Politics and the English language, 2010

The President has proposed a half-day, televised health care summit, and in the process of chickening out, House GOP leader John Boehner and Eric Cantor use one of the most Orwellian quotes I've seen in a long-time.

"If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate."

The mixture of Newspeak and lies in this solitary sentence is chilling. "Job-killing"? which think tank dreamt that up? And when precisely did "the American people" reject anything? When the people of Massachusetts voted in a special election?

The enduring politics of noise

Thinking about L'il Liddy and the Teabuggers, and the general nature of political discourse in this country, I was struck by a quote I just came across. Try to place it...

"It was impossible in the tumult and the shouting to hear much that was said from the platform or to deduce the essential ideology of this great crusade. But one thing came out strong and clear. It was the promise, reiterated to deafening applause, 'to get the liberal termites' out of Washington and out of the conduct of American affairs. John F. Kennedy, you have been warned."

That's Alistair Cooke, writing about a rally for Young Americans for Freedom ("which only two years ago was a defiant underground of odd-men-out and is now a national organisation") in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 9, 1961.

When Stalin went Hollywood

Turner Classic Movie has been running a fantastic series called "Shadows of Russia" about Hollywood's changing image of Russia. I haven't caught enough of it, but I did get to see last month the rarely shown wartime film Mission to Moscow, a Warner Brothers production from 1943 that answers the strange question of what it would have looked like if Hollywood had to spin Stalinism. Just before I saw it, I happened to read James Agee's review of the film in The Nation in May 1943, which sums up its weird appeal...

"It is indeed... a mishmash: of Stalinism with New Dealism with Hollywoodism with journalism with opportunism with shaky experimentalism with mesmerism with onanism, all mosaicked into a remarkable portrait of what the makers of the film think that the American public should think the Soviet Union is like -- a great glad two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht, eminently approvable by the Institute of Good Housekeeping. As such, it is as rich a subject for diagnosis as any other dream."

The film tracks the increasingly peripatetic shuttle diplomacy of FDR's ambassador, Joseph Davies, in the years leading up to the war. He pledges to go with an open mind, and travels the USSR meeting a surprising number of factory workers and peasants who speak very good English. He also encounters scheming diplomats from the Fascist powers, and spineless diplomats from the western democracies who are more suspicious of the righteous Soviets than the Nazis. As the world rushes to war, he begins to hear about strange things, like acts of sabotage at weapons factories, which culminates in the most stylized portrayal of the Show Trials one could imagine. Here is Bukharin, Radek, Tukachevsky, all revealed as enemies of the people taking orders from Trotsky to engineer an invasion by the Fascists to overthrow Stalin. Agee is fascinatingly even-handed about this, which reflects how things are black and white only in hindsight. Even for an avowed liberal anti-communist -- Agee was already good friends with Whittaker Chambers at the time -- the facts were murky:

"About the trials I am not qualified to speak. On surface falsifications of fact and atmosphere I might, but on the one crucial question, whether Trotsky and Trotskyists were or were not involved with Germany and Japan in a plot to overthrow the government and to partition the country, I am capable of no sensible opinion. I neither believe nor disbelieve it. I neither believe nor disbelieve evidence to the contrary. I am unable to trust the politicians of either camp or of any other to supply, the world in general, or even their closest associates, with the truth.... It may be that this painful impotence is an impotence merely of my own spirit; it may be that I am immobilized, rather, by my conviction that a primary capacity for telling or discovering the truth is possible, today, to few human being in few types of occupation or allegiance. In any case I can attempt to learn the truth, and can defend, or attack, only in areas where I can rely in some small degree on the hope of emergent truthfulness in the material and in those who are handling it."

It is a fascinating, somewhat uncomfortable thing to watch. Especially when they neatly present the thoroughly bogus Soviet version of the Nonagression Pact of 1939 and the invasion of Finland

Keeping busy

A few housekeeping notes for the new year... As you can see, things have been pretty quiet around here for a few months, and I'm hoping that, in a number of ways, we'll get things moving again. First and foremost, I've agreed to write a blog for the Albany Times Union about goings on in the Berkshires. And if you look to the right, you'll notice my brand new Twitter account. I'm pretty excited about this multi-platform future, though I predict it may take a little while to find the right balance between everything. I hope you'll stay tuned.

So this is what it looks like...

It often felt like it would never come, but it looks like North Adams' "Mayor for Life," John Barrett III, has finally met his match after 26 years. During the years that I covered North Adams for the Eagle, and spoke to the Mayor almost daily, I often wondered what the end would look like. I especially thought about this after getting one of those hair-dryer treatments when he didn't like a story I'd written, or was forced to bite my tongue and report some unpleasantness about the Harriman and West Airport, or the Hoosac Water Quality District. I had it on extremely good authority that he was already planning his post-City Hall future, but I figured he would go out on his own terms. After all, he hadn't seen a real fight since the 90s, and the dead-end grumblers and sincere proponents of change never seemed to outnumber his base of seniors and lifelong city residents whose kids could have been in one of his grade school classes way back when he was a school-teacher. One of the great things about local politics is how real and raw it is. There is no polling, no big media machines, no legions of consultants (thought there was a little of everything in this race -- I was astonished to see ads for the candidates during a Celtics game last week). It is face to face and personal, and it is impossible to predict. All you can do is listen to the local wiseguys and feel like you're watching baseball before sabermetrics. Watching this campaign through the year, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Nothing would have surprised me, except, perhaps, the size of Dick Alcombright's margin. I'd have predicted it would have been way closer.

Superpower blues

In a piece for The Boston Globe, I compare the state of civil society here and in Russia.

The Balkan Disease (part 2 of 2)

I had to leave a few days early to get back to Budapest to apply for a Russian transit visa. So one Saturday afternoon, Olga and Mila accompanied me to Split. We spent a little while in Diocletian's Palace, stopped by a 'Konzum' for some train-going provisions, and they accompanied me to Split's strangely tiny train station.

It turned out the train was undersold, and I had a compartment to myself, which truly must rank as one of life's best unpredictable joys. On the way up, I stared out the window. The train crawls up the hillsides in such a way that it feels almost designed like some sort of tourist attraction. Each turn presented a new angle on the city, and the island of Ciovo and the Adriatic in the distance. Unfortunately, I left the camera with the family, so all I have is what I remember. As we pulled into the mountains, and the sea left, I had to leave the compartment because it faced the sun and was just too hot. For a long time, I stayed in the corridor, leaning out the window, watching the scrub-covered rocky landscape whiz by.


At one point, the train stopped at a place called Primorsky Dolac to let another southbound train pass. After all the heat, the light, the train's noisy movement, it was surprisingly pleasant to be stopped for a moment. Directly in front of the window there was a building, or rather, the ruins of one. Four sturdy stone walls in place, with a roof collapsed in, the doors all pushed in, the windows gone altogether. But on the outer wall, high up above the level of the windows, there was some sort of monument marker. It was a Catholic cross inscribed above an inscription, which for the life of me I couldn't make out from the distance we were standing (it was also in Serbo-Croatian). But it had a date, 1914, which got me thinking. What was this thing? One would assume, at first, this must have something to do with the Great War, with the terrible events of that summer not half a days drive from there that changed the world forever. When men of that village would have marched off to fight their Serbian neighbors. Or perhaps, it was about something else, something that could have happened in any other year ahead of then, but simply happened to have happened the same year as the single turning point for the Western world.


The whole trip was full of those kind of moments. Eventually we came out of the parched mountains and into a broad, green valley. The sky had turned grey, and as if on cue, it began to rain. I hadn't seen rain in weeks, and it was strange to not see a blue sky overhead. Outside there was a wide valley, and I realized that the mushroom-like structures placed near each railroad trestle appeared to be machine gun emplacements. The tracks run not far from the Bosnian border, through the heart of what would have been the Serb parts of Croatia, and which were the scene of great fighting during the war. It was raining when we came into Knin, the city that had been the capital of the breakaway Serbian Krajne Republic. From the station, you could see the fortress on a commanding hill above the city. That day there was an enormous Croatian flag flying from the fortress, and it was clear to see that there was a lot of work going on up there. The walls and ramparts were being repaired, but there was nothing about historic preservation in the work -- it was a functioning military outpost on the edge of a state that still didn't really trust its neighbors. Through the hills the train continued, and you began to see abandoned houses and farms and villages. Trashed houses, and barely overgrown orchards and fields.


The sun was going down already by the time we got closer to the heart of Croatia. And there were many things I saw that have stayed with me. Among them was a view of a long valley just as the sun was casting its last rays on the valley. It was impossible for me to retreat to my compartment as long as there was light. In the distance there was a small, narrow hill, and on its crown was a bright white church, which seemed to light up above the valley like a sort of beacon. It seemed like it had been there like that for who knows how long, and that every evening the light hits in the same way, for whoever happened to be around to see it. That day, Aug. 8, was my day to see it. And tonight and tomorrow the same image will appear for someone else.


I eventually feel asleep, waking occasionally when the train lurched to a stop, including one spot somewhere in Hungary in the early dawn hours, when I was awoken by a mob of young people at the station wrapping up a warm summer night, presumably trying to get home. We arrived in Keleti Station in Budapest in the bright early morning hours. It's difficult to explain why certain experiences move you in certain ways. I suppose for me this trip was about going to a place where I never thought I would go, and seeing up close what history looks like. That it isn't a slow sluggish march, but something that loops around and refuses to sit still.

The Balkan Disease (part 1 of 2)

Mila by the sea at Okrug Gornji, July 2009. The one constant companion on my travels over the summer was a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic, thousand-plus-page 1937 travel book about Yugoslavia. Robert D. Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts, said that he'd have preferred to lose his passport than his copy of the book. Seemed like the kind of recommendation that made it worth lugging around. Despite its many quirks and hinks, the book is about how this part of the world has a weird habit of grabbing people bay the ear and refusing to let go. I thought about this a lot as we prepared for our trip. I had also listened to a podcast of a talk given by retired American diplomat William Montgomery, who had served as ambassador in Croatia and Bulgaria in addiiton to many other posts around the region. When he retired a few years ago, he decided to settle down in a house near Dubrovnik, which prompted one of this friends to express the concern that an interest in the Balkans can become like a disease. It is a condition that got Montgomery, West, and even my wife, who has always got a funny look in her eye whenever she talks about Croatia. Of course, everyone sees this in their own way. For me, my first impression, was of an incredible pain in the bum. We left Budapest by train very early in the morning, and reached Zagreb to find that the trains would go no further becauase an accident near the coast, which had killed six people, had closed the railroads. So we had a few hours in the capital before taking a bus for another six hour trip to Split on the coast. From there, we had to catch another smaller bus to Trogir for the rest of the trip. For whatever odd reason, the bus station in Split is far too small for the country's second city. And it was a mass of crushed people and buses coming and going. As we searched for the right loading spot, I got to talking with a young fellow to see if he was going up the coast. He had just come off the ferry from Bari, which docked just across the street, and was on his way on another bus to Sarajevo. I have to confess a certain American ignorance about the city, which I knew mostly from news reports in college as the epicenter of a world of baffling and confusing pain. It struck me as strange that this fellow -- who was of indeterminate ethnicity but American citizenship, but that's a long story -- would be bouncing around hoping to get there. Once we found our place near the sea, my first impressions were immediately shaped by traveling with a two-year old, and that we were staying with our friends and their own two-year old. Totting the shorties around unavoidably warps your sense of time and place -- how you sleep, what you do, what you eat, what you think is fun. It isn't bad, just different. But it didn't take long for me to note that Croatia is much more touristed than I had thought. In the English-speaking world, Croatia barely exists as anything other than a slightly exotic and out-of-the-way place for certain adventurous travelers. But for a wide swath of Central Europe, it seems to be the rough equivalent of Cape Cod. The part of the village where we were staying was almost entirely hastily constructed summer rentals. The traffic was astonishing -- it took us two hours on a bus one day to travel the two kilometers to Trogir. That gave me lots of time to note the different license plates -- from Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Hungary. The beach was a scrum of different languages, rarely English. Maybe because I've spent my entire adult life living in places with a significant tourist economy, or because I read too many situationists in college, but I feel acutely aware of the condition of being a tourist. When I'm traveling, I always feel that sense that whatever I am seeing or experiencing is warped by the very fact that I am there. Couple that with the realization that an entire infrastructure exists to accomodate me there as an economic unit, and there is a strange sense of guilt, self-consicousness and alienation from what is, at a certain level, unreal. It is something I struggle with in the strangest ways -- the thing I like most about living in the Berkshires is showing people from other places around. I often feel like I am helping them to puncture their sense of "tourist-ness" by presenting authentic experience, even when taking them to Mass MoCA or the Clark or some other perfectly obvious touristy thing to do. But nevermind the digression. Back to the point, I was stunned by how beautiful the sea was, the Solta Channel with the islands just out of reach, the sparkling clean water. I was amazed at how perfectly well the weather held for two weeks, in which we barely saw any clouds and when the day and evening temperatures fell into such reliable predictability. There was the cute little restaurant nearby, with its lovely pizza and Karlovacko beer, which I loved even though every night we ate their they played the song "Baker Street" on the house stereo, thus permanently lodging it in my head like some kind of sonic shrapnel. It was perfect, but if the first sniffle of the Balkan disease didn't come until later.

Person who died

I never really bothered to have a strong opinion about Jim Carroll, the poet, diarist, and rock star who died suddenly last Friday at the age of 60. He swam in the same current as many of my favorite writers and musicians, so I've long known and admired much of his work. But I've never felt much more than that. He was in all the right places, knew the right people, but it always felt like he was opportunely a few steps behind.


Take his cult classic, The Basketball Diaries, which never struck me as even a very good example of writing about drugs. Looking at it again recently, it seems to me it isn't much more than a disjointed collection of clever observations, with a certainly dated shock value, which all suggest raw talent that might lead to something solid with the right influences. But the book itself never gets too deeply into why this nice Catholic jock would go so far off the rails, nor about what any of these misadventures might have to tell a disinterested reader.


His poetry was, I guess, alright, but not really that distinctive from a lot of the kind of stuff happening around New York in the good old days. The Jim Carroll Band, his game effort at rock n' roll/poetic fusion, never went far enough (see the perfectly serviceable version of "Sweet Jane" below, which really doesn't give you any reason not to just listen to Lou's original version again).  


 The only thing he did that is truly timeless is the song "People Who Died," an unrelenting, upbeat, almost hypnotizing rocker that transcends the ghoulishness of its subject matter to become a very profound assertion of life in the face of impermanence. But even then, the song was just an adaptation of a poem by his friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan.


Carroll gave a reading at Penn when I was there, and I came away impressed. The thing that I remember most was his voice -- this incredible, authentic New-Yawk honk, which sounded incredibly strained and weary croaking out of his tall, frail body. There was something in the way he read that suggested a kind of humility. The kind of deep appreciation many recovering addicts possess, especially one that pissed away what many think could have been a really promising career in professional sports. There was something about him that made you want to root for him, a kind of everyman sense of wonder and awe.


Of course, there is another way to look at this -- Robert Christgau acidly described him as being a phony "who's been charming suckers ever since he ran away from home." (He then goes on to acknowledge that charming this successfully takes real talent. "He's got a great eye, a great memory, great connections. He knows how to put himself across.") I wouldn't be that uncharitable though. You have to imagine him as a fifteen year old kid with a lot on his plate -- one of the best young basketball players in the city, already turning tricks around Times Square to fuel a drug habit, and still finding the time to stalk Frank O'Hara as he walked home from work, just to see what he saw and maybe get an insight into what made his poetry tick. They really don't make them like that anymore -- poetry has become ossified and ridiculous, promising athletes are channeled into the game so thoroughly they barely develop personalities, and the great American stewing pot of New York is a pathetic shadow of itself. He swam in some amazing slipstreams.

Rumors of war, and no pronunciation guide

By sheer coincidence, I've been spending a lot time researching the lead-up to the start of the Second World War, 70 years ago this morning. Reading through the papers and magazines of the time, it is hard not to feel a chill reading about how the world marched into the abyss, while America was content to look on with what almost feels like bemused concern. I came upon this thought from an editorial in The New York Times on Monday, August 21, 1939.

"Already we undergo a fresh baptism of consonants at news dispatches from Grunia, Lwow, and Bydgoszck, and worse may be yet to come. Any day now we may have to read of skirmishes at Mlawa and Piotrkow, turning movements at Wloclawek and Wlocklawa, and artillery duels at Bycloweszka and Czestowhowo. For all we know, there will even be retreats to Zgenz and Maciecjowice and a famous victory at Tecxynski, and by then the tongues of suffering millions will be tied in hard knots for life."