Long Pauses

Tag: Cold War

  • Media Blackout

    I’ve toyed with the idea of posting a prediction for tomorrow’s outcome, but the fact is that I’m just too riddled with anxiety. A prediction would require that I go sifting through polling data with a calculator and a map. And, even more exhausting, I’d have to think seriously about the fallout: the inevitable court challenges, the days (weeks? months?) of political posturing and legal maneuvering, the general acrimony, and the slack-jawed wonder I’ll feel when it’s all decided, finally, regardless of the outcome. I’ll make only one prediction: whoever wins — and excuse my Fre-, er, my Cheney — is fucked. I feel a bit like Ethel in Millennium Approaches: “History is about to crack wide open.”

    And speaking of the Rosenbergs, rather than making predictions (or reading any news that might spoil my distorted sense of guarded hope), I have instead been getting up each morning and working on my dissertation, burying myself in 1937-1956. The significance? In 1937 Arthur Miller was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, reporting on efforts to unionize General Motors plants in Detroit and Flint for the school paper. He was also writing his first plays, which are like Clifford Odets’ except without all the nuance. (If you’re not familiar with Odets, that was me being sarcastic.) Miller has characters say things like:

    I’m a Communist because I want the people to take the power that comes with ownership away from the little class of capitalists who have it now.

    Subtle, eh?

    In 1956 Miller was called to testify before HUAC. His hearing came nine years after the committee’s first trip to Hollywood, three years after Elia Kazan’s testimony, and three years after the Broadway debut of The Crucible, and things were beginning to change. Miller, in fact, could have gotten out of the mess entirely if he had just allowed Marilyn Monroe to have her photo taken with the committee members beforehand. But he didn’t. And he testified. And that testimony helped to secure his reputation as our moral conscience, or something. And I’m doing my damnedest to figure out what this can teach us about the American Left.

  • Living with Miller

    According to Microsoft Word, I wrote the first fifteen pages of the first chapter of my dissertation in November 2003, before life and other projects got in the way. So now I have these fifteen pages (which read quite well, actually) and no idea what comes next. I mean, I know that I have to write about Arthur Miller, but I no longer remember what I had intended to say. And so I’ve spent the last five or six days reading. And reading. With more of the same to come.

    After living with Miller for the last few days — after rereading The Crucible and After the Fall and a three inch stack of photocopied criticism — I’ve come to one significant conclusion: I don’t like Miller. His early work shows an obvious knack for wrenching every last drop of sentiment and inevitable heartbreak from a tragic narrative, but, damn, they are really unpleasant to read. His language is starving for poetry.

    But Miller is a dramatist of ideas, one might argue, which is true. It’s also the reason that he is the starting point for my project. Certainly no other American writer of the late-1940s and early-1950s was so publicly interrogating the nation’s postwar, capitalist values. But like many of his critics, I find little value in his critique, which seems to offer only ahistorical, liberal platitudes in response to particular historical conditions. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Joe Keller, Willy Loman, John Proctor, and Eddie Carbone all die at the end of Miller’s most famous plays. Suicides, murder victims, and proud martyrs make for good tragic heroes but lousy politics.

    That’s why I’m more intrigued by Miller’s work of the 1960s. Gay and Roslyn ride off into an uncertain future at the end of The Misfits, as does Quentin in After the Fall. Miller’s turn toward existentialism and toward the possibility of a life lived in good faith has real political consequences that will be fun to explore in the chapter.

  • The Great Work Begins

    I can’t seem to muster enough energy to even care about the Reagan mini-series hubbub; carving out a nuanced position is completely beyond me. For largely economic reasons, CBS seems to have caved to partisan political pressure, which is lame and disheartening but neither illegal nor censorship. It’s not even particularly surprising. Come to think of it, I might actually be more offended by the idea of there being a Reagan biopic starring James Brolin than by the fact that I won’t get to see it. I mean, who would want to?

    I am intrigued, though, by the rising tide of commentary that links the mini-series with Angels in America. Frank Rich got the ball rolling with his piece in the Sunday Times. Then, yesterday, Andrew Sullivan posted a response at The New Republic. And now there’s word that Showtime will bump up its broadcast of the Reagan movie to November 30, exactly one week before HBO’s big premiere. In the Post article, Lisa de Moraes explains that Showtime President Robert Greenblatt “denied speculation that [his network] moved up the airdate to Nov. 30 because The Reagans, with all its juicy, audience-attracting controversy, was in grave danger of becoming roadkill when HBO debuted its adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play.” Greenblatt’s motivations are actually irrelevant to me; I’m more interested in the fact that the media has made that leap on its own, connecting the two films in a hotly politicized context.

    All three links are worth a read — I’m especially excited by Rich’s claim that “Angels is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire more than a half-century ago” — but I’m going to limit my comments to Sullivan’s piece, and, more specifically, to one aspect of it: his strangely ambivalent dismissal of Kushner’s play as “good Stalinist agitprop.” (I’m tempted also to take on his equally bizarre claim that “networks aren’t supposed to be” biased, but I’ll leave that argument to others better equipped and motivated to do so.)

    It is perhaps worth mentioning here at the start that Sullivan and Kushner have, as they say, “a history.” I haven’t followed it all too closely, but it’s been public at least since June ’94, when they appeared together, along with Donna Minkowitz and Bruce Bawer, on the Charlie Rose show to discuss the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. I haven’t seen the episode, but based on the transcript (available in Tony Kushner in Conversation) it appears that they spent a good portion of the evening throwing jabs at one another — Kushner accusing Sullivan of knocking down paper tigers, “one of them is the politics of the Left, as though there’s one politics of the Left”; Sullivan accusing Kushner of being “stuck in the McCarthy period….stuck in the late 1960s.” There was also Kushner’s commencement speech at Vassar, in which he took a none-too-subtle jab at “those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” I don’t read Sullivan often enough to know if he responded in kind.

    But back to the piece in The New Republic. Sullivan writes:

    Exhibit A in the attempt to turn the human tragedy of AIDS into political agitprop was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. As such, it appealed and still appeals to the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer and entirely why Frank Rich of The New York Times single-handedly championed it in the 1990s.

    That Angels is a fiercely political play goes without saying. And, yes, I imagine that its particular politics would be more appealing to those of a leftist bent. But to reduce the play to agitprop — a rhetorical ploy of the laziest variety — demands a grossly simplistic reading of a work that delights in ambiguity. Later, Sullivan seems to acknowledge as much in a back-handed compliment, calling Kushner’s play “a magical realist fantasy — where dreams become enacted, angels appear, and all sorts of metaphors are turned into dramatic imagery.” Even Roy Cohn, who Sullivan (accurately) describes as “an emblem of all the hard left despises,” is treated by Kushner with tremendous grace. Sure, the character Louis describes Cohn as “the pollstar of human evil,” but anyone who has seen or read the play with at least a modicum of maturity and human understanding will surely remember Roy’s death scene — a moment of suffering and humor and mourning and, perhaps most surprising of all, forgiveness. (I can’t wait to see Pacino and Streep together.)

    To be fair, Sullivan’s biggest beef here seems to be with Rich, who I would agree makes some questionable argumentative leaps. But Sullivan makes too many of his own. The historical record, he writes, “is complicated, hemmed in by political and scientific realities that neither Kushner nor Rich want to explore. Why? Because such nuance would get in the way of their anti-Republican hysteria.” He also compares Angels unfavorably to Randy Shilts’s As The Band Played On:

    Shilts’s sin — and the reason that he was vilified as viciously as Kushner was celebrated — is that he actually criticized some gay activists, as well as the Reagan administration, for resisting efforts to counteract the plague early enough. But in the polarized politics of AIDS, such complexities are generally unrewarded.

    Again, Sullivan’s reduction of Angels to simplistic, partisan politicking reveals his embarrassingly simplistic reading of the play and, I might add, some blatant partisanship (and personal anger?) of his own. Like Shilts’s book, Kushner’s play is actually quite critical of the American left, which is precisely why it’s a great play and not just one more Waiting for Lefty. The following paragraphs are the opening of a larger piece that might or might not end up in my dissertation.

    – – –

    Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Louis Ironson asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” then proceeds to answer his own question — sort of — rambling for several pages through a breathless and often hilarious (in a flummoxed, Woody Allen kind of way) litany of stereotypically liberal “fetishes” including, but not limited to: freedom, homophobia, human rights, race, anti-Semitism, and “the inescapable battle of politics” (1:89, 92). When his companion, an African-American ex-ex-drag queen named Belize, accuses Louis of spouting “racist bullshit,” Louis wilts, acknowledging that he probably is. “Oh I really hate that!” Belize sighs. “It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish” (1:93).

    It’s a telling moment for Kushner, perhaps the most explicitly political of America’s top-tier playwrights. Set mostly in the mid-1980s, Angels in America is very much concerned with a particular moment in history when, as Louis’s debilitating ambivalence demonstrates, “being Left in this country” was more transgressive and exasperating than it had been since the consensus days of the Eisenhower administration. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mondale; the ideological partnering of the Republican party with the “Moral Majority”; the wholesale cutting of budgets to domestic social programs; the intensification of Cold War rhetoric and foreign policies of containment; and the ineffectiveness of key left-leaning organizations to stem this tide — all contributed to a crisis point in the history of the American Left. Kushner has said of the era:

    the play is set — and I think this is very important — at a time when there’s no such thing [as mass-movement politics] in the United States for generally progressive people. For someone like Belize, there isn’t anything: The Rainbow Coalition has started to waffle and fall apart. And there is nothing in the gay community — there’s the Gay Pride parade, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis getting humiliated at the City Council in Newark every year — 1984-1985 was a horrible, horrible time. It really seemed as if the maniacs had won for good. (Savran 27)

    Throughout Angels and much of his other early work, Kushner responds directly to this crisis with equal parts vitriol and, perhaps more surprisingly, a tempered optimism. In that same interview he asks a critical question of the Left, one that guides his plays and that should likewise guide the formation of any contemporary progressive politics, or so he implies. “So none of these people had anything they could hook into, which is the history of the Left,” Kushner says. “When the moment comes, when the break happens and history can be made, do we step in and make it or do we flub and fail?” (Savran 27).

    – – –

    Ultimately, Angels in America is unable to offer a single, simple answer to Kushner’s own question — or, at least, a single, simple, political answer. Hell, as the curtain closes, Louis and Belize are still arguing, now about Israel and Palestine. But there’s something in the play itself — in its humanism and poetry, its theology and ambiguity, its campy theatricality and epic reach — that does inspire a strange longing (in me, at least) for progress (whatever that means) and for something like collective action, though not of the variety that would likely send Sullivan’s knee-a-jerkin’. Prior’s closing lines are a benediction, with all of the stickiness that word implies:

    You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
    And I bless you: More Life.
    The Great Work Begins.

    If Sullivan reads Angels in America as a Stalinist tract, then I pity his ideological blindness. He’s missing a hell of a play.

  • Friday Colloquy

    On Friday afternoon I subjected myself to ninety minutes of critical scrutiny by a group of professional historians. And it ended up being a damn good time.

    My article, “The American Left and the Problems of History in Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy,’” was the subject of this month’s Friday Colloquy, sponsored by UT’s Center for the Study of War and Society. Unlike most academic conferences — wherein, in my experience at least, you read a paper to a small and largely disinterested audience who then ask one or two questions while staring at their watches — the colloquy provides participants with copies of the article weeks in advance. The monthly meetings, then, become sites of informed discussion and constructive criticism. Who knew such a thing could still be found in academia?

    After spending the last three weeks writing and deleting and rewriting and deleting again the opening twelve pages of my first chapter, my confidence was shaky at best. Sitting face-to-face with a group of critical readers was, surprisingly, exactly what I needed. The best compliment I received was that my writing was “refreshingly free of jargon,” and more than one member of UT’s history faculty told me that when my dissertation is published it will be a welcomed addition to the required readings of many undergraduate American history courses.

    Someone might actually read this thing after all. Go figure.

  • A Writing Exercise

    I spent my lunch hour over in the library, where I went snooping for some old Arthur Miller essays. Most have been collected in fine editions, of course, but I like to put my hands on the originals — to grab those bound periodicals from the stacks and flip through their fragile pages, discovering the context within which the words that inspired my work were first published. It’s the wannabe historian in me, I guess.

    Unfortunately, Miller’s essays are just old enough that, except for a piece in the July 3, 1954 issue of The Nation — a fascinating McCarthy-era adaptation of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — I was forced to leave the stacks and venture down into the microfilm room. Contrary to popular opinion, I actually like the microfilm room (though I’ll be the first to admit that it absolutely pales in comparison to the real thing). I like browsing through the rows of tiny carboard boxes, threading the microfilm through the reader, whizzing my way through pages and pages of history at the touch of a button. It makes me feel, well, scholarly.

    I spent my lunch hour whizzing mostly through Life, Harper’s, Esquire, and the like. 1958 was an interesting year for Miller. He was married to Marilyn Monroe then, making him America’s most recognizable “serious” artist. In the year-end, double-issue of Life that year, an issue devoted to “Entertainment” that featured a multi-page pictorial of Miss M, Miller contributed a few hundred words: “My Wife Marilyn.” It’s accompanied by a charming portrait of the two together — the Jewish intellectual and his bombshell shiksa wife. The photo is so impossibly metaphoric, so iconic even, that I can’t look at it and see two real human beings. The image, refracted through my mind’s eye, is too blurred by celebrity and tragic history.

    I’m most intrigued, though, by the April 1956 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which Miller published his seminal essay on “The Family in Modern Drama.” For a cultural studies guy like myself, the issue is a gold mine. Miller’s essay is sandwiched between a two-page spread from General Electric — “Progress is Our Most Important Product” — and Averell Harriman’s analysis of “The Soviet Challenge and American Policy.” It’s like a snapshot of my dissertation project. Miller’s liberal critique of American profiteering is impossible to imagine removed from its Cold War context.

    I think I’ve found the introduction to my first chapter.

  • Happy Anniversary

    While sweating my way through a section of my dissertation (in which I’m attempting to say something intelligent about Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg and failing utterly), I got an e-mail from my dad, who passed along this article:

    Today, or, more precisely, a few minutes past 8 p.m. tonight, marks the 50th anniversary of the deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs, who maintained their innocence to the end, were convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, a crime the judge declared “worse than murder.” It now seems clear the Rosenbergs were neither as innocent as they claimed nor as guilty as the government alleged.

    I had to read the article twice before I noticed that throwaway phrase in the first sentence —”a few minutes past 8 p.m. tonight.” I’d forgotten that the execution was delayed by several hours because Eisenhower and his cronies thought it unseemly to execute Jews on the Sabbath. Apparently they weren’t as troubled by the other quirky problem posed by the date: Julius and Ethel died on their fourteenth wedding anniversary.

    If you’re looking for a fun summer read — something equal parts spy thriller, courtroom drama, and political history — check out The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton. I’m hoping that they will publish a revised version soon, incorporating the newly available KGB documents. It really is a fascinating story.

  • Un Chien Andalou

    Un Chien Andalou

    Over the years, I have, of course, heard and read a great deal about Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou (1929), but until Friday I had never actually seen it. Created in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Bunuel’s first film is most remembered today for one of its opening sequences, which cuts between shots of a razor blade, a woman whose left eye is being forced open, and a thin line of clouds passing before a full moon. Just as we’ve become convinced that the cloud and moon will serve as a symbolic gesture, comfortably eliding the violence implied by the sequence, Bunuel cuts to a close-up of the eyeball being sliced open. The scene still works, more than seven decades later.

    My favorite discussion of the sequence can be found in Virginia Carmichael’s Framing History, where she compares Bunuel’s film to E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a novel that attempts to make sense of the early Cold War years. There’s a remarkable and disturbing moment in the novel when the title character reaches over to burn his young wife with a car cigarette lighter. Instead of showing the horrible scene, though, Doctorow (through his narrator) attacks the reader, writing:

    Shall I continue? Do you want to know the effect of three concentric circles of heating element glowing orange in the black night of rain upon the tender white girlflesh of my wife’s ass? Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred? (60)

    Carmichael on the scene:

    What seems merely gratuitous cinematographic aestheticism on Bunuel’s part becomes something more radically critical in a political sense when considered as [Daniel’s] symbolic discovery of the function of symbolism in history to mask the horrors of reality—realities such as Stalin’s purges, the U.S. government’s knowing exposure of government workers to high-level radiation. (143)

    So much of contemporary filmmaking is about misdirection, about exciting the emotions and disregarding the consequences. I appreciate Bunuel’s film for its refusal to let us off so easily, though I must admit that, as with so much of Modernist surrealism, I found myself often stunned by the images but unwilling to engage in the intellectual gamesmanship necessary to decode them. I’m sure that great articles have been written that carefully trace contours through the fifteen minute film, but I couldn’t find the motivation to do so myself.

  • The Agony of the American Left

    By Christopher Lasch

    Spanning the years from the Populist movement of the 1890s to the radical politics of the 1960s, Lasch’s study offers a useful analysis of many of the social, economic, and political forces that have combined to frustrate the American Left in its search for a politically potent mixture of theory and action. Writing during the heydays of the New Left, Lasch argues that such analysis is conspicuously absent from much of the contemporary debate, leading throngs of young radicals toward heroic nihilism and impotent protest, and squelching their potential in the process. Ultimately, though, Lasch’s book, like so much of leftist intellectual thought, is better at theory than action, better at uncovering the faults of past movements than offering workable alternatives. Like the New Left itself, this book peters out near the end, unable to muster the energy for long-term resistance.

    Throughout The Agony of the American Left, Lasch suggests that the promise of the Left lies in the establishment of a new brand of socialism, one modified drastically from those modeled in underdeveloped nations and uniquely capable of exploiting America’s machinelike economy toward collective ends. His argument takes root first in his distinction between late-19th century Populism and Socialism. That division, he feels, created too many missed opportunities. In particular, it prevented the formation of larger coalitions around shared progressive interests. Drawing helpful connections between those past mistakes and Nixon-era America, Lasch writes:

    Organization, in fact, was achieved precisely by eliminating in advance all who could not be organized with a minimum of effort—immigrants, Negroes, sharecroppers, hillbillies; the ‘culturally deprived.’ Poverty has not been eliminated, it has merely been concealed. Because they are both ‘invisible’ and voiceless, the millions of poor have no way of making their presence felt except by violence; but precisely because they are leaderless and unorganized, violence, once it erupts, cannot be directed by radicals toward political objectives. (30)

    As Lasch points out, in the years surrounding WWI, socialism held considerable sway in American politics. “In 1912,” he writes, “the year Eugene V. Debs polled six per cent of the Presidential vote, Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states. As late as 1918, they elected 32 state legislators. In 1916, they elected Meyer London to Congress and made important gains in the municipal elections of several large cities” (35). But by the mid-20s, perhaps reflecting the combined influence of America’s booming industrialism and the growing isolationism of its foreign policy, the movement had lost its momentum, and “American radicalism had acquired the characteristics it has retained until the present day: sectarianism, marginality, and alienation from American life” (40). Of course, the liberalism and anticommunist sentiment that characterized so much of the political discourse during the post-WWII years only served to further bury the Left.

    In the second and third chapters, Lasch uses two case studies, The Partisan Review and The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), to expose the double-bind facing leftist intellectuals during the most heated of the Cold War years. Members of the CCF, for example, found themselves fighting for “cultural freedom” while maintaining a virulent anticommunist posture, which forced them to stake out an ambivalent position on, say, the Rosenbergs—”[The] pre-eminent fact of the Rosenbergs’ guilt must be openly acknowledged before any appeal for clemency can be regarded as having been made in good faith”—and Arthur Miller, who “had made an unforgivable mistake: he had criticized political interference with art not only in the Soviet Union but in the United States, thereby implying that the two situations were comparable” (87, 90). Ultimately, it was discovered that the CCF’s position was more compromised than anyone had imagined. Like so many other supposed mouth pieces of the Left, the American CCF’s journal, Encounter, was later revealed to have been supported by the CIA. Lasch writes:

    The modern state, among other things, is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.

    A system like this presupposes two things: a high degree of professional consciousness among intellectuals, and general economic affluence which frees the patrons of intellectual life from the need to account for the money they spend on culture. Once these conditions exist, as they have existed in the United States for some time, intellectuals can be trusted to censor themselves, and crude ‘political’ influence over intellectual life comes to seem passé. (94-95)

    The end result is that American intellectuals found (some would say find) themselves in a Pynchonesque nightmare of absurd miscommunication, all of which masks harsh political realities for the sake of furthering capitalist gains. “’What would a ‘free thinker’ do, asks the Sunday Times of London, ‘when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidized by a ruthlessly aggressive intelligence agency as part of the international cold war?’ According to the curious values that prevail in American society, he should make a redoubled effort to salvage the reputation of organizations that have been compromised, it would seem, beyond redemption.”

    The final chapters of The Agony of the American Left examine the strange ties that bound the Black Power movement with the predominantly white New Left. For Lasch, they were most closely united by their failings. They shared, he writes, “romantic anarchism but several other features as well, none of them (it must be said) conducive to its success—a pronounced distrust of people over thirty, a sense of powerlessness and despair, for which the revolutionary rhetoric serves to compensate, and a tendency to substitute rhetoric for political analysis and defiant gestures for political action” (131). For his analysis of Black Power—a really interesting read, I should mention—Lasch relies heavily on Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which argues that the movement is marked by a lack of theory and historical understanding. Like the New Left, it is dominated by emotional rhetoric and generic “resistance,” but the solutions it offers evidence a naïve misunderstanding of the economic forces that shape America’s social structures. For instance, Lasch asks the provocative question: Do ghettos exist because “powerful interests have a stake in perpetuating them,” or because “American society can get along so well without black people that there is not motive either to integrate them by getting rid of the ghettos or to allow the ghettos to govern themselves”? (132). That Black Power had no answer, just as the New Left had no specific, sustainable goals in its disruptions of campus life, only exacerbates the Left’s agony.

    For Lasch, the New Left is a failure both for reasons beyond their control and for problems of their own making. Had they been offered glimpses of progress, they may have moved toward more thoughtful analysis and greater cooperation. Instead, their peace movements were met only by further escalations in Vietnam. Their dovish President (Johnson) turned hawk once reelected. Their most promising candidate (RFK) was lost in another in a series of senseless assassinations. And instead, they were left with riots in Chicago and Humphrey as their nomination. Lasch suggests that the last promise of the Left remains in the founding of a new socialist majority. “In other words,” he writes:

    the Left has to begin to function not as a protest movement or a third party but as an alternative political system, drawing on the abilities of people who realize that their talents are often wasted in their present jobs. It has to generate analysis and plans for action in which people of varying commitments to radicalism can take part, while at the same time it must insist that the best hope of creating a decent society in the United States is to evolve a socialism appropriate to American conditions. (200-01)

    But aside from his thoughtful analysis, Lasch offers little insight into how such a socialist consensus might be formed. “In espousing decentralization, local control, and a generally antibureaucratic outlook, and by insisting that these values are at the heart of radicalism, the New Left has shown American socialists the road they must follow” (211). In the margin I wrote, “Is that it?” Like Lasch, I’m seeking praxis. I only wish that he would have put more of his theory into action.

  • Kennan and Containment

    I had no idea that George Kennan was still alive. The man who literally wrote America’s containment policy, the policy that has directed our foreign policy for nearly sixty years now, is 98 and living in Georgetown. Speaking about Bush’s desire to wage war with Iraq, Kennan said:

    War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

    He is also critical of Congressional Democrats, who are allowing the President to make this a purely political issue, despite Daschle’s protests.

    I wonder why the Democrats have not asked the president right out, “What are you talking about? Are you talking about one war or two wars? And if it’s two wars, have we really faced up to the competing demands of the two?” This is, to me, as a very old, independent citizen, a shabby and shameful reaction. I deplore this timidity out of concern for the elections on the part of the Democrats.

  • The Culture of the Cold War (1991)

    By Stephen J. Whitfield

    As with Thomas Hill Schaub’s study of the era’s fiction, the “Cold War” in the title of Whitfield’s book is somewhat of a misnomer in that he has limited his focus to the period of unprecedented national consensus during the Truman, Eisenhower, and (to a lesser extent) Kennedy administrations. The Culture of the Cold War is divided into chapter-long studies of the major voices of popular culture, each of which, according to Whitfield, reflected and contributed to the polarity that characterized so much of the 1950s. By making case studies of such disparate public figures as Whittaker Chambers, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Graham, Lillian Hellman, and Mickey Spillane (among many, many others), Whitfield exposes the dominant ideologies that shaped the politics, the news media, literature, film, religion, consumer culture, and television of the day.

    Whitfield begins by cutting through the hyperbolic rhetoric that dominates so much writing about the Red Scare, calling the period not a “collective tragedy” but a “disgrace.” “Unable to strike directly at the Russians,” Whitfield writes, “the most vigilant patriots went after the scalps of their countrymen instead. Since Stalin and his successors were out of reach, making life difficult for Americans who admired them was more practical.” The McCarthy era witch hunts divided the country into two distinct parties: honest, patriotic, God-fearing Republicans and Communists, a category that included everyone who, for instance, fought for Civil Rights legislation or worried about American poverty or questioned our involvement in Southeast Asia or failed to attend Christian church services regularly. In fact, for a period of several years, Whitfield convincingly argues, anyone who voiced any doubt whatsoever about the perfection of American society was opening up him- or herself to charges of disloyalty, which could then lead to blacklisting, prison, or, in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, execution.

    The most lamentable product of the hysterical finger-pointing was the silencing of all progressive politics. Whitfield captures the moment with effective understatement: “Because an intense concern with unsolved social problems may have betrayed Soviet influence, policy options thinned.” The Kennedys make for an interesting study of how dominant the anti-Communist ideology had become. JFK, then a young Congressman from Massachusetts, voted with the majority against several key pieces of proposed social legislation, and RFK served alongside Roy Cohn as an influential aid to McCarthy. New Deal programs atrophied when they were loudly denounced as “pink” and when funding was funneled instead toward the building of the Military Industrial Complex and the securing of American financial interests worldwide. America quickly shifted its focus to production and consumption. Whitfield writes: “What the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were supposed to protect was, above all, a lifestyle intimately associated with the blessings of prosperity. Above all the American experiment meant—at home and abroad-abundance, which was the finest measure of manifest destiny.”

    Typical of Whitfield’s book is the case study that closes it. In the final chapter, “Thawing: A Substitute for Victory,” Whitfield looks more closely at the early years of the 1960s, when cracks began to form in the American consensus. Stanley Kubrick’s films offer some timeline of that development: Paths of Glory (1957) was so strangely ambivalent about war that it was preceded by a disclaimer; Spartacus (1960) was based on a novel by Socialist Howard Fast and employed several blacklisted screenwriters, who were given on-screen credit for the first time in years; and Dr. Strangelove (1963) exposed the absurdity of Cold War policy by blending truth and satire in hilariously uncomfortable ways. Whitfield quotes Kubrick on the genesis of the film, which was originally intended to be a straight-forward adaptation of the novel, Red Alert: “ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’ But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful.” Whitfield pairs Kubrick with Joseph Heller, whose novel Catch-22 likewise took its form from the “disintegrated” days of Korea and the 1950s. Voices like Kubrick’s and Heller’s, Whitfield argues, helped to bring an end, finally, to the hypocrisy: “The culture of the Cold War,” he writes, “decomposed when the moral distinction between East and West lost a bit of its sharpness, when American self-righteousness could be more readily punctured, when the activities of the two superpowers assumed greater symmetry.”

  • American Fiction in the Cold War

    By Thomas Hill Schaub

    A more appropriate title for Schaub’s study might be The Liberal Narrative in American Fiction of the 1950s. He focuses the majority of his attention on the early post-war years, turning to the New York Intellectuals—Howe, Trilling, and Schlesinger, in particular—for his diagnosis of the crisis at the heart of the American Left at the start of the Cold War. Quoting heavily from C. Wright Mills’s 1952 essay, “Liberal Values in the Modern World,” Schaub writes: “any ‘democratic or liberal-even humanist-ideals . . . are in fact statements of hope or demands or preferences of an intellectual elite psychologically capable of individually fulfilling them, but they are projected for a population which in the twentieth century is not at present capable of fulfilling them.’ The new kinds of social and political organization which have arisen have left liberal values without any footing: ‘the ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization’” (19).

    Schaub argues that American writers of the New Left responded to this crisis—precipitated largely by the revelation of Stalin’s savagery—by returning to a brand of realism better suited to balance their well-intentioned but ultimately naïve faith in the perfectibility of American society with the hard facts of humanity’s obvious failings. Schaub labels this style of writing the “liberal narrative.” Lionel Trilling describes it as such: “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination” (22). As an example, Schaub often turns to Richard Chase’s 1949 study of Melville, an author who “presents his reader with a vision of life so complexly true that it exposes the ideas of Henry Wallace as hopelessly childish and superficial” (23).

    Facing for the first time in human history the very real possibility of apocalypse, artists shunned the formal sterility of Henry James and turned inward, exposing the problems of consensus culture by examining those most alienated from it. It’s no coincidence, Schaub notes, that much of the best writing of the era was written by African-Americans, Jews, and women. In chapter 4, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” he argues that the “new liberalism” manifested itself in a shift to first person narration: “often autobiographical, a point of view which embodied in one degree or another the isolation of the speaker, while at the same time issuing from the unimpeachable authority of his consciousness and perception” (68). Schaub describes this new narrative as one based on psychology, a narrative voice barely distinguishable from the author’s own mind. Norman Mailer’s first novel, for instance, begins with “an omniscient confidence, . . . but Barbary Shore begins much more uncertainly and has already acquired the characteristic first person, often disturbed voice of the fifties” (72). The Beats likewise turned to technique as a means of exposing the “phoniness” (to borrow a term from another novel of the day, The Catcher in the Rye) that characterized so much of “mass culture.”

    After setting up his argument, Schaub turns his attention to chapter-long studies of four representative “liberal narratives”: Ellison’s Invisible Man, O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Mailer’s The White Negro, and Barth’s The End of the Road.

  • The Public Burning (1976)

    By Robert Coover

    In the opening pages of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover’s satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America’s first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his “Checkers” speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy’s sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in ’68.

    “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?” The fictional Nixon’s question is at the heart of Coover’s satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It’s as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the ’50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation’s Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled “un-American,” a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-’50s.

    Knowing something of The Public Burning‘s infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel’s naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: “What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?” Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.”

    The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something.” There’s a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the ’70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel’s final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy,” is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain’t a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.

  • Day of Wrath (1943)

    Day of Wrath (1943)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Elegant, slow tracking shots, often in combination with pans in the opposite direction. Three times during the film, the camera tracks along the row of accusers, as in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Bodies are often half-hidden in shadows while faces, particularly the eyes, remain exposed. Favorite image is high-angle shot of Martin and Anne in a rowboat. Much of the frame is devoted to the water passing underneath, a Tarkovsky-like image of nature.

    • • •

    I can’t imagine how it must have felt to sit in a crowded theater, watching Day of Wrath during its original release in 1943. Set in 17th century Denmark, when rising religious fanaticism gave church leaders the authority to execute those of “questionable” morality, the film must have mirrored, much too closely for comfort, the Nazi atrocities being waged just outside the theater door. In his liner notes of the Criterion DVD release, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that Dreyer cast the blonde actress Lisbeth Movin in a deliberate attempt to diminish the allegorical implications of Anne’s plight, thereby diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), however, it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction here. Day of Wrath is a damning critique of hypocritical authoritarian power told in very human terms, a modern fable that interrogates faith and sin, love and family, desire and its consequences.

    As a fan of Arthur Miller, I must admit that comparing his play to Dreyer’s film pains me. The former was written for more explicitly allegorical purposes — a direct attack on McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As such, its characters are comparatively two-dimensional. With rare exceptions, they operate, rightly or wrongly, as stock mouth-pieces for Miller’s political and social commentary. Dreyer’s characters, by comparison, are afforded a more recognizably human complexity and moral ambivalence. For instance, we sympathize with Herlof’s Marthe (Anna Svierkier), the old woman accused of witchcraft in the film’s opening scene, not because she is a pious, honorable, and innocent martyr (like Miller’s Rebecca Nurse), but because of her human failings. She has experimented with witchcraft, she does lack Christian faith, and most importantly, she genuinely fears her death — the pain and suffering awaiting her at the stake — rather than her eternity. Dreyer stages Herlof’s Marthe’s scenes in a manner reminiscent of many in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory: they are stark, honest, and completely free of easy sentiment.

    The family drama at the center of Day of Wrath is likewise composed of characters with whom we must sympathize despite their obvious moral lapses. Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose) is, by most standards, a man of admirable faith and conviction. His piety, however, is cooled by intellectual distance. He respects his family and his God, but is incapable, until the very end of the film, of understanding the human cost of his actions. Anne, Absalon’s young wife, is his most obvious victim. She has been robbed of her youth, of joy, and of children by a man who has never even considered her need for love. Yet, despite her victimization, it is impossible to take any vindictive pleasure from her murderous curses. When she takes Absalon’s son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), as a lover, we are again forced to balance our own sympathies for the young lovers with the troubling moral consequences of their symbolically incestuous act.

    Day of Wrath‘s brilliant final scene must have offered little hope to those first audiences. Even Martin has turned from Anne, leaving her resigned to a fate that has always remained beyond her control. It’s a stunning image — the young widow leaning against her husband’s coffin, whispering a confused confession to her accusers. The critical (but superficial) question of Anne’s guilt or innocence is left unanswered, which makes a fitting conclusion to a film that brutally interrogates our lives, but refuses to offer trite solutions.