Herb Stein, who died last month, was chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers. Reflecting on Nixon’s Jewish problem, he wrote that he never felt anything but the utmost respect and friendship from Nixon. Whatever Nixon’s private thoughts, both in his personal relations and in his public actions as president, he was a friend of the Jews.
It is part of the trivialization of politics that we give endless attention to the inner life of the politician—his private thoughts, his inner demons—at the expense of his outer life. I cannot, for example, imagine Pat Buchanan ever saying even in private anything as nasty about Jews as did Nixon. But the public Pat Buchanan goes around fanning hatred for Jews with his sly and not so sly allusions to Jewish power, Jewish influence, Jewish disloyalty. So who is the antisemite?
Obsession with self is the motif of our time. It carries over into our thinking about public figures, to our preoccupation—long predating our fascination with Gary Hart’s nocturnal trysts—with their inner life.
The reductio ad absurdum of this tendency is Edmund Morris’ disastrous book on Reagan. The subject of the book is really not Reagan but Morris, and when Morris does get around to Reagan, it is the inner “Dutch” that interests him, not the politician, the leader, the president.
The results are comical. Seven pages spent on imagining Reagan’s thoughts while making his first movie, four pages on the momentous years 1976–80, when Reagan remade American politics. Between Reagan’s losing the nomination in ’76 and winning the presidency in ’80, the book is a near total blank. We hear about Morris’ encounter with Jimmy Carter, Morris’ publication of his Theodore Roosevelt biography, then get one page—out of 674—on the 1980 campaign.
One modern conceit is that the inner man is more important than the outer man. The second conceit is that somehow, thanks to Freud and modern psychobabble, we have real access to the inner man.
As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly.
Even the experts haven’t a clue. Remember that group of psychiatrists, 1,189 strong, who in 1964 signed a statement asserting their professional judgment that Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be president? The very attempt to make such a diagnosis at a distance is malpractice.
Even Nixon, his private thoughts spilled out on tape forever, is no open book. Sure, the seething cauldron of inchoate hatreds and fears helps explain Watergate. But how do you match that with the man who cut through the paranoia and fear and opened the door to China, fashioned détente and ushered in the era of arms control—something less psychically roiled presidents had not been able to do?
“Know thyself” is a highly overrated piece of wisdom. As for knowing the self of others, forget it. Know what they do and judge them by their works.
The Washington Post, October 15, 1999
THE MIRROR-IMAGE FALLACY
“As is evident just from the look on his face,” observes The New Yorker in a recent reflection on the Lincoln Memorial, “[Lincoln] would have liked to live out a long life surrounded by old friends and good food.” Good food? New Yorker readers have an interest in successful soufflés, but it is hard to recall the most melancholy and spiritual of presidents giving them much thought. New Yorker editors no doubt dream of living out their days grazing in gourmet pastures. But did Lincoln really long to retire to a table at Lutèce?
Solipsism is the belief that the whole world is me, and as mathematician Martin Gardner points out, its authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions. What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin, the belief that the whole world is like me. This species of solipsism—plural solipsism, if you like—is far more common because it is far less lonely. Indeed, it yields a very congenial world populated exclusively by creatures of one’s own likeness, a world in which Lincoln pines for his dinner with André or, more consequentially, where KGB chiefs and Iranian ayatollahs are, well, folks just like us.
The mirror-image fantasy is not as crazy as it seems. Fundamentally, it is a radical denial of the otherness of others. Or to put it another way, a blinding belief in “common humanity,” in the triumph of human commonality over human differences. It is a creed rarely fully embraced (it has a disquieting affinity with martyrdom), but in a culture tired of such ancient distinctions as that between children and adults (in contemporary movies the kids are, if anything, wiser than their parents) or men and women (“I was a better man as a woman with a woman than I’ve ever been as a man with a woman,” says Tootsie), it can acquire considerable force.
Its central axiom is that if one burrows deep enough beneath the Mao jacket, the shapka or the chador, one discovers that people everywhere are essentially the same. Eleven-year-old American anthropologist Samantha Smith was invited to Moscow by Yuri Andropov for firsthand confirmation of just that proposition—a rare Soviet concession to the principle of on-site inspection. After a well-photographed sojourn during which she took in a children’s festival at a Young Pioneer camp (but was spared the paramilitary training), she got the message: “They’re just … almost … just like us,” she announced at her last Moscow press conference. Her mother, who is no longer eleven but makes up for it in open-mindedness, supplied the corollary: “They’re just like us … they prefer to work at their jobs than to work at war.”
That completes the syllogism. We all have “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions.” We are all “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.” It follows, does it not, that we must all want the same things? According to Harvard cardiologist Bernard Lown, president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, that’s not just Shakespeare, it’s a scientific fact “that Russian and American hearts are indistinguishable, that both ache for peace and survival.”
Such breathtaking non sequiturs, cardiological or otherwise, are characteristic of plural solipsism. For it is more than just another happy vision. It is meant to have practical consequences. If people everywhere, from Savannah to Sevastopol, share the same hopes and dreams and fears and love of children (and good food), they should get along. And if they don’t, then there must be some misunderstanding, some misperception, some problem of communication.
As one news report of the recent conference of Soviet and American peace activists in Minneapolis put it, “The issue of human rights sparked a heated discussion … and provided participants with a firsthand view of the obstacles to communication which so often characterize U.S.-Soviet relations.”
It is the broken-telephone theory of international conflict, and it suggests a solution: repair service by the expert “facilitator,” the Harvard negotiations professor. Hence the vogue for peace academies, the mania for mediators, the belief that the world’s conundrums would yield to the right intermediary, the right presidential envoy, the right socialist international delegation. Yet Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini have perfectly adequate phone service. They need only an operator to make the connection. Their problem is that they have very little to say to each other.
There are other consequences. If the whole world is like me, then certain conflicts become incomprehensible; the very notion of intractability becomes paradoxical. When the U.S. embassy in Tehran is taken over, Americans are bewildered. What does the ayatollah want? The U.S. government sends envoys to find out what token or signal or symbolic gesture might satisfy Iran. It is impossible to believe that the ayatollah wants exactly what he says he wants: the head of the shah. Things are not done that way anymore in the West (even the Soviet bloc has now taken to pensioning off deposed leaders). It took a long time for Americans to get the message.
Other messages from exotic cultures are never received at all. The more virulent pro
nouncements of Third World countries are dismissed as mere rhetoric. The more alien the sentiment, the less seriously it is taken. Diplomatic fiascoes follow, like Secretary Shultz’s recent humiliation in Damascus. He persisted in going there despite the fact that President Assad had made it utterly plain that he rejected efforts by the U.S. (the “permanent enemy”) to obtain withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.
Or consider the chronic American frustration with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis consistently declare their refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East, a position so at variance with the Western view that it is simply discounted. Thus successive American governments continue to count on Saudi support for U.S. peace plans, only to be rudely let down. When the Saudis finally make it unmistakably clear that they will support neither Camp David nor the Reagan plan nor the Lebanon accord, the U.S. reacts with consternation. It might have spared itself the surprise if it had not in the first place imagined that underneath those kaffiyehs are folks just like us, sharing our aims and views.
“The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature,” writes Emerson. “The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man.” Ultimately to say that people all share the same hopes and fears, are all born and love and suffer and die alike, is to say very little. For it is after commonalities are accounted for that politics becomes necessary. It is only when values, ideologies, cultures and interests clash that politics even begins. At only the most trivial level can it be said that people want the same things. Take peace. The North Vietnamese want it, but apparently they wanted to conquer all of Indochina first. The Salvadoran right and left both want it, but only after making a desert of the other. The Reagan administration wants it, but not if it has to pay for it with pieces of Central America.
And even if one admits universal ends, one still has said nothing about means, about what people will risk, will permit, will commit in order to banish their (common) fears and pursue their (common) hopes. One would think that after the experience of this century the belief that a harmony must prevail between peoples who share a love of children and small dogs would be considered evidence of a most grotesque historical amnesia.
From where does the idea of a world of likes come? In part from a belief in universal brotherhood, a belief that is parodied, however, when one pretends that the ideal already exists. In part from a trendy ecological pantheism with its misty notions of the oneness of those sharing this lonely planet. In part from the Enlightenment belief in a universal human nature, a slippery modern creation that for all its universality manages in every age to take on a decidedly middle-class look.
For the mirror-image fantasy derives above all from the coziness of middle-class life. The more settled and ordered one’s life—and in particular one’s communal life—the easier it becomes for one’s imagination to fail. In Scarsdale, destitution and desperation, cruelty and zeal are the stuff of headlines, not life. Thus a single murder can create a sensation; in Beirut it is a statistic. When the comfortable encounter the unimaginable, the result is not only emotional but cognitive rejection. Brutality and fanaticism beyond one’s ken must be made to remain there; thus, for example, when evidence mounts of biological warfare in faraway places, the most fanciful theories may be produced to banish the possibility.
To gloss over contradictory interests, incompatible ideologies and opposing cultures as sources of conflict is more than anti-political. It is dangerous. Those who have long held a mirror to the world and seen only themselves are apt to be shocked and panicked when the mirror is removed, as inevitably it must be. On the other hand, to accept the reality of otherness is not to be condemned to a war of all against all. We are not then compelled to see in others the focus of evil in the world. We are still enjoined to love our neighbors as ourselves. Only it no longer becomes an exercise in narcissism.
But empathy that is more than self-love does not come easily. Particularly not to a culture so fixed on its own image that it can look at Lincoln, gaunt and grave, and see a man ready to join the queue at the pâté counter at Zabar’s.
Time, August 15, 1983
CHAPTER 5
PASSIONS AND PASTIMES
THE JOY OF LOSING
Among my various idiosyncrasies, the most baffling to my friends is my steadfast devotion to the Washington Nationals. When I wax lyrical about having discovered my own private paradise at Nationals Park, eyes begin to roll and it is patiently explained to me that my Nats have been not just bad, but prodigiously—epically—bad.
As if I don’t know. They lost 102 games in 2008; 103 in 2009. That’s no easy feat. Only three other teams in the last quarter-century have achieved back-to-back 100-loss seasons.
Now understand: This is not the charming, cuddly, amusing incompetence of, say, the ’62 Mets, of whom their own manager, Casey Stengel, famously asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”—and whose stone-gloved first baseman, Marv Throneberry, was nicknamed Marvelous Marv, the irony intended as a sign of affection.
Nor am I talking about heroic, stoic, character-building losing. The Chicago Cubs fan knows that he’s destined for a life of Sisyphean suffering and perpetual angst. Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, may have said, “Let’s play two,” but in 19 years he never got to play even one postseason game. These guys go 58 years without winning, then come within five outs of the National League pennant, only to have one of their own fans deflect a ball about to settle into a Cub outfielder’s glove, killing the play and bringing on the unraveling.
The fan was driven into hiding and the fateful ball ritually exorcised, blown to smithereens on TV. Sorry, that’s not my kind of losing. Been there. I’m a former Red Sox fan, now fully rehabilitated. No, I don’t go to games to steel my spine, perfect my character, journey into the dark night of the soul. I get that in my day job watching the Obama administration in action.
I go for relief. For the fun, for the craft (beautifully elucidated in George Will’s just-reissued classic Men at Work) and for the sweet, easy cheer at Nationals Park.
You get there and the twilight’s gleaming, the popcorn’s popping, the kids’re romping and everyone’s happy. The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment. In Tuesday night’s game, our starting pitcher couldn’t get out of the third inning. Gave up four straight hits, six earned runs, and as he came off the mound, actually got a few scattered rounds of applause.
Applause! In New York, he’d have been booed mercilessly. In Philly, he’d have found his car on blocks and missing a headlight.
No one’s happy to lose, and the fans cheer lustily when the Nats win. But as starters blow up and base runners get picked off, there is none of the agitation, the angry, screaming, beer-spilling, red-faced ranting you get at football or basketball games.
Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn’t lend itself to histrionics. You “take in” a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.
And for a losing baseball team, the calm is even more profound. I’ve never been to a park where the people are more relaxed, tolerant and appreciative of any small, even moral, victory. Sure, you root, root, root for the home team, but if they don’t win “it’s a shame”—not a calamity. Can you imagine arm-linked fans swaying to such a sweetly corny song of early-20th-century innocence—as hard to find today as a manual typewriter or a 20-game winner—at the two-minute warning?
But now I fear for my bliss. Hope, of a sort, is on the way—in the form of Stephen Strasburg, the greatest pitching prospect in living memory. His fastball clocks 103 mph and his slider, says Tom Boswell, breaks so sharply it looks like it hit a bird in midair. In spring training, center fielder Nyjer Morgan nicknamed him Jesus. Because of the kid’s presence, persona, charisma? Nope. Because “that’s what everybody says the first time they see Stra
sburg throw,” explained Morgan. “Jeeee-sus.”
But now I’m worried. Even before Strasburg has arrived from the minor leagues, the Nats are actually doing well. They’re playing .500 ball for the first time in five years. They are hovering somewhere between competent mediocrity and respectability. When Jesus arrives—my guess is late May—they might actually be good.
They might soon be, gasp, a contender. In the race deep into September. Good enough to give you hope. And break your heart.
Where does one then go for respite?
The Washington Post, April 23, 2010
BEAUTY, TRUTH AND HITCHCOCK
While the rest of the sporting world was distracted with sideshows—the World Series, the Douglas-Holyfield fight—the main event was being played out in utter silence at the Hudson Theater on Broadway, where the two best players in the world, Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, were fighting it out for the championship of chess. (After 12 games, the match is tied.)
Now, mention chess and most people’s eyes glaze over. They think of two old geezers, one of whom has died but no one has noticed, in overstuffed armchairs at the Diogenes Club. Know how chess crowds do the wave? guffawed a CBS newsreader. With their eyebrows.
Ho, ho. What the benighted don’t understand is that modern chess is played not just against an opponent but against a clock. It thus produces a heart-stopping equivalent of football’s two-minute drill. At Move 32 of Game 8, for example, challenger Karpov, losing, was forced to make nine moves in less than three minutes. He executed them in a dazzling flurry that didn’t just leave him winning; it left the crowd stunned and silent. Except, that is, for one patron who, unnerved by Karpov’s preposterous escape, let out a loud, shocking laugh.
Moreover, the place to watch world-championship chess is not in the theater but five floors up, in the analysis room. There the action is frenzied. One TV monitor shows the players and the running time clocks. The other shows the latest board position. Scattered about are a score of the greatest players in the world, a couple of whom are standing at the front trying dozens of follow-on combinations on a large demonstration board. The result is a tumult of lightning analysis, inspired second-guessing, withering criticism, contemptuous asides, suggestions and refutations as the pros search for the best possible “lines” into the future.
Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics Page 9