Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (15 page)

It's true. There is a big difference. Republicans are rich and sober. New Orleans is poor and drunk - and Democrat. Indeed, the city has an air of almost Caribbean laxity. Over Sunday breakfast on my first morning in the French Quarter ('the Quarter'), I watched a teenage girl lurch out of a bar with a beer bottle swinging from her hand. She walked as if she had just come down from Vermont, on horseback; past Big Daddy's Topless and Bottomless Tabletop Dancing she meandered; then she sat on the sidewalk outside a club unceremoniously called the Orgy. No one stared, in forgiving New Orleans. But if I'd had a video camera with me, I could have made a good ad for abortion. In the Quarter, everybody knows about the alternative to
choice.
The alternative to legal abortion is illegal abortion. Just more free enterprise.

There is a little voodoo store a couple of blocks further up Bourbon Street. In the front room there is a tub full of coloured ribbons: 'MOJO'S FOR - LOVE (red and black) stop conFUSSION (yellow and BLACK) FOR a good health (diFFerent colors and stripy BLACK) COURTCASE (BLACK and BLACK)'. In the back room there is a rectangular chest covered in masks and pinecones: 'Pleas do not touch this COFFIN - DANGER - BE WARE of FReddies COFFIN!! PS shit HAPPENing'. The store looked far from prosperous. The potency of voodoo, one fears, is definitely on the wane — except in the realm of economics and, perhaps, in that of prophecy. For George Bush was due in town that day. Soon we would hear the sinister creak of Freddie's coffin lid. And shit would be happening.

Like many of the media I began the day by morbidly attending a brunch thrown by the National Rifle Association, with fingers crossed for a few atrocities from the lips of Charlton Heston and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Resplendently present at the bar, Schwarzenegger no-showed on the podium (as he would later monotonously no-show at the Mississippian, Tennessean, and South Carolinian caucus meetings). In the matinee gloom of the curtainless ballroom, Heston was bland and depressingly centrist; we took what solace we could from the opening blasphemies of a local chaplain ('And now a word to our Sponsor. Heavenly Father . . .') and from Phil Gramm's tribute to capital punishment: 'If they hurt other people we want them put in jail, and if they kill other people we want them put to death.' Hearing this, a couple of elegant young ladies at my table joined in the fierce applause; the palms of their right hands sought their throats in flustered affirmation. Civilised girls. But this isn't civilised. Still, gas chambers and gunslinging aren't news at the end of the Reagan Era. Furloughs are news. The media bitterly decamped to Spanish Plaza to wait for Bush.

Vintage aircraft buzzed the shopping mall, two deejays jabbered into microphones, a fat tug befouled the Mississippi with dyed fountains of red and white and blue, gay protesters took their positions — and into this scene of contemporary pageantry the candidate stepped from the riverboat
Natchez ...
Some minutes later there was this frenzied little blond guy waving his arms around and hollering into the mike, and doing pretty well considering he looked about nine years old. Watching him give his cheek a thorough and astonished wipe after a kiss from Barbara, you might have thought that here was another tearaway Bush grandson. But no: here were three bad decisions (manner, timing, substance) all rolled into one. Here was Dan Quayle.

The TV crews are the Germans of the media. Here they come (watch out), lugging their bazookas and ack-ack launchers, sweating, swearing, and not smiling. They are all elbow and kneecap and have the gracelessness of undisputed muscle. They stand in ranks on crates and platforms, like firing squads. As they focus, their upper lips drag to the left in dead Presley grins. 'They got Channel 56 from Jacksonville, Texas, in here,' said one crewman at the first Bush-Quayle press conference. 'That's how Mickey Mouse it's getting.' I peered through the wires and webbing, the jeans and chinos. When the ticket came on to the stage the cameras phutted like a great flock taking to the air. And there was Quayle, confident, plump-faced, handsome, and stupid, all set to go get 'em.

The process that began in those first few minutes would develop into the detailed recycling of a political being, much of it on prime time. The media chomped him up and pooped him out again. And the contraption that is now being buckled on to a horse and sent out on the campaign trail is no longer the 'Dan Quayle' to whom Dan Quayle so often, and so robotically, refers. He is a hurried creation of the Bush people: the prepped preppy, wired up for a narrow repertoire of frowns and whoops, wired up for limited damage. Facing his first question about Paula Parkinson (the Washington lobbyist he was alleged to have taken on a golfing trip), Quayle made a gesture of erasure with his hand, said 'No' when he meant 'Yes' and looked like the kind of man who would want to beat you up if you swore in front of his wife. You don't come on to the media like that. Then the bombshell: Quayle — the identikit, join-the-dots militarist — had given Vietnam a miss, staying at home and serving with the National Guard. By the next morning there were rumours that Quayle would be dumped from the ticket. Out of the loop for decades, the media was calling, in effect, for a second ballot. The media wasn't just a crowd, busy dispensing free TV. The media was saying that it was a
player.

Even before the story broke, one remarkable fact had surfaced: here we had yet another major American politician who was quite at sea in the English language, utterly confounded by the simplest declarative sentence. Minutes after the press conference, Bush was blooding his young warrior at the California caucus meeting. Before long, Bush found himself standing there with a look of respectful concentration on his face as Quayle hammered out: 'The question today is whether we are going forward, or past to the back.' Even this miserable commonplace was too much for him. Indeed, the only sentence Quayle seemed really comfortable with was 'Let's go get 'em!' The following night he managed twenty minutes of monosyllabic jingoism on the podium, but a day later, in Huntington, Indiana, his syntax was crazily unspooling all over the courthouse steps. 'The Reserve forces is nothing to say is unpatriotic ... By serving in Guard somehow is not patriotic, I really do not subscribe to that ... And a goal cannot be really a no-win situation.'

Quayle was chosen, supposedly, to help ease Bush's passage to the centre, a position he tried to occupy in his 'soft' acceptance speech, with its Whitmanesque intonations and nudges of moral suasion. Four days later we got a glimpse of the contortions Bush must now attempt, when he addressed the VFW in Chicago and sounded like Spiro Agnew: '[Dan Quayle] did not burn his draft card and he
dawned sure
didn't burn the American flag!' No other Veep candidate, no other politician, can ever have won such savage praise for not burning the American flag. Bush chose Quayle, I think, because he responded to and took pleasure in his youth, unaware of the slowly dawning reality that
all
baby boomers are unelectable, by definition (none of us is clean: we've all smoked joints, had sex, worn bell-bottoms, gone to the toilet, and so on). Perhaps Quayle is the fanatically right-wing son that Bush never had. More probably, the young man answered to the young man in Bush, to the frisky kiddishness that remains his central implausibility. By golly. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Deep doo-doo. Who does
that
sound like?

One night in New Orleans I fell in with some representatives of the pollster and media-consultant community, people who had worked with Bush, or with 'Poppy', as they call him. ('We think Poppy is a regular guy. Mainly because he says
fuck
a lot.') Here, all values are expedient and professionalised, and politics - fascinatingly - is discussed in strictly apolitical terms. I conflate their voices:

'On Spanish Plaza, Quayle looked like he just did a gram of coke. But they only jerked him off the streets of the Quarter an hour before, and that's what power feels like: you're thinking what you were yesterday, what you might be tomorrow. Their first job then was to calm him down. To calm his ass
down.

'I think everyone's surprised that he seems so vapid. I mean, we're talking Bob Forehead. There's got to be more there. The Bush people are taking shit now but they're smart guys — they must know that Quayle has moves we ain't seen. Hey. What do you get if you cross a chicken and a hawk?'

'I don't know.'

'You get a quayle. If he's going to help the ticket he's got to bond with his generation. That's the whole idea, right? He's
got
to express more ambivalence about the war. Maybe you'd want to do that with paid media later on, where you can control everything. It could all help Bush. It could release a lot of emotion, as opposed to canned emotion, and the challenge then is to steer that energy in your direction.

'Right now America is button-punching. If Bush looks like everybody's first husband, then Dukakis is looking like a great first date. The point is, Bush has better guys. Someone like Bob Teeter really earns his money when you're three days from a race and the tracking says you're seven points down and wondering whether to go with an attack spot or just keep with the positive stuff. Like Bush-Dole in New Hampshire. Anyone can do the numbers. It's the analysis. It's like on the
Vincennes.
Hey. How do you tell the difference between an Airbus and an F-14?'

'I don't know.'

'Exactly. You don't know either.'

At this point we were joined by a young woman from a news network who had spent the day in fruitless search of a Vietnam veteran willing to denounce Dan Quayle. Later, I heard about one of the more recent techniques in market research. You put sixty or seventy people in front of a videotaped stump speech and hand out dials (marked 1-100) on which the audience plots its undulating level of approval. This information goes into a computer. And out comes a tracking graph that gives you an emotional com-

rnentary on the speech. Further equipment is available to measure physical responses.

I left with an image of the American electorate, fitted with heartbeat monitor, peter meter, and armpit humidor dial, and pegged out in the political-science lab of the future.

Not that it appears to matter, but in a sense George Bush is everything that Ronald Reagan only seems to be: war hero, sports star, self-reliant achiever, family man. If George is the best father in America, then Ronnie is the worst (he is also, for instance, a war wimp who lied about his record — to Yitzhak Shamir). Yet Reagan has made it all new: the frictionless illusion of a distinguished life is now far catchier than the effortful reality. The only serious omission in Bush's resume is thirty years in acting school.

Here are three well-placed comments on the Republican nominee. '[Bush's negatives] are not venal negatives, they're warts negatives.' 'We have a perception problem on some compassion issues.' 'The guy's got no biceps, no tattoos -he's not up to it.' It is evident from his career, and from his autobiography, that Bush has always been prepared to do anything, or anything legal, to get the next job. What the 'anything' is in 1988, apart from the usual low blows of a tight race, is a lot of vulgar bull about family (which is ironic, since Barbara Bush must be one of the few remaining housewives in America). After Reagan, though, the messenger is the message, and this messenger tends to pratfall on the steps to the throne. Poor George, with his warts negatives, his compassion-issues perception problem, and his lack of biceps — and of anchors and songbirds and the bruised names of love . . .

Do we get the feeling that the language has taken a beating over the past eight years? It has been an era of euphemism, during which taxes have become revenue enhancements, accountability has demoted itself to deniability, and the lie has turned into the blooper. Reagan bequeaths an economy so unrecognisably deformed that nobody can get a stethoscope close to its chest. He bequeaths the Debt: just as crucially, he bequeaths an atmosphere in which no politician dares discuss it.

Deep, autonomous, imperishable, Reagan's popularity remains the key to everything, including the election. What
is
this woozy affinity between the American people and a
Bonanza
fan who turns in at 10 pm? Either it is all very simple or it is all very complicated. To adapt the writer Clive James on the singer Barry Manilow: everybody you know despises Reagan, but everyone you don't know thinks he's great. When they see Reagan frowning at his cue cards - instead of wanting less, they want more.

For a decade Reagan has impersonated, with an un-guessable degree of sincerity, the kind of American we hear a lot about at election time, if at no other: pious, wise, caring, industrious, independent, and above all
average.
The clear truth that this average American is a vain and shifty prodigal is not something that average Americans are raring to face up to. But then it goes still deeper.

In New Orleans the amplifiers sweltered with that special theme: American exceptionalism. Reagan understands that Americans are 'special' (my candidate for the worst word in the current lexicon). They are special — because they really think they're special. Never content just to be, America is also obliged to
mean;
America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion. In elevating Reagan — the average American who was special enough to land the best job in the free world — Americans elevate themselves. So perhaps the Era can be viewed as a narcissistic episode: a time when every American was President. Or not every American. Just every American that we don't know.

Esquire, 1988

VISITING MRS NABOKOV

He also remembered that the hotel was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to another, much better hotel, through the
rez-de-chaussée
of which you could make out the phantoms of pale tables and underwater waiters . . .

These lines from the late novella,
Transparent Things,
came flooding back to me, as I walked from my own dire hostelry (fuming radiators, pot-luck room service, a bed like a hammock) to the sparkling citadel of the Montreux Palace Hotel, where the Nabokovs took up residence in 1961, and where Véra Evseevna Nabokov has now spent the last four years, alone, in the sixth floor of the old wing.