by John Leonard
Which brings us back to the grubby and the brutish. Marshall Berman itemizes everything Tom Wolfe never noticed: “spectacular giveaways to real estate operators; the attacks on the poor, depriving them of industrial work, low-income housing, public hospitals;… the casual brutality that has come to permeate our public life, as in the recent wave of mass arrests to drive homeless people out of the railway terminals that the city’s own development policies have driven them into; the triumphal march of the city’s rejuvenated political machines, whose movers… have made the 1980s one long carnival of white-collar crime; the rescue of the city from the clutches of a hostile federal government, by selling it (or giving it away) to rapacious real estate empires that will tear down anything or throw up anything, if it pays; the long-term transformation of New York into a place where capital from anywhere in the world is instantly at home, while everybody without capital is increasingly out of place.”
In this corner: the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Coliseum, Lincoln Center, Westway, Zuckermandias, Trump Television City, Times Square as Alphaville and Disney World. In the opposite corner: the homeless—the usual ghosts, of course, on the brownstone stoop with the little green bottles, and the bag lady who reads Vogue, and the portly sociopath with the green beret and the eight-inch pigsticker, as well as the ambassador of this month’s designer-zombie mushroom, nodding off on his way to where the action isn’t. But they were our “regulars,” and they’ve been overwhelmed by a deindustrialized proletariat, a ragged army of the dispossessed, a supply-side migratory tide of angry beggars and runaway refugee children and almost catatonic nomads. Have you seen the cold-water, crime-ridden, disease-spreading shelters in which we “warehouse” these dropouts and castaways? They are safer on the streets, except for Crazy Eddie and his net. In the parks, of course, we burn them alive.
There are as many as 100,000 homeless in the imperial city today. In the last twenty years—the years of the 2.5 million “newcomers”—housing production has decreased from 60,000 new units in 1966 to 7,000 in 1985 (Huxtable). Twenty-five percent of us live below the poverty line. At the end of World War II there were a million jobs in New York light industries; it’s down today to 400,000. White unemployment is 7.2 percent, blacks, 11.5, Hispanics, 13.4; the white young, 22.5; black young, 47.9 (Tyler)—47.9, all of them Pimp Rolling on Wolfe’s subway.
Meanwhile, why do you suppose that real-estate developers, brokerage houses, and their law firms forked out over $4 million in 1985 campaign contributions to Koch and the other seven members of the Board of Estimate? Maybe because Koch and the board have given these same people $11.3 billion in property tax breaks and zoning variances since 1978 (Jim Sleeper). Since 1981 we have as much new commercial space—45 million square feet—as the total commercial space in Boston and San Francisco combined (Sleeper), and yet there’s still no room for the homeless. There isn’t even any room for a simple idea like San Francisco’s: In San Francisco you can’t put up new commercial space downtown unless you pay for day care for the children of the people who will work there (Messinger). Of course the Reagan administration won’t invest in permanent housing for New York’s poor: that would be socialism, the dread “S”-word. But Crazy Eddie doesn’t want unions or churches or foundations or grassroots community groups or anybody else except his favorite developers in the business of rehabilitating the 100,000 condemned properties the city already owns. Nor are a big developer’s tax breaks available to these groups. Why not? Maybe because this kind of low-cost community initiative is bad for the Profit Motive and the Power Base. Certainly permanent housing for the poor—the ever-unpopular “free ride”—is bad for the Work Ethic, like aid to dependent children.
It’s not just the money. It’s a social philosophy which is at the same time greedy and punitive. We might scrounge the money. Messinger reminds us of that mysterious $500 million in unspent revenues—mostly from “Big MAC,” World Trade Center, and Battery Park City surpluses—that the city “rolls over” every fiscal year until it disappears whenever anyone wants to spend it on basic decencies. Dan McCarthy can find another half billion in a capital-gains tax on real estate. If we tax cooperative apartments for mortgage-recording and real-property transfer, as Phillips suggests, that’s another $60 million. Just suppose we killed off “gratuitous tax abatements to Smith Barney or A.T.&T.,” and decided to use the city’s zoning clout to insist on social services, and helped low-income communities “establish themselves in properties the marketplace has abandoned” (Sleeper). We aren’t talking here about anything so radically Scandinavian as income redistribution. But we are talking about more than anybody now in power has the conscience and commitment to attempt. What we need, of course, is a change of philosophy and philosophers.
For this change, Dissent looks to those 2.5 million “newcomers,” with mixed feelings. We’ve been a “minority-majority” city since the middle of this decade — blacks and Puerto Ricans joined by Dominicans, Cubans, and other Caribbeans and South Americans, plus Africans and 350,000 Asians. (The indefatigable Sleeper tells us that by 1995, “with revolution in Korea and the defenestration of Hong Kong,” our Asian population will have tripled.) To this “Third World” of Tom Wolfe’s swamp-fever dreams—Koreans in the fruit and vegetable trade, Indians in the newsstand business, Arabs in neighborhood groceries and head shops, Senegalese street vendors—add 200,000 Russian Jews, Israelis, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and the Irish in Kriegel’s Bronx. That’s a lot of clout waiting to be mobilized.
But Sleeper, Chapin, and Philip Kasinitz are also cautionary tale-tellers. Blacks and Hispanics haven’t got their act together, except in “hip-hop,” even in Brooklyn. Many newcomers can’t speak English, aren’t citizens, aren’t registered, or aren’t old enough to vote. Why should Korean shopowners in Washington Heights or Cuban doctors in Jackson Heights join a coalition that cares about the interests of welfare mothers in Bedford-Stuyvesant? It isn’t Popular Front–romantic when blacks resent Koreans, the Russians are “rednecks,” and the Chinese won’t join unions, and the unions are mostly right-wing anyway. Chapin is cold-eyed: “Immigrant insurgencies are generally pluralist rather than radical in nature. Some are even regressive.” He asks the left—census figures on this minority have been unavailable since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—to “stop mistaking ethnicity for politics; while ethnicity may be more important than class to voting, economics is more important to governing policy than ethnicity.”
This doesn’t exactly sing, but we’d better learn to hum it. To be sure, even the broadest coalition — of immigrants and intellectuals, teachers and preachers, ethnics who’ve yet to get their taste, limousine liberals and Republican “good government” types and low-income community organizers and “delirious professionals”—can’t save the city all by itself. Even the federal government (another bunch of once and future jailbirds) can’t control oil prices or the dollar or the deficit or international drug traffic. No government in the world, says Berman, knows how to regulate “the vastly accelerated mobility of capital, propelled by breakthroughs in information technology,” that “is fast bringing about the deindustrialization of America.” But if we begin by being ashamed of ourselves and then start working the streets, we might find enough conscience and will to make over again the city Randolph Bourne once called “a federation of cultures.”
On the other hand, tourism is up, from 3.3 million in 1975 to 17.5 in 1987. Just like Venice: a theme park. See the pretty Winter Palace.
Don DeLillo’s Libra
DON DELILLO’S COLD and brilliant novel begins with thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother—that American Medea, Marguerite—watching television in the Bronx. For “inward-spinning” Oswald, his mother is a television. Her voice falls “through a hole in the air.” She stays up late to compare test patterns.
Libra ends with a hole in the ground, and Marguerite’s apostrophizing. “They will search out environmental factors, that we moved from home to home. Judge, I have lived in
many places but never filthy dirty, never not neat, never without the personal living touch, the decorator item. We have moved to be a family. This is the theme of my research.”
Between these solitudes, someone else is doing the research. DeLillo, who’s shy, has found himself a surrogate: Nicholas Branch, CIA (Retired), sits exactly like an Author-God at a desktop computer in a glove-leather chair in a book-lined fireproof room full of “theories that gleam like jade idols.” He follows “bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows.” He feels “a strangeness… that is almost holy. There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real.” Branch is writing, at the Agency’s request, a secret history of Dallas—those “six point nine seconds of heat and light” on November 22, 1963. The Agency has given him more than he needs to know. For instance:
The Curator sends the results of ballistics tests carried out on human skulls and goat carcasses, on blocks of gelatin mixed with horsemeat… bullet-shattered goat heads in closeup… a gelatin-tissue model “dressed” like the President. It is pure modernist sculpture, a block of gelatin layered in suit and shirt material with a strip of undershirt showing, bullet-smoked.
Equally modernist, of course, is the Warren Commission Report, “with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words”:
Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred…. Everything belongs, everything adheres, the mutter of obscure witnesses, the photos of illegible documents and odd sad personal debris, things gathered up at a dying—old shoes, pajama tops, letters from Russia. This is the Joycean Book of America.
And what does the historian decide—after his access to goats’ heads and pajama tops; psychiatrists and KGB defectors; confidential Agency files and transcripts of the secret hearings of congressional committees; wiretaps, polygraphs, Dictabelt recordings, postoperative X-rays, computer enhancements of the Zapruder film, Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental chart, microphotographs of strands of Oswald’s pubic hair (smooth, not knobby), FBI reports on dreams… and the long roster of the conveniently dead?
Branch decides “his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms.” To be sure, his own Agency may be “protecting something very much like its identity,” but rogue elements of that Agency have conspired in their small rooms to write an enormous fiction. They will mount an attempt on the president’s life that’s intended to be a “surgical” near miss. They will leave a “paper trail” that leads from this attempt to Castro’s Cuba, their “moonlit fixation in the emerald sea.” They require someone like an Oswald, a fall-guy figment, to point the way.
Libra deconstructs the official story and reimagines the dreary principals whom we know already from the pages of the Warren Report and the fevers of Jim Garrison. But it also peoples the parentheses of this shadow world with monsters of its own—agents disgraced at the Bay of Pigs; cowboy mercenaries shopping for a little war; Kennedy-hating mafiosi, international remittance men, Batista swamp rats; myths (salamanders out of Paracelsus) and freaks (geeks, androgynes). If his surrogate Branch is a stay-at-home, DeLillo flies by night, and enters, an exorcist, into rooms and dreams. In each room, he finds a secret and a coincidence, a loneliness and a connection, even a kind of theology: “the rapture of the fear of believing.”
Win Everett, for instance, is the Agency Author-God of the JFK plot, for whom “secrets are an exalted state,” “a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it.” In his small room with Elmer’s Glue-All and an X-Acto knife, he invents the Oswald-figment out of fake passports, false names, phony address books, doctored photographs; “scripts” him “out of ordinary pocket litter.” He has, if not misgivings, at least forebodings:
There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of death outside the book, play it off, contain it…. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot.
But the Agency’s bound to forgive him: “What’s more, they would admire the complexity of his plan…. It had art and memory. It had a sense of responsibility, of moral force. And it was a picture in the world of their own guilty wishes.”
He sounds like any old modernist at the keyboard of his masterwork, his Terminal Novel, his grand harmonium of randomness. Imagine his surprise on finding that there really is an Oswald, sitting there in a Speed Wash Laundromat in Dallas at midnight reading H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. It’s creepy. Dyslexic Lee, who grew up dreaming of Lenin and Trotsky, “men who lived in isolation… close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls….” Ozzie the Rabbit in Tokyo: “Here the smallness had meaning. The paper windows and boxrooms, these were clear-minded states, forms of well-being.” A Marine defector who cuts his wrist to stay in Russia, a wife abuser who gets “secret instructions” from “the whole busy air of transmission… through the night into his skin”; a Fair-Play-for-Cuba mail-order assassin whose stated ambition it is “to be a short story writer on contemporary American themes”—he’s spent his whole life converging on a plot that is itself just eight months old.
Learning there is a real Oswald, Everett feels “displaced”: “It produced a sensation of the eeriest panic, gave him a glimpse of the fiction he’d been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world.”
His coconspirator, Parmenter, a member of “the Groton-Yale-OSS network of so-called gentlemen spies,” is grateful to the Agency for its understanding and its trust: “The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe.” During the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, Parmenter’s radio station, “supposedly run by rebels from a jungle outpost in Guatemala,” was really in Honduras, broadcasting disinformation “rumors, false battle reports, meaningless codes, inflammatory speeches, orders to nonexistent rebels. It was like a class project in the structure of reality. Parmenter wrote some of the broadcasts himself, going for vivid imagery, fields of rotting bodies…” A real Oswald makes him laugh. “It was all so funny…. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence….”
But the president dies of coincidence, and so does Oswald. Like Oswald, everybody is writing fiction “on contemporary American themes.” One conspirator, Mackey, works with a private army of Cuban exiles: “Alpha was run like a dream clinic. The Agency worked up a vision, then got Alpha to make it come true.” Another, Wayne, lives on Fourth Street in Miami: “Judo instructors, tugboat captains, homeless Cubans, ex-paratroopers like Wayne, mercenaries from wars nobody heard of, in West Africa or Malay. They were like guys straight out of Wayne’s favorite movie Seven Samurai, warriors without masters willing to band together to save a village from marauders, to win back a country, only to see themselves betrayed in the end.”
So much bad art. This is Joan Didion’s territory, isn’t it, paranoia and blank uneasiness? Just so, the Mafia boss Carmine Latta, with his wiseguy contempt for social orders not his own, seems to have wandered in from Saul Bellow, Chicago instead of New Orleans. But with Didion, paranoia is personal, and so, for Bellow, is contempt. DeLillo is loftier, in a room that hangs above the world. He’s part camera, of course, with a savage eye on, say, pretty Marina with the “breezes in her head,” or Ruby, whose desperate jauntiness breaks the heart:
If I don’t get there in time, it’s decreed I wasn’t meant to do it. He drove through Dealey Plaza, slightly out of the way, to look at the wreaths again. He talked to Sheba about was she hungry, did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union Office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a c
an opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars out of the moneybag and stuffed it in his pockets because this is how a club owner walks into a room. He put the gun in his right hip pocket. His name was stamped in gold inside his hat.
But language is DeLillo’s plastique. Out of gnarled speech, funny, vulgar, gnomic, he composes stunning cantatas for the damned to sing. Libra is as choral as it’s cinematic. Marguerite is the scariest mother since Faust, and David Ferrie, with his homemade eyebrows, mohair toupee, and the land mines in his kitchen, his expertise on cancer and astrology, seems to speak to us through the cavities in our teeth: “All my fears are primitive. It’s the limbic system of the brain. I’ve got a million years of terror stored up there.” For Ferrie, “astrology is the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the end of human affairs.” Oswald is a Libra, which means Scales: “You’re a quirk of history,” Ferrie says; “you’re a coincidence.” But we say coincidence when we don’t know what to call it: “It goes deeper…. There’s a hidden principle. Every process contains its own outcome.” On learning Kennedy’s motorcade route, Ferrie is beside himself. “We didn’t arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don’t have that kind of reach…. There’s something else that’s generating this event. A pattern outside experience. Something that jerks you out of the spin of history. I think you’ve had it backwards all the time. You wanted to enter history. Wrong approach, Leon. What you really want is out.”
“But,” thinks Ferrie: “There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”