But if Rodgers and Hart are long gone, so are Edmund Wilson and Ralph Gleason and James Agee. The greatest critics loved the subjects of their examinations: literature, music, movies. They celebrated quality and dismissed the fraudulent, examining each new object of art the way a master watchmaker looks at another man’s watch, admiring the accomplishments, pointing out the flaws. There were always literary ax murderers among them. But in a way, the best of them were attorneys for the defense. They’ve been replaced by prosecutors. And the penalty they demand for imperfection is death. Behind them have arrived the successmeisters, those who rank artists as if they were entrants in the National Football League, failure the unforgivable sin. Book didn’t work? Record didn’t make it? Movie opened on Aeromexico? That’s it: Arraign him, convict him, get him outta my sight. Sentence him to teach. Book him as a lounge act. Make him an usher. Drop him off the gibbet.
In sports, the style established thirty years ago by Muhammad Ali has been appropriated by his inferiors, who emphasize the “dissing” but leave out the irony and the humor. (Only Charles Barkley really gets it.) Prizefighters learn how to demean a man before they’ve mastered the uppercut. Reggie Miller isn’t satisfied with playing better than most men in the NBA; he has to make choke signs and grab his crotch and keep up a torrent of trash talk. No football player seems able to carry a ball for a touchdown without following up with some taunting dance in the end zone. Goodbye, Jim Brown; farewell, Gale Sayers; hello, Neon Deion. No baseball player since Don Baylor has been able to endure the occupational hazard of a knockdown pitch without charging the mound in retaliation. In all sports, grace is treated like a character flaw. Athletes snarl and mock in triumph — and whine in defeat.
But they have one large excuse: They are only part of this America, the torn, violent country where everybody now plays for keeps. The nation approaching Endgame.
Everybody seems infected with the virus of argument and the need for triumph. Leaders of tiny sects are granted huge television audiences, provided their messages are sufficiently drastic, violent, or stupid; more people know about Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, than know about Octavio Paz or Isaiah Berlin. Hour after hour, across the day and deep into the night, talk radio spews forth a relentless message of contempt for democratic institutions, from the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court to the governors, state legislators, and mayors. Rush Limbaugh is the master of this electronic genre, but his imitators make him sound like Henry Adams. They have none of Limbaugh’s gift for brittle humor and venomous sarcasm. Anyone with compassion is a target. Anyone with a sense of complexity is scorned. Callers with accents are jeered. Complicated issues are reduced to cartoons. Maybe it’s an act. Maybe it’s just cashing in on Limbaugh’s success. But the drumbeat from these electronic kraals is ominous: Hate Washington, hate the media, hate the liberals, hate the blacks, hate the dark-skinned and their babies, hate democracy. All disguised, of course, as a love for America.
In the rest of the media, virtually all public activity is treated as a fight in an alley. If the subjects of stories are not shooting down opponents, they usually don’t get covered. Murder is the best story, of course, but even the more tedious stories can be treated like homicides. Health care, welfare reform, GATT, NAFTA: Answer me, baby, who struck John?
In the freest country on the planet, democratic political campaigns are a ghastly joke. The ideal candidate is a cipher, devoid of personal history. The handlers write the scripts, build the drama, concoct the spin, and get famous themselves. Nobody expects them to
