Faking a Prophet

National Review Online, September 29, 2011

The e-mail arrived on my computer, garlanded with exclamation marks and entitled "Holy Smoke!!" It was a day or so after the slaughter at the World Trade Center — murders, it seemed, that had been forecast nearly half a millennium ago by Nostradamus, the 16th Century French seer. He had written, I was informed, the following words:

In the year of the new century and nine months,

From the sky will come a great King of Terror,

The sky will burn at forty-five degrees.

Fire approaches the great new city…

In the city of York there will be a great collapse,

Two twin brothers torn apart by chaos.

While the fortress falls the great leader will succumb.

Third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

Spooky, eh? A lot of people seemed to think so. All over the country Scullys were transformed into Mulders. There was a run on Nostradamus books (the New York Times reported that in the week of September 11th no fewer than three editions of Nostradamus were in the Amazon Top 25, a feat more typically associated with that much younger wizard, Harry Potter). At least one website dedicated to the far-sighted Frenchman has had to suspend part of its service due to "excessive load." Amazingly, the extra demand had not been foreseen.

The problem, however, is that the two chilling quatrains are as bogus as Big Foot, as credible as a Clinton, as ridiculous as Roswell. Of course, this sort of thing has been happening for years, sometimes, even, in a good cause. In 1943, in an attempt to terrify the notoriously superstitious Nazi leadership, fake quatrains prophesying their doom were parachuted, like some mystical maquis, deep into the heart of occupied Europe.

More recently, a quatrain purporting to warn that in December 2000 "the village idiot" would be proclaimed leader of "the greatest power" consoled bitter Democrats in the aftermath of the presidential election. They should have known better. The verses were obviously faked. As we all know, the real "village idiot" went abroad and grew a beard.

Turning to the "WTC" verses, the latest, and easily most tasteless hoax, we find that the second quatrain ("In the city of York…") is entirely made up, much of it a borrowing, ironically, from a 1990s paper by a Canadian student looking to demonstrate how ambiguous sounding verses can be used to "predict" anything. The four lines of the first quatrain are, by the low standards of this field, somewhat more authentic. They appear to be cobbled together from random, and heavily modified, pieces of the great man's work. To take one example, there is a reference in the prophecies to a year and a number of months, but the year is 1999 and the number of months is seven (something that led the seemingly innumerate fashion designer Paco Rabane to shut up shop and flee Paris in, August 1999, ahead, he thought, of an imminent crash landing by the space station Mir). Russia's cosmic jalopy, however, continued to lurch round the planet while unkind skeptics gathered outside Mr. Rabane's shuttered offices, champagne glasses in hand, and celebrated an apocalypse averted.

The first "WTC" quatrain is not, in fact, the only example of cut and paste prophecy in the Nostracademy. Followers of the enigmatic Mr. Baines of the Nostradamus Society of America (it is worth visiting their website, just for the Vincent Price-style greeting) will know that their latter-day sage has adopted what he calls a "collage method" to interpret the prophecies. Using this technique, with its unfortunate reminder of that old saying about chimpanzees, typewriters, and Shakespeare, it was possible to claim that the World Trade Center attack (which, apparently, left Nostradamians "shocked but not surprised") was predicted in the Frenchman's writings. By jumbling up the words from no fewer than five quatrains, Mr. Baines has assembled a passage that appears to show that the knowledgeable Nostradamus had forecast the tragedy.

It appears not far from the age of the great millennium

In the month of September from the sky,
Will come the great king of terror,
At 45 degrees, the sky will burn,
The bird of prey appears and offers itself to the heavens
Instantly a huge scattered flame leaps up.

And so on…

With nearly one thousand quatrains to choose from to make up a text, this ghoulish grab bag of mixed-up verse proves absolutely nothing — other than some people's desperation to find meaning in gibberish.

And that is something that Nostradamus makes it very easy to do. A physician who built, amazingly, a reputation as an effective doctor on the basis of his "cures" for the plague (sawdust, cloves, roses, and a few other bits and pieces) he was, clearly, a remarkable salesman with a good sense of what was going to pull in the paying customers. So, in the introduction to his principal work, he cleverly portrays himself as an exciting man of mystery, an intriguing wand-toting Merlin "sitting by night in [his] secret study."

The verses themselves are filled with the sort of magical sounding apocalyptica that will always find a readership, and even today enliven any long wait in the supermarket checkout line. Of course, the wily seer took care to couch his warnings in such vague terms that he could never ever be proved to have got the future wrong. It was, grumbled a perceptive contemporary, the Englishman William Fulke, a clever trick. The "craftye Nostradamus," he complained, wrapped his predictions "in such dark wryncles of obscuritye" that no man could make any sense of them. But that is only partly the point. The ambiguity of the text actually adds to its attractiveness. Humanity likes a riddle. Besides, readers could fill in the gaps with their own imagination. They might not be able to make any sense out of the quatrains, but they could make nonsense, and for most people that would do just as well.

So, take a quatrain such as this:

When Venus will be covered by the Sun
Beneath the splendor will be a hidden form:
Mercury will have exposed them to the fire,
Through warlike noise it will be insulted.

And, so far as the authors of Nostradamus — Prophecies for Women are concerned, those lines can be reinterpreted as follows: "The mercurial nature of women will already have begun to expose men to a fiery new aspect of life, and through militancy on the part of women this maleness will be exposed and insulted."

Now there's something to look forward to.

In the view of the writers of Prophecies for Women, Nostradamus had put the PC in prophecy. He had, apparently, predicted a "paradigm shift that will place women in most of the positions of power throughout the civilized word during the years of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries," including, the authors guessed, the November 2000 election to the presidency of a certain former Texas governor. Wow. Except that it was meant to be Ann Richards. Oh well.

Other seemingly more successful predictions, the ones we tend to hear about, are the results of similarly wishful thinking, much of which is dissected in James Randi's indispensable and marvelously sarcastic The Mask of Nostradamus. As Mr. Randi shows, essential tools for the true believers include credulity, shaky historical knowledge, dubious translations, dyslexic anagrams ("Pay, Nay, Loron" for Napoleon) and a refusal to contemplate the harsh facts of Renaissance cartography. "Hister," I'm afraid, is the old name for the lower Danube; it is not, as is often claimed, a coy reference to a future Fuhrer.

But for many, probably most, people, none of Mr. Randi's arguments will make any difference. The notion of prophecy is more fun than dull reality, and, in a curious way, it can be a comfort to the gullible, a reassuring, if misleading, suggestion that there is at least some predictability and order in a changing world. It fits too with the mood of our superstitious times, with its shifting, uncertain notions of truth. These days, skepticism doesn't sell, and logic no longer convinces, even if it ever gets a chance to make itself heard. James Randi's book can be difficult to find, but his 16th century competitor fills the cyber shelves. Nostradamus enthusiasts at Amazon.com can buy The Prophecies, The Complete Prophecies, The Unpublished Prophecies, The Secret Prophecies, The Further Prophecies, The Final Prophecies, The New Revelations, The Secrets, The Dream Book, The Conversations (Volumes One, Two, and Three), The Essential, The Code, The Visions of The Future, The Final Reckoning, The Conspiracy, Across The Centuries, Predictions of World War III, and, most alarmingly, Comet of Nostradamus: August 2004 — Impact!.

On a personal note, I would be grateful if those people who have ordered Nostradamus 1999: Who Will Survive? could contact me. I have a bridge to sell them.

Pinter’s Poison

National Review Online, September 26, 2001

The Lincoln Center's festival of plays by Harold Pinter was, the critics said, one of the highlights of that long ago Manhattan summer, that summer before, the summer of 2001. The sequence of nine pieces was a celebration and a tribute, New York's homage to England's most celebrated dramatist, a man that the city had, apparently, taken to its heart. To Newsday, the plays were "deliriously rewarding," while the Village Voice found them "a source of pleasure and contemplation." One writer in the New York Times talked of "genius," while another, gleefully anticipating the menace of a typical Pinter production, warned that "alarm sirens should be screaming at Lincoln Center. Evil has arrived…" Well, the alarm sirens did scream in New York, but not at the Lincoln Center. Evil did come to Manhattan, but it was no play. And down, down in Hell, in that wrecked abomination that they call Ground Zero, the rescuers still dig, looking for traces of people, including, quite possibly, some who might have attended a Pinter festival just a few weeks before.

With his audience in body bags, and the city that had so recently honored him torn and broken, you might expect that the eloquent Harold Pinter could find something to say, something to let us know, in words that we could never hope to find, what he thought about this tragedy.

And so, in his own fashion, he did.

On September 20th, Pinter cosigned a letter to the London Daily Telegraph that gives us his view on downtown's mass murder. It begins with a brief nod to New York's dead, but then, comes briskly to the real point. "Stop the war!" As the letter is, effectively, addressed to America, we can only assume that its authors believe that the responsibility to abandon any fight lies with the U.S., not bin Laden. Retaliation, they argue, would be pointless. A crusade against countries which "are said to" harbor terrorists will not, the writers warn, bring safety to the "cities of America and Europe."

The "are said to" betrays, I suspect, the skillful dramatist's touch, the insertion of ambiguity, where there is, in fact, none.

The greater criminals, the letter implies, are to be found in London and Washington. "In Afghanistan, four million people are homeless and scores of thousands are starving or dying…because of sanctions, imposed by the West in their attempt to force the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden." It is a new variant on that old tired theme of moral equivalence, the perverse logic once used to support the claim that there was no meaningful difference between the home of the Gulag and the land of the free.

And, as always, those making such a case need to keep clear of any awkward, inconvenient reality. Why the Taliban should want to play host to bin Laden is never discussed in the letter, and nor is there is any mention of the fact that Afghanistan's misery began long before the imposition of sanctions. There is no suggestion either that the Taliban's savagery, of a type so primitive that "medieval" would be an compliment, might have something to do with the country's current predicament. We are told nothing of the relief workers, driven out of Kabul by the Taliban's village Stalins, for being too modern, too helpful, too threatening. There is silence too about the regime's laws, cruel dictates that deny people medical care, or even the right to work, because they are, unfortunately for them, women. Widow? Well, that's just too bad. Mr. Pinter and his friends also seem to have little to say about those tens of thousands of Afghanistan's brightest who have fled, escapees from a nation where going beardless can be a crime, exiles from a country that they might otherwise have helped to rebuild.

But perhaps we should not be surprised at these omissions. Pinter's plays, renowned for their enigmatic silences, are as famous for what they leave out as for what they put in.

Equally well known, at least over in England, are Mr. Pinter's leftist politics, and it is these that place the letter to the Daily Telegraph in its real context. Now, he is, of course, a man of the theater, and these views may in part be a pose, a thrilling role, perhaps, for a dramatist who has always seemed to relish the drama of opposition and the excitement of some safely imaginary martyrdom, but that doesn't make them any more attractive. We saw this display at its self-indulgent worst during the Thatcher years, a time when the rich, successful playwright liked to portray himself as a dissident (he was a founding signatory of Britain's Charter 88, a British pressure group of which the very name was an insult to Charter 77's brave fight against the Communist system in Czechoslovakia), a fantasy Havel for Britain's alienated chattering classes.

With humbug comes hypocrisy. A self-proclaimed humanitarian (of course!) Pinter is, he likes to remind us, a campaigner against torture, and yet he is also "an active delegate" of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that likes to claim that Castro's Caribbean charnel house "is the most democratic state in the world." Good leftist that he is, Pinter is, we must presume, an egalitarian, but he is an egalitarian with a big house, a fat bank account and a ludicrously self-important website, a website where he is at pains to remind us that he is married to Lady Antonia Fraser. Don't worry comrade, we peasants know our place.

And through it all, dank and poisonous, runs a visceral anti-Americanism. It is an old European infection, still all too common and with more than a whiff of the continent's dark 20th century about it, and it is likely to cause trouble as this crisis unfolds. It is a hating, jealous assumption of moral and intellectual superiority, the wrath of the pygmy who has discovered that he is no giant. You can hear this rage in the virulence of Pinter's language over the years (the U.S.A., is a "bully," "a bovine monster out of control," its crimes are "systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless") the one-sidedness of his causes, and in his choice of favored authoritarian regimes (Castro's Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua), a curious selection that would seem to hint that the playwright is yet another European intellectual who still sees something sexy in the socialist jackboot.

Under these circumstances, Harold Pinter's signature on this letter should be seen for what it is, a particularly tasteless attack on an America he despises, whose hospitality he has recently accepted, whose checks he has just cashed and whose dead he now insults.

On Afghan Plains

National Review Online, September 24, 2001

Afghanistan is, say those here who tell the U.S. to do nothing, a graveyard of empire, a land where American soldiers should not go, a mountainous desolation filled with a savage race of warriors that we would be crazy to challenge, a place, as Kipling so often described it, of terrifying cruelty.

 When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come up to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

 It is a landscape, runs the argument, where technological advantage counts for little. These, we are warned, are the fearless guerrillas who could shoot down a Soviet attack helicopter or defy the best of Imperial Britain.

 A scrimmage in a Border Station —

A canter down some dark defile —

Two thousand pounds of education

Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —

The Crammer's Boast, the Squadron's pride

Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

 The Taliban understand the deterrent power of their country's daunting image. Speaking to the press on Friday, the Afghan regime's ambassador to Pakistan seemed to revel in the country's bloodstained past, "So the only master of the world wants to threaten us, but make no mistake: Afghanistan, as it was in the past — the Great Britain, he came, the Red Army, he came — Afghanistan is a swamp. People enter here laughing, are exiting injured."

 The ambassador's message is as clear as his grammar is shaky, but the truth, needless to say, is rather less forbidding. For a would-be invader, the lessons of Afghan history are not quite so bleak as myth would suggest. Contrary to legend, and for all the undoubted ferocity of the country's defenders, history shows that it is possible to mount a successful attack on Afghanistan. Those fearsome tribesmen can be beaten in a fight. The Soviets often achieved this during their long conflict with the Afghans, and, what is less well known today, so did the British in the course of theirs.

 Britain's first (1838-42) and second (1878-80) Afghan wars saw a good number of battlefield victories by Queen Victoria's troops. The problem, however, then as now, was that winning battles was not the same as winning wars. For all their formidable reputation, the redcoats proved no more successful than the Red Army in establishing any lasting authority over this troublesome territory

 It was a failure that was symbolized for generations of Britons by Dr. William Brydon. The Victorians often took a mawkish pleasure from images of their own failure, so long as that failure was either heroic or tragic. Dr. Brydon, clinging to his pony as he made it into Jalalabad in January 1842, managed to be both. Battered and bruised, the brave surgeon was the sole survivor of a British exodus from Kabul. 16,000 people, the scraps of an army and its camp followers, had fled the Afghan capital the week before. Dr. Brydon was the only person to reach safety. It was possibly the most humiliating moment in the history of the Empire, and a defining moment in the creation of the West's image of the invincible Afghan.

 Poor Dr. Brydon had, in the most horrifying way imaginable, been taught the other main lesson of Afghan history. Don't stay too long. Where the both the British and the Soviets went wrong, militarily speaking, was not in their initial onslaught, but in their attempts to impose alien rule on the country. Afghanistan may be a fissile half-state filled with a number of feuding ethnic groups, but, as much as its Pathans, Uzbeks, and Tajiks may loathe each other, they tend to hate the interfering outsider far, far more. And in their hatred, they have always had an ally in the country's brutal terrain. Those who want to control Afghanistan have to declare war on geography itself.

 The story of the Soviet intervention is well known, but in its failure (if not its motivation) it was not so different from those two British attempts well over a century ago. In 1838, the British succeeded in installing their own puppet ruler in Kabul. The sybaritic and cruel Shah Shujah failed to win any indigenous support, and the English presence was quickly seen as an intolerable infidel insult. "The mullahs," noted one officer, "are preaching against us from one end of the country to the other." It was an almost inevitable consequence of the invaders' arrogance that political ineptitude and cultural insensitivity were accompanied by military incompetence. In a country used to the politics of endless rivalry, the utterly predictable (except it seemed, to the Brits) betrayals, treachery and slaughter followed in due course. It was not so long later that Dr. Brydon was making his melancholy way back to Jalalabad.

 Significantly, however, in terms of current debate in the U.S., it has been forgotten that the last stage of the war, a punitive expedition, went relatively well for Britain. It was an example of how a carefully defined mission with clear and limited objectives can succeed as much in Afghanistan as anywhere else. Shah Shujah was dead (killed, naturally, under a flag of truce) by the time that the British returned to Kabul but the Afghan capital was reoccupied long enough for them to proclaim a somewhat unconvincing victory and return to the comforts of their Raj.

 Britain's second Afghan war followed a similar course. Attempts to reduce the country's independence again came to nothing, despite the occupation of Kabul on a number of occasions (at the end of the first of which, Queen's Victoria representative was murdered in the now traditional way). The invaders also fared little better in the rest of the country, which remained uncontrollable despite some notable British victories, which the Afghans, in their stubborn way, simply chose to ignore.

 London at last got the message. Pride saved by some conventional military successes, the British withdrew, having managed to leave Kabul in the hands of a new ruler, Abdur Rahman. Rahman was (genuinely) independent enough to satisfy local sensibilities, militarily competent (he managed to impose something roughly resembling unity on the country) and not actively hostile. So far as neighbors of Afghanistan are concerned that is about as good as it gets. Thereafter problems on the frontier with British India rarely rose much above a state of vaguely criminal disorder, periodically and effectively policed by the occasional intervention by Her Majesty's military.

 Today's challenge for America is more complicated, and more dangerous than anything ever faced by the British. Much of the solution probably lies in the shrewd and cleverly oblique approach recently advocated by James Robbins on NRO. Nevertheless, if as seems likely, some U.S. troops see action in Afghanistan, the real lesson of history is that they can prevail against this supposedly invincible enemy.

 But they mustn't try and run his country.

After Darkness

National Review Online, September 17, 2001

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

As the sun sets over an outraged Manhattan skyline small groups of people begin to gather outside their apartment buildings. They are holding candles, and they stand together, a little awkwardly, somewhat embarrassed. This is not a city that is comfortable with open displays of sentiment. This is a town where neighbors like to keep to themselves. But this night they stand together, sometimes looking to that new emptiness to the south, as the light cupped in their hands flickers, but never, quite, seems to go out. There's a soft wind, a perfect early autumn breeze that blows against the flags that seem to be everywhere, outside a bar, in the window of a supermarket, on a baby stroller, outside our local firehouse, a base now of brave men in mourning. The breeze also catches this city's newest, and saddest, banners, little paper fliers stuck to the walls, to the phone booths, to the streetlights, each one carrying a name.

Robert Sutcliffe, Larry Boisseau, Gilbert Ruiz, Sara Harvey, Ye Wei Liang…

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

Each piece of paper has a story to tell. Each is different, and yet each, heartbreakingly, is the same. They almost all come with that identical, awful heading, "Missing," evidence of tragedy and last, desperate hope. Readers are provided with addresses, ages, height, distinguishing characteristics, jewelry, and, often, a final, doomed location, usually a floor or a stairwell in the buildings that we are still learning to call the "former" World Trade Center. There are photographs, wedding-day joyful, passport unflattering, graduation-day solemn, awkward at a company dinner, smiling happily with a laughing toddler, raising a glass in a restaurant, posing proudly in a fireman's uniform.

Linda Oliva, Taimar Khan, Jan Maciejewski, Gene Calvi, Arnold Lim…

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

The Armory on Lexington Avenue and 26th Street has become one of the locations where relatives of the missing can go to give these details to the authorities. The building's monumental beaux-arts solidity gives off a reassuring aura of civic order. It is a red-brick counterpart to the city's tirelessly effective mayor, Rudy Giuliani; it is a place where government is doing what it should do, and doing it well. Kindly ladies sit in little makeshift booths dispensing hot meals and snacks. Military types jump in and out of humvees, shockingly soldierly in a city where camouflage is usually only a fashion statement. Those little fliers are all over the place, attached, seemingly, to every surface, even to the media trucks that line the sidewalks. I see a middle-aged woman reach out to touch one. She strokes the paper, softly.

John Scharf, Terry Gazzini, Alexis Leduc, Jason Jacobs, Vanavah Thompson…

It is not far from the Armory to Union Square, the place where downtown is traditionally said to begin. Despite two decades of gentrification, it is still a little scrappy, still believable in its century-old role as a rallying point for demonstration and protest. Tonight it is, once more, full. Thousands have come here, again carrying candles. Other flames flicker by little makeshift shrines, illuminating the faces that stare out from posters of the missing, pasted, to the trees, to the walls, to the entrance to the subway station, to the concrete of the construction barriers.

Arlene Babakitis, Kevin Williams, Joanna Sigismund, Kristy Ryan, Margaret Echtermann…

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

For a city that has got too used to the whiff of acrid smoke wafting up from ruined Lower Manhattan, the sweet smell given off by the candles is gentle relief. There is music too, "We Shall Overcome "sung beautifully by women with intense, clever faces, from NYU probably. Sung tonight, it is a memorial hymn, but also, perhaps, a reproach to those mourners who want justice as well as "peace." In this part of the square that night, there is a taste of future controversy, with banners that protest American bombs rather than the American bombed. Other posters warn against the temptations of racism. Fair enough, but we have no need of lectures, not now, not here. "War is not the answer," read the placards in one corner. We will see.

But we are downtown, a place where people prefer to do their own thing, so others, less political, start to sing different songs, from slow tunes to show tunes ("New York, New York," extempore and ragged, never sounded better), from pop hits to, several times, "The Star-Spangled Banner. " In an age of recorded music, we no longer remember lyrics, but two men who do, lead the way, coordinating the effort for the rest of us. It was a memorial service, Big Apple style, moving and raucous, a wake, a party and a jam session. Someone starts playing a sax. To add to the din, a jet, a fighter, swoops low overhead. In our newly learned reflex, we all look up.

Union Square, September 14, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are cheers too, cheers for the fire truck making its way further downtown, and applause as someone succeeds, finally, in placing a little American flag in the hand of the statue of Washington that stands in the middle of the square. As the Stars and Stripes slide in to old George's metal grasp, the refrain goes out, "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A."

Things are quieter in Washington Square Park, ten blocks or so to the south. A few people are sitting there, some, still, with candles, which are guttering now as they slowly burn out. It is late. Someone has a guitar and is playing songs from the Sixties. An appreciative old man, eccentric in baseball cap and Allen Ginsberg beard, spins round and round, dancing to the music in the jig of the irrevocably deluded. At the north end of the park there is a triumphal arch, splendid evidence of Victorian confidence. It commemorates the centenary of Washington's first inauguration (which took place here in New York, of course, not far from what we now know as Ground Zero). Prolonged restoration work means that it is surrounded by a supposedly temporary fence and this fence too now bears the spoor of Tuesday's slaughter, the evidence of our lost confidence, those poor hopeful, hopeless scraps of paper, garlanded with flowers and flags, illuminated by clusters of votive candles.

Sean Fagan, Andy O'Grady, Michael Baksi, Giovanna Gambale, Harry Goody…

Normally, if you gaze south from here, towards Houston Street and beyond, you can expect a view of the Twin Towers. At this time of the evening they glitter and shimmer, transformed from their daytime ordinariness. The blink, blink, blink of the lights at the end of their antennae become Manhattan's lodestars, reassuring against the backdrop of a blank, urban darkness. But not tonight. All that can be seen now is a vast cloud of smoke, transformed by the rescue operation's klieg lights into a ghostly, ghastly unnatural white. And we all know what is behind that cloud.

Nothing.

Two Cities

National Review Online, September 15, 2001 

East 51st Street, September 15, 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford

There is a border now that divides Manhattan, somewhere to the south of Fourteenth Street. To those of us who have not crossed it since last Tuesday, it is “down there,” a once familiar territory where shops, schools, restaurants, and even some streets are closed. It is, they say, a shuttered dusty place, the gateway to the nightmare that we now call Ground Zero, the nightmare we never thought was possible. Not here. North of this line, we live in what is a very different city, a city with more of a resemblance to the Gotham that we once knew, that confident city that flourished here in the distant past, before September 11. We are the lucky ones and we know it. Even on Tuesday, life in this safer zone did not, quite, stop. Emerging from my Midtown office that grim, scarred, scared noon, Madison Avenue was quiet, too quiet, but there were still people in the street. They were talking not screaming, they were walking to the shops, not running for their lives. There were, of course, reminders of atrocity elsewhere, the scraps of overheard conversation, frantic and tense, the callers on their cellular phones, redial, redial, redial, and then, at last through, their shouted cries of reassurance audible to all, amplified by anxiety and the high volume etiquette of mobile communication, “No, no, I’m OK, don’t worry.”

And the smoke, not billowing, of course, on Madison and 50th (over Midtown the sky that terrible day remained untouched, a bright, brilliant, taunting blue), but three miles away, “down there.” It mocked us, a cruel cumulus to the south, death’s dark expanding banner, a bleak smudge on the heavens. It was, we already knew, a funeral pyre, and, in its height it was a perverse tribute to the immense size of those two oddly ungainly icons, the twin towers that now meant more to us than we ever could have imagined.

In this tranquil, still civilized part of Manhattan, our taste of smoke came later, with just a whiff on Wednesday when the wind turned north. It was a delayed, acrid belch from the beast that had consumed so many, so much, so quickly, so soon. Downtown’s butchery left other traces too in our zone of unnatural calm, the dust-covered fire engine, parked at 6 A.M. outside the station on a cordoned-off 51st Street, the cops chatting there quietly, tired (how long had they been up?), but still watchful, as a man who tried to bike past them was quick to find out.

There were the flags at half mast, a somber memorial fluttering from the police station, the firehouse and the office buildings. You could see other flags too, less funereal, more defiant, proudly on display in new, unexpected venues, at the entrance to a local bar, on the antenna of a delivery truck, behind the counter of a store. The Red, White and Blue flies “down there” too. We can see it on television, giving some dignity to that other, devastated New York, hanging from the ruins of what was once someone’s work place, put there by a rescue worker with a touch of poetry in his soul. We can only hope that he has survived.

Midtown Manhattan, September 15, 2011, © Andrew Stuttaford

At the deli, at lunchtime the second day, supplies have run a little low (the bridges were closed); the small depleted pile of sandwiches looks even careworn than usual. ”How old are these?," asks the customer, for an instant the voice of that aggressive, querulous Noo Yawk we all know so well. Then he realizes he doesn’t care. He buys his food with a rueful smile. There are more important things to worry about.

The bars in my neighborhood are open, not full, but not empty either, and in the Thai place where a friend (a refugee from an emptied Tribeca) and I ate on Wednesday night, the tables were busy. It will take more than murderers to persuade Manhattan to cook for itself. Only the buzz was different. There is anger now, as well as sadness, and more talk of international politics, probably, than would normally be heard in this restaurant in the course of a year. Osama Bin Laden, it is a name we all know now.

Thursday dawns, and with it, traffic, and some suggestion of a normal life, returns to much of Manhattan. But this is a flawed, illusory normality, undermined by unease and subverted by our sense of unearned survival. At the tip of the island, the firemen and the police still dig, stoic in their own tragedy (how many dead, two hundred, three hundred?) a line that held, a stolid link with the city’s fragile ordered past, the source, we dream, of miracles. Six firemen saved, the television tells us, sheltered in their SUV. They live! We celebrate, high fives in Hell. And then our joy is denied. There is, it turns out, another explanation, and then thoughts return “down there,” to the people we knew, and will know no more.

Night falls. I leave my office building. From the usually taciturn security guard, I hear an almost gentle “take care.” There is a curious smell in the air, pungent and harsh. Meanwhile, outside the hospitals, the relatives wait, photographs in their hands. Have we seen that brother, that wife, that cousin? They were last witnessed at their desk, glimpsed in an elevator, seen in a lobby, and now there is nothing, just silence. Later, past midnight, there is the sound of thunder, and the heavens light up. For an instant, we look up alarmed.

But this time the storm in the sky comes from nature, not man.

Speechless

National  Review Online, September 11, 2001

We are used, those of us who work in the financial markets, to watching the news as it breaks. The information snakes across our screens, impassive, unrelenting, flowing in the orange of a Bloomberg headline, or the boldface red of Reuters' breaking news. With luck, it is something quick, something timely, something to give a trader the edge, enough perhaps, to make that extra buck. There are televisions too, mounted, on the walls of our Midtown office, hanging , even, from the ceiling, relaying garrulous, greedy CNBC, and the nonstop chatter of a world going about its business. And then the chatter stopped. On the TV screens, we could see the smoke, billowing murderous and black, out of that first brutally wounded tower, a dismaying repeat, it seemed then, of an earlier tragedy. The messages went out to Downtown, to the people we knew were there. Some said that they might evacuate their building, others were not so sure. It looked as if, they hoped, everything would be OK.

There was still at that point a remnant, just, of normality, an impression, almost, of maneagable horror. What we were witnessing, it appeared, was another bloody chapter in the long terrorist war, cruel, spectacularly savage (could that really be true about a plane, we wondered) but not something so different from what New York City, and the world, had been through before.

So the routine news continued to flow, retail sales, CBOT December wheat, but there was no real return to work, just a few half-hearted glimpses at the dealing screen, with the gaze returning again and again to CNBC, to the images of that first tower, and then, suddenly, drawn by a fireball, to the other. More smoke, more flames, and fluttering down from the windows of the outraged building, scraps of paper, Hell's tickertape, the last trace of all those shattered offices.

Safe in Midtown, we watched the World Trade Center's end, we watched the destruction of the building we knew so well, the site, for us, of countless meetings, the workplace, we worried, of too many friends.

Later, we could see that the European stock markets had fallen, but, it was not something, really, that we wanted to discuss.

Star Monkey

National Review Online, September 3, 2001

Ham's Grave, Aug 2001  © Andrew Stuttaford

The astronaut's grave is plain, a metal plaque on a slab of concrete on the grounds of the Museum of Space History just outside Alamogordo, N.M. There is no statue, no elaborate monument, just the silence of a desert hillside. Wreaths do not flourish in the dryness of the American Southwest, but some kindly individual has left a pancake-shaped cactus in memory of the dead flier. A face has been cut into the plant, two eyes and a jagged smile. The carving was, doubtless, well meant, a tribute, perhaps, to a simple, friendly, soul, but the impression it leaves is faintly grotesque, more Jack O'Lantern than Smiley. That is not inappropriate, because to modern sensibilities there is something disturbing about the story of the deceased, a small dark space pioneer by the name of Ham, America's first Astrochimp. Yes that's right. Ham was a chimpanzee, a space-suited representative of the species known technically, and somewhat insultingly, as Pan Troglodytes. It is largely forgotten now (although not in the Comoro Islands, a fine nation that, a few years ago, issued a stamp in Ham's honor), but the early days of America's attempt to storm the heavens were marked by the space-bound trajectories of a number of luckless mammals.

Various rhesus monkeys, all called Albert, were shot off into the sky from captured German V2 rockets. As the space program progressed to homegrown technology, other tiny simians, Able, Baker, Sam, Miss Sam, and Gordo all followed in the Alberts's exhaust trails, as did a squadron of mice, but this was not enough for NASA. Before Homo sapiens could be risked, the space agency moved up the evolutionary scale, turning to man's closest relative, known then, as now, to be the chimpanzee, but quite how closely related, well, in those days, nobody could be sure.

Times have changed. DNA testing has now made it possible to argue that the traditional division between humanity and the four species of Great Ape (Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Gorilla, and Orangutan) owes more to vanity than biology. According to this view, we are simply the fifth, and most sophisticated, variant. Within this new, and alarmingly expanded, family, our nearest relations, the chimps, turn out to be closer to us than they are, for example, to the gorillas. What is more, over the last 30 years, detailed observation of chimpanzees in their native setting has established that they have at least the rudiments of a culture, one that includes the use of tools, barter and primitive medical techniques. As noble savages, however, the often unruly and violent chimps fail to make the grade. The mark of Cain turns out, depressingly, to be a sign of a good brain.

Quite how good is far from clear. Measuring animal intelligence is difficult, and prone to anthromophic exaggeration, but it does seem that a chimp possesses the intellectual ability of a two- to three-year-old. That may be no revelation to a parent of toddlers, but it is a fact worth remembering when considering what happened to Ham in the years that followed his abduction from his African birthplace. The derivation of his name, "Holloman Aerospace Medical," gives the critical, ominous clue.

The museum in Alamogordo takes up the narrative, although, sadly, the simian spaceman does not make it to the museum's pantheon, a plaque-bedecked Valhalla known as the International Space Hall of Fame. No, Ham's story is confined to the building's lesser regions, more specifically, a corridor decorated with a series of educational posters, the first of which provides a good prologue. It features a glorious color image of a rocket at launch and the headline, "Before there was John Glenn or Neil Armstrong there was…," and there right in the corner is a little circular cut-out of Ham's head, a Caliban satellite for the giant, gleaming Saturn 5, an enigmatic, humbling reminder of where we all come from.

Other posters show some of the chimponaut training process. We see three chimps being taught to become accustomed to sitting in one place for up to 24 hours. It is a scene out of daycare hell. One ape sits, impassive, a cross-legged lama, the second slumps, pensive with a hint of Rodin, while the third wriggles like the bored two year old he so clearly resembles. Another shot shows the three chimpanzees reclining side by side, each in an open container. Two are holding hands. Reassurance? Other grimmer tests ("windblast", "acceleration/deceleration") are, tactfully, not shown and nor is the darker side of the "mild" electric shock/banana pellet routine used to train Ham to pull the right levers when he was in his capsule.

There are, of course, pictures of the great day, January 31, 1961. Ham is in his spacesuit, an eerie mix of the futuristic and the primitive, looking like a suspicious old man as he stands with his trainer, showing few signs of the "friskiness" that had earlier earned him his ticket to the infinite (and with that ticket came a name; previously he had been known as "61"). Later, we see him lying in his "couch", NASA's Ikea-style description of his capsule-within-a-capsule. During the flight our chimpanzee Columbus is photographed staring out of his little window, face impassive, eyes as black as the space through which he was flying. Finally, after his safe return, Ham is portrayed reaching for his reward, an apple (John Glenn, it has been pointed out, got a Senate seat for pretty much the same achievement). He looks, to humans at least, to be grinning, but if it really was a grin, it must have been one of relief.

For the flight would have been a juddering, jerking nightmare for anyone, let alone for a passenger unable to understand what was going on, but bright enough to suspect that it was nothing good. To make it worse, almost everything that could go wrong, did. The exhibit skirts the issue, but, to put it bluntly, Ham was nearly toast. Right at the start, his rocket started sucking in fuel too fast. As a result, the angle of the craft's climb was too steep and too high, subjecting poor Ham to g-forces far fiercer than ever expected, a process repeated on re-entry sixteen minutes later, when the retrorockets cut off too soon, sending our once-frisky Icarus plunging down to earth at nearly 6,000 mph, 1,400 mph faster than planned. These were not the only difficulties. Quite early in the flight, cabin pressure collapsed, a development that would have been fatal for an astronaut, but not, fortunately, for an astrochimp safe in his self-contained couch. On the other hand, no one ever subjected Neil Armstrong to "mild" electric shocks every time he pulled the wrong lever, which was the threat that continued to hang over Ham even as his capsule careened through space.

In fact the redoubtable chimponaut, hardened by the rigors of his bleak training regime, performed very well, going about his preordained tasks (Watch for the white light, pull the left lever! Watch for the blue light, pull the right lever!) with surprisingly few outward signs of stress, despite the massive g-forces and the weightlessness. One final insult remained, however. On splashdown, the capsule promptly sprung a leak. By the time rescuers arrived on the scene (late, of course: they had expected Ham to land somewhere else), our hero was in severe danger of drowning. Once recovered, he appeared distinctly unimpressed by this shambles of a trip. Ham may have taken NASA's apple, but for a few hours the biting, irritable chimp displayed every symptom of the syndrome we now call air rage, something probably made worse by the gesticulating, shouting, flashbulb-popping Cape Canaveral press corps that surrounded him on his arrival back on dry land.

NASA did not seem to mind. The agency had what it wanted — good publicity (Ham made the cover of Life!) and good science. To quote from his tombstone, Ham "had proved that mankind could live and work in space." All was now set for Alan Shepard's historic flight. Unfortunately, America's Soviet rivals were even quicker to get the message. The next primate to leave the Earth, less than three months later, was Yuri Gagarin. As for the astrochimp, it was back to the barracks for him for a while, but a rival, Enos, got the first orbital mission, leaving the discarded Ham to be retired to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. There, at least, there were no levers, no shocks, no crazed wild rides, but it was, apparently, a somewhat isolated existence, a miserable fate for such a gregarious animal. After 17 years this Chimp of Monte Cristo was moved to a more congenial zoo in North Carolina and, finally, the company of his own kind. He met Mrs. Ham; in fact, some say that he met two Mrs. Hams, but these better times were not to last. Within two years Ham had died of, poetically, an enlarged heart.

To judge Ham's treatment by current standards would be posturing of a type that is, these days, regrettably familiar. We are often too quick to apply contemporary criteria in measuring the supposed failings of the past. Nevertheless, from what we know now it is clear that humanity does need to take another look at its handling of the Great Apes. And if Ham's strange, sad odyssey can remind us of that, he will have helped out yet another species.

His own.

Dead Men Talking

National Review Online, August 12, 2001 

Who, these days, is prepared to act their age? Teens carry on as if they were 30, the middle-aged think that they are 20, and now, if a new TV hit is to be believed, the dead are behaving as if they were alive. The show, Crossing Over with John Edward, a surprise success for cable's Sci-Fi Channel, stars the eponymous Mr. Edward. He's a fast-talking psychic with slow-witted fans, many of who like to believe that this former ballroom-dancing instructor can put them in touch with the dear departed.

For what is, presumably, a matter of fantasy, Crossing Over is surprisingly matter-of-fact. The introductory tune is mildly spooky, with a hint of the X-Files, but the rest of the format is more daytime talk show than nighttime séance. There are no Ouija boards, no startling emanations of ectoplasm, no tables are tipped. Those who prefer more mumbo in their jumbo need to look elsewhere (perhaps to Mr. Edward's series of audio tapes: his Unleashing Your Psychic Potential, for example, offers listeners the recipe for a ritual psychic spring-cleaning, something, in case you are wondering, which involves sage and plenty of Kosher salt).

On Crossing Over, the tone is conversational and relaxed. The audience sits in front of the seer, ranged in expectant rows on a dais. By talk-show standards, it appears to be a fairly upscale crowd, ranking perhaps half way between Oprah and an Al Gore town meeting. Well, I did say "fairly" upscale. Women outnumber men, and if the dead are present, they are low key and discreet, at least to start with.

Mr. Edward begins the proceedings briskly. As his fans will already understand, the great man is surfing the interred-net hoping to pick up a name, a fragment of a name, or any clue, indeed, that will sound vaguely familiar to one of the people in the room. It doesn't take long (for a show about eternity, Crossing Over is very rapidly paced). Mr. Edward typically comes out with a syllable or two, "Francesca," say, or "Francis" or "Fran." After a few moments, a member of the audience will normally react, eagerly proffering a candidate, "Francesco," perhaps, for consideration. If Francesco turns out to have "passed" ("kicked the bucket," "bought the farm," or "croaked" are not acceptable terms on this program), that will be enough for the psychic. He'll turn into a quick-fire interrogator, Sam Spade on Speed, with a bewilderingly fast Q & A designed to show that ex-Francesco is now in touch.

Mr. Edward will ask the audience member about cats, dogs, colon surgery, mantelpieces, ceramic teapots, anything. Surprisingly often (and surprisingly quickly), the psychic will succeed in turning up some precise little reference that could "only" have come from the dead man. Let's say that ex-Francesco loved ceramic teapots. By supposedly prompting the psychic's question about ceramic teapots, ex-Francesco will, to use the jargon of the show, have provided "validation." The dead guy will have "come through" by putting the idea of ceramic teapots in John Edward's head. Well, that's what the audience clearly wants to think. Crossing Over is a show for the sort of people who would have preferred The Sixth Sense to have a more upbeat finale. The amiable Mr. Edward is pleased to oblige. Bereaved relatives turn out not to be so bereaved as they had once thought, and the ratings keep on rising (particularly among women, a group previously under-represented among the dank ranks of Sci-Fi Channel viewers).

To be fair, some of Mr. Edward's findings are indeed remarkably specific. These discoveries are usually accompanied by little gasps and shouts of recognition among the not-so-bereaved-after-all. Their astonished comments are always along the same lines, "oh my God how did he do that wow that's amazing," but subtitles are provided when the exact wording of the audience's amazement comes across a little inarticulately. This happens more often than you might think. If there is one thing muddier than the reasoning on Crossing Over, it is the diction.

Then again, I have no idea either how Mr. Edward does it. Maybe it is, as is claimed in the introduction to the show, all "real." The only people who know for sure are the dead and they are not talking, to me at least (Granny, phone home). If I had to make a guess, Mr. Edward is probably an extremely able "cold reader." Cold reading is an old "psychic" trick. The term is basically a fancy way of describing the use of intuition, empathy, guesswork and, initially, very, very general questions (Francis, Francesca, Fran) to come to that one remarkable revelation that convinces the credulous that the spirits are indeed "coming through." It takes skill, which Mr. Edward certainly has, and it also takes, how can this be put politely, a certain special something in the minds of his subjects.

It cannot be put politely. Those special somethings are naivety, superstition, and a problem with rational thought, qualities that are all too common in this supposedly sophisticated country's current high tech re-run of the Dark Ages. It is a ridiculous phenomenon, and Crossing Over is very far from being its only example. What makes Mr. Edward one of its more representative figures, however, is not only his show (or considerable commercial success), but the peculiarly maudlin banality of his vision of the afterlife. It is the vision that is the sub-text to Crossing Over, but which is set out more explicitly elsewhere, notably in Mr. Edward's "inspirational" novel, What If God Were the Sun? This is a book modestly described by its publisher as "incomparable" (and, in a way, it is) but the seagulls on the cover are fair warning. Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s know what that can mean.

To describe this novel as sugary is an understatement. Diabetics should not read it except under close medical supervision. For page after page, the reader is subjected to a sickly sweet mash of simpering truisms and New Age folklore. The conclusion, of course, is that there is no conclusion. As he "crosses over," the narrator, "Timothy," finds himself floating through a "tunnel of light" with a "sensation of overwhelming love and peace," which, mercifully for the rest of us, he cannot "put into words."

Arrival on the other side is, it turns out, a little bit like Thanksgiving, only worse. All the relatives are in town ("Uncle Dominick and Aunt Gina…Aunt Marsha and Grandpa Jack, too") and so are in the in-laws (including those impolite enough to die before our hero had the chance to get to know them first time round). Before you ask, yes, this is meant to be Heaven, not Hell. And that is to be expected. The notion of Hell is far too judgmental, far too demanding for this sort of New Age cosmology. There's no St. Peter blocking the gate, just a rather vague "life review" designed to give "a type of closure." We leave Timothy surrounded by his family and his "oldest and dearest" friend, his dog Chester. "It's so wonderful to know that our beloved pets are waiting on the other side to meet us, too!"

It's not exactly Valhalla, is it? Other belief-systems have offered the prospect of a rather more inspiring afterlife than this perpetual family reunion. Unfortunately, these usually came with a fairly substantial downside. Just ask Dante. To take another example, the Ancient Egyptians believed that the newly deceased had to appear in front of Osiris, the Judge Bork of the Underworld. This was a "life review" with consequences. The hearts of those judged guilty would be fed to a beast that was part-lion, part-crocodile and part-hippopotamus. There would be no Chesters in their future.

That is not the sort of talk that many of Mr. Edward's fans would like to hear. They are looking for the comfort of faith without its rigor. They want the prospect of Heaven without the danger of Hell, and, above all, they seem to need the cozy reassurance that nothing has consequences, not even death. And why shouldn't they? After all, it would seem to be a perfect creed for a society that sees the term "endless self-indulgence" as a promise, not a criticism.

Wait a minute. Didn't I say that Crossing Over was a "surprise" success? What was I thinking?

End of a Century

National Review Online, august 6th, 2001 

A few days ago, in a quiet English country town, the long, long life of Bertie Felstead finally came to an end. And when the old man died, a small, surviving fragment of the 19th century died with him. He had been a local celebrity, an approachable Methuselah, a dapper figure in blazer, regimental tie, and, sometimes, on very special occasions, a row of medals. He had bright eyes, a cheery, amazed-to-be-here smile, and a lifespan that stretched across civilizations. Born on October 28th, 1894, Mr. Felstead was ancient enough to have seen the imperial spectacle of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, sufficiently young to have outlived the Clinton presidency. It was an astonishing achievement, made all the more remarkable by the fact that, in his youth, Mr. Felstead was to participate in an event that characterized, more than most, the last moments of the world into which he was born. Historians like to tell us that the European 19th century did not end at the moment dictated by the calendar. Its optimistic bourgeois spirit, its almost naïve belief in progress, continued to flourish for more than another decade. It took the First World War to bring that "long 19th century," and so much else, to a close. Spiritually and physically, the Europe that emerged from that conflict bore very little resemblance to the seemingly stable culture that had existed only four years before. In August 1914, totalitarian hecatombs were the stuff of nightmare, believable, perhaps, by madmen or in the dark of night, unimaginable in the reassuring light of an Edwardian morning. Forty months later Lenin was already ordering his first mass executions.

The men that went off to fight that summer were still the soldiers of the older era, still the sort of men who believed that war could be a bit of a lark. With luck, they thought, it would be over by Christmas. In Britain, poignantly, the troops were all volunteers, professional soldiers, "Territorials" (National Guardsmen) perhaps, or the first wave of that trustingly patriotic civilian army that was doomed to die in the killing fields of Flanders and of France.

Christmas 1914, of course, eventually arrived, but peace did not. Despite this, up and down the line the holiday was marked by informal cease-fires, the sound of carols, and, surprisingly often, even more. The opposing armies shared meals, drinks, and cigarettes. There were contests, peaceful for once, a shooting match, card games, some soccer. The generals did not approve, but to see these encounters as an early pacifist spasm is to believe hindsight's myth. Those sentiments would come, but only later, after the disillusion brought by countless battles over scraps of Belgian mud. In that first, almost innocent Christmas of the war the troops were celebrating a truce, not a mutiny, a day off, not a desertion, and, yes, they were pleased to do so with their counterparts in the opposite trench. The enemy was still the enemy, certainly, but that word had not yet come to bear its full, modern significance. There could be room for a break in a war that was still, just, being fought according to the rules of a dissolving, shared civility.

A year later, the orders went out. There was to be no repetition of such disgraceful scenes. Christmas fraternization was a crime, a desertion, a betrayal of the glorious dead. In the event, these instructions were largely superfluous. The sporting contest of 1914 was no more. The war had become an abattoir struggle that stretched the length of a continent. There had been too many casualties, too many tens of thousands of corpses, too many bitter memories. The hundred-yard gulf between the two trenches was no longer so easily crossed by mistletoe, schnapps, and a burst of song. In a couple of magical spots along the Front, however, wonderfully, hauntingly, the older decencies still managed to linger on. One of those places was Laventie, in France. Bertie Felstead, in those days a private in the 15th Welch Fusiliers, was there. The man who was to survive into the 21st century participated in one of the final grace notes of the long 19th.

It was a story that this last witness would often tell. "We were only one hundred yards or so apart when Christmas morning came. A German began singing All Through The Night, then more voices joined in and the British troops responded with Good KingWenceslas…you couldn't hear each other sing like that without it affecting your feelings for the other side."

"The next morning all the soldiers were shouting to another, "Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz." The Germans started it, coming out of their trenches and walking over to us. Nobody decided for us, we just climbed over our parapet and went over to them. We thought nobody would shoot at us if we all mingled together." And nor they did. No shots were exchanged, only cigars and cigarettes. "We met, we swapped cigarettes and had a good smoke…Of course, we realized we were in the most extraordinary position, wishing each other Happy Christmas one day and shooting each other the next, but we were so pleased to be able to forget the war and shake hands."

Someone started kicking around a soccer ball. "It wasn't a game as such, more of a kick-around and a free-for-all. I remember scrambling around in the snow. There could have been 50 on each side. No-one was keeping score." No one was keeping score. Ah, the relief of it. Just for a moment, just for a snatched miraculous instant, there was a pause in that daily murderous struggle, a pause in that struggle where the savage accounting never seemed to stop, a pause in that struggle where high commands always knew the score.

Just for a few minutes, it was all so different. In the age before the mass ideologies and the slaughters that they made so easy, it was still possible for these opponents to remember what they had in common. "The Germans were men of their Fatherland, and we [were men] of our Motherland, and human nature being what it is, the feelings built up overnight and so both sides [had] got up…to meet halfway in No Man's Land." To Bertie Felstead, a civilized, understated man, a man of an older era, it was the natural thing to do and, as for those Germans that day, well, they were, he said, quite simply, "all right".

It couldn't last. The 20th century was not to be kept waiting. After about half an hour an officer appeared to warn his troops that they were in France to fight "the Huns, not to make friends with them." It was not long before artillery had replaced the carols.

In 1916, there were no Christmas Truces.

Apes in Time

Planet of the Apes

National Review Online, July 28, 2001

Well, they finally, really did it. Planet of the Apes is out, and the critics are in (except for this one: the power and global influence of NRO did not stretch to two preview tickets — thanks, Jonah), but it is not true to say that this event marks the return of our monkey masters. They have never left. The original Planet was followed by four sequels, which was no mean feat: The second in the series ended with a supposedly conclusive atomic explosion. Even the sequels had sequels. There was a TV show (the first episode was watched by half the viewing public), a cartoon series, and even a rather serious-minded documentary. Somehow, at some moment in the process, those clever monkeys managed to carve out their own long-armed, human-hunting, ram's horn blowing space right in the sweet spot of American popular culture, up in the pantheon somewhere between Captain Kirk and Danny Partridge.

If you don't believe me, what else can explain the fact that that the orangutan priest/scientist/Machiavellian wily Doctor Zaius, the shrewd guardian of ape orthodoxy, has enjoyed an afterlife that has included an interactive advice bureau over the Internet and being feted by song in The Simpsons ("Doctor Zaius, Doctor Zaius, Doctor Zaius")? Even the altogether less important Aldo, a truculent, but ambitious gorilla, who rises to the rank of general in the course of the final two movies, is celebrated by an action figure, a 96-piece jigsaw puzzle and a loyal following on the web.

So great is the force of this franchise, that it can even bring fame to the silent. In the first two movies Nova is the beautiful, but primitive girlfriend of the marooned astronaut, Taylor. She is given a two-piece costume and a one-word script. As roles go, it's no Ophelia, but more than 30 years later, the actress who played Nova can still be seen at sci-fi and collectables conventions, surrounded by fans, most of whom were born long after the moment she said that precious, unique, loyal word, "Tay-lor." Two syllables, two films. They have proved to be more than enough for immortality.

What is the secret of the simians' success? Well, interactive Doctor Zaius wouldn't tell me ("Why do you bother me with such trivia?") but clearly nostalgia is part of the explanation. By itself that would not be enough. Just ask the hoodwinked hordes who were lured in to see the Brady Bunch movies. In our age of endlessly recycled memories, all the old icons are still out there, never, quite, allowed to fade, (they even remade Mister Magoo) shown in rerun or in syndication, on Nick at Night or AMC, available in DVD, video and retro-style lunch box. Very few of them, though, still have the genuine pull still enjoyed by those damn, dirty apes.

It helped, of course, that the first Apes movie was as good as it was. From the moment that that spacecraft crashed into the stark, strange landscape of an alien planet (in reality, a part of this country now represented in the U.S. Senate by that stark, strange John McCain) the viewer is transported to a world upside down, a world transformed, to borrow Shakespeare's phrase, into a "wilderness of monkeys," where the gorillas ride horses, humans are vermin, and the Statue of Liberty is a shattered ruin, left, like our former civilization, in fragments on a deserted ocean shore.

The script, co-written by Rod Serling, is a splendid period piece, a close cousin of the writer's other great legacy, The Twilight Zone. It features the same crackpot moralizing, the same sly references to current controversies (one of the younger chimps has evidently been to Tom Hayden's Berkeley) and the same imaginative power. Like the best of those shows, it is hokey enough to be nostalgically comfortable, but clever enough, still, after all these years, to thrill, provoke, and enthrall. The cast rose to the occasion, most of all, Charlton Heston (Taylor), the film's greatest and, ironically, most savage presence (once Taylor gets his rifle, the spaceman proves unstoppable. He triumphs: No ape ever gets to pry any weapon from Taylor's cold, dead hands). Played by Heston in a style that is part Shatner, part histrionics, and wholly compelling, it is remarkable performance, made all the more memorable by the fascinating problem with which our hero is confronted. For Taylor is an angry misanthrope who has the misfortune to land on a planet where men no longer rule.

And that is the concept that has ensured the success of these movies. As a species, we have always been intrigued by the notion of a world where the usual rules did not apply. It appeals to our barely controlled love of disorder and escape. The Romans used to celebrate it during the festival of Saturnalia, a time when the aristocrat played the slave, and the plebeian the senator. In medieval Europe, peasants used to delight themselves with tales of the land of Cockaigne, a place that was like Heaven, except more fun, not least because it was the former nobility that had to do all the heavy lifting.

The planet of the apes is a sort of reverse Cockaigne, like Hell, in a way, only worse. In this world, all of us, rich and poor, turn out to have been the nobility, and now we must pay. It is a fascinating, terrifying idea, and one that proved strong enough to sustain the Apes franchise through the distinctly less impressive sequels that followed. The scripts were weaker and, critically, the power of the original concept was diluted by the fact that in the later movies, humanity was in, at least with a chance.

The second movie, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, has its moments, but had to weather a finale that involved grotesque mutants (my guess is that those folks needed no make-up: their features had already been permanently scarred by the uncontrollable laughter triggered by the sight of some of the screenplay) making their quavering way through a hymn in praise of the particularly nasty nuclear weapon that they have chosen to worship. The last three films are best seen as a separate trilogy, and they are burdened somewhat by an unattractive and not particularly subtle sub-text about race relations in mid-20th-century America.

Those wanting to know more about this politicized angle need to contact Mr. Eric Greene, the author of the wonderfully odd Planet of the Apes as American Myth — Race, Politics and Popular Culture. Despite its leaden prose and leftist polemic, Mr. Greene's book is a fascinating and insightful read, even if, at times, the author appears to have been left a little deranged by his obviously intense and repeated exposure to the Apes movies. To the best of my knowledge, he remains the only person to have spotted the sexism inherent within Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Without Mr. Greene's help, I would not have realized that Caesar's choice of mate (Would it be the "demure chimpanzee" Lisa or a "voluptuous and eager" alternative?) revealed that "even in the ape world…women's roles are divided into the stereotypes of either virgin or whore." Who knew?

The ability of the franchise to endure and to survive the occasional missteps of the later films (if you think that the hymn-singing mutants were absurd, just wait until the moment that the monkey statue starts to cry) is a tribute to the strength of its original notion, a notion made all the more seductive by its choice of protagonists, the apes. Planet of the Dogs just would not have packed the same punch. The choice of apes was the masterstroke. It made the films, somehow, believable.

For deep down, we know that, when it comes to the animal kingdom, the apes are in a class of their own, they are different, they are smarter, and they are family. They really could have made this their planet. A few million years ago, at the critical evolutionary moment, it was between them or us. We got lucky, that was all (something to do with monoliths from outer space: it was all explained in 2001: A Space Odyssey), but we never have quite escaped our simian past, and, all too often, it shows. As the 17th Century playwright Congreve, once admitted, it is not possible to "look long upon a monkey without very mortifying reflections."

We use the apes as humanity's distorted mirror, and as its chattering reproachful goad. That is why they so intrigue us, and that is why the Apes movies, with their unsettling suggestion that evolution was not, perhaps, for the best, have had such a grip on our imagination. And so, as soon as I can get my stinking paws on a ticket, I shall go to Tim Burton's new film.

So long, of course, as Doctor Zaius gives me permission.