clinton nineteen delegates rather than none—instead of having a civil war.)
Clinton leads in the superdelegates—having an estimated 248 to Obama's 212 (several of Clinton's signed on when she was "inevitable"); but she still lags behind Obama overall. A consensus is forming among leading Democrats that the nomination should be decided on the basis of who has the most pledged delegates; their main concern is that the outcome appear fair. If Clinton has won the popular vote, which is a possibility but difficult (at this point Obama is ahead by 700,000 votes), or most of the big states (including, presumably, Florida and Michigan), the Clinton campaign will argue, those factors should prevail. The Obama people argue that most of the "big states"—New York, Massachusetts, California—will vote Democratic in the general election anyway, and that Obama has won some important "swing states," such as Iowa, Missouri, and Virginia, as well as more states overall.
Most of the leading Democrats want to avoid a situation in which Clinton somehow wrests the nomination from Obama while he is ahead in delegates. This would leave the hundreds of thousands of people whom he has brought into the political system for the first time disillusioned—and an uproar could ensue. On March 16, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will chair the convention, said firmly, "It's a delegate race." According to Pelosi, "The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee." This translates into a preference, shared with many House Democrats, for Obama to head the party ticket. Pelosi was clearly unfazed by the recent storm over race.
The superdelegates, especially the elected politicians, are worrying that the party might be cleaved in two. A large number of them favored Obama early on, and still do. A senior House Democrat told me that support for Obama is based on three things: concern that the animosity of Republicans toward Hillary Clinton would motivate them to go out and vote against the Democrats; that Obama attracts independents, which the national ticket will need; and that Obama gets the votes of blacks in overwhelming numbers, which can help in many districts as well as nationally.
Being politicians, the Capitol Hill Democrats who hadn't already committed themselves waited to see what would happen on Super Tuesday; then they waited to see what would happen in Ohio and Texas on March 4; now they are waiting to see what will happen in Pennsylvania, and also Michigan and Florida. They are hoping that the delegate race will somehow resolve itself so that they won't have to deal with a messy situation.
Bright Days -- Oxford or no
I was in Oxford for Freshers’ Week. Long shadows fell on the Front Quad of Trinity, my old college. Outside the rooms the college had given me young voices chattered febrilely. They were gathering for the Freshers’ Dinner, to be addressed by Michael Beloff, president of the college. My rooms looked out on to two quads enclosed by the chapel, the hall and various staircases. (How easily I slip into this self-congratulatory, clubby mode.)
From the basin by the bedroom window I could see Garden Quad and a bust of Cardinal Henry Newman, Trinity’s most famous cleric, who left Oxford and never returned after he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, and who found his time at Trinity a trial: “I really think, if anyone should ask me what qualifications were necessary for Trinity College, I should say there was only one, drink, drink, drink.” But like almost everyone who has ever been to Oxford, he kept strong feelings for the place. As Philip Larkin puts it in his “Poem About Oxford”, “The old place still holds us.”
The old place still holds me. Outside, the voices had an unfamiliar timbre and I realised what it was: girls’ voices. Oxford prefers to call them women but these were unmistakably girls, children, chattering brightly, chiming nervously. Only much later in the night did I hear something more familiar, the bull-calf bellow of a drunken public schoolboy.
Later that night I sat in the gallery of the hall looking down. The candles were lit, the college silver beamed triumphantly. Latin grace was said under the portrait of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder, before the college servants, formally dressed in dark trousers and waistcoats, moved in. Below the Adam urns, which decorated the gallery, I put my head in my hands and wept. The tears were brief and strangely pleasurable, like being moved in the cinema. What was it that moved me?
Michael Beloff told the freshers they had been chosen on merit, no matter what their background or schooling: “At Trinity we discriminate neither in favour of nor against anyone. We believe that you are very lucky to be here and that we are very lucky to have you.” And this is a feature of Oxford that outsiders, and even some living within its quadrangles and enclosed gardens, believe, that there is something too privileged about the life. Looking down on the freshers that evening it was hard to imagine any comparable group of students outside Oxbridge enjoying a dinner like this, candlelit, securely framed within the perfect hall.
And there was plenty of symbolism on view for those who knew where to look; the Jewish president of the college presiding over a Latin grace, spoken by the Anglican chaplain, the portraits of the great and the good suggesting, semaphoring, a kind of ease with history and tradition; a sense – not peculiarly Oxonian but always present there – that history, religion, art, science and ethics are the servants of a liberal society, not its master.
Beloff also told the freshers that the college expected high standards of application and behaviour: “It is not necessary to get drunk every night.” And I wondered if this wasn’t in some sense also Oxonian, as these children were unashamedly being served wine from the college’s stocks. Underneath Oxford are thousands of bottles of wine, laid down by committees of interested dons. But also underneath Oxford, stretching right under Broad Street, are millions of books, not merely books designed to aid the student in passing a degree, but Islamic and Hebraic collections, political papers, ephemera, a Shakespeare First Folio, Cranmer’s bible, Kafka’s manuscripts and much, much more, a richness almost beyond comprehension.
Oxford’s relative importance has declined but its hold on the imagination is still strong. The Evening Standard’s columnist Victor Lewis-Smith recently proclaimed one of his rules, that everyone who was at Oxford would announce that fact within 11 minutes of the start of any conversation. I’m afraid it is true of me. But it is also true that many people who didn’t get in to Oxford wish they had. I loved this from another journalist, Giles Coren: “You can always tell a person who went to a good second-rank university because within the first 10 minutes of meeting you, they will say, ‘You can always tell a person who went to Oxford or Cambridge because they will tell you about it within the first 10 minutes of meeting you.’ ”
For all its civilised aspect, Oxford is prone to rancour. Oxford anthologies of anecdotes are full of cruel snobbery, philistinism and vicious put-downs. A sort of witty cynicism has long been prized. But as the years go by some of the aphorisms can seem merely self-regarding. Although Bowra’s “Buggery was invented to pass the awkward hour between evensong and cocktails” is rather brilliant. And I also like “Awful shit, never met him”.
The literature of Oxford dons, from Lewis Carroll to Tolkien and CS Lewis, suggests that a certain infantilism is admired. (Iris Murdoch is another matter.) Waugh, perhaps Oxford’s greatest 20th-century writer, with his defiant third and his abhorrence of all literary pretension, is the perennial Oxford novelist, and John Betjeman with his pass degree, teddy bear and nostalgia, is Oxford’s most-read poet. Betjeman loathed his tutor, CS Lewis, and Lewis, as his diaries reveal, loathed Betjeman: “I wish I could get rid of the idle prig ... I was rung up on the telephone ... from Moreton in the Marsh, to say that he hasn’t been able to read as he was suspected for measles & forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?” Betjeman for the rest of his life blamed Lewis for his failure to get a degree, which needed a pass in divinity – “failed in Divvers” was his lament in one of his poems.
The tutorial system, the idea that as an undergraduate you can spend an hour or two a week with one of the finest minds in Oxford – maybe even in England – is seductive. So it came as a surprise to discover that the tutorial system is the product of the Victorian reforms of Oxford: I had assumed it was something time-honoured and venerable. So lazy, drink-sodden and self-serving had many fellows of colleges become by the mid-19th century – a majority didn’t even live in Oxford – that private tutors had to be found outside the colleges for the intellectually curious.
When the reforms were introduced in 1852 and 1854 these private tutors, who had set up shop all over Oxford, were brought into the colleges not out of the sudden realisation that one-to-one teaching was desirable but to bring the standards up. Oxford was deep in a trough: Matthew Arnold wrote “Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene.”
At Trinity I met a young English don, Simon Humphries, whom I asked to take me for a tutorial, setting me an essay and criticising it without fear or favour. I decided I would try, as far as possible, to rely on my own literary knowledge and what I had learned in 20 years of reading and reviewing, to write the essay. Simon was disconcertingly vague about what I was to do: he would be giving me some extracts to read; I was to make of them what I could ... What method, I asked tentatively, do you advocate in Oxford these days? Close reading, he said...
The extracts Simon had given me to consider were a piece from John Ruskin’s “Of Kings’ Treasuries” from Sesame and Lilies; “Stepping Westward” by William Wordsworth, “It Was a Hard Thing” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Knight in the Wood” by Lord de Tabley, and “Old China”, an essay by Charles Lamb. As far as I could remember, I had never read any of these except for the Lamb ... I knew a little about Hopkins and Ruskin, but I had never read a word by Lord de Tabley, or ever heard of him.
Simon, I thought, was asking me to look behind the arras and see what the pieces were really about. When I came back to Oxford a week or two later, I had prepared a few pages. I review a fair number of books every year, the job being to give the occasional reader a summary of the book, some context, and then to advise him or her if I think the book is worth buying. But for the academic the job is different; to read and interpret, and to take account of research, social history and the shifting drifts of literary theory, in order to draw from the student some deep response to literature.
Simon had started life as a librarian and came to Oxford as a mature student, without any academic qualifications, and went on to take a first in English. I began to read my essay. I started with Ruskin’s, “Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good this is – that’s exactly what I think!’ But the right feeling is, ‘How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, someday.’ ... Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.”
I have been using a sentiment much like this as a definition of literature, as opposed to genre fiction, that literature produces the sense that we have intuited something similar but never heard it expressed in this way. Literature, in this fashion, increases the human understanding. I explained this, and moved on. But I saw immediately that I had passed too lightly over Ruskin’s prescription of how to attack an author’s work: I had ignored, for example, as Simon soon told me, Ruskin’s reference to a writer’s reluctance to give the meaning of his work too readily: Ruskin refers to writing in parables. Simon asked if I had wondered why he used the word “parables”? I had a feeling of drowning. Simon suggested it might be a reference to Mark IV, in which Jesus says he speaks in parables so that men may not understand. Already I was feeling apprehensive of what was to come.
I had ignored the most significant thing about the piece, which is that writers deliberately withhold meaning. In an interview with Craig Raine, David Lodge makes the same point, that novelists are reluctant to get right down to the bedrock of their ideas, for fear of revealing the poverty or banality of their sources. As I was reading [to Simon], it struck me that just the two pages of Ruskin could have produced a much more detailed and interesting essay than the wafer-thin criticism I was now offering on all five pieces ... I clung, however, to the idea that the limits I had set myself were the reason for my failure.
We moved on to “Stepping Westward”, by Wordsworth. I knew by now that my two paragraphs – longish – would be hopelessly inadequate. I was able to summon from memory Hopkins’s “inscape” – the imperative to discover the essential quality of things. While I was writing the essay I felt I had discovered the essential qualities of Simon’s brief, but now I was not so sure...
I did better with “Old China”, by Lamb. Simon said he would have to reconsider his view of the essay in light of my suggestion that Lamb draws the reader into a satirical trap which is sprung much later in the piece. I was pleased to be complimented, after decades of writing, with nine novels and hundreds of reviews and essays published, by young Simon. [But] I left Trinity shaken by his judgment that, if I were a first year, he would say “Must read more attentively”.
Benjamin Jowett, probably Oxford’s most famous head of a college, aimed to use the tutorial to “inoculate England with Balliol”. When a Professor Blackie of Glasgow University wrote to him, “I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you,” Jowett replied, “We don’t think of you at all.” Oxford was “the granary of intellectual and spiritual life”, wrote JA Smith. “Nothing,” he said, “will be of any use to you except this, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot.” ... “I have a great prejudice,” Jowett said, “against all those who do not succeed in the world.” But for him material success was to be achieved in the imperial project, in the Law and the Commons, not in an investment bank or ... in some solicitors’ firm dealing with the City and its superfluity of money; there was something of the moral enquiry about Oxford tutorials, the better to discover idealism and patriotism.
I think one can see pretty clearly where Oxford finds itself now: the tutorial is prized more as cultural capital, part and parcel of the whole Oxford experience, than for its own sake, although I don’t think anybody could deny that a fondness for the essay, followed by the vigorous discussion, is visible at the top levels of the civil service, cabinet and in the adversarial nature of parliament and High Court: they are the children of the tutorial system and conditioned by the quad. Every report by some distinguished judge or retired civil servant reads like an extended essay, concerned with advertising a higher intellect, as much as with the matter in hand...
For an outsider like me [Cartwright is South African], with a sentimental view of Oxford, it seems that the power of the myth of Oxford and its consequent value are underestimated by those who live and work there. The place is so beautiful, the teaching – at its best – is so wonderful, the sense of collegiality – of belonging to something ancient and serious and open-minded – is so pervasive that I think the natives sometimes fail to see it as the world sees it, as something unique and irreplaceable. When I walked down Broad Street after my tutorial, I was again aware that under my feet were the great collections of the Bodleian. And, although I had taken something of a pasting from Simon, I thought of my tutorial and Hopkins’s lines:
“The sun on falling waters writes the textWhich yet is in the eye or in the thought.It was a hard thing to undo this knot.”
From the basin by the bedroom window I could see Garden Quad and a bust of Cardinal Henry Newman, Trinity’s most famous cleric, who left Oxford and never returned after he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, and who found his time at Trinity a trial: “I really think, if anyone should ask me what qualifications were necessary for Trinity College, I should say there was only one, drink, drink, drink.” But like almost everyone who has ever been to Oxford, he kept strong feelings for the place. As Philip Larkin puts it in his “Poem About Oxford”, “The old place still holds us.”
The old place still holds me. Outside, the voices had an unfamiliar timbre and I realised what it was: girls’ voices. Oxford prefers to call them women but these were unmistakably girls, children, chattering brightly, chiming nervously. Only much later in the night did I hear something more familiar, the bull-calf bellow of a drunken public schoolboy.
Later that night I sat in the gallery of the hall looking down. The candles were lit, the college silver beamed triumphantly. Latin grace was said under the portrait of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder, before the college servants, formally dressed in dark trousers and waistcoats, moved in. Below the Adam urns, which decorated the gallery, I put my head in my hands and wept. The tears were brief and strangely pleasurable, like being moved in the cinema. What was it that moved me?
Michael Beloff told the freshers they had been chosen on merit, no matter what their background or schooling: “At Trinity we discriminate neither in favour of nor against anyone. We believe that you are very lucky to be here and that we are very lucky to have you.” And this is a feature of Oxford that outsiders, and even some living within its quadrangles and enclosed gardens, believe, that there is something too privileged about the life. Looking down on the freshers that evening it was hard to imagine any comparable group of students outside Oxbridge enjoying a dinner like this, candlelit, securely framed within the perfect hall.
And there was plenty of symbolism on view for those who knew where to look; the Jewish president of the college presiding over a Latin grace, spoken by the Anglican chaplain, the portraits of the great and the good suggesting, semaphoring, a kind of ease with history and tradition; a sense – not peculiarly Oxonian but always present there – that history, religion, art, science and ethics are the servants of a liberal society, not its master.
Beloff also told the freshers that the college expected high standards of application and behaviour: “It is not necessary to get drunk every night.” And I wondered if this wasn’t in some sense also Oxonian, as these children were unashamedly being served wine from the college’s stocks. Underneath Oxford are thousands of bottles of wine, laid down by committees of interested dons. But also underneath Oxford, stretching right under Broad Street, are millions of books, not merely books designed to aid the student in passing a degree, but Islamic and Hebraic collections, political papers, ephemera, a Shakespeare First Folio, Cranmer’s bible, Kafka’s manuscripts and much, much more, a richness almost beyond comprehension.
Oxford’s relative importance has declined but its hold on the imagination is still strong. The Evening Standard’s columnist Victor Lewis-Smith recently proclaimed one of his rules, that everyone who was at Oxford would announce that fact within 11 minutes of the start of any conversation. I’m afraid it is true of me. But it is also true that many people who didn’t get in to Oxford wish they had. I loved this from another journalist, Giles Coren: “You can always tell a person who went to a good second-rank university because within the first 10 minutes of meeting you, they will say, ‘You can always tell a person who went to Oxford or Cambridge because they will tell you about it within the first 10 minutes of meeting you.’ ”
For all its civilised aspect, Oxford is prone to rancour. Oxford anthologies of anecdotes are full of cruel snobbery, philistinism and vicious put-downs. A sort of witty cynicism has long been prized. But as the years go by some of the aphorisms can seem merely self-regarding. Although Bowra’s “Buggery was invented to pass the awkward hour between evensong and cocktails” is rather brilliant. And I also like “Awful shit, never met him”.
The literature of Oxford dons, from Lewis Carroll to Tolkien and CS Lewis, suggests that a certain infantilism is admired. (Iris Murdoch is another matter.) Waugh, perhaps Oxford’s greatest 20th-century writer, with his defiant third and his abhorrence of all literary pretension, is the perennial Oxford novelist, and John Betjeman with his pass degree, teddy bear and nostalgia, is Oxford’s most-read poet. Betjeman loathed his tutor, CS Lewis, and Lewis, as his diaries reveal, loathed Betjeman: “I wish I could get rid of the idle prig ... I was rung up on the telephone ... from Moreton in the Marsh, to say that he hasn’t been able to read as he was suspected for measles & forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?” Betjeman for the rest of his life blamed Lewis for his failure to get a degree, which needed a pass in divinity – “failed in Divvers” was his lament in one of his poems.
The tutorial system, the idea that as an undergraduate you can spend an hour or two a week with one of the finest minds in Oxford – maybe even in England – is seductive. So it came as a surprise to discover that the tutorial system is the product of the Victorian reforms of Oxford: I had assumed it was something time-honoured and venerable. So lazy, drink-sodden and self-serving had many fellows of colleges become by the mid-19th century – a majority didn’t even live in Oxford – that private tutors had to be found outside the colleges for the intellectually curious.
When the reforms were introduced in 1852 and 1854 these private tutors, who had set up shop all over Oxford, were brought into the colleges not out of the sudden realisation that one-to-one teaching was desirable but to bring the standards up. Oxford was deep in a trough: Matthew Arnold wrote “Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene.”
At Trinity I met a young English don, Simon Humphries, whom I asked to take me for a tutorial, setting me an essay and criticising it without fear or favour. I decided I would try, as far as possible, to rely on my own literary knowledge and what I had learned in 20 years of reading and reviewing, to write the essay. Simon was disconcertingly vague about what I was to do: he would be giving me some extracts to read; I was to make of them what I could ... What method, I asked tentatively, do you advocate in Oxford these days? Close reading, he said...
The extracts Simon had given me to consider were a piece from John Ruskin’s “Of Kings’ Treasuries” from Sesame and Lilies; “Stepping Westward” by William Wordsworth, “It Was a Hard Thing” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Knight in the Wood” by Lord de Tabley, and “Old China”, an essay by Charles Lamb. As far as I could remember, I had never read any of these except for the Lamb ... I knew a little about Hopkins and Ruskin, but I had never read a word by Lord de Tabley, or ever heard of him.
Simon, I thought, was asking me to look behind the arras and see what the pieces were really about. When I came back to Oxford a week or two later, I had prepared a few pages. I review a fair number of books every year, the job being to give the occasional reader a summary of the book, some context, and then to advise him or her if I think the book is worth buying. But for the academic the job is different; to read and interpret, and to take account of research, social history and the shifting drifts of literary theory, in order to draw from the student some deep response to literature.
Simon had started life as a librarian and came to Oxford as a mature student, without any academic qualifications, and went on to take a first in English. I began to read my essay. I started with Ruskin’s, “Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good this is – that’s exactly what I think!’ But the right feeling is, ‘How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, someday.’ ... Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.”
I have been using a sentiment much like this as a definition of literature, as opposed to genre fiction, that literature produces the sense that we have intuited something similar but never heard it expressed in this way. Literature, in this fashion, increases the human understanding. I explained this, and moved on. But I saw immediately that I had passed too lightly over Ruskin’s prescription of how to attack an author’s work: I had ignored, for example, as Simon soon told me, Ruskin’s reference to a writer’s reluctance to give the meaning of his work too readily: Ruskin refers to writing in parables. Simon asked if I had wondered why he used the word “parables”? I had a feeling of drowning. Simon suggested it might be a reference to Mark IV, in which Jesus says he speaks in parables so that men may not understand. Already I was feeling apprehensive of what was to come.
I had ignored the most significant thing about the piece, which is that writers deliberately withhold meaning. In an interview with Craig Raine, David Lodge makes the same point, that novelists are reluctant to get right down to the bedrock of their ideas, for fear of revealing the poverty or banality of their sources. As I was reading [to Simon], it struck me that just the two pages of Ruskin could have produced a much more detailed and interesting essay than the wafer-thin criticism I was now offering on all five pieces ... I clung, however, to the idea that the limits I had set myself were the reason for my failure.
We moved on to “Stepping Westward”, by Wordsworth. I knew by now that my two paragraphs – longish – would be hopelessly inadequate. I was able to summon from memory Hopkins’s “inscape” – the imperative to discover the essential quality of things. While I was writing the essay I felt I had discovered the essential qualities of Simon’s brief, but now I was not so sure...
I did better with “Old China”, by Lamb. Simon said he would have to reconsider his view of the essay in light of my suggestion that Lamb draws the reader into a satirical trap which is sprung much later in the piece. I was pleased to be complimented, after decades of writing, with nine novels and hundreds of reviews and essays published, by young Simon. [But] I left Trinity shaken by his judgment that, if I were a first year, he would say “Must read more attentively”.
Benjamin Jowett, probably Oxford’s most famous head of a college, aimed to use the tutorial to “inoculate England with Balliol”. When a Professor Blackie of Glasgow University wrote to him, “I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you,” Jowett replied, “We don’t think of you at all.” Oxford was “the granary of intellectual and spiritual life”, wrote JA Smith. “Nothing,” he said, “will be of any use to you except this, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot.” ... “I have a great prejudice,” Jowett said, “against all those who do not succeed in the world.” But for him material success was to be achieved in the imperial project, in the Law and the Commons, not in an investment bank or ... in some solicitors’ firm dealing with the City and its superfluity of money; there was something of the moral enquiry about Oxford tutorials, the better to discover idealism and patriotism.
I think one can see pretty clearly where Oxford finds itself now: the tutorial is prized more as cultural capital, part and parcel of the whole Oxford experience, than for its own sake, although I don’t think anybody could deny that a fondness for the essay, followed by the vigorous discussion, is visible at the top levels of the civil service, cabinet and in the adversarial nature of parliament and High Court: they are the children of the tutorial system and conditioned by the quad. Every report by some distinguished judge or retired civil servant reads like an extended essay, concerned with advertising a higher intellect, as much as with the matter in hand...
For an outsider like me [Cartwright is South African], with a sentimental view of Oxford, it seems that the power of the myth of Oxford and its consequent value are underestimated by those who live and work there. The place is so beautiful, the teaching – at its best – is so wonderful, the sense of collegiality – of belonging to something ancient and serious and open-minded – is so pervasive that I think the natives sometimes fail to see it as the world sees it, as something unique and irreplaceable. When I walked down Broad Street after my tutorial, I was again aware that under my feet were the great collections of the Bodleian. And, although I had taken something of a pasting from Simon, I thought of my tutorial and Hopkins’s lines:
“The sun on falling waters writes the textWhich yet is in the eye or in the thought.It was a hard thing to undo this knot.”
30.3.08
VVG
It's the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, born in Zundert, Holland (1853). He painted sunflowers, starry nights, wheat fields, and self-portraits, and his work was just beginning to be acknowledged when he committed suicide at the age of 37. When he was 20, he went to work for an art dealer in London, then went off to Brussels to study to become an evangelist, and then went as a missionary to the coal miners in southwestern Belgium. One day he decided to give away all of his worldly goods and live like a peasant. But his religious superiors thought he was having a nervous breakdown. They kicked him out of the mission, and he had to go home.
It was then that he started to draw and paint. He taught himself with art books and by studying the masters. He was especially interested in painting the daily life of peasants, and he began a collection of clothing that had been worn by fishermen, miners, and other laborers.
For the next 10 years, from 1880 to 1890, he painted fast and furiously. He eventually settled in Arles, in southern France, where he said he could "look at nature under a brighter sky." It was in Arles that he began to develop the style he became known for, in which the images of flowers and trees and landscapes are exaggerated by extremely rough brush strokes and vivid colors. He believed that his paintings should convey the mood he was in when he painted them, and he painted extremely quickly so that his mood would not change before he finished. To get the job done, he often squeezed tubes of oil paint directly onto the canvas.
His brother Theo was an art dealer, and for years he had supplied Van Gogh with a small monthly stipend. In return, Van Gogh gave his brother every canvas he painted. He wrote thousands of letters to Theo. "How much sadness there is in life," he wrote. "The right thing is to work." He moved to a small town north of Paris and painted feverishly until insanity overtook him. He cut off part of his own ear and was placed in an asylum at St. Rémy. One of his greatest paintings, Starry Night (1889), was painted while he was confined there. He left the asylum for good in the spring of 1890. In July, just as he was starting to receive favorable attention for his work, he committed suicide. Shortly before he died, he wrote "I feel a failure."
It was then that he started to draw and paint. He taught himself with art books and by studying the masters. He was especially interested in painting the daily life of peasants, and he began a collection of clothing that had been worn by fishermen, miners, and other laborers.
For the next 10 years, from 1880 to 1890, he painted fast and furiously. He eventually settled in Arles, in southern France, where he said he could "look at nature under a brighter sky." It was in Arles that he began to develop the style he became known for, in which the images of flowers and trees and landscapes are exaggerated by extremely rough brush strokes and vivid colors. He believed that his paintings should convey the mood he was in when he painted them, and he painted extremely quickly so that his mood would not change before he finished. To get the job done, he often squeezed tubes of oil paint directly onto the canvas.
His brother Theo was an art dealer, and for years he had supplied Van Gogh with a small monthly stipend. In return, Van Gogh gave his brother every canvas he painted. He wrote thousands of letters to Theo. "How much sadness there is in life," he wrote. "The right thing is to work." He moved to a small town north of Paris and painted feverishly until insanity overtook him. He cut off part of his own ear and was placed in an asylum at St. Rémy. One of his greatest paintings, Starry Night (1889), was painted while he was confined there. He left the asylum for good in the spring of 1890. In July, just as he was starting to receive favorable attention for his work, he committed suicide. Shortly before he died, he wrote "I feel a failure."
Feelings
First there was the Epoch of Sincerity. Then the Snark Ages. Now we are on the verge of a whole new period in American popular culture.
We'll name it in a moment.
For the longest time, we were a nation of nurture. We sipped cider through a straw, choosily chose Jif, trusted our cars to men wearing stars. Hollywood played along, reminding us that "It's a Wonderful Life" and that the hills were alive with "The Sound of Music." It was a time of innocence, simplicity, respect -- in pop culture, if not always in real life.
Sentimentality reigned, frequently expressed through "the happy ending." We laughed together, wept together, said "awww" together when Andy Griffith or June Cleaver gave us a parental talking-to.
In the last decades of the 20th century, however, the American mood shifted, our mores morphed. The planet may have warmed, but the culture cooled. Sarcasm overswept the zeitgeist like a glacier. Our worldview became less trusting, more cantankerous. And we buried sentimentality in cement.
Its demise began in the 1960s and '70s with the rash of political assassinations and Watergate and, arching over all those events, the rise of the counterculture. For our society, "that was the beginning of loss of faith and trust," former poet laureate Billy Collins says in an interview. In order to be earnest, "you have to expose yourself to emotions. We have become a lot more guarded."
And a lot more cynical.
From the WPost: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/28/AR2008032800930.html?wpisrc=newsletter
We'll name it in a moment.
For the longest time, we were a nation of nurture. We sipped cider through a straw, choosily chose Jif, trusted our cars to men wearing stars. Hollywood played along, reminding us that "It's a Wonderful Life" and that the hills were alive with "The Sound of Music." It was a time of innocence, simplicity, respect -- in pop culture, if not always in real life.
Sentimentality reigned, frequently expressed through "the happy ending." We laughed together, wept together, said "awww" together when Andy Griffith or June Cleaver gave us a parental talking-to.
In the last decades of the 20th century, however, the American mood shifted, our mores morphed. The planet may have warmed, but the culture cooled. Sarcasm overswept the zeitgeist like a glacier. Our worldview became less trusting, more cantankerous. And we buried sentimentality in cement.
Its demise began in the 1960s and '70s with the rash of political assassinations and Watergate and, arching over all those events, the rise of the counterculture. For our society, "that was the beginning of loss of faith and trust," former poet laureate Billy Collins says in an interview. In order to be earnest, "you have to expose yourself to emotions. We have become a lot more guarded."
And a lot more cynical.
From the WPost: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/28/AR2008032800930.html?wpisrc=newsletter
29.3.08
BEAR STEARNS & The FED
When an election campaign coincides with both a crisis on Wall Street and soaring home foreclosures across the country, the traditional ideological battles over "more government" or "less government" become blurred.
Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic candidates for president, claim to have proposed a more activist role for government than either President George W. Bush or the likely Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, and the Democratic rhetoric makes the contrast appear even sharper.
But while their philosophies might seem starkly different, in reality both parties have come to the conclusion that major government involvement is needed to rescue the financial and housing markets.
The ideological clashes are less about whether the government should intervene in the economy, and more about whom it should try to rescue.
"Democrats are more likely to propose protecting individuals, and Republicans are more likely to propose protecting markets," said William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group in Washington that champions smaller government.
Despite differing approaches, Democrats and Republicans may end up in a similar place because it will be difficult to protect individuals without protecting the markets, and the markets will remain fragile if individuals suffer huge declines in their personal wealth.
For now, the parties seem to be worlds apart. This week, the two Democratic presidential contenders seized on the deepening economic crisis and proposed broad government rescue plans for homeowners that would each cost about $30 billion.
The Bush administration dismissed such ideas as bailouts and vowed to veto even modest Democratic bills to help homeowners. McCain asserted this week that "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly."
In practice, the Democrats have not really had to confront the full fury and magnitude of the crisis. Measured in dollars, their biggest proposals are small compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has decided to lend to struggling institutions, and compared with the magnitude of losses in home values and defaulted mortgages.
McCain and the Bush administration, meanwhile, have staunchly supported one of the biggest government interventions in the last century: the Federal Reserve's decision to lend as much as $400 billion at rock-bottom rates to banks and Wall Street firms.
The Fed's rescue operation involves a sum many times more than Democrats proposed spending on homeowners, and it comes on top of a host of other injections of government money into the economy. First came the bipartisan economic stimulus package, which this year alone will provide about $152 billion in tax rebates and temporary tax cuts to help spur consumption.
Then came a series of moves to greatly expand the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage finance companies.
And this week, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board decided to lend an extra $100 billion to member banks for mortgage financing.
In a speech this week, Clinton compared McCain's approach to that of Herbert Hoover, and said, "I don't think we can afford four more years of that kind of inaction." Obama, laying down his own marker on Thursday, declared that "the free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get."
But the two Democrats have also proposed a number of changes — such as the expanded role for Fannie and Freddie — that Bush has recently adopted as well.
An area where the parties do seem to have sharp disagreements is regulation, particularly of investment banks.
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail are pushing for tougher restrictions on deceptive or risky mortgage lending, stricter rules for credit-card issuers and new rules that would allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the size of mortgages. Democrats have also called for tighter supervision of Wall Street firms.
Republicans have resisted a swing back toward greater regulation. Though the Bush administration is expected to unveil next week a sweeping blueprint for overhauling the financial regulation, administration officials have made it clear their main goal is to streamline regulatory agencies.
The most radical idea that Obama and Clinton have endorsed is for the government to step in and refinance mortgages for as many as two million homeowners who are at risk of defaulting.
The idea is based on bills being drafted by Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, both Democrats. The legislation would let the Federal Housing Administration guarantee as much as $300 billion in mortgages if the existing mortgage lenders agreed to reduce the loan amounts to levels that the borrowers could realistically afford.
In effect, the government would be taking over mortgages heading toward foreclosure. The mortgage lenders would have to swallow a significant loss, but the government would offer them a chance to recoup some of their losses if the houses were eventually resold at a higher price.
The measures would provide about $10 billion to underwrite about $300 billion worth of federal loan guarantees, and another $10 billion for states and localities to help finance affordable housing programs.
Bush and his top advisers oppose the idea, arguing that it would be a bailout for both irresponsible lenders and irresponsible borrowers. Henry Paulson Jr., the secretary of the Treasury, ridiculed the proposals as "not yet ready for the starting gate."
But Republicans are still looking for new ways for the government to soften the crisis.
The Bush administration began a new program called FHA Secure last summer, which is intended to help people refinance high-cost subprime mortgages. Industry executives and consumer groups say the eligibility rules are far too narrow to make a dent in foreclosures, and administration officials are looking at ways to expand the program.
The administration's other big effort has been a voluntary program called Hope Now, under which mortgage lenders agree to freeze a borrower's interest rate at its low introductory level. But industry analysts estimate that only about 3 percent of subprime borrowers are likely to benefit from that program. More than 20 percent of subprime mortgages are already delinquent.
McCain and other Republicans have argued that homeowners and lenders alike need to endure a correction from the wild run-up in housing prices in recent years as well as from unwise and often fraudulent mortgages.
"Some Americans bought homes they couldn't afford, betting that rising prices would make it easier to refinance later," McCain said this week. "Our system of market checks and balances did not correct until the bubble burst."
Republican lawmakers and Bush have been busy on other fronts. For years, they had sought to shrink the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which raise money at lower rates than private banks because they have an implied guarantee of government help if they get into trouble.
In the last several weeks, Congress and the administration have loosened a number of restrictions on both companies, which analysts estimate will allow them to finance an additional $200 billion in mortgages this year.
But there are risks to taxpayers. Some analysts predict that both companies will face as much as $12 billion in losses this year, largely because falling home prices are expected to lead to a surge in defaults that will infect even the conservative mortgages guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.
The government is not technically obligated to bail them out, but if the companies veered toward insolvency, political leaders would be under intense pressure to do so.
Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic candidates for president, claim to have proposed a more activist role for government than either President George W. Bush or the likely Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, and the Democratic rhetoric makes the contrast appear even sharper.
But while their philosophies might seem starkly different, in reality both parties have come to the conclusion that major government involvement is needed to rescue the financial and housing markets.
The ideological clashes are less about whether the government should intervene in the economy, and more about whom it should try to rescue.
"Democrats are more likely to propose protecting individuals, and Republicans are more likely to propose protecting markets," said William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group in Washington that champions smaller government.
Despite differing approaches, Democrats and Republicans may end up in a similar place because it will be difficult to protect individuals without protecting the markets, and the markets will remain fragile if individuals suffer huge declines in their personal wealth.
For now, the parties seem to be worlds apart. This week, the two Democratic presidential contenders seized on the deepening economic crisis and proposed broad government rescue plans for homeowners that would each cost about $30 billion.
The Bush administration dismissed such ideas as bailouts and vowed to veto even modest Democratic bills to help homeowners. McCain asserted this week that "it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly."
In practice, the Democrats have not really had to confront the full fury and magnitude of the crisis. Measured in dollars, their biggest proposals are small compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has decided to lend to struggling institutions, and compared with the magnitude of losses in home values and defaulted mortgages.
McCain and the Bush administration, meanwhile, have staunchly supported one of the biggest government interventions in the last century: the Federal Reserve's decision to lend as much as $400 billion at rock-bottom rates to banks and Wall Street firms.
The Fed's rescue operation involves a sum many times more than Democrats proposed spending on homeowners, and it comes on top of a host of other injections of government money into the economy. First came the bipartisan economic stimulus package, which this year alone will provide about $152 billion in tax rebates and temporary tax cuts to help spur consumption.
Then came a series of moves to greatly expand the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage finance companies.
And this week, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board decided to lend an extra $100 billion to member banks for mortgage financing.
In a speech this week, Clinton compared McCain's approach to that of Herbert Hoover, and said, "I don't think we can afford four more years of that kind of inaction." Obama, laying down his own marker on Thursday, declared that "the free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get."
But the two Democrats have also proposed a number of changes — such as the expanded role for Fannie and Freddie — that Bush has recently adopted as well.
An area where the parties do seem to have sharp disagreements is regulation, particularly of investment banks.
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail are pushing for tougher restrictions on deceptive or risky mortgage lending, stricter rules for credit-card issuers and new rules that would allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the size of mortgages. Democrats have also called for tighter supervision of Wall Street firms.
Republicans have resisted a swing back toward greater regulation. Though the Bush administration is expected to unveil next week a sweeping blueprint for overhauling the financial regulation, administration officials have made it clear their main goal is to streamline regulatory agencies.
The most radical idea that Obama and Clinton have endorsed is for the government to step in and refinance mortgages for as many as two million homeowners who are at risk of defaulting.
The idea is based on bills being drafted by Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, both Democrats. The legislation would let the Federal Housing Administration guarantee as much as $300 billion in mortgages if the existing mortgage lenders agreed to reduce the loan amounts to levels that the borrowers could realistically afford.
In effect, the government would be taking over mortgages heading toward foreclosure. The mortgage lenders would have to swallow a significant loss, but the government would offer them a chance to recoup some of their losses if the houses were eventually resold at a higher price.
The measures would provide about $10 billion to underwrite about $300 billion worth of federal loan guarantees, and another $10 billion for states and localities to help finance affordable housing programs.
Bush and his top advisers oppose the idea, arguing that it would be a bailout for both irresponsible lenders and irresponsible borrowers. Henry Paulson Jr., the secretary of the Treasury, ridiculed the proposals as "not yet ready for the starting gate."
But Republicans are still looking for new ways for the government to soften the crisis.
The Bush administration began a new program called FHA Secure last summer, which is intended to help people refinance high-cost subprime mortgages. Industry executives and consumer groups say the eligibility rules are far too narrow to make a dent in foreclosures, and administration officials are looking at ways to expand the program.
The administration's other big effort has been a voluntary program called Hope Now, under which mortgage lenders agree to freeze a borrower's interest rate at its low introductory level. But industry analysts estimate that only about 3 percent of subprime borrowers are likely to benefit from that program. More than 20 percent of subprime mortgages are already delinquent.
McCain and other Republicans have argued that homeowners and lenders alike need to endure a correction from the wild run-up in housing prices in recent years as well as from unwise and often fraudulent mortgages.
"Some Americans bought homes they couldn't afford, betting that rising prices would make it easier to refinance later," McCain said this week. "Our system of market checks and balances did not correct until the bubble burst."
Republican lawmakers and Bush have been busy on other fronts. For years, they had sought to shrink the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which raise money at lower rates than private banks because they have an implied guarantee of government help if they get into trouble.
In the last several weeks, Congress and the administration have loosened a number of restrictions on both companies, which analysts estimate will allow them to finance an additional $200 billion in mortgages this year.
But there are risks to taxpayers. Some analysts predict that both companies will face as much as $12 billion in losses this year, largely because falling home prices are expected to lead to a surge in defaults that will infect even the conservative mortgages guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.
The government is not technically obligated to bail them out, but if the companies veered toward insolvency, political leaders would be under intense pressure to do so.
Three in the Morning
It's 3 a.m. Do you know where your president is?
If it's Hillary Clinton, her campaign has repeatedly assured us, she is just waiting to be woken, ready to address the latest crisis threatening our national security. If it's Barack Obama, her campaign implies, we are on the road to disaster. "Experience," we're told, is what counts when the president's phone rings.
But if history is any guide, Obama should go back to sleep. And so should Hillary.
If you doubt that, consider the example of the president who won the war to end all wars: Woodrow Wilson. He was "a master of sleeping," as his chief usher, Irwin H. "Ike" Hoover, attested. He could snooze at will during the day, for a few minutes and no more, but at night he "insisted on his rest and . . . and ordered that he never be disturbed."
Wilson's aides broke the rule only once. A crisis with Mexico arose, and the Navy secretary insisted that the president be woken to decide on a proposed course of action. Wilson let it be known that he would give his answer in the morning, after considering the matter.
"The next morning," Hoover wrote, "he told the one in charge, who happened to be myself, that he should not be called again during the night, except in case of 'life or death.' He explained that no one could pass intelligent judgment when awakened from a sound sleep and that he was not going to try."
Wilson's staff did not need to be reminded. Various high-ranking officials tried to have him roused in supposedly urgent situations, but not once during all of World War I did anyone dare to wake Wilson.
So what of all this nonsense about solving a crisis in the dead of night? As The Post reported this month, recent presidents have often been roused from sleep to be alerted to important developments, but rarely were they required to do much besides listen and hit the pillow again.
"In my experience," former secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger told The Post, "I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a snap decision that had to be made in the middle of the night." Indeed, Kissinger added, "I think that one should reduce the number of snap decisions to be made."
Sleep, to be sure, can be overdone. Calvin Coolidge never let the demands of his lackluster presidency interfere with his snoozes. He slept an average of 11 hours a day, going to bed at 10 p.m. and getting up between 7 and 9 a.m. In the afternoon, Ike Hoover recounted, "he would without fail take a nap, lasting from two to four hours." Hoover, who spent 42 years at the White House, said that no other president he served slept so much.
In contrast, both Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton liked to bounce ideas off their aides in the wee hours. But that's no guarantee of good governance. Warren Harding stayed up late, too, often until 1 or 2 a.m.
It's easy to imagine a situation requiring a clear-headed decision at a muddy hour. One nightmare scenario could involve a "dirty bomb." We have just 60 minutes, the president might be told, to blow up the bomb and the terrorists who plan to explode it. But, one hopes a president might wonder, how often has our intelligence been wrong? How many buildings and innocent people have been blown up by U.S. forces that didn't hit their targets? How many probing questions is a groggy president supposed to ask at 3 a.m.? How much confidence should he or she have in the answers?
Clinton's phone ad got more free publicity than its sponsors could have bought. Credulous as ever, the political media can be counted on to promote an attack without questioning its premises. The commercial deserves hall-of-shame ranking for its snide demagoguery: "Something's happening in the world . . . Your vote will decide who answers that call . . . Whether it's someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world."
If our votes will decide who answers the 3 a.m. call, let's have a write-in vote for Ike Hoover, the long-serving White House usher. Hoover would tell the bureaucrat on the other end of the line, the one looking for brownie points by being the first to tell the president something that he or she will learn soon enough, to call back in the morning. After all, if it's the end of the world, there's nothing the president can do about it. If it isn't, it can almost always wait till breakfast. We got through World War I that way. And we won that one, didn't we?
If it's Hillary Clinton, her campaign has repeatedly assured us, she is just waiting to be woken, ready to address the latest crisis threatening our national security. If it's Barack Obama, her campaign implies, we are on the road to disaster. "Experience," we're told, is what counts when the president's phone rings.
But if history is any guide, Obama should go back to sleep. And so should Hillary.
If you doubt that, consider the example of the president who won the war to end all wars: Woodrow Wilson. He was "a master of sleeping," as his chief usher, Irwin H. "Ike" Hoover, attested. He could snooze at will during the day, for a few minutes and no more, but at night he "insisted on his rest and . . . and ordered that he never be disturbed."
Wilson's aides broke the rule only once. A crisis with Mexico arose, and the Navy secretary insisted that the president be woken to decide on a proposed course of action. Wilson let it be known that he would give his answer in the morning, after considering the matter.
"The next morning," Hoover wrote, "he told the one in charge, who happened to be myself, that he should not be called again during the night, except in case of 'life or death.' He explained that no one could pass intelligent judgment when awakened from a sound sleep and that he was not going to try."
Wilson's staff did not need to be reminded. Various high-ranking officials tried to have him roused in supposedly urgent situations, but not once during all of World War I did anyone dare to wake Wilson.
So what of all this nonsense about solving a crisis in the dead of night? As The Post reported this month, recent presidents have often been roused from sleep to be alerted to important developments, but rarely were they required to do much besides listen and hit the pillow again.
"In my experience," former secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger told The Post, "I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a snap decision that had to be made in the middle of the night." Indeed, Kissinger added, "I think that one should reduce the number of snap decisions to be made."
Sleep, to be sure, can be overdone. Calvin Coolidge never let the demands of his lackluster presidency interfere with his snoozes. He slept an average of 11 hours a day, going to bed at 10 p.m. and getting up between 7 and 9 a.m. In the afternoon, Ike Hoover recounted, "he would without fail take a nap, lasting from two to four hours." Hoover, who spent 42 years at the White House, said that no other president he served slept so much.
In contrast, both Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton liked to bounce ideas off their aides in the wee hours. But that's no guarantee of good governance. Warren Harding stayed up late, too, often until 1 or 2 a.m.
It's easy to imagine a situation requiring a clear-headed decision at a muddy hour. One nightmare scenario could involve a "dirty bomb." We have just 60 minutes, the president might be told, to blow up the bomb and the terrorists who plan to explode it. But, one hopes a president might wonder, how often has our intelligence been wrong? How many buildings and innocent people have been blown up by U.S. forces that didn't hit their targets? How many probing questions is a groggy president supposed to ask at 3 a.m.? How much confidence should he or she have in the answers?
Clinton's phone ad got more free publicity than its sponsors could have bought. Credulous as ever, the political media can be counted on to promote an attack without questioning its premises. The commercial deserves hall-of-shame ranking for its snide demagoguery: "Something's happening in the world . . . Your vote will decide who answers that call . . . Whether it's someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world."
If our votes will decide who answers the 3 a.m. call, let's have a write-in vote for Ike Hoover, the long-serving White House usher. Hoover would tell the bureaucrat on the other end of the line, the one looking for brownie points by being the first to tell the president something that he or she will learn soon enough, to call back in the morning. After all, if it's the end of the world, there's nothing the president can do about it. If it isn't, it can almost always wait till breakfast. We got through World War I that way. And we won that one, didn't we?
28.3.08
Peggy Noonan on Hillary
I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.
That's what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac -- and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought -- either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual).
AP
But either you get it now or you never will. That's the importance of the Bosnia tape.
Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves.
Not that her staff isn't policing them too. Mrs. Clinton's people are heavy-handed in that area, letting producers and correspondents know they're watching, weighing, may have to take this higher. There's too much of this in politics, but Hillary's campaign takes it to a new level.
It's not only the press. It's what I get as I walk around New York, which used to be thick with her people. I went to a Hillary fund-raiser at Hunter College about a month ago, paying for a seat in the balcony and being ushered up to fill the more expensive section on the floor, so frantic were they to fill seats.
I sat next to a woman, a New York Democrat who'd been for Hillary from the beginning and still was. She was here. But, she said, "It doesn't seem to be working." She shrugged, not like a brokenhearted person but a practical person who'd missed all the signs of something coming. She wasn't mad at the voters. But she was no longer so taken by the woman who soon took the stage and enacted joy.
The other day a bookseller told me he'd been reading the opinion pages of the papers and noting the anti-Hillary feeling. Two weeks ago he realized he wasn't for her anymore. It wasn't one incident, just an accumulation of things. His experience tracks this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Mrs. Clinton's disapproval numbers have risen to the highest level ever in the campaign, her highest in fact in seven years.
* * *
You'd think she'd pivot back to showing a likable side, chatting with women, weeping, wearing the bright yellows and reds that are thought to appeal to her core following, older women. Well, she's doing that. Yet at the same time, her campaign reveals new levels of thuggishness, though that's the wrong word, for thugs are often effective. This is mere heavy-handedness.
On Wednesday a group of Mrs. Clinton's top donors sent a letter to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, warning her in language that they no doubt thought subtle but that reflected a kind of incompetent menace, that her statements on the presidential campaign may result in less money for Democratic candidates for the House. Ms. Pelosi had said that in her view the superdelegates should support the presidential candidate who wins the most pledged delegates in state contests. The letter urged her to "clarify" her position, which is "clearly untenable" and "runs counter" to the superdelegates' right to make "an informed, individual decision" about "who would be the party's strongest nominee." The signers, noting their past and huge financial support, suggested that Ms. Pelosi "reflect" on her comments and amend them to reflect "a more open view."
Barack Obama's campaign called it inappropriate and said Mrs. Clinton should "reject the insinuation." But why would she? All she has now is bluster. Her supporters put their threat in a letter, not in a private meeting. By threatening Ms. Pelosi publicly, they robbed her of room to maneuver. She has to defy them or back down. She has always struck me as rather grittier than her chic suits, high heels and unhidden enthusiasm may suggest. We'll see.
What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can't trace the line from "this moment's difficulties" to "my triumphant end." But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don't lose. She can't figure out how to win, and she can't accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn't know how he did it!)
She is concussed. But she is a scrapper, a fighter, and she's doing what she knows how to do: scrap and fight. Only harder. So that she ups the ante every day. She helped Ireland achieve peace. She tried to stop Nafta. She's been a leader for 35 years. She landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.
* * *
What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: "Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy." Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. "She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself." Then she turned to his wounds. "She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood."
Made me laugh. It was like the voice of the people answering back. This guy knows that what Mrs. Clinton said is sort of crazy. He seems to know her reputation for untruths. He seemed to be saying, "I get it."
That's what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac -- and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought -- either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual).
AP
But either you get it now or you never will. That's the importance of the Bosnia tape.
Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves.
Not that her staff isn't policing them too. Mrs. Clinton's people are heavy-handed in that area, letting producers and correspondents know they're watching, weighing, may have to take this higher. There's too much of this in politics, but Hillary's campaign takes it to a new level.
It's not only the press. It's what I get as I walk around New York, which used to be thick with her people. I went to a Hillary fund-raiser at Hunter College about a month ago, paying for a seat in the balcony and being ushered up to fill the more expensive section on the floor, so frantic were they to fill seats.
I sat next to a woman, a New York Democrat who'd been for Hillary from the beginning and still was. She was here. But, she said, "It doesn't seem to be working." She shrugged, not like a brokenhearted person but a practical person who'd missed all the signs of something coming. She wasn't mad at the voters. But she was no longer so taken by the woman who soon took the stage and enacted joy.
The other day a bookseller told me he'd been reading the opinion pages of the papers and noting the anti-Hillary feeling. Two weeks ago he realized he wasn't for her anymore. It wasn't one incident, just an accumulation of things. His experience tracks this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Mrs. Clinton's disapproval numbers have risen to the highest level ever in the campaign, her highest in fact in seven years.
* * *
You'd think she'd pivot back to showing a likable side, chatting with women, weeping, wearing the bright yellows and reds that are thought to appeal to her core following, older women. Well, she's doing that. Yet at the same time, her campaign reveals new levels of thuggishness, though that's the wrong word, for thugs are often effective. This is mere heavy-handedness.
On Wednesday a group of Mrs. Clinton's top donors sent a letter to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, warning her in language that they no doubt thought subtle but that reflected a kind of incompetent menace, that her statements on the presidential campaign may result in less money for Democratic candidates for the House. Ms. Pelosi had said that in her view the superdelegates should support the presidential candidate who wins the most pledged delegates in state contests. The letter urged her to "clarify" her position, which is "clearly untenable" and "runs counter" to the superdelegates' right to make "an informed, individual decision" about "who would be the party's strongest nominee." The signers, noting their past and huge financial support, suggested that Ms. Pelosi "reflect" on her comments and amend them to reflect "a more open view."
Barack Obama's campaign called it inappropriate and said Mrs. Clinton should "reject the insinuation." But why would she? All she has now is bluster. Her supporters put their threat in a letter, not in a private meeting. By threatening Ms. Pelosi publicly, they robbed her of room to maneuver. She has to defy them or back down. She has always struck me as rather grittier than her chic suits, high heels and unhidden enthusiasm may suggest. We'll see.
What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can't trace the line from "this moment's difficulties" to "my triumphant end." But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don't lose. She can't figure out how to win, and she can't accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn't know how he did it!)
She is concussed. But she is a scrapper, a fighter, and she's doing what she knows how to do: scrap and fight. Only harder. So that she ups the ante every day. She helped Ireland achieve peace. She tried to stop Nafta. She's been a leader for 35 years. She landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.
* * *
What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: "Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy." Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. "She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself." Then she turned to his wounds. "She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood."
Made me laugh. It was like the voice of the people answering back. This guy knows that what Mrs. Clinton said is sort of crazy. He seems to know her reputation for untruths. He seemed to be saying, "I get it."
Scorsese & the STONES
While he was growing up in New York's Little Italy, Martin Scorsese recalls, the neighbourhood record players and jukeboxes sang the soundtrack to his life. As he wandered from street to street, he'd hear the skittering sounds of swing, the sighing notes of a sweet-tempered ballad, and the rich wailing tones of opera.
For Scorsese, however, it was the sound of the blues in all its varieties that appealed most of all. "The whole thing was like a series of mini concerts," he sighs, "and I loved to hear the Rolling Stones. The sound of their music, the chords, the vocals, the entire feel inspired me greatly and became a basis for most of the work I've done in my movies, going from Mean Streets to Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino. The nature of the music is timeless, for me."
Indeed, the Rolling Stones have entranced Scorsese for so long that the 65-year-old director suggests that he has been filming the band for the past 40 years ("This is the only Scorsese film that doesn't contain our track Gimme Shelter," jokes Mick Jagger), and the culmination of that experience has now been rendered as a single two-hour movie, Shine a Light.
For Scorsese, however, it was the sound of the blues in all its varieties that appealed most of all. "The whole thing was like a series of mini concerts," he sighs, "and I loved to hear the Rolling Stones. The sound of their music, the chords, the vocals, the entire feel inspired me greatly and became a basis for most of the work I've done in my movies, going from Mean Streets to Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino. The nature of the music is timeless, for me."
Indeed, the Rolling Stones have entranced Scorsese for so long that the 65-year-old director suggests that he has been filming the band for the past 40 years ("This is the only Scorsese film that doesn't contain our track Gimme Shelter," jokes Mick Jagger), and the culmination of that experience has now been rendered as a single two-hour movie, Shine a Light.
27.3.08
Julian Barnes (from the TLS)
In the introduction to his 2002 translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain – a fragmented record of the French novelist’s syphilitic decline – Julian Barnes reflects on the notion that suffering, and the knowledge that one’s time is almost up, may lend urgency or authenticity to a writer’s last literary testament. The abyssal shuffle, notes Barnes, “may, or may not, concentrate the mind and encourage a final truthfulness; may or may not include the useful aide-m魯ire of your life passing before your eyes; but it is unlikely to make you a better writer. Modest or jaunty, wise or vainglorious, literary or journalistic, you will write no better, no worse”. Barnes is sixty-two, and his days, happily, are not yet clearly numbered, nor eked out in the kind of agony that halted Daudet’s pen some months short of the end. But Nothing To Be Frightened Of – a memoir of sorts, an essay on this past life with digressions into the beyond – is nothing if not unsettled by the thought that death – “the one appalling fact which defines life” – might fail to up the writerly ante.
Because if not death then what, exactly? Is writing into the dark not, after all, the ultimate (if not quite plum) commission? If the thought of his impending demise – and the prospect of all our definitive full stops – does not rouse the writer to some feat of bleak eloquence or indelible rage, then the suspicion must be that his prior tinkering with such passing themes as love, ambition, violence and regret has been just so much stalling before this last test, which he has known he was bound to fail. Barnes knows this, and worries away constantly, just below the surface of his book, at the question of whether he is good enough to write about death. One suspects in the end that he is less afraid of death – which fear is the book’s ostensible theme – than he is of couching his dread in a clumsy phrase. This is both the proper literary response to the problem and the reason Nothing To Be Frightened Of is so elusive and even (despite its confessional depth and its breadth of reference) so curiously slight a volume.
It is not, Barnes tells us, an autobiography. It is rather an essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void. (They are none of them, of course, the voices of experience – death is not, as Wittgenstein put it, an event in life.) For most of them, as for the author himself, the fear of death is inseparable from the problem of God and the possibility of an afterlife: few of us possess the assurance of Barnes’s brother, a philosopher for whom the end is the end, the dead are dead and God is just a soppy consolation. Barnes’s own lack of faith is not so bottomless. “I miss Him”, he writes in the book’s opening sentence – in the face of being cosmically stood up, this is a rather winsome alternative to Samuel Beckett’s robust response: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”. Nothing To Be Frightened Of is a reasonable, if ultimately somewhat shy, inquiry into what is to be done, in His absence, with the fact of finitude.
The ends in question include Barnes’s own – of which he tells us he is extremely frightened, and with which he is unusually preoccupied – and those of his parents. Regarding the latter, he is not exactly detached but tellingly understated, as when he writes of his father: “he died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months – indeed, years – after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive”. When it comes to Barnes’s own death, it seems to be this half-life that scares him most, the idea that his personality, or more precisely his written “I”, will fade before his body does. Literature at least promises to reverse the order:
do we create art in order to defeat, or at least defy, death? To transcend it, to put it in its place? You may take my body, you may take all the squidgy stuff inside my skull where lurks whatever lucidity and imagination I possess, but you cannot take away what I have done with them. Is that our subtext and our motivation?
The answers discovered in a lifetime’s reading vary greatly in logic, elegance and consoling power. Cicero is obscurely unhelpful: “after death, either we feel better, or we feel nothing”. Pascal’s celebrated wager seems to Barnes “a piece of self-interested position-taking worthy of the French diplomatic corps”. He remains equally unconvinced by Montaigne’s admonition to keep death firmly in focus so as to overcome one’s fear: advice proffered also by Sir Thomas Browne. (The logic was rarely so affectingly embodied, however, as by the ailing John Donne, shrouded for his portrait as the end approached; his “Death’s Duel” preaches already as if from beyond the grave.) A version of the same argument was later framed by Flaubert, with the crucial subtraction of God and the addition of a graveside swagger: “people like us should have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it. By dint of saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm”. Flaubert attended regular dinners with Daudet, Turgenev, Zola and Edmond de Goncourt: all of them competing at table for the most insouciant attitude in the face of death.
It is the novelist Jules Renard, however, who seems to Barnes the most sympathetic exemplar in his pantheon of (mostly French) ripostes to the reaper. Renard’s agnosticism – “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t”, he wrote – was the result of a series of bereavements that in their grisliness and absurdity would have tested the strongest faith. At first, following the suicide of his father in 1897, Renard still believed in a heroic, even artistic death. Three years later, his brother collapsed and died in his office after complaining that the central heating was killing him; at the graveside, Jules noticed a fat worm: “if a worm could strut, this one would be strutting”. In 1909, his mother fell backwards into a well and was drowned; Renard at last concluded that death was merely incomprehensible, impenetrable: “death is not an artist”. There is no such thing as a “good death”, but neither is there a meaningful death. Still, we persist in imagining that language can elide the reality: even Renard’s apparently cold-eyed aphorisms share in this fantasy.
Barnes’s own relation to the deaths of his parents is couched in exactly these terms. His philosopher brother, Jonathan Barnes, refuses to speak of what the deceased “would have wanted”: this is merely to invent a narrative voice where there is none any longer. The novelist is less certain, pointing out that he practises an art which “runs counter to the idea of a calm farewell to a thinned self”. Accordingly, he nurses certain fantasies regarding his own place in posterity, but knows that in the long run there is really no such thing:
"first, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the second-hand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much."
At length, “at some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet”, the last reader will turn the last page.
It is a more localized version of this doomed desire for posterity that in the end makes Nothing To Be Frightened Of a somewhat evasive book: Barnes’s very facility when it comes to writing about the idea of death starts to seem an avoidance of the main event. At times it seems as though what he is really spooked by is not death at all, but the possibility of his being taken seriously, of having his lubricious sentences stripped bare, and needing to commit to an actual argument or admit an unqualified emotion. But he simply cannot give up being Julian Barnes, staying resolutely in character, with all the apophthegmatic skill that that implies – “God might be dead, but Death is well alive” – and all consequent reticence at the level of the book’s otherwise politely chatty form. Nor can he allow his reflection on mortality to descend to the level of bodily abjection: apart from glancing references to his own partial deafness and the physical decline of a few friends, one would think that Julian Barnes, for all his professed fear of the end, was actually immortal. It is instructive that the most palpable symbol in the book is made of words: an Indian leather pouffe that his parents, unaccountably, filled with their shredded love letters. This is a book about death in which, despite the author’s eloquent efforts to face (or, understandably, flee from) the brute uncultured fact of dying, it is all more or less in the mind.
Julian Barnes
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
250pp. Cape. £17.99.
978 0 224 08523 6
Because if not death then what, exactly? Is writing into the dark not, after all, the ultimate (if not quite plum) commission? If the thought of his impending demise – and the prospect of all our definitive full stops – does not rouse the writer to some feat of bleak eloquence or indelible rage, then the suspicion must be that his prior tinkering with such passing themes as love, ambition, violence and regret has been just so much stalling before this last test, which he has known he was bound to fail. Barnes knows this, and worries away constantly, just below the surface of his book, at the question of whether he is good enough to write about death. One suspects in the end that he is less afraid of death – which fear is the book’s ostensible theme – than he is of couching his dread in a clumsy phrase. This is both the proper literary response to the problem and the reason Nothing To Be Frightened Of is so elusive and even (despite its confessional depth and its breadth of reference) so curiously slight a volume.
It is not, Barnes tells us, an autobiography. It is rather an essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void. (They are none of them, of course, the voices of experience – death is not, as Wittgenstein put it, an event in life.) For most of them, as for the author himself, the fear of death is inseparable from the problem of God and the possibility of an afterlife: few of us possess the assurance of Barnes’s brother, a philosopher for whom the end is the end, the dead are dead and God is just a soppy consolation. Barnes’s own lack of faith is not so bottomless. “I miss Him”, he writes in the book’s opening sentence – in the face of being cosmically stood up, this is a rather winsome alternative to Samuel Beckett’s robust response: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”. Nothing To Be Frightened Of is a reasonable, if ultimately somewhat shy, inquiry into what is to be done, in His absence, with the fact of finitude.
The ends in question include Barnes’s own – of which he tells us he is extremely frightened, and with which he is unusually preoccupied – and those of his parents. Regarding the latter, he is not exactly detached but tellingly understated, as when he writes of his father: “he died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months – indeed, years – after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive”. When it comes to Barnes’s own death, it seems to be this half-life that scares him most, the idea that his personality, or more precisely his written “I”, will fade before his body does. Literature at least promises to reverse the order:
do we create art in order to defeat, or at least defy, death? To transcend it, to put it in its place? You may take my body, you may take all the squidgy stuff inside my skull where lurks whatever lucidity and imagination I possess, but you cannot take away what I have done with them. Is that our subtext and our motivation?
The answers discovered in a lifetime’s reading vary greatly in logic, elegance and consoling power. Cicero is obscurely unhelpful: “after death, either we feel better, or we feel nothing”. Pascal’s celebrated wager seems to Barnes “a piece of self-interested position-taking worthy of the French diplomatic corps”. He remains equally unconvinced by Montaigne’s admonition to keep death firmly in focus so as to overcome one’s fear: advice proffered also by Sir Thomas Browne. (The logic was rarely so affectingly embodied, however, as by the ailing John Donne, shrouded for his portrait as the end approached; his “Death’s Duel” preaches already as if from beyond the grave.) A version of the same argument was later framed by Flaubert, with the crucial subtraction of God and the addition of a graveside swagger: “people like us should have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it. By dint of saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm”. Flaubert attended regular dinners with Daudet, Turgenev, Zola and Edmond de Goncourt: all of them competing at table for the most insouciant attitude in the face of death.
It is the novelist Jules Renard, however, who seems to Barnes the most sympathetic exemplar in his pantheon of (mostly French) ripostes to the reaper. Renard’s agnosticism – “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t”, he wrote – was the result of a series of bereavements that in their grisliness and absurdity would have tested the strongest faith. At first, following the suicide of his father in 1897, Renard still believed in a heroic, even artistic death. Three years later, his brother collapsed and died in his office after complaining that the central heating was killing him; at the graveside, Jules noticed a fat worm: “if a worm could strut, this one would be strutting”. In 1909, his mother fell backwards into a well and was drowned; Renard at last concluded that death was merely incomprehensible, impenetrable: “death is not an artist”. There is no such thing as a “good death”, but neither is there a meaningful death. Still, we persist in imagining that language can elide the reality: even Renard’s apparently cold-eyed aphorisms share in this fantasy.
Barnes’s own relation to the deaths of his parents is couched in exactly these terms. His philosopher brother, Jonathan Barnes, refuses to speak of what the deceased “would have wanted”: this is merely to invent a narrative voice where there is none any longer. The novelist is less certain, pointing out that he practises an art which “runs counter to the idea of a calm farewell to a thinned self”. Accordingly, he nurses certain fantasies regarding his own place in posterity, but knows that in the long run there is really no such thing:
"first, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the second-hand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much."
At length, “at some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet”, the last reader will turn the last page.
It is a more localized version of this doomed desire for posterity that in the end makes Nothing To Be Frightened Of a somewhat evasive book: Barnes’s very facility when it comes to writing about the idea of death starts to seem an avoidance of the main event. At times it seems as though what he is really spooked by is not death at all, but the possibility of his being taken seriously, of having his lubricious sentences stripped bare, and needing to commit to an actual argument or admit an unqualified emotion. But he simply cannot give up being Julian Barnes, staying resolutely in character, with all the apophthegmatic skill that that implies – “God might be dead, but Death is well alive” – and all consequent reticence at the level of the book’s otherwise politely chatty form. Nor can he allow his reflection on mortality to descend to the level of bodily abjection: apart from glancing references to his own partial deafness and the physical decline of a few friends, one would think that Julian Barnes, for all his professed fear of the end, was actually immortal. It is instructive that the most palpable symbol in the book is made of words: an Indian leather pouffe that his parents, unaccountably, filled with their shredded love letters. This is a book about death in which, despite the author’s eloquent efforts to face (or, understandably, flee from) the brute uncultured fact of dying, it is all more or less in the mind.
Julian Barnes
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
250pp. Cape. £17.99.
978 0 224 08523 6
Do We Read Too Much About Reading?
Perhaps if we read more and read about reading less, we would be better read. See this piece from the Guardian.
26.3.08
NYLON
The good and bad in New York and London
By Irwin Stelzer
There is nothing like a trip to New York City to put some of the problems facing Britain in perspective - and some of its advantages. High on the list of the latter for many is the $2 pound.
New York is teeming with British tourists. Two British women of a certain age we encountered in the lift in our hotel could barely carry the results of their day's swarm over the counters of New York's emporia. For them, everything here is half-price.
Americans are of two minds as they watch their dollar depreciate in value. It both troubles us by adding to domestic inflation and making overseas trips too expensive to contemplate, and cheers us by bringing bargain-hunting foreigners to snap up everything from jeans to apartments.
Britons are not so conflicted: the ones I meet here say it is a relief to come to New York where a decent meal does not require taking out a second mortgage. Which probably isn't available these days, anyway.
On to a meeting with a young man formerly employed in Britain, recently transferred to America and happily stunned by the openness to change and revelling in the energy of his co-workers. He came to New York in search of the "anything is possible" attitude that Gordon Brown is so eager to import to Britain, and found it.
Then there is the not-so-small matter of sex and government. Britain has not had much to offer lately in the way of sex scandals. New York governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace after it was discovered that he prosecuted prostitution rings by day, and frequented them by night.
In the process, Spitzer proved that British "johns" are tougher bargainers: he paid £2,500 for what the complaint says a British "client" got for £500.
The fallen governor's successor, David Paterson, devoted his first press conference to listing not only his extramarital flings, but those of his wife. His lawyers have been trawling through records so that he can reimburse New York State for any expenses he charged to his campaign or to the state.
Britain might catch the occasional MP in flagrante, but rarely an official as powerful as the governor of New York.
There is more when it comes to government. Compared to London, New York is a rather placid place. The departure of Rudy Giuliani, whose accomplishments are legion, but who was hardly a soothing force in the city, and his replacement by dull, competent Mike Bloomberg, has brought a kind of calm to life here.
No invitations to anti-Semitic, homosexual-hating, Islamic preachers; no cheap oil from America-hating Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the benefactor of Ken Livingstone's London and Joe Kennedy's Boston-based oil company; Muslim immigrants seem more or less contentedly integrated into New York and American society, and do not blow up the subway.
But then there are the taxis. Compared with the drivers of London's black cabs, New York's are a sorry lot. Careening up the Avenue of Americas in a cab littered with apple cores, driven by a man who had no idea where my hotel was, I longed for the serenity of a London taxi - although not for the speed with which its meter clicked along.
And certainly not for the traffic jams that have made life in London so difficult. As one British visitor remarked, the thing he likes about New York is that traffic moves smartly along. That might be due to the fact that the city government has figured out how to co-ordinate road works to avoid the London phenomenon of digging up streets multiple times to accommodate, sequentially, water companies, electric companies, BT and others.
Most of all, one notices the different pace of life and of economic activity. A tour of the downtown area is especially revealing. Yes, there is squabbling over what to put where the World Trade Centre once stood. But the rest of the area is now festooned with new condominiums, new office buildings, new businesses. It is as if an entire new city has sprung up.
Perhaps some of the differences between New York and London stem from the fact that London is both a great metropolis and home to central government.
Londoners therefore, quite naturally, are absorbed with the day-to-day doings of Parliament and Prime Minister, and tend to look to government for solutions, whereas New Yorkers view Washington as some distant place that has less effect on daily life, and a generally malign one.
Being less concerned with the doings of central government, and less likely to look to it to solve their problems, New Yorkers can and do devote more time and energy to making money - and giving it away.
Because charities in America do not look first to government; because New York is home to lots of rich people; because America has a deeper tradition of private philanthropy than does Britain, with its welfare state; and because Americans receive more generous tax treatment for their charitable donations, New York is famous for its ritzy balls and charity-dos to benefit arts organisations and medical research into just about every known disease.
Do-gooders here seem to concentrate more on directly doing good than on trying to persuade government to do it for them. Which is not to denigrate Britons: their hearts are made of just as pure 21-carat gold as are Americans'. But the Government claims a larger portion of their hard-earned income, leaving them less to donate to worthy causes.
Finally, there is politics. Thanks to the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats' presidential nomination, and to Obama's special appeal to young voters, political life has taken on a vitality that has thoughtful observers in Britain wondering whether the American scheme of primaries and debates might not be useful imports.
More than a few have even confessed to me, after making certain they cannot be overheard, that they find themselves following US television's coverage of American politics with greater interest than BBC's duller reporting of duller British political affairs.
By Irwin Stelzer
There is nothing like a trip to New York City to put some of the problems facing Britain in perspective - and some of its advantages. High on the list of the latter for many is the $2 pound.
New York is teeming with British tourists. Two British women of a certain age we encountered in the lift in our hotel could barely carry the results of their day's swarm over the counters of New York's emporia. For them, everything here is half-price.
Americans are of two minds as they watch their dollar depreciate in value. It both troubles us by adding to domestic inflation and making overseas trips too expensive to contemplate, and cheers us by bringing bargain-hunting foreigners to snap up everything from jeans to apartments.
Britons are not so conflicted: the ones I meet here say it is a relief to come to New York where a decent meal does not require taking out a second mortgage. Which probably isn't available these days, anyway.
On to a meeting with a young man formerly employed in Britain, recently transferred to America and happily stunned by the openness to change and revelling in the energy of his co-workers. He came to New York in search of the "anything is possible" attitude that Gordon Brown is so eager to import to Britain, and found it.
Then there is the not-so-small matter of sex and government. Britain has not had much to offer lately in the way of sex scandals. New York governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace after it was discovered that he prosecuted prostitution rings by day, and frequented them by night.
In the process, Spitzer proved that British "johns" are tougher bargainers: he paid £2,500 for what the complaint says a British "client" got for £500.
The fallen governor's successor, David Paterson, devoted his first press conference to listing not only his extramarital flings, but those of his wife. His lawyers have been trawling through records so that he can reimburse New York State for any expenses he charged to his campaign or to the state.
Britain might catch the occasional MP in flagrante, but rarely an official as powerful as the governor of New York.
There is more when it comes to government. Compared to London, New York is a rather placid place. The departure of Rudy Giuliani, whose accomplishments are legion, but who was hardly a soothing force in the city, and his replacement by dull, competent Mike Bloomberg, has brought a kind of calm to life here.
No invitations to anti-Semitic, homosexual-hating, Islamic preachers; no cheap oil from America-hating Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the benefactor of Ken Livingstone's London and Joe Kennedy's Boston-based oil company; Muslim immigrants seem more or less contentedly integrated into New York and American society, and do not blow up the subway.
But then there are the taxis. Compared with the drivers of London's black cabs, New York's are a sorry lot. Careening up the Avenue of Americas in a cab littered with apple cores, driven by a man who had no idea where my hotel was, I longed for the serenity of a London taxi - although not for the speed with which its meter clicked along.
And certainly not for the traffic jams that have made life in London so difficult. As one British visitor remarked, the thing he likes about New York is that traffic moves smartly along. That might be due to the fact that the city government has figured out how to co-ordinate road works to avoid the London phenomenon of digging up streets multiple times to accommodate, sequentially, water companies, electric companies, BT and others.
Most of all, one notices the different pace of life and of economic activity. A tour of the downtown area is especially revealing. Yes, there is squabbling over what to put where the World Trade Centre once stood. But the rest of the area is now festooned with new condominiums, new office buildings, new businesses. It is as if an entire new city has sprung up.
Perhaps some of the differences between New York and London stem from the fact that London is both a great metropolis and home to central government.
Londoners therefore, quite naturally, are absorbed with the day-to-day doings of Parliament and Prime Minister, and tend to look to government for solutions, whereas New Yorkers view Washington as some distant place that has less effect on daily life, and a generally malign one.
Being less concerned with the doings of central government, and less likely to look to it to solve their problems, New Yorkers can and do devote more time and energy to making money - and giving it away.
Because charities in America do not look first to government; because New York is home to lots of rich people; because America has a deeper tradition of private philanthropy than does Britain, with its welfare state; and because Americans receive more generous tax treatment for their charitable donations, New York is famous for its ritzy balls and charity-dos to benefit arts organisations and medical research into just about every known disease.
Do-gooders here seem to concentrate more on directly doing good than on trying to persuade government to do it for them. Which is not to denigrate Britons: their hearts are made of just as pure 21-carat gold as are Americans'. But the Government claims a larger portion of their hard-earned income, leaving them less to donate to worthy causes.
Finally, there is politics. Thanks to the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democrats' presidential nomination, and to Obama's special appeal to young voters, political life has taken on a vitality that has thoughtful observers in Britain wondering whether the American scheme of primaries and debates might not be useful imports.
More than a few have even confessed to me, after making certain they cannot be overheard, that they find themselves following US television's coverage of American politics with greater interest than BBC's duller reporting of duller British political affairs.
25.3.08
1968 & Tom Stoppard
Mr. Stoppard opines in Sunday's Times
In 1968 I was living the good life with my first wife and first baby in our first house on the swell of my first play and was beginning to be noted by my peers as someone who was politically dubious.
It was to be some years before a well known left-wing director, asked to typify a “Royal Court play”, replied that it was a play not written by Tom Stoppard, but I was already conscious of a feeling in myself which detached me from the prevailing spirit of rebellion when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was to be where it’s at.
The feeling I refer to was embarrassment. I was embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris, had moved on since Wordsworth was young and which seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born – the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent.
I had not been born into it. You don’t need to be a qualified psychologist to work out that in England in 1968, 22 years after I arrived, I was much more disposed to champion my adoptive country than to find fault with it. For all I knew to the contrary, if my father had survived the war (he was killed in the Far East) he would have taken his family back to my birthplace in Czechoslovakia in 1946 and I would have grown up under the communist dictatorship which followed two years later.
I was as aware as most people were that not everything in the gardens of the West was lovely and of course we didn’t know – one never knows – the half of it. But when in August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, an act which was simply the ongoing occupation of eastern Europe writ bold, my embarrassment at our agit-prop mummers’ “revolution” turned to revulsion.
What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.
A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”
Communism’s “normality” relied on the distortion of language and my new hero, George Orwell, had long since diagnosed the disease in his own society, so I took this kind of thing very much to heart.
And in 1968 there was Paris, too. By August the smoke of May in Paris had cleared. There had been pitched battles between thousands of students and riot police, followed by a five-week occupation of the Sorbonne and a general strike. These were immense events, not much diminished – from my viewpoint in a thatched cottage off the M4 – by the coat-tails attachment of famous philosophers, actors and other luminaries of a generous state culture.
Even at this 40-year distance les événements of 1968 still give, by association, our more constrained English version a resonance for people who are vague about what happened in Prague or why. But I look back on our “revolution” – the occupation of the London School of Economics, Horn-sey College of Art and all the excitements of those heady days – as little more than a saturnalia.
This indeed was one of the things I loved about England. The English version of continental eruptions suggested a national character in control of itself. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, political activism at its extremes included murder, kidnap and bombs. My Italian publisher, one of the most sophisticated, charming and charismatic people I’d ever met, was later killed by his own explosives while trying to blow up an electricity pylon outside Milan.
A few miles away across the Channel, clashes between protesters and riot police were affairs of burning cars, overturned buses and buildings turned to rubble. Our own street-fighting man was only rock’n’roll.
There was something self-con-scious about rebellion here. Demos had a carnival air about them. Our meetings – and I was drawn to a few – were earnest convocations of squat-dwellers and what would now be called media types planning to overthrow society by starting a magazine and discussing how to get “the workers” behind them. Trevor Grif-fiths’s fascinating play The Party, set in 1968 and performed at the National Theatre with Laurence Olivier as a working-class activist invited to a meeting in a house in SW7 with an early Hockney on the wall, is for me the perfect time capsule of the posh end of ’68.
It wasn’t all posh, of course. The “scene”, as we called it, was more populously located in a shifting underground of art events – exhibitions, gigs, happenings, poetry readings – in dark places around Covent Garden and elsewhere and here the word “revolution” takes on some substance, I think. It was not a social revolution, but there was a sense of a cultural revolution pivoted on that moment.
Unfortunately I was embarrassed by that, too. I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn’t take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions.
That last phrase I have taken back from a character in my last play, Rock’n’Roll, which begins in 1968. Ironically, the person who speaks for me on the subject of that revolution is a Marxist, a Cambridge communist called Max looking back in 1990 when he is about the same age as I am now.
The way he remembers it is that the 1950s was the last time that liberty opened up only when you left your youth behind you. By the mid1960s young people started off with more liberty than they knew what to do with, but confused it with sexual liberation and the freedom to get high so it all went to waste – wasted, that is, in a cultural revolution rather than social revolution. “Street theatre” is what Max calls it.
Altering the psyche was supposed to change the social structure but, as a Marxist, Max knows it really works the other way: changing the social structure is the only way to change the psyche. The idea that “make love, not war” is a more practical slogan than “workers of the world unite” is as airy-fairy as the I Ching.
I wish I had known this man in 1968. We could have been embarrassed together as we looked upon the spectacle. He had fought fascism in the slums and in Spain and when he remarked sarcastically that his hippie daughter “thinks a fascist is a mounted policeman in Grosvenor Square,” I might have said, “Right on!” or “My own view exactly.”
He could have also, on the other hand, changed my views about a few things, starting with the society that I was grateful, and remain grateful, to have joined. What about those abuses? Are they really egregious or are they endemic to the system? And where does the job of editing blur into censorship?
I wouldn’t have asked these questions of myself in 1968, the events of which are examined in Revolution 68, an edition of The South Bank Show, tonight on ITV1. But it is not just I who have changed. Society has changed, too.
In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in Rock’n’Roll.
What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue, it is your virtue.” The article that I subsequently wrote about Belarus was published almost on the very day that Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Labour party member, was forcibly ejected from the party conference for heckling the foreign secretary. I received a gleeful postcard from Harold Pinter.
The idea of the autonomy of the individual is echoed, I realise, all over the place in my writing. In The Coast of Utopia I was using 19th-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen’s own words about the English in the 19th century: “They don’t give asylum out of respect for the asylum seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”
If I had known in 1968 what we were going to squander, long before we had the excuse of 9/11, I might have joined in the fun with less embarrassment, with less to lose. But at the time all the goings-on seemed frivolous compared with the freedoms we had invented – or should I say the freedoms you invented?
I was 31, I had been earning a living for 14 years, I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England and too hung up to let it all hang out.
Revolution, violence ... and shoes
Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher The 1968 riots marked the beginning of the antitotalitarian movement in France, which appeared to be communist but in actual fact was an antiMarxist movement, in support of the Czech demonstrations. Our hearts beat to the same rhythm and for the same cause as the people of Prague
Martin Amis, novelist The main pretext for the demonstrations was the war in Vietnam and a growing antiAmerican sentiment, but my feeling is that the real reason was the consolidation of the youth movement. The ’68 riots were a celebration of youthfulness: for the first time in three generations, young men weren’t being sent off to die at war. And, as a result, the young celebrated being young
Frank Field, Labour MP Looking back at the newsreels of the Grosvenor Square protest, I am amazed at how violent it was. It is a lesson in how easily things can blow up. I had no interest or involvement at the time and I’m quite amazed that these events took place in my own nation. Although we have a peaceful nation now, one wonders what’s bubbling under the surface. It teaches you that being a peaceable kingdom is not necessarily a permanent state
Emma Tennant, novelist Determined to join the revolution, I was walking towards the Sorbonne in Paris when my shoes collapsed. There is little so unrevolutionary as sitting in a shoe shop, awaiting a fitting, as Madame Guillotine stands outside. And in London, my ambition to join (the radical activist) Tariq Ali at a demonstration was thwarted again by shoes – this time, worn by nervous horses. I just ran for it. But I have a cupboard full of footwear for the next revolution – vive Jimmy Choo
Compiled by Emma Buckle
In 1968 I was living the good life with my first wife and first baby in our first house on the swell of my first play and was beginning to be noted by my peers as someone who was politically dubious.
It was to be some years before a well known left-wing director, asked to typify a “Royal Court play”, replied that it was a play not written by Tom Stoppard, but I was already conscious of a feeling in myself which detached me from the prevailing spirit of rebellion when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was to be where it’s at.
The feeling I refer to was embarrassment. I was embarrassed by the slogans and postures of rebellion in a society which, in London as in Paris, had moved on since Wordsworth was young and which seemed to me to be the least worst system into which one might have been born – the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent.
I had not been born into it. You don’t need to be a qualified psychologist to work out that in England in 1968, 22 years after I arrived, I was much more disposed to champion my adoptive country than to find fault with it. For all I knew to the contrary, if my father had survived the war (he was killed in the Far East) he would have taken his family back to my birthplace in Czechoslovakia in 1946 and I would have grown up under the communist dictatorship which followed two years later.
I was as aware as most people were that not everything in the gardens of the West was lovely and of course we didn’t know – one never knows – the half of it. But when in August 1968 the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, an act which was simply the ongoing occupation of eastern Europe writ bold, my embarrassment at our agit-prop mummers’ “revolution” turned to revulsion.
What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West”, God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.
A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”
Communism’s “normality” relied on the distortion of language and my new hero, George Orwell, had long since diagnosed the disease in his own society, so I took this kind of thing very much to heart.
And in 1968 there was Paris, too. By August the smoke of May in Paris had cleared. There had been pitched battles between thousands of students and riot police, followed by a five-week occupation of the Sorbonne and a general strike. These were immense events, not much diminished – from my viewpoint in a thatched cottage off the M4 – by the coat-tails attachment of famous philosophers, actors and other luminaries of a generous state culture.
Even at this 40-year distance les événements of 1968 still give, by association, our more constrained English version a resonance for people who are vague about what happened in Prague or why. But I look back on our “revolution” – the occupation of the London School of Economics, Horn-sey College of Art and all the excitements of those heady days – as little more than a saturnalia.
This indeed was one of the things I loved about England. The English version of continental eruptions suggested a national character in control of itself. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, political activism at its extremes included murder, kidnap and bombs. My Italian publisher, one of the most sophisticated, charming and charismatic people I’d ever met, was later killed by his own explosives while trying to blow up an electricity pylon outside Milan.
A few miles away across the Channel, clashes between protesters and riot police were affairs of burning cars, overturned buses and buildings turned to rubble. Our own street-fighting man was only rock’n’roll.
There was something self-con-scious about rebellion here. Demos had a carnival air about them. Our meetings – and I was drawn to a few – were earnest convocations of squat-dwellers and what would now be called media types planning to overthrow society by starting a magazine and discussing how to get “the workers” behind them. Trevor Grif-fiths’s fascinating play The Party, set in 1968 and performed at the National Theatre with Laurence Olivier as a working-class activist invited to a meeting in a house in SW7 with an early Hockney on the wall, is for me the perfect time capsule of the posh end of ’68.
It wasn’t all posh, of course. The “scene”, as we called it, was more populously located in a shifting underground of art events – exhibitions, gigs, happenings, poetry readings – in dark places around Covent Garden and elsewhere and here the word “revolution” takes on some substance, I think. It was not a social revolution, but there was a sense of a cultural revolution pivoted on that moment.
Unfortunately I was embarrassed by that, too. I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn’t take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions.
That last phrase I have taken back from a character in my last play, Rock’n’Roll, which begins in 1968. Ironically, the person who speaks for me on the subject of that revolution is a Marxist, a Cambridge communist called Max looking back in 1990 when he is about the same age as I am now.
The way he remembers it is that the 1950s was the last time that liberty opened up only when you left your youth behind you. By the mid1960s young people started off with more liberty than they knew what to do with, but confused it with sexual liberation and the freedom to get high so it all went to waste – wasted, that is, in a cultural revolution rather than social revolution. “Street theatre” is what Max calls it.
Altering the psyche was supposed to change the social structure but, as a Marxist, Max knows it really works the other way: changing the social structure is the only way to change the psyche. The idea that “make love, not war” is a more practical slogan than “workers of the world unite” is as airy-fairy as the I Ching.
I wish I had known this man in 1968. We could have been embarrassed together as we looked upon the spectacle. He had fought fascism in the slums and in Spain and when he remarked sarcastically that his hippie daughter “thinks a fascist is a mounted policeman in Grosvenor Square,” I might have said, “Right on!” or “My own view exactly.”
He could have also, on the other hand, changed my views about a few things, starting with the society that I was grateful, and remain grateful, to have joined. What about those abuses? Are they really egregious or are they endemic to the system? And where does the job of editing blur into censorship?
I wouldn’t have asked these questions of myself in 1968, the events of which are examined in Revolution 68, an edition of The South Bank Show, tonight on ITV1. But it is not just I who have changed. Society has changed, too.
In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in Rock’n’Roll.
What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue, it is your virtue.” The article that I subsequently wrote about Belarus was published almost on the very day that Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Labour party member, was forcibly ejected from the party conference for heckling the foreign secretary. I received a gleeful postcard from Harold Pinter.
The idea of the autonomy of the individual is echoed, I realise, all over the place in my writing. In The Coast of Utopia I was using 19th-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen’s own words about the English in the 19th century: “They don’t give asylum out of respect for the asylum seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”
If I had known in 1968 what we were going to squander, long before we had the excuse of 9/11, I might have joined in the fun with less embarrassment, with less to lose. But at the time all the goings-on seemed frivolous compared with the freedoms we had invented – or should I say the freedoms you invented?
I was 31, I had been earning a living for 14 years, I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England and too hung up to let it all hang out.
Revolution, violence ... and shoes
Bernard-Henri Lévy, French philosopher The 1968 riots marked the beginning of the antitotalitarian movement in France, which appeared to be communist but in actual fact was an antiMarxist movement, in support of the Czech demonstrations. Our hearts beat to the same rhythm and for the same cause as the people of Prague
Martin Amis, novelist The main pretext for the demonstrations was the war in Vietnam and a growing antiAmerican sentiment, but my feeling is that the real reason was the consolidation of the youth movement. The ’68 riots were a celebration of youthfulness: for the first time in three generations, young men weren’t being sent off to die at war. And, as a result, the young celebrated being young
Frank Field, Labour MP Looking back at the newsreels of the Grosvenor Square protest, I am amazed at how violent it was. It is a lesson in how easily things can blow up. I had no interest or involvement at the time and I’m quite amazed that these events took place in my own nation. Although we have a peaceful nation now, one wonders what’s bubbling under the surface. It teaches you that being a peaceable kingdom is not necessarily a permanent state
Emma Tennant, novelist Determined to join the revolution, I was walking towards the Sorbonne in Paris when my shoes collapsed. There is little so unrevolutionary as sitting in a shoe shop, awaiting a fitting, as Madame Guillotine stands outside. And in London, my ambition to join (the radical activist) Tariq Ali at a demonstration was thwarted again by shoes – this time, worn by nervous horses. I just ran for it. But I have a cupboard full of footwear for the next revolution – vive Jimmy Choo
Compiled by Emma Buckle
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