A Colossal Wreck (23 page)

It’s a miracle half the ruling class isn’t wiped out around Martha’s Vineyard every year. That hateful island is often shrouded in fog; normal commercial flights are canceled and the rich then whistle up charter flights, often with pilots either weary or half drunk. Even the ferry from Woods Hole isn’t entirely safe for the big-wigs. Back in the Vietnam era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was nearly wrestled over the side by an anti-war zealot.

I’m not sure what the exact averages are, per person mile flown, but small planes are unwise forms of conveyance. Helicopters are even more lethal. Even so, the last time, back in the early 1980s, I was on Martha’s Vineyard I was desperate for escape, so much so I declined even to wait for the ferry. Instead I chartered a small plane, instructing the pilot to fly myself and my daughter to Keene, NH. That’s the sort of effect the island has on one.

August 11

Steve Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and John Donohue III, a law prof at Stanford, have been circulating a paper—reported in the
Chicago Tribune
on August 8—arguing that the legalizing of abortion in the early 1970s has contributed to the falling crime rate in the 1990s. Indeed they claim that legalized abortion may account for as much as half the overall crime drop between 1991 and 1997. Levitt says abortion “provides a way for the would-be mothers of those kids who are going to lead really tough lives to avoid bringing them into the world.” The authors cite statistics from five states that legalized abortion before the
Roe v. Wade
decision of 1973. These five states with high abortion rates in the early 1970s had greater crime drops in the 1990s.

The
Trib
’s story quotes Cory Richards, a policy wonk at the Guttmacher Institute, as saying, “This is an argument for women not being forced to have children they don’t want to have. This is making the point that it’s not only bad for the women, but for children and society.”

So, from the social-engineering, crime-fighting point of view the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1977 had the legalization of abortion in 1975—the
Roe v. Wade
decision—as its logical precursor and concomitant. And the death penalty for undesired embryos has had the advantage of being a lot more certain, and cheaper to administer, than the death penalty for undesired adults. I don’t think it’s the way the women’s movement put the choice issue back in the early 1970s, but I can certainly imagine Hillary arguing for abortion as socially therapeutic.

August 20

Nabbed back in March for speeding in my 1964 station wagon I finally made it to traffic school last week. Under California law you can thus shield your rashness from the insurance companies, provided there’s at least an eighteenth-month interval from your last citation.

Down the years, here in the Golden State, I’ve been to a few such sessions, which have to last eight hours. My first such school, back in
the late 1980s, was in Riverside, on the eastern margin of the greater Los Angeles area. The composition of the thirty-odd people was 50 percent white, 50 percent black. At all classes the initial routine is for each person to divulge name and cause of citation. In the Riverside class almost all the blacks said they’d been cited for going a few miles over the limit, in urban areas: 30 mph instead of 25. So reasonably enough, all the blacks thought they’d been framed. Almost all the whites had been caught speeding on the highway, doing 70 and over. They all thought they’d been breaking the law.

My next class, in Santa Cruz, was run by a California Highway Patrol officer who spent most of the session giving us useful hints on how to avoid being caught speeding. In Berkeley a couple years ago, our class was run by a former alcoholic who underwent visible nervous breakdown throughout the eight-hour session, saying the breakdown was prompted by his daughter’s driving skills and her indifference to her father. As he issued our certificates he tearfully thanked us for sharing.

The class in Eureka last week was run by a former cop from San Diego, who divides his time between running a driving school and representing tax deadbeats before the IRS. He offered a torrent of statistics. The most dangerous time to drive: Friday evening, closely followed by Saturday night, closely followed by Sunday night. The safest day is Tuesday. The last twenty-four-hour period in California in which no one was killed on the roads was on May 1, 1991 (which turns out to have been a Wednesday).

Amid this deluge of numbers he paused to review the best way to deal with the officer as he approaches your car. It’s best, he said, to have your hands up on the wheel. The instructor plunged into cop’s-eye view about what it was like to approach a car. Death could be waiting. There was no job, he told us, more perilous than that of the police officer.

I told him I didn’t think this claim was true; that in fact police work is among the safer occupations, that the likelihood of being killed in the line of duty was exceedingly slim. He held his ground, but the figures support my view. If you tot up the numbers of local police, sheriff’s deputies, state police, special police (a mysterious category
in the US Statistical Abstract) and all sworn officers both full- and part-time, the total in 1992 was 661,103. The total of police killed accidentally and feloniously in that year across the country was 129, which seems to be about average in any year. This gives a death rate per 100,000 cops of twenty, most of whom are probably killed in car crashes. The rate of death per 100,000 in coal mining was thirty-eight in 1995, making it the riskiest job, followed by other forms of mining (twenty-five), oil and gas extraction (twenty-three), agriculture, forestry and fishing (twenty-two). If cops walked more and drove less, they’d probably halve their death rate, putting them on par with people in the electrical, gas and sanitary services, at eight or so per 100,000.

That wasn’t my only tussle of the evening in the traffic class. We tangled again on the subject of drunk driving. After reciting the savage penalties meted out to those caught driving under the influence of alcohol, the instructor gave an impassioned speech in favor of the pillory of public ridicule and contempt, meaning in this instance that convicted drunks would have to display an orange license tag. I told the class I thought penalties for drunk driving were already out of hand, at least for those who had caused no harm. This intervention was badly timed, because the instructor completed the class by showing a half-hour movie about a teenage drunk who killed a young woman, and his consequent remorse. I felt as though I had somehow argued that the teen drunk killer should have been levied a $10 fine and then handed back his driver’s license. The big disclosure of the evening is that the American Psychiatric Association is putting road rage into its next edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, meaning that this nebulous category has now been okayed by shrinks as a bona fide condition, amenable to insured treatment by anti-depressants and kindred potions. Having made road rage official, the shrinks can now begin to coin money off it.

September 22

Now it turns out that the greatest writer of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Flann O’Brien, was nearly put on trial as a
traitor after World War II. No, not Ezra Pound, but P. G. Wodehouse. Last week the British Public Records office released files showing that the director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Matthew, thought that a trial of Wodehouse would be a tricky prospect, but said that “If Wodehouse ever comes to this country, he should be prosecuted.” In the event, Wodehouse lived in the US continuously from 1944 on.

Wodehouse broadcast from Germany in 1941, having been marched off to an internment camp in Upper Silesia after the Nazis invaded France and came across the writer working away in his house at Le Touquet, writing one of his very best novels,
Joy in the Morning
. After he’d spent eleven months in the internment camp, American friends saw a photograph of him and worried about his somewhat emaciated appearance. Wodehouse was soon released and taken to Berlin, where he accepted the request of Werner Plack, a German foreign ministry official he’d known slightly before the war, that he do some broadcasts to America about his experience in the internment camp. The five talks were sequestered by the British authorities for many years. When they were finally released they turned out to be slightly labored, knockabout reminiscences in a jocular vein. Wodehouse evidently enjoyed internment life, as did many Englishmen who, like Wodehouse, regarded public school as the high point of their lives.

Wodehouse could conceivably be faulted for poor judgment but he certainly didn’t deserve the vicious campaign launched against him in the British press.

Of course Wodehouse was saying nothing that wasn’t also entertained by many in the Western governing elites who had always yearned for Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, and who had been pro-fascist in the 1930s, at a time Wodehouse was making fun of British fascists with his portrait of Oswald Mosley, memorably satirized in the form of Sir Roderick Spode in another of Wodehouse’s best books,
The Code of the Woosters
. Many years ago I wrote an intro to a Random House reissue of this novel. Wodehouse wrote his best stuff in the late 1930s and 1940s. Bertie Wooster remains his greatest creation. Wodehouse was an extraordinary technician. His public school, Dulwich, also gave us Raymond Chandler. Both of them emigrated here, and forged prose styles that made use of a highly
formalized mannerism, while remaining a supple and fluid language, like Shakespearean English.

October 13

From the typographical clamor raised in the
New York Daily News
, you’d have thought
New York Press
columnist George Szamuely had been caught committing satanic abuse in a day-care center. But it turned out that Szamuely’s great crime was to have taken too many books—580 is a number that shows up in the press reports—out of the New York University library, and been remiss in giving them back. The
News
and other newspapers have exultantly noted that Szamuely faces an overdue fine of $31,000, plus charges of grand larceny and possible jail time. John Beckman, described as a university spokesman, strutted through the news stories like some frontier sheriff twirling his six-gun: “Don’t mess with NYU librarians.”

Some of the news stories noted that among the books held by Szamuely was Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
. It’s well-known that only Hungarians have the fortitude to grapple with this exhausting work. The last person I know to have read it thoroughly was my dear friend Nicholas Krasso, a student of Lukács who fled Budapest for England in 1956. We spent a lot of time together in the mid-1960s, and Nicholas was forever quoting from the
Phenomenology
, which he said was best studied under the influence of LSD. Poor Nicholas fell asleep reading one night, and died in the smoke caused by the cigarette that fell from his drooping hand. Hegel was probably on the bed somewhere, probably the London Library’s copy. What a fitting way for a copy of the
Phenomenology
to go!

Another of the books cited by the news stories—this particular one was on the AP wire—was
Thoughts on Machiavelli
. So, how many other NYU students have any interest in Leo Strauss? A simple test. If Szamuely pleads innocent and opts for a jury trial, as I very much hope he will, let his attorney make a pile of the books in the courtroom, and then, let the jurors note how many times these books had been checked out before the erudite Szamuely got his hands on
them. Probably most of them sat ignored, awaiting the moment NYU decided to sell them off to a book broker.

NYU should be glad and thank Szamuely for freeing up its shelf space.

Szamuely may be charged with grand larceny. Two or three centuries ago, the standard was simple: Stealing books is not a crime unless the books are sold. There’s no evidence Szamuely was popping along to the Strand to flog off editions of Hobbes. He held those books for admirable reasons, such that a jury would understand. He needed them for the same reasons my shelves groan with volumes (Hegel’s
Phenomenology
included) I may never get to, may never re-read. To surrender them is to confess that, yes, I may die before I get around to reading Hegel properly, or all the dialogues of Plato, or all Balzac’s novels, or all the volumes of Motley’s
Rise of the Dutch Republic
; I may die before I write the column or the essay or the book that requires absolutely that these books be instantly to hand.

November 1

Riding the BART across to San Francisco, I heard two young black women who’d presumably got on the train at North Richmond, deep in conversation.

Girl #1: When I first heard something, my baby started to wake up, so I was patting him on his back, and we were talking for a few more minutes, and then I heard, “No, no, I ain’t got nothing, I ain’t got nothing. Stop!” Then I said, “Don’t that sound like Tony?” and my brother said, “Naw, girl,” and I said, “Yes, it does,” so I jumped off the couch and by this time they were already by my front door. Then I heard, “Oh man, come on, I ain’t got nothing.” Then I said, “Rich, get out there and help.” So I opened the door and he was laid down on my front doorstep.

Girl #2: Was he on his knees?

Girl #1: No, on his butt, kinda to the side with one of them on him with a shotgun pointed him and the other one was in front of him
with a gun, so when I opened the door he put the gun in my face and I said, “Oh shit” and shut the door.

Girl #2: You looked at him and he looked at you?

Girl #1: Yes, I looked right at him. Then I shut the door back, and I got stuck. I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Oh my god, oh my god, shit.” Then I locked my door and heard someone say, “Take off you coat, punk, what yo got in yo pockets?” and Tony said, “I ain’t got nothing,” and they were hitting him. Then I don’t know if he got up by hisself or if they pulled him up and they keep saying, “Give me what you got, punk.” Tony said, “I ain’t got nothing, please don’t kill me, don’t shoot me.” Then they said, “Stop crying like a little bitch,” two times, then “What the fuck is you looking at?” two times too, and then Tony said, “Please, don’t kill me, don’t shoot me,” and one said, “Shut the fuck up.” Bop, Bop.