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Michael Chabon and Frank Rich

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from: Michael Chabon

A Politician Who Talks Like a Human Being

Posted Thursday, Jan. 25, 2001, at 8:00 PM ET

Dear Frank,

You're right. Though crabbiness is as pardonable as it is endemic in this land of the Irritable and the Irritating, sometimes there are things that redeem your faith in the faint sparkling residue of integrity in American public life. Tonight on Fresh Air, I heard Terry Gross talking with Bob Dole. He has a book out called something like Great Presidential Wit and was flogging it by phone on the show. I voted against the guy. I would not have wanted to see him become president. And yet even during that election I was intermittently but regularly struck by his core of genuineness, by the sense he gave and still gives of saying, at least every so often, exactly what he's thinking, in the exact manner in which he's thinking it. Tonight on NPR he came across--freed once and for all from the tyranny of having something to lose--as candid, thoughtful, and honest in a way that was really shocking. He wasn't saying anything particularly shocking. It was just that he was talking like a human being, and an intelligent one at that. Using wit and humor as a kind of statistical sample for analyzing the overall character of a man, he was remarkably decent and even-handed in judging Bill Clinton, at once appreciative and undeceived. He expressed heartfelt-sounding regret for Al Gore, and when it came to George W. Bush, he said essentially that he was reserving judgment but that there was potential for success or failure there, and his comments had a faint air of good-natured skepticism.

I guess what impresses me ultimately about the man is the lingering aura of his generation, who were probably not the greatest but who were certainly challenged, collectively, in a way that no American generation has since been challenged, and who pretty much--with some horrible, glaring failures--rose to the occasion. There clings to him the tattered remnants of the old civic religion of America, with its fundamental if at times self-deluding faith in the institutions and heroes and national style of the country. Even the idea of writing a book about presidential wit has something touchingly old-fashioned about it. I think my generation (b. 1963) was the one that saw that civic religion falter and crumble. I was inducted into its mysteries (from Columbus to Custer) only to have all of its assumptions and tenets called, sometimes violently, into question around me. And while I have no desire or hope to return to the willful, at times blind and spurious innocence of those times, I still respond to the old tune when I hear somebody whistling it who learned it by heart. I'll be sad when the Bob Doles are gone.

I still wouldn't vote for the guy, though.

See you in the Times.

Michael

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Michael Chabon

A Politician Who Talks Like a Human Being

Posted Thursday, Jan. 25, 2001, at 8:00 PM ET
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Michael Chabon's latest novel is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Frank Rich is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and author, most recently, of Ghost Light.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:




Thank you Mr Rich for bringing up the no tanks in the streets comment repeated by all the talking heads on TV. I too was shocked by it. We should be celebrating because there are no tanks in the streets? We settle for so little. They had an election in Canada recently, with very high turnout(by American standards) modern voting machines, and yes no tank in the streets. The winner was declared within hours. Unlike the US they can be certain that the man in charge was elected fair and square.

Why do the talking heads repeat empty pieties? Healing, closure, no tanks, peaceful transfer? Is it to create a false sense that the system works even when there are signs that the system failed?

--James Lynch

(To reply, click here.)


The news coverage of the inauguration seemed so rote. It reminded me of my local cable access channel, which replays the same prom footage over and over and at odd times. It's odd to channel surf and come across high-schoolers decked out in tuxes and gowns, standing awkwardly on lawns, getting into limos, walking into a dance hall over and again. I'm sure the kids in the video might like the event, and must love seeing it.

So too this inauguration. The hard core Bushies and the hard core Clinton-haters were likely cheered and moved by the whole coronation process. But really. It was so forlorn.

And even Bush's well-crafted--it's a pleasure to read--acceptance speech sounded tin coming from him. Every time he speaks, even when the rhetoric's lofty, I can't help but hear the C- student he usually is, the one who describes or explains things by restating the obvious (I'm a uniter, not divider, and that means I try to bring people together, not push them apart.). I'm so used to circular logic from Bush that I'm edge whenever he speaks.

And too, Clinton's 7.5 minute farewell, it seemed to me, had more oomph and staying power than W.'s 14 minute at bat. So as Rich suggests, W. pales not only because I usually find him dim, but also, in this case, by comparison to Clinton's superior oratory style.

--Nick Carbone

(To reply, click here.)

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