Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  Result? Stalemate. How does this movie end? How should it end? Hurry, the ship’s going down.

  Time, March 30, 1998

  DON’T TOUCH MY JUNK

  Ah, the airport, where modern folk heroes are made. The airport, where that inspired flight attendant did what everyone who’s ever been in the spam–in–a–can crush of a flying aluminum tube—where we collectively pretend that a clutch of peanuts is a meal and a seat cushion is a “flotation device”—has always dreamed of doing: Pull the lever, blow the door, explode the chute, grab a beer, slide to the tarmac and walk through the gates to the sanity that lies beyond. Not since Rick and Louis disappeared into the Casablanca fog headed for the Free French garrison in Brazzaville has a stroll on the tarmac thrilled so many.

  Who cares that the crazed steward got arrested, pleaded guilty to sundry charges and probably was a rude, unpleasant SOB to begin with? Bonnie and Clyde were psychopaths, yet what child of the ’60s did not fall in love with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty?

  And now three months later, the newest airport hero arrives. His genius was not innovation in getting out, but in deconstructing the entire process of getting in. John Tyner, cleverly armed with an iPhone to give YouTube immortality to the encounter, took exception to the TSA guard about to give him the benefit of Homeland Security’s newest brainstorm—the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett’s, warning the agent not to “touch my junk.”

  Not quite the 18th-century elegance of “Don’t Tread on Me,” but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch.

  Don’t touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don’t touch my junk, Obamacare—get out of my doctor’s examining room, I’m wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don’t touch my junk, Google—Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon—my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

  In Up in the Air, that ironic take on the cramped freneticism of airport life, George Clooney explains why he always follows Asians in the security line:

  “They pack light, travel efficiently and they got a thing for slip-on shoes, God love ’em.”

  “That’s racist!”

  “I’m like my mother. I stereotype. It’s faster.”

  That riff is a crowd-pleaser because everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes. Beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants. Three-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives—when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.

  The ultimate idiocy is the full-body screening of the pilot. The pilot doesn’t need a bomb or box cutter to bring down a plane. All he has to do is drive it into the water, like the EgyptAir pilot who crashed his plane off Nantucket while intoning “I rely on God,” killing all on board.

  But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety—95% of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling—when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.

  The junk man’s revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy. Metal detector? Back-of-the-hand pat? Okay. We will swallow hard and pretend airline attackers are randomly distributed in the population.

  But now you insist on a full-body scan, a fairly accurate representation of my naked image to be viewed by a total stranger? Or alternatively, the full-body pat-down, which, as the junk man correctly noted, would be sexual assault if performed by anyone else?

  This time you have gone too far, Big Bro’. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don’t touch my junk.

  The Washington Post, November 19, 2010

  ACCENTS AND AFFECTATIONS

  When I was a kid, movie Indians said things like “me no like-um paleface.” No one ever explained the origins of the peculiar “-um” declension, but no matter. Logic was not expected of Indians, and the same held for other native peoples in other movies, from Tarzan on up.

  Things have changed. The dignity of language has been restored to movie Indians (well, PBS Indians—there are none left in the movies). They speak in their own tongue now, and the subtitles report them saying lyrical things like, “The cry of the night pierces the soul of my darkness.”

  This process of language decolonization follows the general political decolonization of the last 30 years. It also follows modern recognition of the dignity and complexity of native cultures. That is all to the good. It even makes more fictional sense for Indians to be speaking something other than a bizarre variant of Ellis Island English.

  The trend, however, has not stopped there. It never does. Linguistic emancipation, it seems, is for everyone. Even, say, cavemen. Twenty years ago, the Hollywood Neanderthal communicated with a pound on the chest and a wield of the club. It is hard to see one today for whom some consultant anthropologist has not invented a language as elaborate as it is bogus. And honored, like the highest German, with subtitles. Thankfully, the movement to subtitle dolphins is stalled.

  I find these good intentions strained but tolerable. Less tolerable is the direction of another wing of the language decolonization movement, the school of Militant Anti-Colonials—MACs for short. MACs insist that whenever, in conversation, you cross an international border, you must turn in your English and go native. A MAC is the guy (English-speaking) who, in the middle of a discourse (in English) about Central America, tells you that you totally misunderstand the situation in Neeeee-kahh-RAAAHH-gwahhh.

  Neeeee-kahh-RAAAHH-gwahhh? Pronouncing Nicaragua the Spanish way is perhaps a sign of sophistication, but it is also an advertisement of one’s raised consciousness. More annoying still is the ringingly rococo “elll sahl-vahh-DOHRRRRR,” all liquid l’s and rolling r’s, climaxed in the triumphantly accented last syllable. All this to signify hopes for a liberated El Salvador and, some day, a liberated listener.

  MACs can easily be picked out of a crowd even before their conversation has wandered south. A MAC is anyone who carefully and aggressively says “North America” to mean “United States” (as in “North American aggression”) to demonstrate that he has transcended the imperial (North) American tendency to appropriate for one country the name of two continents.

  I can take this oblique swipe at the Monroe Doctrine. What I cannot take is the follow-up reference to, say, the drug problem in “Kohl-LOHHHHM-bia.” My habit now is to respond with the observation that the problem is seen very differently in Paa-RRREEEE, is ignored totally in Mohs-KVA, though it has provoked street demonstrations in KUE-bin-hah-ven (DAN-mark).

  Not that such an anti-MAC attack ever satisfies. But it does make the point that what drives English-speaking MACs is not a sense of linguistic authenticity but merely a bad colonial conscience. They would never think of assaulting you with “Mahhh-DRRREEED.” We never sent a Marine there.

  In my calmer moments I do admit the existence of a real dilemma here. It is a problem: How do you pronounce a foreign-language word when speaking English?

  My answer: When in Rome, speak Roman; when in America (what some
call the United States), speak English. Drop the umlauts, the aigues and graves, and give foreign words their most mundane English rendering.

  About the use of fancy accents in mundane situations, I speak from experience. When I was five, my family moved to Montreal, in part because it was French-speaking (my mother being Belgian, my father French). But our French was not the kind spoken in Quebec. Ours was what Montrealers called “Parisian” French, the language of Quebec’s upper class (i.e., snobs, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who once dismissed Robert Bourassa, the current Quebec premier and of working-class origins, as “a hot dog eater”). This bit of local sociology was unknown to me the first time I got on a bus and asked, in my Parisian French, for directions. The bus driver did not take kindly to being linguistically patronized by a creature four feet tall and wearing short pants. I learned my lesson. From then on I used only English in public.

  But one can’t totally avoid foreign words, even when speaking English. I still did not know what to do with French words that pop up in everyday English. For years, I doggedly, and self-consciously, pronounced déjà vu precisely as my folks insisted at home, with sharps and flats and lips pursed (“vuh”) as if to whistle.

  Then came Déjà Vu, the album. It’s been “vooo” ever since. One does not discuss Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in an Inspector Clouseau accent. The gig was up. Time to learn to embrace English, jettison flatulent foreignness and say ciao to all that. So how about it, guys? Ni-cuh-rag-wa.

  The Washington Post, July 11, 1986

  THE APPEAL OF ORDEAL

  William Butler Yeats tells of Icelandic peasants who found a skull in a cemetery and suspected it might be that of the poet Egill. “Its great thickness made them feel certain it was,” he writes, but “to be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer.” When it did not break, “they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet and worthy of every honor.”

  The human propensity to test the worthiness of a thing by seeing how well it stands up to abuse—the instinct to kick the tires on a used car—is an ancient and, if Yeats is to be trusted, occasionally charming habit. It can also be painful. Trial by ordeal, the venerable and once widespread practice by which fire or poison or some other divining element is used to determine a person’s guilt or innocence, is the kick-to-test instinct applied to living subjects. It used to be a popular method for deciding whether or not someone was a witch, perhaps because what the practice lacked in fairness—the ancient Hindus tied a bag of cayenne pepper around the head of an accused witch, and suffocation was the only proof of innocence—it made up for in finality.

  We have come a long way since those dark days. Or have we? We no longer pick our witches or our poets this way, but that is because moderns have little interest in either. When it comes to things they are interested in—doctors, lawyers, presidents—they have replaced skull-bashing and suffocation with more subtle ordeals. Aspiring doctors must first survive the pressure cooker of a sleepless year of internship, aspiring lawyers the cutthroat paper chase of first-year law school. And those who aspire to the most exalted title of all, president, are required to traverse a campaign trail of Homeric peril. Its length is ludicrous: three years for any serious candidate; its requirements absurd: giving up privacy, often family and almost always a job (“You have to be unemployed to run for president,” says Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, who leaves the Senate in January and is pondering a run for the presidency in 1988); and its purpose obscure: posing with funny hats has, on the face of it, little to do with the subject at hand, namely, governing.

  The ritual seems strange. Things just aren’t done that way anymore. Not even in Chad, where ten years ago President Ngarta Tombalbaye ordered all high government officials to undergo Yondo, a sometimes fatal initiation ritual combining physical abuse (e.g., flogging, mock burial) with ingeniously gruesome tests of stamina (e.g., crawling naked through a nest of termites). For his pains, Tombalbaye was assassinated within a year, and his people danced in the streets. Americans bear their burdens with better humor. They show no inclination to deal nearly so decisively with, say, the Hubert Humphrey test of presidential toughness. Humphrey once questioned whether Walter Mondale had the “fire in the belly” to run for president, a charge so serious that to meet it Mr. Mondale had to submit to a three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow. Mondale may have other political liabilities, but the absence of a burning belly is no longer one of them.

  There is only one point to these trials: to humble. The imposed, often improbable ordeal is a form of payment, dues demanded of people who are about to be rewarded with high position. It is a form of democratic practice, laying low the mighty before we bestow upon them prestige and power. It is, as an Icelandic peasant might see it, poetic justice.

  But what of the ordeal not mandated by others? How to understand the current passion for the self-imposed, the recreational ordeal? A marathon, after all, is a voluntary thing, and for 99.9% of the 95,000 Americans who run marathons every year, there is nothing awaiting them at the finish line except a blanket and bottled oxygen. Yet the marathon has become so commonplace that a new sport had to be created: the triathlon, a monstrous composite of three consecutive marathons (swimming, biking and running a total of often a hundred miles or more). And now the upper classes have taken the fun indoors. A few years ago the rage was Napoleon, a silent film 4½ hours long. Then came the stage production of Nicholas Nickleby, 9½ hours, including snack-and-comfort breaks. Now we’re up to 15½ hours with Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, shown in either five, two or occasionally one grand sitting of “sheer exhilarating length” (Vincent Canby, New York Times)—and subtitles.

  To be sure, the self-inflicted ordeal was not invented yesterday. The 1920s had marathon dancing, and the Guinness Book of World Records is full of champion oyster eaters and HulaHoopers. But such activities used to be recognized as exotic, the province of the down-and-out or the eccentric. The 24-hour underwater Parcheesi game was for slightly nutty college freshmen. Running 26 miles at a shot was for the most hardened athlete, preferably a barefoot Ethiopian. Nowadays, a 26-mile run is Sunday afternoon recreation, an alternative to a day at the beach or on the lawn mower. As for evening recreation, Fassbinder’s epic is so popular that the Wall Street Journal dubbed it “the Flashdance of the intelligentsia.”

  What’s new is not the odd individual who rows the Atlantic left-handed while eating only salted peanuts, nor the collegians perched atop flagpoles for reasons still unknown. It is the midday, mainstream, Main Street marathoner. The modern wonder is to be found on America’s heartbreak hills, where it has become impossible to drive without running across (and nearly over) at least one bedraggled jogger drenched in sweat and close to collapse, the very picture of agony. Why do they do it?

  The participants will tell you that they go to marathon movies for culture. They run for health. They spend 48 consecutive hours locked in a Holiday Inn ballroom in enforced communion with complete strangers and call it therapy. (Sartre had another word for it: He once wrote a play based on the convincing premise that hell was being locked in a room forever with other people.) But surely there are less trying ways to acquire culture, health or psychological succor.

  There are, but the ordeal offers as a bonus two very chic commodities. One is survivorship, the highest achievement of the modern self-celebratory ethic, best exemplified by the I-SURVIVED-THE-BLIZZARD-OF-’77 T-shirt. Survivorship, however, is capriciously doled out. Not everyone can live in Buffalo or have a Malibu beach house obliterated by a mud slide. For the average Joe, there is no cachet in surviving the 5:22 to White Plains. How, then, to earn the badge of honor that is survivorship? Create an ordeal. Run the Western States 100 (miles, that is) over the Sierra Nevada (they say that horses have died racing the trail), and live to talk about it. Or attend the first modern showing of Napoleon, held in the Colorado Rockies, outdoors, from 10:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and feel, in the words of the m
an who put the film together, “Like survivors of the retreat from Moscow.”

  The other modern good greatly in demand is the learning experience. Ordeal is a great teacher. A group of adventuresome souls staged an unbelievable race on New York’s Randall’s Island last year: a six-day run, the winner being the person who could traverse the most ground and survive. The race was run around an oval track, subjecting the runners not only to blisters, dehydration and shin splints, but to the overwhelming ennui of unchanging scenery. When reporters swarmed around the runners to ask why they did it, many replied that they had learned a lot about themselves. They never said exactly what it was they learned, but they seemed satisfied that it was important. “Because it is there” has become “Because I am here.”

  Like the ancients, moderns believe that one can learn about something by subjecting it to the ultimate test: beat the skull, and find the poet. Only today we insist on beating our own skulls, and not quite for the pleasure of stopping.

  Why, then? The prestige of survivorship and the hunger for learning experiences are only partial explanations. The somewhat misanthropic economist Thorstein Veblen described the larger phenomenon. He hypothesized a new kind of good, demand for which, contrary to economic law and common sense, increases with price. In the end, the recreational ordeal is just the latest example of a Veblenesque status good, periodically invented for the amusement and prestige of the leisured classes. Now that everyone can afford status items like designer jeans, conspicuous consumption gives way to conspicuous exertion. Sheer exhilarating length becomes a value in itself. And the triathlon comes to represent, to quote a winner of the Hawaiian Ironman race (2.4-mile ocean swim, 112-mile bike ride, 26.2-mile marathon run), “the ultimate expression of the Southern California life-style.”