A
HELLUVA TOWN
This summer marks a sea change in the traditions of American
party politics. For the first time, the Democratic National Convention
will be held in Boston, and the Republican National Convention
will be held in that great Babylon, that hole of sin and abomination,
New York City.
AN
ADVERTISMENT FOR MYSELF
Richard
Snow and Fred Allen, the agreeable gentlemen who edit this column,
suggested that this time out I write something on my new book,
a historical novel called Paradise Alley. They had to insist for
all of about twenty seconds or so before I would agree to do anything
so immodest.
ANOTHER
DAY OF INFAMY
Congress is trying to legislate the history of what happened
on the eve of Pearl Harbor.
"What is history? Is it something we decide on the
best available evidence, weighing and culling the many varied
accounts of the past?..."
A
PRAYER FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
“Our seemingly interminable argument about education
now seems to have boiled down to the debate over school vouchers...”
BALL
AND CHAIN
"As
baseball's pennant races approach their dramatic climax, we can
all look forward to that furious, no-holds-barred competition
that marks nearly every season of our national pastime…"
CAPITOL
PUNISHMENT
When mudslinging in Congress led to actual bloodshed
“Our recent politics have brought the editorial handwringers
out in force, decrying a new outbreak of “partisanship...”
CARPETBAGGING
“New
Yorkers knew they were in for a long hot summer this year when
Hillary Rodham Clinton made an early political foray into their
state and was greeted by demonstrators dressed as black flies...”
CATCHING
A DRAFT
"Any attempt to determine the most ridiculous thing said
by an American cabinet official would have to be a titanic competition.
But, at least since the beginning of the year, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld has been threatening to run away from the field..."
"CONSOLIDATION”
AND THE GREAT PARK
“The children are back at Columbine High School now for
the new school year—if they can still truly be called children...”
FIFTY
YEARS IN HOLLYWOOD
"All happy occupations, like Tolstoy’s families, resemble
one another; but each unhappy occupation is unhappy in its own
way. Of course it is too early to tell which our occupation of
Iraq—not to mention Afghanistan—will be, happy or
unhappy..."
FUNNY
BUSINESS
Zounds! Once again, the innocent citizens of Gotham City have
been rescued from the clutches of modern art by their mild-mannered
mayor, Rudy Giuliani. The latest menace to civilization? A reworking
of the Last Supper, shown at the mayors arch-nemesis, the Brooklyn
Museum. Entitled "Yo Mamas Christ," the offending picture
features a naked, black woman, the artist, n the place of Jesus.
GETTING
A LIFE
What's an ex-President to do?
“Edward
Heath, Britain's prime minister from 1970 to 1974, recently announced
that he intended to retire from the House of Commons after serving
continuously there for fifty years. Heath has been around so long
that he's in the lyric of a Beatles song...”
HAIL
AND FAREWELL
How is it that a great republic sustains itself? How do we keep
the democratic ideal before us, in a world preoccupied with instant
gratification, with allegiance to tribe and creed above all else?
HERITAGE
"Now that the presidential campaign is speeding along
with all the joyful noise and unpredictability of a woodchipper,
it seems unlikely we will encounter any more surprises as unsettling
as the great Confederate flag controversy…"
HOW
TO LOSE THE NEXT ELECTION
Americans won't choose a President who chides them
“I
no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe
that a majority of Americans actually shares our values,"”
lamented Paul Weyrich, the conservative activistand coiner of
the very phrase moral majoritysoon...”
KNOW
YOUR RIGHTS
“Yes, I read the illegal translation,” a Czech internet
correspondent known as “Hustey” wrote this summer,
when the next, eagerly awaited book in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry
Potter” series—Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix—first appeared in bookstores.
LET
US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
One of the saddest things about history is discovering how often
one’s idols turn out to have feet of clay. Even our most
revered heroes have usually done something to make us cringe,
or at least to search about for some sort of rationalization.
"LET'S
REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR…"
Remember
September 11? Or rather, remember how it was supposed to change
us all, and usually for the better?
"MENE,
MENE, TEKEL, AND PHARSHIN"
"By now every American with access to a television, a radio,
or a computer has heard the notorious howl with which Howard Dean
ended his concession speech after the Democratic caucuses in Iowa.
Dr. Dean’s weird outburst was immediately labeled a gaffe,
comparable to the classic political gaffes of the past..."
NEVERMORE
“The
whole campaign was a sham. It pitted a well-known Washington insider,
an incumbent too smart for his own good, against a candidate from
the Western boondocks whom many felt was simply not up to the
job, and whom others suspected of having used mind-altering substances...”
OUR
CITY
One standing rule at this column and the rest of American
Heritage is to be sure not to focus too much on New York.
It’s a good rule, for we New Yorkers have a tendency to
think we are always at the center of the world, in case you haven’t
noticed. We also love to insist that we have seen it all before.
OUR
COUNTRY’S BATTLES
The
mission now confronting our nation—to transport a large military
force to a distant, hostile, Islamic country; hold together a
tenuous international coalition; subdue a brazen terrorist network;
and put an end to the random slaughter and harassment of American
citizens—may seem like an impossible one. If it is any consolation,
though, we have done it before. And if it will be any help in
the months and years ahead, we should also know that the last
such effort, some two hundred years before, was rife with blunders,
delays, and confusion of both purpose and means—as well as
stirring feats of heroism and perseverance.
OUR
MALCOLM
Richard
Snow and Fred Allen, my editors here at American Heritage, were
kind enough to suggest that I write something this month about
my forthcoming novel, Strivers Row, which is being published by
HarperCollins, and is now in fine bookstores everywhere.
REPLY
TO ADMIRAL RICHARDSON
Regarding the Events Surrounding the Japanese Attack on Pearl
Harbor, December 7, 1941
"Admiral
Richardson distorts both the events surrounding the attack on
Pearl Harbor and what I have written about them..."
SYMPATHY
FOR THE DEVIL?
"RAT!"
screamed the tabloid headlines, when John Walker Lindh, "the
American Taliban," was hauled out of a prison basement in
Afghanistan and into the public limelight. Media commentators
would have a field day projecting their own obsessions onto Mr.
Lindh. Shelby Steele attributed his defection to "a certain
cultural liberalism" to be found in Northern California,
while a still loonier right-wing pundit called for his execution
"in order to physically intimidate liberals." The
New York Times pointedly contrasted Lindh’s childhood
with that of John Spann, the young CIA agent killed in Afghanistan
and raised in Georgia.
THE
AGE OF INSECRITY
It’s
easy to talk a great deal of rot about when you start generalizing
about generations. Witness the recent mania regarding Tom Brokaw’s
beloved “Greatest Generation.” Yes, those individuals
who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II were
certainly courageous in guiding America through the two worst
crises it ever faced. But does that really make them any more
or less greater than, say, the generations that fought the Civil
War, or the Revolution, or who pushed the American frontier through
to the Pacific?
THE
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS
When
Hurricane Katrina battered down the levees that protected our
most fabled big city last September, many of us familiar with
America’s “can-do” traditions figured it would
be a matter of weeks, maybe even days, before the Crescent City
was at least on the mend again.
THE
ENGINEERED SOCIETY
“Reform
party movements can be pretty weird in the best of times; imagine
what they might have been like in the worst...”
THE
LEGACY
“As
he counts down the last days of his second term, we can be assured
that President Clintonıs thoughts are now focused exclusively
on the one subject that has preoccupied him since he first took
the oath of office...”
THE
MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
There is nothing quite so pathetic as a wizard when he is
starting to lose it. See The Wizard of Oz, when the title
sorcerer thunders at Dorothy and friends to "Pay no attention
to that man behind the curtain!"—i.e., himself.
THE
NUN'S STORY
“Those
fortified with enough caffeine to follow our presidential race,
may have noticed the frequent presence of a priest behind George
W. Bush since the primary season...”
THE
TEMPER THING
The rumor first began to spread around Washington last year: Senator
John McCain had a skeleton in his closet. Was it something to
do with his past as a war hero in Vietnam? His voting record in
the Senate? The role he played as one of the “Keating Five”
in the savings & loan scandal?
THE
WAVE OF THE FUTURE
The Democratic candidate was crushed. An urban, ethnic
liberal from the Northeast, he had been caught flatfooted by the
waves of vitriolic attacks that smeared his background, his years
of dedicated public service, the character of his beloved wife—even
his religious beliefs and cultural values. The heartland and even
the traditionally Democratic South had turned against him in unprecedented
numbers, and Republicans would continue to control not only the
White House, but also both houses of congress and the Supreme
Court for the forseeable future.
THINKING
ABOUT THE WEATHER
They swept over the plains at speeds of 100 miles an hour, outracing
cars and shorting their ignitions; forcing down planes and stopping
trains in their tracks. They were accompanied by lightning and
thunder, or they moved in awesome silence, driving hundred of
panicked birds before them—clouds of dust 10,000 feet high,
the prairie winds carrying off the rich topsoil of the American
heartland.
TO
LIGHT THE LAMPS OF CHINA
Sino-American relations always seem to have at least
a hint of the ridiculous about them, and small wonder, since they
tend to be more about the images each nation projects upon the
other than any objective reality. Witness the last superpower
brush-up, which involved the death of a Chinese pilot who seemed
most intent upon exchanging e-mails, an unacknowledged hostage
crisis, and a non-apology apology from the United States.
WHAT
TRENT MEANT
It’s not an easy thing to be a politician. One never knows
when the media will suddenly pick up an offhand remark—the
same sort of thing that one has said for years, really—and
suddenly focus withering, national attention on it. No wonder
that most politicians would rather history be an infinitely malleable
subject, a record that they could rewrite at will.
WHATEVER
BECAME OF HUBERT?
Pity Al Gore. No matter how many times the Democrats nominee has
switched campaign strategies, advisers, and locales, he has still
found himself facing the same, basic conundrumhow to run for President
from the Vice-Presidents office.
WHEN
THE LAST LAW IS DOWN
What does it mean to be an American? This may be a trite-sounding
question, but it is one that we have been asking for the whole
history of the United States, and it has more relevance than ever
in the age of globalization.
WHERE
I COME FROM
Our seemingly interminable presidential campaign is safely behind
us now, but I’m not willing to let it go just yet—at
least not until I hear an apology from someone about the most
egregious smear to emerge from the campaign. I’m not talking
about the notorious “Swift Boat Veteran” lies, or
“flip-flopping,” or anything perpetrated by Michael
Moore. What I mean is the decision to transform my old home state
into an epithet.
YOUR
BRAVE AND EARLY FALLEN CHILD
"Since the beginning of the war in Iraq last year, a small
tempest has arisen in the media over whether or not George W.
Bush should attend the funerals of American servicemen and women
killed in the line of duty. As of this writing, Mr. Bush has not
done so—a decision which critics tend to view as indicative
of the administration’s preoccupation with “spin,”
and the desire to avoid any “negative” images and
associations..."
