Gotham Diary:
Pizza Grande
27 August 2013
When Kathleen shuffles through the bedroom, her feet make the carpet whistle. It’s like something a kid might do, but she’s not a kid, and she’s not having fun. Every now and then, Kathleen throws a muscle in her lower back, and it takes a few days to relax. In some unknown way, she did this over the weekend. On Sunday, she asked for a cane — that was the worst. Heat packs, hot pads, Advil and tea are bringing her round slowly. In the afternoon, she will move into the living room to work on a document.
As if I were visiting in the hospital, I’ve been taking shameless advantage of Kathleen’s cripplement to spend hours reading magazines. It’s true that these are not found magazines, reluctantly settled for over a waiting room side table, but magazines to which I subscribe and don’t quite manage to keep up with. I seem to have spent most of Sunday with the July issue of Harper’s (there have been two since), which contains, among other things, a beguiling memoir by Julie Hecht and an exciting takedown of contemporary American poetry — Graham! Bam! Heaney! Ashbery! Bam! Bam! — by Mark Edmundson, the UVa professor whose new book, Why Teach?, is on its way to me. I didn’t just enjoy the piece, I reveled in it. Not only does Edmundson berate today’s poet’s for their pusillanimous solipsism, but he blames their cowardice on my favorite villains, the men and women of academe whom I would seriously consider vaporizing if given the chance: theorists.
Poets now would quail before the injunction to justify God’s way to man, or even man’s to God. No one would attempt an Essay on Humanity. No one would publicly say what Shelley did: that the reason he wrote his books was to change the world. But poets should wise up. They should see the limits emanating from the theoretical critics down the hall in the English department as what they are. Those strictures are not high-minded moral edicts but something a little closer to home. They are installments in the war of philosophy against poetry, the one Hass so delicately invokes [in a poem that I don’t know called “Meditation at Lagunitas”]. The theorists — the philosophers — want the high ground. They want their rational discourses to hold the cliffs, and they want to quiet the poets’ more emotional, more inspired interjections. They love to talk about race and class and gender with ultimate authority, and of course they do not wish to share their right with others.
Hear, hear! The practice of philosophy ought to be as obsolete as the practice that it inspired, back in the days when nobody knew anything, blood-letting.
Yesterday, I read that piece about drones in the Atlantic that everybody’s talking about — will there ever be a grand unification of the rules of engagement of military and police forces? — and then new LRB arrived in the mail, catnip as usual. After dinner, I read Susan Watkins’s somewhat exhausting review of recent books about the Eurozone and its crises; as the editor of the New Left Review, Watkins predictably takes a very dim view of the anti-democratic price-tag of fiscal rescue, and she is not hesitant to see “Washington and Wall Street” behind it.
I could not help agreeing that the ordinary people of Europe are suffering because elite governments permitted reckless behavior in the banking sector, and, ordinarily, it would have stopped there, but because of what I’d written earlier in the day for this space, I had a bit of a brainwave. In calling for “an articulate and functional doctrine of loyal opposition,” I had been thinking of structure, not content, but now I saw that the natural occupants of the loyal opposition in any democratic government ought to be the “moneyed interests.” It is clear, after a century of catastrophic tampering, that it is the moneyed interests that make society dynamic, but also that they do so only when they do not actually run the government. The golden age of upward mobility and broadening affluence that everyone likes to see in the Fifties and Sixties was definitely a time when “business” was in loyal opposition to an expanding welfare state. This halcyon came to an end for extrinsic reasons, but we would be much better off today if the relationship between business and government had not shifted so drastically. (For which I blame sourpusses such as Lewis Powell. Isn’t the money enough?)
A friend called to say that he had been shocked by the discussion that Bill Moyers had with This Town author Mark Leibovich. I almost didn’t read This Town, because someone said that it doesn’t really deal with the politics or with the issues or with the money. On the other hand, it was said to be a fun read (and it is), so I eventually found out that the failure to explore politics, issues, and money is no drawback in a book that captures Washington’s culture. This is a culture, most notably, to which there is no significant opposition of any kind, loyal or otherwise. People who boast that they’re going to go to Washington to change things by doing right are like thirteen year-olds who vow never to smoke, drink, drive or have sex. Leibovich doesn’t say this, but Washington is a court society with very strict etiquette. This etiquette has nothing to do with the politesse of Talleyrand; rather, it is a distillate of three distinguishing obsessions of everyday American life: sports, cars, and television. In other words: high school. And somebody few outsiders have heard of is both the principal and the cheerleader: Tammy Haddad.
This Town has no index — for a good reason, it turns out — but I would be vastly entertained by a compilation along the lines of Julian Barnes’s hysterically funny index to his collection of Letters from London (to The New Yorker). I can imagine something like this: “Haddad, Tammy: … as human ladle, 32.”
As I walk out, I get a big hug from Tammy Haddad, a veteran cable producer who repurposed herself in recent years as a professional party host, event organizer, and full-service convener of the Washington A-list. Haddad, a towering in-your-face presence with black hair bisected by a white streak, is a human ladle in in the local self-celebration buffet. She tells you how great you are, how you really need to meet the author, or cohost, or honoree, of whoever, and that by the way, she just talked to Justice Breyer! “Over the Rainbow” plays as Tammy and I and the rest of the Club schmooze our way up to the Kennedy Center roof for an actual cocktail party.
Or this: “Club, The: … metamorphic immortality of, 7.”
And the gathering itself [a memorial service for Tim Russert, to be followed by that “actual cocktail party” on the roof] is itself testament to The Club, that spinning cabal of “people in politics and media” and the supporting sectors that never get voted out or term-limited or, God forbid, decide on their own that it is time to return home to the farm. The Club can be as potent in DC as Congress, its members harder to shed than ten-term incumbents. They are, in effect, the city fathers of This Town. They are not one-dimensional and are certainly not bad people. They come with varied backgrounds, intentions, and, in many cases — maybe most cases — the right reasons. As they become entrenched, maybe their hearts get a bit muddled and their motives too. Not always: people are complicated, here as everywhere, and sometimes even conflicted (enough sometimes to see therapists, though we don’t discuss that here, don’t want to scare the vetters). But their membership in The Club becomes paramount and defining. They become part of a system that rewards, more than anything, self-perpetuation.
Is This Town cynical and depressing? No. It really is funny. Beyond that, it’s a vivid sketch of a social world that is very appealing to people who are powerful or who want to be powerful. (High school.) Entrée to this world is confined to several portals, most of them exacting stiff fees. The money side of Washington is not Leibovich’s brief; he just wants to show you what goes on and how all that goes on is part of one big pizza. He disposes of The Club’s financial machinery in a brief but superpotent quotation from Jack Abramoff, the formerly-incarcerated former lobbyist. (And, what do you know? The book opened to the very page — 163!)
In addition, tens of thousands of Hill and administration staff people move seamlessly into lobbying jobs. In a memoir by disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the felon wrote that the best way for lobbyists to influence people on the Hill is to casually suggest they join their firm after they complete their public service. “Now, the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to them, that was it, we owned them,” said Abramoff, who spent forty-three months in the federal slammer after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges. “And what does that mean?” Abramoff continued. “Every request from our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they’re gonna do. And not only that, they’re gonna think of things we can’t think of to do.”
It occurred to me, in the cryptic terms that haunt my meditations on “organized money” — a phrase that George Packer uses in The Unwinding, but without analyzing it — that putting “the moneyed interests” into some sort of structural loyal opposition to the administration of government just might organize the people who have money, instead of letting the money organize them.