Waiting for the Barbarians
By Lewis Lapham
Verso, 1997, 230 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
"Satire is humour sent on a moral errand." So writes Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine, whose new collection of essays is a welcome revelation that good writing, blazing satire and a moral mission critical of the free-market excesses of capitalism can still be heard amidst the din from the echo-chamber of conservative political commentators in the US media.
Lapham is at his cutting best when penning portraits of the leading lights of the US state. Judge Robert H. Bork, the arch-conservative nominated by Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court, has a social utopia, says Lapham, which would rest comfortably on the foundations laid by the women-hating, anti-democratic moral despots of the extremist Taliban. The Taliban conquered Afghanistan in the same week that Bork published a book of his writings — both events were militant interventions which sought to "put an end to the nonsense of liberty and equality".
John F. Kennedy Jr releases a new, up-market journal reflecting the continued turning away from substantive politics to the empty universe of style — "a political magazine from which the politics has been tactfully removed, a lifestyle magazine refreshingly devoid of ideas and unencumbered by any partisan perspective ... a magazine not unlike a merchandising catalogue ... made to the measure of sophisticated consumers certain to bring to their reading of the Bill of Rights or a speech by Bob Dole, the same standards of judgment (discriminating) and taste (exquisite) that they bring to their appreciation of an Armani suit, a pair of Ferragamo shoes or a Louis Vuitton suitcase".
General Colin Powell, feted by the slobbering media as a saviour of a society said to be "exhibiting ominous signs of moral rot and social decay", holds deliverance in his hands. These are the hands of "the great captain embodying all the old-time American virtues believed to have gone AWOL from a Saigon bar in the summer of 1969".
Would-be president, Republican Bob Dole, is a sitting duck for any apprentice, or (like Lapham) master satirist. "Only right conduct distinguishes a great nation", intones Dole in a typical homage to the US.
Against this, Lapham takes aim with the weapon of satire forged by Mark Twain in his battle against "pompous, self-righteous cant". Lapham imagines Twain scanning through the histories of ancient Rome, the Renaissance papacy and imperial Spain in a comically fruitless search for proof of the theorem that great nations triumph by doing what is right, disposing one after the other "the chaste and righteous acts performed by such exemplars of Christian deportment as Cesare Borgia and Cardinal Richelieu and Otto von Bismarck" up to "the nation so favoured by a virtuous God and Pat Robertson that it never killed a buffalo or a Cherokee Indian, never ran a gambling casino or lynched a Negro or bribed a judge".
Lapham takes the baton of Twain's "torch of words" to throw light on the realities of political and economic power. Attending a dinner party with the likes of Wall Street lawyers, journalists, lobbyists, investment bankers and property owners, Lapham observes that "although few of the people at the dinner believed in the practice of democratic self-government, they deemed the belief necessary to the maintenance of public order".
So, whilst the "permanent government" of corporate US goes about expropriating wealth, determining unemployment, making laws, censoring ideas and otherwise running the country, the "temporary government" of Congress provides the distraction of "an ornamental chorus meant to sing the empty praises of democracy", making a loud and joyful noise borne aloft on great billowing clouds of platitude.
It is, says Lapham, churlish of business to complain about government: "Who else but the government supplies the tax exemptions and the highway contracts? If not the government, who rescues the monied classes from the pits of bankruptcy when the prices on the New York Stock Exchange abruptly lost $479 billion of their value on October 19, 1987? Who pays the costs of rebuilding after floods in the Dakotas and hurricanes in Florida? Or defends the plutocracy against a siege of anarchy and angry mobs, feminists and labour unions?"
Democratic pretence also serves a useful waste disposal function. The government proposes to store all the country's nuclear waste, 85,000 tonnes of it, in the Nevada desert, disturbing the citizens of Nevada. Yes, nobody wants the nuclear waste, the politicians agree, "but somebody's got to take the stuff".
"So also", says Lapham, "with politics, the waste product generated by the immense energy of the country's devotion to private and selfish enterprise. Somebody's got to take the stuff, and what better place for it than among the blocks of hortatory stone, some of them surprisingly lifelike, on Capitol Hill".
"Deeply reverent in the presence of wealth", the establishment media ensure that dissent is stifled. Satirical wit is disastrous to one's media career, and one "soon learns that in the troubled seas of worldly affairs, one sinks by levity and rises by gravity".
Lapham, fortunately, must have been away the day they did that lesson, probably playing ideological hooky by rewriting Dickens' A Christmas Carol — which, says Lapham, "doesn't fit the bracing spirit of the times, and neither does its irresponsible moral lesson. Here was old Scrooge, an exemplary Republican, troubled in his sleep by ghostly dreams of human kindness, changed into a gibbering liberal at the sight of a crippled child."
Today's Scrooge should start out as an "imbecile philanthropist" who is shown the error of the "idealist's misspent life" and who discovers the "majesty of a cold and savage heart" in a conversion to business values and enlightenment about the moral rot of human caring and sympathy.
Lapham is an essayist of splendid talent — juicy prose, luxuriant, velvety sentences of rhythmical grace, in-season metaphors and ripe adjectives. For lethal polemic with a literary flourish, this is rich, nutritious fare indeed.