To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave the way the rich behave, is like saying that we could drink all day and stay sober.
—L.P. Smith
At one of the last Paris Review revels that George Plimpton staged in the fading din of the 1960s, huge balloons had been affixed to the ceiling of a West Side discotheque; on the surface of the balloons, slide projectors flashed photographs of many of the well-known personalities present in the strobe light. The managers of the revel had also set up a closed-circuit television system within the little world of the party, thus allowing the guests to look at themselves as well as at one another as they passed from the dance floor to one of several bars and anterooms that defined the universe of celebrity. The technical effects evoked an oddly cubist combination of images. While talking to Joan Baez, it was possible to see her appearing in concert on the surface of a balloon as well as on the television screen in conversation with oneself. At the same time, the loudspeakers might be amplifying the sound of Joan Baez’s voice, the lyrics of her desolate song running on a parallel track with the fragments of her desolate talk.
Toward the end of the evening I overheard a brief but oracular colloquy between two extraordinarily pretty girls seated on a circular banquette. Both were blondes in their early twenties, and both were wearing the miniskirts of metallic sheen then considered emblematic of women’s emancipation. Maybe they were also wearing cartridge belts thought to convey sympathy for Bob Dylan and Che Guevara. The pulsing of lights caused them to appear and disappear at four-second intervals in the midst of the enveloping sound:
First Girl: “You’re working for Givenchy?”
Second Girl: “No, McCarthy.”
First Girl: “Yes, well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
The riposte sums up not only the moral dandyism of the 1960s, a style of feeling to which Tom Wolfe gave the name “radical chic,” but also the dreaming narcissism of the 1980s. People who wish to make time stand still can think of nowhere else to go except into the depths of the mirror. The golden horde sets off on expeditions into worlds out of time, and the transforming power of money pays the cost of summoning the images that flatter the vanity of the sponsor. Once having turned inward into the magical present, people come to believe that words stand as substitutes for things—that the phrase “supply-side economics” actually means something, that “Star Wars” is a real weapons system, that the military pageants staged over the coast of Libya or on the island of Grenada demonstrate the existence of a coherent foreign policy, that the Ayatollah Khomeini could be bound to the American cause with the gift of a Bible and a cake.
Prior to the burgeoning of the newly rich American society at the end of the Second World War, the descent into the mirror was a privilege available to the relatively few people who had both time and money to hire the props and pay for costumes. Edith Wharton, writing about the twilight of the Gilded Age, set Lily Bart “drifting on a tide of opulent diversion.” In Newport at the turn of the century the ladies and gentlemen possessed of conspicuous leisure staged fashion shows for their dogs; the so-called lost generation of the 1920s went to Paris to play at being artists.
In California as a child I first became acquainted with the more elaborate journeys into the looking glass through the example of a friend whose mother, granddaughter of a nineteenth-century railroad baron, liked to dress him up in costumes she had seen in famous paintings. On his first day at a public elementary school in the early 1940s the boy, dressed as Thomas Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” emerged from the safety of a chauffeured town car into the sunlight and jeering scorn of his new classmates. At the Hotchkiss School I knew a boy who chose to imagine himself a gun-fighter on the old Oklahoma frontier. He carried out this charade with immense solemnity, and never once do I remember being so gauche as to make a joke. From a tailor in New York he ordered several suits in the style of the 1870s; at Abercrombie and Fitch he bought an authentic Colt revolver that had once belonged to a cavalry officer stationed at Fort Leavenworth during the Indian Wars. He also acquired a hat, a string tie and boots. During school vacation he fought gun duels with the western heroes prominent in the early days of television. The butler would roll the television set into the drawing room and the boy, whose parents were invariably attending a charity or masquerade ball, would dress himself up in the nostalgia of the Old West. Standing at what he thought was a sporting distance from the screen he would wait, his right hand held slightly above his holster, for the moment when the good guy faced the bad guy in a deserted, dusty street. The boy fired at whichever of the two figures drew his gun against the camera. Afterward he poured himself a drink in the library while the butler cleared away the broken glass.95
The wealthier students at Yale took a good deal of trouble to be seen wearing torn cashmere sweaters and white shoes so badly scuffed that they had achieved a patina of anonymity. They wished to convey an impression of simplicity and very old money. The better clothing stores in New Haven sold white shoes already worn into a becoming shade of dirty gray. These shoes cost more than a new pair, but they relieved the wearer of the embarrassment of having to risk being thought, if only for a few days, a parvenu. (A variation on this same charade is now being sold to the mass market by Ralph Lauren in the form of clothes meant to suggest the understated elegance of the 1930s: Lauren’s emblem of a man on a horse and his use of the name “Polo” testify to his astute understanding of the social rank implicit in the distinction of an equestrian class.)
For young men accustomed to money, the prospect of its absence seemed romantic. Feeling themselves deprived of the capacity to act, they imagined that if they could feel the goad of necessity they might become somehow “creative.” More than once at Yale I listened to young men say that if they were poor, they could write novels. Sometimes they said they wished they had been born either Jewish or black—if Jewish they could belong to a group with a common and recognizable enemy; if black, they could become musicians, untrammeled by conventions of family and social class, free of inhibitions that prevented them from becoming “real people” capable of leading “real lives.” The girls at Vassar and Smith lamented the absence of meaning in Oyster Bay and wondered if the sky was a different color of blue in Paris or Barcelona. They took French lessons or studied the piano, in the meantime complaining about the stuffiness of their parents and believing, with Jane Fonda and Patricia Hearst, the world well lost for love or art or revolution.
During the 1960s in New York, possibly because of my occupation as a journalist, I began to notice that society as a whole was acquiring an extraordinary talent for playing charades. Given the large number of people in the United States who had become rich, or, more to the point, who had become converted to the faith in money, narcissism traded at discount prices. Their boredom, which an earlier century would have called “ennui,” set in motion the frantic round of amusement meant to convey the illusions of meaning, and their money filled the spaces left by the subtraction of purpose and feeling. The counterculture exaggerated the passion for dressing up. Tour groups left on Wednesdays and Saturdays for wherever it was that somebody reported finding the Islands of the Blessed, and everybody who was anybody could afford an exercise consultant, a guru or a cause.
My great-aunt Evelyn, at the age of sixty-three, took up a career as an opera singer. Every afternoon between the hours of three and six, wandering through the halls of a house in which the servants fled the sound of her approach, she sang, loudly and in a false soprano voice, selected arias from the works of Richard Wagner and Giacomo Puccini. When her teacher pronounced her the equal of Renata Tebaldi she hired Town Hall for her debut. The performance was well attended. My great-aunt had taken the precaution of informing her many friends, relatives and dependents that anybody marked absent from the occasion would be deemed ineligible for a place in her will.
The concert lasted for nearly three hours, without intermission. Holding herself firmly erect in front of the grand piano (she was a large woman, not given to frivolity or theatrical expression), my great-aunt sang her entire repertoire. Every now and then she made an inexplicably sudden and imperious gesture with the palm frond that served as her only prop. On the dying of the last unhappy note the audience rose to its feet in a storm of tumultuous applause. Cries of “Brava!” echoed through the hall. The accompanist bowed deeply and kissed the diva’s hand. A destitute nephew came forward bearing roses for which he had pawned his watch. A daughter in law was heard to remark that never before had she understood the importance of Gluck.
Under the Reagan cultural dispensation in the 1980s, these sorts of spectacles aspired to the pretensions of the baroque. Gilbert Kaplan, publisher of Institutional Investor, fancies himself a musician, and in the winter of 1982 he rented the American Symphony Orchestra in order that he might conduct, at Carnegie Hall, Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony in C minor. Although unable to play an instrument, Kaplan had learned the score by listening to records. The violin section smiled obediently, as if playing requests at a debutante dance, and the several hundred invited guests applauded loudly and tried to think of adjectives with which to flatter the maestro in return for his champagne.96
Also in 1982, albeit in a slightly different genre, David Rockefeller entertained at Sunday luncheon at his estate in Pocantico Hills the entourage of the late Sékou Touré, the African despot who seized the government of Guinea in 1958 and transformed a backward colony of the French empire into a reasonably efficient police state. Rockefeller provides most of the subsidy for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and takes a keen but amateur interest in the destiny of nations. Despite the large sums of money bestowéd on Touré by his would be patrons in the United States and the Soviet Union, the standards of living in Guinea showed a steady decline. Touré found it prudent to eliminate at least 100,000 political enemies. Because the killing was done in the name of progress and freedom, the American commercial banks could continue to invest in the moral beauty of dialogue between north and south.
At the luncheon with the Rockefellers, Touré’s wife was dressed in white mink hat and white mink coat which dragged becomingly along the floor. Rockefeller welcomed Touré with an elaborate toast, saying that when he was last in Conakry, Touré had met him at the airport in a Mercedes limousine and that on their subsequent drive through the streets of the city Touré dispensed with the services of a chauffeur. Miracle of miracles, Touré had driven the car himself. To Rockefeller this proved that Touré was a great African leader, a man of the people who had taken to heart the immortal lessons of democracy. Touré responded by saying that in the hall of Rockefeller’s house he had noticed a portrait of Abraham Lincoln; he was reminded that both Abraham Lincoln and Rockefeller were great leaders because they were great revolutionaries. After luncheon Rockefeller ordered one of his nineteenth-century carriages brought around to the front door, and set jauntily off, driving the horses himself, with Mrs. Touré beside him on the box and Touré seated in back with Mrs. Rockefeller. Being an American, and therefore innately modest, Rockefeller omitted the ceremony of posting long lines of cheering supporters along the roads of his estate.
Within the spheres of literary interest, excursions into the mirror account not only for the writing of a good many books but also for the rise and fall of countless journals of political and literary opinion. A certain kind of rich man afflicted with symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic, but in the spring of 1985 Mortimer Zuckerman, a Boston real estate developer, carried humor to the heights of parody. Most newly arrived publishers at least have the wit to regard their property as a kind of very expensive rubber duck. They content themselves with giving lunches for wandering dignitaries and deciding the broad questions of editorial policy. Zuckerman had it in mind to make a grander entrance into the intellectual limelight. Not only did he buy U.S. News & World Report for $185 million, but he appointed himself editor in chief and resident sage. It was in the writing of his biweekly column that he achieved his most wonderful effects. As if striving for what one admirer (Andrew Ferguson in the Washington City Paper) described as “profound inanity,” Zuckerman discovered an editorial voice magnificently and uniquely false. Week after week, traveling to Moscow before the Geneva summit conference or to Manila just before the revolution, he returned with breathless announcements. “Readiness for war is part of the problem as well as part of the solution,” or, “Preemptive surrender is not good negotiating doctrine.” Not even the editors at Newsweek aspire to such discoveries.
Equally picturesque examples of the delusions to which the American equestrian classes fall victim no doubt will come readily to the reader’s mind, and I don’t think it necessary to supply voluminous documentation from the front pages of the New York Post. The dreams of self projected on the nursery walls can take forms as various as Michael Cimino’s production of Heaven’s Gate (a film that bankrupted United Artists) or Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s fanciful reconstruction of the political realities of the Middle East and Central America.97 Within the corridors of large American institutions, corporate as well as governmental, the narcissistic turn of mind appears to have become norm rather than exception. Any institution rich enough to sustain its own definition of reality becomes a palace of mirrors. When a corporate grandee in New York or Washington says to his secretary, “Get me London,” he means an office in London in which he can talk to a man who shares his own assumptions and views of the world. The resident hierarchs recognize themselves as ornamental figures dependent upon the whim of the institution, and the aspirants to privilege know how easily they can be replaced. The language of flattery isn’t difficult to master, and most executive duties can be as impressively performed by another group vice president, another deputy secretary for Middle Eastern affairs, another assistant managing editor. At least half, perhaps 90 percent, of the discussion within any large institution turns on questions of status and appearance—who has the bigger office; who rides in which limousine; who accompanies the secretary of state to Geneva or goes with the CEO to Los Angeles or Peru; who carries the candidate’s shoes; who travels first class and who goes coach; who sits in the green room or the owner’s box.98
As the business of administering a large institution becomes mainly a matter of ritual, the interoffice propaganda becomes more necessary than statements released to the public. The people working for the organization must believe their own press notices. It isn’t enough merely to do one’s job; one must actively imagine that the questions important to the institution are those on which the country, perhaps the free world, depends for survival. Having listened to a good many self-congratulatory speeches at annual conventions, I have been struck by how often the objectives announced as the institution’s primary reasons for being prove to be precisely those promises on which it cannot make good. Universities claim to inculcate in their students the love of learning, and yet, three or four years after graduation, most of the students abandon the habit of reading books. The legal profession preens itself on its concern for justice, and yet most lawyers devote their lives to preserving whatever interest, just or unjust, pays the highest fee. The military believes that it preserves the nation from harm, that without it nothing is safe, and yet it poisons the American atmosphere with nuclear radiation and, by its deranged stockpiling of weapons, it constitutes a constant threat to the world’s peace. Prisons supposedly protect society; in fact they serve as spawning grounds for accomplished criminals. The media assume that they unite society, binding it together with lines of communication and understanding, and yet most of their efforts result in suspicion and rancor.
Within the walls of the institution the accomplishments of one or two legendary figures justify more general claims to significance. Among New York bankers, it is still said that Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank, is a man of large vision and humane purpose, the sort of fellow who would never foreclose on widow or orphan; George Marshall supposedly embodied the spirit of the Army, Learned Hand the spirit of the laws. Everybody neglects to mention that such men, always extremely rare, probably achieved their success despite the weight of institutional intrigue and bias. As with The Washington Post, which first tried to discourage Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from looking too closely into the Watergate affair, most institutions worthy of the name rid themselves of people who display too much energy and talent. It is only after the truants have discovered penicillin, or won the Nobel Prize, or captured a Vietnamese hillside against heavy odds, that our institutions claim them as their own and reward them—preferably posthumously—with a medal or an honorary degree.
Once our American corporations attain a certain size and complexity, the chief executive officer loses touch with the mechanics of the business; except in a general way he no longer understands the commercial sequences that provide him with stock options and a secretary. Like the heirs to American fortunes, stewards of our more prominent institutions might as well be guests seated on the afterdeck of somebody else’s yacht. The bankers among them find it hard to explain the fluctuations of the bond and stock markets; the publishers seldom know one typeface from another; the statesmen have trouble remembering the names of the countries with which the United States has signed treaties. Nobody knows how to navigate the vessel or repair the machinery in the event of an accident.
Nor can they acquire the necessary knowledge. Their dilemma is the same as that of a journalist who knows he cannot possibly verify the facts that need to be checked. Who can foresee the consequences of another war in the Middle East or the result of populist legislation enacted by a bewildered Congress? Who can predict the movement of interest rates or the possibility of revolution in Brazil? Who knows what the media will do, or the tax reformers, or the Russians?99 If the institution is large enough, the answers to any of these questions impinge upon its profits or continued existence. And yet nobody, least of all a committee of experts, can come up with the answers. The questions have become too many, the details too complex. The technologies change so fast that a physicist or engineer finds much of his knowledge obsolete within six or seven years of leaving graduate school.
Knowing they inhabit a hall of mirrors in which appearances take precedence over facts, our more philosophical corporate hierarchs accept their ignorance with equanimity. The chairman of a New York bank once explained the operative dynamic over lunch at “21,” nodding across the room to presidents of other corporations to which he had made several disastrous loans. “Think of it in terms of baseball,” he said. “If only one out of every two decisions goes bad, that’s a damn good batting average. If most of my guys at the bank hit .500 for the season, I’d say we were ahead of the game.”
If the facts no longer matter as much as the images, it’s important that somebody make the decisions with the appearance of resolve, which is why the same kinds of people can succeed as managers of oil companies or foundations or universities or television networks—that is, within any institution large enough to depend on the observance of ritual. They combine a political instinct with a priestly function, and as soon as they begin to aspire to a high place within the organization they abandon the empirical habit of mind.
Within lower tiers of the hierarchy, of course, facts still matter, and it is possible to encounter minor executives who retain a degree of humility as well as a grasp of relevant information. They share the experience of the project foreman or the parish priest. But once ascended to the higher ranks, these same individuals incline to forget faces and names, and at the highest levels of decision the members of corporate boards of directors perform what they recognize as an elaborate ceremony. Knowing they cannot know what they are expected to know, they become adept in the art of asking ritual questions.
“What are the tax consequences?” “Have we heard from everybody with an interest in this acquisition?” “Will the sponsor object?” “How many more names must we add to the list?” “What will be the implications in Europe, in Bolivia, on the price of the Swiss franc?”
The people who ask such questions, many of whom serve on six or seven boards, want to be reassured. Few of them can afford the time to study the subject at hand, but they wish to feel they have done what is expected of them. Even if they understood the answers to be wrong, they couldn’t make the necessary corrections. They listen for the soothing voice of the factotum.
“Yes, Mr. Chairman, all that has been looked into.”
“No, General, we checked on that, and there’s nothing to worry about in C Company.”
“I am informed, Mr. President, that we have a man in Vienna.”
Precisely this habit of mind lost the war in Vietnam, destroyed the Challenger and wrecked the credibility of the Reagan administration. The hierophants at NASA heard only what they wished to hear about the readiness of the space shuttle. President Reagan accepted the soothing lies offered by his subordinates on the National Security Council.100
Remarking on the weightlessness of American politics, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, echoing the observation of the New York banker, long ago conceded the primacy of appearances. About a week before the election of President Jimmy Carter we were sitting in a restaurant on West Fifty-seventh Street, and Moynihan, waving his arms in the air, laughed uproariously at the absurdity of his predicament. As a senator, he said, he was expected to hold informed opinions under as many headings as were listed in the Federal Directory—on weapons and civil rights as well as on nuclear energy, education, Indians (American and Meskito), communications theory, military intelligence, Arizona groundwater and the volume of barge traffic on the Mississippi River.
“It’s a joke, of course,” he said. “A dangerous joke, maybe, but still a joke.”
Government, he said, had become representative in the theatrical instead of the constitutional sense of the word. Because nobody could know what he or she was expected to know, somebody had to perform the rituals of wisdom. Somebody—the actor, newsman, publicist, politician—had to pretend to be wearing a robe and crown of stars and go before the assembled cameras to say that he was the north wind.101
Incompetent armies deify the commander, and in Washington what is important is the appearance of a thing and the reflection in the glass (i.e., the editorial pages of The Washington Post), not the eventual playing out of policy in some distant and muddy swamp in Indochina. Officials make their reputations on decorous theories as well as on the patronage of ministers more highly placed. Whether the theories bear any relation to reality matters less than their appearance in handsomely printed portfolios. To the American commanders in Vietnam, both military and civilian, what was real was the image of war that appeared on their flowcharts and computer screens. What was not real was the experience of pain, suffering, mutilation and death.
To the extent that the complexities of twentieth-century politics (like the complexities of twentieth-century biology and accounting) multiply at an exponential rate, the concerns of government become as small and stylized as the performances on Marie Antoinette’s stage at the Petit Trianon. Authority attaches to personality because a governing class founded on anything else—on ability, say, or knowledge—would be too quickly superseded. Even if a politician knew something about particle physics or credit markets, within two or three years his information would be as old as reports from the battlefields of Antietam or Little Big Horn.
The emphasis on appearance results in a corresponding loss of the sense of specific gravity. It is a peculiar but defining characteristic of the social classes afflicted with the infirmities of wealth that they often complain of a feeling of weightlessness.102 For at least ten years I have listened to corporate hierarchs of various denominations try to account for what they vaguely describe as a drifting in the void. They preside over multinational fiefs richer than Venezuela and employ more people than lived in Florence at the zenith of the Renaissance, and yet they feel no palpable or fleshly sense of power. Nor do they feel the consequences of their actions. Appearances pass muster as reality, words stand surrogate for things, “junk bonds” count as honest money and yet nothing happens. The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to notice the unbearable lightness of being.
If the corporation is large enough or important enough to the nation’s defense, the government will provide it with a subsidy. Citibank can make disastrous loans to Argentina and Brazil, but the gentlemen responsible for those loans continue to receive comfortable salaries and generous pensions. General Motors can manufacture a poorly designed car, but the automotive gentry in Detroit suffer no loss of ease. Ogilvy & Mather can launch, at a cost of $40 million, an advertising campaign that fails to move the product, but nothing happens to the most highly placed people in New York. Yes, a few hundred or a few thousand lesser subordinates might have to leave on short notice, but the sad events in question might as well have occurred among anonymous tribes on the upper reaches of the Zambesi River.
The business magazines do their best to provide flattering portraits and adoring odes to entrepreneurial success, but still the subjects of the hired praise fret about their lack of visibility. Their decisions bear upon the well-being of entire states and industries, but when they walk into restaurants, nobody knows their names. They look at ballplayers selling hairspray, or actors hustling jogging shoes and American Express cards, and they wonder at the injustice of a world that casts so much light on persons of so little substance.
A fair percentage of the mergers, takeovers and leveraged buyouts of the middle 1980s accomplished nothing other than shoring up the vanity of the principal traders. The deals consumed many millions of dollars in superfluous fees, failed to improve the efficiency of the companies engaged in the coups de théâtre and cost many thousands of people their livelihoods. But for the few men whose names appeared in the papers the deals offered proof of their own magnificence.103
The feelings of inferiority and deprivation have prompted a fair number of corporations to supply the pomp and ceremony once provided by Louis XIV to the nobility resident at Versailles. Possibly this is because corporations have learned that if they neglect to provide these dignities, then their executives, anxious to catch a glimpse of themselves in the shop windows of the media, might betray stockholders to hostile takeover or leveraged buyout. At the very least the corporations stage a ceaseless round of spectacles, conferences and entertainments. Individuals can no longer afford to keep up appearances at the levels of opulence maintained by a bank, oil company or movie studio. The more discerning organizations employ a staff to consider the distinctions between museum shows and theater benefits, to order the wine and hire the music, to decide between the underwriting of a tennis or a golf tournament, to drum up invitations for the chairman to address a congressional committee or a meeting at some distant and prestigious institute.104
The most precocious business executives demand principal roles in their own corporate advertising campaigns. The settings vary according to taste and the measurements of the executive’s self-esteem. Sometimes we see the gentleman in an impressive office imparting a sense of wealth, efficiency and calm to a world too often disfigured by bankrupts and louts. Sometimes we see him in a helicopter or at a construction site, demonstrating a sense of entrepreneurial energy and movement. Sometimes he merely stands in front of the camera with a chicken or a rack of suits.
These performances apparently have become the subject of negotiation at the point of signing corporate magnates to employment contracts. It is no longer enough to offer salaries in excess of $1 million as well as country club memberships, chauffeured automobiles, free medical care, stock options, clothes allowances and annual vacations on the Riviera. These benefits might satisfy less ambitious executives, but the gentlemen with the wide grins and the glad hands demand the most precious of modern commodities—a publicly licensed personality. They seek to enter the sacred grove of celebrity, and a leading role in the company’s advertising campaigns provides them a ticket of admission.
The corporation choosing to bestow this sublime favor sends its executives to the equivalent of what used to be called “finishing schools” for young ladies of gentle birth and polite intellectual attainment. The executives sit in a studio and learn to talk to a television camera, which is the modern analogue of learning to talk to the Duc d’Orléans. They learn to refrain from fidgeting in their chairs, to wear their hair at modish length, to walk gracefully through an assembly line or accounting department, to keep their fingers from drumming on the lectern, to speak forcefully, and, above all, to avoid raising their voices when exchanging civilities with the ladies and gentlemen of the press. These latter personages open and close the doors to the lighted drawing rooms of celebrity, and they must never, never be made to look foolish. But no matter how lavish the expense, almost every one of these would-be grandees somehow manages to look and sound as wooden as Walter Mondale. The humor of their predicament rests on the paradox that they apply for the license of personality only after they have renounced all claim to identity other than the one permitted by company rules.
The weightlessness of the world in the mirror gives rise to the vogue for androgyny because people drifting in the suspensions of reality find it difficult to establish sexual identity or definition. Within the frame of the mirror the pilgrims in search of a plausible face can try on the thousand and one masks to which Freud gave the name of the polymorphous perverse and to which the trendier dress designers affix the labels of high fashion.
For some years now, it has been no simple matter in New York to tell the boys from the girls. Girls dress like boys and wear their hair short; boys wear their hair long and spend a lot of time comparing foreign and domestic after-shave lotions. The fashion magazines promote “the androgynous look” and illustrate it with high-tech photographs in which both boys and girls appear to be dressed as parachutists.
The androgynous image is further amplified by rock musicians (among whom it is mandatory) as well as in the style known as “punk,” in the advertisements for hairspray and silk shirts, in the jargons of health and physical fitness. In the dramas mounted on prime-time television, men play the parts of happy homemakers, women play police detectives. At the more sophisticated discotheques, men and women wear each other’s clothes and can choose, on alternate evenings, if they have both the money and talent for it, to give either a masculine or feminine performance of their character.
In keeping with the sexual ambiguity of the age, Dior in 1982 published a series of advertisements conceived and photographed by Richard Avedon in which two male characters (“Oliver” and “Wizard”) appeared in various phases of suggestive undress with a woman named “The Mouth.” Avedon explained that he invented the three “Diors” because “three is never boring.” A copywriter supplied cute captions for the pictures—“When the Diors got away from it all, they brought with them nothing except The Decline of the West and the butler”; “when they were good, they were very, very good, and when they were bad, they were gorgeous.” The clothes, of course, were suitably precious, and so were the three people posing in attitudes meant to express their frightfully witty escapes from ennui.
Money in sufficient quantity sustains the illusion of infinite possibility, and the liquidity of gender, like the liquidity of cash, holds out the ceaselessly renewable promise of buying into a better deal. In the world of the mirror it is always permissible to seduce or betray almost anybody else in the dream.105 Not at that particular moment, of course, not in front of the lady’s husband or the gentleman’s wife, but on some convenient occasion when a coincidence of schedules happens to place the concerned parties in the same town or on the same beach at the same unencumbered moment.
The androgynous states of mind sustain the divorce rates and make it possible to postpone the tiresome business of growing up. To the extent that both sexes tailor their feelings to fit the measure of status and money, the structures of gender, like the obligations to family or loyalty to principle, come to be seen as so much troublesome baggage impeding one’s movement into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “orgiastic future.”
In the rarefied atmospheres of wealth and celebrity the liquidity of gender counts as an asset, and the idea of money becomes as confused as the idea of sex. Understood not as a commodity, not as something that must be earned and has the value of the labor of getting it, money becomes, a mystery, a shower of fairy gold. The liquidity of gender and the delight in masquerades were much in vogue at Rome in the Age of Empire, in England during the reigns of the early Stuarts, at the court of Versailles under Louis XVI, in Nazi Germany. The preferred aesthetic shows itself in an emphasis on surface and gesture, as well as in the reverence for images.
The successful Broadway shows of the last decade take the form of revues, dependent for their effect on the energy of the music and dance numbers, utterly lacking in character and plot. The same weakness distinguishes movies and literature of the last generation. The movie cameras glide over sensuous surfaces, dwelling on the texture of a gun barrel or the shape of a woman’s head, but the principal characters seldom achieve clear definition. Always it is hard to know who is doing what to whom, or why anybody says one thing instead of another. The television dramas rely on automobile chases (thus conveying the impression of movement if not of development) and on situations explained by set decoration (richly appointed house signifies rich man, etc.) rather than the architecture of thought.
The contemporary belief in the magical properties of images resembles the pantheist worship of rivers and trees. The pagan invests everything in the universe with an aura of personality. A river god sulks and the child drowns; a sky god smiles and the corn ripens. One of the most luminous instances of the modem dispensation occurred some years ago in New York, when the weather correspondent for WABC’s Eyewitness News caught a cold. The producers of the show hit upon the notion of broadcasting the evening’s dispatches from the young woman’s bedside. At the appointed moment in the script, the scene shifted to an apartment somewhere in Queens. The ailing dryad was seen sitting up in bed with a quilt drawn around her shoulders, smiling bravely through her symptoms, bringing her audience reports on the next day’s chances of rain. Setting up an intimate location shot meets the prevailing definition of news as an aspect of personality, and maybe I do the producers of Eyewitness News an injustice by assuming that they sent their cameras into darkest Queens merely to amaze and astound their rival impresarios at WCBS and WNBC. It is conceivable that they believed that if their weather correspondent failed to make her evening propitiation to the storm gods, it would rain for forty days and forty nights.
Because in the United States there is no such thing as a poor celebrity, the aura of klieg lights confers the same sense of ease and protection that attaches itself to manifestations of great wealth. When the Metropolitan Museum in New York sponsored the exhibition of Tutankhamen’s gold, I used to wonder why so many people shuffled so reverently past the relics of the pharaoh’s golden funeral. Why did they come, and what did they hope to see? The museum’s Egyptian galleries, crowded with objects no less beautiful than those accompanying the pharaoh on his voyage into eternity, ordinarily remained as empty as the upper reaches of the Nile. On most Sunday afternoons the stone figures looked down on a lost child, a boy and girl holding hands on a bench, a bearded gentleman making notes for an eccentric theory of civilization. Why then the fascination with the same objects made in gold? Because the gold itself, dormant and inanimate, attained the rank of a rock star. How much more satisfying if the gold could speak and move. When Pavarotti sings, Mailer writes and Minnelli dances, it is as if King Tut’s gold had come to life, singing, writing and dancing.
With any luck and the right sort of promotion, an individual can become a commodity as precious as an ounce of rhinoceros horn or a designer label pasted on T-shirts, perfume and boxes of chocolate. Celebrities of all magnitudes bestow the gifts of immortality, awakening with their “personal touch” inanimate throw pillows, automobiles, blue jeans and chairs. Athletes show up on television breathing the gift of life into whatever products can be carried into a locker room. Actors pronounce ritual incantations over the otherwise lifeless forms of cameras, tires and brokerage firms. The popular worship of images thought to be divine has become so habitual that people find it easy to imagine celebrities enthroned in a broadcasting studio on Mount Olympus, conversing with one another in an eternal talk show. By granting the primacy of names over things, the media sustain the illusion of a universe inhabited by gods and heroes as well as by satyrs, nymphs and fauns. Barbara Walters struck the appropriate note when, in the midst of interviewing newly elected President Carter in the autumn of 1976, she said, in the hushed whisper of a suppliant at a woodland shrine, “Be kind to us, Mr. President. Be good to us.”106
The belief in the transfiguring power of personality derives its egalitarian bona fides from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic pastoral of man as a noble savage at play in the fields of the id, of man set free from laws and schools and institutions, free to constitute himself his own government, free to declare himself a god. In a spirit that would be well understood by editors of People magazine, Rousseau’s writings dwell on his desire to walk into a room and seize the instant and universal approbation of everyone present, to focus on himself all eyes, all praise, all sexual feeling. Precisely the same desire animates the life and work of individuals as sympathetic to the spirit of the age as Lee Iacocca, Ronald Reagan and Shirley MacLaine.
But in a society that delights in movement and change, not even immortality lasts forever. What has been given also can be taken away. Because the public image comes to stand as the only valid certification of being, the celebrity clings to his image as the rich man clings to his money—that is, as if to life itself. Continual publicity becomes as necessary as the oxygen that sustains the artificial environment of a space capsule, which is why even the most luminous of celebrities so often can be persuaded to show up for the opening of a shopping mall. Once dependent upon their reflections in the media they will go almost anywhere to meet a camera or gossip columnist.
The figures in the mirror fear the media in the same way that some aboriginal tribes fear the anthropologist with a camera. The aborigine believes the photograph will steal his soul. The man who genuinely shuns publicity (cf. Thomas Pynchon, Evan Connell, William Gaddis) knows he would be imprisoned within an image from which he would be hard put to escape. The media cannot adjust to the development of character. Despite its seeming fluidity, television is a remarkably rigid medium that makes use of personae as immutable as the masks in an African ritual or the commedia dell’arte.
During the last advance of the Ice Age the temperature dropped so suddenly that some mammoths under the Siberian snow have been found with flowers in their mouths. The making of television images happens as quickly, and a man must be careful about the face he wears on his first appearance in the media. He seldom gets a chance to put on a different one. Most actors and politicians remain forever fixed in the role that first placed them in a producer’s Rolodex. Mailer begins and ends as the enfant terrible of American letters, Richard Nixon as the Machiavelli of American politics. W.H. Auden once observed that only in America do so many writers produce, in their youth, one interesting or important book and then, over periods as long as forty years, nothing else except timid imitations of themselves. He attributed their sterility to their wish to make a sublime product that would eliminate all competition.
Mindful of the media’s rigidity the promoters of political and literary images know that once they have shaped the public mask (e.g., Jimmy Carter as the pure-hearted country boy embodying the belief in rural virtue) their client will have to commit a felony at high noon in Times Square before the media will change their collective mind. This same principle governs the making and selling of opinions. Only after an idea has been frozen into the solidity of cliché can a politician use it as a slogan or the producers of Hollywood movies shape it into the molds of fantasy and romance.
A society overwhelmed by complexity places a correspondingly high value on simplification. It is no surprise that Americans bestow their highest honors and rewards on those individuals who perform their rituals. The media seldom deign to notice those people or professions on whom society utterly and uncomprehendingly depends. It is probably fair to say that the more visible the personality, the less likely he or she performs an essential task. If the water engineers went on strike, cities would become uninhabitable within a matter of hours; equally extreme consequences would attend a strike by a fire department or by the few doctors still not engaged in psychoanalysis or cosmetic surgery. But who would miss Dan Rather? The keeping of celebrities might also be compared to the keeping of pets, and it is a mark of the society’s affluence that it can indulge its passion for exotic breeds. The cost of maintaining ornamental figures on the order of Sam Donaldson or Alexander Haig exceeds what even John Jacob Astor stood willing to pay for a racing stable. Before the advent of the postindustrial society the labor strike was a form of expression popular among the working classes. Ruffians in ragged clothes committed unspeakable acts of sedition, and the press obligingly portrayed the labor union as a mob. But now the strike has become an upper-class occupation—a last resort of actors and big-time ballplayers. Who can recommend the use of fire hoses against members of the Screenwriters’ Guild who receive $50,000 for a script? Who marches at the side of third basemen who earn $350,000 for a season in the sun? Clearly the fellows suffer terrible deprivation, but what do they want? If it isn’t a question of wages or hours on the job sites, then presumably their grievances have to do with a fear they have become superfluous. The strikers ask to be appreciated, and the strike becomes a demand not for a commodity as vulgar as money but for recognition of their value as precious ornaments.
The officials who succeed at the pantomime of government understand the theatrical nature of their offices. The people who criticize President Reagan for his moral and intellectual emptiness, like the people who still cast Henry Kissinger in the role of villain, apply the wrong sets of criteria. Charlatans, they say, scoundrels and liars who dress themselves in as many policies as Johnny Carson puts on funny hats. Possibly so, but beside the point. Given fewer opportunities, Kissinger would have done well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley.
The necessity of keeping up appearances, of course, is nothing new or unique to businessmen, journalists or politicians. Unemployed actors in Los Angeles feel obliged to drive a rented Rolls-Royce or Ferrari to establish an aura of success. Hollywood producers trying to make an impression in New York stay at the Pierre Hotel and spend $400 a day on room service, $350 a day on phones and $375 a day to keep the limousine waiting in case somebody wants to go to Nell’s or send for pizza.
But to the extent that appearances become primary to the governing of an institution—and to the degree that men define themselves by their titles, dress, speech and manner—the American equestrian classes take on characteristics of an eighteenth-century court society. It isn’t an especially elegant society, not yet as refined in its tastes as the aristocracy assembled at Versailles, but it has begun to show some of the same weaknesses that eventually wrecked the French nobility on the shoals of revolution.
Kissinger Associates charges its clients $250,000 per annum for “geopolitical strategic consulting” and for arranging introductions to some of the world’s more highly placed tyrants and arms dealers. A duchess employed in Marie Antoinette’s household received an equivalent stipend for combing the queen’s hair or holding the queen’s glove.
Washington lobbyists earn substantial fees for the favor of taking their clients to lunch in the Senate dining room or the White House Mess. The Goncourt brothers, in their journal of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire in France, noted an entry in a lawyer’s ledger of bribes: “To Monsieur X, government minister, the sum of 40,000 francs for having taken my arm in the foyer of the opera.”
Given the wealth and power of the American supremacy over the last forty years, it is no wonder that Americans have come to imagine the rest of the world as nothing more than a series of images gliding in and out of the mirror of the news. Like actors in a Japanese Noh theater, the diplomats speak a stylized language of threat and counterthreat, their tropes echoed by a media long since accustomed to the part of a docile chorus. The familiar troupe of diplomats and anchormen travels to Tokyo, Mexico City or Geneva to discuss the law of the sea, terrorism, the international monetary system, the chance of World War III. Always it is difficult to remember that the abstractions bear any relation to a specific instance, that somewhere beyond the compound—three blocks from the hotel or across the street from the conference center—the “cultural dysfunction” or “social disenfranchisement” has been made manifest by a man with a knife in his hand.
The narcissistic habit of mind confirms the assumption that the world is a movie theater and diplomacy a higher form of screenwriting. President Reagan’s amiable improvisations on the themes of geopolitical romance, or American statesmen explaining such things as “the domino theory” and “the arc of crisis,” bring to mind a remark attributed to Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. In the midst of redrafting the map of Europe, Lloyd George turned to an aide and said, “Refresh my memory. Is it Upper or Lower Silesia that we are giving away?”
I first encountered the governing temperament in the fall of 1957, when, having studied history for a year in England, I returned to the United States with the notion of working for either the Washington Post or the CIA. My interest in foreign affairs had been awakened by the Suez and Hungarian incidents of 1956 and by my inability to understand, much less explain to a crowd of indignant Englishmen, the policy of John Foster Dulles. In 1957 the Washington Post and the CIA could be mistaken for different departments of the same corporation. Newspapermen traded rumors with intelligence agents, and although the gilding on the Pax Americana was beginning to wear a little thin, anybody who had been to Yale in the early 1950s couldn’t help thinking that the totalitarian hordes had to be prevented from sacking the holy cities of Christendom. Failing to find a job with the Post, I took the examinations for the CIA. These lasted a week, and afterward I was summoned to a preliminary interview with four or five young men introduced to me as “some of the junior guys.” The interview took place in one of the temporary buildings put up during the Second World War in the vicinity of the Lincoln Memorial. The feeling of understated grandeur, of a building hastily assembled for an urgent, imperial purpose, was further exaggerated by the studied carelessness of the young men who asked the questions. All of them seemed to have graduated from Yale, and so they questioned me about whom I had known at New Haven and where I went in the summer. I had expected to discuss military history and the risings of the Danube; instead I found myself being asked to remember the names of the girls who sailed boats off Fishers Island, or who had won the summer tennis tournaments in Southampton and Bedford Hills. As the conversation drifted through the ritual of polite inanity (about “personal goals” and “one’s sense of achievement in life”), the young men every now and then exchanged an enigmatic reference to “that damn thing in Laos.” Trying very hard not to be too obvious about it, they gave me to understand that they were playing the big varsity game of the Cold War. Before I got up to leave, apologizing for having applied to the wrong office, I understood that I had been invited to drop around to the common room of the best fraternity in the world so that the admissions committee could find out if I was “the right sort.”
From that day forward I have never been surprised by news of the CIA’s vindictiveness and inattention. Good, clean-cut American boys, with the best intentions in the world, and convinced of their moral and social primogeniture, must be expected to make a few good-natured mistakes. If their innocent enthusiasm sometimes degenerates into sadism, well, that also must be expected. Nobody becomes more spiteful than the boy next door jilted by the beautiful Asian girl, especially after he has given her the beach house at Cam Ranh Bay, $100 million in helicopters, and God knows how much in ideological support. It is a bitter thing to lose to Princeton and to find out that not even Dink Stover can make the world safe from Communism.
This same undergraduate insouciance has remained characteristic of American foreign policy for the past thirty years. Administrations have come and gone, and so have enemies and allies, but the attitude of mind remains constant, as does the tone of voice. It is the voice of Henry Kissinger explaining to a lady at dinner that a nation, like an ambitious Georgetown hostess, cannot afford to invite unsuccessful people to its parties. It is the voice of McGeorge Bundy, who told an audience of scholars in the early 1960s that he was getting out of Latin American studies because Latin America was such a second-rate place. It is the voice of James Reston finding something pleasant to say about this year’s congenial dictator, or the State Department announcing its solidarity with Cambodia and expressing only mild regret about the regime’s program of genocide.
After 1968 the inflection of the voice became slightly more irritable and petulant. During the early years of the decade the heir to the estate flattered himself with gestures and exuberant rhetoric appropriate to an opulent idealism. He had access to unlimited resources (of moral authority as well as cash), and he stood willing to invest in anybody’s scheme of political liberty. Nothing was too difficult or too expensive; no war or rural electrification too small or inconsequential. The young heir undertook to invade Asia and to provide guns and wheat and computer technology to any beggar who stopped him in the street and asked for a coin. After 1968, when the bills came due and things turned a little sour, the heir began muttering about scarcity and debts, about the damage done to the environment and the lack of first-class accommodation on spaceship earth. Nobody becomes more obsessive on the subject of money than the rich man who has suffered a financial loss. The fellow feels himself impoverished because he has to sell the yacht. President Nixon closed the gold window, and associate professors of social criticism dutifully taught their students that sometimes money weighs more heavily in the balance of human affairs than the romance of the zeitgeist.
Even so, the assumptions of entitlement remain intact. Although feeling himself somewhat diminished (as witness the success of the philosopher-merchants on the neoconservative Right) and somewhat older (as witness the dependence on sexual and spiritual rubber goods), the still-prodigal son continues to believe himself possessed of unlimited credit. He is still heir to the fortune, no matter what anybody says about his horses and dogs, and he can damn well play his game of policy in any way he damn well chooses.
In American military circles, it is considered poor form to discuss fortification and the strategies of attrition and civil defense. The whole notion of fortification is seen as stodgy, corrupting, somehow un-American. It brings to mind the depressing memory of stuffy French generals on the Maginot Line in the early weeks of the Second World War. The United States owes it to itself to cut a more dashing figure in the world. Where is the fun in fighting dreary rearguard actions? The young men in the Pentagon and the military academies speak of forward thrusts, of broad-gauged advances, of assaults and landings and insertions.
All the fine talk conceals a not too subtle irony. When it comes to a question of how to go about these romantic maneuvers, the United States relies less on the daring and intelligence of its commanders than on the superiority of its expensive equipment. It is assumed that wars will be won by the avalanche of American resources, materiel, production, logistics and assembly lines—i.e., by bureaucrats who need be neither impetuous nor brave. The faith in gadgetry and the “tech fix” accounts for the incalculable investment in missiles, bombs, airplanes, and anything else that can be bought in the finest sporting-goods stores. Nobody has the bad manners to insist that strategic bombing has yet to be a decisive factor in any of the century’s wars. The rich man depends on his technology in the same way he depends on his trust fund. Even if he makes no effort to think about the great bulk of his capital, it goes about the business of gathering its daily ransom of interest and dividends. The miraculous nature of this contrivance persuades the heir to believe in the divinity of machines.
One proof of a great power is its belief that it can afford to be forgetful. A rich nation’s collection of treaties bears resemblance to a rich man’s stock portfolio. The lawyers and secretaries gather so many pieces of paper that the heir to the fortune no longer knows what any document means. Agreements signed by his forefathers—NATO, SEATO, CENTO, etc.—might as well be Mexican railroad bonds. As careless of its allies as a rich man is careless of his friends (on the ground that he can always buy new ones), America cannot quite manage to perceive the reality of the world elsewhere.107
God knows we try hard enough. We send camera crews to the uttermost ends of the earth, decorate the front pages of our newspapers with foreign names and datelines, endow learned journals and research institutions, dispatch our corporate executives to the Aspen Institute for weeks of earnest briefings—mostly to no avail. The American correspondents don’t get sent to the important posts in Moscow, Tel Aviv or London unless their editors already know their agents will confirm the presuppositions already in place.
On a Sunday afternoon during my first summer as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune in the early 1960s I was sent to a meeting of Black Muslims in Harlem. The editors expected a story of violent black men threatening revolution. Malcolm X made what seemed like an interminable speech, rambling and demagogic, condemning the white establishment and all its works, demanding that the federal government cede to blacks the states of Georgia and Mississippi. At appropriate intervals the crowd chanted, “Oh yes!” or “You tell ’em, brother!” or “That’s right!”
But none of the threats were threatening. Everybody present was dressed in his or her best clothes, the little girls in starched dresses and patent leather shoes, the little boys as well-behaved as the choir in church. Although I was one of only two white men in a crowded auditorium, I never once felt frightened. Malcolm X was conducting a political variation on a revival meeting, speaking the language of ritual catharsis. Nothing in his performance, or the response of the crowd, suggested the least hint of violence. The words were terrifying, but the spirit in which they were said contradicted their apparent meaning.
On my return to the newspaper office, the editors wanted a story that could justify a headline foretelling riot and bloodshed. I explained that so literal-minded an interpretation was utterly false. Disgusted with my lack of journalistic acumen, the editors assigned another reporter, who hadn’t been present, to write the story conforming to their own wishes and fears.
In one of his books of memoirs, Harrison Salisbury, foreign correspondent of The New York Times, describes a comparable incident during his tour of duty in Moscow. The editors in New York somehow had become convinced—possibly because of an important rumor overheard at an important dinner party—that the Soviet Union was about to invade Western Europe. They told Salisbury to count the number of tanks and infantry divisions massed on the East German frontier. Salisbury, of course, found neither tanks nor infantry divisions for the simple reason that none were present. Still the editors in New York preferred the truth of their own revelation. It took Salisbury the better part of a month, filing voluminous cables, telegrams and dispatches, to persuade them to abandon their hope of war.
The provincialism of our media reflects the insouciance of its audiences, almost none of whom expect the president of the United States to possess a working knowledge of history and geography. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter arrived in Washington with only the sketchiest knowledge of diplomatic affairs, but so did presidents Kennedy and Johnson. So do most senators and congressmen, remarkably few of whom bother to travel to the Soviet Union to look upon the “Evil Empire” against whose implacable enmity they dedicate so much of the nation’s income. Reagan’s ignorance of history is by now the stuff of nightclub jokes. When asked questions of a historical character he responds in the language of myths and dreams, attributing to Lincoln or the Roosevelts sentiments they never expressed, assigning the causes of the Second World War to whatever circumstances might agree with the bias of the voters in the room or with a half-forgotten scene in an old and patriotic movie. Just as it was a matter of some doubt as to whether Jimmy Carter could have located Czechoslovakia on a map, so it is unlikely that Reagan can remember whether Colombia is in South or Central America.
The failing is characteristic of a nation in which the standard of geographical literacy is traditionally low. The Association of American Geographers discovered in 1982 that only 40 percent of American college students could point to the United States on a map of the world; 40 percent of American high school seniors thought Israel was an Arab state. The national belief that the rest of the world isn’t real coincides with the conviction that the past is irrelevant. The contemptuous phrase “you’re history” signifies nothingness.
During the inquest that takes place in the American media after a particularly embarrassing failure abroad, it inevitably turns out that nobody knew very much about the culture of the country in which the failed policy was destined to bring about a happy result. Certainly this was true of Vietnam, where, many years later, the Washington mandarinate discovered that the task of “preserving democracy” might not have been so easy for people to whom the idea of democracy was as foreign as the taste of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. The war vanished almost as suddenly as it had come, as if it were a guilty secret nobody wanted to discuss with a Park Avenue psychiatrist. In the middle 1970s, during the aftermath of the war, the recriminations subsided into a distant muttering in the academic quarterlies, and the much touted national debate about “the lessons of Vietnam” never took place. The novels about the war all had the oddly surreal character of a dream. The authors didn’t know how or why they got to Vietnam, and none could fix the experience within historical or political coordinates that might have explained their sudden arrival in what turned out to be a very badly managed summer camp.
The press and the politicians sometimes blame the CIA for being so poorly informed, but the accusations seem to me unfair. The inattention of the CIA reflects and embodies the carelessness of the society for which it acts as agent. On leaving his club the rich man never looks behind him to see if the waiter is holding his coat; in much the same way the United States doesn’t take the trouble to notice much of what goes on in the world’s servants’ quarters. The American press reports news from Africa that deals with disputes between whites and blacks; between armies of blacks only large-scale civil wars deserve mention in the dispatches, and then only if the Russians agree to sponsor one of the contenders. The rich man never knows why other people do what they do because it never occurs to him that they have obligations to anybody other than himself. Few among the nation’s more prominent journalists speak or read French. It would exceed the bounds of all decent patriotism to expect more than two or three of them to read or speak Russian, Chinese or Arabic.
Although promoting the illusion of happier results, almost all American magazine and television advertisements take place within the enchanted gardens outside the world of time. One in particular stands out as an exact but ironic analogue of the American experience in Vietnam. Expressed as a two-page photograph selling Mark Cross luggage, it showed a beautiful woman wearing silk pajamas being carried from a Rolls-Royce by her chauffeur at Newport, Rhode Island; against a background of light rain and fog, followed by a maid holding an umbrella over her head, the woman clutches a precious rose. The accompanying text explains that the luggage summers in the south of France and winters in St. Bart’s. Of the woman it is said, “She lived as if in a dream.” She reminded me, both in her attitude and pose, of General William C. Westmoreland.
By 1986 the war had been reprocessed into the trite melodrama of a Sylvester Stallone movie, and the media carefully ignored any evidence (cf. William Gibson’s The Perfect War) that discounted the myth of a triumphant American army cheated of its victory by a timorous civilian authority and a lying press. As late as 1970, seven years after Americans accepted the burden of the war and two years after the Tet offensive, no scholar in the United States was devoting his or her full time to the study of Vietnam; no American university offered a tenured professorship in Vietnamese studies, and fewer than thirty students in American schools were engaged in learning the Vietnamese language.108
The makers of American foreign policy, most of them trained in abstractions of investment banking or the law, seldom question the great truth that all the important events of the last fifty years have centered upon the United States. Other nations come and go in supporting and character roles. Because their stories get written for them in Washington or New York, their national identities retain the character of picturesque backgrounds for a trendy movie complete with social statement.
To the rich almost everything in the world is make-believe, and they cannot understand how other people take seriously what they regard as diversions and toys. The dreaming narcissism of America's overlords suggests that Louis XV didn’t get the axiom quite right, that instead of “après moi, le déluge,” the dictum should read, “after me, nothing.” The egoist cannot conceive of the world without his presence in it.