|
|
| Photos by Chris Shonting | |
A CONVERSATION WITH LEWIS LAPHAM - PART 2
INTERVIEW BY BLAKE BAILEY
Do you still think that Al Gore is just another “well-known brand name” of the American plutocracy like Bush?
I’ve softened on the subject of Gore. I know I said that, and I know I thought that. I voted for Nader in 2000, but I think that was a mistake. I think had Gore been the president of the United States when 9/11 occurred, we would not be in Iraq now. I don’t know whether that’s just wishful thinking or not, but certainly the people that would have been around him in the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department wouldn’t have been the cadre of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and those guys.
You’re friends with Ralph Nader. What do you think of his persistent presidential aspirations? Do you think there’s something a bit quixotic and annoying about it?
I think there’s something quixotic about it. I’m not sure it’s annoying because I don’t think he will do enough damage for it to be annoying. I admire the impulse, and I’ve told him this. I’ve said, “Ralph, why don’t you run for the Senate?” I think he’d be a strong voice. We have three branches of the government, and there aren’t very many real voices of conscience that are both eloquent and forceful in the Senate. So that’s my view on it.
What did he say when you made the suggestion?
He said no. He said it wouldn’t have enough effect.
May I ask who you’ll vote for in the general election, given your druthers?
Barring unforeseen accidents and further disclosure?
Right. If the election were being held today [March 6, 2008].
If it were today, I’d vote for Obama. I think that there is at least a chance of some kind of energy being brought into our politics. I’m impressed by the kids that are excited by Obama, and the thought that politics matters. The thought that politics is, after all, what we make our freedom with. Freedom is not given by God, it’s given by our political structures.
But does Obama have enough experience? He’s only been in the Senate for three or four—
He may be insufficiently cynical to know how hard it is to move the furniture. On the other hand, there’s at least a chance of a different attitude toward politics—something not as cynical. That—to use his own phrase—words do matter. I am a person who is in love with words. I like writers and fine speeches, and Obama gives a marvelous speech. And I think words
do matter. If he can bring some of that energy into our political life, all power to him. Besides, I don’t think anybody is sufficiently experienced to be president of the United States.
Not even George Bush the First? With his résumé?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody’s prepared for it. And you have to remember how young the people were in Philadelphia, how young Jefferson was when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. How young most of them were in Philadelphia in 1787. I think the best-prepared president ever—I read this somewhere—was Millard Fillmore. He’d been vice president and he’d been in the House of Representatives for ten years. He knew everybody. And I think he’d be on the short list of worst presidents.
What do you say to ambitious young men who come asking you for introductions to Woody Allen or the doorman at Balthazar?
Fortunately, I don’t know either Woody Allen or the doorman at Balthazar. But I am more than happy to introduce them to editors that I know, or anybody to whom they might make some professional connection.
Your daughter married a prince, your son Andrew married former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney’s daughter, and your son Winston dates Amanda Hearst. Having yourself been born into considerable wealth and privilege, do you feel sympathy for those who are somewhat more obliged than you to clamber up the greasy pole?
Oh yeah, sure I do. That’s the American story. It just depends which greasy pole. All poles are greasy. I was discussing this just yesterday on the radio with David McCullough in terms of his book on John Adams, which just aired as an HBO miniseries. Adams comes from a very, very humble background in Massachusetts—unlike Jefferson, who’s something of a Virginia slaveholding aristocrat with a taste for the refinements of Paris. All of the Founding Fathers are climbing a greasy pole of one kind or another, but the thing that possessed Adams was the idea of honor, of fame, of being a meaningful servant of the republic. He had a very strong notion of duty to what he construed to be the American idea. And so did Jefferson, although Jefferson was, in the context of his day, privileged. So was Washington. Washington was married to the richest woman in the colonies. And all through the Revolutionary War, the Bank of England continued to honor the payments due his wife. He also continued to order his clothes and pipes and Madeira and so on.
So you don’t have an “old money” bias?
No, I’m entirely in sympathy—I’m not satiric about the supposedly vulgar nouveau riche. The nouveau riche are actually much more fun to be around than the faded gentry living on the memory of Pennsylvania Railroad in 1875, right?
You’ve mentioned attending gatherings of the Bohemian Club. Did you consider yourself more conservative then, or what? Because the Bohemian Club is pretty notoriously right-wing.
I went once and then took my name off the list of prospective members. My father was a member, my uncle was a member, my grandfather was a member, and so my name was entered on the waiting list at a relatively early age. I was in my late 20s or early 30s, and one has to become older to become a member of the Bohemian Club. I was in the queue, but then I went—it was either 1967 or 1968—and I was not impressed.
Is it as wild and strange as I’ve heard, with people like Kissinger taking part in dirty skits?
It has that element. I wrote about it somewhere, in my book about money and class. I think I devote a page to it. It did have those elements then, but my information is very old. They could go what they call “over the wall” to a small town on the Russian River that I believe was Monte Rio. It’s a resort for the sporting gentlemen in the company. And they would have ribald skits. It’s a large place—several thousand acres of a redwood grove, and it has a valley running through the middle of it, and in the woods there are a lot of different encampments. You belong to the Bohemian Club, but then you also become a member of a camp. It’s like becoming a member of a fraternity at college, and they’re all different. Some of them are musicians, some are card players, some are business executives, some of them like to drink. It kind of depends on which crowd you’re with.
In your essay “Tentacles of Rage,” you mention that 40 million Americans earn less than $10 an hour, 66 percent of the population earns less than $45,000 a year, and that 2 million people—mostly black and Hispanic—are in prison. What general measures would you recommend to correct this ethos?
Certainly the raising of the minimum wage. I would think that would be a good way to put money into the economy. I would get it over $10 an hour. And also, it’s a matter of education. The strongest resource of any country is its people, and so the money you can invest in their health and intelligence is money well spent. I would try to put money into the educational system, and that would mean paying teachers more. I would try to put money into some kind of a single-payer health-care system. Something more along the lines of the systems in place in France and Canada. Invest money in the infrastructure. It is, after all, a commonwealth, so clean water and a healthy environment are good for the whole common enterprise. This is actually the notion that Hamilton had in mind when he set up the first national bank, although he was entirely aware that many swindlers would take advantage of the assumption of the revolutionary debt. On the other hand, he was trying to put money into general circulation.
In the same essay, you mention the right-wing foundations that have made “generous distributions of academic programs and visiting professorships.” What about the dominant left-wing ethos of most American universities? To what extent do you think the “monster of multiculturalism” really is a monster, insofar as it tends to underplay, say, the roles of Dead White Males in shaping western civilization? Do you acknowledge that there’s something of a left-wing bias on most American university campuses?
I’m not so sure about that. I went to Yale from 1952 to 1956, and there was a big student demonstration, but it was pro-McCarthy! And that was the first student demonstration I ever saw. About 16 years ago, I went up to have a debate with Richard Brookhiser [a right-wing pundit/historian]. He’s a very smart guy. We were debating God and Man at Yale, Buckley’s thesis, and I was taking what would be called the liberal position. I lost. Part of that is because Brookhiser is a better debater than I am, but also part of that is because there is—at least at Yale—something profoundly conservative. I wrote a history of the college for the Yale Alumni Magazine’s 300th-anniversary issue. And I mean conservative in a good way—more of an Edmund Burke sort of conservatism than a Rush Limbaugh conservatism.
Well, but in terms of teaching so-called liberal arts—for example, do you think that the importance of certain writers should be downplayed because of their supposed ideological positions? Just off the top of my head, there’s the argument that Joseph Conrad reflects a sort of racist colonialism…
I don’t accept that view. I would teach Conrad and not teach some of the more dogmatic leftist writers. I guess your point about multiculturalism could be right, because my children all went to good prep schools and good colleges, and the assigned reading did have a politicized multicultural bias to it. That’s true. And I think that’s a bad thing. I think you should try to read literature and not tracts. The stuff that I’m trying to put into the history quarterly—I want it to be good writing. I want people to read Tolstoy, even if it’s only a little bit, or read Burke. I really don’t care if it’s left or right, if it’s well written. I think you learn from literature more than you do from sermons.
A CONVERSATION WITH LEWIS LAPHAM | 1 | 2 |
See all articles by this contributor
Anonymous, on Jul 15, 2008 wrote:
Hopelessly tiresome. Bailey needs to learn to ask non-leading questions. Light-weight rookie, interviewing a limp-dick. |
|
|
