Holidays in Heck (23 page)

Now imagine all concerned doing all of the above with their eyes closed. That is a night operation. We went back on deck to see—wrong verb—to feel and hear the night flights. The only things we could see were the flaming twin suns of the F-18 afterburners at the end of the catapult slot.

Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do—voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge,
discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half-gallon of Dewar's. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There's Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-under-sniper-fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968, “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screwups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it's full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as a hall closet. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once belowdecks you're sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a dollhouse of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets in a make-believe political doll house. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.

And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can't. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts—yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can't hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can't do that. Really, they communicate by “training telepathy.” They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.

These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only nineteen or twenty. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about twenty-four. ”These are the same kids,” a chief petty officer said, “who, back on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees, hanging out on corners. And here they're in charge of thirty-five-million-dollar airplanes.”

The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks—and they do—half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there's no ejection
seat for the flight deck crew. While we were on the
Theodore Roosevelt
, a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when you were twenty?

Supposedly the “youth vote” is all for Obama. But it's John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the “women's vote” is . . . well, let's not go too far with this. I can speak to John's honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary's attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill's life, who may constitute nearly a majority of the “women's vote.”

These would be interesting subjects to discuss with the
Theodore Roosevelt
shipmates, but time was up.

Back on the COD you're buckled in and told to brace as if for a crash. Whereupon there is a crash. The catapult sends you squashed against your flight harness. And just when you think that everything inside your body is going to blow out your nose and navel, it's over. You're in steady, level flight.

A strange flight it is—from the hard-and-fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters—who, put together, don't have the life experience of the lowest-ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on
the Big Stick—presume to run for president of the United States. They're not just running against the hero John Mc-Cain; they're running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

And a few months later John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, and . . . Oh, never mind.

The Field Museum, Chicago, May 2008

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a new permanent exhibit of savagery and barbarism, “The Ancient Americans.” The ancient Americans themselves are not portrayed as savage or barbarous. (
How
surprising. Knock me over with a
feather
.) The savages and barbarians are the museum's curators. They plunder history, ravage archaeology, do violence to intelligence, and lay waste to wisdom, faith, and common sense.

At the Field Museum the bygone aboriginal inhabitants of our hemisphere are shown to be regular folks, the same as you and me, although usually more naked and always more noble. Ancient Americans have attained the honored, illustrious status of chumps and fall guys. Never mind that
they were here for 12,000 or 13,000 years before the rest of us showed up with our pistols and pox, so most of their getting shafted was, perforce, a do-it-yourself thing.

And also never mind that “The Ancient Americans” exhibit tells you nothing a fourth-grader doesn't know. I am the parent of a fourth-grader. I live in a house cluttered with twig and Play-Doh models of hogans, longhouses, and wickiups, hung with ill-made dream catchers, and strewn with poorly glued miniature birch bark canoes shedding birch bark on the rugs. My daughter Muffin's bedroom is heaped with the apparel, equipage, and chattel of Kaya, the Native American American Girl doll. The bookshelves in the fourth-grade classroom overflow with culturally sensitive and ecologically aware retellings of Potawatomi, Paiute, and Kickapoo legends, colorfully illustrated by women who use birds or mammals for their last names.

When I was in fourth grade, some fifty years ago, my grandmother would take me to the Field Museum. It was a solemn, quiet, awe-engendering place. All of creation's wonders were on display in orderly ranks. Dim corridors were lined with dioramas featuring important animals—shot, stuffed, and carefully labeled. Further corridors held wonders of a sterner kind: sinister masks from Africa, demon deities of the heathen Raj, alarming Sung dynasty figurines depicting the exquisite tortures of Chinese hell. Whatever steadiness of nerve I now possess I owe to steeling myself to walk past the display case containing an unwrapped Egyptian mummy.

The Field Museum was interesting even in its least interesting parts. The section devoted to “Useful Varieties of Wood” fascinated me in the exactitude of its tediousness. The world was full of things and—if I could summon the
patience and concentration—those things could be organized, understood, and made to serve a purpose.

The museum fueled every worthy ambition. The mineralogical collection made me decide to become a man of learning and means sufficient to lead an expedition to find an immense amethyst geode, which I would present to Jennifer Riley, she of the auburn hair in my fourth-grade class, one row over and two desks up. And the large, gloomy hall devoted to life in the Arctic was a religious inspiration. I looked at the full-scale cutaway of winter quarters in Mackenzie Bay, where you lived in an underground room the size of a Buick, wore itchy sealskins, ate raw whale, and breathed the smoke of a caribou chip fire. I would bow my head and intone, “Praise God for not making me an Eskimo.”

Then Grandmother and I would go to lunch in the museum's cafeteria, an austere room that served school food of the better kind—much as the White House Mess does to this day. Over this comforting fare I would quiz my own family's ancient American.

“Grandma, what's the difference between Democrats and Republicans?”

“Democrats rent.”

“Grandma, what's wrong with the people in the bad neighborhoods that we saw from the el?”

“No one is ever so poor that he can't pick up his yard.”

“Grandma, which Roosevelt was worse, Teddy or Franklin?”

“Theodore. He had no business meddling in things the way he did after your great-grandfather's friend Mr. McKinley died, and he divided the Republican Party, allowing that scallywag Woodrow Wilson to become the president.”

One of the best pleasures of my childhood was to walk hand in hand with my grandmother up the broad flights of marble steps to the towering bronze doors of the Field Museum. The doors are closed now. The main entrance to the museum is no longer used. These days that neoclassical portico with its view of Loop, lakefront, and Grant Park grandeur probably makes people feel small. The back door has more room for tour buses and handicapped ramps. Grandeur is out of style anyway. The Field Museum was built for Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1892, celebrating (if you can imagine celebrating such a thing) Columbus's “discovery” of America. It wasn't the happiest 400th anniversary for ancient Americans.

The museum is full of noisy children and their caregivers, blended families, and whatever else we're calling kith and kin these days. A long, mouse-maze, airport security–style line must be endured to get tickets. The sculpture of a Masai spearman facing off against a crouching lioness has been shunted to a lonely corner, lest someone somehow take offense. Nowadays offense is taken—snatched and grabbed—as if offense were something valuable to own. And, given our umbrage-fueled national politics, maybe it is. The brontosaurus has been pushed to the back (that is to say the front) of the main hall and isn't called a brontosaurus anymore. (Doubtless offense was taken by Chicago's Bronto-American community.) Nor is the skeleton of this vast vegan any longer engaged in postmortem mortal combat with the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Modern kids are too loving and caring about dinosaurs to be exposed to such scenes of domestic violence.

Most of the minerals and all of the useful woods have been replaced by a gift shop the size of Macy's (appropriately
enough, since Macy's is now the name on Marshall Field, the department store whose founder was the Field Museum's patron). The cafeteria is gone; McDonald's has been installed. At least people are still dressed the way I was half a century ago: in jeans or shorts, T-shirts, and gym shoes. Except that these are people of forty or fifty. Indeed, some are as old as my grandmother was when she, in hat and gloves, escorted me. And grandma had first visited the Field Museum during the Columbian exposition.

I couldn't see what the children are wearing; they are misbehaving blurs to my bifocaled eyes. None seems afraid to walk past the mummy case. I didn't have the heart. Unwrapped as he is, with aged body parts on view, the mummy fits in too well, sartorially, with a twenty-firsts-century crowd.

At the portal of “The Ancient Americans” exhibit is the first of many, many wall inscriptions telling you what you should be thinking, if you happen to do any of that.

The Ancient Americans is a story of diversity and change—not progress.

Were this a criticism of pre-Columbian societies, you'd be in for an interesting experience. It isn't. You aren't.

Besides the wall inscriptions the exhibit is cluttered with innumerable video screens displaying people yakking in native languages described as nearly extinct. What information is conveyed thereby, and to whom, is an open question.