-Caveat Lector-
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Citation: Harper's Magazine March 1998, v296, n1774, p8(3)
Author: Lapham, Lewis H.
Title: Coq au vin. (political participation) by Lewis H. Lapham
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1998 Harper's Magazine Foundation
Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of
civilization. Who cares whether Caesar stole or Caesare Borgia cheated? . . .
The real evil that follows a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the
intellectual dishonesty it generates.
John J. Chapman
Early in January on one of the editorial pages of the New York Post, I came
across James K. Glassman, a syndicated Washington columnist, telling his
readers that they no longer needed to trouble themselves with politics, and
what was wonderful about the announcement was its air of supreme certainty
joined with its proof of sublime ignorance. Mr. Glassman was provoked to his
drum major's display of furious word twirling by a New Year's Day editorial in
the New York Times suggesting that despite the marvelous gains on the New York
Stock Exchange and the cornucopia of expensive merchandise in the country's
department stores and automobile showrooms, something was amiss in the
American scheme of things. The editorialist had worried that too little
attention was being paid to politics and then had gone on to say that 1997
might be best remembered as "The Year of Living Smugly."
Mr. Glassman found the phrase offensive--deplorable in intent, insulting in
tone, and just the sort of professional hand-wringing that one had come to
expect from soft-headed liberals who couldn't bear the sight of money.
"Americans are happy," said Mr. Glassman, "really happy," and so what if they
weren't interested in politics? They were right not to care about politics.
Politics had been reduced to "background noise" or, at best, "elevator music,"
which was "a very good thing" because the happy Americans had better things to
do than vote or read the newspapers. Mr. Glassman wasn't of a mind to listen
to any quibbling on the point.
"We have reached an era," he said, "in which we can turn our attention away
from politics and war and toward art, in the broadest and best sense of the
word, which includes not just porcelain but philanthropy, aesthetics, religion
and family. As the century draws to a close, we seem to be witnessing the
death of politics and the rise of something else. Call it the art of living."
As pleased with himself as a prize rooster, Mr. Glassman puffed up the
feathers of his good news with what has become, if not in all quarters of the
society at least among people earning upward of $250,000 a year, the customary
crowing of statistics--low rates of inflation and unemployment, business
booming, churches reporting record levels of attendance, a bull market in
philanthropy, violent crime being scrubbed from city streets like so much
graffiti, impressive numbers of people traveling to Europe, attending
adult-education classes, swarming through the doors of the country's opera
houses and art museums.
"Yes," said Mr. Glassman, "there's still poverty and ignorance and
pathology," and true, the government might try to "reassert itself, to prove
it's still important," but as long as the watchful plutocrat remained "alert
to mischief," nothing significant was likely to happen in Washington,
certainly nothing serious enough to prevent the fortunate Americans from
"fruitfully pursuing happiness the way the Declaration of Independence
intended."
Although I never before had encountered Mr. Glassman's writing, I
recognized the complacent-and pre-recorded voice of what over the last ten or
fifteen years has become the sovereign American oligarchy, and it didn't
surprise me to learn that Mr. Glassman was a figure of some consequence on the
reactionary right, a former publisher of The New Republic, a columnist for the
Washington Post, and the host of CNN's Capital Gang Sunday. It could be safely
assumed that his opinions kept pace with what was being said in the wealthier
quarters of the society, where it is customary to speak ill of big government
and all of its misguided works, to suggest that nothing good can come from
meddling bureaucrats in Washington, that it's no use cosseting poor people
with federal subsidies, that the brutalized forms of public life in the United
States no longer can accommodate the promise of freedom or the hope of
justice. Because the same oligarchy that owns and operates the nation's banks
also owns and operates the nation's news media, variants of one or more of
these noble truths constitute the bulk of what now passes as trenchant
political commentary not only on network television but also in the journals
of thoughtful opinion that circulate the views of reformed feminists,
chastened Marxists, and currency speculators who have seen a great light.
Together with Mr. Glassman, most of the country's best-known social
theorists address their readers not as voters or citizens but as buyers of
political entertainment (loyal to a product rather than obliged to a principle
or interested in an idea), and they hold fast to the belief that government
should remain "as unobtrusive as possible" and that all decisions of any
importance should be referred to the custodians of private wealth or the
officers of corporate management.
Their faith unshaken by the spectacle of fatted oligarchies in Thailand and
Indonesia paying a heavy price for their insolence and greed, Mr. Glassman and
his friends find no reason to think that the barbarism implicit in the
restless energies of big-time global capitalism requires some sort of check or
balance, if not by a spiritual doctrine or impulse then by a lively interest
in (or practice of) democratic politics. What would be the point, and who
would have the patience to listen to the speeches? If no Robespierre has yet
to appear in the balcony of the New York club scene, why tinker with a system
that pays $18 billion for the broadcast rights to the next eight years of
professional football games and awards the senior vice presidents of Fortune
500 companies with salaries of $2 million, $4 million, $10 million per annum?
Behold the glory of the global economy from which all blessings flow, and
rejoice, my children, in the knowledge that the well-run state is synonymous
with a profitable corporation, that history is a board game, that freedom,
like the future or any other item of high-end merchandise, belongs to the
people who can afford the price of a condominium on the beach at Bali.
So complacent a haze of self-congratulation was sufficiently familiar to
the ancient Greeks that Aristotle accepted it as a proof of his hypothesis
that the forms of government follow one another in a sequence as certain as
the changing of the seasons--monarchy dissolving into despotism, despotism
replaced by aristocracy, aristocracy overthrown by democracy, democracy
degenerating into anarchy, anarchy forcing the return of monarchy. Aristotle
proceeded from the premise that all government, no matter what its name or
form, incorporated the means by which the privileged few arrange the
distribution of property and law to the less fortunate many. A government's
longevity thus depends upon the character of the oligarchy that supports its
claims to legitimacy and its pretensions to grandeur. But oligarchies bear an
unhappy resemblance to cheese, and over time even the best of them turn
rancid. Intelligent government might delay the process by making as difficult
as possible the concentrations of wealth that inevitably fall to the lot of
individuals equipped with financial talent, military genius, or noble birth,
but not even the strictest tax and sumptuary laws can nullify the logic of
compound interest or postpone indefinitely the triumph of vanity. Sooner or
later the men become pigs. An oligarchy that might once have aspired to an
ideal of wisdom or virtue gradually acquires the character of what Aristotle
likened to that of "the prosperous fool"--a man or a class of men so
bewildered by their faith in money that "they therefore imagine that there is
nothing that it cannot buy."
Aristotle derived his understanding of politics from his study of Greek
history in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., which encompassed the rise and
fall of the Periclean aristocracy, the democratic experiments (most of them
failures) spawned by the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War, and the
recurrent outbreaks of what the Greeks called pleonexia, the appetite for more
of everything sold in the markets of desire--more houses, more dancing girls,
more banquets, more prosperous fools. The cult of the individual replaced the
collective ideal of the polls; the images of civic virtue dissolved into the
mirrors of self-absorption, and in the hierarchy of popular esteem, acrobats,
cooks, and astrologers occupied a higher rank than orators or magistrates.
Aristotle mentions a faction of especially reactionary oligarchs who took a
vow of selfishness by the swearing of a solemn oath: "I will be an adversary
of the people [i.e., the commonwealth], and in the council I will do it all
the evil that I can." The oath may yet become mandatory among the more
grasping members of our own 105th Congress, but among the great protectors of
American oligarchy the sentiment is traditional. As long ago as 1887,
explaining his veto of a bill meant to provide financial relief to the poor,
President Grover Cleveland said, "The lesson should constantly be enforced
that though the people support the government the government should not
support the people."
The prosperous fool is a familiar figure on the world's political stage--a
stock character, like Harlequin and Pantalone in the old commedia
dell'arte--and although I don't wish to suggest too close a parallel between
James Glassman and Marie Antoinette or between Barbara Walters and the Emperor
Commodus, I think it fair to say that after two centuries of experiment with
the theory of the Enlightenment and the volatile substances of democracy, our
own American oligarchy has grown tired of politics and bored with public
speaking. Having persuaded itself that "there is nothing that money can't
buy," it proceeds to the assumption that now that capitalism has triumphed
over every other ism that anybody can think of (liberalism and irredentism as
well as communism and socialism), all the old political disputes amount to
nothing more than a list of possible titles for next season's hit musical.
Most of the upholders of what has become the wisdom in office take the
trouble to conceal their contempt for the forms of democratic government, but
it sometimes happens that an overly enthusiastic spokesperson blunders into a
plain statement that even Sam Donaldson would find it hard to misunderstand,
and over the last two or three years I've taken to collecting remarks like
those of Mr. Glassman's as a measure of the oligarchy's lack of interest in
(or notice of) what it apparently chooses to regard as the American peasantry.
I'm especially fond of the one attributed by a Washington magazine in the
winter of 1995 to a Heritage Foundation functionary named Scott Hodge, who
appeared at a congressional committee hearing to recommend charging admission
fees to citizens visiting the Capitol Building. "They wear down the steps," he
said, "they brush against the walls," and why should they not be obliged to
pay the cost of maintenance?
A similarly condescending tone informs many of William F. Buckley Jr.'s
observations about the American electorate falling away from the standards of
behavior expected at the court of King George III, but last summer's strike
against the United Parcel Service sorely tried Mr. Buckley's patience and
provoked him to language slightly stronger than usual. Forced to correct Ron
Carey, the president of the Teamsters Union, for his failure to grasp the
logic of capitalism, Mr. Buckley didn't bother to disguise his scorn. "The
economic model in capitalism is that a living wage must be paid in order for
an economy to function. Carey insisted that part-time workers for UPS earned
`too little to live on,' which prompts the question: `Why aren't they dead?'"
The historians of the early Roman empire speak of another oligarchy gone
bad in the sun, of an "Epicurean generation" devoted to the cults of
celebrity, preoccupied with the pleasures of the bedchamber and the banquet
table, excusing itself from the tedium of public affairs on the ground that
politics, like the children and the laundry, were best left to the hired help.
Once again (as in modern-day Bangkok or late-eighteenth-century France) the
weights of instant gratification shifted the balance of the common interest
from the public square of politics to the private gardens of the self, and the
energies once drawn to the care of the res publica dwindled into the ashes of
ceremonial sham. At Antioch and Alexandria the reigning plutocrats imagined
utopia as a suburban garden where tame sophists in gilded cages sang the songs
of gratified desire. All things private were to be preferred to all things
public, and even second-class cities supported a multitude of statues (as many
as 3,000 in the streets of Delphi and Rhodes) shaped to the specifications of
wealthy individuals who ordered the precast torsos in one of four standard
forms (all beautiful, all heroic) and and commissioned the sculptor to supply
a handsome portrait of the missing head.
As it was among the wealthy Romans, retired to their villas by the sea,
writing wistful letters to one another about the loss of ancient virtue, so
also it is now with the wealthy Americans gone off to Florida or Connecticut,
hidden behind stucco walls and tinted glass, exchanging rumors of liberal
conspiracy, entrusting their hope of immortality to the photographers of
Fortune and Vanity Fair rather than to the sculptors of marble portrait busts.
For nearly two centuries the more magnanimous of the early Roman emperors
preserved the outward forms of the hollow republic, but after the death of
Marcus Aurelius in 180 A.D., the de jure citizens had become so accustomed to
their places as de facto subjects that the later emperors no longer maintained
the shows of pointless debate about the laws being either important or just.
Nor did they concern themselves with anything so boring as the administration
of the state, and as the frontiers slowly collapsed under the press of
barbarian invasion, a fatuous oligarchy discovered that it had forgotten the
procedures for mounting a common defense. When King Alaric's 100,000 Visigoths
drove their bronze-headed battering rams through the walls of Rome in the
summer of the year 410, the Emperor Honorius was in his palace on the Adriatic
coast, arranging and rearranging his collection of prize poultry. Later the
next day, while the Goths busied themselves with the looting of the imperial
city and the murdering of its inhabitants, a court chamberlain in Ravenna
informed the emperor that Rome had perished. Honorius received the news with
shock and disbelief. "Rome perished?" he said. "It is not an hour since she
was feeding out of my hand."
The chamberlain explained that he referred to the city of Rome, not to
Honorius' chicken of the same name. It isn't known whether the bird bore a
resemblance to Mr. Glassman, but all the historians report the emperor much
relieved to learn that nothing had gone seriously wrong with the Roman scheme
of things.
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
