American Studies (27 page)
Authors: Louis Menand
The other poison, Gore suggested, is cultural. “There is a deep well of cynicism in the culture today,” he said. The country has suffered, over the last forty years, “a whole series of body blows to the self-confidence necessary to self-governance.” That government doesn’t work has become the premise of every political dispute, and all the Republicans need to do to discredit the administration’s policies is to drop their bucket into this well.
From one point of view, of course, this was an answer from Mars. Surely one did not need to go back forty years to look for the source of cynicism about politics; one could just go back to Monday.
If you were writing a book on cynicism, the sentence “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” would make an excellent epigraph. Still, Gore’s analysis was a reminder that he and Clinton really do think of their mission as a generational one, and that they have to be understood in a generational context.
If you were writing a book on cynicism, the sentence “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” would make an excellent epigraph. Still, Gore’s analysis was a reminder that he and Clinton really do think of their mission as a generational one, and that they have to be understood in a generational context.
Clinton was born in 1946, Gore two years later. Both men essentially started running for office when they were in grade school. This meant that for both of them the romance of politics was represented not by Eugene McCarthy or Tom Hayden or Daniel Cohn-Bendit, but by John F. Kennedy. The photograph of Clinton shaking hands with Kennedy in the Rose Garden, taken just a few months before the assassination, is a well-advertised piece of Clintoniana. Gore’s connections were much more personal. He is the only son of Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and he was introduced to Washington politics as a small child. The Kennedys were not just distant icons; they were, in effect, his dad’s business partners. They came to the house.
So that Clinton and Gore are not, in the general sense, sixties Democrats; they are, much more specifically, Kennedy Democrats. For all their futurist-sounding talk about the New Democrats and the Third Way (a distinctly Toffleresque phrase), they are really trying to go backward, to reknit a raveled tradition. They think that the Democratic Party went down the wrong road after 1963, and persisted on it for almost thirty years. A national majority party transformed itself into a minority party From 1963 to 1992 was the Interregnum. Clinton and Gore mean to be the Restoration.
Like most Kennedy Democrats, Clinton and Gore are defined by their antagonistic relation to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s Great Society policies, in the view of many Kennedy Democrats, set an impossible standard for the role that government should play in the effort to achieve social progress, and helped to polarize the electorate, to the disadvantage of the Democratic Party. But those policies might have been successfully moderated. Johnson is the villain because of his prosecution of the war in Vietnam. It was the war that created
the culture, as Gore had described it to me, of political enmity: it dug the “well of cynicism” about government, and it destroyed the Democratic Party. It gave us Nixon, Watergate, and the degradation of the public service ideal.
the culture, as Gore had described it to me, of political enmity: it dug the “well of cynicism” about government, and it destroyed the Democratic Party. It gave us Nixon, Watergate, and the degradation of the public service ideal.
For Clinton and Gore, the issue was not just political; it was personal. To young men who had been grooming themselves for a political career on, as they imagined it, the Kennedy model, Johnson’s war presented an impossible dilemma. It forced them to choose between duty to country and duty to conscience, and in the most concrete way: they had to face the draft. The draft was a crisis for both Clinton and Gore, and nothing shows up the contrast in their personalities better than the difference in their strategies for coping with it.
The prospect of the draft drove Clinton almost to despair. It seems to have been the only time in his life, as David Maraniss’s biography,
First in His Class
, makes clear, when he lost his sense of bearings. A man whose deepest impulse is to demonstrate sympathy for every faction was suddenly obliged to alienate the affections of one faction completely. Clinton responded, typically, by juggling his options—which included a pledge to join the University of Arkansas ROTC—until the lottery was instituted, and his number placed him outside the pool of probable inductees. His famous letter to the commander of the ROTC unit, explaining that he was dropping that option, is a classic of Clinton’s special art: it manages to praise the honor of those who were willing to fight and the honor of those who refused to fight with equal sincerity. Thomas and Hill were both telling the truth.
First in His Class
, makes clear, when he lost his sense of bearings. A man whose deepest impulse is to demonstrate sympathy for every faction was suddenly obliged to alienate the affections of one faction completely. Clinton responded, typically, by juggling his options—which included a pledge to join the University of Arkansas ROTC—until the lottery was instituted, and his number placed him outside the pool of probable inductees. His famous letter to the commander of the ROTC unit, explaining that he was dropping that option, is a classic of Clinton’s special art: it manages to praise the honor of those who were willing to fight and the honor of those who refused to fight with equal sincerity. Thomas and Hill were both telling the truth.
Gore’s experience was much worse. Albert Gore, Sr., had emerged as an opponent of the war (as did Clinton’s political mentor, Senator J. William Fulbright, of Arkansas), and when the antiwar insurgency within the Democratic Party failed, with the nomination and defeat of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Al Jr. found himself with Clinton’s dilemma, but with much higher stakes. His father was up for reelection in 1970, and an antiwar position was unpopular in Tennessee. If young Al refused to serve, he would almost certainly sink his father’s candidacy; he also, according to the testimony
of some of his Tennessee friends, felt guilty about, in effect, sending another man in his place if he sheltered himself from the draft. So in 1969, after graduating from Harvard, he enlisted. His father lost anyway. It was the end of his political career.
of some of his Tennessee friends, felt guilty about, in effect, sending another man in his place if he sheltered himself from the draft. So in 1969, after graduating from Harvard, he enlisted. His father lost anyway. It was the end of his political career.
When Gore spoke to me about this period in his life, he emphasized a couple of things besides his father’s defeat. One was the shock he had when he returned to Cambridge in 1970, before going overseas, and walked through Harvard Square in his Army uniform. It was, as he put it, “a Ralph Ellison experience.” He was sneered at; people shouted epithets. “People I would have identified as those I agreed with on the way we saw the world all of a sudden, because my hair was in a buzz cut and I was in a uniform—it made all the difference in the world to them. Of course, it seems painfully obvious now. But in other ways it was really quite revelatory.”
The second was the shock he had when he got to Vietnam. He had always seen the issue in black-and-white terms, he said. “The policy was misguided and wrong, the war was a mistake, et cetera, et cetera. When I actually went there and got to know some of the South Vietnamese, who were genuinely terrified of what would happen to them if they lost their freedom in a takeover by the North, my easy assumptions about the nature of the conflict were challenged by the reality of it. It was so much more subtle. I still think that the policy was a mistake, but I think that it was much more complicated than either the proponents or the opponents of that policy thought.” The war as an issue split his generation; the war as a reality made a mockery of the domestic political debate about it.
Once Clinton had successfully steered (we will not say dodged) his way through his period of exposure to the draft, he sailed serenely off to Yale Law School and then to his first campaign for public office. He had not taken his eyes off the prize for a minute. Gore, on the other hand, needed to put himself back together before he could go on. He was in Vietnam for five months, serving as an Army journalist. When he returned to the United States, in 1971, he swore off public service forever. He vowed, as he recalled in a speech at his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, in 1994, that “I would never, ever go into politics.” He did not exactly drop out—he
worked for five years as a reporter on the
Tennessean,
a Nashville paper—but he tuned out. He went to divinity school, at Vanderbilt, and quit; he went to law school and didn’t finish. He spent five years looking for an alternative to the career for which he had been raised. He finally changed his mind about politics, by all accounts overnight (“My wife was very surprised by it,” he said), and in 1976 he ran successfully for his father’s old congressional seat. But his whole education had taught him the necessity of undoing the damage wrought by Lyndon Johnson.
worked for five years as a reporter on the
Tennessean,
a Nashville paper—but he tuned out. He went to divinity school, at Vanderbilt, and quit; he went to law school and didn’t finish. He spent five years looking for an alternative to the career for which he had been raised. He finally changed his mind about politics, by all accounts overnight (“My wife was very surprised by it,” he said), and in 1976 he ran successfully for his father’s old congressional seat. But his whole education had taught him the necessity of undoing the damage wrought by Lyndon Johnson.
Gore’s response to the sixties was therefore much more generationally typical than Clinton’s was. Contrary to the usual understanding, the baby boomers didn’t create the culture of the sixties; they didn’t even inspire it. They consumed it. In 1968, the climax of the decade politically, the oldest baby boomer in America was just turning twenty-two. To the extent that baby boomers participated in protests, took drugs, and practiced “free love,” they were responding to slogans, tastes, and fads dreamed up and promulgated by people much older than they were.
When, at the end of the decade, that whole culture seemed to implode, baby boomers were left to patch together a culture of their own in a landscape littered with fragments. The establishment and the elite culture, the culture of “the best and the brightest,” were discredited; but so were the radical alternatives. Mainstream politics had produced Nixon, radical politics had produced the Weathermen, and the counterculture had produced Charles Manson. For people disillusioned or burned out by the sixties, there grew up, in the seventies, a culture of therapy and renewal. Our problems are not political (this culture urged); our problem is our whole way of being in the world. Conflict and contention are symptoms of wrong thinking; a new age demands new epistemologies. It was the time of Erich Fromm and Alvin Toffler. This is in many respects the culture that shaped Al Gore. Gore is, to a much greater degree than Clinton, a man molded by the current of popular ideas. If he were not so manifestly buttoned down, you might even say that he was trendy.
You know right away with Gore that his philosophical ideas were not worked up for him by speech writers. Asked which thinkers he
had been influenced by in his brief career as a divinity student, he mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edmund Husserl. Would that be Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception
? Yes, he said, with a flicker (just a flicker) of excitement—did I know it? He had found the work helpful, he said, “in cultivating a capacity for a more refined introspection that gave me better questions that ultimately led to a renewed determination to become involved with the effort to make things better.” It is a little hard to imagine having this conversation with George W. Bush.
had been influenced by in his brief career as a divinity student, he mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Edmund Husserl. Would that be Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception
? Yes, he said, with a flicker (just a flicker) of excitement—did I know it? He had found the work helpful, he said, “in cultivating a capacity for a more refined introspection that gave me better questions that ultimately led to a renewed determination to become involved with the effort to make things better.” It is a little hard to imagine having this conversation with George W. Bush.
The vice president, as it gradually emerged in our talk, is a holist, a post-postmodernist, and a goo-goo. Let us ponder these in sequence. Holism is the view that by dividing experience up into different categories—fact and value, science and religion, art and morals—we end up treating a universe that is a living, integrated whole as though it were a machine with detachable parts. We murder to dissect. Beneath appearances a single reality beautifully blooms, holists believe, but we have lost touch with it.
Gore lays the blame for these artificial divisions (his view is nothing if not long) on the scientific revolution. “Clearly one of the large changes under way in our civilization,” he told me, “is that we’re trying to escape from the narrow segmented emphasis on specialization that began some four hundred years ago with the scientific revolution, seducing the rest of the centers of thought in our civilization into looking at the world in very narrow slices, gaining the great benefits of using this approach to understand in intricate detail ever narrower slices of the world, but at a cost of ignoring the interconnections with the rest of the world.”
The most dangerous of these divisions, Gore believes, is the division between the mind and the body, for which he holds responsible Descartes’ theory that the mind can know truth solely by rational introspection. A “philosophical error,” Gore had called this theory in his best-selling book on the environmental crisis,
Earth in the
Balance,
published in 1992. “The Cartesian model of the disembodied intellect,” he argues there, is responsible not only for our twentieth-century environmental problems—the destruction of the ozone layer, the elimination of plant and animal species, and global warming—but
also for what he calls our whole “dysfunctional civilization.” Cartesian thinking has cut us off from our feelings.
Earth in the
Balance,
published in 1992. “The Cartesian model of the disembodied intellect,” he argues there, is responsible not only for our twentieth-century environmental problems—the destruction of the ozone layer, the elimination of plant and animal species, and global warming—but
also for what he calls our whole “dysfunctional civilization.” Cartesian thinking has cut us off from our feelings.
Feeling is an important category for Gore. “Feelings represent an essential link between mind and body or, to put it another way, the link between our intellect and the physical world,” he says in
Earth
in the Balance
. “Abstract thought is but one dimension of our awareness.” Living for centuries in this artificial way has produced “a kind of psychic pain at the very root of the modern mind.” Gore has, it must be said, a rather abstract way of condemning abstraction: “Insisting on the supremacy of the neocortex exacts a high price,” he explains in the book, “because the unnatural task of a disembodied mind is to somehow ignore the intense psychic pain that comes from the constant nagging awareness of what is missing: the experience of living in one’s body as a fully integrated physical and mental being.” He goes on at some length to explain our relation to modern civilization in the vocabulary of codependency, addiction, denial, and recovery.
Earth
in the Balance
. “Abstract thought is but one dimension of our awareness.” Living for centuries in this artificial way has produced “a kind of psychic pain at the very root of the modern mind.” Gore has, it must be said, a rather abstract way of condemning abstraction: “Insisting on the supremacy of the neocortex exacts a high price,” he explains in the book, “because the unnatural task of a disembodied mind is to somehow ignore the intense psychic pain that comes from the constant nagging awareness of what is missing: the experience of living in one’s body as a fully integrated physical and mental being.” He goes on at some length to explain our relation to modern civilization in the vocabulary of codependency, addiction, denial, and recovery.
The most common misperception of Gore is that he is a techie, a superrationalist out of touch with his inner child. Gore sometimes plays to this image by beginning public appearances with his frighteningly convincing impersonation of himself as a block of wood. But one suspects that, like many sobersided and deliberate people, he is extremely brittle, and that it is the brittleness, rather than the self-importance, that accounts for the stubbornness. It took him five years to recover from Vietnam; his son’s accident kept him out of presidential politics for almost three years. It also led him to write
Earth in the Balance
, and all the discussion in that book about addictive behavior and dysfunctional families clearly arises—he as much as says so—out of a personal trauma.
Earth in the Balance
, and all the discussion in that book about addictive behavior and dysfunctional families clearly arises—he as much as says so—out of a personal trauma.
When he talked in his office, he connected the sense of lost integration—the “psychic pain at the root of the modern mind”—to the cynicism he believes is poisoning politics. “Those who are cynical, those who are overly skeptical about self-government—some of their energy comes from that, too,” he maintained. “And postmodernism, also a mistake, came about in reaction to that earlier emphasis on overspecialization. There’s a great desire now to find the
connections between different parts of our society, our civilization—science and religion being the two large subdivisions that need to be reconnected.” He recommended a recent book on the subject, called
The Marriage of Sense
and
Soul
. Did I know
that
one? “That’s one of my new favorites,” he said.
connections between different parts of our society, our civilization—science and religion being the two large subdivisions that need to be reconnected.” He recommended a recent book on the subject, called
The Marriage of Sense
and
Soul
. Did I know
that
one? “That’s one of my new favorites,” he said.
The Marriage of Sense and Soul
(research reveals) is by Ken Wilber, who lives in Boulder and has written twelve previous works, including
Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality
and
A Brief History of Everything. The
Marriage of Sense
and
Soul
is endorsed by Deepak Chopra (“Ken Wilber is one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness in this century. I regard him as my mentor”), the pollster Daniel Yankelovitch, and Michael Lerner, the editor of
Tikkun.
Wilber’s idea is that modern civilization denies the spiritual and emotional side of experience by exalting the rational and the material. The result is what he calls the modernist “flatland,” a world shorn of depth and meaning.
(research reveals) is by Ken Wilber, who lives in Boulder and has written twelve previous works, including
Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality
and
A Brief History of Everything. The
Marriage of Sense
and
Soul
is endorsed by Deepak Chopra (“Ken Wilber is one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness in this century. I regard him as my mentor”), the pollster Daniel Yankelovitch, and Michael Lerner, the editor of
Tikkun.
Wilber’s idea is that modern civilization denies the spiritual and emotional side of experience by exalting the rational and the material. The result is what he calls the modernist “flatland,” a world shorn of depth and meaning.
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