Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Are We All Feeling Better Yet? A Tragicomedy in Four Scenes by Simon Schama

Simon Schama, a professor of history at Harvard University's Center for European Studies, is the author of Citi­zens: A Chronicle of the French Revolu­tion, for which he won the NCR Book Award, as well as An Embarrassment of Riches and Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculation).

Prologue

Enter Chorus with cellular phone.

Friends, Fellow Americans, lend me your votes. I come not to praise representative government but to bury it. I mean, fellas, who needs it? All that yap-yap, scribble­-scribble, and nothing getting fixed.

Yes, my friends, the era of couch potato democ­racy is at hand, the political equivalent of fast food - fully electronic, superconducted, user-friendly, drive-through citizenship. No need now to slog through boring, complicated position statements, fine-print journalism, party platforms, legislative proposals, congressional hearings and debates. We're talking bottom-line problem-solving here.

And you can forget the inconvenience of driving all the way to a polling station in some dinky little school, getting in the voting booth and reading all those columns of God-knows­ who running for God-knows-what. Starting real soon, from the comfort of your very own den, you will be able to sample the options and hit the remote. Why, you could do it between innings. In fact, why not save ourselves some time and effort here and have Brent Musburger or Bryant Gumbel or Larry King give us the questions? Why have a Constitution when America can be tuned into one terrific Talk Show?

Believe me, it's as easy as pie and you won't feel a thing. No pain, no taxes. All you have to do is to follow the Leader, hit the right button on cue and shazzam, 600 billion dollars' worth of deficit disappears. Am I right? Are we feeling better yet?

Well, never mind, there are still places where Feelgood America is doing just fine, thank you.

Scene One

Hand-jive at the mall

There are places deep in the malls of America where even today the spirit of 1955 lives on. A bona fide marketing genius has created a time bubble eatery called Johnny Rockets (coming shortly to your neighborhood), in which you can guzzle blissfully on an innocent past: perfect cold malted milks, fries for which the state of Idaho might have been invented, BLTs of peer­less crispy-crunchiness. If God is not actually in these soda fountains, apple pie that tastes as though it might have been by Him certainly is. The Johnny Rockets diner in Burlington, Mass., just outside Boston, looks like an installation at the Museum of Modern Art, down to the shiny red bar stools, the jukebox selectors at each booth, and the photos from Life on the wall. The soda jerks are from Central Casting: corn­fed, clean-cut, indefatigably good-natured. If you pick the right numbers on the juke, the waitresses will hand-jive for you. On the night we were there everyone sang Happy Birthday to my 9-year-old daughter. The place was packed with teenage dental hardware and the air was thick with Ike-liking.

Bottled happiness - who does it better than America? We are, after all, the only great empire whose founding charter expressly articulated the right to be happy (or at least to pursue it). The trouble is that we tend to confuse the good life with a life of goods, that Bluebird of Happiness with the Right to Shop. And right now, Dame Fortune (a.k.a. the business cycle) isn't smiling on us. But, hey, not to worry. There's nothing so wrong that a real take-charge guy couldn't fix it with a touch of elbow grease, right?

Don't count on it. Some months ago I pub­lished an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times comparing Yeltsin's Russia with pre-revolution­ary France. A colossal burden of debt, an inno­vative but politically incoherent government, the self-defeating expectation that the invention of democracy comes with a full market basket­ all seemed to warrant the comparison. But perhaps analogies become obses­sions. For these days it is our own floundering poli­ty, the United States, that looks more like a pre-revolutionary danger zone. And the magnitude of our troubles is not to be measured simply by the conventional indices of economic perfor­mance. More housing starts, a little leap in the “consumer confidence” ratings or a pickup in autosales may signal some short of return to short-term cheerfulness, but these indices say nothing about the deep systemic sicknesses that may in the end determine that the American Century will have lasted, in fact, for just 50 years. In ways that may be irreversible, we have become lawless (66 million handguns); mindless (Check your television listings); and directionless. Our national temper is sour, our attention span limited, our fuse short. We yearn, childishly, for a cowboy in a white hat to ride into town. We are ripe for political disaster.

Scene Two

No more Polish jokes, please

Northeast Poland is a place of deep forests and mirror lakes. It is one of the last unruined paradises in Europe, so I won't tell you where exactly I have in mind, much less how to get there. Trust me. In one of these lakes teenagers splash and laugh while a small battle takes place on the bank. (This is a topography of ancient battles - between Polish Kings and Teutonic knights and between Russian and German ar­mies.) This battle, however, involves only two men and a cow. One of these men, small, wiry, with the obligatory bristling Walesa moustache, pulls the cow towards the water to make it drink.

His partner pushes from behind. The cow does not want to go but is finally, slitheringly dragged into the lake, where it eventually gets the idea and proceeds to slurp.

It seems like a lot of work. Jan, the senior cow puller, tells us he is an unemployed construction worker who simply couldn't face doing nothing about his predicament. A country boy by origin, he decided he would be a meat wholesaler, hoping to cash in on steeply rising prices in Warsaw and other Polish cities. He had bought the cow for 3.5 million zlotys (about $280). But since he had no transport of any kind he had walked (or dragged) the animal 5 miles from the farmyard to his house in the local town. Soon, he says, he will butcher the cow, turn it into saleable veal, and take the product to the meat marketers in the nearest big urban center. But he is not a happy entre­preneur. He has discovered that the meat marketers (who sell to the butchers) dictate, rather than negoti­ate, prices, and their non­negotiable prices mean his profit will be just 600,000 zlotys, or around $48, a pitiful reward for all his work. Jan shrugs his shoulders, "What can I do?" He is learning capitalism the hard way. The market economy that has replaced the paternalist communist state has already robbed him of one job and made his efforts to turn himself into a producer a cruel joke. With almost nothing he nevertheless remains defiant and ebullient. He will make it. Poland will make it. The cow will drink at the lake.

A few miles away, in the heart of the Mazurian lakeland, a gleaming new hotel stands incongru­ously in a landscape of small farms, horse plows and timber cottages. Its five stories dominate a hillside as did the gentry's country houses and hunting lodges of past centuries. But instead of stables and carriage drives in front, there is a helicopter, its rotors twirling, ready to take tourists on their flight over the lakes. There is a swimming pool, a lobby with acres of gleaming marble. There are even-mirabile dictu-elec­tric hand driers in the spotless white-and chrome bathrooms.

Though the place looks and feels like a Hyatt clone, right down to the plastic-and-rock water­falls in the lobby and the almost unnaturally breezy and efficient table service, all the guests are Polish. So someone in the new Poland is making enough money to support all this crystal glassware and white table linen. The hotel, open for barely six months, sports the name of its founder and entrepreneur, very much as though he had already set his sights on becoming the Polish Conrad Hilton. Over a terrific bowl of zurek, the sour-cream soup, we ask our waitress if the owner is, like Stanislaw Tyminski, the Canadian businessman who came back to Poland to run for the presidency against Lech Walesa, a foreign-born Pole reinvesting in homeland. Nie, absolutely not, she say with a smile of beaming pride, he is "one of ours.”

Not everyone in Poland is quite this ready to be made over in the image of Adam Smith in Las Vegas. We breakfasted on country white cheese and fresh-baked rye bread at a monastery overlooking over another of the lakes that had turned into a conference center by the Ministry of Culture. The food was delectable, the building handsome, the views spectacular. We asked for coffee. "Ah," said the blonde waitress flashing a dazzling smile, "coffee is upstairs at the bar, this is tea." Our photographer, Tadeusz was brazen enough to push his luck. “Er, any possibility of someone bringing the coffee downstairs?" An even more dazzling the reply, "Maybe."

"It takes longer than a year or two to emerge from communist contempt for the philosophy of customer service," Tadeusz said, needlessly apologizing (for the tea, as the waitress well knew, was wonderful).

Nowadays butter and margarine are plentiful in the cities, along with most other kind of foodstuffs like meat, fresh vegetables and fruit. All it takes is the income to buy them. For the implementation of free-market has been so brutally effective that many households in Poland, perhaps most, now spend 70% to 80% of their income on food.

Not since the Industrial Revolution can there possibly have been so violent a shock to expectations about living standards. If Americans accustomed to their binge-and-bust lifestyle as a constitutional right, ever had to endure even a fraction of the economic pain borne by the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, it is unthinkable what political ugliness might ensue.

So we should not be surprised to discover such societies having a hard time settling into the working habits of viable democracy. The least predicted feature of life after communism (at least outside Russia) is not disagreement over economic policy. For however painful the reforms may be, they seem to accepted, at least in the cities, as the inevitable price to be paid for years of communist economic fantasy. The most serious sources of destabilization in much of Eastern Europe come from ancient tribal hatreds and incompatibilities. And as in Poland, populations are almost ethically and culturally homogeneous, it is the dreadful burden of suspicion and recrimination, pointing fingers and publishing lists about who did and who did not collaborate with the discredited regime, that makes a genuine pluralism so diffi­cult to accomplish. While dissidents who were once united in their anticommunism bicker over the purity of their credentials, their erstwhile persecutors sit back and enjoy capitalism at its most opportunistic. Edward Gierek, one of the last hardline Polish communist leaders, is now a millionaire (in dollars, not zlotys, my informant insisted) from sales of his memoirs. Out of power, he is incomparably more popular than in power. (The opposite is true of Lech Walesa.) At signing sessions the lines outside the bookstores stretched round the block.

It is impossible to be in Warsaw and not believe, or at least hope, that the Poles (and for that matter, the Czechs and the Hungarians) will make it. For all the privations and desperate anxieties, there is a phenomenal hunger to succeed; and great energy and determination to work at it. Not everything about this scene is heroic. The "new Poles" point to the pathetic "Russian markets" spread out on the cobble­stones by itinerant vendors trying to sell Yeltsin dolls, carnations, a basket of cucumbers, any­thing, as their new underclass. And at the very bottom of the heap, lying in wretchedness all around the streets of Cracow, one of the most spectacularly beautiful cities in the world, are Romanian beggars.

Scene Three

Liverpool Street station

I rubbed my eyes, as they say, in disbelief. The taxi had dropped me off at Liverpool Street railway station in London, a place I had known throughout the Sixties and Seventies as a scruffy, crumbling rat hole of a station covered in soot and grease with urinous smells that would leap out at you unpredictably as you walked to the tracks, and where surly ticket takers would punch your ticket as if they hoped the clippers would go right through your hand.

And now there was the railroad's answer to Xanadu. What good fairy had waved a wand? The station had turned into a palace, and I was fairly transported. The floors were some sort of polished white stone, sparkling clean. The great glazed hemispherical roof was clear enough to let in the sunshine of a London spring, and the ribs of iron girders had been restored to their original Victorian polychrome brilliance, all Grenadier Guard scarlet and royal blue. Up from the entry ramp and down the immense operatic staircase poured tens of thousands of travelers with expressions on their face altogether different (so it seemed to me) from standard-issue bilious misery that usually went with ordeal by British Rail. And even if had gone badly, on their way to the track they could brighten it in at an incredible array of stores selling everything from exotic fruit juices to hand-milled soap to 15 varieties of cheese (all of which, to those FORBES readers not expert in the Welsh cheeses, I can say make the French equivalents pale by comparison for sheer savory voluptuousness).

Not everything about British Rail 1992 is showplace perfect. A few days before a station, Euston, I had been treated to a more predictable version of public transport. The idea was to get to Manchester by high-speed City train. But after 20 minutes waiting in the cars, with that uncomplaining British resignation I have definitely lost, passengers were treated to the following announcement. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2:20 to Manchester. British Rail wishes to apologize for this delay, which has occurred because . . . er. . . there is no engine." "Bloody hell” muttered a commuter behind me, whose British sangfroid had finally turned to sang-churd last week they had the engine but forgot the driver.”

Only in England. But in all Europe, ­travel by rail remains phenomenally successful and popular. The French system SNCF pioneered lightning trains that can now get passengers from Paris to Lyons or Bordeaux in less than three hours. In the most densely populated areas like the Netherlands, cities are supplied with invariably punctual trains every 20 minutes or so (perpetuating the tradition of the old passenger barges of the 17th-century canals with their two-class travel and dependable timetables.) Even beleaguered Poland now has a superb service that covers the distance between Warsaw and Cracow in about two and a half hours.

By contrast, the United States has a pathetic remnant of a once majestic railroad system, lumbering along on ancient track, and with obsolescent rolling stock. In fact, Amtak does the best job it can with absolutely no willingness on the part of its national government (again, unlike the Europeans or the Japanese) to invest in the technological improvements that could make it competitive with the airlines. So instead of real choice between modes of transport over medium-haul distances, the airlines (who never seem capable of turning a profit) enjoy a virtual monopoly and treat the regular traveler to a succession of overpriced ordeals: filthy food, unhealthy air, and a series of barefaced lies about arrival and departure times.

No wonder we feel lousy.

Scene Four

The hustings

None of this matters beside one chilling statistic more truly terrifying even than the monstrous scale of our national debt; the numbing scale of our homicide rate; the shaming data rising about infant mortality; the scary return of tuberculosis; the relentless march of AIDS; the appalling rates of adult illiteracy; the clouding of our children's minds by hour upon hour of televisual smog; the huge vagrant encampments of the homeless; the stupefying divorce rate. No, none of this should scare us half as much as the single damning fact that barely half of Americans entitled to vote do so.

For nothing, as Tocqueville knew, will condemn a democracy, first to impotence then to manipulation and finally to self-destruction, more certainly than indifference. By contrast, for example, there was a 77% turnout for the British general election last April. But then, British elections, with all their faults, are much less the prisoners than their American counterparts of the opinion polls, the media-managers, the handlers and fundraisers. Television time in the UK is allotted impartially and equally between the parties, not bought by the deepest pockets. During the three weeks of their campaign, spending by candidates for the House of Parliament is limited to just $15,000. And whatever one thinks of the result, there is no doubt whatsoever that in the last British campaign no major issue of serious concern to the electorate - from European policy to health care to education reform and proportional representation - failed to be directly and exhaustively addressed by the parties. The Labor Party was even responsible enough to cost its proposed programs carefully and spell out exactly how it would pay for them, not that this candor did it much good.

Perhaps something like the British system would never work in our continental democracy. But when it is axiomatically rejected as fit only for cottage elections, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that there are huge industries - political consultancies; professional image-makers and breakers; fund-drive merchants; scandalmongers - all of whom have a vested interest in perpetuating the trashy status quo and who would still feed off the dying carcass of democracy even if voting rates were down to 10% or 5%. At the time when business are being touted as just the thing to clean up government , it's worth noticing that it’s just because politics has become so outrageously commercialized that it now has the moral authority of a toxic waste dump.

Why has America lost faith in its own politics, rooted as they are in a Constitution that remains, for all its imperfections, the noblest working document that democracy has ever produced?

The first reason is the calamity that has befallen the language in which democracy is practiced. You need only listen to paid political advertisements or the miserable travesties of political argument announced as "Debates” to agree with Orwell that democracy lives or dies with the clarity and integrity of its speech. It is no accident that from the very beginnings of Western culture, the learning and practice of rhetoric were at the core of its pedagogy, and every high school debate team carries with it the presumption of the moral significance of eloquence. It is not simply the ornament of democracy. It is its basic working tool, the agency of explanation, persuasion and trust, between politicians and the people.

Such an optimal description bears no resemblance, of course, to the wretched mush of banalities, deceits and abuse that constitutes the habitual forms of political language in this country. Negative campaigning is now the expected norm in our crouch potato democracy. Its working premise assumes that the People out there are too lazy, too stupid and have too short an attention span ever to pay heed to the substantive issues that will really affect them. On the other hand, playing the lowest common denominator, fear, prurience, hatred, contempt, will always get their attention. And when at all possible, use crouch potato references as a substitute for serious argument, since fictitious television characters command more concern and loyalty than live ones. Wheel on Murphy Brown’s baby.

The result of all this is the trivialization of the American political process to the point where it has become a grim joke. The goal of campaigns, abetted by most press coverage, has been to distract the voters from, not concentrate their minds on, the issues that will determine their lives. Give them sound bites and photo-ops. Make sure that whatever happens in “debates” isn't actually debating, but a formulaic exchange of predetermined positions and utterances, and then present it as thought it were a sporting event, with commentaries on “winners” and “losers.” Nothing too heavy, man, just the kind of politics that can be effortlessly consumed with a bag of Doritos and a can of Miller Lite.

It's not Demosthenes I'm asking for, you understand, not even Abraham Lincoln (though he would help), just somebody who has the eloquence to restore to America its lost sense of a shared community. Without it we are doomed to the rhetoric of division, of utterly alienated and separated communities - black, white, Asian, Hispanic, urban, suburban, Chris­tian, Jewish, pro-choice, pro-life, all against all.

Hardly less important is the reinvention of government. Ronald Reagan's famous dictum that "government is not the answer, it's the problem" powerfully reinforced an old notion in America that regards public administration as an unclean thing. The force of the cliché is now so strong that anyone presuming to suggest a little more, rather than a lot less, regulation, has to defend himself against the accusation of proposing socialism by the back door.

The country is faced, nevertheless, with a vast array of brutal problems, many of which cry out for more, not less, governmental intervention. Public health, the environ­ment, education, relations between local and central government all need the kind of coherence and lead­ership that an activist government might supply. This is, after all, the nation of Hamilton as well as Jeffer­son. Is it conceivable that one day we might even end up with a President who was not ashamed to point out to the country that there might actually be decent and pressing purposes for which their tax money might be spent?

We need to feel better about our government because the crises we face are so urgent and so terrible. Even at the most minimal level, govern­ment should have responsibility for the physical protection of its citizens. But for decades now governments, intimidated by the NRA, have run away from the single statistic that provokes horrified amazement everywhere else in the world: the presence of 66 million handguns in the population, a real fetish of violence, death and revenge celebrated every night on small and big screens. And nowhere else in the world does the assumption run so conventionally unchal­lenged that the best deterrent for murder is capital punishment, a premise belied by the records of every country in the world, where its elimination is accompanied by homicide rates an infinitesimal fraction of the rising tide of Ameri­can bloodshed.

The list of tasks is endless, almost overwhelm­ing. For example, how about a decent and ambitious national educational curriculum that does away with the mechanical multiple-choice testing turned out by the testing organizations, themselves more interested in profit than education? And despite recent attacks on PBS, we need more, not less, federal commitment to public broadcasting, especially in the shape of imaginative children's programming so that some chance of rescuing them from the idiotization (to use Carl Bernstein's term) that comes from countless hours of being deposited before the box as apprentice couch potatoes.

Most of all, though, we are in n­eed of a government that is not ashamed of its own job description.

It's an old joke in our family that the Schamas have an uncanny knack for following collapsing empires. A century and a half ago we were subjects of the Ottoman Empire; then, as that disintegrated, took ourselves off to Habsburg Vienna; thence, in my parents' generation, to Edwardian Britain. And here I am.

Yet there's nowhere I'd rather make my home. For all its ills and sorrow and plagues and vexations; this country still has phenomenal reserves of raw energy, creative inventiveness, courageous idealism and gritty determination. Unlike my place of birth on the other side of the Atlantic, it is not a culture in which gentle skepticism really thrives. With rare exceptions like Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken, America has usually taken its sense of historical destiny too seriously to value historical irony, at least in public discourse. Yet outrageous self-mockery is one of the things America does best, flaying the sentimentality that makes State of the Union addresses seem as though they were composed from greeting cards.

Time and time again throughout their history Americans have shown an amazing for responding to the threat of disaster by rediscovering their sense of community. What lies ahead, though, is not some sort of imminent apocalypse, the sudden and brutal extinction of power of the kind just experienced by the Soviet Union. If American power dies, it will be a death from a thousand cuts, all of them self-inflicted, rather than any kind of wound from an outside enemy.

Of course, there is always the possibility that the campaign of 1992 may be seen by historians as an altogether happier watershed in the American public life: the moment when politics was liberated from the public relations men; when it recovered enough nerve to address real issues and when, at long last, the America public tired of their allotted role as couch potato democrats and bestirred themselves enough to want the real thing. Perhaps.

But I don't feel too good about it.

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