IN THE innocent days before September 11th 2001, a popular parlour game in Washington was guessing when Donald Rumsfeld would be given the boot. The new secretary of defence had managed to alienate both Congress and the Pentagon bureaucracy. And the press was full of stories about his abrasive style and pig-headed arrogance.
September 11th transformed a has-been into a national hero. Mr Rumsfeld immediately captivated the country by running into the burning Pentagon to rescue the wounded. And he kept it captivated with a series of press conferences that projected a mixture of defiance and determination. This was American manliness at its best. The staid Wall Street Journal called him a “hunk”. George Bush took to referring to him as “Rumstud”.
Then came the Iraq war and the disgrace of Abu Ghraib; and this paper, among many critics, called for Mr Rumsfeld to go. Now he is under fire once again. As before, Mr Bush has pledged support for him: “I am the decider and I decide what's best.” And Mr Rumsfeld is fighting hard for his political life. He has dismissed the calls for his resignation as a passing storm and a silly fad. Why dismiss the defence secretary, he asks, just because “two or three” people disagree with him?
But the current furore can't be brushed aside. Six retired generals have publicly called for the secretary's resignation. This is extraordinary in itself. But it comes on top of a mountain of other problems. Senior politicians such as Joe Biden and John McCain have been calling for his head for months. And a series of books—most notably “Cobra II” by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Pantheon)—have provided yet more ammunition for Mr Rumsfeld's critics. The secretary of defence has become a liability that Mr Bush's troubled administration can no longer afford: a distraction at home and a barrier to success in Iraq.
There is now widespread agreement on what he got wrong. His biggest mistake—the fons et origo of all the others—was to try to fight the war with too few troops. His second-biggest was to make no proper provision for restoring order afterwards. But there is no shortage of other mistakes. Mr Rumsfeld misread the intelligence in the build-up to the war, and much of it was simply wrong in any case. He failed to plan for the occupation. He ignored the growing insurgency. He disbanded the Iraqi army, scattering 300,000 armed and unemployed men into the population. The more interesting question is why he messed up so comprehensively.
The most obvious reason, of course, is arrogance. Mr Rumsfeld suffered from exactly the same problem as another whizz-kid CEO turned secretary of defence, Robert McNamara: iron self-confidence. He junked the army's carefully laid plans for invasion (General Zinni's plan called for at least 380,000 troops, for example, far more than Mr Rumsfeld sent). He dismissed warnings from General Shinseki that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to win the peace. He ignored pleas for more troops on the ground. And he surrounded himself with similarly one-dimensional strategists such as General Franks and yes-men like General Myers.
Another reason is bureaucratic turf wars. Henry Kissinger once described Mr Rumsfeld as the best practitioner of the art of bureaucratic infighting that he had ever seen, which is no mean compliment; and he certainly did a brilliant job of elbowing Colin Powell and the State Department aside, putting control of post-war reconstruction in military hands for the first time since the second world war. But he had no idea what to do with his new-found power. Without the State Department's experience of post-war reconstruction, gathered in Bosnia and Afghanistan, Mr Rumsfeld veered all over the place.
The biggest reason that Mr Rumsfeld made such a mess of things was that he was fighting the wrong war. His greatest passion was to “transform” the lumbering old army into a much lighter and more flexible force, and he seized on Iraq as a perfect opportunity to demonstrate it. In a few short weeks, American troops victoriously took Baghdad—but then failed completely to impose control and end the violence. The defence secretary's insistence on “lean warfare” made it impossible to seal the borders or stop the looting; his reliance on high-tech weaponry rather than boots on the ground made it difficult to crush the insurgency; and, according to the non-partisan Schlesinger commission, his insistence on junking long-established planning procedures contributed directly to the disgrace of the prisoner-baiting at Abu Ghraib, because the chain of command was disrupted and commanders found themselves in charge of units that they didn't know.
The tragedy of Mr Rumsfeld is that his vices are the flip side of his virtues. He was right that the American armed forces had barely woken up to the end of the cold war. He was right that the Pentagon bureaucracy is one of the most reactionary in the world. And he was right that, with very precise air-strikes based on good intelligence, minimum muscle could be used in modern warfare. But Mr Rumsfeld ended up suffering from the very problem that he saw in his critics: a failure to adjust his thinking to new circumstances. He allowed “transformation” to distract attention from the war (army officers accuse him of “trying to fix the car while the engine's running”). And he mistook criticism as a sign of bureaucratic resistance.
But this is a tragedy that America can no longer tolerate. Getting rid of Mr Rumsfeld is no guarantee that things will get better. But keeping him ensures that they will get worse. Mr Bush made a huge mistake in not accepting Mr Rumsfeld's offer to resign in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Every day he keeps him in his job he compounds his mistake and weakens his presidency.
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
25.4.06
23.4.06
THE BARD OF AVON
AN academic colleague of mine once asked me who had made me into a writer. "And I don't mean one of those creative writing professors," he said to me, a creative writing professor.
"Well, who do you mean?" I asked, probably ungrammatically, a thing creative writing professors get to do.
"I mean, who was your Shakespeare professor?" he asked; he was of course a Shakespeare professor himself.
I understood what he meant: Shakespeare was elemental, formative, fateful. Unlike the work of any writer before or since, Shakespeare's plays and poetry, while taking advantage of an audience's church-acquired tolerance for long speeches, celebrated the relatively new language of English and explored the strangeness within the ordinary and the familiar within the strange — the task of every artist. He returned again and again to the pathologies of love, marriage and family — interest in which is a prerequisite for embarkation on an American literary life.
My own Shakespeare professor, now a fellow at the Folger Library, was a brilliant, handsome, manic young man fairly fresh from Duke, who on the first day of class sang an entire verse of "Afternoon Delight," clutching the lectern with bitter energy, to demonstrate to the students the all-pervasive and maddening junk he, as a Shakespearean, had been up against all summer.
He once diagrammed Hamlet as a sort of Pollock painting, with color-coded chalk for the characters. He directed us in a homemade film of "Romeo and Juliet," the Capulets in red pinnies. But in general, he simply, convincingly communicated his love of the work and helped the plays come alive. When I recently met him again in Washington, he said, with unsuppressed glee: "How long are you in town for? The Queen's Folio is here!"
Though many people have tried to insist that Shakespeare must have been a secret guild of theatricals, or the Earl of Oxford, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or some other person of education and rank ("How about the theory that Shakespeare is really Cliff Robertson?" joked a friend of mine), there is no doubt the man existed. Those who are still skeptical may be the same people who, generally pessimistic about human ability, insist that the pyramids were built by space aliens, or that Joyce Carol Oates is really a committee of middle-aged men. Or else they are the same elitists who think things like the roots of rock 'n' roll are actually white.
It seems clear — or at least we can say with a certain ad hoc confidence — that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon 442 years ago today, the son of a Catholic mother and glovemaker father (Christopher Marlowe, his contemporary, was the son of a shoemaker — anyone got a problem with that?). He had one sister who lived into adulthood, and who may or may not have been the thwarted genius of Virginia Woolf's imagining: "what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith." What we do know, however, is that she was named not Judith but Joan. He also had three younger brothers, all of whom preceded him in death.
Shakespeare's eighth-grade education was enough to give him a good grasp of Latin, to help him land work perhaps as a legal assistant (the plays are full of knowledge of the law as well as of gloves), a tutor, a horse-holder and an actor. How many writers have had jobs like these? A lot.
According to Stephen Greenblatt's impressive biography, "Will in the World," Shakespeare's father's success then failure in the glove business may have prevented Shakespeare from going on to Oxford as many of his classmates (and Christopher Marlowe) did, but this is not the same as an insistence that he was too uneducated to have written the plays.
In Elizabethan England, apprentices abounded, as did pages and tutors, and Shakespeare would have easily made his way in that world. Actors had to know how to speak as gentlemen or bums, and carried around their own costumes and swords. The art and value of disguise, impersonation and adaptation is usually learned young. The father's mercantile life would have given the young son an early indelible glimpse of all segments of society — rich and poor, rural and urban, successful and failed — and arguably gave Will, in part, the great comic character Falstaff: the drunken father figure whom the successful young man outgrows, outpaces and renounces, though not without a chilling soupçon of hate.
Shakespeare married early and, for practical reasons, someone older and richer (where there's a will, Anne Hathaway, the old quip goes) and then left her behind to pursue revolutionary work in the world, only to return to her and take up companionship with her at the end. In this — and in his stalwart determination, knack for real estate and penchant for petty lawsuits — he is reminiscent (to me) of George Washington, whose marriage was made similarly coolly and for a good part of his life sat at that same convenient and pleasing distance (until retirement), while he annoyed the other army officers in New Jersey by dancing with their wives.
That Shakespeare's most passionate loves were at first youthful and then adulterous is suggested by his plays, which scarcely have a happy marriage in them, let alone a happy family. Though one shouldn't look to fictional work as autobiography, a writer will always write from what is on his mind, and somewhat from what he knows, and so the intensity and buffoonery of youthful erotic love and the low miserable hum of marital discontent — famous as literary muses — were probably Shakespeare's muses as well. Just as they were Charles Dickens's (another actor turned writer). And Edith Wharton's. And (remain) Alice Munro's.
The limberness of Shakespeare's gift is arguably best demonstrated not by the greatest plays — "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Macbeth" — but by two that are considered more minor, one a tragedy, one a comedy, and both written the same year, more likely the tragedy first, as the comedy is something of a satire on the tragedy. These are "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." (That they might have been accruing simultaneously on his writing table is one of those events writers and critics alike are fond of imagining.)
Though they each have their various textual sources — Shakespeare, like Puccini, was a notorious artistic poacher, so much so that tales of Shakespeare's actual poaching of game have attached themselves to his legend — they are distinctly Shakespearean in their look at love.
In "Romeo and Juliet," however inconvenient Cupid's choice, the energy of youthful love hurdles obstacles: "With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls," says Romeo to Juliet, adding, "And what love can do, that dares love attempt." Though at play's end he is dead from his own hand, as is Juliet, victims in their own plot to outsmart the rather vicious society around them. Impetuosity never had a greater poet or a greater dramatist. Nor a greater comedian.
In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," a kind of buddy tale of mind and body on a fated forest trudge, erotic love is quite literally a drug, defying all solemnity and even intelligence, washing the brain in potions, something modern scientists have at long last proven to be an accurate occurrence. The most beautiful creature of the forest is made to fall in love with a blustery bumpkin by the sad name of Bottom, who through fairy mischief is now sporting the head of, well, an ass. A donkey's head: this is grotesquerie worthy of a Tim Burton movie. And it is all in service of Shakespeare's compassionate skepticism about love.
Each of these plays contains the other: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" contains "Romeo and Juliet" in its enactment of the tragical tale of "Pyramus and Thisbe" but played for laughs: "These yellow cowslip cheeks/Are gone, are gone!/Lovers make moan;/His eyes were green as leeks." And "Romeo and Juliet" contains a window onto "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the comic relief of Romeo's friend Mercutio, who throws barbs at the mere idea of romantic love to the comic approval of his entourage: "Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down."
The structure of both these plays is intricate and geometrical. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" moves easily in a single day among four different worlds and among the various romances giddily proceeding within them (some with more elegance than others). At the end of "Romeo and Juliet" the body count perfectly, symmetrically comprises two Montagues, two Capulets and two relatives of the Prince. Death, not love, has the final blocking, though of course there is always the curtain call, and everyone is back up and alive again, as if to keep trying. Oh, why not.
Shakespeare's London was one of the great cities of Europe, though smaller than Madison, Wis., is today. It was also rife with the religious bloodshed of modern Belfast or Baghdad. When Shakespeare arrived in London as a young man he would have passed, impaled on the famous bridge into town, the skull of a distant cousin, killed for being a Catholic. How could this fail to leave ann impression?
He filled his early plays, written in his new home, with violent young men and angry mobs. When he left, rich and successful, it was to die (at 52) of what doctors today have speculated was a rare cancer of the tear duct — an illness as cruelly ironic as that of Puccini's cancer of the throat. His beloved Globe Theater had burned down. He could not have been happy.
But he did not know that his work would survive forever not just on stage but in book, screen and musical form — no one at that time could have. Or that his words would inspire their own honoring thefts: Joni Mitchell took a glittering simile of his for "That Song About the Midway"; "West Side Story" and "She's the Man" borrowed his plots.
Washington, Dickens, Puccini and Tim Burton somehow merged into one: there's your genius. Or the bare bard bones of him.
Add a dash — of Ogden Nash.
Lorrie Moore is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin
FAWLTY
As the manic Basil Fawlty, John Cleese famously tells his staff "Don't mention the war!" when a group of Germans arrives at his hotel.
But, in one of Fawlty Towers' most memorable scenes, the proprietor spectacularly offends his continental guests with a series of references to the war.
Goose-step: Cleese as Fawlty
He then descends into xenophobic ranting, goose-stepping around the dining room with his arm raised in a Nazi salute.
Now, 31 years after the television series was made, Cleese is again advising the British "not to mention the war", only this time at the behest of Germany.
The 66-year-old actor is endorsing an essay competition - called "But don't mention the war" - organised by the German embassy in London, which encourages British students to write 3,000 words about modern Germany.
Cleese puts the jackboot firmly into his most celebrated character. "I'm delighted to help with trying to break down the ridiculous anti-German prejudices of the tabloids and clowns like Basil Fawlty, who are pathetically stuck in a world view that's more than half a century out of date," he says.
A spokesman for the embassy said that Cleese, who now lives in the United States, had been very supportive."We had to get permission to use the slogan 'Don't mention the war' and he was happy to give it," the spokesman said.
The brief for the competition says: "We know about the clichés John Cleese refers to, but what are your personal experiences of contemporary Germany and all things German?" Prizes include placements with German media organisations and the BBC, summer courses in Germany and flights to Berlin.
The competition is part of a wider campaign by the German embassy - taken up vigorously by Wolfgang Ischinger, Berlin's new ambassador to Britain - to promote a more up-to-date image of Germany.
It may not be easy. Another of Basil Fawlty's lines still widely quoted today suggests that images of the war are deeply embedded in the British psyche. When a German guest asks Basil to stop going on about the war, he retorts: "You started it."
"We did not start it," protests the German.
"Yes you did, you invaded Poland," Basil responds.
But, in one of Fawlty Towers' most memorable scenes, the proprietor spectacularly offends his continental guests with a series of references to the war.
Goose-step: Cleese as Fawlty
He then descends into xenophobic ranting, goose-stepping around the dining room with his arm raised in a Nazi salute.
Now, 31 years after the television series was made, Cleese is again advising the British "not to mention the war", only this time at the behest of Germany.
The 66-year-old actor is endorsing an essay competition - called "But don't mention the war" - organised by the German embassy in London, which encourages British students to write 3,000 words about modern Germany.
Cleese puts the jackboot firmly into his most celebrated character. "I'm delighted to help with trying to break down the ridiculous anti-German prejudices of the tabloids and clowns like Basil Fawlty, who are pathetically stuck in a world view that's more than half a century out of date," he says.
A spokesman for the embassy said that Cleese, who now lives in the United States, had been very supportive."We had to get permission to use the slogan 'Don't mention the war' and he was happy to give it," the spokesman said.
The brief for the competition says: "We know about the clichés John Cleese refers to, but what are your personal experiences of contemporary Germany and all things German?" Prizes include placements with German media organisations and the BBC, summer courses in Germany and flights to Berlin.
The competition is part of a wider campaign by the German embassy - taken up vigorously by Wolfgang Ischinger, Berlin's new ambassador to Britain - to promote a more up-to-date image of Germany.
It may not be easy. Another of Basil Fawlty's lines still widely quoted today suggests that images of the war are deeply embedded in the British psyche. When a German guest asks Basil to stop going on about the war, he retorts: "You started it."
"We did not start it," protests the German.
"Yes you did, you invaded Poland," Basil responds.
22.4.06
It doesn't take brute force to stop a rampaging writer in mid-monologue. Sometimes an innocent question does the trick. Late in his life Dwight Macdonald was holding court at a party when a young woman inquired from the peanut gallery, "Mr. Macdonald, what do you do?" According to Michael Wreszin's biography of Macdonald, "A Rebel in Defense of Tradition," the normally voluble billy goat was thrown for a loss. "Well, I, I, I was a writer, an editor of Partisan Review and Politics, wro . . . wrote for The New Yorker." The incident was more than ego-deflating — it was demoralizing. It signified that to the younger generation Macdonald was an unidentified relic of unknown occupation. Talking about himself in the past tense brought him face to face with the erosion of his reputation and name recognition after a swashbuckling career as critic, editor, protester, provocateur and all-around word warrior.
An intellectual journalist equally at leisure in the jaunty pages of Esquire (where he reviewed films) and the ascetic quarters of Partisan Review, Macdonald — born 100 years ago last month — was a generalist whose specialty was capsizing conventional wisdom, exposing highfalutin fraudulence and filing heretical dissents. His essays on mainstream American culture ("Masscult and Midcult") and the barbarisms of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible were literary events; his lambasting of James Gould Cozzens's novel "By Love Possessed" was comparable to Mark Twain's defenestration of James Fenimore Cooper; his tenure as founding editor of Politics, a small radical publication started in 1944 after he broke with Partisan Review over the war (he opposed America's entry), yielded major work by Simone Weil, Albert Camus and Bruno Bettelheim; his impious critiques of biblical epics — later collected in "On Movies" — were cheerfully absurdist (from his review of "The Greatest Story Ever Told": "There was also that 'Woman of No Name' who pushes through the crowd as Jesus is healing the sick and, after he has grappled with her, cries out in purest Bronx, 'Oi'm cured! Oi'm cured!' and turns around to run toward the camera with arms waving in triumph — and damned if it isn't Shelley Winters"); his championing review of Michael Harrington's "Other America" in 1963 helped ignite the antipoverty movement.
But you can't dine on clippings and the bones of old controversies, so what did his versatile output amount to after decades of pounding the typewriter? For years before his death in 1982 from congestive heart failure, Macdonald had been battened down by booze, pressing doubts and writer's block; frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by writing a major, original work — bringing out a real book, not just a basket of articles. His friend James Agee had burned himself out in a frenzy of nicotine and all-nighters. But despite Agee's centrifugal disarray, he went up in smoke with a gnarled masterpiece pinned to his name ("Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"), a posthumous Pulitzer Prize (for "A Death in the Family") and a live-hard-die-young legend that would draw future disciples into the tomb, rummaging through the remains for saintly artifacts. More of an odd-jobber and instigator, Macdonald harbored no creative cravings, courted no muse, left behind no masterpiece to keep his legacy warm at night. Today, he and many of his concerns could hardly seem more dead. Masscult, midcult — who cares anymore? It's all one big postmodern mishmash. Yet sometimes the most important thing a critic leaves behind is a singular, wised-up, cant-free voice that is pure intelligence at play, and at its best Macdonald's voice shoots off the page as if he were broadcasting live and cutting through the static.
Macdonald majored in being a misfit, the odd man out who somehow managed to fit in just long enough to irritate and activate everyone within the same orbit. At Exeter he belonged to a club called the Hedonists, whose members, all three of them, strutted around the campus with canes. After attending Yale, he enrolled in Macy's executive training program and, on coming to his senses, joined Time and later the fledgling Fortune magazine, where he became radicalized when he realized what dumb clucks and cowardly lions the captains of industry actually were.
Politically, he was all over the left side of the dance floor, nicknamed "flighty Dwighty" for his ideological flappings and earning a memorable rebuke from Leon Trotsky: "Every man has a right to be stupid on occasion but Comrade Macdonald abuses it." He marginalized himself during World War II by making pronouncements that were not just foolish but feckless, the leakage of a cracked egghead (like this beaut: "Europe has its Hitlers, but we have our Rotarians"). An Ivy League WASP in the largely Jewish C.C.N.Y. circles of the Partisan Review set, he found himself on the bitter outs with many of his intellectual confreres when he defended Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" against its detractors.
Although the New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review were a contentious lot, Macdonald's saving grace — what set him apart from the other touchy high-strungs — was his ample accommodation for conflicting viewpoints even when they rammed his hull, as long as they had wit and merit. He believed in being open to reversals of opinion, including his own. He dissected The New Yorker in the debut issue of Partisan Review, yet later hopped aboard as a staff writer, a professional relationship that blossomed into blushing romance. "Although Macdonald would not admit it," Norman Mailer wrote in "The Armies of the Night," "he was in secret carrying on a passionate love affair with The New Yorker — Disraeli on his knees before Victoria."
But those aging knees locked in place, and for a decade Macdonald did little for the magazine except occupy an office, his writer's block making every sentence a painful extraction. His monologues migrated elsewhere — into classroom lectures, speeches at antiwar and pro-student demonstrations, and, fortunately for us, a large chunk of the bustling correspondence that makes up "A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald." This is the book where the staccato rhythm of Macdonald thinking fresh at the typewriter rings most clearly through the ether, and reveals the man in full.
I was fortunate enough to catch Macdonald in action when he was still capable of blowing off a little good-natured steam at the expense of intellectual druids whose tastes seemed inscribed on tablets. In 1980, Skidmore College was the site of a conference on the sunny topic "American Civilization: Failure in the New World?" Among those invited to discuss a paper by George Steiner and other subjects were Cynthia Ozick, Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag and Macdonald, who endeared himself to me by saying at the outset of the panel on film and theater that Steiner's and Ozick's pretentious solemnity "turned me off culture — and I don't know when I'm going to get back to it." His foil on the panel was The New Republic's eternal film critic, Stanley Kauffmann, the gentlemanly soul of generosity, who at one point said he didn't want to speak slightingly of "the popcorn crowd," which made Macdonald crack, "Aw, go ahead." Kauffmann: "No, no; Ingmar Bergman has remarked that those who go to see a Doris Day film — forgive me, is she still alive? — may go to see one of his films the following week. Often in the same theater." Macdonald: "They shouldn't be allowed to." Back and forth they bantered, like a couple of cranky pigeons on a park bench, until Kauffmann explained to the audience that Macdonald came from the Mencken generation, more comfortable responding to culture with a cynical No rather than an embracing Yes. Macdonald pleaded guilty, but argued that experience had taught him the wisdom of heeding his inner veto power: "When I say no I'm always right, and when I say yes I'm almost always wrong."
Right or wrong, his verdicts would mean nothing to us now if he hadn't invested them with a humming force of personality and humor that opened up daylight wherever his mind gusted. Every intellectual era needs its dedicated pirates, and Dwight Macdonald was one of postwar's finest. He wrote and spoke as if fear and conformity were foreign to his nature and affronts to the spirit of liberty. If he were alive, he'd scoff at what wimps we've become under the threat of terrorism. He'd scold us for letting ourselves down. Happy birthday, Dwight, and give our best to Jim Agee.
15.4.06
MARTIN AMIS
Whether it be his teeth, his relationships or his writing, he has a seemingly endless capacity to provoke controversy.
And the fevered commentary that constantly attends the writer Martin Amis is unlikely to be diminished this autumn, given the subject matter covered in his new book.
House of Meetings, his first since the widely derided Yellow Dog two years ago, begins with a straightforward novella, the title story, a gothic love triangle involving two brothers and a Jewish girl across four decades in post-war Russia.
But in the first of two short stories that follow, Amis will once more court the kind of controversy for which he is now famed. It imagines the final movements of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the 11 September attacks in America.
As explained by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, the tale can be summarised like this: "Accompanied by one of the 'muscle' Saudis, Mohamed Atta drove to Portland, Maine, on 10 September 2001. Noone knows why. In 'The Last Days of Mohamed Atta', Martin Amis provides a rationale for Atta's insouciant detour, and for other lacunae in the 'planes operation'. We follow Atta on that day: from his small-hour awakening in the budget hotel room in Portland, all the way to 8:46am - and beyond."
Atta, the Egyptian whose plotting began in Germany as documented in the Channel 4 film, Hamburg Cell, was on American Airlines Flight 11 - one of the two planes commandeered and steered into the World Trade Centre in New York.
His fellow hijacker Abdul Alomari, a Saudi who had been living in America, was seated alongside him on the flight.
Although the publicity for Amis's version of events suggests no one knew why Atta went to Portland, one explanation was forthcoming in the wake of the attacks. A guide, entitled Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, was reported to recommend that attackers should start from smaller airports - such as Portland - where security was more likely to be lax. At Boston, Atta and Alomari transferred on to the plane used to help destroy the World Trade Centre.
The final story in Amis's latest book also draws on contemporary world events. "In the Palace of the End" is narrated by one of the doubles for a Middle Eastern tyrant - clearly a figure such as Saddam Hussein or his demented son and heir, Uday.
"The double divides his day between epic torture and epic lovemaking with picked beauties - all of it filmed for the delectation of the dictator," according to the publisher's blurb.
It continues: "He also has a third obligation: he must duplicate on his person the wounds sustained by the dictator in the almost-daily attempts on his life."
Rumours have long circulated in the Middle East that Saddam Hussein, the now deposed Iraqi dictator, did, indeed, have up to four doubles, though none has ever surfaced.
The publisher said of the new work, which will be released in September: "These themes and settings may look like unfamiliar ground for Martin Amis. But in fact he is returning to his central preoccupation: the nature of masculinity, and the connections between male sexuality and violence."
Amis has previously used world events, such as the Holocaust, in his writing. The son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, he has written nine novels, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction.
Once feted as the voice of his generation with novels such as Money, critics and the public alike seem to have taken great delight when he has faltered since.
Yellow Dog, a satire on the post-September 11 world order, was not well received. The Times Literary Supplement said his prose had become "a nightmare of pointless periphrasis, fruity pomp and numb tautology".
But it has been his perceived personal failings which have been most discussed. He was widely mocked for spending $20,000 (£11,400) on fixing his rotting teeth but angrily rebutted claims of vanity. The work was not cosmetic, he insisted.
More damning for some were his decisions to leave his wife, Antonia, for a younger woman and to fire his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh - the wife of his friend Julian Barnes - in favour of a mercenary American, Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.
Whether it be his teeth, his relationships or his writing, he has a seemingly endless capacity to provoke controversy.
And the fevered commentary that constantly attends the writer Martin Amis is unlikely to be diminished this autumn, given the subject matter covered in his new book.
House of Meetings, his first since the widely derided Yellow Dog two years ago, begins with a straightforward novella, the title story, a gothic love triangle involving two brothers and a Jewish girl across four decades in post-war Russia.
But in the first of two short stories that follow, Amis will once more court the kind of controversy for which he is now famed. It imagines the final movements of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the 11 September attacks in America.
As explained by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, the tale can be summarised like this: "Accompanied by one of the 'muscle' Saudis, Mohamed Atta drove to Portland, Maine, on 10 September 2001. Noone knows why. In 'The Last Days of Mohamed Atta', Martin Amis provides a rationale for Atta's insouciant detour, and for other lacunae in the 'planes operation'. We follow Atta on that day: from his small-hour awakening in the budget hotel room in Portland, all the way to 8:46am - and beyond."
Atta, the Egyptian whose plotting began in Germany as documented in the Channel 4 film, Hamburg Cell, was on American Airlines Flight 11 - one of the two planes commandeered and steered into the World Trade Centre in New York.
His fellow hijacker Abdul Alomari, a Saudi who had been living in America, was seated alongside him on the flight.
Although the publicity for Amis's version of events suggests no one knew why Atta went to Portland, one explanation was forthcoming in the wake of the attacks. A guide, entitled Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, was reported to recommend that attackers should start from smaller airports - such as Portland - where security was more likely to be lax. At Boston, Atta and Alomari transferred on to the plane used to help destroy the World Trade Centre.
The final story in Amis's latest book also draws on contemporary world events. "In the Palace of the End" is narrated by one of the doubles for a Middle Eastern tyrant - clearly a figure such as Saddam Hussein or his demented son and heir, Uday.
"The double divides his day between epic torture and epic lovemaking with picked beauties - all of it filmed for the delectation of the dictator," according to the publisher's blurb.
It continues: "He also has a third obligation: he must duplicate on his person the wounds sustained by the dictator in the almost-daily attempts on his life."
Rumours have long circulated in the Middle East that Saddam Hussein, the now deposed Iraqi dictator, did, indeed, have up to four doubles, though none has ever surfaced.
The publisher said of the new work, which will be released in September: "These themes and settings may look like unfamiliar ground for Martin Amis. But in fact he is returning to his central preoccupation: the nature of masculinity, and the connections between male sexuality and violence."
Amis has previously used world events, such as the Holocaust, in his writing. The son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, he has written nine novels, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction.
Once feted as the voice of his generation with novels such as Money, critics and the public alike seem to have taken great delight when he has faltered since.
Yellow Dog, a satire on the post-September 11 world order, was not well received. The Times Literary Supplement said his prose had become "a nightmare of pointless periphrasis, fruity pomp and numb tautology".
But it has been his perceived personal failings which have been most discussed. He was widely mocked for spending $20,000 (£11,400) on fixing his rotting teeth but angrily rebutted claims of vanity. The work was not cosmetic, he insisted.
More damning for some were his decisions to leave his wife, Antonia, for a younger woman and to fire his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh - the wife of his friend Julian Barnes - in favour of a mercenary American, Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.
And the fevered commentary that constantly attends the writer Martin Amis is unlikely to be diminished this autumn, given the subject matter covered in his new book.
House of Meetings, his first since the widely derided Yellow Dog two years ago, begins with a straightforward novella, the title story, a gothic love triangle involving two brothers and a Jewish girl across four decades in post-war Russia.
But in the first of two short stories that follow, Amis will once more court the kind of controversy for which he is now famed. It imagines the final movements of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the 11 September attacks in America.
As explained by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, the tale can be summarised like this: "Accompanied by one of the 'muscle' Saudis, Mohamed Atta drove to Portland, Maine, on 10 September 2001. Noone knows why. In 'The Last Days of Mohamed Atta', Martin Amis provides a rationale for Atta's insouciant detour, and for other lacunae in the 'planes operation'. We follow Atta on that day: from his small-hour awakening in the budget hotel room in Portland, all the way to 8:46am - and beyond."
Atta, the Egyptian whose plotting began in Germany as documented in the Channel 4 film, Hamburg Cell, was on American Airlines Flight 11 - one of the two planes commandeered and steered into the World Trade Centre in New York.
His fellow hijacker Abdul Alomari, a Saudi who had been living in America, was seated alongside him on the flight.
Although the publicity for Amis's version of events suggests no one knew why Atta went to Portland, one explanation was forthcoming in the wake of the attacks. A guide, entitled Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, was reported to recommend that attackers should start from smaller airports - such as Portland - where security was more likely to be lax. At Boston, Atta and Alomari transferred on to the plane used to help destroy the World Trade Centre.
The final story in Amis's latest book also draws on contemporary world events. "In the Palace of the End" is narrated by one of the doubles for a Middle Eastern tyrant - clearly a figure such as Saddam Hussein or his demented son and heir, Uday.
"The double divides his day between epic torture and epic lovemaking with picked beauties - all of it filmed for the delectation of the dictator," according to the publisher's blurb.
It continues: "He also has a third obligation: he must duplicate on his person the wounds sustained by the dictator in the almost-daily attempts on his life."
Rumours have long circulated in the Middle East that Saddam Hussein, the now deposed Iraqi dictator, did, indeed, have up to four doubles, though none has ever surfaced.
The publisher said of the new work, which will be released in September: "These themes and settings may look like unfamiliar ground for Martin Amis. But in fact he is returning to his central preoccupation: the nature of masculinity, and the connections between male sexuality and violence."
Amis has previously used world events, such as the Holocaust, in his writing. The son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, he has written nine novels, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction.
Once feted as the voice of his generation with novels such as Money, critics and the public alike seem to have taken great delight when he has faltered since.
Yellow Dog, a satire on the post-September 11 world order, was not well received. The Times Literary Supplement said his prose had become "a nightmare of pointless periphrasis, fruity pomp and numb tautology".
But it has been his perceived personal failings which have been most discussed. He was widely mocked for spending $20,000 (£11,400) on fixing his rotting teeth but angrily rebutted claims of vanity. The work was not cosmetic, he insisted.
More damning for some were his decisions to leave his wife, Antonia, for a younger woman and to fire his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh - the wife of his friend Julian Barnes - in favour of a mercenary American, Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.
Whether it be his teeth, his relationships or his writing, he has a seemingly endless capacity to provoke controversy.
And the fevered commentary that constantly attends the writer Martin Amis is unlikely to be diminished this autumn, given the subject matter covered in his new book.
House of Meetings, his first since the widely derided Yellow Dog two years ago, begins with a straightforward novella, the title story, a gothic love triangle involving two brothers and a Jewish girl across four decades in post-war Russia.
But in the first of two short stories that follow, Amis will once more court the kind of controversy for which he is now famed. It imagines the final movements of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the 11 September attacks in America.
As explained by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, the tale can be summarised like this: "Accompanied by one of the 'muscle' Saudis, Mohamed Atta drove to Portland, Maine, on 10 September 2001. Noone knows why. In 'The Last Days of Mohamed Atta', Martin Amis provides a rationale for Atta's insouciant detour, and for other lacunae in the 'planes operation'. We follow Atta on that day: from his small-hour awakening in the budget hotel room in Portland, all the way to 8:46am - and beyond."
Atta, the Egyptian whose plotting began in Germany as documented in the Channel 4 film, Hamburg Cell, was on American Airlines Flight 11 - one of the two planes commandeered and steered into the World Trade Centre in New York.
His fellow hijacker Abdul Alomari, a Saudi who had been living in America, was seated alongside him on the flight.
Although the publicity for Amis's version of events suggests no one knew why Atta went to Portland, one explanation was forthcoming in the wake of the attacks. A guide, entitled Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, was reported to recommend that attackers should start from smaller airports - such as Portland - where security was more likely to be lax. At Boston, Atta and Alomari transferred on to the plane used to help destroy the World Trade Centre.
The final story in Amis's latest book also draws on contemporary world events. "In the Palace of the End" is narrated by one of the doubles for a Middle Eastern tyrant - clearly a figure such as Saddam Hussein or his demented son and heir, Uday.
"The double divides his day between epic torture and epic lovemaking with picked beauties - all of it filmed for the delectation of the dictator," according to the publisher's blurb.
It continues: "He also has a third obligation: he must duplicate on his person the wounds sustained by the dictator in the almost-daily attempts on his life."
Rumours have long circulated in the Middle East that Saddam Hussein, the now deposed Iraqi dictator, did, indeed, have up to four doubles, though none has ever surfaced.
The publisher said of the new work, which will be released in September: "These themes and settings may look like unfamiliar ground for Martin Amis. But in fact he is returning to his central preoccupation: the nature of masculinity, and the connections between male sexuality and violence."
Amis has previously used world events, such as the Holocaust, in his writing. The son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, he has written nine novels, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction.
Once feted as the voice of his generation with novels such as Money, critics and the public alike seem to have taken great delight when he has faltered since.
Yellow Dog, a satire on the post-September 11 world order, was not well received. The Times Literary Supplement said his prose had become "a nightmare of pointless periphrasis, fruity pomp and numb tautology".
But it has been his perceived personal failings which have been most discussed. He was widely mocked for spending $20,000 (£11,400) on fixing his rotting teeth but angrily rebutted claims of vanity. The work was not cosmetic, he insisted.
More damning for some were his decisions to leave his wife, Antonia, for a younger woman and to fire his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh - the wife of his friend Julian Barnes - in favour of a mercenary American, Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie.
TOM WOLFE
For years, Tom Wolfe has been lambasting America's literary establishment for ignoring the best story around—their own country. America positively pullulates with fantastic stories. And yet its writers, ensconced in their Manhattan lofts and writer-in-residence residences, can't be bothered to look further than the ends of their noses. “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature,” Mr Wolfe wrote in one of his manifestos on behalf of literary realism, “we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.”
Yet the trouble with turning yourself into an American Zola is that you immediately expose yourself to being trumped by reality. The better sort of critics are forever lambasting Mr Wolfe for going over the top—for using cartoon characters to exaggerate the evils of modern society—but the truth is the opposite. Mr Wolfe's satire pales into insignificance compared with the hog-stomping reality that he tries to capture.
Take Mr Wolfe's most recent novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004). The book poked fun at the macho culture of an elite university that was closely modelled on the would-be Princeton of the South, Duke. This fictional institution liked to think of itself as being at the cutting edge of political correctness, all unisex lavatories and gay-pride demos. But in reality it was ruled by an elite caste of jocks—brainless bores who spent their lives drinking themselves senseless or wam-bam-thank-you-mamming with any co-ed they could get their hands on. And none were more boorish and brainless than the lacrosse players.
Elaine Showalter, a retired Princeton professor, duly published a tut-tutting review accusing Mr Wolfe of missing the “feminist revolution” and engaging in the “grossest of stereotypes”. Yet Mr Wolfe's story is tame by comparison with recent events at the real Duke. It seems that a month or so ago a group of —yes—lacrosse players hired a couple of strippers to entertain them of an evening. Unfortunately, what might have been a routine night of booze and bawdiness ended in turmoil. One of the strippers accused three lacrosse players of raping and assaulting her. The players strenuously denied the charges, and subsequent DNA tests have turned up negative. The event was heavily overladen with racial tension; the lacrosse players were almost all white while the two strippers were black. It also had a Baroque twist. Two hours or so after the alleged rape, a partygoer sent an e-mail saying that he wanted to lure more strippers to his room in order to kill and skin them.
Or take Mr Wolfe's last-but-one novel, “A Man in Full” (1998). The book opens with a lavish description of a quail hunt among the Georgia nouveaux riches. Many reviewers found the satire as over the top as the prose style (“Quail! The aristocrat of American wild game! It was what the grouse and the pheasant were in England and Scotland and Europe—only better!”). But it is impossible to read that scene today without finding it a bit tame. Why didn't Mr Wolfe include a major Republican politician? Why didn't he get the politician to shoot an elderly lawyer in the face—and then try to hush the whole matter up?
Or take his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987). This has survived the reality test much better than the other two books. But hardly a week goes by without somebody coming along and trying to outdo one of Bonfire's characters. “Bonfire” introduced the world to Peter Fallow, a tabloid journalist who had turned freeloading into a career. Last week, the New York Daily News disclosed that Jared Paul Stern, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, recently solicited $220,000 from a billionaire investor, Ron Burkle, in return for a year's “protection” against damaging items appearing in the paper's Page Six column.
“Bonfire” also introduced the world to the Reverend Bacon, a black politician who uses any excuse to engage in agitprop and race-baiting. Two weeks ago, Cynthia McKinney, a black congresswoman from Georgia, got into an altercation with a Capitol Hill police officer: he tried to stop her from entering the building because she didn't have the right ID and she allegedly responded by hitting him with a cell-phone. Instead of apologising she organised an anti-racist rally at Howard University, complete with cameo appearances by Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, to denounce the “inappropriate touching and stopping of me—a female, black, progressive congresswoman.”
The inadequacy of fiction
Mr Wolfe is not alone. The best of the would-be Zolas to join Mr Wolfe in trying to reclaim America as “literary property” is Christopher Buckley, the son of William Buckley, the founder of the modern conservative movement and long-time chronicler of Washington, DC. The younger Mr Buckley recently hit the literary equivalent of the jackpot. Not only has Hollywood turned one of his novels, “Thank You for Smoking” into a film; it comes out at a time when the Abramoff affair has focused everyone's attention on the lobbying industry.
But it is hard not to watch the film without feeling let down. It is amusing to see the hero labouring on behalf of the tobacco industry and lunching with his “merchants of death”, lobbyists from the alcohol and firearms industries. But this is tame stuff compared with what Mr Abramoff got up to. He not only bilked Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars, but got evangelical Christians to help him in the bilking.
This is not a vote in favour of the sort of literary navel-gazing that Mr Wolfe condemned. But it is a warning that it is almost impossible to outdo reality in a country as richly bizarre as the United States. Perhaps writers should leave those unfinished novels locked up in the drawer—and content themselves instead with the humble craft of journalism.
Yet the trouble with turning yourself into an American Zola is that you immediately expose yourself to being trumped by reality. The better sort of critics are forever lambasting Mr Wolfe for going over the top—for using cartoon characters to exaggerate the evils of modern society—but the truth is the opposite. Mr Wolfe's satire pales into insignificance compared with the hog-stomping reality that he tries to capture.
Take Mr Wolfe's most recent novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004). The book poked fun at the macho culture of an elite university that was closely modelled on the would-be Princeton of the South, Duke. This fictional institution liked to think of itself as being at the cutting edge of political correctness, all unisex lavatories and gay-pride demos. But in reality it was ruled by an elite caste of jocks—brainless bores who spent their lives drinking themselves senseless or wam-bam-thank-you-mamming with any co-ed they could get their hands on. And none were more boorish and brainless than the lacrosse players.
Elaine Showalter, a retired Princeton professor, duly published a tut-tutting review accusing Mr Wolfe of missing the “feminist revolution” and engaging in the “grossest of stereotypes”. Yet Mr Wolfe's story is tame by comparison with recent events at the real Duke. It seems that a month or so ago a group of —yes—lacrosse players hired a couple of strippers to entertain them of an evening. Unfortunately, what might have been a routine night of booze and bawdiness ended in turmoil. One of the strippers accused three lacrosse players of raping and assaulting her. The players strenuously denied the charges, and subsequent DNA tests have turned up negative. The event was heavily overladen with racial tension; the lacrosse players were almost all white while the two strippers were black. It also had a Baroque twist. Two hours or so after the alleged rape, a partygoer sent an e-mail saying that he wanted to lure more strippers to his room in order to kill and skin them.
Or take Mr Wolfe's last-but-one novel, “A Man in Full” (1998). The book opens with a lavish description of a quail hunt among the Georgia nouveaux riches. Many reviewers found the satire as over the top as the prose style (“Quail! The aristocrat of American wild game! It was what the grouse and the pheasant were in England and Scotland and Europe—only better!”). But it is impossible to read that scene today without finding it a bit tame. Why didn't Mr Wolfe include a major Republican politician? Why didn't he get the politician to shoot an elderly lawyer in the face—and then try to hush the whole matter up?
Or take his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987). This has survived the reality test much better than the other two books. But hardly a week goes by without somebody coming along and trying to outdo one of Bonfire's characters. “Bonfire” introduced the world to Peter Fallow, a tabloid journalist who had turned freeloading into a career. Last week, the New York Daily News disclosed that Jared Paul Stern, a gossip columnist for the New York Post, recently solicited $220,000 from a billionaire investor, Ron Burkle, in return for a year's “protection” against damaging items appearing in the paper's Page Six column.
“Bonfire” also introduced the world to the Reverend Bacon, a black politician who uses any excuse to engage in agitprop and race-baiting. Two weeks ago, Cynthia McKinney, a black congresswoman from Georgia, got into an altercation with a Capitol Hill police officer: he tried to stop her from entering the building because she didn't have the right ID and she allegedly responded by hitting him with a cell-phone. Instead of apologising she organised an anti-racist rally at Howard University, complete with cameo appearances by Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover, to denounce the “inappropriate touching and stopping of me—a female, black, progressive congresswoman.”
The inadequacy of fiction
Mr Wolfe is not alone. The best of the would-be Zolas to join Mr Wolfe in trying to reclaim America as “literary property” is Christopher Buckley, the son of William Buckley, the founder of the modern conservative movement and long-time chronicler of Washington, DC. The younger Mr Buckley recently hit the literary equivalent of the jackpot. Not only has Hollywood turned one of his novels, “Thank You for Smoking” into a film; it comes out at a time when the Abramoff affair has focused everyone's attention on the lobbying industry.
But it is hard not to watch the film without feeling let down. It is amusing to see the hero labouring on behalf of the tobacco industry and lunching with his “merchants of death”, lobbyists from the alcohol and firearms industries. But this is tame stuff compared with what Mr Abramoff got up to. He not only bilked Indian tribes of tens of millions of dollars, but got evangelical Christians to help him in the bilking.
This is not a vote in favour of the sort of literary navel-gazing that Mr Wolfe condemned. But it is a warning that it is almost impossible to outdo reality in a country as richly bizarre as the United States. Perhaps writers should leave those unfinished novels locked up in the drawer—and content themselves instead with the humble craft of journalism.
XERXES sends you a spiritual message
 In me there is darkness, |
EUROPE
After this week's extremely close election in Italy, there is a strong sense in Europe that, because of weak governments and divided publics, the Continent's big three countries are unable to make the economic changes that most political leaders agree are essential for restoring growth.
"Everybody in Europe agrees that things can't go on the way they are going," said Wolfgang Nowak, a German economist who is in charge of the Deutsche Bank's International Forum. He was speaking about the near-zero-growth economies with high deficits, rigid labor markets and intractable levels of unemployment and social welfare budgets that are increasingly difficult to afford.
"Everybody wants change," Mr. Nowak continued. "At the same time, everybody does everything so that things don't change."
At stake, in the view of many European experts, is the ability of countries like the big three — Germany, France and Italy — to adapt to a globalized world in which Europe's high labor costs and low population growth could portend a long-term decline, not just of economic power but of political influence as well.
There is an official set of goals, known as the Lisbon Agenda, that European Union members, fully aware of the long-term danger of decline, pledged to meet in March 2000. These include sustaining an average growth rate of 3 percent and creating 20 million jobs, in large part by encouraging innovation through investments in education and technology.
But the big three countries have not even come close. Their failure stems from a mutually reinforcing combination of timid, uncertain leadership, deep political divisions and large European populations ready to explode in furious opposition when changes are presented to them.
"The political leaders of all these countries know what needs to be done, and it's not rocket science," Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, in London, said in a telephone interview. "The Lisbon Agenda lays out objectives. But as Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg has said, everybody knows what reforms we need to implement but nobody knows how to implement them and win an election afterwards."
The picture is not bleak all across Europe, nor do the three leading countries have precisely the same problems. Spain, Britain and Ireland have had years of strong growth. The Scandinavian countries have managed to cut back on social welfare spending and yet retain basic protections and guarantees even as they have stepped up growth in the past few years. And Germany has produced better-than-expected growth figures.
Indeed, in his last two years in office, the former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, was able to push through a series of changes that have by now made a difference, including a sharp reduction of unemployment benefits.
Germany also has new rules enabling employers to fire workers in the first two years. But France was convulsed by general strikes and huge street demonstrations when its government announced similar rules that would apply to workers under 26 years of age.
Germany is also the only one of the three Continental powers whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, campaigned on the need for far bolder changes, including weakening the power of the unions. But, as Mr. Nowak puts it, "the voters gave a powerful 'yes' to Mrs. Merkel and a powerful 'no' at the same time."
They brought her to power, he explained, but as is the case with Romano Prodi in Italy, just barely, and in such a way that she has to govern in a coalition with partners — in her case the Social Democrats — far less disposed to change.
"l think that Merkel has solved the principal unsolvable problems inside her own party," Mr. Nowak said. "The problem for her now is the Social Democrats."
By contrast, France is in disarray, with the government of President Jacques Chirac possibly fatally weakened by the mass protests that greeted its modest proposal to relax the labor laws. Nobody now expects this deeply shaken government to advance any new changes before the presidential election next year.
Aside from the immediate weakness of Mr. Chirac, there is an additional, more general opposition to the sort of free-market reforms that have been embraced, at least in theory, by European Union leaders.
"The problem is a lack of leadership and an intellectual climate that is extremely hostile to economic liberalism in much of Continental Europe," Mr. Grant said from London, using the word liberalism in the European sense, as a movement in favor of free markets and economic deregulation.
"The anti-liberal clerisy has basically won the intellectual argument in much of Europe," Mr. Grant said. "They've fostered the view that liberal economics leads to a kind of Dickensian vision of child labor and old women crying in the streets."
In France, even with a youth unemployment rate of 23 percent, nobody is likely to be elected by campaigning for free-market reforms and deregulation.
"The old heartlands of the Eurozone are clogged by high unemployment and starved by low growth," the British newspaper The Independent editorialized after the Italian vote count. "And yet the political systems of France, Germany and now Italy are failing to produce the necessary solutions."
It is far too early to tell what Mr. Prodi may be able to do in Italy, assuming he does take power. But already, it seems clear that his election by so bare a majority demonstrates how divided Italy is, and how far away the country is from any consensus on what needs to be done.
As some commentators have pointed out, Italy can afford to do nothing even less than France or Germany can. Its growth rate last year was zero, its deficit is particularly high and some of its primary industries, like textiles and shoes, are exposed to rugged competition from China and India.
In his five years in power, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has largely failed to carry out his promise of reform, even though he leads the center-right coalition, which is pro-free-market.
Mr. Prodi is on the center-left, but his coalition includes Italy's Communists, who can be counted on to oppose any strong economic medicine.
"The trap has snapped," the Italian daily La Repubblica commented earlier this week on the almost even split of the country's electorate. "It is as if Italy has been stung by a poisonous scorpion: it cannot build a new government, but it also can't keep the old one. It is perfect metaphor for Italy."
"Everybody in Europe agrees that things can't go on the way they are going," said Wolfgang Nowak, a German economist who is in charge of the Deutsche Bank's International Forum. He was speaking about the near-zero-growth economies with high deficits, rigid labor markets and intractable levels of unemployment and social welfare budgets that are increasingly difficult to afford.
"Everybody wants change," Mr. Nowak continued. "At the same time, everybody does everything so that things don't change."
At stake, in the view of many European experts, is the ability of countries like the big three — Germany, France and Italy — to adapt to a globalized world in which Europe's high labor costs and low population growth could portend a long-term decline, not just of economic power but of political influence as well.
There is an official set of goals, known as the Lisbon Agenda, that European Union members, fully aware of the long-term danger of decline, pledged to meet in March 2000. These include sustaining an average growth rate of 3 percent and creating 20 million jobs, in large part by encouraging innovation through investments in education and technology.
But the big three countries have not even come close. Their failure stems from a mutually reinforcing combination of timid, uncertain leadership, deep political divisions and large European populations ready to explode in furious opposition when changes are presented to them.
"The political leaders of all these countries know what needs to be done, and it's not rocket science," Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, in London, said in a telephone interview. "The Lisbon Agenda lays out objectives. But as Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg has said, everybody knows what reforms we need to implement but nobody knows how to implement them and win an election afterwards."
The picture is not bleak all across Europe, nor do the three leading countries have precisely the same problems. Spain, Britain and Ireland have had years of strong growth. The Scandinavian countries have managed to cut back on social welfare spending and yet retain basic protections and guarantees even as they have stepped up growth in the past few years. And Germany has produced better-than-expected growth figures.
Indeed, in his last two years in office, the former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, was able to push through a series of changes that have by now made a difference, including a sharp reduction of unemployment benefits.
Germany also has new rules enabling employers to fire workers in the first two years. But France was convulsed by general strikes and huge street demonstrations when its government announced similar rules that would apply to workers under 26 years of age.
Germany is also the only one of the three Continental powers whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, campaigned on the need for far bolder changes, including weakening the power of the unions. But, as Mr. Nowak puts it, "the voters gave a powerful 'yes' to Mrs. Merkel and a powerful 'no' at the same time."
They brought her to power, he explained, but as is the case with Romano Prodi in Italy, just barely, and in such a way that she has to govern in a coalition with partners — in her case the Social Democrats — far less disposed to change.
"l think that Merkel has solved the principal unsolvable problems inside her own party," Mr. Nowak said. "The problem for her now is the Social Democrats."
By contrast, France is in disarray, with the government of President Jacques Chirac possibly fatally weakened by the mass protests that greeted its modest proposal to relax the labor laws. Nobody now expects this deeply shaken government to advance any new changes before the presidential election next year.
Aside from the immediate weakness of Mr. Chirac, there is an additional, more general opposition to the sort of free-market reforms that have been embraced, at least in theory, by European Union leaders.
"The problem is a lack of leadership and an intellectual climate that is extremely hostile to economic liberalism in much of Continental Europe," Mr. Grant said from London, using the word liberalism in the European sense, as a movement in favor of free markets and economic deregulation.
"The anti-liberal clerisy has basically won the intellectual argument in much of Europe," Mr. Grant said. "They've fostered the view that liberal economics leads to a kind of Dickensian vision of child labor and old women crying in the streets."
In France, even with a youth unemployment rate of 23 percent, nobody is likely to be elected by campaigning for free-market reforms and deregulation.
"The old heartlands of the Eurozone are clogged by high unemployment and starved by low growth," the British newspaper The Independent editorialized after the Italian vote count. "And yet the political systems of France, Germany and now Italy are failing to produce the necessary solutions."
It is far too early to tell what Mr. Prodi may be able to do in Italy, assuming he does take power. But already, it seems clear that his election by so bare a majority demonstrates how divided Italy is, and how far away the country is from any consensus on what needs to be done.
As some commentators have pointed out, Italy can afford to do nothing even less than France or Germany can. Its growth rate last year was zero, its deficit is particularly high and some of its primary industries, like textiles and shoes, are exposed to rugged competition from China and India.
In his five years in power, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has largely failed to carry out his promise of reform, even though he leads the center-right coalition, which is pro-free-market.
Mr. Prodi is on the center-left, but his coalition includes Italy's Communists, who can be counted on to oppose any strong economic medicine.
"The trap has snapped," the Italian daily La Repubblica commented earlier this week on the almost even split of the country's electorate. "It is as if Italy has been stung by a poisonous scorpion: it cannot build a new government, but it also can't keep the old one. It is perfect metaphor for Italy."
12.4.06
ECONOMISTS
In 1849, the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle labeled economics the “dismal science.” Two centuries later, contemporary practitioners still study dismal choices: Higher prices or fewer jobs? Spend or save? They have also become a smug lot.
Economists take pride in the sophisticated statistical techniques on which they rely to analyze phenomena such as growth, inflation, unemployment, trade, and even the long-term effects of abortion on crime rates. Many are convinced that their methods are more rigorous than those of all other social sciences and dismiss research that does not rest on quantitative methods as little more than “storytelling” or, worse, “glorified journalism.” Anthropologists, some economists jest, believe that the plural of anecdote is “data.”
A survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading departments in the United States believe that “economics is the most scientific of the social sciences.” It turns out, however, that this certitude does not stem from how well they regard their own discipline but rather from their contempt for the other social sciences. Although they were nearly unanimous about the relative superiority of their profession, only 9 percent of the respondents were convinced that economists agree on fundamental issues.
And they are right. Economists today are still grappling with basic questions for which they have no answers. Much more than fodder for academic squabbles, this uncertainty often has serious consequences. When economists err in theory, people suffer in practice. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s former president, recalls that in the midst of his country’s financial crisis, he received calls from experts at the International Monetary Fund, several Nobel laureates in economics, and other superstars in the economics firmament. Each offered different advice, and each sounded convinced that his or her recommendation was the only correct one. A distinguished sociologist, Cardoso managed to employ his considerable talents and experience to steer Brazil out of the crisis, ignoring the recommendations of several celebrity economists—some of whom had even urged him to adopt a fixed exchange-rate regime just like the one that Argentina’s recent crash has now discredited.
“We do not really know what causes economic growth,” admits François Bourguignon, the chief economist at the World Bank. “We do have a good sense of what are the main obstacles to growth and what are the conditions without which an economy can’t grow. But we are far less sure about what are the other ingredients needed to create and sustain growth.”
This bewilderment doesn’t just appear when economists confront the devilish problems of the developing world. Plenty of what goes on in the rich world also baffles them. I recently asked a well-regarded economist on Wall Street what puzzled her these days. “Interest rates,” she said. “They should be higher.” Sure enough, economic theory predicts that today’s long-term interest rates—the rates for mortgages or bonds that will be paid years from now—should be higher and heading upward because of an expanding U.S. economy and exploding fiscal and trade deficits. But the financial markets just won’t cooperate: Long-term interest rates have remained low and are actually heading down. Before retiring in January, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described these trends as “a conundrum.” Robert Samuelson, a Washington Post columnist, surveyed the explanations that economists offer to explain this anomaly and found that they are all flawed. In his view, the experts’ inability to explain something so fundamental “attests to our economic ignorance.”
Nor do economists have a convincing explanation for the value of the U.S. dollar. For more than a decade, economists have maintained that the dollar was too expensive and its devaluation was unavoidable. As predicted, the dollar plummeted 39 percent between 2002 and 2004. An inescapable effect of the economic equivalent of the law of gravity, explained the experts. In a country with a huge and growing trade deficit, out-of-control government budgets, a war expected to cost $1 trillion, and high energy prices, the currency’s value will inevitably tumble. Except that it didn’t tumble for long: The dollar’s decline was so fleeting that economics textbooks didn’t have time to register the change. The dollar recovered quickly, climbing 14 percent in 2005.
Surveying which economies had the best prospects for success, Harvard professor Richard B. Freeman concluded that in predicting superior performance, “luck seems as key as economic policies.”
A science that relies on luck to explain the fate of billions of people is a dismal science indeed. True, other social sciences aren’t in much better shape, but economists would still be well advised to trade in their intellectual haughtiness for a more humble disposition. Albert O. Hirschman, a superbly original economist, borrowed freely from other disciplines and aptly titled one of his books Essays in Trespassing. We need more trespassers. Fortunately, a few of today’s economists are beginning to hurdle professional fences and mine neurology, psychology, sociology, and political science to enrich their analysis.
To be sure, most of these attempts at boundary crossing won’t yield much of value, and they render economists vulnerable to charges of consorting with the methodologically impure. But given the dismal condition of the dismal science, intellectual trespassing is a risk worth taking.
Economists take pride in the sophisticated statistical techniques on which they rely to analyze phenomena such as growth, inflation, unemployment, trade, and even the long-term effects of abortion on crime rates. Many are convinced that their methods are more rigorous than those of all other social sciences and dismiss research that does not rest on quantitative methods as little more than “storytelling” or, worse, “glorified journalism.” Anthropologists, some economists jest, believe that the plural of anecdote is “data.”
A survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading departments in the United States believe that “economics is the most scientific of the social sciences.” It turns out, however, that this certitude does not stem from how well they regard their own discipline but rather from their contempt for the other social sciences. Although they were nearly unanimous about the relative superiority of their profession, only 9 percent of the respondents were convinced that economists agree on fundamental issues.
And they are right. Economists today are still grappling with basic questions for which they have no answers. Much more than fodder for academic squabbles, this uncertainty often has serious consequences. When economists err in theory, people suffer in practice. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s former president, recalls that in the midst of his country’s financial crisis, he received calls from experts at the International Monetary Fund, several Nobel laureates in economics, and other superstars in the economics firmament. Each offered different advice, and each sounded convinced that his or her recommendation was the only correct one. A distinguished sociologist, Cardoso managed to employ his considerable talents and experience to steer Brazil out of the crisis, ignoring the recommendations of several celebrity economists—some of whom had even urged him to adopt a fixed exchange-rate regime just like the one that Argentina’s recent crash has now discredited.
“We do not really know what causes economic growth,” admits François Bourguignon, the chief economist at the World Bank. “We do have a good sense of what are the main obstacles to growth and what are the conditions without which an economy can’t grow. But we are far less sure about what are the other ingredients needed to create and sustain growth.”
This bewilderment doesn’t just appear when economists confront the devilish problems of the developing world. Plenty of what goes on in the rich world also baffles them. I recently asked a well-regarded economist on Wall Street what puzzled her these days. “Interest rates,” she said. “They should be higher.” Sure enough, economic theory predicts that today’s long-term interest rates—the rates for mortgages or bonds that will be paid years from now—should be higher and heading upward because of an expanding U.S. economy and exploding fiscal and trade deficits. But the financial markets just won’t cooperate: Long-term interest rates have remained low and are actually heading down. Before retiring in January, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described these trends as “a conundrum.” Robert Samuelson, a Washington Post columnist, surveyed the explanations that economists offer to explain this anomaly and found that they are all flawed. In his view, the experts’ inability to explain something so fundamental “attests to our economic ignorance.”
Nor do economists have a convincing explanation for the value of the U.S. dollar. For more than a decade, economists have maintained that the dollar was too expensive and its devaluation was unavoidable. As predicted, the dollar plummeted 39 percent between 2002 and 2004. An inescapable effect of the economic equivalent of the law of gravity, explained the experts. In a country with a huge and growing trade deficit, out-of-control government budgets, a war expected to cost $1 trillion, and high energy prices, the currency’s value will inevitably tumble. Except that it didn’t tumble for long: The dollar’s decline was so fleeting that economics textbooks didn’t have time to register the change. The dollar recovered quickly, climbing 14 percent in 2005.
Surveying which economies had the best prospects for success, Harvard professor Richard B. Freeman concluded that in predicting superior performance, “luck seems as key as economic policies.”
A science that relies on luck to explain the fate of billions of people is a dismal science indeed. True, other social sciences aren’t in much better shape, but economists would still be well advised to trade in their intellectual haughtiness for a more humble disposition. Albert O. Hirschman, a superbly original economist, borrowed freely from other disciplines and aptly titled one of his books Essays in Trespassing. We need more trespassers. Fortunately, a few of today’s economists are beginning to hurdle professional fences and mine neurology, psychology, sociology, and political science to enrich their analysis.
To be sure, most of these attempts at boundary crossing won’t yield much of value, and they render economists vulnerable to charges of consorting with the methodologically impure. But given the dismal condition of the dismal science, intellectual trespassing is a risk worth taking.
9.4.06
NOT SO INSCRUTABLE!
The Rolling Stones played a concert in China Saturday for the first time ever. Government censors, however, banned the band from playing five songs, including "Brown Sugar" and "Let's Spend the Night Together." Tickets were so expensive that the audience was predominantly rich foreigners, a fact that was not lost on Mick Jagger. "I am pleased the Ministry of Culture is protecting the morals of expatriate bankers and their girlfriends," he said.
8.4.06
GOSPEL of JUDAS
The tale of how the 'Gospel of Judas' was rediscovered is worthy of a detective novel, but there is an even more tantalising religious mystery - whether the newly released document tells us anything authentic about either Jesus or Judas. Instead of Judas as the sinister betrayer, the Egyptian Coptic text issued Thursday portrays Judas as Jesus' confidant, chosen to be told spiritual secrets that the other apostles were not. Jesus also asks Judas to hand him over to his enemies, a possible elaboration on a New Testament phrase in which Jesus tells Judas: "What you are going to do, do quickly" (John 13:27). But should modern-day Christians take anything in 'Judas' to be historically true? Scholars will debate that for years to come, and the age of the text will be a crucial point in their arguments. There seems little doubt that the document published by National Geographic is, indeed, ancient - despite a murky recent history. Found by a farmer in a remote Egyptian burial cave in the 1970s, the text was sold to an antiques dealer who at one point left it disintegrating in a Long Island, New York, safe-deposit box for 16 years. After changing hands a couple of times, it finally ended up with a Swiss foundation, according to 'The Lost Gospel' by journalist Herbet Krosney, which was released with the document. Judging from radiocarbon testing, the papyrus text appears to date from about AD 300, or perhaps a bit later based on analysis of the handwriting style. The team that studied 'Judas' for National Geographic believe the document is a copy of a text first mentioned as heretical by Bishop Irenaeus in AD 180. But even if this is actually Irenaeus' 'Judas', a point that will spark further debate, the material would still have been written many decades after composition of the four New Testament Gospels that the early church accepted as authentic. Scholars' consensus dates: Around AD 70 for Mark, 90 to 100 for John, Matthew and Luke in between. The way these debates typically develop, the later the document was written, the less likely it has any reliable connection to the people who knew Jesus or were among his early followers. Without that, the document is not important for learning about Jesus' actual history but only for documenting a particular sect's beliefs in the second century and beyond.
THE QUEEN
She has succeeded by being herself
Sarah Bradford
The Queen will be 80 on 21 April, an appropriate time to reflect on the changes which have taken place during her 54-year reign. She was born in the difficult aftermath of the first world war, 12 days before the General Strike of 1926, when the more nervous spirits predicted revolution, and memories of the fall of the Romanovs less than ten years before were still fresh. Her grandfather, George V, conscious of the importance of popular consent in the maintenance of his throne, had abandoned the Tsar to his fate and sent his own sons to the factories and frontiers of empire to maintain and be seen to maintain the connection between King and people. Aged nine, Princess Elizabeth experienced the popularity of the British monarchy at his Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1935. She was ten in 1936 when the scandal of her Uncle David’s abdication to marry Wallis Simpson put her father on the throne as George VI and herself — to her horror — in line to accede to the throne. She was, therefore, not born to reign but in character eminently suited to do so.
As we learn from the notorious and much-maligned Crawfie’s account of Princess Elizabeth’s early years, she was a conscientious, tidy, responsible little girl with a love of horses and dogs — her ambition was to marry a farmer and live in the country. She had a sharp temper which sometimes broke out in fights with her younger sister Margaret, amid snapping of bonnet strings and cries of ‘You beast!’ But generally she was reserved, self-controlled and rarely seen to cry. She was shy and emotionally inhibited, characteristics inherited from her grandmother, Queen Mary, yet with a sense of humour, a biting, sometimes sarcastic wit and a gift for mimicry inherited from her mother. Her entourage on her Commonwealth tour in 1953 was surprised to see her, in full evening dress and jewels, imitating the Maori haka with the requisite stamps and grunts. And on occasion, among friends, she will laugh until the tears come.
Her role models have been her father and her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria; indeed her father liked to compare her dignity and grace of carriage with that of the Queen–Empress, telling his guests that ‘he often wondered if history might not repeat itself’. The King trained her for her future position. ‘Long before most people do,’ Crawfie recorded, ‘Lilibet took an interest in politics, and knew quite a bit about what was going on in the world outside ...The King would also talk to his elder daughter more seriously than most fathers do to so young a child ...It was as if he spoke to an equal.’ When her father died, the new Queen accepted her destiny with equanimity. Martin Charteris, then her private secretary, resorting to the equine similes popular in court circles, described her as ‘taking the reins with a firm grip’.
A similar phrase is often used to describe the Queen — ‘she never puts a foot wrong’. Even in her choice of husband, Princess Elizabeth inevitably did the right thing. Immediately after the second world war when Germany, the usual source of marriageable princes for English princesses, was out of favour in postwar Britain, she lighted on Prince Philip of Greece, who despite his Battenberg blood had fought an honourable war as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN. Having first fallen in love with the handsome prince when she was 13, she persisted against her parents’ fears that she was too young and married him in November 1947, when she was 21 and he 25. Their marriage has endured despite his frustration at having to give up a successful naval career in order to walk two steps behind his wife for the rest of his life. Being born royal as he was, it helped that he ‘knew the score’. In return for the Queen’s tolerance of his sometimes difficult behaviour, he gives her total loyalty. She appears impervious when he speaks roughly and is not afraid to tell him to shut up when she thinks he is wrong. There is mutual respect and support, a sense of duty and a determination to keep the show going.
One key factor has differentiated the Queen’s reign from those of her predecessors: the development of an increasingly powerful and intrusive media. When the Queen came to the throne as a beautiful 25-year-old in 1952, she was greeted with rapture, even adoration. Churchill’s friend, Bernard Baruch, called her ‘the world’s sweetheart’, and the adulation which she and her husband received was described by one less blinkered commentator, John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham, as akin to Shintoism. Criticism gathered apace after the disastrous 1956 Suez expedition, ‘the last twitch of the lion’s tail’, when on closer examination the imperial lion was discovered to be distinctly mangy. While Grigg criticised her ‘high schoolgirl voice’, the platitudes of the speeches put into her mouth and the ‘tweedy’ nature of her court (and was punched in the face by an Empire Loyalist outside the BBC for his pains), commentators like Malcolm Muggeridge and John Osborne diagnosed the monarchy as part of Britain’s post-imperial malaise. The satirists of the 1960s disrespectfully dubbed her ‘Brenda’ and her husband ‘Keith’.
Dutifully, the Queen and her entourage clung to the image of the ‘family on the throne’ praised by Bagehot and first established by Victoria and Albert, pictured surrounded by their considerable brood, and by her own parents, who were photographed with children and labradors (later corgis) on the lawns of Royal Lodge. Disheartened by Muggeridge’s opinion that the British were bored by their monarchy, expressed on television in the United States, the royal advisers collaborated on a film, The Royal Family, which was broadcast in 1969. For the first time, the Queen and her children were seen behaving like normal human beings — talking, laughing, enjoying a barbecue at Balmoral. The public, intrigued, wanted more. Having been invited to peer over the Queen’s shoulder in the drawing-room, they were soon wanting to invade the bedroom. There had been nothing of interest in the family since Princess Margaret’s doomed romance with Peter Townsend, when the newspapers had weighed in with their various opinions. But now they began to chase the royals for headlines: a harried, underage Prince Charles, when asked what he would like to drink in a pub, replied ‘cherry brandy’ — the only drink he knew. Princess Anne told photographers to ‘Naff off’ and danced on stage with the cast of Hair. Later, Prince Charles was photographed with various blondes amid speculation as to which was ‘The One’. In the final analysis, the Queen was to be almost undone by the very family image she had done so much to cultivate: her children and their spouses became media fodder in increasingly vicious circulation wars.
When a new media star appeared in the person of Lady Diana Spencer, the public took her to its heart. ‘In an instant you felt that both the monarchy and the media were united for once, they had both found their woman,’ media commentator Roy Greenslade said. ‘She was going to be a circulation builder for one and she was going to be a re-establishment of the monarchy in the private eye in terms of glamour.’ The people, having been invited to participate in the spectacle of the fairytale marriage, thereafter took a proprietorial interest in it, and as the marriage disintegrated, so cracks began to appear in the royal edifice. The media zeroed in mercilessly. The publication in June 1992 of Andrew Morton’s book Diana, Her True Story turned the public fiercely against the heir to the throne and his mistress as responsible for the failure of the marriage, and the royal family were blamed for rejecting Diana and treating her with cold cruelty. When I toured Canada in 1996 to publicise my book on the Queen, I was frequently asked, ‘Why are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh so horrid to Diana?’ While certain circles at court and around the Prince were certainly guilty of being ‘horrid’ to Diana, the Queen, aware as she was of the ‘three of us in the marriage’ situation, was sympathetic to her, and the Duke of Edinburgh wrote her a series of letters hoping to avoid the final break-up.
During the 1990s the Queen endured the worst period of her reign. The year 1992, the ‘annus horribilis’, saw the Waleses’ separation and the failure of the Yorks’ marriage, the outcry over the Queen’s non-payment of income tax, and finally the Windsor fire, when the public refused to contribute to the castle’s restoration. The Queen, utterly unused to such unkind treatment, even pleaded for understanding in her Guildhall speech that year. Five years later, on the death of Diana, there was more than a sniff of revolution in the air. Searching for a scapegoat, the public blamed the Queen for depriving Diana of her title and driving her out of the royal family into the arms of an Egyptian playboy, resulting in her death. It was then that the Queen finally did put a foot wrong; on her traditional holiday at Balmoral, far to the north of London, she failed to realise the strength of feeling building up in the capital until it was almost too late. The situation was saved by her dignified broadcast tribute to Diana and a splendidly moving state funeral, at which, however, Earl Spencer’s eloquent but subversive speech seemed almost like a call to arms.
Ironically, Diana’s death spelled the end of the most severe media intrusion into the royal privacy, her hounding by the paparazzi whose work serviced the newspapers being immediately blamed for her death. Yet, despite the media onslaught and the cataclysmic events affecting the monarchy, today republicanism has not grown beyond 25–30 per cent of the population, and the proportion of people declaring themselves monarchists has remained roughly the same. Since the events of 1992 and 1997 the Queen has regained her position in the people’s affections. The death of the Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee in 2002 evoked popular expressions of loyalty which took most cynical commentators by surprise. The Queen has succeeded simply by being herself, a model of discretion and dedication to her country. Even last year, aged 79, she carried out 378 public engagements in the United Kingdom and no fewer than 48 official overseas visits. As a constitutional monarch and therefore above party, she is impeccable. People might surmise that she could be unhappy about the demolition of the constitution by New Labour but they do not know. There is, however, a saying that sounds very like the Queen. Amused rather than offended by Cherie Blair’s public refusal to curtsy, she is held to have said, ‘I can almost feel Mrs Blair’s knees stiffening when I come into the room...’.
Again, one can only surmise her feelings about Camilla and the latter’s determination to hold on to the Prince of Wales even at the expense of his marriage. The Queen is, after all, a devout Christian and her aversion to divorce is well known. She is, however, above all a pragmatist and dedicated to the preservation of the monarchy. The marriage of Charles and Camilla has regularised an embarrassing situation and the Queen accepts that. The rift between Clarence House and Buckingham Palace, between the Prince and his parents, caused by the War of the Waleses, Charles’s unwise 1994 television interview in which he admitted adultery and, perhaps still more, the Dimbleby biography which stigmatised his parents, appears to have been healed.
That is not to say that the Queen is prepared to abdicate and hand over the crown to her son. Voluntary abdication has never been on the cards; it is the sort of thing that Continental monarchs do. The Queen loves her job and is better informed than any other head of state about world affairs, let alone about domestic politics, of which she has experience stretching back well beyond any of her surviving prime ministers. Her knowledge of the Commonwealth, her own special interest which has recently taken on a new lease of life, goes back to its inception. She is exceptionally healthy and energetic, eats and drinks moderately and takes a great deal of exercise, riding out when she can and taking long walks on the hills at Balmoral. She is already the longest reigning monarch in Europe; it is even conceivable that one day she may overtake great-great-grandmother Victoria as the longest reigning monarch in British history.
Sarah Bradford
The Queen will be 80 on 21 April, an appropriate time to reflect on the changes which have taken place during her 54-year reign. She was born in the difficult aftermath of the first world war, 12 days before the General Strike of 1926, when the more nervous spirits predicted revolution, and memories of the fall of the Romanovs less than ten years before were still fresh. Her grandfather, George V, conscious of the importance of popular consent in the maintenance of his throne, had abandoned the Tsar to his fate and sent his own sons to the factories and frontiers of empire to maintain and be seen to maintain the connection between King and people. Aged nine, Princess Elizabeth experienced the popularity of the British monarchy at his Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1935. She was ten in 1936 when the scandal of her Uncle David’s abdication to marry Wallis Simpson put her father on the throne as George VI and herself — to her horror — in line to accede to the throne. She was, therefore, not born to reign but in character eminently suited to do so.
As we learn from the notorious and much-maligned Crawfie’s account of Princess Elizabeth’s early years, she was a conscientious, tidy, responsible little girl with a love of horses and dogs — her ambition was to marry a farmer and live in the country. She had a sharp temper which sometimes broke out in fights with her younger sister Margaret, amid snapping of bonnet strings and cries of ‘You beast!’ But generally she was reserved, self-controlled and rarely seen to cry. She was shy and emotionally inhibited, characteristics inherited from her grandmother, Queen Mary, yet with a sense of humour, a biting, sometimes sarcastic wit and a gift for mimicry inherited from her mother. Her entourage on her Commonwealth tour in 1953 was surprised to see her, in full evening dress and jewels, imitating the Maori haka with the requisite stamps and grunts. And on occasion, among friends, she will laugh until the tears come.
Her role models have been her father and her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria; indeed her father liked to compare her dignity and grace of carriage with that of the Queen–Empress, telling his guests that ‘he often wondered if history might not repeat itself’. The King trained her for her future position. ‘Long before most people do,’ Crawfie recorded, ‘Lilibet took an interest in politics, and knew quite a bit about what was going on in the world outside ...The King would also talk to his elder daughter more seriously than most fathers do to so young a child ...It was as if he spoke to an equal.’ When her father died, the new Queen accepted her destiny with equanimity. Martin Charteris, then her private secretary, resorting to the equine similes popular in court circles, described her as ‘taking the reins with a firm grip’.
A similar phrase is often used to describe the Queen — ‘she never puts a foot wrong’. Even in her choice of husband, Princess Elizabeth inevitably did the right thing. Immediately after the second world war when Germany, the usual source of marriageable princes for English princesses, was out of favour in postwar Britain, she lighted on Prince Philip of Greece, who despite his Battenberg blood had fought an honourable war as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN. Having first fallen in love with the handsome prince when she was 13, she persisted against her parents’ fears that she was too young and married him in November 1947, when she was 21 and he 25. Their marriage has endured despite his frustration at having to give up a successful naval career in order to walk two steps behind his wife for the rest of his life. Being born royal as he was, it helped that he ‘knew the score’. In return for the Queen’s tolerance of his sometimes difficult behaviour, he gives her total loyalty. She appears impervious when he speaks roughly and is not afraid to tell him to shut up when she thinks he is wrong. There is mutual respect and support, a sense of duty and a determination to keep the show going.
One key factor has differentiated the Queen’s reign from those of her predecessors: the development of an increasingly powerful and intrusive media. When the Queen came to the throne as a beautiful 25-year-old in 1952, she was greeted with rapture, even adoration. Churchill’s friend, Bernard Baruch, called her ‘the world’s sweetheart’, and the adulation which she and her husband received was described by one less blinkered commentator, John Grigg, then Lord Altrincham, as akin to Shintoism. Criticism gathered apace after the disastrous 1956 Suez expedition, ‘the last twitch of the lion’s tail’, when on closer examination the imperial lion was discovered to be distinctly mangy. While Grigg criticised her ‘high schoolgirl voice’, the platitudes of the speeches put into her mouth and the ‘tweedy’ nature of her court (and was punched in the face by an Empire Loyalist outside the BBC for his pains), commentators like Malcolm Muggeridge and John Osborne diagnosed the monarchy as part of Britain’s post-imperial malaise. The satirists of the 1960s disrespectfully dubbed her ‘Brenda’ and her husband ‘Keith’.
Dutifully, the Queen and her entourage clung to the image of the ‘family on the throne’ praised by Bagehot and first established by Victoria and Albert, pictured surrounded by their considerable brood, and by her own parents, who were photographed with children and labradors (later corgis) on the lawns of Royal Lodge. Disheartened by Muggeridge’s opinion that the British were bored by their monarchy, expressed on television in the United States, the royal advisers collaborated on a film, The Royal Family, which was broadcast in 1969. For the first time, the Queen and her children were seen behaving like normal human beings — talking, laughing, enjoying a barbecue at Balmoral. The public, intrigued, wanted more. Having been invited to peer over the Queen’s shoulder in the drawing-room, they were soon wanting to invade the bedroom. There had been nothing of interest in the family since Princess Margaret’s doomed romance with Peter Townsend, when the newspapers had weighed in with their various opinions. But now they began to chase the royals for headlines: a harried, underage Prince Charles, when asked what he would like to drink in a pub, replied ‘cherry brandy’ — the only drink he knew. Princess Anne told photographers to ‘Naff off’ and danced on stage with the cast of Hair. Later, Prince Charles was photographed with various blondes amid speculation as to which was ‘The One’. In the final analysis, the Queen was to be almost undone by the very family image she had done so much to cultivate: her children and their spouses became media fodder in increasingly vicious circulation wars.
When a new media star appeared in the person of Lady Diana Spencer, the public took her to its heart. ‘In an instant you felt that both the monarchy and the media were united for once, they had both found their woman,’ media commentator Roy Greenslade said. ‘She was going to be a circulation builder for one and she was going to be a re-establishment of the monarchy in the private eye in terms of glamour.’ The people, having been invited to participate in the spectacle of the fairytale marriage, thereafter took a proprietorial interest in it, and as the marriage disintegrated, so cracks began to appear in the royal edifice. The media zeroed in mercilessly. The publication in June 1992 of Andrew Morton’s book Diana, Her True Story turned the public fiercely against the heir to the throne and his mistress as responsible for the failure of the marriage, and the royal family were blamed for rejecting Diana and treating her with cold cruelty. When I toured Canada in 1996 to publicise my book on the Queen, I was frequently asked, ‘Why are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh so horrid to Diana?’ While certain circles at court and around the Prince were certainly guilty of being ‘horrid’ to Diana, the Queen, aware as she was of the ‘three of us in the marriage’ situation, was sympathetic to her, and the Duke of Edinburgh wrote her a series of letters hoping to avoid the final break-up.
During the 1990s the Queen endured the worst period of her reign. The year 1992, the ‘annus horribilis’, saw the Waleses’ separation and the failure of the Yorks’ marriage, the outcry over the Queen’s non-payment of income tax, and finally the Windsor fire, when the public refused to contribute to the castle’s restoration. The Queen, utterly unused to such unkind treatment, even pleaded for understanding in her Guildhall speech that year. Five years later, on the death of Diana, there was more than a sniff of revolution in the air. Searching for a scapegoat, the public blamed the Queen for depriving Diana of her title and driving her out of the royal family into the arms of an Egyptian playboy, resulting in her death. It was then that the Queen finally did put a foot wrong; on her traditional holiday at Balmoral, far to the north of London, she failed to realise the strength of feeling building up in the capital until it was almost too late. The situation was saved by her dignified broadcast tribute to Diana and a splendidly moving state funeral, at which, however, Earl Spencer’s eloquent but subversive speech seemed almost like a call to arms.
Ironically, Diana’s death spelled the end of the most severe media intrusion into the royal privacy, her hounding by the paparazzi whose work serviced the newspapers being immediately blamed for her death. Yet, despite the media onslaught and the cataclysmic events affecting the monarchy, today republicanism has not grown beyond 25–30 per cent of the population, and the proportion of people declaring themselves monarchists has remained roughly the same. Since the events of 1992 and 1997 the Queen has regained her position in the people’s affections. The death of the Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee in 2002 evoked popular expressions of loyalty which took most cynical commentators by surprise. The Queen has succeeded simply by being herself, a model of discretion and dedication to her country. Even last year, aged 79, she carried out 378 public engagements in the United Kingdom and no fewer than 48 official overseas visits. As a constitutional monarch and therefore above party, she is impeccable. People might surmise that she could be unhappy about the demolition of the constitution by New Labour but they do not know. There is, however, a saying that sounds very like the Queen. Amused rather than offended by Cherie Blair’s public refusal to curtsy, she is held to have said, ‘I can almost feel Mrs Blair’s knees stiffening when I come into the room...’.
Again, one can only surmise her feelings about Camilla and the latter’s determination to hold on to the Prince of Wales even at the expense of his marriage. The Queen is, after all, a devout Christian and her aversion to divorce is well known. She is, however, above all a pragmatist and dedicated to the preservation of the monarchy. The marriage of Charles and Camilla has regularised an embarrassing situation and the Queen accepts that. The rift between Clarence House and Buckingham Palace, between the Prince and his parents, caused by the War of the Waleses, Charles’s unwise 1994 television interview in which he admitted adultery and, perhaps still more, the Dimbleby biography which stigmatised his parents, appears to have been healed.
That is not to say that the Queen is prepared to abdicate and hand over the crown to her son. Voluntary abdication has never been on the cards; it is the sort of thing that Continental monarchs do. The Queen loves her job and is better informed than any other head of state about world affairs, let alone about domestic politics, of which she has experience stretching back well beyond any of her surviving prime ministers. Her knowledge of the Commonwealth, her own special interest which has recently taken on a new lease of life, goes back to its inception. She is exceptionally healthy and energetic, eats and drinks moderately and takes a great deal of exercise, riding out when she can and taking long walks on the hills at Balmoral. She is already the longest reigning monarch in Europe; it is even conceivable that one day she may overtake great-great-grandmother Victoria as the longest reigning monarch in British history.
FRANCE
Baby revolutionaries Étienne Phillip, 16, and 17-year-old Christiane T. are lounging on the metal chairs along the boat pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, ready for their next demonstration. Blocks away a phalanx of cops stand guard behind stanchions blocking access to the Sorbonne. The teens are part of one of several clusters of young people in the park highlighting book passages, writing reports and playing cards because they've been locked out of nearby high schools and universities in the wake of protests against the new French labor contract that would make it easy to fire young workers.
The two are laughing, leaning back in the sun, but they exude a quiet resolve. "It's an important fight for us," Christiane explains. "It's our future. It's the future of most of France."
Told that just hours earlier Prime Minister Dominique Villepin had vowed to keep fighting for the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) or First Employment Contract, which would allow new workers under 26 to be fired any time without cause during a two-year period, Christiane simply shrugs and returns to her book. "Now that we're part of the European Union, there's pressure to change," says Étienne. "But we're not going to." Asked what they want, Christiane replies: "Total retreat." It echoes the call for a "coup de grâce" to the CPE from Jean-Claude Mailly, the head of France's powerful union Force Ouvriere, one of several key unions that have joined the battle against the new contract.
Protesters like Christiane and Étienne have been largely portrayed in the U.S. press as privileged, dope-smoking slackers determined not to share their jobs with young immigrants and pitching a fit about it. The French, the cliché goes, will never pass up an opportunity to miss a day of school or work to demonstrate. And what are they so upset about? Losing jobs-for-life that promise six weeks of vacation practically from the minute you step in the door. Ridiculous. Isn't it?
But it's not a school kid spring fling. Many French see the manifestations as a key battle to preserve an essential element of their economic culture and a fight for the soul of the European Union, pitting their sacrosanct labor stability against a more ruthless economic Anglo-Saxon model. The French newspaper Le Monde reported last month that as of mid-March 66 percent of the French wanted the CPE dumped, up from 55 percent the previous week.
"It's important not to dismiss what's going on in France," says political science professor Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. "This is deathly serious for the European Union. This is exactly the generation the E.U. needs on their side. In a way, it's a battle for their souls."
Jean, a no-illusions, pedal-to-the-metal French businessman, supports the protesters, but it's not something he discusses at work. He's thrilled about making money as a partner in a new Franco-American enterprise, but is not willing to mow down what he regards as a cornerstone of French economic life -- job security. He's believes the law would stigmatize the young, making them sous employees -- second-class citizens.
"It would be a nightmare for an entire generation," he says. "They wouldn't be able to rent an apartment or open a bank account without a standard labor contract. There's an unemployment problem among the young, but the answer isn't giving companies more power.
"We rely on having stable jobs," says Jean. "Americans don't know about that."
Weber believes the French labor system will ultimately "break" under increasing competitive economic pressures. "Jobs for life are not sustainable," he says. "The question is going to be how will the costs of that break be distributed? It's going to be a major test of the society as a whole."
Villepin hurried the CPE law through Parliament soon after weeks of riots by young people from the immigrant banlieues rocked France last November. He pitched it as a way to increase jobs and cut the 23 percent unemployment rate for the young, which is estimated to be nearly twice as high in the banlieues. If it's cheaper to hire a young employee, the theory goes, maybe companies will hire two. But can either one make a living?
Students worry that companies will continually replenish slots with CPE labor and young workers will be forced to move every two years, temporarily filling jobs that will no longer be offered to seasoned workers. And if young workers can be fired for no reason, they could be more vulnerable to discrimination based on race, pregnancy or sexual orientation.
The hidden agenda of the CPE is not necessarily only to increase hiring but also to grant companies what economists like to call "flexibility," a kind of get-out-of-a-recession-free card, by allowing corporations to jettison workers onto welfare rolls without severance costs.
The CPE technically passed last weekend, but the government has recommended that it not be enforced -- yet. Union and business representatives are continuing to meet with representatives of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement Party. Several observers expected Villepin, whose public approval ratings have slumped, to resign at his news conference Thursday. Instead he said he'd see the battle for the CPE to the end -- but would consider compromises on specifics.
The unions and students, who have mobilized millions of acitivists in several days of demonstrations, have called for more protests and set April 15 as a deadline to repeal the CPE. In Toulouse on Thursday students blocked transport of parts for a new double-decker plane being manufactured by Airbus, and Paris students spilled onto the tracks at Gare de l'Est to briefly disrupt train traffic. "If the protests keep up, the CPE dies," declared Jean. But Weber believes the French government "could hang tough. It's a very critical juncture for France." Can France preserve what many see as a crucial aspect of its essential character and still survive economically in an increasingly competitive new world order?
Étienne and Christiane are ready to hit the ramparts. "The CPE is not a solution," says Etienne. Asked what the solution is, he reflects a moment, then replies in English: "Make some noise."
The two are laughing, leaning back in the sun, but they exude a quiet resolve. "It's an important fight for us," Christiane explains. "It's our future. It's the future of most of France."
Told that just hours earlier Prime Minister Dominique Villepin had vowed to keep fighting for the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) or First Employment Contract, which would allow new workers under 26 to be fired any time without cause during a two-year period, Christiane simply shrugs and returns to her book. "Now that we're part of the European Union, there's pressure to change," says Étienne. "But we're not going to." Asked what they want, Christiane replies: "Total retreat." It echoes the call for a "coup de grâce" to the CPE from Jean-Claude Mailly, the head of France's powerful union Force Ouvriere, one of several key unions that have joined the battle against the new contract.
Protesters like Christiane and Étienne have been largely portrayed in the U.S. press as privileged, dope-smoking slackers determined not to share their jobs with young immigrants and pitching a fit about it. The French, the cliché goes, will never pass up an opportunity to miss a day of school or work to demonstrate. And what are they so upset about? Losing jobs-for-life that promise six weeks of vacation practically from the minute you step in the door. Ridiculous. Isn't it?
But it's not a school kid spring fling. Many French see the manifestations as a key battle to preserve an essential element of their economic culture and a fight for the soul of the European Union, pitting their sacrosanct labor stability against a more ruthless economic Anglo-Saxon model. The French newspaper Le Monde reported last month that as of mid-March 66 percent of the French wanted the CPE dumped, up from 55 percent the previous week.
"It's important not to dismiss what's going on in France," says political science professor Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. "This is deathly serious for the European Union. This is exactly the generation the E.U. needs on their side. In a way, it's a battle for their souls."
Jean, a no-illusions, pedal-to-the-metal French businessman, supports the protesters, but it's not something he discusses at work. He's thrilled about making money as a partner in a new Franco-American enterprise, but is not willing to mow down what he regards as a cornerstone of French economic life -- job security. He's believes the law would stigmatize the young, making them sous employees -- second-class citizens.
"It would be a nightmare for an entire generation," he says. "They wouldn't be able to rent an apartment or open a bank account without a standard labor contract. There's an unemployment problem among the young, but the answer isn't giving companies more power.
"We rely on having stable jobs," says Jean. "Americans don't know about that."
Weber believes the French labor system will ultimately "break" under increasing competitive economic pressures. "Jobs for life are not sustainable," he says. "The question is going to be how will the costs of that break be distributed? It's going to be a major test of the society as a whole."
Villepin hurried the CPE law through Parliament soon after weeks of riots by young people from the immigrant banlieues rocked France last November. He pitched it as a way to increase jobs and cut the 23 percent unemployment rate for the young, which is estimated to be nearly twice as high in the banlieues. If it's cheaper to hire a young employee, the theory goes, maybe companies will hire two. But can either one make a living?
Students worry that companies will continually replenish slots with CPE labor and young workers will be forced to move every two years, temporarily filling jobs that will no longer be offered to seasoned workers. And if young workers can be fired for no reason, they could be more vulnerable to discrimination based on race, pregnancy or sexual orientation.
The hidden agenda of the CPE is not necessarily only to increase hiring but also to grant companies what economists like to call "flexibility," a kind of get-out-of-a-recession-free card, by allowing corporations to jettison workers onto welfare rolls without severance costs.
The CPE technically passed last weekend, but the government has recommended that it not be enforced -- yet. Union and business representatives are continuing to meet with representatives of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement Party. Several observers expected Villepin, whose public approval ratings have slumped, to resign at his news conference Thursday. Instead he said he'd see the battle for the CPE to the end -- but would consider compromises on specifics.
The unions and students, who have mobilized millions of acitivists in several days of demonstrations, have called for more protests and set April 15 as a deadline to repeal the CPE. In Toulouse on Thursday students blocked transport of parts for a new double-decker plane being manufactured by Airbus, and Paris students spilled onto the tracks at Gare de l'Est to briefly disrupt train traffic. "If the protests keep up, the CPE dies," declared Jean. But Weber believes the French government "could hang tough. It's a very critical juncture for France." Can France preserve what many see as a crucial aspect of its essential character and still survive economically in an increasingly competitive new world order?
Étienne and Christiane are ready to hit the ramparts. "The CPE is not a solution," says Etienne. Asked what the solution is, he reflects a moment, then replies in English: "Make some noise."
1.4.06
BASEBALL TIME
It's that time of year again. Time to lay out the old ballfield. But, right about now, it's nice enough to do it twice. Enjoy the Spring.
DEMOCRACY
THE FREE WORLD (from the Wall Street Journal)
Western' Cultural determinists should look beyond Ancient Greece.
BY AMARTYA SEN
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Culture too, like our stars, is often blamed for our failures. Attempts to build a better world capsize, it is alleged, in the high sea of cultural resistance. The determinism of culture is increasingly used in contemporary global discussions to generate pessimism about the feasibility of a democratic state, or of a flourishing economy, or of a tolerant society, wherever these conditions do not already obtain.
Indeed, cultural stereotyping can have great effectiveness in fixing our way of thinking. When there is an accidental correlation between cultural prejudice and social observation (no matter how casual), a theory is born, and it may refuse to die even after the chance correlation has vanished without trace. For example, labored jokes against the Irish, which have had such currency in England, had the superficial appearance of fitting well with the depressing predicament of the Irish economy when it was doing quite badly. But when the Irish economy started growing astonishingly rapidly, for many years faster than any other European economy, the cultural stereotyping and its allegedly profound economic and social relevance were not junked as sheer rubbish. Theories have lives of their own, quite defiantly of the phenomenal world that can be actually observed.
Many have observed that in the '60s South Korea and Ghana had similar income per head, whereas within 30 years the former grew to be 15 times richer than the latter. This comparative history is immensely important to study and causally analyze, but the temptation to put much of the blame on Ghanaian or African culture (as is done by as astute an observer as Samuel Huntington) calls for some resistance. Mr. Huntington closes his contrast with a spectacular formula: "South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count." Ghanaians, and perhaps many other Africans, seem doomed to stagnate, according to this analysis.
In fact, that cultural story is extremely deceptive. There were many important differences, other than any differences in cultural predispositions, between Ghana and Korea in the 1960s. First, the class structures in the two countries were quite different, with a very much bigger--and proactive--role of business classes in Korea. Second, the politics were very different, too, with the government in South Korea eager to play a prime-moving role in initiating societal reform and economic development in a way that was not true in Ghana. Third, the close relationship between the Korean economy and Japan, on the one hand, and the U.S., on the other, made a big difference, at least in the early stages of Korean economic expansion.
Fourth--and perhaps most important--by the 1960s South Korea had acquired a much higher literacy rate and a much more expanded school system than Ghana had. Korean massive progress in school education had been largely brought about in the post-World War II period, mainly through resolute public policy, and it could not be seen just as a reflection of cultural difference. This is not to suggest that cultural factors are irrelevant to the process of development, but they do not work in isolation from social, political and economic influences. Nor are they immutable.
The temptation of founding economic pessimism on cultural resistance is matched by the evident enchantment, even more common today, of basing political pessimism, particularly about democracy, on alleged cultural impossibilities. While it is easy enough to understand the widespread--and increasing--doubts about armed intervention allegedly aimed at jump-starting democracy in Iraq through largely foreign and military planning, it would be quite a leap from there to become skeptical of the general possibility of the emergence of democracy in any country that is currently nondemocratic. It is worth remembering that democracy has developed well enough in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the case of some, such as South Africa, even foreign assistance to local democratic movements (for example through economic boycott) has positively helped.
When it is asked whether Western countries can "impose" democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of "imposition," since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy "belongs" to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially "Western" idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.
Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is "government by discussion," and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society). There can be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and of public reasoning have been very deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as Marquis de Condorcet, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be deeply misleading. There is a long history of public reasoning across the world, and while it has gone through ups and downs everywhere, the sharp priority of liberal tolerance that has emerged in the West over the past three centuries reflects how social evolution can strengthen and consolidate one tendency to the exclusion--or near exclusion--of other tendencies.
The belief in the allegedly "Western" nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition ("they are all Europeans," we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).
Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer." Mr. Mandela could combine his modern ideas about democracy with emphasizing the supportive part of the native tradition, in a way that Gandhi had done in India, and that is the way cultures adapt and develop to respond to modernity. Mr. Mandela's quest for democracy and freedom did not emerge from any Western "imposition."
Similarly, the history of Muslims includes a variety of traditions, not all of which are just religious or "Islamic" in any obvious sense. The work of Arab and Iranian mathematicians, from the eighth century onward reflects a largely nonreligious tradition. Depending on politics, which varied between one Muslim ruler and another, there is also quite a history of tolerance and of public discussion, on which the pursuit of a modern democracy can draw. For example, the emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides, as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).
Cultural dynamics does not have to build something from absolutely nothing, nor need the future be rigidly tied to majoritarian beliefs today or the power of the contemporary orthodoxy. To see Iranian dissidents who want a fully democratic Iran not as Iranian advocates but as "ambassadors of Western values" would be to add insult to injury, aside from neglecting parts of Iranian history (including the practice of democracy in Susa or Shushan in southwest Iran 2,000 years ago). The diversity of the human past and the freedoms of the contemporary world give us much more choice than cultural determinists acknowledge. This is particularly important to emphasize since the illusion of cultural destiny can extract a heavy price in the continued impoverishment of human lives and liberties.
Mr. Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, is the author of "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny," published next week by Norton.
Western' Cultural determinists should look beyond Ancient Greece.
BY AMARTYA SEN
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Culture too, like our stars, is often blamed for our failures. Attempts to build a better world capsize, it is alleged, in the high sea of cultural resistance. The determinism of culture is increasingly used in contemporary global discussions to generate pessimism about the feasibility of a democratic state, or of a flourishing economy, or of a tolerant society, wherever these conditions do not already obtain.
Indeed, cultural stereotyping can have great effectiveness in fixing our way of thinking. When there is an accidental correlation between cultural prejudice and social observation (no matter how casual), a theory is born, and it may refuse to die even after the chance correlation has vanished without trace. For example, labored jokes against the Irish, which have had such currency in England, had the superficial appearance of fitting well with the depressing predicament of the Irish economy when it was doing quite badly. But when the Irish economy started growing astonishingly rapidly, for many years faster than any other European economy, the cultural stereotyping and its allegedly profound economic and social relevance were not junked as sheer rubbish. Theories have lives of their own, quite defiantly of the phenomenal world that can be actually observed.
Many have observed that in the '60s South Korea and Ghana had similar income per head, whereas within 30 years the former grew to be 15 times richer than the latter. This comparative history is immensely important to study and causally analyze, but the temptation to put much of the blame on Ghanaian or African culture (as is done by as astute an observer as Samuel Huntington) calls for some resistance. Mr. Huntington closes his contrast with a spectacular formula: "South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization and discipline. Ghanaians had different values. In short, cultures count." Ghanaians, and perhaps many other Africans, seem doomed to stagnate, according to this analysis.
In fact, that cultural story is extremely deceptive. There were many important differences, other than any differences in cultural predispositions, between Ghana and Korea in the 1960s. First, the class structures in the two countries were quite different, with a very much bigger--and proactive--role of business classes in Korea. Second, the politics were very different, too, with the government in South Korea eager to play a prime-moving role in initiating societal reform and economic development in a way that was not true in Ghana. Third, the close relationship between the Korean economy and Japan, on the one hand, and the U.S., on the other, made a big difference, at least in the early stages of Korean economic expansion.
Fourth--and perhaps most important--by the 1960s South Korea had acquired a much higher literacy rate and a much more expanded school system than Ghana had. Korean massive progress in school education had been largely brought about in the post-World War II period, mainly through resolute public policy, and it could not be seen just as a reflection of cultural difference. This is not to suggest that cultural factors are irrelevant to the process of development, but they do not work in isolation from social, political and economic influences. Nor are they immutable.
The temptation of founding economic pessimism on cultural resistance is matched by the evident enchantment, even more common today, of basing political pessimism, particularly about democracy, on alleged cultural impossibilities. While it is easy enough to understand the widespread--and increasing--doubts about armed intervention allegedly aimed at jump-starting democracy in Iraq through largely foreign and military planning, it would be quite a leap from there to become skeptical of the general possibility of the emergence of democracy in any country that is currently nondemocratic. It is worth remembering that democracy has developed well enough in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the case of some, such as South Africa, even foreign assistance to local democratic movements (for example through economic boycott) has positively helped.
When it is asked whether Western countries can "impose" democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of "imposition," since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy "belongs" to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially "Western" idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.
Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is "government by discussion," and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society). There can be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and of public reasoning have been very deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as Marquis de Condorcet, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be deeply misleading. There is a long history of public reasoning across the world, and while it has gone through ups and downs everywhere, the sharp priority of liberal tolerance that has emerged in the West over the past three centuries reflects how social evolution can strengthen and consolidate one tendency to the exclusion--or near exclusion--of other tendencies.
The belief in the allegedly "Western" nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition ("they are all Europeans," we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).
Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer." Mr. Mandela could combine his modern ideas about democracy with emphasizing the supportive part of the native tradition, in a way that Gandhi had done in India, and that is the way cultures adapt and develop to respond to modernity. Mr. Mandela's quest for democracy and freedom did not emerge from any Western "imposition."
Similarly, the history of Muslims includes a variety of traditions, not all of which are just religious or "Islamic" in any obvious sense. The work of Arab and Iranian mathematicians, from the eighth century onward reflects a largely nonreligious tradition. Depending on politics, which varied between one Muslim ruler and another, there is also quite a history of tolerance and of public discussion, on which the pursuit of a modern democracy can draw. For example, the emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides, as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).
Cultural dynamics does not have to build something from absolutely nothing, nor need the future be rigidly tied to majoritarian beliefs today or the power of the contemporary orthodoxy. To see Iranian dissidents who want a fully democratic Iran not as Iranian advocates but as "ambassadors of Western values" would be to add insult to injury, aside from neglecting parts of Iranian history (including the practice of democracy in Susa or Shushan in southwest Iran 2,000 years ago). The diversity of the human past and the freedoms of the contemporary world give us much more choice than cultural determinists acknowledge. This is particularly important to emphasize since the illusion of cultural destiny can extract a heavy price in the continued impoverishment of human lives and liberties.
Mr. Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, is the author of "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny," published next week by Norton.
TOM WOLFE
Tom Wolfe from the Chronicle of Higher Education
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
The exclamation points — how could I have forgotten the exclamation points? Two in the first two sentences, 10 on the third page, seven in a mere five lines on page 11. So many that they start to look like straight pins driven neatly through the exoskeletons of rare specimen phrases: This one here's the ironic observation, down there's the learned pun, these are the brazen revelation, the riposte, the clever twist, two running jokes, and several related species of punch line. It's a Tom Wolfe chrestomathy — one from the early years, neatly labeled "Mauve Gloves."
"Mauve Gloves," of course, is "Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine," the title story of a 1976 collection of Mr. Wolfe's essays that I've finally found by dragging the kitchen stool into the back hall and climbing up here to the top shelf of what was once a pantry. The news that Mr. Wolfe will deliver this year's Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities has sent me searching the apartment for books of his that ought to be around here somewhere. From Bauhaus to Our House, his snarky repudiation of Modernism in architecture, is still missing — I must have lent it out. But The Right Stuff, a highly entertaining history of the Mercury astronauts, was in a long row of brittling mass-market paperbacks. I found Mauve Gloves & Madmen nestled up here between collections of Pauline Kael film reviews and John Cheever short stories.
And now, leafing through it, I'm counting exclamations and grinning at Mr. Wolfe's third-person admission that, after a party, he had gone to stand in the doorway of his study, right where he had seen John Leonard of The New York Times standing earlier, and suddenly Mr. Wolfe had decided that his study was depressingly ordinary. "The solution, as he saw it — without going into huge costs — was the library stairs — the stairs to nowhere! — an object indisputably useful and yet with an air of elegant folly!" I'm balancing high up on a kitchen stool by the makeshift back-hall bookcase, reading about Tom Wolfe's custom-made, moveable library stairs — "the classic English type," he says, "going up in a spiral around a central column, carved in the ancient bamboo style, rising up almost seven feet, so he can reach books on his highest shelf." I climb down.
I first encountered Tom Wolfe in the spring of 1978 in Sandy Pinsker's basement in Lancaster, Pa. That's where Eng. 63, "Non-Fiction Writing," met every Wednesday, a dozen or so Franklin & Marshall students slouching on the Pinskers' sofas and chairs. It was, we knew, a great honor to be accepted into the class and invited to the professor's house, where we discussed Robert Benchley and Ms. Kael and Mr. Wolfe before tearing apart each other's mimeographed travelogues and autobiographical sketches and failed attempts at humor. I still have a thick folder of our papers — Gregory Murphy on Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, Connie S. Pilla on her weekends with her boyfriend at a cabin in the woods, me on ... well, never mind. The papers are, by and large, bad, although some are very bad and others even worse. My own I can't stand to read past the first or second paragraph. It's a wonder Professor Pinsker didn't fail us all, instead of responding to each essay with cheery half-page, single-spaced notes. Whatever retirement benefits he's getting now, down there in Florida, he should be getting twice as much.
Mr. Wolfe's role in Eng. 63 was to represent the New Journalism. One of our assignments, after we had tried our hands at movie reviews and travel writing, was to do a paper in the style of the New Journalists. We faced some disadvantages. None of us knew Leonard Bernstein well enough to call him "Lenny" or get invited to his parties to mingle with Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, and the Black Panthers. None of us was being asked to appear on university panels with Günter Grass and Allen Ginsberg — I'm not sure I had ever even heard of Günter Grass. We were English majors at a liberal-arts college in a small, conservative Pennsylvania city where no one would have dreamed of ordering a pair of four-exclamation-point shoes from Mr. Wolfe's London boot makers, John Lobb & Sons Ltd. ("$248! — for one pair of shoes! — from England! — handmade!") We were suburban kids. Like Mr. Wolfe's study, we were depressingly ordinary.
Even so, we learned a lot reading Mr. Wolfe's essays. We learned to look hard for the telling detail, like the red Lincoln Zephyr in which Frank Lloyd Wright was being chauffeured on the day that, according to From Bauhaus to Our House, he so richly snubbed Walter Gropius in Racine, Wis. We learned to look for lively new ways of putting ordinary things: "Dr. Gladys J. Loring," says Mr. Wolfe in The Right Stuff, "looked at him as if he were a flatworm." We learned to write as though writing were fun: "O Mother O'Hare," Mr. Wolfe intones at one point in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, "big bosom for our hungry poets, pelvic saddle for our sexologists and Open Classroom theorists — O houri O'Hare, who keeps her Perm-O-Pour Stoneglow thighs ajar to receive a generation of frustrated and unreadable novelists — " In fact, writing is not fun. It's having written that's a blast.
We also learned — or we should have learned, although I'm not so sure we did — not to take ourselves too seriously. By now, of course, Mr. Wolfe has caricatured practically everyone in the United States, either individually or generally, and millions unfamiliar with the caricatures in his books have met them in the film adaptations, first of The Right Stuff and later of Mr. Wolfe's wildly successful 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. But it must be said of him, in fairness, that he made a caricature of himself first of all. The fussy suits, the parties, the name-dropping, the exclamation points and italic interjections, the O Destinys and the one-word sentences, the ellipses and the em-dashes chasing one another across the pages — all so splendidly unmistakable, all so easily mocked. O peerless ego! —
Mr. Wolfe is like Hemingway, in fact, in that it's hard to read much of his work without finding that your own sentences are sounding a little like his, or a lot. But worse things could happen to a person. Mr. Wolfe's enthusiasm, his boundless confidence, his seemingly relentless reporting, and his bravura writing — well, it's quite a package. Settling back with the copy of From Bauhaus to Our House that Amazon has overnighted, I see that his account of Modernism's rise is much more opinionated than I remembered, not having read the book in 20 years — and having in that time learned a little more about architecture. I also see that he has abridged the tale in ways that support his own view at the expense of Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the other "Mies-box people," as Mr. Wolfe refers to them. But heck — as Gregory Murphy told me once, some years after we took Eng. 63 together, "To have an opinion is to live." Even where I mistrust it, and especially where I disagree with it, From Bauhaus to Our House is a lot of fun to read.
So now I've had old Tom Wolfe books open in various rooms for the better part of a week. Because I have a short attention span, I've taken a pass on two huge, high-profile novels, Bonfire and last year's I Am Charlotte Simmons, rereading older nonfiction instead. E.B. White is still the nonfiction writer to beat, as far as I'm concerned — nothing compares with the rural Maine coast he describes in One Man's Meat, a collection of modest, dachshund-pestered essays he did for Harper's in the early 40s. But White, whose gift was understatement, is long gone. There's no question that Mr. Wolfe, exclamation points and all, is both a keen observer of our times and a fine representative of them — or that he'll give a crackerjack Jefferson Lecture come May.
I pull down the Library of America's black-jacketed Thomas Jefferson, Writings, to see if I can guess what Jefferson himself would think of a career like Mr. Wolfe's — which is, in a way, to wonder what Jefferson would think of his country now. Jefferson did not shy away from ordering himself fourand five-exclamation-point luxuries — he was deeply in debt when he died — or from having marvelously strong opinions about buildings. He, too, knew the most famous people of his time.
But in skimming 1,500 onionskin pages I find few details about Jefferson the man. I can learn almost as much about Tom Wolfe's day-to-day life from the brief title essay of Mauve Gloves as I can about Jefferson's from nearly 1,000 pages of letters on politics, philosophy, farming, and the course of history generally. There is almost no ego to be found anywhere in his lines. And while Jefferson had a keen eye and wrote beautifully, it was not the style of his time to appear to be having fun in the process.
Still, he makes many of his points memorably. Here is a single sentence from a letter Jefferson wrote at Monticello in 1820 to John Holmes, one of Maine's first senators. The letter concerns the Missouri Compromise, but it's easy to see it in a larger context, to take it as a kind of commentary on the stairs-to-nowhere America that Mr. Wolfe chronicles so deftly and inhabits so comfortably: "I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it."
Is ours an era to weep over or laugh at? It's hard to know how Jefferson would answer. Mr. Wolfe, I think, lets us have it either way. O muddled destiny!
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
The exclamation points — how could I have forgotten the exclamation points? Two in the first two sentences, 10 on the third page, seven in a mere five lines on page 11. So many that they start to look like straight pins driven neatly through the exoskeletons of rare specimen phrases: This one here's the ironic observation, down there's the learned pun, these are the brazen revelation, the riposte, the clever twist, two running jokes, and several related species of punch line. It's a Tom Wolfe chrestomathy — one from the early years, neatly labeled "Mauve Gloves."
"Mauve Gloves," of course, is "Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine," the title story of a 1976 collection of Mr. Wolfe's essays that I've finally found by dragging the kitchen stool into the back hall and climbing up here to the top shelf of what was once a pantry. The news that Mr. Wolfe will deliver this year's Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities has sent me searching the apartment for books of his that ought to be around here somewhere. From Bauhaus to Our House, his snarky repudiation of Modernism in architecture, is still missing — I must have lent it out. But The Right Stuff, a highly entertaining history of the Mercury astronauts, was in a long row of brittling mass-market paperbacks. I found Mauve Gloves & Madmen nestled up here between collections of Pauline Kael film reviews and John Cheever short stories.
And now, leafing through it, I'm counting exclamations and grinning at Mr. Wolfe's third-person admission that, after a party, he had gone to stand in the doorway of his study, right where he had seen John Leonard of The New York Times standing earlier, and suddenly Mr. Wolfe had decided that his study was depressingly ordinary. "The solution, as he saw it — without going into huge costs — was the library stairs — the stairs to nowhere! — an object indisputably useful and yet with an air of elegant folly!" I'm balancing high up on a kitchen stool by the makeshift back-hall bookcase, reading about Tom Wolfe's custom-made, moveable library stairs — "the classic English type," he says, "going up in a spiral around a central column, carved in the ancient bamboo style, rising up almost seven feet, so he can reach books on his highest shelf." I climb down.
I first encountered Tom Wolfe in the spring of 1978 in Sandy Pinsker's basement in Lancaster, Pa. That's where Eng. 63, "Non-Fiction Writing," met every Wednesday, a dozen or so Franklin & Marshall students slouching on the Pinskers' sofas and chairs. It was, we knew, a great honor to be accepted into the class and invited to the professor's house, where we discussed Robert Benchley and Ms. Kael and Mr. Wolfe before tearing apart each other's mimeographed travelogues and autobiographical sketches and failed attempts at humor. I still have a thick folder of our papers — Gregory Murphy on Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, Connie S. Pilla on her weekends with her boyfriend at a cabin in the woods, me on ... well, never mind. The papers are, by and large, bad, although some are very bad and others even worse. My own I can't stand to read past the first or second paragraph. It's a wonder Professor Pinsker didn't fail us all, instead of responding to each essay with cheery half-page, single-spaced notes. Whatever retirement benefits he's getting now, down there in Florida, he should be getting twice as much.
Mr. Wolfe's role in Eng. 63 was to represent the New Journalism. One of our assignments, after we had tried our hands at movie reviews and travel writing, was to do a paper in the style of the New Journalists. We faced some disadvantages. None of us knew Leonard Bernstein well enough to call him "Lenny" or get invited to his parties to mingle with Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, and the Black Panthers. None of us was being asked to appear on university panels with Günter Grass and Allen Ginsberg — I'm not sure I had ever even heard of Günter Grass. We were English majors at a liberal-arts college in a small, conservative Pennsylvania city where no one would have dreamed of ordering a pair of four-exclamation-point shoes from Mr. Wolfe's London boot makers, John Lobb & Sons Ltd. ("$248! — for one pair of shoes! — from England! — handmade!") We were suburban kids. Like Mr. Wolfe's study, we were depressingly ordinary.
Even so, we learned a lot reading Mr. Wolfe's essays. We learned to look hard for the telling detail, like the red Lincoln Zephyr in which Frank Lloyd Wright was being chauffeured on the day that, according to From Bauhaus to Our House, he so richly snubbed Walter Gropius in Racine, Wis. We learned to look for lively new ways of putting ordinary things: "Dr. Gladys J. Loring," says Mr. Wolfe in The Right Stuff, "looked at him as if he were a flatworm." We learned to write as though writing were fun: "O Mother O'Hare," Mr. Wolfe intones at one point in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, "big bosom for our hungry poets, pelvic saddle for our sexologists and Open Classroom theorists — O houri O'Hare, who keeps her Perm-O-Pour Stoneglow thighs ajar to receive a generation of frustrated and unreadable novelists — " In fact, writing is not fun. It's having written that's a blast.
We also learned — or we should have learned, although I'm not so sure we did — not to take ourselves too seriously. By now, of course, Mr. Wolfe has caricatured practically everyone in the United States, either individually or generally, and millions unfamiliar with the caricatures in his books have met them in the film adaptations, first of The Right Stuff and later of Mr. Wolfe's wildly successful 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. But it must be said of him, in fairness, that he made a caricature of himself first of all. The fussy suits, the parties, the name-dropping, the exclamation points and italic interjections, the O Destinys and the one-word sentences, the ellipses and the em-dashes chasing one another across the pages — all so splendidly unmistakable, all so easily mocked. O peerless ego! —
Mr. Wolfe is like Hemingway, in fact, in that it's hard to read much of his work without finding that your own sentences are sounding a little like his, or a lot. But worse things could happen to a person. Mr. Wolfe's enthusiasm, his boundless confidence, his seemingly relentless reporting, and his bravura writing — well, it's quite a package. Settling back with the copy of From Bauhaus to Our House that Amazon has overnighted, I see that his account of Modernism's rise is much more opinionated than I remembered, not having read the book in 20 years — and having in that time learned a little more about architecture. I also see that he has abridged the tale in ways that support his own view at the expense of Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the other "Mies-box people," as Mr. Wolfe refers to them. But heck — as Gregory Murphy told me once, some years after we took Eng. 63 together, "To have an opinion is to live." Even where I mistrust it, and especially where I disagree with it, From Bauhaus to Our House is a lot of fun to read.
So now I've had old Tom Wolfe books open in various rooms for the better part of a week. Because I have a short attention span, I've taken a pass on two huge, high-profile novels, Bonfire and last year's I Am Charlotte Simmons, rereading older nonfiction instead. E.B. White is still the nonfiction writer to beat, as far as I'm concerned — nothing compares with the rural Maine coast he describes in One Man's Meat, a collection of modest, dachshund-pestered essays he did for Harper's in the early 40s. But White, whose gift was understatement, is long gone. There's no question that Mr. Wolfe, exclamation points and all, is both a keen observer of our times and a fine representative of them — or that he'll give a crackerjack Jefferson Lecture come May.
I pull down the Library of America's black-jacketed Thomas Jefferson, Writings, to see if I can guess what Jefferson himself would think of a career like Mr. Wolfe's — which is, in a way, to wonder what Jefferson would think of his country now. Jefferson did not shy away from ordering himself fourand five-exclamation-point luxuries — he was deeply in debt when he died — or from having marvelously strong opinions about buildings. He, too, knew the most famous people of his time.
But in skimming 1,500 onionskin pages I find few details about Jefferson the man. I can learn almost as much about Tom Wolfe's day-to-day life from the brief title essay of Mauve Gloves as I can about Jefferson's from nearly 1,000 pages of letters on politics, philosophy, farming, and the course of history generally. There is almost no ego to be found anywhere in his lines. And while Jefferson had a keen eye and wrote beautifully, it was not the style of his time to appear to be having fun in the process.
Still, he makes many of his points memorably. Here is a single sentence from a letter Jefferson wrote at Monticello in 1820 to John Holmes, one of Maine's first senators. The letter concerns the Missouri Compromise, but it's easy to see it in a larger context, to take it as a kind of commentary on the stairs-to-nowhere America that Mr. Wolfe chronicles so deftly and inhabits so comfortably: "I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it."
Is ours an era to weep over or laugh at? It's hard to know how Jefferson would answer. Mr. Wolfe, I think, lets us have it either way. O muddled destiny!
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