A Colossal Wreck (36 page)

Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to you across the abyss. I don’t even have to close my eyes to savor your presence, your caustic or merry laughter, your elegance, your spirit as vivid as that of d’Artagnan, the fiery Gascon. You will burn like the brightest of flames in my memory, as you will in the memories of all who knew and admired and loved you.

September 25

As one who once wrote a book titled
The Golden Age Is in Us
, I took myself off on a Saturday to look at an exhibition in the National Galley on Trafalgar Square, called “Paradise,” a traveling show which had already been shown in Bristol and Newcastle, attracting 160,000 people, apparently double what they would have expected normally
in those galleries. People want to know the lineaments of paradise, whose earthly possibilities utopians used to spend much time usefully describing, though not much anymore.

The exhibition turned out to be patchy, with the curator scraping together a show from available ingredients, such as a Boucher, a Gauguin, a Constable, a Monet, a Rothko, a couple of Renaissance paintings and so forth. But making my visit entirely worthwhile there was one marvelous painting, one of Stanley Spencer’s Cookham paintings about the Last Judgment, done in 1934. It shows a dustman resurrected in his beefy wife’s arms, she in “ecstatic communion with the dustman’s corduroy trousers” as Spencer put it. Other dustmen and women, plus a cat, surround the couple.

“I feel in this Dustman picture,” Spencer wrote,

that it is like watching and experiencing the inside of a sexual experience. They are all in a state of anticipation and gratitude to each other. They are each to the other, and all to any one of them, as peaceful as the privacy of a lavatory. I cannot feel anything is Heaven where there is any forced exclusion of any sexual desire …

The picture is to express a joy of life through intimacy. All the signs and tokens of home life, such as the cabbage leaves and teapot which I have so much loved that I have had them resurrected from the dustbin because they are reminders of home life and peace, and are worthy of being adored as the dustman is. I only like to paint what makes me feel happy. As a child I was always looking on rubbish heaps and dustbins with a feeling of wonder. I like to feel that, while in life things like pots and brushes and clothes etc may cease to be used, they will in some way be reinstated, and in this Dustman picture I try to express something of this wish and need I feel for things to be restored. That is the feeling that makes the children take out the broken teapot and empty jam tin.

Small things these, but there was also a big new thing in Spencer’s life, namely his attraction to a new arrival in Cookham, Patricia Preece and her companion Hilda. Patricia was famous as having been the cause of the death of W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the noted team of Gilbert and Sullivan. Aged seventeen in 1911 and under her birth name of Ruby, she caught the eye of randy old Gilbert, who invited her to come for a swim in the lake at his Harrow home. As
she splashed about he conceived, or professed to conceive, the notion that she was out of her depth and might drown. Swimming out, no doubt planning to clasp her in a savior’s embrace, he had a heart attack and died in front of her. The press had a fine time describing her as a “fair-haired seventeen-year-old schoolgirl.”

It’s the presence of Patricia, though not her image, that suffuses the painting with sexual ecstasy, even though it’s the ample Hilda, who’d fled from Cookham to her mother in Hampstead, who is in ecstatic communion with the corduroy trousers. It’s as earthy and beautiful an expression of the paradise of carnal passion as Joyce’s pages in
Ulysses
about Bloom looking at Gertie. Though Spencer was a member of the Royal Academy and had the right to hang four paintings in the annual show, it was rejected, prompting his furious resignation. This great painting was without a purchaser till a Liverpool gallery bought it in 1947.

Whoever thought to put Spencer into the Paradise exhibit got it right. In ancient times death in the Golden Age was always incorporated into life as a sensate pleasure, followed immediately by an improved life, the way most folks including all those flocking to the show in Bristol and Newcastle would like it. In those earlier times they had Saturnalia which meant not so much drunken sex sprees as subversion of the conventional moral order.

October 7

People on the left spend a lot more time than they should complaining about the mainstream papers, most particularly the
New York Times
. They fume at the breakfast table, and often in print, or on the airwaves, bitterly decrying falsities in the “newspaper of record.” What do they expect? In fact, they should rejoice when the
Times
gets things wrong, which it mostly does, and take it as a singular event when it blunders into accuracy.

The dreariest place on any campus is the J-school, and whenever any young person comes to me to write a testimonial for them to get into journalism school I rail bitterly at their decision, though I concede that these days a diploma from one of these feedlots for
mediocrity is pretty much mandatory for anyone who wants to get into mainstream journalism.

Now the
Times
is nursing its bruises from the Jayson Blair affair. There are so many smellier corpses in the
New York Times
’s mausoleum, not to mention that larger graveyard of truth known as the American Fourth Estate, that it’s hard to get too upset about what Blair did. This same Blair was a young black reporter on the
New York Times
, exposed and denounced at colossal length on May 11 by a team of reporters from his own paper. The guy is now in hiding, his career in ruins.

From all the editorial hand-wringing you’d think he’d undermined the very foundations of the Republic. It reminds me of a
New York Times
editorial back in 1982, commenting on what began with my own exposé of Christopher Jones, a young man who had written an article in the
New York Times
magazine about a visit to Cambodia during which he claimed to have seen Pol Pot through binoculars.

In this same piece Jones made the mistake of plagiarizing an entire paragraph from André Malraux’s novel
La Voie Royale
, and I pointed this out in a column in the
Village Voice
, adding the obvious point that Jones’s binoculars must have been extremely powerful to have allowed him to recognize Pol Pot, let alone describe his eyes as “dead and stony.”

My item stirred the
Washington Post
to point an accusing finger. Then the
Times
itself unleashed a huge investigation of the wretched Jones and ran a pompous editorial proclaiming, “It may not be too much to say that, ultimately, it debases democracy.”

I remember thinking at the time that as a democracy-debaser Jones looked like pretty small potatoes, and it’s the same way with Jayson Blair now. He made up quotes, invented scenes, and plagiarized the work of other reporters, and if senior
Times
editors had not been as optimistically forgiving as, say, the Catholic hierarchy in dealing with a peccant priest, Blair would, and should, have been promptly fired after his second major screw-up.

But in the larger scale of things Blair’s improprieties are of no great consequence. The people into whose mouths he put imaginary words, and from whose imagined front porch he pretended
to see tobacco fields instead of tract homes are not notably put out. Ordinary Americans reckon that since you shouldn’t believe a word of anything you read in a newspaper or hear over the airwaves, what’s so different about Jayson Blair.

The Jayson Blair scandal comes on the heels of what was one of the most intensive bouts of botched reporting, wild speculation and straightforward disingenuous lying in the history of American journalism, a bout which prompted an invasion, many deaths and now—given the way things are currently headed—the likelihood of mass starvation. In other words, the lousy reporting really had consequences.

The invasion of Iraq was premised on the existence of weapons of mass destruction. None has yet been found and most of the US detective teams are now wanly returning home. Did the
New York Times
assist in this process of deception? Very much so. Just look through the clips file of one of its better known reporters, Judith Miller.

It was Miller who first launched the supposedly knowledgeable Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza on the world, crucial to the US government’s effort to portray a nuclear-capable Saddam. Miller it was who most recently wrote a story about a supposed discovery of a chemical WMD site, based entirely on the say-so of a US military unit about an Iraqi scientist whom Miller was not permitted to identify, let alone meet and interview.

Thus far there’s been no agonized reprise from the
New York Times
on its faulty estimate of the credibility of Hamza. And though Blair’s fabrications about the homecoming of Jessica Lynch were minutely dissected neither the
Times
nor any other US paper that I’ve read has had anything to say about the charges made in the London
Times
that the “heroic” rescue of Lynch was from an undefended hospital in circumstances very different and less creditable than those heralded by a Pentagon desperate for good publicity during a time when the invasion seemed to have faltered amid unexpectedly stiff resistance.

December 15

The last time I saw pictures of a man with long hair being displayed as a trophy of the American Empire it was Che Guevara, stretched out dead on a table in a morgue in Valle Grande in the eastern Bolivian mountains. In those edgier days, in late 1967, the Bolivian Army high command wanted him dead, the quicker the better, though the CIA wanted him alive for interrogation in Panama.

After a last chat with the CIA’s Félix Rodriguez, George Bush Sr.’s pal, a Bolivian sergeant called Terran shot Che in the throat and Rodriguez got to keep his watch. They chopped off Guevara’s hands for later checking to make sure the ID was correct. Years later, his skeleton, sans hands, was located and flown back to Havana for proper burial.

“It is better this way,” Guevara told Rodriguez at the end. “I should never have been captured alive,” he said, showing that even the bravest weaken at times. At the moment of his capture by the Bolivian Army unit, a wounded Guevara had identified himself, telling the soldiers he was Che and worth more to them alive than dead.

Back in 1967 most of the world mourned when Che’s capture and death seized the headlines. A million turned out in Havana to listen to Fidel Castro’s farewell speech. It’s been downhill all the way since then. The revolutionary cause has mostly gone to hell in a handcart and the next time America’s Most Wanted came out with his hands up, badly in need of a haircut, it was a mass murderer called Saddam Hussein, helped into power by the CIA a year after Guevara’s death. “I’m the President of Iraq,” he said, and then tried to cut a deal.

I went straight from the Monday morning news clips of the US Army’s film of Saddam having his teeth checked to have my own teeth cleaned by Tom, an oral hygienist in Santa Rosa, northern California. To try to deflect Tom from his stern rebukes for my own flossing failures I mentioned the footage of Saddam with his mouth open, while someone checked out his teeth.

Though he gave no professional opinions on the state of Saddam’s gums, it turned out Tom had spent a couple of years in Basra, in southern Iraq, imparting the elements of oral hygiene to the locals. “I’d point out to them that their gums were bleeding, and they’d
sigh, and say it was Allah’s will.” Then, like millions round the world that morning we (though, of necessity, I did most of the listening) reviewed the various options awaiting Saddam.

There were plenty of pieties in the opinion columns that Monday morning about the need for a manifestly independent tribunal where Saddam could be accorded every legal courtesy and the administration of justice would be scrupulous.

It was impossible to read this claptrap without laughing since that same morning Wesley Clark was testifying in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a body conjured into existence by the UN Security Council. As for it being anything other than a US puppet, ICTY was looking pretty slutty that morning, since the US government had successfully bullied the court into allowing Clark to testify in the absence of public or press, in what the ICTY demurely termed a “temporary closed session” with delayed transmission of the transcript, to allow the US government to “review the transcript and make representations as to whether evidence given in open session [sic] should be redacted in order to protect the national interests of the US.” To further protect the interests of General Clark, he would only have to endure limited cross examination by Milo
ević, a feisty cross-examiner.

All the US wants is for Saddam to be hauled into some kangaroo court and after a brisk procedure—in which Saddam will no doubt be denied opportunities to interrogate old pals from happier days, like Donald Rumsfeld—be dropped through a trap door with a rope tied around his neck, maybe with an Iraqi, or at least a son of the Prophet, pulling the lever.