A Certain Idea of America, page 8
AMERICA NEEDS MORE GENTLEMEN
January 18, 2018
I used to think America needed a parent to help it behave. Now I think it needs a grandparent. Our culture has been so confused for so long on so many essentials, and has gotten so crosswise on the issue of men and women, that we need more than ever the wisdom of the aged.
That was my thought as I read this week’s sexual-harassment story, about the thirty-something TV star, the girl in her twenties, and their terrible date.
The woman in the story, recounted on the website Babe.net, went unnamed, and it doesn’t feel right to add to the man’s social-media misery. Nor is it necessary to assign blame since they were both such hapless representatives of their sex.
They had one thing in common: They were impressed by his celebrity. He deploys it to get what he wants, she wanted to be close to it. They met at an industry party, flirted by text; he asked her to his apartment and took her to a restaurant where he rushed her through dinner. They returned to his home, where he immediately made overt sexual advances, which she accepted but did not want. She seems to have had no sense that any outward show of respect was due her. Taken aback by how quickly he was moving, she tried to slow things via “nonverbal cues.” Among them was allowing him to perform oral sex on her, and performing it on him, which in fairness he may have interpreted as an indication of enthusiasm. She is an articulate person but was for some reason unable to say, “Stop, this is not what I want. I have to leave.” At no point does she allege he threatened her, either physically or professionally, or tried to bar the door.
He was boorish, a slob, what used to be called a wolf. He wished to use her sexually and didn’t understand her reservations. Isn’t that what first dates are for?
Is he a creep? Of course. She has been accused of trying to jump onto the #MeToo movement, painting herself as a victim, and exhibiting no sense of “agency.” (Though she is at least competent at revenge.) She expects us to understand why she didn’t walk out. Why did she stay, and expect such a gross figure suddenly to show sensitivity? In his interactions as she reports them, he never pretended not to be a pig.
Here is why we’re discussing this. All the stories we’ve read the past few months about predators—not those accused of rape and sexual assault, which are crimes, but of general piggishness, grabbiness, manipulation, and power games—have a common thread. The men involved were not gentlemen. They acted as if they’d never heard of the concept.
We have lost track of it. In the past forty years, in the movement for full equality, we threw it over the side. But we should rescue that old and helpful way of being. The whole culture, especially women, needs The Gentleman back.
A person of the cultural left would say that is a hopelessly patriarchal thing to say. But one thing the #MeToo movement illustrates is that women are often at particular risk in the world, and need friends and allies to stand with them. That would be men. And the most reliable of them are gentlemen.
There are a million definitions of what a gentleman is, and some begin with references to being born to a particular standing. But in America any man could be one who had the guts to withstand the demands.
The dictionary says a gentleman is a chivalrous, courteous, honorable man. That’s a good, plain definition. The Urban Dictionary says, “The true gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will…whose self control is equal to all emergencies, who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity.” That’s good, too.
A website called Gentleman’s Journal offers a list of twenty traits that make a man a gentleman. I liked “A gentleman always walks a woman home.” He doesn’t pack her off alone to an Uber downstairs, in the back of which she weeps as she sends her friends horrified texts, which is what happened with the Hollywood star and the girl. I liked “A gentleman ruins his lover’s lipstick, not her mascara.” And “If a woman comes with baggage, a gentleman helps her unpack it.”
A gentleman is good to women because he has his own dignity and sees theirs. He takes opportunities to show them respect. He is not pushy, manipulative, belittling. He stands with them not because they are weak but because they deserve friendship. Once, at a gathering of women in media, I spoke of a columnist who years before had given me helpful critiques of my work and urged me on. “A gentleman is an encourager of women.”
It goes deeper than memorizing and repeating certain behaviors, such as standing when a woman or an older person enters the room. That is a physical expression of inner regard. Being a gentleman involves not only manners but morals. The nineteenth-century theologian John Henry Newman—an Anglican priest who became a Catholic cardinal—said a gentleman tries not to inflict pain. He tries to remove the obstacles “which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him.” He is “tender toward the bashful, gentle toward the distant, and merciful toward the absurd…. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage.”
David Gandy, a fashion model, wrote a few years ago in London’s Telegraph that his work had taught him “being a gentleman isn’t about what you do or what you wear, it’s about how you behave and who you are.” A gentleman “holds chivalry and politeness in great regard. He holds the door for people; he gives up his seat; he takes off his coat to a lady on a cold evening.” These are old-fashioned actions, but a gentleman still holds to them “even though the world has changed.”
Yes, a gentleman does.
A man once told me it’s hard to be a gentleman when fewer of the women around you seem interested in being ladies. But that’s when you should step up your gentleman game. We are all here to teach and inspire.
By the way, I notice there are definitions of what a gentleman is and how you can be one all over the internet.
Someone must be looking for this information. That’s good.
The age of social media has worked against the ideas of decorum, dignity, and self-control—the idea of being a gentleman. You can, anonymously, be your lowest, most brutish self, and the lowering spreads like a virus.
But you can’t judge a nation by its comment threads, or let’s hope so. You can judge it by its struggle to maintain standards. For inspiration we end with Hollywood, with Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. The character played by Katharine Hepburn makes a pass at him, and he notes he could have taken advantage of the moment but she’d been drinking and “there are rules about that.”
Here’s to the rules, and the gentlemen who help keep them alive.
REFLECTIONS ON IMPEACHMENT, TWENTY YEARS LATER
November 29, 2018
December marks the twentieth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. There are many recent retrospectives on the scandal that led to it, including former Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s mildly indignant Contempt and Alex Gibney’s superb documentary series The Clinton Affair.
As I look back twenty years on, I’m more indignant about some aspects, less about others.
I didn’t believe the story when I first heard it—presidents and staffers don’t carry on like that. When I came to see that it was true, I was angry. I wrote angrily in these pages.
I see it all now more as a tragedy than a scandal. I am more convinced than ever that Mr. Clinton made the epic political miscalculation of the twentieth century’s latter half. He had two choices when news of the affair was uncovered: Tell the truth and pay the price, or lie and hope to get away with it.
If he’d told the truth, even accompanied by a moving public apology, the toll would have been heavy. He would have taken a hellacious political beating, with a steep slide in public approval and in stature. He would have been an object of loathing and ridicule—the goat in the White House, a laughingstock. Members of his party would have come down on him like a ton of bricks. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans would have gleefully rubbed his face in it every day. There would have been calls for impeachment.
It would have lasted many months. And he would have survived and his presidency continued.
Much more important—here is why it is a tragedy—it wouldn’t have dragged America through the mud. It only would have dragged him through the mud. His full admission of culpability would have averted the false testimony in a criminal investigation that became the basis for the Starr report and the two articles of impeachment the House approved.
The American people would’ve forgiven him for the affair. We know this because they’d already forgiven him when they first elected him. There had been credible allegations of affairs during the 1992 campaign. Voters had never thought highly of him in that area. His nickname the day he was inaugurated was Slick Willie.
If he had chosen the path of honesty, Americans wouldn’t have backed impeaching him, because they are adults and have also made mistakes and committed sins. They would have been more like the grand-jury member who spoke comfortingly to Monica Lewinsky as she wept near the end of her testimony: “Monica, none of us in this room are perfect. We all fall and we all fall several times a day. The only difference between my age and when I was your age is I get up faster.” That is the sound of an American looking in the face of remorse.
And we know Mr. Clinton would have been forgiven because in September 1998—after the Starr report was released, amid all the mud and lies and jokes about thongs and cigars—a Gallup poll asked, “Based on what you know at this point, do you think that Bill Clinton should or should not be impeached and removed from office?” Sixty-six percent answered “should not be.”
Bill Clinton, political genius, didn’t understand his country’s heart.
And so he lied: “I want you to listen to me…. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”—and the year of hell, the cultural catastrophe, followed. That’s what it was, a year in which eight-year-olds learned about oral sex from the radio on the way home from school, and ten-year-olds came to understand that important adults lie, angrily and consistently, and teenagers knew that if the president can do it, I can do it. It marked the end of a certain mystique of leadership, and it damaged the mystique of American democracy. All of America’s airwaves were full of the sludge—phone sex and blue dresses. The scandal lowered everything.
It was a tragedy because, in lying and trying to protect himself, Mr. Clinton was deciding not to protect America. And that is the unforgivable sin, that he put America through that, not what happened with Monica.
Mr. Clinton’s foes made the catastrophe worse. The independent counsel was obliged by law to “advise the House of Representatives of any substantial and credible information…that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.” The Starr report ran 452 pages and contained an astonishing level of sexual detail, of prurient, gratuitous specificity. Congress could have withheld it from the public or released an expurgated version. It didn’t have to be so humiliating. But Mr. Clinton’s enemies made sure it was.
Almost immediately on receiving the Starr report, Congress voted to release it in full, “so that the fullest details of his sins could be made public,” as Ken Gormley writes in his comprehensive 2010 history of the scandal, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. They put it up on the web. Its contents wound up on every screen in America, every newspaper, every television and radio.
Lawmakers released the videotape of Mr. Clinton’s grand-jury testimony, so everyone could see the handsome presidential liar squirm.
Mr. Starr’s staffers said they needed extremely detailed, concrete specificity to make the American people understand what happened. At the time I assumed that was true in a legal sense. Now I look back and see mere bloodlust and misjudgment.
I see the desire to rub Mr. Clinton’s face in it just as he’d rubbed America’s face in it.
Top to bottom, left to right, a more dignified government, one that cared more about both America’s children and its international stature, would have shown more self-restraint and forbearance. And there might have been just a little pity for the desperate, cornered liar who’d defiled his office.
It wouldn’t have so ruined the life of a woman who, when her relationship with the president commenced, was only twenty-two. She paid a steeper reputational price than anyone. Charles Rangel, at the time a senior Democratic congressman, said on television that she was a “young tramp.” The White House slimed her as a fantasist. She went into hiding, thought about suicide.
And in the end, twenty years later, she put the Clintons to shame.
Publicly for two decades she has reacted with more style and dignity than they, said less and with less bitterness and aggression, when they were the ones with all the resources, and a press corps eager to maintain good relations with them because Hillary would surely one day be president.
Monica told her side and kept walking, and even refrained from blaming her shaming on the Clintons. Feminists abandoned and derided her. She took it all on her back and bore it away. In my book, after all this time, she deserves respect.
Sometimes America gets fevers. They don’t so much break as dissipate with time. Twenty years ago we were in a fever. Others will come. The thing to do when it happens is know it’s happening, notice when the temperature is high, and factor it in as you judge and act, realizing you’re not at your best. Twenty years ago, almost none of our leaders were.
THE UVALDE POLICE SCANDAL
June 2, 2022
The great sin in what happened in Texas is that an eighteen-year-old with murder in his heart walked into a public school and shot to death nineteen kids and two teachers. The great shock is what the police did—their incompetence on the scene and apparent lies afterward. This aspect has rocked the American people.
Uvalde wasn’t an “apparent law-enforcement failure.” It is the biggest law-enforcement scandal since George Floyd, and therefore one of the biggest in U.S. history. Children, some already shot, some not, were trapped in adjoining classrooms. As many as nineteen cops were gathered in the hall just outside. The Washington Post timeline has the killer roaming the classrooms: “The attack went for so long, witnesses said, that the gunman had time to taunt his victims before killing them, even putting on songs that one student described to CNN as ‘I-want-people-to-die music.’ ”
Students inside were calling 911 and begging for help. The officers failed to move for almost an hour.
Everyone in America knows the story. Finding out exactly how and why it happened is the urgent business of government. We can’t let it dribble away into the narrative void and settle for excuses. “People are still shaken up.” “Probes take time.” “We’re still burying the children.” We can’t let the idea settle in that this is how it is now, if bad trouble comes you’re on your own. It is too demoralizing.
We can’t let it settle in that the police can’t be relied on to be physically braver than other people. An implicit agreement in going into the profession is that you’re physically brave. I don’t understand those saying with nonjudgmental empathy, “I’m not sure I would have gone in.” It was their job to go in. If you can’t cut it, then don’t join and get the badge, the gun, and the pension.
The most focused and intense investigating has to be done now, when it’s still fresh and raw—before the nineteen cops and their commanders fully close ranks, if they haven’t already, and lawyer up.
Those officers—they know everything that happened while nothing was done for an hour. A lot of them would have had to override their own common sense to stand down under orders; most would have had to override a natural impulse toward compassion. Many would be angry now, or full of reproach or a need to explain.
Get them now.
Within moments of the massacre’s ending, the police were issuing strange claims. They said the shooter was confronted by a school guard and shots were exchanged. Not true. They said the shooter was wearing body armor. He wasn’t. They said he was “barricaded” inside the classroom. Is that the right word for a guy behind a single locked door? They said a teacher left open the door the shooter used to enter. Videotape showed otherwise. They didn’t admit what happened outside the school as parents pleaded with the police to do something and tried to fight past the cordon so at least they could do something. The Washington Post had a witness who heard parents tell the police, “Do your f— job!” The police said they were. A man yelled, “Get your f— rifles and handle business!” Those parents were patronized and pushed around.
Even accounting for the fog of war there’s something next-level about the spin and falsehoods that occurred in Uvalde.
The commander on scene, school district police chief Pete Arredondo, hasn’t given a public statement on what went wrong. Why is he allowed not to tell the public what happened? He didn’t take reporters’ questions until cornered Wednesday by CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz. Mr. Arredondo was evasive. Reports he’s stiff-arming investigators are wrong, he said; he’s in touch with them and he’ll have more to say but not now. Then, in fatherly tones: “We’re not going to release anything. We have people in our community being buried. So we’re going to be respectful.”
A better form of respect would have been stopping the guy who left them grieving their dead children.
What I fear is a final report issued in six months or a year that will hit all the smarmy rhetorical notes—“a day of epic tragedy for our brothers and sisters in a small Texas town”—but fail, utterly, to make clear who was responsible for the lost hour.
