The Last Empire (39 page)

Perhaps the only literary form perfected by late-twentieth-century United Statespersons is the blurb for the dust jacket. It is for us what the haiku was for the medieval Japanese. Of all the varieties of blurb, the Academic Courtesy is the most exquisite in its balances and reticences and encodements. Now, there was one blurb that the Therns knew that they dare not publish without: that of the chairman of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Would this elusive, allusive—illusive?—figure misread their text as hoped or, worse for them, would he actually read it for what it is? Great risk either way. One can picture the Therns agonizing over how best to rope him in. He was their White Whale, nay, their Cinque of Sierra Leone. Night after night, Therns and their ilk flitted about Harvard Yard, suitably hooded against the night air. Meanwhile, the beleaguered chairman, quite aware of their plot, was careful to take the Underground Railroad when crossing the Yard. But in the end, he broke.
He gathered loved ones around him. “I can no longer live like this, in terror of the Therns. I’m going out.” Loved ones keened, “But not
tonight
. The moon’s full.
This is Thern weather.
”

But the chairman said, “I fear not. My blurb will protect me from all harm.” Blurb? Had he perjured himself? No, he had not, he declared; and so, casting aside fear, he entered the Yard, where a posse of howling Therns promptly held him for ransom in the form of what proved to be the very paradigm of all Harvard blurbs: “This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the state of race relations at the end of the great American century.” Thus, he tricked his pursuers and freed graduate students as yet unborn from, at the very least, a hoisting by the Thern petard.

The Nation

20 April 1998

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B
LAIR

LONDON

In 1964 I watched the election returns in a ballroom at London’s Savoy Hotel. The room had been taken by Pamela Berry, whose husband owned
The Daily Telegraph
. As one would expect, considering our hostess’s powerful political views, the guests were largely Conservative, though the odd transatlantic visitor could stare at the vast screen which, historically, the first British “television” election was filling with faces and numbers. Whenever Labour won a seat, there were boos and hisses. When a Tory prevailed, applause. Then the moment of awful truth: Labour had won and the next Prime Minister would be Harold Wilson. Lives and sacred honor, not to mention fortunes, were now at risk as universal darkness buried all.

Gladwyn Jebb, former ambassador to the United Nations, said to me, “Parish pump politics. Let’s go watch the real news.” He led me into a side room where, on a small screen, the fall of Khrushchev was being gloated over. Jebb: “Now
this
is the real thing.”

A third of a century later I was again in London at the start of the election just concluded. BBC television had hired me to chat about it. Most of the surviving Tories from the Savoy—or their children and grandchildren—were voting for something called New Labor, headed by Tony Blair, while the Conservatives were led by John Major, a Prime Minister who made much of the fact that he was a lower-middle-class Everyman pitted against a posh elitist who had gone to public school. The startling difference between 1964 and 1997 was that where Labour once represented the working classes and poor (today’s “disadvantaged”), it is now a home for prosperous suburbanites on the go as well as disaffected Scots and Welsh. In the end, the Tories did not win a single seat in Scotland or Wales, something that has not happened in a century.

The only real issue was, Should the British, if they ever meet the required standards, join a common European currency? But no politician was about to stick his neck out on that one. Another big issue that the local press was fretting over: Are British elections becoming Americanized? Presidentialized? Devoid of relevant content? The answer is, more or less, yes. The tabloids have created a terrible Clintonian atmosphere. “Sleaze” is the principal word one sees in every headline. Since Rupert Murdoch, a devotee of honest government, has abandoned the Tories for New Labour, and as this Australian-turned-American is allowed to own Britains most popular daily paper (
The Sun
) as well as the weekend
News of the World
, Tory politicians are being wildly smeared as sexual degenerates and crooks.

With a BBC crew I made the rounds of the three parties. Each presented its program to the nation. Liberal Democrat Paddy Ash-down received the press in a small crowded ecclesiastical room. “To make it look like a great crowd,” a journalist whispered in my ear. Pamphlets were distributed. Ashdown is blond, athletic-looking; also quick-witted by American standards, but then any public schoolboy in England speaks more articulately than any American politician except for the great Oval One.

Ashdown played the honesty card, something of a novelty. He wants better education for everyone. He admits that this will cost money. The two other parties swear they will never raise taxes, which, of course, they will. . . . honesty card, something of a novelty. He wants better education for everyone. He admits that this will cost money. The two other parties swear they will never raise taxes, which, of course, they will. . . .

I go to the Royal Albert Hall. Major points out Tony Blair’s contradictions and evasions. I suspect a few ancient heads in the audience were at the Savoy that night so many years ago when Harold Wilson won and socialism would level all. (Once in Downing Street, Wilson quickly said that, actually, he had never read Marx.) As the hall filled with the gorgeousness of Elgar, I intoned for the camera: “Land of hope and glory, of Drake and Nelson, of Clive and Crippen.”

The fascinating kickoff was Mr. Blair’s. We were in an early-nineteenth-century building with a dome, dedicated to engineers. Press milled about in the rotunda downstairs, where stood a tall dark man, Peter Mandelson, reputedly Blair’s Rasputin. He gave solemn audience to the journalists of the lobby. Words murmured to one, hand held over his mouth. TV cameras, including ours, avoided. He had the insolent manner of one born to the top rung but three. The mood of the Labourites was paranoid, particularly the handsome blond girls in black suits with curled lips and flashing eyes. Blair’s lead was so great in the polls that only a blunder on his part could stop his irresistible rise. So one could not be made. Although the BBC and I had been cleared by the press party office, I suddenly looked like a possible blunder.

We take our seats. Blair enters, followed by what will be much of his Cabinet. He has been told not to smile. The smile has been criticized by the press. Too loopy. Too youthful. He is forty-three, JFK’s age in 1960. He is slender with a beaky, mini-Bonaparte sort of nose. The dark hair does not entirely convince. He holds up the party manifesto with his own face, smiling on the cover. I am close enough to him to realize that he does much of his breathing through his mouth. Lips pressed tight together cause his nostrils to flare as he tries to get enough air in. The speech, his program, was written, we have been told—as if it were from the hand of St. John of Patmos—in his own garden in his own longhand. As it turns out, he has no program. But things will be better, he tells us. Afterward, to every question he says simply, “Trust me.” He departs.

The press, seeing that I’m all that’s left in the room, surround me. The blondes try to shoo them away. Question: “Are we becoming more Americanized?” Answer: “Well, you do resemble us in that you now have a single party with two right wings.”

Question: “Which wing is more to the right?”

Answer (in my gravest and most reverential voice): “One does not bring a measuring rod to Lilliput.”

Then we were all thrown out. Labour complained to the BBC that I had preempted their affair to “slag Blair.”

In the next six weeks, Blair makes no errors. He now has a huge majority in the House of Commons. Although he has no plans, I am sure that whatever it was that Mr. Murdoch wanted him to do, he will do. I talked to a Scots MP who knows Blair well. “He’s another Thatcher. Authoritarian. Hands-on control freak.” I go to my splendid ancient friend and former head of the Labour Party, Michael Foot: “Blair is excellent. Really excellent.” I ask, “Whatever happened to socialism?” At this Mrs. Foot looked grim. “Yes,” she asked her husband. “What did?” He smiles. “Socialism? Oh, socialism! Yes! Yes! . . . Well, there’s time. . . .” I move on. “The young, even in America,” I said, “are reading Gramsci.” Foot was delighted. “Good. Good. While you and I are reading Montaigne.”

Question I never got answered by anyone: You are an offshore island. But off whose shore? Europe’s or ours?

The Nation

26 May 1997

*

*

* 
H
OW
W
E
M
ISSED THE
S
ATURDAY
D
ANCE

Duke Ellington on the jukebox: “Missed the Saturday dance, heard they crowded the floor, duh duh duh-duh. . . .” I can almost carry a tune but I can’t remember the words to any song, including the inspired lyrics of our national anthem. But this song, and those notes, have been sounding in my head for over half a century, ever since I heard them at a dance hall near the army camp where I was stationed.

Just out of Exeter, I had enlisted in the army at seventeen. That was a year after George Bush, just out of Andover, enlisted in the navy. Most important, my best friend from a Washington, D.C., school enlisted in the Marine Corps. He had been “safe” at Duke: he had a contract to be a professional baseball player when the war was over. But he thought that he should go fight too. He became a scout and observer for the Third Marine Division in the Pacific. He saw action at Guam. He was assigned to “Operation Detachment” and shipped out to Iwo Jima, where the Japanese were entrenched in tunnels beneath that bleak island’s surface.

On February 19, 1945, the Marines landed on Iwo Jima, after a long, fairly futile aerial bombardment. The Japanese were out of reach belowground. On D-Day plus nine, elements of the Third Division landed on the already crowded island, eight square miles of volcanic ash and rock. Like the skull of some prehistoric brontosaurus, Mount Suribachi looms over the five-and-a-half-mile-long island. Lately, I have been watching closely each frame of an old newsreel that now seems so long ago that it might as well be a series of Brady stills from Antietam except for the fact that it is still as immediate to me as yesterday, even though I was not there but on another Pacific island, far to the north in the Bering Sea. It took a month to win the island. Twenty thousand Japanese were killed; 6,821 American troops, mostly marines, were killed. On D-Day plus ten, 1 March, 1945, at 4:15 a.m., Pvt. James Trimble was killed instantly by a grenade. He was nineteen years old. Bush and I survived.

It is somehow fitting that our generation—
the
war generation, as we think, perhaps too proudly, of ourselves—should be officially as well as actuarially at an end with the replacement of George Bush by a man who could be his—our—son. I say fitting because our generation, which won in battle the American Empire, is somehow nicely epitomized by the career of Bush, who served with energetic mindlessness the empire, always managing, whenever confronted with a fork in the road of our imperial destiny, to take, as did his predecessors, the wrong turning.

Elsewhere, I have noted that the American Golden Age lasted only five years; from war’s end, 1945, to 1950, the Korean War’s start. During this interval the arts flourished and those of us who had missed our youth tried to catch up. Meanwhile, back at the White House, unknown to us, the managers of the new world empire were hard at work replacing the republic for which we had fought with a secret national security state, pledged to an eternal war with communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. It is true that Harry Truman and our other managers feared that if we did not remain on a wartime footing we might drift back into the Great Depression that had not ended until the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and everyone went to war or work. It is part of the national myth that the attack was unprovoked. Actually, we had been spoiling for a war with Japan since the beginning of the century. Was the Pacific—indeed Asia—to be theirs or ours? Initially, the Japanese preferred
to conquer mainland Asia. But when it looked as if we might deny them access to Southeast Asian oil, they attacked. Had they not, we would never have gone to war, in the Pacific or in Europe.

I was born eight years after the end of the First World War. As I was growing up, it was well remembered that we had got nothing out of that war in Europe except an attack on the Bill of Rights at home and, of course, the noble experiment, Prohibition. Young people often ask me, with wonder, why so many of us
enlisted
in 1943. I tell them that since we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to defend our country. But I should note that where, in 1917, millions of boys were eager to go fight the Hun, we were not eager. We were fatalistic. In the three years that I spent in the army, I heard no soldier express a patriotic sentiment, rather the reverse when we saw the likes of Errol Flynn on the screen winning freedom’s war, or, even worse, John Wayne, known to us by his real name, Marion, the archetypal draft-dodging actor who, to rub it in, impersonated a Flying Tiger in the movies.

Although we were not enthusiastic warriors, there was a true hatred of the enemy. We were convinced that the “Japs” were subhuman; and our atrocities against them pretty much matched theirs against us. I was in the Pacific Theater of Operations, where the war was not only imperial but racial: the white race was fighting the yellow race, and the crown would go to us as we were the earth’s supreme race, or so we had been taught. One of the ugliest aspects of that war was the racial stereotyping on both sides. In Europe we were respectful—even fearful—of the Germans. Since blacks and women were pretty much segregated in our military forces, World War II was, for us, literally, the white man’s burden.

So while the Golden Age had its moment in the sun up on deck, down in the engine room the management was inventing the “Defense” Department and the National Security Council with its secret, unconstitutional decrees, and the equally unconstitutional CIA, modeled, Allen Dulles remarked blithely, on the Soviets’ NKVD. We were then, without public debate, committed to a never-ending war, even though the management knew that the enemy was no match for us, economically or militarily. But, through relentless CIA “disinformation,” they managed to convince us that what was weak was strong, and that the Russians were definitely coming. “Build backyard shelters against the coming atomic war!” A generation was well and truly traumatized.

The Korean War put an end to our title as invincible heavyweight military champion of the world. We might have maintained our mystique by avoiding this eccentric war (we did call it a “police action”), but by then we had so exaggerated the power of the Soviet Union in tandem with China that we could do nothing but reel from one pointless military confrontation to another.

Unfortunately, Kennedy was less cynically practical than those who had presided over what Dean Acheson called “the creation” of the empire. Kennedy actually believed—or pretended to believe—their rhetoric. He liked the phrase “this twilight time.” He believed in the domino theory. He believed in “bearing any burden.” He invaded Cuba, and failed. He turned his attention to Asia, to “contain China” by interfering in a Vietnamese civil war where a majority had already voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh, who, quoting Jefferson, asked Eisenhower to make Vietnam an American protectorate. But, as Ike explained in his memoirs, this wasn’t possible: they were
Communists
.

In June 1961 Kennedy began the fastest buildup militarily since Pearl Harbor; he also rearmed Germany, setting off alarm bells in the Soviet Union. They spoke of denying us land access to our section of Berlin. Kennedy responded with a warlike speech, invoking “the Berlin crisis” as a world crisis. In response, Khrushchev built the wall. It was as if we were, somehow, willing a war to turn sad twilight to incandescent nuclear high noon.

The missile crisis in Cuba was the next move, with us as the provocateurs. Then, with the Vietnam War, we not only took the wrong road, we went straight around the bend, fighting the longest war in our history in a region where we had no strategic interest unless we were to openly declare what the management, then and now, does truly believe: the United States is the master of the earth and anyone who defies us will be napalmed or blockaded or covertly overthrown. We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire; unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.

The only subject, other than the deficit, that should have been discussed in the late election was the military budget. Neither Bush nor Clinton came anywhere close. Eventually, we shall be unable to borrow enough money to preen ourselves in ever weaker countries, but until then, thanks to the many suicidal moves made by that imperial generation forged in the Second World War, our country is now not so much divided as in pieces.

The latest managerial wit has been to encourage—by deploring—something called “political correctness,” this decade’s Silly Putty or Hula Hoop. Could anything be better calculated to divert everyone from what the management is up to in recently appropriating, say, $3.8 billion for SDI than to pit sex against sex, race against race, religion against religion? With everyone in arms against everyone else, no one will have the time to take arms against the ruinously expensive empire that Mr. Clinton and the unattractively named baby boomers have inherited. I wish them luck.

There are those who sentimentalize the Second World War. I don’t. There can be no “good war.” We set out to stop Germany and Japan from becoming hemispheric powers. Now, of course, they are economic world powers while we, with our $4 trillion of debt, look to be joining Argentina and Brazil on the outer edge. All in all, the famed good, great war that gave us the empire that we then proceeded to make a mess of was hardly worth the death of one Pvt. James Trimble USMCR, much less the death of millions of others.

I have just listened to the original Duke Ellington record. Here are those lyrics that I always forget.

“Missed the Saturday dance, heard they crowded the floor, couldn’t bear it without you, don’ get around much anymore.” All in all, it’s a good thing for the world that with Bush’s departure
we
don’t get around much anymore. Somalia-Bosnia could be the last of our hurrahs, produced by CNN and, so far, sponsorless. Maybe now, without us, Clinton’s generation will make it to the Saturday dance that we missed. And let’s hope that the floor won’t prove to be too crowded with rivals in trade if not in love, death.

Newsweek

11 January 1993

* 
T
HE
L
AST
E
MPIRE

*
It is wonderful indeed, ladies and gentlemen, to have all of you here between covers, as it were—here being the place old John Bunyan called “Vanity Fair, because the town where ’tis kept, is lighter than vanity.” But these days the town is not so much London or New York as the global village itself, wherein you are this month’s movers and shakers, as well as moved and shaken (I feel your pain, Yasser). In a number of ways I find it highly fitting that we meet on the old fairground as twentieth century and Second Christian Millennium are saying goodbye. Personally, I thought they’d never go without taking us with them. There are, of course, 791 days still to go. I also note that the photographers have immortalized a number of smiles. Joy? Or are those anthropologists right who say that the human baring of teeth signals aggression? Let’s hope not before 2001 C.E.

Of course, centuries and millennia are just arbitrary markings, like bookkeeping at Paramount Pictures. But, symbolically, they mean a lot to those who are interested in why we are today what we are and doing what we are doing. This goes particularly for those movers and shakers who have spent a lot of this year in meetings, courtesy of the one indisposable—or did President Clinton say indispensable?—nation on earth and last self-styled global power, loaded down with nukes, bases, debts.

Denver and Madrid were two fairgrounds. Nothing much is ever accomplished when the managing world director calls in his regional directors for fun and frolic. But when Clinton chose a cowboy theme at Denver, with boots for all, some regional directors actually dared whine. But they are easily replaced and know it. Later the Seven Leading Economic Powers (plus Russia) decided, at Madrid, to extend the North American Atlantic Organization to include Poland, Czechland, Hungary. Jacques Chirac, the French director of the . . . well, let’s be candid: American empire . . . wanted several more Eastern countries to join, while the Russian director wanted
no
Eastern extension of a military alliance that he still thinks, mistakenly, was formed to protect Eastern Europe from the power-mad Soviet Union. Actually, as we shall see, NATO was created so that the United States could dominate
Western
Europe militarily, politically, and economically; any current extension means that more nations and territories
will come under American control while giving pleasure to such hyphenate American voters as Poles, Czechs, Hungarians. The French director was heard to use the word
merde
when the American emperor said that only three new countries are to be allowed in this time. The Frenchman was ignored, but then he had lost an election back home. In any case, the North Atlantic confederation of United States–Canada plus Western Europe can now be called the North Atlantic Baltic Danubian Organization, to which the Black Sea will no doubt soon be added.

I see that some of you are stirring impatiently. The United States is
an empire
? The emperor’s advisers chuckle at the notion. Are we not a freedom-loving perfect democracy eager to exhibit our state-of-the-art economy to old Europe as a model of what you can do in the way of making money for the few by eliminating labor unions and such decadent frills as public health and education? At Denver a French spearcarrier—always those pesky French—wondered just how reliable our unemployment figures were when one-tenth of the male workforce is not counted, as they are either in prison or on probation or parole. The Canadian prime minister, even more tiresome than the French, was heard to say to his Belgian counterpart (over an open mike) that if the leaders of any other country took corporate money as openly as American leaders do, “we’d be in jail.” Plainly, the natives are restive. But we are still in charge of the Vanity Fair.

I bring up all this not to be unkind. Rather, I should like to point out that those who live too long with unquestioned contradictions are not apt to be able to deal with reality when it eventually befalls them. I have lived through nearly three-quarters of this century. I enlisted in the army of the United States at seventeen; went to the Pacific; did nothing useful—I was just there, as Nixon used to say, WHEN THE BOMBS WERE FALLING. But, actually, the bombs were not really falling on either of us: he was a naval officer making a fortune playing poker, while I was an army first mate writing a novel.