Gotham Diary:
Haircut
12 May 2014
So, I’ve got this little problem. I don’t know about you, but my idea of a Supreme Court Justice does not mesh with a man who openly acknowledges, to a reporter from the paper of record,
“I get most of my news, probably, driving back and forth to work, on the radio,” he said. “Talk guys, usually.”
Listening to talk radio is bad enough. Crowing about it is unacceptable.
Adam Liptak’s piece about the “political polarization” of the Supreme Court didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know (except for the new low about Justice Scalia), but it did set me to wondering if “political” is the word. Can political activity occur in a polarized climate? I don’t think so. Politics, it seems to me, can happen only within a cultural consensus, an agreement about (most) basic principles and (most) everyday conventions. Without this consensus, would-be politicians merely shout at one another, and nobody really listens. That’s what the United States has come to, at least at the level of federal government.
In the past fifty years, the Republican Party has become much more than a political organization. It is now an alternative culture within the United States. Unlike the alternative culture of the Sixties, Republican culture is self-conscious, willed, and fearful. What Republicans fear is that time is running out. Time is running out for white men on top. Time is running out for environmental complaisance. Time may even be running out for organized money. The Republican Party is here to help with organized money, the four Roman Catholic Justices as eagerly as anyone.
Time is running out on a chimera called “freedom.”
There is the Republican consensus, and there is everyone else’s consensus. (We need more and better jobs.) If the Republicans would just lock themselves up in their gated communities, things would be fine.
It could be worse. A Manhattan-based apologist for the policies of Vladimir Putin has come up with something unheard of since the 1936 Olympics: “the good Hitler.”
***
I spent the weekend lost in two books, one of them The Sleepwalkers. Top marks to Christopher Clark for narrative expertise! How bold an undertaking, to explain “how Europe went to war in 1914.” Clark has a knack for clarity, and he devotes it to detailing the stunning complexity of his tale.
The story so far seems to be that of Murder on the Orient Express: everybody did it. Far from being an unlucky chain reaction in which reluctant diplomats were pulled into the abyss by their alliances, the runup to World War I looks more like a postponed blockbuster premiere: when is it going to open? To make things even more piquant, there really does seem to have been a lull, a loss of interest in war and international crisis, in the spring of 1914. The assassination in Bosnia of the heir to an imperial throne was required to rekindle the excitement.
The story is fascinating simply because it is impossible to stifle the cry, don’t do it! The part of the story that Clark hasn’t really addressed so far is the cluelessness of the governing elites about the chaos that the war would unleash. We are still disturbed by it, as the United States and Russia, blinded by their Cold-War monomania, stumble about in a world that increasingly has no use for either of them, and that wants them to pack up and go home. To the foreign ministers of 1914, the impending war was going settle things; men would know where they stood when the dust cleared. The uncertainty most in need of settling was the power of Russia, which almost everyone hugely exaggerated. (The war can be seen as the popping of a Russia bubble.) The war would also demonstrate — this appears to have been a widespread expectation — that Austria-Hungary would prove not to be a viable sovereignty. Once these matters were straightened out, the world could wake up and move on.
No one foresaw the ideology and terror that would grip Europe and the world for decades to come. Nobody suspected the toxicity of nationalism. We still don’t know quite why it all happened as it did, but it still seems important to find out as much as we can.
Meanwhile: cast of thousands. Clark makes it easier than most historians to keep track of the players, especially the innumerable envoys in foreign capitals.
***
After some frustration with Face Time — resolved by the updating of operating systems — we celebrated Mother’s Day with a remote visit to the San Francisco branch of the family. Will was in fine form. Asked about school, he said at first that it was “good,” and then reformulated: “It’s a BLAST.” (Somewhere in there, I’ve always felt, is a bottled-up teenager.) We saw that he has learned to write his name quite legibly — if backwards, right to left. We were treated to a pillow fight with his father.
Although Will is very tall for a boy his age (four and a half, almost), he looks like a little boy to me. He is only a foot shorter than Kathleen, but for some reason that’s not what computes. I suspect that my judgment is governed by his face, which is right for his age. That’s what I see. It’s the face of a kid who is about to run off in some direction, to whoop and holler like a berserker.
Unless, that is, he’s in altar-boy mode. This side came to the fore when his new allowance was discussed. He became a little man, the soul of responsibility and prudence. He looked so angelic, in fact, that I almost burst out laughing. No, seriously; he was most admirable. In addition to his allowance, he earns extra money from odd jobs. Not chores, his mother pointed out, but just helping out, as for example, with washing the car. He’s a good little boy, except of course when he’s not. When he’s not being a good little boy, he reminds Kathleen of me.
***
As I feared, we have gone from winter to summer, from polar to sultry. Makes no never mind; I still need a haircut.