30 December 2002: Last week nearly killed me. I cooked and cooked in my tiny kitchen - "in my tiny kitchen" means that I spent as much time cleaning up the kitchen as actually cooking - and got through it all only by reminding myself that, come the day after Christmas, I could forget about cooking for awhile.
Ha. Now it turns out that instead of going out to a New Year's Eve party, I'm giving one. Never mind how it happened; all you have to know is that it involves old friends from out of town who unexpectedly find themselves in New York right now. In order to understand the full meaning of that sentence, bear in mind that, for any New Yorker over fifty who has led even a modest social life, there are old friends from out of town who unexpectedly find themselves in New York at all times. It doesn't have to be New Year's Eve. My invariable response is to say, "Come on over, and we'll have a simple dinner." At which my dear Kathleen rolls her eyes.
Last week, mind you, I wasn't cooking for out-of-towners. Everyone who came to our Christmas Day open house had a Manhattan address, with the exception of one Park Sloper. (Because for the first time in what seems like forever we had a white Christmas, our friends from the suburbs didn't dare try to drive into town.) On Christmas Day, and at a party that we usually throw in May, we entertain our New York friends. The rest of the time, we feed friends from everywhere else.
I suppose this wouldn't happen if we lived in - well, forget the invidious comparisons - anywhere else.
If I were given to making resolutions, I'd make one for everyone else: Stay home in 2003. But instead of that, let me ask you: what's your idea of a simple dinner?
Happy New Year!
20 December 2002: The other day, my sister, who lives in Texas, forwarded an anecdote entitled 'From a Marine in Bosnia,' which purports to be an exchange of insults between a French officer and an American Marine at Camp Bondsteel. The officer volunteered his opinion that Americans were cowboys, and that that if the United States provoked a war (Iraq is not mentioned in the item), it shouldn't count on the support of France. The Marine replied, with characteristic American cool, that the support of France, even were it forthcoming, would be for show only, since in NATO exercises the United States shoulders "85% of the burden." When the officer got huffy, the Marine suggested that they meet outside the Camp's Burger King (a telling touch, I thought) for a fight - at which the Marine would prevail, "thus demonstrating that even the smallest American had more fight in him than the average Frenchman." Then came a little surprise: the writer was a woman.
The next thing you know, I was thinking of Wagner's Siegfried, of the moment in Act III when Wotan (or the Wanderer, as he's called in this opera) encounters Siegfried on the slope of Brünnhilde's Rock. At the end of Die Walküre, the opera that precedes Siegfried in the Ring tetralogy, Wotan put his favorite daughter to sleep with a kiss that dispelled her divinity; surrounded by a ring of fire that only a fearless hero can cross, Brünnhilde has remained there for about twenty years, while the unborn infant whose life she saved, thereby incurring her father's wrath, was born and grew up - namely, Siegfried. Siegfried is certainly fearless; he has just, in the previous act, slain a fierce dragon. When Wotan bars his way up the slope, Siegfried is not particularly distraught. With the easy contempt of the young and strong for the old and weak, Siegfried orders the stranger to get out of his way. Wotan would appear to have no reason not to comply; he has bred this very hero to do exactly what he's doing. But the cold logic of the ring of fire implies that the man who crosses it will be stronger than the mightiest god, thereby shrinking that god's power to insignificance. As a matter of pure ego, Wotan cannot surrender to the future. The men fight, and Siegfried breaks Wotan's staff, and here begins the twilight of the gods. Then Siegfried proceeds merrily up the hill to Brünnhilde, the lover who in her benighted jealousy will betray him to his murderer.
In response to the French officer's opening taunt, the Marine rattled off a list of wars that, in her view, the French would have lost had not the United States come to her aid. Understandably missing from this list is the war that the United States would have lost had not France come to her aid: the American Revolution.
13 December 2002: In Ken Auletta's profile of Miramax founder Harvey Weinstein, screenwriter Jay Cocks (no friend of Harvey's) is quoted as saying of "Industry" people,
"They are all so busy being polite to each other that they forget how to be honest to each other. That leaks over to their movies, which is why there is so much synthetic emotion in films." (81)
While I quite agree about the presence of synthetic emotion in most current films - at times I feel that I'm seeing not so much a movie as the text of a screenplay, with stage directions prescribing the emotional weather - and while I'm very interested to hear Mr Cocks's theory about its cause, I must take issue with his use of the word 'polite,' when what he so clearly means to say is 'obsequious.' It's obsequiousness that makes people volunteer insincere praise. Politeness, while often less than candid, is never really dishonest.
Why are people obsequious? Because it's the easiest way of being nice, and the need to be nice is felt more heavily in some parts of American life than the obligation to pay taxes. Where being nice and being polite diverge is with reference to silence (which is easy) and discretion (which is not easy). Silence and discretion aren't nice because they're gestures of reserve. They hold back, where nice wants always to be giving. And nothing is easier to give than talk.
Politeness is only indirectly concerned with making other people feel good. Its principal objective is to prevent making them feel bad; it endeavors to avert unintended unpleasantness. Truly polite people often strike more carefree souls as 'stuck-up' precisely because they're so alive (polite people, that is) to the ease with the human ego takes offense. Silence, as I say, is the easy way of being polite. Discretion - keeping conversation going without either telling lies or leaking insults - requires study, not just imitation. It is a talent like any other, and everyone develops it in his own way.
So how do you say something nice if you don't have anything nice to say? You develop the amnesia that Jay Cocks talks about.
Speaking of obsequiousness, am I the only one reminded by Trent Lott of Foghorn Leghorn, the star of numerous Warner Bros. animations? And was I the only one not to be shocked, shocked to find that racism runs rampant in Republican regions?
5 December 2002: Snow at last. I happen to like snow, in almost all its stages - but then I don't have to go outdoors if I don't want to, and I certainly don't have to shovel the stuff. From the 18th Floor, snow makes beautiful scenery, softening the city's corners and muffling its racket. There is a civic virtue to snow, too - provided that it falls on the city's watershed. Last winter, it didn't snow at all, really, and as a consequence, the city's fountains were dry all summer.
I'm listening to Dog Eat Dog, Joni Mitchell's 1985 album. When it was new and I was an Express Bus yuppie, I listened to it on my Walkman on the way to work every day for at least two months, and I never really got tired of it. It's loaded with ear candy, remote motifs and wisps of sound that are intelligible only through headphones. Take, for example, 'Smokin' (Empty, Try Another)', a clever little entertainment concocted from humming, a few lyrics, a pizzicato bass, and the looped whine of an out-of-stock vending machine. 'Shiny Toys' was an ironic favorite, celebrating, in Ms Mitchell's mocking way, gadgets like my Walkman (which played audiocassettes), and late nights out on the town. (Listen closely and you'll hear Zyg Winard invest the words 'I love my Porsche' with as much voluptuousness as masculinity allows.) 'Lucky Girl' has the sexy refrain, pointing in the direction that Joni Mitchell's work would take after this album, "I never loved a man I trusted/As far as I could pitch my shoe/'til I loved you." 'Impossible Dreamer,' a lovely song, reappeared on Misses, a collection of the singer's favorites that didn't make the impression that she thought they would (perhaps she jumped the gun; Donna Krall has just recorded the second cut, 'A Case of You'). None of the songs, however, got the Vince Mendoza treatment for Travelogue, Ms Mitchell's new retrospective, two-disc collection of her own songs, reinterpreted in the spirit of 2000's Both Sides Now. I can't think why not.
The song from Dog Eat Dog that I'm playing over and over is the third, 'The Three Great Stimulants.' The refrain recalls the Excessive Eighties:
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence
But it's the chorus that catches in my ear. Accompanied by, among other things, what sounds a lot like a fire bell, it seems unbelievably timely:
Oh and deep in the night
Our appetites find us
Release us and bind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They'd like to slam free choice behind us
'The Three Stimulants' ends with a mild wail: "Oh these time, these changing times, Change in the heart of all mankind." They say that 'everything changed' on September 11, 2001. This song reminds me that it can only have changed for people who had been asleep.
Thanksgiving Day, 2002: This is a cold season for every warm-hearted American. Whatever your philosophy might be, you know that the man in the White House has a conflicting agenda, dedicated to the artificial persons in this country, id est the corporations. I found surprising warmth, this holiday eve, in the DVD of Gladiator, and I recommend that you slip it into your player in lieu of football. It's bound to be more exciting. And when the crowd shouts Live! or Die!, shout 'Vote!' You will feel at least a little bit better. And when the movie crowd hails Caesar!, just remember the word that got Prime Minister Dino of Canada's assistant into trouble.
Pop Quiz (to which I'd love to have Dubya's written answer): why would the Roman Emperor never, ever appear in gladiatorial combat at the Coliseum?
13 November 2002: There's a funny little piece in this week's Talk of the Town about Bernhard Goetz, the subway shooter of 1984 who - and this was news to me - ran for Mayor last year, and won 1800 votes. His candidacy had nothing to do with gun control, either way; rather, it turns out - and I may have forgotten this - Mr Goetz is a vegetarian. "Despite the fact that I do not have a love affair with New York City, I think that New York City does influence the whole world, and I think a quarter of the world's problems would be solved if most people would become vegetarians."
Only a quarter of the world's problems - thank heaven for small favors! Now, despite Mr Goetz's work with an organization called the VivaVeggie Society, on whose behalf he occasionally dons a costume that makes him look like a "giant sexy-lady peapod," I remain grimly unamused by the attribution of any fraction of the world's many woes to human omnivorousness. Quite aside from my own quite contrary gastronomic predisposition, I detect in Mr Goetz's motto, 'Give Peas A Chance,' the charred, if still faint, aroma of religious persecution, and I urge everyone with an interest in either side of the animal-rights issue to familiarize himself with the civil wars that spread throughout Europe like a plague in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. All parties to those wars, which flared on and off for a century and a half, were convinced that the world would fall out of its orbit if their opponents were allowed to practice their rituals. In the end (1648), an exhausted Europe decided to live and let live, and with the exception of Louis XIV's piously stupid revocation of the tolerating Edict of Nantes, the West put religious persecution aside, and religion gave rise to no more wars.
The same fearful self-righteousness that used to motivate inquisitions and crusades reappears today in the makeup of a number groups that share the conviction that the only thing wrong with Planet Earth is mankind. Radical vegetarians, Greens, PETA supporters, and other like-minded abolitionists all give off the terrible stink of being absolutely certain that right is altogether on their side. As in the sixteenth century, the spirit of reform flourishes in the wealthier and more industrious nations; self-denial is something that the poor cannot afford. Add the reasonable and unreasonable anxieties and uncertainties that surround the genetic modification of crops, and the issue of dietary purity assumes truly lethal potential.
Those on my side of the aisle ought to press for dramatically improved awareness of agribusiness: what it does, who owns it, and how its costs are spread out. We must put the heedless enjoyment of the earth's riches behind us. Whether or not fossil-fuel emissions are contributing to global warming is not a tremendously important point, because before that question is even reached it should be clear that any emissions that upset the balance of the earth's atmosphere ought to be avoided if possible. Just as obviously, this cannot be a matter of shutting off millions of engines and taking up Stone-Age lifestyles; rather, it must be worked toward, with patient persistence. (I note with a mordant smile that we may exhaust the stock of fossil fuel before any lasting harm is done, but most people appear to be sublimely unaware that oil and gas are not in infinite supply.) We must encourage the coming generation of businessmen to understand that frankness about environmental impact will serve them better in the long run than secrecy and obfuscation. We've got to look, too, at the price of beef, an issue that Michael Pollan has looked into with his customary clarity both in a recent New York Times Magazine article and on PBS's Frontline. Maybe we can't afford McDonald's and Burger King; maybe prime steak is a luxury, like caviar. That unpalatable possibility ought to be examined before it becomes a burning issue - or an issue for burning.
25 October 2002: My heart is very heavy today, for tomorrow I'm going on a trip. I don't know which prospect bothers me more, that of boarding a plane or that of leaving Yorkville. I am truly terrified of flying, have been for over twenty years, and even the slightest turbulence makes me long for oblivion. But while I will probably get to Amsterdam and back quite safely, the rupture of everyday routines will take weeks to repair, and I wonder - today, now that departure is imminent - why I put myself through the ordeal.
There's no doubt in my mind that my aversion to travel is a flaw; the question is, what to do about it, given that I'm married to (and still very much in love with) a keen traveler. Kathleen even likes to fly!And in recent years she has been invited to lots of conferences in interesting places. She was in Hong Kong only last week, and Amsterdam will be a business destination as well. In fact, Kathleen is much too busy to go anywhere at all unless it's to participate on a panel or to give a talk, and she turns down more invitations than she accepts. I myself would be perfectly happy going to the seashore for a week or two every summer. If Kathleen were not a traveler, in other words, I wouldn't have to confront this flaw in my character.
Why is it a flaw? Because I get a lot out of travel, once I've finally arrived in a foreign city. Books only take me so far. Actually, they take me just far enough to make the most of being abroad. Sniffing the air, walking the streets, noticing how the details of buildings - ordinary buildings, I mean - differ from those on this side of the Atlantic, and listening to the pitch and pace of local speech - these sensory experiences, which must be captured directly, complete the impressions that I've built up before I leave home. As regards Amsterdam, I don't know very much about present-day Nederland, just a lot of history, and that rather a jumble. I expect that I'll love the canals and, just as I do in Nieuwe Amsterdam, the proximity of the sea.
Like any tourist with half a brain, I'm hoping to visit Delft on market day.
Travel has been a fixture of humanist life for so many centuries now that it's hard to scrape away the clichés about travel's broadening the mind and all that, but they're all quite true, so long as you ignore them while you're on the road. As a rule, you ought to ignore anything that isn't right in front of you. The art of travel is an intertwining of the intended (only a fool would make no plans whatsoever) and the serendipitous. My secrets of successful travel are: (1) pick at least one slightly offbeat but easily reached destination, and go there, (2) follow whims generally, but make use of guidebooks, and (3) don't take pictures. It's all right to take photographs, provided your skill is up to the task of framing shots that you'll want to frame, but don't duplicate postcard views. Instead, take a good, long look at everything noteworthy. It worked for centuries and still does. Oh, and (4), don't overbook.
But I've no tips at all for minimizing the dreadfulness of flying (except, of course: Xanax). Perhaps I'm too tall to find comfort on board, but even in first class (which I've enjoyed only twice) aircraft strike me as generally humiliating. And the terminals are worse, inspiring an almost violent misanthropy. Airports never fail to put me in mind of the meat-packing plant in Waterloo, Iowa that I visited in my teens.
But I'll try to take the advice of a good friend who's heard more than enough yammering from me: 'Have a good time, goddamit."
All in a Day's Read...
24 September 2002: In the current issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik tells a charming story about his three year-old daughter's imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli. Not for a moment could I be tempted to retail the delightful particulars of this story, which I urge everyone to read. I mention the piece because at the end of it we find that little little Olivia Gopnik's parents have adopted 'Charlie Ravioli' as a shorthand expression for the busyness of their Manhattan lives: the bumping into friends but not being able to spend time with them because it's necessary to run out and hop into a cab right now in order to be halfway on time for an appointment. "Busyness is our art form," Mr Gopnik writes of New Yorkers, "our civic ritual, our way of being us. Many friends have said to me that they love New York now in a way they never did before, and their love, I've noticed, takes for its object all the things that used to exasperate them - the curious combination of freedom, self-made fences, and paralyzing preoccupation that the city provides. ... If everything we've learned in the past year could be summed up in a phrase, it's that we want to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli for as long as we can."
Well, not me. Even as I giggled over Olivia's exasperation with her imaginary friend, I was thinking of a passage that bonded to the folds of my brain the instant I read it. It comes from a review review, by Bill McKibben, of 'The Complete Walker IV,' by Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins.
From my own experience, Fletcher is also write when he says early in the book that it takes about three days of solo walking to leave civilization behind - to reach the point where your brain runs out of the hunk food diet of opinions and fantasies and news flashes that normally fill our days and begins to go quiet enough to really register the world around. The feeling when that happens is lovely - you begin to fit into that world in a different way. ... You simply find that walking, and the regular and routine chores of daily life (making camp, cooking dinner, washing pots, cleaning clothes, keeping warm and dry), become sufficient. Days are full, sleep comes easy.
Substitute 'reading and writing' for 'walking,' and you have my idea of heaven. Unfortunately, perhaps, it is an idea that I stubbornly intend to realize here below. I would be a much happier person, and certainly easier to live with, if I would just give in to Charlie Ravioli. And I suppose I would give in, if I weren't sure that my writing would be reduced to breathless, slangy, and overly allusive short paragraphs - a Web log, in short. I have never been a walker, but I recognize in Mr McKibben's experience a joy that I have known, and want to go on knowing for as long as I can. But I'll be the first to concede that it's difficult to attain in New York.
What does it mean to 'leave civilization behind'? Actual solitude isn't required. I've capped many an afternoon of mindful work with a visit to the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art, making my way from the quiet of my room to the quiet of the Old Master galleries without leaving the cool and dappled spring of deliberation. What's jarring is not the presence of other people, but the need to attend to them. Having to be at a certain place at a certain time: now that's a distraction. What's even worse, though, is not knowing when someone's going to show up.
Adam Gopnik traces the origins of (unproductive) busyness to the middle of the nineteenth century, and I'll go along with that: the novelty of railways and telegraphs had worn off by mid-century and everyone who could afford to make use of technology was expected to do so. (It was then that clocks reduced morning, noon and night to measured minutes, too.) All that has changed is the multiplication of the means of communication. Only the very rich and the very poor escape the peremptory summonses of telephone calls, faxes, e-mail, and deliverymen. Only the rich and the poor avoid the nuisance and frustration of shopping. I certainly don't want to be poor; neither, if I were rich enough to do so, would I be comfortable hiring a personal assistant to look after my affairs. I'd be very tempted. But as I've said in another connection, anybody smart enough to look after me is smart enough to do much more interesting things. So I shall have to go on making sure that there's fresh milk in the fridge and plenty of toilet paper in the linen closet. But I can't suppress a certain wistfulness for the days when gentlemen never had to think about such things.
In any case, I hope that Charlie Ravioli goes on being too busy to talk to me. That will give me more time to read his book, whenever it comes out.
22 September 2002: In last weekend's New York Times (September 15) there appeared an Op-Ed piece by a Dartmouth professor, James Bernard Murphy, that argued against trying to instill 'civic virtue' in the nation's schools. I was unable to infer any clear sense of what Mr Murphy meant by 'civic virtue,' and so I was grateful to a teacher, Jean Ballard Terepka, whose Letter to the Editor in response appeared two days later, for offering a clear and useful definition. In Ms Terepka's view, civic virtue consists of two elements: knowing how government works and casting informed votes. Schools are obviously suited to teaching the anatomy of government, and they ought to be no less devoted to developing the critical sense that every citizen needs in order to assess campaign rhetoric.
Another look at Mr Murphy's piece convinced me that its author was talking not about civic virtue but civic values. Indeed, he uses that very phrase. "In a pluralistic democracy where citizens disagree about many matters of morality and religion, instruction in civic values offers the prospect of a compelling moral purpose for public education that all can endorse." Now, if Mr Murphy had written 'virtue' instead of 'values' here, and made it clear that he means what Ms Terepka means by 'civic virtue,' I'd agree with this statement. But Mr Murphy means what he says, which is why he knocks down his straw man a few sentences later. Unfortunately, values and virtues are the same thing for him.
Along with the Good Things that we can all subscribe to in general, such as Tolerance and Justice, 'civic values' include the issues that the citizens of a democracy disagree about, the differences that make elections, legislation, and administrative proceedings necessary, and they cannot be taught in school. They can be taught only by example, and only by adult citizens to other adult citizens. But such values will be inconsistent and ill-advised unless the people adopting them have mastered Ms Terepka's civic virtues.
Do you know who your Congressman is? Do you know how your local Highway Commissioner is appointed? Are your judges elected, and, if so, how often? For urban and suburban (that is, most) Americans, the United States and its constituent state and local governments comprise a welter of overlapping jurisdictions that surpasses the complexity of medieval governance, but aside from journalists and interested insiders few people know how the parts interrelate. The executive stars of the political process - presidents, governors, and mayors - rarely have the power that their celebrity appears to confer. Here in New York, for example, the Mayor has little direct control of the transportation system overall and no official say in the operation of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the region's airports, the interstate bridges and tunnels, and, until last year, the World Trade Center. (It still owns Ground Zero.) The power of the City Council is almost as obscure as the workings of the Forbidden City in the days of the Chinese Emperors. The American way of limiting any executive's authority is to create a countervailing authority, or perhaps several countervailing authorities, thereby allowing everyone to take credit for successes while passing the buck on failures. I am convinced that a generation of Americans schooled in these complications - schooled, literally, in schoolrooms - would agitate for simplicity and accountability, but in the absence of such learning we can hardly be blamed for shrugging with half-hearted cynicism and turning to the sports page.
When I was a boy, the history and government of New York State was a course for seventh-graders. It scares me to think that any seventh-grader could take the slightest interest in this subject, at least in the government part of it, whereas for high school seniors it might, in the hands of a good teacher, prove almost riveting. Knowing that they were being scrutinized by incipient voters, moreover, our State Senators and Assemblymen might set a better example at Budget time.
26 August 2002: On a proposed CBS Entertainment four-hour miniseries on Hitler's youth, Richard Bernstein writes,
Some people, including at least one who has actually seen the script, have complained that the very idea is a serious mistake. By focusing on Hitler's younger years, these critics worry, the program will not include the main and essential ingredients of Hitler's wickedness: Auschwitz, the Gestapo, the Final Solution, 50 million dead across Europe. And by leaving all that out, some people say, a film focusing on Hitler's childhood might give him a kind of abuse excuse, portraying him as a lonely, mistreated child of the sort for whom today's youth might even experience a degree of fellow feeling.
According to one school of thought, Hitler believed he was full of rectitude and that in ridding the world of Jews and what he viewed as other inferior types he was cleansing it, making the world better. How does a commercial drama, which is probably not going to reach Dostoevskian heights, deal with a question like that without being basically ridiculous?
I have no intention of watching this miniseries on television. It is almost certain to be dreadful from a purely historical point of view - tin-eared, if not downright anachronistic, about the way people talked and the things they talked about in the Austria and Germany of Hitler's youth. It will almost certainly present inferences, drawn from the sketchy records of Hitler's childhood, as facts - how can it not? I don't need to be wound up again by the public's dismaying preference for images to text. But I can't join the critics - Mr Bernstein's 'some people' - who wish that CBS Entertainment would drop its plans. Mulling over this old wound yesterday, I began to think that the show might do some good.
The history of Adolf Hitler's childhood is shrouded in oblivion because the dictator seems to have taken some pains to eradicate records and obliterate sites. His youth in Linz, Vienna, and Munich, prior to his enlistment at the outset of the Great War, appears to have been extremely unpromising. That Adolf Hitler should ever rise to the top of a major European power still seems improbable, and the more one knows about the young man, the more improbable it seems. But the world to which Hitler returned from war was very different from the world that he had left. The defeated and collapsing Germany of 1918 offered Hitler opportunities that hadn't been there before, opportunities that a man familiar with defeat and disappointment, and gifted with a demagogue's command of oratory, knew how to exploit. Ian Kershaw, whose book Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris provided the writers of the projected miniseries with their background material, writes of Hitler's postwar transformation:
The path from Pasewalk to becoming the main attraction of the D.A.P. had not been determined by any sudden recognition of a 'mission' to save Germany, by strength of personality, or by a 'triumph of the will.' It had been shaped by circumstance, opportunism, good fortune, and, not least, the backing of the army... It was indeed the case, as we have seen, that Hitler did not come to politics, but that politics came to him - in the Munich barracks. Hitler's contribution, after making his mark through a readiness to denounce his comrades following the Räterepublik, had been confined to an unusual talent for appealing to the gutter instincts of his listners ... coupled with a sharp eye to exploiting the main chance of advancement. (p. 128)
Let's grant that Hitler was abused as a child, however you like to define 'abuse.' The point isn't to excuse his monstrosity but to understand how he came to have such a vast scope for practicing it. A decorated hero of the losing side, Hitler could draw on reserves of self-righteous grievance that struck sympathetic responses among downcast Germans. Hitler proclaimed the virtue of a victim's thirst for revenge.
It must be understood that Germany was not a victim simply because it had lost a war. Three novelties attach to the catastrophe of the Second Reich. First, outbreaks of Marxist insurrection, initially rather successful (certainly in Munich, where the future Pius XII was in traumatized residence), stamped Germans with a dread of Bolshevism that was only stiffened by the great uprising in Russia. Second, the Allied Powers dictated vindictive and impoverishing indemnities. Third, and to my mind most interesting, these indemnities, and the anxieties over the future of Germany, were for the first time borne directly by a democratic mass of citizens. The Kaiser decamped to Holland, leaving no successor to assume the mantle of sovereignty. Just as there were no scapegoats for the defeat, so there were no figures who could be expected to set things right.
The United States and the Soviet Union followed up their victory in the Second World War with a colossal show of force designed to preclude any thought of further war. They benefited from failed experiments in the opposite direction that followed the First World War. Shaken by the folly that a trio of emperors and their general staffs could unleash, the very civil governments of interwar Europe were devoted to peace and to decentralization, Germany no less than the others, at least until Hitler's advent. British appeasement was motivated largely by a visceral desire to sidestep if possible another generation-killing bloodbath. Let Hitler have the Sudetenland! Czechoslovakia too! Let him have Austria! (Austria wanted him!) It was only after the invasion of Poland in 1939 that the British accepted the fact that Hitler's territorial ambitions were radically unreasonable. Germans themselves had long since been persuaded by Hitler to repudiate shame about 1914, and along with it the diffuse, somewhat ineffectual, and apparently amoral government of the Weimar Constitution. By the late 1920s, when Hitler began his ascent in earnest, Germany had suffered something worse than military defeat: a hyperinflation that undermined the everyday commercial life of the nation. Hitler's extravagant swagger promised the jobs that Germans so badly needed. A victim himself, Hitler seduced Germany into complicity with its own victimhood.
Being a victim is not a good thing; it is not desirable to be 'special' in the way that victims are special. The only healthy course for a victim to follow is to accept what has happened and to move on. This can be very difficult, and the temptation to strike back (even if one only wounds oneself) can be almost overwhelming. Hitler embodies the dangerous folly of making a monument of resentment while at the same time denying vulnerability. If Germans had not so strongly felt that they had been wronged by the victors of 1918, they would probably never have paid Hitler, or anyone like him, much attention. The CBS miniseries just may show, as if by accident, that it is never wise to listen to someone who self-pityingly identifies himself as a victim.
Theodor Adorno wrote that, after Auschwitz, poetry is impossible, and today's cultural environment has been extensively shaped by a belief that the horrors of the Third Reich imply, as a matter of logical necessity, the bankruptcy of Western ideals. How could the country of Goethe and Beethoven sink to Nazism? In answer to this question, I insist that the only Western ideal involved in the rise of Hitler was the relatively new one of universal democracy. The road to the great tyrannies of the twentieth century was opened in 1789, when the mass of citizens, like Prometheus, dared to steal the fire of the gods. It has taken them - us - quite a while to begin to learn how to handle this fire without being burned by it, and there are doubtless a few further calamities in store. Eventually, I hope, we will collectively acquire the confident majesty of the kings to whom we can never voluntarily hand back our power. And we must learn to be as attentive to affairs, each and every one of us, as a wary monarch. Considering the effort that democracy requires of us, it is not hard to gauge the appeal of surrendering to an all-wise, omnicompetent dictator - a role that Hitler, schooled by failure, impersonated with astonishing success.
5 August 2002: After the long winter of our discontent, I've been loath to broach political topics, but I came across a piece in the Summer, 2002, Issue of The New York Review of Books that I'd like everybody to read, Tony Judt's Its Own Worst Enemy, a review of The Paradox of American Power: Why The World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. I'm tempted to urge everyone to go out and buy Nye's book, just as a show of support for common sense. But as Nye was a security adviser to the Clinton Administration, I'll refrain from partisan gestures.
In the five pages of his essay on the American imperium, Mr Judt lays out competing notions of 'realism.' There is the Bush administration's version, expressed by Condoleeza Rice as proceeding 'from the firm ground of national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community.' This view is pitted against Thomas Jefferson's admonition that Americans pay "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Jefferson's advice sounds moral in a way that Rice's perspective avowedly doesn't, but that's not to say that it's less practical. The sane members of any community act with their neighbors in mind. American neighbors may make very few demands, particularly in the parts of the country that have been colonized by the ruralist culture of the South, but America's neighbors elsewhere in the world rarely share our penchant for laissez-faire.
Because the United States is the world's military superpower, Bush realists appear to to believe that they can do whatever they want with the American arsenal. They believe, further, that right is on their side precisely because as a rule they want to do nothing with it. If you believe, finally, that our military resources are the private property of the American government of the moment, then you will probably find little to object to in the current administration's foreign policy. Secretary of State Colin Powell is a virtual totem of the American commitment to extremely limited military engagements.
But whether our objectives are right or wrong, universally popular or not, we cannot turn a deaf ear to the rest of the world while entreating it to trust our good intentions. The final say about the deployment of American arms, of course, ought to remain with the Oval Office. But if American actions might at times be justifiably unilateral, the deliberations behind them ought never to be, on either practical or moral grounds. Contrary to the millenarian faith that seems to hold sway in Washington, we have not entered a new era of history in which unilateralism can be expected to reap long-term success.
20 July 2002: The New Criterion is a cultural monthly aimed at educated conservatives who are not ashamed to acknowledge their 'elite' status, and this alone ought to make it a congenial berth for good, old-fashioned Arnoldian liberalism. Populism and relativism are equally unwelcome. But an unfortunate irritability clouds the periodical. To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, The New Criterion has been running a series of articles under the heading 'The Survival of Culture,' and the latest is managing editor Roger Kimball's 'The Fortunes of Permanence.' Its point of departure is the classical analogy, first elaborated by Cicero, between culture and agriculture. The attraction of this metaphor is its emphasis upon the care and patience that personal cultivation requires. And the laboriousness. Indeed, if the resemblance between farming and study seems slight to us now, that's because the development of a cultured mind requires a vastly more sheer hard work nowadays than farming does. There have been few intellectual labor-saving advances since Cicero's day, although the two that come to mind - movable type and the personal computer - are certainly startling accessories. Comparing self-cultivation to the maintenance of an ornamental garden seems more apt, but it's much less serious. The appeal to agriculture has become a nostalgic move.
Like other pieces in the series, Mr Kimball's is both dyspeptic and somewhat rambling. Notwithstanding frequent references to Matthew Arnold's 'Culture & Anarchy' - more important reading than ever - Kimball is preoccupied not by 'the best that has been thought and said in the world' but rather by the reverse. It would have been quite useful to write a contemporary assessment of Cicero's image, which has long since passed into the Western intellectual tradition, to the extent that most educated people know of it even if they don't know it. I myself am not the person to undertake this. The idea of likening culture to husbandry presumes that human beings are at one with nature and on a par with all other natural things. It presumes, as well, that cultural expertise is largely traditional, a matter of repetition, of knowing how things were done in the past. It is not a view that comports with my ideas of humanism. I think we're different, we people, from everything else on earth, in degree as well as kind - special, if you will - and I'm not at all shy about my belief that our coming into existence is far and away the best thing that has yet happened on the blue planet. Our powers and responsibilities may once have borne a resemblance to those of the faithful husbandman, but I don't think they do anymore. But this is Mr Kimball's argument, not mine, and I wish he would make it. He writes,
Culture survives and develops under the aegis of permanence.
but instead of expanding on this observation, which ought to be the essay's topic sentence but isn't, Kimball takes off on a jeremiad.
Instantaneity - the enemy of permanence - is one of the chief imperatives of our time. It renders anything lasting, anything inherited, suspicious by nature.
Instantaneity is probably not the culprit. It cannot be bothered with suspicions. Kimball's opening thought deserves better than this. Not surprisingly, given the very conservative nature of the argument from agriculture, what Kimball appears to mean by 'the aegis of permanence' is 'tradition,' and much of the essay that follows laments the powerlessness of tradition. This power is the premium that attaches to a way of doing something simply because it was the way of the people who have gone before. In a traditional society, the fact that one's forefathers believed something to be the case gives rise to a presumption, difficult to rebut, that one ought to believe likewise. It hardly needs to be said that we do not, in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century, live in a traditional society. To the extent that 'The Fortunes of Permanence' regrets this development, its elegy is futile. It seems never to have occurred to the writer that we have given up, if not our traditions, then the power of tradition, in exchange for something very valuable: democracy; and I begin to wonder if it's possible to be a conservative democrat in the full meaning of both terms.
It would be a stretch to regard the French Revolution as an episode in the Industrial Revolution, but in fact it took place just as the longer transformation was approaching a state change. The countrymen and women who almost immediately began to pour into Europe's cities to staff the new factories could not be kept ignorant of the ideals of 1776 and 1789; in 1848, not for the last time, those ideals kindled uprisings everywhere. The struggle for democracy was often a struggle against traditions of any kind. Part of Marxism's persistent appeal, certainly, owed to its renown as a radical break with the past that at the same time proceeded inevitably from that past. Americans, despite their political conservatism - they had fought a successful revolution and meant to stick by the Constitution that concluded its aftermath - were in the vanguard, well into the twentieth century, of iconoclasts, suspicious of anything that recommended itself as a tradition for tradition's sake. 'Instantaneity' had nothing to do with it.
Because writers at The New Criterion so often decry what I'll call 'nontraditional sexuality,' I was not surprised to find Mr Kimball taking pot-shots at Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse. Given the erotic underpinning of all great art, this is perhaps not so irrelevant as it seems, but it does get tiresome. Kimball couches what ought to be a naturalistic observation in Scripture:
It was not long ago that the description from Genesis - 'male and female he created them' [1:27] - was taken as a basic existential fact.
This is to say that the Biblical account of creation used to provide a tradition that explained gender-specific differences and inequalities. Why does it do so no longer? Let's look at some other existential facts. It was not long ago - in the scale of human history - that the defensibility of enslavement, for example, and the virtual enslavement implicit in institutional peasantry were facts of life. The political monopoly of the aristocratic classes, to name another, meant that only those trained to fight were permitted to govern. These traditions, and many others, were upended in the wake of the revolution that began in Paris in the summer of 1789. Like Humpty-Dumpty, they can't be put back together, because democracy cannot be bound by the dead. The voices of the past may make helpful suggestions, and it is the work of critical thinkers to sound them out, but in the end only the living can ratify the rules. If that seems like a surprising consequence of democracy, it encapsulates the dread of democracy's enemies. Nor can there by any thought of going back on democracy. The revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century wrought great planks of language and policy that have made undemocratic government politically incorrect for the foreseeable future.
The simple fact is this: democracy was introduced throughout the West over the broken spear of tradition, so that during the last two hundred years almost every Western tradition has had to find alternative grounds for self-justification. It is no good to quote Scripture. Given their sanction of slavery and limited franchise, it is probably no good to quote the Founding Fathers, either. Technological advances have made mincemeat of many 'existential facts,' and may go on to uproot many more. We are still very far from realizing the democratic state that for a few moments two hundred years ago seemed within our reach. The elusiveness of democracy has inspired continual revolts, some of them violent, others confined, like the one that rages today over multiculturalism, to the academy. Like the excesses of the Terror, these revolts are more often than not brutal and ill-conceived (i.e., stupid), but their objective remains unimpeachable.
Democracy and technological advance - fueled by market capitalism or not - have proceeded arm in arm for two hundred years. The fact that almost everybody can afford to buy some kind of automobile looks like a proof that democracy works, even though the price of cars and our political structure have nothing (in theory) to do with one another. Technology freed women from the peasantry of housework, and by the same stroke made it possible for ordinary single people to manage their own small households. These developments were bound to alter our perception of the 'existential facts' concerning sexuality and the differences between men and women. Agriculture itself no longer exists in its Ciceronian form. Conservatives may fear that we're making Faustian bargains with nature, but in fact nothing in the technology of genetic modification approaches the danger of the warmongers' nuclear weaponry.
Traditions persist, sometimes robustly and with meaning intact. But the argument from tradition has no social validity anymore, and has had none for two centuries. Toward the end of his piece, Kimball gives a hint that he may understand this.
No achievement may be taken for granted; yesterday's gain may be tomorrow's loss; permanent values require permanent vigilance and permanent renewal.
Exactly. Vigilance makes us alert to value, allowing us to sift it from the stale and insignificant, and renewal recasts the values formerly embodied in tradition in fresh terms. Perhaps, in time, democracy will build up its own traditions, but even now it is still very much in the business of breaking with them. Until this changes, every generation will have to test and acknowledge its own values, and we must hope that each generation will do so wisely. It's for this reason that I wish that humanistically-minded thinkers, conservative or not, would forswear tradition altogether and work harder to anticipate and clarify the questions that genuine renewal requires.
2 July 2003: Greetings, from Yorkville Park.
'Gosford Park' was released on DVD last week, and I lost no time ordering a copy from Amazon, but I didn't get to watch it until last Saturday afternoon, while I was giving the bedroom its weekly once-over. Why does the word 'irony' come to mind? Changing the sheets and dusting the furniture, I might well have identified with the movie's downstairs characters, were it not that I'm also the master here, and inescapably upstairs. Like most apartments, ours doesn't have any stairs at all. And like most postwar apartments (all New York apartments are either 'prewar' or 'postwar,' the war in question being the one that more or less put an end to servants), our kitchen is not tucked away at the end of a long narrow hallway, but right off the foyer, all four hundred cubic feet of it. Life is conducted all on one level here. Waited on hand and foot, all by myself, I identify with everybody in 'Gosford Park.'
If I say that I don't envy anyone in that movie, am I telling the truth? Oh, dear no. I envy Ivor Novello, the real-life character who certainly appears to have led a glamorous life, and who wrote that very funny song, 'And Her Mother Came Too,' and I envy Mrs Wilson, the housekeeper. I envy Mrs Wilson her total mastery of domestic management. She may have run out of the homemade marmalade that she knows that the Countess of Trentham would prefer, but can you imagine keeping track of such a detail? Housekeeping is nothing but an aggregate of such details. In a scene near the end, we find her taking note of the rotation of the linen; if she didn't bother, she says, the housemaids would wear the same dozen napkins down to rags. I nodded sagely. Not three weeks ago, I pulled all the bed linen out of the closet and refolded it, putting the winter sheets at the back. And when a plate comes out of the dishwasher, it goes to the bottom of the stack.
We employ a cleaning service to send someone every other week to scrub the bathrooms and the kitchen, and we send the laundry out, but the rest of it's up to me. I expect that most readers are in the same boat. The girls from the cleaning service are recently-arrived immigrants whose English isn't very good, but eventually, they learn the language and move on. Inequitable as our education system still is, it nonetheless spreads out the means of advancement evenly enough so that hardly anybody smart enough to do Mrs Wilson's job, or Mrs Croft's, or Jennings's, isn't faced with more rewarding opportunities - or, in the alternative, able to command a figure in the high five figures to pick up after someone else. And that's how it ought to be.
Which means that we're all going to have to learn to look after ourselves. That's why there's Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House. I have owned this book for some time, but never spent more than half an hour leafing through it, which just goes to show you what a slatternly housekeeper I really am, for all my rotational savvy. Dust the upholstery once a week? Goodness. Avoid all foods made with raw eggs? I don't think so. Mrs Mendelson is just a tad severe, and certainly far more safety-conscious than I've ever thought it necessary to be. Nevertheless, her second chapter, 'Easing into a Routine,' lays out the job in an orderly way, so that you can decide for yourself what you're willing to take on and then follow the author's advice regarding the order in which to do it. The main thing is to have a routine of some kind. I've known more than a few opera fans who do their do-ragging during the Met's Saturday afternoon broadcasts. For my part, I prefer to watch movies, or rather listen to them. Whatever its claims to cinematic greatness, 'Gosford Park' was tailor-made for tidying-up.
3 June 2003: Manhattan already seems as quiet as August. Over the Memorial Day weekend, the streets were almost disturbingly empty. The coming of summer weather means that getting away from it all no longer requires boarding a plane. Did everyone - especially those who hadn't been off the reservation since last September - decide to slip out of town now that the hills were green and the beaches sunny? It felt that way. Kathleen and I didn't mind. We'd had a lovely week in Bermuda at the beginning of May, and two weeks after getting back we gave our annual spring party. By Memorial Day, all we wanted were quiet hours on the balcony.
From the look of things, most of the people who have them don't use their balconies, and builders have stopped tacking them on. It's true that few balconies are as protected as ours, built into a corner and not directly over a street. A school friend of mine lived for a while at a building not two blocks away that he called Cookie Towers, because of the circular balconies that were built out from every corner. His mother's apartment had such a balcony, and it was utterly unusable. It might as well have been in a wind tunnel. The blast coming up or down Third Avenue blew away everything that wasn't nailed down, creating an atmosphere about as restful as the wing tip of a jet. Even on a quiet balcony there is the problem of dirt. Cars may be fitted with emission controls, but trucks certainly aren't, and if I let three or four days go by without taking Windex to the tabletops, the accumulated particulate matter turns the paper towel lamp black. Finally, perhaps, there's the problem of furnishing a balcony. There aren't any garden centers in Manhattan that sell inexpensive outdoor tables and chairs, and even if there were, they would last for only two or three seasons - there's no place to store the stuff during the winter.
And not every balcony looks out to the horizon, beyond the Queens County line. We knock wood every time we drink it in. We've lost bits and pieces of our view over the years, but the focal line hasn't been blocked any further, although of course it might be. We will enjoy the view while it lasts. For all the thousands of windows that we can see from the balcony, our situation isn't visually different from that of early hominids, who preferred to settle in groves of trees in the middle of broad, open savannahs.
Our balcony is leafy enough, what with several large houseplants that move outside as soon as the danger of frost is past (and frosts occur on quiet Manhattan balconies only when the rest of the world is frozen solid), a few tubs of daylilies, a large pot of herbs, and an annual renewal of impatiens and geraniums. We've got two novelties this year, a pair of box bushes - one of them isn't doing too well; I don't think it was healthy when the florist, whom I'd been after since last fall to order one for me, finally delivered it at the end of April - and an obelisk of morning glories. There's a morning-glory-like vine in Bermuda that's said to grow as much as a foot a day; taking the smaller scale of our balcony into account, the seeds that I planted eight weeks ago are equally robust. The obelisk is a metal frame that sits on a large pot of earth, and I can rotate the whole business so that we can enjoy the flowers as they bloom. For years, we fussed over vines that trailed through the balcony railing and presented their blossoms outward to the sun, and the passing pigeons, but not to us. Now we can foil, if not fool, Mother Nature, just a little.
We like to have dinner out on the balcony, but all the cooking is done in the kitchen. The use of hibachis and barbecue grills is illegal. That's fine with me. The one time I did try breaking the law, the smoke billowed up but wouldn't blow away; it was as if we'd glassed the balcony in (as some people do, often to make an extra bedroom). The smoke just hung there, suffocating us, until I opened the living room door, whereupon the smoke filled the apartment as well. Aside from the small matter of breathing, Kathleen and I don't often have dinner before nightfall, even in the summer, and cooking out by the light of a few candles is something you try only once.
This year, dazed by the happy torture of deciding which books to keep and where to shelve them, I find myself stealing out onto the balcony with a book that I haven't read in years, or a book that I've owned for years but never gotten round to reading. An instance of the former is Nancy Mitford's 'The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles.' It may be an instance of the latter as well. I don't recall ever actually reading the book through. I nibbled on bits and pieces and looked at the pictures, but to be quite frank, this book was too old for me until recently. It is not a conventional history - it's not even an unconventional one. It doesn't so much teach as confirm: familiar with the high society of the middle of the twentieth century, Nancy Mitford illuminates the beau monde at the end of the seventeenth as if from inside. Her brief, somewhat eccentric chapters are like chocolates in a box, perfect for stealing, no more than two at a time, in fugitive moments. And then it is back to the books.
Now that I have finally begun to write my way out of this daze, I am mindful of a matter that I have been discussing with a dear correspondent. My friend wanted to know how, when reading the novels of a long-dead author, one might reliably simulate or recreate the state of mind that the author sought to address, so as to get the most out of the work. I ran off, as I usually do, on a tangent that caught my attention. Forget the long-dead author, I replied; how do I read things that I myself wrote twenty or thirty years ago? Where does the memory of what I meant really lie, in my head or on the yellowing page? What it comes down to is the almost metaphysical mechanics that enable a writer to condense the fog of mental impressions into a precipitate of black words on white paper. What's more, insofar as the act of reading orders the mind, clearing up another fog, it is a continuation, not a reversing, of the writing process. And, seen from this perspective, how very little reading and writing appear to have in common with talking! Talking is almost as mercurial as daydreaming, borrowing almost as heavily on unvoiced assumptions and unexamined preconceptions. Speech is obviously more a matter of gesture and suasion than one of words and meaning. When I write, I plant a concrete slip of myself that will come to life every time it is read. The only thing I know is that it will never mean quite I meant when I wrote it, even to me. Anyone who sees writing as a business of nailing down certainties will probably be frustrated by this fluidity of meaning, but to me it is the most fertile of miracles.
30 March 2002
Between the heart and the head lies the soul, and soulfulness is not the least thing we ask of thought and thinkers. Liberal humanism, as much as it is a theory, is a style - even, at moments, a look, an appearance - of openness turned inward, social tolerance, geniality writ large... Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, April 1, 2002, p. 93 'The Porcupine,' a review of 'Wittgenstein's Poker,' by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.
When Theodor Adorno said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, he unwittingly launched then thousand essay questions. The remark still resounds, not only in German and not always in ways that Adorno would have wished it to be understood. But one of its legitimate implications, it seems to me, is that the expression 'European Civilization' should have become unusable after 1945. Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIX No. 6 (April 11, 2002), p. 55 'Surviving for Art,' a review of Marcel Reich-Ranicki's autobiography.
A third passage that has also been knocking about in my head in the last few days is a litany, delivered by Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, to journalist Nicholas Lemann (it appears on page 48 of the same issue of The New Yorker as Adam Gopnik's review). Libby runs through a list of events, all of which occurred in the past ten years and each of which might be taken as an example of American pusillanimity. Somalia. The first World Trade Center attack. The embassy bombings. And so on. Because the United States did not respond with full force to these violations, Osama bin Laden could credibly claim that Americans, being 'morally weak,' might be attacked with impunity, and perhaps even be driven from Middle Eastern soil altogether. Libby's point here was to underline the current Administration's determination to correct that impression. No more Mr Nice Guy.
In a bizarre way, Neal Ascherson's indictment of the term 'European Civilization' is right at home with the spirit of American belligerence. If you believe that the Holocaust established the bankruptcy of liberal humanism - that's what 'European Civilization' stands for here - then there's no point in trying to oppose violence with anything but more violence. I don't believe anything of the kind. My heart and head both respond in harmony to Adam Gopnik's remark about 'openness turned inward.' Ascherson and Libby oblige me to satisfy myself, however, that my faith in liberal humanism isn't wishful thinking.
Here's why I think Adorno and Ascherson are wrong: the values of liberal humanism still have not, in the two hundred years since the end of the ancien régime (not just in France), been absorbed by the masses of newly enfranchised people. Two hundred years might seem like a long time, but it is not, evidently, time enough for a new social and political order to refashion a body of ideals that was cut to suit an elite. Let me put it more simply: liberal humanism could be charged with failing to halt the Holocaust only if the old elite of European had swelled to include all Europeans. If old Europe's rich culture had been available to, and been embraced by, every European - not just by the bourgeoisie, in patches - then the persistence of liberal humanism would indeed be impossible to square withe the fact of the Holocaust. But the democratization of the West tended to work in quite the opposite way, the way of populism. The French Revolution began as a high-minded experiment conducted by an elite, but onced it was swamped by the populists - the sansculottes - of Paris, liberalism gave way to terror. Napoleon may have put a stop to the horrors of the Revolution, but he hardly reinstated the liberalism of its inception. The liberal spirit - and for a brief but inclusive definition, Mr Gopnik's can't be beat - was firmly resisted by the powers that ruled Central Europe, even when they introduced democratizing reforms, but even where it was embraced - principally in England - it did not trickle down very far into the population. It couldn't. If liberal humanism has a fault, it is this: it requires long and serious education.
That's what I mean by 'a body of ideals cut to suit an elite.' The old elites of Europe could afford long and serious educations, for their smarter sons, anyway, and even for a handful of bright and curious women. Even the richest of modern Western societies can't afford to provide that resource to every citizen. What we haven't yet figured out is how to teach liberal humanism in the course of twelve years of mandatory schooling. It may very well be that we're wasting our time trying to teach it to children - who would be better made to learn some manners.
What the Holocaust proves about liberal humanism is this: without it, democracies succumb to monstrous paranoid disorders. After 1945, we learned that we needed more - and more and more - European Civilization.
Copyright (c) 2003 Pourover Press