Stars & Stripes captain and future White House guest Dennis Conner was there, also in a bad tux. He looked like a poster child for the Penguin Obesity Fund. Dennis is supposed to be something of a personality, but with 2,499 other drunks with skin rashes all around it was hard to tell.
In the middle of the wool-barn dance floor, flanked by armed guards, was the America's Cup itself. The America's Saucer, the America's Dinner Plate, the America's Soup Tureen and the America's Gravy Boat that go with it are presumably held by other yacht clubs. It must be quite a place setting when it's all put together.
I was milling through the crowd of Cup admirers when I bumped into Jimmy Buffett, on tour in Australia and looking, as usual, like a one-man Spring Break. I've known Buffett since he was playing for Coppertone handouts on the beach at Key West. He's a sterling character and so forth, except he's under the misapprehension that sailboats are fun. He nearly drowned me in a sailboat one time when we almost collided with a supertanker off Miami Beach. It was a Gulf supertanker, but it came so close all we could see was the U. Anyway, Buffett had written the Stars & Stripes fight song "Take It Back" and was in a tizzy of spectator enthusiasm.
"Oh, come on," I said. "This is about as interesting as watching George Bush get ready for bed."
"Goddamn it, P.J.," said Buffett, "you dumb-ass Yankee landlubbing typewriter skipper with your phony-baloney job making fun of everything-this is the most spectacular sporting event of the decade." And he promised to explain twelve-meter racing to me so that I'd feel about the America's Cup like David Hinkley felt about Jodie Foster.
Buffett and I went off to show the Australian bartender what he could do with his Rose's Lime Juice. And before you could say, "G'day, Mate! Got a fair dinkum hangover? Good on ya!" We were back on the Sea Chunder, flopping around like tropical fish on the carpet.
This time I had a better view of the action, not that there was any. "Look!" yelled Buffett, "They're jibing! They're heeling! They're running! They're reaching! Oh, my God, they're jibing again!" All of which seemed to mean that they weren't doing much.
A twelve-meter is a big boat, some sixty-five feet long, with eleven people sailing it all at the same time. But, no matter how much fooling around they do with the ropes and the steering wheel and stuff, the boat just keeps piddling along in the water. Now and then they put up a spinnaker-a great big sail that looks like what happens when a fat girl in a sun dress stands over the air vent at a Coney Island fun house. The purpose of the spinnaker is, I believe, to give the sponsor some place where he can put the name of his company in really gigantic letters.
"Jimmy," I said, "I could probably get into this if they'd arrn these twelve-meters. You know, maybe twin-mount .50-calibers right up in the pointy part at the front-with tracer bullets."
"P. J.," said Buffett, "shut up."
Fortunately, there was a wild-ass drug scene on the Sea Chunder. I was popping fistsful of hyoscine hydrobromide (mar keted under the Barf-No-Mor label). Enough of this in your system and you get seriously bent. Your vision goes zoom lens and begins doing Top Gun special effects, aboriginie didjeridoos start playing in your brain, your temples inflate and your mouth tastes like Lionel 0-Gauge track. You don't feel like throwing up. But you do feel like wetting yourself and raping the first mate and eating all the colorful boat clothes. Sailboat racing can be interesting. So was Altamont.
I went downstairs to the Sea Chunder's first floor and had twelve beers to cool out and make myself regular sick instead of hyoscine hydrobromide sick. Also, I figured it was important not to see any more of this America's Cup stuff sober, or I might start thinking about how many starving Ethiopian kids you could feed with just one of these twelve-meters. Of course, that's ridiculous. You can boil Kookaburra III for as long as you want, and starving Ethiopian kids still won't eat it.
I spent the rest of the race in the Sea Chunder bar watching "Dialing for Dingos' on local TV. Eventually I heard Buffett outside hollering, "We won! We won!" And I guess we did. That's nice. We now have a new national hero, size extra-large. I like it that Dennis Conner, 1987 Athlete of the Year, can't touch his toes or even see them. And twelve-meter racing is the perfect sport for the Eighties-snobbish, expensive and high-tech in a pointless way. You have to be rich even to afford to go see it. I'm sure there are two dozen Hollywood mudsuckers slithering around L. A. this moment pitching twelve-meter movie ideas. "Like Karate Kid," they're saying, "but with boats."
Already a great national debate has started about where the next America's Cup race should be held. Let me be the first to suggest Aspen. I'll bet these twelve-meters go like a bitch downhill.
SEPTEMBER 1986
I always envied the fellows who went to Harvard. Wouldn't it be swell to be on the Crimson gravy train? I'd probably be a government big shot by now, undermining U.S. foreign policy, or a CEO running some industry into the ground. I'd have that wonderful accent like I'd put the Fix-A-Dent on the wrong side of my partial plate. And I'd have lots of high-brow Ivy League friends. We could have drinks at the Harvard Club and show off our Ivy League ability to get loud on one gin fizz. There, but for low high school grades, middling SAT scores, a horrible disciplinary record and parents with less than $100 in the bank, go I. How sad.
Or so I thought. I'm cured now. I just came back from Harvard's monster gala 350th Anniversary Celebration, and thank you, God, for making me born dumb. I went to a state college in Ohio. Therefore, I will never have to listen to dozens of puff buckets jaw for hours about how my alma mater is the first cause, mother lode and prime mover of all deep thought in the U.S.A. I'm not saying the puff buckets are wrong. Harvard is the home of American ideas; there have been several of these, and somebody has to take the blame for them. But it ain't the likes of me. Us yokels who majored in beer and getting the skirts off Tri-Delts bear no responsibility for Thoreau's hippie jive or John Kenneth Galbraith's nitwit economics or Henry Kissinger's brown-nosing the Shah of Iran. None of us served as models for characters in that greasy Love Story book. Our best and brightest stick to running insurance agencies and don't go around cozening the nation into Vietnam wars. It wasn't my school that laid the educational groundwork for FDR's demagoguery or JFK's Bay of Pigs slough-off or even Teddy Roosevelt's fool decision to split the Republican Party and let that buttinski Wilson get elected. You can't pin the rap on us.
But I was still full of high, if slightly green-eyed, expectations when I arrived at Harvard on Wednesday, September 3rd. I was just in time for something the Official Program called "Harvard's Floating Birthday Party," though it took place on a patch of muddy grass between Memorial Drive and the Charles River and didn't float at all. According to the Program notes, there were to be "a 600 foot illuminated rainbow, laser projections . . . appearances by the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra . . . The Yale Russian Chorus, the clown Mme. Nose; the one-man riddle and rhyme show, `Electric Poetry,"' and other sophisticated delights.
The laser projections looked like Brownie Scouts at play with flashlights and colored cellophane. The illuminated rainbow looked like a McDonald's trademark. "Electric Poetry" turned out to be one of those two-bit Radio Shack things where you can program messages to crawl along rows of little light bulbs. It flashed such verses as, "Be your best/Pass this test/Divest/Your funds from South Africa." I searched in vain for the clown Mme. Nose.
The Yale Russian Chorus, however, was performing or maybe that was the Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra or perhaps the Oxford Nose Harp Ensemble. I listened, but I couldn't be sure. It was raining, but this did not deter the spectators who arrived by the hundreds to stand lax-jawed in bovine clusters, occasionally fingering their alumni badges. Here was America's power elite, all wet with no idea what they were doing. You can take it for a symbol if you like. I couldn't take it at all and went to the nearest bar.
There was a modern-dance performance that night called "Gym Transit"-part of Radcliffe College's contribution to the 350th festivities. The Program notes described it as "celebrati
ng the art of sport and dance." I admire phrases like this with a whole bunch of concepts that, if you have a Harvard education, you can just jumble together any old way. I'll bet "Gym Transit" could also be described as "dancing the celebration of art and sport" or "sporting the dance of celebration art" or "making an art of sport dance celebration." It was hard to pass this up, but after six drinks I managed.
The next morning was the great Foundation Day convocation, which President Reagan wasn't addressing. You may remember the press flap. Harvard wanted the president to give a 350th birthday speech as Franklin Roosevelt had done at the 300th and Grover Cleveland at the 250th. But Harvard didn't want to give the president an honorary degree. I guess they felt Reagan was a nice man and, no doubt, important in his way, but not quite Harvard material. Once again they're right. Ron would have dozed off during "Gym Transit" even quicker than I. So the president, God bless him, told Harvard to piss up a rope. And Harvard had to go shopping for someone else. I'm sure they were looking for a person who embodied democratic spirit, intellectual excellence and the American ethos, which is why they picked Prince Charles.
The Convocation opened with prayers by Chaplain of the Day Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director of the campus B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation. Rabbi Gold graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago and sounded like Shecky Green, and running him first out of the gate seemed a kind of cruel joke. The Ivy League has never been famously hospitable to Jews. And Harvard has been almost as important to the American Jewish community as the pork-sausage industry. There followed eleven speakers and three anthems sung mostly in foreign languages. The temptation to rattle on at length was resisted by no one. I whiled away the time in the half-empty press section by defending myself from a horde of yellow jackets that had descended on Harvard Yard and by deciding which member of the Radcliffe Choral Society I would take with me to a desert island if I had to take one of them, and fortunately I do not. The choral society looked like the Harvard football team with mops on their heads. Indeed, since Harvard football is played as though the team spends its practice sessions singing in a choir, this may have been the case.
Every now and then I'd catch some fragment of a speech. I remember the adenoidal-voiced professor of classical Greek, Emily D.T. Vermeule, dumping on Homer. She quoted the Odyssey where Homer had the minstrel Phemius, begging Odysseus to spare his life, say, "I am self-taught. God planted all the paths of poetry in my mind."
Professor Vermeule took a dim view of this. "He spoke in pride," she said, "that only God was his tutor; in vanity, for his original genius; in fear, that death might take his irreplaceable gift of words. He was wrong. . . . Harvard," Professor Vermeule said, `... is not self-taught, and is rightly proud of that." Poor Homer, you see, probably couldn't even get into Yale.
By the time Prince Chuck got to the podium the show was running almost an hour behind schedule. "The suspense of this momentous occasion has been killing me," said the Prince. "It's exquisite torture for the uninitiated. Fortunately, all my characterbuilding education has prepared me for this." Charles seemed as confused as I was about what he was doing there. "I thought that in Massachusetts they weren't too certain about the supposed benefits of royalty," he said and noted that he hadn't "addressed such a large gathering since I spoke to forty thousand Gujarato buffalo farmers in India in 1980... "
The rest of the speech was a sweet little well-pronounced thing about development of character being more important in education than mastery of technology. The audience clapped at odd moments, and it was a while before I figured out they were applauding anything that could be construed as a warning against atomic energy and bombs and stuff.
The 350th Anniversary Celebration went on for four days and included a mind-numbing and butt-wearying number of events. There were two other convocations, eighty-three academic symposia, forty-three exhibitions and sixteen performing arts events, plus heaps and piles of private lunches, cocktail parties, dinners and receptions. The symposia ranged from over-reach ("The Universe: The Beginning, Now and Henceforth") to under-reach ("Films as an Art Form") and included the dumb ("Feminist Criticism and the Study of Literature: What Difference Does Difference Make?"), the very dumb ("Taking Charge of Your Life") and the hopelessly oxymoronic ("The Role and Social Value of the Large Law Firm"). One symposium was called "Beyond Deterrence: Avoiding Nuclear War" and billed itself as "An examination of the use of nuclear weapons." For doorstops? Another was titled "Homer at Harvard," so maybe they're claiming the old hexameterbasher as one of their own after all.
The list of exhibits looked worse yet, for instance, "Artifacts of Education" at the Gutman Library, which I assume was old pen nibs and gum under seats. I actually saw only one exhibit, a massive display on "A New Approach to the Treatment of Advance Periodontal Disease," complete with color photographs, which I had to walk by to get to the free press lunch.
I felt I should go to at least one symposium too. I picked "The International Negotiation Process: Can We Improve It?" figuring this was as likely a place as any for eggheads to go wrong. But, in its ability to disappoint, as in all other fields, Harvard excels. The eggheads didn't go wrong. They didn't go anywhere. They yammered for two hours about US.-Soviet treaty bargaining, saying nothing about negotiation I couldn't have learned from a Kansas City divorce lawyer.
The moderator, Professor of Law emeritus Louis Sohn, had an accent so thick I could understand almost nothing he said. The gist of that almost nothing was that there are three kinds of negotiation: one-on-one, mediation by a third party and submission of dispute to an international tribunal. Professor Sohn said one of these doesn't work very well with the Soviets and the other two don't work at all.
The first panelist, Arthur Hartman, U. S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, pointed out that Russians are very Russian. He also pointed out that communism is totalitarian and we can't count on Pravda investigative reporters to catch the Soviets cheating on arms agreements. And he railed briefly against congressional tendency to legislate the negotiating process instead of letting the executive branch screw things up on its own.
The second panelist was former Attorney General Elliot Richardson. Richardson is one of those fixtures of the political scene that nobody knows quite what to do with. A job negotiating the boring International Law of the Sea Treaty was fobbed off on him a few years back. It must have made a big impression. Richardson brought the discussion around to sea law at every opportunity. Among his many insights (each illustrated with a lawof-the-sea example): The Soviets act in their own self-interest; the Soviets get peeved when reminded that they're not really a superpower but a sort of overgrown Bulgaria; and "If we are to succeed in negotiating, we must understand their position ... and we'd better understand our position, too."
The third panelist was Howard Raiffa, a professor at the Harvard Business School and an expert on decision analysis and negotiation. He said a number of things, or I assume he did. I had temporarily dozed off.
Batting clean-up was Roger Fisher, another Harvard Law School prof and author of the best-selling Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreements Without Giving In. Professor Fisher was cute and glib and quotable, saying things like, "Asking who's winning a negotiation is like asking who's winning a marriage," and, "When it comes to arms negotiations, we can be equally insecure for less money." Fisher could probably get a job in the real world if he tried.
A question-and-answer period followed. I asked myself the question, "What am I doing here?" and left.
That night I went to Boston and got hammered and missed the only interesting thing that happened during the anniversary. A weedy group of sixty or eighty anti-apartheid protestors had been popping up here and there all through the ceremonies, squeaking, "Divest Now" and waving placards saying "There's blood on your portfolio." Being a veteran of the pressing issues and real riots of the 1960s, I had paid them no mind. But on Thursday night the do- gooders nerved themselves and blocked the entrances to the 350th Anniversary Dinner, a $20,000 black-ti
e fete for several hundred of the university's most influential alums. There was a good deal of shouting and even some pushing and wrassling between alumni and protestors. According to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, "Hugh Calkins '45 . . . led a small contingent of alumni who tried to make their way through the blockade in front of one door. The activists physically repelled them . . . . At another entrance .. . an alumnus successfully climbed through several rows of armlinked protestors who attempted to push him down the steps. As he physically struggled against the activists, the alumnus called them `assholes ..."
Mercifully for the protestors, this wasn't Georgia Tech. Cambridge police officers reportedly said they were ready to arrest the protestors and only had "to be given the word." President of Harvard, Derek C. Bok, cancelled the dinner instead. I was unable to determine the whereabouts, during these events, of Professor Fisher and his Negotiating Agreements Without Giving In.
On Friday morning Secretary of State George Shultz addressed the second convocation. This was almost as long and involved as the Prince Jug Ears get-together, and the security arrangements verged on the maniacal. A UPI reporter told me he'd counted fourteen different law enforcement agencies so far. While we sat in Harvard Yard, nearly a dozen Secret Service agents roamed the aisles staring intently at us. Outside, the protestors were back but this time double-teamed by cops. They carried signs protesting not only apartheid but also aid to Israel, involvement in El Salvador, and aggression against Nicaragua and Cuba; one sign said "Remember John Reed," the pro-Lenin U.S. reporter (and Harvard grad) buried in the Kremlin wall. Inside, a few protestors had scattered themselves through the audience. About every five minutes one would bob to his feet and yell. Then police and Secret Service agents would come and stand in front of him and glower until he sat down.
Just as the convocation got under way, a low-flying plane began to circle the Yard dragging a banner with the message "US/ HARVARD OUT OF SOUTH AFRICA SANCTIONS DIVEST NOW." This drowned out the Call to Order and a long-winded prayer by the Chaplain of the Day (a Mick, this time) and part of an address by the Mayor of Cambridge-so disrespect for freedom of speech has its rewards. Governor Dukakis spoke next and did some Kennedy quoting. He was followed by Tip O'Neill, who seems determined to break Sarah Bernhardt's record for farewell appearances. It's not often that I have any fellow-feeling for the Buddha of Bureaucracy, but I must hand it to Mr. Speaker; he began by saying he remembered Harvard Yard very well-at fourteen he cut the lawns here. And he went on to point out that when he was first starting in politics and Harvard was celebrating its 300th Anniversary, only 3 percent of high school graduates got a chance at college, leaving it unsaid how it's no thanks to Harvard that more do today. The rest of Tip's speech was, of course, blathersgate, and was followed by a bland student oration and a bad poem by Seamus Heaney, professor of Rhetoric and Oratory.
Holidays in Hell Page 17
