Andrew Breitbart, Your Bell is Tolling

“. . . . it has become an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellowman.” — William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating”

Andrew Breitbart is dead at the age of 43. A warrior for conservative causes, he became a self-styled scourge of political and social liberals through his websites and videos. You might say, with Thomas Hobbes, that his public life was nasty, brutish, and short. 

Just last week he was in Washington, DC screaming obscenities at Occupy Washington and calling them freaks and animals. It’s hard not to think that he simply blew up, all that bile and red-hot anger just incinerating his heart. 

Upon his death many of the right-wing elite weighed in. Sarah Palin vowed to fight on in the endless battle against liberal corruption that Breitbart so valiantly waged. Even Romney released a generic condolence note, while Limbaugh called for “a thousand more Breitbart’s” in America. One of his fans, writing at the Fox Nation website, quoted at length from Ecclesiastes, comparing him to the wise man and reminding all readers that America was built by people like Breitbart. “This is not about politics—an aggressively corrupt vocation, at best—but rather the active living out of one’s faith in God and country; fully recognizing that this country was founded by men of faith. . . . on the principles of the Judao-Christian (sic) Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 

And so the lionization begins of a man who vilified Ted Kennedy after his death, calling him “a special pile of excrement,” among other things, and who assassinated the character of Shirley Sherrod, a United States Department of Agriculture official. Breitbart edited a videotape of Sherrod speaking at a conference so that it appears she made racist remarks about white farmers, when she was really describing how her attitudes had changed over the years. Breitbart lied, distorted evidence, and rejoiced when she was falsely accused and fired. Unrepentant to the last he vowed never to apologize to her. That was how he made his living—and apparently he loved his work. 

As David Frum, a conservative writer and columnist—and a man who knew Breitbart well—said recently, “Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise.”

That’s his legacy—giving a generation of conservative young journalists license to stab the body politic, trash-talk their way through column inches and video moments, and write the kind of drivel that not even a mother could love. 

I couldn’t stand the things he did, I didn’t think he was funny, and I found his values abhorrent. If he served as a catalyst for people’s hatred toward those he chose to crucify, then the world is fractionally better off now that he’s dead. Because he constantly thrust himself into the hot lights of arcade journalism, we only have his public persona to decipher. If there was a kinder, gentler Andrew behind his sneer he certainly kept it on a short chain.

Yet, he’s a fascinating case study for a political culture that has become both poisonous and ludicrous. No society with a majority of people like him could survive. But the very values he excoriated of tolerance, fairness, equality of justice, thinking before you speak and perceiving the world from multiple perspectives, allowed him the freedom to be himself. 

It’s possible that Breitbart might have moderated his style as he matured. With time, some personal pain and loss, and at least a hint of humility, he might have become a powerful and eloquent voice for conservative issues. But I doubt it. His consistency lay in his ability to disregard any viewpoint but his own. With the notoriety he gained and the money he was paid he had no incentive to stop and think before he flew into a rage. 

A lot of people admired him, no doubt for some of the same reasons we venerate Mafia bosses, thuggish musicians, and arrogant athletes: they do what they like and stand over against the crowd. 

I don’t hate the man because I don’t want to be seduced by the very weapons he used to hack his way through the world. If he were drowning I’d hope I’d have the presence of mind to do what I could to save him simply because he was in need. In that regard, he stands for all of us, one of the family of humanity in all its twisted, fallen, and forgivable potential. And his death reminds us that our freedoms, stretched at times to the breaking point when extended to people like him, must be preserved in the particular case in order that all of us may enjoy them.

The Law of Happiness

“. . . . happiness is affected more by one’s movement toward (or away from) success than by one’s position near (or far from) it. . . . So the law of happiness says happiness waxes and wanes in direct proportion to a sense of progress toward or away from a goal, a worthy cause, a creation, a companion to be loved.” — Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life

One of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Outliers, made the claim that successful people achieved their success more by working very hard than by native talent. In fact, their level of success could be predicted by the hours, days, weeks, and years that they kept at their craft. Those who worked hard and long did better than those who worked occasionally or half-heartedly. The “Duh factor” kicks in here, of course—you’d expect people who practiced the piano six hours every day to do much better than those who tickle the ivories once or twice a week. And while I may have forgotten the finer nuances of Gladwell’s argument, one thing I took away from the book is this: those who found enjoyment in the process of working to become the best were more likely to stick with it. And somewhere along the line other people noticed and counted them successful. 

This ability to find oneself in the practice runs against the common belief that our lives only begin in the end. “Wait until you’re older,” we say to those younger than ourselves. “You’ll find out what I mean when you get out into the real world,” we say to students, a warning to be graciously ignored since there is no reason to think that the life of a student is anything but real. “Work hard, think positively, and one day you’ll be on top,” the saying goes. As sayings go this one goes two-thirds of the way until it becomes mired in the mud of probabilities instead of certainties. 

Working hard is guaranteed only to make you adept and expert at what you do. Thinking positively begins as optimism and becomes faith in hope through adversity, never a bad thing. Inevitably reaching the top is not a foregone conclusion, no matter how hard you work. But it is a sure thing that if you don’t work hard your odds of success, much less rising to the top, will quickly diminish. Thus, behind most overnight sensations is a person who put in the time, usually a lot of time, to make it all look so easy.

I’ve been reading a biography of Bruce Springsteen, a man whose music inspires me and whose determination, even in his twenties, was formidable. Living lean, scratching out a living from day to day by playing in clubs, he worked on his music with a single-minded focus. He resisted all attempts to change his style, to use studio musicians instead of the guys he grew up with, and to practice being derivative of what was on the radio. He heard his songs in his head and he made them come out into the air in the way he wanted. 

Although his music is definitively his own he listened and learned from the rock ’n roll greats—Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, Bill Haley, and others—and he has distilled that legacy into the raw essentials of his own vision. 

Sting, another musician whose artistic range seems constantly to be expanding, has surrounded himself with people who, by his own reckoning, are better musicians than he is. Every collaboration offers him another chance to learn, to add to the collage of nuances and meanings he can draw from his own creative process. 

I am drawn to these people, not just because their music has defined and surrounded so many of the ways I experience the world, but also because of their open-hearted stance toward the dazzling, heartbreaking, searing, poignant prospect of becoming human. As artists they have pared away the distractions while remaining free to pick up what moves them from others. They have the humility to learn, the creativity to shape and produce art, and a work ethic that strives for the fullness of their imaginations. 

A. C. Grayling reminds us that “The first lesson of happiness is that the surest way to be unhappy is to think that happiness can be directly sought.” It can’t be, he says, because it is a by-product of other things. “And what it is a by-product of is those activities that are worthwhile in themselves, that bring satisfaction and achievement in the doing, that give one a sense of well-doing and well-being.”

Tonight, walking alone in the night with the wind gusting about me, heading for home and light and love and warmth, I could not help but smile, realizing by those measures, through the grace of God, family, and friends, I am a most blessed and happy man.

Whitney Houston: Respect for the Sufferer

“Compassion, therefore, is the one virtue that lets us open ourselves not just to all humanity but also to all living beings or, at the very least, to all suffering beings.” — André Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues

In the opening paragraphs of Philip K. Dick’s Valis, we meet Horselover Fat, a saintly but psychotic twin of Dick himself, who informs us that his psychiatrist told him that in order to get well he would need to give up dope and stop helping people. Fat was unable to do either. His compassion for others causes him immense suffering; his insanity prevents his compassion from having practical effect. He is all pity, but with little to show for it. 

In my mind there is a close connection between Horselover Fat’s predicament and the feelings generated by Whitney Houston’s death. Absent the dope and absent any way to actually help her or her family, we are left with pity and, as one philosopher has put it, ‘Pity doesn’t go far.’ 

To demonstrate the spectrum of experiences we call pity, I need only think about this past week in which Houston’s death led off, a friend’s aged dog was put down, many more civilians were slaughtered in Syria, and in Honduras a fire in a prison killed hundreds. In each case the common thread is that we can do absolutely nothing for the suffering beings directly. At a far distance we experience pity or compassion on a sliding scale: Whitney Houston’s sad demise in the foreground, a friend’s dog in the middle distance, and in the deep distance the suffering of prisoners and families alike in Honduras. 

Comte-Sponville, the author of the epigram above, examines compassion and pity closely in one of the chapters of his wonderful book on virtues. He notes that compassion means ‘to suffer with,’ and pity is almost always tinged with sadness. 

Pity has come in for its share of criticism throughout the ages, from the Stoics to Spinoza to Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt. “Pity is the sadness one feels in response to the sadness of another; it does not spare the other person his own sadness but rather tends to add to it.” Against this piling up of pain Spinoza counseled reason and justice. In his view, pity is evil and useless and unnecessary. Why not act toward the sufferer with the joy of love and generosity? Who needs pity?

Nietzsche regarded pity as more than useless, a weakness that was a fatal flaw in cultures. Those cultures based on Christianity he thought timid and effeminate because of their propensity toward compassion, following the example of Christ. The truly noble cultures would cultivate a visceral hardness, a kind of bitter joy in one’s own toughness and self-sufficiency. 

Which brings us back to Whitney Houston. It is a story we are all too familiar with: the celebrity blessed with talent to burn, beauty, and success, who squanders it, usually through drug and alcohol abuse, and ultimately dies alone under suspicious circumstances, long before their thread of life is fully spun out by the Muses. Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, Heath Ledger, River Phoenix, Amy Winehouse, Elvis—the list goes on and on. We mourn their passing, we miss their talent, we feel a shiver of relief that we are still here—and we go out in the morning and start the car and drive off to work or school or to shop. Of course we must go on; most of us would not be incapacitated by the deaths, however unfortunate, of those we don’t really know. 

I am trying to understand, nevertheless, why we feel this sadness, where it might fit in The Vast Scheme of Things. Understanding an emotion is not the same as defining and categorizing it according to function. Understanding develops almost organically, like a seed bursting open, thrusting shoots up toward the light, branching and twining, from strength to strength. To follow the analogy, it is training the vine instead of pinning the butterfly.  

Emotions simply are: we have them and are affected by them. That fact does not stop us from analyzing them in order to wring all the utility we can from them. We study them  so we can provoke them in others. We tamp them down, build them up, hold them in check, and give free rein to them. Plato called them wild horses, the ever-present danger to rationality. Yet without them we’d be less than human, and compassion, joined at the hip with sadness, practically stands in for love for humankind. “Humanity,” notes Comte-Sponville, “when we speak of it as a virtue, is nearly synonymous with compassion, a fact that says much about both.” 

Compassion, like sympathy, is linguistically bound to the idea and experience of suffering with others. It is a universal that transcends languages and cultures, opening us even to the suffering of animals and enemies. Yet, when a public figure says, ‘I feel your pain,’ or a character in a TV drama says stiffly, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ we bridle. This emotion, more than most, relies on honesty perceived. In other words, if we’re not really experiencing it, then silence in the presence of the sufferer might be better than empty eloquence. 

But an emotion is first experienced and then communicated. We see ourselves as sad, happy, angry, or confused. In fact, William James argued that we are sad because we cry, rather than crying because we are sad. The emotion wells up, we feel it, we awaken to it, and we express it. 

There don’t seem to be any selfless emotions. Even when we feel pity or compassion for another who is suffering we have not Photoshopped ourselves out of the picture. Aristotle said, “what we fear for ourselves excites our pity when it happens to others.” That may be, but does it negate the effect? I don’t think so. What is to be gained, in the long run, by hardening our hearts against the suffering around us, whether it be that of a dog or a diva? 

There is an important distinction to be made, I believe, between pity and compassion. Pity has about it something of contempt for an inferior, the poor schmuck who finally got his. If that’s what it is, nobody really wants our pity. But compassion, if based on love and kindness, sees oneself in the suffering of the other. Respect for the dignity of the sufferer calls not for pity shaded as contempt, but for the recognition of the universal in the particular, the tragic beauty of our common humanity.

So for Whitney Houston’s passing we could claim these lines of Rainier Rilke from his Sonnets to Orpheus:

“But you now, you whom I knew like a flower whose name

I don’t know, I will once more remember and show you

to them, you who were taken away,

beautiful playmate of the invincible cry.

Dancer first, who suddenly, with body full of lingering,

paused, as though her youngness were being cast in bronze;

mourning and listening—. Then, from the high achievers

music fell into her altered heart.

Sickness was near. Already overcome by the shadows,

her blood pulsed more darkly, yet, as if fleetingly

suspect, it thrust forth into its natural spring.

Again and again, interrupted by darkness and downfall,

it gleamed of the earth. Until after terrible throbbing

it entered the hopelessly open portal.”

They Shoot Laptops, Don't They?

“A primary method for studying the effects of anything is simply to imagine ourselves as suddenly deprived of them.” — Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan

There are two ways that new technology is received:  we love it or we hate it. The shock of the new drives many to denounce it, mourn the passing of life as we know it, and predict a bad end for all of us. On the other hand, the beta testers and early adopters bubble with enthusiasm: the new (fill in the blank) will make life easier, more fun, more efficient, and . . . more fun. But once we traverse this familiar territory we find ourselves in rough country without maps and only a general sense of the terrain. 

That is where we are right now with Facebook, the social media phenomenon that recently announced it would go public in May, reportedly raising some $5 billion in the process. When Mark Zuckerberg began Facebook at Harvard in 2004, MySpace was already the place to be online. Rubert Murdoch and News Corp bought MySpace in 2005 and by 2007 MySpace was valued at $12 billion. But by 2008 Facebook overtook MySpace and quickly eclipsed it as the leading social network. In its recent SEC filing for the upcoming IPO Facebook reported over 800 million users world-wide. If you do a search on Amazon for “Facebook” you’ll get over 4, 600 results, and Facebook is now considered essential for corporations, start-ups, and public figures. If there aren’t any dissertations about Facebook yet, I’m sure there will be soon. 

But it’s the effect it has on families and friends that I find so intriguing. Although I am no Luddite I am perhaps slower than some to adopt new media. I can fully appreciate the power of Facebook to bring people together, but it’s how people use it to punish and harass one another that’s so disconcerting. 

Facebook has become Everyman’s bully pulpit, a megaphone to the world. We’ve all heard stories of employees getting fired, students expelled or otherwise disciplined, marriages breaking up, and people’s secrets being exposed on Facebook. It’s simply wrong to blame Facebook for this, but it’s naive to imagine that this medium does not have the power to ruin people. 

I recently saw a video on YouTube which brought all this into sharp focus. A teenage girl had used Facebook to rant about all the housework she had to do, how oppressive her parents were, and how her life generally sucked because of her family. Apparently, this was the second offense of this nature: the first time she had been grounded for months, and her laptop and cellphone were confiscated by her parents. But this time her father decided to carry through on his threat to do much worse if the girl broke the rules again. 

So he made a short video and placed it online so that his daughter and her friends and suffering parents everywhere could learn from her mistakes. We see a man in jeans and a cowboy hat, settling himself in a chair in the backyard, with a sheet of paper clutched in his hand. In a voice tight and high with rage he reads a letter addressed to his daughter in which he quotes at length from her Facebook rant of the previous day, complete with obscenities and the kind of whining and exaggeration which makes parents apoplectic. He recalled how he worked two jobs when he was her age, put himself through college while working full time, and how just the day before he had taken time off work to buy and install $130 of software on her laptop—the very laptop she had later used to complain to the world about her cruel lot in life.  “I’m going to post this to your Facebook account,” he said, “so all your friends and parents everywhere can learn from it.”

I thought it couldn’t get any worse—but then he walked toward the camera and moved offscreen as he directed our view to the ground near his feet. There lay the girl’s laptop and in his hand was a .45 pistol. “I told you last time that if you ever did this again there would be something much worse than grounding—and this is it!“ And with that he pumped six bullets into the offending machine. “These are hollow-point bullets,” he yelled over the echoing gunshots. “They cost a buck apiece and I’m going to charge you for them, and for the $130 I spent putting software on this thing yesterday. Oh, and by the way, for what you said about your mother, she said to save a bullet for her. So there’s the last one from your mother!” And with that he clumped back to his chair and signed off with a strangled, “Have a nice day.” Fade to black. 

Okay. . . let’s see where things stand, shall we? We have a grown man, a father and a husband, shooting a laptop in his backyard, while ranting at his daughter for ranting about her family on Facebook. I guess it didn’t register with him that his movie wouldn’t be seen by his daughter on Facebook since he’d just blown her laptop to bits. 

The video has received close to 4 million hits—it’s gone viral, in other words. There are thousands of comments, 95 percent of them in favor of the father’s disciplinary methods. If this had happened in the village square things could have gotten ugly. But that’s the thing: Facebook is the public square, as is YouTube. Together they make the world into a village—much as Marshall McLuhan predicted decades ago. Bratty teenagers and fed-up parents now fight out their problems on a global stage, and everyone is invited to watch, listen, and join the brawl. 

By responding we become changed, an irony not lost on me, by the way. When all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, it’s hard not to think of it as sound and fury, signifying nothing. But it is something and it does no good to blame Facebook or YouTube by shooting the messengers. 

But by the same token, some reflection on these channels, these media, remind us that McLuhan also famously said, “The medium is the message.” It’s not just what is being said, but where and how the saying is transmitted and received. 

Those words between father and daughter, spoken or even screamed inside the walls of a home, remain the private property of that family, to be dealt with in their own way and time. But putting them on Facebook/YouTube turns them into a spectator sport, like bear-baiting, dog-fighting, and witch-dunking. 

And the troubling thing is that many will not see this as a moral failure, a betrayal of the fundamental sanctity of the family. Indeed, many of the comments cheer the father on for his “honesty,” “for telling it straight,” for giving his daughter “tough love.” 

Technology built to bring people together can do precisely that. It is not neutral in the way we mistakenly think that a gun can be used for good purposes or bad, depending on the person wielding it. A gun is designed to stop, maim, injure, and kill no matter who is using it. Mass media is designed to communicate to the masses. If it’s done right, if it works, — like Facebook and YouTube unquestionably do — then what we say and do can be shared with millions. 

As a species we’re still evolving, and having tools this powerful can seem like a Faustian bargain. But I’m hopeful that we might even learn from the past. We survived the pen, the printing press, the telegraph and television. If we don’t kill each other first we may survive YouTube and Facebook too.

The Still Point at the Super Bowl

"The simplest pattern is the clearest. Content with an ordinary life,you can show all people the way back to their own true nature." — Tao Te Ching, 65, Stephen Mitchell

This weekend the grandest spectacle in all of Mediaworld, the Super Bowl, will draw its millions—both spectators and dollars. I cannot think of another single annual event to which Americans pay such deeply religious homage. The arc of time, from pre-game to post-game, is sacred time, not to be violated by screaming infants, nagging housewives, or tinhorn dictators in Middle Eastern countries. Let Ahmadinejad threaten and bluster! He’ll have to wait his turn; The Game comes first. 

I’ve watched a few Super Bowls, even actually sat and watched the football game too, but those games fade into the blurry recesses of porous memory now. I think the last Super Bowl I watched was when Doug Williams was the quarterback for the Redskins. Then the next year he left for Florida and I left the Redskins. Back in those days the Washington Metro area’s water and sewage systems suffered regular shocks on Sundays as thousands of people flushed at the same time during commercial breaks. To remind myself of how long it’s been since I watched football is to call up an indelible image of John Riggins churning up the field, shaking off Don McNeal, for a 44-yard touchdown run and a Super Bowl record. That was XVII in Pasadena, in 1983. Commercial rates for a 30-second ad were $400,000; this year Volkswagen and other companies will ante up $3.5 million for 30 seconds. 

To put that into perspective, if you spent $1,000 per day of $3.5 million it would take you close to 9.5 years to blow that wad. Companies now can do that in 30 seconds, and with apparently little return on their investment. An article in Forbes notes that Volkswagen and Honda are topping the list of Super Bowl ads this year, having already released them on the Internet, but in purchasing language VW comes in at 13th. In other words, you have to wonder if spending the company’s money on a Super Bowl ad isn’t a vanity purchase, since on Monday or any other day after the game for that matter, the needle on the selling gauge isn’t going to tick more than a degree or two. 

But the Super Bowl, by current standards of entertainment value, is a blowout extravaganza, aiming for shock and awe from start to finish. The football game itself may rank second in reasons-to-watch after the commercials or perhaps even third after the half-time show. Those who mark the beginning of life each year with news from training camp will no doubt appreciate these diversions from the Holy Grail of their team’s heroic struggles, but they will not be denied the play-by-play and the endless angles from which to watch a fumble, a divine reception, and a slow-mo kick into the end-zone. 

There is a great divide between those of us who don’t watch and those to whom it would not occur to miss it under any circumstances. I don’t need to see it to appreciate its tawdry grandeur, its cued-up drama, and its celebration of youth, power, and raw egos. Down on the field, in the well of noise that must almost suck the air from one’s lungs, there is a domestic war being fought. To those who have struggled to get to this moment, life, the universe, and everything comes down to yards, minutes, and muscle twitches. Some, certainly not all, would play to an empty stadium, without cameras, satellites or commentators. The contest itself, shorn of the glitter and tumult of commerce, might be enough for some. 

For them the hours might hold a pure, numinous, power in which they see with absolute clarity the purpose, the means, and the goal. Emerson said, “We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.” 

Professional sports, political campaigns, and corporate strategy are the arenas of Mammon in our time. For those in the heat of the struggle, moments from victory, when the temptation and the means to crush others lies easily at hand, there might be a moment when their true face appears and they must decide whether they will wear it or sell all for a false one. That still point, a blade-edge of decision that maybe only comes with such simple grace once in a lifetime, must not be brushed aside. “It’s just a moment/This time will pass.”

That Was My Future

“Governments should strive to restore to men that taste for the future which religion and the state of society no longer inspire, and they should, without exactly saying as much, teach daily in practical terms that wealth, reputation, and power are the payment for work, that great success should come at the end of a lengthy period of waiting, and that nothing lasting is ever gained without difficulties.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

One of my favorite memories of childhood and early teen years is the image of the future as seen by Popular Mechanics in the late Fifties and early Sixties. As a recurring theme, the future was glorified for its clean cities, happy, healthy families, and the self-guided cars. 

Ah, the cars! They were blessed with automatic guidance systems so that Dad could take his hands off the wheel and turn around to the kids in the back seat who were playing a game together (nicely!), while Mom smiled approvingly. The family would arrive—on time—to their programmed destination, a gleaming skyscraper or, alternatively, a pleasant wooded valley for a picnic. These cars, as I recall, had only one flaw, but it was one that simply could not be overlooked. They were visual variations on what was later to become the AMC Gremlin, one of the most perverse cars of all time for many reasons. That mistake can be forgiven but how can the good people at Popular Mechanics have thought that our metropolitan highways would be anything but stupefyingly clogged?  I thought of this recently as I  inched through traffic on my way to the first class of a new semester. It took me as long to drive seven miles (45 minutes) into Washington, DC as it takes to drive almost forty miles to another campus just north of Baltimore. 

Understanding what this moment in the Great Timeline of History really means is beyond us. It’s beyond us in a curiously literal fashion in that the meaning of this moment, seen from a certain angle, is no-where, and it won’t be anywhere that makes sense for quite awhile. Of course, if you adopt another perspective on this, the present is not no-where but now-here, to be reveled in if not understood. These are not just word games; it makes all the difference in the world how we think about the present with regard to the future. For example, if the future is an eternal recurrence of the present, just more of the same, the appropriate response might be satire, as in Engel’s remark in a letter to Marx that Hegel seemed to be directing history from the grave, “once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.” 

Stephen Colbert, the faux Republican comedian and favorite spokesperson for the political theatre of the absurd, understands this. He understands it so well that he’s willing to put thousands of dollars into a campaign for the presidency that parallels, but does not converge with—at least not yet—the “real” Republican primary campaign. Watching the current survivors of this fracas is instructive. As I write Rick Santorum has declared himself the winner of the Iowa caucus, Rick Perry has quit the race, Jon Huntsman bailed out the previous week, and Newt Gingrich continues to savage Mit Romney at the knees. The tragedy is that these are the kind of people who want to be president; the farce is what they are willing to do to get the job. 

I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times the other day, a shot taken backstage of one of the Republican debates, moments before the candidates took their places. In the rear of the photo can be seen three or four stony-faced onlookers, aides perhaps, while in the foreground Rick Perry joshes Rick Santorum, putting him in an elbow-grip and leaning in close with a tight smile like a preacher about to clamp the guilt-cuffs on a prodigal parishioner. To the right of the photo, bathed in a Rembrandt spotlight, the two alleged statesman of the event speak together. Mit Romney, his back straight, his fixed smile gleaming, his hands gesturing expansively, makes a point to Newt Gingrich who is positioned with his back to the camera. Gingrich is hunched over with concentration, perhaps trying to hear over Perry’s raucous laughter and Santorum’s sharp response. The tableau reminds us that candidates are actors in a traveling road show, fellow evangelists in a long-running gospel revival paid for, produced, and packaged by groups with unlimited funds and a few simple demands. 

After all the name-calling, the low blows, the viciousness, and the outright lying, one of them, probably Romney, will stand up, wipe off his sword, and march off to battle the incumbent. The ability to cut and thrust, grapple and disembowel—and then to emerge, winner and loser together, all smiles and a thousands points of light, makes one’s head spin. I grew up thinking that it mattered what one believed in and acted upon, that you shouldn’t be wielding the sword to dismember your opponent and then denounce him for not beating his sword into a plowshare. 

But such bald-faced hypocrisy is not the talent of the Republican tribe alone. Robert Hughes writes that  “Propaganda-talk, euphemism and evasion are so much a part of American usage today that they cross all party lines and ideological divides.” Even so, naiveté has its benefits: we continue to believe that calculated sins were probably ignorant mistakes long after others have written off the whole political process as a bad joke. That naiveté grows into hope with time and conscience, and hope will not be fooled. The future we looked for in the past is here and it’s nothing like we imagined. It’s not as bad as some made it out to be and it’s certainly not as good as Popular Mechanics painted it. That future never really existed anyway. If you take a much longer view and if you realize that change is incremental and slow—until the fault line snaps and looses the tsunami—then what matters is that consistency and integrity will have their day, though you may not live to see it. Yet at some point we all look back and realize how much has changed, how much is still the same, and how much is still to come. 

More and more these days when I am tempted to regard the present order with horror, I appreciate Orwell’s comment that “Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.”

We should save the word “tragedy” for the genuine article: the suffering of those in earthquakes, tsunamis, and war. The political battles and campaigns that we are watching right now can be viewed as comedy when seen up close. But let’s not forget that the means often become the ends because through constant use they have come to define us.

Zero to Sixty . . . .

“The will is free, but who can account for his own acts and opinions without invoking influences and accidents?”— Jacques Barzun, “Toward a Fateful Serenity”

One of the benefits of an hour-long commute, really, the only benefit, is the time to think, to free associate, to sum up. In two weeks I will slip into that mysterious age of 60, an age which I have, until now, reserved exclusively for the old, perhaps the infirm, most certainly those far enough from shore that the next wave only lifts them gently in passing before cresting up ahead with a roar. We attach significance to these arbitrary numbers—12, 18, 21, 30, the BIG 50, 60, 65. What do they mean? 

The King James Bible (Psalms 90: 7) gives us one of the most memorable phrasings of our limits with its customary sturdy poeticism:  “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” 

The line begins modestly, ‘days of our years,’ adds the common limit with ‘threescore years and ten’, offers up the exception with ‘fourscore years’ but undercuts the implicit surprise with the burden of ‘labour and sorrow.” Finally, the brutal efficiency of ‘it is soon cut off,’ is turned in mid-air as we strain against the tethers that bind us to the earth, and ‘we fly away.’ There’s nothing of Dylan Thomas’ plea to his dying father, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It turns out that we were always meant to leave this earth, but the image is almost one of indifference—‘we fly away’ without a backward glance. 

It is not to be thought that I am at this threshold as yet. I’ve been fending off AARP for years, and both my grandparents lived past 90 with a good measure of strength and plenty of cheerfulness. But, as I say, it marks a moment that we invest with meaning. We should not shrug off these moments, for they will not always announce themselves. 

In 2000 Jacques Barzun, one of this epoch’s greatest cultural historians, published his massive work, From Dawn to Decadence, a New York Times bestseller and the capstone to 75 years and over 30 books of a remarkable career. Two years later The Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works was published, and the first essay, “Toward a Fateful Serenity,” speaks autobiographically of the fault lines and accidents of history that shaped him early on. As a child of wealth, privilege, and genteel upbringing he lived through the chaos of the First World War in Paris, Grenoble, and the south of France. He remembers how temperament, tragedy, and trauma shaped him into the ‘cheerful pessimist’ who, in his eighties, could live serenely despite a culture that exalts selfishness. One of the things that history taught him was ‘the lost faculty of admiration.’ “The past,” he said, “is full of men and women (and children too) whose lives and deeds are worthy of honor, wonder, and gratitude, which I take to be the components of admiration.” 

And I, too, find myself surrounded by those I can admire, argue with, be inspired by, and learn from—from Aristotle to Zola, Annie Lenox to U2, A Bug’s Life to Unforgiven. Barzun recommends reciprocity, a reckoning of the debt we owe to those who have lighted our way. Thus, in gratitude to just some of those whose music has raised me up, here are lines that gave me words for the unwritten scripts I have lived out through the years.

“When you’re down and troubled, and you need a helping hand . . . .” — James Taylor

“Your time has come to shine/All your dreams are on their way . . . .” — Paul Simon

“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive . . . .” — Bruce Springsteen

“So let us not talk falsely now/The hour is getting late . . . .” — Bob Dylan

“Shower the people you love with love/Show them the way that you feel . . . .” — James Taylor

“In your eyes, the light the heat/In your eyes/I am complete . . . .” — Peter Gabriel

“You may say that I’m a dreamer/But I’m not the only one . . . . John Lennon

“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah/Pilgrim through this barren land . . . .” — William Williams

“You broke the bonds/And you loosed the chains/Carried the cross of my shame/Oh my shame/You know I believe it . . . .” — U2

“The river’s wide, we’ll swim across/We’re starting up a brand new day . . . .” — Sting

“Leave it behind/You got to leave it behind . . . .” — U2

and of course. . . .

“Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four?” — The Beatles