And Yet... (33 page)

It is unfortunately true that the city allowed itself to become very dirty and polluted in the twentieth century, and as a result the remaining sculptures and statues on the Parthenon were nastily eroded by “acid rain.” And it's also true that the museum built on the Acropolis in the nineteenth century, a trifling place of a mere 1,450 square meters, was pathetically unsuited to the task of housing or displaying the work of Phidias. But gradually and now impressively, the Greeks have been living up to their responsibilities. Beginning in 1992, the endangered marbles were removed from the temple, given careful cleaning with ultraviolet and infrared lasers, and placed in a climate-controlled interior. Alas, they can never all be repositioned on the Parthenon itself, because, though the atmospheric pollution is now better controlled, Lord Elgin's goons succeeded in smashing many of the entablatures that held the sculptures in place. That leaves us with the next-best thing, which turns out to be rather better than one had hoped.

About a thousand feet southeast of the temple, the astonishing new Acropolis Museum will open on June 20. With ten times the space of the old repository, it will be able to display all the marvels that go with the temples on top of the hill. Most important, it will be able to show, for the first time in centuries, how the Parthenon sculptures looked to the citizens of old.

Arriving excitedly for my preview of the galleries, I was at once able to see what had taken the Greeks so long. As with everywhere else in Athens, if you turn over a spade or unleash a drill you uncover at least one layer of a previous civilization. (Building a metro for the Olympics in 2004 was a protracted if fascinating nightmare for this very reason.) The new museum, built to the design of the French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, has had to be mounted aboveground on one hundred huge reinforced-concrete pillars, which allow you to survey the remnants of villas, drains, bathhouses, and mosaics of the
recently unearthed neighborhood below. Much of the ground floor is made of glass so that natural light filters down to these excavations and gives the effect of transparency throughout. But don't look down for too long. Raise your eyes and you will be given an arresting view of the Parthenon, from a building that has been carefully aligned to share its scale and perspective with the mother ship.

I was impatient to be the first author to see the remounted figures and panels and friezes. Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, the head of the museum, took me to the top-floor gallery and showed me the concentric arrangement whereby the sculpture of the pediment is nearest the windows, the high-relief metopes are arranged above head height (they are supposed to be seen from below), and finally the frieze is running at eye level along the innermost wall. At any time, you can turn your head to look up and across at the architectural context for which the originals were so passionately carved. At last it will be possible to see the building and its main artifacts in one place and on one day.

The British may continue in their constipated fashion to cling to what they have so crudely amputated, but the other museums and galleries of Europe have seen the artistic point of reunification and restored to Athens what was looted in the years when Greece was defenseless. Professor Pandermalis proudly showed me an exquisite marble head, of a youth shouldering a tray, that fits beautifully into panel number five of the north frieze. It comes courtesy of the collection of the Vatican. Then there is the sculpted foot of the goddess Artemis, from the frieze that depicts the assembly of Olympian gods, by courtesy of the Salinas Museum, in Palermo. From Heidelberg comes another foot, this time of a young man playing a lyre, and it fits in nicely with the missing part on panel number eight. Perhaps these acts of cultural generosity, and tributes to artistic wholeness, could “set a precedent,” too?

The Acropolis Museum has hit on the happy idea of exhibiting, for as long as following that precedent is too much to hope for, its own original sculptures with the London-held pieces represented by
beautifully copied casts. This has two effects: it allows the visitor to follow the frieze round the four walls of a core “
cella
” and see the sculpted tale unfold (there, you suddenly notice, is the “lowing heifer” from Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn”). And it creates a natural thirst to see the actual reassembly completed. So, far from emptying or weakening a museum, this controversy has instead created another one, which is destined to be among Europe's finest galleries. And one day, surely, there will be an agreement to do the right thing by the world's most “right” structure.

(
Vanity Fair
, July 2009)

B
Y THE TIME
I came across the full-page ad in Sunday's
New York Times
, I had become so numb and habituated that the thing barely managed to register as grotesque. On an otherwise almost uncluttered expanse of paper appeared the words “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” There followed the name of the politician who once read those words aloud. As I say, this seemed perfectly in keeping with the determination of the American mass media not to give up until every child in the country, if not the world, could lisp the deathless words of Bob Shrum by heart. At the bottom of the page in smaller letters appeared the injunction “Let us continue his legacy of faith in the people and faith in the work that has yet to be done.” That, too, could have come from almost any tribute uttered since August 26. Last of all came the Levi's logo and the blunt exhortation: “Go forth.” (To do what? Multiply? Now that the Kennedys could all do.)

When mindlessly and endlessly reiterated, ordinary words begin to lose their anchorage in original meaning. “Dream” is now so vague as to be strictly without content, and, with strong assistance from Barack Obama, “hope” is rapidly going the same way. (Twice on Saturday I
heard the closing words of the Roman Catholic funeral liturgy, which sonorously intone “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.” If this means anything, it means not that there is anything certain about the prospect of the resurrection but that people sure think that there is something certain about hoping for it.)

One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy “legacy” is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and “torch passing” rhetoric in general. One of the film-archive obits showed an early moment when this began to happen. In 1962, despite having been all but fixed up by his family for the Massachusetts Senate seat, Edward Kennedy (as I feel I must call him since I didn't know the man) ran into a tough and articulate primary opponent named Edward J. McCormack, the state's attorney general. The old footage shows McCormack getting some mileage with his charge of family coattailing and carpetbagging—and then a sort of light coming on in Kennedy's eyes as he bluffs away and says that the election is nothing to do with his ability to peddle influence in Washington but instead concerns “the destiny” of the people of Massachusetts. As the cheap applause starts to rise and it hits McCormack that times have changed, you can almost see the hereditary senator-to-be thinking aloud:
This is too easy
.

The surviving family must have been thinking the same, as the whole Camelot replay rolled once again unchallenged across the national screen. But perhaps by now they take it as their due. Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the “driving accident” that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons' murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the
exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.

In some ways, this banana-republic coverage was a disservice even to the recently departed. After all, it was in part the case that the youngest brother had lived down the criminal and narcissistic and power-mad background of his family. His best biographer, Adam Clymer, wrote, on the morning after he died, that it was arguably wrong to see a discontinuity in Kennedy's career and that he had actually been a decent-enough legislator
before
abandoning any yearning for the White House after 1980. This may be true as far as it goes, but the obituaries would still have had to be somewhat different in tone, even given the servility of the journalistic profession, if Kennedy had died at the time of the Au Bar episode in Palm Beach, for instance, and had not decided to take some kind of a pull on himself and become a citizen again instead of a drone.

A former Senate staffer of his stopped by for a drink last week and told me that, without fanfare, the socialist president of Chile had come in person to the Kennedy home a few months ago to bestow one of her nation's highest human rights awards on him. His work on that subject alone was a part atonement for his siblings' deployment of what Lyndon Johnson himself called “a goddam Murder Incorporated” in the Southern Hemisphere. So, of course, was his labor on health care (where Richard Nixon had a better political track record than the Kennedy administration) and his last decision to keep looking life in the face for as long as he had breath. In those waning months, after being disgusted by malicious anti-Obama propaganda being spread in the Democratic primaries—later picked up and used by the right in the general election—he withdrew his support from a candidate whose victory would have meant the continuation of the dynastic politics represented by the family names Bush, Gore, and Clinton. What a favor he did us all by that repudiation! And how fitting that it should have been a Kennedy who did it. The political rhetoric of Obamaism, alas, is even more bloviating at times than Camelot was, but you can't have everything.

It is true, then, and not just in America, that people do instinctively respond to redemption, atonement, the making up for missed opportunities and squandered time. Call no man happy until he is dead, as the Greeks had it. Kennedy's very last year was quite possibly his best, and how many men or women will be able to say that?

(
Slate
, August 31, 2009)

L
IVING IN THE
Islamic Republic,” wrote Azar Nafisi in her book
Reading Lolita in Tehran
in 2003, “is like having sex with a man you loathe.” This verdict has gathered extra force and pungency as the succeeding years have elapsed and as more women have been stoned, hanged, beaten, raped, and silenced. Lately has come the news that Iranian men in prison are being raped, too, for trying to exercise their right to vote. And now the US government has come to a point where it must ask itself: What is it like to enter negotiations with a man who loathes you and who every Friday holds public prayers that call for your death?

Last Friday brought the news that the Obama administration had accepted an offer from Tehran, delivered the preceding Wednesday, for the holding of what the
New York Times
called “unconditional talks.” It was further reported that the administration had spent “less than 48 hours” deliberating whether to respond to the invitation, which yields the interesting if minor detail that this must have been the most significant decision taken by Obama's people on or about the eighth anniversary of the attacks of September 11.

Well, I am all for talks without preconditions, and I have said several times in this space that I think we should offer the Iranians cooperation on a wide spectrum of topics, especially the very pressing one of helping to “proof” Iran against the coming earthquake that could devastate its capital city. There may even be areas of potential interest in our having common enemies in the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But things have changed a little since the president and his secretary of state were sparring over the word “unconditional” during the primaries. First, it has become ever clearer that Iran's uranium-enrichment and centrifuge program has put it within measurable distance of the ability to weaponize its nuclear capacity. Second, it has become obscenely obvious that the theocracy is prepared to govern by force alone and to employ the most appalling measures to remain in power without a mandate.