When I tuck into the turkey on Thursday, I’ll have three things in particular in mind. First, the country’s pathological obsession with the present. America is still a country where the past is anathema. Even when Americans are nostalgic, they are nostalgic for a myth of the future. What matters for Americans, in small ways and large, is never where you have come from—but where you are going, what you are doing now, or what you are about to become. In all the years I have lived in America—almost a decade and a half now—it never ceases to amaze me that almost nobody has ever demanded to know by what right I belong here. Almost nobody has asked what school I went to, what my family is like, or what my past contains. (In Britain I was asked those questions on a daily, almost hourly, basis.) Even when I took it on myself to be part of the American debate, nobody ever questioned my credentials for doing so. I don’t think that could ever happen in a European context (when there’s a gay American editor of The Spectator, let me know). If Europeans ever need to know why Ronald Reagan captured such a deep part of the American imagination, this is surely part of the answer. It was his reckless futurism (remember Star Wars and supply-side economics?) and his instinctive, personal generosity.
Second, I’m thankful for the American talent for contradiction. The country that sustained slavery for longer than any other civilized country is also the country that has perhaps struggled more honestly for the notion of racial equality than any other. The country that has a genuine public ethic of classlessness also has the most extreme economic inequality in the developed world. The country that is most obsessed with pressing the edge of modernity also has the oldest intact Constitution in the world. The country that still contains a powerful religious right has also pushed the equality of homosexuals further than ever before in history. A country that cannot officially celebrate Christmas (it would erase the boundary between church and state) is also one of the most deeply religious nations on the planet. Americans have learned how to reconcile the necessary contradictions not simply because their country is physically big enough to contain them, but because it is spiritually big enough to contain them. Americans have learned how to reconcile the necessary contradictions of modern life with a verve and a serenity few others can muster. It is a deeply reassuring achievement.
Third, I’m thankful because America is, above all, a country of primary colors. Sometimes the pictures Americans paint are therefore not as subtle, or as elegant, or even as brilliant as masterpieces elsewhere. But they have a vigor and a simplicity that is often more viscerally alive. Other nations may have become bored with the Enlightenment, or comfortable in postmodern ennui. Americans find such postures irrelevant. Here the advertisements are cruel, the battles are stark, and the sermons are terrifying. And here, more than anywhere else, the most vital of arguments still go on. Does God exist? Are the races equal? Can the genders get along? Americans believe that these debates can never get tired, and that their resolution still matters, because what happens in America still matters in the broader world. At its worst, this can bespeak a kind of arrogance and crudeness. But at its best, it reflects a resilient belief that the great questions can always be reinvented and that the answers are always relevant. In the end, I have come to appreciate this kind of naïvete as a deeper form of sophistication. Even the subtlest of hues, after all, are merely primary colors mixed.
At the end of November each year this restless, contradictory, and simple country finds a way to celebrate itself. The British, as befits a people at ease with themselves, do not have a national day. When the French do, their insecurity shows. Even America, on the Fourth of July, displays a slightly neurotic excess of patriotism. But on Thanksgiving, the Americans resolve the nationalist dilemma. They don’t celebrate themselves; they celebrate their good fortune. And every November, as I reflect on a country that can make even an opinionated Englishman feel at home, I know exactly how they feel.
The Princess Bride
September 21, 1997 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
From the moment she danced with John Travolta, she became an honorary American. It wasn’t the kind of thing royalty does, but the kind of thing every young American woman fantasizes about.
In that early act alone, and in countless other gestures in the subsequent years, Diana tapped into those suburban American dreams, and more than fulfilled them. Her appeal was to the masses—women especially. Perhaps that helps explain the extraordinary crowds and impromptu shrines at the British embassy and consulates in America last week. There is nobody except perhaps Ronald Reagan whose death could have prompted such a spontaneous and shocking expression of American grief.
Diana, one now realizes, was a princess in a country where aristocracy remains the object of forbidden fascination, a rebel in a nation dedicated to subversion, a mega-celebrity in a culture that prizes celebrity above all, and a philanthropist in a society where charity is the paramount social virtue. She was an American phenomenon just as surely as she was a British institution.
The wedding began it all—parading every cliché Americans attach to royal tradition. For Americans, whose country began in modernity, the need for such ancient connections, for a history that recedes seamlessly into myth, is overwhelming. So they were glued to the television in the early hours all those sixteen years ago, as they were yesterday, watching the gut-wrenching conclusion. Some would attribute this fascination to traditional American Anglophilia, but something far more interesting was also at work. You can feel it in the way Americans spoke of Diana. They referred to her in a way they never applied to other members of the royal family.
From the beginning, Americans saw her as a clearly modern figure, someone who they not only respected, but envied. The monarchy she represented did not seem some archaic remnant of a lost empire, but a vibrant innovation in the global media age.
When the American networks attempted to bring on commentators on the tragedy, they immediately resorted to Hollywood. Tom Selleck and George Clooney expostulated on the trials of celebrity. Tom Cruise told of being stalked by the same paparazzi in that same Paris tunnel. And, yes, Travolta remembered his moment in history. The stars of Los Angeles saw in Diana a peer, and the tabloids and TV talk shows treated her like a studio star of another era. She appeared on the cover of People magazine forty-three times in a mere decade—more than any Hollywood persona. But she was beyond Hollywood’s grasp, as surely as she was beyond the palace’s.
And this surely was her innovation. Max Weber first distinguished between two types of power—the traditional and the charismatic. The one depended on the trappings of state, of nation, and of history. The other rested purely on the aura of the person in question. In general, these two elements are separate, but occasionally—and memorably—they coincide. They collided with Kennedy, who fashioned a new presidency out of a form of celebrity power. And with Reagan, who learned the art of charisma in the Hollywood that perfected it.
Diana, as an international figure, was also in their league. She needed the traditional monarchy as the august setting for her acting out, and its majesty and tradition provided the essential contrast for her modernity. But she brought to it her own sexual energy and iconic poise.
The result was a new level of cultural power, and helps explain the psychic shock Americans as well as Britons are now experiencing. When the fusion of the traditional and charismatic occurs, and when it is transmitted with unprecedented ferocity by the global media, it shapes the mass consciousness almost subliminally. Many of us saw images of Diana more frequently than our own parents or siblings. She penetrated our lives more fully than many of our friends—and this is as true of Americans, for whom she was a media staple, as of Britons. It is no surprise, then, that her sudden death, multiplied in millions and millions of lives, could generate a response that has verged on mass hysteria. At the British embassy in Washington, the mounds of flowers and votive candles, of almost idolatrous tributes and lugubrious verses, suggested that for Americans, she was their princess too.
> When I asked people why they felt the way they did, the responses were typically eclectic. They ranged from the HIV-infected gay man who remembered that first handshake to the black woman who recalled Diana’s visits to the American inner city. Others, in her generation particularly, felt numbed. “She was a good person; you could tell that,” was one simple explanation. And the effect of the princess reaching across class and nationality and birth to engage the lives of the unfortunate burned itself into the American consciousness.
Americans in particular mourn the felling of a rebel. From the beginning, they saw in Diana a human being trapped in a traditional setting, and egged her on in her journey of self-discovery. The loveless marriage, the rigid protocol, the demands of appearance—all these Americans instinctively suspected. A nation of immigrants, of people who have escaped at some point in their family history from the stifling demands of the Old World, they needed no tutor in the appeal of Diana. They identified effortlessly with her, and longed to set her free.
Her association with Dodi Fayed brought no raised eyebrows on this side of the Atlantic, no snippy disdain for his ethnicity or origins. People magazine summed up the sentiment exactly in its headline: “A Guy for Di.” She needed a date or, better still, a lover. Americans, after all, wrote the “pursuit of happiness” into their very Declaration of Independence. So they did not fail for a minute to understand the last few years of Diana’s life.
And they bonded with her lifestyle. This was a woman, one recalls, who employed a personal trainer and a therapist—and didn’t conceal the fact. She took her sons to McDonald’s in baseball caps and hugged them in amusement parks. She was a breath of fresh evolved air in an institution that reeked of stale dysfunction. Even her public appearances seemed more in tune with American photo ops than British royal audiences. Her ability to sit down with children, to perch on hospital beds, to shake hands with AIDS patients, to wear her emotions on her sleeve, struck a deep, American chord. Indeed, as the years went by, the unassuming English rosebud increasingly resembled an Oprahfied, American bloom. She spoke of the need for “space and time”; she confessed her feelings on national television; she turned her own illnesses into a crusade for self-help. In all this, she was following an American script, and a highly contemporary one.
Her final role—as international charity doyenne—was also shaped on an American model. Charity has long been a function of the English aristocracy, and, indeed, monarchy. But Diana’s fusion of glamour and fashion and charity seemed far closer to the model of American society hostesses than English country wives. And Diana’s thinly veiled social liberalism—her comfort among people with AIDS, minorities, gay men, and the disabled—echoed, and indeed surpassed, theirs. That Katharine Graham, the last great Washington hostess and proprietor of The Washington Post, was a close friend says a great deal about Diana’s membership in a peculiarly American club. And she was a member, not merely a guest.
This is not to say that Diana did not retain her essential British identity. Indeed, what was inspiring about her to many Americanized Brits was how she was able to lend to Britishness a new, and distinctly American, quality. She was, in this sense, a New Brit Princess, not so much hostile to the old order as impatient with it, and prepared to go to war with it if necessary.
In this, Americans were her friends and allies; but the British had the most at stake. For those of us who believe in our native country, and who see what she represented and tried to bring about, her death is particularly heart-wrenching. “I am not a political person,” she said in a recent, charitable speech. But, of course, she was. She represented the forces of change against the serried ranks of crusty resistance, and the possibility of personal happiness and integrity in a country that has sacrificed too many people on the fake altars of propriety and duty.
Her funeral, in its majesty and scale and aura, will inevitably be contrasted with Churchill’s. But with Churchill, the funeral was a burial of something already gone. Diana’s young death points in exactly the opposite direction and is therefore more poignant. In burying Churchill, we buried the past. In burying Diana, in some deep and gnawing way, we have buried a future.
Unsung Heroine
September 27, 1998 | THE NEW YORK TIMES
Forget the pro-Clinton backlash. Isn’t it past time for a pro-Monica backlash?
Throughout the hideous Clinton soap opera, no one has had to endure so much for so long as the twenty-five-year-old from Beverly Hills. Ms. Lewinsky has been let down by her lover, her best friend, her lawyers, her advisers, and by the public.
She has seen the most intimate details of her private life published by virtually every newspaper in the world, has had her mental fitness questioned by the president and every half-baked pop psychologist who can make it onto cable television; she has had her clothing turned into Jay Leno jokes and her weight inspected with all the delicacy one normally expects from the supermarket tabloids. And all the while, she has been essentially under house arrest, her life suspended indefinitely in midair. For all this, she has been rewarded with a public approval rating barely distinguishable from Mike Tyson’s.
Sexism, it seems, rules. In the public’s mind, Mr. Clinton is a foolish man who cannot control his libido. But Ms. Lewinsky is a tramp, for whom no empathy is possible. Mr. Clinton may be an adulterer, but adulterers can be forgiven. Not so the foul temptress, even when she’s less than half the man’s age. Mr. Clinton, thanks to the release of his videotaped testimony, has been awarded with a back eddy of sympathy for having his sex life turned into a news event. But Ms. Lewinsky, it seems, asked for it.
Yet whose private life, one wonders, has been more brutally exposed in all this? Who was forced to spend days and days in front of grand-jury interrogators and who voluntarily spent four hours? And who chose public life in the first place? Mr. Clinton or Ms. Lewinsky?
In all this, Ms. Lewinsky has few allies. Unlike Paula Jones, she receives no support from the right. For enjoying and owning her sexuality, Ms. Lewinsky is a pariah among conservatives. And she can expect no support from liberal feminists. Suddenly, in the third wave of victimless feminism, the intern has to stand up for herself. This was not, these feminists now argue, a case of sexual exploitation. It was an example of a young woman deploying her sexual skills to advance her career. Postfeminist Katie Roiphe derided any notion that Ms. Lewinsky was ever “an innocent used for sexual purposes.”
Excuse me? If this wasn’t a case of exploitation, then what is? Is there any greater power differential than that between a twenty-two-year-old intern and the most powerful man on Earth? If this was not sexual exploitation, then sexual exploitation simply does not exist. Sometimes, even in the brave new world of postfeminism, victimization still happens. And, at the hands of Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky was a sexual and emotional victim.
It also seems to me that Ms. Lewinsky, alone among the major characters, has behaved for the most part decently through this saga. Apart from a few understandable tantrums, she was relatively understanding. Yes, she told several friends, but she was having an affair with the president, for goodness’ sake!
Yes, she asked for a good job in New York. But that was after she had been fired for her love affair, exiled to a job she hated, and left with her phone calls unreturned. And even then, she never explicitly threatened to blackmail the president or go to the press. Her direst threat was to tell her own mother! Even now, she has kept an honorable silence, when the temptation to defend herself must be enormous.
For a very long time, she did all she could to avoid betraying her lover, even to the point of signing an affidavit that denied the affair. Once cornered, she resolved to tell the whole truth. The most stunning aspect of the Starr report is how far this young woman was prepared to go to abide by the law, even to the extent of opening herself up to grotesque public scrutiny. What a contrast with the president. If this morality tale is essentially about honesty, then Ms. Lewinsky is clearly its heroine.
It say
s something about the president’s seductive narcissism that, even now, he has made this affair about himself, and somehow become the victim. But Monica Lewinsky uniquely deserves that honor. Exploited by a lover, betrayed by a friend, hounded by inquisitors, and violated by the media, she has paid far more than a reasonable price for the sin of misplaced, youthful love. She surely deserves much better. From all of us.
Going Down Screaming
October 11, 1998 | THE NEW YORK TIMES
I can’t remember now at which point during the Starr report I stopped reading. Maybe it was the sudden prim reminder that “the President’s wife” was out of the country during one of President Clinton’s hallway trysts. Or the superfluously wounding inference that the president was considering leaving his wife after his second term. Or the inclusion of the date for one of the president’s liaisons: Easter Sunday. Or any one of the points when it simply became obvious that the narrative, compelling and lucid as it was, seemed to be building a case not so much for the president’s public, legal impropriety but for a private, moral iniquity. And I stopped reading not because I sympathize with President Clinton’s repeated public lies, or his abuse of power and of his office. (I still think he should resign.) Nor because I am instinctively a liberal. I stopped reading at some point because it became depressingly clear that the Starr report and its aftermath represents not simply a case study in what has gone wrong with an American presidency, but also a case study in what has gone wrong with American conservatism.
Out on a Limb Page 13