Blog Posts

On the curious lack of a liberal response to the London riots

8/9/2011

As a historian of the US, the riots in London made me think instantly of the urban disorder in America in the 1960s. There are big differences: size, scale, and lack of political motive this time around. This is not the right moment to plug a book, but I noticed when researching my forthcoming biography of Pat Buchanan that there were three different reactions to the disorder of the 1960s. Two – Leftwing pandering and Rightwing populism – were on display in this nice vignette from the 1968 Chicago riots. The local police had horribly over-reacted to the presence of 10,000 antiwar protestors during the local Democratic Convention, using nightsticks and tear gas to dispel the largely peaceful crowds. The demonstrators gathered in Grant Park, across from the hotel where the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan was lodging. He stayed up all night with the Leftwing writer Norman Mailer, drinking cocktails and watching the fight down below. The city had imposed an 11pm curfew on the demonstrators and when they failed to move, the police charged them with teargas and truncheons. Mailer leant over the balcony and screamed at the cops, “Pigs! Fascists!”
Buchanan leant over and shouted, “Hey, you’ve missed one!”

Those were the two responses to the crises of 1968 that most people are familiar with, and both are getting a big play in London 2011. In the 1960s, several conservative populists called for a take-no-prisoners answer to urban chaos: no recognition of supposed grievances, 100% support for the police, and zero tolerance for offenders. Presidential candidate George Wallace promised to hand the streets over to the cops for 24 hours, all civil liberties suspended and no questions asked. Having just witnessed my own capital city be looted by thugs and vandals, I feel considerable sympathy for this position. One’s first instinct in the midst of criminality is to go all Rambo. A good friend asked the question on Facebook, “Where is Charles Bronson when you need him?”

Leftwing commentators in the 1960s expressed far greater sympathy for the rioters than what one might find today. The Kerner Commission of 1968 blamed the disturbances entirely on racism and poverty, with little consideration for personal responsibility. It concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal”, and proposed massive federal spending projects as a solution. That view, incidentally, is still popular within my own field of historical research. The consensus within the academy is that the disorder of the 1960s was a legitimate response to white racism and an unjust war, while the stunning popularity of conservative politicians like Wallace, Buchanan, or Ronald Reagan reflected an underlying mainstream fascism.

What is forgotten about 1968 is that there was a “third way” response to the violence, and it had a big constituency. It was the approach taken by Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey: toughness informed by compassion. Humphrey was a liberal before the term became submerged within radical Leftwing discourses in the 1970s – before it became synonymous with socialist economics and identity politics bullcrap. Nor did it have anything to do with obscure British philosophers: Smith and Mill probably sounded like undertakers to Hubert. Rather, it was a politics shaped by the misery of the Great Depression and the violent grandeur of the Second World War. Humphrey’s liberalism was tough and sinewy. He loved his fellow man, but he understood that part of love is censorship and reform. Man is born in sin: people used to get that.

When he accepted his party’s nomination in Chicago 1968, the same week that Mailer and Buchanan watched the cops and demonstrators duke it out in the street, Humphrey opened with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: “Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light.” Then he said, “Rioting, sniping, mugging, traffic in narcotics and disregard for law are the advance guard of anarchy and they must and they will be stopped. But may I say most respectfully, particularly to some who have spoken before, the answer lies in reasoned, effective action by state, local and federal authority. The answer does not lie in an attack on our courts, our laws or our Attorney General. We do not want a police state, but we need a state of law and order. And neither mob violence nor police brutality have any place in America.”

It was a complex formula, perhaps too nuanced for the angry spirit of the age. But it balanced what many citizens were looking for: a definition of law and order that keeps in check both the criminal individual and the over-mighty state. Humphrey went on to say, “Nor can there be any compromise with the right of every American who is able and who is willing to work to have a job, who is willing to be a good neighbor, to be able to live in a decent home in the neighborhood of his own choice … And it is to these rights – the right of law and order, the right of life, the right of liberty, the right of a job, the right of a home in a decent neighborhood, and the right to an education – it is to these rights that I pledge my life and whatever capacity and ability I have.”

What Humphrey meant was that law and order and social reform are not contradictions as the Marxist Left would have us believe: they are two sides of the same social contract. Peace guarantees the opportunity for progress and progress irons out the iniquities that spur disorder. It’s a forerunner of that blunter paradigm, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. For those who, frankly, want to see some criminals get a good thrashing but who also don’t want to give up on the dream of urban renewal, this is a powerful promise. It was popular enough in 1968 to take Humphrey to within one percentage point of winning the presidency.

As we have come to expect, Britain’s political leadership has been singularly lacking throughout these riots. A few have offered jingoisms, while a former mayor has unwisely suggested that the hoodlums need love. There is a space – a wide vacuum in fact – for a reasonable statesperson to ask, “Can’t we all get along?” Most voters are conservative in that they want peace in the streets yet liberal in that they don’t want to use water cannons to get it. One solution is transformative leadership. Robert Kennedy offered something of that when he spoke in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. He said, "What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." He asked the crowd to go home and pray, and they did. Indianapolis was one of the few major US cities that didn’t experience riots that night. I pray that a similar recourse to reason is still possible in this crisis. In the absense of decent leadership to provide it, I shall be getting grandpa's shotgun down from the attic. To quote Pat Buchanan when asked his response to new federal gun controls: "Lock and load".

Don't panic America! You still have reasons to be cheerful...

7/29/2011

I’m finally leaving America. My visa has expired and they’re kicking me out. I’ve spent my last few days in Washington DC, drunk as a skunk. I was collected from the airport by The Contractor (my mysterious friend who supplies various military regimes with “things they need”), driven to the Capital Grill and pumped full of T-bone and red wine. We had a furious but friendly debate about whether or not slavery is immoral (I think it is). All of this was a welcome switch from Los Angeles, where I lived on a diet of liberalism, lentils, and a once-in-a-blue-moon Mojito. I’ve always found Washington to be a fun place. The average worker ant is boring and aggressive (all those Republican boys in their blazers and cargo pants pushing they way through the Metro), but the old lags who hang around the National Press Club and the bar at the Bombay are fantastic.

In late July, however, Washington is physically unbearable. In past times, the city emptied at June and everyone went home for fourth months to cool their hands against buckets of ice. Nowadays they have to stay and endure this horrible wet heat. Los Angeles was scorching but dry, so the skin had room to breathe. Washington is humid and sticky, like eating a curry in the bath. People are dying of this weather. It accords with the apocalyptic mood that has descended over the capital. I’ve been away three months and it feels like three decades of revolution. The Murdoch Empire is on its knees, Amy Winehouse is dead, some lunatic killed scores of people in Norway, Michele Bachmann declared for the presidency, and San Francisco tried to ban goldfish. America’s budget default creeps closer. All we need now is a whore on a ten-headed dragon to ride into town and we know we’re finished (and that’s probably already happened on this season’s True Blood).

Yet I leave America feeling strangely optimistic. If they count their blessings carefully enough, America and the world should feel happier than they do. Consider the following.

1. The American economy is still fundamentally strong. Growth and profits are back up, although they haven’t been shared in jobs increases. This shouldn’t really surprise us. Like the production shock of the early 1980s, a lot of the recent recovery has been about resizing and stripping bad assets. No one actually wants the banks to return to their profligate ways, so it’s inevitable that capital is a little tighter than it once was. But that’s not a problem so long as we continue to innovate. I know that all TED seems to showcase right now is “Al Gore’s Electronic Flower Pots”, but the beauty of the free enterprise system is its ability to not only dig itself out of a hole but also invent a cybernetic shovel with which to do it. Something’s around the corner and I suspect it’s the energy market.

2. China’s getting fatter. Almost mystical powers of economic productivity are projected onto China. But as she gets richer, she also develops many of the same social problems that the West has – smoothing down the competitive edge between our two markets. It’s estimated that somewhere in the region of 25 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s subjects are now porkers. Not only does that have a deleterious effect on the quality of their labor force, but it demonstrates that those hard-working devils are turning into lazy-ass consumers too. Ergo, MacDonalds now has now committed itself to opening a new store everyday within the next four years. That’s to compete with the Colonel’s tally of 3,200 stores across the country. The cost will be measured in increased demands for health and social services, forcing China to replicate the welfare states that are now bankrupting the West. In 50 years time, the Chinese will owe us money.

3. In a revolution, no one’s safe. In the past, disorder tended to create new orders that would last a little while longer than the last. Nowadays, chaos follows chaos in quick succession. No sooner had the expenses scandal crippled Gordon Brown and helped elect David Cameron, the Murdoch scandal had knee-capped Cameron and possibly opened the door to Ed Miliband. Likewise, the Tea Party revolution is being eaten alive by its own radicalism at the moment – destroying the credibility of the congressional Republican leadership and catapulting the country towards bankruptcy. That might not seem like a reason to be happy, but it is nice to know that Western democracy is proving more sensitive to public tastes than it once did. In the past few months, the people are destroyed two venerable parties – the Canadian Liberals and Fianna Fail of Ireland. It’s likely that they will strike the deathblow of Gaullism in the next French presidential elections. All have been eclipsed by radical parties on the left and right (Irish Labor, Canadian New Democrats, French National Front). The center will not hold. For those of us driven by ideas, it’s an exciting time to be alive. We have finally emerged from the centrist abyss of the 1990s; ideology is back.

I return to a UK in turmoil. What is unusual is that there is no obvious winner from all the political disaster. Labour theoretically leads the Conservatives, but Ed Miliband is widely seen as a bad leader. The Liberal Democrats have extinguished themselves as a party. There is some hope in the bizarre collection of libertarians, disgruntled socialists, Sedevanticists, and golfing fanatics who make up the United Kingdom Independence Party, but they are hamstrung by the First Past the Post voting system that makes it tough for minority parties to break through.

In contrast, the American party system seems fairly stable and alive. What Britain did in the last ten years – consciously and systematically – was kill off all internal party opposition. That’s strangled new ideas and left large swathes of the country without representation. There are no young voices in Britain that are definitively liberal or conservative, whereas the Americans have charismatic lobbies working on both sides. It may seem odd to see the deficit crisis as anything but a crisis, but it does highlight the fact that the US still trades in ideas and philosophies of government. I regret having to leave that debate for the rather more tepid one in Britain, which, despite all its anxieties, still obsesses about emptying the bins and cleaning up dogs’ mess.

Conservatives and Hollywood

7/17/2011

My time in Los Angeles is drawing to a close. I’m anxious about returning to London (via a week in Washington DC) because I’m finally starting to build a life here. The house has my smell; the floors are covered in my crumbs; those are my socks strewn across the bathroom floor. It should come as no surprise that I’ve made more friends in three months in Hollywood than I did in 28 years in England. Bar my floating accent and bizarre wardrobe, I’ve gone completely native.

An example. I’ve taken to having lunch once a week at the Panda café on Sunset. It’s a long, hot walk south of Franklin – the road that cuts East to West and divides rich and poor from North to South. There are few people down there, no Caucasians for sure, only a handful of Hispanic men with moustaches hanging around on street corners selling manual labor. Wealthy white men drive slowly past, wind down the window, and ask for the time of day.
“What you looking for, senior?”
“Depends on what’s on offer.”
“Lawn cut, $20. Roof tiles, $50. If you want me to do any heavy lifting, you have to clear it with my pimp first.”
“Get in.”

The Panda is a part of a grisly chain of Chinese restaurants that serves irradiated chicken and something they claim is rice but is palpably not. The rule of thumb for Chinese restaurants is to dine within only if both the waiters and the customers are Chinese. In Panda, everyone’s Mexican. I go there because I’m hooked on cheap crap and I enjoy the fiesta atmosphere of lunch break for the DIY guys. Sometimes the nannies bring their little white charges in, and there’s something reassuring about the future generation’s bilingualism.

I was leaving Panda yesterday, bloated by three rounds of “Chernobyl chicken” and a man and a woman stopped me in the street. They were fairly well dressed and a little sun burnt. They both had the vague stare of the crack addict.

“You got any spare change buddy?” the man asked. “We lost our hotel key and we’ve been sleeping under the freeway.” Whether it was the saddest story of accidental tourism or the lamest lie ever told, I gave him a five. His wife was astonished. She shook my hand.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “I had a sandwich, but someone stole it.”

[Pause for a moment to reflect that none of this would have happened in England. We’re so conditioned to fear other people in London that even walking on the same side of the road as this couple would be regarded as reckless. But it was the tone of the conversation that was uniquely American: the naïve sense that we might enjoy each other’s company if we only tried.]

“How on earth does someone steal a sandwich?” I asked.
“Are you Australian?” she replied, nicely deflecting the question.
“No I’m from England.”
“O, you’re from England? Say, is it true that Prince Charles killed Diana?” Thirty minutes later and we were still talking. Or rather, the lady and I were still talking: the fellow just kept staring at the sun and scratching his neck. He really wanted to go spend that $5.

So it is in the area of sociability that I’ve gone American, and it’s something I’ll dearly miss. I don’t think that living here has made me a better person, but the conviviality of Hollywood does give that false impression. If life were – as it is here – a long round of fundraisers for congressmen and rock concerts for dolphins, then we’d all feel permanently really, really good about ourselves. But I’m conscious that all the love is unstructured and useless. The obsession with telling good personal stories means that charity is atomized (“I personally, like, believe, you know, that education is so important … and that’s why I, like, read books.”) When asked what he does for a living, one man told me earnestly, “I fight poverty.” The how, when, and why were never followed up, but he seemed very sincere about it. “I’m building a website. To fight poverty.”

That might be one reason why Buddhism is so popular. It’s all about personal narratives – one man’s voyage from ignorance to enlightenment. And I’ve heard many, many of them. One Buddhist lady told me at a cocktail party that, “We don’t judge or evangelize; we are all on our own journey”. But for faith to transcend personal therapy, it relies on externals – doctrines, churches, monks, priests, communities. No one in Los Angeles, I sense, exists for other people. How can they, sitting as they do on their yoga mats in perfect isolation from one another – colliding only at vegan picnics to save the white tiger? Everyone out here is very friendly, friends even. But for relationships to have value there must be flickers of love and hate. Where else do memories come from? In the purple light of the Pacific Ocean, everything in Los Angeles is Zen.

And I think that’s one reason why conservatives don’t often flourish in this town. There’s been a lot of literature (chiefly by James Hirsen and Andrew Breitbart) about how conservatives are locked out of making movies by their politics. But Hollywood doesn't work by censorship. This town is all about business, and that business is driven by a free market of ideas. For anyone to exclude any idea on the grounds of ideology would be stupid – it would lose the viewership of at least half the country. And the vast majority of movies do conform to a fairly conservative view of human nature: families, ambition, violence, faith, and patriotism are generally encouraged. There are exceptions, but the comparative success and failure of pro and anti-war movies is indicative of how the market moves (compare Lions for Lambs with Saving Private Ryan).

No, the problem that the conservative faces isn’t intellectual, it’s social. Conservatism tends to be raw and unfiltered. In conversation, it punctures the Zen equilibrium that sustains everyone in Los Angeles. The industry works by networks and anyone who can’t sustain a long conversation about the importance of raw carrots and natural fibers to the functioning of Yin and the flowing of Yang won’t fit in. One writer told me that following 9-11, he found work dried up. There was plenty of interest in his output (he’s a very good writer) but when it came to small talk before pitches, or the gossip at the writers’ in LA Farm, he was immediately frozen out. “People would open with, ‘Isn’t George Bush a moron?’ And I would say, ‘No, I voted for him.’ And I could feel I was losing their respect.”

True, this suggests that Hollywood cleaves to the left. But I suspect the real problem with what the writer said wasn’t the content but the act of disagreement itself. Hollywood conversations deal in hyperbolic affirmations: “You’re amazing. That pitch was the best ever. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Adam Sandler really is funny, isn't he?” Disagreement and contradiction are acts of verbal rape.

Why is Hollywood so sensitive to criticism? Because it’s a town motored by untested ideas. If we were to tell everyone who came up with a new plot line or concept for a commercial that it sucked (and 9 out of 10 of them do) then nothing would get done. If you were to tell that idiot on the street corner strumming a one-string guitar that he sucks, it would spark an industry-wide crisis of confidence. Writers, actors, and directors are sensitive people. They need to know that everything they do and say is “Fantastic - the best!” The cynical, minority-reporting lash of conservatism doesn’t fit. Why, if that is true, did Ronald Reagan flourish here? Because he was very, very nice. He was, by all accounts, the actor's actor and in conversation he deflected controversy with quips and annecdotes. Ronald Reagan was the Zen master of rightwing charm, and it's the ability to avoid controversy that marks success from the failure in La-la Land.

It is in that last, important regard that I have truly become Californian: I’ve caught its obsession with fantasy. I can’t wait to return to England to be reminded that nothing is possible and that thing the Americans call ambition is really just naiveté. Home is where the heartless are.

Monkeys, dogs, and liberal wrath

7/2/2011

I was overjoyed to read that there is a baboon on the loose in New Jersey. A woman called the police to report a monkey sitting on her back-porch. Presumably, its little pink bottom gave away the species. Experts think that it escaped from the Six Flags Great Adventure’s Monkey Jungle. Park officials say they can’t be sure because they don’t keep count of how many baboons they own. How did it escape? Perhaps it carved a tunnel under the fence with a teaspoon; perhaps it stole a hat and walked out pretending to be a child. Either way, go monkey, go!

The importation of exotic animals into the US is having a queer effect upon the wildlife. The Everglades are like a stretch of the Congo now. Released pet snakes have bred and grown to prehistoric size. Last year, police found the remains of a boa that had split in two attempting to consume an alligator. The worrying thing is that this is the first recorded case of a snake winning a fight against an animal of that size. Something in the water is making them grow beyond their natural dimensions. It is the stuff of countless horror movies, but it warms the heart in one regard. It proves that evolution hasn’t stopped, that man’s relationship with the wild is still being negotiated. And while nature is winning in one part of the world, it is losing in many others. Having made so many friends among liberal activists, I'm now on a lot of animals rights mailing lists. Recently, I was sent pictures of a bizarre coming-of-age ritual in Denmark whereby young men go out into shallow waters and - to prove their masculinity - stab dolphins to death. It made me determined to boycott everything Danish, which amounts to ... Lurpak butter and Seventies child pornography.

So the thought of nature getting its revenge and goosing mankind pleases me greatly. And who can resist the potential for hilarity that a baboon swinging free in The Garden State presents? I hope it steals things from washing-lines and gets up to all sorts of shenanigans. This has been a week of thinking about animals. On Friday, I interviewed the Sheinbaum family for my project on Hollywood politics. Stanley and Betty Sheinbaum are the king and queen of Hollywood liberalism; ageing maybe, still capable of throwing a fundraiser that can bring down a president. They have counted among their friends George McGovern, Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, and Yasser Arafat (what a party!). At 91, Betty is incredibly full of vim but Stanley is confined to a chair and very deaf. They plied me with cookies as we discussed the state of the country. I sat between them, asking Betty a question on my left and then shouting it again at Stanley on my right. I was amazed to discover that Stanley still goes to the cinema twice a week. I agreed with Betty that there was little point. The advent of superheroes has rendered a trip to the flicks an unmitigated bore. “Do you think the superheroes with all their powers are a metaphor for Obama?” Betty asked innocently. “We certainly need someone to rescue us.”

The Sheinbaums are disillusioned with the administration, but then so is everyone else here in Los Angeles. It is odd, considering how Obama is often portrayed as the candidate of the liberal elite, just how much the liberal elite now dislike him. They hate him all the more for the fact that they once loved him; they feel cheated, conned – like a lover who married a stunning blonde heiress only to discover that her hair comes from a bottle and the only thing she’s inheriting is the trailer. The liberal elite suspended their usually high critical faculties (these people are not easily pleased) and got behind Obama in 2008, only to be appalled when he turned out to be as human and corrupt as all the rest. “I cried when Obama was elected,” said Betty sadly. For them, the election of a black man fulfilled the promise of all their years of activism in the Civil Rights movement – only for it to be dashed when they discovered he was the wrong black man. But the Sheinbaums have the comfort of nostalgia. Jane Fonda showed up at Stanley’s birthday last month and kissed him on the cheek.

The Sheinbaums must be exceptional people because they own a beautiful brown standard poodle. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, so too did Richard Nixon – and you have to be rather special to tame one of these brilliant creatures (they are so guilefully intelligent that the French used to teach them to play poker). When I was a child, my family tried to break a poodle and failed: he bullied his way to top of our pack and made my life a living Hell. Every night he would stroll into my bedroom, leap up onto the bed, push me out, and fall asleep. If I tried to get back in, he would growl without opening his eyes until I backed away. I named him Dino after the pet dinosaur in The Flintstones. The name turned out to suit him in a way that none of us predicted, for it’s also the moniker of many a small-time Italian crook. Dino was like one of those unstable psychopaths you see in gangster movies – the life and soul of the party one scene, a switchblade wielding lunatic the next.

The Sheinbaum’s poodle is a finer class of pooch and introduced herself to me in the manner of a lady – with outstretched paw and fluttering brown eyes. As I ran my fingers through her cotton wool hair I was thrown back to my youth. Just as Proust would go wild at the smell of an orchid for the memory that it invoked, the hair of a poodle transports me back (rather more prosaically) twenty years to when we drove Dino home for the first time: a terrified puppy in a cardboard box. We were taking him away from his mother. I remember sitting on the backseat of the car trying to reassure him, feeding his thick ears between my fingers and waggling a tennis ball before his eyes. Poor Dino wept and wailed all three hours home. When we arrived, he vomited on my trousers and then passed out beneath an apple tree. Perhaps the memory of being snatched from his mother is why he hated us. I wonder if all dogs can remember that moment in the same way that humans remember a divorce or a parental slap – a scar on the memory that never heals.

Now many hours later and lying awake on my bed sweating in the interminable Los Angeles heat, I am hankering for the attentions of a dog. Meeting the Sheinbaum’s poodle reminded me of all the pleasures of canine company: the loopy, pointless grin of a Labrador, the mischievous yap of a sausage dog, the feminine wiles of a weimaraner with its silky grey skin. I would be old enough now to cultivate Dino’s respect if he were still alive. Dogs instantly defer to an adult man, if only for a pause before devouring him. They elevate their master, when contact with other humans so often lowers him.

Just one month left in the US before my visa expires and all I can think about is those giant boas crawling through the Everglades. I wonder, what if one is split open and they find a half-consumed Sasquatch inside? Then we will know that nature really is winning and those bastard Danes on the beach will be next.

Letter from America: Johann Hari's sin

6/30/2011

I feel sorry for the journalist Johann Hari. Brits know him as a blubbery liberal with manic depression who hates religion. Americans might recognize him from a zillion appearances on the Rachel Maddow show. He’s a divisive figure. A pal once said to me, “I narrowly missed Hari at Cambridge.” I replied, “You mean he graduated before you arrived?” He said, “No, I mean I tried to run him over with a Volkswagen and missed.”

This week it was revealed that Mr. Hari has been cleaning up interviews with people by inserting things they've said or written elsewhere into their reported dialogue. For instance, Hari interviewed a gay rugby player (golly!) and quoted him as saying of his sexuality: “I used to visualise it as a little ball. I know it's crazy, but I'd imagine this little ball in my stomach and I'd have an encounter with a man and the ball would just be there. Then from that day to the next encounter, be it one month, two months, three months, all I could see was this gold liquid dripping out of the ball. That was the real me seeping out”. However, in an earlier interview with Wales Online, the same man who leaked gold was reported as saying of his predilection, “I used to visualise it as a little ball. I'd imagine this ball in my stomach and I'd have an encounter with a man and the ball would just be there. Then from that day until the next encounter, be it one month, two months, three months, all I could see was this gold liquid dripping out of the ball. That was the real me seeping out”. To his credit, when he heard the charge, Hari immediately cried mea culpa. There is now an inquiry going on as to whether or not his prestigious Orwell Prize should be rescinded.

How many historians, writers or journalists have not accidentally retold a story they heard from someone else? In my own writing I often tidy up quotes, omitting all the “ums” and “ahs”. Certain political clichés are so common that it’s possible to accurately write down what a politician said and, because they’ve said it a million times before to a million other people, accidentally commit plagiarism. Given the way that information is recycled over the internet, it’s probably time that writers collectively rethought the rules of the game.

But Janet Daley of the Telegraph is right that the problem isn’t that Hari tidied up quotes: it’s that he tidied them up to make the interviewees sound better. Almost all of his subjects were leftwing and Hari helped them to make their case with a few cosmetic tweaks. Surprisingly, few people have yet pointed out that Hari also has a nasty habit of misattributing quotes from people he doesn’t like.

In 2010, Hari went on BBC Dateline and quoted from a 2001 letter written by Cardinal Ratzinger (before he became the better known "Pope Benedict XVI") to every Roman Catholic bishop on the subject of pedophilia. The chubby churnalist claimed that the letter said, “cases of child abuse should be dealt with in the most secretive way, restrained by perpetual silence, and everybody is to observe the strictest secret.” Inferring his complicity in covering up child abuse, Hari demanded Pope Benedict’s immediate arrest. In an open letter to Britain’s Catholics, who were awaiting a state visit by the Pontiff, Hari wrote, “Which side, do you think, would be chosen by the Nazarene carpenter you find on your crucifixes? I suspect he would want Ratzinger to be greeted with an empty, repulsed silence, broken only by cries for justice – and the low approaching wail of a police siren.” (I love it when people who don’t believe Jesus existed challenge his followers to behave more like … Jesus. Isn’t it odd how non-believers use JC as the international benchmark of moral behavior? Perhaps there’s something in this Christianity nonsense.)

This was an example of Johann Hari leaping unquestionably on a source, “tidying it up”, and turning 2+2 into 5. The letter was not secret: it was published within days of being sent. The point of the missive was to remind bishops of the particular gravity of child abuse and to make it clear that Ratzinger was determined to drive it out of the Church. The word “secret” does not appear in the letter, although Hari may have translated the prose by his own fashion. It was a sign of how seriously the Vatican took child abuse that it was to be henceforth dealt with solely by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - an elevation of the crime to the status of breaking the sacramental desecration. Ratzinger instructs that individual cases be referred to tribunals and it is easy to see how someone unfamiliar with cannon law would presume that equated to a cover-up. But nowhere, nowhere, in the letter does Cardinal Ratzinger tell anyone not to contact the police. The absence of this explicit instruction should not be taken by a journalist to mean that the future Pope did not expect or wish sex offenders to go to jail. Only laziness, or hostility, would make a reporter presume that.

Throughout his career, Ratzinger was the scourge of a Vatican establishment that undoubtedly tried to suppress the truth about the scale of child abuse in the Catholic Church. His efforts were continuously obstructed and the delay has sometimes been misattributed to Ratzinger himself. Two examples: the New York Times claimed that while Bishop of Munich, Ratzinger hushed up the crimes of the pedophile priest Peter Hullermann. To quote the Times, “The future pope approved his transfer to Munich.” In fact, Ratzinger sent him to attend psychoanalysis in Munich. It was Hullermann’s local vicar who later, without the diocese’s knowledge, transferred him to a parish. Likewise, it is often claimed that Ratzinger deliberately failed to investigate Fr. Lawrence C. Murphy of Minnesota for sex crimes that had occurred twenty years previously, despite the masses of evidence against him. In fact, Ratzinger’s deputy was in charge of the case, it was the local bishop who neglected to report the assaults, and when Ratzinger did call him to justice, Murphy conveniently died. Hari has cited both of these cases as proof of Benedict XVI’s guilt - distracting those who seek justice from the real culprits for the sake of a little media sunlight.

Johann Hari’s plagiarism represents a wider degradation of reportage that should give us all pause to reflect. In my own field, great historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose have been accused of plagiarism, of lifting whole passages from other works and inserting them as their own (in Ambrose's case, he plundered the autobiography of George McGovern). Such theft reflects a view of prose as something functional, without inspiration or poetry. It is purely there to tell a story and, if someone else has already done it better, then beg, borrow, or steal. But Hari’s bigger, more serious crime is the bending of reality to suit a political agenda. It is his plagiarism in the pursuit of personal vendetta that is so distasteful. Conservatives do it, liberals do it and neither should be forgiven easily. I hope the British establishment won’t let Mr. Hari off the hook.

Letter from America: on the beach

6/24/2011

Last night I wandered into the living room, turned on the light, and found a spider as big as the sun crawling across the ceiling. He was carrying his dinner on his back, and his dinner looked almost as outraged as me. Normally, I have a shoot-on-sight policy with arachnids and would’ve massacred him with a broom. But something about the way he stood very still, hoping that I wouldn’t notice him, pretending to be a light fitting, appealed to me. He seemed to be saying, “Nothing to see here, guv. On your way.” I acted like I hadn’t noticed him, got my glass of milk, turned off the light, and returned to bed. In the morning he was gone.

I guess that the nightlife in my apartment confirms that summer is finally here. Late June and it’s 74-78 degrees in North Hollywood. It’s ten degrees higher in the valley and ten degrees lower on the beaches … but nobody would want to go there (the coast is populated by retirees and gangs). Venturing outside is risky, riding a bus is suicidal. I’ve stayed indoors almost all of the week, the curtains pulled to give the apartment the feel of a Bedouin tent. Yesterday I walked to and from the supermarket and almost collapsed along Franklyn Ave with heat stroke. By the time I got home, the beers were hot to pop and the ice-cream was slush. How can anything be done in this heat?

This is my first year without a summer holiday. Normally in June I stop functioning altogether and just watch Randall and Hopkirk Deceased at Nick Waghorn’s house until the heat passes. One of the tragedies of modern capitalism is that there’s no sense of season when it comes to work. Time is too precious in Los Angeles to waste with cult TV and soda stream, but I still insist that June to August really ought to be written off. It’s the time of year when the gods of summer take over; it should be a Bacchanal of strawberries and beer. But five hundred years of Protestantism have put pay to that. Thank you John Calvin for making us feel guilty about taking a vacation.

***

Yes, it is the time of year for watching movies, although the highstreet cinema is to be avoided. James Franco is starring in two misguided remakes (Straw Dogs and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes - both terrible first time round) and the superhero genre has hit a nadir with the Green Lantern. How many more movies about losers donning a g-string and saving the world can we take? One has to turn to independent cinema to see anything good anymore.

And so this week I attended a private screening of a new documentary, Bombay Beach at the Creative Artists Agency headquarters in WeHo. Getting into the event was an event in itself. The CAA is the KGB of Hollywood talent agencies: a huge unmarked building covered in security personnel (just in case someone tries to assassinate James Franco). They even sweep your car boot before letting you park in the garage. Upstairs the décor is minimalist, with long sweeping white staircases leading up to glass galleries and, beyond that, to the stars. Actors and writers call it The Death Star, but it’s more like a mental processing plant – it’s what I imagine the Scientologist heaven would look like.

Bombay Beach, however, is a town in the California desert on the cusp of the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea was created in 1905 when the Colorado River broke its banks and spilled out over the sand. For a few decades, the landlocked Salton was a huge tourist draw – a cheap place for Westerners to enjoy water-sports and a fantastic array of birdlife. Bombay Beach was one of many towns built to host the predicted influx of people. But the Salton has no run-off or fresh source, so it quickly became over-salted and polluted. Fertilizer spilt from nearby farms poured liquid filth into the water. The Salton is now a site of accelerated, toxic change – a sea that lived and died within a few decades. Bombay Beach is nearly empty and the shoreline is covered in dead fish. At present, the Salton’s salinity is 4%. It is estimated that when it passes 4.4%, everything but the algae will die. Bombay Beach is so far from the nearest gas station that the locals get around on golf carts.

Bombay Beach the place is a cruel joke by God. Bombay Beach the movie is an aesthetically astonishing documentary by Alma Har'el about the lives of three people living on the salty dunes. One is a marvelous old loner who feeds himself by selling boot-legged cigarettes. He lives in a trailer park populated by criminals. He could move in with his grandchildren several hundred miles away, but he refuses to talk to his family on account that one of them married a gentleman of color. The stubborn old geezer remembers waking one night and confronting a prowler. The old boy pulled out his gun and the burglar ran away. A few months later the thief returned to buy cigarettes: the place is too damned small to bear a grudge. Some of the best scenes of the movie feature the warhorse driving across the dunes in his golf cart. Towards the end of the film, he has a stroke, falls down and is rushed to hospital. His family takes him to live in Fresno. He doesn’t like the damp or the chlorophyll. So he returns home triumphant in the last reel. I gave him a little cheer from the back row.

The second character is an African-American boy who quits Los Angeles and moves to Bombay Beach to escape a gang. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of the film maker that she managed to find someone who actually wanted to live in this dump. What is boredom and death to some is peace and liberty to others. After his cousin was shot in LA, our hero was “scared straight”. He knuckled down to his school work, wowed everyone on the football field, and even got the girl of his dreams. The story is a testament to the endurance of the American Dream – proof that anyone can make it if they try.

The third story is by far the complex and tragic. It focuses on a seven year-old boy with ADD who seems trapped in a permanent daydream. His folks went to jail a decade ago because they were caught blowing things up in the desert; the police said they were a militia and took their kids into protective custody. Now on their third strike before permanently losing their children, the boy’s parents are doing their best to eek a normal existence. That seems to involve breeding Chihuahuas and getting drunk. The pappy is a remorseful blowhard – probably an Irishman – who gets into a fight with everyone he meets. The mother lives to be pregnant. Both are terrified of the authorities. So when their son is diagnosed with ADD, they give him all the medication the doctors suggest – no questions asked. Tragedy strikes when the little boy overdoses on Ritalin and has a mild stroke. I won’t give away the ending, but the GOP ought to run it as an ad against Obamacare.

Upon leaving the cinema, I dived into the California crowd and was astonished by the response. Many people remarked that the movie was “obviously about poverty” and the need for the government to “do something”, anything to help. A common reflection was that “the wrong people are breeding”; or that life for the little boy was barely worth living and he would be better off in an orphanage. My companion for the night called the mother “fucking stupid” because she fed her child a prescribed overdose. As we chugged our mineral water, lifted drop by drop from some Alpine brook, the gulf between the two Americas never looked bigger.

Whiggish liberalism is so very snobbish. It’s all about looking at other people and thinking, “If only you would let me improve you.” I saw Bombay Beach in an entirely different way from the people who “Ooohed” and “Urghhhed” in the audience. To me, the boy and his family were victims of the welfare state. Who cares if they blew things up, if they were in a militia or not? They could be driving tanks or marrying wild geese, it’s none of the federal government’s business. And once trapped in the horrible cycle of carrot and stick that we laughingly call charity (inspections and welfare checks to you and me), they were forced to do whatever they were told – or face the ultimate sanction. The mother only fed her child those drugs because if she didn’t she would have been separated from him for good. "Kill or cure", "leave or die". Such is the cruel logic of the taxpayer’s compassion.

This is not to say that the government should do nothing, or that domestic abuse should go unchecked. The family’s household was pretty disgusting and some intervention was obviously necessary, if only to affect a much needed spring clean. But the tragedy of people stranded on Bombay Beach was so enigmatic and all-encompassing as to be beyond systemic. It was Southern gothic. And anyone who loves Southern gothic will tell you that suffering cannot be alleviated, it can only be endured. With a little bourbon, it can almost seem witty. Perhaps the young boy would grow into the old racist, charging across the dunes in his golf cart. Perhaps that wasn’t such a bad way to live anyhow? In this LA summer heat, the residents of Bombay Beach seem heroic rather than pathetic - getting on with their lives out there in the desert. I admire that they have the energy for drinking and changing the TV station, much less birth and bigotry.

But then, I too have experienced the misery of the dole queue. I went on benefits for one week after leaving college. I was searched by a policeman, nipped by sniffer dogs, and interrogated by a fat woman with an oxygen mask. After seven days of humiliation, I signed off. I had greater dignity than to live off tax payers’ money. So I moved back in with my parents instead.

Letter from America: Brian Blessed and Weinergate, a tale of two revolutions

6/17/2011

This is the tale of two revolutions. One is very British, the other is very American. Readers can skip back and forth to which ever applies to them.

Today, for the first time, I felt at home in Los Angeles. I interviewed the writer Lionel Chetwynd, who lives way up in the Hollywood Hills. His house is one of those marvels of LA design – you walk a mile up a mountain, enter through the garage, and then take a lift a mile back down to the living-room. He grew up in London and did a year at Oxford; he even turned out to be the brother of Claire Reyner, the British agony aunt. But it wasn’t Lionel’s spookily good impersonations of Hackney folk that made me feel at home. O no. It was the fact that he offered me a cigar. It was a sweet, spongy Dominican, four inches long with a brazen black nipple.

In most US municipalities there is a fascist guerilla war against smoking going on. People will honk their horns if they see you doing it in public. In a few years time we can expect cigarettes to be banned, yet marijuana will probably be compulsory. In the absence of any decent bars, I’ve taken to relieving the strains of Hollywood-living by smoking one Dunhill a day. I love shocking the Angelinos by hanging around on street corners blowing smoke rings at cars. My favorite place to do it is outside the Scientology Celebrity Center at the bottom of my street. Angry eyes glare out at me from under the blinds: I’m sure I once spotted Tom Cruise giving me the bird from the fifth floor. I don’t know why the Scientologists worry so. Doubtless, L Ron’s mind could lung cure cancer as easily as it could break breezeblocks. I wonder, how many Thetans can dance on the head of a pin?

The cigar threw me into a patriotic state of mind. I’m halfway through my research trip and it’s usually at this point that I start to feel a little homesick. The past few nights, I’ve indulged in a James Bond marathon as a way of getting by. I’ve just completed Goldfinger in half-hourly installments. Of course, these movies are a loving reminder not of Britain as it is – but Britain as it was. The series starts with Sean Connery in a hat (bravo, Sir!) taking on the world with nothing more than a magnetic wristwatch and a potato peeler. It was a better age, in which real men drank in the afternoon and when it came to convincing women to have sex, “no” apparently meant “yes” on the fourth try. By the end of the 1980s, Bond had morphed into Roger Moore – a geriatric superhero giving Mother Russia one for the lads. The first of these movies that I ever saw was Roger’s last: A View to a Kill. To me, Bond will always be a 73 year-old man looking terrified as a naked Grace Jones bears down upon him. After that movie, it was all downhill. Britain was gone and into the wasteland strode a series of Ken Dolls to play its once-archetypal hero. Don’t even get me started on what they’ve done to Dr. Who, which is now Queer as Folk in Space.

In the course of re-exploring the charms of the Old Country, I stumbled upon a very British rebellion going on at Cambridge. The university is electing a new chancellor. As is tradition in post-Thatcher/Blair/Brown/Richard Branson Britain, the post is going to the highest bidder. Barron Sainsbury is the favorite because, frankly, he’s donated a lot of money and promises to give more in the future. Academia desperately needs the cash, so the choice is logical. But some former students have decided to resist the walkover by offering up an alternative candidate. Of course, the rebellious instinct is global; it’s their choice of candidate that is uniquely British. They’re putting up Brian Blessed, a character actor and amateur mountaineer.

Only in Britain – only in Britain – would such a worthy cause by championed by such an eccentric figure. It’s as if they chose to fight the War on Terror with selected readings from AE Houseman, or to reduce global warming with hand fans. And yet, Blessed’s nomination makes a certain sense in the British context. He’s beyond politics, so he won’t alienate conservatives or liberals. And he’s fondly remembered by the kids of baby boomers for chewing up the scenery in almost every TV serial going. Blessed’s ridiculous swagger has a touch of the epic. One can imagine him playing the part of a chancellor in a way that Sainsbury could not. Barron Moneybags may well be a very talented entrepreneur, but he looks like an accountant from Surrey.

The question is, should I make the effort to go to Cambridge to vote for Blessed? It’s probably a boring, complicated procedure that involves wearing a gown and kissing a swan. And so, in that very British way, I shall only make my voice heard on this vitally important issue if there’s the promise of an open bar. If that’s in the offing, then Blessed will get my vote. My only real regret is that Roger Moore isn’t on the ballot.

***

That same degree of bloody-mindedness causes me to sympathize with Andrew Breitbart, the man who broke the infamous Anthony Weiner scandal. I had lunch with him this week in fashionable Westwood. He arrived high on adrenaline after thirty days of storming the media, insulting and being insulted in equal measure. He looked like a prophet, a plumper Russian monk with wild white hair and wide-blue eyes. I told him that I had enjoyed every minute of his journey from madman to martyr. I too thought he was insane when he first told the world that Congressman Weiner had been sending women pictures of his genitalia. His claims seemed too elaborate and too many. He reminded me of McCarthy at Wheeling crying “I have a list of a hundred, nay a thousand names! A Communist in every household!” When Weiner denied it all, I believed him. How could something so ludicrous be true? And when Breitbart stormed the stage at Weiner’s final press conference to demand an apology I – like every other lame-duck journo watching – thought the poor man had flipped his lid. Then Weiner took the podium and said, “It’s all true … and I owe Andrew Breitbart and apology.” And, in an instant, so did we all.

Breitbart and his internet revolution pose two challenges to the mainstream American media. First, Breitbart insists that he doesn’t want to promote one worldview; he just wants to make it possible to openly express as many opinions as possible. The division of ideas into acceptable and “off limits” is regrettable and has reduced a great deal of public discourse to a witch-hunt. Conservatives have to constantly battle inferences that they are racist, sexist, homophobic, or insane. I think that Breitbart and many others see Weiner’s confession as validating the grander libertarian argument for total freedom of information and expression. One man’s sexual disgrace might be an unusual vehicle for that, but seeing the extraordinary energy that it has poured into Andrew Breitbart, I can understand why it might feel like a watershed moment in the battle of ideas.

Second, he wants journalists to be more honest about their politics. It is true that liberals often disguise their liberalism as objectivity – “I’m just giving the facts rather than pushing a political agenda.” In contrast, conservatism is often presented as the product of intellectual bias or base cultural prejudice. One movie producer told me that he was critical of extremism of both left and right, except to say that the left is all the time and everywhere factually accurate. Such opinions – that social democracy is as reasonable a deduction as gravity or evolution – are common in Hollywood and shape the way news is presented. But there really is no objective truth when it comes to politics – just competing claims to the truth. Breitbart is refreshing in that he doesn’t even want to be seen to present disinterested facts. He wants to be a moral crusader, and he wants other journalists to compete with him on equally honest terms.

It occurred to me, as Breitbart darted back and forth between our conversation and his IPad, that he is a genius of the internet age. The mass proliferation of ideas and information, the preference for opinion over cold facts, the triumph of the amateur … all of these have found their culmination in this moment. It was a crime committed by Twitter, leaked by an email, and prosecuted over the internet. But I wonder if the unreality of the process extends to the punishment? Personally, I think that Weiner has committed a form of existential sexual assault. If he had jumped out of a bush and exposed himself to these women, he’d be in jail right now. But the internet lends distance to events, rendering them virtual – like the money we use and the politics we play. As each year passes, our grip of reality loosens. And that, I suspect, caused Weiner to do what he did in the first place. The pixilated little sex pest.

Letter from America: where have all the good men gone?

6/10/2011

It’s a dull grey June here in Los Angeles. Mercury is in retrograde, everything is going wrong. I failed my driving test on Monday for a (record breaking?) seventh time. I didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. Within five seconds of pulling away from the DMV, a truck drove into the side of the car. The examiner was ruder than necessary. I sucked up the abuse for a good five minutes before I lost my cool and said: “The only reason why I couldn’t see the truck, madam, was because your enormous gut was blocking the view.” That was harsh but true. I rode home with my driving instructor in an angry, embarrassed silence. My chauvinist, fatist outburst means I can never return to the Hollywood DMV again. I’ve officially given up trying to drive anyway. I am to spend the rest of my life on buses or on foot, like some juvenile environmentalist.

I spent some time in New York last week. Manhattan is fantastic for underground bars and seedy places that still mix Negronis. But above ground it was stifling hot, with a watery jungle heat that turned every afternoon into a warm bath. My friend, El, lives in a decayed old block in the West Village with marble floors and peeling paint. She described coming home one night to find a water beetle the size of her fist asleep on the bathroom floor. She was too drunk to be frightened, so she gently cupped it in her hands and slipped it back down the plug hole. We spent hours sitting by the air conditioning; watched a few South Parks, had a few laughs.

I was lucky to break out for an afternoon to interview the actor Robert Vaughn at his house in Connecticut. Get out of New York and you are suddenly in New England proper. The temperature dropped, the grey asphalt gave way to green woodland. For miles and miles my train chugged through tiny villages called Hobart’s Corner or Widdlefield St. Martin. I had to get out at something unpronounceable beginning with “K” and take a cab another thirty minutes into the woods. How wonderful it was to see landscape that was made green by God rather than by the Los Angeles Municipal Sprinkler System! How nice to smell something other than petrol and weed!

I arrived early and strolled up the drive in a pale blue jacket and bowtie. Mrs. Robert Vaughn spotted me from the kitchen window and thought I was a salesman. She sent her husband out to accost me.
“Can I help you?” he asked from the porch. He couldn’t hear my reply and shouted back, “We don’t want anything today thank you.”
“I’m here to interview you,” I said. “I’m early.” He smiled and clasped my hand and led me into the house.
His wife’s voice echoed from the kitchen: “Why have you let him in, Robert? We don’t want to buy anything.”
“He’s my guest, honey,” said Robert.
“Is he religious? Is he a Mormon?” she replied, apparently too deaf to understand.
“No, it’s my guest,” Robert repeated, a little louder this time.
“Why do you let these people in? Can’t you tell him you’re a Presbyterian?”
“Please excuse me,” said Robert, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

That left me to do what I always do when alone in famous people’s houses: I ran round the room checking out every book, antique, and photo possible. A couple of surprises on the bookshelves, including a book by Glen Beck. But it was the photos that really caught my eye.

These past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time discussing great, dead men. Many of them were framed on Robert Vaughn’s wall, shaking the actor’s hand and looking just as star-struck as he. Their politics is immaterial; their character is what still leaps off the wall forty years hence. Their names have come up time and time again in interviews, usually as sources of inspiration. And I wondered, as I later nursed my coke and listened to Robert Vaughn expound upon the origins of the Vietnam War, where have all the good men gone?

This week has been an uninspiring one for politics junkies. Newt Gingrich’s campaign collapsed under the weight of his own impossibility. Anthony Weiner admitted to sending women pictures of his genitalia. Sarah Palin couldn’t identify who Paul Revere was. The Republican field looks wide open only because the current options are so poor. “Why don’t you write something positive about Ron Paul?” a friend asked today. The answer: because he can’t and won’t win, and my editor would rightly be angry if I wasted copy pushing an unsellable product. The good guys are all at 2 percent, the frontrunners are largely goof-offs. Barack Obama is no better. He’s worse than awful because he once looked quite good. Now he’s little more than the Bore-in-Chief. [O how my toes curl whenever he opens his mouth! I have been insulted by professionals in my time as a student and an academic. I am trained to spot the scornful look of a “superior intellect” as it spies a lesser being handing his essay in late. It’s the same look Obama gets when someone tells him he might be wrong about something. The man is the barbed boredom of the academy personified.]

Cast your imagination back to 1968 and survey the talent on display on Robert Vaughn’s walls: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, George Romney, and Ronald Reagan. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in a hotel in Memphis; Bobby Kennedy was murdered in a parlor in LA. William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal debated police violence during the Chicago convention. Norman Mailer and Pat Buchanan watched the chaos from a hotel balcony. The politicians of that age were flawed men, no doubt. But they had eloquence and wit that is sorely lacking today. They had an aura of the epic – like they carried the weight of history on their shoulders. All of these men damn-well knew who Paul Revere was. Presumably, none of them mailed photographs of their wieners to young ladies they had never even met.

Perhaps interesting times produced interesting leaders. But today is interesting too. Indeed many of the issues of ’68 are germane – an unpopular war, a poor economy, a sense of decline. Perhaps those men were moral weaklings and the sympathies of the establishment press only made them look good. There’s something to that argument, after all biographers have alleged that even Martin Luther King Jr. was unfaithful to his wife. But I could take Bobby Kennedy’s dirty tricks and wandering eye in exchange for a little of his compassion for the poor and his ability to silence a crowd of thousands with a few word of Aeschylus.

Last month was the centenary of Hubert Humphrey’s birth. Humphrey was ridiculed by many formidable people during his lifetime. He often seemed like the weakest of the men I listed above. The right thought he was a spokesman for outdated ideas, the left saw him as a shallow careerist. To Hunter S. Thompson he was the Great Windbag – “Martin Bormann in Drag”. Had I lived in 1968, I might have hated him for his refusal to oppose Johnson’s policy in Vietnam. Now, we can look back on Hube and sigh wistfully for a “better-man-than-I”. It was Humphrey who pushed through the Civil Rights plank at the 1948 Democratic Convention, who kept up the momentum for the Great Society in the 1960s, and who tried to commit the Democratic Party to a full employment economy in the 1970s. He was a real person – gabbing on in his endless, joyful way about peace and jobs and a chicken-in-every-pot. In the black-and-white photos on the wall, you can smell the cigarettes of the union label heavies standing behind him and feel the sweat of the crowds of poor-folk crowded round to hear Hube’s gibble-gabble about ideas and ideals that seem hopeless dreams now.

Robert Vaughn gave me a ride back to the station in his black limousine. “You may recognize the car,” he said. “It’s the exact same model that President Kennedy was shot in.” I trembled appreciatively. “Of course, it’s too expensive to park. So you’ll have to jump out when I shout.” He swerved into the station beginning with “K” and I leapt onto the train and hurtled back home to the hot, grey world of the here and now.

Letter from America: flying saucers in the Mojave, hustlers in Las Vegas

6/1/2011

What a very American flight that was. From Los Angeles to Charlotte, I sat between a lady carrying a poodle and a United States marine. The marine was a refreshing break from California – a loud, brash, masculine ball of fun and conservatism.

“Did you like California?” I asked when I learned that he has just been visiting from North Carolina.

“No, sir, I did not. I did not like the desert and I did not the Democrats.” He also missed his motorbike, which he had left in the care of his platoon. I shared his pleasure at heading eastwards. I was becoming tired of the effeminacy of the Pacific coast, where the men are prettier than the women and their dogs wear clothes. “The terrorists want to kill us all,” said the marine as we hit a rough patch that could’ve been turbulence, could’ve been a hijack. “That’s what these Democrats don’t understand,” he said. “It’s kill or be killed. We gotta wipe those mother fuckers out.” He wore a baseball cap with a Confederate flag printed on it, accompanied by the misnomer: “Proud To Be An American Sportsman”.

Sitting up front was a large black lady in a cowboy hat. “I know you didn’t just pour me a diet coke,” she said to the stewardess. And we pitched forward into the black night towards North Carolina.

***

Last week I took a well earned break from Los Angeles and drove to Las Vegas for the weekend. I’m proud that I made the 600 mile journey there and back by car because it proves that those petty driving license people back in Britain were wrong to fail me five times. I actually failed my US test just before I went out too, but there’s a Californian loophole whereby the written exam certificate counts as a permit to drive while accompanied by an adult. That’s a fine example of America’s can do spirit. Letting someone drive to Vegas and back who has failed his test a grand total of six times is yet one more reason to love this country.

The drive took us through Death Valley, up three thousand feet into the hot, sandy mountains of the Mojave. Once you pass the last gas station, you’re on your own up there. We pulled over at the top to smoke cigarettes and count cacti. The desert imparts its own sort of wisdom. “Stay here too long and you’ll die,” it says. It’s a reminder that parts of this planet are still alien worlds that defy colonization – a happy reminder that man has his limits and can only take so much. God’s mystery is multifaceted, and often cruel. For want of a gallon of gas, we might have stayed up there all week, lying beneath the motorcar waiting to die, evaporating into the dust.

If we had done so, we wouldn’t have discovered Victoriaville at the bottom of the mountain. Victoriaville comprises a vile Denny’s restaurant and the historic Royal Hawaiian Motel (long abandoned and covered in whatever passes for a weed). Above the gas station is a model UFO; silver and round with a cone top. Coming over the ridge in 90 degrees, it looks for a moment like it might be the real thing hovering on the horizon looking for a place to get a beer. The guy at the pump says it dates back to the Sixties, “When UFOs used come here all the time.” Perhaps the decline of the Royal Hawaiian was due to falling demand among little green men for water beds on Route 15.

After another hundred miles of nothing, Vegas suddenly erupts from the desert with an Eiffel Tower and a circus tent. Las Vegas is an antidote to Los Angeles. Vegas is camp but not gay; it’s the adult heterosexual’s Disneyland. The fantastic architecture is another example of that American “can-do” 'tude. Want a shopping mall with a river in it that you can ride gondoliers on? You got it. Want a pyramid, a castle, the Champs Elysee, and a giant Coke bottle that lights up at night? Buddy, you got it! In an hour’s walk, the pedestrian passes through eight different centuries, five continents, and half a dozen capital cities. Yet, beyond the occasional shark ballet or electronic Beethoven tribute band, every fantasy offers the same thing: gambling, sex, and cocktails. The best casinos are those that provide all three at once. We spent several hours in Treasure Island watching girls in pirate costumes serve drinks to Chinese men playing poker, their cards dealt by a Russian model in a bikini.

There is no time and space inside the casinos. It’s either permanent dusk or artificial midday, and the floors are built in concentric circles that make it very easy to get lost, give up looking for the exit, and stay for another 12 hours at the same table. Each casino is connected by indoor walkways, so it is also possible to exit one casino only to find yourself lost in another. We went from Venice at six pm to a Roman forum at 11am in five minutes. The only thing to do is wait uselessly by a machine until a lady dressed in period costume offers you a drink. I looked upwards from the poker table in the Bellagio and my reflection was refracted back at me in several hundred silver balls of glass. It was like being voyeured by a fly.

I love Las Vegas. It has an energy that is unique – a sense that people are determined to enjoy themselves whatever the cost; that anything is possible, that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, that it’s all right so long as the police never find out. All the windows are barred from the third floor up to prevent suicides. The topless dancers have degrees from LSU; the hustlers came from the east and didn't quite make it as far as Hollywood. For Anglo-Saxon/Irish drunkards like myself, it posses the thrilling challenge of “and what would you like to do next?” Chug beers in a paddling pool? Drink champagne from a Gucci shoe? Take a bath in a Margarita? If the desert that surrounds city is the world drained and bleached of life, Vegas is the huddled masses of humanity drawn together by the warm glow of the polystyrene sphinx - an electronic, supersonic, whizz-bang, roll-em high Hell. All are equal in their sin. Some people walked around in shorts and t-shirt, but not an eye was batted at the hungry looking gentlemen in black tie who dashed from floor to floor in search of fresh flesh.

Las Vegas is a cathedral to Capitalism, celebrating the best and worst of that system. Its potential is unlimited; its willingness to serve is admirable. But it feeds hungers that could never, should never, be sated. I drove back to Los Angeles hung-to-the-over, reeking of gin and nicotine. We stopped at Victoriaville, sat on the bonnet of the car, and threw pebbles at the flying saucer. I tasted pleasure and all I wanted now was a cup of PG tips.

A reply to Richard Dawkins

5/22/2011

This morning at 7am, I attended Mass at a convent two blocks down. It’s a cloistered establishment; the nuns live behind an iron grill. Before the service starts, a giant wooden screen descends from the ceiling, cutting the chapel in two and hiding the saintly ladies behind it. If you strain your ears, you can hear them gently reciting the Ave Maria through the walls. The chaplain is older than the palm trees that brush against the bell tower. He conducted the entire Mass sitting down. “I’m very tired,” he told us. “And the day has only begun.” This is what a religious life is like for most people who try to live one: quiet, human, mysterious, wonderful.

I returned to my computer to discover that I’ve caused a minor storm in the community of politicized Atheists. I had spent the previous day hung-to-the-over, lying in bed moaning, eagerly awaiting the Rapture. When it didn’t happen, I flicked through the dailies to discover predictable joy at the embarrassment of a small group of religious-types. I wrote a piece for the Telegraph bemoaning the demonization of evangelicals. Sincerely, I meant to say this: “Yes, it is foolish to try to predict Armageddon, but these people are but one small segment of evangelical culture – a culture which is diverse, ever-changing, and of tremendous historical importance to America.” I concluded that it was mean-spirited to celebrate other people’s humiliation and that greater tolerance should be shown towards a movement that works tirelessly to improve people’s lives. I received one nice email from a gay evangelist; whose very existence I feel proves my point.

Alas, the article was not taken quite so well elsewhere. Richard Dawkins wrote on his website, “I’m struggling to find a reason why American evangelical Christians deserve even a little respect, and I’m not struggling at all to discover that Tim Stanley merits no respect at all.” Grammar reveals a lot about a person. When it’s strictly speaking accurate but one still struggles to decipher the meaning of what has been said, you know you’re reading a sentence written by an academic.

I am frustrated that Prof. Dawkins has dismissed me so easily and so cantankerously. I will only say that I hope his wife doesn’t share his view, as I’ve long admired her. She played a heroine in my favorite TV program, and wrote books about needlework that obsessed my Baptist mother during her most creative patchwork craze. Ironically, her patterns were replicated on a thousand church cushions that my mother ran through her old Singer while humming “Heavenly Sunlight”. But Prof. Dawkins’ ad hominem attack is nothing compared to this remarkable piece of class warfare. I am, according to someone I’ve never met, “a fancy little boy” (thankyou?) who is destined to be a New York Times op-ed writer (again, thankyou?). The critiques I have received are full of odd paradoxes. One blogger accused me of being “immature”. He has as his profile picture a photo of Harry Potter.

People have taken offense in two prime ways. First, they don’t agree with my reading of history that evangelicalism has shaped American democracy. Actually, that’s a no-brainer. The Puritan influence is up for debate; while some historians see them as inflexible theocrats, others argue that their surface authoritarianism was bound by an inner quest for personal enlightenment that was freely obtained and not coerced. But on the influence of the first and second Great Awakenings, historians are at one in acknowledging that evangelicalism shaped social egality, notions of citizenship, and the party system. [I said that Jonathan Edwards was the “greatest” American theologian. Mea Culpa, that’s my personal prejudice. But it’s not unique]. I would urge those who care to get a copy of Richard Carwardine’s Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997). It’s the definitive book on the subject and you’ll read how everything from mass participation to female emancipation finds some root in inter-evangelical debate. The positive role played by evangelicalism was felt during the 1960s Civil Rights movement and is still there today in campaigns for prison reform and debt relief. True, some denominations opposed all those things. But my argument was never that evangelicalism was everywhere and always good – just “complex and nuanced”.

Second, some readers have inferred – disingenuously – that I think religious people are charitable but atheists are not. Again, the point of the piece was not to attack atheism as a philosophy but to defend evangelicals as human beings. I do think it is in poor taste for some atheists to celebrate the misery of those who thought they’d be raptured but weren’t. (That said, I’m quite glad I wasn’t. I’m not ready to face my bank manager or my priest, let alone God.)

This second point goes to the heart of a lot of the criticism my piece received: my critics hadn’t actually read it. At least, they read it myopically – picking out a single sentence (or even a couple of words within a sentence) and extrapolating from a handful of syllables that I favor witch burning and table-wrapping. There is an excellent movie due out soon called Patriocracy. It argues that the national conversation about politics has become debased by extremism, of a blanket refusal to even hear another’s argument. I agree. True, I wrote a piece that had an obvious agenda. But it was filled with equivocation and cowardly sub-clauses, things that I always put in my writing because I’m careful not to reduce everything to an idée fixe. Yet the anger of the debate about religion seems to have blinded some people to subtle argument, and the instantaneous nature of blogging means that – rather than sit down and construct a thoughtful letter as in days of yore – they are able to type “Fuck you, you posh twat”, press return, and publish it within seconds.

That’s all fair enough, and I don’t really mind because that’s what I signed up for when I started blogging for the Telegraph – a paper whose very existence drives some hipsters into intensive yoga. But I am disappointed that Prof. Richard Dawkins – a professor of Oxford, no less – is capable of similar yobbery. He is a fellow academic after all, and he probably knows just how highly we prize our “respect”. It is our economic and emotional sustenance, and I would never deny it to anyone as easily as he has refused it to me.

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