A Certain Idea of America, page 23
The papers are doing their stories about those strange Americans with their quirky ways burning up the internet with their quaint conspiracies. But who would not wonder about foul play? With all the people who’d want him dead?
This whole thing is a big stinkin’, fumin’ hunk of foul-up. And there’s still time to get this story. I miss the tough, crazy beat reporters of yore. Like me. I got cancer and was on chemo when I got a tip about a police-brutality story. I tore the IV out of my arm and ran to the sound of the crap!
So Jimmy Breslin it. McAlary it. Hell, Steve Dunleavy it. There was a story, too good to check: Dunleavy gets there early when the Berlin Wall’s starting to fall, sees the kids dancing in the streets. He wires home, says send me a dozen sledgehammers. Next day he hands them out to the kids, they jump on the wall and start hammering. The photographs were beautiful! Caught an existential truth! That’s a reporter!
Work every source and angle, every prison guard and cop you know—you’re supposed to know them! Pete Hamill would have known the estranged sister of the night nurse at the ER. He’d wait at her house, she’d tell him the EMTs came in laughing about “Who do you think killed the guy who suicided?” Or maybe she’d say they were nervous and just plopped him down and scrammed. But he’d have gotten the color, the feel. And it would suggest something.
Where is this Maxwell lady hiding? You believe nobody knows where she is? You’re an idiot. Go find Maxwell House! Live on the stoop! Ask her: Did you flip? Because I figure she went state’s evidence on Epstein and he knew. “Are you in hiding in fear for your life? Who wants to kill you, Ms. Maxwell?”
It’s like reporting now takes place in greenrooms. People say it’s all gossip but it’s not, because gossip is fun. It’s more like data points formalized around some vaporous Official View.
It’s like every great media organization is tied up in this complicated, soul-crushing, virtue-signaling fearfulness, this vast miasma of progressive political theory and ideology and correctness and “please report to HR”—and it has nothing to do with the mission. The mission is to get the story!
Reporters and editors, they’re not the fabulous old drunks and girl reporter miscreants, they’re like—like normal people! Reporters aren’t supposed to be normal! And they’re very tidy because they’re extremely important! You get the impression they became reporters to affect the discourse. “I’m going into journalism to press for cultural and political justice.” These—these deconstructionist intellectuals! These twinkies with soft hands from Phillips Exeter Andover whatever. These mere political operatives. These people with grievances, who’ve never had anything to grieve because their lives were the red satin lining of a music box.
If I was in charge I’d say, “Thank you for your boundless efforts to secure the greater progress for the polity. But I was wondering if, in your spare moments, you could be troubled to help us cover the biggest scandal of your blanking lifetimes?”
The editors don’t honor old shoe-leather ways. The owner wants you out there branding the brand on cable so the brand is being branded.
And those losers in Washington. Lemme tell you what they’re thinking. They’re thinking New York cares and L.A. cares but nobody else in America cares about this pervert and his fancy friends. They’re thinking it’s August, play it out, let the story sink in the sands of time. Because it’s a story they don’t like. My hunch, they have no real confidence in themselves or the system. They don’t think they themselves are gonna find out if Epstein was killed or committed suicide.
Which if I’m right is a story.
Get me a drink. In the drawer in the desk over there.
I bet you miss me. And Breslin and the rest. Because we gave it all color. Because deep down we respected life, which has color and facts.
Stories, yarns. The feel of it, the old romance of it.
Bled right out by the theoreticians. Good luck with the brand.
WHY THE TITANIC KEEPS DRAWING US IN
June 23, 2023
Why are we still drawn to the Titanic? Why, 111 years after it went down, doesn’t our interest fade? What is the endless lure that billionaires and explorers put their lives in their hands just to see it?
After its remains were discovered in 1985, the director James Cameron, who would make the blockbuster 1997 film, went down in a Russian sub to film the wreckage. Later in interviews he spoke of what he came to understand after the ship emerged from the darkness. “It wasn’t just a story, it wasn’t just a drama.” The sinking of the Titanic was “like a great novel that really happened.” His film carried the lore to new generations, but there had been popular books and movies before. Obsession was a preexisting condition. It’s why the studios let him make the costliest film then ever made: They knew there was a market. Why?
The Titanic story is linked to themes as old as man. “God himself couldn’t sink this ship.” “If we eat the fruit against his command, then we’ll be in charge.” “Technology will transform the world; it’s a mistake to dwell on the downside.” It’s all the same story.
In the search for the submersible this week Britain’s Telegraph quoted retired Rear Admiral Chris Parry of the Royal Navy. Why, he wondered, would anyone get into a “dodgy piece of technology” like the submersible? “It is fundamentally dangerous, there was no backup plan, it’s experimental, and I’m afraid to say there’s an element of hubris if you want to go down and do that.” Everyone thinks he’s unsinkable.
The Titanic’s story has everything. Splendor and perfection meet a sudden, shocking demise. A behemoth, a marvel of human engineering, is taken down by a stupid piece of ice. We make ships in our pride and nature makes icebergs for her pleasure.
No one is insulated from fate: There was no protection in wealth, the sea took who she wanted. It’s a story of human nature, of people who had less than three hours to absorb that they were immersed in a massive tragedy and decide how to respond. Some were self-sacrificing, some selfish, some clever, some fools. But ultimately, as on 9/11, they all died who they were. The brave were brave, the frivolous frivolous. The professionals in the band did what professionals do, play through to the end of the evening.
Anyone who hears those stories wonders: Who would I have been if I’d been there?
The Titanic captured nearly everything about America at the exact point at which it happened. The ship was built and registered by the British but it is the American imagination it most captured.
In first class, the Gilded Age aristos and plutocrats—the merchants, industrialists, and sellers of things in their fancy dress. They weren’t embarrassed to be rich, wore the grandest silks and top hats and jewels, not so much to be vulgar—that was new money’s job—but because they wanted to be noticed and admired, and perhaps they thought it said something about them as persons that they’d done so well.
In second class, regular people—sturdy coats and practical shoes. No one’s ever interested in them. In third class, the ethnics of Europe—the immigrants to America coming in waves just then peaking. Satchels, rough clothes. It was crowded in steerage; there were more children.
And all the different classes could peer at each other from the different decks. Just like today.
Among those who died was Isidor Straus, a co-owner of Macy’s department store. Something about him always touched my heart. His wife, Ida, refused to leave his side to get on a lifeboat. Thinking about him the other day, I made up a story about the dynamism of the era:
The last day of the journey he was peering down, watching a young Irishman on the decks below throwing a ball with his mates, comically enacting triumph. At one point the young man helped a mother of three as she lost control of her youngest, who was barreling toward the rail. Straus asked his valet to bring the young man up.
“What are your plans?” Straus asked.
“Don’t got a plan. Take a chance. It’s America.”
Straus gave him his card and said to look him up when they got to New York. The young man survived, holding on to big wooden chairs he’d strapped together. Weeks later he presented himself at Macy’s, showed a manager the card, and told the story. The manager, knowing old Isidor Straus, knew it was true.
Macy’s gave him a job in the basement stacking inventory. He worked his way up and in 1937 became the first Irish-American CEO of a major department store. In 1942 he was dragged by a friend to a backer’s audition for a Broadway show, a musical about Oklahoma, the first from a duo called Rodgers and Hammerstein. He underwrote the show, it became the smash of the decade, his friends called him a genius, but he knew he wasn’t. There was just a thing in the music, a kind of dream ballet, and when he heard it his mind went where it rarely went, to a moment long ago—a man with a fiddle and a song in a big ship listing in the darkness…
Again, the story of the Irishman isn’t true, but something in the story of the Titanic gets you spinning tales.
My friend John Gardner says the reason the Titanic endures is that there was an immediate connection in the public mind with the Great War. The twentieth century was to be the century of progress. Peaceful, prosperous Europe was beyond war. Everything was science—the new world of psychotherapy and a Viennese named Freud—and the arts—Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Seurat. And then one June day in 1914, two years after Titanic, an obscure archduke was assassinated. In Europe’s great capitals, miscalculation after miscalculation yielded a sudden continental disaster. “The glittering failure of a glittering Titanic came to be seen as a premonition of all that, the end of an old world.”
I end with something mysterious, for no tale lives without mystery.
Art sometimes heralds what’s coming. Artists—true artists—often know things they don’t know they know. In the years before big dramatic events there’s often something in the air, and sometimes the vibrations enter artists’ brains, whether they’re conscious of it or not, and show up in their work. In the foreword to Walter Lord’s great Titanic history, A Night to Remember, published in 1955, the first thing he notes is that in 1898 a struggling writer named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel about a fabulous Atlantic Ocean liner carrying wealthy, self-satisfied people that went down one cold April night after hitting an iceberg. “The [Titanic] was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson’s [liner] was 70,000. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800.” Both vessels could carry some three thousand people, both could make twenty-four to twenty-five knots, and both carried only a fraction of the lifeboats needed if something bad happened. But little matter, because both were called “unsinkable.”
What did Robertson call his ship? The Titan.
Isn’t that something? Makes you wonder what artists are seeing now.
THE PROTECTED VERSUS THE UNPROTECTED
February 25, 2016
We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.
But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
They are figures in government, politics, and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past twenty years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policymaker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
Now it seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
CHAPTER 5
