A Colossal Wreck (51 page)

In Venice, looking east across the vast expanse of the Piazza San Marco, we could see a knot of maybe 300 people down the far end, near the Basilica. As we drew nearer they turned out to be tourists leveling their digital cameras at a knot of maybe fifty Italians lofting the national flag and dancing round in a circle.

Things weren’t much livelier in front of the Doge’s palace facing the Grand Canal. On the Ponte della Paglia, opposite the carving of drunken Noah and his sons, an Italian woman commented irritably that she’d been in Rome when Italy beat Ukraine, and it had all been a lot more fun.

We ambled back to the hotel through the warm Venetian evening. Snatches of German, Japanese, English, and even Russian drifted from couples peering at their maps. An American woman showed me a postcard of the Rialto, stabbing it with her finger, and said slowly, in a loud voice, “How … get … there?”

There were almost no cheering Italians because Italians don’t live in central Venice any more. Walking around the city for five days, we could see easily enough where ordinary life, as expressed in the form
of grocery stores, bakeries, and so forth, ends and the international enclaves begin.

The writer Andrea di Robilant, author of a marvelous chunk of eighteenth-century Venetian romantic history in the form of his bestselling
A Venetian Affair
, confirms this. When he was writing that book three years ago di Robilant and his wife Alessandra lived in the Dorsoduro district, west across the Grand Canal. These days, said Andrea sadly, the Dorsoduro is dying.

When neighborhoods in Venice die it’s not because huge vulgar concrete condos replace delicate eighteenth-century facades. The rules protecting Venice’s exterior appearance are rigidly enforced. Nor does death merely come in the vulgar form of T-shirt stalls featuring underwear with the genitals of Michelangelo’s David painted on them (plentiful this year on the Lista di Spagna).

Death comes respectably, in the form of moneyed quietness. There’s no bustle of everyday life, no local kids in the streets, few old folk, no little food stores or wine shops, just the bland, well-maintained exteriors of high-end international homes, part of a portfolio that might include a condo in Mayfair, or Vail or Hana.

The locals have been moving out for quite a while. The city’s population is down to 70,000, from a high of around 200,000. Di Robilant now has a delightful apartment on the island of Guidecca, a district of Venice half a mile south towards the Lido from the main part of Venice.

Rich Venetians used to have summer homes there a hundred years ago. Then the island slowly nose-dived and became a dangerous slum. Clean-up began in the 1990s, with artists and writers—as so often—pioneering the rehab.

If the histories of zones like Manhattan’s SoHo are any guide, next usually come the fancy restaurants, the art galleries, the clothes stores, the antique stores. The rents soar and the artists and writers become real-estate operators. The locals leave.

In Guidecca’s case di Robilant is optimistic. He thinks there are too many modest-income locals who won’t quit the island. I hope he’s right, but I fear the worst. At the east end of Guidecca there’s already the very high-end Cipriani’s, and at the west end a
consortium including Hilton has just bought the vast old nineteenth-century mill.

July 30

Twenty-three years after one of America’s stupidest Presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan’s dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the
New York Times
, from Bill O’Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth.

Here we have a Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who gazes at the rubble of Lebanon, 300,000 refugees being strafed with Israel’s cluster bombs, and squeaks happily that we are “witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

Here we have a president, G. Bush, who urges Vladimir Putin to commence in Russia the same “institutional change” that is making Iraq a beacon of freedom and free expression. Not long after Bush extended this ludicrous invitation, the UN relayed from the Iraqi Ministry of Health Iraq’s real casualty rate, which was running at least 100 a day, now probably twice that number.

“Crackpot realism” was a concept defined by the great Texan sociologist, C. Wright Mills when he published
The Causes of World War Three
in 1958, also the year that Dwight Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon to bolster local US factotum, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun.

“In crackpot realism,” Mills wrote, “a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands … The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists … instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe … They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines … they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what …”

September 5

Though the numbers are dwindling, some people still go through their whole adult lives thinking that the next Democrat to hunker down in the Oval Office is going to straighten out the mess, fight for the ordinary folk, face down the rich and powerful. I got off the plane in New York in 1972 at the age of thirty-one with one big advantage over these naive souls. I’d already spent twenty years seeing the same hopes invested in whatever Labour Party candidate was on the way to 10 Downing Street.

By the time I reached my prep school at the age of nine, the first postwar Labour government was already slipping from power. Back in the summer of 1945, if any party was ever given a mandate, it was surely Labour, propelled into office by the millions who had spent the war years awakened by unusual circumstance—a familiar effect of war—to a fresh awareness of the barely inconceivable incompetence and arrogance of the British upper classes and memories of the prewar Depression when the Conservatives ruled the roost. With one voice they said, there must be a better way.

The Tories thought they were going to win. After all, Churchill was presiding over the defeat of the Axis in the war, and the apparatus of gerrymander was still in place, including an electoral register unchanged from 1935, thus rendering those in their twenties as disenfranchised as American felons today. University graduates and businessmen could vote twice. There were predictably archaic methods to undercount the overseas armed forces vote from troops overwhelmingly for Labour. But Clement Attlee’s Labour Party swept to tremendous victory.

When the dust settled, Labour had 393 MPs out of a total of 640, the greatest majority in their history, with the Tories limping along with 213 MPs, almost exactly the reverse of what happened thirty-eight years later when Thatcher trounced Foot and got a majority of 143, which she swiftly put to radical use. In 1945, with an invincible majority of 146 and vast popular hunger for radical change, the challenge was great but Labour’s leaders—Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, and the others—rose and mastered it, managing successfully in the next five years to keep the British class system
intact in all essentials. Of course the Conservatives savagely attacked the onset of “socialism,” but the “welfare state” had more to do with the wartime command economy than with any attack on the dominion of capital.

Across the channel the French used their Marshall Plan handouts from the US to reorganize their infrastructure and plan the railway network the British now worship as they surge in a few hours from Paris to Marseilles. The British themselves, Miss Muffets of propriety, paid off old debts and rejected new ideas. French-style planning? “We don’t do things like that in our country,” Bevin scoffed. “We don’t have plans, we work things out practically.”

My awareness of this first Labour government was limited, though I do remember my father telling me that “we”—this was 1947 when I was six—now owned the railways. I was no early bloomer. A year later the British Special Branch, tapping my father’s phone as part of a continuous program of surveillance of the man, lasting from 1934 to 1954, monitored me urging him to come home to read me Christopher Robin, a conversation finally released into the National Archives in 2004 and perused by my brother Patrick, who swiftly reported the Christopher Robin request to me.

Christopher Robin! By the time he was seven John Stuart Mill was already re-reading Aeschylus, although he confessed later he did not know what an emotion was until he was twenty, which shows the downside of intellectual precocity. We went off to live in Ireland, followed by the Special Branch onto the boat where, so the archives now show, they made “a discreet search” of my father’s suitcase, prowling through his socks and shirts in search of the Communist Master Plan, while 4,000 drunks heading home for Easter wondered why the ship wasn’t getting under way.

Irish politics, as ripe in intricate corruption as those of Naples or Bangkok, had scant relevance to the vices of the Labour Party or the Democrats of the United States. I returned to England for the late 1950s and ’60s. Great was the rejoicing when, in 1964, Harold Wilson led the Labour Party to slim victory, ousting the Conservatives after thirteen long years. Years of disappointment immediately followed, with a celerity that had to wait until 1993 to be equaled by the almost
instant collapse of the Clinton administration as any kind of reforming force. By 1972 Edward Heath sat in 10 Downing Street.

Now I was nearly thirty and yearned for escape. I could see English politics stretching drearily ahead. After Wilson’s return there would be James Callaghan. After Callaghan, Michael Foot. After Foot, Neal Kinnock. After Kinnock … One day in the late summer of 1972 I had occasion to be in the portion of south London known as Balham. It was hot, and the streets infinitely dreary. I must get away, I muttered to myself, like Razumov talking to Councillor Mikulin in Conrad’s
Under Western Eyes
.

I turned in the direction of the subway station. A dingy sign caught my eye, in a sub-basement window. I knocked, and the sibyl, in Indian saree, greeted me. She had Tarot cards and a parrot, a method of divination with an ancient lineage in India. She dealt the cards. The parrot looked at them, then at me, then at the fortune teller. Some current of energy passed between them. The sybil paused, then in a low yet vibrant voice, bodied forth the future to me, disclosing what lay ahead in British public life. Her lips curved around the as yet unfamiliar words “New Labour.” Falteringly, raising her hands before her eyes in trembling dismay at the secret message of the cards, she described a man I know now to have been Tony Blair. I paid her double, then triple as, amid the advisory shrieks of the parrot, she poured out the shape of things to come.

Within a week, obeying the promptings of the parrot, I had booked a flight to New York and a new life. Ahead of me lay a vast political landscape, seemingly of infinite richness and possibility. Never for a moment have I regretted my journey westward. That parrot in Balham had read the cards correctly. It is probably still alive, and I’m sure that if I were to return for another consultation, it would cry out, “I could have told you so,” and cackle heartily as it described the blasted expectations raised by Democrats stretching from Carter to Clinton.

We approach the midterm elections; soon thereafter the great masquerade of Election 2008 will commence. There will, I can guarantee it, be once again hopes for change, courtesy of a Democrat. I will remain without illusions. Like the Labour Party, the Democrats offer
no uplifting alternative and not even the pretense that they differ in essentials from the Republicans in the way they propose to deal with the rest of the world.

I might even offer a maxim here: the greater the hunger for change, the more thunderous the popular cries for decisive, radical action, the more rapid will be the puncturing of all hopes, as though the whole point of the electoral exercise, of 1964 and 1966 in the case of Wilson, and of 1992 in Clinton’s, had been to demonstrate to those foolish enough to have thought otherwise the lesson that all hopes and fierce expectations notwithstanding, business will continue as usual.

It’s the same lesson European governments now regularly give European voters. The French vote against neoliberalism, despite the stentorian advice of the entire political establishment. The voters prevail, with a thunderous “Non!” The political establishment, as represented in the major parties, pays no attention. Same in Germany, same in Italy, same in Britain. Same in the United States.

As is now widely recognized, most of all by the voters, there is no effective opposition here, any more than there is in the UK. But if the parties are identical in their essential programs, give or take miniswerves from the norm such as tactical environmentalism by the Democrats to keep Green and Hollywood money flowing in, then why is there such vitriol between them? Much of it is plain stupidity. Many people in middle age keep the prejudices of their youth intact. What we need from the political scientists is a fresh consideration of political constituencies and their material interests. The current maps are useless. The parrot did a much better job.

October 8

I drove into Eureka to speak at an anti-war rally. I asked one of the organizers—one I knew to be keen on the 9/11 conspiracy scenarios—whether this was planned as basically a conspiracists’ convocation. The inviter said No. “Maybe one speaker on 9/11.” I went along, to the parking lot north of the jail in the middle of town. There were about 200 people. It was a glorious day.

Speaker #1 was the chairperson, many days into a fast. He told the crowd that he was a 9/11 conspiracy convert. The war in Iraq didn’t get much of a mention in his address. Speaker #2 was a 9/11 conspiracy advocate. He gave a long, detailed and incomprehensible speech, whose main effect was to cut the crowd by about a third. The only audible bit of his allocution was a savage denunciation of Alexander Cockburn. He also barely mentioned the war in Iraq. Speaker #3, an academic, read a lengthy speech loaded with refined ironies about Bush. I don’t know whether he mentioned the war because two young people, one with a button saying “9/11 was an inside job,” were beginning to harangue me. Speaker #4 was my neighbor, David Simpson, who announced he was a global warming cultist and spoke briefly on that theme.