Step Across This Line

by Salman Rushdie

  I’m thinking, in particular, of Israel, and of the aftermath of the post-Begin election of 1984. The Israeli national unity government came into being after that election, once it was clear that neither Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud nor Shimon Peres’s Labor Party could command a majority. The two major parties then came together in an uneasy, but nevertheless enduring, alliance. For two years Peres served as prime minister, Shamir as foreign minister; then they swapped portfolios. After the elections of November 1988 failed to shift the balance of power significantly, the coalition was renewed, with Shamir retaining the premiership, and Peres still serving as foreign minister. The arrangement finally broke down in 1990, because of the parties’ incompatible views of the peace process. While it lasted, it wasn’t the world’s most effective government, but it did bring down the Israeli inflation rate and, more important, permitted Israel to present a united front to its adversaries for six long years: no mean achievement.

  How could such a grand coalition be brought into existence in the USA? Well, if Bush becomes president, Dick Cheney, citing his ill health, might be persuaded to stand aside from the vice presidency, which could then be offered to the present vice president, Al Gore. And in the increasingly improbable event of a Gore presidency, Joe Lieberman could opt to take up his Senate seat instead of becoming Gore’s veep; whereupon President Gore could offer the spot to Bush. After so radical a move, the creation of a genuine coalition cabinet would be relatively—and I mean relatively—simple. As to whether it would be constitutional for the president to step down after two years to allow his deputy a turn, that’s an issue for the swarm of litigators presently buzzing around this election to consider.

  Impossible? Maybe so. But everything about this election so far has strained credulity. What was once unthinkable might, in these odd circumstances, actually begin to make sense. It might even have become necessary. There’s a satirical text from Zimbabwe, that great democracy, doing the rounds of the Internet at present. Asking us what we would think of the U.S. electoral fiasco if it had happened in a Third World country, this satire, supposedly written by “a Zimbabwean politician,” pokes much predictable fun at the alleged corruption of the United States. If America can now be laughed at by Zimbabwean pols, then it’s surely time for drastic remedies to be considered. A Bush-Gore alliance might just renew American (and international) faith in the honor of their leaders and restore some much-needed luster to their tarnished institutions. It would be a government of strange bedfellows, but better that, perhaps, than four more years of bitter partisan squabbling, which would inevitably drag America’s democratic institutions—the Congress as well as the presidency, even the Supreme Court itself—further down into the Zimbabwean dirt.

  “If only they could both lose.” Why not stand the joke on its head? Let them both win. “The people have spoken,” Bill Clinton said not so long ago. “It’s just that we don’t yet know what they meant.” Maybe this sort of power-sharing formula comes closer to expressing the people’s will than anything else. *27

  JANUARY 2001: HOW THE GRINCH STOLE AMERICA

  [A verse for the inauguration, with apologies to Dr. Seuss]

  Every Vote down in Voteville liked Voting a Lot,

  But the GRINCH, who lived West of Voteville,

  did Not.

  For Voting was Counting—not just Adding and such

  But finding out if you Amounted to Much.

  In this case, the question was, who, in a pinch,

  Amounted to More? Did the Veep? Or the Grinch?

  The Veep! What a creep!

  What a CREEP! CREEP! CREEP! CREEP!

  He simply could NOT be outdone by the Veep.

  But the Veep was Experienced.

  He’d done the big jobs,

  He was smart. (He was smart-ass.)

  He knew all the knobs

  And the levers and buttons

  That worked the State’s Ship

  And the Grinch?

  Well, re: knowledge he was not too hip.

  The President of India? The economy? Pass.

  He’d never been close to the head of the class.

  So far the poor Grinch hadn’t Amounted to zip,

  He just hadn’t Counted. It gave him the pip.

  (His father! His eminent Dad! His own blood!

  Compared to him, Grinchy had proved quite a dud.)

  And now that he’d actually reached his Big Day

  Argh! Counting the Ballots could steal it away!

  And what was a Ballot? Was it silver or gold?

  Were they counting up treasure? A fortune untold?

  No! Just some dumb punch-card! They were counting up holes!

  Oh, the holes!

  Yes, the holes!

  Oh, the HOLES! HOLES! HOLES! HOLES!

  The whole thing depended on Circles of Air—

  Not to mention the half-holes,

  and holes that weren’t there,

  but that wanted to be there,

  and thought that was fair.

  All they would do was to add up! To Count!

  And they’d count! And they’d count!

  And they’d COUNT! COUNT! COUNT! COUNT!

  And they’d probably end up with a

  Quite Wrong Amount!

  “If they go on counting,”

  the Grinch shuddered, “Eep!

  “They may just wind up electing the Veep!

  “How to stop it?” the Grinch exclaimed with a moan

  And then he remembered he wasn’t alone.

  There were Grinches all over,

  Big Grinches and small,

  There were Grinches in Voteville and in City Hall,

  He knew some news-Grinches,

  And he could depend

  On these inky fellows to shape and to bend

  Their stories to help him win through in the end.

  But the Grinches who’d give him

  The edge and the win

  Were the great Legal Grinches,

  And Grinches of Spin.

  So he called on his cohorts.

  “My friends, we must Grinch

  The election! ’Nuff Counting!

  To work! Do not flinch!

  We must Grinch! We must Grinch!

  We must GRINCH! GRINCH! GRINCH! GRINCH!

  We cannot be beaten by circles of air

  Or circles that only imagine they’re there.

  Every day that they Count them, the total will creep

  Up and up, until it elects that old Veep!”

  So they Grinched the election.

  They Grinched, day by day,

  Until all the options were whittled away.

  They Grinched it with lawyers,

  They Grinched it with writs,

  They split all the hairs

  And they picked all the nits,

  And when it came up to the Ultimate Bench

  They Grinched it away with one final Wrench.

  They ordered all Voteville to give up its Count,

  Before it came up with that Quite Wrong Amount.

  And the Votes down in Voteville?

  They’ve run out of steam.

  ’Tis the season to party, to heal, and to dream.

  Why worry? The Constitution is strong,

  The judges who judge it can never be wrong,

  The Veep may have won, but he’s lost.

  And that’s that.

  Voteville accepts the high judges’ fiat.

  There isn’t a holler, there isn’t a scream,

  Think of the dollar! Let’s play for the team!

  So everyone okays the Grinch’s regime,

  And things are probably

  probably

  probably

  probably

  Not as bad as they seem.

  “Four whole years of Grinchdom!”

  The Grinch cries with glee.

  “There’s Only One Person who Counts now

  . . . That’s

  ME.”


  FEBRUARY 2001: SLEAZE IS BACK

  One day after France’s former foreign minister, the almost impossibly grand Roland Dumas, who is on trial for corruption, denounces the proceedings against him—that a personage as distinguished as he should be subjected to such an ordeal! Zut! Alors!—the fugitive businessman Alfred Sirven is arrested in the Philippines and immediately claims that he can provide evidence of corruption against “one hundred names”—that is, most of the political elite of the Mitterrand era.

  Meanwhile, in Peru, the seizure of over two thousand secretly obtained videotapes reveals the power of the fallen President Fujimori’s secret state over just about everyone in that country’s ruling class. Journalists, politicians, generals were all being blackmailed for years.

  Meanwhile, in India, the Bofors scandal bubbles to the surface again. The rumors of corruption surrounding this 1980s arms deal have already besmirched the reputations of the late Rajiv Gandhi—did he or did he not accept illegal kickbacks?—and the late Olof Palme—was he assassinated by a disgruntled middleman? Now, as the Indian courts turn their attention to the activities of the billionaire Hinduja brothers, the old scandal threatens to hurl new dirt across the oceans, at the British government, which became so improbably friendly with the Hindujas.

  (A four-year-old child could have warned the Blairites against this association. Unfortunately, no four-year-old child was available, and as a result the British public presently believes New Labour to be almost as sleazy as the grubby Tories they replaced. Almost as sleazy as Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken! Well . . . gosh.)

  Meanwhile, in the United States, ex-President Clinton is under fire for having pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich, while his successor, “President” Bush, mouths platitudes about bilateralism while pursuing an agenda of the far right; and this in spite of the growing evidence that he lost the election he “won” thanks to the notorious Supreme Court coup; lost it, in Florida, by a margin of around 25,000 votes.

  Yes, sleaze has resurfaced, grinning its slobbering grin, to remind us that it never really went away—that it remains the great occult force that bends and shapes the age, its existence perennially denied, its empire expanding daily. You can almost admire its inexhaustible inventiveness. Things you never imagined were sleazy—things that actually were never tarnished before—come daily under sleaze’s slimy suzerainty, and are hopelessly compromised, or, like innocence or paradise, lost.

  Thus, a feature of recent months has been the sleazing-up not only of politics, where it’s almost expected, but of sport. Is racing fixed? asks the British press, and you can almost hear the horses laugh. About boxing, nobody even bothers to ask. And the former Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar has at last been found guilty of taking bribes. Even cricket, whose very name was once a synonym for integrity, is now up to here in the dirt. As for athletics, the recent “doping Olympics” offered spectacular evidence of trouble: the shot-putter C. J. Hunter’s four positive drug tests, the gold-medal gymnast Andreea Raducan’s positive test for pseudoephedrine, Carl Lewis’s astonishing comment on Linford Christie’s positive test for nandrolone: “They got him at last.” So our heroes are at it now, as well as our leaders. In fact, it looks as if they’ve been at it all along. Is there anything out there that isn’t fixed? Reality-TV contests? Literary prizes? University entrance examinations? Your upcoming job interview? Or is it just that we haven’t found out how the fixing is being done?

  Welcome to the third millennium. The American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s redefinition of paranoia has never seemed more firmly on the money: paranoia usefully seen as the crazy-making but utterly sane realization that our times have secret meanings, that those meanings are dreadful, immoral, and corrupt beyond our wildest imaginings, and that the surface of things is a fraud, an artifact designed to hide the awful truth from us ordinary deluded suckers, who keep wanting to believe that things might actually—you know?—be beginning to improve.

  The sucker’s reaction to much of the foregoing would be to point out that many of the sleaze merchants I’ve mentioned have received or are receiving their comeuppances. Dumas is on trial, Sirven is in custody, Fujimori has fallen, the Hindujas have been obliged to remain in India pending the outcome of their case, Clinton is history, the bent cricketers were banned, and the doping athletes were caught. So that’s all right then.

  The paranoid knows better. If the crimes of the past are only now being uncovered, the paranoid will retort, how long will it take before we know about the crimes of the present? Are the “innocent” merely the guilty whose guilt hasn’t yet been established? Pynchonian analysis leaves true paranoids with few choices: to become obsessed investigators of the world’s secret meanings; to accept their impotence and fall into one of a familiar selection of futile, addled, entropic hazes; or to explode into the kind of rage that wants to blow things up.

  I knew a man once whose thing it was to wreck the toilets in office buildings and write a slogan on the ruined walls: “If the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed.” I’m beginning to understand how he felt. And to remember how, in a younger, hairier, angrier phase of life, I often used to feel.

  MARCH 2001: CROUCHING STRIKER, HIDDEN DANGER

  Without Hollywood, they say, Los Angeles would just be Phoenix with a coastline. This year, as deadlines approach for strikes by actors and writers, L.A. is facing the possibility of becoming, for a time, exactly such a characterless, movie-less sprawl. Rumors are flying: the studios actually want the strikes, the actors don’t, though their representatives are talking tough, and the writers? Well, they’re only writers, after all. Talks keep breaking down an inch away from agreement. TV companies are preparing to flood the schedules with even more reality-TV programming—it’s cheap! it’s popular! it’s not unionized!—to fill the holes created by The Strike. There’s plenty of bad feeling in the air, and a growing sense of inevitability. The shutdown is “going to happen.” (Which means either it will or it won’t.)

  And in the midst of this uncertainty, the movie community awaits its annual you-love-me-you-really-love-me festival of big business interests disguised as individual achievements. The lobbying season is over. The city is no longer being bombarded by “for your consideration” videotapes. Rock stars are no longer playing impromptu gigs in old folks’ homes in the hope of garnering a few votes for Best Song from elderly academicians resident therein. The votes are in. The Oscars are coming.

  The movies are L.A.’s culture. At the weekend, big audiences go to the new pictures the way the opera-loving Milanese go to an opening at La Scala. L.A. is a city of passionate moviegoers. I haven’t seen such enthusiastically participatory audiences anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent. This can get irritating, for example when a big guy with his ass hanging out of his pants moans and groans loudly every time Penélope Cruz appears on screen in All the Pretty Horses—“my God, she’s so beautiful!—Oh, oh, he’s going to fall for her!—Uh-oh, here comes trouble!”—or when a five-year-old insistently asks her parents, during the interminable Cast Away, “Mommy, when is the volleyball going to talk?” (Footnote: Wilson the volleyball’s performance is the best thing in this leaden movie. Why wasn’t Wilson nominated for Best Supporting Actor? It’s a scandal.)