The Prince

Il Divo

National Review Online, April 24, 2009

To listen to what is not said is often as informative as hearing what is. Absence can reveal as much as presence, the opaque more than the clear. It is this idea, brilliantly conveyed, that runs through the performance that dominates Il Divo, transforming this bravura, epic, and wildly imaginative new film by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (released last year in Italy, it opens at selected U.S. venues this weekend) from the merely great into something very close to a masterpiece.

An acerbic, allusive depiction of Giulio Andreotti (born 1919), the acerbic, elusive statesman who served seven times as Italy’s prime minister between 1972 and 1992, and who was for decades its most powerful politician, Il Divo is not a movie with obvious appeal to a wide American audience. It monkeys with time, reality, and genre, jumping to and fro between decades, between fact and fiction, between comedy, tragedy, satire, and philippic. The events it purports to describe are little known over here. The political figures that prowl through its lethal funhouse narrative will be unfamiliar and, in their urbane cynicism and sardonic Realpolitik, almost indistinguishable from one another. Was that Franco Evangelisti we just saw, or Salvo Lima? Does it matter?

If it’s any consolation, Italians also struggle to understand their country’s post-war political history. It’s a half-century-long saga of cabals, conspiracy, and faction, of collusion with organized crime, of governments that fell but never changed, of guilty verdicts that were not, of murky Masonic lodges and devious Vatican bankers, and, always, the fear that the country’s deep ideological divisions would ultimately lead to violent conflict. Finally, hideously and, except to the dead, ambiguously, they did. The “years of lead” between the late 1960s and the early 1980s were the years of the Red Brigades, of fascist bombings, of a Mafia that appeared ready to take on the state, but also of a growing suspicion that much of this was the result of a deliberately engineered “strategy of tension” designed to whip up support for a more openly authoritarian regime. It’s no surprise that Italians have a word, dietrologia (“the science of what’s behind”), to describe the quest to discover who is really responsible for what goes on in that country of theirs. Up until recently, the answer, more often than not, or so it is repeatedly claimed, was Andreotti.

Paranoia? To a degree, but amongst the members of the faction that Andreotti led within Italy’s Christian Democratic party, and who feature in Il Divo, Salvo Lima used his connections to la Cosa Nostra to deliver large numbers of crucial Sicilian votes (he was eventually murdered by the Mafia in a response to government moves against it), Franco Evangelisti was a self-confessed recipient of large amounts of illicit campaign-finance “contributions,” Paolo Pomicino was convicted for his role in a major bribery scandal (naturally he still sits in parliament, where he has served as a member of the commission responsible for investigating organized crime), and Giuseppe Ciarrapico was found guilty of involvement in the same Banco Ambrosiano affair that saw the bank’s chairman “suicided” from London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Ciarrapico became a senator in 2008. Under these circumstances, does it matter who exactly is who?

As for another Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, who haunts this film and, it implies, what’s left of Andreotti’s conscience, he ended up broken, “tried” and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 after a kidnapping in which efforts to rescue him may have been hampered by the same establishment of which he once believed himself to be an indispensable part.

Then there’s Mino Pecorelli, a prominent muckraking journalist with a sideline in blackmail. He’s gunned down at the beginning of the movie. Back in what passes for real life, he was reported to have had damaging information about Andreotti, information that may have proved fatal — though not to Andreotti. In 1999 Andreotti was tried for his alleged involvement in Pecorelli’s murder and acquitted, only to be found guilty by a court of appeal in 2002, a verdict that was itself overturned the following year. Andreotti continues to be a senator-for-life. Pecorelli continues to be dead.

Pecorelli’s is just one of many violent deaths to punctuate this movie. The most striking is that of Salvo Lima. Filmed in a cleverly cross-cut sequence strikingly reminiscent of the murderous finale to TheGodfather, Part II, it is just one of several nods to Coppola’s trilogy (which featured, incidentally, a character thought to be partly based on Andreotti). In another scene we watch Andreotti handing out small gifts to some of his humbler constituents. It’s impossible not to remember Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone dispensing a favor here and a favor there, and, if you’re me, to be struck by the similarities between the patronage state and a successful criminal enterprise.

But compared with Andreotti, Brando’s Godfather is a mumbling, incoherent lout. As depicted by Sorrentino’s biting, perversely witty, slyly winking script and Toni Servillo’s extraordinary (and in the view of many, remarkably accurate) performance, the reserved, melancholy Italian prime minister is a black hole, enigmatic, all-consuming and irresistible, his nature illuminated only by tiny inflections of his hunched, tightly held-in body and flashes of bleak, knowing humor. He’s devoutly religious (famously so), but we soon come to realize that he has embraced the idea of a fallen humanity so fully that it has become for him both inspiration and alibi.

Servillo’s soft-spoken, deadpan Andreotti makes the screen his own. Even if you have no interest in this film’s subject matter, go for Servillo, a maestro depicting a master with a subtlety and intensity that defy description. At times he seems almost inhuman, his narrow frame and bat-ears hinting at Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, particularly in a sequence in which he practically glides down the corridors of power, corridors that, Italy being Italy, are as architecturally glorious as they are politically treacherous. Its story of murder, corruption, and betrayal may be ugly, but Il Divo is frequently gorgeous to look at. It’s a contrast that reinforces the message that Sorrentino is trying to deliver. This is underscored by scene after scene shot in that perfect chiaroscuro where light and darkness play off each other with neither quite prevailing. Even the times when Andreotti walks slowly and stiffly down a quiet Roman street, completely, hauntingly alone yet accompanied by a heavily armed police escort, are filmed with a somber noir beauty all their own.

To be sure, in some respects Il Divo’s Andreotti is a caricature (the real Andreotti, no surprise, is no fan). Sorrentino is not looking for balance. He is making the case for the prosecution: Look out for the sequence in which Andreotti is interviewed by a journalist who recites a long list of distinctly awkward “coincidences” for which Andreotti has no easy exculpatory explanation. On another occasion Andreotti is filmed confessing, if only to himself, to terrible wrongdoing.

Sorrentino does at least allow his Andreotti to refer briefly to the Communist threat that had threatened to overwhelm the young, fragile Italian republic. Fair enough. To head that off required tactics unlikely to pass muster in safer, more complacent times. “Trees,” observes Servillo/Andreotti on another occasion, “need manure in order to grow.” Andreotti takes a similar tack in the course of his “confession,” referring to “the deeds that power must commit to ensure the well-being and development of the country,” and the “monstrous . . . contradiction [of] perpetuating evil to guarantee good.” Maybe, but these “deeds” became an end, not the means. The excesses that ensued, and the scandals they brought in their wake, brought both the First Republic and Andreotti tumbling down, even if, the film’s coda suggests, neither fell quite as far, or as hard, as they deserved.

One notable commentator on Italian politics has written that a leader “must not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state . . . Some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be wicked will bring him security and prosperity.”

Somehow I don’t think that Machiavelli would have liked Il Divo. See it nonetheless.

The Sum of All Fears

Knowing

National Review Online, March 20, 2009

Knowing

Things are bad out there, you know, really bad: The economy is in a shambles, Iran’s mullahs are monkeying around with nukes, Michael Jackson is planning a comeback, and the S&P recently bottomed out (for now) at the number of the beast. Nevertheless, as Knowing director Alex Proyas’s endearingly apocalyptic, thoroughly entertaining, and ultimately goofy new movie reminds us, matters could be a lot, lot worse.

As the successful director of I, Robot, The Crow, and Dark City (the thinking man’s The Matrix), Mr. Proyas knows how to make the most out of doom — and he doesn’t disappoint on this occasion. I enjoyed Knowing’s every portentous, preposterous moment — even an absurd passage toward the end of the film involving children, bunny rabbits, and a richly kitschy Kincadian landscape located somewhere between Gladiator’s ridiculously Elysian wheat fields and the trippier sequences in The Fountain.

Mind you, I may be biased. As far as I am concerned, Knowing is a movie that has almost everything going for it: a beautiful heroine; hints of the end times; sinister and silent watchful presences; an eerie abandoned dwelling with scraps of ominous paper stuck on its walls; a wildly careering and occasionally senseless storyline; some sort of vast conspiracy; moments of excruciating sentimentality; moments of cruel death; Beethoven; scientific gobbledygook; a bloody-fingered, spooky, whey-faced child; prophetic visions of a world in flames; disembodied, not-quite-audible whisperings of warning and menace and some of the most dramatic special effects that you have ever seen. After knowing Knowing you may well hesitate before taking the subway again. You won’t feel too good about flying, either. (Does Mr. Proyas have something against public transportation?)

To reveal more would be to spoil a film structured to move from surprise to surprise. For Knowing is a movie driven more by plot than performance, something almost inevitable in any film starring the reliably not-up-to-it Nicolas Cage. Presumably under the impression that he is still stuck in that disastrous remake of The Wicker Man, the tiresomely hyper-kinetic and relentlessly histrionic Mr. Cage stumbles nervy, wild-eyed, insistent, and more irritating than I can say throughout a movie in which the audience will end up thinking that Armageddon might be a small price to pay for never having to set eyes on his character again.

As for the character unfortunate enough to be played by Mr. Cage, he’s Prof. John Koestler, an MIT astrophysicist and tragically widowed single father. Koestler is a brilliant scientist and, no less importantly, a devoted dad to his young son Caleb (nicely played by Chandler Canterbury, most recently seen by moviegoers as a senescent, eight-year-old Benjamin Button), an impression reinforced by Hollywood’s notion of what good child-rearing in an upscale academic household is meant to look like. Words are stuck to the refrigerator for spelling-class purposes. Television is limited to an hour a day, and most of that — poor, poor Caleb — appears to be the Discovery channel. We can be sure that this is a family that recycles.

Caleb attends William Dawes elementary school, the locus for the film’s opening scenes. These are centered on the celebrations that marked the school’s founding back in 1958, the highpoint of which was the burial of a time capsule containing artwork created by the new school’s pupils. Most kids draw rocket ships and other images of the future in which my generation (I too was founded in 1958) used to believe — but one outsiderish child, an unsettling Wednesday Addams look-alike by the name of Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) obsessively covers a sheet of paper with a long (uncompleted) sequence of numbers. What they mean will take the rest of this film to decode.

Flash forward 50 years and the time capsule is opened. Lucinda’s numbers end up with Caleb and then with Caleb’s conveniently mathematical dad, astrophysicist John. John comes to recognize that many of the numbers are dates, all subsequent to 1958 and each linked to a tragedy. Unsurprisingly for a movie aimed at American audiences and made in our own jittery era, the first date Koestler notices is 9/11/2001. In fact, it’s easy to see how — as in, say, Cloverfield — memories of that terrible day have influenced some of this film’s most unnerving imagery, including its depiction of even worse destruction to come, making this movie the latest to bear witness to the way in which the destruction of those towers still haunts the popular imagination — and is likely to do so for a very long time.

Not all the dates on Lucinda’s sheet have passed, however, and Koestler now sets off to do what he can to either stop or survive the future horrors they may foreshadow. This brings him into contact with Lucinda’s daughter Diana (the lovely Rose Byrne, even more depressed than in the current series of Damages) and her daughter Abby (Lara Robinson, again). Together they all embark on a desperate race against time that they quite possibly have no chance of winning.

That their destiny may already be fixed reflects an unexpectedly interesting philosophical subtext that bubbles throughout this film. When we first encounter Koestler, he’s an atheist, albeit of a distinctly non-Dawkinsian hue: He is content to let Caleb believe that the boy will one day reunite with his much-missed mother in the hereafter. That said, Koestler takes his convictions sufficiently seriously to be estranged from his pastor father. Perhaps inevitably, however, his belief in a random, purposeless universe comes to be shaken by the implications of Lucinda’s ominous, forbidding, and implacable numerals. To be sure, Koestler knows full well that numerology is nothing more than a junk science designed, like so many human beliefs, to create meaning where none exists, but in their seemingly genuine ability to predict the future, Lucinda’s numbers may, it is hinted, be driving this man of science to concede that there is more order and purpose to the universe than he had once thought possible.

By the conclusion of the film Koestler has reconciled with his father, and, maybe (the ending is much more ambiguous in this respect), the faith of his childhood. Are these issues carefully worked through? No, not really. Knowing is, thank heavens, a movie, not a seminar — an entertainment, not a sermon. Nevertheless, it’s a mark of its director’s impressive sensibility that he allows concepts such as these to make an appearance in the course (and conceivably even in the title) of a would-be blockbuster.

Strangely enough, despite this film’s cleverly fashioned portrayals of gathering disaster, the most poignant images of destruction are only by implication. Mr. Proyas’ affectionate, if somewhat rose-tinted, depiction of that orderly, dedicated, and kindly late-1950s elementary school ushers his audience into a long-obliterated world, just another victim of the continuous humdrum apocalypse that is the passing of irrecoverable time into an infinitely variable future at which we can only guess. In real life, there’s no knowing.

Iceland Without the Fish

National Review Online, February 4, 2009

Gulfoss, Iceland, 2007 © Andrew Stuttaford

If there’s one thing that can be said in defense of Tony Blair and his successor (and former finance minister), Gordon Brown, it’s that they took longer to squander Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy than some first expected. But squander it they did, and credit’s Armageddon has at last exposed the full extent of the damage.

As Warren Buffett once observed, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” That’s not the nicest way to visualize Gordon Brown, but, seen from the vantage point of the markets, the view is not much prettier. Stocks have crashed, of course, as they have across the planet, but so, more ominously, has the pound. The British currency hit record lows against the euro at the turn of the year. And when it comes to the greenback, the pound buys less than a buck and a half (it fetched more than two dollars earlier in 2008). That suggests the United Kingdom’s troubles are nastier than elsewhere, a view echoed by the IMF, which now predicts that Britain is facing the deepest recession of any major industrialized economy.

Yes, yes, the pound has gone through other ugly episodes in the relatively recent past, but the present fall (on a trade-weighted basis, sterling dropped by more than 20 percent last year) is the most dramatic since 1931. For the first time since the Labour-controlled mid-1970s, Brits are wondering if they face a genuinely catastrophic collapse in their currency.

For a country such as Britain, burdened with a large trade deficit, devaluation can be a shot in the arm by making its exports more internationally competitive. But that only holds true if there’s a market for those goods in the first place. In a time of shrinking trade flows, nobody can be sure of that. More worrying still, with the U.K.’s combined external debt (public and private) rising rapidly from a total that already exceeds 400 percent of GDP (a gross number, but even so), the usual cost-benefit analysis may no longer apply. Repaying overseas debt in a devalued currency can be a very tricky business, indeed. Will the sceptr’d isle become Iceland without the fish? (The EU took all those.)

In some respects it was only to be expected (if not by Gordon Brown; he’s saying that he never saw this coming) that the land of the much-vaunted Blair/Brown economic miracle is turning out to be more storm center than safe haven. The global meltdown revolves around the embattled international financial system, a system in which the City of London has become a key hub. That role brought a great deal of cash into the United Kingdom, but with it a great deal of risk. The City’s international business has proved, in a sense, to be hot money–fun while it lasts but with a tendency to evaporate in times of trouble. And trouble has now come calling.

The problem for Britain is that, with the financial sector in disarray (and most of the North  Sea oil gone), eleven years of Blair/Brown have left the country with dangerously little else to fall back upon. This was not how it was meant to be. Back in 1997, Tony Blair had won his way into 10 Downing Street as a representative of “New” Labour, a supposedly reformed party ready to renounce the taxing, spending, and relentless class warfare of previous socialist governments, to support free enterprise, and to do what it could to avoid the “boom and bust” cycles that had characterized so much of the U.K.’s postwar economic history. Oh, well–people believed Bernie Madoff, too.

The Blair and Brown governments were careful not to increase the top income-tax rate, but everything else was up for grabs–and was duly grabbed. Overall taxation has risen by far faster than the OECD average and has been accompanied by regulatory excess (much of it, admittedly, at the behest of the EU) and a public-spending binge that long preceded the current emergency but left the country woefully unprepared to deal with it. Gordon Brown may be the son of a Scottish clergyman (who had, marvelously, the middle name Ebenezer), but the whole preparing-for-the-seven-lean-years thing just doesn’t seem to have sunk in. In the decade that followed the 1996–97 spending year, “managed” public expenditure jumped by roughly 90 percent, and that’s before taking account of liabilities incurred but kept off the books with the help of legerdemain that would have shamed Enron.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that the U.K.’s productivity growth has, at best, been uneven, despite (up until now) broadly respectable increases in GDP. It’s perhaps telling that most (around two thirds) of the new jobs created since 1997 have been located in the public sector. What’s more, in a strikingly high percentage of cases, they have gone to recent immigrants rather than to native-born Brits, too many of whom have remained on the dole for too long. We can debate why that is, but we cannot debate the grim fact that nearly 2 million people are now registered as unemployed, a bad number that is getting rapidly worse. Another 2.7 million (more than 7 percent of the working-age population) live on “incapacity benefit,” a handout that defines them as too sick to work–a statistic that implies either repeated epidemics, a failed National Health Service, or a seriously dysfunctional labor market. I know which explanation I’d pick.

If the British are not working enough, they are not selling enough, either. The trade deficit has continued to deteriorate. For goods (“visibles”) it now stands at well over 6 percent, the highest level since proper records began in the late 17th century. In the past, the overall deficit has been narrowed by the U.K.’s ability to export services (many of them, problematically, financial), but this is just another reminder that the City’s relative preeminence is as much an expression of the weakness of the wider British economy as it is of London’s success in playing host to the choosy and itinerant international financial community.

It would be wrong, however, to blame all the horrors that are pummeling the City on Messrs. Blair and Brown. This is a fiasco with deeper and wider origins than the cack-handed fumbling of two economically illiterate politicians, but Labour’s decision to take responsibility for banking supervision away from the Bank of England (historically the country’s most experienced, and most respected, regulator) helped pave the way for disaster. It was a dumb move, made in the name of modernization but more truthfully explained by the Labour government’s disdain for anything smacking of Britain’s past. In America, the existence of a series of distinct financial regulators, each with agendas and areas of expertise all of their own, played no small part in the failure of regulation that contributed so much to the current debacle. Britain’s new tripartite regulatory system (which splits duties between the Treasury, the Financial Services Authority, and the central bank) has proved a disastrous failure for very similar reasons, a failure made all the more galling by its needlessness: Resentment is not a good basis for public policy.

In any event, the U.K. went through a bubble that in all its excess, shoddy lending practices, and baroque speculative mania bore a depressing resemblance to the horrors here in America. To take two numbers cited by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in Fantasy Island (a broadly leftist, sometimes oddball and often fascinating critique of the Blair years), between January 2000 and December 2005, outstanding consumer-credit balances rose by two thirds, and mortgage debt nearly doubled. The appalling consequences are now all too visible in a shattered housing market, on a shuttering high street, and on what is left of the balance sheets of Britain’s devastated and partially nationalized banking sector.

The damage to Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy has therefore already been bad enough, but the financial cataclysm (or, more accurately, the government’s response to it) may well, ironically, make its final destruction Gordon Brown’s best hope of remaining in power. The political reaction to his early attempts to bring a halt to the developing economic disaster shows why.

So what did Brown do? Unburdened by ideological objections to the idea of the state assuming direct stakes in the nation’s banks, the prime minister was the first to borrow (very loosely) from the successful Swedish precedent of the early 1990s and take this necessary (if regrettable) step. At the same time, his government launched a £20 billion stimulus package with, given the shaky state of public finances, little obvious idea of how to pay for it. As The Economist noted in December, even on the government’s “optimistic” projections, borrowing will hit 8 percent of GDP in 2009–10 and debt 57 percent in 2012–13. America’s budget may be a shambles, but with the dollar an internationally accepted reserve currency (for now), the United States at least has the ability (fingers crossed) to print money and buy its way, however imperfectly, however clumsily, out of the present mess. The U.K. does not–thus the tumbling pound.

Initially Brown’s rapid and decisive response played well with frazzled voters desperate to see the government do something. With the financial crisis widely blamed on three decades of (largely imaginary) laissez faire, Labour rediscovered the electoral allure of unashamedly interventionist government. Dour, stern, and carefully wrapped in an image of egalitarian rectitude, Brown came across, however absurdly, as a serious man for serious times. The Tories jeered, but for a while their advantage in the polls faltered: Their impeccably upper-crust leader (who is burdened both by youth and a past in public relations) was caricatured in ways that made him appear a feckless, callow Wooster to Brown’s shrewd, capable Jeeves.

That moment may have passed for now. Swept along by a torrent of economic bad news, the Conservatives are once again clearly ahead. That probably puts paid to the once widely rumored prospect that Brown would call a snap election before the bills finally fall due. Nevertheless Labour’s brief revival was an early warning that this crisis may yet represent an opportunity for a return of the more full-bodied socialism of the party’s destructive past. If Brown is to win another term (an election has to be held no later than June 2010), he will have to shift left. In frightening times in which capitalism is widely (if inaccurately) believed by voters to have failed, there is an obvious opportunity for the hucksters of big, redistributionist government. The announcement that Labour, if reelected, will hike the top income tax rate from 40 to 45 percent (and that’s before onerous social security levies) is only a beginning.

Somehow I suspect that the pound has far further to fall.

Obama on Everything

National Review Online, January 19, 2009

Union Station, Washington D.C., November 2008 © Andrew Stuttaford

There are some on the right who take defeat badly, but I’m not one of them. I’m not a lurk-in-the-bunker-poison-the-dog-shoot-myself kind of guy. And if you’re still in a position to read this, neither are you. But that still leaves open the question as to how, exactly, we should mark the upcoming inauguration.

Sulking is an option, as is picking a fight with a liberal member of the family, obsessively researching birth-certificate rules in Hawaii, repeatedly watching Red Dawn, or kicking the as-yet-unpoisoned dog. But, with the exception of those repeated viewings of Red Dawn, none of these alternatives is very uplifting, particularly if, as seems likely, the new president’s speech will be that–and more. At the same time, to follow the advice of those good sports over at the Wall Street Journal who suggested opening “a fine bottle of American bubbly” is to go too far down the road to reasonability, respectability, and good-hearted bipartisanship–and that’s just not our thing.

cigars-obama-sample4

It’s better, I think, to borrow a few ideas from the Orange Alternative (Pomarańczowa Alternatywa). Fearless prankster surrealists of the Polish sort-of-Left from the 1980s, they used to taunt their country’s crumbling Communist regime with cheers, not jeers, their specialty being sporadic displays of unsettlingly enthusiastic loyalty. These included a reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace and a procession through the streets of Warsaw by 4,000 people chanting their love for Lenin. Now, I would not want to compare Obama with that other community organizer–no, not for a second!–but the cult of personality now surrounding our next president suggests that hosting an Orange Alternative inauguration dinner would be a perfect counterpoint to the pomp, sincerity, and cynicism on display in Washington. It’ll also be an ideal opportunity to treat friends of all political persuasions to a confused, confusing, and almost certainly annoying celebration that can be read, as Obama has said about himself, in any way they like.

The proceedings should start with a sing-along, possibly the Obama Kids’ We’re Gonna Change the World, a song that brought so many people so much pleasure last summer:

We’re gonna spread happiness

We’re gonna spread freedom

Obama’s gonna change it

Obama’s gonna lead ’em.

We’re gonna change it

And rearrange it

We’re gonna change the world.

After hymning themselves hoarse for Change, your guests will need a drink. They will probably have had enough of clichés by then, so forget the champagne and opt instead for some Obama Limited Edition Reserve (“very detailed features of Barack Obama deep carved into the bottle . . . fit for the Smithsonian!”), a 2005 Merlot from Napa Valley. You’ll want to avoid any suggestions of elitism, however, so slip in some suds, too, perhaps some Obama (formerly “Senator”) beer from Kenya. Cocktail drinkers meanwhile may enjoy a Barackatini (rum, fruit, a splash of club soda) and, since nobody will be excluded from the promise of Obama’s America, teetotalers will be able to join in the fun (if teetotalers ever do join in the fun) with Obama Soda from France–which is, apparently, now a friend.

For food, as for bailouts, turn to Washington. The M Street Bar & Grill has designed a Barack Obama Pizza Burger. If that’s too bland, just add some Barack Obama Inauguration Hot Sauce. For those who fancy something altogether more exotic, blogger and author Veronica Chambers has dreamt up a recipe for a Barack Pie “that would celebrate, in culinary fashion, the hope, promise (and okay, super yummyness) of having Barack Obama as our next president. . . . [It] serves . . . souls hungry for hope, change and a new day in American politics.”

And if that’s not sugary enough, Max and Benny’s of Northbrook, Ill., will supply “Yes We Can!” cookies emblazoned with images of the president-elect, his wife, and the odd-looking individual who will be the next vice president. On the other hand, Obama Waffles taste too much of sour grapes to have any place at such a celebratory table–we’ll prefer the sweetness of Ben & Jerry’s “inspirational’ Yes Pecan! On that note, your guests can get at their beer with the help of a “Yes We Can” Opener. For the wine there’s Corkscrew Bill, an engaging device modeled on the husband of the new secretary of state.

When preparing the food, the Barack Obama cutting board, as versatile as a Panetta, will undoubtedly come in handy: “Can also be used as a hot plate, serving tray, cheese board, bread board . . . place-mat, or director of the CIA.” (I obviously made up the last of those. Running Langley in wartime is a job for specialists. Who could possibly think otherwise? Oh. Anyhoo . . .) When it comes to chopping, cutting, and slicing our feast’s ingredients, the adventurous will be tempted by President Barack Obama’s White House Sword, forged in the heat of a renaissance fair/faire/fayre, pleasingly suggestive of once and future Camelots, and best kept out of the hands of any members of clan Clinton.

And when it’s time at last to chow down, each of your guests should dine off an Obama Historic Victory Plate (“a priceless work of art featuring the triumphant President-Elect surrounded by the American flag and spectacular fireworks celebration”), and, according to taste, drink from a pewter-accented Obama wine glass or an “Obama Will Save Us” beer stein. Alcoholics will appreciate the opportunity to down some federally subsidized ethanol out of a specially engraved Obama Drinking Flask.

To wrap things up, how about freshly brewed Kona Joe’s (Barack O Blend, naturally) swigged out of a Barack “Change” coffee mug while savoring a cigar (Cuban?) wrapped in a commemorative Obama cigar band? Coffee and cigars? This might also be the moment to hand out a few Obama National AchieveMints. Few’s the word. Boost the mood still further by festooning your house with Obama posters, ideally in the fake, yet electorally effective, socialist-realist style pioneered by Shepard Fairey (in the Smithsonian soon!). Your couch, chairs, and any notably slow-moving guests should be draped with a “Believe” throw from NBC.com.

obamatime

Wait, there’s more! As the special commemorative clock on the mantelpiece reminds you, “It’s Obama time.” And so it is. Raise a “Yeaaaah! Obama Won! Happy Days are Here Again!” banner. The faintly alarming echoes both of Howard Dean and the (last) Great Depression will probably pass unnoticed. If they don’t, start talking excitedly about Change; that usually does the trick. Meanwhile, Obama balloons and lumi-loons (in red, white, and blue) should be allowed to soar, like hope, hype, and deficits, as high as they can go. And beyond.

It’s not only the house that should be decorated. We will, we are told, be feting the most historic inauguration in the history of history. Formally inclined male guests will want to wear a tie, perhaps one featuring Smithsonian Shepard’s “now iconic portrait of president-elect Barack Obama set in bold reds, whites, and blues.” The more casual of either gender will, perhaps, like the look of a colorful satin Obama jacket. And what woman (apart from the one from Alaska, who doesn’t count) could resist a set of HOPE earrings from www.barackobamajewelry.com (“accessorizing the movement”)?

No child need be left behind: Even the youngest can be part of the Change with an Obama onesie from Irregular Apparel (“We offer politically and socially aware messages on baby clothing that is colorful, inexpensive, covered with sass-filled designing but made without sweatshop labor.”).

obamashirt

Others will want to don a T-shirt. There are more designs from which to pick than there are magically reappearing Al Franken votes in Minnesota. My favorite, featuring Chris Bishop’s portrayal of Obama astride a unicorn, may be cut a little too close to fit: Irony is death to all things Obama. To avoid any open signs of this renegade sensibility ruining your event, I’d recommend punctuating the festivities with a few readings, seder-style, from a devotional book. The Bible might be going too far and the Koran would excite conspiracists (People, please! He’s not a Muslim!) but the hagiographic Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope would do very well. This strikingly illustrated children’s book (and New York Times bestseller) by award-winning poetess Nikki Grimes tells the story of Obama from boyhood to presidential campaign. Celebrants might wish to begin with this passage describing Obama’s time in Indonesia:

He caught crickets, flew kites,

and joyed in the jungle

at the end of his new home– a perfect paradise, until

the sight of beggars

broke his heart.

Barry started to wonder,

Will I ever be able

to help people like these?

Hope hummed deep inside of him.

Someday, son.

Someday.

With luck, your guests will rejoice in those words, and also in these, recording Barry-now-Barack’s move to Chicago:

Barack’s eyes saw

the hungry and the homeless,

crying out like beggars in Djakarta,

burning a hole in his heart.

When his classes came to an end,

he raced to Chicago

to join hands with the church,

to learn new lessons:

not how to be black or white,

but how to be a healer,

how to change things,

how to make a difference in the world.

And if those later lines conjure up any awkward thoughts of The Reverend Who Must Not Be Named, they can be dispelled by allowing your guests to gaze at some of the book’s illustrations–a weeping Barack at prayer, maybe, or a butterfly settled on the hands of a praying Barack of Assisi. Best of all is a picture showing Obama acknowledging the cheers of the crowd the night he was elected senator. Haloed by what looks like starlight, he’s smiling, his hands extended in a gesture more normally associated with the Mount of Olives.

Did I mention that Kool-Aid will be served?

Raising Hackles

Black  Watch

National Review Online, November 14, 2008

Of all the remarkable aspects of Tony Blair’s personality, one of the strangest is the absence of any noticeable feeling (other than a prim, preachy technocratic disdain) for Britain’s past. From countless questionable constitutional “reforms” to his continuous attempts to integrate the U.K. ever deeper within the European Union, he demonstrated an indifference to the history of the nation he led that is so profound that it raises disturbing questions as to why he wanted the job in the first place. But if British history meant little to Mr. Blair, the British military meant even less. Blair may have deployed the U.K.’s armed forces far and wide, but he starved them of the resources they needed and the respect they deserved.

To realize this is to grasp why, in October 2004, the decision to divert Scotland’s legendary Black Watch away from the British army’s area of operations around Basra and into Iraq’s American zone (specifically, in and around the notorious “Triangle of Death”) was greeted in Britain with an anger that stretched far beyond the usual critics of the Iraq war. To many Brits, the mission made scant military sense, but was easy to explain politically as an electorally helpful gesture of support to a Bush administration intent on showing that the Coalition of the Willing was indeed just that. To add insult to the likelihood of injury it had recently emerged that, as part of the Labour government’s ongoing “rationalization” of the British army, the Black Watch, the oldest Highland regiment (it was founded in 1725), was likely to be reincorporated as a battalion within a larger Scottish formation. Like its soldiers, this formidable regiment was, it appeared, disposable.

This forms the background to Gregory Burke’s extraordinary, innovative, and elegiac Black Watch. Dating from 2006, this fine, fierce, but flawed play is now running at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse (it closes December 21; veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are admitted free of charge) in a strikingly staged, beautifully acted production by the National Theatre of Scotland. Some of the more extravagant plaudits this play has attracted may spring from its critique (“the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever”) of an unpopular war, but only some. Black Watch is a work of a quality that transcends ideology.

Jumping back and forth between a grim Scottish pub and an even grimmer Iraq (Camp Dogwood and its environs, 20 miles west of Mahmudiyah) — and interspersed with song, music-hall moments, reminders of Edinburgh’s military tattoo, and sequences that tip over into evocatively choreographed dance — Black Watch has little that is new or interesting to say either about war in general (bad) or the Iraq war in particular (very bad). Where it fascinates is as a portrait of the clash between the men (and I mean men, the only glimpses of women in Black Watch are as centerfold and DVD porn) of a venerable warrior tradition wrestling with a difficult war, political betrayal, and — hardest of all — themselves.

The opening monologue by Cammy (compellingly played by Paul Rattray), one of the unit’s soldiers, reveals the originality of the play’s vision, the vigor of its script, and the banality of its politics:

A’right. Welcome to this story of the Black Watch.

At first, I didnay want tay day this.

I didnay want tay have tay explain myself tay people ay.

See, I think people’s minds are usually made up about you if you were in the army.

They are though, ay?

They poor f***ing boys. They cannay day anything else. They cannay get a job. They get exploited by the army.

Well I want you to f***ing know. I wanted to be in the army. I could have done other stuff. I’m not a f***ing knuckle-dragger.

And people’s minds are made up about the war that’s on the now ay?

They are. It’s no right. It’s illegal. We’re just big bullies.

Well, we’ll need to get f***ing used tay it. Bullying’s the f***ing job. That’s what you have a f***ing army for.

“Bullying”? In all its pride, prickly defensiveness, and profanity (if un-FCC speech is a problem for you, don’t go to see Black Watch: The largely liberal audience may have come prepared for wartime horror, but a noticeable number flinched every time — and it was often — that the “c word” ricocheted across the narrow stage) Cammy’s language sounds authentic, but, as for its content, well, the idea that a soldier steeped in the lore and mystique of a regiment with hundreds of years of experience of counter-insurgency and “police” work would regard his work as “bullying” beggars belief.

But to Mr. Burke it’s that lore and that mystique, the fabled “Golden Thread” of regimental history that has linked successive generations of the Black Watch, which beggars belief. In a dazzlingly structured, darkly funny (like much of this play) and sardonically narrated sequence, Cammy hints that the thread is really a garrote:

[W]e fought the French and Indians. In America and India. And the French again in Egypt and Portugal and Spain. And at Waterloo in our squares. And somewhere along the way, George the Third decided we deserved tay wear a red vulture feather in our hats.

The Red Hackle.

We got it for the recapture of two cannons in a little village in Flanders in 1795. Which didnay seem like a big deal at the time. But George the Third must ay thought so.

The British Army likes little touches like that. It calls them force multipliers. Gets the cannon fodder hammering down the recruitment doors.

Even if we allow for the traditional gallows humor of the serviceman, that’s too glib, too slick, and too easy. The regiment’s heritage, and the pride its soldiers take in it, may be drummed into new recruits, but it is organic, not manufactured, as real as three centuries. What counts is not the feather, but what that feather symbolizes — something that goes far, far beyond a king’s whim and a couple of cannon.

But, as Mr. Burke (who based his drama on a series of interviews with former members of the Black Watch, semi-fictionalized versions of which frame and punctuate his intricately organized play) clearly understands, history forms just one of the threads, golden or otherwise, that bind the regiment together:

Macca: It was the regimental system ay. It was perfect.

Granty: You got tay go way the people you kent.

Rossco: And you get to fight.

Nabsy: That’s what we’re trained for.

Cammy: That’s what we joined the army tay day.

Rossco: Fight.

Cammy: No for our government.

Macca: No for Britain.

Nabsy: No even for Scotland.

Cammy: I fought for my regiment.

Rossco: I fought for my company.

Granty: I fought for my platoon.

Nabsy: I fought for my section.

Stewarty: I fought for my mates.

Cammy: F***ing s****e fight tay end way though.

Writing in the introduction to a published edition of the play, Burke explains this phenomenon in terms that might startle readers more familiar with America’s distinctly different recruiting tradition:

Even today, in our supposedly fractured, atomized society, the regiment exists on a different plane. In Iraq there were lads serving alongside their fathers. There were groups of friends from even the smallest communities. Four from the former fishing village of St. Monans. Seven from the former mining village of High Valleyfield. Dozens from Dundee and Dunfermline, Kirkaldy and Perth. Friends and family. Uncles, brothers, cousins, fathers, sons, schoolmates. . . . [T]he army does not recruit well in London or any other big city. Metropolitanism and multiculturalism are not the things that are welded into a cohesive fighting force. Fighting units tend to be more at home with homogeneity. Not that there aren’t other nationalities in the Black Watch. There are Fijians and Zimbabweans, even a few Glaswegians. However, the central core of the regiment has always been the heartland of Perthshire, Fife, Dundee and Angus. . . . The Black Watch is a tribe.

Yet despite Burke’s cynicism about the use to which the Black Watch’s history is put, and despite the ways in which this play, and Burke’s bleak portrayal of how the troops viewed their stint in Iraq, is colored by his obvious opposition to the war (and possibly also by the fact that he only appears to have talked to men who chose not to re-enlist) he is too honest to conceal his respect for the way that this tribe works together, sticks together, and fights together right “tay end.” It’s no surprise to learn that Burke, a college dropout brought up in Fife, has relatives who had fought in the regiment.

At the same time, for all Burke’s sympathy for the troops, it is impossible not to detect a touch of condescension in the way he depicts them. Like Rudyard Kipling before him, he is for the soldiers, but not of them. The lovingly reproduced, sharply observed, and spectacularly obscene Scots vernacular of Burke’s dialogue is a comprehensive-schooled sequel to the carefully dropped aitches and delicately coarse language of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. The social gap between Burke and the men of the Black Watch (a theme that the playwright cleverly turns against himself in some acutely uncomfortably exchanges in that acutely uncomfortable pub) is dauntingly wide, if nothing like the vast class chasm that divided Kipling from the army rank and file that he, in his turn, hymned so well.

The suspicion that Burke may view his subjects de haut en bas — as puppets to be positioned to make a point — is only reinforced by the banality, the aggression, and the repetitiveness of so much of their conversation. This depiction occasionally comes close to turning them into caricatures of masculinity, belligerence, and ignorance — cut-outs where depth is replaced by testosterone-fueled display. It’s probably significant that with the exception of one hypnotic, heart-breaking scene — part dance, part mime — in which the men receive letters from home, only one of the soldiers, the upper class officer (Peter Forbes, in a finely judged performance), is shown to have a family life.

Or perhaps the playwright was just reaching his way to a truth about the brave, tough troops who defend the rest of us, a truth that is not (as Kipling recognized) always quite as straightforward as our myths tell us it ought to be:

We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,

Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints:

Wise man, Kipling. Wise man Burke.

Angela’s Ashes?

National Review Online,  June 16, 2008

LisbonNO1

If there were any last, few, pitiful remaining scraps of doubt about the depth of the disdain felt by the European Union’s leaders for the people of their wretched union, they ought, surely, to have been dispelled by the miserable saga of the Treaty of Lisbon, the sly, squalid, and cynical pact that has just been rejected by Irish voters, the only mass electorate given the chance to do so.

From its very beginnings, the Treaty of Lisbon was an exercise in deception, deliberately designed to deny the EU’s voters any more chances to slow down the construction of a European superstate that relatively few, outside an elite chasing power, privilege, and the chance to say “boo” to America, actually appear to want. Its origins can be found in the 2005 decision by some of those voters, the ones in France and Holland, to take the opportunity presented by two referenda to say non and nee respectively to the draft EU constitution that had been prepared so meticulously, so proudly, and so expensively on their behalf. Lesson learned: The voters were never again to be trusted. In future they would have to be bypassed.

Nevertheless, in a pantomime of responsiveness to that non and that nee, the constitution’s ratification process was suspended in the late spring of 2005. What ensued was officially described as a “period of reflection,” but was, for the most part, a period of frantic scheming. Its aim: To investigate how the draft constitution could be revived and, this time, be ratified. Sure enough, just about a year later German chancellor Angela Merkel announced that one of the objectives of her country’s upcoming EU presidency (the presidency currently rotates between different member states every six months) would be to “review” the constitution’s status. The message was clear: The people had spoken, and they were to be ignored. Chancellor Merkel was brought up in East Germany — and sometimes it shows.

Within two weeks of Germany assuming the presidency on January 1, 2007, Merkel declared the period of reflection to be over. She wanted, she said, a “road map” for the adoption of the constitution to be completed by the conclusion of the German presidency. And so it was, but with a clever twist. By the end of June, the EU’s governments had agreed to hold a conference to amend the union’s existing treaties in ways that mimicked much of the rejected constitution but without the bother of reintroducing the constitution itself, a bother that might run the risk of an extra referendum or two.

In essence, a number of largely cosmetic alterations were made (thus the proposed EU foreign minister was now re-dubbed a “High Representative”), and the new document generally avoided repeating those provisions of the old draft constitution already enshrined within EU law (why remind voters of what they had already given up?). Most of the changes were meaningless, flimflam designed to minimize the risk that ratification might be subject to the whims of a popular vote. Meanwhile, the “substance” of the rejected constitution had, boasted Merkel, been “preserved.” Indeed it had. The constitution was dead, long live the “Reform Treaty.” Six months and a few concessions later, the treaty was signed in Lisbon at a ceremony notable mainly for the absence of British prime minister Gordon Brown. He signed the paperwork a discreet few hours later.

For a while it looked as if Merkel’s coup would proceed without too much democratic interruption. This time around the French and Dutch governments were able to avoid consulting the electorates they supposedly represented. Holland’s Council of State, its government’s highest advisory body, helpfully decided that a referendum was not legally required. The Reform Treaty did not, apparently, contain sufficient “constitutional” elements, a ruling that undoubtedly pleased a large majority of Holland’s establishment politicians on both left and right: Off the hook! The lower house of parliament approved the Treaty of Lisbon earlier this month. The senate was expected to follow suit later in the year. In France, President Sarkozy made it quite clear that, whatever French voters might want (opinion polls suggested that a majority favored a referendum), he had no intention of consulting them. Last November he warned that a referendum “would bring Europe into danger. There [would] be no treaty if we had a referendum in France.” There was no referendum. Both national assembly and senate approved the treaty in February.

As for Britain, that perennial member of the EU’s awkward squad, departing Prime Minister Tony Blair was unable to resist giving one more kick to the country he had already done so much to trash. He announced that there would be no referendum, and so did his successor, Gordon Brown. Sure, a referendum had been promised in Labour’s 2005 manifesto, but only in the event of a revived constitution. The new treaty didn’t count. The argument was, typically for both men, absurd, dishonest, and insulting, something later highlighted by two parliamentary committees, not that it made any real difference.

In October 2007, the (cross-party) European Scrutiny Committee concluded that the Reform Treaty was “substantially equivalent” to the original constitution, a statement of the obvious – but one, under the circumstances, well worth making. Additionally, the committee had a few tart observations about the way that Merkel’s team had handled the crucial June negotiations. It highlighted their secrecy and timing: “texts [were] produced at the last moment before pressing for an agreement.” Meanwhile the compressed timetable then being arranged for the discussions in Portugal “could not have been better designed to marginalize” national parliaments. In January 2008, the Labour-dominated foreign-affairs committee concluded “that there is no material difference between the provisions on foreign affairs in the Constitutional Treaty, which the government made subject to approval in a referendum, and those in the Lisbon Treaty, on which a referendum is being denied.” Not to worry, soothed Britain’s glib young foreign minister, the Reform Treaty would “giv[e] Britain a bigger voice in Europe and enshrin[e] children’s rights for the first time.”

Ireland’s leading politicians behaved better. Under Irish law, significant changes to EU treaties require an amendment to the Irish constitution and all amendments to the Irish constitution have to be approved by referendum. No serious attempts were made to argue that the changes encompassed within the Treaty of Lisbon were too trivial to warrant a referendum. The “substance” of the rejected EU constitution had, admitted Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, survived. He added later that it was “a bit upsetting . . . to see so many countries running away from giving their people an opportunity [to vote]. . . . If you believe in something . . . why not let your people have a say in it?” That’s easy to answer. Those who now direct the EU project believe in it too much to accept placing the union’s future in the hands of its voters.

Mind you, when Ahern made those comments, he was probably confident that his electorate would approve the treaty. Despite a bout of recalcitrance a few years back (Irish voters had rejected an earlier EU treaty in 2001 before being bullied into changing their minds the following year), his countrymen were, and are, reasonably enthusiastic supporters of the EU. The EU has been good for – and to – Ireland, and the Irish know it. But gratitude is not a blank check and that, increasingly, is what the electorate came to believe that it was being asked to sign. In many respects, such as its notorious passerelle clauses (it’s a long story), that’s what the treaty is, but growing suspicions that the whole thing was nothing more than an elaborate con were also sharpened (sometimes unfairly) by the complexity of the treaty’s language.

Ironically, the treaty’s supporters had once regarded that complexity as an asset. As one of them, former Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald, put it in June 2007:

The most striking change [between the failed EU constitution and the Reform Treaty] is perhaps that in order to enable some governments to reassure their electorates that the changes will have no constitutional implications, the idea of a new and simpler treaty containing all the provisions governing the Union has now been dropped in favor of a huge series of individual amendments to two existing treaties. Virtual incomprehensibility has . . . replaced simplicity as the key approach to EU reform.

At a meeting in, tactlessly, London the following month, another former premier, Italy’s Giuliano Amato reiterated the advantages of incomprehensibility: “If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception. Where they got this perception from is a mystery to me. . . .  But, there is some truth [in it]. . . . the U.K. prime minister can go to the Commons and say “Look, you see, it’s absolutely unreadable, it’s the typical Brussels treaty, nothing new, no need for a referendum.” Amato may have been speaking fairly light-heartedly, but he was also quite right. Legislators everywhere are accustomed to approving laws they don’t understand. The man in the street is not. The opaque language of Merkel’s deceptively crafted treaty was a brilliant device to help those politicians looking to dodge a referendum, but a disaster for those who had no choice but to win one.

But last Thursday’s Irish “no” was a rejection of more than elaborately misleading drafting. As the EU’s bureaucracy has extended its reach deeper and deeper into territory once reserved to the nation state, it is bound to provoke opposition, even among many of those who broadly support European integration. Much of that opposition is reasonable, but much of it is not, and who is to blame for that? The EU’s political class has made a mockery of truth for so long that we should not be surprised that some Irish “no” voters preferred to believe (as, reportedly, some did) that the Treaty of Lisbon would pave the way for a pan-European draft.

The “no” coalition was wide, messy, crazy, sane, pragmatic, romantic, all-embracing, and self-contradictory, sometimes well-informed, sometimes not, sometimes paranoid, sometimes prescient, sometimes socialist, sometimes free market, sometimes high tax, sometimes low tax, sometimes honest, sometimes not, sometimes more than a little alarming (Sinn Fein was the only official party of any size to lend their support) and sometimes more than a little inspiring. Marvelously, miraculously, they won, and they won well, 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent (on a respectable turnout of 53.1 percent). If you think that sounds like democracy, you’d be right. And if you think that sounds like a nation, you’d be right too.

But if you think that it’s too soon to declare victory, you’d also be right. Early indications are that the ratification process will continue. As Jose Barroso, the EU’s chief bureaucrat, announced within minutes of the Irish result, “the treaty is not dead.”

And that tells you much of what you need to know about the EU.

With Her People

Rebecca Schull: On Naked Soil - Imagining Anna Akhmatova

National Review Online, May 23, 2008

When, in 2005, Vladimir Putin labeled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century,” he was only confirming the fact that Russia’s understanding of its Communist past is once more in flux. History is again being rewritten, distorted, and manipulated — this time in the interest of creating a national narrative in which all Russians can, supposedly, take pride. The crimes of the fallen dictatorship are being shrouded in comforting patriotic myth, or, increasingly, just denied.

In the West, by contrast, there are signs that Joseph Stalin, the most monstrous of all the Soviet despots, may finally be penetrating public consciousness as an embodiment of an evil that has rarely, if ever, been equaled. Within this context, it’s interesting to note that New Yorkers could have seen not one, but two, evocations of Stalinism on stage this April. The remarkable Rupert Goold/Patrick Stewart Macbeth-as-Stalin attracted more attention, and deservedly so. Nevertheless it would be wrong to overlook a quietly effective production at the Theater for the New City where the focus rested mainly on just one of the “wonderful Georgian’s” victims. On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhmatova is a new play by Rebecca Schull (yes, Fay from Wings,but also the author of an earlier drama about the Gulag memoirist Eugenia Ginzburg) revolving around Anna Akhmatova, the poetess who was among the most eloquent of all the witnesses to the atrocities of the regime that tormented, stifled, but never quite destroyed her:

In the fearful years of the . . . terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody “identified” me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.

And describe it she did, in lines of hideous beauty and terrible sadness:

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us,

and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tires of Black Marias.

On Naked Soil shuttles back and forth between two eras, the late 1930s and the early 1960s, but it is the former, deep in those “fearful years,” that define it. The play opened with Akhmatova (Ms. Schull) alone in her room in Leningrad. The décor hinted at what had been lost: the once elegant furniture had known better days, a nude by Modigliani still teased, but behind broken glass. An ancient wind-up gramophone conjured up memories of St. Petersburg’s long-silenced bohemia. What we saw was a wreck of a room, a wreck of a life, a wreck of a nation. That Ms. Schull is some three decades older than the Akhmatova of 1938 didn’t really matter: It only emphasized the exhaustion of a woman old before her time and the immense distance between the weary, crumbling figure on stage and the siren she once was.

In 1914, Akhmatova had been a leading figure in the chaotic, fabulous, and wildly innovative avant-garde that was the perverse and paradoxical glory of late imperial Russia. Tall and striking, with a love life to match, she was a scandal, a sensation, and a star. Then war came, and revolution. Her verse darkened, and so did her life. Somehow she hung on through the early years of Soviet rule, almost, but not quite, a “former person,” reduced to near-poverty, writing, writing, writing, brilliant, unacceptable, her poems sometimes too dangerous to be committed to paper for long, dependent for their survival on the memories of a few devoted friends.

And in the room of the banished poet

Fear and the Muse take turns at watch,

And the night comes

When there will be no sunrise.

In one of the play’s most compelling scenes, the audience watched what could never be witnessed, the spectacle of Akhmatova repeating an old anecdote (for the benefit of hidden microphones) to her friend, the loyal Lydia Chukovskaya (Sue Cremin), while Chukovskaya frantically memorized lines of poetry written on a manuscript that would soon have to be burned.

For the most part, Schull’s portrayal (as playwright and actress) of Akhmatova is, understandably enough, admiring. While her Akhmatova is no saint (Schull successfully conveyed a sense of the neediness, neurosis, and self-absorption that were essential aspects of Akhmatova’s personality), it’s difficult not to suspect that she chose to smooth over some of her heroine’s rougher edges. Thus the play has relatively little space for the most enduring of Akhmatova’s affairs, the decade and a half she spent with the art critic Nikolai Punin.

That’s a mistake. A clear grasp of the trajectory of this painful, complicated, and essentially polygamous liaison is crucial to understanding how Akhmatova actually spent most of the 1920s and 1930s, but is likely to have eluded any playgoers not already familiar with the story. The pair finally split up in 1938, not long probably, before the opening scenes of On Naked Soil, although, as too often in this play, the chronology is frustratingly vague. Punin was arrested, for the third time, in 1949. He died in the camps four years later. His Gulag mugshot was just one of many images projected onto the set to flesh out the play’s dialogue, but it’s one that lingers in memory, a lined, sunken face, furious, finished.

No less discreetly, the full nature of Akhmatova’s difficult relationship with her son, Lev, is largely glossed over in favor of the more conventional saga of a determined, grieving mother doing what she could to help her imperiled offspring. In 1938, he had just been re-arrested. It was for Lev that Akhmatova had been standing in those prison queues for those 17 appalling months, desperate for a word, a glimpse, a chance to deliver a parcel of supplies, anything:

Son in irons and husband clay.

Pray. Pray.

But the horror was undoubtedly made worse for Akhmatova by guilt. She knew that Lev had neither forgiven her for sending him away to live with his grandmother for most of his boyhood, nor for what the circumstances of her private life had done to him. This element in his agony, and hers, is underplayed in On Naked Soil. As a result, Lev is reduced to little more than a proxy, an Ivan Denisovitch rather than a character in his own right, an irony that the real-life Lev would have recognized but would have been unlikely to appreciate. That said, his ordeal, even if reduced to something more generic than it deserves, is one of the worst of the nightmares that force their way so savagely into this play and its faded, solitary room. This was underpinned by the way the set design incorporated elements of a prison wall. It was there for use in just one scene but its presence onstage throughout the whole performance served as a pointed illustration of the fact that in the Soviet Union it wasn’t necessary to be in jail to be imprisoned.

After Stalin died, the jailers eased up a touch. Akhmatova was even allowed to travel abroad. Those parts of On Naked Soil set in 1965, about a year before Akhmatova’s death, show her in conversation with Nadezhda Mandelstam (Lenore Loveman), the widow of her old friend, Osip, another poet who perished at the hands of the regime. As in the sections set in 1938, Schull uses the dialogue between two women to recount Akhmatova’s story. These passages, like most of this play, come freighted with memory, and have a certain wistful resonance, but they lacked the intensity of the scenes from 1938. In those, Akhmatova’s interlocutor, Lydia Chukovskaya, a gifted writer who became the poetess’s Boswell, was nervous, tense, and visibly aware that she was herself in danger. Her own husband had been arrested earlier that year and, unknown to her, had already been shot.

Reviewing the play in theNew York Times, Caryn James worried that it became “a virtual recitation of events in [Ahkmatova’s] life, and extraordinary though those events were, simply recalling them isn’t enough to make a drama.” There’s something to that, but not much. The simple retelling of events like these ought to be enough to hold the attention of any audience. Besides, there was very little that was simple about this retelling, not least the fact that many of the words used were Akhmatova’s own, either delivered (often beautifully, if with few traces of Akhmatova’s distinctive incantatory style) as poetry, or embedded into the dialogue, jewels waiting to catch the light.

Buttressed by strong performances from its three actresses, On Naked Soil worked well enough as drama, but it has to be seen for what it is, a chamber piece, not an epic — a reflection, the tiniest piece of a hecatomb. If the play was occasionally overly didactic (with its slide projections and moments of densely packed biographical detail, it had a hint of the college lecture about it), that’s a trivial offense: this is a tale that needs to be kept alive as a memorial — and a warning. Quite what Akhmatova herself would have made of this play, however, I don’t know. One of the subtleties of Schull’s script is the way it makes clear that Akhmatova wanted to be remembered for her lines, not for a life she never truly considered to be her own:

I, like a river,

Have been turned aside by this harsh age.

I am a substitute. My life has flowed Into another channel

And I do not recognize my shores.

She began, and probably would have preferred to remain, as a poetess of the personal, if one captivated also by legend, landscape, and the past. But history had other plans. Akhmatova never fled the country that had abandoned her. Instead she took it upon herself to become a symbol, an inspiration, and a reproach, a reminder of the Russia that might have been, a chronicler of the Russia that was:

I was with my people in those hours,

There where, unhappily, my people were.

There’s a sense of nationhood in those words that Vladimir Putin could never reproduce or, for that matter, even understand.

Rebranding America?

National Review Online, January 10, 2008

New Hampshire has gone and done what New Hampshire has gone and done, but it won’t be long before Obamania picks up speed again. As it does, so will the idea, compelling, thrilling, and thoroughly misleading, that an election victory by the junior senator from Illinois will win over that large portion of the world that has, so runs the story, been alienated by the wicked George W. Bush, but which still, even now, wants to love America.

Writing over at “The First Post,” just before the Iowa vote, the distinguished British journalist, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a conservative of sorts, had this to say:

In many parts of the world, the United States is now regarded as “the evil empire”. This is entirely President Bush’s fault. Both his actions and his rhetoric have given the impression of a superpower bent on world dominion. If this had happened in any other country it would require decades, if not centuries, to undo this damage. In the case of America, however, it can be put to rights almost at one, or at most two, strokes. Stroke number one would be for the Democrats, starting this week in Iowa, to nominate Barack Obama as their presidential candidate, and stroke number two, for the electors to put him into the White House with a landslide majority. By these two actions America would be rebranded. That the world’s shield and conscience should have a young and handsome black senator, touched with nobility, waiting in the wings at this particular juncture is little short of a miracle. It is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Obama fan Andrew Sullivan, another conservative of sorts, made a similar point last year, arguing as follows:

What does [Obama] offer? First and foremost: his face. It could be an effective potential rebranding of the United States. Such a rebranding is not trivial – it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Consider this hypothetical scenario. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man – Barack Hussein Obama – is the new face of America. In one simple image America’s soft power has been ratcheted up exponentially. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonisation of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about America in ways no words can.

Sullivan, understandably enough, began pushing this theme with renewed vigor after Obama’s Iowa win, blogging last week that “the international response to Obama will shock many Americans, because it will be so massive” (and by implication) positive. To underline the point, he excerpted this passage from a piece by a South African journalist: “Damn, I love Americans. Just when you’ve written them off as hopeless, as a nation in decline, they turn around and do something extraordinary, which tells you why the United States of America is still the greatest nation on earth.”

There is, of course, no doubt that the symbolism of an Obama victory this November would resonate. Even the U.K.’s Guardian, not normally a hotbed of support for Uncle Sam,was enchanted by the “remarkable” prospect that “there there could be a black man in the White House, not serving the drinks, but sitting in the Oval Office itself.” It would, naturally, have been too much for someone writing for the Guardian to concede that, to take just one obvious example, Colin Powell did rather more than serve drinks in the course of his visits to the Oval Office. Nevertheless the broader sense of what that editorialist is talking about is clear, and it seems to support the case being made by Andrew Sullivan and Sir Peregrine.

The problem is that, while (rightly or wrongly, for good reasons and bad) there will be genuine relief worldwide at the departure of George W. Bush from that office where Condoleezza Rice was so often to be seen pouring martinis, Miller Lites, and alcohol-free beer, it will be rapidly eclipsed by the return of politics-as-usual. An Obama election victory would certainly give the celebrations an additional boost, as may some of the policies he might choose to take up, but the belief that it would pave the way (at least beyond these shores) for a lasting re-branding of America, is mistaken. There may be many reasons to vote for Obama (most of which, I admit, escape me), but this ought not to be one of them.

To grasp why, it’s necessary to understand that anti-Americanism is something that long predates George W. Bush and it will long outlast him. Yes, Dubya’s foreign policy, his domestic agenda, his environmental stance, even his very demeanor, may have riled up America’s critics abroad and antagonized many of its former friends, but the underlying problem, as a President Obama would be forced to recognize, lies elsewhere. The new president might pull the troops out of Iraq, he might sign the U.S. up for some carbon voodoo, he might prove to be more congenial company at a Turtle Bay cocktail party, but, in the wider scheme of things, none of this will make a great deal of difference, none of it will be enough.

Anti-Americanism is rancid, perennial, barely rational (and sometimes not even that), rooted in mankind’s ancestral primate psychology, in jealousy and in fear, and made all the more potent by the cold calculations of global politics, as well, it must be said, as this nation’s own faults, faults made painfully visible by its position, its power, and its promise. Critiques of America have varied at different times, and in different places, and they have frequently been mutually contradictory, but what, all too often, they share at their core is a resentment at the success of a country that has the ability to make everybody else feel, well, just a little bit threatened, sometimes deservedly so, sometimes not. The result has led to absurdities too numerous to list here, although the grotesque spectacle presented by those millions across the globe who claimed, decade after decade, after decade, to find “moral equivalence” between the Soviet Union and the United States is not a bad place to start.

To suggest that a phenomenon on this scale will simply evaporate when confronted with a black president is to ignore the lessons of history, and recent history at that. Just ask the NAACP, an organization legitimately appalled by some of the commentary and cartoons that appeared in the Arab media at the time of a visit by another powerful, successful and charismatic African-American, Secretary Rice, to the Middle East.

Symbolism alone will not, therefore, do the trick, a point that was taken up by Iranian-born Reza Aslan in the Washington Post.

As someone who once was that young Muslim boy everyone seems to be imagining (albeit in Iran rather than Egypt), I’ll let you in on a secret: He could not care less who the president of the United States is. He is totally unconcerned with whatever barriers a black (or female, for that matter) president would be breaking. He couldn’t name three U.S. presidents if he tried. He cares only about one thing: what the United States will do. That boy is angry at the United States not because its presidents have all been white. He is angry because of Washington’s unconditional support for Israel; because the United States has more than 150,000 troops in Iraq; because the United States gives the dictator of his country some $2 billion a year in aid, the vast majority of which goes toward supporting a police state. He is angry at the United States because he thinks it has hegemony over almost every aspect of his world.

Andrew Sullivan is too shrewd not to realize this, and, in his earlier piece (perhaps significantly it was written before the euphoria of the Iowa victory), he was careful to highlight the potential importance of what Obama might do in Iraq as a key element in any re-branding of America:

The other obvious advantage that Obama has is his record on the Iraq war. He is the only significant candidate to have opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, engaging America’s estranged allies and damping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives towards Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

Reza Aslan went further:

The next president will have to try to build a successful, economically viable Palestinian state while protecting the safety and sovereignty of Israel. He or she will have to slowly and responsibly withdraw forces from Iraq without allowing the country to implode. He or she will have to bring Iraq’s neighbors, Syria and Iran, to the negotiating table while simultaneously reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, keeping Syria out of Lebanon, reassuring Washington’s Sunni Arab allies that they have not been abandoned, coaxing Russia into becoming part of the solution (rather than part of the problem) in the region, saving an independent and democratic Afghanistan from the resurgent Taliban, preparing for an inevitable succession of leadership in Saudi Arabia, persuading China to play a more constructive role in the Middle East and keeping a nuclear-armed Pakistan from self-destructing in the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. That is how the post-Bush “war on terror” must be handled. Not by “re-branding” the mess George W. Bush has made, but by actually fixing it.

You can agree or disagree with the particulars of these prescriptions and diagnoses, but it’s difficult to deny that they do much to rebut suggestions that the symbolism of an Obama victory will in itself be enough to make a significant difference. But if symbolism is not enough, what will be?

Let’s just say the list is a long one. That’s not to argue that the United States cannot, and should not, take steps to put in place a smarter foreign policy designed to win it more friends abroad, while at the same time pursuing a robust defense of the national interest. It can, and it should. I find myself these days, I guess, in a small minority to think so, but I’d argue that a Republican president is best placed to do it. The trouble is that such changes would, I reckon, only alter perceptions of America at the margins. Yes, it’s probably true that, reflecting the different priorities of his or her party, a future Democratic president could do more to ingratiate this country with what is laughably known as the international community, but that can likely only go so far. The pathologies of anti-Americanism run too deep.

To even have a chance of curing them, a President Obama would have to transform America so profoundly that it would no longer be the America in which he had succeeded so gloriously. And which Americans other than the self-hating, the masochistic, or the clinically disturbed, would want to vote for that?

Not Obama, I suspect. I hope.

Oh Captain, My Captain! Kirk and me.

National Review Online, September, 28, 2007

It wasn’t on some alien world that we saw him, but in a Midtown Manhattan steakhouse. He wasn’t battling Romulans or Klingons, just a gigantic piece of meat; Porterhouse, if I had to guess. My parents had flown in on a Jumbo from England the day before and he, well, he had flown in on a starship from a distant galaxy and my even more distant childhood. “Look,” I said, “there’s Captain Kirk.”

“Who?” asked my father, the only remaining carbon-based life form within one hundred parsecs not to know.

“Oh dear,” sighed my mother, something of a Star Trek watcher herself in an understated, only-if-there’s-nothing-else-on sort of way.

Who was Captain Kirk? Who was Captain Kirk? Good grief. Not since a former girlfriend had disgraced me in the presence of Captain Picard (it’s a long story, but if I tell you that she also managed to “lose” the autographed copy of George Takei’s memoirs I gave her, you’ll understand that those were tricky times indeed) had I known such shame. What if he, The Captain, had heard? I was also alarmed. I know a lot of things about James Tiberius Kirk, and one of them is that it’s never a good idea to get on his bad side: Just ask replica upperclassman Finnegan (Shore Leave).

And then the memories came. Or did their best to. To be frank, I cannot recall the exact date of my first contact with the space ‘n Vegas of the theme tune, the hissing sliding doors, the cheeping, chirping sensors, the burbling transporters, and the choppy, grand rhythms of high Shatner dialog, but it would have been via the BBC around 1969 or 1970. I’d have been eleven or twelve years old and on a break from a British boarding school where the only permitted television fare was a rugby show hosted by an enthusiastic Welshman with very little to be enthusiastic about. If the Sixties were swinging they were swinging by me, by him and, almost certainly, by most of the population.

Olde England was not then as merrie as it once had been said to be. In fact it was, let’s face it, a little on the drab, crabbed and dingy side. And not only the weather was to blame. The postwar economic recovery was running out of steam, the labor unions were running wild, the taxman was running greedy fingers through the nation’s wallets, and we no longer seemed to be running an empire. But by night, television was showing images of another country where the natives spoke English, appeared friendly, and looked to be having a great deal more fun than we were. The Pilgrim Fathers voyaged to America on the Mayflower, I traveled there by TV.

I loved American television for its wild, goofy, frivolous, gadget-and-bullet, candy-colored, exuberantly plastic, manufactured, frivolous non-BBC joy. I thrilled to the exploits of Napoleon and Ilya, those jester James Bonds from U.N.C.L.E, I wore Bruce Wayne’s mask and cape (there was no Robin: my younger brother refused), I laughed along with F-Troop, and I knew that there was something I found very interesting indeed about Samantha the suburban sorceress. When Britons gathered round the telly in their millions to watch Coronation Street, an endless soap (it continues to this day) set in a depressed northern town, all I wanted was to hop on the last train to Clarksville, wherever that might be. If it was good enough for those sun-kissed blissed-out Monkees, it was good enough for me.

Capping it all, glittering, tantalizing, but oddly accessible, was space. If anyone was lost in there, it wasn’t those lucky Robinsons (yes, I envied them), but me. These were the golden years of NASA (and the rocket men of Baikonur too — I followed that program just as enthusiastically) and as I watched those glorious Apollos rehearse, dance and glide their way to, around, and eventually, on, the moon, the USS Enterprise seemed to be just over the horizon, a part of that same dream, and despite the best efforts of all those Vostoks, Sputniks, and Lunokhods, it was a very American dream.

And Star Trek was a very American show. Sure, Mr. Chekhov was up there in the old NCC-1701, along with Spock and the universe’s stagiest Scot, but everything about the Enterprise, from its name to its Iowa-born captain (we won’t mention the Canadian thing), suggested that those ambitious thirteen colonies had just kept on growing. Whatever the legal structure of the Federation (not something I would have thought about much either then, or for that matter, now), it was quite obviously just the United States writ large, Manifest Destiny boldly going where no Manifest Destiny had gone before, and I, sitting staring at the television was paying plenty of attention. This enchanting exciting country called America was not only fun; it also appeared to be going places.

It speaks volumes that the wonderfully entertaining Doctor Who, deservedly British TV’s most popular sci-fi hero of the era, was played as an eccentric vaguely Edwardian gentleman, whose travels through space and time could just as easily take him into the past as the future. While the original Star Trek offered occasional visits to yesteryear (Tomorrow is Yesterday,The City on The Edge of Forever, Assignment Earth, All our Yesterdays), its basic trajectory was always forward-looking : the Enterprise hurtled through the 23rd Century with few signs of the backward glances and nostalgic appeal that made up so much of Doctor Who’s very British charm.

Star Trek was also, at its core, an optimistic, and to me, more attractive, vision of what was to come than anything likely to emerge out of the U.K., a Mission Control future of engineering savvy, technical marvels, and big, impressive machines, something that I was specifically beginning to associate with that land of wonders apparently located on the other side of the Atlantic. Britain’s feeble attempt to send a man into space had been abandoned years before, our manufacturing industry was crumbling, our autos were a joke, and our technological showpiece, the Concorde, was over budget, behind schedule and, most dismayingly of all, a joint project with those unreliable people, the French. America, on the other hand, it was clear, worked, and I was impressed. British-made tricorders? Wasn’t going to happen. If I wanted the future, I knew where I’d have to go to find it. And in the end, I did.

Looking back now at the original Star Trek, it’s striking to see how much of it came freighted with a strong ideological subtext. A veteran of the Pacific War himself, Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, brought to the series a strong Greatest Generation sensibility, both sharpened and softened by the tough-minded liberalism of the two murdered Kennedys. Time and time again, the Prime Directive was superseded by Kirk’s willingness to use fists and phasers to push alien societies a little further along the way to life, liberty, and the pursuit of extraterrestrial happiness. This clearly reflected the self-confidence and sense of global mission that had prevailed in America since the Second World War, even if in at least two episodes (A Private Little War, The Omega Glory) it’s possible to detect hints of the way that the gathering Vietnam disaster would shake that faith.

I cannot be sure now how much of this I grasped back then, but I certainly understood that the crewmembers of the Enterprise (and not just those landing on Ekos in Patterns of Force) were descendants of the Yanks who had stormed the beaches of Normandy just a quarter of a century before. They may have been in strange uniforms and carrying ray guns but they were recognizably the American soldiers I knew from countless war movies, brave, profoundly democratic, free spirited, good guys trying to do the right thing. In reality, that wasn’t too much of a myth then, and, for all the flaws, mistakes, blunders and worse, I suspect that if you go to Iraq and Afghanistan today, you’d see that it’s not too much of a myth now.

And nor, I now knew for sure, was Captain Kirk. Not that my father, duly enlightened, informed, educated, and possibly a little bored, appeared quite as impressed as he should have been. To some people, a TV show is just a TV show. The conversation moved on, but then, as it happened, an hour or so later the Stuttaford and the Shatner parties left the restaurant at the same time. As we all walked down Third Avenue, I noticed my father (who is both a doctor and a journalist for the London Times) looking at the lion of Starfleet with sudden interest.

“You know what,” he said, “he’s bow-legged. He walks like a cowboy, not a spaceman. Fascinating. I must write that up.”

And you know what, he did.

Shamed again.

Dangerous Litigation

Damages

National Review Online, August 7, 2007

If the summer schedules were once a sun-ravaged, derelict playground for television’s has-beens, no-hopers, bums, and re-runs, that’s no longer inevitably the case, at least so far as cable is concerned. In recent weeks, TNT has launched Saving Grace, a show starring Holly Hunter as a self-destructive detective being bugged by an angel, while AMC is offering up Mad Men, a series set in the golden age of advertising, a time of lies, treble martinis, and fumbling attempts at sophistication, a time when cigarettes soothed your throat and no liquor company would ever have dared tell its customers to drink “responsibly.” Meanwhile those prepared to fork out for truly premium cable can look forward to the glorious prospect of Fox Mulder gone wild as David Duchovny hunts the foxes of Showtime’s forthcoming Californication.

That sounds like challenging competition, but if there’s anyone tough enough to see it off, it’s Glenn Close or, rather, Patty Hewes, the litigation lawyer she plays to icy, intimidating and savage perfection in FX’s new Damages. After a stint as the LAPD’s Captain Rawling on The Shield, Close is already a highly decorated FX veteran, but this latest incarnation shows that there’s a casting genius at work at that channel. Ever since boiling her way up into public attention as Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest, one of the most horrifying embodiments of male (yes, male) guilt, resentment, and rage ever to stalk the big screen, Close has established herself as one of this country’s most formidable actresses. In England she would have been appointed dame; in America she just has to make do with vice president (Air Force One), First Lady (Mars Attacks!), chief justice (The West Wing), and Cruella de Vil (twice).

As the creators of Damages have obviously understood, this is an actress who is at her most alarmingly imposing when the character she plays is in control not only of those around her, but of herself. Alex Forrest may have been dangerous, but she was also dangerously unhinged, a wreck of a woman, desperate and, ultimately, weak, beaten off with little more than bathwater and a bullet or two. Compared with Close’s devious and manipulative Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, wacky Alex was, so to speak, a loveable little bunny. That’s not to say that the wicked Marquise did not have her own vulnerabilities, more specifically, a rancid mix of over-competitiveness and frustrated, only half-acknowledged, desire that eventually triggers her emotional and social destruction. So it is with Patty Hewes: there are chinks in her armor too, in her case a troubled relationship with her adolescent son. Very The Devil Wears Prada, you might think: the strong woman plagued by trouble on the home front, retribution (or so it is hinted) for success at the workplace.

Fortunately, Damages is subtler than that. As we get to know Hewes’s principal adversary, Arthur Frobisher (a terrific Ted Danson, a long, long way from Cheers), we discover that he too can be hurt through his offspring. Frobisher is an Enron-style entrepreneur who has not only been acquitted at his criminal trial, but has also managed to hang on to his billions. Patty Hewes, representing Frobisher’s former employees (who have, as is the way of such things, been left with pink slips and empty retirement accounts) is after that money. The imminence of yet more embarrassing litigation is proving too much for Frobisher’s wife, and she’s threatening to leave, taking their children with her. That would be bad news for Frobisher financially and legally (his loyal spouse has been a courtroom ornament and splendid p.r.), but what really frightens him is the thought of losing his kids. Judging by one Sam Malone interlude in a car (sort of; teetotal Sam would not have snorted the cocaine), Frobisher could get over his wife. His children would be a different matter.

Rapacious businessman? Wronged employees? We’ve been here before. Despite this, Damages shows remarkably few signs of falling into the trite, exhausted routines of the standard tenacious-lawyer-versus-greedy-capitalist morality play. Frobisher is ruthless, and richer than most studio executives and thus, by Hollywood convention, not only guilty, but bad, bad, bad. Nevertheless both the screenplay and Danson’s performance hint that there’s more to this evildoer than the usual by-the-numbers villainy. As for Patty, well, she’s rich too, and something of a monster, a brutal, controlling, ends-justifies-the-means gal, capable (at the very least) of intimidation, deceit, and — shades of Cruella — arranging for the killing of a dog belonging to a potential witness. What is it about Glenn Close and pets?

Quite how all this will resolve itself is, at this stage, a mystery (and, after two episodes, I’m gripped enough to want to find out). Its resolution will, apparently, revolve around the fate of Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), a young attorney recently hired by Hewes & Associates. Damages opens with images of her fleeing a smart Manhattan apartment building, covered in little more than blood and a raincoat. Most of what we see in the show turns out, in fact, to be flashback, set in the months leading up to that terrified, terrifying dash through the streets. In a clever twist, however (and Damages is nothing if not clever), the narrative moves on two separate time tracks. While the bulk of the story is, in essence, an extended flashback, that flashback is sporadically punctuated by footage that shows what happens after Ellen’s flight ends up with her in the hands of the police.

At first the cops assume that she is the victim of assault, so sad, so everyday, but then their inspection of her apartment quickly reveals a battered, bludgeoned corpse. Is Ellen a victim, a perp, or both? Viewers are put in the entertaining position of following the police investigation while simultaneously watching the events that preceded it, events that may enable them to decode the riddle ahead of the detectives working on the case.

It’s when it comes to the recruitment of Ellen, and her subsequent involvement with Patty’s scheming, that Damages stumbles, if only slightly. Ellen is bright, she’s driven, she’s of fairly modest origins, and, as this aspect of the tale unfolds, it becomes evident that she’s taking the audience into familiar, somewhat clichéd territory. In deciding to join Hewes, she naturally ignores the warnings of the silver-haired mentor, shrewd, decent and old school, at the white-shoe firm where she had previously interned, a mentor of the type played two decades ago in Wall Street by Hal Holbrook, who was, course, ignored in his turn by bright, driven, humble origins Bud Fox.

As is traditional in these dramas of associate temptation (The Firm, The Devil’s Advocate, take your pick; there are plenty to choose from), Ellen’s new employer does things like buying her fancy clothes, and finding her a spiffy apartment. By contrast, her future in-laws (regular folks, playing by the rules) can only come up with a voucher for two at, good grief, the Olive Garden (and if you think that you detect a touch of condescension from the scriptwriters you’d be right), at which point the sole remaining question, experienced viewers will realize, is just how low will Ellen be willing to go. Judging by the carefully calibrated manner in which Rose Byrne is handling the role, I’d guess quite a long way. Mind you, if the alternative is a life where the Olive Garden is the acme of fine dining, who can blame her?

But, however clichéd this aspect of Damages may be, it doesn’t seriously detract from the enjoyment of watching a first-rate cast helping an ingenious storyline twist and turn its way through feint, subterfuge, conspiracy, and murder. Above all though, see this show for Glenn Close, an actress in her element, and in control, her strong, expressive face, sometimes smiling, sometimes not, but always a mask, necessary camouflage for a predator tracking her prey in the avenues, mansions, and office suites of our new gilded age.

Brava!