The Art of Getting Away With Things

photograph: White House Press Office

Arguably JFK’s greatest contribution to politics was to do the things he did and get away with it. Politics is 99% presentation and 1% inspiration and the Kennedy White House was Camelot with the president as a venerable Arthur who radiated power and equanimity. The electorate ate it up. But power was the key word. Kennedy fucked the kind of women who had no need to rat on him. Marilyn Monroe didn’t require celebrity or money for that matter. Look at Bill Clinton’s choices and now we have Trump who's simply reduced to having his self described "locker room talk" inspiring the beginnings of another reality series. What should we call it, Animal House? Ike and FDR all had their fabled dalliances, but as with JFK, they operated with a certain nobility, probity and shall we say savoir faire that enabled them to get on with the business of state. “It’s good to be the king “ was the famous Mel Brooks line, but the problem with Trump is that he doesn't behave like one. In order to have noblesse oblige, you require the doit de seigneur and that in turn depends on a sense of true entitlement and nobility. Trump is giving male chauvinism and misogyny a bad name; under the right conditions, it’s true that any man of power can get away with a great deal. Trump said "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." But you can’t get away with murder unless you’re Henry the VIIIth. And you can't be Henry the VIIIth or JFK when you sport the kind of blow dried hair that makes you look like a used car salesman.

The Illiteracy

  

The ILLITERACY is the state of mind occupied by all the people in this country who are either functionally or de facto illiterate. Sure there are those unfortunates who really can’t read. However, a good part of this modern nation state communicate freely and express their outrage and fantasies to one another on social media. So they're definitely capable of reading and writing. But the majority of this increasingly large demographic have been deprived of any sense of history. A large proportion have never heard of The New York Public Library, Shakespeare or Beethoven, the Cold War or utopia. Expressions like parliamentary democracy, economy of scale and conspicuous consumption are totally foreign. They have never heard of Pyongyang and hence have no idea that it's the capital of the insular and rogue state of North Korea whose youthful leader Kim Jong-un has made lots of wild threats. They may have heard that Syria is on fire but they don’t know why and they certainly have never heard of Mr. Assad or could care less. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Werner von Braun, Einstein and certainly Niels Bohr all fall under their radar. Queen Victoria sounds familiar due to Victoria’s Secret, but no, they never have heard of Nelson Mandela, much less Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi or FDR. And no they didn’t read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and they never heard of  “Trane,” John Coltrane that is. They never got polio because they were vaccinated, but they never heard of Jonas Salk and certainly not Alexander Fleming, whose invention of penicillin spared them from infection. Ask a member of the Illiteracy, who is our current Vice President? If they fail ask about earth and what galaxy it’s in and failing that ask, if there is any truth to the fact that it was created in six days (and nights) and that on the seventh God was finished and took a rest.

The Life and Death of the World Historical Figure

At the end of his short encomium to Mandela in The New York Review of Books, “On Nelson Mandela (l918-2013)," J.M. Coetzee writes, “He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.” Then who will rescue us? Where is the hope? Even without the notion of God, it’s nice to believe that history takes a human shape. It’s something like the spirits that haunt Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Hegel believed in dialectic and historical necessity. But like a nuclear bomb which requires a powerful detonator, history has its servants, or World Historical Figures. Thomas Carlyle subscribed to the greatman theory of history, but such anthropomorphizing flies in the face of the variegated web of social and economic conditions which are the petrie dish that produces political leaders. Would Hitler have come to the fore, without a Versailles Treaty? You make your bed and then have to sleep in it. Would Roosevelt have prevailed without the Depression, Gandhi without British colonialism, Lenin without the Czars and Mandela himself without Apartheid? If Apartheid hadn’t been instituted, then Nelson Mandela might have ended up being a high powered lawyer. Look around you, how many determined men and women of great character, have become merely competent or even great in their jobs instead of being world historical figures? Is Mandela the last of the great world historical figures, or is it a little like Six Characters in Search of an Author? Is it a matter of timing and the fact that the world has become so complex that the outlines of history themselves blur the prospect of greatness? Perhaps we no longer appreciate the great men and women in our midst since it’s more difficult for them to shine out. Barack Obama is a source of disappointment to some who thought he would be great, but maybe the multivalent problems he has faced make his greatness harder to appreciate.

History is a Nightmare

In a Times opinion piece that has attracted a good deal of attention, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory, argues that, like little children, the electorate needs a good bedtime story. Obama, in his mind, is a bad storyteller (“What Happened to Obama, NYT, 8/6/11). “When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters,” Westen writes. “Americans were scared and angry…. In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.” In his address at the 1936 Democratic Convention, FDR said, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Fiorello LaGuardia was famous for reading comic strips to the denizens of his beleaguered city. But ultimately the subject is not storytelling but history. Do great historical figures still create history, with Roosevelt and Churchill being forces of good and Hitler and Mussolini representing the axis of evil? Or has the world become so complex that there are no simple stories to be created by men? Lately, history seems to be making the decisions, with men merely taking credit or being assigned blame. Computer-generated stock market programs are capable of causing huge gyrations in markets that have little relation to industrial productivity. In a world in which information can become a virus that takes on a life of its own, it’s becoming apparent that the objects of man’s creation have beat him to the punch. It would be nice if Barack Obama had been able to create a reassuring narrative that would satisfy what Professor Westen calls the brain’s expectation for “stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought.” However, if President Obama were to tell a story that could explain what is actually occurring outside our windows, it might be written in the ironic postmodern style of Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace or Nicholson Baker, or even in the complex, poetically reticulated prose of Joyce. And it would not likely be consoling or even understandable. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus presciently states, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”