The Meaning of Recognition (55 page)

Dan Jacobson’s private letter was, of course, the one that mattered. When you have a genuine case, it can never really be overstated, but there is always a temptation to understate the
possible objections. Hitler and Stalin regarded themselves as monuments of the intellect, and were so regarded by their followers: so it was foolish of me to allow the suggestion that their actions
might have been unaccompanied by mental activity.
Mein Kampf
amounted to a consistent, if not reasoned, presentation of a case, and was unreadable only in the sense of being repellent.
There were intellectuals outside Germany – most conspicuously Harold Nicolson – who read it and not only saw what Hitler was on about, but guessed what he might do. And Stalin’s
Short Course
, which he supervised even if he did not write it, marks the culmination of a Marxist-Leninist tradition, even if it also marks its final descent into sclerosis. But I hold to
the conclusion that it was their desire for a certain kind of action that made them think that way in the first place. A stronger objection to that conclusion – an objection which none of the
philosophers made, strangely enough – would have been to say that Mao Zedong began by trying to put his principles into action through comparatively benevolent means. He became murderous only
later on. When he did, he became more murderous than anybody, but the objection remains. In his case I wouldn’t pretend to have an answer to it. Philip Short, in his excellent biography of
Mao, doesn’t have an answer either. I suppose one possible explanation is that the idea of dealing with an opposing view by killing everyone who holds it, or even might hold it, can enter the
head at any time. Nor does the person so inspired necessarily have to be in charge of a state. Tacitus, talking about Tiberius, gave us everything we need to know about what the despot can do if
the mood takes him. The despotic actions adduced by Tacitus were repeated with depressing regularity all the way down to Pol Pot. But the characteristic genocide of more recent times – one
thinks, or tries not to think, of Rwanda and Darfur – is a different matter. Now we must deal, or fail to deal, with genocide
instead
of a state, with mass killing as a mode of
being; and the focal field of study for that might be in modern terrorism, which, for all but sentimentalists who think there can be no irrationality without a reason, so clearly raises the
question of whether someone might not want to perpetrate an evil for its own sake, and even against his own nominated political interests.

Trying to answer that question leads us into an area beyond nihilism, which at least had a kind of purity. But counter-productive terrorism looks to be mixed up with the dubious attractions of
celebrity, self-realization and the desire of its practitioners to appear on screen, even if wearing a mask. The political analysts of the next generation, whose task one doesn’t envy, might
have to face the possibility that the glamour-boy terrorist does what he does, not because he has a definite cause to pursue, but because he is exercising his one and only talent: the one talent
which it would be death to hide, but which unfortunately expresses itself in the form of random death to others. This seems likely to have been true in the pioneering case of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez,
whom the press foolishly continues to romanticize with the name of Carlos, thereby infantilizing itself along with him. One Sunday afternoon Sanchez threw a grenade into the drugstore in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He killed two people and wounded thirteen more. Apparently his reason for doing so was that the proprietor was a Jew. There is no reason to think that Sanchez’s
anti-Semitism is any more fervent than his Marxism. Yet there are convinced anti-Semites who would never do such a thing. We can even distinguish his achievement from that of the Jewish
ultra-orthodox madman who, when he massacred thirty defenceless Arabs in a mosque, was at least angry about something. Though putatively enraged by the unholy alliance between the US and Zionism,
Sanchez has probably never been angered by anything except the occasional woman who turned him down. Few of them seem to do so. As of this writing, his French lawyer, a clear case of the
sophisticated nincompoop, plans to marry him. It is hard not to hope that he will finish her off with suitable casualness when he moves on to his next triumph. Hard, but necessary. If we
aren’t capable of seeing that the benefit of justice means nothing unless it is extended to those who are too stupid to be worthy of it, we should join the other side.

A speech delivered at the Australian Commercial Radio Conference, 16 October 2004

I met Andy Warhol only once, and I wasn’t sure it was happening even then. Theoretically he was still alive at the time, but he had the handshake of a ghost. It was
beyond limp – just a cellophane sack full of liquid, like the water bombs we made in school. But the hand was a miracle of vitality compared to his face. Transparent of skin and with the eyes
of a salmon on a marble slab, he would have made Lazarus, emerging from the family vault, look more animated than Billy Crystal. Our encounter happened in London, not Palestine, but there was
something biblical about the features thinly painted on the front of that balsa skull, under the canopy of stark white fibre-optic hair. There was a post mortem solemnity there, an intimate
knowledge of the world beyond the tomb. Perhaps, after he had been shot a few years earlier by one of his bedraggled platoon of untalented actresses, he had journeyed through the netherworld while
on life support. His smile – a computer-generated rearrangement of crumbling tissue – seemed to suggest that he had met me down there, and was as glad as a zombie could be to see me
again. It was kind of him, because he had no idea who I was. And of course I wasn’t anybody. Everybody Warhol knew was a celebrity. Therefore he did not know me.

For a fleeting moment I felt bad about that. I didn’t want it to be such a comedown for the man who had lunch with Jackie O to be having his hand squeezed by Clive Zero. Besides, I quite
admired him. I didn’t think much of his paintings, which struck me as sheets of stamps designed by the semi-gifted daughter of a Third World despot. I couldn’t see why a silk-screen
photograph of the electric chair should be more interesting than the actual electric chair, which at least transmits some kind of thrill, even if fatal. But I had been impressed by his much-quoted
prediction that everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes. The prediction was so obviously already coming true. And he had said it well, and saying something well is almost as good
as doing something. Somewhere in what passed for my brain in those days, I was already struggling towards the conclusion that if somebody did something they had a right to be somebody, but merely
being somebody meant nothing if being somebody was the only thing that somebody did. I wonder if I’ve made myself clear. Let me expand on that point, as the bishop said to the actress. No,
wait a second, it wasn’t what the bishop said to the actress. It was what the Governor of Tasmania said to the Queen of the Netherlands.

Not long after our encounter, Andy Warhol made another trip to the beyond, and this time to stay. He expired somewhere in the centre of a tangle of plastic tubes, most of them supplying his body
with fluids it had never had in the first place. It wasn’t the way I want to die – I want to be knifed to death in an Elle McPherson lingerie commercial – but as I read the news
of his passing I had already achieved my own fifteen minutes of fame and had started to wonder whether it was worth the trouble. I wasn’t world famous, which was the only degree of fame that
had ever interested Andy. To be world famous you first have to be famous in America, which I would probably never have managed even had I desired to. Not that I have anything fundamental against
America. I have detailed criticisms, but I don’t see how you can have those if you hate the whole place: if everything is always wrong, there is nothing they can change. And you have to
admire a country so democratic that a mentally handicapped man can become President.

Incidentally, I was in New York the weekend before last, having arrived just in time for the first debate between Bush and Kerry. Watching the debate with a deepening sense of awe, I thought:
there is the spectacle of the two most highly qualified men in a great nation contending eloquently for the right to occupy its highest office, and then there is this. It wasn’t surprising
that Kerry was generally thought to have won the contest. Being more articulate than George W. Bush is no challenge. So is my cat. In the debate, Bush once again proved that it is too early in
America’s history to have a president for whom English is not his first language. Once again you could see the truth of the remark (I think it was my remark but other commentators have been
borrowing it) that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s great advantage as a world statesman is his gift for putting President Bush’s thoughts into words. It’s even possible
that President Bush has no thoughts at all, only emotions. When he searches for a word, he feels fear, and his face shows it. When he finds one, he feels triumph, and his face shows that. Almost
always, the word he finds is the wrong one, but his look of relief arouses sympathy in the audience, as when a child, sent to fetch a spoon from the kitchen drawer, comes back with a fork. I was
especially sympathetic when he announced that the ‘group of folks’, by which he meant the insurgents in Iraq, were fighting us ‘vociferously’. ‘That’s why
they’re fighting so vociferously.’ He must have meant ‘viciously’ or perhaps ‘ferociously’, but he could scarcely have meant ‘vociferously’. If all
that the insurgents were doing was shouting loudly they would be less of a problem. But Bush’s premature senile aphasia wasn’t the real story of the debate. The real story was that
Kerry, even with his opponent disappearing into a semantic black hole, still managed to win only by a hair. In fact he won only by a hairstyle. Kerry’s hairstyle is worth a short digression,
because it represents the chief reason why I could never have been famous in America.

How did Kerry’s hair get like that? We must presume that it is real, or the Bush campaign would already have suggested that he received it as a bribe from Kim Jong-Il. And indeed
Kim’s bouffant coiffure must be some kind of technological creation, separated from his elevator shoes by the length of a short lunatic. Kerry’s hairstyle, on the other hand, almost
certainly started its life on top of his own head, instead of in the same laboratory that refines the uranium for North Korea’s atomic bombs. But Kerry’s hair would be far less
frightening if it were fake. As all you women in the audience know, the amount of hair on top of a mature man’s head is governed by the amount of testosterone he secretes, but the proportion
is not direct. The proportion is inverse. Testosterone attacks the hair follicles. It fries and shrivels them like noodles in a wok of acid. As a potent man comes to maturity, the testosterone
begins to kill off the hair on top of his head. As he advances into vigorous middle age, his head rises through his remaining hair like a shining symbol of his virility. Meanwhile the displaced
hair-growing capacity moves steadily down his body, cropping up, if that’s the appropriate phrase, in the strangest places, for which a healthily curious woman is glad to search. As a result,
nothing excites an adventurous woman more than a bald man. Tom Jones may be pelted with women’s underwear, but the women’s underwear that used to be thrown at the bald actor Telly
Savalas still had the women inside it. The American entertainment industry permits itself only one bald male star in a generation, and Telly Savalas drew the lucky card. Exercising the resulting
sexual privilege to the full, he died with a gleam on his lips, and I hope to do the same. Ladies, I’ll be ready to discuss this theme in more detail later on, up in my hotel room with a
bottle of Roederer Cristal and mixed sandwiches, but for now let’s just agree that Senator Kerry’s luxuriant hairstyle is incontrovertible proof that he doesn’t have a drop of
testosterone in his body.

Does the American army really want a man like that leading them into battle against millions of vociferous religious extremists? President Bush may be without a brain, but Senator Kerry lacks a
gland that most men would agree is even more vital to existence. The only other possible explanation is that he has had a transplant. Perhaps the first plugs of extra hair were inserted during the
Vietnam war, when he made his mystery trip into Cambodia. Somewhere beyond the Mekong Delta, a communist hair-scientist was waiting for him, ready to do a deal if he would go home and oppose the
war. But the job could have been done in America, bit by bit over the course of all those years when we weren’t hearing a lot about him. What was he doing? He was growing younger.

American cosmetic technology can restore to an ageing man everything he ever had, except credibility. In a recent issue of
Vanity Fair
there was a two-page spread devoted to Ralph
Lauren products which featured a photograph of Ralph Lauren himself. A man of a certain age, he could be said to be wearing well. An Egyptian mummy wearing that well would still be walking. His
hairstyle, an extravaganza in spun silver, looked as if it had been lowered onto his head by a crane. It reflected the light, and looked as if it could reflect bullets. The message being that if
you buy clothes with his label on them you will look as casually stylish as he does. You and I might think that Ralph’s stylishness looks no more casual than that of Louis XV dressed for his
coronation, but clearly the American consumers are convinced. Very thin American men, frantic with worry because their latest boardroom embezzlement is about to be discovered, wear Ralph Lauren
clothes on the weekend in order to seem relaxed, just as very fat American men who can swallow a Big Mac like a canapé wear shorts and trainer shoes in order to seem athletic. Since their
only conceivable means of rapid unassisted locomotion would be to roll downhill, the trainer shoes are purely symbolic.