A Certain Idea of America, page 13
Could it help? For a minute. But it would be constructive—not just carping, leaking, posing, cheering, and tweeting but actually trying to lead.
The president needs to be told: Democracy is not your plaything.
THE MEDIA CAN’T KEEP THEIR HEADS
June 15, 2017
What we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement. It is between those who support Donald Trump and those who despise him, between left and right, between the two parties, and even to some degree between the bases of those parties and their leaders in Washington. It is between the religious and those who laugh at Your Make Believe Friend, between cultural progressives and those who wish not to have progressive ways imposed upon them. It is between the coasts and the center, between those in flyover country and those who decide what flyover will watch on television next season. It is between “I accept the court’s decision” and “Bake my cake.” We look down on each other, fear each other, increasingly hate each other.
Oh, to have a unifying figure, program, or party.
But we don’t, nor is there any immediate prospect. So, as Ben Franklin said, we’ll have to hang together or we’ll surely hang separately. To hang together—to continue as a country—at the very least we have to lower the political temperature. It’s on all of us more than ever to assume good faith, put our views forward with respect, even charity, and refuse to incite.
We’ve been failing. Here is a reason the failure is so dangerous.
In the early 1990s Roger Ailes had a talk show on the America’s Talking Network and invited me to discuss a concern I’d been writing about, which was old-fashioned even then: violence on TV and in the movies. Grim and graphic images, repeated depictions of murder and beatings, are bad for our kids and our culture, I argued. Depictions of violence unknowingly encourage it.
But look, Roger said, there’s comedy all over TV and I don’t see people running through the streets breaking into laughter. True, I said, but the problem is that, for a confluence of reasons, our country is increasingly populated by the not fully stable. They aren’t excited by wit, they’re excited by violence—especially unstable young men. They don’t have the built-in barriers and prohibitions that those more firmly planted in the world do. That’s what makes violent images dangerous and destructive. Art is art and censorship is an admission of defeat. Good judgment and a sense of responsibility are the answer.
That’s what we’re doing now, exciting the unstable—not only with images but with words, and on every platform. It’s all too hot and revved up. This week we had a tragedy. If we don’t cool things down, we’ll have more.
And was anyone surprised? Tuesday I talked with an old friend, a figure in journalism who’s a pretty cool character, about the political anger all around us. He spoke of “horrible polarization.” He said there’s “too much hate in D.C.” He mentioned “the beheading, the play in the park” and described them as “dog whistles to any nut who wants to take action.”
“Someone is going to get killed,” he said.
That was twenty hours before the shootings in Alexandria, Virginia.
The gunman did the crime, he is responsible, it’s fatuous to put the blame on anyone or anything else.
But we all operate within a climate and a culture. The media climate now, in both news and entertainment, is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating antipathy. You don’t need another recitation of the events of just the past month or so. A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head. New York’s rightly revered Shakespeare in the Park put on a Julius Caesar in which the assassinated leader is made to look like the president. A CNN host—amazingly, of a show on religion—sent out a tweet calling the president a “piece of s—” who is “a stain on the presidency.” An MSNBC anchor wondered, on the air, whether the president wishes to “provoke” a terrorist attack for political gain. Earlier Stephen Colbert, well known as a good man, a gentleman, said of the president, in a rant, “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.” Those are but five dots in a larger, darker pointillist painting. You can think of more.
Too many in the mainstream media—not all, but too many—don’t even bother to fake fairness and lack of bias anymore, which is bad: Even faked balance is better than none.
Yes, they have reasons. They find Mr. Trump to be a unique danger to the republic, an incipient fascist; they believe it is their patriotic duty to show opposition. They don’t like his policies. A friend suggested recently that they hate him also because he’s in their business, show business. Who is he to be president? He’s not more talented. And yet as soon as his presidency is over he’ll get another reality show.
And there’s something else. Here I want to note the words spoken by Kathy Griffin, the holder of the severed head. In a tearful news conference she said of the president, “He broke me.” She was roundly mocked for this. Oh, the big bad president’s supporters were mean to you after you held up his bloody effigy. But she was exactly right. He did break her. He robbed her of her sense of restraint and limits, of her judgment. He broke her, but not in the way she thinks, and he is breaking more than her.
We have been seeing a generation of media figures cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump. He really is powerful.
They’re losing their heads. Now would be a good time to regain them.
They have been making the whole political scene lower, grubbier. They are showing the young what otherwise estimable adults do under pressure, which is lose their equilibrium, their knowledge of themselves as public figures, as therefore examples—tone setters. They’re paid a lot of money and have famous faces and get the best seat, and the big thing they’re supposed to do in return is not be a slob. Not make it worse.
By indulging their and their audience’s rage, they spread the rage. They celebrate themselves as brave for this. They stood up to the man, they spoke truth to power. But what courage, really, does that take? Their audiences love it. Their base loves it, their demo loves it, their bosses love it. Their numbers go up. They get a better contract. This isn’t brave.
If these were only one-offs, they’d hardly be worth comment, but these things build on each other. Rage and sanctimony always spread like a virus, and become stronger with each iteration.
And it’s no good, no excuse, to say Trump did it first, he lowered the tone, it’s his fault. Your response to his low character is to lower your own character? He talks bad so you do? You let him destabilize you like this? You are making a testimony to his power.
So many of our media figures need at this point to be reminded: You belong to something. It’s called: us.
Do your part, take it down some notches, cool it. We have responsibilities to each other.
WHERE DID THE ADULTS GO?
April 5, 2018
I want to write about something that I think is a problem in our society, that is in fact at the heart of many of our recent scandals, and yet is obscure enough that it doesn’t have a name. It has to do with forgetting who you are. It has to do with refusing to be fully adult and neglecting to take on, each day, the maturity, grace, and self-discipline that are expected of adults and part of their job. That job is to pattern adulthood for those coming up, who are looking, always, for How to Do It—how to be a fully formed man, a fully grown woman.
It has to do with not being able to fully reckon with your size, not because it is small but because it is big. I see more people trembling under the weight of who they are.
Laura Ingraham got in trouble for publicly mocking one of the student gun-control activists of Parkland, Florida. She’s been unjustly targeted for boycotts, but it’s fair to say she was wrong in what she said, and said it because she didn’t remember who she is. She is a successful and veteran media figure, host of a cable show that bears her name. As such she is a setter of the sound of our culture as it discusses politics. When you’re that person, you don’t smack around a seventeen-year-old, even if—maybe especially if—he is obnoxious in his presentation of his public self. He’s a kid. They’re not infrequently obnoxious, because they are not fully mature. He’s small, you’re big. There’s a power imbalance.
As of this week, it is six months since the reckoning that began with the New York Times exposé of Harvey Weinstein. One by one they fell, men in media, often journalism, and their stories bear at least in part a general theme. They were mostly great successes, middle-aged, and so natural leaders of the young. But they treated the young as prey. They didn’t respect them, in part because they didn’t respect themselves. They didn’t see their true size, their role, or they ignored it.
It should not be hard to act as if you are who you are, yet somehow it increasingly appears to be. There is diminished incentive for people to act like adults. Everyone wants to be cool, no one wants to be pretentious. No one wants to be grim, unhip, to be passed by in terms of style.
And our culture has always honored the young. But it has not always honored immaturity.
I have spent the past few days watching old videos of the civil rights era, the King era, and there is something unexpectedly poignant in them. When you see those involved in that momentous time, you notice: They dressed as adults, with dignity. They presented themselves with self-respect. Those who moved against segregation and racial indignity went forward in adult attire—suits, dresses, coats, ties, hats—as if adulthood were something to which to aspire. As if a claiming of just rights required a showing of gravity. Look at the pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking, the pictures of those marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, of those in attendance that day when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and then stepped aside to the force of the federal government, and suddenly the University of Alabama was integrated. Even the first students who went in, all young, acted and presented themselves as adults. Of course they won. Who could stop such people?
I miss their style and seriousness. What we’re stuck with now is Mark Zuckerberg’s.
Facebook’s failings are now famous and so far include but are perhaps not limited to misusing, sharing, and scraping of private user data, selling space to Russian propagandists in the 2016 campaign, playing games with political content, starving journalism of ad revenues, increasing polarization, and turning eager users into the unknowing product. The signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical expertise by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness. Beyond that, what a shallow and banal figure. He, too, appears to have difficulties coming to terms with who he is. Perhaps he hopes to keep you, too, from coming to terms with it, by literally dressing as a child, in T-shirts, hoodies, and jeans—soft clothes, the kind five-year-olds favor. In interviews he presents an oddly blank look, as if perhaps his audiences will take blankness for innocence. As has been said here, he is like one of those hollow-eyed busts of forgotten Caesars you see in museums.
But he is no child; he is a giant bestride the age, a titan, one of the richest men not only in the world but in the history of the world. His power is awesome.
His public reputation is now damaged, and about this he is very concerned. Next week he will appear before Congress. The Onion recently headlined that he was preparing for his questioning by studying up on the private data of congressmen. The comic Albert Brooks tweeted: “I sent Mark Zuckerberg my entire medical history just to save him some time.”
His current problems may have yielded a moment of promise, however. Tim Cook of Apple, in an impressive and sober interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, said last week something startling, almost revolutionary: “Privacy to us is a human right.” This was stunning because it was the exact opposite of what Silicon Valley has been telling us since social media’s inception, which is Privacy is dead. Get over it. Some variation on that statement has been made over and over by Silicon Valley’s pioneers, and they say it blithely, cavalierly, with no apparent sense of tragedy.
Because they don’t do tragedy. They do children’s clothes.
Perhaps what is happening with Facebook will usher in the first serious rethinking, in terms of the law, on what has been lost and gained since social media began.
Congress next week should surprise. The public infatuation with Big Tech and Silicon Valley is over and has been over for some time. Congress should grill Mr. Zuckerberg closely on how he took what people gave him and used it. Many viewers would greatly enjoy such questioning along these lines: “Is your product, your service, one without which we can’t live, like Edison’s electricity? It seems to me you are a visionary, sir, and we should give you your just reward, and make you a utility!”
Mr. Zuckerberg invited Congress to regulate him. Wondering why, it has occurred to me it’s because he knows Congress is too stupid to do it effectively. He buys lobbyists to buy them. He knows how craven, unserious, and insecure they are, and would have no particular respect for them. Nor would he have particular reason to.
I hope they are adults. I hope they don’t showboat or yell but really probe, carefully.
More than ever, the adults have to rise to the fore and set the template for what is admirable. If we don’t, those who follow us will be less admirable even than us, and those after them less admirable still. That would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it?
CHAPTER 3
TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS
Here we turn to love, which we posit as a very good thing.
MY SUMMER WITH LEO TOLSTOY
August 31, 2023
My great memory of this summer is reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In all these years I never had. In college I majored in British and American literature, so didn’t have to. I expected I’d catch up with it along the way, but I didn’t. For one thing it was huge, more than a thousand pages, a real commitment, and one that involved patronyms, lineages, and Russian existential gloom. Also, at some point in my forties I pretty much stopped reading fiction and was drawn almost exclusively to nonfiction—histories and biographies. From youth I had read novels hoping to find out what life is, what grown-ups do, how others experience life. Now I wanted only what happened, what did we learn, how did it all turn out.
But something got in my brain the past few months, that there were great books I hadn’t read and ought to. My mind went back to something George Will wrote about William F. Buckley, that later in life he’d finally read Moby-Dick and told friends, To think I might have died without having read it.
And so in late July I picked up the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I gathered isn’t considered the greatest but was approved by Tolstoy himself, and finished it this week. And, well, to think I might have died without having read it.
It was stupendous. At some point I understood I hadn’t made a commitment of time but entered a world. It is about life—parties and gossip and thwarted elopements in the night, religious faith and class differences and society, men and women and personal dreams and private shames. It is about military strategy, politics, and the nature of court life, a world that exists whether the court is that of Czar Alexander in 1812, or the White House or a governor’s office today. And of course it is about the Napoleonic wars, and Russia’s triumph after Napoleon’s invasion.
It begins with a whoosh: “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.” This is Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the Perle Mesta of St. Petersburg and a favorite of the empress, at one of her grand receptions. It will be seven years before Napoleon invades her country but she had her eye on him and clocked him early: “I really believe he is Antichrist.” The prince to whom she’s speaking shrinks back, suggests she’s excitable. “Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?” she asks. “You are staying the whole evening I hope!” In the end, what she cares about is the party. So does most everyone else.
I didn’t understand what good company Tolstoy is. The Russian general Pfuel, an ethnic German, is “self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth.” A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally as irresistibly attractive. “An Englishman is self-assured, as being of the best organized state of the world.” “A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.”
One of Napoleon’s commanders rejects better quarters and sets himself up in a peasant’s hut on the field. “Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.”
“Anatole, with the partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument.”
Tolstoy’s Napoleon is a puffed-up poseur, not so much confident and bold as “intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so successfully.” “His whole short corpulent figure with broad thick shoulders, and chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had that imposing and stately appearance one sees in men of forty who live in comfort.” “Only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.”
A small tragedy of humanity is that “man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul.” And so man, in the form of historians, makes up stories. Napoleon, at the battle of Borodino, did all he’d done in previous battles, but this time he didn’t triumph. Why? Because, researchers say, he had a cold. No, Tolstoy says, that isn’t it! Some historians say Moscow burned because Napoleon set it on fire for revenge. Others say the Russians lit the blaze rather than let him rule there. Nonsense, Tolstoy says: Moscow burned down because it was a city made of wood. The French soldiers who occupied it cooked and lit candles and fell asleep and stumbled about. Moscow’s inhabitants had fled; there was no one to watch things and no fire department.
