Pete Hamill - Piecework

But before anybody could know how this would work out, the attacks started. The Republicans, who cheered for intervention in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, suddenly developed the white wings of doves. Bob Dole sounded like George McGovern, stating that Haiti was not worth a single American life. The radio chatterers unleashed ferocious barrages, attacking Clinton for ducking Vietnam and now putting Americans in harm’s way, dismissing Aristide as an anti-American Marxist nutcase. Joe Klein in News-week called the intervention “a bizarre Caribbean adventure” while also stating that Clinton “did the right thing” and sneering at Carter as “the Prince of Peace.” Michael Kramer in Time wrote that “Bill Clinton at war has the disquieting countenance of Bill Clinton at peace; few principles seem inviolate; indiscipline and incoherence are the norm; careful planning falls to last-minute improvisation; steadfastness is only a tactic.”

Journalists are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain an adversarial stance with politicians. But the vehemence of the attacks on Clinton seems more a reflex than thought and analysis. A line has developed on Clinton, and to swerve from it entails risks, most of them social and professional. Few people like to face the question, “Are you fucking kidding?” My objection here isn’t with the facts or the implications of disaster but with the venomous tone.

In modern times, that slashing, lacerating use of language came into the discourse with Vietnam. It was first employed against Lyndon Johnson (I used plenty of it myself), then Richard Nixon, justified by the endless slaughter of the war and then by Watergate. Irony was lost, along with a sense of shared tragedy. What mattered was the casting of anathemas. The Left used the tone first, then the Right picked it up; now it comes easily to almost everybody. The tone is sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental, and its essential component is the sneer.

These days, most members of the Washington press corps wear a self-absorbed sneer. They sneer at any expression of idealism. They sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies. They sneer at the “invisibility” of national-security adviser Anthony Lake but sneer at others for being publicity hounds. They sneer at weakness. They sneer at those who work too hard, and they sneer at those who work too little. They fill columns with moralizing about Clinton and then attack others for moralizing. The assumption is that everyone has a dirty little secret, and one’s duty is to sniff it out.

Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for the great American art of compromise. Clinton, a professional politician, obviously believes in it and is sneered at for being an incessant placater of his opponents. Give us the whole loaf or nothing, comes the intolerant call. Make me feel better. Make me happy. Make life perfect. If you don’t, then give us term limits. Get rid of the professional pols and give us amateurs. Oliver North. Ross Perot. Don’t tell me the world is complicated.

Pericles couldn’t govern that polity. What chance can Clinton have? Domestically, he’s indicted for being too liberal or too conservative, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to public opinion or too desirous of consensus. In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics remain in thrall to Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory of foreign engagement, using naked power to get your way.

After all, if a president won’t smash his domestic opponents, if he won’t kill foreigners with icy dispatch, how can he deal with the blacks and the Mexicans and the immigrants and the feminists and the Cubans and the poor and the rich and the disabled and the por-nographers and the liberals and the guys with the hyphens in their names? How can he be a leader? How can he be a man?

If this goes on, escalating by the hour, the country is doomed. It will remain a state, of course, a geographical entity; but it won’t be a nation. We are in the midst of the largest immigration wave since the turn of the last century. If we have already succumbed to our own jagged forms of tribalism, we can’t hope to absorb and assimilate the new arrivals. If we tell the new immigrants that to be an American is to insist on status as a victim, to hate the president and the government, to fear one’s neighbor, to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level, then our twenty-first century will be a horror. E pluribus unum was not intended to be a gigantic mockery. It’s time for all Americans to think about what we’re doing to ourselves. It’s time to ostracize the sectarian swine who, in Yeats’s phrase, multiply through division. It’s time to honor good taste, hard work, and all those men and women who cherish human decency.

The gulags are gone. The concentration camps exist only in memory. Nobody worries much anymore about atom bombs. But fear is a habit like any other. So is the need for an enemy. And as the great cartoonist Walt Kelly said long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We can’t allow that to replace e pluribus unum as the American national slogan. We have to learn how to pipe down and back off. We have to stop shouting for a little while and learn again how to listen.

Otherwise, it’s black hats and white hats.

Us against Them.

Me against you.

Endgame.

ESQUIRE,

December 1994

These are personal pieces, about living and about not dying. With any luck, they won’t be the last about either subject.

Ihave arrived at last in that peculiar zone where I am no longer young and not yet old. This stage of a human life is called, of course, middle age. Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, I am not in the middle of my life, for there is little chance that I will live to 104. But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, and this sometimes causes personal astonishment. In the course of my time here, I have seen much of the world, loved women, fathered children, worked at several trades, committed cruelties and engaged in folly, had fine meals and good times, drowsed through summer afternoons and heard the chimes at midnight. That is to say, I have lived a life. I am far from finished with that splendid accident, but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition called middle age: I know now that the path is leading inexorably through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death.

Above all, the acceptance of certain death is what distinguishes this age of man. For some, the imminence of death creates remorse about the waste of time and opportunities; for others, fear; for a few, relief; for many, a sense of urgency. This is the time of life when men throw over careers to try painting in the South of France; they leave wives for ballerinas; they hole up in mountain cabins to read Proust; they gaze at the shotgun on the wall of the den and see only the quarry of the self. / am going to die, the man whispers to himself. Sooner than later. This dramatic sense of the inevitable doesn’t resemble the fatalism of the combat soldier, who knows that if he lives, he will still be in command of his youth. Nor does the vision of death have the dark romantic glamour it has when you are young. If you have reached middle age, you have already chosen to live. But the warning signs of decline and decay are as unavoidable as sunset. The most obvious are physical.

One summer, after a grueling winter of work, I discovered I had grown a paunch. A bathroom scale told me that I had gained only ten pounds, but the suety paunch, noticed suddenly in the window of a store, made me look like another person, some chunky middle-aged stranger going about his mundane business. The paunch would not go away, and I have been unable to summon the force of my dormant adolescent vanity to work it off. At the same time, white patches appeared in my beard and a few white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp. Because I do not shave, and thus don’t engage in morning ablutions, I see my face less frequently than I did when young; these changes were sudden reminders of the inevitable.