by Pete Hamill
But before anybody could know how this would work out, the attacks started. The Republicans, who cheered for intervention in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, suddenly developed the white wings of doves. Bob Dole sounded like George McGovern, stating that Haiti was not worth a single American life. The radio chatterers unleashed ferocious barrages, attacking Clinton for ducking Vietnam and now putting Americans in harm’s way, dismissing Aristide as an anti-American Marxist nutcase. Joe Klein in News-week called the intervention “a bizarre Caribbean adventure” while also stating that Clinton “did the right thing” and sneering at Carter as “the Prince of Peace.” Michael Kramer in Time wrote that “Bill Clinton at war has the disquieting countenance of Bill Clinton at peace; few principles seem inviolate; indiscipline and incoherence are the norm; careful planning falls to last-minute improvisation; steadfastness is only a tactic.”
Journalists are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain an adversarial stance with politicians. But the vehemence of the attacks on Clinton seems more a reflex than thought and analysis. A line has developed on Clinton, and to swerve from it entails risks, most of them social and professional. Few people like to face the question, “Are you fucking kidding?” My objection here isn’t with the facts or the implications of disaster but with the venomous tone.
In modern times, that slashing, lacerating use of language came into the discourse with Vietnam. It was first employed against Lyndon Johnson (I used plenty of it myself), then Richard Nixon, justified by the endless slaughter of the war and then by Watergate. Irony was lost, along with a sense of shared tragedy. What mattered was the casting of anathemas. The Left used the tone first, then the Right picked it up; now it comes easily to almost everybody. The tone is sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental, and its essential component is the sneer.
These days, most members of the Washington press corps wear a self-absorbed sneer. They sneer at any expression of idealism. They sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies. They sneer at the “invisibility” of national-security adviser Anthony Lake but sneer at others for being publicity hounds. They sneer at weakness. They sneer at those who work too hard, and they sneer at those who work too little. They fill columns with moralizing about Clinton and then attack others for moralizing. The assumption is that everyone has a dirty little secret, and one’s duty is to sniff it out.
Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for the great American art of compromise. Clinton, a professional politician, obviously believes in it and is sneered at for being an incessant placater of his opponents. Give us the whole loaf or nothing, comes the intolerant call. Make me feel better. Make me happy. Make life perfect. If you don’t, then give us term limits. Get rid of the professional pols and give us amateurs. Oliver North. Ross Perot. Don’t tell me the world is complicated.
Pericles couldn’t govern that polity. What chance can Clinton have? Domestically, he’s indicted for being too liberal or too conservative, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to public opinion or too desirous of consensus. In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics remain in thrall to Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory of foreign engagement, using naked power to get your way.
After all, if a president won’t smash his domestic opponents, if he won’t kill foreigners with icy dispatch, how can he deal with the blacks and the Mexicans and the immigrants and the feminists and the Cubans and the poor and the rich and the disabled and the por-nographers and the liberals and the guys with the hyphens in their names? How can he be a leader? How can he be a man?
If this goes on, escalating by the hour, the country is doomed. It will remain a state, of course, a geographical entity; but it won’t be a nation. We are in the midst of the largest immigration wave since the turn of the last century. If we have already succumbed to our own jagged forms of tribalism, we can’t hope to absorb and assimilate the new arrivals. If we tell the new immigrants that to be an American is to insist on status as a victim, to hate the president and the government, to fear one’s neighbor, to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level, then our twenty-first century will be a horror. E pluribus unum was not intended to be a gigantic mockery. It’s time for all Americans to think about what we’re doing to ourselves. It’s time to ostracize the sectarian swine who, in Yeats’s phrase, multiply through division. It’s time to honor good taste, hard work, and all those men and women who cherish human decency.
The gulags are gone. The concentration camps exist only in memory. Nobody worries much anymore about atom bombs. But fear is a habit like any other. So is the need for an enemy. And as the great cartoonist Walt Kelly said long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We can’t allow that to replace e pluribus unum as the American national slogan. We have to learn how to pipe down and back off. We have to stop shouting for a little while and learn again how to listen.
Otherwise, it’s black hats and white hats.
Us against Them.
Me against you.
Endgame.
ESQUIRE,
December 1994
PART VII
ROLLING THE DICE
These are personal pieces, about living and about not dying. With any luck, they won’t be the last about either subject.
52
I have arrived at last in that peculiar zone where I am no longer young and not yet old. This stage of a human life is called, of course, middle age. Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, I am not in the middle of my life, for there is little chance that I will live to 104. But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, and this sometimes causes personal astonishment. In the course of my time here, I have seen much of the world, loved women, fathered children, worked at several trades, committed cruelties and engaged in folly, had fine meals and good times, drowsed through summer afternoons and heard the chimes at midnight. That is to say, I have lived a life. I am far from finished with that splendid accident, but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition called middle age: I know now that the path is leading inexorably through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death.
Above all, the acceptance of certain death is what distinguishes this age of man. For some, the imminence of death creates remorse about the waste of time and opportunities; for others, fear; for a few, relief; for many, a sense of urgency. This is the time of life when men throw over careers to try painting in the South of France; they leave wives for ballerinas; they hole up in mountain cabins to read Proust; they gaze at the shotgun on the wall of the den and see only the quarry of the self. / am going to die, the man whispers to himself. Sooner than later. This dramatic sense of the inevitable doesn’t resemble the fatalism of the combat soldier, who knows that if he lives, he will still be in command of his youth. Nor does the vision of death have the dark romantic glamour it has when you are young. If you have reached middle age, you have already chosen to live. But the warning signs of decline and decay are as unavoidable as sunset. The most obvious are physical.
One summer, after a grueling winter of work, I discovered I had grown a paunch. A bathroom scale told me that I had gained only ten pounds, but the suety paunch, noticed suddenly in the window of a store, made me look like another person, some chunky middle-aged stranger going about his mundane business. The paunch would not go away, and I have been unable to summon the force of my dormant adolescent vanity to work it off. At the same time, white patches appeared in my beard and a few white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp. Because I do not shave, and thus don’t engage in morning ablutions, I see my face less frequently than I did when young; these changes were sudden reminders of the inevitable.
Three years ago, I awoke with a terrible pain in my left shoulder; the day before, I had been lifting free weights just to see what I could do; I was sure I had merely pulled a muscle. But the pain went on for months, ruining sleep, aching at all hours. I assumed comical positions in bed
, searching for stillness. I found myself unable to pitch quarters into the receptacles at toll booths. I thought: I might live the rest of my life with this pain. I was wrong, of course; the pain was cured with a few shots of cortisone. But the hard, invincible body I thought I possessed when young is gone.
Sometimes I hear my own labored breathing and instantly remember the emphysemic sounds of my father’s final years. Fifteen years ago I discovered with alarm that I could not read a Scoreboard without glasses; now I don spectacles to watch the evening news. In my twenties, I once worked seventy-three hours straight without sleep, belting down waterfalls of coffee, smoking too many cigarettes, listening through the nighttime hours to Symphony Sid. What I then lacked in craft I made up for with energy. Now I take naps in the afternoon. I have been a fortunate man, free of diseases, with few physical injuries. But now I go each year for the physical examination by the doctor and dread the first appearance of blood in the stool or the spot on the X ray.
Some of the minor warning signs are mental. I cannot, for example, remember any additional names or numbers. I am introduced to a stranger at a dinner party and the new name breaks into letters and flies around the room like dead leaves in an autumn wind. In the past year, I have moved with my wife into a small city apartment and a house in the country; I must carry the telephone numbers and the zip codes in my wallet. Once I hauled around in my head the batting averages of entire baseball teams; now I must search them out each day in the newspaper. My memory of the days and nights of my youth remains fine; it is last year that is a blur. It’s as if one of the directories in my brain has reached its full capacity and will accept no more bytes.
None of these small events is original to me, of course. I’m aware that some variation of them has happened to all aging human beings from the beginning of time. As a reporter I’ve witnessed much of the grief of other human beings, the astonishing variety of their final days. And I knew, watching my father get old and then die, that aging was inevitable; it had happened to him, and I’d seen it happen to my friends. Still, it was a cause of some wonder to undergo changes that had not been willed, that hadn’t enlisted my personal collaboration.
To acknowledge the inevitability of death, however, is not to fear it. I was more afraid of death at thirty-five than I am now. My night thoughts that year were haunted by visions of the sudden end of my life. Images of violence, carried over from my work as a reporter, roamed freely through my dreams. Before sleep, I would act out imaginary struggles with the knife-wielding intruder who was somewhere out in those shadowed streets. I did a lot of drinking that year. I slept too often with the light on.
In middle age, I recognize that most of my fear at thirty-five came from a sense of incompletion. That age is a more critical one for American men than is fifty, because the majority of us have grown up obsessed with sports. At thirty-five, a third baseman is an aged veteran, a football player has been trampled into retirement, a prizefighter is tending bar somewhere, wearing ridges of old scar tissue as the sad ornaments of his trade.
But at thirty-five, I often felt as if I was only beginning to live (and of course I was right). I wanted more time, and the prospect of death filled me with panic. There were still too many books that I wanted to write and countries to see and women to love. I hadn’t read Balzac or Henry James. I had never been to the Pitti Palace. I wanted to see my daughters walk autonomously in the world. This is the only life I will ever lead (I murmured on morose midnights at the bar of the Lion’s Head), and to end it in my thirties would be unfair.
Today, I accept the inevitable more serenely. I know that I will never write as many books as Georges Simenon or read as many as Edmund Wilson. Nor will I enter a game in late September to triple up the alley in center field and win a pennant for the Mets. But my daughters live on their own in the world. I have read much of Henry James and the best of Balzac and have walked the marbled acres of the Pitti Palace. Middle age is part of the process of completion of a life, and that is why I’ve come to lose the fear of death. I’ve now lived long enough to understand that dying is as natural a part of living as the falling of a leaf.
And yet, sometimes I wake up in the mornings (usually in an unfamiliar room in a strange city) and in the moments between sleep and true consciousness, I am once again in the apartment on Calle Bahia de Morlaco in Mexico City when I was twenty-one, full of possibilities, with my whole life spread out before me. When I realize where I truly am, and that I am fifty-two and no longer that confused and romantic boy, I am filled with an anguished sadness.
In the three decades since I left Mexico (I was a student of painting there on the GI Bill), I have committed my share of stupidities. The first time around, I was a dreadful husband. I tried to be a good father but made many mistakes. As a young newspaper columnist, drunk with language, I occasionally succumbed to mindless self-righteousness, coming down viciously on public men when I could not bear such an assault myself. I treated some women badly and failed others. There were other sins, mortal and venial.
But in middle age, you learn to forgive yourself. Faced with the enormous crimes of the world (and particularly the horrors of this appalling century), you acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misdemeanors. You have slowly recognized the cyclical nature of society’s enthusiasms, from compassion to indifference, from generosity to meanness, liberalism to conservatism and back, as the pendulum cuts its inexorable arc in the air. And you know that such cycles are true of individuals too. Each of us goes from the problems of others to the problems of the self and back again, over and over, for the duration of our lives. And most often, we measure our own triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, against the experiences of others. In middle age, I know that it is already too late to agonize over my personal failings. As Popeye once said, “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all I yam.” The damage of the past is done; nothing can be done to avoid it or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I’m sometimes comforted by remembering that to many people I was also kind. For good or ill, I remain human. That is to say, imperfect.
And yet I would be a liar if I suggested that I have no regrets. It is that emotion (not guilt or remorse) that comes to me in half-sleep. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much of my young manhood drinking; I had some great good times, but I passed too much time impaired. A few of those years are completely lost from memory, and memory is a man’s only durable inheritance (I retired from drinking in 1972, with the title). I’ve employed too much of my talent at potboiling, executing other men’s visions for the movies or television, in order to feed and clothe and house my children and to ward off a slum kid’s fear of poverty; at twenty-one, growing up in the ’50s when the worst of all sins was “selling out,” I could not foresee any of that. Through sloth or absorption in work, I allowed some good friendships to wither. I too rashly sold a house I loved and years later still walk its halls and open all of its closets.
I also regret the loss of the illusions of my youth. This is so familiar a process, of course, that it is a cliché. Better men than I, from the anonymous author of the Book of Ecclesiastes to André Malraux, have acquired the same sorrowful knowledge. It’s difficult to explain to the young the heady excitement that attended the election of John F. Kennedy or the aching hole his death blew through this country. More impossible still to tell them that there actually was a time, when I was young, when Americans thought that change could be effected through politics. When Fidel Castro triumphed over Fulgencio Batista on New Year’s Day in 1959,1 cheered with all my friends; now poor Fidel is just another aging Stalinist. Once I embraced the hope for a democratic socialism. There was so much injustice in the world, from Harlem to Southeast Asia, that I wanted to believe in the generous theory of the creed. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in one of his essays, “When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.”
But soon that theory shrivele
d away, as I read both Marx and history and witnessed the spectacle of “socialist” tanks in Czechoslovakia, the atrocities of Pol Pot, the crushing of Solidarity in Poland. There might again be a time when young Americans will be moved by political idealism or faith in a theory; alas, I won’t be able to join them.
For any truly conscious middle-aged American must recognize that belief is the great killer of the century. Political belief has slaughtered millions. Religious belief has slaughtered the rest. Agree with me or die has been the essential slogan of the believers, at home and abroad, and you could fill every line of every page of every newspaper in the world with the names of their victims and still not have sufficient room. And yet we cannot seem to ever get free of them; charlatans pose as wise men; hustlers offer themselves as redeemers. And in come the brawny young men with the shovels, to turn the earth and bury the dead.
So in middle age, I am permanently secular. Television preachers provide inexhaustible entertainment, on screen and in motel rooms. And I am moved to outbursts of crazy laughter at the irrational gibberish of the New Age pitchmen, whose public appeal so perfectly mirrors that of the Swaggarts and Bakkers. Both represent some peculiarly American mixture of political exhaustion and the fear of death. Here (they say): grip this crucifix or this crystal and place your faith in the unseeable. Don’t worry about the homeless, the starving, the injured, the humiliated; this life is a mere vestibule through which you must pass to greater happiness on the other side of death. Great stuff. But when they start running for the presidency or proclaiming on The Oprah Winfrey Show that they are God, I begin to check the locks on my door.