Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Henry had always been amused at the Langdon/Vogel attitude toward the Irish — that they didn’t exist. When his aunt Eloise moved to Chicago, his mother had muttered to his father that now she would undoubtedly marry an Irishman, and what would they think about that? When she married a Jew, his mother had breathed a sigh of relief. Jews, at least, were intelligent, not cunning. Henry realized that he had imbibed this prejudice when he studied Anglo-Saxon rather than the Celtic languages. The Celtic languages were far more interesting, and a much greater puzzle than the Germanic ones. And, yes, the Vikings had been all too familiar with Ireland — they had raided and marauded and enslaved; a study of Icelanders after the Second World War had shown that they were as Irish as the population of South Boston.

But his real pleasure was in the mystery of the Celtic languages — Irish, Breton, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish. Gerald of Wales would have been fluent in at least one. Celtic speakers may have lived at the periphery of Europe, but their language was closer to Italic than to German — the Irish word for wheel was roth , akin to the Latin rota —eventually to show up in modern English as “rotate,” whereas the Old Norse hvel and the Old English hweohl had evolved into plain old “wheel.” The Irish had split off the common Indo-European trunk half a millennium before the Germanic languages. Henry imagined those Celts — cunning, handsome, leading small but spirited horses, telling each other stories and myths that made no sense to anyone else, making their way to the edges of the Continent, then being driven farther west. The only things interfering with his plan to spend the summer in Wexford and Waterford were that he was seventy, and was thus rather nervous about driving on the left side of the road, and that George W. Bush, that craven pig, was about to start a war that could end anywhere. Henry and Richie had had a screaming argument about Richie’s vote for the Iraq Resolution and his apparent support for the imminent invasion. Henry had, in fact, been more violent in his opposition than Riley was.

Henry would have said that he was gifted at taking the long view — he enjoyed taking the long view. Yes, the Roman Empire declined and collapsed, and you could put the turning point at any one of several places; Henry himself thought the conquest of the Germanic peoples by Julius Caesar had been a mistaken use of resources, both military and natural, and that Caesar’s assassination was a testament to the instability the Gallic Wars had caused. The British Empire had collapsed much more quickly, and not that long before Henry’s own birth, but he felt a good deal of equanimity about that in spite of his long history of Anglophilia. Libraries had a way of smoothing over the pain of convulsive change. But he was having difficulty taking the long view about intervention in the Middle East. His particular bête noire was Tony Blair.

Tony Blair was three months younger than Michael and Richie, and, given what Henry knew of those two, he had very little faith in the depth of Tony’s analysis of the pertinent issues. According to Tony’s biographer, he had been quite like Michael and Richie — always in trouble, a student whom his teachers “were glad to see the back of,” someone whose main desire in life was to emulate Mick Jagger. At the press conference Blair held with Bush, a reporter had asked the question (noted only as “Q” in the Times ), “Mr. President, Bob Woodward’s account of the White House after Sept. 11 says that you ordered invasion plans for Iraq six days after Sept. 11. Isn’t it the case that you have always intended war on Iraq, and that international diplomacy is a charade in this case?” Neither Blair nor Bush had addressed the question — all tough questions (including the question of whether there was any evidence of direct links between Saddam and Al Qaeda) were avoided. But Henry really understood what he was seeing only this morning, when the Times reported that Blair’s most recent report in support of the war in Iraq, which Colin Powell had used to support invasion, had been cribbed from various magazines rather than resulting from independent research.

And so the boy who got through Yale because he was a legacy had as his biggest ally the boy who cheated on his papers and passed others’ work off as his own. How many times had Henry seen that over the years? Was this why he took the invasion personally? Why it made him physically uncomfortable? Why, during his work in the Folger reading room, deciphering Scéla Muicce Meicc Da Thó word by word (and, slow as it was, enjoying it as a form of rejuvenation), he felt the White House over his left shoulder, reminding him how quickly empires fall apart, and how much, perhaps, that collapse hurt even those who tried to take a long view?

—

DURING THE FIRST IRAQ WAR, Jesse remembered his dad telling him a funny thing — that, after missile silos were installed near Omaha, in the fifties, he would be doing something in the field behind the big house, which ran east-west, and he would be okay going west, because he could keep his eye on the horizon, but he would be nervous going east, because he kept sensing a mushroom cloud behind him. He would tell himself not to glance around — to hold off until the end of the row — but more than once he could not resist and looked over his shoulder. And one time he nearly fell off the seat of the tractor: there was a cloud, which he at first saw as a mushroom, that turned out to be a tornado at that moment reaching down. Yes, he had jumped off the tractor and headed toward the house, but he had been more relieved than frightened, not a normal reaction to a funnel.

Jesse never thought that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons or biological weapons. Somehow, the very expanse of the world around him — flat, huge, time-consuming to cross — had dispossessed him of those fears. And anyway, if Saddam had them, Jesse had said to Jen, why didn’t he use them when the Americans threatened invasion? He might have said, “You come any closer and my representative carrying a dirty bomb in his briefcase will emerge from his hiding place in London (or New York City), and take revenge.” But Jesse did think that Saddam had been foolish. He should have put his hands above his head, metaphorically, and said, “I surrender.” Then Bush and Blair would have had no excuse to invade with tanks and bombs and depleted uranium. Jesse was no pushover. He was skeptical about the war, he was skeptical about the peace, and he was skeptical about the skeptics.

But he was especially skeptical when he was sitting at the supper table, listening to Perky and Guthrie discuss whether to join the military.

Guthrie said, “The war is over. Bush said so. The rest is cleanup.”

Perky said, “Not everyone gets sent there, anyway. There’s other places to go.”

“Like Afghanistan,” said Jen. But that was the closest she would get to attempting to dissuade them. She still believed in the Socratic method of child rearing. For both boys, joining the military was an alternative to farming, and the one thing they agreed on was that any alternative to farming was better than farming. Felicity rolled her eyes, adjusted her pony tail, cut a piece off her pork chop, and ate it — chewing it ten times, the optimum for swallow-ability. She was fourteen and disdained her brothers’ views, but welcomed them — she had told Jesse around Valentine’s Day that he could leave the farm to her and she would be one of those women farmers like Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! , which she had read over Christmas for a school report. She had also said that if he, Jesse, died young (because men always died at younger ages than women, and farmers died younger than other men — it was statistics), she would make sure that her mother had everything she needed, including going to Phoenix for the winter, where she was more likely to find a nice retired man than she was around Denby. Jesse had ceased taking anything Felicity said personally, because she would say anything at all: it depended on what she was reading on the Internet and elsewhere. And she didn’t have many social skills. (Where did that come from? All the Guthries had social skills.)