Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Slipstreaming behind the annual rituals of sorrow and reverence for 9/11, George W. Bush has decreed that, five days later, on the 16th, there is to be a further day of solemnities on which the nation will pray for the unnumbered victims of Hurricane Katrina. Prayers (like vacations) are the default mode for this president, who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command. If you feel the prickly heat of politics, summon a hymn to make it go away; make accountability seem a blasphemy. Thus has George Bush become the Archbishop of Washington even as his aura as lord protector slides into the putrid black lagoon, bobbing with cadavers and slick with oil, that has swallowed New Orleans. No doubt the born-again President is himself sincere about invoking the Almighty. But you can hear the muttered advice in the White House: Mr President, we were in trouble after 9/11; the unfortunate episode of the schoolroom, My Little Goat and all that. But do what you did then; set yourself once more at the centre of the nation; go to the epicentre of the horror and embrace its heroes; make yourself the country’s patriotic invigorator and all may yet be well.

  So this weekend it was predictable that the president would shamelessly invoke the spirit of 9/11 to cover his shamefully exposed rear end – ‘resolve of nation . . . defend freedom . . . rebuild wounded city . . . care for our neighbours’. But comparisons with 9/11 – the fourth anniversary of which was marked in New York yesterday – will only serve now to reinforce the differences between what the two calamities said about America, and especially about those entrusted with its government. The carnage of 9/11 generated an intense surge of patriotic solidarity, even with America’s Babylon, a city scandalously and notoriously indifferent to Heartland values. This was because the mass murders had been committed by people who defined foreignness: theocratic nihilists who equated pluralist democracy with depravity. A hard-ass city supposedly abandoned to the most brutal forms of aggressive individualism (a fiction it liked to cultivate) showed instead the face of American mutualism as volunteers poured into the smouldering toxic crater. Blood and food donations piled up and a mayor disregarded his personal safety to be where he had to be, in the thick of the inferno; his daily press conferences astoundingly bullshit-free, unafraid of bearing bad news; treating his fellow citizens, mirabile dictu, like grown-ups.

  The rest of the country looked at Zoo York and, astoundingly, saw images and heard stories that made themselves feel good about being American: the flag of defiance flown by firemen amid the Gothic ruins; the countless tales of bravery and sacrifice among those trapped inside the towers. For all the horror, this could be made into a good epic of the American character. It was this redeeming sense of national community that protected the President from any kind of serious political scrutiny whenever he invoked 9/11 as the overwhelming reason for launching the invasion of Iraq. As John Kerry found to his cost, unexamined passion triumphed over reasoned argument. Bush won re-election simply by making debate a kind of treason; an offence against the entombed.

  Out of the genuinely noble response to 9/11, then, came an unconscionable deceit. Out of the ignoble response to Katrina will come a salutary truth. For along with much of New Orleans, the hurricane has swept away, at last, the shameful American era of the fearfully buttoned lip. Television networks that have self-censored themselves into abject deference have not flinched from their responsibility to show corpses drifting in the water; lines of the forlorn and the abandoned sitting amid piles of garbage outside the Convention Centre; patients from Charity Hospital waiting in the broiling sun in vain for water and medical supplies; helicopters too frightened of armed looters to actually land, but throwing bottles of water down from their twenty-foot hover. Embarrassed by their ignorance of the cesspool that was the Convention Centre, members of the government protested that it was hard to know what was really going on ‘on the ground’. All they had to do was to turn on the TV to find out.

  Millions of ordinary Americans did. And what they saw, as so many of them have said, was the brutality, destitution, desperation and chaos of the Third World. Instead of instinctive solidarity and compassion, they have witnessed a descent into a Hobbesian state of nature; with Leviathan offering fly-by compassion, 30,000 feet up, and then, once returned to the White House, broadcasting a defensive laundry list of deliveries, few of which showed up when and where they were needed. Instead of acts of mutual succour, there was the police force of Gretna, south of New Orleans, sealing off a bridge against incoming evacuees, and turning them back under threats of gunfire. Instead of a ubiquitous mayor with his finger on the pulse, and the guts to tell the truth, enter Michael Brown, a pathetically inadequate director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Fema, hounded from his eleven-year tenure as supervisor of commissioners and stewards of the International Arabian Horse Association by legal proceedings. Instead of summarily firing ‘Brownie’, the President ostentatiously congratulated him on camera for doing ‘a heck of a job’.

  Only on Friday, in an attempt at damage control, was the hapless Brown ‘recalled’ to Washington, his position as Fema director intact.

  And instead of an urban community of every conceivable race, religion and even class brought together by trauma, another kind of city, startlingly divided by race and fortune, has symbolised everything about America that makes its people uneasy, ashamed and, finally, perhaps lethally for the conservative ascendancy and its myths, angry. A faint but detectable whiff of mortality is steaming up, not just from the Louisiana mire, but from this Republican administration. Call me a cynic, but is it entirely a coincidence that suddenly the great black hope of moderate Republicanism, Colin Powell, is everywhere, publicly repenting of his speech to the UN (and by implication damning those who supplied him with unreliable intelligence), and offering, unbidden, his own lament for the institutional meltdown that followed the breach of the levee? The administration is already thought of as a turkey and the turkey vultures are starting to wheel.

  Historians ought not to be in the prophecy business, but I’ll venture this one: Katrina will be seen as a watershed in the public and political life of the US, because it has put back into play the profound question of American government. Ever since Ronald Reagan proclaimed that government was not the answer but the problem, conservatism has stigmatised public service as parasitically unpatriotic, an anomaly in the robust self-sufficiency of American life. For the most part, Democrats have been too supine, too embarrassed and too inarticulate to fight back with a coherent defence of the legitimacy of democratic government. Now, if ever, is their moment; not to revive the New Deal or the Great Society (though unapologetically preserving social security might be a start), but to stake a claim to being the party that delivers competent, humane, responsive government, the party of public trust.

  For the most shocking difference between 9/11 and Katrina was in what might have been expected in the aftermath of disaster. For all the intelligence soundings, it was impossible to predict the ferocity, much less the timing, of the 9/11 attacks. But Katrina was the most anticipated catastrophe in modern American history. Perhaps the lowest point in Bush’s abject performance last week was when he claimed that no one could have predicted the breach in the New Orleans levees, when report after report commissioned by him, not to mention a simulation just last year, had done precisely that. But he had cut the budget appropriation for maintaining flood defences by nearly 50 per cent, so that for the first time in thirty-seven years Louisiana was unable to supply the protection it knew it would need in the event of catastrophe. Likewise Fema, which under Bill Clinton had been a cabinet-level agency reporting directly to the President, had under his successor been turned into a hiring opportunity for political hacks and cronies and disappeared into the lumbering behemoth of Homeland Security. It was Fema that failed the Gulf; Fema which failed to secure the delivery of food, water, ice and medical supplies desperately asked for by the Mayor of New Orleans; and it was the President and his government-averse administra
tion that had made Fema a bad joke.

  In the last election campaign George W. Bush asked Americans to vote for him as the man who would best fulfil the most essential obligation of government: the impartial and vigilant protection of its citizens. Now the fraudulence of the claim has come back to haunt him, not in Baghdad, but in the drowned counties of Louisiana. In the recoil, disgust and fury felt by millions of Americans at this abdication of responsibility, the President will assuredly reap the whirlwind.

  The British Election, 2005

  Guardian, 5 May 2005

  It was when Michael Howard shifted into the conditional mood that I knew which side of the Atlantic I was really on. ‘On Friday,’ he said, ‘Britain could wake up to a brighter future.’ COULD? You mean . . . it might not happen? If this had been Detroit or San Diego or Dubuque, incredulous staffers would have rushed the candidate off the podium for emergency reprogramming. ‘Will, Michael,’ they would chant patiently at him until he Got It. ‘Never, ever so much as breathe a possibility of defeat.’ But this wasn’t Dubuque, it was the Ashford Holiday Inn, and the Somewhat Beloved Leader was addressing the party faithful on how, probably, all things considered, he might, with any luck, and showery periods on Thursday, even the score by full time.

  Howard’s vision of a briskly spring-cleaned Albion was meant as a rousing clarion call, but it had all the resonance of a tinkling bicycle bell in a country lane. I was just a few hours off the jumbo from Newark, New Jersey, but it felt like dropping down the rabbit hole and emerging into parish-pump politics. Compared with the engorged rapture, the fully orchestrated Hollywood production numbers; the serried ranks of Raybanned Secret Service Men; the ululating good ’ole boys, the big-hair hoopla, the bra-popping, pompom-waggling cheerleaders, the Spandex highkicks; the tossing ocean of flags; the relentlessly inspirational gospel songs; the banners as big as a wall; the parade of uniforms (any uniform will do – firemen, police, marines, traffic wardens, apartment-house doormen); the descending chopper blades; the eventual appearance of the Awaited One to swoons of joy and exultant whoops of messianic acclaim; compared to the whole delirious cornball razzmatazz that passes for democratic politics in the great American empire, Ashford on a bank-holiday weekend was utter Ambridge. Thank God. Except he too was mercifully missing from the general election.

  After the stifling incense-choked sanctimoniousness of American politics, getting back to Britain was like coming up for air. Or was I just nostalgic; childishly elated to be on the electoral roll for the first time, after twenty years of residential disenfranchisement? Maybe I was succumbing to antiquated memories of campaigns past: traipsing house to house for Harold Wilson in the brickier zones of Cambridge in 1964; exhilarated that we were at last on the threshold of seeing off the Tories who’d been Her Majesty’s government ever since I’d become aware of politics. (Many years on, I’d seen The Enemy close up. Tripping over a rug in the Christ’s College senior common room, I rose to find myself face to face with Harold Macmillan’s whiskers. ‘There there,’ Supermac drawled, not missing a beat, ‘gratitude understandable; prostration quite unnecessary.’) Little did he know. In 1964 we were the New Model Army in Morris Minors, interrupting Housewives’ Choice to drive aproned grannies to the polls, transforming, as we thought, a forelock-tugging squirearchical Britain into the bracing social democracy of George Brown, Barbara Castle and Roy Jenkins.

  There had always been a streak of political feistiness in our family. Living in Margaret Thatcher’s Finchley, my father had been so furious at the presumption of whomever it was that had put up a Conservative sign in front of his block of flats, suggesting collective allegiance, that he’d hung from the window balcony of number 26 the biggest Labour-party banner he could find. No one spoke to him in synagogue for months after that. So, yes, coming home politically probably meant returning to unrealistic expectations of face-to-face, high-street, argy-bargy oxygenated polemics. But even if it fell short, it would still feel like red meat compared to the white-bread pap I’d had to consume in the last election I’d covered for this paper: Bush v. Kerry, 2004; primetime-ready brand marketing, punctuated only by sleazebag character assassination.

  I’d heard reports that British politics had been invaded by focus-group, market-tested campaigning. That, between Lynton Crosby and Maurice Saatchi, the Tories were playing the American game, eavesdropping on Basil Fawlty in the snug and turning his pet peeves into electoral policy. Are you drinking what I’m drinking, squire?

  But if slick persuasiveness was the idea, Howard’s performance at Ashford suggested there was more work to be done. After a sly warm-up speech by Damian Green, the local MP, the Somewhat Beloved Leader entered to the stirring chords of ‘Victory at Sea’, composed for television in the early 1960s by the true-blue American Richard Rodgers. Was this a good idea? Tory party as HMS Victory, fine. Pity about the ‘At Sea’ bit, though.

  There then followed what in America would be called the Stump Speech, except that ‘stump’ with its evocation of cigar-pulling downhome wisdom, cookie-bake homilies and a feverish orgy of baby-kissing, isn’t really mid-Kent. To rapt silence, broken only by aldermanic murmurs of assent, the SBL painted an apocalyptic picture of a New Labour Britain – Blade Runner with tea – in which pensioners no longer feel free to go to the shops in safety, where MRSA pullulates in hospitals unchecked by Matron, where a critical swab shortage holds up urgent surgery, a Britain where the police are doomed to standing around on street corners sucking on pencils as they complete interminable questionnaires while platoons of drunken yobs, Shauns of the Undead, run amok in the high street, pillaging Starbucks and sacking Boots.

  Under his government, Howard pledged, the police would be liberated from pencil duty and set free to ‘invade the personal physical space’ of the yobs (protected, presumably, by rubber gloves obtained from Matron). SWABS not YOBS: who could possibly disagree?

  Several times we were promised a government which would roll up its sleeves (though those of Howard’s blue shirt remained elegantly buttoned). Then came the really worrying bit. SBL’s voice dropped, the eyes moistened, the smile widened. Acute observers could instantly recognise the onset of a Sincerity Attack. ‘I love my country.’ Then he told us how he truly feels. About himself. About Britain. Proud. Immigrant roots. State school. Really proud. Work hard. Do well. What Britain’s all about. Not layabout.

  This sort of thing is of course obligatory for American campaigns where the ‘story’ of the candidate – a combination of autobiographical confession and patriotic profession – is the sine qua non of ‘making a connection with the voters’. But in Ashford, among the flowery frocks and jackets flecked with dog-hair, the narrative seemed wetly embarrassing. Then exit to reprise of ‘Victory at Sea’ and sustained (if not exactly deafening) applause. The faithful were giddy with excitement. Well, almost all of them. One loyalist with a bottle-green flying-ducks tie was still barking over the State of the Country. ‘Are you optimistic about Thursday?’ I asked tentatively. ‘I TRY to be,’ he conceded, ‘though I was going to desert the sinking ship.’ ‘Where to?’ ‘Montenegro.’ ‘Montenegro?’ ‘Yes, Montenegro. Not many people know this, but the wine is wonderful and –’ (he whispered confidentially) ‘– they have the most beautiful women in the world. Though, of course, they do tend to be a bit hairy.’

  As indeed do the campaigns in these endgame days. Not that you’d guess it watching Howard taking a walkabout on his own patch. For once the sun shone benevolently on his progress. (‘We arrive; it rains. It always rains,’ said one campaign Eeyore on the battle bus.) Howard was bouncily affable as he trotted down Folkestone high street, a place inexplicably bereft of the roaming hordes of ruffians and mendicant asylum-seekers he says infest New Labour’s derelict Britain. Surely he can’t mean the ubiquitous Ecuadorian pan-pipers (are there any left in the Andes?) who warbled away while the SBL closed in on constituents, for an economical hand-pump (pensioners got a concerned left hand on their arm too) adroitly avoiding, in
short order, the Green party table overstocked with belligerently pacifist eco-literature; giggly girls stuffed into jeans shouting their resolution to vote for the Official Monster Raving Loony party; and burps and hoots from acne-stricken yoofs dressed, bafflingly, in Boston Celtics kit.

  As the Leader ducked into Celeste, ‘A Taste of Heaven on Earth’, for lunch, I was left marvelling at the village-green cosiness of it all; unthinkable in the United States where the candidate would be flanked by a wall of myrmidons with imperfectly concealed shoulder holsters, and would never ever be unplugged from the earpiece through which staff would prompt his every reply. (‘Remember, Michael, WHEN we win, not IF!’) As for the Monster Raving Loony party, they would be in a Secure Holding Facility, not munching on ham sandwiches ten feet away from the Leader. But in Folkestone, the sun glinted off the sea, vagrant scavenging gulls wheeled around the battle bus (send ’em home) and the violent grunge-hole of Howard’s Albion seemed a long way away.

  What is it that draws British politicians down to the sea? Conferences in Blackpool and Brighton; a rally for the Labour party in Hove? In America they go to the major markets: conventions, then, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, not Cape Cod or Virginia Beach. I was at the only exception, forty years ago, Lyndon Johnson’s coronation in Atlantic City, where, amidst the toffee vendors on the boardwalk, porky-pink straw-boatered men from Mississippi with wilting bow ties pretended not to notice the civil-rights demonstrators. At the moment of apotheosis, LBJ, the Hidden One, rose majestically on to the stage on a hydraulic platform as thousands of minute plastic cowboys descended on parachutes from the convention-hall roof. ‘All the Way with LBJ,’ the Democrats roared. And they did; all the way to Hué and Saigon and the helicopters on the roof.

  But whatever’s wrong with this election, it isn’t hubris. No one was shouting ‘If you care, vote for Blair’ in Hove last Sunday. In fact they weren’t shouting at all. Everything and everyone, except David Blunkett, who gave new meaning to the word unrepentant, was a tad defensive, beginning with the lighting of the stage – not exactly shameless red, more softly fuchsia, the kind of ambient glow that lap dancers use to juice the tips.