A Colossal Wreck (18 page)

Back in 1958 the American sociologist Lewis Feuer introduced his edition of the
Manifesto
, writing that the revolutionary intellectual of the ’30s has been replaced by the managerial intellectual of the ’50s, and with this change in social temper the philosophy of Karl Marx would be consigned by many persons to the museum of their youthful indiscretions. In 1998 these same managerial intellectuals want to manage the entire planet, and Hobsbawm, who had a few youthful indiscretions of his own, sees barbarism as the only alternative to such planetary supervision by credentialed, scientific professionals (presumably financed by George Soros and the Nature Conservancy). So Verso’s is a manifesto without class struggle, without revolution.

How different an attitude to history than Marx’s. In his last edition of the
Manifesto
, in 1882, he excitedly used news of the class struggle in Russia and America to adjust his revolutionary gunsights. His aim remained true, as did his commitment.

But to divorce the
Manifesto
from revolution, as does Hobsbawm, is indeed to produce a Marxism without hope. Marx merely becomes a preface to the great German sociologist Max Weber who once
described capitalism as mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.

Many reviewers of Verso’s
Manifesto
have tended to see it as a celebration—admittedly acerbic—of global capitalism, sweeping away all hindrances to the basic task of accumulation. Both the neoliberal
New Yorker
and conservative
Times Literary Supplement
have praised Marx for his perspicacity and overall up-to-dateness in seeing which way capitalism was headed, while saying that where he truly messed up was in his revolutionary politics. Marx gets whacked with words like promethean or utopian, to show how he sent Communism off down a blind alley.

September 16

The more minutely we are able to examine the private side of vastly powerful public persons, the more pity we should feel for their condition. For many years the Emperor Franz Joseph, leader of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, used to try to get an extra kettle of hot water brought along miles of corridors in his palace to warm his bath. His orders were given a respectful hearing, then ignored.

Bill Clinton, leader of the free world, couldn’t engage in a furtive embrace of a woman not his wife in the Oval Office because he thought the gardener would peer in the windows. For the pitifully few moments of semi-gratification he and Monica Lewinsky were able to indulge each other, the two had to seclude themselves in a windowless corridor, a love site without even the close excitement of a broom closet.

The Starr report, released on September 11, on the intimacies of the President and the White House intern, must surely rank as one of the most bizarre documents about the sex life of a public person ever given to the world. A thousand years from now, cultural anthropologists will marvel at the insensate detail of its portrait of what happened when a president in his late forties was seduced by a rich girl from Beverly Hills. The Starr report is Clinton’s legacy, as striking a symbol of our time as was the scaffold of Louis XVI to the late eighteenth century.

This is not to undercut the demented nature of the Starr report, which has as eerie a feel to it as a proceeding from the Spanish Inquisition or one of those court sessions from the Middle Ages when animals were placed on trial for heresy. To us, in the late twentieth century, it is unfathomable that serious people should have considered putting a pig or a goose through the rigors of the judicial process. A century from now our descendants will surely marvel at an age—ours—when millions and millions of dollars were spent to determine that the President and Ms Lewinsky enjoyed ten bouts of oral sex in two years, attended by two orgasms per partner across that entire time.

Even adding in the bouts of phone sex it certainly doesn’t add up to a fulfilling relationship. The sparsity of sexual fulfillment makes a previous White House incumbent, Warren Harding, look like Casanova by comparison. Nor was Bill Clinton’s comportment entirely gross. He was tempted; infatuated. He told Monica he’d had hundreds of affairs in his youth but that now, after forty, he had been trying to commit himself more strongly to his marriage.

They exchanged gifts. In the words of the report, “He told her he enjoyed talking to her. She recalled him saying that the two of them were emotive and full of fire and she made him feel young.” In the end she turns into the spoiled girl from hell, storms the White House, spurns jobs secured for her by the President and Vernon Jordan. And of course she led him badly astray by swearing that she’d never, ever told a soul.

Editorial moralists have sprung to their high horses. The
New York Times
spoke of reading the Starr report with “a heavy heart and churning emotions.” This is like saying one reads Judith Krantz with a heavy heart and churning emotions. The dalliance—“affair” is far too serious a word—between Clinton and Lewinsky simply won’t sustain the burden of moral reproof being placed upon it. It’s like treating Edward Lear as if he was Homer.

It’s clear enough now that Kenneth Starr did Clinton a huge favor by confining himself so relentlessly to the President’s sex life. Not even a whiff from the stagnant marsh of Whitewater riffles his pages. A report which is designed to evict a president by means of
impeachment surely has to have some urgency to it—some sense of great misdeeds of state, the boding darkness of
Macbeth
. You can’t send round to Congress a report in the style of
Midsummer Night’s Dream
and expect those folks in Congress to muster the seriousness of statesmen and stateswomen pondering high crimes and misdemeanors. It just won’t wash.

As things are, the American people once again seem to be displaying themselves as mature adults, endowed with a sense of realism, unlike the opinion-formers who have been howling as though the President molested a child in its pram.

On February 19, 1996, so Independent Counsel Starr discloses to us, the President was closeted with Monica in the Oval Office, telling her they could still meet but that there could be no more canoodling. In the midst of this tête-à-tête he took a call from one of the Fanjul family, powerful Florida sugar barons who at the time were battling the idea that they should have to pay any money to compensate for the damage to the Everglades attendant upon their sugar-growing activities in Florida. Even as Clinton was talking to Fanjul, Al Gore was agitating for such a levy. By the end of the conversation we know there was one, and can surmise there were two, satisfied parties. The Sugar Baron and the President, each man efficiently serviced.

But Ken Starr wasn’t writing about this happily consummated relationship, which is why Americans won’t take this report seriously. They understand the difference between petty moral dereliction and political corruption.

October 7

Driving through Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and out across the Northern Plains, it’s clear enough, in jokes and derision at the blue noses, that the cavortings of Bill and Monica and the maneuvers of the Republicans and Democrats have been good for America. It’s been marvelously cathartic for people to have had to talk so long and so loudly about blowjobs, orgasms, infidelity and privacy. Nothing has been more ridiculous than the whinings of parents about how to talk to the kids about it all. Kids who’ve watched forty-five deaths
a day on American TV their whole lives are experiencing a marked elevation in the quality of their cultural consumption by listening to accounts of Bill and Monica’s sexual encounters, such as they were. (Ironically, it’s always been Hillary-think that kids need special counseling when some big untoward event occurs, like an eleven-year-old blowing away some classmates.)

One thing is certain, as the network correspondents like to say at the wrap-up point. The car mechanics of America are for Bill. The ’64 Chrysler New Yorker I’m driving developed serious gas feed and overheating problems at 5 p.m. in central Indiana the afternoon I was due to give a talk about my and Jeffrey St. Clair’s book
Whiteout
, in a bookstore in Chicago, at 7 p.m. Rodney Sheets, owner and manager of One Stop Auto in Columbia City, flung himself into the emergency, but still had time to deride at some length Henry Hyde. This was Quayle country and at intervals Rodney would chat with several of his children who were running in and out of the shop. So here was a devoted parent and advocate of family values, possibly a former Quayle voter, but still thinking the uproar is ridiculous.

It was the same in Milwaukee, where Peggy and Dennis of Lake Shore Mobil took up the work Rodney had not had time to finish. If Bill’s future was in their hands, Bill would be safe. A word about mechanics. In the late 1940s and early 1950s many Americans got screwed around by car salesmen. The odium carried over to mechanics. Theirs is not the most trusted profession in the charts, albeit not nearly so low as journalists and politicians. But as the owner of ten old cars from the 1950s and 1960s, all of which at various times I’ve driven around or across the country, and in all of which I’ve been beleaguered by various grave setbacks and crises, I’ve only had about four unsatisfactory encounters with mechanics in which I could say I’ve been seriously hard done by. This yields an “I-was-screwed” statistic of a fraction of one percent. Set this against the risk factor associated with encounters with academic people and the entertainment industry and you will agree, mechanics are as honest a bunch as the unpaid staffers of the
Catholic Worker
, which is saying a great deal.

October 10

Fall is always the best time to meander around the country. Across the Midwest the corn is being harvested. The browns and golds of stubble and still-standing stalks warm those vast flat or slightly undulating vistas. In Chicago, we stayed in Danny Postell’s and Tom Petralis’s nice apartment in Rodgers Park—$600 a month, a pleasant mixed ethnic neighborhood, small lakeside park and public beach available for dips in Lake Michigan, which I took. We looked at the map. The decision, as always, is whether to head southwest along old 66, or straight west through Iowa and Nebraska, or take the northerly routes through the Dakotas. This time we aim to go along upper Missouri, right under the Canadian border, maybe go through Glacier National Park. The old Lewis and Clark route, more or less. (One of the local papers had a story about new efforts to find their camp sites. It seems that some of the men on the Lewis and Clark expedition had syphilis, which they treated with mercury. The mercury hangs around in the soil, and so now the researchers run around with sensors and locate the sites.)

About 100 miles along 94 from Minneapolis we came to Sauk Centre, and espied a sign for the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, which he offered to the world as Gopher Prairie in
Main Street
, the novel published in 1920 that made his name.

Fortunately the Info Center has not yet found the money to transform itself into an interactive learning experience in the modern manner, replete with audio-visual aids and the indispensable computers. In fact, the “center” is an old-fashioned small museum with fading photographs and photostats of Lewis’s working manuscripts. Some of these were detailed plans Lewis drew of his fictional towns, plus his real-estate maps of the inhabitants’ precise locations and their family histories. Every time he visited a graveyard, he’d take down names for future use.

The Center, unsurprisingly, presented Lewis as a Man of Letters, gravely posed in tweeds. The only indication that he might have been somewhat of a rip-snorter was a photograph of Marcella Powers, the young aspiring actress with whom Lewis began a five-year
relationship in 1939, when she was eighteen and he was 54 and still married to Dorothy Thompson. From her later letters, Marcella, who died in 1975, seems to have been a lively and intelligent person. My father, who met Lewis in Berlin in the late 1920s, recalled “Red” Lewis as a boozer of formidable proportions.

I’d forgotten how good a writer Lewis was. “This is America,” he wrote in the epigraph to
Main Street
. “Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.”

To give some longer sense of perspective, the Interpretive Center also has an interesting photograph of a Viking Altar stone into which Norsemen, wandering across the prairie, drilled four holes to support a canopy under which a priest had celebrated mass in 1362. Bishop George Spettz rededicated the stone in 1975.

We left the Interpretive Center and headed for Sauk Centre’s greatest pride, Main Street, though the citizens were naturally furious when the novel was first published. Now the banner on Main Street says, “A View of the Past, A Vision of the Future.”

October 15

ORWELL’S SHITLIST

Dear Mr. Anderson,

In Alexander Cockburn’s recent frenzied attack on George Orwell and his now infamous shitlist, he quotes Peter Davison as saying that Cockburn’s father was Orwell’s “political foe.” The following might be of interest to those fans of the deadly ideological wars of the 1930s and 1940s.

Cockburn’s father, Claud Cockburn, was a Communist who Graham Greene called one of “the two greatest journalists of the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, the one collection of his work that
I’ve seen,
Cockburn in Spain
, doesn’t live up to this accolade. The book is a collection of Cockburn’s Spanish Civil War dispatches to the Communist
Daily Worker
. Here’s a taste:

“The POUM, acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and with certain other deluded persons in the anarchist organizations, planned, organized and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front at Bilbao.