A Certain Idea of America, page 9
All this has made Governor Greg Abbott look particularly bad. He gave the imprimatur of his office to early police fictions. In his first news conference following the massacre he was strangely insistent on their sterling valor: “They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire.”
Only after videos of the parents being pushed around by the cops made their way to social media did he make an about-face. In a later news conference he talked of free funerals and mental health resources. Pressed finally on what was already becoming a police scandal, he said he’d been “misled” by authorities and was “livid.” Glad he talked about his emotions. We don’t do that enough in America.
But who misled him? Do they still have a job?
You wonder what his first briefing was like.
Governor: “I need the truth: What went down?”
Burly police official in Stetson: “Within minutes we stormed the school like Iwo Jima—took out the enemy under a hail of fire, carried the women and children to safety. Fixed bayonets. Knives in our teeth. Trust me.”
Governor: “Got it, thanks!”
There is only one way to handle such a mistake: Know it won’t disappear. Lead a swift and brutal investigation, talk about it every day, keep the heat on. When people know you’re playing it straight, they’re generous. When they know you aren’t—there’s an election in November and they’ll let you know.
I close with a thought tugging around my brain. I think I am seeing a broad and general decline in professionalism in America, a deterioration of our pride in concepts like rigor and excellence. January 6 comes and law enforcement agencies are weak and unprepared and the U.S. Capitol falls to a small army of mooks. Afghanistan and the departure that was really a collapse, all traceable to the incompetence of diplomatic and military leadership. It’s like everyone’s forgotten the mission.
I’m not saying, “Oh, America was once so wonderful and now it’s not.” I’m saying we are losing old habits of discipline and pride in expertise—of peerlessness. There was a kind of American gleam. If the world called on us—in business, the arts, the military, diplomacy, science—they knew they were going to get help. The grown-ups had arrived, with their deep competence.
America now feels more like people who took the Expedited Three-Month Training Course and got the security badge and went to work and formed an affinity group to advocate for change. A people who love to talk, endlessly, about sensitivity, yet aren’t sensitive enough to save the children bleeding out on the other side of the door.
I fear that as a people we’re becoming not only increasingly unimpressive but increasingly unlovable.
My God, I’ve never seen a country so in need of a hero.
AMERICA HAS LOST THE THREAD
September 16, 2021
I want to say something that struck me hard after the ceremonies marking 9/11 last Saturday. The grief felt and expressed had to do with more than the memories of that day twenty years ago. It also had to do with right now.
It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of twenty years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.
Certainly, most obviously and geopolitically we lost the thread in Afghanistan. We went there twenty years ago to make quick work of mass murderers who’d attacked us, and those who’d harbored and helped them. But we didn’t get the man who gave us 9/11, he escaped, and attention turned elsewhere, to Iraq, and we just stayed and walked in circles and came up with new words to rationalize the mission and it all turned into a muddle of confused intentions. Ten years in it was like the drunken song, “We’re Here Because We’re Here.”
Having lost the thread in the war we then with an almost magical consistency lost the thread in the ending of it. It was a frantic calamity of ill-thought-through actions and mistaken agendas. The horrifying part was that it couldn’t have proceeded without a willful ignoring of reality.
Evidence of a lost thread: 9/11 was a deeply communal event. We were all in it together, wounded together, and mourning together. We dug deep, found our best selves, and actually saw the best selves in others. The spontaneous community of those who showed up at the hospital to give blood, of those on the top floors of the towers who gathered to try to lead people out, of those on the plane who banded together to storm the pilot’s door—“Let’s roll.” It wasn’t just you, you were part of something.
The country we are experiencing now is one of people in different groups ganging up on each other. We all see this. It’s all division, driven by identity politics, race, gender, class. Twenty years ago we were grateful for cops, now we denigrate them and they leave and we argue about why they left. A rising generation of voters who were children when 9/11 happened and who became conscious of history during the 2008 economic crisis see (and have been well taught!) the imperfections, mistakes, and sins of their own country but have no human memory of the abuses of other systems, of how damaging deep socialism, and communism, have been. The passion of their emerging beliefs will engender opposing passions. They already are.
Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?
Following the trauma and drama of 9/11 we started discovering in some new way our nation’s meaning—what it was in history, meant in history, meant to us. We talked about it. We saw: The first thing the firemen did after the towers fell was put up the flag.
Twenty years in our history is treated as all sin, sin, sin. We’re like mad monks flagellating ourselves. We are going through a nonstop condemnation of our past and our people and their limits and ignorance. It isn’t healthy. Reflection and honest questioning are, but not this. And so much of it comes from our most successful and secure, our elites and establishments. Regular people look and think, “But if our professors and media leaders and tech CEOs hate us, who is going to help us think our way out of this mess?” And they know someone has to, because they know in a way elites can never understand, because they have grown so used to security, that no nation can proceed in the world safely and fruitfully when at bottom it hates itself.
Watching the ceremonies last weekend it was understandable if you thought, We started out rediscovering our love and wound up obsessed with our sins. We started out together and wound up more divided than ever, driven apart by opportunists who set us at each other’s throats.
And of course it all plays out in a million political and cultural issues. The pandemic came, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (we hope), and somehow that shared experience became another opportunity for division. Government had to be deft and persuasive and honest about what it didn’t know and didn’t have, and often failed. But government can always regulate, spend, and tax. We’re no deficit hawks in this corner but doesn’t U.S. public debt going toward thirty trillion dollars feel a little…high? And dangerous?
When a country has lost the thread it gets a mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol going for the ballots that will ensure and formalize a presidential election. When it’s lost the thread it can no longer maintain a rough consensus—it doesn’t even want a rough consensus—on how we vote.
And there are the million goofy things that are insignificant and yet somehow feel…telling. The Met Gala the other night showed the elite of a major industry literally losing the thread. Google the pictures. It was a freak show. There was no feeling of a responsibility to present to the world a sense of coherence or elegance, to show a thing so beautiful it left the people who saw it aspiring to something they couldn’t even name. All this was presided over by a chic and cultivated woman who is cunning and practical. If freaky is in she’s going freaky deaky to the max. Follow the base, even if it’s sick. Do not lead. Leading is impossible now.
That’s what I see with leaders all over America’s business life. What follows the lost thread is go-with-the-flow. Even when you know it isn’t going anywhere good. Especially when it’s going nowhere good.
What are regular people doing? My sense is they’re trying to hide from the national, figuring they’ll make strong what they can make strong—the family, the school, the local. They’re not trying to “maintain control” or “retreat,” they’re just trying to make things work. But what does it mean for a country when its most sober and thoughtful people are essentially trying to hide from it? To hide from the accusations and division and the growing air of freakishness, from the whole cultural revolution and the woke regime, trying to enforce boundaries between “that” and “us.” And knowing all the while that, as they say, you may be through with the culture but the culture isn’t through with you.
I feel certain this whole story will have some effect on, maybe a big effect on, the next election and the one after that. Just people feeling, knowing, that we’ve lost the thread, need to get it back, and wondering what we can do to help make that happen.
THE HALF-MADNESS OF PRINCE HARRY
January 12, 2023
Prince Harry’s book is odd. There’s even something half-mad about it.
He opens with a dramatic meeting at Frogmore Cottage, his former mansion on the grounds of Windsor Home Park. It is just after the death of Prince Philip, Harry’s paternal grandfather. For months Harry has been estranged from his father, Charles, and his brother, William—a “full-scale public rupture.” Harry has flown in from America and requested a meeting. The day is overcast, chilly. Charles and William arrive late looking “grim, almost menacing,” and “tightly aligned.” “They’d come ready for a fight.” Harry is tongue-tied, vulnerable, leaves heartbroken. “I wanted peace. I wanted it more than anything.”
You feel such sympathy. What could have driven them so far apart? Why are Charles and William so cold?
Then you realize, wait—Philip died just a month after the Oprah interview in which Harry rather coolly portrayed his family as remote and hapless puppets and implied they were racist.
Harry forgets, in the opening, to tell us that part. But you can see how it might have left Charles and William a little indignant.
This is the book’s great flaw, that Harry doesn’t always play it straight, that he thinks “my truth” is as good as the truth. There are other flaws, and they grate. There’s a heightened-ness to his language—he never leaves a place; he flees it “in fear for our sanity and physical safety.” He often finds his wife “sobbing uncontrollably” on the floor and the stairs, mostly over what he fails to realize are trivial things. He is grandiose: “My mother was a princess, named after a goddess.” “How would I be remembered by history? For the headlines? Or for who I actually was?” Lord, he was an attractive man fifth in line for a largely ceremonial European throne; it would hardly remember him at all. (Unless he wrote a scalding book and destabilized the monarchy!) He repeatedly points out that he’s a Windsor and of royal blood. His title means a lot to him. He is exhibitionistic: “My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.” (Frostbite.)
There are gaps in his knowledge base that wouldn’t be irritating if he weren’t intent on establishing that he’s giving you the high-class rarefied inside dope. “Never complain, never explain” has been an expression of the old American upper class since forever, and I’m sure the British one, too. It isn’t special to the Windsors. “An heir and a spare” is old Fleet Street tabloidese. It doesn’t mean, as he suggested on book tour, that he was bred for body parts.
Famous families often have internal communication problems. The children of those families learn much of what they know from the many books written about the clan. They internalize and repeat observations and stories that aren’t quite right but are now given their insider imprimatur.
Harry’s anecdotes tend to undermine the institution of the monarchy. When he was a teenager Britain’s biggest tabloid told the palace it had evidence he was doing drugs. In fact, as Harry tells us candidly, he did do drugs when he was young. The palace, no doubt knowing this, opted to “play ball” with the newspaper and not deny all aspects of the story. This made Harry feel thrown under the bus.
His father, he believes, used him as a “sacrifice,” to appease a powerful editor and bolster his own sagging reputation. “No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.” He reports that Charles and his wife, Camilla, were jealous of William and Kate’s “drawing attention away from them.” His stories of jealousy sound like projection. But they also make the book feel less like “Clown Turns on Circus” than something more deadly, especially just before Charles’s coronation this May.
Harry accuses the tabloids of violating his privacy, and no doubt they often did. What is almost unbelievable is that he is so unmoored and destabilized by this inevitable aspect of fame, especially royal fame. He implies he left Britain primarily because of the newspapers and their criticism of his wife.
But the odd, half-mad thing about this book is that in it he violates his own privacy, and that of others, more than Fleet Street ever could.
He is careful throughout to say he is telling his story in order to help others, those who’ve struggled with mental illness or been traumatized by war. It is hard to know another person’s motives; it can be hard to know your own. But I don’t think this book is about others. I think it’s about his own very human desire for revenge, to hurt those who’ve hurt him. And to become secure in a certain amount of wealth. And to show his family and Fleet Street that their favorite ginger-haired flake could make his own way, set up his own palace, break free, fly his own standard, become the duke of Netflix. This book is classic Fredo: “I can handle things. I’m smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb, I’m smart and I want respect!”
It is all so contradictory. He says he wants reconciliation but writes things that alienate, he says he reveres the monarchy and isn’t trying to bring it down but he has gone beyond removing bricks from the facade and seems to be going at the bearing walls.
I close with a thought on privacy. Prince Harry violates his own. He tells us too much about himself and others.
Once there was a reigning personal style of public reticence about private pain. You didn’t share it with everybody, and you didn’t use it for advantage or as a weapon: I have known pain, you must bow before me. The forces of modernity have washed away the old boundary between public and private. It isn’t good. It’s making us less human even as we claim to be more sensitive.
But fully mature people still have a sense of their own privacy, they keep to themselves what is properly kept to oneself. Privacy isn’t some relic of the pre-tech past, as I said once, it is connected to personhood. It has to do with intimate things—the inner workings of your head and heart, of your soul. You don’t just give those things away. Your deepest thoughts and experiences are yours, held by you; they are part of your history. They are part of your dignity. You share them as a mark of trust. This is true intimacy, not phony intimacy but the real thing.
If you tell all the strangers your secrets what do you tell your intimates?
A friend said the other day, “Most of the forces in the world are pushing toward exhibitionism and calling it honesty. The assumption is if you keep things to yourself you have something to hide.” But you aren’t reserved out of shame, you are reserved out of a sense of your own value and self-respect. And it doesn’t leave you alone; it means you are part of something larger, a whole world of distinct souls.
You shouldn’t violate your own privacy, not for attention or admiration, and not for money. It’s a mistake. And it won’t heal you.
THE SEXUAL-HARASSMENT RACKET IS OVER
November 23, 2017
I find myself thankful for something that is roiling our country. I am glad at what has happened with the recent, much-discussed, and continuing, sexual-harassment revelations and responses. To repeat the obvious, it is a watershed event, which is something you can lose sight of when you’re in the middle of it. To repeat the obvious again, journalists broke the back of the scandal when they broke the code on how to report it. For a quarter century we had been stuck in the He Said/She Said. Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas gave their testimonies, each offered witnesses, and the fair-minded did their best with the evidence at hand while sorting through all the swirling political agendas. In the end I believed Mr. Thomas. But nobody knows, or rather only two people do.
What happened during the past two years, and very much in the past few months, is that reporters and news organizations committed serious resources to unearthing numbers and patterns. Deep reporting found not one or two victims of an abuser but, in one case, that of Bill Cosby, at least thirty-five. So that was the numbers. The testimony of the women who went on the record, named and unnamed, revealed patterns: the open bathrobe, the running shower, the “Let’s change our meeting from the restaurant to my room/your apartment/my guesthouse.” Once you, as a fair-minded reader, saw the numbers and patterns, and once you saw them in a lengthy, judicious, careful narrative, you knew who was telling the truth. You knew what was true. Knowing was appalling and sometimes shocking, but it also came as a kind of relief.
Once predators, who are almost always repeat offenders, understood the new way of reporting such stories, they understood something else: They weren’t going to get away with it anymore. They’d never known that. And they were going to pay a price, probably in their careers. They’d never known that either.
