Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  In the freest country on the planet, democratic political campaigns are a ghastly joke. The ideal candidate is a cipher, devoid of personal history. The handlers write the scripts, build the drama, concoct the spin, and get famous themselves. Nobody expects them to believe any of this bullshit; oye, compadre, get real. The job is done with a wink, a curled lip, a bony cynicism. None of this 1960s idealism, for chrissakes. The greater the cynicism, the greater the rewards. Hey, look at James Carville. Full of all that Vince Lombardi stuff about winning being everything. He got Clinton from Little Rock to the White House, didn’t he? It was the economy, stupid. And Mary Matalin! She’s got the knife out, fighting for George Bush. Destroy the Democrats! Save the republic! Naturally, Carville and Matalin get married. Hey, man, don’t laugh. The script is everything. It’s a Tracy-Hepburn movie. It’s a book deal! Maybe it’s …a fucking network series.

  Meanwhile, in every state, in major cities, in contests for the Senate or the school board, the public discourse is all heat and no illumination. The attack ads come rolling forth, reducing opponents to agents of Lucifer. Vote for me, not the other guy. He’s bad, guilty, corrupt, and stupid; therefore, I’m good, I’m innocent, I’m honest, I’m smart. He’s got a wife and kids? He has an ailing mother? Hey, don’t bother me with details, pal, we’re playing hardball here! Quick, my flack, hand me a label: womanizer, flip-flopper, liar, and, uh, liberal. Brrrrruuuuupppppp. Who’s next?

  Most of the American news media have been debased, too. Newspaper, magazine, and television editors and their audiences have been powerfully altered by forty-five years of television drama. The average American household now watches about seven hours of television a day, an appetite for entertainment unknown in human history. The result: The American imagination is jammed with the structures of melodrama. Not analysis, not cool judgment, not the humanizing imagery of high art. Drama. Most of it bad drama. And as it has been since the time of Aristotle, the essence of drama is conflict.

  Even the conflicts of the so-called real world — the nonfiction world of news and society — must be simple, easy to follow through meals and other domestic activities, and preferably violent. Following the style of the television tabloid shows, even some network magazines are using feature-film gimmicks: music to tell the viewer what he should feel; ominous photography or bright, happy lighting to make emotional points. Don’t think is the message; feel. In all media, the best-played stories now are the ones that most resemble movies. Give us good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, and for chrissakes, don’t give us talking heads! Action, baby. Bang-bang. Conflict.

  In the name of egalitarian vulgarity, the newspapers and the television shows fill up with O. J. Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt, her moronic husband, Amy Fisher, the Menendez brothers; serial killers and heroic cops; priests who corrupt kids and kids who kill parents; drug warriors, gun nuts, and politicians caught getting laid. They in turn become subjects for fictional docudramas of invincible stupidity.

  Every day, the American vision becomes cruder, narrower, more parochial. In most newspapers, foreign news gets little play unless Americans are involved. The major newspapers still employ foreign correspondents of immense gifts, but even the greatest reporters must battle for space against the tremendous force of the general parochialism. The mass-circulation newspapers don’t even bother. Unless Americans are concerned, most foreign news seems to be about Princess Di.

  To be sure, there are exceptions to the tide of simple-minded stupidity. C-Span has become a wonderful window into some areas of the society; it allows us to see the boring parts of the craft of governance. Court TV has the potential to educate more Americans about the law than any medium in the country’s history. CNN does a splendid job, in many ways, bringing the audience closer to the outside world than newspapers ever could. But the emphasis remains on conflict, drama, present tense, bang-bang: Crossfire is hardly the forum for thoughtful analysis. Maybe nothing is. The networks were positioned to cover the armed invasion of Haiti; when Jimmy Carter made his deal, most returned to the soap operas and talk shows, or cut back, with a sigh of relief, to the OJ. hearings. Who the hell wants to cover a peaceful intervention?

  As we move toward Endgame, consider this: We live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco.

  II. US AGAINST THEM

  In the wider society, true to the principles of conflict, an often bewildering variety of social factions batter at one another for position and victory (or, as the jargon goes, “hegemony”). Their purpose isn’t to make a better society, a place where that illusive American goal, harmony, is possible. The goal is therapy. The goal is dominance. The goal is vengeance: to take no prisoners and, in Murray Kemp-ton’s phrase, shoot the wounded.

  The unraveling process can have many names: fragmentation, disunification, atomization, balkanization, disintegration. Thoughtful men and women — among them Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Gertrude Himmelfarb, Michael Walzer, Allan Bloom, the late William A. Henry III, Robert Hughes — have looked at the battlefield from different positions. They offer their own analyses of the causes of and remedies for the Endgame psychology of permanent division and confrontation. But most agree about the symptoms.

  One of the most obvious is also the most disheartening: Almost a hundred years after the last great immigration wave changed the face of American society, vast numbers of Americans — including, sadly, the best-educated — are again being taught to identify themselves with the qualifying adjectives of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. The idea of the melting pot is dismissed as cultural genocide, replaced by a social worker’s version of predestination. American identities, state the clerics of the new dogma, are not shaped by will, choice, reason, intelligence, and desire but by membership in groups. They are not individuals but components of categories, those slots and pigeonholes beloved of sociologists, pollsters, and the U.S. Census Bureau. And such categories, they believe, are destiny.

  The ferocious logic of the adjective insists that the individual take sides. To refuse is to betray the larger group, your own flesh and blood. In America now, it is always Us against Them and Them against Us. And to display its anger, its innocence, its righteousness, our side must be in conflict with their side. It’s not enough to be an American; you must despise, attack, diminish, and empty the guts of those millions of other Americans who are not like you. Every grave must be pried open by scholarship, every smashed bone waved in triumph like a relic, every ancient crime posted on the schoolhouse door.

  The result is a society in apparently permanent, teeming, nerve-fraying conflict: blacks against whites; straights against gays, gays against priests, priests against abortionists; sun people against ice people; citizens against immigrants; Latinos against Anglos; people who work against those who don’t; town against gown; blacks against Jews; the orthodox against the reformers; cops against bad guys, lawyers against cops, Crips against Bloods. Good guys and bad guys. Oppressors and oppressed. White hats and black hats. And vicif* versa. Us against Them. Them against Us. And get outta my fuckin’ face.

  But there are additional confusions. All the victimized ethnic categories contain men. And the feminist rhetoric of the Endgame insists that men are themselves a group of oppressors — brutal, insensitive, selfish, murderous. Catharine MacKinnon and others use the word men in the same generalized, blurry way that women is used. This astonishingly broad category — men — is defined all too easily by people who believe that the same state of victimhood is endured by the Wellesley graduate and the woman grinding corn in the hills of Chiapas, by Billie Holiday and Katharine Graham, by Jean Harris and Use Koch. The existentialist philosophers of my youth insisted that existence preceded essence, that you were born and then you forged your identity; the philosophers of gender and ethnicity insist that essence precedes existence.

  The ideologues of gender don’t care much about making distinctions among men or women. Common sense and
experience tell us that among the earth’s billions, there must be some women who are happy and free and others who are brutal and evil. Common sense and intelligence tell us there are millions of black Americans who are not trapped in lives of welfare, violence, illegitimacy. But common sense is in disrepute. The examination of healthy lives is too often dismissed as sentimentality or “anecdotal” gossip, unverifiable under the cold-eyed scrutiny of such exact sciences as sociology or anthropology. The Endgamers of race and gender will limit their investigations to their own kind, the victims. They will define the group by its pathologies and defeats, not its triumphs. Like all believers, they begin with the truth and find evidence to support it. They adhere to a faith, abstract and rigid, full of iron certainties, free of the century’s only useful lesson: doubt.

  But doubt is unsettling. And the overriding educational goal these days is to make students — in particular, minority students — feel better about themselves. Unless they feel better, the argument goes, unless they acquire greater “self-esteem,” they can’t learn. The need to think better, with greater subtlety and lucidity, is seldom mentioned. And of course nobody — black, white, or Latino; middle-class or poor — should be forced to work very hard. Not at school. Not after school. Kids need time to watch television. They need time to hang out. They need time to work on their images.

  They are in much trouble, and so are we. The notion of education as therapy has led to the distortion of history, the reduction of standards, and, in the new-fashioned American style, the creation of enemies. The examination of an American identity is made subservient to the word before the hyphen. Obviously, the accomplishments of American blacks, Latinos, other minorities, and women should be made known to all Americans, not to make them feel better but to make them know more about their own country and the world of which it is a part. Alas, that is not the goal.

  The endless, energy-sapping debate over “multiculturalism” is an example of the more general problem. The word itself is an oxymoron. Every bookshelf is multicultural. Every library is multicultural. Every educated man and woman is multicultural. Culture is multicultural.

  But the most rigid advocates of this form of the hyphen aren’t really talking about the multiple, the plural, or about the natural human movement toward synthesis. They don’t want to add to the fund of individual knowledge. They are insisting upon indoctrination, on the replacement of the many with the singular. There is only one road to Rome — and they know what it is.

  Afrocentrism, for example, is not multicultural. As preached by men like New York’s City College professor Leonard Jeffries Jr., it is a segregation of the mind. It is also a fraud. As Václav Havel said in 1990, as part of his struggle against the Endgame impulses of Communists and anti-Communists: Lying can never save us from another lie.

  In the raging battle over education, Endgamers like Jeffries are now demanding the right to peddle lies. Literature and history have common intentions: to discover the truth about human beings. They can’t be shaped by a creed, an ideology, or a thesis; they can’t be wrapped in the straitjackets of political fashion. Stalinist novels were not novels; they were tracts. Hitler’s movies were not art; they were propaganda. Mao’s poetry is the stuff of wall posters. There have been great Marxist historians, including our own Eugene D. Genovese, but they didn’t alter the facts to prove the thesis. In the end, history should be history, not an alibi.

  “If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.”

  Most purveyors of this therapeutic nonsense attack their critics as racists. But the basic trouble with infusing kids with racial or ethnic chauvinism is that it doesn’t even work as therapy. Instead of feeling better about themselves, most of these kids come out of the process seething with bitterness. And this being the United States, anger and rage are followed by the need to blame. Hell, it can’t be my fault.

  The demands for reparations and revision go on and on, spilling into the newspapers, then amplified by talk radio and television. As presented, there is no solution, because the apocalyptic demand is for the alteration of the past or a surrender of intelligence or an assumption of guilt by the living for the crimes of the dead. But resolution really isn’t the point of all this sound and fury. Fragmentation is the point. Segregation is the point. Conflict is all. We’re Americans. We have been conditioned to prefer conflict to boredom. We prefer violence to talk. We prefer war to peace. We prefer lies to the truth. Clear the board, citizen: We’re reaching Endgame.

  III. PROFESSIONAL CYNICS

  The Endgame culture of cynicism and bitterness is, of course, best observed in Washington. The genius of the American system has been its ability to compromise. We learned from the fratricide of the Civil War that a failure to compromise could unleash the darkest, bloodiest impulses in the American character. Over the years, we developed in Washington a nonideological style that helped us avoid direct conflict. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost; politics was a long season, like baseball, in which even the greatest hitters failed six times out of ten. Most of the time, the system worked. Slowly. Tediously.

  There were human reasons for this. The state was founded on a document, not evolved through a long, shared common history; its principles and promises were abstract. But after 1890, the nation was populated by huge numbers of Europeans who were different from the original British settlers. They were Catholic or Jewish; they often spoke languages other than English or were illiterate farmers. In one big country, they joined the survivors of the slaughter of the Indians, liberated slaves, conquered Mexicans. To meld them into a unified nation required immense efforts of mediation and compromise on the part of the agents of the state. The greatest task was to make the idealism of the Constitution real for every citizen; the alternative was the kind of deep, abiding cynicism that eventually eroded the Communist states, which also had idealistic constitutions. This wasn’t easy. Along the way, there were unspeakable crimes against the newcomers, uncountable social offenses, bloody riots, and the horrors of the Civil War. But slowly, decent, intelligent men and women created a living nation from the abstract principles of the state.

  That agonizing process created the twentieth-century American political style. The most effective politicians — Sam Rayburn, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Taft — employed a basic courtesy in dealing with their opponents. They disagreed on many things. They were capable of immense vanity. They knew that in the end, politics was about power. But they didn’t think it necessary to destroy the enemy. The enemy was over there: Hitler, Tojo, Stalin. Those who swung the broadswords of racism or ideology at other Americans — the Joe McCarthys, the Bilbos and Eastlands — accomplished nothing. They were cheap, vulgar men — ignorant, parochial, and cynical. They never rose to higher office because the American people would not have them. The tougher men who truly changed the country, who moved it along, who made it better, did so with a clarity of vision and a certain amount of grace. They were mercifully free of the Utopian instinct. They were always willing to settle for half a loaf. And they each in their own way did think about what was best for the country. They were, after all, Americans before they were Texans or Ohioans or Democrats or Republicans. They respected the contract. They respected the presidency.

  That era is behind us, perhaps forever.

  Look at what is being done to Bill Clinton.

  I don’t think Bill Clinton is the greatest president we’ve ever had. But I know he is certainly not the worst. This is a country, after all, that elected Warren G. Harding once and Richard Milhous Nixon twice. But from the moment of his election, Clinton has been subjected to the most sustained campaign of personal abuse of any president in memory. No rumor, no allegation of promiscuity, goes unprinted. Jerry Falwell, an alleged man of God, peddles videos tha
t virtually accuse Clinton of murdering Vincent Foster Jr. A newspaper for which I used to work ran a series of stories about the same case that put quote marks around the word suicide. The implication was clear: If Foster didn’t kill himself, he must have been murdered. Aha! A movie plot! Melodrama!

  While reporters were chasing around after Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, various state troopers, Paula Jones, and God knows who else, Clinton was actually accomplishing a few things as president. The Republicans linked arms in a spirit of mindless obstruction, led by Dole, but Clinton somehow managed to get an economic plan through Congress, cutting the deficit for the first time in a generation, creating more than four million new jobs. He got NAFTA passed, doing so in opposition to organized labor and Ross Perot. He finally won passage of his crime bill, too, directly challenging the National Rifle Association. He lost on health-care reform, overwhelmed by the Endgamers who spent millions on attack ads and refused to join the process of compromise. He couldn’t overcome the Republican filibuster on campaign reform and lost that, too; Dole continued to make the world safe for lobbyists and cynicism. But in some real ways, the country was in better shape than it had been on the day he took office. Unemployment was down. The economy was stronger. The stock market was healthy. In the Middle East, South Africa, Northern Ireland, the forces of peace and conciliation were winning the day, supported by American policies and actions.

  And yet Clinton is the most hated president in memory.

  His reluctant intervention in Haiti was an example of the process. Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Sam Nunn worked out a deal that would allow American troops to go into Haiti without shooting. The junta of Raoul Cédras would give up power on October 15. The deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, would return to power and serve out the term to which he was elected in the only free election in that nation’s agonized history. For a few hours, most sane people thought this was a rational solution to a miserable situation. At least American soldiers wouldn’t have to go in shooting. And some of them wouldn’t have to die.