Destination Moon

National Review Online, July 17, 2009

Apollo_11_BBC_Studio

I don’t know where I was when I heard that JFK had been shot, but I can remember where I was at teatime the following day — at home in the east of England, watching the very first episode of Doctor Who. It was the halting, creakily paced beginning of a long, beguiling tumble through time and space that, in the absence of any proper space program of our own, became an eccentric and quintessentially English alternative to Gemini, Apollo, and footsteps on the moon.

Not for the first time, we had sweetened our failure with fantasy. NASA’s Mission Control may have been the acme of American industrial cool, a collection of (Alfred) Sloan Rangers, calm, crew-cut men in white shirts methodically guiding tiny vessels over immense distances, but we had Doctor Who, an almost-perfect embodiment of the chaotic, improvisational genius that Brits like to believe is one of their better national characteristics. The doctor generally appeared to have little control and less interest over where or when his spacecraft might land — but wherever and whenever it was, and whatever the perils he encountered there, he invariably managed to emerge victorious at the end. To be sure, he was an alien from another world, but he was a very British alien, amateurish, surprisingly effective, and clad in vaguely Edwardian clothing, a wistful nod to a lost empire’s last good time.

Yes, the fact that the Union Jack would never preside over some far lunar crater was a disappointment to a nation still proud of its explorers of old, but it was with a certain sardonic, stoic grace that this once-great power came to terms with its role as a space-race spectator and concluded that it performed that role rather well. In addition, the world famous Jodrell Bank Observatory was, Britons told themselves, an essential element in man’s thrust into the unknown, a listening post that provided the Americans with invaluable assistance, not least in eavesdropping on the intriguing Soviet spacecraft that sailed through the heavens. These vehicles were shrouded in mystery and lies, yet were quite capable of delivering a series of spectacular achievements — the first orbit by an artificial satellite, the first man in space, the first space walk, the first successful soft landing of a probe on the moon.

To tell the truth, we were able to take more pleasure in those Soviet triumphs than were our cousins across the Atlantic. Naturally, we were more or less on the side of the Yanks, our allies, “family,” and, don’t say it too loudly, heirs, but we had a touch more room for the idea that the us-versus-them that counted most was man against the dangers of the universe, not man against man.

When, in August 1961, four months or so after his pioneering orbit around the Earth, Yuri Gagarin visited the British capital, the London Times sniffed that he had “received a welcome that sometimes bordered on hysteria” (this was before Beatlemania). At just three years old, I was a part of the frenzy. My parents, no stooges of the Kremlin, decided it was “important” that I was taken to stare at the Soviet spaceman. Sadly, I have no memory of this historic event, but I like to believe that it played a part in triggering my lifelong fascination with what might lie out there among the stars, a fascination only partly attributable to my subsequent abduction by aliens (well, you never know), a fascination rocket-powered throughout my boyhood by the way that science fiction and science fact played off each other in that first great age of space exploration, an era that promised, or so it seemed, to make a reality of the wonders already foretold by Asimov, Clarke, and the best of the rest of the paperback seers.

And as the decade progressed, each new program — Gemini, Apollo, Vostok, Voskhod, Soyuz — seemed to bring that reality ever closer, especially when it became clear that man was at last on the threshold of a visit to his planet's nearest neighbor. By the late summer of 1968, the finish line was coming into view. September saw the Soviet Zond 5 become the first vessel to circle the moon and return safely to earth — complete with a cargo of worms, flies, and a turtle or two. America countered with a sharp ratchet-up of the evolutionary scale, dispatching Apollo 7 into orbit in October, the first successful manned Apollo mission.

That, thought NASA, was practice enough. It had to be. Nobody knew what the Soviets might try next. In December, Apollo 8 headed for the moon — and possibly the most magical Christmas since Charles Dickens first published his tale of Ebenezer, ghosts, and redemption. Britain was enthralled. The moon made stars of science correspondents such as the dignified Peter Fairley from ITV (then the UK’s sole private television network) and the boyishly enthusiastic James Burke of the BBC, and gave an extra boost to the career of Patrick Moore, the marvelously oddball host of The Sky at Night, a show the BBC has operated as a vespers for insomniac astronomers since, astonishingly, 1957 — with Patrick, these days Sir Patrick, Moore always in charge. As for me, in between painstakingly monitoring developments on the telly and painstakingly boring everyone I knew with my command of mission minutiae, I pored over diagrams from the newspapers showing Apollo 8’s tricky trajectory (suitably enough, it resembled a figure eight) and preparing for the tense vigil for to come once Anders, Lovell, and Borman first disappeared behind the dark side of the moon.

Then 1968 evolved into 1969, and Apollo 8 into Apollo 9 and from that into the dress rehearsal that was Apollo 10. The Soviet program ran into difficulties, leaving history to Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins — and the future to the rest of us. Looking at the diary I kept that year, I can see that I had marked out the projected date — July 16 — for the launch (“US MOON SHOT OFF TODAY”) of Apollo 11 some time before the momentous day itself actually dawned. This launch was something to count the days to, a grand historical happening to which the later entry in my diary didn’t do much justice: “It took off successfully.” True enough, but not enough. I gazed that day delighted and agog at television pictures of the giant rocket rising majestically into a sky then unscarred by memories of the Challenger.

Eventually Apollo 11 vanished from my sight — but not from my mind. Obsessed by thoughts of the moon landing ahead (at last!) and where it might lead (Mars!), I stalked that spacecraft over the next few days. Nothing must go wrong! TV’s designated experts did what they could to explain what was going on, helped by the models and the charts that were the best — not bad — that British television could come up with in a primitive time long before CGI. But it could never be enough: I needed to know more. I scrutinized footage of the three astronauts. How were they doing? Were they okay? I checked out cavernous, disciplined Mission Control for clues. Was all well? Who looked nervous? Between the beeps that became part of Apollo’s soundtrack, I strained to make sense of those exotic, evocative communications between Houston and spaceship that NASA chose to relay to us back “home,” a word itself now given a larger meaning than ever before.

The night of July 20 found me allowed to stay up way past my bedtime and sip from a glass of, strangely, cherry brandy (a sickly drink then mainly associated with a minor scandal involving Prince Charles) that I’d been given so I could toast Armstrong, Aldrin, and, as my mother usually described him, “poor Michael Collins.” We watched as the Eagle slowly (or so it seemed to me then) descended onto the gray surface that I believed would soon (the exciting-sounding year 2000 sounded about right) play host to moon bases and other treats; I listened to the clipped, sparse commentary of a BBC that had the sensitivity to let the descent — and the men from NASA — speak for themselves.

And it was the BBC that we watched. Despite perpetual parental muttering about its (undoubted) left-wing bias, the Stuttafords, like most British families in that era, tended to turn to the Beeb for coverage of anything really significant. July 20, 1969, showed why. ITV’s coverage revolved around hours upon hours of Frost/Moon or, more accurately, David Frost’s Moon Party, a broadcast that drove one guest, Ray Bradbury, to walk off in despair. It was not, grumbled Bradbury later, “a night for Sammy Davis Jr. or Engelbert Humperdinck.” Indeed it wasn’t.

Then finally (nearly 4 a.m., UK time — what had they been doing in there?), Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle and onto the Moon. Sitting in a house in the quiet English countryside, we raised refreshed glasses and exhaustedly contemplated the spectacle of a man walking on a rock some quarter of a million miles away. The images transmitted from the Sea of Tranquility were blurry, shadowy, appropriately dreamlike, but what had taken place was clear, even if I didn’t remain awake long enough to see Aldrin join Armstrong out in that “magnificent desolation” of theirs. No matter. As my diary for that night records: “MAN on MOON.” And so he was. And so they were. And so we were.

There are, of course, those who say that the whole thing was both a waste of money and a blind alley. I don’t agree, but that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I’m waiting for Monday the 20th, and a chance to crack open the cherry brandy in a celebration of that extraordinary night of 40 years ago. Come to think of it, maybe not cherry brandy, but you get the point . . .

Heart of Darkness

James Palmer: The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia

National Review, June 18, 2009

To find even a quick allusion to the White Russian civil-war commander Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg (1886–1921) is to be pulled into a past too strange to be believable and too terrible not to be. Three years ago, I was working on an article on Mongolia for National Review. When the text I’d submitted for editing was returned, a reference to the country’s “brief, brutal, and bizarre rule [by] a crazed Baltic baron” was questioned: “Are you certain about this?” As James Palmer’s absorbing, wonderfully written new biography of this gargoyle khan, exterminationist anti-Semite, paranoid mystic, and (some thought) reincarnated god shows, when it comes to Ungern, certainty has a way of vanishing into myth, rumor, and whispered campfire tale: There is much about the baron that remains, in Palmer’s perfect adjective, “elusive.”

An earlier, and profoundly influential, biographer (of sorts), the Franco-Russian Communist Vladimir Pozner, came to the same conclusion (Ungern “kept on escaping me”) but took a different tack in response. His Bloody Baron (1938) openly blended fact with fiction and, more surreptitiously, well-crafted Soviet propaganda, to recreate the baroquely cruel baron of legend — but not just legend. There was indeed an Ungern, a killer, a torturer, a burner-alive, who battled the Bolsheviks with a heedless bravery and primitive ferocity so devastating that he was able to turn a corner of Siberia into a charnel-house realm all his own. And yes, he later did the same with a swathe of Mongolia that he transformed into an anticipation of Babi Yar and a reminder of Genghis.

But that was not enough for Pozner. His baron is, almost, a creature of nightmare seemingly lurking in the thin space between reality and the darker side of the human imagination, yet not without a certain atavistic grandeur that was, in fact, entirely lacking from Ungern’s shabby, psychotic, ragtag crusade: “From a distance came a call of trumpets. The street filled with Ungern’s squadrons, riding slowly. The Baron leant out of the window. A stream of horsemen flowed along the roadway. On their shoulder-straps two-headed eagles were foreshortened: legions of silver eagles ready to wing northwards.”

This is the baron who can be glimpsed in comic book (in one of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series), in video game (Iron Storm), and even in the lyrics of “Ungern-Sternberg,” a song by French punk rockers Paris Violence: “Ungern-Sternberg, chevalier romantique / Tu attends la mort comme un amant sa promise . . .” (“Ungern-Sternberg, romantic knight / You wait for death like a lover . . .”)

Faced with, and fascinated by, epic monstrosity, we — as a species — seem disturbingly willing to keep ourselves at a comfortable emotional and intellectual distance from its deeper, even more hideous implications. In The Bloody White Baron, Palmer does not hold back from detailing the horrors (this is not a book for the faint-hearted) for which that chevalier romantique was responsible, but he does so clinically, analytically, immune to their dark spell: “Ungern’s sadism . . . was appalling and inexcusable, but also explicable. The obsession with . . . whipping was an exaggerated version of the discipline of the old Russian imperial army, where fifty lashes were considered a light punishment. Ungern favored ‘a hundred blows to each part of the body.’ . . . ‘Did you know,’ he mused, ‘that men can still walk when the flesh and bone are separated?’”

By contrast, when Ungern makes an appearance in Buddha’s Little Finger, a 1996 novel by the Russian writer Victor Pelevin, it is as the stern, laconic guardian of an infinite, coldly beautiful Valhalla, and if anything, an oddly admirable figure. Of the maniac there is barely a suggestion; of the chevalier romantique, there is all too much.

It’s no surprise that the other two best-known biographical accounts of the baron are themselves “elusive.” In Beasts, Men and Gods (1922), Ferdinand Ossendowski, a Polish adventurer, writer, and Munchausen detained by the baron in Urga (today’s Ulaanbaatar), paints a vivid portrait of a soldier lost to mysticism, madness, and massacre, a warlord startlingly reminiscent of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz. Ossendowski’s accuracy is as disputed as the role he came to play in Ungern’s entourage, and Palmer jeers that the Pole “was not always the most reliable of storytellers.” No, he was not; but — notwithstanding Palmer’s use of an impressive range of archival material — Ossendowski’s flawed, sometimes fantastical yarn remains a significant, and unavoidable, influence on this latest biography of a man who seemed to relish the speculation he provoked: “My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.” Naturally, the source for that quotation is Ossendowski.

There’s more than a trace of Ossendowski in Dmitri Alioshin’s Asian Odyssey (1940), a memoir by one of Ungern’s veterans, and another major (possibly even reasonably accurate) resource for Palmer. Typically for some of Ungern’s earlier chroniclers, little is known about Alioshin: We cannot even be sure that that was his real name. This lurid, frequently stomach-churning volume is also, if unintentionally, a revealing account of its author’s own moral disintegration: “A few days later we caught a Bolshevik commissar, a former army officer. We tied him to a pole and marched a detachment past him. Each man struck him as hard as he could in the face. He died in fifteen minutes. The next commissar we caught was beaten to death with a nagaika, a strong army whip which tears the flesh from the bones.”

Note the echo of Ungern’s obsessions. Note too that “we”: The once-idealistic officer was descending into barbarism, a process that ground on as the young Russian’s odyssey unfolded on its dreadful course. Tragically, his was a story not so different from that of many others swept into the maelstrom of an empire collapsing into revolution, ruin, and civil war of an atrocity that might have shocked even Hobbes. It’s also a story that helps us peer deeper into the abyss into which Ungern so ecstatically jumped.

But unlike Alioshin, Ungern did not have to fall so very far to leave civilization behind. The baron may have been the scion of one of those ancient German families that retained their hold over Russia’s Baltic provinces until almost the last days of the czars, but arguably the most important thing he inherited from his forebears was a streak of insanity. Violent, charmless, impulsive, and uncontrollable, the baron, as Palmer demonstrates, was from the beginning a Junker amok, noblesse with no hint of oblige. He made a nonsense of his education, and his career in the imperial army was a stop-go fiasco redeemed, and then only partly, by World War I.

It was the Bolshevik revolution that finally gave Ungern his chance to shine, if that’s the word. Within months of Lenin’s coup, the baron’s bravery, energy, and fanatical opposition to a new order that he believed to be literally demonic had allowed him to carve out a prominent role in the White forces ranged against the Red Army in Siberia’s Transbaikalia. Russia’s Calvary was Ungern’s opportunity. Like Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness on which Apocalypse Now was modeled, the baron had “immense plans”: He dreamt of building a great Asiatic empire as bulwark and spearhead against the revolutionaries (and anyone else) who “threaten[ed] the Divine Spirit” in mankind. And like Conrad’s Kurtz, Ungern appears to have been beguiled, emboldened, and inspired by the wilderness in which he found himself, far from home, far from convention, far from conscience.

Palmer deftly and briskly (this is not a long book) guides his readers through a conflict that raged throughout southeast Siberia and, ultimately, Mongolia. Given the remoteness of time and place, not to mention the bewildering range of characters, factions, and causes, Palmer’s success in telling this tale as clearly as he does is no small achievement. More than that, he brilliantly conveys a sense of the savagery, scope, and strangeness of this war, a war of telegraphy and sorcery, a war at the intersection of ancient and modern, of European and Asian, a war fought in a distant ghastly nowhere, a blood-drenched free-for-all where the most effective forces included huge armored trains, mounted cavalry, and lethal squads of Tibetan dobdobs, “monk-enforcers, their clothes lightly smeared with butter and their faces painted with soot to strike fear into the enemies of the faith.”

But of all the images that crowd this evocative book, there is none more haunting than one that Palmer borrows from Alioshin, a description of Ungern leading his troops during their final retreat: “[He] rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. [He] had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like the reincarnation of a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid to look at him.”

And so they should have been — but as much for what Ungern says about all of us as for what he might have done to them.

Millionaires' Brawl

the weekly Standard, June 8, 2009

With the economy floundering, Wall Street in disgrace, and American capitalism facing its most serious ideological challenge in one, two, or three generations (you can take your pick), it's a good moment to remember Lenin.

While the bearded Bolshevik's grasp of economics was never the best and his stock picks remain a mystery, he would have grasped the politics of our present situation all too well. The old butcher would not have found anything especially surprising about the rise of Barack Obama, the nature of his supporters, or the evolution of his policies. He would have simply asked his usual question: Kto/kogo ("Who/whom"). The answer would tell him almost everything he needed to know. Lenin regarded politics as binary--a zero sum game with winners, losers, and nothing in between. For him it was a bare-knuckled brawl that ultimately could be reduced to that single brutal question: who was on top and who was not. Who was giving orders to whom. Hope and Change, nyet so much.

Of course, it would be foolish to deny the role that things like idealism, sanctimony, fashion, hysteria, exhaustion, restlessness, changing demographics, Hurricane Katrina, an unpopular war, George W. Bush, and mounting economic alarm played in shaping last November's Democratic triumph. Nevertheless if we peer through the smug, self-congratulatory smog that enveloped the Obama campaign, the outlines of a harder-edged narrative can be discerned, a narrative that bolsters the idea that Lenin's cynical maxim has held up better than the state he created.

So, who in 2008 was Who, and who Whom?

In a Democratic year, it's no surprise that organized labor emerged as Who and large swaths of the private sector as Whom. Many of the other, sometimes overlapping, constituencies (whether it's minorities, the young, or the gay, to name but three) who saw themselves benefiting from an Obama presidency were equally easy to predict. After all, whether by the accident of his birth or the design of his campaign, Obama's victorious coalition was, even more than most, a creation of meticulously assembled blocks, more pluribus than unum, and each with plenty to gain from his arrival in the White House.

That said, for all the smiles, the reassuring vagueness, and the this-isn't-going-to-hurt (too much) rhetoric, it was somewhat less predictable that a large slice of the upper crust would succumb to Obama's deftly articulated pitch. Yes, it's true that there had been signs that some richer, more upscale voters were being driven into the Democratic camp by the culture wars (and the fact that prosperity had left them free to put a priority on such issues). Nevertheless, even after taking account of the impact of an unusually unpopular incumbent, it's striking how much this process intensified in 2008--a year in which the Democrats were not only running their most leftwing candidate since George McGovern, but also running a leftwing candidate with every chance of winning. Voting for Obama would not be a cost-free virtuecratic nod, but a choice with consequences. At first glance therefore it makes little sense that 49 percent of those from households making more than $100,000 a year (26 percent of the electorate) opted for the Democrat, up from 41 percent in 2004, as did 52 percent of those raking in over $200,000 (6 percent of voters), up from 35 percent last go round.

Yet, this shift in voting patterns is more rational than it initially seems: more Lenin than lemming. Class conflict is inherent in all higher primate societies (even this one). It can manifest itself at every level, right up to the very top, and certain aspects of the 2008 campaign came to resemble a millionaires' brawl--one that was, of course, decorous, sotto voce, and rarely mentioned.

In a shrewd article written for Politico shortly after the election, Clinton adviser Mark Penn tried to pin down who exactly these higher echelon Obama voters were ("professional," corporate rather than small business, highly educated, and so on). Possibly uncomfortable with acknowledging anything so allegedly un-American as class yet politically very comfortable with this obvious class's obvious electoral clout, he eulogized its supposedly shared characteristics: teamwork, pragmatism, collective action, trust in government intervention, a preference for the scientific over the faith-based, and a belief in the "interconnectedness of the world." We could doubtless add an appreciation of NPR and a fondness for a bracing decaf venti latte to the list, and as we did so we would try hard to forget this disquieting passage from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: "The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians."

We are not Oceania, and there's a messiah in the White House rather than Big Brother, but it's not hard to read Lenin, Penn, and Orwell, and then decide that Penn's professionals are the coming Who. They have certainly (at least until the current economic unpleasantness) been growing rapidly in numbers. As Penn relates:

 While there has been some inflation over the past 12 years, the exit poll demographics show that the fastest growing group of voters .  .  . has been those making over $100,000 a year. .  .  . In 1996, only 9 percent of the electorate said their family income was that high .  .  . [By 2008] it had grown to 26 percent.

This is a class that is likely to be more ethnically diverse and younger than previous groupings of the affluent--factors that may influence their voting as much as their income. Nevertheless, even if we allow for the fact that there is a limit to how far you can conflate households on $100,000 a year with those on $200,000, there are enough of them with enough in the way of similar career paths, education, and aspirations that together they can be treated as the sort of voting bloc that Penn describes. And it's a formidable voting bloc with a formidable sense of its own self-interest.

That sense of self-interest might seem tricky to reconcile with voting for a candidate likely (and for those making over $200,000 certain) to hike their taxes. In the wake of the long Wall Street boom and savage bust, however, it is anything but. Put crudely, the economic growth of the 1990s and 2000s created the conditions in which this class could both flourish and feel hard done by. Penn hints at one explanation for this contradiction when he refers to the alienating effect of the layoffs that are a regular feature of modern American corporate life. That's true enough. Today's executive may be well paid, sometimes very well paid, but he is in some respects little more than a day laborer. Corporate paternalism has been killed--and the murderer is widely believed to be the Gordon Gekko model of capitalism that Obama has vowed to cut down to size.

But Penn fails to mention (perhaps because it was too unflattering a motive to attribute to a constituency he clearly wants to cultivate) that this discontent stems as much from green eyes as pink slips--as well, it must be added, from a strong sense of entitlement denied. Traces of this can be detected in parts of Robert Frank's Richistan: A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (2007), a clever, classically top-of-the-bull-market account of what was then--ah, 2007!--America's new Gilded Age. To read this invaluable travelogue of the territories of the rich (the "virtual nation," complete with possessions, that Frank dubs "Richistan") is to see how the emergence of a mass class of super-rich could fuel growing resentment both within its ranks and, by extension, without. By "without," I refer not to the genuinely poor, who have, sadly, had time to become accustomed to almost immeasurably worse levels of deprivation, but to the not-quite-so-rich eyeing their neighbors' new Lexus and simmering, snarling, and borrowing to keep up. The story of rising inequality in America is a familiar one: What's not so well known is that the divide has grown sharpest at the top. Frank reports that the average income for the top 1 percent of income earners grew 57 percent between 1990 and 2004, but that of the top 0.1 percent raced ahead by 85 percent, a trend that will have accelerated until 2008 and found echoes further down the economic hierarchy.

You might not weep for the mergers-and-acquisition man maddened by the size of an even richer hedge fund manager's yacht, but his trauma is a symptom of a syndrome that has spread far beyond Greenwich, Connecticut. Above a certain level, wealth, and the status that flows from it, is more a matter of relatives than absolutes. The less dramatically affluent alphas that make up the core of Penn's professionals--lawyers, journalists, corporate types, academics, senior civil servants, and the like--suddenly found themselves over the last decade not just overshadowed by finance's new titans but actually priced out of many things they view as the perks of their position: private schools, second homes, and so on. I doubt they enjoyed the experience.

Well educated, articulate and, by any usual measure, successful, they had been reduced to betas--and thus, politically, to a glint in Obama's eye. The decades of prosperity had swollen their numbers, but shrunk their status and their security. Their privileges were mocked or dismantled and their "good" jobs were ever more vulnerable. Wives as well as husbands now had to work, and not just down at the church's charity store either, a change that is more resented than Stepford's children would generally like to admit. Even so, things they felt should have been theirs by rights were still out of reach or, perhaps worse, graspable only by heavily leveraged hands. In a boom-time (July 2006) piece for Vanity Fair, Nina Munk interviewed two women amongst "the worn carpet and faded chintz" of Greenwich's old guard Round Hill Club. They told her how everything had gone downhill, "no one can afford to live here--all our kids are moving to Darien or Rowayton because it's cheaper."

It's a mark of the pressure to keep up that, as Frank noted, in 2004, 20 percent of "Lower Richistanis," those 7.5 million households (the number would be lower now, but it then would have constituted roughly 6-7 percent of the U.S. total) struggling along on a net worth of $1 million to $10 million, spent more than they earned. These poor souls will have included the most prosperous of Penn's professionals, but in an age of "mass luxury" and almost unlimited credit, the compulsion to do whatever it took not to be trumped by the Joneses spread to their less affluent cohorts, with the devastating consequences that were finally visible to all by the middle of last year.

Thus Penn's people had been outbid and outplayed by a rapacious Wall Street swarm of boors, rogues, gamblers, whippersnappers, the plain lucky, and the otherwise undeserving. Then came Wall Street's implosion and these prejudices were reinforced by that hole in the 401(k) and the collapse in the value of that overmortgaged house. Voting left looked better and better.

In 2007, the final financial reckoning was still slouching along waiting to be born. Back then, all they knew was that they had been shoved down the totem pole, which had changed beyond recognition. Nothing that had mattered did, or so it appeared. You can see an echo of this in the opening sections of one of the numerous (and, to be fair, not entirely unmerited) I-told-you-so articles penned by Paul Krugman in recent months:

Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a graduate student in economics, only the least ambitious of my classmates sought careers in the financial world. Even then, investment banks paid more than teaching or public service--but not that much more, and anyway, everyone knew that banking was, well, boring. In the years that followed, of course, banking became anything but boring. Wheeling and dealing flourished, and pay scales in finance shot up, drawing in many of the nation's best and brightest young people (O.K., I'm not so sure about the "best" part).

This social unease bubbled through Tom Wolfe's "The Pirate Pose," a 2007 essay that ran, apparently without irony, in the inaugural edition of Condé Nast's glossy Portfolio magazine, itself a lost artifact of the era when CDOs were still chic. Wolfe's sly--and in its exaggerations accidentally self-revealing--piece opens with an insistent pounding at the door of a Park Avenue apartment. Inside, a genteel lady rises from her "18th-century" (old!) "burled-wood secretary" (tasteful!), "her grandmother's" (old money!), "where she always wrote her thank-you notes" (refined!). Outside rages the absolutely dreadful hedge fund manager with "more money than God" who has just moved into the building:

Ever so gingerly, she opened the door. He was a meat-fed man wearing a rather shiny--silk?--and rather too vividly striped open shirt that paunched out slightly over his waistband. The waistband was down at hip-hugger level because the lower half of his fortyish body was squeezed into a pair of twentyish jeans .  .  . gloriously frayed at the bottoms of the pant legs, from which protruded a pair of long, shiny pointed alligator shoes. They looked like weapons.

Wolfe had fallen out of love with the Masters of the Universe. The ironic detachment that was one of the many pleasures of The Bonfire of the Vanities had been bumped and buffeted by the author's horror at the barbarians not just broken through the gates, but everywhere he would rather be, something that perhaps explains the faintest trace of glee that runs through this passage:

As for the co-op buildings in New York, their residents having felt already burned by the fabulous new money, some are now considering new screening devices. .  .  . The board of a building on Park Avenue is now considering rejecting applicants who have too much money.

Wolfe is angry, not so much because of the money (Sherman McCoy wasn't exactly poor), but because these loutish self-styled freebooters do not care for what he enjoys, what he stands for, even for where he might socialize (in his lists of some of the older Upper East Side hangouts, he throws in a couple of the more recherché names--the Brook, the Leash--as a reminder that he knows what's what). They despise what he favors, and even condescension, that traditional last line of defense against the arriviste who does not know his place, is unavailable. How can you condescend to someone who does not care what you think and is richer than you can imagine? The great writer finds himself sidelined on what is, quite literally, his home turf.

This is the class resentment that twists through recent remarks by another writer, a former academic who argued that it was ridiculous that "25-year-olds [were] getting million-dollar bonuses, [and] they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and the waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious."

The reference to a "college professor" as the epitome of the individual wronged by this topsy-turvy state of affairs is telling: 58 percent of those with a postgraduate education voted Democratic, up from 50 percent in 1992 (those with just one degree split more evenly). If those comments are telling, so is the identity of the speaker: one Barack Obama, a politician who has explicitly and implicitly promised the managers, the scribblers, the professors, and the now-eclipsed gentry that he would finish what the market collapse had begun. He'd put those Wall Street nouveaux back in their place. Higher taxes will claw at what's left of their fortunes and, no less crucially, their prospects. What taxes don't accomplish, new regulation (some of which even makes some sense) and the direct stake the government has now taken in so much of the economy will. Better still are all the respectably lucrative, respectably respectable jobs that it will take to run, or bypass, this new order: Former derivatives traders need not apply.

In an only slightly tongue-in-cheek February column in the New York Times, David Brooks neatly described what this will mean:

 After the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three .  .  . a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live.

If the price for this is a relatively modest (for now) tax increase on their own incomes, it is one the denizens of Ward Three and their equivalents elsewhere will be happy to pay. For it is they now who are on a roll, and every day the news, carefully crafted by the journalists that make up such an archetypical part of Penn's professional class, gets sweeter.

The humbling of Wall Street has made for great copy, but it's fascinating how much personal animus runs through some of the reporting; from the giddy, gloating, descriptions of excess, of bonuses won and fortunes lost, to the oddly misogynistic trial-of-Marie-Antoinette subgenre devoted to examining the plight of "hedge fund wives" and, more recently, "TARP wives" (who had not, of course, been compelled to work).

In his "Profiles in Panic" a January 2009, article for Vanity Fair, Michael Shnayerson wrote:

The day after Lehman Brothers went down, a high-end Manhattan department store reportedly had the biggest day of returns in its history. "Because the wives didn't want the husbands to get the credit-card bills," says a fashion-world insider.

Not quite the guillotine, but the tricoteuses would have relished the story.

And then there's this from the Washington Post's travel section last month:

For so long, they have been taking Manhattan. They as in the Wall Streeters who counted their bonuses in increments of millions. .  .  . The coveted restaurants, the hotels with infinite thread-count sheets .  .  . the designer shops that sniff at the idea of a sale--it was all theirs. But the times they-are-a-changin'. .  .  . Our moment to reclaim the city has arrived. To shove our wallets forward and say, Yes, we can afford this. In fact, give us two.

To anticipate what (other than Ward Three vacationers to Manhattan) is coming next, listen to the increasing talk of congressional investigations (modelled on the FDR-era Pecora hearings) into Wall Street's workings or for that matter an intriguing, much-discussed piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the IMF (Academic: check! Bureaucrat: check!), in which he drew comparisons, not all of them unfair, between the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and Washington and the more overtly corrupt oligarchies he had witnessed abroad in the course of his work. As this analysis finds wider acceptance (and it's too convenient not to), it presages a far greater overhaul of the financial sector than the moneymen now expect and a permanent shift of the balance of power (and the resulting rewards) back in favor of the political class and those who feed off it.

If you think that leaves some of Obama's Wall Street backers in the role of dupes, you're right. But there is a group who are looking smarter by the moment: the tiny cluster that dwells in Upper Richistan (households with a net worth in excess of $100,000,000). If we look at the admittedly sketchy data, there are clear indications that a majority of the inhabitants of Lower Richistan--with their millions but not their ten millions--voted for McCain. However much they might dislike the GOP's social conservatism or hanker after, say, a greener planet, they know that they are not so rich that they can afford to overlook the damage that a high tax, high regulation, high dudgeon liberal regime could do to their wealth, position, and prospects.

The view from Upper Richistan looks very different. The (again sketchy) data suggest that its occupants voted for Obama, as they may well have done for Kerry. Platinum card and red (well, tastefully pink-accented) flag apparently go well together. Warren Buffett's ideological leanings are well known, as are the donations, causes, and preachings of George Soros. Then there was that campaign a few years back by some richer folk (including Soros, Sanka heiress Agnes Gund, and a nauseatingly named grouplet called Responsible Wealth) in defense of the Death Tax. Describing itself as a "network of over 700 business leaders and wealthy individuals in the top 5% of wealth and/or income in the US who use their surprising voice to advocate for fair taxes and corporate accountability," Responsible Wealth is these days busily calling for New York governor David Paterson to increase the tax on "those who can afford it--which means us."

To be sure, neither self-righteousness nor idiocy is a respecter of income, but taken as a whole such efforts are much more than gesture politics, and much more than an updated version of the radical chic so ably described by a younger Tom Wolfe. Many New Jerseyans might think that the very liberal, very rich (thank you, Goldman Sachs) Jon Corzine has been a joke of a governor, but his political career has been all too serious--easily gliding from Wall Street to the U.S. Senate to the governor's mansion--and he's by no means alone. Colorado's high-profile "Gang of Four" (three tech entrepreneurs and a billionaire heiress) may not quite share the politics of Madame Mao's even more notorious clique, but they have been enormously effective in pushing their state into the Democratic camp, and their tactics are sure to be emulated elsewhere. In Richistan, Frank cited a 2004 study that showed that among candidates who spent more than $4 million on their own campaigns, Democrats outnumbered Republicans three to one. Among candidates that spent $1 million to $4 million, Republicans outspent Democrats two to one: more evidence of the political split between Lower and Upper Richistan.

The notion that some of the very richest Americans (not all, of course) support the Democrats should no longer be seen as a novelty. Backing Obama was just the latest chapter in a well-worn story. And it is not as illogical as it might seem. These Croesuses are rich enough scarcely to notice the worst (fingers-crossed) that an Obama IRS can do. They were thus free to vote for Obama, a candidate whose broader policy agenda clearly resonated with many in this nation's elite and who seemed at the time both plausible and unthreatening. The shrewdest or most cynical amongst them will have realized something else, something that an old Bolshevik might call a class interest. The onslaughts on Lower Richistan and on Wall Street will make it more difficult for others to join them at mammon's pinnacle and thus to compete with them economically, politically (particularly in an era when McCain-Feingold has greatly increased the importance of being able to self-finance a campaign), and socially.

Who/whom indeed.

The Prince

Il Divo

National Review Online, April 24, 2009

To listen to what is not said is often as informative as hearing what is. Absence can reveal as much as presence, the opaque more than the clear. It is this idea, brilliantly conveyed, that runs through the performance that dominates Il Divo, transforming this bravura, epic, and wildly imaginative new film by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (released last year in Italy, it opens at selected U.S. venues this weekend) from the merely great into something very close to a masterpiece.

An acerbic, allusive depiction of Giulio Andreotti (born 1919), the acerbic, elusive statesman who served seven times as Italy’s prime minister between 1972 and 1992, and who was for decades its most powerful politician, Il Divo is not a movie with obvious appeal to a wide American audience. It monkeys with time, reality, and genre, jumping to and fro between decades, between fact and fiction, between comedy, tragedy, satire, and philippic. The events it purports to describe are little known over here. The political figures that prowl through its lethal funhouse narrative will be unfamiliar and, in their urbane cynicism and sardonic Realpolitik, almost indistinguishable from one another. Was that Franco Evangelisti we just saw, or Salvo Lima? Does it matter?

If it’s any consolation, Italians also struggle to understand their country’s post-war political history. It’s a half-century-long saga of cabals, conspiracy, and faction, of collusion with organized crime, of governments that fell but never changed, of guilty verdicts that were not, of murky Masonic lodges and devious Vatican bankers, and, always, the fear that the country’s deep ideological divisions would ultimately lead to violent conflict. Finally, hideously and, except to the dead, ambiguously, they did. The “years of lead” between the late 1960s and the early 1980s were the years of the Red Brigades, of fascist bombings, of a Mafia that appeared ready to take on the state, but also of a growing suspicion that much of this was the result of a deliberately engineered “strategy of tension” designed to whip up support for a more openly authoritarian regime. It’s no surprise that Italians have a word, dietrologia (“the science of what’s behind”), to describe the quest to discover who is really responsible for what goes on in that country of theirs. Up until recently, the answer, more often than not, or so it is repeatedly claimed, was Andreotti.

Paranoia? To a degree, but amongst the members of the faction that Andreotti led within Italy’s Christian Democratic party, and who feature in Il Divo, Salvo Lima used his connections to la Cosa Nostra to deliver large numbers of crucial Sicilian votes (he was eventually murdered by the Mafia in a response to government moves against it), Franco Evangelisti was a self-confessed recipient of large amounts of illicit campaign-finance “contributions,” Paolo Pomicino was convicted for his role in a major bribery scandal (naturally he still sits in parliament, where he has served as a member of the commission responsible for investigating organized crime), and Giuseppe Ciarrapico was found guilty of involvement in the same Banco Ambrosiano affair that saw the bank’s chairman “suicided” from London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Ciarrapico became a senator in 2008. Under these circumstances, does it matter who exactly is who?

As for another Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, who haunts this film and, it implies, what’s left of Andreotti’s conscience, he ended up broken, “tried” and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 after a kidnapping in which efforts to rescue him may have been hampered by the same establishment of which he once believed himself to be an indispensable part.

Then there’s Mino Pecorelli, a prominent muckraking journalist with a sideline in blackmail. He’s gunned down at the beginning of the movie. Back in what passes for real life, he was reported to have had damaging information about Andreotti, information that may have proved fatal — though not to Andreotti. In 1999 Andreotti was tried for his alleged involvement in Pecorelli’s murder and acquitted, only to be found guilty by a court of appeal in 2002, a verdict that was itself overturned the following year. Andreotti continues to be a senator-for-life. Pecorelli continues to be dead.

Pecorelli’s is just one of many violent deaths to punctuate this movie. The most striking is that of Salvo Lima. Filmed in a cleverly cross-cut sequence strikingly reminiscent of the murderous finale to TheGodfather, Part II, it is just one of several nods to Coppola’s trilogy (which featured, incidentally, a character thought to be partly based on Andreotti). In another scene we watch Andreotti handing out small gifts to some of his humbler constituents. It’s impossible not to remember Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone dispensing a favor here and a favor there, and, if you’re me, to be struck by the similarities between the patronage state and a successful criminal enterprise.

But compared with Andreotti, Brando’s Godfather is a mumbling, incoherent lout. As depicted by Sorrentino’s biting, perversely witty, slyly winking script and Toni Servillo’s extraordinary (and in the view of many, remarkably accurate) performance, the reserved, melancholy Italian prime minister is a black hole, enigmatic, all-consuming and irresistible, his nature illuminated only by tiny inflections of his hunched, tightly held-in body and flashes of bleak, knowing humor. He’s devoutly religious (famously so), but we soon come to realize that he has embraced the idea of a fallen humanity so fully that it has become for him both inspiration and alibi.

Servillo’s soft-spoken, deadpan Andreotti makes the screen his own. Even if you have no interest in this film’s subject matter, go for Servillo, a maestro depicting a master with a subtlety and intensity that defy description. At times he seems almost inhuman, his narrow frame and bat-ears hinting at Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, particularly in a sequence in which he practically glides down the corridors of power, corridors that, Italy being Italy, are as architecturally glorious as they are politically treacherous. Its story of murder, corruption, and betrayal may be ugly, but Il Divo is frequently gorgeous to look at. It’s a contrast that reinforces the message that Sorrentino is trying to deliver. This is underscored by scene after scene shot in that perfect chiaroscuro where light and darkness play off each other with neither quite prevailing. Even the times when Andreotti walks slowly and stiffly down a quiet Roman street, completely, hauntingly alone yet accompanied by a heavily armed police escort, are filmed with a somber noir beauty all their own.

To be sure, in some respects Il Divo’s Andreotti is a caricature (the real Andreotti, no surprise, is no fan). Sorrentino is not looking for balance. He is making the case for the prosecution: Look out for the sequence in which Andreotti is interviewed by a journalist who recites a long list of distinctly awkward “coincidences” for which Andreotti has no easy exculpatory explanation. On another occasion Andreotti is filmed confessing, if only to himself, to terrible wrongdoing.

Sorrentino does at least allow his Andreotti to refer briefly to the Communist threat that had threatened to overwhelm the young, fragile Italian republic. Fair enough. To head that off required tactics unlikely to pass muster in safer, more complacent times. “Trees,” observes Servillo/Andreotti on another occasion, “need manure in order to grow.” Andreotti takes a similar tack in the course of his “confession,” referring to “the deeds that power must commit to ensure the well-being and development of the country,” and the “monstrous . . . contradiction [of] perpetuating evil to guarantee good.” Maybe, but these “deeds” became an end, not the means. The excesses that ensued, and the scandals they brought in their wake, brought both the First Republic and Andreotti tumbling down, even if, the film’s coda suggests, neither fell quite as far, or as hard, as they deserved.

One notable commentator on Italian politics has written that a leader “must not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state . . . Some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be wicked will bring him security and prosperity.”

Somehow I don’t think that Machiavelli would have liked Il Divo. See it nonetheless.

Tough Times in EUtopia

The Weekly Standard, March 30, 2009

Sometimes truth just has to speak to powerlessness. Addressing the EU's sham parliament in mid-February, the Czech Republic's refreshingly tactless and refreshingly Thatcherite president, Václav Klaus, raised the awkward topic of what the EU euphemistically refers to as its "democratic deficit" and told MEPs that they were part of this problem, not its solution:

 "Since there is no European demos-and no European nation-this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European parliament either. This would, on the contrary, make the problem worse and lead to an even greater alienation between the citizens of the European countries and Union institutions."

Klaus's listeners were predictably outraged. They ought to have been terrified. With the EU economies falling apart at an unprecedented pace, there is nothing that these toy-town parliamentarians can do-except get out of the way.

The EU's insultingly undemocratic nature is not news (indeed, it is part of its rationale), but it remains the key to grasping how those who run the EU have, for better and worse, had so much success in ramming their agenda through. Not having to bother too much about national electorates has been a great boon to Brussels. As the continent's economies slide ever deeper into the mire, however, that once handy feature could end up crashing the entire system.

An economic debacle on the current scale is going to shake any political structure, however securely moored, but the EU's persistent recourse to a form of soft authoritarianism has left it peculiarly ill suited to weather the storm to come. After decades of routinely bypassing its voters the union may well no longer have what it takes to secure their approval for the harsh medicine and painful sacrifices necessary to bring the EU through this ordeal in one piece. After all, it can barely even get them to vote: Turnout for the most recent (2004) elections for the EU parliament sank to a record low of 45.5 percent. Admittedly that total was dragged down by massively uninterested Eastern Europeans (only 16.7 percent of Slovaks voted and 20.4 percent of Poles), but it was sparse almost everywhere: Only 39 percent of Brits showed up, about the same percentage as made it to the voting booth in the Netherlands, one of the EU's founding nations.

As the history of the union's occasional, grudgingly granted referenda-a sorry saga of chicanery, rejection and do-overs-reminds us, appeals to the supposed solidarity of that imaginary European demos have never really worked. And that was in the good times. They surely won't do the trick now, nor will arguments based on the logic of a free market ideology widely, if inaccurately, said to have failed. Yet to steer a course through what may become hideously hard times without much in the way of popular consent threatens to push already alienated electorates in the direction of the extremist politics of left or right.

The story of this slump is too familiar to need repeating here, but it is worth pausing to consider how the introduction of the euro has left the EU marooned on a circle of economic hell all of its own making. Imposed on most of the European heartland by a characteristic combination of bullying, bribery, conclave, and legerdemain, the single currency was put in place with as little regard for the real world as for the ballot box. To squeeze a wide range of vastly divergent economies (and to do so with few safety nets) into one monetary system made little sense except when understood as a matter of politics, not economics. But economics has a nasty habit of biting back.

Up until the eruption of the present crisis, the European Central Bank's interest rate policy primarily reflected the needs of France and Germany, Euroland's largest economies. This left rates "too" low for naturally faster growing countries like Ireland and Spain, which in turn inflated unsustainable housing bubbles. These have now burst-in Ireland's case taking much of the banking system down with it. On some forecasts Irish GDP may shrink by 10 percent between 2008 and 2010, a dismal number that could eventually prove too optimistic. Gloomsters joke bleakly that the difference between Ireland and Iceland is six months and one consonant. Spain meanwhile now boasts an official (in other words, understated) unemployment rate of 14 percent. Over 600,000 migrant workers have been laid off. This is not a recipe for social peace.

In other countries, most notably a horribly in-hock Italy (public sector debt over 100 percent of GDP and expanding fast), low interest rates allowed governments to put off long overdue structural reforms. Instead of forcing the introduction of the badly needed discipline that was allegedly one of the principal reasons for its adoption, the euro (a hard currency when compared with shabbier predecessors such as the lira or drachma) was treated as a free pass. It has been anything but. Even before the current mess, Italy's crucial export sector was finding it difficult to cope with the brutal combination of rising cost inflation and a currency far stronger than the accommodating, and periodically devalued, lira. On some estimates, this latest recession is the fourth that Italy has suffered in the last seven years. Back in 2005 Silvio Berlusconi described the euro as a "disaster" for his country. He was not exaggerating.

Devaluations are to GDP what steroids are to sport. In the long-term they may be unhealthy, but in the short-term they frequently work miracles. The problem is that the option is no longer so easily available for the nations that adopted the euro. Italy, Ireland, and a number of other countries are in the grip of a one-sized currency that could never fit all, and the euro is now for them little more than a straitjacket or, more accurately, a noose. They have theoretically retained enough sovereignty to quit the euro, but for one of them to do so, especially if other states stick with the common currency, would be to risk something close to complete economic meltdown.

Money would pour out (so much so that capital controls would probably be required), interest rates would soar, and the reborn national currency would plummet. In the absence of a bailout from the eurozone it had just abandoned, the exiting country itself would probably be driven to renege (either de facto or de jure) on its foreign debt-as would much of its private business. In its consequences, this could be a Lehman-plus trauma with possibly devastating effects on already chaotic international capital markets. No less critically, it could set off a crisis in confidence in the credit of those weaker nations that had kept faith with the single currency, not to speak of feebler economies elsewhere. The cure, therefore, could well be worse than the disease.

In the meantime, in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't spasm, the markets are fretting that the disease is turning ever more dangerous-and, in a process that feeds upon itself, ever more infectious. Spreads on sovereign debt yields within the eurozone (between German Bunds, say, and paper issued by Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland) have widened noticeably. This is a warning that investors are beginning to think a once unthinkable thought: that one or more of the zone's less resilient members might go into default. On this logic these countries can neither afford to keep the euro nor to junk it. Rock, meet hard place.

These worries are made even more pressing by concern over the impact of Eastern Europe's spiraling economic woes on the already shattered finances of the western half of the continent. Contrary to some of the more excitable headlines, not all the countries of formerly Warsaw Pact Europe are, yet, in deep trouble, but the problems of those that are (notably Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, and Latvia) threaten to wreck confidence in those that are not. And those problems will not be confined safely behind the Oder-Neisse line: Two of Sweden's largest banks, for instance, are frighteningly overexposed to the faltering Baltic States, while their counterparts in Austria, seemingly lost in nostalgic Habsburg reverie, have reportedly lent out the equivalent of 70 percent of their country's GDP to once Kaiserlich und Königlich territories and parts nearby.

Eastern Europe's problems are Western Europe's and, given Eastern Europe's dependence on Western capital flows, vice versa, a state of affairs that neither side appreciates. Infuriated by the impression that they were being sidelined by the upcoming "G-20+" summit in London, nine of the EU's former Soviet bloc members held their own breakaway meeting earlier this month to discuss what to do. Meanwhile, led by Germany's indignant Angela Merkel in full prudent-Hausfrau, Thatcher-handbag mode, the Westerners have tried to damp down the East's increasingly aggressive demands for assistance. Good luck with that. Demonstrating a keenly cynical awareness of which buttons to press, the Hungarian prime minister warned that a severe slowdown in the East could lead to "a flood of unemployed immigrants traveling to Western Europe in search of jobs."

If you suspect that all this leaves the EU looking somewhat stuck, you would be right. But then this is no accident. The lack of democratic responsiveness so thoroughly ingrained into the union's architecture was always intended to stop the bloc's politicians from succumbing to the temptations of protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor devaluations, and other questionable devices often found in the toolbox of an economically desperate national government. That's all very well, and all very praiseworthy, but it doesn't do anything about the desperation, a desperation that will be felt all the more sharply by electorates looking for their leaders to do something, anything, in response to this crunch-only to discover to their chagrin (to use too gentle a word) that there is little that the EU will, legally or politically, allow those leaders to do.

To take just one example, earlier this year Britain saw a series of wildcat strikes protesting the importation of cheap foreign workers from elsewhere in the union as a means of undercutting the locals. The facts that triggered the dispute are murky, but what is certain is that even if the British government had wanted to intervene under EU law it could not. Equally, while the opposition Tories grumbled, nobody was fooled. If the Conservatives had been in charge, they would have done just the same as Labour: nothing. If you want to drive voters to the political extremes, stories like this are a good place to start.

Except that "start" is the wrong word. Parties of the extreme, whether of left or right, already have more than a foothold in Germany and France. "Populists" of every description can be found in the legislatures in countries from Belgium to Denmark to Latvia to Austria to Poland to Hungary. Take your pick: There are plenty to choose from. Even in never-so-sedate-as-it-seems Britain, a country that has made a fetish (if not always convincingly) of its moderation, the much-reviled far rightists of the hitherto tiny British National party are showing some signs of evolving from being useful bogeymen for the left into a party with demonstrable political clout within elements of a white working class that has been neglected for too long.

The backgrounds and the prospects of these movements vary widely from country to country, as do the pasts and the resentments that have shaped them, but in recent years their appeal has begun to grow in sections of the electorate pummeled by the dislocations brought about by mass immigration and globalization-dislocations made all the more painful by the realization that the ruling elites who never really asked them for their opinion on these changes, let alone their agreement to them, couldn't give a damn about their plight. This is a perception that will only be sharpened when the populations of these countries, more and more of whom are losing their jobs, are told by that very same political class that protection is off the agenda and that austerity is on, that saving local industries is unacceptable, and that helping out foreign countries is a must. And, oh yes, none of this was our fault-it was all the bankers' doing-and, oh yes, they and their bonuses have got to be rescued too.

So what's next? The leaders of the EU countries will do their best to muddle through in rickety, unpopular unity. Here and there they will cheat both on each other and on the key EU principle of a single market. The warning signs are already there. In February, President Sarkozy attacked the way that French auto companies were supplying their home market from manufacturing facilities in the Czech Republic. The previous month, Britain's Gordon Brown had criticized the amount of overseas lending by the UK's beleaguered bailed-out banks. Nevertheless, however awkwardly, however reluctantly, the EU's members will attempt to hang together-for as long as (or indeed longer than) their domestic politics comfortably permit, an effort that will inevitably further boost the appeal of the wild men of the fringes.

That said, as the EU's leaders are all too well aware, the slump has so far brought down two European governments (in Latvia and non-EU Iceland). Nobody wants to be next, let alone run the risk of political and economic breakdown. The few remaining traces of the budgetary discipline that supposedly still underpins the euro will therefore probably be scrapped. The euro may hang on to its reach, but only at the cost of its integrity. To ordinary Germans this will be seen as a betrayal, a Dolchstoss even. A people haunted by memories of where a debauched currency can lead, they only agreed to part with their much-cherished deutsche mark on the understanding that the euro would be run with Bundesbank-style discipline. That was then.

So money will be thrown around, the imperiled brethren of both East and West will, after much shoving, screaming, and hesitation, be bailed out. Some protectionist measures (directed against those outside the EU) will be brought in and all fingers will be crossed. It won't be pretty, but with luck, it might be enough to stave off catastrophe. Pushing their luck, some glass-is-half-full Europhiles believe that the fact that no country can easily work its way through these tribulations alone will conclusively make the case for still closer European integration to some of the EU's more reluctant federalists. You can be sure that this is a rationalization that Brussels will look to exploit: Rahm Emanuel is not the only politician unwilling to waste a crisis. The EU's policy response to the slump is likely to have two objectives: the reconstruction of member-states' economies and the destruction of what's left of their autonomy. Going for the latter could well drive even more disaffected voters into the extremist fringe, though Brussels is arrogant enough to persist. There are already indications that the eurocrats may be pushing at an open door. In a startling example of mistaking the Titanic for the lifeboat, Poland has become just one of several nations speeding up plans to sign up for the euro-and the safe haven it is meant to represent.

On the other hand if, as appears disturbingly likely, the economic situation grows far darker, it's easy to draw an alternative picture in which both euro and union come under previously unimaginable stress, stress with unpredictable and potentially ominous consequences, stress that will be echoed and intensified by mounting political and social disorder in a Europe that discovers, too late, that there was something to be said for democracy after all.

The Sum of All Fears

Knowing

National Review Online, March 20, 2009

Knowing

Things are bad out there, you know, really bad: The economy is in a shambles, Iran’s mullahs are monkeying around with nukes, Michael Jackson is planning a comeback, and the S&P recently bottomed out (for now) at the number of the beast. Nevertheless, as Knowing director Alex Proyas’s endearingly apocalyptic, thoroughly entertaining, and ultimately goofy new movie reminds us, matters could be a lot, lot worse.

As the successful director of I, Robot, The Crow, and Dark City (the thinking man’s The Matrix), Mr. Proyas knows how to make the most out of doom — and he doesn’t disappoint on this occasion. I enjoyed Knowing’s every portentous, preposterous moment — even an absurd passage toward the end of the film involving children, bunny rabbits, and a richly kitschy Kincadian landscape located somewhere between Gladiator’s ridiculously Elysian wheat fields and the trippier sequences in The Fountain.

Mind you, I may be biased. As far as I am concerned, Knowing is a movie that has almost everything going for it: a beautiful heroine; hints of the end times; sinister and silent watchful presences; an eerie abandoned dwelling with scraps of ominous paper stuck on its walls; a wildly careering and occasionally senseless storyline; some sort of vast conspiracy; moments of excruciating sentimentality; moments of cruel death; Beethoven; scientific gobbledygook; a bloody-fingered, spooky, whey-faced child; prophetic visions of a world in flames; disembodied, not-quite-audible whisperings of warning and menace and some of the most dramatic special effects that you have ever seen. After knowing Knowing you may well hesitate before taking the subway again. You won’t feel too good about flying, either. (Does Mr. Proyas have something against public transportation?)

To reveal more would be to spoil a film structured to move from surprise to surprise. For Knowing is a movie driven more by plot than performance, something almost inevitable in any film starring the reliably not-up-to-it Nicolas Cage. Presumably under the impression that he is still stuck in that disastrous remake of The Wicker Man, the tiresomely hyper-kinetic and relentlessly histrionic Mr. Cage stumbles nervy, wild-eyed, insistent, and more irritating than I can say throughout a movie in which the audience will end up thinking that Armageddon might be a small price to pay for never having to set eyes on his character again.

As for the character unfortunate enough to be played by Mr. Cage, he’s Prof. John Koestler, an MIT astrophysicist and tragically widowed single father. Koestler is a brilliant scientist and, no less importantly, a devoted dad to his young son Caleb (nicely played by Chandler Canterbury, most recently seen by moviegoers as a senescent, eight-year-old Benjamin Button), an impression reinforced by Hollywood’s notion of what good child-rearing in an upscale academic household is meant to look like. Words are stuck to the refrigerator for spelling-class purposes. Television is limited to an hour a day, and most of that — poor, poor Caleb — appears to be the Discovery channel. We can be sure that this is a family that recycles.

Caleb attends William Dawes elementary school, the locus for the film’s opening scenes. These are centered on the celebrations that marked the school’s founding back in 1958, the highpoint of which was the burial of a time capsule containing artwork created by the new school’s pupils. Most kids draw rocket ships and other images of the future in which my generation (I too was founded in 1958) used to believe — but one outsiderish child, an unsettling Wednesday Addams look-alike by the name of Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) obsessively covers a sheet of paper with a long (uncompleted) sequence of numbers. What they mean will take the rest of this film to decode.

Flash forward 50 years and the time capsule is opened. Lucinda’s numbers end up with Caleb and then with Caleb’s conveniently mathematical dad, astrophysicist John. John comes to recognize that many of the numbers are dates, all subsequent to 1958 and each linked to a tragedy. Unsurprisingly for a movie aimed at American audiences and made in our own jittery era, the first date Koestler notices is 9/11/2001. In fact, it’s easy to see how — as in, say, Cloverfield — memories of that terrible day have influenced some of this film’s most unnerving imagery, including its depiction of even worse destruction to come, making this movie the latest to bear witness to the way in which the destruction of those towers still haunts the popular imagination — and is likely to do so for a very long time.

Not all the dates on Lucinda’s sheet have passed, however, and Koestler now sets off to do what he can to either stop or survive the future horrors they may foreshadow. This brings him into contact with Lucinda’s daughter Diana (the lovely Rose Byrne, even more depressed than in the current series of Damages) and her daughter Abby (Lara Robinson, again). Together they all embark on a desperate race against time that they quite possibly have no chance of winning.

That their destiny may already be fixed reflects an unexpectedly interesting philosophical subtext that bubbles throughout this film. When we first encounter Koestler, he’s an atheist, albeit of a distinctly non-Dawkinsian hue: He is content to let Caleb believe that the boy will one day reunite with his much-missed mother in the hereafter. That said, Koestler takes his convictions sufficiently seriously to be estranged from his pastor father. Perhaps inevitably, however, his belief in a random, purposeless universe comes to be shaken by the implications of Lucinda’s ominous, forbidding, and implacable numerals. To be sure, Koestler knows full well that numerology is nothing more than a junk science designed, like so many human beliefs, to create meaning where none exists, but in their seemingly genuine ability to predict the future, Lucinda’s numbers may, it is hinted, be driving this man of science to concede that there is more order and purpose to the universe than he had once thought possible.

By the conclusion of the film Koestler has reconciled with his father, and, maybe (the ending is much more ambiguous in this respect), the faith of his childhood. Are these issues carefully worked through? No, not really. Knowing is, thank heavens, a movie, not a seminar — an entertainment, not a sermon. Nevertheless, it’s a mark of its director’s impressive sensibility that he allows concepts such as these to make an appearance in the course (and conceivably even in the title) of a would-be blockbuster.

Strangely enough, despite this film’s cleverly fashioned portrayals of gathering disaster, the most poignant images of destruction are only by implication. Mr. Proyas’ affectionate, if somewhat rose-tinted, depiction of that orderly, dedicated, and kindly late-1950s elementary school ushers his audience into a long-obliterated world, just another victim of the continuous humdrum apocalypse that is the passing of irrecoverable time into an infinitely variable future at which we can only guess. In real life, there’s no knowing.

Another Spectre Is Haunting Europe

The weekly Standard, March 2, 2009

As the worldwide slump deepens so must worries that the economic crisis will spill out onto the streets. In December, France's president Nicolas Sarkozy warned that les évènements of May 1968 could repeat themselves, and not only in the land of the torched auto. That same month IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn used the possibility of social unrest--in rich countries as well as poor--to drum up support for aggressive fiscal expansion. Now it's reported that the leaders of the EU's member states will spend part of their March summit discussing signs of growing disorder across their increasingly embattled union. After weeks in which Greece came close to anarchy, and riots broke out in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania (and, just outside the EU, in newly destitute Iceland), they are right to be concerned.

After roughly three decades of growth, European living standards are imploding, and once-rising expectations are dropping down with them. It's the sense of something lost that hurts the most. People can deal with living without that which they never had (which is why so many dirt poor countries languish without any meaningful regime change), but when prosperity vanishes, rage will go hand-in-hand with disappointment, frustration, and despair. Extra-legal protest, whether it's antiglobalization riots, spasms of racial or ethnic violence, or the repeated recourse to highway blockade, is already a part of the European political landscape, east and west. Under the circumstances it's hard to see how an economic slowdown on the current scale can continue without expanding this miserable tradition. The only question is where. Riga today. London tomorrow? Hamburg? Lille? Madrid? Dublin? A glance at the business pages suggests there are plenty of places to choose from.

It's a sad commentary on the situation Europe's leaders are now contemplating that some of the best clues as to what might happen there can be found in China and Russia. This reflects how the increasing reach of the EU within its member states has left the individual nations less free to respond to the demands of their peoples at a time of distress and imposed upon them a soft authoritarianism that increases the chance of disorder.

Start with China where, despite the extraordinary economic expansion of recent years, the promise of prosperity has spread far further than its achievement. According to some reports, there were nearly 80,000 "major" incidents of unrest in 2007, an inevitable response to the dislocations of helter-skelter growth in a People's Republic where hundreds of millions of the People have been left behind, deprived of what scant security they once enjoyed, and given no legal way of making themselves heard. And that was in the good times.

Since 2007, growth has slowed dramatically to an annualized rate of perhaps 6-7 percent. That's some way below the near double-digit pace usually thought necessary to sustain China's vast army of migrant workers (some 20 million of whom are said to have lost their jobs in the downturn). More ominous still are the large numbers of new university graduates: articulate, ambitious, and now unemployed. There is a good reason that the Chinese regime has put in place a $600 billion stimulus package. It's the same as the one that has led some of the country's elite to worry openly about the prospects for social peace.

There are at least some (faint and fiercely disputed) signs that all those billions might be having an effect, but no such comfort is available in Russia. The ruble is sharply down, and the economic growth that legitimized Putin's rule has dwindled to nothing. This winter has seen protests in Moscow, Vladivostok, and other cities, events largely unthinkable a year ago. Like the Chinese, the Russians are throwing money at the problem. And, like the Chinese, they are tightening up internal security. The rigidities of authoritarian rule may ultimately provoke a violent reaction, but so long as these regimes retain a monopoly of force and a willingness to use it, disorder can generally be stamped out: until, of course, the revolutionary moment. But that moment still seems far away.

In a broad collection of countries to Russia's west, the situation looks more immediately dangerous. These states are all nominally democratic, but the extent to which democracy, and the shared trust that must go with it, have really taken root is not only unclear, but also about to be put to a brutal test. Emerging from beneath the rubble of the Soviet imperium has been a long and wearying process, marked by setbacks and punctuated by crises, but somehow nearly always sustained by the dream of better times to come and, more practically, massive transfusions of Western money, both public and private. That was then. GDPs across the region are in free fall (if you prefer another cliché, the governor of Latvia's central bank has offered up "clinically dead" as a description of his country's economy), a situation that may finally sink the hulks of the Western European banks already perilously exposed to this part of the world and not, therefore, in a position to come up with any fresh cash.

Economic collapse and fragile democracies are a fissile combination, and that's before considering the opportunity they present for geopolitical mischief-making. The Ukrainian state is politically weak, ethnically divided, facing tricky elections, and, many analysts reckon, on the edge of insolvency. Under these promising circumstances Moscow would be most unlikely to object to a destabilizing riot or two in a neighbor whose independence it still resents. And the same holds true for the Baltics. After all, the Kremlin was widely thought to be behind disturbances (unrelated to the economy) in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in 2007.

But while Kiev, Riga, and Sofia may seem reassuringly remote, believing that the more established democracies in the western half of the continent will necessarily escape disorder is, as Sarkozy, Strauss-Kahn, and those fretting European premiers undoubtedly understand, to ignore the lessons of the past. Optimists like to see Iceland as a special case, and, yes, Greece too. They might also argue that the January protests in France were nothing more than business as usual. But all these supposedly discrete disturbances were beginning to look like a pattern even before a wave of wildcat strikes in the U.K. (protesting the importation of cheap foreign workers from other EU countries). Expectations are being dashed in the west of Europe just as much as they are in the east, and there will be consequences. To be sure, the nations of the EU's heartland are far better off (and, critically, have more generous social security nets) than those that so recently escaped Soviet rule, but a dashed expectation is a dashed expectation wherever it falls to earth.

In some ways the darkening of a once bright future may be more difficult to deal with for populations like those living in Western Europe where truly hard times (and the psychological mechanisms to cope with them) are scarcely more than a folk memory. Making matters worse, social cohesiveness within these countries has been badly battered, most notably by mass immigration and, more happily, the greater opportunities for individual autonomy that affluence has hitherto brought in its wake. The idea that, at some level, "we're all in this together"--a vital safety valve for a society under stress--may no longer be available for use.

Adding further poison to the mix is the catastrophic effect of EU membership on the relationship between Europeans and their political class. The idea that the governing should listen to the governed underpins any successful democracy. It does not underpin the EU--as those naughty no-voting Irish are just the latest to discover. National politicians, neutered by a confederation where most important decisions are taken within an opaque and remote political structure that is subject to but the barest pretense of democratic control, now function as little more than messenger boys or enforcers for the real bosses in Brussels.

This raises rather awkward questions as to what Europe's ballot boxes are actually for, questions that may turn very ugly indeed when the bread has gone stale, the circuses have shut down, and recovery remains elusive. Fortified perhaps both by images of disturbances elsewhere and the knowledge of the spinelessness that is a not-so-guilty not-so-secret of so many European governments, the peoples of the EU might well conclude that the street is a better way to force through change than the voting booth. Throw in the organizing capabilities of the Internet, relatively high levels of unemployment amongst the articulate and well-educated, and the rallying impact of a populist cause, and it's easy to see what will come if the slump lingers on.

No clear thread yet runs through the discontent now rippling across the EU, which remains mostly of the throw-the-bums-out variety. Yet in the midst of a debacle typically blamed (we could debate how fairly) on capitalist excess, a Trotskyite postman is the second most popular political figure in France and a party with its roots in the Communist dictatorship is polling at around 15 percent in Germany. If economies continue to spiral down, anxiety, uncertainty, and anger are bound to assume more concrete ideological forms, forms that are unlikely to be pretty.

Sometimes history repeats itself as tragedy, not farce.

Iceland Without the Fish

National Review Online, February 4, 2009

Gulfoss, Iceland, 2007 © Andrew Stuttaford

If there’s one thing that can be said in defense of Tony Blair and his successor (and former finance minister), Gordon Brown, it’s that they took longer to squander Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy than some first expected. But squander it they did, and credit’s Armageddon has at last exposed the full extent of the damage.

As Warren Buffett once observed, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” That’s not the nicest way to visualize Gordon Brown, but, seen from the vantage point of the markets, the view is not much prettier. Stocks have crashed, of course, as they have across the planet, but so, more ominously, has the pound. The British currency hit record lows against the euro at the turn of the year. And when it comes to the greenback, the pound buys less than a buck and a half (it fetched more than two dollars earlier in 2008). That suggests the United Kingdom’s troubles are nastier than elsewhere, a view echoed by the IMF, which now predicts that Britain is facing the deepest recession of any major industrialized economy.

Yes, yes, the pound has gone through other ugly episodes in the relatively recent past, but the present fall (on a trade-weighted basis, sterling dropped by more than 20 percent last year) is the most dramatic since 1931. For the first time since the Labour-controlled mid-1970s, Brits are wondering if they face a genuinely catastrophic collapse in their currency.

For a country such as Britain, burdened with a large trade deficit, devaluation can be a shot in the arm by making its exports more internationally competitive. But that only holds true if there’s a market for those goods in the first place. In a time of shrinking trade flows, nobody can be sure of that. More worrying still, with the U.K.’s combined external debt (public and private) rising rapidly from a total that already exceeds 400 percent of GDP (a gross number, but even so), the usual cost-benefit analysis may no longer apply. Repaying overseas debt in a devalued currency can be a very tricky business, indeed. Will the sceptr’d isle become Iceland without the fish? (The EU took all those.)

In some respects it was only to be expected (if not by Gordon Brown; he’s saying that he never saw this coming) that the land of the much-vaunted Blair/Brown economic miracle is turning out to be more storm center than safe haven. The global meltdown revolves around the embattled international financial system, a system in which the City of London has become a key hub. That role brought a great deal of cash into the United Kingdom, but with it a great deal of risk. The City’s international business has proved, in a sense, to be hot money–fun while it lasts but with a tendency to evaporate in times of trouble. And trouble has now come calling.

The problem for Britain is that, with the financial sector in disarray (and most of the North  Sea oil gone), eleven years of Blair/Brown have left the country with dangerously little else to fall back upon. This was not how it was meant to be. Back in 1997, Tony Blair had won his way into 10 Downing Street as a representative of “New” Labour, a supposedly reformed party ready to renounce the taxing, spending, and relentless class warfare of previous socialist governments, to support free enterprise, and to do what it could to avoid the “boom and bust” cycles that had characterized so much of the U.K.’s postwar economic history. Oh, well–people believed Bernie Madoff, too.

The Blair and Brown governments were careful not to increase the top income-tax rate, but everything else was up for grabs–and was duly grabbed. Overall taxation has risen by far faster than the OECD average and has been accompanied by regulatory excess (much of it, admittedly, at the behest of the EU) and a public-spending binge that long preceded the current emergency but left the country woefully unprepared to deal with it. Gordon Brown may be the son of a Scottish clergyman (who had, marvelously, the middle name Ebenezer), but the whole preparing-for-the-seven-lean-years thing just doesn’t seem to have sunk in. In the decade that followed the 1996–97 spending year, “managed” public expenditure jumped by roughly 90 percent, and that’s before taking account of liabilities incurred but kept off the books with the help of legerdemain that would have shamed Enron.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that the U.K.’s productivity growth has, at best, been uneven, despite (up until now) broadly respectable increases in GDP. It’s perhaps telling that most (around two thirds) of the new jobs created since 1997 have been located in the public sector. What’s more, in a strikingly high percentage of cases, they have gone to recent immigrants rather than to native-born Brits, too many of whom have remained on the dole for too long. We can debate why that is, but we cannot debate the grim fact that nearly 2 million people are now registered as unemployed, a bad number that is getting rapidly worse. Another 2.7 million (more than 7 percent of the working-age population) live on “incapacity benefit,” a handout that defines them as too sick to work–a statistic that implies either repeated epidemics, a failed National Health Service, or a seriously dysfunctional labor market. I know which explanation I’d pick.

If the British are not working enough, they are not selling enough, either. The trade deficit has continued to deteriorate. For goods (“visibles”) it now stands at well over 6 percent, the highest level since proper records began in the late 17th century. In the past, the overall deficit has been narrowed by the U.K.’s ability to export services (many of them, problematically, financial), but this is just another reminder that the City’s relative preeminence is as much an expression of the weakness of the wider British economy as it is of London’s success in playing host to the choosy and itinerant international financial community.

It would be wrong, however, to blame all the horrors that are pummeling the City on Messrs. Blair and Brown. This is a fiasco with deeper and wider origins than the cack-handed fumbling of two economically illiterate politicians, but Labour’s decision to take responsibility for banking supervision away from the Bank of England (historically the country’s most experienced, and most respected, regulator) helped pave the way for disaster. It was a dumb move, made in the name of modernization but more truthfully explained by the Labour government’s disdain for anything smacking of Britain’s past. In America, the existence of a series of distinct financial regulators, each with agendas and areas of expertise all of their own, played no small part in the failure of regulation that contributed so much to the current debacle. Britain’s new tripartite regulatory system (which splits duties between the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority, and the central bank) has proved a disastrous failure for very similar reasons, a failure made all the more galling by its needlessness: Resentment is not a good basis for public policy.

In any event, the U.K. went through a bubble that in all its excess, shoddy lending practices, and baroque speculative mania bore a depressing resemblance to the horrors here in America. To take two numbers cited by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in Fantasy Island (a broadly leftist, sometimes oddball and often fascinating critique of the Blair years), between January 2000 and December 2005, outstanding consumer-credit balances rose by two thirds, and mortgage debt nearly doubled. The appalling consequences are now all too visible in a shattered housing market, on a shuttering high street, and on what is left of the balance sheets of Britain’s devastated and partially nationalized banking sector.

The damage to Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy has therefore already been bad enough, but the financial cataclysm (or, more accurately, the government’s response to it) may well, ironically, make its final destruction Gordon Brown’s best hope of remaining in power. The political reaction to his early attempts to bring a halt to the developing economic disaster shows why.

So what did Brown do? Unburdened by ideological objections to the idea of the state assuming direct stakes in the nation’s banks, the prime minister was the first to borrow (very loosely) from the successful Swedish precedent of the early 1990s and take this necessary (if regrettable) step. At the same time, his government launched a £20 billion stimulus package with, given the shaky state of public finances, little obvious idea of how to pay for it. As The Economist noted in December, even on the government’s “optimistic” projections, borrowing will hit 8 percent of GDP in 2009–10 and debt 57 percent in 2012–13. America’s budget may be a shambles, but with the dollar an internationally accepted reserve currency (for now), the United States at least has the ability (fingers crossed) to print money and buy its way, however imperfectly, however clumsily, out of the present mess. The U.K. does not–thus the tumbling pound.

Initially Brown’s rapid and decisive response played well with frazzled voters desperate to see the government do something. With the financial crisis widely blamed on three decades of (largely imaginary) laissez faire, Labour rediscovered the electoral allure of unashamedly interventionist government. Dour, stern, and carefully wrapped in an image of egalitarian rectitude, Brown came across, however absurdly, as a serious man for serious times. The Tories jeered, but for a while their advantage in the polls faltered: Their impeccably upper-crust leader (who is burdened both by youth and a past in public relations) was caricatured in ways that made him appear a feckless, callow Wooster to Brown’s shrewd, capable Jeeves.

That moment may have passed for now. Swept along by a torrent of economic bad news, the Conservatives are once again clearly ahead. That probably puts paid to the once widely rumored prospect that Brown would call a snap election before the bills finally fall due. Nevertheless Labour’s brief revival was an early warning that this crisis may yet represent an opportunity for a return of the more full-bodied socialism of the party’s destructive past. If Brown is to win another term (an election has to be held no later than June 2010), he will have to shift left. In frightening times in which capitalism is widely (if inaccurately) believed by voters to have failed, there is an obvious opportunity for the hucksters of big, redistributionist government. The announcement that Labour, if reelected, will hike the top income tax rate from 40 to 45 percent (and that’s before onerous social security levies) is only a beginning.

Somehow I suspect that the pound has far further to fall.

Obama on Everything

National Review Online, January 19, 2009

Union Station, Washington D.C., November 2008 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are some on the right who take defeat badly, but I’m not one of them. I’m not a lurk-in-the-bunker-poison-the-dog-shoot-myself kind of guy. And if you’re still in a position to read this, neither are you. But that still leaves open the question as to how, exactly, we should mark the upcoming inauguration.

Sulking is an option, as is picking a fight with a liberal member of the family, obsessively researching birth-certificate rules in Hawaii, repeatedly watching Red Dawn, or kicking the as-yet-unpoisoned dog. But, with the exception of those repeated viewings of Red Dawn, none of these alternatives is very uplifting, particularly if, as seems likely, the new president’s speech will be that–and more. At the same time, to follow the advice of those good sports over at the Wall Street Journal who suggested opening “a fine bottle of American bubbly” is to go too far down the road to reasonability, respectability, and good-hearted bipartisanship–and that’s just not our thing.

cigars-obama-sample4

It’s better, I think, to borrow a few ideas from the Orange Alternative (Pomarańczowa Alternatywa). Fearless prankster surrealists of the Polish sort-of-Left from the 1980s, they used to taunt their country’s crumbling Communist regime with cheers, not jeers, their specialty being sporadic displays of unsettlingly enthusiastic loyalty. These included a reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace and a procession through the streets of Warsaw by 4,000 people chanting their love for Lenin. Now, I would not want to compare Obama with that other community organizer–no, not for a second!–but the cult of personality now surrounding our next president suggests that hosting an Orange Alternative inauguration dinner would be a perfect counterpoint to the pomp, sincerity, and cynicism on display in Washington. It’ll also be an ideal opportunity to treat friends of all political persuasions to a confused, confusing, and almost certainly annoying celebration that can be read, as Obama has said about himself, in any way they like.

The proceedings should start with a sing-along, possibly the Obama Kids’ We’re Gonna Change the World, a song that brought so many people so much pleasure last summer:

We’re gonna spread happiness

We’re gonna spread freedom

Obama’s gonna change it

Obama’s gonna lead ’em.

We’re gonna change it

And rearrange it

We’re gonna change the world.

After hymning themselves hoarse for Change, your guests will need a drink. They will probably have had enough of clichés by then, so forget the champagne and opt instead for some Obama Limited Edition Reserve (“very detailed features of Barack Obama deep carved into the bottle . . . fit for the Smithsonian!”), a 2005 Merlot from Napa Valley. You’ll want to avoid any suggestions of elitism, however, so slip in some suds, too, perhaps some Obama (formerly “Senator”) beer from Kenya. Cocktail drinkers meanwhile may enjoy a Barackatini (rum, fruit, a splash of club soda) and, since nobody will be excluded from the promise of Obama’s America, teetotalers will be able to join in the fun (if teetotalers ever do join in the fun) with Obama Soda from France–which is, apparently, now a friend.

For food, as for bailouts, turn to Washington. The M Street Bar & Grill has designed a Barack Obama Pizza Burger. If that’s too bland, just add some Barack Obama Inauguration Hot Sauce. For those who fancy something altogether more exotic, blogger and author Veronica Chambers has dreamt up a recipe for a Barack Pie “that would celebrate, in culinary fashion, the hope, promise (and okay, super yummyness) of having Barack Obama as our next president. . . . [It] serves . . . souls hungry for hope, change and a new day in American politics.”

And if that’s not sugary enough, Max and Benny’s of Northbrook, Ill., will supply “Yes We Can!” cookies emblazoned with images of the president-elect, his wife, and the odd-looking individual who will be the next vice president. On the other hand, Obama Waffles taste too much of sour grapes to have any place at such a celebratory table–we’ll prefer the sweetness of Ben & Jerry’s “inspirational’ Yes Pecan! On that note, your guests can get at their beer with the help of a “Yes We Can” Opener. For the wine there’s Corkscrew Bill, an engaging device modeled on the husband of the new secretary of state.

When preparing the food, the Barack Obama cutting board, as versatile as a Panetta, will undoubtedly come in handy: “Can also be used as a hot plate, serving tray, cheese board, bread board . . . place-mat, or director of the CIA.” (I obviously made up the last of those. Running Langley in wartime is a job for specialists. Who could possibly think otherwise? Oh. Anyhoo . . .) When it comes to chopping, cutting, and slicing our feast’s ingredients, the adventurous will be tempted by President Barack Obama’s White House Sword, forged in the heat of a renaissance fair/faire/fayre, pleasingly suggestive of once and future Camelots, and best kept out of the hands of any members of clan Clinton.

And when it’s time at last to chow down, each of your guests should dine off an Obama Historic Victory Plate (“a priceless work of art featuring the triumphant President-Elect surrounded by the American flag and spectacular fireworks celebration”), and, according to taste, drink from a pewter-accented Obama wine glass or an “Obama Will Save Us” beer stein. Alcoholics will appreciate the opportunity to down some federally subsidized ethanol out of a specially engraved Obama Drinking Flask.

To wrap things up, how about freshly brewed Kona Joe’s (Barack O Blend, naturally) swigged out of a Barack “Change” coffee mug while savoring a cigar (Cuban?) wrapped in a commemorative Obama cigar band? Coffee and cigars? This might also be the moment to hand out a few Obama National AchieveMints. Few’s the word. Boost the mood still further by festooning your house with Obama posters, ideally in the fake, yet electorally effective, socialist-realist style pioneered by Shepard Fairey (in the Smithsonian soon!). Your couch, chairs, and any notably slow-moving guests should be draped with a “Believe” throw from NBC.com.

obamatime

Wait, there’s more! As the special commemorative clock on the mantelpiece reminds you, “It’s Obama time.” And so it is. Raise a “Yeaaaah! Obama Won! Happy Days are Here Again!” banner. The faintly alarming echoes both of Howard Dean and the (last) Great Depression will probably pass unnoticed. If they don’t, start talking excitedly about Change; that usually does the trick. Meanwhile, Obama balloons and lumi-loons (in red, white, and blue) should be allowed to soar, like hope, hype, and deficits, as high as they can go. And beyond.

It’s not only the house that should be decorated. We will, we are told, be feting the most historic inauguration in the history of history. Formally inclined male guests will want to wear a tie, perhaps one featuring Smithsonian Shepard’s “now iconic portrait of president-elect Barack Obama set in bold reds, whites, and blues.” The more casual of either gender will, perhaps, like the look of a colorful satin Obama jacket. And what woman (apart from the one from Alaska, who doesn’t count) could resist a set of HOPE earrings from www.barackobamajewelry.com (“accessorizing the movement”)?

No child need be left behind: Even the youngest can be part of the Change with an Obama onesie from Irregular Apparel (“We offer politically and socially aware messages on baby clothing that is colorful, inexpensive, covered with sass-filled designing but made without sweatshop labor.”).

obamashirt

Others will want to don a T-shirt. There are more designs from which to pick than there are magically reappearing Al Franken votes in Minnesota. My favorite, featuring Chris Bishop’s portrayal of Obama astride a unicorn, may be cut a little too close to fit: Irony is death to all things Obama. To avoid any open signs of this renegade sensibility ruining your event, I’d recommend punctuating the festivities with a few readings, seder-style, from a devotional book. The Bible might be going too far and the Koran would excite conspiracists (People, please! He’s not a Muslim!) but the hagiographic Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope would do very well. This strikingly illustrated children’s book (and New York Times bestseller) by award-winning poetess Nikki Grimes tells the story of Obama from boyhood to presidential campaign. Celebrants might wish to begin with this passage describing Obama’s time in Indonesia:

He caught crickets, flew kites,

and joyed in the jungle

at the end of his new home– a perfect paradise, until

the sight of beggars

broke his heart.

Barry started to wonder,

Will I ever be able

to help people like these?

Hope hummed deep inside of him.

Someday, son.

Someday.

With luck, your guests will rejoice in those words, and also in these, recording Barry-now-Barack’s move to Chicago:

Barack’s eyes saw

the hungry and the homeless,

crying out like beggars in Djakarta,

burning a hole in his heart.

When his classes came to an end,

he raced to Chicago

to join hands with the church,

to learn new lessons:

not how to be black or white,

but how to be a healer,

how to change things,

how to make a difference in the world.

And if those later lines conjure up any awkward thoughts of The Reverend Who Must Not Be Named, they can be dispelled by allowing your guests to gaze at some of the book’s illustrations–a weeping Barack at prayer, maybe, or a butterfly settled on the hands of a praying Barack of Assisi. Best of all is a picture showing Obama acknowledging the cheers of the crowd the night he was elected senator. Haloed by what looks like starlight, he’s smiling, his hands extended in a gesture more normally associated with the Mount of Olives.

Did I mention that Kool-Aid will be served?

Notes of a drink-man

Kingsley Amis: Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

The New Criterion, January 1, 2009

There are, I suppose, various possible things I might do after failing to reconcile with an estranged wife because of my refusal to give up alcohol. Becoming a drink columnist for a national newspaper is not one of them. Then I’m not Kingsley Amis. Then again, Elizabeth Jane Howard soon ceased to be Mrs. Kingsley Amis. Oh well. Some or all of those columns later re-appeared, clean-shaven, refreshed, and tidied-up as Every Day Drinking (“Being paid twice for the same basic work is always agreeable”), the second of three books (the other two are On Drink and How’s Your Glass?) that differ from much of Amis’s oeuvre in that they are specifically about drink rather than being merely drink-sodden.

Don’t misunderstand that “merely.” An immense torrent of alcohol surged through much of Amis’s work, sweeping his novels and their protagonists on their bleary, boozy, too British to be Bacchanalian, way, and, as it did so, it shaped our view of their creator. As Amis complained/boasted in his Memoirs, he had “the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.” Part of the blame lay with the characters with whom he peopled his fiction: “A link is set going and is reinforced every time one of my chaps raises a glass to his mouth, and I have to admit that some of them do so rather often.” Somewhat defensively, and after allowing for the necessary journalistic exemption, Amis goes on to warn that writing and drinking don’t mix: “Whatever part drink may play in the writer’s life, it must play none in his or her work.”

By many accounts, Amis stuck fairly strictly to this rule. Alcohol was his theme, not his muse. Even in his extraordinarily bibulous, and, under the circumstances, remarkably productive, later years, he would write for a few disciplined, Mojave-dry hours in the morning before calling it quits and plunging into a liquid lunch, wet afternoon, and thoroughly saturated evening. Influenced, doubtless, by Dixon’s most memorably dreadful morning in Lucky Jim, Martin Amis has described his father as “the laureate of the hangover,” and so the Old Devil was—but, surely, in both senses of the phrase.

Every Day Drinking, On Drink, and How’s Your Glass? are now available in one volume, with, perhaps unsurprisingly, Christopher Hitchens (a friend of Amis, that’s all I mean by that “unsurprisingly”—really) providing a new introduction. He does so deftly, with charm and insight. It’s even less of a surprise that a highlight of this collection is frequently said to be Amis’s discussion of the hangover. Grand stuff it is too: amusing, certainly, but also awash with patent cures, long-marinated advice, and the details of “three notable breakfasts.” Unfortunately, it is also chock-full of bunkum, and pretentious bunkum (“the metaphysical hangover”: come on) at that.

Hangovers are a bad business, but they are (fairly) easily seen off with Veganin (a take-no-prisoners painkiller, long available over-the-counter in the U.K.), Coca-Cola, and, once things have calmed down intestinally, an Egg McMuffin. There’s no need to make a big deal about them, but that is exactly what Amis is doing, disappointing behavior from a man so skilled at deflating mystification, humbug, and fuss, from the writer who so relished repeating (in the Memoirs) Brendan Behan’s approval of the way that Parisians (allegedly) ordered wine:

You don’t catch ’em saying “Have you a nice full Burgundy with a good big body?” … Christ, it’s “D’ya want the ten, the twelve or the fourteen percent and d’ya want the label with the sluts dancing or the bastard with the big hat?—What d’ya want?”

That’s, so to speak, the spirit, and that, I suspect, is also the spirit in which Every Day Drinking and On Drink were designed to be read (How’s Your Glass?, a dull series of quizzes of interest only to drink nerds, is something else altogether).  Amongst Amis’s targets are wine snobs, reverse snobs, “authenticity,” the “no-reds-with-fish superstition,” Paris, “curiously shaped” bottles, and dancing (“ridiculous and shameful”). Food (“irrelevant rubbish” with no place in a “drink-man’s” refrigerator) is, as often with Amis, an object of disdain. Amis’s later career as a restaurant critic was one of his better jokes.

And if it’s good jokes and convivial writing that you’re looking for, there’s plenty to be found in Every Day Drinking and On Drink, as well as, amongst other treats, generous portions of splendidly forthright advice (good and bad) and an endearingly eclectic selection of cocktail recipes (good and bad): tomato ketchup has no place in a Bloody Mary, Sir Kingsley.

But it’s not just the thought of Stolichnaya colliding with Heinz that may leave some readers a touch queasy. Complicated undercurrents swirl beneath the breezy, blokey surface. At one level, with his references to wine merchants, drinks parties, waiter wars, and the pub, Amis is presenting himself as one of the “chaps” (even then, a mildly arch, somewhat dated term to use so repeatedly in print), a modestly prosperous, immodestly reactionary everyman (and I mean man: “females” are generally relegated to annoyances, totty, or comic relief), but on closer inspection this proves to be a confidence trick.  With their name dropping, vacation dropping (“Should you find yourself in Athens, you seriously should make the trip to Naxos”), and condescendingly matey intellectual ostentation (Goethe’s Harzreise im Winter is, “between you and me, rather crappy”), the conceit that these writings reflect the lives of their intended readers is, between you and me, nonsense—flattering nonsense, but nonsense all the same.

In truth, Every Day Drinking and On Drink are aspirational, and what its readers are meant to aspire to be is Amis. Back in 1965, Amis (lightly disguised as Lieutenant-Colonel William “Bill” Tanner) had written The Book of Bond or Every Man His Own 007, a “how to” guide for would-be Bonds, extremely funny (find it if you can), but firmly tongue-in-cheek.  As Books of Amis, Every Day Drinking and On Drink were intended a little more seriously, and that, ultimately, is the tragedy they represent. Drink was Kingsley’s (other) Thing, a prop, a pleasure, a crutch, a social lubricant, and, I’d guess, a means of “getting away … from this body … from this person … from attending to my own thoughts.” These last words are borrowed from The Green Man’s Maurice Allington, an alcoholic, and, of all Amis’s numerous fictional alter egos, the one who may have come closest to reality.  Allington is contemplating the relief that only death will bring, but, in the meantime, we know that he will make do with the bottle.

In his invaluable Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader observes that the question of alcoholism is given “short shrift” in On Drink (Amis wrote there that he had “little to offer” on the topic). Plausibly enough, Leader suggests that for Amis the distinction between drinker and alcoholic rested on whether the drinking was a social activity. Quite possibly: it’s questionable science, but as a rationalization it could work. Amis’s writings can thus be interpreted as an attempt to redefine his own drinking in a way that made it seem, if only to himself, as a normal expression of sociability—and therefore nothing to fear. Snarling Garrick get-togethers are transformed into something jovially Pickwickian; binges and pratfalls are just what any chap might to do; a compulsion becomes a respectable intellectual interest, and, what’s more, a nice little earner: all under control, then.

Except that, as Amis must have been too sharp not to realize, it wasn’t. As Hitchens recalls, “the booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm.” There’s nothing particularly social, or sociable, about that. In the end, of course, it helped kill him. He’d got away at last.