It happens like this. Three or four months beforehand, a voice over the phone invites you to speak in some exotic, semi-tropical port of call. Like Tampa. It sounds as irresistible as the sound of the surf, as palms swaying in the breeze. Especially if the speaking date comes in the middle of winter. The sunshine and the waves beckon, and it’s a deal.
Three or four months is a long time. Surely you’ll think of something to say by then, though you know you’ll still be scribbling notes on a yellow pad on your way in from the airport. That’s anxiety time. It’s also when the payoff begins-the bright green of the grass, the blooming azaleas and impatiens and oleander and hibiscus and strange flowers whose names you never knew . . . . And there, right on the bridge across the bay, a brown pelican roosts next to a couple of human fishermen.
The bird looks on passively, as if to see how this handicapped species must use poles and string and patience to compensate for its limited eyesight and mobility. These awkward creatures spend all day at what the more feathered and gifted can accomplish with a single swoop.
Have you seen a pelican dive lately? One minute it’s lumbering across the sky like a small transport plan, slowly, awkwardly . . . and the next it’s only a mass streamlined by gravity, its bill and body an instantly assembled arrow pointing down, down, down. An invisible hand might have reached up from the watery deep and jerked the bird down by its suddenly elongated neck in one, did-that-really-just-happen? movement.
As if in love with the pelican, a sea gull follows the larger bird everywhere, especially at the moment of the catch, ready to grab any overflow of fish from the commodious pouch. The gull is always there, like white on snow, or, more exactly, like the tax laws on an entrepreneur.
My talk that evening is an act of treason: a newspaperman speaking about the tyranny of the news. Its theme: The news is too much with us late and soon, and watching and listening we lay waste our powers. Nothing is more insignificant in journalism than its subject; it’s how the story is told that compels, and explains why good news from a far country still comes like cool water to a thirsty soul.
But a kind of perverse Gresham’s Law now has taken hold, and the new drives out the old, irrespective of the quality of either. Novelty, even the promise of novelty, is all. It would add some welcome perspective if occasionally folks greeted one another not with “What’s new?” but “What’s old?”
On the beach, a couple leans back in their chairs, their eyes glued to the papers, each wearing earphones, which they lift occasionally to exchange a word or two. What music can they be listening to that is better than the sound of the surf? Or is it the news they can’t bear to miss? I imagine both listening to one of those recordings of the surf that one can now buy to drift asleep to. Ah, technology.
What use does our new, technically proficient age have for the dead past? We now know so much more than the past did. Yes, T.S. Eliot agreed, and it is precisely the past that we know. Although if we continue to ignore it in favor of the next edition, the next newscast, the next Sensation, we shall have no advantage over the past because we shall no longer know it. And we shall be condemned to repeat it. To geese, fools and news junkies, the world is created anew every morning.
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Contrary to the calendar, the world is moving not into the 21st Century but a replay of the 20th. With the collapse of communism, that last of this century’s stultifying totalitarianisms, the clock is being pushed back to 1914, before the Great War set off the chain of calamities that is the history of our century. This is just where we once wanted to be-in that halcyon time before ideological empires divided the world into two nuclear-armed camps. Once again a thousand nationalisms bloom as freedom stirs across the globe.
We forgot how difficult it is to keep nationalisms from devouring one another, and freedom from degenerating into anarchy, and bold ultimatums from tripping catastrophes nobody really wanted. One recalls A.J.P. Taylor’s description of Europe’s leaders on the eve of the First World War: “Their sensations, when diplomacy collapsed, were those of a train passenger who sees the express thundering through the station at which he intended to alight.” The chain of crises eventually exploded, almost accidentally, into the First World War. Now the fuse sputters in the same spot-Sarajevo. As if from all this the species had learned nothing.
Now the source of greatest danger is no longer some megalomaniac who seeks evil and can do it on a grand scale, some Hitler or Stalin, though each have their imitators-the Saddam Husseins and Slobodan Milosevics and Fidel Castros and Radovan Karadzics. No, the greatest danger comes from good men who temporize while evil prospers, or slip into the maelstrom a step at a time without any sure sense of direction or justice. (See today’s news from Bosnia. See any day’s news from Bosnia for the past year.)
The forgettable pre-Churchill prime ministers of Britain now have their counterparts in the bootless parade of Cyrus Vances and David Owens and Boutros Boutros-Ghalis, all not only perfectly useless but actively dangerous because their futile gestures substitute for anybody’s actually doing much to keep the peace. Amnesiac, ineffective, dithering, they don’t postpone war but ensure it. Abhorring violence, they promote it. Abjuring force, they leave the world at its mercy.
Twentieth-century man has been at this same crossroads before, but it’s all new to some. “How beauteous mankind is!” exults Miranda on being introduced to human society at the conclusion of “The Tempest.” ” ‘Tis new to thee,” wise old Prospero sighs in response, knowing full well the traps that await. He’s been there before.
What, Europe act as the flames mount? It dispatches emissaries to what was Yugoslavia and a token force of “peacekeepers” that will make perfect hostages. The United Nations mumbles vaguely. A new administration in Washington seeks to concentrate on domestic affairs (“The economy, stupid!”) as if events at home could be isolated from those abroad. The United States, rather than lead, follows. Once again America is being drawn into into the Big Muddy step by unthinking step, largely in an absence of mind.
This country’s new class, thinking itself free from the past, glides smoothly on, its glib leaders confident they swim with the tide into a new age. ‘Tis new to them. They may scarcely notice the danger till history comes careening down in an instant, its maw wide open.