Lies, Lies, Lies; Nader-Buchanan 2000; Nights Out with Classics; Among the Dullwits
"Excuse me, somebody left a message for Arthur on my machine? A Mr. Greenspan, is that right?"
"Yes that's correct."
"Are you Greenspan?"
"Yes."
Now here I felt the sudden immensity of options open before me like a vast grin. The world divides into those who can't resist the outlandish moment, and those who'll always play it straight because time deviating from money is wasted time?and New York is now flooded entirely with the latter. I'm heartily sick of their New York. So I said, "There's an Alan Greenspan?I think that's his name?who runs the Federal...er...Reservoir, like, um, really high caliber, but it's not him, no way, because he's pretty old to play, like, tennis."
Silence on the other end. "Greenspan?" More silence. "What I wanted to say is that Arthur, your tennis partner?"
"Yes."
"He asked that, well, let me just say this: that he's probably rather robust physically. I mean I don't know him that well but if something happened to him I don't suppose the global economy would suffer. But Alan Greensback the Federated guy? If he collapsed or something, it's like, anyway it's pretty irresponsible at his age, in his condition."
Another uncomfortable silence followed, on the other end, by a fatigued sigh. "Excuse me, I really have to go. Will Arthur get my message at this number? What number am I speaking to?" In one of those phone moments when each side knows the other's thoughts precisely, he'd sensed my imposture, I knew he had, he knew I knew. We both knew he'd hang up next. So I shot out a final gambit in falsetto shriek, "Numbers! Numbers! That's all you Federales care about. Don't you know that..."
Click and he'd gone, though it seemed I heard a parting chuckle.
Now, I tell this story not as a singular display of wit but to illustrate a point. I'm assuming everyone agrees that life in New York is now the most boring it's been since, say, just before the Jazz Age. It's not about the depletion of "street life" or topless joints or crack houses. Or even the flight of artists to the boroughs. In other words, the Mayor is not to blame. No, the causes are the triumph of the New York Times and Wall Street cultures, of political correctness and untrammeled meritocracy. My colleague Toby Young wrote a brilliant defense of aristocracy versus meritocracy in the London Spectator some weeks ago, and nowhere is it more true than in New York. As old money fades in quicker cycles, so do its cultural effusions, the higher modes of style and wit and, above all, elegant irreverence. Used to be that in the 80s Wall Street radiated spontaneous humor, but perhaps you've all noticed those days are gone. The serious guys won, the Bob Pittmans and Henry Kravises and Gerald Levins, homo corporatus.
As antidote, the Times/Voice axis would hold up the "irreverence" of multiculti polysexual ghetto cultures. But, as we know in the real world, that offers no consolation because dinner with RuPaul is about as endurable as cocktails with Janet Reno for the average literate citizen, and brunch with Henry Kravis is as tedious as breakfast with Sean Puffy Combs?and all for the same reason. They're all "professionals" in the business of self-aggrandizement. Fine if they can do the same for you, but that's a business dinner and it makes for cautious conversation, even in drag. All this is nothing new, perhaps, since Tocqueville noted such things about America eons ago: that Americans worshipped success inordinately, praised one another's success publicly, but resented it privately. And that meritocratic systems made people less satisfied and unhappier because everybody felt they should be busy doing better. I'd maintain that such threads have run through life here always but other chivalric or European codes have presided periodically.
This is all by way of saying that certain types of people have not found my Alan Greenspan shenanigans at all funny. I've told the story a few times and have noticed that the weasely kind of dull-wit who waits and watches before laughing, indeed who doesn't laugh at power at all anymore, is on the rise. What most worries me is that I detect sympathy and solidarity with Greenspan in the withheld laughter. "Poor man, the fools he must endure" kind of thinking. He's got a job to do, after all. Ah, there's the rub. We've all got such important jobs now, who needs to be subversive? Unless it pays, of course.
I confessed last time that I was an addict and that my addiction was the theater. The Royal Shakespeare Company has now brought its production of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid to the Young Vic Theatre in London. Hughes is remembered as the unhappy husband of the unhappy and tragic Sylvia Plath. He will now also be remembered for having made me and packed audiences happy watching naked actors gallop around the stage reciting beautiful poetry. And I mean actors, not actresses, in the nude. I declined to pay the scalpers' price of £300 to see Nicole Kidman without her clothes on in The Blue Room. I have politely refused offers of a seat at the box office price of £30 to get a whiff of Kathleen Turner or Jerry Hall in the buff as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. I like naked women in private, and, though I'm no homophobe, I don't really like naked men at all, and certainly not onstage. There is bound to be too much potentially dangerous equipment swirling around and getting in the way of soliloquies if you start staging Hamlet in a nudist camp. And how would you handle (perhaps the wrong word?) every "touche" in a strippers' duel in Cyrano De Bergerac?
But with Hughes' cast list, which includes Apollo and Bacchus and Pan, it is another matter. When did you last see a Greek god (and you have some fine ones in the Metropolitan Museum) wearing a snazzy suit from Versace or a seersucker from Brooks Brothers? So, as verismo staging, the Royal Shakespeare got it right. (Incidentally, the program notes tell me that the "severed head was created by Dominic Murry." It was a good head, and I like the way winners of the Oscars these days pay tribute to all the little people, who made all this possible. Jeremy Irons, when he was praised for the chilling voiceover he recorded for the wicked uncle of the little Lion King, generously admitted that he had just been emulating my droning accent.)
Some of the best London theaters are quite far from the center. Not really dangerous, provided you take your minders and an armor-plated limousine. Personally, I take the tube, because as a senior citizen I travel free. A Labor government introduced this worthy system and then had the chutzpah to call it a freedom pass. I think the millions in the old Communist Paradise had a different idea of freedom when they broke down the Iron Curtain.
Anyway, up in Shoreditch, (somewhere south of Scotland, I believe) Ralph Fiennes has been playing Coriolanus, and intermittently Richard II. The critics did not like Fiennes playing King Richard as a weak man who is a bully, but surely all bullies are weak men trying to hide their weakness. I went to a posh gala benefit to see Fiennes. There really is nothing like a fatcat benefit for bringing out the morons in strength!
A more adventurous audience was in a textile factory near the same neighborhood for a performance of Last Night in the Life of Antonin Artaud. I went out of loyalty, since Katrine Boorman was in the cast. She is the daughter of John Boorman, the great film director. Half the audience thought she was the niece of Adolf's sidekick, Martin Borman (and she was dressed in an SS uniform). The other half just liked Artaud, which means that they were Francophile, schizophrenic, deconstructionist druggies. For the first 20 minutes I sulked as my most bourgeois intolerant self, but then I was invaded by the audience hysteria and also thought I had discovered God on a mescaline trip. Theater can do that. Some people blamed the stage manager at the Nuremberg rallies for their later political follies. These bijoux theaters can be disaster areas on the three warm days of a London summer. One of them had installed air conditioning and a wind tunnel at gale-force strength. The gentlemen members of the audience who, like I, suffer from hirsutical deprivation wrapped their heads with turbans formed from their wives' shawls, or yarmulkes or Bedouin headgear out of handkerchiefs. London is as melting-potty as the Big Apple.
I am an opera snob so I don't go to musicals, but during the Kirov Opera's current season in London you get a combination of both. Great singing from the stars and particularly from huge milling choirs of Russian peasantry, lavish costumes and scenery that would have bankrupted Mr. Ziegfeld, and large slices of historical spectacle that kept the corporate-sponsor audience with their noses stuck to the program synopsis. I heard Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa, Mussorgsky's Khovanschina (as orchestrated by Shostakovich) and finally Prokofiev's War and Peace. I am told the darling Russkies are headed toward the Met in New York, so I will not tell you more except to book your tickets.
A tremendous surge of enthusiasm will undoubtedly greet this electoral alliance. A Nader/Buchanan ticket should have no problems reaching the 15-percent poll support necessary to get into the presidential debates. It is a shame, though, that only one of the two will be able to take part in the debates, while the other is relegated to the vice-presidential contest.
A Nader/Buchanan electoral pact makes a lot of sense. If its support surpasses Ross Perot's 19 percent of the vote in 1992?as it almost certainly will?then there is a real prospect of a dramatic realignment of American politics. The ticket should function smoothly. Buchanan and Nader are personally compatible and agree on many issues. To be sure, they disagree on abortion. But Buchanan and Nader hold astonishingly similar views on the condition of American culture. "Through television, the Internet stores, samples and mailings," according to Nader, "companies convey their message to the little ones. They teach them how to crave junk food, thrill to violent and pornographic programming, interact with the virtual reality mayhem. The marketeers are keenly aware of the stages of child psychologies, age by age, and know how to turn many into Pavlovian specimens powered by spasmodically shortened attention spans as they become ever more remote from their own family." Nothing much there for Buchanan to dispute.
On the economy, Buchanan and Nader have been almost alone in pointing out how few benefits most Americans have derived from those spectacular economic growth rates and surging Dow Jones index that media hacks endlessly crow about. "We've had 10 years of economic growth," says Nader, "but the majority of the workers are making less today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than they made in 1973 or '79." The minimum wage, he points out, is lower than it was in 1973. American workers have to work longer hours to maintain their income levels. Here is Buchanan: "Seven years after NAFTA, there are 4000 fresh factories, most of them U.S. owned, in Mexico; and Mexico exports 10 times as many cars to the United States as we export to Mexico. What NAFTA was really all about was letting GM and Ford say adios to the USA..." The corporations are only concerned with shareholder value, which depends on ever-rising profits. They close down factories here and open them wherever there is cheap labor and no health, safety and environmental regulations to worry about.
On the causes and consequences of large-scale immigration into the United States Buchanan and Nader are of one mind: The corporations promote illegal immigration to drive down wages and increase their profit margins. But Nader takes the argument further: "I don't think this country should be engaged in a brain drain of highly talented scientists and computer specialists from Third World country [sic] that desperately need them in order to bring them here instead of paying American specialists an adequate wage."
Unfortunately, while Buchanan demands strong government when it comes to trade and immigration, he seems surprisingly content to leave almost everything else to the vagaries of the free market. As a result, Nader's description of the plight of working Americans often sounds far more trenchant. He speaks powerfully of Americans going to work "wondering who will take care of their elderly parents or their children, irritated by the endless traffic jams, stifled by their lack of rights in the corporate workplace, ripped off by unscrupulous sellers and large companies?beset by having to pay for health care [they] cannot afford." Nader calls for universal healthcare coverage, pointing out correctly that Europeans all have it without sacrificing quality or being forced to live in a police state.
On foreign policy, however, Pat Buchanan is clearly Nader's superior. Where Buchanan is lucid and incisive, Nader burbles incomprehensibly about "preventive diplomacy" and rescuing the "languages of indigenous people." When he denounces the U.S. penchant for bombing and starving countries that do not toe Washington's line, Buchanan's is almost an isolated voice. "What is best for America and the world, they tell us, is that the United States should remain a superpower sheriff, the Wyatt Earp of the West, possessed of the sole right to deputize posses, or go it alone if necessary, to discipline evil-doers, wherever our 'values' are threatened," he noted sarcastically a few months ago. Buchanan has been eloquent in his attacks on the madness and cruelty of sanctions against Iraq, and has promised to bring the era of cruise missiles and sanctions to an end.
If Buchanan and Nader do not team up, they will end up in single digits in November?and as yesterday's news. Whatever happened to Ross Perot?
Take for example last week's taunting of George W. Bush. Sure, it might be good politics, but you'd think at the end of his presidency the man who's defiled it more than any of his predecessors would at least pretend to act presidential. But no, Clinton has always preferred the low blow to the bon mot, and he had to take the low road.
One of my favorite foreign films during the late 50s was Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale Della Rovere. A small-time Italian gambler and pimp is picked up by the Germans, who is mistaken for a resistance general in the closing days of the war. Sentenced to death, he is wildly cheered by other prisoners as he awaits the dawn. Suddenly, a cowardly pimp assumes the mantle of the hero and walks bravely, without complaint and proudly, toward the firing squad.
You'd think even a scumbag like Clinton would assume the mantle of the presidency and act with some dignity, especially in the closing months. But again, no. Just as MUGGER pointed out last week, the Draft Dodger will spring one October surprise after another, and along with his fellow scumbag Sid Blumenthal will practice the only thing he knows, the politics of personal destruction.
When Clinton pokes fun at George W. as an irrelevant aristocrat, he shows loudly and clearly the depths he will go to in order to discredit a decent person who kept his mouth shut during the sex scandals. Unlike Clinton, who has never had a job except that of professional bullshitter, Bush was a successful businessman and played with the big boys. The fact he was born upper-class should be a plus, not a minus. Upper-class people are more often than not honest?unlike the crooked Clintons?and learn the code of a gentleman early on in life.
Lying is a very ungentlemanly thing to do, as is being a phony. When an Indonesian company controlled by James Riady paid Webster Hubbell $100,000 on June 27, 1994, Hubbell was facing criminal charges and about to spill the beans. Four days earlier, Riady met with Clinton at the White House, having met with Hubbell earlier in the day. One does not need to be Sherlock Holmes to guess what transpired. On April 21 of this year, in an interview with a senior Justice Dept. prosecutor, Clinton denied any recollection of a pledge for $1 million by Riady. In England they have a nice expression when one hears such outrageous bull: And pigs may fly. In America, it's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky..."
According to Clinton, he saved the Constitution by getting himself impeached. He committed perjury and obstructed justice, he resorted to witness tampering and has lied throughout the whole Monica mess, yet he manages to keep a straight face and announce he's strengthened the Constitution. Over in not-so-jolly old England?it's been raining nonstop since June?phony Tony Blair is following in Clinton's footsteps. He is using focus groups and armies of spin doctors to manipulate the press' public opinion and to distort the truth.
This is a new phenomenon for Britain. And it's because Blair saw how successful Clinton has been with untruthfulness. The Clintons pretend to be friends in equal measure of every minority, be they blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, Jews, Greeks, you name it. By proclaiming that they wish to further the interests of any minority, they forget that by advancing one set of interests, more often than not they disadvantage another. Basically, the Clintons don't give a damn about Middle America's values. Just look at those values. America today is a country that tolerated lying and a sexual scandal by its head of state, and the obsession by the same head of state of pursuing the lowest moral common denominator.
Dishonorable behavior by politicians is nothing new. But at least in the good old days people resigned when caught. The Clintons have made it almost honorable to lie and spin and sling dirt. Not a word of contrition, not a scintilla of regret, has ever crossed their lips. This arrogant refusal to admit a single mistake shows the lack of grace that has coarsened American politics?and British ones?and is a Clinton trademark. This trademark signals to other politicians that they can go to the verge of criminality and still be welcome in Washington.
Just look at Gore. He cynically planted stories about how shocked he was by Clinton's shenanigans with La Lewinsky, and how wronged he felt by what the Draft Dodger did. And if you believe that, you'll believe that Gore didn't know he was fundraising from the White House.
Alas, such are the joys of the Clinton years, but even with a booming stock market I really believe honor and integrity needs to be restored to the White House.