Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

  But finding out if you Amounted to Much.

  In this case, the question was, who, in a pinch,

  Amounted to More? Did the Veep? Or the Grinch?

  The Veep! What a creep!

  What a CREEP! CREEP! CREEP! CREEP!

  He simply could NOT be outdone by the Veep.

  But the Veep was Experienced.

  He’d done the big jobs,

  He was smart. (He was smart-ass.)

  He knew all the knobs

  And the levers and buttons

  That worked the State’s Ship

  And the Grinch?

  Well, re: knowledge he was not too hip.

  The President of India? The economy? Pass.

  He’d never been close to the head of the class.

  So far the poor Grinch hadn’t Amounted to zip,

  He just hadn’t Counted. It gave him the pip.

  (His father! His eminent Dad! His own blood!

  Compared to him, Grinchy had proved quite a dud.)

  And now that he’d actually reached his Big Day

  Argh! Counting the Ballots could steal it away!

  And what was a Ballot? Was it silver or gold?

  Were they counting up treasure? A fortune untold?

  No! Just some dumb punch-card! They were counting up holes!

  Oh, the holes!

  Yes, the holes!

  Oh, the HOLES! HOLES! HOLES! HOLES!

  The whole thing depended on Circles of Air—

  Not to mention the half-holes,

  and holes that weren’t there,

  but that wanted to be there,

  and thought that was fair.

  All they would do was to add up! To Count!

  And they’d count! And they’d count!

  And they’d COUNT! COUNT! COUNT! COUNT!

  And they’d probably end up with a

  Quite Wrong Amount!

  “If they go on counting,”

  the Grinch shuddered, “Eep!

  “They may just wind up electing the Veep!

  “How to stop it?” the Grinch exclaimed with a moan

  And then he remembered he wasn’t alone.

  There were Grinches all over,

  Big Grinches and small,

  There were Grinches in Voteville and in City Hall,

  He knew some news-Grinches,

  And he could depend

  On these inky fellows to shape and to bend

  Their stories to help him win through in the end.

  But the Grinches who’d give him

  The edge and the win

  Were the great Legal Grinches,

  And Grinches of Spin.

  So he called on his cohorts.

  “My friends, we must Grinch

  The election! ’Nuff Counting!

  To work! Do not flinch!

  We must Grinch! We must Grinch!

  We must GRINCH! GRINCH! GRINCH! GRINCH!

  We cannot be beaten by circles of air

  Or circles that only imagine they’re there.

  Every day that they Count them, the total will creep

  Up and up, until it elects that old Veep!”

  So they Grinched the election.

  They Grinched, day by day,

  Until all the options were whittled away.

  They Grinched it with lawyers,

  They Grinched it with writs,

  They split all the hairs

  And they picked all the nits,

  And when it came up to the Ultimate Bench

  They Grinched it away with one final Wrench.

  They ordered all Voteville to give up its Count,

  Before it came up with that Quite Wrong Amount.

  And the Votes down in Voteville?

  They’ve run out of steam.

  ’Tis the season to party, to heal, and to dream.

  Why worry? The Constitution is strong,

  The judges who judge it can never be wrong,

  The Veep may have won, but he’s lost.

  And that’s that.

  Voteville accepts the high judges’ fiat.

  There isn’t a holler, there isn’t a scream,

  Think of the dollar! Let’s play for the team!

  So everyone okays the Grinch’s regime,

  And things are probably

  probably

  probably

  probably

  Not as bad as they seem.

  “Four whole years of Grinchdom!”

  The Grinch cries with glee.

  “There’s Only One Person who Counts now

  . . . That’s

  ME.”

  FEBRUARY 2001: SLEAZE IS BACK

  One day after France’s former foreign minister, the almost impossibly grand Roland Dumas, who is on trial for corruption, denounces the proceedings against him—that a personage as distinguished as he should be subjected to such an ordeal! Zut! Alors!—the fugitive businessman Alfred Sirven is arrested in the Philippines and immediately claims that he can provide evidence of corruption against “one hundred names”—that is, most of the political elite of the Mitterrand era.

  Meanwhile, in Peru, the seizure of over two thousand secretly obtained videotapes reveals the power of the fallen President Fujimori’s secret state over just about everyone in that country’s ruling class. Journalists, politicians, generals were all being blackmailed for years.

  Meanwhile, in India, the Bofors scandal bubbles to the surface again. The rumors of corruption surrounding this 1980s arms deal have already besmirched the reputations of the late Rajiv Gandhi—did he or did he not accept illegal kickbacks?—and the late Olof Palme—was he assassinated by a disgruntled middleman? Now, as the Indian courts turn their attention to the activities of the billionaire Hinduja brothers, the old scandal threatens to hurl new dirt across the oceans, at the British government, which became so improbably friendly with the Hindujas.

  (A four-year-old child could have warned the Blairites against this association. Unfortunately, no four-year-old child was available, and as a result the British public presently believes New Labour to be almost as sleazy as the grubby Tories they replaced. Almost as sleazy as Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken! Well . . . gosh.)

  Meanwhile, in the United States, ex-President Clinton is under fire for having pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich, while his successor, “President” Bush, mouths platitudes about bilateralism while pursuing an agenda of the far right; and this in spite of the growing evidence that he lost the election he “won” thanks to the notorious Supreme Court coup; lost it, in Florida, by a margin of around 25,000 votes.

  Yes, sleaze has resurfaced, grinning its slobbering grin, to remind us that it never really went away—that it remains the great occult force that bends and shapes the age, its existence perennially denied, its empire expanding daily. You can almost admire its inexhaustible inventiveness. Things you never imagined were sleazy—things that actually were never tarnished before—come daily under sleaze’s slimy suzerainty, and are hopelessly compromised, or, like innocence or paradise, lost.

  Thus, a feature of recent months has been the sleazing-up not only of politics, where it’s almost expected, but of sport. Is racing fixed? asks the British press, and you can almost hear the horses laugh. About boxing, nobody even bothers to ask. And the former Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar has at last been found guilty of taking bribes. Even cricket, whose very name was once a synonym for integrity, is now up to here in the dirt. As for athletics, the recent “doping Olympics” offered spectacular evidence of trouble: the shot-putter C. J. Hunter’s four positive drug tests, the gold-medal gymnast Andreea Raducan’s positive test for pseudoephedrine, Carl Lewis’s astonishing comment on Linford Christie’s positive test for nandrolone: “They got him at last.” So our heroes are at it now, as well as our leaders. In fact, it looks as if they’ve been at it all along. Is there anything out there that isn’t fixed? Reality-TV contests? Literary prizes? University entrance examinations? Your
upcoming job interview? Or is it just that we haven’t found out how the fixing is being done?

  Welcome to the third millennium. The American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s redefinition of paranoia has never seemed more firmly on the money: paranoia usefully seen as the crazy-making but utterly sane realization that our times have secret meanings, that those meanings are dreadful, immoral, and corrupt beyond our wildest imaginings, and that the surface of things is a fraud, an artifact designed to hide the awful truth from us ordinary deluded suckers, who keep wanting to believe that things might actually—you know?—be beginning to improve.

  The sucker’s reaction to much of the foregoing would be to point out that many of the sleaze merchants I’ve mentioned have received or are receiving their comeuppances. Dumas is on trial, Sirven is in custody, Fujimori has fallen, the Hindujas have been obliged to remain in India pending the outcome of their case, Clinton is history, the bent cricketers were banned, and the doping athletes were caught. So that’s all right then.

  The paranoid knows better. If the crimes of the past are only now being uncovered, the paranoid will retort, how long will it take before we know about the crimes of the present? Are the “innocent” merely the guilty whose guilt hasn’t yet been established? Pynchonian analysis leaves true paranoids with few choices: to become obsessed investigators of the world’s secret meanings; to accept their impotence and fall into one of a familiar selection of futile, addled, entropic hazes; or to explode into the kind of rage that wants to blow things up.

  I knew a man once whose thing it was to wreck the toilets in office buildings and write a slogan on the ruined walls: “If the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed.” I’m beginning to understand how he felt. And to remember how, in a younger, hairier, angrier phase of life, I often used to feel.

  MARCH 2001: CROUCHING STRIKER, HIDDEN DANGER

  Without Hollywood, they say, Los Angeles would just be Phoenix with a coastline. This year, as deadlines approach for strikes by actors and writers, L.A. is facing the possibility of becoming, for a time, exactly such a characterless, movie-less sprawl. Rumors are flying: the studios actually want the strikes, the actors don’t, though their representatives are talking tough, and the writers? Well, they’re only writers, after all. Talks keep breaking down an inch away from agreement. TV companies are preparing to flood the schedules with even more reality-TV programming—it’s cheap! it’s popular! it’s not unionized!—to fill the holes created by The Strike. There’s plenty of bad feeling in the air, and a growing sense of inevitability. The shutdown is “going to happen.” (Which means either it will or it won’t.)

  And in the midst of this uncertainty, the movie community awaits its annual you-love-me-you-really-love-me festival of big business interests disguised as individual achievements. The lobbying season is over. The city is no longer being bombarded by “for your consideration” videotapes. Rock stars are no longer playing impromptu gigs in old folks’ homes in the hope of garnering a few votes for Best Song from elderly academicians resident therein. The votes are in. The Oscars are coming.

  The movies are L.A.’s culture. At the weekend, big audiences go to the new pictures the way the opera-loving Milanese go to an opening at La Scala. L.A. is a city of passionate moviegoers. I haven’t seen such enthusiastically participatory audiences anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent. This can get irritating, for example when a big guy with his ass hanging out of his pants moans and groans loudly every time Penélope Cruz appears on screen in All the Pretty Horses—“my God, she’s so beautiful!—Oh, oh, he’s going to fall for her!—Uh-oh, here comes trouble!”—or when a five-year-old insistently asks her parents, during the interminable Cast Away, “Mommy, when is the volleyball going to talk?” (Footnote: Wilson the volleyball’s performance is the best thing in this leaden movie. Why wasn’t Wilson nominated for Best Supporting Actor? It’s a scandal.)

  Angeleno enthusiasm can, however, also be thrilling. I can’t remember ever seeing a Western audience react to a new film the way a packed afternoon audience in a theater on La Brea responded to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Even by L.A.’s standards, the whooping and cheering was astonishing. The audience knew it was sharing a very special experience—the arrival of a great, classic film—and was simply transported by its brilliance. Anyone who thinks DVDs will someday replace moviegoing should have been there.

  Those PC killjoys who have denigrated Crouching Tiger as a piece of latter-day Orientalism, a Western appropriation of Eastern manner and material, would have seen an audience as diverse as America itself—Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans easily outnumbered any WASP-y Orientalists who might have been there enjoying it for the wrong reasons. Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray reached smaller audiences, in their native Japan and India, than the commercial movies of their contemporaries. That doesn’t make Seven Samurai inauthentic, or the trashy products of the mainstream Bombay cinema “more Indian” than Ray’s masterworks. So, yes, Jackie Chan sells a lot of tickets and, yes, Crouching Tiger draws on a long tradition of martial-arts movies. But Jackie Chan movies are cardboard fun, and Ang Lee’s beautiful, intimate epic is—one would have thought self-evidently—a luminous work of art.

  In the context of the Academy Awards and the shadow of the strike, the success of Crouching Tiger is especially significant. It’s being talked about as the breakthrough movie that has taught Americans to accept subtitled foreign films into the giant cineplexes where the big money is made. And this is why the various players—but the studios above all—may be making a big mistake if they think they can ride out the strike without losing their stranglehold on the market. From the late 1950s to early 1970s, a flood of great non-American filmmakers prized Hollywood’s fingers off the cinema’s throat for a few years. The result was the golden age of the sound cinema, the time of the great films of Kurosawa and Ray, of the French New Wave, of Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti, of Wajda, Jancso, and Bergman. Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming, in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the mass audience is ready, at long last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without.

  The Oscars usually show us how Hollywood sees itself. Ridley Scott’s technically brilliant but woodenly scripted Gladiator is the big-studio candidate for honors, just as the latest sentimental Miramax confection, Chocolat, leads the charge of the smaller guys. Comedy comes off badly, as usual—the Coen brothers have to be content with screenplay and cinematography nominations for the wonderful O Brother, Where Art Thou? There’s no nomination for George Clooney’s delicious, hairnet-wearing performance in this movie, or, indeed, for Renée Zellweger’s moving, subtle work in the title role of Nurse Betty. But behind all this familiar maneuvering, the tiger is crouching, the dragon hides.

  And if by some chance the one genuinely great movie to have been nominated this year runs away with the big prizes, it may just be the wake-up call that Hollywood needs. When the world’s finest filmmakers are coming after your audience, it may not be such a smart idea to shut your industry down.

  APRIL 2001: IT WASN’T ME

  The current hit single “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy (featuring Rikrok) celebrates, with wickedly infectious glee, the uses of shamelessness. A man caught red-handed cheating on his girl—a man watched by said girl making love to someone else on the sofa, in the shower, on the bathroom floor—must, or so the song tells us, at all costs, and in the face of all the evidence, deny, deny, deny. Now, who does this remind us of?

  There have been some great champions of brazen denial in recent years: Diego Maradona ignoring the video evidence of his notorious hand-balled goal against England and ascribing it to the “hand of God”; O. J. Simpson swearing to dedicate his life to finding his wife’s “real” killer (any hot leads, O.J.?); the British Conservative politicians Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken denying their proven corruption to th
e point of their economic ruination; and of course the great denier himself, Bill Clinton, passim, from “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” to the rejection of any improprieties in his last-gasp “Pardongate.”

  The barefaced denial, the giving of the lie direct, has become, in this age of saturation media coverage, an increasingly prominent feature of public life. It is now routine for even the age’s greatest monsters—the war criminals of ex-Yugoslavia or Cambodia—to deny their atrocities, knowing that their power of access to the world’s airwaves is almost certainly greater than any journalist’s power of access to the truth. When great crimes are openly admitted—Timothy McVeigh boasting about the Oklahoma bombing, the Taliban taking pride in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas—it’s so unusual that you find yourself fighting the urge to praise the criminals for their plain speaking.

  I once sat in a courtroom in Alice Springs, Australia, listening to the testimony of a truck driver accused of murder—of having deliberately crashed his vehicle into a bar he’d been thrown out of, killing and maiming many people. The man had clearly been carefully coached in the important contemporary art of saying the thing that is not. His dress was sober, his eyes downcast, his manner shocked and decent; and for a long time, he persuasively denied his guilt. But in the end the coaching couldn’t save him. After he’d repeatedly denied that he could do such a thing, he made the mistake, under cross-examination, of saying why. “For me to half-destroy my truck,” he explained reasonably, “is completely against my personality.” The jury quickly found him guilty and threw away the key. What did him in was that flash of unpalatable truth. A more skillful liar—or rather, denier—would have known better.

  “It wasn’t me.” Many such consummate exponents of the arts of brazen obfuscation are presently in the news. In Britain, successive governments have colluded with the British agricultural lobby to unleash not one but two plagues upon the world. The first, BSE [Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy], was the result of (1) turning cows into cannibals and then (2) allowing farmers to save energy costs by giving their cattle food that hadn’t been boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to kill the deadly germs. But of course the Tory government of the day did not admit its complicity; nor did the farm lobby own up to its part. Instead, both parties pretended, for a long time, that the links between BSE and its crossover human variant, CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease], were “unproven.” And now here comes foot-and-mouth, and we discover that three years ago the present Labour government declined to outlaw the use of pigswill as feed (even though many of our European partners had done so) and failed, once again, to ensure that the swill was boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to be safe. Once again, the decision was cash-driven: the farm lobby wanted to cut corners and save money, and the farm lobby got its way. Do we hear the government or the lobbyists admitting they were wrong? Of course not. “It wasn’t us, it was this Chinese restaurant that imported illegal meat.” So that’s all right then. We can just blame the Chinese. We all know the kinds of things they eat.