Driving Home, page 45
These were the people whom the boom had left behind. The demonstrators were protesting Seattle’s leaping rents and house prices; the unfathomable workings of the “new economy” in which companies were valued not on their ability to make money, but on their capacity to spend it at a hell-for-leather burn rate; the marginalization of once-prized manual skills; the takeover of the city by alien, baby-faced stock-option millionaires.
Earlier in the year, a fleet of primrose-yellow vans had appeared in the streets wearing the livery of the newest extravagantly bankrolled start-up, MyLackey.com. The lackeys, capped and braided like bellboys, ran errands and did chores. The company name, however facetiously meant, was incendiary, suggesting as it did a gleeful return to an upstairs-downstairs master-and-servant society—which was exactly what the WTO demonstrators hated, for they knew all too well on which side of the baize door they were expected to belong.
On the morning of November 29, when I was driving my then seven-year-old daughter to school over a high freeway overpass, she was excited to see a banner strung from the boom of a mammoth crane, held in place by men dangling gymnastically from ropes a hundred feet above the ground. One waved to her as we passed by at eye level. The boom was aligned due north and south, and the banner showed two enormous arrows. The southward arrow pointed downtown, and said WTO; the northward one said DEMOCRACY. Where had democracy fled? To the—relatively—blue-collar city of Everett, Washington? To Canada? To the Arctic wastes? It was impossible to tell.
Since I moved here, greater Seattle—which includes the morainelike sprawl of tract housing and subdivisions along the urban corridor on Interstate 5 as well as the East Side cities and suburbs—has grown in population by 37 percent, from 2.4 million to 3.3 million. In a farflung state considerably bigger than England, Seattle, broadly defined, holds slightly more than half the total population and its votes. The governor and both its senators are liberal Democrats whose elections were bitterly fought by the state’s timber, mining, ranching, farming, and construction lobbies. Resentment of Seattle’s financial and political power has intensified as its numbers have risen: one needn’t travel far out of the city to find it viewed as the Great Wen, William Cobbett’s name for London in 1821—smug, tyrannical, leaching the life out of its suffering hinterland.
But if anything, Seattle loves its surrounds too dearly, calling it “the environment.” On weekends, we disperse into the environment to pursue such urbanite pleasures as skiing (but not snowmobiling), fly-fishing, hiking, mountaineering, birdwatching, kayaking, and sailing. (The city’s latest promotional slogan is the grating coinage “Seattle—Metronatural.”) So the hinterland presents itself to the conurbation as a giant recreational park, whose every last vestige of wildness—stands of old-growth forest, salmon-spawning habitat, bear and cougar territory—must be vigilantly preserved or restored, whatever its longtime residents might have to say. Seattle, which likes to flaunt the title of “America’s most educated city,” knows best.
As soon as one leaves its suburbs, incomes fall precipitately, as if off a cliff. An air of quiet—too quiet—distress pervades once-prosperous timber towns such as Forks, on the Olympic Peninsula, whose best hope now is to divert tourists before they hike into the rainforest that Forks used to cut down with chainsaws. An underpatronized cafe here isn’t a bad place from which to contemplate the host of cultural luxuries to which Seattle has recently treated itself—the new opera house, the just-reopened and greatly expanded art museum, the dazzling public library designed by Rem Koolhaas, the new downtown sculpture park, the state-of-the-art symphony hall, new baseball and football stadiums, the botched fantasia of Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project—or to reflect on its latest political controversy, which was about whether to replace the aging and earthquake-vulnerable Alaskan Way viaduct with a $3.4 billion tunnel.
As people on the make tend to snub and discard those who’ve helped them on the way up, so do cities. Yet Seattle, having disentangled itself from its roots over the past twenty years, seems unconcerned—and no wonder. Its stake in the expanding commerce of the virtual world is big and growing bigger. As the nearest port in the continental United States to Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, it looks to the rise of China with more equanimity than any other American city (and for the same reason, it views the nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang with more apprehension). Cyberspace and Asia beckon.
But this is a very different city from the one I settled in in 1990. Most days, I take myself off to Fishermen’s Terminal, a mile from where I live, to buy a cigar at one of the last remaining proper cigar stores in Seattle and to wander its seventy-six acres of clanking masts and spars. So much water, scattering the reflections of dock pilings rooted in deep mud, is consoling, and so are the smells and sounds of paint and sawdust, the churring of power tools, the old skills of patiently mending nets and diesel engines. I like boats and the people who tend them—reminders of what work used to be, of what Seattle used to be.
But I’m not fooled. Five years ago, the terminal—the United States’ last dedicated fishing port—began opening berths to yachts and cruise vessels. The fleet of trollers, gillnetters, and purse seiners is an increasingly marginal part of the Seattle economy; like my cigar, it’s fast turning into a quaint anomaly and a draw for tourists in search of a splash of local color to take pictures of, a taste of old-fashioned “real” life in this virtualized city. Given the present strength of salmon runs in southeast Alaska, the fishermen will continue to make a decent living, at least for the next year or two, helped by the growing discrimination of consumers and restaurateurs who reject cheap farmed fish in favor of expensive wild ones. So the oil-skinned fisherman survives courtesy of the Amazonians and the Microsofties, much like the Sussex thatcher who’s kept in business by London owners of weekend cottages.
The cigar butt is flipped off the dock, making circles in the water like a rising fish. For me, it’s back to Seattle’s present, to the screen blossoming to Windows XP, the black Thermos mug emblazoned with the green Starbucks logo, and the peculiar silence of a twenty-first-century boom city minting money, intermittently broken by the distant whistling noise of incoming 767s on their glidepath over Lake Union. As Seattle conquers the world with its brand names, it seems to me—as it never could have seemed in 1990—that I might be anywhere.
Financial Times, June 2007
Indian Country
IN HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH at the Republican National Convention in 2004, George W. Bush said, to rapturous laughter and applause, “Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called walking.” Nobody would have scripted that line for him four years before, but in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, one of his most potent electoral attributes lay in his investiture as a Western gunslinger hero. It was an improbable transformation: Bush’s build is too slight for the role, his scratchy tenor voice too high, and his rococo verbal flubs anything but laconic. His face lets him down, falling too easily as it does into the expression of a snigger, or of pettish irritation, rather than one of manly resolve. There still clings to him, at age sixty-one, a perplexing element of juvenility. As one of his advisers, quoted in Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, asks, “What kind of male obsesses over his bike-riding time, other than Lance Armstrong or a twelve-year-old boy?”
But expedient myths have to be made of whatever raw materials are to hand, and in the intellectual and emotional turmoil that followed the events of 9/11, when American journalism entered a dark period of frantic mythopoeia, both the president and his then defense secretary were decked out by the press in heroic buckskin. The new idiom of U.S. foreign policy—“smoke ’em out,” “bring ’em on,” “stuff happens,” “Wanted: Dead or Alive”—was less the spontaneous creation of the White House than a ready collusion with the public clamor for cowboy vengeance. On September 24, Bush said of the terrorists, “They thought they could diminish our soul. They just strengthened our country … we’ll be a stronger nation as a result of this.” In search of a national vernacular of strength and virility, Bush and his ghostwriters, along with a thousand editorialists and commentators, reached for the language of the 1950s Western.
That reflexive retreat into America’s haunting mythology is explored by Susan Faludi, with characteristic lucidity and drive, in The Terror Dream. She argues that the September 11 atrocities, far from being “unprecedented,” as people like to say, awoke this country’s oldest, darkest, and most enduring folk memory: the fear of sudden attack by Indians—the burning village, the glint of the tomahawk, the triumphant whooping of infidel savages bent on the destruction of white Christian civilization. For more than two hundred and fifty years, from the Pequots and Narragansetts in seventeenth-century New England to the Comanches, Sioux, Cheyennes, and Apaches on the western plains in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Native Americans were assigned the role of murderous fiends by the settlers. Even after the 1890s, when the last beaten Indians were interned on government reservations, their role as the original terrorists survived them. The Ku Klux Klan cast blacks in their image, as Joseph McCarthy cast Reds in the Cold War, but it wasn’t until 2001 that Americans came face to face with men who so perfectly embodied the demons of antique nightmare—swarthy heathens who had been living undetected in our midst, bringing death by fire out of a clear blue sky.
The mythic connection was instantaneous. Faludi reports that on September 11 she was in Los Angeles, where she took a call from a reporter (who has to be admired for his lightning grasp of the new zeitgeist) asking for her opinion on what the attacks meant for the “social fabric.” His own view became clear moments later: “This sure pushes feminism off the map!” Sometime before noon that day, the Manly Man returned to America with, alongside him, the Womanly Woman, whose childlike dependence and frailty were required in order for her to be rescued and protected by the burly male hero. By 8:30 p.m. EDT, when the president addressed the nation on television (“These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve”), we were already beginning to find ourselves inside a familiar movie plot.
A formidably adroit polemicist, Faludi has the great merit of rarely sounding polemical. Like an archaeologist patiently sifting through a midden, she picks fastidiously through the slurry of bad journalism that followed 9/11, letting the patterns she discerns in it speak more or less for themselves. Her own tone is cool, often amused, always lethally observant, as she holds up for inspection each new artifact in the form of a quotation from Ann Coulter, James Wolcott, Jonathan Alter, Diane Sawyer, Camille Paglia, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, and dozens more. In the process, she reconstructs the national temper of that time with a kind of shocking fidelity to its lunacies. In September this year, Friedman belatedly admitted that “9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11—mine included—has knocked America completely out of balance.” On one level, The Terror Dream is our Dunciad, a satire on an era of stupidity and its hack writers that began in the fall of 2001 and lasted at least until election day in November 2006, if it’s not still with us now.
As in Backlash and Stiffed, Faludi uses the cultural manipulation of gender as a close-up lens, directing it on events to great, if necessarily selective, effect. Within the first few hours, the taciturn bravery of the New York firefighters—immediately and pointedly renamed firemen—supplied the mold into which politicians would try to shape themselves in the days and years to come. Although the firefighters themselves would attribute their appalling losses (three hundred and forty-three died at Ground Zero, or, as they called it, “the pile”) to a failed command structure and radios that didn’t work inside the towers, the media insisted that they’d voluntarily sacrificed their lives in an act of rugged male heroism; and although two out of three people working in the World Trade Center were men, the dominant photographic image of the firefighter was of a man rescuing a woman. Firemen—to their widespread embarrassment—were cast as the new sex symbols: the Orange County Register commissioned a female reporter to date one (“All day I’d wondered whether the Real Man could kiss. All I can say is wow, can he ever”).
By a seamless sleight of hand, the firefighter with axe and helmet became the cowboy with gun and Stetson, the alpha-male defender of his imperiled women and children. In a column for the Wall Street Journal, published on October 12, 2001, Peggy Noonan wrote:
I think [John Wayne] returned on September 11. I think he ran up the stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes, came back down, and shoveled rubble. I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering silence, “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”
I think he’s back in style. And none too soon.
Welcome back, Duke.
Among the people who had “killed” Wayne, Noonan blamed “feminists … peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals,” along with Woody Allen, who “made nervousness and fearfulness the admired style.”
This rebirth of pungent, few-words masculinity—or the “Menaissance” as the Boston Globe dubbed it just last year—required women who were properly grateful to be slung over the shoulders of their stalwart rescuers. Those who dared to question or critique the emergent cowboy code, like Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt, Barbara Kingsolver, and Arundhati Roy, were vilified as witches—“hysterical,” “moronic,” “repulsive,” “deranged,” “despicable,” and “foaming-at-the-mouth.” Ed Koch prophesied that “Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell.” By contrast, Faludi points out that Bill Maher, when he said “We have been the cowards …” on Politically Incorrect, was defended by such unlikely figures as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. When Jonathan Alter wrote a Newsweek column titled “Blame America at Your Peril,” about “ignorant and dangerous appeasement” and “mindless moral equivalency,” he named only three such ignorant and dangerous “lefties,” all of whom were women: Sontag, Kingsolver, and Alice Walker.
The war on terror was men’s business in which there was little or no room for opinionated women, and Faludi documents the sudden, precipitous decline after 9/11 of female bylines on the op-ed pages and female contributors to radio and TV talk shows, noting that even the liberal Nation, edited by Katrina vanden Heuvel, kept in step with the national trend. In the media dissection and mythicization of the last minutes of Flight 93, the software salesman Todd Beamer (“OK. Let’s roll”) was the anointed hero, while the flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw, who phoned her husband to say she was boiling water in the galley to scald the hijackers, was effectively edited out of a story in which her quick-thinking initiative might have diluted the tough-guy glamour of Beamer and his athletic male colleagues as they sprinted down the aisle. Time authoritatively reported that, as a high-school basketball player, “Todd Beamer was the kind of guy you wanted on the free-throw line in a tied game.”
Rather than Sandra Bradshaw, it was Lisa Beamer, the grieving widow, devout Christian, and stay-at-home mother, who was held up as the role model for American women at a time of war—the prototype of the “security moms” who were later predicted to swing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush. The good woman was promoted as someone who knew little about politics but expected her leaders to keep her and her family “safe,” preferred childrearing to a career, and dressed fetchingly for the Real Man in her life. Faludi has a good deal of fun with the spring 2002 fashion pages, in which the new post-9/11 look proclaimed a return to exaggerated femininity.
The new styles for women are “distinctly nonaggressive,” a Vogue editor announced. “They’re not about dominance, power … but instead gentle and private”—like the “diaphanous chiffon dress” that reflected “the internal landscape of a peaceful existence.” Allure’s fashion director asserted that, “as a result of the atrocities of Sept. 11,” clothes should be white—it’s “a very angelic, soothing, ethereal type of color” that makes us feel “like we’re on some kind of road to recovery.” The general media helped promote these new fashion priorities, too. “The toughness of last season has surrendered to a sweet, romantic, girlish sensibility,” Newsday advised readers. “The clothes themselves are a lovely salve for our wounds.”
The fashionable man kitted himself out in “protector gear”: “Armani peddled camo duds,” and “Bloomingdale’s opened ‘The Fire Zone’ in its flagship Upper East Side store, where men could dude themselves up in firefighter’s jackets and ‘FDNY’ sweatshirts.” Journalists, themselves writing in the new season’s style of butch fireman prose, clad the Bush administration in becoming gunfighter outfits:
A Vanity Fair cover-story photo essay featured Bush as a flinty cowboy in chief, sporting a Texas-sized presidential belt buckle—and assigned all the president’s men superhero monikers: Dick Cheney was “The Rock,” John Ashcroft “The Heat” (“Tough times demand a tough man”), and Tom Ridge “The Protector” (“At six feet three, with a prominent Buzz Light-year Jaw, he certainly has the right appearance for a director of homeland security”). Rumsfeld had “gone to the mat with al-Qaeda, displaying the same matter-of-fact, oddly reassuring ruthlessness.” And national security officials Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and Stephen Hadley were “almost as battle scarred.” At least at the gym, where Armitage “can bench-press 440 pounds.”
In November 2001, Karl Rove enlisted the help of Hollywood to project the image of Bush as heroic defender of the nation. The result was a three-minute montage of “110 scenes of valorous vengeance” from classic movies, assembled by the director Chuck Workman and titled The Spirit of America. Massively distributed to cinemas and schools around the country, this hectic distillation of mostly brutal virtue was “bookended,” as Faludi says, by the opening and closing shots of John Wayne in The Searchers, made by John Ford in 1956.
