Chick-Tac-Toe

National Review, December 23, 2002

Las Vegas, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford 

MOST people go to Las Vegas for the gambling. Dazzled by neon, crazed by greed and Wayne Newton, they challenge the odds, trying to outwit the trickster goddess, Lady Luck herself. But I was there for a different, wilier adversary. I was in town for the chicken. It was payback time, a chance for the revenge I'd seen waiting for since that shameful, sultry night in Manhattan's Chinatown all those years ago. You know the sort of evening—too much Tsingtao, not enough sense. Next thing, you're in a seedy airless room doing something you shouldn't: in my case, playing a chicken at tic-tac-toe—and losing. Years later I tried to track the bird down for a rematch, hut it had flown the coop: dead in a heat wave, said some, off hustling in another hutch, said others. And then the rumors began—whispers about tic-tac-toe-playing poultry spotted in Atlantic City, claims of sightings in Indiana and Las Vegas, reports of the theft of three uncannily smart birds from a county fair in Bensalem, Pa. And always there in the background, a muttered, mysterious name: Bunky Boger.

The stories are true. A slick chicken is back on the scene, hut this time it's not alone. Chickens skilled in tic-tac-toe have come home to roost in no fewer than three locales—all of them casinos (and two of them called Tropicana)-— while others, avian carny folk, work the county-fair circuit, usually without being stolen. The source of this scourge? Bunky Boger. Turns out he runs a Springdale, Ark., farm known for training animals to perform the feats some call remarkable and others just plain peculiar. Bunky's brainy brood docs not stop at the O's and the X's. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, these chickens dance and play basketball too.

NATIONAL REVIEW's budget for investigating strange tales from Arkansas has shrunk over the last couple of years, so I can't claim to have checked Boger's methods. There's talk, however, of "positive reinforcement" (basically the use of food as a reward) and other behaviorist techniques of the sort developed by the psychologist B. F. Skinner. Broadly speaking. Skinner saw personality as a blank slate, pliant and ripe for conditioning. This is an idea that played no small part in the disasters of 20th-century collectivism, but it seems to work well when applied to chickens. Far mightier than the Mighty Ducks, Boger's chickens are tricky to lick. Recorded defeats are few and hit between; just a handful this year, so rare that the two Tropicanas (Atlantic City and Las Vegas) are prepared to offer $10,000 to any customer able to take on the chicken, mano a claw, and win.

Ten thousand dollars? That's not chickenfeed. Maybe I was counting chickens before they were dispatched, but revenge, it seemed, was going to be profitable as well as sweet.

Outside the Las Vegas Tropicana, all is anticipation. Large signs proclaim the "Chicken Challenge—Play Tic-Tac-Toe With a Live Chicken." A poster shows a chicken contemplating a tic-tac-toe Götterdämmerung. The creature's blue eyes (contacts?) are bulging with tension. It's sweating pullets. Good.

Las Vegas, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

Once you're inside, there is a brief detour for paperwork (tackling the chicken is free, but prospective foes of the fowl have to sign up beforehand for the casino's optimistically named "Winner's Club") and then it's on to the main event, first heralded by a glimpse of white feathers fluttering in a large, glass-fronted booth and an amazed Italian muttering, "Pollo? Un pollo?”

A crowd has gathered behind the velvet rope, would-be contestants (around 500 over a twelve-hour day) looking for- ward to the game, and, less admirably, spectators waiting to jeer. It's a tough arena. Be felled by the fowl, and the display attached to the booth will declare your shame for all to see with flashing lights and an announcement of the result ("Chicken wins"), followed by insulting slogans ("You're no egg-spert" is one of the milder examples). The crowd is no kinder. The losers slink off amid mocking laughter, crushed and beaten-—well, a little embarrassed anyway.

And then it's my turn. I step up to the booth, staring fiercely at the chicken. It's time for some psychological warfare. The creature gazes back imperturbably. Is that intelligence I see in those beady black eyes? Is it a brainy bird or merely bird-brained? Mr. Boger seems unable to decide. In a confusing interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Springdale Svengali boasted that his chickens were "smart little peckers" but then, in a disloyal twist (did a cock crow three times?), he went on to condemn them as "kind of simple-minded." "You wouldn't," he said, "want to take their advice on the stock market"—which, if New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer is to be believed, would put the chickens on a par with a number of Wall Street's leading investment banks.

Simple-minded or not, my chicken moves away from the glass window of her booth and heads at a leisurely pace into a more secluded area, a "thinking" booth within the booth. Suddenly the chicken makes its choice (the bird always gets to go first). An O appears on an illuminated touch screen, together with the information that I have 15 seconds to respond. And so I do. X. My opponent operates under no such time constraints. As the seconds drag by, the display flashes up the words "Chicken's thinking," this contest's equivalent of the annoying little hourglass that always accompanies those slower software moments. There are, of course, some skeptics, wild-eyed folk—Chicken Challenge's Capricorn One crowd. They whine that the bird is a fake, a feint, fowl play at its worst. The thinking booth, they claim, is nothing more than a device to hide the fact that the chicken does nothing—its "moves" are all the work of a pre-programmed computer. Is there a HAL in the henhouse, an updated twist on "The Turk," that supposedly chess-playing automaton once famous for puzzling 18th-century Europe.' I prefer not to think so.

The Tropicana, Las Vegas, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

O, X, O. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that it's too soon for the chicken to crow. The hen tenses. At one point a move is preceded by a savage, primeval display. Wings beat, and that noble head turns towards me, cruel, merciless, and proud. It's a chilling moment. The chicken, like all birds, is descended from the dinosaur. Could the Tropicana be transformed into Jurassic Park?

Well, no. An O and an X or so later, and the game draws to its close. It's a tie. The chicken acknowledges the result with a curt nod and turns away, ready for the next challenger. I walk off, honor satisfied, but true revenge for the Chinatown fiasco remains elusive. Next stop, Atlantic City.

In conclusion, it's important to point out that, in keeping with NATIONAL REVIEW’s policy, no birds were harmed in the writing of this article. PETA, however, has complained about the Chicken Challenge, and a representative of the chicken activists at the Virginia-based United Poultry Concerns condemned the whole spectacle as "degrading" and "derisive." Judging by the Las Vegas setup, that seems harsh. The Chicken Challenge booth is relatively spacious and housed in an air-conditioned environment. There's food and water inside. What's more, according to a spokeswoman from the Tropicana, no one chicken has to play for more than about 90 minutes at a time. The booth is manned—if that's the word—by chickens drawn from a squad of 15 (all known as "Ginger"). Each Ginger is regularly rotated but never, apparently, rotisseried.

Bunky Boger himself seems untroubled by the controversy. As he explained to the Review-Journal; "A chicken would rather play tic-tac-toe than float around in a can with noodles."

Find me a chicken that could argue with that.

Sex in the City

National Review Online, December 3, 2002

There's a gift shop at the entrance to New York's new Museum of Sex with "edible body chocolate," "Kama Sutra" oils, nudie pens, and books such as New York Girls, Fetish Girls, Forbidden Erotica, Strip Flips, Peek — Photographs from the Kinsey Institute, The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, and Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist — but none of this was enough for one downtown Jezebel, grumpy in Winona black as she gazed idly at pictures of Bob Flanagan's tortured form. "You'd think," she grumbled, "that there would be more here than this. There ought to be, like, you know, toys." After all the foreplay — the carding (no one under 18 allowed), the $17 admission ticket (now there's an obscenity), the bawdy, giggling anticipation, the titillating costume (all visitors are issued with a self-adhesive scarlet "X"), and the come-hither enticement (the museum's advertising features boots, spurs, and a very, very short skirt), was this a first hint that the actual Museum of Sex experience might, well, fall a little flat?

The museum, which opened in October, is located, appropriately enough, near a street corner. It's on 27th and 5th, just to the east of the old "Satan's circus," Manhattan's former Tenderloin district, in a slightly shabby building that may once have known some very shabby times: There's fevered talk that it was used as a brothel. The interior — whitewashed walls, bare floors, and (cathouse chic?) bead curtains — is almost as drab. Perhaps the austerity is designed to emphasize the seriousness of the museum's "mission": "breaking new ground in an area of human life that…museums…have previously treated at best with benign neglect. This… includes the consideration of both high and low sexual culture (in all their endlessly fascinating manifestations)…" High culture? Who cares about that? I was there for the low (in all its endlessly fascinating manifestations). The academic flummery is best seen as a disguise, camouflage for the peepshow, a scholar's gown for those too prim to be seen in a dirty gray raincoat.

But back to that "mission" — according to the museum's publicity materials, its inaugural exhibition, NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America is devoted to an investigation of "the sexual subcultures of the city's past and present, and…the means by which they have influenced the development of modern attitudes about sex and sexuality." It's an appropriately narcissistic theme for a perennially self-absorbed city (or, more accurately, borough — the references to queens in this exhibition have nothing to do with Archie Bunker's old stamping ground). It comes with a flattering subtext: Out there in the sticks, the rubes, the birds and the bees were stuck doing it the same old way until those enlightened and sophisticated Manhattan folk started spreading the news.

That said, the first part of the exhibition is dedicated to prostitution, a business that even New Yorkers cannot claim to have invented. On this topic, the museum's main emphasis is on the 19th century: its most beguiling feature an interactive display highlighting extracts from Zagat-style guides to Manhattan's whorehouses, clearly a necessity for anyone wishing to avoid the perils of locales such as 14 Mercer Street, an unsavory joint where "gentlemen are never known to call a second time."

There's more to see than hooker handbooks, of course, not least a mummified penis, a chorus girl's costume, and a skull rotted by syphilis, but the real delight lies not in curios but in absorbing the details of this lost city of sin, a Gomorrah on the Hudson that had, in its downtown "fairy resorts," a suggestion of Sodom too. To be frank, though, this evidence of Victorian vice mainly comes across as a little bland. The passing of time and large amounts of soft sepia coloring mask both its erotic force and the brutality and squalor that must have lain not so far below it. All that remains is surface strangeness, best seen in a 1890s illustration of the Bowery by night, teeming, exotic, and menacing with more than a hint of a Blade Runner streetscape about it.

When the museum's visitors arrive in those sections of the exhibition that deal with the 20th century, improved photographic techniques literally bring the picture, and the reality behind it, into far clearer focus. This is just as well if the show is to hold our attention. Age can lend fascination to the most banal of knick-knacks, but once we reach the modern era there is not much in the way of alluring artifacts for the museum to display. An old tin of Ramses may be vaguely "Egyptian," but it's not exactly the treasure of Tutankhamen. Brave attempts are made: Exhibits include some nasty-looking bondage gear, a poster for the Village People and a 1971 handbook used to instruct the police on how to identify "toilet snipes," but a showcase featuring a forlorn pile of vintage peepshow tokens is a reminder why photography has to be an essential resource for this exhibition.

But, in a museum looking to chronicle behavior at its most intimate, this becomes, paradoxically, a problem. It's simply not that often that couples bring a camera into the bedroom and, unless they are a Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, it's even more unusual for the rest of us to see the results. Every type of picture can tell a story, but when it comes to recording this area of human conduct, the paintbrush can be more effective than the lens. It's surprising how little art is included in this show. The heavy reliance on photography inevitably shifts the exhibition's balance away from the private sphere to public — or quasi-public — displays of sexuality, primarily pin-ups, pornography, and an orgy or two; interesting enough, but something of a caricature. We are shown more, but, somehow, it feels like less. It is an impression only heightened by a selection of photographs more weighted towards, shall we say, the mechanics of this show's subject matter than its broader social context. This is not history, just a vision of the past reflected in a funhouse mirror.

This doesn't always matter. That part of the exhibition concerned with New York's contribution to 1970s pornography succeeds on its own terms. As porn is never meant to be anything more than dirty pix there is no intimacy to lose. Spectacle is simply replayed as spectacle, and becomes the source of the museum's most entertaining sight — small groups of visitors earnestly clustered around monitors showing continuous loops of disco era smut. As the crowd gawped at the gropers, portable audio guides related the (forgive the phrase) blow-by-blow reminiscences of a star from that time, Vanessa del Rio — the "Latin from Manhattan," reduced, these days, to Brooklyn.

To see how a display lined with photographs can fail as a record of the history of sex, check out the installation devoted to S&M. It is redeemed only by the revelation that the ranks of the spanked received a significant boost from the arrival of refugees from Nazi Germany, a place where sadism was no fantasy. For the most part, however, this segment of the show is, ahem, dominated by pin-ups of the pinioned, the pummeled, and the trussed, posed by professionals and packaged by profiteers. These pictures tell a picaresque tale (the saga of Irving Klaw, bondage entrepreneur, cries out for a Tim Burton movie), but they are far from enlightening. They record not authenticity, but performance. On the other hand, having also glanced at the museum's small, but painful (holy urethra!), sample of the undeniably authentic Mapplethorpe oeuvre, I'm not inclined to complain too much.

When the museum turns its attention to homosexuality, the results are somewhat better. Whether it's in the bleak camera work of Thomas Painter, the Brassai of Manhattan's mid-century gay demimonde, or in plain brown envelope beefcake photos (including one of a naked Yul Brynner — the real shock is his full head of hair) from the 1940s and 1950s, pseudo-exotic, claustrophobic, and vaguely ill at ease, the impact of that era's repression is obvious. Later came the Stonewall riot (visitors can study the Village Voice's remarkable report of that "fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen") and then the Dionysian 1970s (exhibits include a board game, "Gay Weekend," featuring Scott, Billy, Mark, Glen, Terry, Ritchie, a beach, a bar, and a truck stop). Inevitably, there's also an installation designed to describe the horror of the plague years that followed.

What we are never really shown is the gradual acceptance of gays into "respectable" society, an omission typical of an exhibition that consistently confuses the extreme with the cutting edge, and also tends to neglect the mainstream by much more than the show's stated purpose would suggest. That's a distortion of the historical record even for supposedly go-ahead Gotham, and it has another disadvantage. The exaggerated emphasis on the far out, and the touch of Coney Island that it brings to this exhibition, reinforces the sense of alienation and emotional distance already implicit in viewing images of other people's sex lives. For all the low culture thrills, I left the museum lost in mild, but oddly persistent melancholy.

Post-coital depression by proxy? I doubt it. Intriguing, prurient and more than a little kitsch, the Museum of Sex is certainly worth trying but you won't need a cigarette afterwards.

Goodnight, John Boy

National Review Online, October 11, 2002

The Pax TV network promises "quality, family-friendly entertainment, free of senseless violence, explicit sex and foul language." That's one good reason for me to avoid it. Just Cause, a new show that premiered a couple of weeks ago, is another. Described by the self-proclaimed "feel good" network as a "compelling legal drama" this dreary offering is, in fact, no more than populist pabulum for the age of Enron. Promoted with the slogan "Cleaning up America…one crooked CEO at a time," Just Cause is a gimcrack morality play tailored for dunces. More ominously, it is almost certainly an early example of how the recent corporate scandals have, once again, turned bashing business into showbiz fare. The show's premiere opens in a women's prison, that familiar location for overheated fantasy, which on this occasion involves not sex (well, this is Pax), but racial harmony, pizza deliveries, benignly butch wardresses and a rendering of "I Will Survive." The occasion is the release of Alex DeMonaco (played by the marvelously named Lisa Lackey), paroled towards the end of a five-year sentence for insurance fraud. Naturally, like many of her fellow inmates, she is a "bona fide member" of the "been done wrong by a man club", a victim, not a criminal. In her case, she has taken the fall for her crooked lawyer of a husband, who has, the brute, disappeared with the loot, taking the couple's young daughter with him. In a final confirmation of this monster's wickedness, we learn that he used to wear a $3,000 suit, while poor Alex had to make do with "pantyhose with holes in them."

Alex, however, did not entirely waste her time in prison. Not only did she find true friendship amongst the salt of the cellblock, but she also managed to complete a law degree. On leaving prison, Alex works as a cleaning woman, but not for long. This very briefest of stints amongst the working poor was probably included only to establish her street credibility — her coworkers are impressed that she's a "home girl" from East L.A., who can speak Spanish. She then manages to talk herself into the offices of Hamilton Whitney III, a tony (we know that because of his name, his number, and the fact that he is the last man in America to wear a three-piece suit) San Francisco lawyer, whose firm's caseload will, after the arrival of Alex, move decidedly downscale.

As Jacqueline Zambrano ("a surfer and a Buddhist," according to a press release), the show's producer and co-creator, has explained, "We kind of feel like we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore… Our stories are going to be about corporate greed, drug companies that don't give us disclosure, the Army [not paying] for Agent Orange veterans, fast-food companies that give us breakouts of [bacteria]," a predictably shrill agenda so narrow-minded that to describe it as one-sided would be a compliment.

None of this seems to worry Hamilton Whitney III. His pleasantly profitable commercial practice (described in Pax's promotional materials as "helping rich people keep their money") will probably be wrecked by the militantly anti-business DeMonaco, but, by the end of the first episode, Alex's crusading zeal has fired up Whitney's old enthusiasm for the legal profession (apparently the practice of corporate law doesn't really count as a truly satisfactory calling) and the ex-con has become a member of his team. Perhaps casting is to blame. Whitney is played by Richard Thomas, an actor who became infamous as "John Boy" Walton, that simpering scion of a sanctimonious clan which, for all its supposedly conservative appeal, always seemed more Roosevelt than Coolidge.

Revealed as a man with a painfully clichéd social conscience, and thus, in all likelihood, a bore, the character of Whitney runs the risk, despite the best efforts of the amiable Mr. Thomas, of being too dull to watch. To spice him up a little, the show's scriptwriters have given this antiseptic attorney a racy past that is more Fox than Pax. Whitney III has three ex-wives! The problem is that, as a Casanova, the erstwhile sage of Walton's Mountain simply does not convince, and nor, for that matter, does Rebecca, the only one of his former spouses to make an appearance so far. Presumably one of the show's promised "comedic undercurrents," she's a curvy FBI agent in a Sue-Ellen Ewing power suit sashaying through her scenes in a way that reminds us yet again that the departure of a far more likeable G-woman, the restrained and classy Dana Scully, was a tragedy for the discerning viewer.

As for the series' storylines, they operate as little more than a showcase for the scriptwriters' ideological posturing. The premiere was, opportunistically but understandably enough, dedicated to financial and other shenanigans in an Enron-like corporation, Coltar, "a Bay-area energy giant." While aspects of the drama (the way in which the document shredder has become the getaway car of early twenty-first century robbery) were bang up to date, many of its characterizations were archaic caricatures, not much fresher than that old cliché of the capitalist bogeyman in his top hat and frock-coat, albeit adapted to the movie of the week sensibilities of contemporary TV.

Thus, while Enron's real-life chieftains seemed to have succeeded in maintaining at least a veneer of sophistication, the Coltar entourage includes a posse of Texan Neanderthals, complete with bolo ties, hee-haw accents, talk of executive jets, and a deplorably sexist attitude towards poor, pawed Alex, who is referred to as "Honey" and, in the ultimate display of crassness, asked to stick her "pretty finger" into the coffee "in order to sweeten it up." It's not only the bad manners that are exaggerated — Coltar's crimes are also far worse than anything now alleged about the home of that infamous crooked E.

Given Enron's current difficulties, it's difficult to become too upset when that company is parodied, even if unfairly. Suspicions, however, that the evil Coltar was being used as a device to make broader comments about the wickedness of corporate America were confirmed in the second episode of Just Cause. This saw the scriptwriters turn their attention to a far-less-deserving target: the pharmaceutical industry, a familiar punching bag for the unthinking Left. The story revolved around a rogue drug company testing its possibly dangerous products on an appropriately helpless community (the patients of a free clinic in an impoverished part of town). That's not an outlandish plot for a TV drama these days, but what marked out this episode was a series of observations by Alex that seemed to suggest that our heroine wants to see the U.S. adopt a Soviet-style medical system or, failing that, revert to the era of the apothecary and the leech.

On asking the clinic's doctor (long-haired, sincere, sympathetic) why a pharmaceutical company should want to manufacture a drug almost identical to one that is already available, Alex is told that the answer is "greed." If a company sees a competitor's product doing well, it will want to "whip up a me-too product and get a little of the action." Alex shakes her head at this disgraceful example of free market competition, mutters angrily about "capitalism at work" and looks sadly across at, you guessed it, some children. Needless to say the principal victim in this episode is also, Rodham-style, a child — of Russian immigrants, no less. Within minutes of his mother telling him about the joys of being brought up in the United States, the land of equality and democracy, the unfortunate tyke has (like, I suspect, most of the Just Cause audience) fallen into a coma. In poor Yuri's case, the grasping capitalists of the American pharmaceutical industry are to blame. Subtle, this show is not.

Other contributions by Ms. DeMonaco to the healthcare debate include misleading statistics hurled into the conversation in a way rather reminiscent of The West Wing and, in a comment on the drug companies' efforts to develop their business, the remark that "pushers aren't just on the street." There are, quite clearly, few depths to which this tawdry piece of agitprop will not sink.

So, Ms. Zambrano says that she is as mad as hell. I don't know about that, but she certainly ought to be embarrassed.

Gas-Mask Chic: Dressing for Armageddon

National Review, September 30, 2002

For reasons that need, sadly, no explanation, we find ourselves living in a nervous, uneasy era, a time when every backfiring car becomes a bomb, every spilled sachet of sugar a plague. Once again, an enemy is out there, but the threat now is not the familiar Soviet-style Armageddon, but the occasional hit-and-run, jihad on the installment plan, which although revoltingly vicious, should, with luck— and preparation—leave most of us unscathed. Preparation? Back in the Cold War years, that never seemed necessary. Mutually Assured Destruction meant that the threat to civilians was both minimal and total. Now attacks seem certain, but the odds of survival are good. Still, with homeland security in the hands of Tom Ridge and Norman Mineta, it may be wise to improve on those odds—and that's just what many Americans are starting to do. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist strikes some stores saw a surge in demand for guns and televisions, a good first step, but then what?

In Gotham, where I live, New York magazine tried to help out. Its "Survivalist's Guide to Living with Terrorism" offered a series of spooky lists, tailored (of course!) to income level. Silk-stocking survivalists were told to get ready for a designer doomsday with equipment that included a Maxa Beam searchlight ($1,687), Altec suspension expedition backpacks ($329), Eagle Gear "War Bags" ($195), Mobiflex portable shelter systems ($2,700), a Sea Eagle HSR sport boat ($3,200), and, to keep the irradiated rabble at bay, two pneumatic Tasers (priceless). Poorer folk were expected to make do with rather less. Recommendations for Archie's bunker included candles, Ziploc bags, and (don't ask) kitty litter.

Missed that issue? Never mind, there's always the Internet. With its themes of menace, conspiracy, government ineptitude, and the chance to make a buck, the current crisis may be the web's finest hour. And why not? As is pointed out at www.gammascout.com (home of the "Gamma-Scout" radiation detector), "government can only do so much." Indeed. At www.gasmasks.com they avoid talk of politics and get straight to the point: "Do you really want you, your spouse or your children to go through life with breathing disorders or scarred flesh from 3rd degree burns, or worse? It's just not necessary." Well, it you put it that way . . .

So where to begin? With the threat of NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) attacks, we are now being offered carnage a la carte. I'll start with the nukes, but first, a disclaimer. As trial lawyers, like cockroaches, will undoubtedly survive the worst that bin Laden can throw at us, it's necessary to say that neither NATIONAL REVIEW nor I am endorsing—or condemning—any of the products mentioned in this survey, which is, I should add, about as comprehensive as this nation's airport security. Full disclosure: My own supplies include a radio, bottled water. Red Army-designed flashlights, a .357 Magnum (Tasers are for wimps), Cipro, potassium iodate, and cans of some nasty-looking beans (my wife is a vegetarian).

Now, back to the nukes. If a nuclear device explodes on top of you, there's not much to be done, but in the case of a dirty bomb, or a more conventional nuke that has gone off at a somewhat safer distance, there are some useful steps that can be taken. First swallow a pill. Fallout will contain radioactive iodine, something that is not only highly carcinogenic, but also thrilling fodder for the thyroid, a gluttonous gland, always greedy for a little more iodine, radioactive or otherwise. Greed, though, can be good: An effective defense against this menace comes from preemptively swallowing "clean" iodine, which should ensure that the duly sated thyroid has no room to absorb any iodine that glows. My own iodine stash comes in the form of potassium iodate pills from www.medicalcorps.org. I'm not convinced there's a huge distinction, but at www.nukepills.com they're selling "FDA-approved" potassium iodide ("different spelling, different drug").

After pills, pillboxes. Those wanting their own purpose-built shelters should check out www.disastershelter.com, but the homes in this line may be of limited use in Manhattan—some of these constructions are rather larger than the average apartment. Helpfully, at www.disastershelters.net (no relation) guidance is given on how to design a better-than-nothing shelter (the euphemism is "expedient") for the real-estate-starved or the simply improvident. One suggestion is to huddle under a table in a basement with "two feet of books or other heavy objects . . . placed on and around the table." Anything by Bernard Lewis should work particularly well. For those who have forgotten their kitty litter, "a 5 gallon bucket with plastic bags could be used for sanitation."

But what exactly would you be sheltering from.' Fallout is see-through, and if you want to see it through, some sort of radiation meter will be essential. But be careful. At the cheerfully named www.planetwide-exodus.com, they warn, accurately enough, that many Geiger counters now on the market were designed for geological research and "cannot handle" the amounts of radiation that would be produced in the aftermath of an attack, which is something they may have in common with us humans. The uncomfortably frank realists at www.homelandprotection.net are offering the Raditect: "the first Gamma Radiation Detector designed for home and office use" for those "nuclear emergencies that would present a long-term health risk, not immediate annihilation." Despite its promising name the focus at www.geigercounters.com seems to be on products for a more sedate era, including the "Inspector," which is, apparently, suitable for "applications requiring higher levels of sensitivity such as checking food for radioactive contamination." Forget food. What about me? At www.twotigersonline.com, there's a "pocket dosimeter" (in essence a personal nuclear odometer) designed to tell you just how irradiated you really are.

If the assault is biological rather than nuclear, coping may be a lot less work. We are already tragically familiar with the effects of anthrax, but conventional medicine—often antibiotics—will usually be able to deal effectively with most biological threats. If you have problems getting hold of antibiotics, www.tetrahedton.org ("an educational corporation" that deals with "health science and government cover-up[s]”) seems to be recommending a rummage through the feedlots. But with supplies of Advance Calf Medic (a possible source of oxytetracyline) being as scarce in Manhattan as a barnyard and a pitchfork, your HMO might, for once, be a better bet.

More practical, if a little unsentimental, are the folks at Gasmasks.com, the compassionate conservatives of viral Armageddon. Their "Biological Survivors Caring Kit" is a complete head-to-toe outfit for someone who doesn't want to get too close: It's something to wear "while caring for a loved one contaminated with a deadly virus, so the caregiver cannot get infected."

Mention of Gasmasks.com raises the question of chemical attacks, the third pony of bin Laden's bargain-basement apocalypse. Comfortingly, some of the protective gear against this threat may be of use against N and B, as well as C, but be sure to watch out for gas-mask grifters. At www.homelandgasmasks.com, there's dark talk of the older (and often foreign) military-surplus masks being offered to "unsuspecting Americans." You can see a few of them (masks, not unsuspecting Americans) at www.approvedgasmasks.com with its rogues' gallery of gas masks fit only for use as a "Halloween costume or conversation piece," a list that includes the Russian M4I Aardvark. From the look of it, you will die laughing long before the gas gets to you.

Approvedgasmasks.com also boasts a wide range of hopefully more effective devices: the Scott ProMask, the SGE 1000, the SGE 400se, the MSA Advantage 1000, the MSA Advantage 3000, the MSA Night Ranger (lens resistant to shrapnel!), the MSA Ultra-Twin, and the M-95 Military. If that's too much to choose from, try the narrower selection at Homelandgasmasks.com (Panoramic Visor, Economy, and, for the kids, the Junior). Fashionistas will appreciate the different colors available at Gasmasks.com: neon yellow, midnight black, or, for the tactless, cobalt blue.

Of course, most such masks are somewhat bulky and difficult to carry around, at least without raising a few eyebrows. In preparing to save your life, you might well lose your job. At www.gasmasks-usa.com, they have a solution for this, a compact "Quick Escape Mask." This may buy just enough time for you to parachute out of your building (www.aerialegress.com), swallow your pill, grab your "One Person Tote N Go Survival Kit" (from www.areyouprepared.com—comes complete with emergency poncho and nine towelettes), and head for the hills, or, possibly, that book-lined table.

Once in the hills, thoughts will turn to longer-term survival. True pessimists will have bought the $6,320 Super Pak (one year, two people, 344 cans, one can-opener) from www.healthywealthyandwise.net. The state of kitchen facilities will, of course, be uncertain, but that won't worry purchasers of "super fresh, super tasting" MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, including country captain chicken, Jamaican pork chop, and many others) from Two-tigersonline.com. Cooking instructions include placing the unopened pouch "inside your shirt, allowing your body temperature to help warm the food inside."

That's the spirit: determined, dauntless, and a little bit daffy. Al-Qaeda doesn't stand a chance.

Basic Instinct

American Outlook, September 1, 2002

Joseph Epstein: Snobbery - The American Version

The Englishman said to me, “oh you are writing for an American magazine.” The eyebrow arched, the lip curled, the cliché was confirmed over a smugly sipped cup of tea. English snobbery, again. To the rest of the world, it is our defining vice (full disclosure: I’m also from the scepter’d isle), something as English as military defeat is French. Fair enough: mine is a country obsessed by class. Only in England could a humorous essay (published in the 1950s by one of the Mitfords, naturally) on the distinctions between the language (“U”) of the upper classes and that spoken by everyone else (“Non-U”) become a national obsession. Lavatory was “U,” toilet was (and, some would say, still is) a social catastrophe. Of course, such refinement should be no surprise in a nation with a sense of class so acute that, only a few years ago, it was usually possible to tell a man’s social origins by his socks (ideally dark blue or black, calf-length, and never, ever patterned).

But if snobbery is our vice, it isn’t ours alone. England’s trick was to market its snobbery as the best in the world, and then to put it to work. In this, if nothing else, Britain succeeded brilliantly. In his Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, historian David Cannadine makes the case that the British colonizers often co-opted the “native” social hierarchy (medals all ’round!) into their own in order to assist in the preservation of colonial rule. As any reader of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim will know, class did not always trump race, but as a prop (in both senses) of the glittering imperial structure, it certainly played its part. Even today snobbery remains a useful weapon in London’s diplomatic arsenal, most notably in the awarding of knighthoods to the occasional friendly foreigners. Step forward, “Sir” Norman Schwarzkopf.

Snobbery, then, is not confined to those damp islands off the northwestern coast of Europe. In his entertaining new book, Snobbery: The American Version, author and Northwestern University lecturer Joseph Epstein gives credit where credit is due (“the English are more practiced in snobbery than any other people”), but chooses not to linger too long in Albion. The main focus of his book is snootiness on the western side of the pond, “its perplexities and its perils, its complications and not least its comedy.” On a more serious note (this is, after all, a book by an American academic), he aims to examine “whether snobbery is a constituent part of human nature or instead an aberration brought about by any particular social conditions.” He succeeds admirably in the analysis of the first part of his objective, stumbles over the second, and has problems too with a third, no less important question: what exactly is a snob?

That last difficulty puts Epstein in good company. In his 1848 collection, The Book of Snobs, Thackeray complains that although “the word snob has taken a place in our honest English vocabulary,” it can’t be defined. “We can’t say what it is, any more than we can define wit or humor or humbug; but we know what it is.” Epstein has a similar problem. His notion of the “essence of snobbery” (“arranging to make yourself superior at the expense of other people”) seems to miss the point. Ray Kroc, no snob icon but the man who made McDonald’s what it is today, reportedly said that if he saw a competitor drowning, he would put a live fire hose in his mouth. Superiority is often achieved at the expense of someone else. Such leapfrogging has taken our species from mud huts to the moon. But how superior is that superiority? Epstein writes that “snobbery often entails taking a petty, superficial, or irrelevant distinction and running with it.” He’s right, and if anything is the essence of snobbery, that would be it. Some of his examples, however, are strangely unpersuasive.

Contrary to what Epstein suggests, the driver of a BMW 740i is indeed quite entitled to feel “quietly, assuredly better than the poor vulgarian in his garish Cadillac.” As is acknowledged elsewhere in this book, good taste is not the same as snobbery. Equally, whatever Epstein may think, the parent of a daughter “studying art history at Harvard” need not be ashamed of the “calm pleasure” with which he greets the news that the child of an acquaintance is able to manage only a major in photojournalism at Arizona State University. That parent has, in all probability, earned that moment of satisfaction. The snob is not distinguished from the man of taste by his ability and willingness to discern the difference between a Beamer and a Caddy but by the use he makes of that discernment. Coming to the conclusion that Harvard is better than ASU is not necessarily the mark of the snob: treating an ASU graduate worse, merely because of where he went to college, most surely is.

These lapses into a dismaying (and, one hopes, insincere) egalitarianism are the exception rather than the rule in this book. Epstein soon finds himself on safer ground. Like Thackeray (a comparison that he would, doubtless, accept with “calm pleasure”), Epstein is rather better at identifying snobs than at analyzing snobbery. From a vantage point of somewhat tweedy, curmudgeonly disdain, he offers his readers an enjoyably vicious introduction to the different types of American snob. They are presented as a ludicrous and absurd spectacle, lampooned with a vim and biliousness that is all too rare in an era wherein there is no offense greater than giving offense. Among Epstein’s victims are Susan Sontag (“when young, a knockout American woman who did a fairly decent impression of a European intellectual”), PC “virtucrats” (“What makes the virtucrat a snob is that not only is he smug about the righteousness of his views, but he imputes bad faith to anyone who doesn’t share them. Upon this imputed bad faith he erects his own superiority.”), Gore Vidal (“Self-love, which in him never goes unrequited, is sufficient for this remarkably confident snob.”), and foodies (“When did my dentist begin using the word pasta?”).

Epstein appears to concede that he himself may be something of a snob, but it would be wrong to dismiss his tastes (there are, for example, touches of PBS, academe, and the hair shirt in his rather ostentatious lack of interest in material gain) as routine examples of intellectual snobbery. As he explains elsewhere in the book:

High standards far from being snobbish are required to maintain decency in life. When the people who value these things are called snobs, the word is usually being used in a purely sour-grapes way. Elitist is almost invariably another sour-grapes word, at least when used to denigrate people who insist on a high standard. The distinction is that the elitist desires the best; the snob wants other people to think he has, or is associated with, the best. Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant.

Quite. The mere fact that he is so obviously comfortable using a shockingly abrasive word like ignorant tells the reader all he needs to know about Joseph Epstein.

Epstein is even prepared to risk being labeled snobbish about snobbery with his suggestion that American snobbery has itself gone down in the world. In a key chapter (“O WASP, Where Is Thy Sting-a-Ling?”), he chronicles how America’s old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite walked away from power (and, as he notes in a brilliant, brutal aside, “came away disliked, diminished, maybe even a little despised for having done so”), leaving snobbery unanchored, “setting it afloat if not aloft, to alight on objects other than those connected exclusively with social class,” including, presumably, pasta.

But that’s an exaggeration. Class sensibility was no longer so rooted in ethnicity or tradition as in the past, but, as Paul Fussell showed in his book Class (1983), it was flourishing well into the Reagan era. It continues to do so today, but, so far as snobs are concerned, class has lost much of its glitter. The years of fluid hierarchy and social change have taken their toll. Old notions of caste no longer suffice for truly effective one-upmanship. In response, snobs did what they had to. They evolved.

As snobbery is such a basic instinct, this was only to be expected. Yet, despite the fact that the force and existence of such an instinct explains much of what Epstein describes, he seems curiously unwilling to accept it. In an attempt designed, presumably, to satisfy his objective of seeing whether snobbery can be linked to “particular social conditions,” Epstein asserts that “snobbery as we know it today, [the] snobbery meant to shore up one’s own sense of importance and to make others sorely feel their insignificance” was rarely seen before the nineteenth century. The reason for its expansion, he argues, was the spread of democracy. By unsettling a previously fixed social order, democracy increased the level of insecurity within society. Epstein quotes H. L. Mencken’s observation that, socially speaking, the American is on a perpetually icy slope, wanting to climb “a notch or two,” but “with no wall of caste to protect him if he slips.” As an ersatz class system, snobbery could assist in the struggle to survive within a society that had become suddenly, and frighteningly, competitive.

It is an ingenious theory, but it fails. Snobbery, and its simpering handmaiden, deference, could be witnessed long before the emergence of mass democracy. Epstein need have no doubt that it is, indeed, “a constituent part of human nature.” Let’s take one example. “Novelists,” writes Epstein, “are our keenest sociologists,” and there were none keener than Jane Austen. At the time she was writing, the ballot box was yet to cast much of a shadow over England’s country gentry, and yet her novels are filled with snobbish tension and social unease. And that’s only natural. People have always understood that no social order can be guaranteed to endure forever. Our species has emerged through millennia of turmoil, conflict, disaster, and war, and the lesson it has drawn has been simple: there is never, ever a bad time to be jockeying for position.

If there’s one person who knows about jockeying for position, it is a snob. On its face, Epstein’s comment that “there is something deeply antisocial about the snob” seems puzzling. There is, on the contrary, no one more social. Lacking the talent to succeed on his own merits, the snob is forced to manipulate social convention in such a way as to ensure that he achieves that all-too-necessary commodity, status. Epstein’s complaint, however, is subtler: it is not the snob who is antisocial, but his methods. The snob, he grumbles, “is, in a profound sense, in business for himself,” to which the obvious retort is, “Who isn’t?” Where snobbery can be said to be antisocial is in the misdirection of effort and ability that it implies; but like it or not, its existence is inevitable in any functioning society: a successful organism will always attract parasites.

It is difficult to avoid the feeling that Epstein’s disapproval of his snooty subjects colors his other main theme: that snobs have no fun. His description of the miseries of the snob’s life is bleak indeed. Epstein contends that the snob has only one standard, “that of comparison,” and that this approach to life can bring no “lengthy contentment” because “comparison inevitably implies competition.” There’s something to this; the snob’s self-esteem may be unusually susceptible to the opinions of others. But this is only a question of degree: almost all of us worry about how we are seen by the outside world. Besides, what’s the problem with competition? Epstein’s notion that competition is automatically an ordeal is a view that I suspect (perhaps snobbishly) only an academic could hold. Competition can be agony (check out the scene in Bret Easton Ellis’s repulsive but perceptive novel American Psycho, in which various Wall Street types compare the quality of their business cards), but it can also be ecstasy (Ray Kroc again). It depends on the nature not of the game (which can be snobbish or not), but of the individual who is playing it.

The truth is that, disapproving of snobbery as he does, Epstein desperately wants to believe that snobs must, by definition, be unhappy. In this he is doomed to be disappointed. Like all primates, we are social animals, and therefore status in itself—deserved or not—can be a source of profound satisfaction. The rewards from the superficial can run very, very deep.

It’s not “fair,” of course, but so far as snobs are concerned, that’s just the point.

The Good Russian

Richard Lourie: Sakharov - A Biography

National Review, August 12, 2002

Sakharov's Grave, Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, Moscow, 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

It takes more than a Bolshevik to erase history. Lenin intended his revolution to be a clean break with the unruly, uncontrollable past, but, in the end, he failed. Remnants of the older—and, for all its faults, more humane—Russia succeeded in enduring through three-quarters of a century of Communist brutality. Andrei Sakharov, the subject of this new biography by Richard Lourie, may have been born in the formative years of the Soviet dystopia, but he is best seen as a child of the earlier, finer civilization that the revolution had been designed to destroy. Miraculously, he too managed to survive.

More than that, he was even—for a while—to flourish within the Soviet system. The regime knew how to promote talent as well as to punish it. Although Sakharov was never a party member, his scientific ability was enough to bring him into the inner circles of the Soviet establishment. It was his moral strength, however, that was to take him out again. It turned out that the enormously gifted scientist, an explorer of the impossibly complex, was to find fulfillment in his dedication to some very basic truths. Sakharov, the man who gave the Kremlin the H-bomb, became a champion of human rights and—in a delightful irony—an architect of the Soviet collapse.

It was an extraordinary journey, and any attempt to make sense of it must begin with an understanding of the Russian intelligentsia into which Sakharov was born—a group, as Lourie puts it, that is "something between a class and a clan." Its members were, and are, "educated people whose sense of honor and duty compels them to take action against injustice." But, as Lourie also notes, "Lenin and some of the other Bolsheviks [also] were of the intelligentsia, its crude and jagged cutting edge. And there were also spiritual extremists." Indeed there were. Those true believers still shouting Stalin's praise at the very moment his executioners gunned them down were no less representative of the intelligentsia than were those gentle, thoughtful folk found in Turgenev or Chekhov.

What these people had in common was the idea that it was they who should set (and live up to) the standards necessary to build a better Russia. They saw themselves as intellectually and morally superior both to the dangerous and benighted masses below and the crude and despotic rulers above. They believed that they were the nation's true elite, elevated and yet oppressed. Theirs was a state of mind prone to lethal naivete and Utopian fantasy, to dreams of a finer, purer way of life that were to pave the way for the Bolshevik nightmare.

That Sakharov inherited this utopianism can be seen from his "Reflections," the 1968 essay that marked his definitive break with the Communist regime. It was an extraordinarily brave attack on totalitarianism, strangely skewed by a lingering attachment both to collectivism and dopily enthusiastic futurism. Science fiction is blended with Stalinist mega- project ("Gigantic fertilizer factories and irrigation systems using atomic power will be built... gigantic factories will produce synthetic amino acids"). As Lourie notes, Sakharov at that time still had hopes of a worldwide socialist paradise, to be achieved by technological advance, heavy taxation, and "convergence" between "democratic socialism" and "the leftist reformist wing of the bourgeoisie."

If this dreamlike world view was one aspect of Sakharov's fidelity to the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, so too was his dedication to his work and the notion that he could somehow do something for the greater good. These are demanding standards to maintain in the best of times. Trying to live up to them in the moral slum that was the mid-20th-century Soviet Union was to lead Sakharov to a life of barely comprehensible contradictions. So, in the late 1940s, we find the future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize busily designing weapons of mass destruction, an apparently decent man conscientiously putting his talent for murderous innovation at the disposal of a regime already responsible for the deaths of millions the old-fashioned way.

Loyalty to his country (enhanced by memories of its huge wartime losses) was partly to blame, as were the shreds of belief in a Soviet future (the letter that Sakharov wrote to his first wife on the occasion of Stalin's death makes for nauseating reading). Ignorance, certainly, offered no alibi. Sakharov knew. The facility where he worked was built by slave labor. He wrote later that he saw them everywhere—"long lines of men in quilted jackets, guard dogs at their heels"—but it did not stop him doing his best for the government that had imprisoned them.

Then something changed. This loyal servant of the Soviet state began asking awkward questions. And when he didn't get the answers he wanted, Sakharov did what very few dared do. He persisted—and it is the great weakness of Lourie's book that it never really explains why. Superficially, the story is straightforward, and so is the way that Lourie tells it. Increasing concern over the dangers posed by the atmospheric testing of his nuclear devices led Sakharov to urge restraint. He was told, none too kindly, to keep his thoughts to himself and to get back to work, but he continued with his complaints, embarking on a voyage that would take him from privilege to protest, through gradual alienation to outright dissidence, internal exile, and, ultimately, triumph.

To be fair to Lourie, pinning down what drove Sakharov may be a hopeless task. This most public of dissidents was a private, reserved man. Aged about 50, he claimed to have only one close friend (a friend who subsequently let him down in a characteristically squalid, characteristically Soviet way); it is easy to detect a similar pattern of emotional distance in Sakharov's first marriage.

With Sakharov, however, there is always that capacity for surprise. Whatever the shortcomings in their relationship, he fell apart when his first wife died. A little later this quiet, dry, slightly prudish introvert found himself drawn to the lively, abrasive, and demanding Elena Bonner. Understandably enough, their partnership (they subsequently married) is often (and Lourie's book is no exception) discussed in a primarily political context, but it was, clearly, much, much more than that. This was a great romance, a grand, gorgeous late-flowering love affair that carried alt before it, a light in the midst of totalitarian darkness, a bastion of integrity in a state that had none.

But those looking for the source of Sakharov's anti-Soviet struggle need to look further than Elena Bonner. She accelerated the process and made it more bearable for the beleaguered physicist (two against an empire is better than one), but this was a question of speed, not destination. By the time the pair first met, it was 1970—and Sakharov was already in irrevocable opposition.

The key to the puzzle must lie elsewhere. Readers of Lourie's book are given enough clues to draw some conclusions of their own. It is necessary to look again at the influence of what Sakharov once referred to as the intelligentsia's "inherited humanist values." Add those values to a demanding family tradition, courage, and a certain innate goodness, and we start to understand why Sakharov began asking those awkward questions, both of his government and of himself And once he had begun, there could be no going back. Dedicated scientist that he was, Sakharov could not rest until he had arrived at the solution, no matter the cost.

This quest ought, one day, to be at the core of a more substantial biography. In the meantime, Lourie's book will do, not least because the stories it tells do give a good measure of the man that Sakharov became. Here's a wonderful example dating from the late 1970s (1978 according to Lourie; Sakharov in his Memoirs places it two years earlier). Bonner and Sakharov had been shown photographs of a dissident exiled to Nyurbachan, a settlement in a remote part of Siberia. Troubled by the look on the exile's face (that was all it took) they decided to visit him.

On the way to the airport, their taxi was rammed. Undaunted, they took another. The first leg of their journey brought them within 400 miles of their objective, but the next flight was "unexpectedly" delayed by 24 hours. They camped out at the terminal, and took the plane the next day. On landing, they were told that the bus to Nyurbachan had been canceled. There were still 15 miles to go. The secret police were obviously watching their every move. Lourie tells us what this indomitable duo, no longer young, no longer in good health, then did.

"Though it was getting dark, Sakharov and Bonner decided to walk . . . The forest path was moonlit, the air fresh, a Siberia of stars above the trees. They stopped for bread and cheese, sipping coffee from a thermos . . . Alt the KGB's machinations had only afforded them hours of happiness."

And, yes, they reached their destination.

Hollow Laughter

Martin Amis: Koba the Dread - Laughter and The Twenty Million  

National Review Online, July 16, 2002

Stalin, Moscow, 1997  © Andrew Stuttaford

Back in the time of the revolution he was described as a gray blur, and it is as a gray blur that Stalin survives today, a nullity, a gap in our memory, an absence. In the lands of his old empire, they remember more, far, far more. The absence there is absent fathers, absent mothers, absent grandparents, absent uncles, absent aunts, absences in the millions, all victims of the monster who remains, remarkably, still present in Red Square (there's a small bust at his burial site by the Kremlin's walls and usually someone takes the trouble to leave a flower or two). In our ignorant, spared West, the West that never knew him, not really, we catch only glimpses of what we think what was. The images are caught on fading, flickering newsreel, a friend from the greatest of America's wars, FDR's pal, smiling benignly out, hooded eyes beneath a peaked cap, good old Uncle Joe.

In his new book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, the British novelist Martin Amis makes an attempt to fill this gap. It is a curious, compelling but more than occasionally self-indulgent work, a meditation that uneasily combines snatches of its writer's autobiography with tales of the Soviet holocaust.

The tone too seems just slightly off. Amis has long been known as a master of the acid one-liner, but it jars to read his snide reminiscence of the trivial (attendance at Tony Blair's dreary millennium celebrations) within a few pages of this extract from a letter written by the elderly Soviet theater director, Vsevolod Meyerhold after his arrest and torture by the secret police:

I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap…For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain…Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it.

Meyerhold was shot three weeks later. He managed, at least, to outlive his wife. She was found murdered in their apartment a few days after his arrest. Reportedly, her eyes had been cut out.

And so yes, London's Millennium Dome may, indeed, have resembled a "second-rate German airport," but, in the context of such horror, so what?

It's not just the tone and the awkward snippets of autobiography. Martin Amis's style, mannered, arch and self-consciously clever, also seems out of place, an all too elegant frame for such a crude and bloody canvas. We read of the "fantastic sordor" of the Gulag's slave ships, and that Stalin's "superbity" was "omnivorous." When told of the Wehrmacht's initial successes on the Eastern front, the Soviet dictator apparently "collapsed as a regnant presence." The baroque vocabulary acts as a barrier between the reader and the events that it is being used to describe. It may also signify the emotional distance that Amis himself feels from the Soviet tragedy. Good writer that he is, he understands "why Solzhenitsyn needs his expletives, his italics, his exclamation marks, his thrashing sarcasm," but rarely seems to feel such a compulsion himself.

What Amis does offer is a brief, and competent, introduction to the Stalin years, drawing both on recently published research and, very obviously, a long acquaintanceship with Robert Conquest, the finest English-language historian of Stalinist terror, who happens also to be an old friend of the Amis family. Tics of style and tone apart, the tale is well told, and clearly benefits from the skills of an accomplished and insightful writer. We learn, for instance, that Stalin failed to show up for his mother's funeral, a decision that "scandalized the remains of Georgian public opinion." The insertion of those three bleak words, "the remains of," tells the reader all that he or she needs to know about Stalin's impact on his native land.

Similarly, in describing the catastrophe of collectivization Amis manages in a few short lines both to summarize the onrush of disaster and to speculate what that might say about the differing personalities of Lenin and Stalin. Faced by peasant resistance, "Lenin accepted defeat, withdrawal and compromise. In other words, he accepted reality. Stalin did not. The peasantry no longer faced a frigid intellectual. It faced a passionate lowbrow whose personality was warping and crackling in the heat of power. He would not accept reality. He would break it." The result was a death toll that ran into the millions and, in Amis's vivid phrase, "swaying, howling lines" in front of the few food stores with anything to sell.

It is a hideous story, and Martin Amis should be thanked for retelling it. In forgetting those who were murdered, it is as if we kill them again, and yet with Stalin's dead that it is just what the world seems content to do. As many as seven million died in the genocidal Soviet famine of the early 1930's, yet in most histories it usually merits no more than a footnote. Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who tried to deny the famine's existence earned a Pulitzer for his "reporting" in Moscow, a prize that the "paper of record" still includes on its roll of honor.

As for the other slaughtered millions (Amis believes that Stalin was responsible for a total of at least 20 million deaths — and there are other, much higher, estimates), their fate is often passed over in silence or with the most insultingly cursory of regrets. Almost no one has ever been held accountable. There has never been a Soviet Nuremberg. Solzhenitsyn has calculated that between 1945-1966 West Germany convicted some 86,000 people for crimes committed for the Nazis. The number of those found guilty of similar atrocities on behalf of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union is unlikely — even now — to run into triple digits. In the countries of the former USSR, however, there is at least an argument (albeit misguided) for inaction: it is said that the long duration of Soviet rule manufactured too many accomplices to permit — yet — a full examination of the past in societies where democracy remains fragile.

In the West there is no such excuse, yet, when Stalin is discussed at all, the tone is often strangely sympathetic, and the tally of victims is frequently subjected to downwards revisions on a scale that would embarrass even David Irving. Where Koba The Dread fails, and fails most completely, is in trying to explain why. As a first step, Amis looks again at the old question as to whether Hitler's crimes were "worse" than those of Stalin (Conquest, interestingly, believes that they were, but can give no reason other than the fact that he "feels" so), but this controversy is, forgive the phrase, a red herring. Any moral distinction between these two bestial systems is so slight as to be irrelevant, and yet our response to them is strikingly different. In contemporary discourse, the Nazis are totems of wickedness, while Communism (despite accounting for far greater slaughter, a slaughter that still continues) is somehow seen as not so very bad.

As a shorthand for these perversely different responses to two very similar evils, Amis records how at a debate featuring the two Hitchens brothers (Christopher and Peter), Christopher Hitchens (quoted elsewhere in Koba as — astonishingly — still believing that Lenin was a "great" man) referred to evenings passed in the company of his "old comrades," a remark greeted with affectionate laughter (it is the laughter referred to in the title of Amis's book), a laughter that would be inconceivable as a reaction to a light-hearted reference to happy days with the fascists.

As Amis (who admits to laughing himself) concedes, "this isn't right." To explain that laughter, he turns, unconvincingly, to the elements of black farce that were never absent from Communist rule (but which were, he neglects, crucially, to say, equally present under the Nazis), and then, more believably, "to the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society, [which] is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million."

And in that one word "unconsciously," Martin Amis gets it all wrong. Murder, turmoil, and repression were always explicit in that "old, old, idea" and they play no small part in its appeal. Glance, just for a second, at Lenin's writings and you will be amazed by the morbid love of violence that permeates his prose. The "Just City" of Marxism's dreams always came with a concentration camp. The Bolsheviks had the genius to understand this. Their intellectual descendants know enough to try and cover it up: thus the silence about Stalin, thus that disgusting laughter.

Martin Amis's achievement is that, in writing this odd, flawed book, he has done something to help ensure that it is we — and not Stalin's heirs — who will have the last laugh.

Party On

Imagine, for a moment, that some crime had taken place, an act of wrongdoing so outrageous that it gripped the attention of the nation. And suppose that the perpetrator of this crime had been the member of an ethnic minority, do you think, even for a second, that the New York Times would have set up a meeting with some genial racist to find out his reaction? Would the reporter from the New York Times have sat there, quietly nodding as he took his notes, preparing to write an article that (with, of course, the appropriate amount of ironic distance) hinted that the recent outrage might show, just perhaps, that there was something to the crackpot's theories? Well, hopefully not, but on Friday the "paper of record" published an article that, in a number of ways, was not really so different from doing just that. "Letting the Capitalists Eat Crow" by Clyde Haberman, takes the form of a chat about the recent Wall Street scandals with Jarvis Tyner, the executive vice chairman of the Communist Party USA. Tyner is a veteran activist with a lifetime of Communist politicking behind him, including a stint as the running mate to party leader Gus Hall in the 1972 U.S. presidential election (it's worth remembering that Hall, an unrepentant Stalinist, had effectively endorsed the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia only four years before) and again in 1976. I'm not sure where Comrade Tyner stands now on the Soviet rap sheet, but offered a platform for his views on capitalist criminality, he unsurprisingly jumped at the chance.

Why anyone should care about Tyner's opinions on this topic is quite beyond me. The American Communist Party is a grubby group with a shabby history. Its numbers are miniscule these days and its significance is even less. If its leadership has anything interesting at all to say, it would be to shed some light on a murky Moscow-subsidized past that includes espionage, Stalin worship, tacit support for Hitler (during that embarrassing Nazi-Soviet pact) and acquiescence in mass murder. Sadly, Mr. Haberman did not choose to raise any of this. The only reference to earlier times came from Tyner himself with his wistful references to the "radicals" of the 1960s, and, inevitably, the 1930s. Ah yes, the radicals of the 1930s, that generation of leftists who will forever be associated with the CPUSA, the Gulag groupies who added further disgrace to an already ghastly decade, creepy enthusiasts for collectivism, coercion, and revolutionary violence, the old comrades who Tyner apparently still mourns.

Worth mentioning, Clyde? But, no, Mr. Haberman would prefer to discuss the country's current economic troubles with the beaming Bolshevik. Fair enough, you might think. Having presided over the impoverishment of much of the planet, Communists know a thing or two about mismanagement. Unfortunately, the incompetence that Mr. Haberman wants to discuss is not theirs, but ours.

"Is there any greater joy," writes Haberman,

for a heart that pounds to the beat of a hammer attached to a sickle than the sight of capitalists resorting to a form of corporate hara-kiri…Thanks to the shenanigans of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the rest, the Dow Jones industrial average has fallen further in the last three months than it did in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Think about it. The boardroom brethren have walloped the stock market harder than Osama Bin Laden did.

That's the sort of simplistic analysis that could only appeal to someone with absolutely no grasp of economics, to someone like, well, a Communist. And it does. The "smiling" Jarvis Tyner's response to the crisis is "we told you so". Blithely ignoring the fact that Marxists have been "telling us so" every year since about, oh, 1848, Tyner tells us again.

The growing corruption of big business is a sign of its inability to generate profits honestly any more…People were left out in the cold. But capitalism always functioned that way. It's just gotten worse. We've got a society that's run on greed. And they've got their guys in the White House now.

Hmm, greed. There are those who hint that Tyner's old running mate Gus Hall might have had some explaining to do on that account. Rather less ascetic than his creed might suggest, greedy Gus was said to have lived in some style, even, one old comrade has claimed, going so far as keeping a stable of Arabian racehorses, a gift, it was alleged, from Mr. Brezhnev himself. Can this be true? Racehorses? Brezhnev? Now, that's what I call a story.

Alas, these tales of socialist sybaritism never come up. Readers are, instead, presented with Tyner's tired sloganeering. He believes the president's proposed crackdown on corporate crime is meaningless: Bush is "playing softball with the big guys…He's running with the big dogs and he's not going to hurt them." Yada, yada, yada. As even Haberman notes, "what else would you expect from a Communist?"

Quite, but then the journalist goes on to write, "But isn't it funny that Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, have been saying pretty much the same thing?" And so there you have it; that sly half-suggestion that maybe this repulsive old ideology is not quite so demented as it once seemed.

It is a nauseating conclusion to a distasteful piece, and it overlooks a simple, and rather obvious point: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Sob Sisters

National Review Online, June 26, 2002

Even the trailers were a sign that I was in a strange place. Instead of the usual fare, tantalizing glimpses of fast cars, brutal murders, sinister aliens, and seething high-school passion, the movies previewed included a "mature love story" (apparently dedicated to the astonishing idea that romance is possible among the over-50s) and a multigenerational family drama (we were urged to "go ahead and cry") starring Susan Sarandon. But the sobs would not have to wait for Socialist Sue. For this was chick-flick night, a chance to discover the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a movie that is, warned the Los Angeles Times, "rich in emotional life." And moviegoers know what that means — tears, rows, mothers fighting daughters, daughters fighting mothers, hissy fits, shouting matches, and hugs, all culminating in a definitive reconciliation somewhere towards the conclusion of the final reel, often at about the time one of the key characters perishes of a terminal, but not unsightly, disease.

If that is what you are looking for, the Ya-Yas don't disappoint, except that the only person to die is the hapless (but handsome) Jack Whitman, who comes to the requisite tragic end, but relatively early in the movie. Jack is unlucky in love, and unluckier in war. He joins the air force not long after Pearl Harbor (seemingly more to impress his father than to depress Hitler) and, poor fellow, is killed before he has had much chance to enjoy his budding affair with the lovely Vivi, drama queen and lead Ya-Ya. Like Jack, Vivi (played excellently as a younger woman by Ashley Judd, and, in her old age, by a less-convincing Ellen Burstyn) never appears to get over this setback. Being dead, Jack has an excuse. Vivi does not. No matter. In this movie, self-indulgent is usually just an adjective, only a criticism when applied to those perennial symbols of boomer disdain for the older generation: drink, cigs and Feelgood-era pharmaceuticals.

Of course, a touch of the exotic always helps pull in the ladies: Just ask Fabio. In Divine Secrets this is provided by a gorgeous Louisiana setting, the perfect excuse for good music, bad behavior, ridiculous names (Siddalee!), cookery porn (crayfish!), and wild overacting (ham!). Naturally, this being the south, the past, as Faulkner once put it, is never dead; it is not even past. No one is prepared to follow the advice of another, less distinguished, southerner and simply "move on." Instead, most of the movie is dedicated, mainly through a series of flashbacks, to showing how the damaged Vivi proceeds to damage everybody else for the next six decades. Propped up only by the support of the Ya-Yas (a sorority she formed with her three closest childhood friends), pills, booze, and tobacco, Vivi is a poor wife and unsatisfactory mother. We only meet her husband, Shep, in his later years, but his weary expression is more than enough to tell the tale of a marriage that has been more for worse than for better. Old Shep has become a withdrawn, stoic figure (portrayed with dignified melancholy by James Garner) still fond of his high-maintenance Ya-Ya, but careful always to lock the door to his (separate) bedroom at night.

Vivi's dealings with her children are shown in rather more detail. The high maintenance wife was, it turns out, an even higher-maintenance mother, capable of acts of love, of cruelty, and of something that was a bit of both. As a result, her relationship with her offspring is, to say the least, tricky. Remarks by her eldest daughter, Sidda (a rather muted Sandra Bullock), in a magazine interview trigger a crisis between mother and daughter, which only the Ya-Yas can resolve. They do so by kidnapping Sidda and gradually revealing her mother's deepest, darkest, and far from divine, secret: Vivi once had a breakdown so total that she was taken away from her kids and institutionalized. Relief all round! Mom wasn't nasty after all, just nuts. A blissful Sidda reconciles with Vivi, Shep unlocks his door and Sidda decides to marry her Shep-in-waiting, Connor (a soft-spoken Irish hunk played with quiet charm by Angus MacFadyen), a man who has clearly not been studying his future in-laws' family history.

Does any of this make any sense? Not exactly. An even vaguely believable story is one of the casualties of the film's complex heritage. Divine Secrets is a bowdlerized version of Rebecca Wells's novel of the same name, which is itself a prettied-up companion to her 1992 debut, Little Altars Everywhere, and quite a lot has got lost in the process. Typical products of an era when most Americans seem to have believed that they had been molested by a close relative during childhood, these books fill in the gaps left in the movie's narrative by a creative team unwilling, presumably, to frighten off potential ticket buyers.

The books reveal that Vivi was not only badly abused by her mother (something that is hinted at in the film) but, quite probably, her father too. This complies with a basic rule of boomer fiction (fatally flawed families) and makes much more sense as a source of Vivi's later instability than the more romantic alternative put forward in the movie: that the Ya-Ya was pining for her pilot. Vivi may have been crazy about Jack, but I doubt if his death would have been enough to drive her mad. Equally, the remarkably tortured relationship between Vivi and her grown children becomes more understandable after reading that the abuse she inflicted on them was far worse than anything depicted on screen.

Not that this matters. The audience for this film is expecting two hours of lush Louisiana gush, the moviegoers' equivalent of aromatherapy, massage, and a nice long soak, and that is what they get, much of it in front of the most empathetic stretch of water since that famous Golden Pond. Those few who worry about plot details will probably have read the books, and, as we have discussed, if they haven't they will need to. As for the other characters in the movie, no one has to think too hard about them; their characters are caricatures, crudely drawn bayou nobility with the mannerisms of a clutch of drag queens. They are talking props, a Greek chorus with nothing (but too much) to say and if everyone (except calm Shep and doomed Connor) and everything in this movie seem a little overwrought, well, that's just chick-flick high-jinks. Besides, a quick look at some of Ms. Wells's original prose would suggest that understatement was never on the cards:

"If Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Yas in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock. She would have known that a primal, sweet strength flowed in her mother like an underground stream, and that the same stream flowed in her. Whatever scars Vivi had inflicted with her unhinged swings between creation and devouring, she had also passed on a mighty capacity for rapture."

Oh, is there a little of that loopy feminist-pagan thing swinging around unhinged in there? You bet, but, reduced to a subtext, it is one of the few aspects of the film that is underplayed, except, that is, for a moment of total absurdity near the end: Vivi, standing in the center of a circle of flaring, blazing sparklers is shown offering up a prayer to a Virgin Mary, who, one can only hope, is kindly enough not to burst out into amazed, startled laughter. As for me, a man from Mars watching a film from Venus, it was just another reminder that rationality, logic, and a sense of proportion had long since fled this unapologetically manipulative piece of hokum. If chicks could dig a flick like this, I was ready to proclaim to the world the superior reasoning powers of my own sex. Then I remembered something:

The movies of Jerry Bruckheimer.

The Ex-Files

National Review Online, May 17, 2002 

It has been a rough couple of months for fans of 1990s television. Waifish Ally is waving goodbye, ER's noble Mark Greene has already passed beyond the help of the most dedicated trauma surgeon, and even simpering Steve from Blue's Clues has abandoned his cerulean canine in favor of a beard and a band. Sunday, though, will truly see the end of an era. With the airing of its final episode, the X-Files will x-pire. Like Samantha, Fox Mulder's abducted sister, the series will be sorely missed. Its tales of alien mayhem and spooky intrigue are a dark, twisted delight, an unreality show that took paranoia to prime time and made suspicion a star. Brilliantly written and beautifully shot, the X-Files is film noir for color TV. Chiaroscuro interiors echo themes of a world lost in the shadows of conspiracy and moral ambiguity, while the series' pale landscapes are vistas of a not-quite-normal America, a place where everything is bleached out, other than the bizarre.

And, half-lit in the gloom, or, sometimes, seen as no more than a blur, there emerges a cast of characters to savor (occasionally, given the writers' rather unhealthy interest in cannibalism, quite literally so): monsters, mutants, maniacs, murderers, mechanical cockroaches, prehistoric mites and, most frightening of all, white men in suits. But there's no need to worry too much. If they can actually manage to avoid death, disease, demons, alien bounty hunters, abduction and walking off the show, Mulder and Scully will be around to protect us.

Strangely romantic heroes in an unromantic age, this oddly matched duo search for truth in a maze of lies. The eccentric interplay between them only adds to the show's offbeat appeal. Working with the exasperating Mulder, poor Scully finds herself in an often-thankless role. Sancho Panza and Doctor Watson would feel her pain. Played by Gillian Anderson, a strikingly attractive redhead (Doctor Watson would have approved), Dana Scully is the scientist, balanced, skeptical, and altogether quite sane. None of these adjectives apply to David Duchovny's Fox Mulder, a man with the soul of Don Quixote, the beliefs of Shirley Maclaine, and the mind of Sherlock Holmes. He is clever, cranky, obsessive, and inspired. Crumpled and faintly saturnine, there is also something of Sam Spade about him, but without the booze or, usually, the broads (despite getting lucky with a trainee vampire, Mulder's love life — and death (but that's another story) — is generally confined to pornography).

The X-Files has been a critical and popular triumph. At its peak four or five years ago, the show was regularly drawing audiences of around 20 million in the U.S. and it has been broadcast in well over a hundred countries (although what they make of it in Yemen is anyone's guess). With success came spin-offs (the X-Files movie, the Lone Gunmen TV series, various X-Files novels, video games), paraphernalia (t-shirts, action figures, trading cards, an "X-Files Ken and Barbie," comic books, posters, CDs, calendars, and no fewer than six "official guides") and, of course, learned tomes (Conspiracy Culture from Kennedy to the X-Files, Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files, and a lengthy (and invaluable) section in Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization).

Launched in 1993, the series was also one of the first cyber-sensations. Its conspiratorial themes and otherworldly subject matter were at one with the weirdness of the amazing, expanding web. The brave new show and the brazen new medium echoed each other, and as the thoughts and the ideas bounced between them, rapidly amplifying and becoming ever more absurd as they did so, they helped create an intellectual climate in which the X-Files could thrive.

This new means of communication was also used to create some old-fashioned buzz. As science fiction with more than its fair share of gore, the X-Files attracted its first viewers among exactly the same 18-34 (largely male) demographic that was the source of the Internet's most enthusiastic early adopters. Word of mouth recommendation was said to be the most effective advertising. Word of web turned out to be even better. It is impossible to quantify the contribution made by the Internet to the build-up in the X-Files' audience (from an average of around seven million in the first season to the high teens of millions two years later), but the show's creators were always careful not to neglect the geeks' dank ghetto, a recognition that reached its height when they listened to cyber-feedback and made heroes out of the Lone Gunmen, three nerds whose idea of fun was "hopping on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2."

However, it is not necessary to be Clyde Bruckman (the insurance salesman with the ability to predict the manner of someone's death) to realize that the X-Files would eventually have to close. The truth may still have been out there, but fewer and fewer have seemed to care. The number of viewers has fallen to around 8-9 million, and Agent Mulder hasn't been seen for weeks. Scully seems distracted and disengaged, a woman with more than autopsies on her mind, played by an actress who has now been in a period film (House of Mirth! Edith Wharton! Costumes!) and may be a tad too grand these days for little green men. And, yes, before anyone writes in, I know that aliens are gray. The more recent recruits, Agents Doggett and Reyes, are New Coke to Fox and Dana's Classic, perfectly acceptable, but not really worth the effort.

As even the makers of M*A*S*H eventually realized, no series can last forever. What was once original goes stale, innovation turns into a formula that even alien DNA cannot keep alive. While the X-Files has never been shy about repeating itself (we have seen a mutant that munches on human livers, a mutant that feasts on human fat, a mutant that is hungry for human hormones, and a mutant that browses on human brains) there comes a moment when there really is nothing else to say.

More than that, the X-Files is a product of a time that has passed. It is a relic of the Clinton years as dated as a dot-com share certificate, a stained blue dress or Kato Kaelin's reminiscences.

It's the attitude, stupid. Typical of that era, the X-Files combines credulity (too many episodes show alarming signs of a New Age "spirituality") with cynicism, irony, and a notable sense of detachment. This is a show where, for all the drama, no one seems genuinely involved — even with each other. There has clearly been an attraction between Mulder and Scully almost right from the start, but for many years they could not be bothered to do very much about it (Scully now appears to have had a child by Mulder, but that's a more complicated matter than it may first seem). Meanwhile, the underlying plot has twisted and turned, sometimes into deliberate self-mockery, sometimes into incomprehensibility, sometimes into real suspense. There are episodes that teeter between horror and comedy, while there are others (some of the most effective, interestingly enough) that are just played for laughs. This is Po-Mo Sci-Fi, a wild, self-referential, but essentially meaningless jaunt into the unknown. It is Seinfeld with flying saucers, another show, ultimately, about nothing. Nothing serious, anyway.

Nothing serious? Apart, that is, from the existence of a vast conspiracy involved, somehow (more details on Sunday?), with covering up, and perhaps assisting, the planned alien colonization of this planet. But aliens were the pet rocks of the mid-90s, and it's too soon for nostalgia. The X-Files' continuing obsession with our gray-skinned tormentors is, well, so over. The same is true of its conspiratorial premise and all those suggestions of an irrevocably untrustworthy and malevolent government. While Chris Carter, the series' creator, seems to see himself as a left-libertarian (it is not necessary to be an Earth 2 nitpicker to detect in the X-Files a worldview a little closer to that of Oliver Stone than the Cato Institute), it is not surprising that the show found a mass audience in that now bygone era, the epoch of Reno amok and the Gingrich revolution.

Of course, there's no real mystery as to why Chris Carter had to turn to aliens, the feds, and sinister "syndicates" for his dark side. As he once put it, "With the Berlin Wall down, with the global nuclear threat gone…there is growing paranoia because…there are no easy villains anymore." At the time, viewers seemed to agree, but we have since been taught that such an assumption was hopelessly, tragically wrong. With Duchovny largely absent (he'd had enough: E.T. was not really to blame), the X-Files would have been set for decline even without 9/11, but you would have to be Norm Mineta to avoid noticing that ratings fell almost 25 percent between the May 2001 season finale, and the ninth season's premiere last November. The X-Files was a show for self-indulgent, more complacent times, an entertainment for before. That is something that makes one aspect of the series' 1993 debut seem, now, eerily appropriate.

Its date — September 10.