TANGLED WEBS

Listened to Radio 3's Night Waves tonight, particularly for Philippe Sands talking about his new book Torture Team. The skinny on it is: in December 2002 Rumsfeld's lawyer drew up a list of proposed interrogation techniques which breached the Geneva Convention. Rumsfeld approved the list and this led to use of said techniques, including the now-infamous waterboarding, in Gunatanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Two very interesting points came out. The first was that an episode of 24 where Jack Bauer uses torture somehow had a big effect not only on popular, but official opinion of what was acceptable practice. Nice to know the US government is taking advice from the best minds in, uhr, television. Second, Alan Dershowitz wrote an article, which I vaguely recall hearing about, in which he said that certain forms of torture might be permissible in certain instances, for example the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario (which has always seemed to me to be on a par with the question, "And what if you came upon a German soldier raping your sister?" i.e. so restricted that it bears no relation to anything one might actually encounter in reality). Dersh's leetle contribution, which at least has the virtue of demonstrating that even Harvard professors can be nitwits, all of a sudden made it very difficult indeed for those in the Guantanamo administration opposed to the use of torture to carry on arguing their case effectively. The door, as Philippe Sands notes, had been opened, and once opened is nigh-impossible to close.

Incidentally, if like me you've never been quite clear just what waterboarding involves, or why it's effective, take a look at the wikipedia article. Among the merry pranksters who've used it are the Spanish Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge. One can only hope that those who believe it isn't torture (step foward, Rudy Giuliani) one day have the opportunity to experience it first-hand.

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The second segment was more disappointing. Apparently there's a new film out claiming that RFK's assassination was down to a CIA plot involving mind-control, multiple gunmen and a cast of thousands. Well, we've been here, in JFK and The Parallax View and god knows how many books and broadcasts. Presenter Rana Mitter and his guest Scott Lucas, American Studies prof at Brum Uni, dismissed it as tosh and had a brief and unenlightening chat about the mind control/assassination meme in fiction and reality, with reference to The Manchurian Candidate and Project MK-Ultra, nothing those of us with our flying saucers parked out back haven't come across already. But then, then, Mitter asks, what is it about America, that when a political figure gets assassinated, there is positively a public demand for a conspiracy to blame, instead of the lone crazed gunman? (This from the country which has spent god knows how many millions proving three times in court that Princess Diana died of the bleedin' obvious.) Lucas gave a reasonable-sounding answer but didn't challenge the premise underlying the question: that a conspiracy is never to blame and all arguments to the contrary are intrinsincally pooh-poohable (despite his having earlier given several examples of CIA conspiracies to assassinate Castro).

Now, clearly, sometimes nutters strike. John Hinckley and Arthur Bremer are examples (although, weirdly, Hinckley acted out of an obsession with an actress in a film based on Bremer, who was, in turn, inspired by Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. If that isn't a meme out of control, I don't know what is.) And just because JFK and RFK both died by assassination doesn't mean the two incidents are connected. Not least because there is an important disctinction to draw between them.

RFK was assassinated by a man who was caught at the scene, tried, convicted and imprisoned. Regardless of why or even whether he did it, it's comprehensible.

JFK was assassinated by a man who was subsequently caught, arrested, then himself assassinated by a man who dies in prison a few years later. That stinks. The thing is, if it happened in Italy, though it wouldn't stink any the less, one wouldn't be at all surprised. One would think: business as for the past several hundred years. In the white-picket America of the early sixties, only then does it become bizarre, in need of exegesis. Gore Vidal has put it more succinctly: JFK's send-off was "purest Palermo".

[AMENDED MON 19/11/2007]

STAINED GLASS TELLS OLD STORY

From "Lost New York", the first essay in The Last Empire. Gore Vidal is reviewing a novel called Many Mansions by Isabel Bolton, published 1952 and set in 1950:

The old lady finished her reading: 'If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?' One wonders - is there such a thing now as a habitual reader of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass window trade.

Of course, Vidal has been raising this question for all of his career, and continues to do so today. I think it's certain that there are fewer and fewer literary references in public discourse, and that people in general don't have a literary common ground (other than Harry Potter). When I was at university I met an old fella who told me his father would meet with friends of an evening to read aloud their favourite passages from Thomas Hardy, and that this wasn't at all an unusual pastime. But then I suppose Dickens was the TV of his day, and followed with the kind of unifying, street-emptying attention people would one day give to Z Cars.

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In 1876 Vidal kind of provides his own answer, through the mouth of his narrator Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler:

My pen delays...Stops. Why write any of this? Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word.

I don't quite agree with this, but it's a good answer. Not quite as pithy as the beginning of his answer to a long, rambling and (to judge by the reaction) irritating question I posed to him when he was on a book tour in 1998: "Writing is basically an extension of thinking."

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I posted a little while back that 1876 was much taken up with the buying of American politicians, but despite the massive and widespread corruption which Vidal depicts, I wasn't prepared for the thrilling change of gear in the final section, when the presidential election goes to the wire. Up to this point, grand theft has seemed wrong but still sort of fun, committed by boring or jovial rascals; in any case, everyone does it, fortunes are there to be made in the Gilded Age and only the terminally unlucky or foolish suffer (we are talking here about the elect, the members of the American oligarchy which, of course, did not and does not exist - not the Civil War veterans who occasionally intrude on the narrative with their raggedness and missing limbs.) And then, having jollied and joshed us, Vidal gets serious, and it's like a slap in the face.

-- SPOILER ALERT 1876 --

The candidates are Governor Samuel Tilden (Dem, dry, highly intelligent but somewhat charmless, a reformer) and Rutherford B. Hayes (Rep, a man seemingly without qualities other than being the one candidate his party can unite behind). Tilden will neither take bribes nor buy favours; Hayes is no more corrupt than any of his peers, which is still saying a great deal. Tilden has already won the popular vote by a quarter of a million, has 184 electoral college votes, and one more will secure him the presidency; Hayes is on 165, and needs all of the 20 remaining votes from Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina and - yes - Florida. The results from all four of these states are in dispute.

Tilden addresses the press:

With altogether too much delicacy Tilden referred to the current "subject of controversy," making the point that in the twenty-two previous presidential elections, the Congress had simply recorded the votes sent them by the Electoral College. But now the Congress must choose between two absolutely conflicting sets of votes sent them by four states.

Tilden reminded the audience that three years ago the Congress had declared illegal the present Government of Louisiana, whose Returning Board has just seen fit to reverse the state's popular vote. Tilden also spelled out the illegality of the South Carolina and Florida boards. But where he ought to have thundered his contempt for the most corrupt and now tyrannous Admininstration in our history and unfurled his banner as our rightful lord, he was throughout his address very much the dry constitutional lawyer and in no way the outraged tribune of a cheated people.

All the way through this final section, Tilden is almost, almost there, but not quite. It should be his, it must be...and yet he seems to be unable to clinch it, despite the egregious nature of Republican attempts to pervert the count. By the time I got to this part, I was already experiencing a serious case of deja vu:

During the week since the electoral commission was given the two (actually, because of a technicality, three) sets of Florida returns, things did not appear to go well for us despite the brilliance of Charles O'Conor.

For one thing, the commission has never seriously tried to examine any of the initial voting frauds in Florida. The Republican case is based on the fact that the Hayes returns are the only valid ones because they have been signed by the carpetbag Republican governor of the state, while those favouring Tilden were only signed by the state's attorney general. For a whole week the number of angels able to dance on that pin's head have been counted and re-counted.

The entry for Tilden on Wikipedia notes:

While the Republicans boldly claimed the election, Tilden mystified and disappointed his supporters by not fighting for the prize or giving any leadership to his advocates. Instead he devoted more than a month to the preparation of a complete history of the electoral counts over the previous century to show it was the unbroken usage of Congress, not of the President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes. [Bigelow v 2:60]

The italics are mine.

-- SPOILER ENDS --

I came to 1876 totally cold (apart from recognising the name of Rutherford B. Hayes), began it with mild trepidation, continued with pleasure, raced through the end, and put it down with real satisfaction. A thirty year-old novel about a one hundred and thirty year-old scandal, which shines a powerful light on America today. Yup, I'd say that's a vindication of the stained-glass trade.

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It's accepted that the presidential election in 2000 was 'troubled', 'controversial' - that's to say, stolen. But no-one describes the 2004 election in those terms, which is astonishing given the number of complaints of irregularities. Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to Rep. John Conyers' report What Went Wrong in Ohio, which goes into these concerns in depth and is available as a PDF.

EYES WIDEN, EYEBROWS RAISE

There's a sonnet by Belli which consists of almost nothing but various names for the male member, which must present an interesting task for the translator. Here's a little snippet from Gore Vidal's Point to Point Navigation which may throw light on why - a Roman preoccupation, or simply a male one?

[Federico Fellini] was certainly a phallophobe in a culture rooted in phallophilia. He had even done a book of caricatures of phalluses, with such labels as "the happy cock", "the snobbish cock", "the angry cock". He entertained ladies with these drawings.

Whether or not this is normal behaviour for a phallophobe is beyond me.

OUROBOROS

First, a confession of ignorance. In one of his many fine essays in United States, Gore Vidal writes warmly and admiringly of V.S. Pritchett.

Who? V.S. Naipaul? No. Naipaul was born in 1932 in Trinidad and Tobago and is demi-Indian. Awarded the Nobel in 2001. Knighted 1990. Writes about the Third World, particularly India, and got into scraps with Edward Said, apparently for not being Indian enough. Pritchett was English. 1900 - 1997. Also knighted, in 1975. Poor, unstable middle-class background. After spending some time in McJobs got into literature and wrote throughout his long life, travel, novels, short stories, biographies, criticism and autobiographies, all of which, with the probable exception of the novels, were well or highly regarded.

Still at this point ignorant, I came across a collection, The Essential Pritchett, and began to dip with increasing happiness. This amazon review of the American edition gives a very good account of it. Here's Pritchett on Gerald Brenan's Thoughts in a Dry Season:

There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances.

Which, oddly, and as if to prove him right, was a very good description of the second volume of autobiography from Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation. In fact it's less of an autobiography than a series of utterances, anecdotes and reflections, most of which have autobiographical roots.

It's very much an old man's book, and has the quality of conversations with the old - you listen, and you gather the scraps, without being sure of how you got from one part to the next, and you wonder if you missed the link. Probably not. It was clear enough in the speaker's mind, but it would waste time to ask for an explanation, and we've moved on now. The title is completely appropriate.

It is still very readable - Vidal is incapable of writing inelegantly, even when his energy is limited. I will buy it, but not in hardback.

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Pritchett describes Brenan, apparently an incredibly learned man, as being "innocent of university", as was Pritchett, as is Vidal. What's the collective noun for autodidacts?

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At some point in his memoir, Vidal mentions how one of his early novels, Dark Green, Bright Red, was based on the coup mounted by the United Fruit company against the democratically-elected government of Guatemala. Just a few days ago I was encouraged to take a look at Jungle Capitalists, which is all about United Fruit, how it began, the power it wielded in the original 'banana republics', and how it serves as a template for and warning about today's multinationals. There's a summary written by the author on the FT site, but you'll need to log in to read it.