Soho:
The Afterlife

Soho
is a place where the heroic heady talk of self-creation is to be performed.
–Steven
Koch, "Reflections on Soho," SOHO: Downtown Manhattan (catalog,
Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, 1976)

Fifteen
Minutes

For
me, the often-proclaimed death of Soho is confirmed at 5:59 a.m. on the morning
of Nov. 20, 2000. Sprawled on the floor in artmaking exhaustion, I suddenly sense
little kisses all over my body. Dirty, dirty water is pouring down through hideous
fissures in my ceiling never seen before.

The
Fire Dept. will later say it hears from my 911 operator at 6:14 a.m., 15 minutes
later, then rushes to Soho’s birthplace, my studio on Wooster St. It’s
Soho’s birthplace because George Maciunas, the late Fluxus saint–the
man who colonized this neighborhood when it was mostly empty, rotting factories–thought
most of it out here, on the spot, with Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Jim Stratton–followed,
a bit later, by Robert Watts, John Lennon, Trisha Brown, Nam June Paik, La Monte
Young and, finally, me. He probably nailed those high beams–now gushing soiled
refuse–with his own hands.

Am
I going to drown here in the ultimate Fluxperformance, rattling Maciunas’
ghost? Like Tim Leary, George turned his demise from cancer into a performance,
upstairs on the street floor, in 1978. He will hate it if I out-die him. Paik,
a tough competitor, will be furious, too, over on Mercer St. I reach for my video
camera, but suddenly the firefighters arrive.

They
race down to see what’s happening, then charge back up the steps, one of
them calling out: "We’re breaking into that fucking boutique."
Five minutes later, one fireman returns, wet boots glistening. "Know anything
about that new toilet?" I shake my head. "The pipe broke hours ago.
We turned off the water but that won’t stop the gallons up there from leaking
down. Get some buckets and pray."

I
mutter obscenities about world-class Kenzo, Inc. above my head. I point out they
always storm ahead without consulting anybody living under or near them. "We’ve
been fighting them all summer."

"You
just lost," he replies. "Big time."

Soho
Agonistes

Soho
the Endangered Artist’s District is a story worthy of a big independent film
produced by Julian Schnabel, directed by Ed Harris, with local stars like David
Bowie, Courtney Love, Mike Piazza and Spalding Gray. The market for this film
would be international. "Soho" came to mean "renewal" in every
language, if not "renaissance." Its urban lesson–bringing vagabond
artists into an old, decaying neighborhood makes much wealth–has been learned.
When I’m in Ireland, Australia, Japan, Russia, Argentina, and admit where
I live, I am immediately told, "We have a Soho, too."

That’s
the leader. But what followed Maciunas walking on water in the 70s and early 80s
is complicated and contradictory. By contrast, what happened in the garish, painful
90s and 00s seems deceptively simple. The "certified artist’s district"
has been transformed. On my block it’s names like Kenzo and Yves Saint Laurent,
with an unnamed behemoth soon to follow, replacing Printed Matter (deserted to
Chelsea) across the street. Around the corner on Spring, it’s Chanel and
Helena Rubinstein, primed with a basement spa, J. Lindberg of Stockholm and Salvatore
Ferragamo coming soon. On W. Broadway it’s Armani and the nameless condo
palace poised to rise out of the gutting of the 420 building, where the galleries
of Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend and Charles Cowles once reigned.

On
Prince, in the place of Food, Whole Foods and (probably) Jerry’s, among other
tiny enclaves, we’ve seen the arrival of one slick boutique after another,
topped by H&M, the big Swedish clothing chain, which just opened on the corner
across Broadway. Where the Reese Palley Gallery once squatted on the near corner,
flanking Mercer, are the Mercer Hotel and Mercer Kitchen. Across Mercer, the stillborn
Guggenheim Soho is handing most of its gallery space to Prada, which at least
had the wit to hire Rem Koolhaas, once a proponent of "delirious New York,"
now a proper designer primed to please a gilded client.

Walk
up and down any Soho street and look for an art gallery on the first floor. You
won’t find more than a handful. Performances? Way down toward Canal maybe
you’ll find a few, at Artist’s Space, Jack Tilton, David Zwirner, the
Drawing Center, American Fine Arts. Independent theater still lives on Wooster,
on my block, at Ohio and the Performing Garage. But keep going north past semi-historic
Fluxhouse, across Spring: you see now an immense flag hanging out from 104 Wooster,
a building once jammed with the artmaking elite. It’s a neat placard, the
words spaded by a commercial draftsman:

When
you call and ask how much, they tell you, "We have a few smaller spaces for
$2.5 million."

The
change seemed slick and fast, funded by bankers here, in Frankfurt, in Paris,
in Tokyo. Soho has come to resemble an American or British or Soviet colony, ruled
by absentee dukes, generals, commissars and politicians who rarely set foot here.
Lord Kenzo innocently destroyed my ceiling without knowing it, just as Count Armani,
blissfully soaking on a beach in Corsica, allegedly fired toxic fumes up the stairs
at 167 Spring St. this winter, affecting one bird and two small children.

That’s
global corporate practice, or so the line goes, and it’s said to be unstoppable.

But
the takeover has not proceeded without some resistance. Time and again, in court
after court, roughneck capitalists have been successfully opposed–a form
of warning for the Gucci-shoed smoothies following in their wake. For instance,
my co-op, allied with others, defeated three applications in a row to install
a loud, blaring disco at 76 Wooster, next door to me (though they’re sure
to try again).

In
the 90s, up to 1997, these proposals routinely rolled past the State Liquor Authority.
Then an idealistic lawyer named Barry Mallin–allied with City Councilwoman
Kathryn Freed–won a landmark case in state court. He killed a disco proposed
for 72 Grand St. The judge explicitly confirmed that you can’t justify loud,
ugly intrusions into neighborhoods simply because they bring "profit and
jobs."

Now,
in 2001, Mallin has won 16 straight cases against rampant imperialism on Greene
St., Crosby St. and beyond, in Williamsburg, the Village and Chelsea. By rousing
the residents to protest all-night bars and discos–as well as permanent rooftop
revelry–Mallin is proving (with his associate, Eric Rubenstein) that the
1997 decision has teeth. The protesters jam community and State Liquor Authority
hearings, flood politicians with letters and phone calls.

The
Soho Alliance–heir to the first Soho Artists Association created by Stratton,
Maciunas and others–has also resisted the complete Armanification of the
neighborhood. The moment the landlord at 599 Broadway (at Houston St.) threatened
to destroy Forrest Myers’ classic The Wall–the cantilevered sculpture
that’s straddled the building’s Houston St. facade since 1972–the
Alliance gang-jammed the sidewalk for a protest and press conference.

To
combat the general impression that there are no working artists left in Soho anymore,
Sean Sweeney, president of the Soho Alliance, commissioned Columbia University
to study Soho’s demographics in 1996. The study indicated that 56 percent
of the neighborhood’s residents were still working artists–and that
lots of art galleries–226 to be exact–were still in the neighborhood,
only hiding up above the ground floor.

Granted,
those figures are now five years old, and since then artists have continued to
leave, selling out for high prices. But Sweeney argues, "It’s wrong
to say all the artists are leaving. Even a 1999-2000 survey by the Noho B.I.D.
[a business association, not particularly friendly to artists] had 40 percent
of the respondents as artists, still very high considering only one member of
a household must be a working artist."

No
one thinks Soho is still the artmaking scourge it once was, though. I’m thinking
of a photograph of Trisha Brown’s beatific Roof Piece (1973), in which
her dancers are spread across the tops of four buildings, one of them seeming
to prance across Fluxhouse itself. I think of the ghostly image of Scott Burton
walking nude down Lispenard at midnight in 1969, the triumph of self-creation.
And I remember the daily video art showings at Anthology Film Archives, on the
first floor of Fluxhouse, precisely where Kenzo now thrives.

The
Birth of Soho

Why
did art rise up so vigorously in Soho from the 60s into the early 80s, then give
way so easily to svelte commerce in the 90s? Did art create its own Frankenstein?
Should we all have known in 1970 that the city’s promise to keep Soho "safe"
for artists was well-meaning deception?

Before
then, post-World War II, there were decades of open warfare in downtown Manhattan
between artists and the city’s stolid Buildings Dept.–determined to
oust the vagabonds who were taking over deserted, illegal spaces and upgrading
them. "We…moved here in 1963, when there were only nine lights on high
up in the old buildings," one pioneer recalls. "But the light manufacturers
were still here, and we saw ourselves, as artists did then, as light manufacturers
who needed to live where we worked because we couldn’t afford anything else."

Suddenly,
stunningly, the city capitulated in 1971. Nearly all the revolutionaries still
alive say the key event was the unlikely pairing of one daring rascal, George
Maciunas, and one daring, highly prestigious foundation, the Kaplan Fund, in 1967.

Hoping
to keep artists from following corporate offices and light manufacturers out to
the suburbs, Kaplan gave $100,000 to Maciunas and colleagues to "convert"
the neighborhood’s deserted cast-iron buildings. (Kaplan also funded the
beginning of artist housing at Westbeth.) Maciunas began with "Fluxhouse
2" at 80 Wooster St., then seeded a string of Flux co-ops, each one offering
lots of space for minimal down payments–and all against the law at that time.
The Soho Artists Association rose up at the same time to defy the city, and found
themselves backed by a friendly, intrigued press.

In
January 1971 (several months after I hailed Soho’s potential in my very first
treatise on art for Newsweek, based on Ivan Karp’s brash new O.K.
Harris Gallery on W. Broadway), Donald Elliott, the city’s planning chief,
gave the upstart SAA more than it originally wanted: a district where only artists
could be "legal" owners and residents. To live or work inside the landmark
43-square-block neighborhood, as owner or renter, you now had to obtain an "Artist’s
Certification" document (mostly proving that your artmaking needed a big
space) from the Dept. of Cultural Affairs.

The
city had stopped resisting Maciunas and his pioneers for a solid political and
practical reason. In the 1960s, inner cities were considered to be dying all over
the country. Plugging artists into cheap loft spaces was one way to stem the outflowing
tide. But the artist’s certification process (still managed by Cultural Affairs
to this day) could not keep nonartists away, particularly if they were collectors,
art dealers, banker/stockbroker spouses, etc.–that was the job of a brilliantly
pacified Buildings Dept. There was plenty of pro-art idealism in the administrations
of the charismatic Mayor Lindsay and the art-collecting Gov. Rockefeller. But
these exotic liberal Republicans welcomed what was officially known as "JLWQA"
("Joint Living and Working Quarters for Artists") because it was an
innovative way to save a slice of the dying inner city.

"When
we were negotiating with the city in the late 60s to avoid eviction, the artists’
idea for Soho was simple," one pioneer recalls. "You should be legal
if you needed to live with your work, no matter what you were doing. The idea
of an exclusive artist’s certification neighborhood was the idea of planners
and publicists. It made the city look good. But it was always a smoke screen."

In
the end, JLWQA proved not only an enlightened smoke screen: the artists’
enclave attracted nonartists like moths to the flame–the rich and the powerful,
the celebrities and designers, who are now transforming it again.

But
early Soho was still a rich, yeasty miracle of innovation. How did this decrepit
manufacturing center become the center of the world of vanguard art? George Maciunas
and his Fluxus esthetic is the long-ignored answer.

Soho
Fluxus

In
his carefully researched book, Soho: The Artist in the City (U. Chicago
Press, 1981), Charles R. Simpson concluded: "Soho is by necessity a political
community." But if it hadn’t been much more than real estate and politics–if
it hadn’t flaunted an art esthetic as contiguous as its floral cast-iron
architecture–the ideal of Soho as artists’ preserve probably would have
quickly collapsed, with the developers and bankers moving into the perfectly positioned
landmark district far earlier than they eventually did.

Early
Soho was driven by a radical, often frightening idea, born in the Fluxus movement:
that raw, unmediated life–a clump of honey, say, singing with your mouth
full, dancing bare, collaging varieties of insect excrement–could be art.
This obsession, variously expressed, distinguishes Soho, I believe, from its would-be
clones in Williamsburg, Chelsea and DUMBO. For almost a decade after I moved here,
Soho was a kind of forbidden zone, an artistic red-light district that scared
away many of the affluent and commercial types it eventually seduced. Driven by
an esthetic to oppose rather than indulge the mainstream art world, Flux-inspired
Soho rarely stooped simply to hanging paintings on walls. The residents performed,
filmed, sang, talked to animals (Joseph Beuys’ classic conversation with
a coyote on Spring St., 1974), created their own "Cable Soho" for video
art. They cavorted and paraded out on the streets, in the bars, the stores, around
my backyard tree (planted by Yoko and Maciunas), beside potholes around which
the likes of John Lennon, Yvonne Rainer and Dick Higgins danced.

They
rented or created their own galleries and wide-open sites in the classic avant-garde
manner, as did Manet. The "alternative space," now hallowed art history,
boomed in Soho in the 70s. These spaces shaped the perimeter of the culture–the
Kitchen on Broome St., Jonas Mekas’ Anthology, Artist’s Space, the Drawing
Center, A.I.R. (a woman’s cooperative), 98 Greene St., 141 Greene St., Dia,
the Clocktower (below Canal, but feeding off Soho–later to spawn P.S. 1 in
Queens). The best symbol of early Soho was Gordon Matta-Clark’s "interactive"
dumpster sitting out on Greene St., filled with witty gobs of trash contributed
each day by his colleagues. That dumpster frightened as many minds as it attracted.

These
were years when lots of taxi drivers and museum curators simply didn’t want
to know how to get to Soho. Nor did my Newsweek colleagues. Nor did the
Upper East Side collectors, who patronized the uptown Castelli in the 70s, or
Andre Emmerich on 57th St.

If
the conclusion isn’t simple, it’s still clear. The Fluxus-inspired cadre
of Soho artists built a gilded Frankenstein by pretending they didn’t care
about success–exactly as the city pretended it wanted only threadbare artists
living there. Driven by Maciunas’ wheeling-dealing madness, the first generation
played this game with ferocity. They made Soho something far more than just a
"legal residential place" for artists. It stood for something more than
real estate or mere style; it stood for an unleashed, pushed-to-the margin attitude.
Soho’s Something Wild reputation, which at first kept the commercial
types at bay, is exactly what finally fascinated and attracted them.

As
one staffer in the Yves Saint Laurent store puts it now: "Yes, it is true
that a lot of our customers come down here to feel a part of an exciting artists’
community. Soon they find this isn’t the case, but they enjoy something new
anyway." Or, as filmmaker Mark Rappaport says to me, "We the artists
have made Soho safe for entrepreneurs."

Was
it inevitable? In 1977, when I went to live in Berlin to co-create a satellite
video broadcast with Beuys and Paik, I discovered that the prestigious Akademie
der Kunste was doing a big exhibition and catalog on Soho. Roof Piece was
on the catalog’s cover. Inside, the show’s main curator Rene Block presciently
declared:

"Obviously
it will not be long before the tourist buses start arriving every Saturday and
the boutiques…begin their invasion."

The
Art of Commerce

Still,
not even Block imagined the level to which Soho would be colonized by the global
corporate chains that started to invade in the late 80s and now dominate at street
level. They have chased out the old Flux crudity and bluntness, and replaced it
with a sleek anonymity. Today, when you ask a Soho store manager who "owns"
the chain–H&M, say, or Kenzo, for whom they work–you get a genuinely
blank stare. In the global era it’s a wise child who knows the signature
on his check. Very different from a decade ago, when the art studio kids who manned
Food knew who their mama was.

"I
am old enough to remember when Greenwich Village was the artists’ and writers’
neighborhood," artist Joan Semmel recalls. "Remember Bohemia? There
are some of those writers and artists still dug in amongst the boutiques and restaurants
in the Village, just as we will fight to retain what we can of Soho as we knew
it. The remaining community here is stranded in an alien country, one of fashion,
and money, which is essentially oblivious to our concerns as artists, except to
use us as exotic fauna to promote the neighborhood, when there aren’t any
fashion models available."

"Who
can afford to sell and move?" longtime Flux resident Caroline Stone complains.
"Where would one go for an equivalent situation in terms of economics and
space? I am not willing to lose the pleasure of the esthetics of these buildings
and the neighborhood itself."

Much
as the neighborhood’s resident artists often position themselves as pure
victims in this takeover, the truth, as I’ve suggested, is more subtle. Everyone
here is now immersed in a form of corporate stealth, if only because the sheer
volume of dollars now riding on every co-op vote about who can rent a building’s
commercial first floor–to say nothing of that tricky JLWQA code, still routinely
ignored–makes conversations guarded. Many vintage Soho titans are involved.
Inside "guilty" co-ops, nobody rats on anybody else–or will admit,
when I ask, how many illegal owners are now in their buildings.

"Yes,
we have several Wall Street couples in the co-op," one anonymous resident
admits. "They are nice people–don’t quote me, as I have to live
with them and there is still an artists’ majority, but it’s in trouble.
A few weeks ago somebody here sold a small, 1800-square-foot loft with two windows
for $1 million. Artists can’t pay that kind of money."

The
city is just as reticent to talk as many residents are. When I ask the Cultural
Affairs office how many JLWQA residents are now living in Soho, I’m told
they have no "current figures." When I ask the Buildings Dept., which
once ran illegal residents out of Soho, whether they’re ejecting illegal
nonartists, I’m again told they have "no count." (But I suspect
they do: it’s zero.)

"We
moved the store here in 1982 because we liked the art gallery environment,"
Judy Auchincloss, co-owner of Ad Hoc, recalls. "It brought people with visual
smarts–artists and collectors both. We paid $20 a square foot then, $6000
per month to be at the center of the most famous intersection in the world [W.
Broadway and Spring St.]. Armani has replaced us, paying $675,000 per year. We
weren’t even given the chance to bid against them–so we moved way up
north, near Prince on Wooster. The owners used to run an art gallery. Now they
are in Westchester living the horse-owner life. Why not? Soho has been called
the most successful uncovered mall in the world."

"We
began to hear construction noises from 420 W. Broadway out our back window,"
reports composer Daniel Goode, who lives with critic Ann Snitow above Armani.
"Slowly I figured out a penthouse was rising up over the fifth floor, where
Cowles used to be. The owner won’t tell us what’s happening, but it
sure looks like expensive condo apartments. And I bet the King is going to live
up on top."

Obviously,
Soho 2001 ain’t Soho 1971. But if the "serious" galleries have
mostly deserted to Chelsea, the brainpower jammed into all the floors above the
street is denser, more diversified, more impressive than ever. Thirty years ago
the word "information" belonged to MIT. Today it’s not only an
industry but an entirely new mode of art-thinking and -making. Photoshop and the
Web are steadily replacing the drawing pencil. Even after the decimation of Silicon
Alley in recent months, there are still a lot of dangerous dotcom minds between
Houston and Canal Sts.

In
that sense, "the death of Soho" is a media bromide that ignores the
inevitability of change. What died were old styles of artmaking. Fluxus, video
and street art went the way of all vanguards, into the museums and history books.
Why must new provocations be made only in what must now be called "traditional"
alternative spaces? Why must the "artist" of the new century evolve
out of the old-boy art school network? Why shouldn’t the artist emerge as
entrepreneur, programmer, designer of video games, stockings, hats, perfumes?

Barry
Mallin agrees. He has probably won more Soho cases in courts of all kinds than
any single downtown lawyer. He lives on Mercer St. with his playwright wife, with
whom he once coproduced plays in Greenport, LI.

"When
we won the case in 1997 on Grand St.," he says, "it was the first time
such a high court ruled in favor of the community lifestyle against a commercial
company. This awareness is spreading. I don’t believe the situation now is
any more threatening than in the early 60s, when the city was trying to evict
artists all over lower Manhattan. You organized in Soho, you raised hell and it
changed everything. I agree the corporations present a subtler threat, but they
are mainly a first-floor threat. The big commercial spaces are blinding us to
the people power above, which is where your strength lives."

Kathryn
Freed, now running for public advocate to replace Mark Green, has lived in Soho
since the early 70s. She helped Jim Stratton–who later wrote the first book
about urban art renewal (Pioneering in the Urban Wilderness, 1977)–and
others form the SAA. She fought to get this largest cast-iron neighborhood in
the world historic landmark status. On the city council, she browbeat her colleagues
and the Mayor into giving Soho its first library (opening soon on Lafayette St.).

Freed
argues that Soho’s remaining artists and its newer corporate residents can
get along, but opposes an influx of too many new residents. "There are plenty
of artists still here," she insists. "Why wouldn’t the big chains
want to be good citizens? Already they are closing down promptly at night, and
hiring workers to clean the sidewalks. Yes, the courts and commissions are following
Giuliani’s lead. They’re permitting ridiculous penthouse condos, like
the two buildings going up on the Houston St. parking lot, with small apartments
for nonartists. The Mayor is dead wrong to think the city can handle thousands
of new tenants down here. Those numbers would burst the bubble and prices will
drop. You don’t have infrastructure in Soho to handle them–I mean water,
electricity, streets you can walk down without being trampled, parks, pools, schools.
Soho is a great place for artists to live. They can put up with anything. But
it’s not great for everybody else."

At
Freed’s suggestion, I asked the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs,
Schuyler Chapin, what he thinks. He was less sanguine than she.

"Values
in Manhattan are going through the roof," he declares. "Artists have
to think about Brooklyn…Queens… the BAM district. I have no crystal ball."

The
BAM district means the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s neighborhood, sinking
fast into deconstructed urban decline. Harvey Lichtenstein, director of something
called the BAM Local Development Corporation and a veteran mover and shaker, is
certain the district can become a Soho-exurb, funded by public and private money.

"Artists
are fleeing Manhattan," he says. "We’re creating a nonprofit cultural
district with low-cost studios and offices for small arts organizations. They
are all welcome."

The
Afterlife

In
Los Angeles recently I encountered Soho pioneer Jonas Mekas. Immediately he starts
talking about his old Lithuanian exile buddy Maciunas. "George made Soho
happen. I love talking about him. He made me a millionaire–my loft is now
valued at $1.9 million." But still he protests the notion that Soho is dead.
"George wouldn’t be depressed over all these global chains. He would
be in his element. He’d join and subvert them. He’d open Fluxshops,
flux.coms, fluxspas… He wanted Soho to become Hong Kong."

Hm.
I decide on the flight back that in the new Soho Maciunas’ spirit would come
back in a female body. (He did, after all, once crossdress in my garden.) Ms.
George would be sublimely commercial, offering undergarments more subversive than
Anna Sui’s–bras wired with small pellet guns, say, to ward off makeout
artists.

In
the very next Sunday New York Times I see a full-page ad for Bernard Arnault,
the Parisian mastermind who is rapidly collecting every design shop or fashion
line he can find under an umbrella he calls "LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton."
It is Arnault who owns Kenzo, my rainmaking upstairs neighbors–and so, it’s
ultimately he, emperor of mass fashion, who sends one svelte, indecisive insurance
agent after another to stare at the damage…and do nothing about it.

Kenzo
did invite me, and all the residents of 80 Wooster, for the first time, to an
opening of its new spring line. My seething building-mates refuse, but I go and
find a soft, sweet and welcoming Kenzo staff, shoving one glass of champagne into
my hand after another. The reception is cosponsored by the Soho Partnership; not
to be confused with the Soho Alliance, this is the privatized charity on Greene
St. that hands out jobs–like sweeping streets–and tens of thousands
of dollars to the homeless every year between Houston and Canal Sts. A female
companion quips that it can’t be long before Yves Saint Laurent and Helena
Rubinstein are sponsoring "bare-assed performances" on slow weekday
nights.

The
next day I go to Chelsea and visit with two old neighbors.

"I
moved into 420 W. Broadway in 1981 and lived in a small apartment there for a
while," says art dealer Charles Cowles. "I loved Soho, but I had to
go. Leo was dying, Ileana was getting older, the five owners were fighting, and
we got a magnificent offer. But I come back every night and still live in Soho.
It never was a pure artists’ neighborhood–my building was filled with
nonartists. I heard about two cases of nonartists being evicted, but I am not
absolutely sure. I would argue that specialized art galleries and spaces ought
to stay [in Soho]–it’s still a great audience."

"We
moved to Chelsea because we had to," Printed Matter’s director David
Platzker says. "Dia, our patron, wanted to rent the choice Wooster St. space.
But the public here is mostly serious collectors and students. In Soho we had
a much more lively and diverse crowd. It included artists and many arty tourists–people
not of the arts but fascinated and ready to buy in our low price range. I miss
the nonartists as well as the artists. And I still live there."

The
following week I see a notice that Ben’s Pizza on Spring St. is moving. Rizzoli,
the last big art bookstore, closes. Can Metropolitan Lumber be far behind? In
a nightmare I see Arnault and the Vuitton empire offering Fanelli’s, the
second oldest bar in the city, more money than even God could resist.

And
yet… And yet: In April I am called by close friends and asked to address the
Municipal Council of Jersey City. The politicians there are said to be primed
to demolish a new artist’s district named W.A.L.D.O., which has been rising
up in one more deserted warehouse district, with the developers pushing and prodding
behind the scenes. The spirit of Maciunas invades me as I speak. I literally pound
the lectern.

Shocking
everyone, the Council ends up voting 9-0 for preserving W.A.L.D.O. as an artists’
haven. The film isn’t over.

Why? Satiation, in part.
After thousands of Al the Dull quips, it’s hard to find anything new to
say on this score. Just in time, Gore seems to have played out his primordial
role as class dullard. How many times can you listen to variations on Al correcting
Bill when he says "quickie" rather than "quiche" to the
waitress? Whether Al or Formica or the FBI agent is stiffer? On "dressing"
for sex with Tipper? Al Franken reached way down to hit Al’s tipping point
(no pun meant) two weeks ago, preconvention, joking that from now on Gore’s
going to save our timberlands by recycling the wooden stick up his ass rather
than inserting a new one every day. Nowhere to go after that. And Gore slyly
keeps repeating Gore jokes himself, ensuring their death.

George W. mostly responds
to his Dumbo image with thin-skinned, tight-lipped fury, making him a more appealing
target. Last year, for example, he raged in public against the brilliant "Unofficial
Official" Bush website devised by RtMark, a group of cranky digital artists,
handing them millions of hits. Surely this explains all the parody anti-W sites,
from About.com’s "Dubya, If Only We Knew Ya" to "The Georgy
Bush Project" to www.gwbush. com, where you’ll find poison-pen "prisoner
letters" written by a captive audience. Surely this is why W is now reaching
a tipping point of his own, based on his alleged stupidity, reminiscent of the
condescending Quayle jokes of 1992. They’re not like the mushy, charming
Reaganisms that circulated in the 80s, when we saw Reagan depicted as an amiable,
dozing bumbler, not a danger to the republic. These are more like this one,
which recently made the e-mail rounds:

Nader, Gore and W went to
a fitness spa for some fun (if you believe Nader ever has fun) and relaxation
(if you believe Gore ever relaxes). After a healthy lunch, all three decided
to visit the men’s room and found a strange-looking gent sitting at the
entrance who said, "Welcome to the gentlemen’s room. Be sure to check
out our newest feature: a mirror that, if you look into it and say something
truthful, you will be awarded with a wish. But, be warned–if you say something
false, you’ll be sucked into the mirror to live in a void of nothingness
for all eternity." They entered, and on finding the mirror Nader said,
"I think I’m the most truthful of us three." In an instant he
was surrounded by a pile of money, which I suppose he invested in tech stocks.
Gore stepped up and said, "I think I’m the most ambitious of us three,"
and he suddenly found the keys to a brand new Lexus in his hands, which he liked
because it looked better than the Veep’s car. Excited over the possibility
of having a wish come true, W looked into the mirror and said, "I think"–and
was promptly sucked into the void.

Several reasons why this
joke ought to shake the GOP. It was ubiquitous. Its curt, quick punchline confidently
assumes we all think W is stupid. And this is bad, because most of us would
rather have a (sexy or boring) president with a high IQ than a charmer who’s
dumb. I know this last point flies in the face of media assumptions about the
American voter. Not long ago, after a day of reading Dumb W jokes, I tuned into
CNN and found solemn, well-paid analysts assuring us that no matter how good
Gore is in repartee, he still isn’t as "likable" as W. That even
if W is murdered in the fall debates, he will still win because Ma and Pa will
"like" him and "dislike" Gore.

What a wealth of history
this ignores! Nixon, probably the least "likable" candidate for president
in history, won twice, over ingratiating rivals, one of them (McGovern) an authentic
war hero. At the high school prom, handsome Barry Goldwater, not Lyndon Johnson,
would have dated the queen. Among the totally distasteful or wooden personalities
elected in the 20th century–a century obsessed with the "personality"–were
Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson and George Bush the Elder. The truth is we actually
worry about the candidate’s IQ. Very few of us want to put Dumbo’s
finger on the nuclear trigger or the economy or healthcare. Intelligence–or
the perception of intelligence–matters hugely in all final electoral decisions,
according to exit polls. Carter defeated Ford in 1976 not because of his Peanut
Smile but because the voters perceived him as intelligent and capable. He lost
in 1980 because his economic policies didn’t work, not because Ronald Reagan
was lovable. And Reagan devastated Mondale, a more nimble debater, with a booming
economy–well before Ollie North and the Contra war scandals depressed his
popularity.

Yes, JFK is an exception.
So is Clinton. I contend that Clinton’s current high approval rating is
positively fueled by the tens of thousands of sex jokes swamping his name on
the Web. Gore might consider a little serious public petting next. Lustiness
doesn’t threaten voters the way a low IQ does. Here I take issue with Sigmund.
Jokes don’t simply bubble up through our veins and emotions. They filter
through our brains, too.

Douglas Davis is an artist
and author. His latest book is The Five Myths of Television. Exchange
jokes at dd2001@sfd.com.

My Love
Affair with America
by
Norman Podhoretz
(The Free Press, 248 pages, $25)

Not that long ago my teenage
daughter inadvertently flagged this hot issue. Five times she has organized
her classmates to leave school and demonstrate against police brutality at One
Police Plaza. "Dad," she said one day, "why don’t I ever
see you down there?" I responded, gamely, that I earned my protest scars
by marching against a war that landed me in jail in Berkeley in 1967. "Jail?
You went to jail? Which war?" Oops! I fear I had finally impressed her,
in the wrong way. I filled her in on Vietnam but quickly point out I never did
an overnighter: with hundreds of others my name was duly recorded on a police
blotter, about two hours of incarceration–that’s all.

"I protested in a civil,
peaceful manner, protected by the Bill of Rights, just as you should. It’s
called civil disobedience," I said. "Go to the Web and search out
the essay with that title. It works, if you follow the legal rules–and
don’t beat up anybody."

I don’t know whether
she has yet read "Civil Disobedience," but I’m sure Podhoretz
read Thoreau long ago. Alas, you won’t find Thoreau’s name in the
index of his paean to a highly selective view of the American Revolution and
democracy itself. Nor will you detect the name of Thomas Paine, who railed like
Jesus Christ against "the malefactors of great wealth, to borrow Franklin
Roosevelt’s phrase." You won’t discover a single reference to
the most influential recent historical interpretation–among most centrist
scholars–of the events launched in 1776: Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism
of the American Revolution (1991). We found carefully researched evidence
that our Founders were secular to the core–lovers of books, wine, travel,
the flesh, collegial debate, without a reverent churchgoer among them, least
of all George Washington, whose long, happy liaison with a married woman is
documented by letters in the Library of Congress. Hey, there must be a reason
why these men insisted on a separation of church and state, on the First Amendment,
on a whole thicket of libertarian-style laws–one of which, "The Order
to Show Cause," will force any harassing corporation or bill collector
to cease and desist, deserves book-length study.

No, Podhoretz’s love
affair is with a highly restricted and crabby America burning with resentment
over the leftist liberals who allegedly have taken over our hearts and minds,
even during the long Reagan-Bush hegemony. It is an America that hates government
laws indexed to tax the rich and protect the poor. That refuses to this day
to provide health insurance for all its citizens, virtually alone among postindustrial
democracies. An America that in defiance of its glorious ethnic and religious
pluralism insists on the codification of the very Judeo-Christian doctrine the
Founders wished to keep far from power and the schools (while allowing its churches
and synagogues free, unfettered expression). Most of all, it is an America that
seeks to at least defame if not punish anybody who disagrees with the main tenets
of government policy, particularly when that policy dictates going to war against
presumed foes.

For at least 100 of its
235 pages, Love Affair is a delightful memoir of growing up in Brooklyn,
of a lapsed but Orthodox Jewish father, parents who fought off the Depression
and loved President Roosevelt for helping them, of his inspiring tutelage at
a series of magnificent public schools, ending up at Columbia University and,
finally, of how he worked his way "up from liberalism" into the rich,
lively brand of conservatism he promoted during his editorship of Commentary
from 1960 to 1995.

This is a signal and valuable
text, and transforming as well, in the sense that it represents for nearly one
third of its length a kinder, gentler conservative rhetoric. We can even fantasize
this spirit creeping into W’s "compassionate" acceptance speech
in a few weeks. At times Podhoretz sounds wistful about the loathed FDR, whose
boldness and spirit he acknowledges, even though he despises his "make
work" measures, at a time when nearly half the nation was unemployed, bankrupt
or scraping the barrel. He is gentle if occasionally condescending to leftist-Trotskyite
classmates. He admits to something of a youthful attraction to Marxism, if not
Uncle Joe Stalin himself. And he is genuinely attracted to what he considers
the core value of American society and democracy: its tolerance of divergent
races, languages and cultures. He calls Hubert Humphrey, who drove the Civil
Rights laws through the Senate, a "great liberal." And though he never
says so, Podhoretz is surely not one of those Republicans determined–in
the manner of Pete Wilson of California–to cut off immigration or deny
Latino workers access to schools and hospitals.

But those who differ with
Podhoretz on issues like welfare, progressive taxation and Vietnam do not fare
well. When Podhoretz begins to size up Gore Vidal, Sontag ("the Dark Lady"),
Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and the revisionist Robert McNamara, the tone
changes. You can almost feel that kindly smile freezing into a grimace, his
jaw dropping, a la William F. Buckley Jr., the eyes rolling in his head. From
here to the end of the book he is tough and mean-spirited, only softening at
the very end, when he "thanks" America for a long list of gifts it
has laid upon him, most of all a fine public education.

I want to collar Podhoretz
on the Vietnam-protest issue. The protests that occurred 1965-’75 are unforgivable,
in his mind. Here his generous, open, welcoming Americanism is replaced by a
rigidity that sees all those who disagreed–and most of all those who refused
to go to the jungles to die–as traitors, more or less. "In that alternative
view, the American intervention in Vietnam was not a mistaken extension to Asia
of the strategy of containment that had worked so well in holding the Soviet
Union back in Europe; it was a criminal act of imperialism aimed at suppressing
the legitimate national aspirations of a downtrodden dark-skinned people…it
was morally evil…involving atrocities, illegal uses of force, and even a secret
campaign of genocide." Most of all, in Norman’s view, the protesters
believed "any time" was the wrong time for "such a war,"
which must mean an anticommunist war, since the communists stood in our minds,
he believes, for "freedom."

All we former protesters
are, virtually down to the last man or woman, vile to Podhoretz–and the
like-minded Rollyson and Paddock. (In their anti-Sontagism, they even pounce
on their subject because she broke into tears when heckled by leftist Mexican
students in 1968 because she wasn’t "radical enough.") All this
is a breathtaking oversimplification. It takes no account of the sophisticated
analyses presented within both the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the
war was in a practical sense unwinnable because of the corruption and unpopularity
of the South Vietnamese government–an analysis with which Podhoretz himself,
in the 70s, agreed. It ignores the widespread proof presented in congressional
testimony that American soldiers were often pressed by their superiors into
acts of unspeakable brutality. It blithely dismisses the agony of the 58,000
soldiers who died (one of them related to me), not to say the tens of thousands
of veterans still suffering from stress, trauma and Agent Orange.

All these horrors were accurately
cited and predicted over and again by the millions of citizens who opposed the
war, some foolishly, yes, others brilliantly. The latter includes the army of
historians and scholars who doubted the "domino effect," mainly because
it ignored the ancient feuding between China and Vietnam that waxes to this
day. What surely rankles Podhoretz and company is the final verdict of history:
the "other" side was right; the self-proclaimed "patriots"
were wrong. For example, we’ve just concluded an extensive series of trade
agreements with the ogres in Hanoi, who now form a market we wish eagerly to
enter. Police-state communism is as dead as a stepdoor nail, felled by economic
and cultural factors, not by military means.

We, meanwhile, can now redefine
patriotism as something far more loving and intelligent than blind adherence
to orders from above, even when they are idiotic and immoral. And we can do
it from the source. The exact words of a skilled naval tactician–who probably
would have also seen the Vietnam War as military folly–were these, delivered
in a toast in 1815: "To our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations,
may she always be in the right. But right or wrong…Our Country!"

Does this toast permit us
to commit insanities and inanities in the name of the USA, a society celebrated
for so many other contradictory reasons in our Constitution, our Declaration
of Independence, art, poetry, music and even in My Love Affair with America?
Far more reasonable–and just–is the opposite reading: no matter what
my country does, it is my country, it belongs to me, I belong to it and,
in the end, I’m responsible for those actions. Which means I have not only
the right to oppose official insanity: It is my duty! (Clink glasses, please.)

Brilliant stuff, superbly
fed to us through the media CEOs dying to get their taxes reduced and the Democrats
off their antitrust drive against Bill Gates. I don’t deny the presence
of sincere W Lovers/ Clinton Haters among the producer-editor ranks. In The
New York Times several months ago we saw the penultimate move to co-opt
what I will shortly call Culture 3: W is the first GOP presidential candidate,
said the dazzled reporter, who tolerates tongue rings.

Tolerates them? You
see my point? Whose "culture" is W–followed, shortly, by Al and
the big media–about to define? On the lowest level, the neoconservative
sharpies feeding ideas to the media bosses stole Culture 3–the Virtual
Real culture–from us long ago. The neocon premise, beloved up in the tower
suites if not downtown, goes like this: the real, true culture is a closed,
coherent body of knowledge, wired into certain classics we all must read, if
we love the late Allan Bloom and Daniel Bell, not to say the now totally discredited
views of Milton Friedman.

The point of this culture–let’s
call it Culture 1, still lurking behind most newspaper editorials–is that
it follows rules. Known rules. You see it saluted constantly in the columns
of William F. Buckley Jr., who is celebrated, publicized and guested on tv endlessly,
most recently by Yale. Not far away from this elitist position is Culture 2,
which is also likely to blind us, and our pols, to the truth of the present
situation. Culture 2 is in fact a kind of populist guerrilla front for neoconservatism.
You won’t see its leaders getting honorary degrees from Yale. The tabloids
are handing "cultural politics" over to politicians like John McCain,
Pat Buchanan, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes and Rick Lazio–that is, to monogamy,
feudal decency and "life" for the unborn. For Culture 2 fanatics,
Gore and even W are vulgar utilitarians, and Hillary is Satan in drag. Worse,
anything remotely vanguard, provocative or hip is not "culture," period.
McCain summed it up when he called contemporary art "pornography."

Culture 2, while linked
to Culture 1 because it shouts about rigid rules and unyielding beliefs, appeals
to a different market. It’s the voice of small-town entrepreneurs and blue-collar
workers. Culture 2 defies elitist intellectuals and global CEOs. Culture-2 types
not only have no specific right-wing cast, some of them even took to the streets
lately in Seattle and DC to badger Motorola, Microsoft and Sony. They include
relatively decent libertarians, blue-nosed greens like Ralph Nader, blue-nosed
antisex feminists, antigay nuts like Dr. Laura Schlessinger, inventive millionaires
like Donald Trump, even Jesse Ventura, who hates intellectuals and religion
yet loves sex, as does Trump.

Now, Culture 3 is where
the most of us really live, over here with Lars Von Trier, American Beauty,
the Web, Copenhagen, Backroom Seats and Bathroom Stalls, gigabyte
chips about to turn your microwave into a think tank, quantum theory, our manic,
uncontrollable, unstoppable info-based economy, Ventura when he is mischievous,
and the progressive, self-driven, often self-employed middle class. The essential
insight of Culture 3, which many of us share, both consciously and subliminally,
is this: Get Ready for Anything. No way that W, given his advisers, can make
himself over into a 3 in any substantial way, beyond declaring tolerance for
tongue rings. By rights, Gore ought to get it, though there is not yet
a scintilla of evidence in his campaign, beyond the dialogue he had earlier
this spring with Chuck Close and a band of contemporary artists. For some reason
he seems even to be declaring himself against medical marijuana, which is a
pariah only to Culture-1 types (libertarian Culture 2 voters actually endorsed
it in Arizona and a clutch of Western counties). No signs yet that Culture 3
is on Hillary’s radar, but we know she has a high IQ tempered by the madness
of the impeachment/affair–she is surely ready for anything.

The candidate who touches
the steadily building consensus Culture 3 represents will make a political fortune.
The only barriers are the obvious barriers: Culture-1 types control our media,
and Culture-2 types scream the loudest. If you take them seriously you’d
guess that our society is about to deconstruct, spiral into a depression and
revive official Victorian morality. Yet you and I know the situation is open,
not closed, that a society earning its living on Palm Pilots and self-driven
URLs, in which health, professional and gender independence, sexual diversity,
innovative forms of family and lifespans are all expanding, is a distinctly
new kind of society. Nobody knows where this profound and fundamental change
is heading us, but surely it won’t be the fragile society that greeted
Carville in 1992.

At the end of Copenhagen,
the clone of Werner Heisenberg, who spends an intensely fateful and theatrical
night on Broadway debating the morality of atomic weapons with his old friend
Niels Bohr in 1941, sums up Culture 3 when he says: Beneath all these events,
these exchanges, these passions we will find in the end a powerful–and
inspiring–uncertainty.

Douglas Davis is an artist
and author. His latest book is The Five Myths of Television. Debate him
at dd2001@sfd.com.

Sick of
predictionism? Frightened by the 21st-century visions forced upon you by a range
of corporate and pseudo-Marxist prophets? Take heart. The future is wide, wide
open, not a closed shop–and the millennium’s still a year off (Christ
wasn’t born in the Year 0).

One day
after I saw Yahoo’s fearsome vision of 250 broadband blimps blitzing
us with split-second Internet access to infotainment programmed by Alexander
Haig (one of the "real" investors), the headlines, primetime tv and
the Net were suddenly glowing over the biggest corporate merger of all time.
By folding into each other like expensive lovers in the hay–a $300 billion
tryst, matching the GNP of one third of the world’s nations–AOL and
Time Warner, if it comes through, will make that blimp fleet look like democracy.
The biggest ISP, the biggest publisher, the second-biggest CATV company are
gearing up to broadband us all to death. Out in Las Vegas at the big hi-tech
show, AOL-TV will soon be here, in the shape of a tiny black box sitting on
top of your set, linking you immediately to AOL (surprise!), as well as Time,
Life, Money, etc., etc., etc., etc.

George Gilder,
my favorite right-of-center forecaster, a man who calls the postindustrial shots
about 75 percent of the time, also buys into the broadband revolution–the
fat-wired move into your home by big cable and/or big telephone companies, handing
you split-second access to…what? The Big Brothers of news and entertainment,
the very people you’re fleeing by reading this newspaper and using the
Web each night to pursue your singular dreams, if not romances. Instead, you’d
have AOL and Time in your face every time you turn on your computer or
tv, answer your phone, open your fridge or flush your toilet.

But hold
on. Not even Gilder wants this to happen. (He once predicted The Death of Television
because we’ve become addicted to multichannel choices.) And fortunately:

Predictionism Is
Always Wrong
This
is our first principle. For proof, you need only reflect on the endless series
of false calls in the past, many of them repeated so often some of us believe
them to this day…

Remember
that tv was going to turn us all into couch potatoes, close down movie houses
and the legitimate theater, restaurants, travel, health clubs, sports stadia
and book publishing. The truth is exactly the opposite.

As is the
anti-fate of the so-called "paperless office," a confident, constant
prediction in the 70s.

Another
persistent bad call is the assumption that tv news and political commercials
control voting habits. This untruth leads certain pundits constantly to overrate
GOP chances, since the Republicans can normally afford overwhelmingly more paid
tv time over their assorted opponents (though currently House Democrats seem
to be reversing this norm–a contrarian move befitting my thesis). Until
New Hampshire, the official certainty that George W. Bush will be elected because
of his $60 million war chest was as firm as the forecasts for his father in
1992. McCain temporarily derailed this myth, but within a week it was back:
if he doesn’t match that war chest, if he doesn’t drench us with tv
spots, he hasn’t got a chance.

Remember
all this in a few weeks.

On the right,
the certainty that Clinton would be impeached over an oral sex affair betrayed
the same error: underestimating voters’ ability to vote their own self-interest.
On the left, remember how John Kenneth Galbraith kept warning us in the mid-90s
that the Silicon Valley boomlet was about to bust. Not long ago, the Union for
Radical Political Economists whined that soaring stock prices based on management
riding roughshod over labor were bound either to crash or provoke revolution.
Yet last year more black males got jobs than at any time in long memory.

Remember
those who sold Apple stock in 1996, because the smart money said Mac was dead?
And the certainty that Y2K was about to destroy us if we didn’t pour billions
of dollars into certain corporate coffers?

The louder
the prophetic voice, in brief, and the more it wears the trappings of last-decade
success, the more we ought to disbelieve. Bill Gates is the world’s richest
man we are told, over and over. He’s also facing the same antitrust mole
who chewed up imperious IBM in the 70s and AT&T in the 80s. And remember
how Bill the genius missed the meaning of the Web, as his infamous 1995 memo,
redirecting his company’s focus, acknowledged? The proliferation of focused,
special-interest tabloids and small publishers was similarly missing from all
Global Village forecasts dating back to McLuhan.

Watch out
for Big Sociology, too, and Muscular Religion. While we are told over and again
that the organized churchly values are on the rise, the number of unmarried
middle-class white parents raising kids keeps zooming ahead, most of all in
wealthy Dutchess County, as cranky Sen. Moynihan reminds us often, ignored,
on the Senate floor. While Al Gore and Bill Bradley clash over who is more holy,
roughly three in four Democrats say they don’t believe in God, at least
not the white-haired Sunday School variety (while more than half of all Catholics
say they’re pro-choice in quiet poll after quiet poll).

Despite
all you’ve been told, despite the evangelical rhetoric launched at us each
night by candidates playing to a minority of Republican voters, this is a decidedly
pagan society, following many different gods. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t
lusting after spirituality–that’s what the obsessions with music,
art, independent film, even quantum teleportation (www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation)
and deep-space telescoping is all about.

As for science,
supposedly moving us toward a utopian point where we can control nature, we
now face not only the specter of defiant global warming but Chaos and Uncertainty,
which argue that we don’t know where any moving particle in space is going
to land. Instead of rules, we now face counter-rules and counterintuitive phenomena
like black holes. No wonder we still can’t "predict" tomorrow’s
weather.

All this
is actually good news. Welcome it. Ignore any forecasts that disrespect this
cranky contrarianism. Yes, some forecasters seem sincerely persuaded that history
follows a logical, progressive track, bordering on the kind of determinism that
drove purist Marxist governments to destroy themselves. (The workers always
cleave to a system that exalts them.) But what they forget is:

Chaos & Reversal
Is the Proper Forecast at All Times
Chaos
and Reversal (or "C&R") is constant, because it is the human condition.
Human intelligence is every bit as difficult to manage as atomic particles.
Maybe more. That’s why scientists and predictionists try to ignore it and
won’t fold its unmanageable power into their planning or forecasting.

Example:
The original makers of both the telephone and, decades later, the Internet expected
their inventions to serve essentially as a kind of public broadcast medium.
Edison thought politicians and symphony conductors would use his telephone to
reach large groups of simultaneous listeners, while the Defense Dept. saw military
documents zapping from computer to computer on the Net. We human users of these
tools had a radically different idea in both cases.

The difficulty
with Yahoo’s broadband forecast is a similar kind of assumption:
that the widely toasted Steve Case and his colleagues at Time Warner, which
has already dropped a bundle on "interactive tv" and its nascent ISP
Road Runner, know precisely what we want. But already even America Online, Ma
Kettle’s ISP, owes half its commerce to chatlining, often of a highly intimate
nature. Users aren’t buying into Steve Case’s esthetic when they gorge
on AOL time, just as we aren’t lusting after Time Warnerism when we fork
out monthly fees to a quasi-monopoly cable service now threatened by direct-broadcast
satellites.

We’re
lusting after access–to all kinds of ideas, words, images, partners,
over which AOL/TW has, thank heaven, no control. Already you can scent all the
alternative means coming to help you zap onto the Net–satellites, pocket
PCs, cellphones, cuddly little info-appliances lying by the bed, wireless cups,
phones, mics.

This is
an antireality reality that can’t be soundbitten. It’s not as easily
simplified or as glamorous as the image of Steve Case and Gerald Levin making
love on a bed of billions of paper stock bucks. But the reality awaiting us
isn’t simple. The complexity, fluidity and freedom of rampant communications
will be yours to tangle with–often losing–in 2001. That’s what
happens when the future collapses, when it tumbles down into your hands like
a crumbling but still delicious cookie. It’s so immediate, so real, you
can’t turn it into a soundbite or an abstraction like the "Global
Village" (which really turned out to be a Global Archipelago).

Consider
the word "free," which neoconservatives at Fortune and National
Review and elsewhere love to attach to the word "market"–where
often it really means "unfree," especially when it comes to huge mergers
seeking to constrict a market. Fortune itself astonishingly admitted
this a few months ago: "Free markets," Thomas A. Stewart wrote in
an article called "Grab the Knowledge and Squeeze" last November,
"through the law of diminishing returns, destroy profits; the business
person’s job is to elude the law by setting up in a marketplace that (1)
is valuable and (2) can be made less than free" (emphasis added).

For the
rest of us, "free market" only means free when there are lots of competing
players–for instance, Web video and Web audio, where free products are
abounding and Microsoft is competing with Real.com to give away video/audio
players. And Europe, where Social Democrats hand out near-free human services,
winning election after election. In the U.S., in the midst of the wildest prosperity
any nation has known, you can’t bleed in front of a doctor unless you hand
him cash, check, money order or various authenticating plastic cards. In the
European Community, in the midst of what our media calls a stagnating economy,
plagued by unemployment, you’re cured first, asked about a modest payment
second.

The EC model,
which also extends to issues like gays in the military, women’s rights
and arts funding (and, well, yes, neofascism in Austria), may haunt the world’s
oldest democracy for decades to come (if not the 2000 election, where Bradley
forced the others to compete with him on health care, another event nobody expected
six months ago). Health, given the aging of the population–and its cynicism
about HMOs and drug companies–is likely to rise to the status of the old
Cold War as a do-or-die issue in politics. And the Euro model is not about to
vanish. Neither is that backward continent’s low-cost elite education,
early retirements or secure jobs.

A few other
contrarian events no one would have predicted just a few years ago:

Women taking
over the culture and dominating many freshman classes, as well as law and med
school enrollments. As they take over, gender relations are loosening, not tightening,
to the dismay of right-wing feminists and Old Testament Christians (cf. the
numbers on divorce, illegitimacy, extramarital sex).

One year
after we were told we wouldn’t buy products off the Web, we begin buying
in droves. Lately Sotheby’s has alleged that the sale of a copy of the
Declaration of Independence on the Web in the spring may net $6 million.

And now
we find that Maureen Dowd’s monthly savaging of Bill Clinton in her widely
read New York Times column (where she pretends to be inside Bill’s
mind, talking to himself) has moved into the perilous future in 2001, where
she envisions the ex-Prez shipped off to Chappaqua, bored and lonely on weekends.
Didn’t expect her to turn so nasty, did we? But wait a minute. Already
you can smell it, can’t you? A total reversal, an improbable liaison
dangereuse on the way? A year from now, she could make it from W. 43rd St.
to Chappaqua in 90 minutes, easy, given limo service…

What Are They Predicting
For Us Now?
Broadly
speaking, the same two themes we have been hearing the past five years are being
recast on every talk show and editorial page, by the left as well as the right:

(1) The
radical free market, primed by the monopoly takeover of the Web, will sweep
the world. Bigness, in brief, is Destiny. At the same time,

(2) get
ready for a Good Old Values sweep. The virtues exalted by William Bennett are
coming back in a "re-norming," as Francis Fukuyama puts it.

It goes
unnoticed that these two themes, which mix like sweet and sour on the tongue,
actually cancel each other out. They’re a staple of the pundits, not to
mention presidential debates. Yet Theme 1 envisions a society so mobile, so
wealthy, so in touch with other cultures and realities, primed by an Internet
nobody in the GOP wants to tax or control, that it ironically dictates the final
collapse of Theme 2’s serene nuclear family, hymned on all sides in every
political debate.

This very
disparity was eloquently summed up by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism (1976), a polemic masterpiece that ought to be pressed on
every presidential candidate. Bell contended that freewheeling materialism would
lead to free-wheeling living, mass sophistication and a decline in mom-and-pop
suburban virtues. That’s precisely what has happened. That’s precisely
why the normally quick-witted Fukuyama, Bell’s acolyte on the Highbrow
Right, self-destructs in his grand new thesis predicting the "re-norming
of society." How can Fukuyama count on a re-normed society, with Mom and
Pop chanting the Ten Commandments to their brood, when Mom ain’t home
anymore?

The wholesale
flight of young and middle-age women into offices, professions and jobs during
the past decade has been devastating to this vision. So has the rise in women
no longer dependent upon Dad, church and split-level to survive. The nuclear
family is shifting, and child care, like health insurance, is already a political
necessity–the Contra war, in effect, of this decade.

Our grand
solons don’t want to face these facts because they reflect immediate and
evolving trends, with no obvious solutions. That’s why we continue to be
pelted with nonsense and half-truths, spiced with a few fantasies. Here’s
a quick sampling:

"The
Third Millennium’s economy has to be a mutually beneficial construction
of expanding productivity and shared prosperity, built around the engine of
trade" ("The Shape of An Age to Come," The New York Times,
Jan. 1, 2000).

"Mortality
will be a thing of the past by the middle of the next century, as we migrate
to machine consciousness" (Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines,
Jan. 2000).

"A
few major conglomerates will dominate the mass news business, each with tv,
print and Web outposts" (Brill’s Content, July-August, 1999).

"The
use of standardized testing in education will increase even more, and there
will be an explosion in the sales of ‘educational’ software designed
to improve children’s scores on the new tests. These will be promoted for
use both in schools and at home" (Patricia Mendel, "Predictions for
the Top Tech Issues in Schools," Education Horizons, January 2000).

"How
upbeat are the two leading forecasters of advertising spending about the prospects
for the marketing and media industries in 2000? At a conference Monday, they
almost warbled a medley of ‘Blue Skies’ and ‘Cockeyed Optimist’…
One reason is…‘the extraordinary growth of dot-com advertising’"
(Thomas Jones, Advertising Age, December 1999).

"2004–First
(publicly admitted) human clone… 2005–First sample launched back to Earth
by Mars. 2011–On his 100th birthday, Arthur C. Clarke is toasted on the
Hilton Spacecraft Hotel… 2016–All existing currencies are abolished.
The mega-watt-hour becomes the unit of exchange… 2021–The first humans
land on Mars, and have some unpleasant surprises. 2025–Neurological research
finally leads to an understanding of all the senses, and direct inputs become
possible, by-passing eyes, ears, skin etc." (Arthur C. Clarke, Google.com,
January 2000).

"Will
we come up with a Viagra for the brain?" (Dr. Joseph R. Race, Ely Lilly
and Company, January 2000).

"Television
doesn’t handle the variety of needs. In a few years the InterNet will be
more dynamic, even wireless. You’ll be able to personalize any website
you visit, in five minutes" (Gordon Tucker, CEO, Egreetings Network, in
The New York Times, Jan. 6, 2000).

"FORE-SITE
2009: www.celebritysperm.com/-tcruise" ("What’s Next: 2000 and
Beyond," Yahoo, December 1999).

Yes, I saved
the best for last. Because Yahoo is semiserious, it’s probably closer
to the future than either Brill’s Content or the Times, given
the nature of us irrational beasts who’ll be driving the next world. Dependence
on rationality and precedent is an addiction, not a judgment.

Arthur C.
Clarke ranks with Kissinger for continuing bad calls. He put a man on Mars in
1994, at least the equivalent of Henry’s Vietnam "peace is at hand"
in 1972; Clarke also gave us the evil HAL, whose example didn’t stop us
from cohabiting happily with Mac or even Windows, whom most of us now regard
as household pets. But he is gleefully primed by whimsy as well as the conviction
he’ll live almost forever. And Dr. Race’s desire for "brain Viagra"
responds to the primal needs of the race itself, which will surely be satisfied.

Yahoo,
Clarke and Race relieve the tedium of Predictionism. For this we must be grateful.
But still, we find here a deadly serious reprise of not only Themes 1 and 2,
but at least four more: (3) technology is driving us on its own toward unprecedented
wealth; (4) increasingly, power will be consolidated into fewer and fewer hands,
confirming Marx’s determinism–free-market capitalism yields to monopoly
power; (5) increasingly, we will ignore human variation, diversity and potential
by standardizing methods of judgment; and (6) indeed, mere humanity is about
to be replaced, even while medical advances seem certain to double if not triple
the life span.

That’s
it, fans–if you honor logic and precedent.

But What If The Logic
Is Wrong, Again?
Let’s
turn the tables. Let’s assume the very reverse of predictionist future
occurs in 2001, for a reason I’ll shortly elucidate. As we do so, let’s
call to our side two perhaps surprising establishment examples: Alan Greenspan,
chairman of the Fed, and Peter Drucker, guru of all the corporate consultants.
Behind their bluenosed reputations, they turn out to be as counterterrorist,
as unexpected, as red-nosed as the rest of us.

First, Greenspan:
By often reversing rigid logic (which dictates that he raise interest rates
every time the economy booms, to kill off inflation), by bobbing and weaving,
keeping our investors guessing–he just nudged the rate up, slightly–he
has flooded the economy with so much cash that even black male teenagers and
a few white male artists are beginning to get jobs. His theories are manic (in
Senate testimony recently he castigated the European fondness for job security
as a "non-economic cultural value"), but his actions in the past five
years have nearly always betrayed his ponderous words.

As for Drucker,
now 90, the man who in the 50s first outlined the probable evolution of the
global corporation is now arguing the reverse–that the megacorporation
is moving toward a slow death in the 21st century, primarily because knowledge
workers will demand independence, to stay at home and pour their passions into
nonprofit goals. Why? The anticorporate corporate guru speaks:

"The
20th century was the century of business. The next century is going to be the
century of the social sector."

There is
yet another reason to take heart. Let’s dare to consider that the biological
brain counts for more than the digital brain, "the spiritual machine"
allegedly primed to enslave us all. The most profound news delivered to us by
medical science in the past year is the discovery that our brains probably never
stop churning out new cells, even in old age. This means that the streams of
free-access information and sensation now flowing into our brains will extend,
rather than blunt, our powers. Compared to what we are now able to imagine and
invent, the dramatic new Intel and IBM gigaherz chips, prepared to cycle a billion
times a second, are minor stuff. Imagine instead our jam-packed gray cells multiplying
all over the world, as citizens of all continents live longer, learn more, create
finer and wilder applications for these chips. My God, the world is becoming
(as Robert Wright imagines in NonZero, his aptly titled new book) a giant
mind!

For this
reason alone, all calls based on the assumption that we’re either naive
or dumb, just playthings for high-minded robots, unable to keep up with the
captains of postmodern industry, look wrong…again.

Armed with
this conviction, our contrarianism certified by the Greenspan and Drucker establishment
examples, let’s overturn predictionism and see what we might find on the
other side, in 2001:

•What
if the free market remains free? Simply because neither AOL-Time Warner (not
a done deal anyway) nor the broadband blimps can dilute our raging taste for
multiplicities in news, the arts and entertainment. It’s way, way too late
to stop us from producing our own shadow-plays on Web video, MP3 audio and the
DVD discs eagerly placed in our hands by competing free-marketeers. Drucker
believes the megacorporation will be replaced in the 21st century by myriad
minicorporations, mostly generated by small groups or lone individuals able
to promote, sell and sustain themselves via direct digital contact with their
markets.

•As
for the wholesale flight back to the mom-and-pop homestead predicted by politicians,
what if in fact we’ll soon see many Moms, many Pops, many illegitimate,
some temporary? Your average child will listen to sounds from Mars and walk
as a VR avatar across the steppes in Asia before he/she has finished elementary
school. His/her peers will be global. The parent-child relationship will become
more equalized, less like a master-apprentice relationship, if only because
the kids will often contact new knowledge and new technologies ahead of the
parents. My 17-year-old daughter ought to write my articles. Maybe she’s
writing this one.

•Conventional
dot-com advertising is likely to decline, exactly as the lavish political-com
ads will (unless McCain misunderstands his success and joins the pack, as Bradley,
alas, has). For sure print admaking is now primarily a legitimizer, not a seller.
You buy full-page ads to prove you’re serious, you’re in the game.
But the step that sells is direct mail, direct calls, a big dinner party, a
website that pulls in millions of users.

•The
richest, roundest anti-prediction: In a booming economy, wealth, widely shared,
becomes non-wealth. The focus in a society where most basic needs are satisfied
will be on nonmaterial issues. Already we see that the main debate in the 2000
election is focusing on nonmilitary "luxuries" like education, the
Ten Commandments, global warming and prescription drug benefits. Yes, Clinton’s
military budget is huge and wasteful–as is George W.’s proposed one–but
they don’t want to talk about it, do they? For all his prescience, Daniel
Bell didn’t allow that materialism’s destruction of tradition might
be replaced by whole new codes, better attuned to minds no longer stunted by
provincialism, not reluctant to exercise selfless choices where public or environmental
needs are concerned.

•What
if the evolving radicality of our lifestyles forces us to change the old definitions
of "left" and "right"? The final refutation of 2000 logic
may be that both conservatism and liberalism will learn from this campaign that
the old songs don’t sing anymore, that they must readjust to the extended,
multidimensional lives we actually live now, which don’t resemble the lives
lived by our grandparents or even our parents. While my father died at 34, and
never left this country, I expect to be with Arthur C. Clarke on that Hilton
in space in 2011, where we’ll recall a day we spent together at the Chelsea
Hotel swatting an enormous roach in 1975, while a museum curator hid in the
closet, afraid to face Mr. 2001.

•What
if Mr. President in Chappaqua turns columnist? Invades the mind of Maureen Dowd?
Invites her up for a drink, offering to pay for that limo…?

To repeat:
these are anti-predictions, simply here to defy the idea of a remote, abstract
Future. That distant utopia (or dystopia) no longer exists, period. Our lives,
tools and capacities are escalating so rapidly that Futurist modeling–a
neat little vision of a coherent destiny that is 10, 20 or 50 years down the
road–is impossible. Each of the destabilizing contradictions I just listed
is as reasonable as the Official Destiny.

Why
Be So Contrarian?

Because
we love to defy the odds. Because we are at our best when we are experiential,
not ideological, primed by attitude, not determinism. Spontaneous reversals
bring out the best in us. Yes, this may be a uniquely American sickness, fostered
by the infinitude of cultures, desires and passions that keep us constantly
off balance, on edge, where we love to be. But it is the key to the economic
and cultural success that has characterized the past decade.

Remember
"the Asian Century" that was supposed to overwhelm us in the 1990s,
due to the top-down planning embodied by Japan’s Ministry of Trade and
Industry? What in fact has happened since then argues against big plans, and
for giving complexity, reversal and chance proper respect. (This position is
summed up brilliantly in economist Paul Ormerod’s new book, which links
itself metaphorically to the infamous butterfly trope that defines complexity
theory.)

Let’s
cultivate, not resist, the butterfly–that is, C&R. The great anarchist
historian Paul Feyerabend, a most rare guide to the past, argues against the
false clarity of "order"–of making history seem logical. Feyerabend
bids us to see the virtues of disorder and confusion. The great moments of achievement
have always been moments when competing ideas are let loose, he tells us, with
no supreme authority in control: classical Athens, the early Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, the coming of the "Modern" early in the last century
and the flowering of postmodernity, with its insistence on the juxtaposition
of opposites and the cross-reference of cultures.

In the 21st
century, "anything goes" will seem more attractive than ever. Let’s
focus on 2001, not 2000, alert to every shocking, unexpected, unsettling event,
rather than past patterns. Anything can happen now, even a Bradley-McCain ticket.
Until 1/1/2001, place no conservative bets, book no normal reservations, invest
only in wild stocks. The improbable is yet to come.

Yet Faludi is–with
Naomi Wolf and a few other second-generation feminists, now in their late 30s
and 40s–"pro-male." With Betty Friedan and a few men, she once
argued that the "masculine mystique" needs detonation, just like the
"feminine" one. For six years it had been rumored Faludi was interviewing
men all over the nation, determined to explain what the postfeminist world looks
like through men’s eyes–and how we’ve been betrayed.

But Stiffed, for
all its good intentions, is a downer. The Barbell Girl, upon reflection, is
also a downer. Then I pick up The New York Times and find Natalie Angier,
the Supreme Male-Basher of 1999, praising a body manual written for teenage
girls that welcomes sexuality into public discourse (Deal With It!: A Whole
New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a Gurl, by Esther Drill, Heather
McDonald & Rebecca Odes; Pocket Books, 309 pages, $15). She is ecstatic
over its frank language. She warns us it’s filled with first-person testimonies
from the authors’ website, much of it celebrating heterosexuality. ("Salome"
writes: I try to look into my boyfriend’s eyes when I’m sucking.
It seems to get him off faster.) This manual is a signal reversal of the
tide that has swept through our political and media life since Monica, dousing
George W. Bush so totally he decided to come out against masturbation a few
weeks ago, denying his fratboy past as well as contradicting Naomi on Al Gore’s
shoulder, who thinks self-gaming is fine.

So of course I call the
publisher for a review copy of Deal. Gloom lifts, temporarily. It’s
no longer just me vs. the rich women who reduce every talk show debate to the
primitivism of old-style Marxist class warfare or new-style free market panaceas.
The debate seems to be admitting new ideas, differing viewpoints…and one feminist
book about the forgotten male. Women are beginning to hint they aren’t
totally indifferent to us.

You sense what I mean.
Faludi wants to straddle all the worlds at once. While implying often in these
pages that women don’t "get it" about men, she’s not going
to bash women. She’s going to argue that "conventional assumptions"
(cf. male media, corporate bosses and politicians), not feminist attack squads,
are ripping the sexes apart. She’ll admit the genders are coiled inside
a system that beats up on both of them, revealing one inch of Marxist stocking.
But she’s going to focus primarily on the victim-guys most likely to hate
feminism, the unemployed Industrial Belt sluggers, ignoring the ones who voted
to give women the right to vote and hoist barbells, the white collars in service
and information. Her book is layered in hundreds of direct-quotation male conversations.
They’re unmistakable proof that Susan really enjoys men, provided they’re
rough and tough, but fragile at the same time, barely able to blurt out grainy
sound bites that badly need the gloss she gives them.

Let’s begin with the
myth that "men" are furious over "women’s advances,"
as Faludi tells me on the phone. It’s not only that her model is brilliantly
selective: laid-off engineers, steelworkers, shipyard mechanics, high school
dropouts, poor-boy gangs, male porn stars, ex-astronauts, gun nuts, Promise
Keepers, Citadel cadets. Stiffed begins with the author shadowing one
domestic abuse workshop after another. She rigorously ignores the vast numbers
of males who say–in poll after poll–that they are for equal
rights, well-qualified female pols and women CEOs. The last serious poll to
ask the question, "Would you be willing to vote for a woman for president?"
yielded a "yes" vote of over 90 percent, with only a two-point difference
between male and female respondents.

As for the chastened men
who do talk to her about beating up their women and such, yes, they’re
eloquent about sexist sins and more than willing to confess all. She’s
surprised by this, but in truth it’s predictable. By the time Faludi gets
to them, they have expiated their sins in more than one workshop, right on cue.
The Confessed Sinner, among them our President, is a celebrity of our time.

That’s why this male
mystique code, subtly modulated by feminist analysis, is drenched in guilt–as
was the feminine mystique that rose out of the same 1950s. And why the single
achievement of the gender war rhetoric in the past few decades has been negative,
not positive, however much the employment rolls have enlarged to take in hordes
of women. We have mightily–if unintentionally–eroded whatever small
tolerance existed in this repressed society for the pleasures of heterosexuality.
Anyone 15 years old or more has surely noticed the rise since 1990 of legal
and bureaucratic actions against any mainstream sexual expression that doesn’t
follow strict guidelines. The courts are filled with harassment charges, the
schools are chocked with seminars warning each gender against the other (all
the way down to grade schools where little boys are suspended for kissing little
girls who want to be kissed), and our political leaders, most of whom enjoy
rich and varied sex lives, sound like Cotton Mather on the stump (in his scorn
for masturbation, George W. is the spitting image of Pope John Paul).

Faludi ignores this heterophobic
public relations trauma, other than an occasional quotation ("Girls have
the power to have sex with somebody if they want to," says a California
teenage boy, burning with resentment. "They have the power.") She
sees the male crisis as primarily economic–the loss of manly blue-collar
jobs. No other issue, social, psychological or political, means as much to males
now as the drought in manual labor, she says, and regular paychecks and beer
parties.

This single-issue mania
is the main reason Stiffed fails to achieve its goal, which is nothing
less than man’s lib. Monomania, a thoroughly American sickness, is also
lurking behind the failure to liberate women. It’s our obsession with One
Truth at a Time.

Here and elsewhere I think
Faludi buys into the very mystique she wishes to bankrupt. In search of males
who fit the pattern, she finds them, exalts them, pats them on the head like
a good mom. Of course this is why she continually expresses surprise that tough
guys can talk, as well as chew gum: because two decades of feminist rhetoric
had led her to believe they couldn’t.

The betrayed American male
has no ability, in brief, to sense what the bad guys are doing to him. She expresses
shock in Stiffed that Sylvester Stallone or Michael Bernhardt, the Vietnam
vet who told the truth about the My Lai massacre, contradict the pattern. Stallone’s
discomfort with his Rambo/Rocky image, which brought him at once fame, fortune
and derision, is seen here as a lonely, heroic rejection of his father. Bernhardt’s
decision to tell the Congress and the media about what he saw–even the
moment when the infamous Lieut. Calley, half-clad, held a gun to a naked Vietnamese
woman–is also seen as isolated defiance.

But are they really unique?
Stallone is simply the latest multimillionaire Hollywood star fed up with typecasting,
stretching all the way back to Gary Cooper and Rock Hudson. He admits to Faludi
(at the Four Seasons) that he helped get himself out of the Vietnam draft by
pretending his bad hearing was worse than it is. In all his moves, Rocky/Rambo
reveals himself at one with Hollywood and America: rejecting the male mystique
script whenever it causes pain or loss.

God knows Michael Bernhardt
is worth the time and adulation Faludi heaps on him (in diners and coffee shops
rather than the Four Seasons). But again she is driven to cast him as a loner,
as one of the rare few who saw through the Vietnam War folly. Has she forgotten
how many males refused to fight in Vietnam, deceived the system (cf. Bill Clinton,
Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh) or demonstrated against it? Or how their models–from
the Quakers to Gandhi to Martin Luther King–were also males?

It doesn’t take a
professional historian to point out how often feminist writers distort history
in the most blatant terms, ignoring long lines of male pacifists, pro-feminists
and socialist visionaries.

Faludi is obsessed with
the alleged right-wing power to blind males to the evils of Late Capitalism.
Be a good girl, guys, she says, in effect. Admit you’ve been
brainwashed. Reject the patriarchy. She even finds JFK in obscure speeches
in 1960–as well as his address to the Democratic National Convention–trying
to rouse "young men" to invade "the new frontier," which
he defined like a football game, as "a set of challenges." "The
fight," she concludes, "was the thing, the only thing, if America
was to retain its manhood." But JFK was much more than a simple muscleman,
as he later proved on several levels, including his willingness to admit defeat
in the Bay of Pigs. I agree that Stallone, Bernhardt, and company are admirable
in their ability to "see through" the gorilla ethic. But they’re
hardly alone. They’re not even in the minority.

For sure Faludi is right
when she argues that women were able to organize in the 60s and 70s against
a "clear enemy." But the enemy can be so overstated and oversimplified
that he/she isn’t real. The idea, for example, that the average American
male worships the corporate elite is one example. It’s equivalent to assuming
that the average woman sees herself as Hillary Clinton or Martha Stewart. What
about the tons of poetry, politics, art, popular music and theater that attack
this elite? Why is Warren Beatty (Reds, Bulworth) making a fortune?
What about the endless polling that documents massive distrust of Wall Street
and the government, not to say tv commercials? Why do millions of males either
refuse to vote at all, or pull down the lever for adversarial politicians in
this allegedly domineering, dominating patriarchy?

But Faludi herself weaves
the "private" realm of sexuality into what she calls the "final"
betrayal of the American male, the coming of "ornamental culture,"
which is a product, she says, of the past two decades. That’s when the
service and information industries pushed hard muscular work offstage. During
this traumatic switch, the corporate media barons began to value masculinity
entirely as display–cf. Stallone–not as function. Image, display and
flourish replaced "real" work. "Femininity fit more easily into
the new ethic"–the ethic of display. Faludi’s favorite guys are
now final losers: "The internal qualities once said to embody manhood–surefootedness,
inner strength, confidence of purpose–are merchandised to enhance their
manliness."

Faludi assumes that the
American male is only an asset, only a Real Man, when he uses his muscles, not
his brain. Another perversion of history, but more to the point, isn’t
the new economy a betrayal of the traditional American female as well?
Ripped from her home, her kids and her privileged privacy, thrown into the marketplace,
where she must do battle with Gates, Grove and Gore?

Or is it that at this moment
two traditional mystiques, never particularly powerful or confining,
are deconstructing, leaving the old paradigms in ruins?

That is why Stiffed,
far more than Backlash, is simply reporting and allowing the men to speak…
There is no one else to explain what it is to be a man but a man. But men don’t
speak. Did you read that great book by Richard Rhodes about his sexual coming
of age? Male reviewer after male reviewer complained…as if he broke
some taboo. I think fear and hatred await any male who breaks the silence.

Part of me agrees. Heterosexual
men are attacked when they write frankly about gender issues–but
it’s hardly just by the "male reviewer." And until we can speak
frankly we can’t change things.

What’s wrong with
the tons of paper wasted on genderism to date is that it’s focused relentlessly
backward, as is the nonsensical "family values" debate. Neither side
keeps its eyes open to what is actually happening right now: the radical decline
in the percentage of American households made up of "married couples with
kids"; the sharp upswing in white illegitimacy, which means prosperous
unmarrieds choosing to spawn kids; the meteoric rise of the information industry
to dominance in our economy, while Faludi’s Rust Belt dwindles; the expansion
of sexual activity both before and around marriage, due primarily to the independence
of women who no longer feel they must marry to survive, meaning that the employment
of sex-as-pleasure has doubled. (As our lives lengthen, as the genetic logistics
of our body extend, it will triple.)

While all this happens,
the software differences between the genders are widening, not collapsing. On
one side, Microsoft. On the other, gurl.com, where Salome’s fellatio quote
cited in Deal With It! came from. Let’s allow a few flowers to bloom
in this artificially constricted debate. Helen Fisher, author of a classic anthropological
study, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce,
predicted many of the current behavioral changes almost a decade ago–most
of all the potential coming of abundant existential sensuality.

Fisher’s references
were to the past, to older societies that simply "equalized" male
and female freedom. Faludi’s outlook is retrogressive for an entirely different
reason–back to a sentimentalized work-ethic era no longer decisive in our
lives. Your reference and mine ought to be the future, a radically open, a thoroughly
un-stiffed future.

Saint Augustine
by Garry Wills
Penguin, 145 pages, $19.95

Almost 1600 years ago, the
silver-tongued bishop of a small city in Northern Africa began to write and
rail against one simple and (for him) indefensible act: Spontaneous Erection
or S.E., impure and simple. Now known as St. Augustine, this intellectual powerhouse
decided that S.E. is an offense against God. How dare the "disobedient
member," inflamed by a licentious wife, rise up against Divine Power? Doesn’t
either offender remember what happened to Adam? To Eve?

Perhaps no single act of
critical misreading in history blitzed the lives of more people than Augustine’s
interpretation of Genesis, with the possible exceptions of Goebbels parroting
Mein Kampf and Stalin distorting Das Kapital for legions of black-
and red-shirted thugs. To this day you and I, whether Judeo-Christians or innocents
living in a society they molded, feel the sting of Augustine’s verbal whip.
For sure he has handed over more patients and gold to our shrinks than anyone
else. If women want to know why you dare not "speak your desires,"
read The City of God. If males want to know why we were ashamed of our
hard-ons in high school, read Augustine’s Confessions. And if anybody
wonders why the world regards once-radical Christianity as a reactionary and
repressive faith, read the saint’s heated debate with his fellow bishops,
summed up in The City of God Against the Pagans.

But stay away from Genesis
itself. If you read it in a sane mode, you may join millions of contrarians,
as well as the revisionist historians who are studying early, pre-Augustinian
Christianity, by concluding that the Adam and Eve saga is not obsessed with
balling in the woods, and certainly not with defiant dicks, as Augustine concluded.
Genesis is clearly a fiction enfolded in metaphor. We’re clearly expected
to seek meaning there as we seek it everywhere in the Bible–beneath (or
above) the literal plot line. This is how the first Christians and their left-wing
Gnostic brothers used Genesis and the Bible before Augustine dropped in from
hell to pronounce every single word in that tiny tale that suits him as literal
truth.

In Augustine’s eyes,
the message of the story is not that Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s prohibition
against eating the fruit of "knowledge"–a complex, profound matter.
No. They defiled their creator, and us, because Adam (allegedly) got a hard-on.
And Eve, in fine, is a tramp. Let us cast all our stones at her, Augustine says,
in effect. Order her to obey her husband and stay far away from the higher councils…of
his church.

Ludicrous, isn’t it,
that an entire religion, at first committed to a merciful new God, not his Old
Testament granddad–to saving and feeding the poor, defying the Emperor
in Rome, rolling back the moneylenders, defending whores and outcasts–should
decide that lust and love is its central enemy? That women, whom Jesus Christ
deliberately sought out and defended, are Sin, collectively, incarnate? Yet
this is precisely Augustine’s argument, making it easy today for his ally
John Paul II to shove it down the throats of the faithful in one Augustinian
anti-abortion, antisexuality, antimasturbation encyclical after another. As
they mount in rage, the encyclicals have steadily alienated even some devout
Roman intellectuals. One of them, in a rich, yeasty review of John Paul’s
writings in The New York Review of Books back in 1994, wondered whether
the pope is obsessed with sex and chastity because of his Polish past. Worse,
maybe his refusal to grant women full equality in his church is driven by his
extremist idolatry of the Virgin (with whom no earthly female can compare).
Why won’t the pope shut up about sex, the writer wondered, and focus on
larger issues? "When I am asked whether I am a church-going Catholic and
answer yes," he wrote, "no one inquires whether I really believe in
such strange things as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection. I am
asked about ovaries and trimesters. The great mysteries of faith have become…
the ‘doctrines’ on contraception and abortion."

That writer was Garry Wills:
darling of the fading neoconservative intellectual elite, winner of a Pulitzer
and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and a venomous, often brilliant
political analyst. A few years after casting doubt on his pope’s obsession
with sex, the same Wills now publishes this fawning "life" of St.
Augustine that blindly endorses virtually every comma and period ever written
by the Monster of Hippo. Most amazing of all, Wills contends Augustine was wrapped
inside the mind of God when he wrote.

Why? Imagine what mincemeat
Wills might make of a George W. speech in which he claimed to be wrapped inside
the mind of G. Washington, if not his father, George the President. Savor the
spectacle of Wills lashing into Al Gore for misreading the Founding Fathers
on Church and State. Yet here Garry reverts to choirboy status, parsing his
catechisms. Not only does he equate Augustine with God; he rattles off a series
of cotton-candy generalizations that echo his Master:

Yes, Augustine is at one
with the mind of God.

God’s word is whatever
Augustine says it is.

If a penis rises spontaneously,
it does so against the will of is owner.

If a penis does not rise
when bidden, it has a mind of its own.

Eve is evil because she
wanted to bed Adam.

God, who controls all things,
who shaped Adam to impregnate Eve, and Eve to attract Adam, was shocked when
the pairing worked. Furious, God ejected the original couple, clothed, from
Paradise, demanded that Eve submit to Adam, and condemned their progeny forever…to
commit sex, spawn kids, and die.

Men and women can only defy
death–and avoid sex–by throwing themselves on the mercy of the Church.

If you swallow any or all
of these absurdities in 1999, you are a special case. Even in the fourth and
fifth centuries Augustine’s fantasies provoked spirited resistance. Wills
barely acknowledges this counter-Augustinian movement, which is the centerpiece
of Elaine Pagels’ widely respected book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.
Pagels and many other scholars have also flooded the intellectual market in
the past decade with a wealth of discoveries about the politics and sociology
of the early Christians, who turn out to be a rangy, daring and highly diversified
band of rebels, alternately infuriating both the Romans and the orthodox Judaic
elders. "In the late fourth century and the fifth century…," Pagels
writes, "Augustine’s theory of human depravity–and, correspondingly,
the political means to control it–replaced the previous ideology of human
freedom."

Wills does not even mention
the discovery and translation of the "forbidden" Gnostic gospels,
found in Egypt in 1945. Though Christians, the Gnostics drew very different
conclusions not only from the "accepted" biblical texts but from many
writings cast out by the mainstream church leaders. Some Gnostics saw Eve as
the hero, along with the Serpent, of the Genesis story, not its villain. Many
more disagreed totally with Augustine’s denigration of women. Indeed, the
Gnostics saw God as a crossdresser in effect, at once male and female. From
Pagels’ 1979 Random House edition of The Gnostic Gospels: "I
am androgynous. [I am both Mother and] Father, since [I copulate] with myself…[and
with those who love] me… I am the Womb [that gives shape] to the All… I
am…the glory of the Mother."

For our strangely uninformed
biographer, however, the embattled Augustine alone is Christianity, surrounded
by pagans and pederasts. Wills even tries to debunk what he calls "the
legend" of his hero’s notoriously profligate youth. He does so simply
on the ground of declaration, without reference either to biographical fact
or to Augustine’s own Confessions, which are riddled with references
to his rapacious behavior: "In the 16th year of the age of my flesh…the
madness of raging lust exercised its supreme dominion over me." Later,
"I drew my shackles along with me, terrified to have them knocked off."
Given this mystifying remorse mixed with rage, it is no wonder that Augustine
ended as an enemy of free will. Whereas the early Christians saw the destiny
of man/woman as open-ended, Augustine saw the genders as sick, helpless, depraved.

And his theory locked in
perfectly with the church’s sudden rise in stature in the fourth century
from the margins to the center of power. As one Roman emperor after another
converted to the ranks of an increasingly popular–because originally benevolent–faith,
the Christian gospel inevitably changed in content and style. Now the heads
of the church were forced to manage a huge, warring and fractious empire. Order,
not freedom, became its necessity. Let the church then teach its faithful to
submit, to control their depraved impulses (political or sexual).

Augustine’s "reading"
of Genesis was officially adopted by the Council of Orange in 529, one century
after his death. To some extent, his deeply authoritarian theory has been exploded
over the centuries by education, democracy and egalitarianism. Even the Roman
Church now finds it necessary to adapt to social and economic conditions that
promote self-reliance and self-definition, not submission. Sex is perhaps the
last frontier. Why? The answer is enfolded at once in the politics of lust and
of free will.

To take the first: It is
at least possible, if not probable, that Augustine was obsessed with erection
because he couldn’t get it up, at least not as often as he wished. Over
and over he pointed out that "the married man" loses control when
it won’t stand up on command, as well as when it will. Time for
a little common sense: Who really cares or thinks deep thoughts when his member
is stiff? The gray cells are immobile at that moment. The same is true of a
woman in arousal. We’re only plunged into self-doubt and introspection–deeply
scarred or touched–when we fail or run dry.

My conclusion, then, is
that Augustine turned into a raving puritan because he didn’t have either
Viagra or a seductive woman near at hand.

Perhaps free will and sex
are a Mobius strip, one side turning constantly into the other. The early Christian
records of Christ’s words and actions–what is called the "Synoptic
Gospels" (meaning written by those who knew him, or a disciple)–do
not preach Augustinian doctrine or loathing for the flesh. Yes, Jesus is profoundly
opposed to adultery; he is also profoundly opposed to those who want to punish
sinners (cf. the Mary Magdalene defense). He leaves the decision, the action,
up to the user, if you will. And of course he is an enemy of coercive power
and the state, which executes him in the end.

Given the plot of the Greatest
Story Ever Told, what other story, equally brilliant, equally historic, does
it recall? In The Bacchae, we also find the son of a god, Dionysius,
spawned by a lowly woman in whom Zeus decides to implant his seed. Like Christ,
Dionysius takes human form–and consorts with the lowliest citizens of Thebes
as well as the mighty. He is hugely popular with women, who are enthralled by
his beauty as well as his decidedly sensual theories of the good life, which
argue for release, not restraint. To this day, "bacchanalian" means
wining, dining, loving.

Also like Christ, Dionysius
incurs the wrath of the state. In place of Pontius Pilate, he must contend with
an Augustinian puritan in the form of Pentheus, the King. Pentheus rails against
the usurper, fearing that he will corrupt his kingdom, if not destroy law and
order. Dionysius and Pentheus represent two opposite claims on life–one
that seeks to empower and delight each citizen of Thebes, and one that seeks
only unification and control. In this Alternative Greatest Story, however, Pilate-Pentheus
is destroyed. Dionysius, a left-wing, anarchist version of Christ, wins the
day.

No one can say whether Euripides’
plot influenced those who claimed to remember what happened in Jerusalem, but
the similarities are intriguing. So is the main difference. The classical legacy–which
drove both the Enlightenment and democracy–welcomed sex into the middle
of life. The Christian legacy, as later revised and extended by Garry Wills’
beloved patriarch, tried to drive it out. In one sense, of course, that legacy
not only self-destructed, it may have bequeathed us the delights of eroticism–the
art, poetry and music of repression. But the legacy still hounds our laws, our
schools and the stump speeches of our candidates for president.

E-mail Douglas
Davis at dd@sfd.com.