Save the Aristos; Free Debate; Jesus Freak on the Road; Dirty Movie for Our Times
Free Debate
In its last survey, the monitoring organization Freedom House notes happily that "Global Democracy Continues Forward March"?though the country-by-country reports leave room for quibbling. Press freedom is actually diminishing according to the group's 1999 survey.
Global monitoring makes clear that political liberty, the readiness to contest for power through free elections, respect for freedom of the press and the resultant battle of ideas are not universal values. Before their emergence in Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, such freedoms existed nowhere. We may assume the march toward democracy proceeds inexorably, despite an occasional detour (a "forward march"). George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, among others, were more skeptical.
Accounts of political activist David Horowitz's struggle with various campus newspapers over publication of a political ad make one wonder where the United States will rank on the Freedom House scale in a generation's time. Some weeks ago the intrepid author and former 60s leftist bought a full-page ad in the Daily Californian, the Berkeley student paper, and sent it out to some 30 other campus publications. The ad ran in these pages last week.
In 10 sharply argued paragraphs, it punctured the burgeoning black activist demand for monetary reparations from the rest of America for the crime of slavery. Some of Horowitz's points were standard: it is impossible to determine who living today benefited from slavery. Some were valid but seldom mentioned: slavery was a universal institution, and were it not for the American and English abolitionists it might still be with us. Some were true and provocative: American blacks are, materially, many times better off than the blacks in the African nations from which they were kidnapped and sold, indeed materially better off than any other black population in the world.
One might dispute any of these arguments. But students at Berkeley didn't want to dispute them, they wanted to suppress them. When the ad ran, several dozen barged into the Daily Cal's offices to demand apologies and acts of contrition. Then they stormed around the campus stealing papers off the racks, so other Berkeley students would be spared exposure to Horowitz's points.
Daily Cal editor Daniel Hernandez ran a craven front-page apology for the ad, claiming it had inadvertently made the paper a "vehicle for bigotry." It is not yet clear how he will respond to the protesters' demand for hiring a person to review future editions for "offensive" material.
The impulse to submit to the enemies of free political speech was not confined to Berkeley. At UC Davis, the editor claimed that running the ad was a "grievous mistake." Faculty advisers to the campus paper at Arizona State promised an apology after spring break. Most of the 30-odd papers to which Horowitz sent the ad have not run it.
The tide of censorship is running stronger. Two months ago, a group called the National Puerto Rican Coalition demanded an apology from NBC for an episode of the show Law & Order based on the Central Park sex rampage following last year's Puerto Rican Day parade. Instead of telling the "coalition" to take a hike, the network execs caved in, promising never to re-air the offending program. Billboards put up by the immigration reform group Project USA?which point out the connection between federal immigration policy and rapid population growth?face regular harassment. In New York, city government has used legal loopholes to have them removed.
Tolerance for political speech we don't agree with is learned behavior, and Americans are gradually unlearning it. The assertion that some political views can't be aired because they offend this or that racial or ethnic faction is a relatively new phenomenon, the only kind of censorship request that can count on a sympathetic hearing from today's media executives.
The great question is whether America's freedoms will survive its growing diversity. This was a subject of much debate for political economists of the 19th century. John Stuart Mill argued that free institutions required that the boundaries of government coincide with those of nationality. Absent a relatively homogenous "nation-state," mutual distrust between ethnic groups would override fear of governmental despotism. Lord Acton took the other side. The relevant laboratory for them was the Hapsburg Empire, the prisonhouse of nationalities. American ethnic groups are a different matter, but perhaps not so much as we imagine.
Could prominent Americans today hold a variant of the Mill-Lord Acton debate? Might any of the myriad private and public agencies scouring ever nook and cranny of American life (SAT scores, bank lending policies, law enforcement) for possible "disparate impact" on minorities give a thought to measuring the impact of ethnic diversity on our political and press freedoms? Every year the United States becomes home to hundreds of thousands of people from cultures where freedom is the exception, not the rule. Under proper circumstances, they can presumably learn to internalize and treasure Western political values. But the existing establishment must at least insist on them.
TTwo weeks ago The Wall Street Journal published an editorial I wrote on George Soros, Warren Buffett, Paul Newman, et al., those austere priests of money, who'd come out in favor of keeping the inheritance tax. Theirs was a high moral stance and this, they felt, was a moral tax. I thought the spectacle nauseatingly phony, since the tax would still leave their children ultra-privileged?a typical leftover Clinton-era gesture, in fact, all pose and no substance. I came out against them.
Within days I got spammed silly with scores of letters, e-mails and phone messages. Far-flung news organs begged to reprint, radio talk shows in Detroit and Chicago deemed it ready for drive-time. And today, as God is my witness, 60 Minutes phoned.
Despite the odd negative, the experience has been weirdly pleasant, like being caressed gently by a dinosaur tusk. The respondents were some 60-40 on my side. Opposers, however rabid, generally hadn't thought about the issue beyond "privilege: bad; inherited privilege: really bad." You will remember the arguments: that without inheritance taxes, philanthropy would dry out; and that, absent the tax, aristocracy would replace meritocracy, destroy the will to excel, and the entire system would fail.
The first position swiftly met its riposte from others who simply showed that philanthropy abounded before the death tax. So I took on the second point?an easy enough task, a matter of common sense. Meritocracy means the right to pass on your triumphs to your offspring. Why work till you drop if your kids have to strain like salmon to spawn wealth all over again? In fact, an inheritance tax actually hobbles the system's incentives. Furthermore, who wants to live in a society where competition for wealth, and not the enjoyment of wealth, is the imposed rule? George Soros, apparently. And what qualifies him to judge for everyone else? The fact that he's so wealthy his children will scarcely need to compete anyway. Which brings us back to the hypocrisy of the initial gesture.
But I went further, and actually argued in defense of aristocracy. This is what caused the outcry and touched the nerve. Americans had never heard of such a thing. But for one shrill exception, respondents and interviewers were mainly baffled and intrigued. (That exception was Tim Noah, the "Chatterbox" columnist at Slate, who howled for a week. But we'll get to him later.)
This was my thesis: Aristocracy can be a good thing. In wealthy societies like France, Spain and England, aristocracy no longer entails poverty. And it certainly bestows benefits on a society: a code of refinement, of enjoying the good things and facing the bad with ceremony and good grace, a code of leisure to pursue a higher trajectory of life, in fact a code of standards higher than those imbued by ceaseless competition and commercialization. The primary effect of the wealth tax when first imposed was to eradicate country-house culture, both here and in the UK. Mansions and castles were leveled, libraries and collections dispersed. A life of ritual and grandeur obliterated. Aristocratic families are solid custodians of national cultures at their highest moments of achievement. Because a family's history is bound up in their estate, they'll fight to save it. Sure, governments can take care of grand piles as museums, but without the pageant and poetry of living institutions. Aristocracy, in short, is a sure medium of conservation and continuity, of a memory of place and region and nation.
Naturally, money pashas like Soros and Buffett, and their celebrity counterparts like Paul Newman, came from nowhere and have no culture of place to preserve. They are specifically hostile to it because it resists the borderless, nationless market and entertainment culture that bred them.
Finally, in my essay, I pointed to the conscious self-sacrifice of American aristocrats aboard the Titanic. So they enshrined a noble moral code as well. How would you like to be aboard the Titanic with the likes of George Soros and Warren Buffett, who'd spent lives in pursuit of self-advantage? I stress the "self," since they apparently didn't do it for the grandkids.
I didn't have the room, or perhaps the courage, to defend aristocracy on its most arbitrary and whimsical grounds. The romance and idyll of it. Privileged offspring can feel free to act eccentrically, absurdly, fantastically and yes, even unproductively. Who said we are born to toil and increase the bottom line? Lord Byron didn't believe that. Neither did Montaigne, or Pascal or Virginia Woolf or Proust, all privileged wunderkinder.
This is where Slate's Tim Noah took off into hyperscreech and entirely missed the point. He banged on and on that privilege breeds laziness, debauchery, alcoholism, self-indulgence. Not more industry and wealth. Well, yes, but often so does poverty. And even middle-class life. Look at the 60s. To make his point, Noah called on others to furnish further evidence of "WASP rot," degeneration of the WASPocracy. He furnished evidence of nothing more than his own class and race hatred.nnn
Gstaad ? I'm in a holding pattern. In January, CNN canceled its excellent weekly magazine program, latterly called CNN & Time, for which I was reporting. I'm now waiting for my agent to tell me what advance the publishers will offer for my next book. In this lull between television and literature, I've escaped London for Paris, Burgundy, Switzerland and wherever the train takes me next. I'm spending most of my time in cafes, writing reviews for the London Review of Books, and documentary proposals. In the meantime, I've turned 50, read lies about myself and an old friend in tabloid rags, fended off conniving hacks from my front door and, for Lent, am abstaining from alcohol and cigars.
On the first day of the fasting season, I happened to be in Soho and took ashes in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Later, I read that Ted Turner, CNN's idiosyncratic founder, called those of his employees whose foreheads he had seen adorned with the same sort of palm ashes I picked up from the priest a bunch of "Jesus freaks." That didn't surprise me, from what little I learned about Turner during the two years I made segments for his best and much-missed program. A few years ago, Turner hired my old friend Rick Kaplan away from ABC News. Rick flew out to the half of Montana that Turner owns for their first face-to-face meeting. When the 6-foot-7 Kaplan walked in, Turner scanned him from boots to head and ejaculated, "Geez. You're the biggest Jew I ever seen."
Kaplan thought it was funny, and I laughed when Turner called us Ash Wednesday Catholics Jesus freaks. Why not? It's harmless. What is not funny is that Turner apologized. For Christ's sake, apologized for what? Why are people so touchy? If Turner apologizes for anything, it should be for the stuff CNN has been broadcasting since it fired Kaplan last September and went into self-destruct mode.
Anyway, this Jesus freak is enjoying life on the road. It's been a while since I've wandered aimlessly, no story to cover, no holiday to "enjoy," no deadlines to meet. My escape south on the Eurostar came just in time for me to miss the foot-and-mouth disaster, the Tube strike, the railway crashes and the latest instance of the American "hurt feelings" syndrome that has infected Britain. (Why do the British adopt the worst of American culture?like McDonald's, sitcoms, game shows, political correctness, psych-speak, focus groups, public relations?and have resisted the best, like the Bill of Rights?)
Keith Vaz, Tony Blair's minister of Europe, stands accused of what the British press calls "sleaze" and you and I would call "taking a bribe." Vaz's injured response was nearly Clintonesque. Remember that he is a politician who refused to answer some questions from the House of Commons Committee on Standards and inaccurately responded to others. His assertion to the Committee that he had not received a penny from a businessman was contradicted by records in the businessman's office. What does Minister Vaz do? He accuses his accusers of being racists. Mr. Vaz, who is of Indian origin, has not apologized for "misleading" the Committee. Instead, he expects an apology from his detractors for exhibiting racial prejudice. Sometime, it's like I never left America.
On the Continent, all that seems far away until I read the newspapers. Here, the politicians are as corrupt as any in Britain, where Mr. Vaz is a minor player at best. (Remember how his mentor, the extremely white Prime Minister Tony Blair, exempted Formula One racing from the ban on tobacco sponsorship after Formula One's owner, a Mr. Bernard Ecclestone, donated £1 million to the Labor Party. "Bernie" Ecclestone now owns the Olden Hotel, a few hundred yards from where I am sitting in a cafe. No escape, no escape. And Marc Rich, né Reich, is just down the valley enjoying his presidential pardon and ill-gotten gains.)
Continental pols don't resort to the American "hurt feelings" defense, although such stalwarts of Italian integrity as Craxi and Andreotti feigned astonishment when their honor was impugned. Jacques Chirac, Roland Dumas and the son of François Mitterrand stand along with innumerable Frenchmen and women accused of lavish corruption. Dumas, the former foreign minister whose mistress has ratted on him and who admits having received expensive gifts while in office, handled himself more adroitly than the inexperienced Vaz. He explained that he had to take the expensive Berluti shoes he was given, because they were the only ones he could wear comfortably with his bad hip. He had made a point of hobbling into court on a cane. Perhaps, after all, his was a subtle, Gallic variation on the "hurt feelings" defense. Could the implication have been that French prosecutors were going after him because of his handicap? Surely, it would not be beyond the powers of a Johnnie Cochran to prove discrimination against a mobilely challenged old man?I mean, senior citizen.
In the Western world and Japan, politics is dead. Prime ministers from Tokyo to Turin can go down for taking money or lying under oath, but in none of these countries do the parties they represent stand for anything. What is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat in America? Gaullist and socialist in France? Anyone and anyone else in Italy? Tory and Labor in Britain? Blair adopted Thatcherism, and the Conservatives have become Blairites. I would say that the right to vote, for which our ancestors fought, has at last been rendered meaningless, and that politicians are third-rate hacks whose only qualification is their ability to suck up to the rich. I would say that, but some politician will say I have hurt his feelings. I wouldn't want to risk that.