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P E T E R S AV O D N I K O N O B A M A’ S N AT O P R O B L E M

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2009 $6.95

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THE $10 TRILLION HANGOVER Paying the Price for Eight Years of Bush

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz GO FORTH AND FALSIFY Katherine Anne Porter and the Lies of Art

By William H. Gass THE SANTOSBRAZZI KILLER A story by Heidi Julavits Also: Paul West and Siddhartha Deb ◆

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Editor ROGER D. HODGE Literary Editor BEN METCALF Managing Editor ELLEN ROSENBUSH Senior Editors CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN, LUKE MITCHELL, JENNIFER SZALAI, BILL WASIK National Correspondent LEWIS H. LAPHAM Washington Editor KEN SILVERSTEIN Art Director STACEY D. CLARKSON Associate Editors BENJAMIN AUSTEN, PAUL FORD, THEODORE ROSS Assistant Editors CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA, CLAIRE Z. GUTIERREZ, RAFIL KROLL-ZAIDI, GEMMA SIEFF, GENEVIEVE V. SMITH, SAM STARK Assistant Art Director ALYSSA COPPELMAN Editorial Interns ATOSSA ABRAHAMIAN, ERIC BENSON, J. W. MCCORMACK, AARON LAKE SMITH Art Intern ANUTA SKRYPNYCHENKO Contributing Editors KEVIN BAKER, JOHN BERGER, TOM BISSELL, CHARIS CONN, MARK EDMUNDSON, BARBARA EHRENREICH, THOMAS FRANK, NICHOLAS FRASER, WILLIAM H. GASS, JACK HITT, EDWARD HOAGLAND, DONOVAN HOHN, SCOTT HORTON, FREDERICK KAUFMAN, GARRET KEIZER, MARK KINGWELL, JOHN LEONARD, WYATT MASON, BILL MCKIBBEN, VINCE PASSARO, MATTHEW POWER, FRANCINE PROSE, DAVID QUAMMEN, DAVID SAMUELS, JONATHAN SCHELL, JEFF SHARLET, EARL SHORRIS, JAKE SILVERSTEIN, MARK SLOUKA, REBECCA SOLNIT, MATTHEW STEVENSON, JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN, TOM WOLFE, THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA JOHN R. MACARTHUR, President and Publisher Vice President and Associate Publisher PETER D. KENDALL Vice President and General Manager LYNN CARLSON Vice President, Circulation SHAWN D. GREEN Vice President, Public Relations KATHY J. PARK Assistant to the Publisher BARBARA ANDREASSON KIM LAU, Senior Accountant EVE BRANT, Office Manager ADRIAN KNEUBUHL, Staff ADVERTISING SALES: (212) 420-5720; FAX: (212) 260-1096 FRANK M. SMITH, Advertising Director ELENA GUZMÁN, Sales Representative/ Book Publishing, Art, and Culture IRENE M. CASTAGLIOLA, Classified Sales Manager/ Rights and Reprints JENNIFER C. ADAMS, Production Director EMILY WILCOX, Advertising Coordinator Sales Representatives Chicago: TAUSTER MEDIA RESOURCES, INC. (630) 858-1558; FAX: (630) 858-1510 Detroit: MAIORANA & PARTNERS, LTD. (248) 546-2222; FAX: (248) 546-0019 Western States: CHRIS LEIGHTON (916) 446-3926; FAX: (916) 446-3563 Direct Response: EMILY WILCOX (212) 420-5772; FAX: (212) 260-1096 Canada: JMB MEDIA INTERNATIONAL (450) 538-2468; FAX: (450) 538-5468

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2009

LETTERS

Tilting at Windmills In response to Garret Keizer’s “Of Mohawks and Mavericks” [Notebook, December], I invite Keizer— whose writing I enjoy and whose ideas I often agree with—to reflect on the guise he donned when, in his June 2007 Notebook, “Climate, Class, and Claptrap,” he decried the wind farm planned for Sheffield, Vermont, as being nothing more than an “environmentalist grotto” set in the perverse new world of carbon-trading.

The same SUV drivers and viewshed connoisseurs Keizer sees fighting today against funding for afterschool programs have in the recent past spearheaded efforts to fight wind development in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Although such development is the result of an admittedly flawed process lacking in adequate public participation early on, it would, and may still, provide the residents—rich and poor—of the economically depressed town of Sheffield with property-tax relief, and thus more flexibility to increase school spending.

Keizer has said that he would support any approach to climate change that acknowledges “it is eiHarper’s Magazine welcomes reader response.

Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012, or email us at letters@harpers.org.

Short letters are more likely to be published, and all letters are subject to editing. Volume precludes individual acknowledgment.

ther Earth for all of us or hell for most of us.” Yet his rejection of utility-scale wind within Vermont’s working landscape reinforces the cycle of immiseration that rural Vermonters have known under the serfdom of their second-home lords.

To what hell is he consigning the children he champions when he denies them the opportunity of an essentially free energy source in an energy-constrained future?

Brian Miles Durham, N.C. Garret Keizer responds: I am glad that a reader as thoughtful as Brian Miles enjoys my work.

That said, his letter contains at least five dubious assumptions. First, he seems to assume that I would need an invitation to reflect on the deplorable priorities of those who oppose industrial wind development in my region while voting down school budgets in the same place. In fact, I was thinking of that very shamelessness when I wrote December’s Notebook, and even more pointedly when I gave those “SUV drivers and viewshed connoisseurs” in my community as good a public dressing down as I could deliver.

Miles errs, too, in his blanket use of “the same.” In fact, the most militant and committed opponents of the wind project in my town are also among the strongest supporters of our public school. In contrast, the faction

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Why Save Capitalism?

that has promoted the wind project as an exercise of the sovereign right of private property has been notorious in its opposition to public-school funding, albeit thoroughly consistent in its libertarian agenda.

Miles also assumes that wind developers have a better track record than other energy corporations in keeping their promises to the communities they exploit; I would invite him to do some further research. He likewise assumes that even if the promised revenues come through, the town of Sheffield will devote them to maintaining or improving its school program instead of providing across-the-board “propertytax relief,� the bulk of it going to those who need it least.

The most objectionable of Miles’s assumptions is that those living in “serfdom� have no better option than to lie down for every slick stranger who offers them a box of candy and a ride in his big shiny car. I would consign no children to hell, but there are parents who have consigned their children to brothels based on that same idea.

Your cover headline “How to Save Capitalism� [Forum, November] lists beneath it the important political and economic people who want to enlighten us. Why should they, or we, want to save capitalism? If you asked important chefs and restaurateurs “How to Save Bad Chicken,� they would give you a simple answer: Throw it away before it puts you in the hospital!

Or, more to the point, if you asked “How to Save Cancer,� we would all laugh, and medical experts would explain that cancer is a greedy disease, so greedy that its cells feed on their host until they kill it—and themselves.

They—that is, cancer cells and capitalists—greed themselves to death, and end up taking us along for the ride.

Bert Hornback New Orleans

Ad Nauseam Tell me that you were testing your readers’ powers of observation when you ran a two-page advertisement for British Airways masquerading as a gen-

uine Annotation in your November issue. I was momentarily taken in by the familiar typeface, layout, and graphics, and fully expected a fierce critique of the conspicuous consumption and environmental degradation that take place at airport terminals.

Instead, I was faced with breathless ad copy celebrating spa treatments, personal shoppers, world-acclaimed chefs, and a view of Windsor Castle. When I spotted the tiny “Special Advertising Section� caption at the top of the page and the British Airways logo at the bottom, the effect was not unlike being sucker-punched in the stomach by someone you trust. What’s next, a Letters section generated by P.R. flacks, or a Notebook essay by a corporate shill?

Please, never again prostitute your magazine’s intellectual authority in this way. You might undo some of the damage by running a real Annotation of this fake “Annotation� in your next issue. But in that case I suppose British Airways would want its money back.

Graham Sanders Toronto

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NOTEBOOK By the Rivers of Babylon

By Lewis H. Lapham

The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters. I just hate the idea that such an ethic is more alive today in China than in America. . . . We need to get back to collaborating the old-fashioned way. That is, people making decisions based on business judgment, experience, prudence, clarity of communications and thinking about how—not just how much.

—Thomas Friedman, New York Times, October 15, 2008

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don’t know what country Friedman thinks he’s been living in for the past thirty years, or in which New England gift shops he searches out the treasures of the American past. I can understand why he might wish for a happy return to an imaginary state of grace, but to explain last fall’s melee in the world’s financial markets as a falling away from the Puritan work ethic is to misread America’s economic and political history and to mistake the message encoded in the DNA of the American dream. Given any kind of choice in the matter, who among the faithful ever has preferred hard work to the fast shuffle and the artful dodge, the bird in the hand to the five in the bush? When has the thinking about the how ever been preferred to the projecting of the how much? Ask any American what money means, and the respondent is an odds-on favorite to say that it’s the soul of freedom and the proof of wisdom, that if only he or she had Lewis H. Lapham is the National Correspondent for Harper’s Magazine and the editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.

more of it the upgraded combination of numbers must open the vault of Paradise. Add to the account the long-standing American romance with crime—the outlaw and the confidence man forever shining like the fixed stars in the Hollywood sky—and although the desire for wealth might be seen as a character trait that doesn’t get along well with others, the statement “Yes, but I did it for the money” serves to explain, if not always to justify, any and all forms of conduct (tax evasion, mail fraud, a second marriage or a third divorce, the war in Iraq) that otherwise might be regarded as insensitive, stupid, self-defeating, or unjust.

The looting of the U.S. Treasury is never an easy trick, but to carry off more than $1 trillion in broad daylight while the members of Congress stand around applauding the exit strategy as one certain to guarantee the health and happiness of the American people is a wonder of entrepreneurial enterprise that surely deserves some sort of tip of the hat.

When the James gang robbed the Kansas City Fair in the fall of 1872, the local paper acknowledged the achievement as “so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators,” and I would have thought that our own easily awestruck news media might have found a few words of respect and esteem for the perps who knocked over the Wall Street fairgrounds last year.

How not at least revere the scale of the undertaking—nine banks emptied of more than $500 billion in

capital, as much as $8 trillion withdrawn from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, $2 trillion from the country’s pension and retirement accounts. How not admire the “collaborating the old-fashioned way,” stock-market touts working together with the Federal Reserve, investment bankers with credit-rating agencies, hedge-fund managers with committees of Congress, all doing their part to gin up the numbers and shear the sheep? For the financial operatives booming the sale of worthless paper, the bonus money last year came up to the sum of $39 billion. How not at least commend so vivid a revival of the frontier American spirit and so eloquent a testimony to the powers of the unfettered free market?

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hy then the sermons and no joy in Deadwood? Friedman and his associate clergy in the pulpits at Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal apparently require more edifying precedents than those to be found in Mark Twain’s Nevada mining camps or in Charles and Henry Adams’s Chapters of Erie. If they worry about straying too far from the sacred Massachusetts shore, they might wish to consult Robert Patton’s Patriot Pirates, a history of the Revolutionary War at sea published in a timely fashion last spring soon after the prize crew from JPMorgan Chase swarmed aboard the wreck of Bear Stearns. Patton suggests, and offers a good deal of evidence to demonstrate, that our war of independence was won by the stout-

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hearted greed of New England ship captains licensed by the Continental Congress in the autumn of 1775 to plunder, burn, or sell at auction British vessels bringing munitions and military stores to the king’s regiments quartered on the merchants of Boston. The colonists at the time had few other means of acquiring weapons with which to give voice to their rebellion, and General George Washington understood that his illequipped and untried troops were not likely “to do much in a land way” against the superior force of the British Army. It occurred to the general to admit the servants of Mammon to the kingdom of Heaven with the thought that a squadron of privateers steered on the compass bearings of murderous self-interest might inflict enough damage on Britain’s overseas trade to persuade the British Parliament that war with its North American colonies was a losing proposition.

Opponents of the policy thought it unworthy of Christian gentlemen, one likely to encourage practices both vicious and depraved, tending to “the destruction of the morals of the people.” Friedman not being present, the objections were overruled by the advocates of piracy as public service, among them John Adams, who informed his fellow representatives in Philadelphia that the innovative investment strategy securitized the criminal collateral. “It is prudent,” he said, “not to put virtue to too serious a test. I would use American virtue as sparingly as possible lest we wear it out.”

The voyages were rigged as venture-capital deals, the richest share of the spoils reserved to the managing partners who advanced the money to build and provision the ships, lesser amounts distributed to the officers, the subcontractors, the accomplice politicians, and the crews. The work was not without its difficulties. Great Britain in the 1770s was the world’s superpower, its navy equivalent to America’s twenty-first-century Air Force, and for any privateer coming within range of the broadside from a British frigate the end was as certain as foreclosure on a California mortgage

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armed with a subprime loan from Countrywide Financial. But for captains able to avoid unlucky shifts in the wind, the rewards were of a match with those achieved in the Civil War gold rooms, the 1920s Wall Street rise, and the Internet boom of the late 1990s—many times the cost of setting sail from Plymouth or Newburyport—and during the course of the Revolutionary War the winnowing of what came to be known as “the golden harvest” at sea developed into a big business. If in the autumn of 1775 as few as ten or twenty small schooners were cruising the Atlantic coast, by 1783 as many as 4,000 investment vehicles had been licensed to practice the art of piracy as far offshore as the West Indies and the Mediterranean.

Better yet, the costs often were defrayed by the semblance of a government in Philadelphia, the profits taken by the speculators in Boston, Providence, and Marblehead. The contracts specified a transfer of the proceeds to the Colonial war effort, but the agreements tended to go AWOL when it came time to offload the boodle, preferably gunpowder but also African slaves, tobacco, sugar, table linen, Spanish wine, and anything else the traffic happened to be bearing.

Which isn’t to say that the sparing use of virtue didn’t prove to be “the pivot,” as Adams had foreseen and Washington had said, “on which everything else turned.” The putting of country second instead of first brought with it change believed in by electorates both domestic and foreign. By 1776 the British were losing cargoes valued in the millions of dollars; by 1782 the destructive presence of American privateers in the English Channel had dismasted the British public’s enthusiasm for what was no longer a splendid little war.

More importantly for the American love of liberty and pursuit of happiness, the lessons learned in the oceangoing counting houses of the Revolutionary War furnished the new republic with risk-management models that over the course of the next century settled the transMississippi American West, built the steel mills and the railroads, fi-

nanced numerous richly rewarding stock-market schemes, and by 1899, the year that Thorstein Veblen published his Theory of the Leisure Class, advanced the country’s market society to a stage in which vendible capital had replaced vendible labor as the product that turned the wheels of fortune. The pirates no longer went down to the sea in ships, but neither did they go about the getting of an honest living. Reconfigured as predatory financiers embodying the ethic of what Veblen called “the higher barbarian culture,” they lived off the work of the lower industrial orders, concerning themselves only with the pleasantries of how much, never, God forbid, with the indignity of how.

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ven more touching than Thomas Friedman’s laying of a wreath on the grave of Cotton Mather was the sight of Alan Greenspan sitting down by the rivers of Babylon, his harp hung upon the willows, silent in a strange land. During his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve (1987–2006) Greenspan had believed it his duty to irrigate the fruited plain of the American economy with the flow of easy money, his policy to supply the banks with the abundant credit, at low cost and presumably risk-free, that enabled the floating of both the Internet bubble (1995–2000) and the housing bubble (2003–2006).

For his efforts he was accorded the title of “maestro,” his word on the country’s finances trading at parity with the word of God. When it was suggested (as long ago as 1994) that the newborn market in derivatives demanded some sort of government supervision, Greenspan discounted the suggestion as insulting to the integrity of the public-spirited Wall Street gentlemen laboring on behalf of the common good; when on October 23 of last year he appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to explain what had gone wrong with the making of something out of nothing, his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of

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lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

To think that the Wall Street financial institutions seek to protect the equity of their customers in preference to their own is to think that at the Las Vegas poker tables the dealers seek to protect the chips stacked in front of the sweet old lady in the blue baseball cap playing a system drawn from the book of Revelation. But if Chairman Greenspan put virtue to too serious a test, so do the cupbearers of civic conscience who complain of the lack of “leadership” on the part of the government in Washington.

Throughout the months of September and October the Dow was gaining or losing as many as 700 points a day (thereby enriching the speculators taking a cut of the action on both the black and the red), and from the choir lofts of the national media the news went forth that what had gone missing from both the Congress and the Bush Administration was the prudence and the clarity of communication. Avarice and incompetence at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, “nihilists” in the House of Representatives, corporate bagmen in the Senate, everywhere a falling away of sober business practice and the habit of self-denial—where, O Lord, was the wisdom in the shining city on the hill, where the watchers on the ramparts of freedom looking out for the safety and well-being of the American taxpayer?

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s with the misreadings of the spirit of American commercial enterprise, the misinterpretings of the purpose of American government substitute the theory for the practice. Just as the stock-market speculations do what they’re intended to do, which is to reward the promoters and fleece the marks, the government does what it’s supposed to do, which is to enrich the creditors and plunder the debtors. The eighteenth-century New England privateers flew the American flag as a flag of convenience, not as a declaration of their allegiance to a cause but as a license to seize the wealth stored in the hulls of wooden ships. Their twentyfirst-century heirs and assigns employ

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the semblance of a government in Washington as an investment vehicle permitting them to seize the wealth stored in the labor of the American people. The Republican and Democratic parties compete for the brokerage business, between them putting up $2.4 billion for last year’s presidential campaigns— i.e., for the speculative ventures that bundle junk slogans into collateralized-debt obligations, which, when it comes time to offload the boodle, transform the upside into private property, the downside into the good news that poverty replenishes the soul.

When Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson distributes more than $1 trillion to the country’s financial overlords ($700 billion to the commercial and investment banks; $150 billion to AIG, $100 billion each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, etc.), he proceeds in the time-honored manner of the governments in Washington that during the four decades after the Civil War presented the railroads with 183 million acres of subprime desert on which to set up the derivatives market in pioneer homesteads that were sold as gardens of Eden on fertile prairies “ready for the plow and spade.” When the land holdings turned into fairy-tale castles of debt rising from the mists of boundless credulity, it was the farmers wondering where was the rain in western Nebraska, not the silk-hatted gentlemen rounding up the oysters in William K. Vanderbilt’s palm court, who paid for the burials of the mules and the American dream. Bait-andswitch is the name of the national pastime. President Grover Cleveland confirmed the principle in 1887, explaining his veto of a bill passed by Congress to provide financial aid to the poor. “The lesson should be constantly enforced,” he said, “that though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.” Such has been the policy of the Bush Administration for the past eight years; so also is it the policy “alive today in China,” Thomas Friedman’s far-off happy land where the cheap labor relies on the Puritan work ethic to lay up its treasure in Heaven.

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NOTEBOOK

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HARPER’S INDEX A retrospective of the Bush era Number of news stories from 1998 to Election Day 2000 containing “George W. Bush” and “aura of inevitability” : 206 Amount for which Bush successfully sued Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 1999 : $2,500 Year in which a political candidate first sued Palm Beach County over problems with hanging chads : 1984 Total amount the Bush campaign paid Enron and Halliburton for use of corporate jets during the 2000 recount : $15,400 Percentage of Bush’s first 189 appointees who also served in his father’s administration : 42 Minimum number of Bush appointees who have regulated industries they used to represent as lobbyists : 98 Years before becoming energy secretary that Spencer Abraham cosponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy : 2 Number of Chevron oil tankers named after Condoleezza Rice, at the time she became foreign policy adviser : 1 Date on which the GAO sued Dick Cheney to force the release of documents related to current U.S. energy policy : 2/22/02 Number of other officials the GAO has sued over access to federal records : 0 Months before September 11, 2001, that Cheney’s Energy Task Force investigated Iraq’s oil resources : 6 Hours after the 9/11 attacks that an Alaska congressman speculated they may have been committed by “eco-terrorists” : 9 Date on which the first contract for a book about September 11 was signed : 9/13/01 Number of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African men detained in the U.S. in the eight weeks after 9/11 : 1,182 Number of them ever charged with a terrorism-related crime : 0 Number charged with an immigration violation : 762 Days since the federal government first placed the nation under an “elevated terror alert” that the level has been relaxed : 0 Minimum number of calls the FBI received in fall 2001 from Utah residents claiming to have seen Osama bin Laden : 20 Number of box cutters taken from U.S. airline passengers since January 2002 : 105,075 Percentage of Americans in 2006 who believed that U.S. Muslims should have to carry special I.D. : 39 Chances an American in 2002 believed the government should regulate comedy routines that make light of terrorism : 2 in 5 Rank of Mom, Dad, and Rudolph Giuliani among those whom 2002 college graduates said they most wished to emulate : 1, 2, 3 Number of members of the rock band Anthrax who said they hoarded Cipro so as to avoid an “ironic death” : 1 Estimated total calories members of Congress burned giving Bush’s 2002 State of the Union standing ovations : 22,000 Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU : 50 Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following : 1,069 Estimated number of U.S. intelligence reports on Iraq that were based on information from a single defector : 100 Number of times the defector had ever been interviewed by U.S. intelligence agents : 0 Date on which Bush said of Osama bin Laden, “I truly am not that concerned about him” : 3/13/02 Days after the U.S. invaded Iraq that Sony trademarked “Shock & Awe” for video games : 1 Days later that the company gave up the trademark, citing “regrettable bad judgment” : 25 Number of books by Henry Kissinger found in Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz’s mansion : 2 Number by then–New York Times reporter Judith Miller : 1 Factor by which an Iraqi in 2006 was more likely to die than in the last year of the Saddam regime : 3.6 Factor by which the cause of death was more likely to be violence : 120 Chance that an Iraqi has fled his or her home since the beginning of the war : 1 in 6 Portion of Baghdad residents in 2007 who had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003 : 3/4 Percentage of U.S. veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have filed for disability with the VA : 35 Chance that an Iraq war veteran who has served two or more tours now has post-traumatic stress disorder : 1 in 4 Number of all U.S. war veterans who have been denied Veterans Administration health care since 2003 : 452,677 Number of eligibility restrictions for admission into the Army that have been loosened since 2003 : 9

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Percentage change from 2004 to 2007 in the number of Army recruits admitted despite having been charged with a felony : +295 Date on which the White House announced it had stopped looking for WMDs in Iraq : 1/12/05 Years since his acquittal that O. J. Simpson has said he is still looking for his wife’s “real killers” : 13 Minimum number of close-up photographs of Bush’s hands owned by his current chief of staff, Josh Bolten : 4 Number of vehicles in the motorcade that transports Bush to his regular bike ride in Maryland : 6 Estimated total miles he has ridden his bike as president : 5,400 Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots : 1/3 Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home : 25 Estimated number of juveniles whom the United States has detained as enemy combatants since 2002 : 2,500 Minimum number of detainees who were tortured to death in U.S. custody : 8 Minimum number of extraordinary renditions that the United States has made since 2006 : 200 Date on which USA Today added Guantánamo to its weather map : 1/3/05 Number of incidents of torture on prime-time network TV shows from 2002 to 2007 : 897 Number on shows during the previous seven years : 110 Percentage change since 2000 in U.S. emigration to Canada : +79 Number of the thirty-eight Iraq war veterans who have run for Congress who were Democrats : 21 Percentage of Republicans in 2005 who said they would vote for Bush over George Washington : 62 Seconds it took a Maryland consultant in 2004 to pick a Diebold voting machine’s lock and remove its memory card : 10 Number of states John Kerry would have won in 2004 if votes by poor Americans were the only ones counted : 40 Number if votes by rich Americans were the only ones counted : 4 Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners : 3/4 Increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level : 3,500,000 Percentage change since 2001 in the average amount U.S. workers spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses : +172 Estimated percentage by which Social Security benefits would have declined if Bush’s privatization plan had passed : –15 Percentage change since 2002 in the number of U.S. teens using illegal drugs : –9 Percentage change in the number of adults in their fifties doing so : +121 Number of times FDA officials met with consumer and patient groups as they revised drug-review policy in 2006 : 5 Number of times they met with industry representatives : 113 Amount the Justice Department spent in 2001 installing curtains to cover two seminude statues of Justice : $8,650 Number of Republican officials who have been investigated by the Justice Department since 2001 : 196 Number of Democratic officials who have been : 890 Number of White House officials in 2006 and 2007 authorized to discuss pending criminal cases with the DOJ : 711 Number of Clinton officials ever authorized to do so : 4 Years since a White House official as senior as I. Lewis Libby had been indicted while in office : 130 Number of U.S. cities and towns that have passed resolutions calling for the impeachment of President Bush : 92 Percentage change since 2001 in U.S. government spending on paper shredding : +466 Percentage of EPA scientists who say they have experienced political interference with their work since 2002 : 60 Change since 2001 in the percentage of Americans who believe humans are causing climate change : –4 Number of total additions made to the U.S. endangered-species list under Bush : 61 Average number made yearly under Clinton : 65 Minimum number of pheasant hunts Dick Cheney has gone on since he shot a hunting companion in 2006 : 5 Days after Hurricane Katrina hit that Cheney’s office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines : 1 Days after the hurricane that the White House authorized sending federal troops into New Orleans : 4

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Portion of the $3.3 billion in federal Hurricane Katrina relief spent by Mississippi that has benefited poor residents : 1/4 Percentage change in the number of Louisiana and Mississippi newborns named Katrina in the year after the storm : +153 Rank of Nevaeh, “heaven” spelled backward, among the fastest growing names given to American newborns since 2000 : 1 Months, beginning in 2001, that the federal government’s online condom fact sheet disappeared from its website : 17 Minimum amount that religious groups received in congressional earmarks from 2003 to 2006 : $209,000,000 Amount such groups received during the previous fourteen years : $107,000,000 Percentage change from 2003 to 2007 in the amount of money invested in U.S. faith-based mutual funds : +88 Average annualized percentage return during that time in the Christian and Muslim funds, respectively : +11, +15 Number of feet the Ground Zero pit has been built up since the site was fully cleared in 2002 : 30 Number of 980-foot-plus “Super Tall” towers built in the Arab world in the seven years since 9/11 : 4 Year by which the third and final phase of the 2003 “road map” to a Palestinian state was to have been reached : 2005 Estimated number of the twenty-five provisions of the first phase that have yet to be completed : 12 Number of times in 2007 that U.S. media called General David Petraeus “King David” : 14 Percentage change during the first ten months of the Iraq war “surge” in the number of Iraqis detained in U.S.-run prisons : +63 Percentage change in the number of Iraqis aged nine to seventeen detained : +285 Ratio of the entire U.S. federal budget in 1957, adjusted for inflation, to the amount spent so far on the Iraq war : 1:1 Estimated amount Bush-era policies will cost the U.S. in new debt and accrued obligations : $10,350,000,000,000 (see page 31) Percentage change in U.S. discretionary spending during Bush’s presidency : +31 Percentage change during Reagan’s and Clinton’s, respectively : +16, +0.3 Ratio in 1999 of the number of U.S. federal employees to the number of private employees on government contracts : 15:6 Ratio in 2006 : 14:15 Total value of U.S. government contracts in 2000 that were awarded without competitive bidding : $73,000,000,000 Total in 2007 : $146,000,000,000 Number of the five directors of the No Child Left Behind reading program with financial ties to a curriculum they developed : 4 Amount by which the federal government has underfunded its estimated cost to implement NCLB : $71,000,000,000 Minimum number of copies sold, since it was released in 2006, of Flipping Houses for Dummies : 45,000 Chance that the buyer of a U.S. home in 2006 now has “negative equity,” i.e., the debt on the home exceeds its value : 1 in 5 Estimated value of Henry Paulson’s Goldman Sachs stock when he became Treasury Secretary and sold it : $575,000,000 Estimated value of that stock today : $238,000,000 Salary in 2006 of the White House’s newly created Director for Lessons Learned : $106,641 Minimum number of Bush-related books published since 2001 : 606 Number of words in the first sentence of Bill Clinton’s memoir and in that of George W. Bush’s, respectively : 49, 5 Minimum number of nicknames Bush has given to associates during his presidency : 75 Number of associates with the last name Jackson he has dubbed “Action Jackson” : 2 Number of press conferences at which Bush has referred to a question as a “trick” : 14 Number of times he has declared an event or outcome not to be “acceptable” : 149 Rank of Bush among U.S. presidents with the highest disapproval rating : 1 Average percentage of Americans who approved of the job Bush was doing during his second term : 37 Percentage of Russians today who approve of the direction their country took under Stalin : 37

Most of the Bush-era figures cited here appeared in the Harper’s Index between 2000 and 2008 and have been updated as of November 2008. Sources are listed on page 68.

“Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

HARPER’S INDEX

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READINGS

[Oration]

RECANTORIUM

By Charles Bernstein, from his “Recantorium (a bachelor machine, after Duchamp after Kafka),” delivered May 31 at the University of Arizona and published in the Winter issue of Critical Inquiry.

Bernstein’s most recent book is Blind Witness: Three American Operas. His poem “Pompeii” appeared in the August issue of Harper’s Magazine.

I

, Charles, son of the late Joseph Herman, later known as Herman Joseph, and Shirley K., later known as Sherry, New Yorker, aged fifty-eight years, arraigned personally before this Esteemed Body, and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Readers, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity throughout the entire Poetry Commonwealth, having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Books of the Accessible Poets, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and by your help will in the future believe, all that is held, preached, taught, and expressed by the Books of the Accessible Poets.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that National Poetry Month is not good for poetry and for poets. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy. And I now freely and openly attest to the virtues of National Poetry Month in throwing a national spotlight on poetry, so crucial to keeping verse alive in the twenty-first century.

I was wrong, I apologize and recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that only elitist and ob-

scure poetry should be praised. I abjure, curse, detest, and renounce the aforesaid error and aversion.

And I now freely and openly attest that the best way to get general readers to start to read poetry is to present them with broadly appealing work, with strong emotional content and a clear narrative line.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that, to raise the profile for poetry, events involving celebrities reading poems, such as the one each year that is the centerpiece of National Poetry Month, are not as valuable as events presenting poets reading their own work. I acknowledge and regret my error.

Poets would turn off the large and wealthy audience of arts patrons. Like the retarded or crippled stepchildren in fairy tales, it is for the best to have the poets stay in the back room during the party, lest they frighten the guests.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether reject, abjure, and denounce the sarcasm that just now has undercut the sincerity of my confession.

My comments about poets as retarded or crippled stepchildren are offensive. I abase and prostrate myself in humbly and sincerely asking your forgiveness and the forgiveness of all those who seek, above all, sincerity and authenticity in poetry.

I

was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon and renounce the false opinion that poetry is a social and ideological construction and not the expression of the Pure Feeling of the Poet (PFP) and declare, The Sovereign Human Self (SHS) is the sole origin of authentic expression and meaning. In full recognition and

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acknowledgment of my error, I hereby declare and swear, to all present company, that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that official verse culture, through prestigious prizes awarded for merit and reviews in nationally circulated publications selected for major importance, and including the appointments of the poets laureate, does not represent the best and the finest, the most profound and significant, the richest and most rewarding, poetry of our nation. And now that I myself, in my person and through my work, have ascended into this Exalted Company, and joined the rarefied

[Poem]

MAMA

By Jesse Patrick Ferguson, from a selection of visual poems, edited by Geof Huth, in the November issue of Poetry. The author of five poetry chapbooks, Ferguson is a poetry editor of The Fiddlehead.

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and incorrigible company of official verse culture, I do here cast stones and sticks and call an abomination and curse and scorn and repudiate any who would not cherish and adore both the process and product of that official verse culture that has embraced, with trepidation and embarrassment, and with noses tightly pinched and earmuffs in place, my unworthy ascent.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. I altogether and totally, completely and thoroughly, without reservation, quibble, or question, and with newly faithful heart, abandon the false doctrine that meandering, digressive, or paratactic prose, prose that fails to state clearly its meaning, sentences that get caught up in their own rhythms and sounds and cadences, nuances and nooks, rather than in getting to the point or meat or heart of the matter or meaning or substance, as I say, I abandon and renounce the false doctrine that crooked and bent prose can have any value for truthful discourse or accurate representation. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion and the many related errors and aversions that flow inevitably as a consequence of the aforesaid error and aversion, as a baby inevitably flows from its mother or an ocean from its rivers or a false conclusion from a flawed premise or a disease from a virus or death from repeated blows with a blunt instrument or gorging from a starving child given food. Clearly written expository prose, with a delineated argument including a beginning, middle, and end, is the only guarantor of Rational Mind.

I was wrong, I apologize and recant. I altogether abandon the false doctrine that ambiguity and irony are anything more than sophistry. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and apostasy, which I have lapsed into again and again, like a habitual drinker seeking his five o’clock martini, or an erotomaniac seeking nonprocreative sexual experiences, or a worker idling on the job, or a habitual truant passing notes in class.

I am with regret fillèd and by errors o’erwhelmed, having chosen the broken path over the righteous, the warped over the erect. I cant and recant. I altogether abandon the false doctrine that poets can remain radical while working as academics. After it had been notified to me that

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the said doctrine was contrary to the Books of the Accessible Poets, I wrote and published works in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any negation of these, and for this reason I have been vehemently and justly rebuked. I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid error and aversion. Academic employment is the mark of a compromised poet who has sold out. Radical poets prove their authenticity through poverty.

I

am with regret fillèd and by errors o’erwhelmed, having chosen the broken path over the righteous, the warped over the erect. I cant and recant. I altogether abandon the false opinion that advocacy or partisan positioning has any place in poetry and poetics. Poetry and poetics should be reserved for those who look beyond the contentions of the present into the eternal verities, the truths beyond this world that never change, as represented in the Books of the Accessible Poets. I further stipulate that I recant, categorically, that poetry is an activity of the intellect and herewith and hereby declare and proclaim that true poetry is an affair of the heart and only the heart.

I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Like the black sheep who strays too far from the adoring flock, or like the drunk with a pale green beret who, deep into the night, and desperate for one more absinthe before closing time, babbles uncontrollably to the deaf and crippled barkeep, I embraced an elitism that puts me out of touch with the sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia of everyday, ordinary, run-of-the-mill people, the Johns and Joans and Janes and Jills, the Billys and Bobs, the Shirleys and Toms, the Frans and Fritzes, Millys and Moes, not only thinking I was better than John and Joe, Mary and Harry, but that their sentiments, feelings, convictions, beliefs, preferences, perspectives, and dyspepsia did not matter. I spent my time hunting for thoughts rather than hunting quail. My solipsism overcame me, so that I wrote, and professed for others to write, words that communicated to no one, that meant nothing, that defied the laws of

meaning and the fundamentals of grammar; praising—over and above clear sense and good syntax—the incoherent, the nonsensical, the aberrant, the foolish, the deformed, the contradictory, the awkward, the frivolous, the ungainly, the self-indulgent, the infantile, the stubborn, the phony and fake, the prevaricating, the disorderly. In my promiscuous dalliance with affect rather than emotion, I cast my lot with the excessively cerebral and the cerebrally excessive. I recant this cant. Now I stand before you to repudiate and abjure, to cast away and revile, this stiff-necked arrogance in order to dedicate myself to the freedom in right thinking.

[Poem]

ORIGINS OF POETRY

By Joel Lipman, from a longer work, in the November issue of Poetry. Lipman is professor of art and English at the University of Toledo. His books include The Real Ideal and Ransom Notes.

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I was wrong, I apologize, I recant. Like a rat seeking a dark cavity to eat its hapless prey, I succumbed to the dictatorship of relativism, a state of profound confusion in which I could not recognize anything as definitive and based my judgments solely on my own ego and desires. In this graceless state, I falsely believed that the real tyranny was intolerance to those who do not adhere to the aesthetic values of honesty, coherence, clarity, and truth as revealed to all with a moral conviction and a commitment to the timeless human story. I repudiate this gutless indulgence toward benighted and fallen ideas and commit myself to the dictatorship of obedience.

I was in error, I apologize, I recant. I altogether abandon the false doctrine of midrashic antinomianism and bent studies, which I have promulgated in writings, lectures, and teaching, with its base and cowardly insistence on ethical, dialogic, and situational values rather than fixed and immutable moral laws. I loved language more than truth, discourse more than reality, and so allowed to spread, in myself and in others, an intellectual virus that uproots the plain sense of the word.

written onto me as I merge with it, yet I cannot comprehend it, even as it apprehends me. For yet, you have already seen, my errors abound around me, and I, I am engulfèd by them, as an harpooned whale is overcome by the very waters that had buoyed him. I am in anxiety and in sorrow, for my wrongs known and unknown.

For I have, here, now, in this very moment, done badly and wrongly with the hypocrisy, the bad faith, of this recantation, which reflects pride and arrogance, flippancy, sarcasm, resentment, hyperbole, and a fundamentally false analogy, and I regret, already as my mouth speaks the words, my unsupportable and offensive identifications, in placing myself, even if only imaginatively or rhetorically or didactically, even if only parodically or satirically or ironically, in the position of poets and writers and artists and scientists in the past who confronted most cruel, most terrible, and most violent sanctions for their work, for their thinking, and for their discoveries, but also poets and writers and artists and scientists in the present, now, in this moment, as we speak and as we listen, here and in other places, at home and abroad, who daily and even hourly confront most violent, most terrible, and most uivering with tiny, rapid oscillations, cruel sanctions for their work, for their thinkthese recantations are inscribed upon the bed ing, and for their discoveries, while I am at of my thought, as a harrow incises the ground leisure, relatively free of fierce and wounding before the seeds are planted. My sentence is reprisals and may cant and recant, recant and cant, for the most part, at my own discretion. So, verily, I have fallen into error deep, an error I cannot ironize or satirize or joke my way out of, and I have a queasy feeling [Poem] of unease in my regret, for I realize I am making a mistake, these words are all out of proportion and grotesquely exaggerated in suggesting an equivalence of violent politiBy Rae Armantrout, in Fence: 20. Armantrout’s collection Versed will be published next month by Wesleyan Universical repression with often minor and ty Press. petty, silly and stupid, ignorant and harmless, doctrines, beliefs, and sentiments, or, indeed, sometimes AMERICA perfectly reasonable views and perThe playboy scion of a weapons company repents. His spectives, with which I have had company, he sees now, is corrupt, his weapons being cause to quarrel, and whose only sold (behind his back) to strong men. Alone, he builds a crime is my disagreement, fomented super weapon in the shape of a man. Now, more powerful by an increasingly inexcusable and and more innocent than ever before, he attacks. unjustified crankiness, ungratefulness, and belligerence, abetted by a HAPPENING morbid fascination with the strucThe train halts. An engineer tells us we’re stopped because ture of such disciplining machines, we’ve lost touch with the outside world. Things perfected by a series of reigns of terare happening ahead, but we don’t know what they are. ror, from all of which I have been This could represent an act of war. We stand in a field, spared (or else such exercises as this no longer passengers. would be impossible, since it is my freedom, however relative and circumscribed, that both lets me

Q

PREVIEWS

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COURTESY THE ARTIST AND WINSTON WACHTER FINE ART, SEATTLE AND NEW YORK CITY

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COURTESY THE ARTIST AND WINSTON WACHTER FINE ART, SEATTLE AND NEW YORK CITY

January Readings Final2

Bauhaus, by Peter Waite, was exhibited last spring at Winston W채chter Fine Art, in Seattle.

compose this and is the measure of its failure).

For after all is done and said, after the fury and the sound, after the pomp and bombast and self-regard, after the myopia and insufferably inappropriate and unjustified delusions of persecution, this recantation enacts a false and offensive analogy to woefully pernicious, lifedestroying belief systems, states, or religions.

And for this I recant my cant, cant and recant, I am wrong, I have strayed from the path of decency, restraint, and honor.

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Poets and Poetry Readers, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and aversions, and generally every other error, apostasy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Books of the Accessible Poets, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any dissenter, or person suspect-

ed of dissent, I will denounce him to the Inquisitor of the place where I may be and also to the Inquisitor that is in me, that I have become. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me.

And, in the event of my contravening any of these promises and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents as myself.

I, the said Charles Bernstein, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration and abjection, and recited it word for word at Tucson, formally S-cuk Son, at the base of the Black Mountain, in the long shadow of Baboquivari, in the County of Pima, State of Arizona, on the border of Estados Unidos Mexicanos, on the Last Day of May, in the year Two Thousand and Eight of the current era.

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[Dystopia]

BARACK TO THE FUTURE “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” released October 22 by Focus on the Family Action, an activist group affiliated with James Dobson’s conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family.

October 22, 2012 Dear friends, The 2008 election was closer than anybody expected, but Barack Obama won. Many Christians voted for him, as they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far-left policies that had marked his career. They were wrong.

[Utopia]

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ From headlines printed in a parody issue of the New York Times, produced by a group of activists, including the Yes Men and CODEPINK, dated July 4, 2009, and distributed nationally on November 12.

IRAQ WAR ENDS NATION SETS ITS SIGHTS ON BUILDING SANE ECONOMY MAXIMUM WAGE LAW SUCCEEDS NATIONALIZED OIL TO FUND CLIMATE CHANGE EFFORTS UNITED NATIONS UNANIMOUSLY PASSES WEAPONS BAN COURT INDICTS BUSH ON HIGH TREASON CHARGE NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE ACT PASSES ALL PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES TO BE FREE PENTAGON ENDS SECRET BUDGET USA PATRIOT ACT REPEALED BIOFUELS BAN ACT SIGNED INTO LAW, SEEKS TO EASE F OOD SHORTAGE TORTURE, RENDITION “NOT SUCH GOOD IDEAS AFTER ALL” PUBLIC RELATIONS INDUSTRY FORECASTS A SERIES OF MASSIVE LAYOFFS HARVARD WILL SHUT BUSINESS SCHOOL DOORS ARMY RECRUITER GOES FROM MARKETING THE MILITARY TO MARKETING HIMSELF

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In his first week in office, Obama fired all ninetythree U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, recruiting the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush Administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq War. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail, and most of them also have been bankrupted by legal costs.

The next month, when Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens announced they would step down from the Supreme Court, President Obama nominated two far-left, ACLUoriented judges, and the Democratic Senate quickly confirmed them. They are brilliant, articulate, and in their early forties, so they can expect to stay on the court for thirty years. The court retained its 4–4 split, with Justice Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote, but the decisive changes started in June 2009, when Justice Kennedy resigned.

The four conservative justices who remained were suddenly in the minority. Then, in August, Justice Scalia unexpectedly resigned because of health problems, and another Obama appointment joined the court. Finally, the far left had the highest prize: complete control of the Supreme Court. And they quickly set about to enact their entire agenda.

The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that laws barring same-sex “marriage” violated the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. President Obama repeated his declaration that personally he was against same-sex “marriage,” but he told the nation there was nothing he could do. Several previous Supreme Court decisions were reversed rather quickly. The Boy Scouts chose to disband rather than be forced to obey a Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual Scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.

President Obama invited homosexual-rights leaders from around the United States to join him at the White House as he signed an executive order directing all branches of the military to abandon their “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and start actively recruiting homosexuals. As a result, homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting.

The Supreme Court nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene radio and television broadcasts. As a result, television programs at all hours of the day contain explicit portrayals of sex acts.

The Supreme Court declared that home schooling was a violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents agreed not to teach their children that homosexual conduct

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is wrong or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment. Thousands of homeschooling parents, seeing no alternative in the United States, have begun to emigrate to other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand.

I

n his role as commander in chief, President Obama began the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, completing it by April 2010. In May, Al Qaeda operatives from Syria and Iran poured in. Hundreds of thousands of “American sympathizers” have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The number put to death may soon reach the millions. Since 2009, terrorist bombs have exploded in four U.S. cities, killing hundreds. President Obama has vowed “to pursue and arrest and prosecute those responsible,” but no arrests have been made. He has, however, increased foreign aid to the poorer nations that are the breeding grounds for terrorism. In early 2009, Russia sent troops to occupy Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. President Obama appealed to the United Nations, but Russia sits on the Security Council, and no action has yet been taken. Then Russia occupied Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria.

In mid-2010, Iran launched a nuclear bomb that exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of the city. President Obama said he abhorred what Iran had done and hoped the United Nations would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity. He also declared that the United States would be part of any international peacekeeping force if authorized by the United Nations, but Muslim member nations have so far prevented any action.

The new Congress under President Obama passed a nationalized “single provider” healthcare system. Because medical resources must be rationed carefully by the government, people older than eighty have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures.

Their “duty” is thought to be to go home to die so that they don’t drain scarce resources from the medical system. Euthanasia is becoming more and more common.

Through the actions of the Federal Communications Commission and Congress, Democrats were largely able to silence the strongest source of conservative opposition: talk radio.

By the summer of 2009, the five-member FCC was controlled by Democratic appointees— including a chairman appointed by President Obama. The FCC quickly implemented the Fairness Doctrine, which requires radio stations to provide “equal time” for alternative views on political issues. As a result, every conservative

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talk show is followed by an instant rebuttal to the program by a liberal “watchdog” group.

Many listeners gave up in frustration, advertising (and donation) revenues dropped dramatically, and nearly all conservative stations have gone out of business or switched to other formats such as country or gospel music. Legal scholars predicted the Fairness Doctrine would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but the liberal Obama court upheld it.

Many brave Christian men and women tried to resist these laws, and some Christian legal agencies tried to defend them, but they couldn’t resist the power of a 6–3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court. It seems many of the bravest went to jail or were driven to bankruptcy, and the reputations of many of them have been destroyed by a relentless press and the endless repetition of false accusations. Our freedoms have been systematically taken away. We are no longer “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” because many of “the brave” are in jail.

Personally, I don’t know how we are going to get through tomorrow, for these are difficult times.

But my faith in the Lord remains strong. I still believe God is sovereign over all history, and though I don’t know why He has allowed these events, it is still His purpose that will ultimately be accomplished.

Sincerely, A Christian from 2012

[Diary]

X, THE SCOURGE

By Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, edited by David Rieff, Sontag’s son, and published last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Alfred Chester, a friend of Sontag’s, was the author of The Exquisite Corpse. “P.” refers to Philip Rieff, Sontag’s exhusband; “I.” refers to María Irene Fornés, Sontag’s lover at the time of these writings, when Sontag was teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and had recently left a position as an editor at Commentary.

February 1960 X, the scourge.

“X” is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. When you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + name-dropping, or by being very cool.

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COURTESY THE ARTIST

January Readings Final2 [15-30]

“Flood at DeKalb Ave.,” by Annmarie Crampton, whose work was on display in 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Roskilde, Denmark.

America a very X-y country. Can limit “X” by rules of class + sex behavior, which America has less clearly defined.

The tendency to be indiscreet—either about oneself or about others (the two often go together, as in me)—is a classic symptom of X. Alfred pointed this out at the White Horse the other night. (This was the first time I. and I had talked about X with anyone.) Alfred is like me in this way. Alfred has huge chunks of X! People who have pride don’t awaken the X in us. They don’t beg. We can’t worry about hurting them. They rule themselves out of our little game from the beginning.

Pride, the secret weapon against X. Pride, the X-cide.

Apart from analysis, mockery, etc., how do I really cure myself of X? I. says analysis is good. Since it was my mind

that got me into this hole, I have to dig myself out by way of the mind. But the real result is a change of feeling. More precisely, a new relation between feelings and the mind.

The source of X is: I don’t know my own feelings.

I don’t know what my real feelings are, so I look to other people (the other person) to tell me. Then the other person tells me what he or she would like my feelings to be. This is ok with me, since I don’t know what my feelings are anyway, I like being agreeable, etc.

I don’t know what my real feelings are. That’s why I’m so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal directly?

Why don’t I know what I feel? Am I not listening? Or am I turned off? Doesn’t everyone

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[Imperative]

WAR IS HELMET From “Brain Network Analysis and Modeling for Communication and Orientation,” a multidisciplinary university research initiative issued in 2007 by the Department of Defense. A grant of $4 million was issued to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Maryland, and the University of California, Irvine, to pursue the project.

BACKGROUND

Breakthroughs in neuroscience, coupled with technological advances, have significantly furthered research progress on brain-computer interfaces. A concerted research effort should be able to develop a databased computational model that could decode (1) intended mental speech, and (2) the attentional orientation of an individual based solely upon recorded brain activity. Adaptively tuning the algorithmic system for individual variation in specified and limited contexts would have to be an integral part of closing the loop between human and machine, i.e., the machine would have to learn the user and the environment while the user may have to learn to think “clearly.”

OBJECTIVES

The overall objective of this program is to create the necessary understanding, models, and technologies needed to eventually produce a noninvasive brain-machine interface usable in humans that can translate intended (nonvocalized) speech and directional orientation into machine-readable form, i.e., a “thought helmet.”

IMPACT

Direct readout of a soldier’s verbal and attentional intent has applications beyond tactical combat ranging from the prosthetic to the forensic. Civilian dual-use capability in conditions involving motor-neuron dysfunction is a not inconsiderable benefit. Having a soldier gain the ability to communicate without any overt movement would be invaluable both in the battlefield as well as in combatcasualty care. Most directly, it would provide a revolutionary technology for silent communication and orientation that is inherently immune to external environmental sound and light. Evolution of this research thrust beyond this research initiative could lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone.

naturally have reactions to everything? (P. used to enrage me because there were so many things he didn’t react to—sit in this chair or that, go to this movie or that, order this or that on the menu.)

Why don’t we mind when others react X-ily to us? Don’t I in fact despise the prematurely balding young man in the faculty dining room X-ing all over the place?

2/29/60 More thoughts on “X”: X is why I am a habitual liar. My lies are what I think the other person wants to hear.

I have an X-feeling for Sarah Lawrence, as I had last year for Commentary. Why? Because I feel I haven’t fulfilled my obligations there.

I’ve been unpunctual, unprepared, etc.

But note: it’s true. I am delinquent. I missed last Thursday’s class. I never prepare for the Tuesday lectures. I always come after lunch on Thursday when my contract says I must be there at 10:00. It’s true I get away with it, but my feeling for the place becomes sick, infected.

Maybe people who are X-prone are habitually irresponsible?

Isn’t the problem that I don’t know any of the degrees between a total enslavement to a responsibility and ostrichlike irresponsibility? All or nothing, what I’ve been so proud of in my love life!

All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.

X is Sartre’s “bad faith.”

3/12/60 The way to overcome X is to feel (be) active, not passive. I feel anxious when the phone rings—therefore I don’t answer or I get someone else to. The way to beat that is not to force myself to answer the phone. It is to make the calls myself.

3/3/61 source of X: not really liking the person maybe I’ve never liked anyone

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“Untitled,” by Kohei Yoshiyuki, from his series The Park, was on view last fall at ALP/Peter Bergman, in Stockholm.

[Fiction]

MY FIRST REAL HOME

By Diane Williams, in Post Road: 16. Williams is the editor of Noon. Her most recent book is It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, published last year by FC2.

I

n there, there was this man who developed a habit of sharpening knives. You know, he had a house and a yard, so he had a lawn mower and several axes and he had a hedge shears and, of course, he had kitchen knives and scissors, and he and his wife lived in comfort.

Within a relatively short time he had spent half of his fortune on sharpening equipment and they were gracing his basement on every available table and bench and he added special stands for the equipment.

He would end up with knives or shears that were so sharp they just had to come near something and it would cut itself. It’s the kind of sharpening that goes beyond comprehension. You just lean the knife against a piece of paper.

Tommy used to use him. Ernie’d do his chain saws.

So, I take my knives under my arm and I drive

off to Ernie’s and he and I became friends and we’d talk about everything.

“I don’t sharpen things right away. You leave it—and see that white box over there?” he’d said.

That was his office. It was a little white box attached to the house with a lid you could open and inside there were a couple of ballpoint pens. There was a glass jar with change. There were tags with rubber bands and there was an order form that you filled out in case he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there the first time I came back, at least I didn’t see him.

I went up to the box and those knives were transformed.

As I was closing the lid, he came up through the basement door that was right there and we started to chat and he has to show me something in the garden, so he takes me to where he has his plantings. It’s as if the dirt was all sorted and arranged, and then, when I said he had cut his lawn so nice, he was shining like a plug bayonet.

All the little straws and grass were pointing in one direction.

“I don’t mow like my neighbor,” he said.

Oh, and then he also had a nice touch—for every packet he had completed there was a BandAid included. Just a man after my own heart.

He died.

I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.

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[Memorial]

ALWAYS ANOTHER WORD

By Michael Pietsch, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, and Don DeLillo, from remarks delivered October 23 at a memorial service for David Foster Wallace on the campus of New York University.

Until his death last September, Wallace was a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Michael Pietsch: I work for Little, Brown and Company, and I had the tremendous good fortune to work with David Wallace on his books Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and Consider the Lobster. We communicated mostly in letters. And through a form of communication that I thought of as a Dave specialty, the phone message left on the office answering machine hours after everyone had departed. Very few emails—he came to email reluctantly, and preferred the narrow-margined single-spaced letter in ten-point Times Roman over all other forms of written communication. I never saw what he was like in the morning before his coffee, I never sat and watched a tennis match with him. But in our occasional visits and our hundreds of letters and phone calls and late-night messages, I saw what he was like while he was writing, and revising, and working out what exactly he wanted a novel or story or essay to be.

Those letters were extraordinary, and I tore into every one of them hungrily, knowing there was pleasure awaiting me inside. Mostly the letters had to do with the editing of his books. They are documents of the superhuman care David took with his writing, but at the same time of the joy and pride he took in his work. Here is a sample from innumerable pages of back-and-forth on Infinite Jest, in which David was responding to request after request for cuts. Which cut requests, please bear in mind, were the work he had asked me to do: p. 52—This is one of my personal favorite Swiftian lines in the whole manuscript, which I will cut, you rotter. p. 82—I cut this and have now come back an hour later and put it back. p. 133—Poor old FN 33 about the grammar exam is cut. I’ll also erase it from the back-up disk so I can’t come back in an hour and put it back in (an enduring hazard, I’m finding). pp. 327–330. Michael, have mercy. Pending an almost Horacianly persuasive rationale on your part, my canines are bared on this one. ppp. 739–748. I’ve rewritten it—for about the

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11th time—for clarity, but I bare teeth all the way back to the 2nd molar on cutting it. p. 785ff—I can give you 5,000 words of theoreticostructural arguments for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?

David’s love affair with the English language was one of the great romances of our time, both a scholarly learn-every-nuance love and a wildly passionate flights-and-flourishes love. David’s idea of an unbeatable magazine assignment was when he was asked to review a new dictionary. One of his proudest moments, he wrote, was when he learned, “I get to be on the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage panel. . . . My mom whooped so loudly on the phone that it hurt my ear when I told her.” David loved encountering new words.

In one letter he wrote of “the last sludgelets of adolescent self-consciousness being borne away on the horological tide.” And added in parentheses, “I just learned the word ‘horology’ and was determined to use it at least once.” No mention of the fact that he had just invented the word “sludgelets.” I think he wanted to use every word in the language before he was done. In one talk about the drawbacks of using words that sent readers running to their dictionaries, I mentioned a favorite book by another writer whose first word is the very obscure word “picric.” (Means “yellowish.”) David’s instant response was, “I already used that!”

Zadie Smith: To the critics, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was an ironic book about misogyny. Reading it was like being trapped in a room with ironic misogynists on speed, or something like that. To me, reading Brief Interviews wasn’t at all like being trapped. It was like being in church. And the important word wasn’t “irony” but “gift.” Dave was clever about gifts: our inability to give freely or to accept what is freely given. In his stories, giving has become impossible: the logic of the market seeps into every aspect of life. A man can’t give away an old tiller for free; he has to charge five bucks before someone will come and take it. A depressed person desperately wants to receive attention but can’t bring herself to give it. Normal social relations are only preserved because “one never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.”

Brief Interviews itself was the result of two enormous gifts. The first was practical: the awarding of the MacArthur. A gift on that scale helps free a writer from the logic of the market, and maybe also from that bind Dave himself defined as postindustrial: the need always to be liked. The second gift was more complicated. It was his talent, which was so obviously great it confused people: Why would such a gifted young man create such a resistant, complex piece of work? But you need to think of the gift economy the other way round. In

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© HURVIN ANDERSON; ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION; COURTESY THOMAS DANE GALLERY, LONDON

Country Club II, by Hurvin Anderson, whose work is on view this month at Thomas Dane Gallery, in London.

a culture that depletes you daily of your capacity for imagination, for language, for autonomous thought, complexity like Dave’s is a gift. His recursive, labyrinthine sentences demand second readings.

Like the boy waiting to dive, their resistance “breaks the rhythm that excludes thinking.” Every word looked up, every winding footnote followed, every heart- and brain-stretching concept, they all help break the rhythm of thoughtlessness—your gifts are being returned to you.

To whom much is given, much is expected. Dave wrote like that, as if his talent was a responsibility. He had a radical way of seeing his own gifts: “I’ve gotten convinced,” he wrote, “that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent. . . .

Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.”

This was his literary preoccupation: the moment when the ego disappears and you’re able to offer up your love as a gift without expectation of

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reward. At this moment the gift hangs, like Federer’s brilliant serve, between the one who sends and the one who receives, and reveals itself as belonging to neither. We have almost no words for this experience of giving. The one we do have is hopelessly degraded through misuse. The word is “prayer.” For a famous ironist, Dave wrote a lot about prayer. A married man, confronted by a teenage seductress, falls to his knees and prays, but not for the obvious reason. “It’s not what you think I’m afraid of,” he says. The granola-cruncher prays as she is raped, but she isn’t praying for her own rescue. A man who has accidentally braindamaged his daughter prays with a mad Jesuit in a field, as a church made with no hands rises up around them. When the incomprehensible and unforgivable happens, Dave’s characters resort to the impossible. Their prayers are irrational, absurd, given up into a void, and that, paradoxically, is where they draw their power. They are the opposite of ironical. They are full of faith, a quality Kierkegaard defined as a gesture made “on the strength of the absurd.”

When I taught Brief Interviews to college kids, I made them read it alongside Fear and Trembling.

The two books seem like cousins to me. Both find black comedy in these hideous men who feel themselves post-love, post-faith, post-everything.

“When people nowadays . . . will not stop at love,” wrote Kierkegaard, “where is it that they are going?

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To worldly wisdom, petty calculation, to paltriness clothes away and leaving him naked, with and misery? . . . Would it not be better to remain supersensitized skin, newly susceptible to the standing at faith, and for the one who stands there weather, whatever that weather might be. If it was to take care not to fall?” The truth, he argued, is a sunny day, he was going to feel the sun more. that we haven’t even got as far as faith.

If it was a blizzard, it was going to really sting.

Kierkegaard took faith seriously, recognized it as Something about the prose itself was inducing a an impossible task, at least for him. Dave took special variety of openness that I might call terfaith seriously, too: it’s his hideous men who don’t. rified tenderness: a sudden new awareness of what The most impassioned book recommendation he a fix we’re in on this earth, stuck in these bodies, ever gave me was for Catholics by Brian Moore, a with these minds. novella about a priest who, after forty years in a This alteration seemed more spiritual than aesmonastery, finds he still isn’t capable of prayer. thetic. I wasn’t just “reading a great story.” What Anyone who thinks Dave primarily an ironist was happening was more primal and important: my should note that choice. His is a serious kind of mind was being altered in the direction of comsatire, if by satire we mean “the indirect praise of passion, by a shock methodology that was, in its good things.” subject matter, actually very dark. I was undergoing But I don’t mean to replace an ironist with a a kind of ritual stripping away of the habitual.

God-botherer. The word “God” needn’t be The reading was waking me up, making me feel present—I’d rather use the phrase “ultimate valmore vulnerable, more alive. ue.” Whatever name one has for it, it’s what perThe person who had induced this complicated mits the few heroes in Brief Interviews to make their gestures on the strength of the absurd, making art that nobody wants, loving where they are not loved, giving without the hope of [Poem] receiving. Dave traced this ultimate value through the beauty of a Vermeer, to the concept of infinity, to Federer’s serve—and beyond. As he

By John Ashbery, in Conjunctions: 51. Ashbery’s Collected Poput it: “You get to decide what you ems 1956–1987 was published last fall by the Library of America. worship.” But before we get giddy with po-mo relativity, he reminds us that nine times out of ten we worAs virtuous men float mildly away ship ourselves. Out of this double so do our minutes hasten toward the rain, bind, the exit signs are hard to see, but some speckled, some merely numinous, they’re there. When the praying marand so it goes. The Traveler and his Shadow ried man puts his hands together, the find much to concur on. The wreckage of the sky gesture might be metaphysical, but serves to confirm us in delicious error. he’s seeking a genuine human conCongratulations on your life nection, which, in Dave’s stories, is as anyway. hard to find as any God. Love is the Not even doing it ultimate value, the absurd, impossible makes up for the loss it guaranteed. thing—the only thing worth praying Only a twenty-eight-year water supply for. The last line is wonderful. It reads: shields us from the desert.

“And what if she joined him on the floor, just like this, clasped in suppliSticker shock awaits plaid gutter boys cation: just this way.” pissing out over a stream. Surely if you were going to count that against him the others would befall too.

George Saunders: That’s not what he was saying, Uncle.

A few years back I was flying out to We’re going to have a friendly chat with him California, reading Brief Interviews in the belief that someone will vote for you. with Hideous Men. I found the book was doing weird things to my mind Pleated regret that is easier and body. Suddenly, up there over by the end of the war inhibits only cats. the Midwest, I felt agitated and flinchy, on the brink of tears. When Some other holy man was here before I tried to describe what was going on, and the eunuchs made much over him.

I came up with this: If the reader was In the small garden a harmonica was heard braying. a guy standing outdoors, Dave’s prose had the effect of stripping the guy’s

FLOATING AWAY

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feeling was one of the sweetest, most generous, dearest people I’ve ever known.

I first met Dave at the home of a mutual friend in Syracuse. I’d just read Girl with Curious Hair and was terrified that this breakfast might veer off into, say, a discussion of Foucault or something, and I’d be humiliated in front of my wife and kids.

But no: I seem to remember Dave was wearing a Mighty Mouse T-shirt. Like Chekhov in those famous anecdotes, who put his nervous provincial visitors at ease by asking them about pie-baking and the local school system, Dave diffused the tension by turning the conversation to . . . us. Our kids’ interests, what life was like in Syracuse, our experience of family life. He was about as open and curious and accepting a person as I’d ever met, and I left feeling I’d made a great new friend.

And I had. We were together only occasionally, corresponded occasionally, but every meeting felt supercharged, almost—if this isn’t too corny—sacramental.

I don’t know much about Dave’s spiritual life, but I see him as a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg. He was a wake-up artist. That was his work, as I see it, both on the page and off it: he went around waking people up. He was, if this is even a word, a celebrationist, who gave us new respect for the world through his reverence for it, a reverence that manifested as attention, an attention that produced that electrifying, all-chips-in, aware-in-all-directions prose of his.

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve thought about what I might say up here, I’ve heard my internalized Dave, and what he’s been saying is: Don’t look for consolation yet. That would be dishonest. And I think that voice is right. In time—but not yet— the sadness that there will be no new stories from him will be replaced by a deepening awareness of what a treasure we have in the existing work. In time—but not yet—the disaster of his loss will fade and be replaced by the realization of what a miracle it was that he ever existed in the first place.

For now, there’s just grief. Grief is, in a sense, the bill that comes due for love. The sadness in this room amounts to a kind of proof: proof of the power of Dave’s work; proof of the softening effect his tenderness of spirit had on us; proof, in a larger sense, of the power of the Word itself. Look at how this man got inside the world’s mind and changed it for the better. Our sadness is proof of the power of a single original human consciousness.

Dave—let’s just say it—was first among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest, the least inclined to rest on his laurels or believe all the praise. His was a spacious, loving heart, and when someone this precious leaves us, especially so early, love converts on the spot to a deep, almost nauseating sadness, and there’s no way around it.

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But in closing, a pledge, or maybe a prayer: Every one of us in this room has, at some point, had our consciousness altered by Dave. Dave has left seeds in our minds. It is up to us to nurture these seeds and bring them out, in positive form— into the living world—through our work, in our actions, by our engagement with others and our engagement with our own minds. So the pledge and the prayer is this: We’ll continue to love him, we’ll never forget him, and we’ll honor him, by keeping alive the principal lesson of his work: Mostly we’re asleep, but we can wake up. And waking up is not only possible, it is our birthright, and our nature, and, as Dave showed us, we can help one another do it.

Don DeLillo: Infinity. This is the subject of David Wallace’s book on the mathematics, the philosophy, and the history of a vast, beautiful, abstract concept. There are references in the book to Zeno’s dichotomy and Goldbach’s conjecture, to Hausdorff’s maximal principle. There is also the offsetting breeze of Dave’s plainsong—Okay then and sort of and no kidding and stuff like this.

His work, everywhere, tends to reconcile what is difficult and consequential with a level of address that’s youthful, unstudied, and often funny, marked at times by the small odd sentence that wanders in off the street.

“Her photograph tastes bitter to me.”

“Almost Talmudically self-conscious.”

“The tiny little keyhole of himself.”

A vitality persists, a stunned vigor in the face of the complex humanity we find in his fiction, the loss and anxiety, darkening mind, self-doubt.

There are sentences that shoot rays of energy in seven directions. There are stories that trail a character’s spiraling sense of isolation.

Everything and More. This is the title of his book on infinity. It might also be a description of the novel Infinite Jest, his dead-serious frolic of addicted humanity. We can imagine his fiction and essays as the scroll fragments of a distant future. We already know this work as current news—writer to reader, intimately, obsessively. He did not channel his talents to narrower patterns. He wanted to be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture.

We see him now as a brave writer who struggled against the force that wanted him to shed himself. Years from now, we’ll still feel the chill that attended news of his death. One of his recent stories ends in the finality of this half sentence: Not another word.

But there is always another word. There is always another reader to regenerate these words.

The words won’t stop coming. Youth and loss.

■ This is Dave’s voice, American.

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P

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the $10 trillion

hangover Paying the price for eight years of Bush

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz Information graphics by Nigel Holmes n the eight years since George W. Bush took office, nearly every component of the U.S. economy has deteriorated. The nation’s budget deficits, trade deficits, and debt have reached record levels. Unemployment and inflation are up, and household savings are down. Nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared and, not coincidentally, 5 million more Americans have no health insurance. Consumer debt has almost doubled, and nearly one fifth of American homeowners are likely to owe more in mortgage debt than their homes are actually worth.

Meanwhile, as we have reported previously, the final price for the war in Iraq is expected to reach at least $3 trillion.

As bad as things are, though, this is just the beginning. The Bush Administration not only has depressed the economy and racked up unprecedented debt; it also has made expensive new commitments to the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, to disability compensation and education benefits for veter-

1

ans, to replenishing the military equipment consumed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and simply to paying interest on the debt itself.

The president is not solely to blame for American profligacy, of course. Congress approved inequitable tax cuts and spending binges, and the Federal Reserve and other regulators, along with the mortgage industry and millions of consumers, share responsibility for the housing collapse. Nonetheless, the outgoing administration has made a series of unwise economic choices that together will add up to a burdensome legacy.

Using conservative assumptions, we calculate that the bill for Bush-era excess—the total new debt combined with the total new accrued obligations— amounts to $10.35 trillion. This legacy will have long-term consequences for America’s prosperity, but it also will weigh heavily and immediately on the Obama Administration, which will need to spend money fast to get the economy moving again.

Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public finance at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, is a former assistant secretary for administration, management, and budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor of Economics at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics.

They are co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

Nigel Holmes was the graphics director of Time magazine for sixteen years and is the author of Wordless Diagrams.

REPORT

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George W. Bush took office, he inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion and a bright fiscal future.

W hen The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan government agency responsible for estimating future expenditures and revenues, projected a cumulative budget surplus of about $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011, if the country stayed on track—which of course it did not. What happened instead was that the administration successfully pushed for not only two rounds of massive, inequitable tax cuts but also a 59 percent surge in government spending. The result has been the largest budget deficits in U.S. history, and estimates of the current deficit are climbing even as we go to press. In September, before the financial meltdown, the CBO projected the deficit for fiscal 2009 to reach $438 billion—about the same level as it was in 2008—but in October, Peter Orszag, the director of the CBO, predicted the deficit would reach $750 billion, and we believe that number could go higher still. Such increases are the result of several factors:

WHAT DROVE THE DEFICITS

Iraq and Afghanistan The combined annual costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including indirect costs, have shot from $20 billion in 2001 to more than $208 billion this year.

Other Defense But government spending on the rest of the military also has grown more quickly than at any time since the Vietnam War. Part of that growth is attributable to indirect costs of the Iraq war (such as the growing recruitment budget), but much of it stems from an unrelated spending spree on acquisitions, weapons systems, and research.

Medicare Entitlement spending has risen even faster than projected, in part because of another major initiative of the Bush Administration: the 2006 launch of Medicare Part D. This new provision, which provides prescription drug coverage for seniors, added $47.4 billion to the cost of Medicare in 2006—a jump that accounted for almost 12 percent of total Medicare spending.

Net Interest on Debt All of the new debt incurred to pay for the foregoing did not come free. Net interest, which fell in the early part of the Bush Administration as a result of Clinton-era belt-tightening, has begun to climb back toward record levels, and now is the fourth-largest spending category in the federal budget.

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Sources: Congressional Budget Office, Department of Defense, Center for American Progress, Kaiser Family Fund, Department of Health and Human Services, Census Bureau,

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result of deficit spending is debt. When President Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion.

T he Now it is $10.6 trillion—and Congress voted in October to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion, the seventh such hike since President Bush took office and the second since last July. If, as is quite likely, we reach the new ceiling by January 20, the outgoing president will have managed to amass more debt than all of his predecessors combined.

And even that number may be too small. When the federal government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it also assumed their $5.4 trillion debt. The accounting procedures used by the International Monetary Fund, and endorsed by the CBO, normally require that such debt also be taken into account, which means that the total national debt now may be as high as $15 trillion. (If we account for only the riskiest loans, however, that number would “only” be $12 trillion.)

GROWING DEBT But the pain most Americans are feeling right now is much more immediate. The increase in credit-card, automobile, mortgage, and other forms of personal debt—from around $8 trillion in 2000 (in current dollars) to more than $14 trillion today—also looms behind the implosion of our financial system. Had the value of assets increased in tandem, that increase might not have mattered, but what is remarkable about America’s debt binge under President Bush is that it primarily served consumption. Homebuyers used easy credit to buy overpriced houses, which they then refinanced to pay for every other kind of consumption, betting that in the end rising housing prices would balance the account. At the same time, household savings rates plummeted, hitting zero or less than zero in some areas. With housing prices in a slump and no money in the bank, the result, according to one estimate, will be more than 5,000 foreclosures per day—more than at any time since the Great Depression.

DEBT AS A PERCENTAGE OF GDP

MAJOR FOREIGN LENDERS

The national debt is now more than 70 percent of the gross domestic product, the highest such proportion in half a century. Where did all this debt come from? To an unprecedented extent, America depends on loans from China, Japan, and the Middle East. The share of public debt that is owed to foreign nationals has risen from 31 percent in 2000 to 46 percent today. This means that every man, woman, and child in the United States owes $9,000 to some other country.

Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal Reserve, Department of the Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service. All figures are adjusted to 2007 dollars.

REPORT

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THE BILL national debt has already nearly doubled in the Bush era, but T he the consequences of the president’s policies will continue to be felt for many years to come. We estimate that the total bill to the nation as a direct result of President Bush’s policies, in today’s dollars, is an amazing $10.35 trillion. This includes the new debt as well as liabilities that will need to be paid through 2018. We can break this legacy into eight components:

Increase in National Debt Debt has long been a fixture of American governance, of course, but—given the surplus President Bush inherited—even a conservative estimate of the Bush bill requires that we take into account the entirety at least of his addition to that debt. The Bush tax cuts lowered national revenues by about $1 trillion, even as the government spent nearly $900 billion in direct operations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and added another $600 billion to the total spending on “regular” defense, a significant proportion of which is indirectly related to those wars. And because interest accrues on the outstanding debt, interest charges also will rise. It should be noted as well that this increase does not take into account another factor: had Clinton-era policies been kept in place the past eight years, the CBO estimates, the overall national debt actually would have significantly decreased. Cost: $4.9 trillion Projected Deficit for 2009 The rapidly weakening economy means that tax revenues will fall off, even as unemployment benefits and other government spending rise. Congress also is likely to approve a significantly larger stimulus package, possibly in excess of $300 billion, and more spending on the bailouts already undertaken, as well as new bailouts and subsidies for struggling sectors such as the auto industry. Moreover, even assuming that the United States begins to withdraw combat troops from Iraq, we expect that the war’s costs will remain steady at best in 2009, as functions are transferred to private contractors. We also expect that Congress will extend the temporary fix of the alternative minimum tax and will enact some form of additional homeowner mortgage relief. For all these reasons, next year’s budget deficit easily could rise to a trillion dollars, so our estimate is a bare minimum. Cost: $0.75 trillion Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac When the federal government took over these failing residential mortgage giants, it also assumed their $5.4 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and outstanding debt. Under conventional accounting standards, this entire amount should be counted as part of the national debt. It is difficult to predict, however, how much exposure the United States has really taken on. We have included what is likely to be the minimum additional debt that the CBO adds on for these agencies, which is the $1.6 trillion in risky unsecured debt. The final cost, however, will depend on how far housing prices fall, and how many houses go into foreclosure, which presents the incoming administration with a significant dilemma: if it spends less on stimulus it will need to spend more on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Cost: $1.6 trillion Debt from Other Bailouts Congress has already provided $700 billion in authority to purchase toxic mortgages and other assets through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It also has committed another $800 billion to bailing out AIG, Bear Stearns, and other financial firms, and it most likely will extend this commitment to other core U.S. industries in the coming year. Although some of this cost will appear in the 2009 budget, much of it will not be accounted for until 2010 or later. Not all of the loans will go sour, so it is difficult to estimate the price tag on these programs. Cost: $0.5 trillion Future Interest on New Debt The United States spends nearly $250 billion per year in net interest payments (interest paid on Treasury debt securities less interest received by the Social Security and other trust funds). The CBO projects that the net interest payable on the total debt will over the next decade exceed $3.35 trillion, of which about $1.5 trillion is directly attributable to the debt that we have taken on during the past eight years. Even this figure, however, understates the true amount of interest payable, because interest also will accrue on money that will need to be borrowed in the next ten years to pay for obligations incurred in the past eight years. Cost: $1.5 trillion Medicare Part D The administration’s flagship prescription drug benefit program is expected to cost $800 billion over the next decade. It is possible, though, that the number will be larger. The program has been criticized because, unlike the department of Veterans Affairs, Medicare does not negotiate bulk price discounts with drug companies. In addition, the program coverage contains a “doughnut hole”

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whereby Part D stops paying for drugs after a senior receives prescriptions totaling $2,700, and doesn’t resume coverage until that senior has paid an additional $3,454 for drugs. Our estimate is based on the assumption that Congress will take steps to close the “doughnut hole” but also will take steps to encourage price negotiation with pharmaceutical companies. Cost: $0.8 trillion Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Entitlements For every U.S. serviceman or -woman killed in Iraq, fifteen more have been wounded, injured, or have contracted an illness serious enough to require medical evacuation. More than 350,000 U.S. veterans from the two wars have sought medical treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and nearly 300,000 have filed applications for disability benefits (more than 90 percent of which are likely to be approved). The cost of providing medical care and disability benefits may eventually exceed even the cost of combat operations, and over just the next decade, using the most optimistic assumptions, taking care of these veterans is going to cost at least $59 billion. The president

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also reluctantly signed into law a measure that restored education benefits for new veterans in an updated G.I. Bill, which we estimate will cost $40 billion over the next decade. Cost: $0.1 trillion.

Rebuilding National Defense The armed forces have been severely depleted by the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, in terms of personnel, training, and equipment. While we urge spending reductions in some areas of defense (e.g., space-weapons programs and other projects with huge cost overruns), there is no doubt that the military will require a substantial expenditure to “reset” basic military strength. This includes the replenishment of aircraft, vehicles, and weaponry; restoring the National Guard to its previous strength; depreciation of equipment used or abandoned in Iraq; and the costs related to a partial withdrawal from Iraq, including the dismantling of some bases. In addition, the Pentagon will need to spend considerably more over the next decade on military hospitals, recruiting, and bonuses. Cost: $0.2 trillion

worst legacy of the past eight years is that despite colossal government spending, most Americans are T he worse off than they were in 2001. This is because money was squandered in Iraq and given as a tax windfall to America’s richest individuals and corporations, rather than spent on such projects as education, infrastructure, and energy independence, which would have made all of us better off in the long term.

President Bush did manage, by way of deficit spending, to grow the economy by 20 percent during his tenure. But who benefited from that growth? Between 2002 and 2006, the wealthiest 10 percent of households saw more than 95 percent of the gains in income. And even within those rarefied strata, the gains tended to be concentrated at the very top. According to one study, the nation’s 15,000 richest families doubled their annual income, from $15 million to $30 million. And in that same period, corporate profits shot up by 68 percent—more than five times the growth seen in the overall economy.

Even as the wealthiest families have increased their holdings, the families at the center of the income spectrum saw their incomes shrink by 1 percent. In 2000, the average weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers (70 percent of the workforce) amounted to $527 (in current dollars). Six years later, their wages had risen a mere $11, and those same workers have meanwhile seen their net worth (assets minus liabilities) wither as a result of falling home values, higher personal debt, and shrinking savings—factors now being exWHERE THE MONEY WENT acerbated by the collapsing stock markets.

The extraordinary transfer of wealth that has taken place from ordinary households to the super-rich has been made possible by another transfer: borrowing money from future prosperity to pay for current consumption. For example, President Bush provided a much heralded $600 tax rebate to most families in 2001. But once interest rates return to more normal levels, simply servicing the new debt from the Bush years will require those same families to spend more than $2,000 a year, year after year, forever.

The Obama Administration, facing the most serious economic crisis in at least a generation, will need to mount an expansionary fiscal policy. The problem is how much the country’s debt mountain will crimp our ability to pay for the type of change we just voted for— better health care, public investment in alternative forms of energy, and a renewal of our aging roads and bridges— and that we need in order to rescue the economy.

The global financial crisis is denting the huge foreign exchange reserves of governments that bankrolled the Bush spending spree. Although our major creditors will continue lending to us, even they have their limits. If the world’s appetite for U.S. Treasury bonds begins to wane, that would likely drive up long-term interest rates and send the dollar lower, leading to inflation. Historically, governments faced with such impossible debt mountains have resorted to inflation in order to repay their debt more cheaply. But high inflation hits the poorest members of society hardest. Whether we struggle to break our addiction to deficit spending in order to pay off our debts, or wind up inflating them away, the economic mistakes of the The bottom half of American workers saw their share of George W. Bush White House will cast a long shadow over national income decline, even as the wealthiest 1 percent saw an increase in their overall share. the next generation of Americans.

■ REPORT

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E

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GEORGIAN ROULETTE Mikheil Saakashvili beckons from the brink

By Peter Savodnik

I

n August 2006, I took a bus from Tbilisi to the city of Gori, a little more than an hour northwest of the Georgian capital. At the bus station before I left, I bought from an old woman some bottled water, a very small apple, and two rolls filled with nuts and a white powdery cheese. The station was really a sprawling car-repair shop circumscribed by an outdoor bazaar. There was a huddle of dusty broken-down buses that hadn’t been driven in many years; Soviet-era Ladas and Volgas propped up on columns of bricks; kiosks manned by fat men hawking dried fruit, sunglasses, pirated DVDs, baked goods, sausage links, and pornographic magazines; dogs of indiscernible ownership; small children; children on bicycles; and hordes of long-distance cabbies leaning against the hoods of their cars, mostly Volgas or Opels or Volkswagens, smoking cigarettes and waiting to drive someone to Batumi, on the Black Sea, or Ninotsminda, near the Armenian border, or Vladikavkaz, in Russia.

I had been in Tbilisi for a week, and I had visited the galleries, museums, and squares on Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main artery, and climbed the ancient steps to St. Nicholas Church and the Narikala Fortress, and dined at a first-rate café known for its spicy rice-and-mutton soup, or kharcho, around the corner from the old Sephardic temple. That morning, I’d decided it was time to venture outside the capital. I went to Gori for the same reason most foreigners go there: It was the birthplace of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, or Josef Stalin.

Roughly 50,000 people lived in Gori that summer, and the bus was scheduled to make several stops around the city. When we arrived at my stop, the bus driver stood up and declared: “Stalin here!” I alone arose—I was wedged into a window seat toward the back—and trundled up to the front and stepped outside, into a quiet dusty stretch of yellowed apartment buildings with pine trees festooned around.

The house where Stalin spent the first four years of his life, 1879 to 1883, is exactly the kind of pathetic wood-brick structure from which one might expect a world-historical tyrant to emerge.

Three steps lead up to a wooden deck. The walls are white. The rooms are tiny. Surrounding the house is a large, rectangular, marble-and-concrete structure with rectangular columns, ornate capitals, and hammers and sickles etched into what looks like a plastic casing that serves as a ceiling forty or fifty feet up. The Soviets, when they erected this shrine to the Father of All Fathers in 1936, must have wanted to convey two opposing but interwoven tropes: the ordinariness and simplicity of Stalin’s beginnings, and the extraordinary, even spiritual, force of this place, where the workers’ paradise is said to have been born.

Today, viewed through a post-Soviet prism, the little house enveloped by the monstrous beige shell looks absurd. It’s not just that this is a shrine to a discredited faith, or that Stalin holds a top place in the pantheon of history’s bloodiest dictators. Either of these uncomfortable facts could be explained away or compartmentalized if the lit-

Peter Savodnik is a writer in New York City.

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tle house had been transformed into a piece of history, something to be studied. But that is not what the Stalin house is. The Stalin house, like so many statues to the cosmonauts, poets, and sundry heroes of the revolution scattered across the former Soviet Union, is simply woven into the tapestry of Gori. No academic distance separates it from its surroundings. There is a plaque stating that here lived young Iosif Vissarionovich, but no ticket dispenser, no turnstile, no velvet rope.

Nothing sets this place apart; it feels too close.

the Gulag—I assumed I’d missed something— she pointed to a panel with a map of the camps where Stalin had been imprisoned. “He suffered at the hands of the tsar’s police,” she said, “but they couldn’t destroy him.” This sort of airbrushing would have been expected in Soviet times. But in 2006? Granted, Stalin was Georgian, and Gori was his hometown, but Georgia had embraced its independence in the early Nineties and displayed little of the Soviet nostalgia now in vogue among Russians. Yet here was the clearest and crudest

This sense of historical flattening is only exacerbated by a history museum that sits directly behind the house, on the top floor of a stately building with high ceilings, thick walls, and heavy drapes. One imagines Stalin himself admiring the space, strolling past the display of photographs, maps, and personal effects with a vague smile on his face, nodding approvingly at the gravity, the bigness of everything. There is one obvious omission from the museum: namely, any serious discussion of the labor camps and killing fields that were known collectively as the Gulag and that left 20 million to 40 million Soviet citizens dead and that ultimately defined Stalinist Russia. When I asked an usher if there was any space reserved for

manifestation of that nostalgia. The most important aspect of the maniac-despot—his murderous paranoia and all its terrible consequences— had been buried, camouflaged. The leviathan, far from being portrayed in opposition to his subjects, at war with them, remained their father-protector.

Residents walk past a building destroyed by bombs in Stalin Square, Gori; August 17, 2008. Photograph © Marcus Bleasdale/VII

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n August 7, 2008, two years after my visit to Gori, Georgia launched an attack on South Ossetia, a Georgian province that declared its independence in 1991. There had been numerous violent clashes between the two sides since then, but the only country that signaled any support for an independent South Ossetia was Rus-

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sia, which borders the province to the north; the majority of South Ossetia’s residents are of Russian, rather than Georgian, ancestry. Russian authorities say their support, which blossomed into formal recognition following the outbreak of hostilities, was aimed at preserving the peace in the Caucasus. The likelier reason was that Russia wanted to absorb the province and destabilize the government in Tbilisi. The Kremlin has employed a similar policy (which entails expelling or marginalizing ethnic groups that are not loyal to Moscow, arming local militias, and issuing residents Russian passports) to good effect in Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian province, and in Transdniestr, the easternmost sliver of Moldova. In all three cases the goal has been the same: to expand Moscow’s hegemony at the expense of the HE WEST, CHINA, THEY DON’T government of a WANT TROUBLE,” SAAKASHVILI sovereign state.

In the months SAID. “BUT THESE GUYS IN MOSCOW preceding Georgia’s attack on South OsTHRIVE ON TROUBLE” setia, there were many skirmishes, all of which were almost certainly orchestrated or approved by the Russians with the hope of provoking Georgia to act. Georgian officials, including President Mikheil Saakashvili, knew this; as did the Europeans, as did the Americans, who repeatedly urged Saakashvili, who is known to have a bit of a temper, to keep his powder dry.

But on August 7, after weeks of short exchanges of mortars and gunfire, Georgia began a sustained artillery attack on the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvadi.1 Early the following day, Russia, now armed with a casus belli, responded with a devastating counterstrike, not only occupying South Ossetia but invading Georgia proper. The Russians made Gori, about a twenty-minute drive from the South Ossetian border, their base of operations.

One wonders what the Russian soldiers must have thought as they milled around the little Stalin house or, in Gori’s main square several hundred yards away, the towering Stalin statue, to my knowledge the only one of its kind still standing in the former Soviet Union. Did they know the meaning of this little scratch of a town, its place in the political-historical firmament? They should have. The sense of entitlement many Russians feel when it comes to Georgia—the strut and arrogance of the invading army, marching with impunity through the hometown of Stalin—requires, in some sense, Stalin. But what now? Once the invading army inevitably receded, what would hap-

“T

1 Saakashvili claimed this attack was in response to Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages. But international observers, quoted by the New York Times in November, strongly dispute that this shelling ever occurred.

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pen to this place? Would a rebuilt Georgia be the same country it had been a few weeks earlier?

What new geographic, and geopolitical, role might it inhabit?

With these questions in mind, I telephoned President Saakashvili to discuss the conflict and its many repercussions. It took a week to make the call happen. First I called a friend in New York, who called someone in Tbilisi, who knew someone who knew someone who was a senior adviser to the president, who, it turned out, was eager to speak with Western reporters and dispel the myths, as the president sees them, that Russia had been disseminating since hostilities broke out.

Early one Sunday afternoon, I received a phone call in my New York apartment from a woman who works in the presidential administration in Tbilisi. She said I should call back in thirty-five minutes to speak with the president. I did this, and the operator patched me through immediately. When Saakashvili picked up, he sounded subdued. It was just before 10 P.M. in Georgia, the president was in his office, and Russian troops were stationed about a half hour’s drive from where he was sitting.

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aakashvili, who speaks good English, received a law degree as an Edmund S. Muskie Fellow at Columbia University in 1995 and pursued further study at George Washington University the following year. When he ascended to power in late 2003, replacing former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in what is often called the Rose Revolution, he was hailed in Washington as a new kind of long-hoped-for post-Soviet leader: the democratic-minded Westernizer.

In his self-conception, Saakashvili is a sort of anti-Stalin, not simply a reformer but the embodiment of a new epoch. Imbued with a deep moral conviction, a belief that Georgia must renounce wholeheartedly the past and insert itself into the Western fold, he sounds determined to reconstitute—almost metabolically—Georgia’s political identity. Indeed, when he gets lost in one of his anti-Kremlin rants, one suspects that a part of Saakashvili is also ranting against elements in his own society that retain a fondness, even a nostalgia, for an empire and a vozhd, or leader, to provide clarity and purpose and an escape from freedom.

With Russia occupying large swaths of his country, including the Black Sea port of Poti and key transport routes, the Westernizer was challenging the West to live up to its ideals. “If the West cannot support its values in a country like Georgia, where can it?” Saakashvili asked me. He argued that Georgia is in dire need of a “Marshall Plan” to rejuvenate its economy, and of more military support. “I think some people

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in the West justify their inaction by saying, ‘Who started it first?’ All of them know that Russia was preparing for months or years. It’s like saying Dubcˇek”—the Czech reformist leader during the Prague Spring—“provoked the Soviet Union.”

Since the beginning of his presidency, this has been a standard Saakashvili narrative: that Russia, in Soviet fashion, gravely threatens its neighbors and former satellite states, and that it is only Saakashvili, in the mold of Alexander Dubcˇek in 1968 or Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy in 1956, who is bravely defying Moscow. Referring to the current conflict, Saakashvili said, “This is exactly what has been done before the Second World War in Europe—Stalin toward Finland in 1939. And then Czechoslovakia in 1968. It’s a combination of Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s tactics in their most brutal forms.” There was an air of exasperation in his voice, a frustration that Western leaders failed to see matters as he did, with obvious, morally instructive parallels between then and now.

“We warned people,” Saakashvili said. “But it was such an uncomfortable truth, some people thought it was our wild imagination. Now what happened on the ground surpasses any imagination.” He continued: “Look at how Putin acted in the Caucasus with the invasion of Chechnya. The more brutal he was, the more subdued the Caucasus became. Then Yukos and Khodorkovsky”—the Russian oil giant’s former CEO, a wealthy oligarch whose arrest Putin ordered in a 2003 dispute. “Now no other businessman is going to speak up against Putin.

Then the most daring journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was killed. Now it was time to slaughter an independent country because no one in the neighborhood will challenge Russia. And, of course, Georgia was considered a symbol of another way of doing things—democracy versus autocracy in Russia. So it was a very distinct pattern of behavior, a very distinct pattern of going through things. This is the question the Europeans should be thinking about: Who will be the next victim of this aggression?”

After such a dire portrayal of his foe, Saakashvili then pivoted to emphasize how easily the West could aid him. Russia, he stressed, was no longer the Soviet menace it had once been.

The problem was only that some European leaders (whom he declined to name) believed it was, and it is this confusion—about the nature and extent of Russian power, and what can be done to

Map by Kirk Caldwell

counter it—that posed the real threat to the West.2 According to this somewhat convoluted line of reasoning, Western leaders, far from exercising a cautious realpolitik, as they did during the Cold War, simply fail to understand their own strength relative to Russia, having been blinded by their fear of a resurgent and bellicose Kremlin. “This Russia is not as scary as Germany back then or Stalin’s Soviet Union, but [the Europeans] don’t think so,” Saakashvili said. “I don’t think that Russia has enough force to change [the balance of] world power.”

And yet, in Saakashvili’s view, Russia imagines

itself to be more powerful than it really is—a fantasy fueled by Western timidity. “I think that Russia has more arrogance than ever in the past.

You have a leadership in Russia that is so euphoric about oil income and money, so euphoric that they can put fuel back into its Soviet tanks. They are irrational in their rage and behavior. The West, China, everybody, they don’t want trouble, but, well, it looks like these guys in Moscow thrive on trouble. Not having trouble makes them very bored, or they feel very insecure without this sort of thing. They are so insecure they always want to run—but they are short-distance runners.” I asked him what he meant by this, and he replied, “The Soviet Union had lots of soft-power appeal, in Eastern Europe, 2

Presumably, Saakashvili had in mind Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlusconi, who is close with Putin, and Merkel, who is said to have a strong distaste for Saakashvili, have pressed for a more measured response to the Russian incursion.

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in the Middle East, Asia. Russia has lost all of this. All that Russia has left now is brute force.”

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he critical question facing America and Western Europe is: How far will they go to defend Georgia? Specifically, they must decide whether to allow Georgia into NATO—which would

come naturally. Saakashvili is universally described as gregarious and passionate, always confident he is on the right course. Charles Ebinger, a professor at Georgetown who also works for the Brookings Institution, recalled having Saakashvili in one of his classes in the mid-Nineties. “He was an excellent student, very brash,” Ebinger said. “He told me and the other professor who taught the

mean, per Article Five of the alliance’s treaty, that a future attack on Georgia like the one it recently suffered would be regarded by member states as an attack on their own territory, thereby almost certainly igniting a war between Russia and the West. “This is a big question,” Saakashvili said. “It’s a moral issue for NATO. It’s no longer about Georgia. It’s about whether NATO wants to stand up for its values or succumb to these pressures.”

Throughout our half-hour conversation, Saakashvili attempted to thread a perilously thin needle, casting Russia as imperial and revanchist but not so imperial or revanchist that, should Georgia be protected (whatever that might entail) from Russian aggression, the West would have anything to fear. It was a delicate balancing act, undertaken by a man for whom delicacy does not

course that he was going to be president of Georgia one day.” As F. Stephen Larrabee of the RAND Corporation put it, “There was always a feeling in the State Department about Saakashvili that he was an attractive guy, on the one hand, but that he was an impetuous guy.” This impetuousness has often led Saakashvili to take undemocratic steps in the name of democracy, most notably when he ordered a violent crackdown on demonstrators last November and temporarily shut down independent media. (To his credit, Saakashvili called an early presidential election for January 2008 and won with 53 percent of the vote, beating his closest rival, a wine magnate, by 28 points.) Larrabee, who served on the National Security Council during the Carter Administration and lived in Georgia from 2002 to 2006 while doing research, said: “There’s the expression,

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Russian troops pull out of Gori; August 22, 2008.

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‘He’s a package,’ and he’s a package. He had his good sides, wanted to Westernize the country, and he had his more negative side, which was that he was emotional, impetuous, tended to be reckless, didn’t always think through things, leaped before he looked, the kind of person that you could never be sure what he was going to do, even if his basic political instincts were in the right direction. So he could be his own worst enemy.”

In the Russian-Georgian conflict, Saakashvili sees a deep cultural gulch: a backward-looking empire, filled with vassals and serfs and boyars, pitted against a fledgling democracy in the Western tradition. When I asked about the root causes of the fighting, he said, “I think the main thing is that it’s really values-based. It’s not personal—I never had any fight or public insults with Russian leaders. I think it’s purely values-based. Georgia is a small country which is democratic, with double-digit growth for several years. We are at least a hundred times less corrupt than Russia, and, you know, suddenly, they realize that you have this country here that is successful, and the last thing they want is a continuation of our success, with more and more foreign investments, more construction and energy routes from Central Asia to Europe.”

It is ironic, and also typical of the absurdity of post-Soviet politics, that one of Saakashvili’s literary heroes is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When the dissident novelist died in August, two days before hostilities broke out between Russia and Georgia, Saakashvili contacted Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia. “I wrote a letter . . . to say that he helped my country become independent,” Saakashvili said.

This is true in that Solzhenitsyn brought attention to the calamity of Stalinism and helped galvanize the pro-democracy movement. But it ignores the fact that Solzhenitsyn was also a champion of the imperial Russia embodied by Vladimir Putin; indeed, Putin attended Solzhenitsyn’s funeral in Moscow, which included an honor guard and a Russian tricolor. Saakashvili obviously was trying to market himself to the West, to embrace the pro-democracy mantle by wrapping himself in the vintage anti-Communist cloak. But this oversight (if that is a strong enough word) also underscored just how interwoven these two peoples are. Far from being culturally and historically at odds, as Saakashvili contends, Russia and Georgia are cut from very much the same cloth. “I love Russian literature,” said Saakashvili, who, being a Georgian, knows Russian and has read extensively the great Russian novelists and poets. “I love Tolstoy. I love Bulgakov. I can recite you hundreds of Russian poems. I can do it better than Putin.”

As for his all-time favorite novel, it is perhaps not a coincidence that Saakashvili and Senator John McCain, who has himself been accused of a certain impetuousness, share a pick: Ernest

Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is, if nothing else, about the power of our ideals and the honor, the sense of purpose, we derive from fighting for those ideals no matter the cost.

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oday, seventeen years after the Soviet implosion and the nearly bloodless conclusion of the Cold War, the United States faces the very distinct risk of a new Cold War–style conflict with Russia. The underlying dynamics that precipitated this past summer’s war—South Ossetia’s uncertain political status, Russia’s uncertain political identity, growing energy demands in Europe and especially China, and, of course, the personal animosity that persists between Saakashvili and Putin—remain in force, even as one important factor has changed: Washington has aggressively ramped up its support for Saakashvili. This became clear during the presidential campaign, when John McCain, and then Barack Obama, issued strong, unequivocal statements on behalf of Georgia’s effort to roll back the Russians. In our interview, Saakashvili stressed that both men were good friends. He said he had no preference when it came to the November election. Voters may have forgotten, against the background of McCain’s ceaseless saber-rattling against Russia, that after the August conflict it was Senator Joe Biden, now the VP-elect, whom Saakashvili specifically asked to come to Georgia (and who complied). “It’s really a hard choice for me,” Saakashvili said of the race. “Right now, you have both camps that are really, really supportive.”

This is a dangerous place for the United States to be. Irrespective of whether Georgia is admitted to NATO, a war pitting Russian troops against the U.S.-backed Georgian military (including, possibly, U.S. military advisers) would severely strain relations between NATO members, set back U.S.-Russian relations for years, solidify Russian control of oil and gas supplies to Europe, and embolden Russian hardliners who want Moscow to step up political and military cooperation with Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, thereby resurrecting the old imperial strategies. Worse yet, it is hard to imagine the United States mustering the same political will to fight as Russia. Recall the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the Soviet Union ultimately conceded, albeit tacitly, that Cuba was within the U.S. sphere of influence.

A war over Georgia, from Russia’s perspective, is not a war over another country that happens to border Russia but a war over what many Russians, and certainly Vladimir Putin, regard as a part of Russia. This thinking is ubiquitous in Russia and indeed predates the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. The famous and ancient Georgian Military Highway, connecting Tbilisi and

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Vladikavkaz, in the Russian territory of North Ossetia, has been celebrated and mythologized by writers from Pushkin to Lermontov to Tolstoy.

Nor is the danger confined to Georgia. The Crimea, in southern Ukraine, is similarly problematic. Russia maintains its Black Sea fleet at the port city of Sevastopol, as the Soviet Union once did, and as the tsars did before it. The Ukrainians have said they want Russia out by 2017, and, in fact, Russia has announced plans to relocate the scores of attack submarines, destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers docked there to Novorossiysk, in Russia, in 2012. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if—as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has recently hinted—the Russians try to extend their stay? The parallels with Georgia are unmistakable and ominous. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, like Saakashvili, was backed by the United States in a popular movement (the 2004 Orange Revolution) against the wishes of the Kremlin; the Crimea, like South Ossetia, is filled with people who identify much more closely with Russia (or the former Soviet Union) than they do with Ukraine. If Moscow chooses not to leave, will Kiev stand up to it? When Ukraine asks for American help, how will America react? And what about territorial disputes in Moldova? Or the constant friction, bordering on open hostility, between Russia and the Baltic states? Even Belarus, which has been ruled by strongman Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, is now making overtures to the West. What will Russia do if Minsk says it wants to join the EU or expand diplomatic relations with Washington? What will Washington do?

Saakashvili has often portrayed Georgian admission to NATO as the defining moral question of our time, as if the Western security blanket, once tugged snugly over his nation, would somehow end for good the old imperial patterns of the region and inaugurate a period of stability and respect for national sovereignty.

There is something to be said for this. The unending war of words between, say, Estonia and Russia has remained a war of words in large measure, one imagines, because Estonia belongs to NATO. But Saakashvili is perhaps not taking into account how the addition of new member states alters, not just strategically but psychologically and even ontologically, the alliance’s constitution. Recent flare-ups within the alliance—surrounding anti-missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, a Soviet war memorial in Estonia, and, of course, the Russian-Georgian war—point to the widening gulf, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, between “old” and “new” Europe. There is no doubt that old (or Western) Europe has very little appetite for an expanded defense burden.

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But that is exactly what Europe would inherit, by way of Article Five, should Georgia join the alliance. Once upon a time, when there was a Soviet Union with a Red Army and a huge nuclear arsenal, no one doubted the alliance would hold together. But today, a vastly weakened Russia, by forging bilateral energy agreements with European countries, has far more power to manipulate individual member states—precisely because it is weakened. Russia, having been stripped of its power to frighten the West into a unified alliance, has acquired a new power to pry that alliance apart.

All of which is to say that NATO, should it welcome Saakashvili, may not survive a second attack on Georgia. Charles Ebinger, the Brookings scholar, notes that NATO member states would have been sharply divided about what to do had Georgia already belonged to the alliance when Russia invaded last summer. “Let’s assume that they had been admitted to NATO,” Ebinger said. “Do we really believe that NATO would have come to their defense? I personally do not believe there’s any stomach for a military confrontation with Russia.” Saakashvili, no doubt, would counter that Russia would never have struck had Georgia already been safely ensconced in the Western fold. But as a strategy for the future, such an arrangement would be, to say the least, a gamble. Certainly, Russia is well aware that by attacking Georgia it aggravated significant, long-standing tensions within NATO. The question is whether those rifts, in the event of another war, would open so wide as to swallow the alliance, or whether NATO would be able to suppress its internal divisions in the name of some greater good. The question is whether NATO believes Georgia, and especially a Georgia governed by Mikheil Saakashvili, is worth defending.

Central to this debate is how Georgia imagines itself and what it aspires to be. That Britain, France, or Germany has misgivings about bringing Georgia into the Western alliance signals an uncertainty about not only their own capacities and inclinations but Georgia’s, too. Saakashvili, one suspects, is aware of as much. He has been to Gori, has seen that statue of Stalin standing in the town square. He can’t help but be sensitive to the many forces and ideologies vying for his country’s future. The Georgian president has articulated a new political identity for his people. By playing the role of the anti-Stalin, he has sought to transcend Stalin. Whether he is capable of that quantum migration—and whether he can negotiate the pitfalls and provocations that his giant revanchist neighbor to the north will inevitably foist on him— ■ is very much in doubt.

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NOWHERE LAND Along India’s border, a forgotten Burmese rebellion

By Siddhartha Deb

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ast winter I traveled to Moreh, a small town on the border between India and Burma.

Moreh sits at the very end of National Highway 39, an outpost of tin-roofed houses and small shops set amid palm trees and dirt tracks that appears quiet even during the day. The principal landmark is the police station, a dark run-down building that the policemen reserve for prisoners and weapons while they conduct their business from a gazebo on the front lawn. The main avenue wanders past the police station and ends, after a walk of twenty minutes, at a border checkpoint marked by a bamboo barrier and a pair of limp flags. Dusk comes early to this eastern edge of India, and since there is rarely any electricity, Moreh is ready for bed by the time the policemen go around to announce the evening curfew, blowing their whistles and tapping their sticks on the shop shutters, asking the odd drunkard who might be loitering on the streets to go home.

The sleepiness of Moreh is deceptive. The border, crossed in daylight hours by local traders, opens onto BurSiddhartha Deb is the author of the novels The Point of Return and An Outline of the Republic. He is currently writing a non-fiction book about India.

Illustration by Shonagh Rae

ma, an insular country that seems cut off from the world by its authoritarian government and the punitive sanctions of the United States and the European Union. And then there is Moreh itself, which is located in Manipur, a small, impoverished, and violent state in India’s remote northeastern territories, more than a thousand miles from Delhi, a state that is largely off-limits to foreigners and visited by few Indians.

Moreh is where India ends, which is to say that most of what one associates

with India has disappeared long before one reaches this town, giving way instead to a reality that is substantially different from the official narratives produced in Delhi.

Two months before I made my trip, there had been an unusually large number of references to the border in the Indian press. A series of demonstrations had broken out in Burma, led by Buddhist monks with upturned begging bowls who demanded a restoration of democracy and an end to the military regime that has been in power in their country for more than four decades. When the monks rose in revolt, taking to the streets in Rangoon and other cities, Western governments were vociferous in their support for the monks and argued for a continuation of the sanctions.

In India, the reaction was quite different. The country’s petroleum minister had flown to Rangoon at the very height of the protests to sign a $150 million deal to explore for natural gas off the Burmese coast, and throughout the weeks of turmoil in Burma, the Indian government refused to criticize the junta. Instead, it put security forces in Manipur on a state of alert to make sure that Burmese protesters did not try to seek shelter on Indian territory, and when it appeared that anti-junta demonstrations might erupt in Moreh,

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it closed the checkpoint and declared a curfew in the town.

These steps were consistent with India’s grand vision for the border territories it shares with Burma. This vision has a name, the “Look East” policy, and it indicates that after decades of obsession with the West, India is reorienting itself, turning toward China both as a trading partner and as a rival power. India’s engagement with the Burmese junta is part of this policy, meant to check Chinese influence in the region and garner a share of the resources, especially the vast reserves of natural gas in the Shwe fields off Burma’s western coast. After losing out to China in earlier contracts to extract Burma’s petroleum and gas, India proposed a pipeline that would bring a portion of the Shwe gas into India through the northeast.

The pipeline was only one of many projects envisaged for the northeastern frontier, the most ambitious of which was the “Trans-Asian Highway,” a network of roads connecting northeastern India with southeast Asia and China, something last done during World War II. One of the segments of this highway would link Moreh to Mandalay in Burma, and then eventually to Mae Sot in Thailand, covering a distance of 870 miles. Supposedly, these projects not only would increase India’s trade with its eastern neighbors; the improved transport network also would allow the extraction of natural resources in northeastern states like Manipur, bringing an end to the cycle of insurgency and poverty endemic to the isolated region.

All this sounded fairly plausible while I was in Delhi, but I couldn’t help wondering whether it had any bearing on reality. I grew up in the northeast of India and had experienced for myself the discrepancy between life in the region and the things said about it in a faraway capital. When I had traveled in the past to the frontier between India and Burma, nothing I encountered there conformed to these visions of open borders and free trade. It had always seemed to me, from the time I lived in the northeast to when I moved away and began writing about it in my fiction, that there was something subterranean about the region, the sum total of its insurgencies, riots, and ethnic

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clashes never amounting to more than a few tremors in the larger world.

But it was possible that things had changed. India’s friendliness toward the Burmese junta was a fairly recent development; before the right-wing BJP government of the 1990s, India had supported democracy movements throughout the developing world, including Burma, and allowed Burmese dissidents to cross the border and settle in Manipur. Since then, however, the BJP and the centrist Congress government that succeeded it have pursued their strategic interests in the region. No one spoke about the Burmese dissidents said to be floating around in Manipur, people who had escaped a harsh regime and fled to India, apparently with the idea that the Indian government would support them in their struggle for democracy. It was this invisibility that interested me, especially when measured against the “large-scale movement of peoples, ideas, and connectivity” being touted by India’s prime minister, and so I headed for the borderland.

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he flight from Delhi took a little over three hours, the densely populated Ganges plains giving way to a land of hills and ridges, still thick with forest cover, until the aircraft came down over the Imphal Valley with its small, rectangular agricultural plots and slender bodies of water edged with dark conifers. The Imphal airport building was new and clean, briefly raising the possibility that the official optimism had some substance to it, but then I stepped out into the open and found myself facing soldiers in black bandannas bristling around a ring of armored jeeps with gun turrets cut into their roofs. As for Imphal, Manipur’s capital, it was just as I remembered it, with fetid drains, streets covered in rubble, and graceful women in striped phanek skirts who walked quickly past the soldiers posted at every corner.

The connection between the northeast and the rest of India has always been tenuous. Mountainous, lashed by the monsoons, peopled largely by groups described as “Tibeto-Burman,” the region is attached to mainland India only by a thin strip of land squeezed between Nepal and Bangladesh known as the “chicken’s neck.” The geographical iso-

lation is only one aspect of its difference. Six decades after a fledgling Indian government hastily took over these areas from the British, often against the wishes of the people living there, the northeastern states have a per capita income 30 percent lower than the rest of the country and an unemployment rate twice the national average. Four of the eight states in the region have significant insurgent groups fighting the Indian government, and sometimes one another, a situation to which the Delhi government has responded with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives security forces the right to arrest, interrogate, and kill without scrutiny from the notoriously corrupt local governments.

Even by the standards of northeastern India, Manipur is an especially fractured state. As with Kashmir, which it resembles in its violence and alienation from the rest of the country, its merger with India in 1949 is controversial, dependent on a document signed by the Manipuri king while he was under house arrest. The Lonely Planet guide to the region calls Manipur the most dangerous state in the northeast, hardly worth the trouble of applying for a permit to visit, as foreigners are required to do. In spite of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which has been in effect throughout Manipur since 1980, there are as many as twenty-three insurgent groups in the state, most of them operating from bases just across the border with Burma. Insurgents also control stretches within the sparsely populated hills, and during the two weeks of my stay, the smudgy print in the local newspapers gave accounts of gun battles and mine-clearing operations in Chandel district, where Moreh is located and where Indian forces were trying to dislodge an insurgent group from their “liberated” territory.

This general condition of turmoil, which people in Manipur seem to accept with resignation, lent a tinge of foreboding to my journey from Imphal to Moreh. The distance between the two towns is only 68 miles, but it takes over four hours to make the journey by car, and even then one needs some luck. In the morning, just as I was heading out of my room, the hotel boy told me that no vehicles were being allowed into Moreh. I was told that a woman

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had been raped there the previous evening and that the Meira Paibi—a Manipuri women’s organization originally formed in response to the brutal rapes and murders routinely committed

by Indian soldiers—had shut the place down for the day. I headed out nevertheless, accompanied by a local photographer named Jinendra, who had pasted a very large PRESS sticker on the Maruti van I had hired. It was probably the sticker and the persuasiveness of Tomba, who was the driver of the van and also owned a small call shop in Moreh, that got us past the first checkpoint, where dilapidated buses packed with people were being turned back by the police.

For a while, ours was the only vehicle on the highway, which wasn’t much more than a narrow road bisecting paddy fields. Plumes of smoke rose from the fields where straw was being burned to create ash for the winter’s crops, and

Map by Kirk Caldwell

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in the distance were bluish-green mountains fringed with the unruly tufts of pine trees. We passed small villages with open marketplaces and fortified police stations and army camps. Then we began climbing through the mountains, 10,000 feet at the highest point of Tengnoupal, and the road became an endless series of craters to be traversed behind long army convoys, the discomfort of the journey somehow negated by the thickly forested peaks and valleys, with patches of wild sunflowers exploding next to the rubble of the road.

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n the highway from Imphal to Moreh, there had been a series of checkpoints where passengers and belongings were scrutinized, papers examined, and bribes paid. The most impressive of these was the checkpoint just before Moreh, sited along a bend in the road over which towered a paramilitary base

on top of a hill. This was the place where, according to newspaper reports I had read in Delhi, three “Myanmarese nationals” had been stopped while they were headed toward Imphal. It was a border within a border, complete with a 600-foot stretch of no-man’s land that people had to cross on foot, keeping their hands empty and leaving all their belongings behind in the vehicle for a separate inspection. Then our cell phones stopped working, apparently because the Indian government jammed signals inside Moreh. It wasn’t entirely clear what purpose this served, but in a town where land lines were few and unreliable and everything was shut down by an evening curfew, it meant that one was completely cut off at night.

When I visited the Moreh police station, the officers there claimed to know nothing about the three “Myanmarese nationals,” just as they could tell me nothing about the time when Moreh had been a center for Burmese activists. For that, I had to go and see a man I’ll call Narayan. The local reporters who led me to him described Narayan as an influential local businessman who had organized money and material support for the dissidents, although he did not project such an image when I first saw him sitting on a plastic chair in the courtyard of a Hindu temple. A portly man in his fifties with wavy graying hair and a small mustache, Narayan had an air of calm reserve about him, and the only signs of emotion he displayed as he listened to my questions were the furrows of caution appearing on his brow. He seemed to be considering how much to tell me, and although I had been introduced to him by people he knew well and it was unlikely that anything I wrote about him would make its way to Moreh, he asked me not to use his real name because he didn’t want to be identified by the Burmese junta.

Like most of the Tamils in Moreh, Narayan belonged to a diaspora descended from the traders and laborers who had gone to Burma from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in the early twentieth century. He grew up in Mandalay and studied engineering, but after running a small business in motor parts, he decided to leave Burma in 1984, when it became increasingly difficult for him to continue his

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business. After trying for a while to live in Madras, now Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, he settled in Moreh.

“It used to be a nice place,” he told me, perhaps detecting my disbelief that someone would so willingly leave a metropolis for a seedy border town. “But it became bad in the early Nineties. Violent.” This was the period when Manipuri insurgents belonging to different ethnic groups were attempting to take control of the town and its trade in narcotics, guns, gems, and teak. Some of these groups were supported by Indian intelligence agencies if they were thought to be a useful counterforce to a more troublesome outfit. As the Manipuri insurgents based in Burma turned Moreh into a battleground, they displaced the largely nonviolent Burmese dissidents who had sought shelter in the town, in Indian territory. The Indian government wasn’t too perturbed by the exodus of Burmese dissidents; it had supported them in the past, but since forging a closer relationship with the junta, the government had begun considering them an irritant.

“There are no dissidents here anymore,” Narayan said, sounding bitter.

“No support for any Burmese working against the junta. There was a divisional commander who tried to defect a few months ago, but they handed him back to the Burmese army.” The junta had benefited the most from the changes in Moreh, Narayan felt. They had won the Indian government over to their side, in part by promising to act against the insurgents operating from Burma, but they also used the Manipuri insurgents to do their bidding in exchange for providing them shelter.

I asked Narayan why he stayed on in Moreh, especially since he now owned a house in Chennai, one of India’s booming cities. Narayan looked around and pointed at the temple. It consisted of a series of small shrines, each of them guarded by pairs of menacing, four-armed figures. It was unlike any temple I had ever seen, and Narayan explained that it had been modeled on a temple in Rangoon. It reflected the intermingling of Tamil and Burmese cultures that had taken place among the diaspora and that made this corner of Southeast Asia Narayan’s own. This was what had kept him in Moreh, amid other Tamils from Bur-

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ma, and he was closer to home here than he would ever be in Chennai.

But the nearness to Burma was an illusion. Narayan had started visiting Burma again when a recent power struggle within the junta deposed the minister in charge of internal security and destroyed many security files, making him feel that it was now “reasonably safe” to make the trip once a year.

When he went to Burma, though, he traveled the long way around, going to Chennai first and then flying to Rangoon. I asked him if he had ever attempted to visit Burma from Moreh. “I would never attempt to go that way,” he said. The Burmese authorities “know everybody here. They know me. Everybody knows everybody here,” he said, and looked nervously at Jinendra, who had accompanied me to the temple.

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he officially sanctioned border trade between Moreh and its counterpart, the Burmese town of Tamu, began in 1995. This was at the very start of the Look East policy, and the Indian and Burmese governments agreed to keep the checkpoint open during the day for the locals’ convenience. Indeed, when I was there I saw people swirling through the border checkpoint, going past the Burmese guards to the Namphalong bazaar, the market on the other side, where stalls housed in a gray concrete building offered shapeless winter jackets, lighters with attached flashlights, and pirated DVDs in thin plastic sleeves. On the outskirts of Moreh, bullock carts filled with sacks of rice forded a small stream, right underneath a slum on the edge of a cliff where a boy was plucking a headless chicken, releasing clumps of feathers into the water down below.

But the gun battles, kidnappings, rapes, and bomb blasts that are regular incidents in Moreh and Tamu suggest that there is much more than an everyday exchange of goods going on in these places, as do the restrictions that increase in severity as one travels toward Burma. When I visited Tamu the next day, I had to leave my passport at Tomba’s call shop. It was the only government identification I possessed, but it would draw attention to me as a person who had ventured beyond the northeast. Tomba took the passport

and my cell phone, and made me empty my wallet of credit cards, debit cards, library cards, store receipts—all those talismans of globalization. Sometimes the Indian army came around to check his shop, so he put everything together with a rubber band and placed the collection in the refrigerator.

We were joined near the checkpoint by a local stringer I’ll call Ibomcha.

(Because the junta scans the foreign press for articles on Burma and this stringer often crosses the border, I haven’t used his real name.) I was asked to stay in the background while the Manipuris gave their identity cards to the border guard, a man in an old khaki uniform and thick glasses who was laughing at whatever it was Ibomcha was saying. We walked away from the guard’s post, making our way through the crowd milling around the checkpoint, still one permit short. The plan was made clear to me as soon as we were some distance away from the guard. Ibomcha would go back to Moreh from here, but I would travel on to Tamu with his permit, collecting his I.D. card on the way back. It was a deceptively simple trick, one that put my companions in high spirits, but the junta could afford to be lax about such small things. The barriers were in place long before one reached the Burmese border. Most of the people who crossed here were local, known to the junta, as Narayan had pointed out. The countryside was sparsely populated, with guard posts along the road where the permits had to be shown, and in that flat landscape a lone bicycle rider was visible from miles away.

When we stepped out from the van into the downtown area of Tamu, it looked quite unlike Moreh. It was clean and pretty, the straight avenue lined with small shops, low houses, and a bright red pagoda. A group of laborers smoked cheroots near a park, a few shopkeepers sat behind their counters, and a solitary Buddhist monk walked from store to store with his begging bowl.

There was another Tamu somewhere around here, one in which Manipuri insurgents hid out, where brothels were staffed by HIV-positive women who could no longer find work in Thailand, and where narcotics were gathered, packaged, and prepared for

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shipment into India. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Burma is the second-largest producer of heroin in the world, and much of that business has shifted from the Thai border, after a crackdown by the Thai government, to the western border with India. The trade has brought to Tamu an ethnic group called the Wa, former headhunters and anti-junta guerrillas from Burma’s northeastern frontier with China. Since signing a cease-fire with the junta in 1989, the Wa have been able to run narcotics and prostitution rings throughout Burma, and their interest in Manipur coincides with greater restrictions on the borders with China and Thailand. The heroin and amphetamine pills pumped into Manipur through Tamu and Moreh have devastated the state, which, with a population of only 2.4 million people, has the highest concentration of HIV cases in India, most of them injecting drug users.

The degree of control and surveillance in the town has ensured that even Manipuri journalists, used to threats and violence while working in their home state, do not attempt to report anything from Tamu. When Tomba said that we might be able to speak to a Burmese trader he knew, I wasn’t particularly hopeful. We approached a house with a hardware shop on the ground floor and living quarters above, and an elderly man in a lungi came down to meet us. Tomba asked for the trader who lived there, but the elderly man shook his head. The trader was not at home; in fact, he had gone to Moreh, and if we hurried back, we might be able to meet him there.

We went into some of the stores, but the shopkeepers, mostly women, avoided eye contact unless we showed interest in buying something. My companions began to trail behind me, and I felt alone and exposed. We had been the only non-Burmese people to get off the van ferrying passengers from the border checkpoint to Tamu, and no one else was wandering around these nearly empty streets. There wasn’t even a tea shop in the downtown area where we could sit and look around, and it seemed only a matter of time before someone would appear to ask us for our papers, including my rather suspect permit with Ibomcha’s

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name on it. The bluster that had been visible in Jinendra and Tomba at the checkpoint had evaporated, and when they began insisting that we should leave, I agreed.

On the drive back toward Moreh, we had a sudden glimpse of the TransAsian Highway, which we rode on for a few minutes before we turned off onto the dirt track to the Namphalong bazaar. The Trans-Asian Highway was a wide metal road running from Tamu to Kalemyo, a distance of 75 miles. The signs on the road said that it had been built by the Indian army in an act of friendship between the two countries, and according to the official junta newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, the opening of the highway had been a ceremonious affair. More than 10,000 people had gathered in Tamu, accompanied by musical bands, to watch Lieutenant General Tin Oo (whose full designation was “Chairman of Central Supervisory Committee for Ensuring Secure and Smooth Transport and Secretary-2 of the State Peace and Development Council”), Major General Saw Tun, and then Indian Minister for External Affairs Jaswant Singh cut the ribbon to open the road. I tried to imagine the Burmese cycles, makeshift motorcycle vans, and bullock carts—the only vehicles I had seen so far—making that journey to Kalemyo. The highway was utterly empty as we drove past.

When we returned to Moreh, I went to look at the highway from the other side, near a checkpoint closed to the public. There was a bridge spanning the stream that formed the border here, the Burmese half of the bridge painted yellow, the Indian portion in white. Another stretch of the highway was being built where I stood, and as I watched, a small, battered green truck made its way across the bridge toward us, bringing a load of stones to a group of Burmese women and children dressed in rags and makeshift turbans. The laborers waited until they had filled the baskets on their heads with rocks, and then they walked past me, going down to the stream to lay the foundations for this part of the Trans-Asian Highway stone by stone.

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he last time such a highway had been built in the Indian northeast was

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in the 1940s, during World War II, when the battle for Asia turned in this obscure corner of the world. Manipur is where a Japanese army that had been victorious in China, Singapore, and Burma finally ran aground. Throughout the fighting, roads and bridges had to be laid in order for Allied soldiers and guns to be moved forward. It was a challenging task, one that briefly captured the imagination of the world, and the last time Manipur was mentioned in this magazine was in a 1944 article on General Joseph Stillwell’s attempt to connect a different part of northeastern India, through Burma, with China. These were the roads that the Indian government was planning to rebuild for its thrust toward the east.

When I arrived back in Imphal, I saw people wading through squelchy layers of refuse and plastic bags at the marketplace. The few restaurants had a shabby, secretive atmosphere, with most of the Indian customers looking like army men in mufti. As the sun set and wiry migrant laborers gathered around the small fires they had built on the streets, the buildings around them dark and silent, I felt as if I were in a post-apocalyptic setting, but without any knowledge of how the end had come about.

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was planning to meet some Burmese dissidents who would tell me about their arrival in Manipur and how they had been affected by the Indian government’s partnership with the junta. But when I called the phone numbers I had gathered in Delhi, the men who answered were suspicious and frightened. Eventually, I persuaded a man named Ko Thein to meet me, although he would see me only in my hotel room in Imphal. He showed up in the afternoon accompanied by another Burmese man, both of them looking awkward and uncertain as they stood in the corridor. My room, which cost six dollars a night, was a claustrophobic hole with fluorescent lights, its filthy windows opening onto a wall and a generator that spewed noise and diesel fumes into the room. The elevator in the hotel rarely worked, and at ten in the evening the entrance was closed off with metal shutters, locking residents and staff

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in and presumably keeping insurgents out. This was considered the best hotel in Imphal, popular because it had a restaurant and a conference room where small groups of people gathered during the day for seminars on business and governance. As the two Burmese men came in, hesitantly accepting my offer of tea and sitting gingerly on the two grimy armchairs, it seemed that what they saw in the room was luxury and power.

Ko Thein was a burly, shy man in a baseball cap; his friend Ko Todu was thin and light-complexioned, wearing glasses that had only one temple. Thein appeared to understand English but not speak it, whereas it seemed to be the opposite with Todu. We ended up in a complicated, three-way communication chain wherein I posed most of my questions to Thein, whose answers, translated back to me by Todu, I tried to write down as the generator pounded away in the background.

They had fled Burma in 1988, when the junta responded to a nationwide uprising on August 8 with a severe crackdown, killing at least 3,000 people and arresting thousands more. The Indian government had been supportive of the dissidents at the time. It looked favorably upon the Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who had gone to college in Delhi and knew Rajiv Gandhi, then the Indian prime minister. The state-run All India Radio began a series of Burmese-language broadcasts that criticized the junta, while in Rangoon the Indian embassy gave medical aid and money to many of the activists, encouraging them to escape to India if they feared arrest. Thein and Todu made their way to Moreh, where the Indian government welcomed them with food and temporary shelter. After a few months, a camp was set up for the Burmese in the barracks of the Manipur Rifles, a paramilitary unit, at a place called Leikun, in Chandel district.

The dissidents who had fled to Moreh were hoping to launch an armed struggle from India. A militant organization called the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front had already been formed by exiles on the border between Burma and Thailand, with a fighting peacock as its symbol (which reappeared on the streets of Burma during the September

2007 demonstrations). The ABSDF members in Manipur thought they would start a guerrilla army, with training and equipment from India. But the Indian government made it clear that it didn’t want another armed group operating in Manipur, and they ordered the Burmese dissidents to stick to nonviolent methods. I asked the two men if they had tried to go ahead with their armed movement in spite of the warnings, but they shook their heads. They couldn’t have taken on both the junta and the Indian government, and they had known nothing about the complexity of the northeastern region they had fled to. “The Manipuri people have been good to us. They support our democracy movement,” Thein said. “But the Manipuri insurgents are based in Burma and work for the junta. They would attack us here if we tried to form an armed group.” Even though they were members of a nonviolent group, pressure from the insurgents had led Thein and Todu to leave Moreh. Two men who had last tried to operate from Moreh had been abducted from the town. “It happened late at night, on January 14, 2006,” Thein said. “It was done by Burmese soldiers who came into Indian territory, but they were shown the way by Manipuri insurgents.

On their own, the Burmese wouldn’t have known where to find our men.”

He glanced at Todu, who began feeling inside his torn puffy jacket and extracted a compact disc. I slipped it into my laptop and looked at the documents and pictures on the disc, including a plaintive letter to the deputy commissioner of Chandel district about the abduction in Moreh.

The letter had obviously gone unanswered, but the disc was a surprise, suggesting forethought and organization, with information ordered carefully into letters, spreadsheets, and photographs, even though the lives they documented appeared very hard. The people in the pictures, including the two men who had been abducted, looked shabby, lost, and worn down by their long stay in Manipur. Three of the dissidents, all in their forties, had died in the past few years. “Heart trouble,” Thein said.

According to Thein, there were a hundred dissidents or “political” Burmese left in Manipur, as distinct

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from the Burmese migrant workers who have been coming into Manipur since the Nineties. The dissidents were divided between Imphal and Leikun, but in their years of exile they had married among themselves and had children.

There were no schools near Leikun, and the ones in Imphal were unaffordable, so all the children of school age and their mothers lived in Churachandpur town, 40 miles from Imphal.

It seemed, in fact, that the lives of the dissidents were preoccupied less with protest than with survival. The guerrillas manqués had been forced to become entrepreneurs, collectively running a photocopying and call shop in Imphal and operating a van between Churachandpur and the neighboring state of Mizoram. Thein and Todu seemed embarrassed when they told me this, and Todu began laughing. “We are very bad businessmen,” he said. “We took loans to buy the van, but now we can’t pay them back.”

They were anxious that I not think of them simply as refugees or failed entrepreneurs, and they told me that they operated a network across the border and organized camps in Manipur for people coming over secretly from Burma. In these camps, Thein said, they trained people in democracy, human rights, and “hygiene.” But I think he realized even as he was talking to me that none of this sounded as dramatic as running camps for guerrilla warfare.

“It’s important we do this,” he said.

“We wanted to become guerrillas.

That’s why we came. But we couldn’t, not without some help.” He held out his large hands to me, as if demonstrating his willingness to carry a gun. “We get information about what’s happening in Burma and pass it on to the world. The Thai border is full of Western media and NGOs, but they can’t come here, and if we didn’t stay here, no one would get information from this side. During the demonstrations in September, we got hold of photographs and stories that showed what was going on inside, and we helped people who tried to escape the junta.”

It sounded as if the two of them were trying very hard to emphasize their role as dissidents, and they brought to mind a meeting I had attended that September of Delhi’s Burmese dissidents and their Indian supporters. What was most

evident at the meeting was the despair over the Indian government’s cessation of support for the Burmese democracy movement. It was also clear that the dissidents had few ways of pressuring the Indian government. Instead, it was the three Indian representatives of Amnesty International who came up with a series of measures their office would take to publicize the Indian government’s position, but they left before the meeting had come to an end, presumably to put these ideas into practice.

It wasn’t surprising that the Burmese dissidents didn’t possess the same clinical efficiency as the NGO workers.

The dissidents had been overtaken by history, by the change in India’s attitude toward Burma, which in turn reflected how India’s notion of foreign policy had become, in the past decade, mostly about securing its business interests. And a world that stressed markets over democracy paradoxically attached much more value to the category of political exile than to that of economic migrant, which explains why Thein and Todu had brought along their disc, hoping to show me that their lives included resistance as well as privation. There are nearly 50,000 Burmese in Manipur and Mizoram, most of them toiling in lowwage jobs involving seasonal agricultural labor, and they didn’t want to disappear into this indefinable mass of the poor and the dispossessed. They had been middle-class in Burma, people with education who could have looked forward to government jobs and a certain degree of security. But they had given up on that future twenty years ago, and in return they insisted on their status as dissidents, as people still fighting for a cause.

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few days after Thein and Todu came to see me, I set off for the Leikun refugee camp in Chandel district. No one I knew in Manipur had been there.

Isolated and forgotten, a remnant of the Indian government’s earlier nonaligned phase of foreign policy, the camp seemed to stand in opposition to the transnational highway that would blast open this part of the world.

Tomba drove, while Jinendra and I sat in the back. We turned off Highway 39 near the first Moreh checkpoint, heading into the mountains in Chan-

del district where the army was engaged in its operations against a Manipuri insurgent group. The villages we passed were sparsely populated, with a few people clustered around a market or bus stop. Soon we had to slow down at a bend where a dozen trucks were parked, tarpaulin-covered civilian vehicles bookended by military escorts.

There were troops in flak jackets, some of them shouting into walkie-talkies and others directing a vehicle up a steep track to the right. We were waved on, passing so close to the soldiers that I could read the names on their uniforms as we drove by.

The Manipur Rifles camp was a row of long buildings behind a brick wall and barbed wire. Jinendra spoke to the guard and went inside while Tomba and I waited by the road, exchanging small talk with the soldiers. We stood around for a while, far longer than it took to get directions, and I thought Jinendra was having trouble getting permission to proceed. Dusk was setting over the road, creating sharp silhouettes of the village women trudging up the mountain with cane baskets slung on their backs. Everything was quiet until two jeeps came back from a patrol, the camp gates swinging open as they raced inside. A few minutes passed, and then there was a sudden burst of activity inside the camp, with many uniformed figures waving and shouting at us. The gates swung open again, and we drove in, following a pair of tire treads cut into the grass. Our van groaned along, shrubs and grass scraping its belly, Tomba gripping his wheel tightly as we kept going along the mountain, the land falling away steeply to our right. We stopped where the tracks came to an end in the thick brush.

After the sound of the engines, the silence was startling. The last tinge of sunlight was nearly extinguished over the pine trees on the mountains. Below us was a valley, with terraced farmland giving way to jungle broken up by streams. On the other side, where the land rose again, was the Leikun camp, a scattering of huts with mud walls and tin roofs set in a clearing in the jungle. We walked down to the valley, crossing a gully bridged by a narrow, precariously placed log, wading through grass and pools of water before we began climbing up steps cut rough-

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ly into the earth. The furious barking of dogs and squawking of geese greeted us as we entered the camp. There was just enough light in the sky to see the two halls around which the smaller huts were arranged, the glow of wood fires showing through the halls’ narrow doorways.

A thin man in jeans who had appeared at the sound of the dogs was asked by the Manipur Rifles sergeant to fetch the “village chief.” I liked this designation for the camp leader; it suggested that the sergeant held on to an older, more humane idea of the refugee camp as a village and the Burmese exiles as just another tribe in this diverse land. Yet when the chief appeared, a slight, young man in rolled-up jeans holding a cell phone, the sergeant ordered him roughly into the hall that served as both a kitchen and a dining room. We crowded around the long dining table, wood smoke in our eyes. The sergeant grabbed the chief by his shoulders, shook him, and said, “There’s a journalist who’s come here from Delhi, understand?

Sit down and answer all the questions.”

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ey Myo was strikingly handsome, with long wavy hair and a delicate, almost feminine face. It couldn’t have been easy for him to have so many strangers, three of them soldiers, barge into his camp at a time when everyone was preparing for bed. But he seemed spirited, responding directly to my questions and not hesitating to criticize the Indian government in front of the soldiers. The youngest of the dissidents I met, he had been fourteen years old when he fled Burma a year after taking part in the 1988 demonstrations. As Myo told me about his journey to India, patiently repeating the details and spelling out names, I realized that he had taken a route that coincided with the Trans-Asian Highway, escaping from Rangoon, through Mandalay, to Moreh.

Myo lived in Moreh for six months and then moved to Leikun. The camp wasn’t what he or the other dissidents had expected: a place where they would be trained to fight the junta. Instead, the dissidents were prevented from going out without permission from the

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Manipur Rifles. They were treated like undesirable refugees, and this led to hunger strikes, protests, and a retort from an Indian officer that they were in a military camp where the rules of democracy did not apply. Some of the more troublesome dissidents were taken forcibly from the camp and abandoned near the border; some were arrested for venturing out of the camp and sent to prison in Imphal; some of them eventually left for Delhi, where recognition from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees might open up the prospect of political asylum in the West; and others went back to Burma. After a few years, the restrictions were unofficially eased, and those who still remained at Leikun began venturing out into the surrounding villages.

From the look of the mountains, the appearance of the local people, the violence between insurgents and government, and the isolation of Manipur from the world at large, they could have still been in Burma. They began weaving cloth, raising poultry, and gathering firewood to sell to the local people, living off the land like settlers on a frontier. But they never forgot that they were dependent on the goodwill of the local people and the patronage of the Indian government, which provided the camp inmates with eleven basic food items, each calculated to the kilo. Myo’s responsibility as camp leader involved going to Chandel town once a week to collect these items, but he sometimes traveled to Imphal, where he met with other dissidents and picked up course materials for his correspondence degree in public administration. He was married and had two children, but he saw his family only when they came to Leikun during the school holidays.

After twenty years, Myo still considered himself a dissident waiting for the junta to collapse. “We have the option of getting Indian citizenship,” he said, perhaps rather optimistically. “But we won’t do that. It’s been a good country for us, but we plan to return to a free Burma.” Myo didn’t agree with my suggestion that the dissidents were making things harder for their children, who were cut off from both India and Burma, possessing no rights in India other than that of residence and no mem-

ories of Burma. They couldn’t even read or write Burmese, as Myo reluctantly admitted.

The soldiers were now growing impatient, and Jinendra and Tomba were worried about traveling back to Imphal in the dark. I wanted to see some more of the camp before we left, so Myo led us out of the kitchen toward the community hall. A little antechamber in the hall held a shrine with a small statue of the Buddha, who had a surprised look on his face. There was also a bulletin board on the wall, and one of the pictures showed five smiling Burmese dissidents dressed in camouflage uniforms, a vestige of their dream of an armed struggle.

Myo was talking about another uprising that would take place in 2008, one that would finally overthrow the junta. “What will you do if that happens and you can go back?” I asked him.

“The first thing I want to do is see my parents, if they are still alive,” he said.

We had come out of the hall and were standing in the clearing, the mountains all around us. Although Myo spoke of going back soon, it seemed to me that Leikun was his journey’s end.

The camp wasn’t the way station the dissidents claimed it to be, a temporary halting place and base for the eventual victorious return to Burma. It looked like a rough, makeshift home, a place where the ’88 Generation would spend another twenty years as they had spent the first twenty, dwindling into nothingness. “The next time you come,” Myo whispered to me, “let me know first. There is a different way in, one that avoids the Manipur Rifles camp.”

He seemed so hopeful at the prospect of my return that I didn’t tell him there wouldn’t be a next time. Nobody other than the Manipur Rifles personnel visited the inmates, which was probably why the soldiers had been so excited to guide a stranger to the camp at the end of their working day. Nobody else was likely to show up in the future to meet the inmates of Leikun and listen to their stories. The lonely journey back from the camp made this clear enough, as we crossed the valley and came out of the Manipur Rifles base. It was dark all the way back to Imphal until we were pulled over at a police post, and all we could see then were the flashlights ■ on our faces.

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Mike Smith is a photographer based in Johnson City, Tennessee. His monograph, You’re Not From Around Here: Photographs of East Tennessee, was published by the Center for American Places and Columbia College Chicago in 2004.

Photographs © Mike Smith

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CADETS On not flying in the Royal Air Force

By Paul West

O

ne icy day in November 1948, when, as the song has it, the snow was raining fast, I presented myself at one of Britain’s so-called Labour Exchanges—where people used to change jobs or go on the dole—and registered for national service, as the law demanded. Blithely entering my preference as Royal Air Force, I gave no reason, as none was required. There were no guarantees, I was told, and I suspected that bureaucratic illogic would just as soon stick an airminded youth into the infantry as into the cockpit of a Miles Magister training monoplane. But it was worth a try.

Years later, I found out what a long memory the Selective Service system had.

I took the train to London Paddington station, checked into a mediocre hotel that reeked of greens and cocoa, and took the Underground to the Air Ministry building on Kingsway, to be interviewed.

I want to fly, I told the Board, and as a pilot: even the role of navigator seemed somehow secondhand, an amenity for arithmeticians. Yet the Paul West is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, memoir, criticism, and verse. His most recent work is The Shadow Factory (Lumen).

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prospect of pilot-training flew out of the window almost at once. Stationed at one end of a dark tube in which

occasional numbers appeared like cash-register ghosts, right against the eyeball (as it seemed) and then, a mere second later, indecipherably in the distance, genuine light-years away, I failed the aircrew medical. This evaluative kaleidoscope had mimicked approach speeds of 200 to 600 miles an hour, and somewhere around the 300 mark I had “crashed,” as the medical technician melodramatically put it.

My sluggish eye muscles had let me down, refusing to alter focus fast enough. I tried again, with identical result. Aerially speaking, I was one of the blind, and, in spite of having 20/20 vision (of my own slowmotion sort), I felt at one with the legion of the sightless all the way from Samson to my father, blinded in the First World War. I got on with the rest of the examination. Reflexes, senses, and coordination all proved satisfactory. (Indeed, my smell and hearing have always been overacute: always the first to know when the milk is off, I dread the ticking clock.) For ground duties I was exemplary, coded G.1., whereas my airrating was A.4., or perhaps even A.13., bumped into the underworld by my eventual reluctant admission that I was liable to attacks of ophthalmic migraine that rendered me half-blind for several hours at a time and had plagued me since puberty. I marvel now at the gall of volunteering myself as a pilot—I who during the worst attacks couldn’t even see my own hand within the fortification spectra around it. In the end, of course, I did fly, quite a lot, mainly as a passenger, marking papers at 5,000 feet for a change, but sometimes illegally at the controls of an Avro Anson with a seaRoyal Air Force Display (detail), 1932, by Roderic Hill © The Art Archive/RAF Museum Hendon/Eileen Tweedy

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soned pilot watching me hard, usually Pete Wildy, of the saffron mustache, who used to fly Sunderland flying boats to Singapore.

One other thing I learned about on that inauspicious day with the doctors: a scar deep in my left ear, its cause unknown but doubtless an inthrust pen in quest of an itch while I was writing an examination answer.

The group of us spent the night in London, on the town, none of us very hearty, swilling beer like transvestite peasants and observing women of the evening ply their trade.

(This was before London denied them sidewalk Lebensraum and relegated them to doorways, windows, and incitational cards in the display cases of run-down shops.) Exhausted and giggling, we ended up—surrendered to—the dream chamber of an Odeon, addressing ourselves to the froth of a John Wayne war movie.

I

n 1954 I had to present myself for three months’ basic training at the RAF’s Officer Cadet Training Unit, Jurby, Isle of Man. Months before that, however, as an officerto-be in the Education Branch—oh, what a falling-off: no cockpit but a blackboard!—I received a uniform allowance and one January day, among enviable snowflakes, took the double-decker bus into Sheffield to be measured by a tailor who, although on the Air Ministry’s recommended list, had not made an RAF uniform since 1939. Had I, however, required cavalry breeches, a busby, and an epauletted Horse Guards tunic, thick with piping and velvet insets, he would have known exactly what to do. I think he had bargain cuirasses in the rear of the shop, in case a real gentleman should happen along: a knight of any order, or a time-traveling crusader. Such was my impression when he looked me up and down with unchivalrous hauteur that said they would commission anything nowadays, even a dandiprat with a phony American accent and hair that needed not so much cutting as burning off in order to clear the ground for a new crop.

Gradually, as he warmed to his

sartorial calibrations, asking which side I “dressed” and administering a none too gentle hand-stab into my groin to find out, he began to speak to me as if I were going to be a corporal at least. There I stood, like the marooned fetus in the border of Edvard Munch’s lugubrious Madonna, answering, “No, no medals,” to his sardonic inquiry, and being obliged to raise my voice when he insisted that I could not, absolutely not, enter the Royal Air Force (said in full) as a Flying Officer; the lowest commissioned rank was Pilot Officer, didn’t I even know? What he didn’t know, having dealt only with young men destined for Sandhurst or Cranwell (echt military colleges), was that a Student-Officer, such as I was going to be, went in at a rank equivalent to the aforementioned Flying Officer and was paid accordingly. It was one of the ambiguous privileges of having degrees. He finally agreed to sew, on the sleeves of the jacket and on the shoulders of the greatcoat, the broad braid of the Fg. Off. and not the narrow one of the Plt. Off. Either way, it was azure within black braid, and my mind wouldn’t leave well alone the penguin irony of the epithets: I would be neither Flying nor Pilot, except in some national disaster. A month later, he turned out an impeccably cut article, at three times the price I might have paid for an only slightly inferior item at one of the big military outfitters who had little shops at the camps. Not only did I not need a “best” uniform beforehand; I could have kept the unspent balance of the allowance for carousing and books. There was still the matter of shoes, which—unlike shirts, ties, socks, and pullover—I had to buy. Did officers (or penguins) wear capped or plain fronts? That was the iron question. No one seemed to know. An ex-RAF shopkeeper in the village, who just happened to sell shoes along with millinery and fishing poles, said plain. I bought two pairs. He was wrong—because, my mother said, in a tremendous and scathing access of snobbery, he had been just an airman, and that was what airmen wore. As it turned out, I slunk around “incorrectly

dressed” for a couple of years, at first trying to mask the toes with my trouser bottoms, which made me stoop, then walking even more pigeon-toed than nature had made me, hoping through some miracle of light (with the line of my pants’ cuffs reflected on the convex toe cap as the stitching of an Oxford front) to deceive critical eyes. But no one seemed to care, and after an interval neither did I.

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eaving home at midnight, on the last bus, I went by train to Liverpool, where I had a four-hour wait in the herring-rich aroma of its railway station before taking the dawn boat to Douglas, Isle of Man. I might have been going to Siberia for all the cheer I felt; the boat, named King Orry after an ancient Manx king, ran into a decent gale soon after leaving the Kersey, and the remainder of the four-hour voyage became a tilting diorama of hell. Babies keened in private staterooms, blueblazered military-looking paragons, to whom my next years of play were already forfeit, braced themselves against lifeboat davits or, in the carpeted lounge, the white-painted iron pillars of the ship’s rib cage, and wore an air of officious nonchalance.

Short-haired ciphers in little corduroy or felt caps, whom I mistook for cadets returning from leave, whereas they were prematurely shorn new ones (pawns wanting to get off on the right foot), studied and copied the paragons: the ostentatiously worldly-wise pucker of the mouth, the imperiously narrowed eyes, even the self-congratulating sentry stance. It was the beginning of the end. I hummed and gulped, trying not to watch the tumbling verdigris outside. Air was my element, not this.

At Douglas one took a cab to the railway station, from which a tiny red-and-black steam engine with a brass dome dithered its way, ahead of four uncushioned carriages, up the island to Sulby Glen, a mere map point, where the apprehensive cadet-to-be transferred to a blue-gray omnibus that lurched off to the camp itself, a dreary immaculate settlement of low huts that really be-

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THE SIXTIES: Recollections of the Decade from Harper’s Magazine Introduction by Eugene J. McCarthy

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longed at Novosibirsk in Siberia. Already I had seen and heard Warrant Officer Phillips, a tall corsetedlooking stoic of dauntingly coarse grain, whose look alternated between aloof despair and mastered exasperation. Bridlingly polite, he yelled orders in a Zulu English on which he remained to the end of his days there the one authority. As I later discovered, he thought mainly of retiring and then raising cucumbers in the Welsh hills.

That night, aghast at the stark lack of privacy, although amused to have been waited on in the mess by Manx civilians (a “high tea” of eggs, sausages, ham, baked beans, woolly white bread, and tea but no coffee), I reviewed barracks life and found it poor. Next day, after sullen NCOs had kitted us out with ill-fitting battle dress, which the camp tailor would adjust for a few shillings, there began a madhouse program of polishing, pants-pressing, communal shaving, and imbecilic rural hikes intended to test the number of OQs (Officer Qualities) in each of us.

Raked by the tops of compulsory boots, my ankles bled, so I put on my plain-toed shoes and kept the boots for ceremonial purposes, having learned from an old pro (a warrant officer turned cadet at forty-six in order to retire on a junior officer’s pension) how to veneer and buff the toe caps with flame, sputum, and velvet.

One highly evolved cadet achieved such a sheen he was able to use it, as a demonstration proved, to shave by, while those watching with contemptuous envy wondered at his future.

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e consisted of student-officers (officers in name only) and officercadets (by far the larger number): S/Os and O/Cs, Souls and Ocarinas to me, the first different in having cap badges that needed no polishing, the second a motley group ranging from obedient boys fresh from school to wily noncommissioned retreads.

In command of each hut was a senior man who had a room to himself, in which the more pretentious held petty court, uncouth couchés especially; and our own, a master-pilot given to martial simplifications, was

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the first military person with whom I had an outright row, I forget what about, but he was loud and blunt while I (I hoped) was calm and mordant. Of course, he and I became friendly after that mutual baring of claws: one was too much involved with others in communal living, too dependent on them in scores of ways, to cherish grudges. Against such pragmatic sodality one must reckon, however, the corrosiveness of the male ghetto. Crude pranks rent the night. One overvocal masturbator climbed into bed (“pit”) one evening and upturned a maliciously planted can-lid full of white liquid polish.

In Douglas, at the Majestic ballroom, where the tables had telephones so that the cruising sexes could anonymously accost one another, and at the local Beehive café, where home cooking boosted our rations, one vented one’s assorted frustrations. Against this there was no taboo, except against venting them in uniform: a joke because, even in mufti, cadets looked just like cadets, in caps (which one raised when encountering officers), unworn-looking suits, and fastidiously carried gloves (to be worn only when downhanding duchesses from pumpkin coaches, or so I presumed). What a gaggle of tin-pot soldiers we were, the intelligent bored silly, the mediocre exhausted, and the dense frightened out of their wits. It was hard to average more than five and a half hours’ sleep or not to wad one’s raging appetite with too much bread and potato. I lost weight but regained my wind and even developed a masochistic fascination with the almost daily rain blown horizontal by the wind off the North Sea. Every three weeks a Board of Review met, and cadets were passed, failed, or recoursed: justice and injustice, bigotry, bluff, and benefit of doubt, all in one rough-and-ready stew. 503524 was the number on my 1250 (an identity card that procured cheap railway tickets); Yellow 2 was my squadron. My only usable skills there were some ability in public speaking and a knack for extemporizing scurrilous doggerel in speeding omnibuses. A slovenly cadet who

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could not remember the jargon of the drill manual, I one day stood before a squad, had them salute as one, for practice, and then, unable to recall the terminal formula of the whole daft pantomime, said simply, “Hands down!”—an improvisation I was rather proud of (as if I had lowered my six-gun)—but it launched Warrant Officer Phillips into a Welsh frenzy. I redeemed myself the day I had to improvise, after five minutes’ warning, the AMGOT (Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories) procedures and protocols for a hypothetical, recently occupied enemy island. Trapped in front of a lectern, sixty cadets, and two officers, I let my imagination skip about, filching things here and there from Rasselas, Candide, Erewhon, Gulliver’s Travels, and even, addictive paradise of boyhood, R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, and larding the whole spoof with special measures concerning the islanders’ exotic religion, their cannibalism (mermaids only on holy days), and Phlogogloss, their undeclined, nonconjugated, tenseless, and primarily erotic language. The reward for this effrontery came at once in the form of a command, from on high, to lecture to the same class, a week later, on American Foreign Policy, about which I knew nothing nor even if there actually were one. This lecture was the hobbyhorse of Exeter (as he must be called here), a sibilantly dapper young fellow addicted to golf. I fudged up a series of jokes and reminiscences, and let it go at that, convinced I was being vetted for treason, schizophrenia, or indelible levity. With Macbeth, I felt it easier to cross over, having already damned myself halfway.

Rumors abounded, as in encampments of all kinds: a “neutral” Scots accent was to be preferred over all others, even over an Oxbridge or BBC fanfare of languid diphthongs, and a North American burr— Canadian rather than Yankee—was a help. Equally unreliable yarns confirmed that only six-footers could win the Sword of Honour; that, by 1960, the entire Air Force would be computerized, which meant that all

pilots were obsolescent and would have to be remustered as accountant and equipment officers, or as chaplains; that no cadet who broke a bone during training (as distinct from when in his cups or reeling from brothel to brothel) was ever failed— his commission came with his plaster cast. One pressed on through a maze of marksmanship, military tactics, formation drill, weapon-stripping, fatuous gymnastics, and procrustean General Knowledge tests concocted by lackadaisical but implacable Flying Officers with degrees in nonliterary subjects: the lame, righteous one who doted on two ferocious boxer dogs who ate doors away; the plethoric, tallow-haired one who seemed somewhere to have failed a freshman course in The Smile; the elongated Channel Islander with the kindergarten face and the complex, juicy manner; the bluff Scottish goblin with the ingratiating conversational baritone and hair bristling gold from his ears; and, of course, Exeter, supplely urbane because he alone knew how deadly he was going to be once in Parliament. These appraisers amused me with their sophistries gleaned from the student unions of yesteryear, their lectures on current affairs (culled every weekend from the pages of The Economist, The New Statesman and Nation, and the Observer), their paramilitary flourishes, in which something myopic or giddy exposed the recent graduate. But they terrified others, and I heard of one indecorous plot, devised by a quorum of master-pilots for the day they became his fellow-officers, to seize Exeter in Douglas and subject him to a bicycle-pump-and-whitewash enema in a comfortable hotel room over afternoon tea. Perhaps he heard of it: he certainly stayed close to home and moved his rear with a weaving tautness, like the head of a featherweight boxer. He always began his first lecture—was this the rub that hurt the listening veterans?—by unsheathing a sword and jubilantly crying: “Attack!, gentlemen, is the only form of defense.” Not everything he uttered was quite so galling or so daft, some of it even edging past aphorism into epigram, no doubt in

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emulation of his intellectual hero, Walter Lippmann; but almost all he did was just as extravagant, including the remarkable habit of addressing his wife as “Boy,” as if she were canine (but promoted male to soften the relegation). Exeter was an entertainment, and he looked healthy, like a piece of euphoric earthenware: a cheering fact because it seemed to prove that an eccentric could now and then survive, or even prosper, in that honor-mad enclave of 600 homesick souls whose obligatory motto was per ardua ad astra: through toils to the stars.

P

rivately I managed to read a few pages in my copy of Jean Cocteau’s Opium, in French, heady fodder for a military dormitory. I have recently unearthed a photograph of myself, passport-size (and genre), from this period; I look shorn and skinny, world-wearily abstracted; the lean chin has a frail juvenility; the bagged eyes are dead, the frown aches. Opium indeed! I have never been so tired since. But perhaps that picture corresponded to my first brush with danger in the company of Cadet Sulfur (as I dubbed him), with whom I was deploying a mortar and smoke bombs on the firing range at the Point of Ayre, a windswept barren that druids would have spurned, where we sometimes encamped en masse for toughening-up exercises.

Sulfur would hold and direct the barrel of the weapon while I dropped the bomb in and pulled the firing string, an arrangement that worked until, for once, his grip loosened, the finned bomb leapt out and invisibly grazed my brow in passing. Bless Sulfur for missing. From the pneumatic thump of the charge, I was deaf for a whole day, and when we fired Sten submachine guns on the range, soon after, I somehow avoided him. But it was not he who turned around at the butts to point at us the cocked Sten that refused to fire; explaining, even as he pumped the trigger, he saw a score of denim-clad cowards hit the dirt. I was amazed to get up alive; only the pain was missing. It should have been he who pulped his thumb in the ejection chamber of that

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trashiest of weapons, but instead it was one of the more prudent cadets, just short enough of sleep to let his mind wander while perforating a painted plywood homuncule. That first casualty was our last, though I think it might not have been had we ever used hand grenades, and I heard it said that many a newly commissioned officer left the island with a vintage chancre for not having heeded the lurid, caveat-fornicator movies we had to sit through, caught between retch and snigger.

Airplanes one hardly ever saw.

There was more chance of finding a respirator in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Reminded of these desirable objects by the wings on the breasts of our instructors (who toward the end of my stay acquired, perhaps even stole, a communications plane in which to earn their flying pay), I found them doubly vivid in the talk of the Polish cadets: refugee veterans of the annihilated Polish Air Force, their insignia had been a quartered red-and-white square. Hefty Mickiewicz had broken his back against the tail fin when bailing out of his Spitfire and had briefly found himself hinged against it. He did nothing by halves after that, one of his escapades being to climb up the facade of a Douglas hotel and mount a balcony, upon which (so the tale ran) he twice settled the hash of the wench who had taunted him as he waddled rubber-jointed past. Much quieter, Vic Miliewski, a pensive political theorist who won the Sword of Honour, smoked a pipe, and ruminated on death, Chopin, and fidelity; he died in an air crash a few years later, one of many Poles who survived war only to succumb to peace, as if something retributively pedantic in fate were using their brio, their gutsy panache, against them. I wish I still had his letters; in him, heroism had become a fine-tuned harmony of all the things a man just had to do.

The Poles, for reasons good enough, were the drinkers who set the pace during the virility liturgies called dining-in nights, when cadets wore black bow ties and white shirts instead of blue, horseplayed with chairs and rolled-up carpets, and made compulsory speeches while

standing amid the cheap cutlery on the long white-clad tables.

That quarter-year of boot camp and bravado permanently broke the pattern of my life as it had been from fifteen to twenty-four; it remains, a shattered icon, its outline clear, its biggest fragments etched with constant hubbub, and I retrieve from it the personifying ghost of the senior squadron officer who invariably introduced himself to a new audience of cadets by saying, “Gentlemen, my name is . . . ,” and then had to look in his pocket for the card that told him.

Some laughed at this con; I wonder now if it was only the gullible who felt sorry for him. Such egregious poppies apart, there is still Wing Commander Proop, his face that of a suntanned tortoise, who, gravely returning one’s salute, proved he knew an open hand hides no pistols. Had he known more of assassins, he would have revised service custom and had one remove one’s headgear as well.

H

aunted by the buzzing phantoms of dead aviators I knew and did not know, whose images even then undid and reformed themselves under the auspices of boot camp, I returned, like a porous mutant, to my six-year-long and by then nearly metaphysical affair with a BOAC stewardess whom I had first met when we were undergraduates. Reconstructed according to King’s Regulations, would I seem to her man of action or newly automated fool? Would my parents detect a new, crisp aura around me? I went on leave with a nagging sense that my life had snagged itself on a node in the brute world’s weave. At the dining-in, after the passing-out parade, Wing Commander Proop read out, in alphabetical order of names, the postings of the graduates: to Malaya, Iraq, Christmas Island, Germany. Only one of us would return, newly appointed to the Unit staff for a period of two years. Up went a howl of sympathetic derision from the outbound company of one hundred Yellow 2 cadets, intake 37, as if they knew their joint happiness might suck me ■ outward after them.

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S

T

O

R

Y

THE SANTOSBRAZZI KILLER

By Heidi Julavits

M

y trip of January 17—one of my monthly visitations to a Cincinnati-based subsidiary research outfit, during which I spend two days observing the general activities of the subsidiary outfit, filling out forms on a Lucite clipboard and stressing, via my maniacal focus, their subsidiariness—was plagued by the usual inconveniences.

My seatmate on the commuter leg brought with him a meatball sub of such capaciousness that three meatballs dropped from the butt end of his hero roll and landed on my sandstone Hush Puppy, permanently staining it a greasy orange.

My connecting flight was late. Exiting the airport, I chose a taxi driver whose heater was on the fritz, and who handed me a plastic-baggie boot heater, instructing me to knead the baggie and apply it to my solar plexus. Unfortunately the baggie was torn, and the chemical blue ooze seeped through my suit coat and sweater and shirt, burning my chest and forcing me to jury-rig a dressing from the random castoffs in my carry-on, essentially a stolen moHeidi Julavits is the co-editor of The Believer and the author, most recently, of The Uses of Enchantment (Anchor).

Illustration by Lou Beach

tel, patronized by nearly no one because of its lack of microwaves and satellite televisions and its surfeit of hundred-year-old bellhops incapable of carrying anything heavier than a dop kit. But I found the place charming, or at least unusual, and this made my January trip to the subsidiary research outfit seem to promise discomforts of an unexpected nature.

tel washcloth slathered in hand cream and affixed to my skin with corn pads.

But these inconveniences—which were, as I said, classified as usual—were eradicated by the unusual pleasure of checking into an unusual hotel. Usually on these visitations I’d stay at the Tuck Inn, the one with the kitchenettes and the rooms that smelled of vomit and microwave popcorn and Febreze—but this Tuck Inn had been bought by a hospice organization, possibly because it felt like the absolutely ideal place to expire. Subsequently, I’d been booked into a quaintly museumy Victorian ho-

January 18. Thursday.

I arrived with my insulated travel mug filled with clearly superior off-site coffee, I stood against the sheetrock perimeter of the wall-less playpen of an office, and, at moments when the action seemed most unworthy of note, jicked my ballpoint and started writing. I’d perfected the timing of my jick, and without thinking now could sense the most innocuous moment to employ the jick, thereby creating, amidst the outfit staff, a Chinese water torture kind of expectant dread. I refused to take a lunch break, ingesting instead a few tubes of cashews from the vending machine, the sort that can be poured into the mouth, Pixie stick–like. At 3 P.M., I energized the staff by loudly getting into it with the mustache-and-sunglasses guy who sat near the south-facing plateglass windows. I asked him about the ap-

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propriateness of wearing sunglasses at work, and he said that his glasses weren’t sunglasses, they were regular glasses with light-sensitive lenses, and it was utterly beyond his power to prevent them from going dark. I nodded compassionately and jicked him anyway.

I stayed until 6:30, even though the staff dismissal time was 5:45.

Without speaking to anyone, I left.

Because of the expiration vibe at the Tuck Inn, I tended to spend much of my spare time away from it.

Thursdays I ate Cincinnati chili at a restaurant housed in an old brick building that came to a point at a five-way intersection, and was called The Point, and sold souvenir aprons and mugs that read, “What’s The Point?” This perfectly suited my usual Thursday post-jicking moods.

But on January 18, the unusual Thursday, I decided to return to my hotel room, which, although lacking a television, did feature a clawfoot enamel bathtub, enamel being less porous than plastic and thus easier to sterilize, even by a half-hearted chambermaid.

I lounged against the inflatable headrest and read a local tourism magazine called The ’Natti, which I’d found under the faux-leather stationery ledger and whose unwritten masthead slogan was, “What’s So Bad About Here?”

What’s the rub of living in Cincinnati, save the fact that you’ll always be working for subsidiary outfits and forced to pay top dollar for a parmesan of middling quality? We’ve got competing mix-in ice-cream franchises.

We’ve got local silversmiths of some talent. We’ve got something that mall developers call “Frontier Spirit.” We’ve got Thai-bo, and can, for a mediumsized urban center, boast the country’s lowest percentage chance that you’ll be killed by a suicide bomber. Cincinnati was, in other words, a place commendably low on zeal.

I called the concierge to ask if the hotel had a restaurant.

Not only a restaurant, he told me, but a famous cocktail lounge called the Cruise Room, where one could also grab a light repast. A person I’d never heard of named Ruben D’Angelo considered the Cruise Room to be the best cocktail lounge in the Midwest, and this was back in the Forties, said

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the concierge, when people were much more serious about their cocktails.

Quite unlike today, said the concierge, a cocktail era defined by an overdependence on vodka, an alcohol he demeaned as a “blunting elixir.”

I took the elevator to the basement, as instructed, and followed the woggly black line someone had painted on the wall. It concluded at a door with a large porthole from which emanated a lipsticky pink glow.

The bar inside was horseshoeshaped; the pink glow came from the light box behind the liquor bottles.

The effect of the bottles in front of the pink lightbox was that of leftover skyscrapers silhouetted against the twilight ruins of a prettily bombed city. The rest of the room was in shadow, or in what might be termed “declining pinkness.”

The bartender—a tiny-headed man wearing a white tuxedo shirt— gestured me toward a booth and produced a book that resembled, in its squatness and its thickness, a Gideon bible.

“Cocktail menu,” he said, placing it on the table. “Unless, of course, you already know what you want.”

“I’ll have a blunting elixir on the rocks,” I said.

The bartender, a standoffish fellow, refused to get the joke. I opened the bible.

The cocktails were organized into three categories: Mellifluidies, Revigorators, and Amnesiacals. I narrowed my search to the Revigorator category, then hovered between the Grinning Necrophiliac and the Vengeful Subsidiary (there really was such a cocktail; it featured, among other mysterious ingredients, a liquid to be administered with a dropper, called Hercules). I signaled the bartender.

“I’ll have the Vengeful Subsidiary,” I said. “Is that served on the rocks?”

“I’m afraid my dropper’s missing,” said the bartender.

“Not a problem,” I said. “You have my permission to wing it.”

“You’ll have to order something else,” the bartender said.

“What is Hercules, by the way?” I asked, attempting a runaround. “I’m dying to try it.”

“Hercules is a substance that must be administered via dropper,” the

bartender said. “If you’re dead set on Hercules, you might think about a cocktail that has Gluden in it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why?” “Because Hercules is derived from the Swedish wormwood shrub. Gluden is also derived from the wormwood shrub. Not the Swedish wormwood shrub, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“The Gludenites begin on page 476,” the bartender said.

I turned to page 476.

“The Nagasaki, then,” I said, showcasing my decisiveness.

“Dropper,” the bartender said.

“Excuse me?”

“I need my dropper for that one.”

“As the name implies,” I said.

No smile from the bartender.

“Fine,” I said. “Bring me The Santosbrazzi Killer.”

The bartender nodded. “Would you care for some food?”

“Just the drink,” I said, having lost my appetite. “And nuts, if you have them.”

“I have.”

“Nuts, then.”

“Nuts,” he said.

“Nuts,” I said.

He left.

M

y nuts arrived quickly—they were mixed, and someone had looted them of the almonds and the cashews, leaving only some pecan shards and those albino roach-sized nuts that taste more like a bloated cannellini bean than a nut. My drink, however, was very long in coming.

More perplexing still, the bartender wasn’t visibly engaged in making it.

Instead he was rewashing, for the fourth time, his stirrer and his shaker and his shot glass, like a surgeon sterilizing his equipment repeatedly while his patient dies on the table.

I approached the bar.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m still waiting for my cocktail.”

“Oh,” he said. “What was it you ordered?”

“The Salomone Killer,” I said.

“We don’t have a cocktail by that name.”

“The Santogori Killer,” I said. “It’s Glutinous.”

“Ah,” he said. “The Santosbrazzi Killer.”

“That’s it,” I said.

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“Coming,” he said, and started drying his utensils with a chamois.

Although I wasn’t wearing a watch, and the Cruise Room, like some kind of subterranean casino, boasted no clocks, I’m certain I waited twenty-five minutes for my cocktail before giving up. I’d just lodged a dollar bill under the nut dish when a man slid into my booth.

I recognized him, or thought I did, from the subsidiary research outfit. It was the mustache-and-sunglasses guy, sans sunglasses and apparently desiring a follow-up. After our tense exchange that afternoon, he’d treated me with glaring (I could tell he was glaring, even behind the dark lenses) hostility; he was also, I was pretty certain, the person who’d slipped into my clipboard, while I was in the loo, a business article about a workplace phenomenon called “asshole poisoning.”

Vengeful subsidiary, indeed.

“Hello,” I said, noting again that he was not wearing glasses, which meant that he was wearing contact lenses, which meant that he could have worn contact lenses to work to prevent the “going dark” phenomenon he claimed was out of his control. Jick, I thought.

“What brings you here?” I said.

“You asked for me,” he said.

“I did?”

He nodded solemnly from his shadowy booth patch.

“Well then,” I said. “Welcome. I’d encourage you to order a drink, but drinks don’t seem to be a strong point of this bar.”

“I don’t drink,” he said. “In my line of work, it’s frowned upon.”

Your line of work, I thought, receiving, loudly and clearly, the slight.

“Huh,” I said coolly. “Your judgmental abstemiousness jibes completely with your less-than-optimal work attitude.”

He signaled the bartender, who, instantaneously it seemed, appeared with a tall glass filled with cola so carbonated I felt the bubbles misting my forearm as he set it on the table.

“So you’re a regular,” I observed.

“Not so regular,” he said. “You’d be surprised how little work I get these days.”

“You’re employed here as well?” I

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said. I wanted to remind him of the no-moonlighting clause in his contract.

“I meet clients,” he said. “Such as yourself.”

“I’m your client?” I said. “How is that?”

“You ordered me,” he said. “I’m the Santosbrazzi Killer.”

I laughed. I tried to catch the eye of the bartender. Good one, my friend. But the bartender was busily origami-folding his chamois.

The so-called Santosbrazzi Killer pulled a clipboard from his briefcase, and in doing so leaned his face into a dust-twinkling swathe of pinker airspace. He was not, despite the neartwinny similarities, the mustache-andsunglasses guy from the subsidiary research outfit.

This unsettled me. Suddenly I was talking to a stranger in whom I’d engendered no prior animus toward me.

I thrived on prior animus to render unsurprising all human interactions.

“I’ll need you to fill out this form,” he said, rotating the clipboard toward me.

“And this is?”

“Legal requires it.”

I inspected the form. It asked for the standard information: name, address, DOB, employer, insurance, etc.

“And why do you need a reference?” I asked.

“Reference?”

“Here,” I said, showing him the form.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s the job,” he said.

“The job?”

“The person you want me to work on.”

“Work on?”

“Kill,” he said.

I laughed again.

“But I don’t want you to kill anybody,” I said.

“Then you shouldn’t have ordered me.”

“You weren’t my first choice,” I said, reaching for a roach nut. “I wanted the Vengeful Subsidiary, but, due to a dropper mishap, he was unavailable. Who is Santosbrazzi?”

“It’s a place. A little fishing village on the coast of the former Yugoslavia.”

“You were born there?” I ate a second roach nut. Then a third roach nut. Then I felt very thirsty.

STORY

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The Killer pulled a ballpoint from his overcoat pocket. He jicked it six times. Jick-jick. Jick-jick-jick-jick.

“Please stop that,” I said.

“My grandfather,” he said. “We’ve been in this line of work for generations.”

“A family business, then. Do you think I could get a drink?” I called to the bartender.

The bartender approached with the bible.

“No, no,” I said nervously, “I’ll just have what he’s having. Generations,” I said, returning to the Killer.

He’d placed his pen hand in his lap; I could hear the muted sub-booth sounds of jicking.

“Since the 1600s,” he said. “The first of the Santosbrazzi Killers could be summoned by carving an X into the corner of a certain church pew.”

“How appropriate,” I said. “And what if a man asks you to kill another man just because he thinks he’s an asshole?”

“It’s not my job to evaluate motive,” he said.

“You’ll just kill anyone,” I said.

“Not anyone,” he said cryptically.

“But let me ask you. Would it be so terrible if an asshole died? Think of how little sense it makes when generous, lovely people die. But when an asshole dies, we think, well, hmmmm.

An asshole is dead.”

Our conversation lagged. Usually a conversation lag is a man’s social escape hatch, but this lag had a more sinister feel to it. The less I talked, the more trapped I became.

The Killer sipped his cola and used his Cruise Room cocktail napkin to blot his mustache. I hadn’t previously noticed, but now I saw with some alarm that the Cruise Room’s insignia was a piece of nautical rope coiled into a noose.

“So. An asshole killer,” I said.

“You must be swamped.”

“Actually, I’ve suffered five straight years of negative growth,” the Killer said. “People are loath to take direct responsibility for killing anyone these days. That’s why we’ve partnered with the service industry. We wanted, in this culture of no responsibility, to emphasize responsibility. To emphasize the prison of choice. A menu provides the most direct access to a person’s primitive and unmediated desires; i.e.,

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I want this thing. Bring it to me. The average person won’t take it upon himself to put a hit out on his son’s fauxbeleaguered kindergarten teacher, but he’ll order a panino or a protein smoothie called The Santosbrazzi Killer.”

He seemed a little bleak on humanity, the Killer.

“And what if the average person, after ordering you, tries to send you back?”

“In the restaurant of life, there are no returns. And believe me, the average person is relieved when I show up.

By the way,” he added, “I’ve recently cemented a deal with two local Orange Julius franchises. Also a Panera.”

He handed me his ballpoint.

“But I’ve told you already,” I said. “I don’t know anyone who needs killing.”

“As I just explained,” the Killer said. “I cannot be unordered. There are some loopholes, but they’re too rare to be counted upon.”

“That’s unfortunate,” I said. “Because there’s nobody that I want dead.”

“Everybody wants somebody dead,” he said.

“Metaphorically, of course. I’ve wished many a metaphorical death on people. But dead-actually-deaddead? That’s another matter.”

“Apparently you haven’t heard,” the Killer said. “Metaphor is dead.

Metaphor is the asshole of language. I killed it.”

“Okay, but . . .”

“We live in literal times,” he said.

I peered paranoiacally over my shoulder. Surely this was all a big gotcha joke choreographed by the staff of the subsidiary research outfit, clearly a craftier and more creative bunch than I’d credited them with being. But the lounge was almost empty.

“So let me get this straight,” I said to the Killer.

“Let me get you straight,” said the Killer. “Before there are dictators there are the sadistic nobodies who spread daily misery and make it possible for someone with a perspective problem, like a Mobutu Sese Seko, to respond out of all proportion to the little cruelties perpetrated by one asshole, and kill millions of people.”

“One asshole created Mobutu Sese Seko,” I said. This was a new theory to me.

“My family has been responsible for arresting the development of count-

less evil people,” the Killer said. “Our motto is ‘Crimes for Humanity.’”

He pulled his swizzle stick between his clamped lips, squeegeeing it dry.

“Without civilians to steer us in the proper direction, we’re a useless service. You ordered a Santosbrazzi Killer. Your subconscious is telling you that you know someone who should be killed. It is your duty to tell me the name of this person.”

I nodded understandingly, perhaps too understandingly. Because I’ll admit it—I was intrigued. The situation was a crazy one, yes, but not entirely unappealing. This was a checks-andbalances system, after all, that may have kept the burgeoning tide of hurtful human jerkiness to a bearable minimum for four hundred years.

I contemplatively jicked his ballpoint. It had a very nice action to it, what I liked to call “jickback.”

“I really think I need to sleep on this,” I said to the Killer.

He tugged at his mustache tips; clearly my indecision further contributed to his sense of a greater cultural decline.

“I can give you until tomorrow, 8 P.M.,” he said.

“I’d appreciate that,” I said.

“We’ll meet here,” he said, indicating this booth.

January 19. Friday.

I arrived at the subsidiary research outfit and inquired if there were a desk I might borrow. The receptionist put me at a centrally located conference table, assuming I’d be interested in the activities of the staff. I wasn’t. The night before I had amassed, on a piece of hotel stationery, a list of thirty names—none of which, worrisomely, possessed any real assholey resonance for me. Although I’d hated these people intensely at the time, I couldn’t access that hate from across a distance of years and decades. Maybe, too, my hate had been mediated by my own descent into quasi-assholedom. Life, the pure unceasing grind of it, can shear you into crueller shapes. That’s not an excuse. I’m just offering the observation that there’s an inevitable wear pattern necessitated by certain situations. The people in those situations are like the industrial carpet tiles

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at the front door of the office; they are more prone to abuse than those tiles protected, say, underneath the copy machine.

By 9:30 A.M. I’d rearranged my assholes in a series of interlocking circles drawn from the outermost perimeters of the page and working inward, some circles bigger than others, some circles swallowing whole circles inside of them. It was a Venn diagram of assholiness, spiraling out from a single core asshole. Who was this person? Who was the biggest asshole I knew? At lunchtime I ordered pizza for the staff and we all ate together, somewhat stiffly, in the break room. I excused everyone at 3:30; sensing a trap, no one left. As the sky darkened behind the plate-glass windows, I found myself staring at my Lucite clipboard, the chrome arm of which still pinioned the article on asshole poisoning. Suddenly, I felt that delicious telltale tightening in my viscera—maybe due to the abundance of slickery pizza and rat-pellet coffee I’d consumed, but I preferred to attribute the tightening to something more meaningful.

I returned to my hotel, eager to soak in my tub and read through the documents I’d compiled quickly before leaving—basically a few pages of Web printouts, a performance review I extracted from a locked filing cabinet, some damning emails from a certain ex—which I planned to organize in a folder and present to the Killer. The Killer would be bolstered by the knowledge that he was killing an exemplar of assholitude, and this would possibly lift him out of his career funk. Maybe I’d even invite him to The Point for some chili, and buy him a “What’s The Point?” mug on the condition that he enjoy it as a satirical gift, and not take the question it posed too seriously.

But when I unlocked my hotel room door, the Killer was already in my room, sitting in the velvet armchair and paging through The ’Natti.

I smelled beer.

“I’ve never read this before,” he said. “How ironic is that? I’ve lived here for twenty years and I’ve never read The ’Natti.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said.

“You’re not the intended demographic.”

“I didn’t even know we had Thaibo,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like I

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could be living anywhere. Do you mind?” He gestured toward my minibar.

The Killer helped himself to five small bottles of vodka and a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar.

He returned to the velvet armchair.

“I thought you didn’t drink,” I said.

He chugged two consecutive bottles.

“Vodka is a blunting elixir,” I warned.

“Good,” he said. “Today I hate my job.”

“Well then,” I said, “I have something to cheer you up.”

I pulled the folder out of my briefcase.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“My asshole.”

He accepted the folder and balanced it, unread, on the edge of a stupid coffee table that had a standing lamp coming up through the center.

“I don’t want to know about your asshole,” he said.

“But he’s a good one,” I said. “I’d wager you’ve rarely killed better.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “Our business relationship has changed.

You’re no longer my client.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because now you’re my job.”

“Me?” I said.

The Killer hamfisted another tiny bottle.

“Well, that’s ironic,” I began, “because . . .”

I couldn’t continue. Tremblykneed, I sat on the edge of my bed, which was covered by a bedspread scattered symmetrically with little white pompoms I could feel mushrooming beneath the thin gabardine seat of my pants. Many tangential thoughts and words (including mushrooming) competed for my attention, but amidst this head chaos, what most engulfed me was a slowburning siege of happy surprise. Yes. Happy. Surprise. I knew I was a jerk—I was, according to the folder, the most death-worthy jerk I knew—but I’d never realized I was considered by my peers to be such an exceptional one, influential enough to create a tyrant on the order of a Mobutu Sese Seko.

A person coughed outside my room, then knocked. The Killer kicked his chin doorward, giving me permission to answer.

It was the bartender, holding a cork tray.

“I found my dropper,” he said, smiling.

He set the tray on the desk and shook out a cloth napkin, which he draped over his forearm. He held the silver shaker parallel to his shoulder and vibrated it elegantly, then popped the cap and strained the contents into a martini glass.

“Your Vengeful Subsidiary,” he said. “I think you’ll find Hercules to be a memorable elixir.”

The bartender left.

“Cheers,” the Killer said, holding up his tiny vodka bottle.

“Cheers,” I said.

We drank in silence. I felt nervousness rise in my throat like a fist, but maybe it was just the numbing effect of the Hercules, which had a eucalpytusy taste. I pushed past my anxiety to my nobly efficient, asshole core. I’d planned to accept death as I’d accepted my recent demotion— with a sense of proud responsibility.

“So where do we do this?” I asked.

He pointed to the bathtub.

“In there. You can leave your clothes on.”

I stepped into the tub. The surface was grainy—apparently the chamber maid had Cometted it today when she’d made my bed. I wished that I could leave her a large tip.

“Go ahead and finish your drink.

I’m just going to get a few things ready out here.”

“Knock first,” I joked.

The Killer shut the door. I sat in the tub, sipping my Vengeful Subsidiary. I felt intoxicated by calm. I finished my drink and re-inflated the rubber headrest. I waited for the knock on the door. I waited to announce, gamely and bravely, “Come in.”

After an hour I had a leg cramp and my bottom was numb. I opened the bathroom door to find my hotel room empty, and a note written on hotel stationery, folded around a twenty. It said, “For the minibar.” To the side was the folder containing proof of my killability; on it the Killer had written, “Congratulations, you found the loophole.” Beneath an empty vodka bottle he’d secured a torn-out page of text explaining a Santosbrazzian bylaw wherein a person became ineligi-

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ble for killing if both he and another person selected him to be killed.

For further reading, it was uselessly suggested I consult the Double Indemnity Loophole of 1953, described on page 345.

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put the twenty in my wallet and left the hotel. I walked through a neighborhood that might be considered dangerous in another city but here seemed benignly abandoned by all life-forms. Multi-block-size lots had been cleared of old warehouses and filled with the beginnings of shopping centers, though in the dark these rebar skeletons appeared unpromisingly like the symbolic remains of a long-dead culture after a nuclear bomb has been dropped.

Without meaning to, I ended up at The Point. I ordered my usual chili and root beer and watched a news special about suicide bombers. A rogue academic meant to provide saucy counterpoint called suicide bombers “pioneers of change”; tenting his fingers, seated in an office chair before a wall of books, he accused Americans of losing their frontier abilities to take matters of injustice into their own hands, preferring instead to hide behind legal proceedings and governmentsponsored atrocities.

Next to me, a table of men booed the rogue academic and asked the bartender to change the channel.

Soon we were watching a hockey game, with no fights.

I finished every last noodle and purchased a “What’s The Point?” souvenir mug. I returned to the empty streets, not watching or caring where I was going. In a dark stretch of sidewalk lit by a single pinkish streetlamp, I collided tooth-knockingly with a fellow lone pedestrian.

“Sorry,” I offered.

“Asshole,” the pedestrian said.

He kept walking. I peered at his shambling, overcoated form.

“You’re right,” I called after him.

“I am an asshole.”

No response.

“I am an asshole,” I repeated. “You should kill me.”

He paused underneath the streetlamp, in the cone of pinkish light.

My shoulders and neck tensed. From

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within the streetlamp’s convex bulb cover came an erratic buzzing sound.

Jick. Jick-jick-jick-jick.

“There was a loophole,” I said to him. “I’m ineligible to be killed— some double indemnity crap—so the duty falls to you.”

“Duty,” he said.

“It’s your civilian duty to kill me and prevent the rise of a future Mobutu Sese Seko,” I said.

The man coughed. He scrabbled at his overcoat—for a knife, I hoped.

But no. From his pocket he pulled a mouse-sized oblong of Kleenex.

“Go kill yourself,” the man said, daubing at his nose. “I don’t have the energy.”

“But you could be a pioneer!”

I yelled.

The man kept walking.

As I watched his overcoat disappear in the gloom, I contemplated my own shortcomings in the pioneer department. When faced with the prospect of killing myself—as suggested, and as was shaping up to be the only option left to me—I found that I lacked conviction.

I lacked zeal. What I’d wanted was to be nobly executed, not to die. The world didn’t particularly need me dead.

Oddly, I found my shoulders detensing, as if the jicks from the shortedout streetlamp were little fingers kneading my stress away. To either side of me teetered the rebarred and generically portentous ruins of new buildings, and the unwritten motto of The ’Natti came back to me, as if from on high: “What’s So Bad About Here?” Here was a zeal-free place where people jicked your manufactured failures, sure, but otherwise left you to your Thai-bo. Here was where I, and all the assholes, belonged. With a dawn-cracking sense of hopefulness, I considered how easy it would be to buy a criminally cheap Craftsman bungalow and fulfill an old, vague publishing dream by getting a job at The ’Natti. My first order of business would be to change the unwritten motto. Where else but in Cincinnati, I’d intone during my interview, and when I said “Cincinnati” I’d make it clear, even though metaphor was dead, that “Cincinnati” was a stand-in for “America.” Where else but in Cincinnati could an asshole stand in the middle of such a prettily bombed city, begging to be killed, and be left so entirely alone? ■

January Index Sources 1 Harper’s research; 2 Enterprise Rent-A-Car (St. Louis); 3 National Institute of Standards and Technology (Gaithersburg, Md.); 4 Enron Corp. (Houston)/Halliburton (Houston); 5 The Presidential Appointee Initiative (Washington); 6 Center for Responsive Politics (Washington)/Harper’s research; 7 U.S. Government Printing Office; 8 Chevron Corporation (San Ramon, Calif.); 9,10 U.S. Government Accountability Office; 11 Judicial Watch, Inc. (Washington); 12 Anchorage Daily News; 13 Editions First (Paris); 14–16 Human Rights First (N.Y.C.)/American Civil Liberties Union (N.Y.C.); 17 U.S. Department of Homeland Security; 18 Federal Bureau of Investigation (Salt Lake City); 19 Transport Security Administration (N.Y.C.); 20 Gallup Poll (Princeton, N.J.); 21 First Amendment Center (Nashville); 22 Integer Group (Denver); 23 Washington Post; 24 Jeffrey Roitman, Research Medical Center (Kansas City, Mo.); 25 American Civil Liberties Union (N.Y.C.); 26 Neil Kinkopf, Georgia State University (Atlanta); 27,28 Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington); 29 Harper’s research; 30 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (Washington); 31 Sony Corporation (Tokyo); 32,33 Jonathan Finer (Washington); 34,35 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Baltimore); 36 U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (Geneva)/U.N. Statistics Division (N.Y.C.); 37 ABC News (N.Y.C.); 38 Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. (Washington); 39 Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (Silver Spring, Md.); 40 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; 41 Center for American Progress (Washington); 42 U.S. Army Recruiting Command (Fort Knox, Ky.); 43 Scott McClellan, White House Press Office; 44 Harper’s research; 45 U.S. Office of Management and Budget; 46 Mark McKinnon (Austin, Tex.); 47 Mark McKinnon (Austin, Tex.)/Harper’s research; 48 Mark Knoller (Washington); 49 Harper’s research; 50 U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (Geneva); 51 Human Rights First (Washington); 52 Reprieve (London); 53 USA Today (McLean, Va.); 54,55 Parents Television Council (Los Angeles); 56 Citizenship and Immigration (Ottawa); 57 Harper’s research; 58 Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc. (N.Y.C.); 59 Raba Technologies, LLC. (Columbia, Md.); 60,61 Andrew Gelman, Columbia University (N.Y.C.); 62 Emmanuel Saez, University of California, Berkeley; 63 U.S. Census Bureau (Suitland, Md.); 64 Hewitt Associates (Lincolnshire, Ill.); 65 Economic Policy Institute (Washington); 66,67 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Rockville, Md.); 68,69 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Rockville, Md.); 70 U.S. Department of Justice; 71,72 Donald Shields, University of Missouri, Kansas City; 73,74 U.S. Department of Justice; 75 American National Biography (N.Y.C.); 76 Impeach PAC (Washington); 77 USASpending.gov (Washington); 78 Union of Concerned Scientists (Cambridge, Mass.); 79 Harris Interactive (Rochester, N.Y.); 80,81 Center for Biological Diversity (Portland, Ore.); 82 Harper’s research; 83 Southern Pines Electric Power Association (Taylorsville, Miss.); 84 U.S. Department of Defense, Northern Command (Peterson, Colo.); 85 Mississippi Development Authority (Jackson); 86 Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (Baton Rouge)/Mississippi Department of Health (Jackson); 87 American Name Society (Bellevue, Neb.); 88 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta); 89,90 New York Times; 91,92 Morningstar, Inc. (Chicago); 93 National September 11 Memorial and Museum (N.Y.C.); 94 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (Chicago); 95 U.S. Department of State; 96 Harper’s research; 97 Harper’s research; 98,99 U.S. Marine Corps Public Affairs (Baghdad); 100 Joint Economic Committee (Washington)/U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; 101 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University (N.Y.C.)/Linda J. Bilmes, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.); 102,103 Veronique de Rugy, George Mason University (Fairfax, Va.); 104,105 Paul Light, New York University (N.Y.C.); 106,107 Office of Management and Budget Watch (Washington); 108 U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; 109 National Education Association (Washington); 110 Nielsen BookScan (White Plains, N.Y.); 111 First American CoreLogic (Sacramento, Calif.); 112,113 Goldman Sachs (N.Y.C.)/Harper’s research; 114 White House Press Office; 115 Books In Print (New Providence, N.J.); 116 Harper’s research; 117,118 Harper’s research; 119 Harper’s research; 120 Harper’s research; 121,122 Gallup Poll (Washington); 123 All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center (Moscow).

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JOHN LEONARD (1939–2008)

he year 2003 had barely begun when I was told that I would be working with John Leonard, who at that point had written three New Books columns for this magazine. I was twenty-five years old, and had just started to edit the Reviews section; John was sixtythree, and had been doing what he was doing, reading books and writing about them, for a lifetime.

If I were to describe our first month together through the gauzy haze of nostalgia, John would no doubt accuse me of indulging in the kind of sentimental flimflam that occasionally gets the best of our better selves. Back then I knew John only through his work, the multitude of pieces he had written for the New York Times, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books, and so I was familiar already with the ardor of his enthusiasms and the exuberance of his prose. Still, I had the young editor’s tendency to err on the far side of caution. My queries to John weren’t many, but their phrasing was that of someone who had never met a hair she wouldn’t split yet was shy about wielding the knife. I recently opened up the Microsoft Word document on which we did most of our edits for that column, last saved at 8:22 P.M. on February 11, 2003, and I saw a bold-faced query of mine after John’s reference to “a techno-rave, ZyloFlex body armor, and some stun-gun sex.” I had

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bolded “stun-gun sex” and added, “John: Just to clarify: Is ‘stun-gun’ meant metaphorically here?”

No, it most emphatically wasn’t.

John was describing the “minor hurdles” faced by the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, and indeed there it was, on page 114 of DeLillo’s novel, like the stage directions of an avantgarde play or the beginning of some cosmic joke: A man, a woman, and a stun gun are in bed. It was the kind of detail John savored, the surprises offered up by the worlds within his books. He was both champion and channeler, the medium through which these worlds would first be revealed to us, his readers, in all their glorious strangeness. Here he is, writing about Philip K. Dick: “That’s the problem with having intuited so early on that objective reality is a scam; that we are surrounded by simulacra, lied to by robots, programmed by aliens, or maybe semi-dead already, a box of cryogenic popsicles. After five bad marriages, who knows who you are?” And here he is again, writing about a new novel by John Updike: “I miss Rabbit, don’t you? Tired meat and moist cheese, he exploded from too much consumption of hydrocarbons, carbohydrates, cheap sensations, and disposable ideas.”

There were a few fellow critics— there always are—who simply didn’t get it. The rollicking, multi-clausal exhilaration that was an element of

Discarded Treasures (detail), by John Frederick Peto © Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund. SC 1939:4

John’s style didn’t please the schoolmarms who wanted their lit crit as prim and proper as the quiet student with his hand raised in the front row.

What they missed, and I pity them for it, was how John’s writing, his eagerness for more, reflected not only a way of reading but a way of living, too. A month or two after we started working together he learned that the lung cancer he thought was gone had, in fact, returned. My first response was to offer him a reprieve, so he could acclimate himself to his treatment, the chemotherapy he would be getting every Wednesday morning from then on. But John would have none of that.

He continued to file his copy every month, on time. He never missed a deadline in the sixty-nine months that I worked with him. He once described his schedule to me: Mondays, he would file the television column he wrote for New York; Tuesdays, he would read; Wednesdays, he had chemo, after which he was so exhausted he would spend the rest of the day with the TV clicker in hand, watching screeners; and then the next day he would be ready to return to his world of books.

When John’s stepdaughter called me on Thursday, November 6, to tell me John had died the night before, she was saying the words I had feared, dreaded, for nearly six years. But I still wasn’t ready. I had seen John that Saturday.

His wife, Sue, was celebrating her birthday, and friends and family had gathered at the Leonard house, almost every wall of its four stories lined, as they had to be, with books. John was sitting in the corner of a sofa, a light-blue cardigan covering his shoulders, and he told me about the books he was planning to include in his column for this issue. One about Vesuvius, another about Naples —they were stacked up on the end table beside him. He looked frail, but I had seen him frail before. And the avidity with which he talked about those books, and about Sue, and about the forthcoming election, was that of someone who had much more to do. John lived as he read and read as he lived; I don’t think he would have seen a distinction between the two.

—Jennifer Szalai

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GO FORTH AND FALSIFY Katherine Anne Porter and the lies of art

By William H. Gass Discussed in this essay:

Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, by Joan Givner. University of Georgia Press. 576 pages. $32.95 (paper).

Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, by Darlene Harbour Unrue. University Press of Mississippi. 381 pages. $35.

Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue. Library of America. 1,093 pages. $40. atherine Anne Porter’s reported life was made of myths, most of them planted by Porter herself, and many meant to improve her humble beginnings, refigure the course of her early years, and conceal the existence of her numerous marriages and frequent affairs. Of people fleeing their origins, some are inclined to brag about them afterward, proud of the distance they’ve come, while a few are so indifferent to the past they manage to recall only what is routinely demanded by official documents. That leaves those who are still ashamed or hateful of their history, desperate to deny it, and prepared to rub it out if they can.

You ought to remember the past rather clearly if you are going to lie your way out of its existence, but you also have to be able to enter your new history so completely that it replaces the truth even in your own mind. Katherine Anne Porter had no actual memories of her mother or of life in tiny Indian Creek, Texas, where she had been born in 1890, so she imagined some, and then discovered them again when

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William H. Gass is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author, most recently, of A Temple of Texts.

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she searched her past, as if finding gold ore shining in the water of the stream where it’s been planted.

Moreover, when you falsify your own life, you can later be open and generous in your account of it, draw upon it for any fiction you may write, confident that your real self’s safety will be assured. You can even second Madame Du Barry’s challenging brag, as Porter did: “My life has been incredible. I don’t believe a word of it.” Eventually,

however, the curious, and any others who care, will grow skeptical, believe only the worst because they assume only the worst would be concealed, and—the unfortunate consequence often is—they will not mind, after so much misleading, if they mistake a truth for a lie the next time, or even every time.

Through photographs and other evidence, Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter’s 1982 biographer, demonstrates that most of the settings for Porter’s reenactment of her life’s rites of passage in “The Old Order” were actually supplied by memories of a sojourn in Bermuda when Porter was thirty-nine, despite the author’s claim that they were captured from her childhood. How it ought to have been quietly overtook how it was. Thomas F. Walsh, in his essay “The Making of ‘Flowering Judas,’” unweaves the many threads that have gone into this masterful story’s composition, disproving Porter’s claim that “my fiction is reportage, only I do something to it; I arrange it and it is fiction, but it happened.” “Flowering Judas” is based on events that actually occurred, all right, but her rearrangements were so radical that even she could not remember, in her frequent accounts of the story’s composition, which ones she had previously claimed to be facts and which ones were fictions. Although Porter’s fiction is notably lucid on the page, her life history is a biographer’s nightmare, full of false connections and alleged events, and blank about substantial passages of time, as if they had happened during intermission and were never a part of the play. fter her mother’s death, Porter was raised by weak men and many women in the household of her paternal grandmother, whom everyone called Cat, not because of any special grace or caution but because it shortened “Catharine” by two thirds and cauterized its odd spelling. Cat was

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Illustration by Joseph Adolphe

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a dominating figure, by her granddaughter’s account, and ruled her household with a Calvinist’s severe self-righteous hand. In 1892 it was more than a brief toddle from Indian Creek to Cat’s farm near the Texas town of Kyle, one hundred miles away, but in terms of a child’s escape from the short street that a small town can seem to be, the move widened the world by at least two roads.

The five hundred people there, with their local Protestant ways, were Katherine Anne Porter’s first teachers, and they supported a school where she received, from age six to twelve, the little formal education her circumstances allowed. Townsfolk went about their business in full view of her wide eyes. They also regularly read from the Good Book, in which one could be warned of serious threats to the safety of one’s soul, enjoy instructive allegorical stories, and encounter great prose. School primers taught virtue and obedience, nearly every page gleamed with moral varnish, while figures like Joan of Arc and Cotton Mather provided stirring examples of the prowess possible for women, and the merciless hatred some men had for them. From her grandmother she learned manners and had the fear of God “systematically ground . . . into [her] tender bones.”

Loose family ties and impoverishment compelled Cat to offer free room and board, in the guise of hiring governesses, to a Miss Babb and Miss Mudd, from whom Katherine learned spanking and calisthenics.

According to Darlene Harbour Unrue’s 2005 biography, Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist, Grandmother and her dependents provided Porter with a loving, watchful, closely guarded yet colorful environment, stocked with what would later prove to be a useful cast of characters: a former slave, Masella Daney, who remained a household helper; Daney’s husband (an ironically named Squire Bunton), who lived near and rode by regularly on a mule named Aunt Fanny; as well as a couple of hired hands, one of whom was a morphine addict whereas the other (Old Man Ronk) became the model for Olaf Helton in “Noon Wine.” Cat finally completed this list with “a long procession of dreadful old women, of a most awful gentility, who consented to act as a sort of upper

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house keeper and companion and general nuisance, who merely took it out by gritting their teeth at us and wishing, in low voices when no one else was by, that they could blister our skins for being such bad children.”

Young ears must have been captivated by the ubiquitous voices of Southern storytellers, leaning back in stiff chairs against the hardware store’s porch wall, shaded, certainly, from the sun, a length of straw caught like a savory cliché between tongue and teeth, droning on of Chancellorsville or Lee at this ford or that railhead, Jackson charging through a stand of trees, repeating the feats and foibles of relatives whose odd mien and strange ways were usually instructive and always engrossing. These figures were connected by a verbal chain of recollection that reached at least to the moment when some fabulous ancestor’s feet had first hit the turf in the New World.

To sustain interest in its story, every family had to have an ancestral secret that was kept as zealously as a shrine for Mother Mary; and we should add, to all the customary local wash, the buckets of bravado and romance that kept white the Southern dream, each tale’s tallness teaching how the laws that govern the truth might be repealed.

Typically, these were the sort of stories that Porter’s grandmother maneuvered with considerable style through occasions of former opulence and ease— gowns and balls and beaus and canapés—that made Porter “hunger for fine clothes and other comforts of wealth.” In 1962, after Ship of Fools became a bestseller, she bought herself an enormous square-cut emerald surrounded by diamonds, a ring larger than the one she had invented for La Condesa to wear in the novel, and an imprudent purchase at 20,000 bucks. t has always seemed to me that the storyteller’s social assignment, which furnished the origins and directed the development of narrative, was to glorify the past and its daring deeds, protect the family tree, justify male ownership of land, women, and personal property, direct and legitimize the passing of power from father to rightful heir, one generation to the next. Oral histories helped unite communities, extol their chiefs, and define

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the various rites and ceremonies pertaining. No wonder their tales tended to be about male gods and their heroic human counterparts. Nowadays this history is a weakening string of memories, but at one time the bard’s recital was the main conduit of authority, making sense of the past, fostering acceptance, and focusing pride—whether true or false or fabled mattered only to outsiders. Old anecdotes gave present circumstances heft, scope, interest, and instruction. In so many ways you were your forebearers, and the storyteller taught you whom to hate or emulate, what to aspire to, and, like the Bible, what to believe, how to behave.

Every society, every religion, every nation-state and ethnic enclave, appears eager to employ such historical myths, or first fictions, in their manipulation of the masses. Certainly narratives need not take the novel’s form to be effective; in fact, serious novels now seem more likely to undermine them.

For many Southern writers these romantic sagas were acceptable, and they were eager to protect the honor, habits, and basic creeds of their culture, although a lacquer of criticism contributed to the glow of objectivity.

Katherine Anne Porter was sawn in two, and not by a magician. She despised the actual family system and its methods of operation: its smugly narrow, stupid views with which it infected its children; its monarchy of men, their posturing and pomposity; its stifling so-called moral grip; its hypocrisy concerning women—courting them like queens, breeding them like sows.

If a man were not the ruler of a kingdom, even not the owner of all he could survey, at least he was the master of his own household, made the main decisions, chastised deviation, doled out the dough, did the deep thinking, got all the mail. Katherine Anne Porter knew this system was based on a lot of poisonous pish tosh: she had seen how weak her father was, how his mother ran the house; yet all the essential perks were still his.

Daughters were to be taught householdry and how to be well-married, if possible; if not, as old maids they could sew in a corner and care for the sick.

Porter passed much of her adolescent years in a series of convent schools that were so eager to snatch a young

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Protestant from Luther’s hands they would waive tuition, a generosity that her father found irresistible. Such schooling also made her more acceptable to a nineteen-year-old suitor with wealthy parents named John Koontz, whose Catholicism could not dampen his desire for drink or lessen his pleasure in abuse. Porter’s marriage to this stalwart lasted nine invisible years, most of them miserable, though it removed her from her relatives, gave her a noticeable social upgrade, and took her to a somewhat larger mildly industrial town named Lufkin. This new location often allowed her to ride on the family’s ranch nearby and feel how it was to have a mighty force between her knees.

According to Unrue, the couple’s eventual divorce yielded a deposition from the husband: “Nine years after the wedding he admitted that from the beginning of their union he was frequently guilty of adultery, extreme intoxication, vile name-calling, and physical attacks that resulted in Katherine Anne’s broken bones and lacerations.”

The charges may have been rather starved for substance, but Porter enjoyed a harvest of grievances all the same. The pair moved often but packed their problems with their pajamas. On one occasion, husband threw wife down a flight of stairs, “breaking her right ankle and severely injuring her knee.”

On another, he beat her unconscious with a hairbrush. The view one has of men and marriage from the foot of such a fall, or from an instrument that should only pursue fashion or caresses, tends to be as permanent as Adam’s; nevertheless, Porter tried to save her marriage by converting to Catholicism, a move I find mystifying, though I was never consulted. Largely, what it meant was a redirection in her reading habits and the discovery of new authors—always a plus—while the Church’s rituals encouraged her to ponder the impact of belief upon behavior and to appreciate the role of symbols in the imagination.

She also learned, as she began to write, how things grow more real when they are put into words, because without storytelling the past would pale beyond even the pale of paper. The fattest, most familiar story of all is the one we tell ourselves about ourselves, repeatedly, as if before bed, as a daily comfort or admonition, throughout our lives.

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hen Joan Givner wrote her Katherine Anne Porter: A Life in 1982, her subject had four husbands (Porter customarily claimed there were three), but when the editor of this Library of America collection (Collected Stories and Other Writings), Darlene Harbour Unrue, published her biography of Porter in 2005, the marriage list had swollen to five, none of them Givner’s early candidate, Ernest Stock, the handsome former member of the British Royal Flying Corps, with whom—it turns out—Porter had only “a relationship.” I suspect that, for appearances, affairs might have been called marriages sometimes and, for convenience, marriages said to be affairs, until who knew what the situation was, and who would any longer care?

Unrue discovered that after Porter’s marriage to Koontz in 1915 she wed H. Otto Taskett, a handsome Englishman who lasted the length of a sentence, though, as a fiction, he received many more in Ship of Fools, as did all of her husbands. Subsequently, in 1917, someone named Carl von Pless blew through Porter’s life like a prairie wind.

Despite what previous biographers believed, she did not marry Stock in 1926; she simply spent a summer with him in a rented house. Now and then a year would have more than one summer.

After this one, Porter had gonorrhea.

Then, from 1933 to ’38, following a lengthy and rocky liaison, she was married to someone as short as she was.

This was Eugene Pressly, a young fellow from the Institute of Current World Affairs in Mexico City and later of American oil interests in Venezuela.

He was her devoted companion on the sea voyage from Vera Cruz to Bremen that became the setting for Ship of Fools, and he would travel with her, over the next seven years, to Berlin, Paris, and New York before disappearing over the horizon en route to Venezuela.

Porter’s final bet for wedded bliss was Albert Erskine, a young graduate student who had followed Robert Penn Warren from Memphis to Louisiana State University’s English department.

He was another “handsome young man,” this time of twenty-seven, who was bewitched by her beauty, sophistication, and charm, with a background in literature that enabled him to appreciate fully the corresponding charm,

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sophistication, and beauty of her work.

As the brief life of this marriage wore on, the charm was perhaps the first to go, Porter’s sophistication was admitted to be forty-eight years of maturity instead, and her beauty quite a bad habit. To get rid of her husband, and divorce him as a favor, since he was eager to marry another woman, she established a residence in Reno.

The trouble with the men Porter married was that they were still men.

She had fabulous legs suitors would insist she be proud of, the voice of a seductress, a figure that drew looks, so that men, their private part plump, would fawn and favor her; and what was more important, inadvertently make possible a fuller, freer realization of her talents and her dreams. But she often had to marry them to take the next step up, to relish the security their money and station could confer, or enjoy the acceptance society gave to such arrangements; except that when tread upon these “partners” grew sullen and unruly, wanted the pleasures of her body without giving any pleasure in exchange, so that, when refused, their passions grew petulant, their entreaties tiresome, their presence wearying.

Beauty did not make Porter proud; it made her vain; and these repeated romantic misadventures sapped her emotional energy. Perhaps they were the reason why she was a frequent procrastinator and stingy with her work.

Daily life can be taxing, running around on the road can give any head and heart the dizzies, and the dizzies can cause you to sink onto strange sofas.

Inconsistencies are bad assets, and Porter had her share: she was at once cold and promiscuous, romantic and calculating; she sought both solitude and society, thus the emotional space necessary for composition, and the excuses to avoid it. Although very aware of pregnancy’s dangers to her health, to her way of life as well as the prospective child’s, Porter longed to be a mother.

In consequence, she suffered miscarriages, required abortions, and “lost children in all the ways one could.”

Porter knew what it was to be poor, but she nevertheless regularly lived beyond her means. She flirted with religion but was too intelligent to commit. She deplored her humble origins, said she disliked the South, yet she

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longed to put down roots, and was fascinated by the myths that glorified her region. In spite of that she fled every place that offered itself in order to live like a gypsy. In her day Marxists were the most relentless of the political bores, and I feel it is to her considerable credit that no -ism or -ology could tempt her, no fashionable jargon lead her into obfuscation, or fad of intellect seduce. Porter supported liberal causes, both in print and on the street, and was vigorous in her denunciation of fascism while demonstrating a mistrust of minorities that was thoroughly Southern and deeper than a streak.

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.O. Matthiessen observed, as early as 1945, that Miss Porter (as she was then addressed) had a â&#x20AC;&#x153;high reputation among nearly all schools of criticsâ&#x20AC;? and was regarded as â&#x20AC;&#x153;a writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s writer,â&#x20AC;? by which he meant that other authors could learn much from her consummate craftsmanship.

Although Porter was thirty-two when she published her first story, â&#x20AC;&#x153;MarĂ­a ConcepciĂłn,â&#x20AC;? her signature style was in place and more assured in its use than she had come to be in her life.

Her sensuous yet hard-eyed prose would never need improvement and would be flexible enough in tone (ranging from the famous impersonality of â&#x20AC;&#x153;MarĂ­aâ&#x20AC;? to the witty sarcasm of â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Wooden Umbrellaâ&#x20AC;? and the revulsion of â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Leaning Towerâ&#x20AC;?) to accomplish whatever effect she required.

Matthiessen feared such praise might be taken to mean that her work was arty and esoteric. (I would add to those adjectives the words â&#x20AC;&#x153;fancyâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;frilly,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;manneredâ&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;difficult.â&#x20AC;?) When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style, it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope, since they are presumably eager to find out what happens next or what fresh disclosure will yield surprise. So they are happily immersed in the account, lose all touch with mere words, and feel as if they were present when Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arcy does this or Miranda that, or when the mangy dog chases the cat. Porter herself, who sometimes knew better, compliments Thomas Hardy on his ability to put her in his chosen place and let her see. She should have said and let me read.

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In the same year and season that Matthiessen published his little piece in Accent, Gertrude Buckman wrote this about “The Leaning Tower” for the Partisan Review: “It has for a long time been apparent that Katherine Anne Porter consistently writes a luminous prose, of an exactness of choice and suggestiveness of phrasing, which is altogether extraordinary. Miss Porter’s work has probably been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that most writers hardly dare to hope for, rarely achieve, and can almost never withstand. That Miss Porter can bear such careful reading proves her much more than simply an excellent stylist.” This praise is well meant, but it is also withdrawn as quickly as it is offered. For most critics, the presence of “style” requires assurance that there is also “substance.” Style is wrapping paper and ribbon, scented tag and loving inscription. If you are careful, the tissue can be reused for a birthday or another Christmas. My aunt ironed such paper as she fancied and stored it like linen napkins in folded flat stacks beneath her bed.

Style, I should like to protest, is the result of that “exactness of choice” that Porter exhibits. Whether unconsciously or by intent, the writer chooses subjects, adopts a tone, considers an order for the release of meaning, arrives at the rhythm, selects a series of appropriate sounds, determines the diction and measures the pace, turns the referents of certain words into symbols, establishes connections with companionable paragraphs, sizes up each sentence’s intended significance, and, if granted good fortune because each decision might have been otherwise, achieves not just this or that bit of luminosity or suggestiveness but her own unique lines of language, lines that produce the desired restitution of the self.

You cannot miss the rhetorical beat of passages such as this one from “The Leaning Tower” of 1941 that buries the reader under shovelfuls of scorn.

Charles Upton, the principal character, is taking a walk, looking for a lodging, on his sixth day as a newcomer to Berlin: He would wander on, and the thicker the crowd in which he found himself, the more alien he felt himself to be. He had watched a group of middle-aged

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men and women who were gathered in silence before two adjoining windows, gazing silently at displays of toy pigs and sugar pigs. These persons were all strangely of a kind, and strangely the most prevalent type. The streets were full of them—enormous waddling women with short legs and ill-humored faces and round-headed men with great rolls of fat across the backs of their necks, who seemed to support their swollen bellies with an effort that drew their shoulders forward.

It might seem sad enough to be so described, but the feeling is still, though dismayed, detached. The next paragraph plays rough. These depicted people are window-shopping, but the windows are both mocking and reflecting them.

In one window there were sausages, hams, bacon, small pink chops; all pig, real pig, fresh, smoked, salted, baked, roasted, pickled, spiced, and jellied. In the other were dainty artificial pigs, almond paste pigs, pink sugar chops, chocolate sausages, tiny hams and bacons of melting cream streaked and colored to the very life. Among the tinsel and lace paper, at the back were still other kinds of pigs: plush pigs, black velvet pigs, spotted cotton pigs, metal and wooden mechanical pigs, all with frolicsome curled tails and appealing infant faces.

The expelling puffs required to cross the page over all those disgusting pees, the alternation among the vowels the pees accompany, the word “pig” itself, made of piss and gag, the feel of the tongue against the teeth while performing the doubled tees of “spotted cotton,” the marvelous march of the metaphor as it moves from examples of the real thing through sugary still eatable samples to reproductions in plush, then wood, and finally metal, and the mingled reflection in and through the glass of pig parts, pig-like imitations, and acquired pig-resembling forms and faces: they play together to create her style in this passage and prove her worth.

Any resonance beyond rhetoric to this passage? You bet. It takes the toil of butchers, bakers, gimcrack makers to provide the fare; shopkeepers’ time and money to acquire and arrange the space; an entire culture—for this is already a Nazified Germany—to collect

the crowd; and Porter to imagine a lonely American looking for his lodging in this coarse and gluttonous community. The scene is a construction, as all literary descriptions are, because an actual eye would sweep the scene in one look, then send attention here and there in a flick or three. Instead, we are given a summary in the guise of a moment, a habit in an instance, and a judgment meant for forever.

The sight of fat people apparently sharpened her pen. These two sentences from “Noon Wine” are famous. “He wasn’t exactly a fat man.

He was more like a man who had been fat recently.” moment ago I wrote, “to create her style . . . and prove her worth,” as if I were sure that proving her worth was at least one function for perfection to perform. I suspect Porter’s art had to be a form of salvation for her, but perhaps I am allowing my own attitudes to intrude the way my pack-ratty aunt scuffled into this text seven paragraphs ago. In the careful practice of the arts of prose, Porter could avoid mistakes, whereas in life she was invariably putting the wrong ring on the wrong finger. On the page she could wait until she and her skills were a match. In time she would learn her art from the kind of reading that teaches writing, and choose according to her lights, picking her mentors wisely—internationals such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, because Southern writers were treacherous guides and might lead you to the most dangerous monster of all: Faulkner’s all-swallowing world. The perfection of the work would hide the imperfections of the life. Then she could look at the past without either shame or guilt. There she would discover problems worthy of her and conquer them. Her life’s journey was in the company of a load of fools as well as the freight of friends, but she would board no friends and embark the fools to Bremen from Vera Cruz.

Although its author might have been characterized, at one time, as a loose base-born woman, her muchadmired style bore every mark of the aristocracy and had taken her to the White House of John F. Kennedy, where she had dined more than once.

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That style was neither very inventive nor exploratory, but it was precise about perception, adept at dialogue and scrupulous about dialect, rich in recollection, careful with abstractions, sensuous and frank though never coarse, otherwise always high-toned, never casual or breathless as if her vowels had been running.

Porter relaxed her standards somewhat when writing essays or doing reviews (which occupy a good half of the substantial Library of America volume), but Katherine Anne in an apron is still a wonderful cook. Her pieces on Edith Sitwell, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield are observant and generous pleasures; she roughs up a pompous T. S. Eliot in defense of Thomas Hardy, takes Lady Chatterley for a thoroughly deserved walk in the woods, and in “The Wooden Umbrella,” one of three pieces on Gertrude Stein, vents her spleen with admirable wit and accuracy. Who but Gertrude and Alice wouldn’t enjoy the following characterization? “Considering her tepid, sluggish nature, really sluggish like something eating its way through a leaf, Miss Stein could grow quite animated on the subject of her early family life, and some of her stories are as pretty and innocent as lizards running over tombstones on a hot day in Maryland.” Porter attacks Stein with considerable understanding. The difficulty for Porter is that her being somewhat right about Stein simply doesn’t matter.

At the end, Gertrude sits amid the wreckage of her furniture like a Roman senator undisturbed by his city’s scrumbled marble.

Porter is a discriminating and passionate critic, but she deals mostly with a work’s general effects and does not venture to bore her reader with the many small strokes that, when so many are completed, create the ultimate result. Unless she is reminiscing about an experience of her own. Then the lines are drawn like bowstrings. For instance, when Eliot reads in front of Joyce (and Porter) at Shakespeare and Company: “The poet before us had a face as severe as Dante’s, the eyes fiercely defensive, the mouth bitter, the nose grander and much higher bridged than his photographs then showed; the whole profile looked like a bird of prey of some sort. He might have been

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WASHINGTON

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BY KEN SILVERSTEIN

A weblog focused on political corruption in Washington, D.C. Updated several times a week with breaking news and political analysis Only at:

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alone, reading to himself aloud, not once did he glance at his listeners.”

Her own commentary can be eloquent—though executed with a bit of the shapelessness she is prepared to risk in an essay—when she remembers an anecdote about Tolstoy, which alleges the old man said, as mad as Lear, that he would tell the real story about women only from his coffin and only when he felt the shovelfuls falling on his face: It’s a marvelous picture. Tolstoy was merely roaring in the frenzy roused in him in face of his wife’s terrible, relentless adoration; her shameless fertility, her unbearable fidelity, the shocking series of jealous revenges she took upon him for his hardness of heart and wickedness to her, the whole mystery of her oppressive femaleness. He did not know the truth about women, not even about that one who was the curse of his life. He did not know the truth about himself. This is not surprising, for no one does know the truth, either about himself or about anyone else, and all recorded human acts and words are open testimony to our endless efforts to know each other, and our failure to do so.

Our ignorance is reassuring to Porter because the self she fears she is she hopes will remain unknowable to others, while the self she wishes she were takes its public place. Yet the self she regretted and the self she desired are actually states of the populous nation that a self is: cowgirl, coquette, cook, queen, artist, the disillusioned well-used lady, and the girl with a dream—a roaring, riotous, shrewd, and foolish community of loving and quarreling equals.

During a notable moment of scrutiny as she entered her thirty-eighth year, Katherine Anne Porter confessed, “When I was quite young I decided to set my limitations moderately. Maybe this was my mistake. For by setting my bounds, I find they are real things and have a way of closing upon me without my (conscious) consent.” Although O’Connor, Welty, and Porter obliged us by writing novels, it is for short stories they are generally remembered, in which more polish for small surfaces is routinely expected, whereas writers like Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Stein—well, they are moving mountains, and it doesn’t matter if they leave a small mess here and there like great chefs in ■ their kitchens. Does it?

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MAN OF NO NATION A Habsburg prince’s bid for Ukraine

By Nicholas Fraser Discussed in this essay:

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke, by Timothy Snyder.

Basic Books. 344 pages. $27.95. ot long ago, Ukrainians polled on behalf of a television show were asked to identify “The Greatest Ukrainian.”

Lenin, whose likeness once disfigured every Soviet-bloc square or railway station, finished in twentythird place, behind Nikolai Gogol, author of Dead Souls. Perhaps inevitably, a row broke out between supporters of Yaroslav the Wise, eleventh-century prince of Kievan Rus, who came first, and those of Stepan Bandera, leader of the resistance to both Nazi and Soviet rule, who was poisoned on orders from Moscow in 1959. The Bandera camp claimed that Prince Yaroslav, celebrated during the Soviet era as an acceptable (because long dead) specimen of Ukraine Man, had won by means of a last-minute surge in computerized phone-in votes. Angry Bandera supporters contacted the BBC, which had designed the format of the contest, to complain that their hero hadn’t received his rightful due.

One Ukrainian figure who wasn’t nominated was the man variously known as Archduke Wilhelm of Austria, Prince Wilhelm, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, and Wilhelm von Habsburg. Wilhelm died in Soviet captivity in 1948, after a varied career as a soldier, spy, and frequenter of cafés that would seem to offer the historian no more than a wealth of disconnected anecdotes. Wilhelm, however, wanted to be king of Ukraine, and he took this ambition seriously. For the author of The Red

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Nicholas Fraser is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. His last review, “Toujours Vichy,” appeared in the October 2006 issue.

Prince, a young American historian named Timothy Snyder who teaches at Yale, Wilhelm offers a way to reopen the half-lost story of the Habsburgs and to advance the notion that Europe might somehow have been spared the horrors of the last century. Snyder believes that far from being the anachronism they seemed to such historians as A.J.P. Taylor, who was writing sixty years ago, the Habsburgs offered—and continue to offer—the prospect of a different European future.

Snyder wrote an earlier book, The Reconstruction of Nations (2003), that unraveled the tangled identities of Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing through the Communist era to the present. Another book, Sketches From a Secret War (2005), artfully described the life of Henryk Józewski, a painter and set designer who became governor of the eastern Polish province of Volhynia and then became a spy, spending three years of his life in Communist jails. It would be easy to dismiss Józewski as a quixotic Pole engaged in desultory intelligence work and plotting to overthrow the Soviets; by the time Poland was pried from the Soviet Empire, he was entirely forgotten.

Wilhelm represents a different kind of heroism altogether, exhibiting what Snyder calls “true shamelessness” in pursuit of private pleasure, but the Bohemian and the Prince have much in common. Both believed passionately that the state shouldn’t seek to impose a cultural identity on its citizens, and both were prepared to risk their lives for

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the idea of pluralism. This makes them romantic heroes for our times as well as true Europeans. ilhelm was born in 1895 and brought up on an island in the Adriatic that is now part of Croatia. (Later, he would remind himself of the sea by having an anchor tattooed on his wrist, hidden by an Omega watch of the kind worn by James Bond.) When he visited anyone in Vienna, a bell was rung twice to announce his arrival, a privilege accorded only to archdukes and cardinals.

Born to rule over nations, Wilhelm was himself without nationality. He was sent to the life-threatening cadet school described by Robert Musil in The Confusions of Young Törless. Tall, blond, and svelte, Wilhelm was 358th in line to the English crown. He was also a member of the Habsburg Order of the Golden Fleece, until he was forced to resign as a consequence of scandalous behavior in low-life Paris.

Reading The Red Prince made me wish that the young Alec Guinness of Kind Hearts and Coronets would return to play not just Wilhelm in his successive incarnations but his deeply eccentric relatives too. Wilhelm’s father, Stefan, was a cousin of the Emperor Franz Josef, and Wilhelm’s mother, also a Habsburg, was a Tuscan princess.

An amateur painter of no great talent, Stefan was for a time in charge of the Habsburg Navy, and he was considered to be among the less myopic of the vast clan. He formulated the notion that Habsburgs, rather than fighting off nationalism, could co-opt its advocates. Habsburg heirs should offer themselves as kings and queens to those who wished to avail of their services, thereby appeasing them. Stefan determined that he and his family would start a new dynasty, and that he would become king of Poland.

No evidence exists that Stefan was taken excessively seriously by Poles (and, indeed, it doesn’t appear that Stefan met many Poles outside the posh families into which his sons and daughters would marry). Nonetheless, his fantasies were taken seriously by the Habsburgs.

While his father married off siblings in order to create a Polish dynasty, Wilhelm looked even farther east. Because

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no Habsburg had ever ruled there and because it seemed romantic, he wanted to be king of Ukraine, proposing to extend the influence of the Habsburgs eastward and thus create a populist Mitteleuropa version of the dynasty that had claimed to rule by divine right for so many centuries. At the age of seventeen, Wilhelm traveled incognito to the Carpathian Mountains. He wanted to see for himself what the Poles characterized as the “bandit nation.”

The wild Ukraine that he found, with its green pines and sturdily resource-

Photograph of Archduke Wilhelm (detail) from the collection of Vasyl Stets (UGCC), Ternopil, Ukraine. Courtesy Svyatoslav Lypovetskyj

ful hunters, delighted him, and his identification with Ukraine was secured when he commanded a platoon of Ukrainians in 1915. Whereas his ancestors had dressed up in the elaborate fancy costumes of feathers and goldbraided tunics, Wilhelm took to wearing a Ukrainian embroidered shirt under his uniform. He adopted the name Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, the latter being the Ukrainian word for “embroidery.” Wilhelm’s men were encouraged to wear azure-and-yellow armbands, the Ukrainian national colors. This infuriated the Poles, who came to regard Wilhelm as a dangerous socialist subversive, calling him “The Red Prince.”

Ukraine was divided between Habsburg Galicia in the west and an eastern portion, including Kiev, that was part of the Russian empire; the collapse of tsarist Russia and the revolution in 1917 appeared to give the Habsburgs the opportunity to control a new country. Franz Josef’s successor, Karl, placed his cousin in charge of the Battle Group Archduke Wilhelm (comprising old men and boys), sending him to Odessa.

Arriving in the Cossack homeland, Wilhelm found his people. He began to “Ukrainize” the country, spreading the message of national liberation. His men spent much of their time writing and performing consciousness-raising plays.

Wilhelm, as befitted a Catholic and a prince, was a passionate anti-Bolshevik, but he believed that a country as poor as Ukraine should have more equality.

Now that Russia was out of the war, the idea of a Ukrainian National Republic didn’t seem foolish. The Habsburgs believed that a unified Ukraine could be an ally of their empire, after which it would be absorbed as a principality, and Wilhelm was the natural Habsburg candidate for the job. The Germans, however, had their own dictator capable of keeping the natives quiet, and Berlin complained to Emperor Karl, who was obliged to recall his cousin. Nevertheless, within a year, Germany and Austria had lost the war, and things were different. At the 1919 peace conference, no one was interested in Ukraine; monarchs, actual or prospective, were out of fashion. “I only saw a Ukrainian once,” recalled Lloyd George. “It is the last Ukrainian I have seen, and I am not sure that I want to see any more.” By 1921, the country

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was once again partitioned, this time between an insecure, chauvinistic Poland and a vengeful Soviet Union.

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ther Habsburgs—including Princess Zita, the mother of Wilhelm’s cousin Otto—had attempted to reclaim Mitteleuropa for the dynasty, but they weren’t successful.

Royals of the early bourgeois age had a soft spot for peasants, and Wilhelm’s infatuation with Cossack manliness could be seen as a campy equivalent of Queen Victoria’s interest in Highlanders. Wilhelm, however, persisted in his ambition. Broke, an exile in republican Vienna and Bavaria, he drifted into the shadowy world of royalist conspiracies. He started a newspaper that bore as its slogan “Ukrainians of all lands, unite!” and a masthead featuring a Ukrainian worker with a hammer and sickle. Wilhelm offered himself as the only man capable of reversing the tide of Bolshevism. He enlisted the help of the most dubious partners, including syndicates of extreme right-wing German nationalists, to whom he proposed shares in the trade of the yet-to-be nation in return for the cash required to install himself. His first effort, in 1924, was foiled by an anti-monarchist movement, which organized its own effort to topple Stalin. Predictably, this rival movement was a failure, resulting in a massacre of Ukrainians.

But Wilhelm was undaunted, and a second fund-raising round, organized from Paris in 1934, led him to make the most bizarre miscalculation of his career. Although Wilhelm enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes and visited male brothels in Paris, sometimes in the company of his valet (a police report stated that Wilhelm frequented “assiduously” establishments on the Left Bank with Arabic names), he appears also to have acquired a mistress.

In 1934, Paulette Couyba involved Wilhelm in an elaborate scam. She told him that she had organized a dinner featuring potential donors Maurice de Rothschild and Henri Deterding, the oil tycoon. Instead she invited the Pernod magnate Henri Hémard, to whom she offered a postdated check in return for 400,000 francs. Paulette’s check was a dud, but she was able to persuade the police that the fraud was Wilhelm’s idea. Snyder’s account of

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the courtroom proceedings gives some idea of his gifts as a storyteller: Paulette recounted her version of events, in her own particular style. She was in love. She was a poor naïve Frenchwoman. She was no match for the wiles of the handsome Habsburg prince. She had not known what she was doing, and whatever it was, she had done it for her man. She gave him all of the money, except for that small part that she needed for the care of her elderly mother. She had to have hundred-franc notes at the ready so that he could pay sailors for sex.

This, of course, had broken her heart.

To escape prosecution, Wilhelm fled Paris, leaving behind even his beloved cat. And it seems that Paulette, having precipitated the near ruin of Wilhelm, was still in love with him. A year later, she disguised herself and adopted another name, attempting to follow her prince to Vienna. ushioned by payments from wellwishers, Wilhelm would live at a remove from the catastrophes of the time. There is no account in Snyder’s otherwise meticulous narrative of what Wilhelm thought of the horrifying Ukraine famine of 1932–33, brought on by the Stalinist policy of collectivization. (Much of what we know about Wilhelm comes from the transcript of his interrogation by the Soviets in 1948, when he was ill with pneumonia and probably wanted to paint himself in the simplest, most heroic terms before he died.) Not much is said about Wilhelm’s surrender to the antiSemitism prevalent in interwar Vienna.

Like most Habsburgs, Wilhelm had enjoyed the company of Jews, but after fleeing Paris he would dump longtime Jewish associates and seek the company of such Nazi sympathizers as the Ukrainian nationalist Ivan PoltavetsOstrianytsia. While Hitler’s goons stole Jewish property, Wilhelm was to be seen on the ski slopes, in the company of many elegant companions. Wilhelm felt, mistakenly, that the Nazis might help in his quest for the throne, and his brown moment appears to have been motivated in part by spite toward his relatives. Although the Nazis treated him as a useful idiot, he joined them in repudiating his cousin Otto.

Against all expectations, however, Wilhelm appears to have decided

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that his days as a would-be king were over. Appalled by German and Russian atrocities, he became a supporter of the Allies, and in 1943 he began to spy, probably first for the British, then later for the French. He proved to be an excellent agent, prepared to risk his life. His royalist contacts were useful, as more and more Ukrainians were swept into Vienna as a consequence of the German retreat. Many of them had worked with the Nazis in the hope that Hitler would give them the homeland they desired, and they possessed information about the Nazi war machine. But he was less lucky when spying on the Soviets in the postwar Vienna made familiar by the movie The Third Man. On August 26, 1947, Wilhelm was arrested at the Südbahnhof by Soviet soldiers wearing red armbands and taken away. Interrogated, he told and retold his story. Finally, Snyder tells us, he reached Kiev “wearing a blindfold instead of a crown and was borne to a dungeon rather than a throne.” A Soviet tribunal found him guilty of wanting to be king of Ukraine, leading the Free Cossacks in 1921, and serving both British and French intelligence. Sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, he died six days later and was buried anonymously.

are unreliable, though this seems an excessively complicated way of making the point.

People were freer within the Habsburg lands than they were later, under Stalinism and Hitler’s occupation. But Snyder wants to go further, suggesting that the Habsburg empire, which “lasted long and might have lasted longer,” wasn’t doomed. This can be accepted only if one concludes that the Habsburgs knew what they were doing when they shuffled around constitutional arrangements, creating or abolishing parliaments in an effort to contain the demands made by Czech, Hungarian, German, and Balkan nationalists. Snyder tells us that the Habsburgs “did love” their ungrateful subjects, a love that “was cosmopolitan, indiscriminate, selfish, unreflective, and thus in some sense perfect.” The adjectives can certainly be applied to poor Wilhelm, but it is not clear who or what he ever loved, except for the prospect of himself as king of Ukraine. Perfection is not a quality easily found in any of the characters in this enthralling book. Indeed, by Snyder’s own account, Wilhelm became a better human being when he realized that he could never be a Habsburg king, only a lowly pilgrim in search of an end to injustice in a brutal, imperfect world.

nyder’s account of the various episodes in Wilhelm’s life is ornately rendered in a series of tableaux, each chapter given a different color. (Appropriately, lilac characterizes his Parisian adventures.) But the events are also garlanded by historical speculations, some of them hard to understand. At times Snyder seems to lose his way in this exotic world:

he Red Prince is representative of the continuing attraction of the Habsburgs, whose appeal may be due to the extremely bourgeois nature of this family, which combined glamour with just enough in the way of survival skills. Neither the pompous, physically unattractive, and reckless Hohenzollerns nor the Romanovs (who were better looking but took the notion of divine right and their love for their people far too seriously) possessed these qualities. Among contemporary royalty, only the Japanese imperial family and the Windsors (if one excepts some of the more uncouth grandchildren of the queen) measure up to the Habsburgs. Snyder wants to flatter the Habsburgs by comparing their position to that of the European Union: “The ‘European’ identity of today, like the ‘Austrian’ identity of the late Habsburg period, transcends but does not exclude national feeling. . . . Yet even the freest of today’s societies would not permit

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How, then, to speak of contemporary European history? Perhaps the Habsburgs, with their weary sense of eternity . . . have something to offer. Each moment of the past, after all, is full of what did not happen and what will probably never happen, like a Ukrainian monarchy or a Habsburg restoration. It also contains what seemed impossible but proved possible. . . . And if this is true of these moments in the past, it is true of the present moment as well.

It is certainly true, as historians remind us often, that the future is uncertain and our own views of the past

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the sorts of choices the Habsburgs made. . . . Yet surely the ability to make and remake identity is close to the heart of any idea of freedom, whether it be freedom from oppression by others or freedom to become oneself.” But the Habsburg empire is hardly the stuff out of which an alternative vision of Europe, or indeed a theory of history, can be woven, even by a writer as ingenious as Snyder.

Not all historians are nostalgics, but the Habsburgs appeal most to those who are, or at least those, like Snyder, who think that the past isn’t stable and can be constantly reinvented, affording not just second thoughts but tenth or eleventh ones. Waltz-like, latter-day Habsburg history is composed of equal parts pageantry, celebrity scandals, complex diplomatic goings-on, high culture, and vulgar, often racist, populism—all of this bundled with the whiff of imminent catastrophe. As a child in 1908, Wilhelm was present at a theatrical performance in Vienna celebrating the sixtieth jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef. Successive tableaux depicted the dreams of future glory of Emperor Rudolf, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor by his fellow princes in 1273, founding the dynasty. In the Vienna military museum, one may linger in front of the bloodstained costume and feathered hat of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, along with the bathtub-shaped automobile in which he was shot by a Serbian terrorist, and be surprised at the abruptness of the Habsburg ending.

And yet an ending was widely expected at the time, even wished for.

“We were bound to die,” sighed Count Czernin, the Habsburg representative at the 1918 peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks, in a moment of lucidity. “We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.” Weary or not, Habsburgs existed in a history of their own making, devising and staging their own fate. They are a warning against complacency; and they remind us, too, that the most complicated arrangements of civilization are futile if nobody wants to defend them. n recent visits to Vienna, I’ve been struck by the degree to which the badly remembered

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past still dominates the Austrian present. Absent and mourned, the Habsburgs have always enjoyed a good press.

From 1919 onward, reduced to penury and insignificance by the fall of the empire, Viennese intellectuals wrote about what was lost. Their sense of heartbroken displacement became more intense after Hitler invaded Austria in 1938. Some, like Joseph Roth, drifted off into nostalgia and alcoholism; but others refused to accept the death of their cherished way of life. Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities is an account of the empire’s dying days spun out over more than a thousand pages, as if time could thus be halted and reversed. “If there is a sense of reality, and no-one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility,” Musil tells us as he attempts to immerse the reader in Kakania, his name for the empire.

“Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well it could probably just as well be otherwise.”

Well yes, it might have been otherwise; but in reality, alas, it happened as it did. Musil’s hero, Ulrich, resembles Wilhelm in his ability to assume different shapes or postures according to the ebb and flow of fashion or history— except that in real life, Wilhelm, unlike the half-absent Ulrich, finally tightened his grip on the world around him. Could the old empires of Europe somehow have survived? Europeans love to imagine a continent spared the Armageddon of 1914. As Isaiah Berlin tactfully pointed out, there are limits to counter-historical speculations. To be effective outside the confines of a donnish parlor game, they must reject “all the infinity of logically open possibilities.” Mitteleuropa was comprehensively vandalized in the twentieth century, first by Hitler and then by Stalin. It isn’t plausible to suggest that so comprehensive a disaster could have been avoided if Wilhelm and his ilk had somehow been luckier or less obtuse. Snyder never tells us what a disaster-free Europe under Habsburg stewardship might have looked like.

But it is clear that he thinks such an outcome would not have been unthinkable, and that it certainly would have been desirable.1 I once attempted to learn about Europe by working in an Austrian sawmill.

The work was boring as well as onerous, and my German did not improve in conversation with dour Austrian peasants. I didn’t know at the time that in the valley where I labored British officers handed over the Cossacks who had fought on Hitler’s side to the Russians, who murdered them. As I chopped and stacked wood, however, I became aware of death amid so much beautiful scenery. This appeared to go with a semi-amnesiac, highly selective cultivation of certain aspects of the past, most of all those flattering to Austrian amour-propre. Then, as now, Austrian society appeared to be constructed around the proposition that many things are best left in the cellar.

One Saturday afternoon, I was invited to meet an honored guest. I was driven through empty von Trapp countryside to a rambling, opulent, eighteenth-century affair, impeccably maintained, filled with servants. Like Wilhelm’s, the family who lived here owned breweries. The women were dressed in fancy dirndls, loaded with tasteful jewelry, and their husbands wore lederhosen with spiffy brogues and Scottish-type tweed stockings. A hush surrounded the guest, punctuated by much Grüss-Gotting, bowing, and curtsying. Great-great-nephew of Franz Josef, the bespectacled, smallish Otto to whom I was formally introduced was heir to the Habsburg throne, though he had recently renounced the title.

He later became a successful member of the European parliament, promoting the cause of democracy in former Habsburg lands such as Bosnia, Croatia, and Ukraine. “We are playing tonight,” he used to say whenever Austria and HunContinued on page 82 1

A coherent endorsement of counter-history comes in Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson (1998). A.J.P. Taylor was a vigorous, iconoclastic practitioner of counterhistory; unlike Snyder, he believed the Habsburgs couldn’t have survived. Norman Stone’s World War One: A Short History (2008) is a terse, brilliant dissection of received ideas about the conflict, though he, too, concludes that the Habsburgs doomed themselves to extinction.

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gary encountered each other on the football field.2 “Their own sense of time was one of eternal possibility,” Snyder writes, “of life as composed of moments full of incipient rays of glory, like a drop of dew awaiting the morning sun to release a spectrum of color.” Since my encounter with Otto, I have thought often of the Habsburgs, coming to somewhat different conclusions. Colorful they may be, but anticlimax is the true Habsburg characteristic and their ultimate European legacy. Already, the mid-century horrors seem impossibly distant, and some species of recovered good fortune appears to have enveloped Europe.

Something of the old multinational ethos survives. Like the Habsburgs in their day, Europeans are not martial, relying for their defense on few troops, ill-equipped and wearing fancy uniforms. In its shapelessness, its dilatory and complex procedures, its tangle of constitutional arrangements, with formally separate but in practice overlapping arrangements codified in incomprehensible bureaucratese, as well as in its pompous architecture, Brussels feels like Imperial Vienna. The European Union is moving uneasily toward enlargement—the Balkans are readying themselves for inclusion, Turkey and Ukraine stand next in line—with the same mixture of caution and rashness that characterized Habsburg bureaucrats. Sometimes it does seem, as with the Habsburgs, that Europe needs to expand if it is not to implode. “The oppression of irony leaves Europeans 2 I also hitchhiked to meet W. H. Auden, who lived in Kirchstetten, a small village near Vienna. When he was driving me in his old black VW to the nearest autobahn, I asked him why he lived in what appeared to be a geranium-filled dump packed with ex-Nazis, and he mumbled something about wanting to be at the heart of Europe. In “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten” (1964), Auden describes going to the local church. In its smugness the poem seems irritating; but the jocular lateAuden tone is abruptly jettisoned as he parenthetically inserts the recollection of buried, unremembered catastrophe:

(Maybe, when just now Kirchstetten prayed for the dead, only I remembered Franz Josef the Unfortunate, who danced once in eighty-six years and never used the telephone.)

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unable to boast about their system,” Snyder observes, and he is right to say that the achievements of Eurocrats (like those of the Habsburgs) do not receive much recognition, though this may be something of an understatement.

And yet it would be more accurate to conclude that Europeans, having lost the Habsburgs and never fully found them again, now live with some half-conscious recollection of the dynasty’s terrible failings. Multinationalism is kept half-hidden from Europeans by the Brussels elite, lest another outburst of nationalism tear the continent apart. Even as they pretend to revere the past, or appear to forget it, Europeans remain anxious, filled with foreboding. So much irony, oppressed or not, is not a direct legacy of the Habsburgs, as Snyder would have it, but of the chaos that followed them.

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f geopolitical contingencies had allowed a Ukraine capable of offering him a crown, Wilhelm might indeed have experienced his heart’s desire. But I have trouble visualizing the reign of King Vasyl.

What would Wilhelm have chosen for a coat of arms—a Habsburg eagle, maybe wearing an embroidered shirt, while perched on a hammer and sickle? Neo-Ruritanian royals and aristos can nowadays do what they wish, so long as they appear in the pages of Hello! magazine. It is not difficult to imagine Vasyl wearing the frocks he loved, sniffing coke or peddling progressive movies with starlets on the beach at Cannes.

The Red Prince closes wistfully, with a visit to the old multiethnic Habsburg city of Lviv (known as Lwów in Polish and Lemberg in German), now part of a poor, vigorously democratic, and corrupt Ukraine. In the city a square is to be found named after Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, with an empty plinth before which old ladies with brightly tinted hair sit and children play. Someday soon a statue will be unveiled, and a small group of well-wishers will gather. Flowers of many hues will be scattered in Wilhelm’s memory, and there will be admiring tributes in Ukrainian, Polish, German, and broken English. I hope that someone will read aloud portions of this splendid, eccentric book.

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PUZZLE 1

OLD NEWS

By Richard E. Maltby Jr.

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Small change in fold by the Church of 54 England (5) Coke is one derivative of coal (4) 58 Ruin: look up if it’s OK for use! (5,2) 60 King has turned back to capture horse (4) Capital letters used to write “GO SLOW” (4) Lose spirit after wedding of rice and sex, but without love (8) Rictuses twisted into bows, in a way (8) Gun very nearly recoiled (3) Lodging small photographic image in the heart of a groundbreaker (7) Let sand be inventive part of interior design (3,6) In turn, like a group of bishops (5) Polaris, e.g., (Darn it!) heads west (4) Mislabel contents when moving, getting left with sleaze (9) One motley arrangement resulting from a process like evolution (9) Insect _____ but not after a day! (6) He might appear to be dead, without energy! (3) Wows! coming from where Lamaze’s left off (6) He had the vice presidency almost cold (5) Killer article with special following (3) Bonds get you running into the tax people (5) Eggs on endlessly, before getting a sign of victory (3) Got ripped in ship’s holds (6) International gathering the French enter, attend inappropriately without a gift (10)

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he unclued Across entries (some more than one word), when linked to the unclued Down entries, comprise a well-known collection.

Clued answers include four proper nouns. The entries at 43A, 50A, and 12D are uncommon. As always, mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last month’s puzzle appears on page 75.

ACROSS

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Spots chess maneuvers involving secret plan (9) 43.

Criminal is the activity of a criminal (5) 46.

Hookers—sometimes they don’t go straight! (7) 47.

Second set, for example, turns up as duds (6) Inspiring feature about ring: it can take your breath away! 48.

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(5) Energy source for companies involved in sticky business (7) 52.

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Decline to go up in hot air (3) (See 17A) 57.

Something that can turn up, or down (5) Corrupt trade union head taken in, in the name of Eva Perón (6) Drink sounds small, compared to a Grasshopper! (4) Convincing as I might be, linking American Revolution to the day World War II ended (7) (See 22A) (See 46A) Five orthodox non-democratic lands, yet leaders are showing warmth (6) Gibson Girl finally comes after me (3) Iota is in the first half of the alphabet! (4) Tutor some misfits, extremely far from the Center (9) These are for you, when you go and get burned up!

Some happy resolution! (5) Incorporate dome by rebuilding (6) (See 2A) U.S. city, in variety shows at Apollo (4,4) (See 54A) Three such meals? Cha-cha-cha! (3) Protected on the way up, like iron (4) Use villa when traveling, having references (8) (See 58A) Goes after someone but reacts badly (6) Worker combining two generations! (5) Professional baseball players get frequently high (5) Rose to become a kind of loser (4) (See 34A) Rue a sound made by rake . . . (4) . . . or, it’s said, another device to move things (3) Up to snuff, just a bit lush (3)

Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Old News,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. If you already subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by January 9. Senders of the first three correct solutions opened at random will receive one-year subscriptions to Harper’s Magazine. Winners’ names will be printed in the March issue. Winners of the November puzzle, “Sesquipedalianism,” are Bob Peay, Pine Bush, N.Y.; Chris Perkins, Dallas; and Phil Rubinson, Austin, Tex. PUZZLE 83

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FINDINGS S

tudies found that obese women have as many sex partners as non-obese women, that obese men have fewer sex partners than non-obese men, and that men will spend more money on a date with a lady in red. Researchers discovered that handsome fathers pass on pretty faces to daughters but not to sons, and that facial scars make men more appealing to women for short-term but not long-term relationships, with women preferring scars that suggest violence or trauma rather than acne or chicken pox. Roosters that have had sex recently make more noise at dawn, and male antelopes click their knees loudly to demonstrate sexual prowess. Entomologists found that sex between male flour beetles may allow the males, by dribbling semen onto their partners, to impregnate the females those males later have sex with. San Francisco scientists grew a new prostate in a mouse from a single stem cell. Monogamous male mice were found to be less likely to suffer from diabetes than were their polyamorous counterparts, and an elephant in Texas came down with a fatal case of herpes.

After thirty-six years of celibacy, George, the last living Pinta Island tortoise, mated. Dutch researchers identified a premature-ejaculation gene.

Severely depressed pregnant women are twice as likely to give birth prematurely, and infants warmed in incubators are less likely to be depressed as adults. Protohumans may have learned to create fire as early as 790,000 years ago. Middle-aged white Americans were killing themselves at a higher rate, and a third of heart attacks worldwide were blamed on unhealthy Western eating habits. Computer scientists who hijacked part of a large spam network established that one in 12.5 million junk

emails results in a sale. Neurologists found that many people’s brains contain a designated neuron for identifying Jennifer Aniston. Scientists studying a stalagmite in Wangxiang Cave linked the fall of China’s Ming, Tang, and Yuan dynasties to weak monsoons. An Indian probe, Chandrayaan I, landed on the moon, and NASA’s solar-powered Phoenix lander on Mars went dead with the coming of the Martian winter. Global warming may stop Norwegian lemmings from jumping off cliffs.

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lorida was threatened with colonization by such nonnative cockroaches as the lobster roach, the Madagascar hissing cockroach, the orange-spotted roach, and the Turkestan cockroach, while off the state’s western coast, a crab was spotted riding a pink meanie jellyfish. Gelatinous salps were thriving in the Tasman Sea. Marine biologists discovered that sponges with glass skeletons can draw light deep inside their bodies, allowing symbiotic organisms there to flourish and the sponges, in turn, to grow large. Marine biologists were excited to have filmed a defecating whale shark, and seven of Puget Sound’s orcas were missing and presumed dead, which would mark the largest die-off among the region’s killer whales in a decade. “The population drop,” explained a local cetologist, “is worse than the stock market.” A dead Chinook salmon the size of a small woman was found in California. Scientists at Uppsala University determined that the Panderichthys fish started evolving fingers before it left the water. “It was . . . doing push-ups at the bottom of the river,” said the study’s lead researcher, “looking outside with its eyes.”

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Untitled (three men standing), 2007, oil on canvas, by Johannes Kahrs.

Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York City, and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium 84

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