A Colossal Wreck (2 page)

Sympathy gave way to outrage when Clinton took to bombing people. “This was the Cowards’ War,” he wrote in June 1999 of the aerial war on Yugoslavia, “bombing a country for two and a half months from 30,000 feet. It was the Liberals’ War waged by social democracy’s best and brightest, intent on proving once again that wars can be fought with the best and most virtuous of intentions: the companion volume to Hillary Clinton’s
It Takes a Village
turns out to be
It Takes an Air Force
.”

Derision of such manifestations of hypocrisy was a recurrent theme in his writing, leading him now and then into interesting associations (not least his veneration for Jerry Ford, “our greatest president”), and thereby inducing casual observers to label him a “contrarian.” This silly term, proudly adopted by some as self-description, denotes in reality a discard of principle in favor of reflexive posturing. That was emphatically not Alexander’s course. Whether it was the Fully
Informed Jury Association, a cause normally associated with the right, or the fashion for hate crime legislation, or the ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Serbs from Krajina in 1995, Alexander was always stimulated by his unerring scent for an injustice. Our father Claud used to say that his own lifelong radicalism was no less inspired by regular doses of the
Magnificat
(“He hath put down the mighty from their seats”) in his public school chapel as from Marx, and my brother was no different, never really shifting his aim-point from deserving targets. “There was indeed a vast criminal class coming to its full vicious potential in the 1990s,” he observed in 2002, “a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class comes in the form of our corporate elite.”

Such forthright talk became commonplace after Wall Street’s collapse brought said elite into disrepute, but was not so fashionable in 2002. His contemporary musings on the inauguration of Bush-era monstrosities have a similarly percipient snap. Bush’s initial post-9/11 speech to Congress, for example, was “a declaration of lawlessness, with the concept of ‘justice’ being reduced to that of the freedom to shoot the other guy on whatever terms America may find convenient.” Two administrations and twelve years of drone killings later, we can see how right he was.

Anyone commenting on the contemporary political scene, as Alexander did with unflagging energy for forty years, might possibly sound a little depressing at times. The wonder of his long road trip, ending in a cancer clinic in a small German town (whose history he immediately researched on arrival, unearthing many intriguing details), is that we never want to get off the ride.

PART 1

1995

January 1

To: Daisy Cockburn

Last year a Mexican muralist with nothing to do was here, and so I got him to do an 18-foot-by-8-foot ceiling mural on the roof of my garage become library. Roof meaning ceiling. I said it should more or less address the theme of the meaning of the universe. So there were horses on the vault of heaven and then—being Mexican—he had a peasant crucified to a corncob and lower down a great big skull and lower down Adam and Eve looking really bummed-out. Then some nice birds and an owl with wings extended.

After a year looking at this, I bumped into Daniel the painter back from Mexico and said that I was Anglo-Irish, not Mexican, and so I wanted everything more bushy-tailed. The peasant not crucified but waving a machete; no skull; and Adam and Eve looking excited as though they were off on a lovely picnic. He digested all this with relatively good grace and his (American) wife wagged her head in strong agreement. I felt like Pope Julius telling Michelangelo to give up this idea of god handing Adam a formal note of contract and just have the hands reaching out, know what I mean, Mike. Then what about instead of the skull, THE SPIRIT OF THE ETERNAL FEMININE. Daniel immediately wanted a Mayan-type woman crouching in eternal toil and suffering so I said No and dug up a painting by Dante
Gabriel Rosetti,
Prosperia
, one of those pre-Raph girls, all eyes and raised shoulder and haunted mien, and said try this one for the pose.

Then he needed a face so I think you are going to end up on the ceiling of the library holding a Humboldt lily which he’s made the size of a gladiolus. The lily will have to be curbed, and the eternal feminine is a bit at odds with everything else, so we’ll have to see. I hope you survive the final cut, as they say in Hollywood.

January 2

Dear Mr. Cockburn,

You ask where Bill Clinton was during the Vietnam War and I can tell you; he was spying on the anti-war movement. I was told this by an acquaintance of David Druiding, whose wife learned this from Hoyt Purvis. Hoyt Purvis was the Chief of Staff for Senator Fulbright during the Vietnam War. Bill Clinton worked for Senator Fulbright during the war and was found out to be spying on him. Mr. Purvis is currently the director of the Fulbright Institute of International Relations at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Unclassified
has speculated that Bill Clinton may have been working for the CIA while he was at Oxford since other Rhodes scholars are known to have done this.

Edward G. Qubain, Austin, Texas

January 5

The world has become a sadder and more boring place. On 1 January Gary Larson hung up his sketch pad, which means the end of the universe as Larson has successfully managed to reconstruct it in the past decade and a half. Larson is not the first satirist to tell parables through beasts. But, before him, cows never had the sensitivities of Proust, nor dogs the wisdom of Solomon. There have been great painters of nature, but none with that exquisite precision which catches the taut excitement of an anteater as it sits in its burrow watching television and shouting, “Vera, come quick. Some nature show has a hidden camera in the Ericksons’ burrow. We’re going to see their entire courtship behavior.”

Often the before-and-after narrative is obscure, as in the great cartoon showing a duck and one of Larson’s patented mad scientists on a desert island, sinking ship in background, with the duck quacking triumphantly, “So, Professor Jenkins! … My old nemesis … We meet again, but this time the advantage is mine! Ha! Ha! Ha!” The joke comes out of the linking of the line from old kitsch thrillerdom to the abashed Jenkins–triumphant duck confrontation. But what were those past circumstances? And what will the duck do?

There was an uproar in 1984 when Larson drew a cartoon of a woman shouting out of the window, “Here, Fifi! C’mon! … faster, Fifi!” The eager little hound is dashing up the path, aquiver with doggie trust, but we can see that the dog door is stoutly barred on the inside and that Fifi is going to fetch up against it with a tremendous wallop, a wallop that was as nothing to the torrent of complaint from the sort of citizens you meet in the newsagent’s, buying birthday cards for their pets. Brooding on the fuss, Larson wrote: “The key element in any attempt at humor is conflict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unacceptable.”

In one of his collections,
The PreHistory of the Far Side
, Larson offers what are purportedly childhood sketches saved by his mother from the kindergarten period of his career. These feature prison bars on the windows, slavering hellhounds, a father holding him above a crocodile’s jaws and other fun scenes from the dark vale of infancy.

In
PreHistory
, Larson offers some cartoons he never even bothered to send out for syndication. “Jesus rises from the grave,” says the caption under a picture of a rather haggard Redeemer frying up some breakfast next to an open coffin and thinking: “I wonder what time it is … I feel like I’ve been dead for three days.”

January 11

The duty of the press—an over-roasted chestnut. For uplift we may turn to the editorials written by Robert Lowe for the London
Times
in 1851. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”

“The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity. The Press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times; it is daily and forever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion—standing upon the breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey to the horizon of the world … For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences—to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

From which high-minded sentiments we may turn to the views expressed by Sir Melford Stevenson, who was a British high court judge from 1957 to 1979. To a group of journalists discussing ethical procedures he remarked: “I think you’re all much too high-minded. I believe that newsworthiness is a firm realization of the fact that there’s nothing so much the average Englishman enjoys on a Sunday morning—particularly on a Sunday morning—as to read a bit of dirt. And that would be my test of newsworthiness … There is a curious synthetic halo around these people who are called ‘investigative’ journalists. Now so far as most courts are concerned—and I think most jurors—the concept of a journalist driven by moral fervor to investigate a public scandal is a lot of nonsense. He enjoys the comforting thought that he has a bit of moral fervor which is filling his pocket as well. And there are few more desirable positions in life than that.”

January 15

The Polish director Andrzej Wajda writes in his little memoir about movie-making,
Double Vision
, that once he started directing
Hamlet
and realized the whimsical, arbitrary quality of the plot, the hardest thing was to relate onstage the sequence of the events in proper order, from Hamlet’s first meeting with his mother and the king to Fortinbras’s victorious entrance in the final scene. That sequence of events could have been different if:

1. Hamlet had come to terms with his uncle, the king.

2. He had refused to believe in his father’s ghost.

3. He had not succumbed to Ophelia’s charms.

4. He had succeeded in killing the king while he was at prayer.

5. He had not killed Polonius by mistake, thinking he was the king.

Plus a whole lot of other “ifs.”

And yet, Wajda goes on, “we have to admit that
Hamlet
has a steel-like logic.” One thing just inevitably leads to another.

Wajda also tells a good story about something that happened the day the French left Algiers. People took to the streets and, in the course of events, still in a state of euphoria, arrived at the television studios. The gaping, empty studios, the television cameras and equipment scattered here and there, did not in the minds of the surging crowd seem to have any connection with what they conceived as television—that is, at least until the moment that someone in the know plugged in the cameras. Suddenly the blank screens of the monitors lit up, and the demonstrators saw their own bodies and faces on-screen. At first they were amused. Then they were emboldened. Hey, we’re on TV! They realized if they could see themselves on the monitors, the rest of the population could also see them on TV sets throughout the city. Maybe even further. They began to sing, dance, recite. The result was an uninterrupted television show that for once was completely authentic. It finally ended, as do all such spontaneous demonstrations, with the arrival of the police and armed officers.

January 18

Being without electricity for four days here in storm-lashed Petrolia gives one a keen admiration for gas-fired water heaters (to which
I will be converting shortly). I enjoyed the recovered memory of living by lamplight, which I did for a number of years when I was growing up in Ireland. After 6:00 in the evening until about 7:00 in the morning, life becomes a matter of moving through a darkened house from one small pool of warm light to another. I have two lamps. Unlike the hard-edged world of the light bulb, everything is imprecise in outline. Everything looks like one of the those dark seventeenth- or eighteenth-century paintings. Most of my friends look better by lamplight too. Cooking becomes a different enterprise, based much more on smell or on the noise of a sizzle or a rolling boil. I’m fairly short-sighted, but in lamplight, it doesn’t matter, because you can’t see much anyway.

This situation reminds me of a story I once read about endemic trachoma in the Egyptian village of Gamileya. Trachoma is an infection that causes the inner surface of the eyelids to become chronically inflamed. In Gamileya, people do not require conventionally “normal” vision to conduct their daily activities. Plowing, sowing seed and harvesting don’t require much vision. If there is some small task they are unable to do, their extended family does it for them, thus they do not perceive themselves as disabled.

Early last Wednesday morning, as I felt my way around the house, falling over the cats, listening to hear if the water was boiling, Petrolia played a final joke. Amid the violent thunderstorm that was raging, with the waters roiling not far from my window, the earth decided to heave in a fairly modest—4.3—earthquake.

February 10

I was astonished to see Robert Hughes confess in the
New York Review of Books
that he and his wife watch the MacNeil-Lehrer show every night. Imagine, day after day, week after week, year after year. “Good night, Jim. Good night, Robin.”