The program began with long cuts from the debates, a spectacle I had last watched through my twelve-year-old eyes back in Wyoming. Seeing them again, I realized they had been important not because they had decided the contest for young Senator Kennedy but because they had also fundamentally changed the nature of the office itself.
From that point on, the president of the United States became more a movie star than a leader, more myth than manager, more affect than intellect. After those debates, it was far more important that a presidential candidate did not have a five o’clock shadow than that he offered ideas that could suffer real scrutiny.
Far be it from me to defend the genuinely vile Nixon or to defame the genuinely dashing Kennedy, but I was surprised by the clarity and persuasiveness of what Nixon actually said during those debates. On the other hand, Kennedy said some things that were not very thoughtful, such as his assertion that it was more important for our country to have good missile technology than abundant color televisions.
But his appearance, the visual semiotics of his virtual self, was just as smooth as Nixon’s was lumpy. I was looking at the first decisive national instance in which what a politician said meant far less than his ability to look like he really meant it. The most striking realization that came to me as I watched the tapes was that Kennedy was not so much elected president by television as he was elected president of television itself, the strange projection from which most Americans have since derived their map of reality.
Kennedy was also an integral part of the process by which television itself became the president. Ever since then, this medium has defined our national agenda in ways that were often at odds with what might have been dictated by either sense or experience, until what we’re left with today is what I like to call Government by Hallucinating Mob.
As I watched all those shiny old black-and-white kinescopes, I felt I was seeing the transformation to this malignant new form take place right before my eyes. During several sequences, it also became clear to me that the most important debater was not Kennedy or Nixon but Sander Vanocur. Like when he sprung it on Nixon that his former boss, President Eisenhower, had said he couldn’t think of any policy decision in which Nixon had played a decisive role. It was a lot harder and a far more damaging shot than any taken by Kennedy. Never before had a mere reporter been able to exercise such power in real time before an entire nation.
As the only geek on the panel, I spoke last. While I waited for my turn, I had to listen to all these bland encomiums generally larded upon the Internet by politicos whose only knowledge of it had come from traditional media. At least none of them called it “the Information Superhighway.”
They all talked about the Internet as though it were the nineties version of the space program, a wonderful and huge government project that America needed to undertake for reasons that were not entirely clear. However, they acknowledged that it would have a role in upcoming elections, much like the one the first televised presidential debates had played so decisively.
* * *
—
I must have said something fairly interesting when I sat on that panel because two years later, I was invited back to Harvard to become a fellow at the school’s Institute of Politics. I spent the spring semester there leading a study group called “Cyberspace vs. Metaspace: Border Conflicts Between the Virtual and the Physical Worlds.”
I got to live in the two-room suite in Winthrop House that John F. Kennedy had occupied during his senior year at Harvard. I was smoking quite a lot at the time, even though I wasn’t supposed to do so in those rooms. Given my long-standing relationship with John F. Kennedy, Jr., I felt like I was desecrating the place.
The seminars themselves were great. Twice a week for an hour and a half, I would meet with about thirty people from the entire Harvard archipelago—undergraduates as well as students from the law school, the business school, and the Kennedy School of Government. I wanted to expose them all to the founding fathers of the Internet, so I brought in a grab bag of people, including Vint Cerf, Alan Kay, Len Kleinrock, and Acid Phreak.
After having spent eighteen years representing Wyoming in the U.S. Senate, my lifelong friend Alan Simpson was then running Harvard’s Institute of Politics. I’d actually had something to do with helping him get the appointment, and the two of us had a fine time there. Nobody has a more obscene mouth than Al Simpson. He literally cannot get through a sentence without using at least one shockingly creative bad word. We would get into these disagreements and write emails back and forth to each other that were just unconscionable.
Both of us had a lot of latitude there, and we would pick the people we wanted to speak at the seminars and then take them to dinner, and it was great. This was the first time the two of us had been able to just hang out together, and I would amble down the hall to his office and put my feet up on his desk and we would sit there talking about Wyoming politics.
Alan Simpson is the only U.S. senator I have ever truly loved. Back when he was running for reelection to the Senate for the first time, he decided to try to shake the hand of every voter in Wyoming. On the day before the election, he found himself at a party in a remote part of the state. After working his way through everyone there, Alan walked up a hill to where a drunk cowboy was leaning against a tree with his hat pulled down low over his face.
Putting out his hand to the cowboy, Alan said, “I’m running for Senate and I’d like your vote.” Shaking Alan’s hand, the cowboy said, “You got it. Because that sumbitch we got there now is no damn good.”
Alan’s parents, Milward and Lorna, were contemporaries of my folks, and so Alan himself was always like a member of our family. Al is sixteen years older than me, and our relationship was fraternal, almost like he was an older brother. For many years, I described myself as an Al Simpson Republican, and I would still do so if that meant anything to anybody besides Al Simpson. He was a conservationist, a fiscal conservative, and a social liberal. He wasn’t enthusiastic about abortion, but he also recognized how things were.
Al’s wife, Ann, is unquestionably one of the most graceful, beautiful, self-contained human beings I have ever known. They just do not come any better than Alan K. Simpson, but Ann has always really been his saving grace. Back when they were arguing about immigration reform in the Senate, Al was the head of the immigration subcommittee. There were like ninety amendments that had to get voted on up or down, and all this had to be done in a single afternoon that wound up going on until about two o’clock in the morning.
It was one of those rare times where the entire goddamn U.S. Senate was in the room together, a spectacle you do not see every day, which is just as well. I was sitting in the gallery with Ann, and after this had all been going on for hours, I turned to her and said, “God, it’s a marvel they get anything done.” And she said, “It’s a grace they don’t do more.”
I also had a role in talking Al out of running for his fourth term in the Senate. I felt he had reached a nadir while questioning Anita Hill during the hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Al was not just on the committee, he was also engaged in active nastiness and cruelty to her, and he knew it. He just got caught up in the mob, as one sometimes can.
During the time I was at the Institute of Politics, I actually took Anita Hill out. We had the same speakers bureau and she contacted them and said, “This guy John Perry Barlow seems really interesting. I wonder if you could get us together.” This was quite a while after the hearing, and she was then teaching at Brandeis. I don’t think she knew about my connection to Al Simpson.
We went on about three dates, and it was pretty casual. She was still somewhat traumatized by what she had gone through, but Anita is a tough cookie and not quite the victim that one might conclude. I tried really hard to get her and Al together, because I felt like they owed each other a conversation. But he was still truly embarrassed about that phas
e of his political life, and so it never happened.
After he was displaced as the Republican whip by Trent Lott, Al decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore. He felt that serving in the Senate for so long had turned him into something he did not want to be. Al and Ann and I talked about it at some length at a Thanksgiving dinner we had together, and that was the conclusion we all drew.
Everybody in Wyoming still loved Alan Simpson, and had he run he would have definitely been reelected. The only way that would not have happened, he said, was if he had been found in bed with a live man or a dead woman.
FORTY-THREE
TWO FUNERALS
My mother died on July 10, 1999. She was ninety-four, and pretty much died just from being old. About an hour and a half before she passed, she made a dirty joke that just about had me rolled over. We had this guy named David taking care of her who was gay, and he took her into the bathroom. Much to my surprise, even though it took her a very long time, she finally managed to get something done in there.
When she came back out, she said, “I hate having somebody fooling around with my bum.” Then she paused and looked at him and said, “But you, David, you love somebody fooling around with your bum.”
I was there when she passed, and I had already forgiven her all of her sins a couple of years before. It was the smartest thing I ever did because then they all evaporated. But I had never forgiven her to her face, because I felt she would regard that as a sign of weakness. I don’t know how I knew this, but I could see she was about to say the last thing she was ever going to say, and so I looked into her eyes and said, “I forgive you everything.” And she said, “Yes. I know.” That was all she had left to say and then she passed away.
In those days, I was putting out something I called the Barlow Spam that went out to about 2,500 people all over the planet. I had written up an account of my mother’s life and death on it, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., had received it. The reason he was late getting to his plane on Friday, July 16, was that he was writing an exceptionally long email to me, which I did not receive and read until the afternoon following my mother’s burial.
John didn’t like email. He was dyslexic, and writing made him feel uncomfortable. He thought of himself as less literate than he really was. In the email, John said he was so glad I had been with my mother when she died. He had been with his mother at that moment and knew this would be one of the most important experiences in my life. He also said that now would be a good time for me to come see him so we could reflect on this together.
On the morning of my mother’s funeral in Pinedale, which I had intended to be a joyous event to celebrate her life, I got a phone call telling me John’s plane had gone missing. I was the one who had taught him how to fly in Wyoming in a Cessna, and in fact I’d had a phone conversation with him about two weeks earlier in which I told him I felt like he knew just enough about flying to be dangerous.
My exact words to him had been, “You are always as chronically late as I am because you are constantly enchanted by whatever is going on in the immediate present. It wouldn’t do to set one’s watch by either of us. This means you are going to fly yourself into conditions that wouldn’t have existed had you left on time. Which means that you will find, as I have, that you are flying on instruments whether you have an instrument rating or not.
“I have just one thing to ask of you. Which is if you lose sight of the horizon, don’t look for it. Just put your eyes on the instruments and believe them. Pay no attention to what may seem to be going on outside the aircraft.”
But when John flew into the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard an hour later than he had planned, he lost sight of the horizon due to a well-known ocean effect that I had encountered many times while flying back east. And he did exactly the wrong thing.
My first desire upon hearing what had happened was to believe that John and his wife, Carolyn, had staged a complete disappearance so they could join their own special witness protection program, get plastic surgery, and have a life like other people. It was an extraordinary fantasy. I wanted Carolyn to have a better life than she did. John had been exposed to the media all along, and so he was far more accustomed to dealing with it than she was.
On September 21, 1996, I had attended John and Carolyn’s wedding on Cumberland Island, a former enclave for the Carnegies and the Rockefellers located about seven miles off the Georgia coast. To keep the media from overwhelming the event, the whole thing was kept hush-hush, and all the guests were instructed not to even talk about it on their cellphones. John and Carolyn had done blood tests and signed their marriage licenses on separate private plane flights before the ceremony.
Everyone who had been invited to the wedding stayed in a lovely inn that had once been part of the Carnegie compound, and John and Carolyn were married in the First African Baptist Church on the northern end of the island in a community that had been settled by former slaves. The entire event was beautiful and incredibly moving, and I was truly honored to have been there. John had attended my wedding to Elaine, and if I had ever been given the opportunity to marry Cynthia, he would have been there as well.
My initial reaction to John’s death was that it was a lot like losing a younger brother, but over the course of the years we had known each other we’d had a bunch of different relationships. What had begun as kind of a father-son connection had become two guys hanging out. Then John began to be like a father to me, because he was the one person I would turn to when I needed insight on how to manage something gracefully on an emotional level. Both of us knew a lot about death, and he had totally been there for me after Cynthia died.
Not many people knew what a truly remarkable human being John was, and how successful he was in what he was really trying to do. He set out to be a good man. That was his central goal. When John was a junior at Brown, he called me one night and said, “You know, this is going to sound incredibly arrogant, but it would be a cakewalk for me to be a great man. I’m completely set up. Everyone expects me to be a great man. I even have a lot of the skills and tools.
“The thing is, I’ve been reading the biographies of great men, and it seems like all of them, my father included, were shitheads when they got home. Even Gandhi beat his wife. What I think would be a much more interesting and challenging ambition for me would be to set out to become a good man—to define what that is, and become that. Not many people would know, but I would have the satisfaction of knowing.”
In 1993, about seven months after John had saved the life of one of his friends by rescuing him from the water after his kayak capsized, the two of us went to see Prince perform at Radio City Music Hall. We were both tripping, and Prince was going off and the place was full of all these bridge and tunnel people who were swaying in their seats like kelp in a mild swell.
Nobody was dancing, and John turned to me and said, “I bet if you and I got up and started to dance, everybody would.” And I said, “I think that’s possibly true, but there’s also a good chance if we do get up to dance, there will be a feeding frenzy directed at you.” He said, “That’s a risk I’ll take.” So we got up and started to dance and then everybody got up and started dancing. Nobody even recognized him.
The last time I saw John alive was at a dinner party held by this foundation he and Paul Newman had created to give awards to corporations that had made significant differences in their communities, and for their workers. John thought if he put me right across the table from him in this slot between Puff Daddy and Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican senator from Long Island, he would get a chance to see me dig Puff Daddy and go right on hating Alfonse D’Amato.
I hadn’t been in my seat for more than two minutes before I knew I didn’t want to have much conversation at all with Puff Daddy, while Alfonse D’Amato and I immediately tried to figure out ways to make each other laugh even harder.
It was a round table, and John kept look
ing slyly back and forth at us. At one point, D’Amato said, “You know what we gotta do?” I said, “What?” And he said, “We gotta get your friend there to run for may-ah of New Yawk on the Republican ticket.” I said, “It doesn’t strike me as out of the question.” When I told John about it, he was amused, but back then the Republicans had not yet turned themselves into the nightmare they have since become.
Some people do not seem destined to get old. John was definitely one of them. He was truly a sporting lad; if he had lived, I think he would have come up with all manner of ways to crank the system. He really did love New York, and the idea of him becoming mayor would not have been out of the question.
FORTY-FOUR
BRAZIL
Gilberto Gil, who had just become the minister of culture in Brazil, had read my essay “The Economy of Ideas.” Without informing me, he translated it into Portuguese. He felt it contained a vision of what needed to happen in order to return the ownership of Brazil’s genetic code—namely its music—from the clutches of Hollywood assholes who then controlled nearly all the copyrights.
As it turned out, Gil and I had a mutual friend who emailed me one day and asked if I would like to meet the minister of culture of Brazil. Both Gil and I were going to be speaking at Midem in Cannes in January 2004, and my friend asked if I would mind getting together with him there.
Midem, an acronym for Marché International du Disque et de l’Edition Musicale, is a massive music-business trade show attended by hundreds of lawyers, publishers, agents, managers, and artists. They had invited me only so the lawyers could take shots at my position about the use of music copyrights on the Internet.
Mother American Night Page 21