Kathryn Harrison and D.T. Max
Stalk the "Billion-Footed Beast" Yourself!
By D.T. Max
Posted Thursday, July 19, 2001, at 11:53 AM ETWhat you say brings forth so many responses that I've nearly choked on my grapefruit. As writers we need drama, so your complaint, which to a Frayster may seem frivolous, I deeply respect. The imagination--my imagination at any rate--is a poor thing, and if it's to get airborne, it needs a lot of help. My duck needs to be goosed. Half-point rate cut stories don't do it. Yet I think you are underrating the capacity for democracies to provide first-rate dramas.
We are in a rather tepid season, prefatory to the silly season, where sharks and missing interns catch the eye. A time of easy coincidences. Yet the General Accounting Office's demand for Cheney's documents on his energy policy meetings draws forth a yawn, too. Cheney's doodles? They ain't exactly Nepal. But this is in part a question of perspective. Seth Lipsky, an online columnist used to tell his staff, when he was the editor of the Forward, that the best way to report in a foreign country was not to speak the language. His point was (I think, as I have not asked him) that knowing a limited amount emboldens our natural sense of wonderment and drama before human activity. We saw this last fall in Florida (that proboscis of a state again): What I saw were party hacks counting ballots in airless county offices while timidly dressed spinners repeated boring half-truths on CNN, but Europeans--bless their slow-growth souls--were seeing a family drama in which Jeb Bush had to make a decision about whether to hand the election to his less-talented brother or pay back a lifetime of competition and give it to Gore. That's good stuff.
The take wouldn't pass muster in our big dailies, of course. That's fine. Here journalism really is a fourth branch of government, on par with the other three and weighted with the same sense of being a stake-holder in the system. But as writers, it costs us. Our political reality is actually quite amazing. We just seem not to have found the handle on it. Where's the novel about J. Edgar Hoover? I've seen some of his scribblings when I worked on a piece on Hemingway for the New York Times Magazine (Hoover was obsessed with Hemingway) He is the stuff of fiction.
Have you read the opening of Don DeLillo's Underworld, in which Bobby Thompson hits his famous home run that won the Giants the penant? That struck me as opening a peephole on what I'm talking about. And now it turns out the Giants had someone stealing signals! Maybe DeLillo will get it in the paperback.
I don't mean to be simplistic. The relationship between public event and private creativity is complex. Tom Wolfe's invocation to writers to stalk the "billion-footed beast" (Have I given it too many feet? I think so.) in Harper's made me think: You go stalk the beast. I'll eat my grapefruit. The novel is internal today: The public/private subject balance will never go back past Flaubert to Balzac. I wouldn't want it to. When I reread Sentimental Education, I think it's a great book. Lost Illusions I find interesting but nothing more. Still I can't help thinking there's something here, something waiting to be found.
Stalk the "Billion-Footed Beast" Yourself!
By D.T. Max
Posted Thursday, July 19, 2001, at 11:53 AM ETReader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Richard Riley lives in flyover country and has only ever come across 'Jewess' in the book Ivanhoe. A-Z says Jewish practices are matrilineal, not matriarchal. Sean Fitzgerald doesn't know what the deal would be if the intern was black, and asks for enlightenment. Whither the "Breakfast Table"? Regular readers make their comments in this thread, and have suggestions for future participants.]
First of all, it isn't about the supposedly unique attractiveness of Jewish women. Both Clinton and Condit had relationships with other women who were not Jewish. The attractive quality was not Jewishess, but availability. These guys, especially Clinton, had limited opportunities to meet available women. So how are Jewish interns available to Democratic politicians? Two American cultural traditions play a role:
First, internships go to families connected to campaign contributors, and American Jews are disproportionately represented among large contributors to the Democratic party. No surprise that many Democratic interns come from Jewish families.
Second, there is an American Jewish tradition of supporting adult children through more years of education (including unpaid internships) than is standard in other U.S. cultural communities, even at comparable parental income levels. Some connect it to the yeshiva tradition in Eastern Europe, where supporting a scholar who never holds down a job was a matter of pride for an extended family. Why this tradition stuck over the generations even among the nonreligious is an interesting question. Both Chandra and Monica were still apparently supported by their parents well into their mid-twenties.
Put these factors together, and a high proportion of young democratic DC interns are Jewish. It's not a surprise that some of the women get involved with the bosses.
This pop sociology comes from the inside, as I was young and Jewish in the DC intern world myself once, and later a parentally-supported Jewish law student.
--Arthur Stock
(To reply, click here.)
As I see it this "Breakfast Table" manages to give any Frayster a choice of ticking time bombs to try and disarm (or throw at other Fraysters). First, a discussion of the sexual mores of Jewish women. While I have identified a Jewish conspiracy to take all my money and life-force, the conspiracy appears limited to my wife and children. Moreover, a first person comment on whether I think Jewish women are easy for Presbyterian men, would leave me in a deeply compromised position if my wife read it. So I will boldly leave this issue alone. The raising of the second issue reminds me of a little boy who has forgotten what happens when you hit a hornets nest with a stick. So I will simply confine myself to saying that Republicans are low-life fascists who don't deserve to ever hold office in a free country.
--Neill Hamilton
(To reply, click here.)
It doesn't help anybody to understand these situations by pretending that the women involved were empty little china dolls broken by big, bad men. I don't know what the deal is with Levy and Condit, but anyone who read that turgid Starr report saw that Monica Lewinsky was a participant, not a puppet, in what happened.
There are women who are attracted to power, and there are women who play on the shortcomings of powerful men for their own reasons. To suppose otherwise is to deny them the very three-dimensional existence that women's empowerment is supposed to provide. To suppose otherwise is to do a shocking disservice to the thousands of young women who cycle through Washington, DC, every year, working hard and getting ahead and never once thinking that it would be all right to sleep with a married man who insisted you not bring ID on your "dates."
--Shark
(To reply, click here.)
(7/16)
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Richard Riley lives in flyover country and has only ever come across 'Jewess' in the book Ivanhoe. A-Z says Jewish practices are matrilineal, not matriarchal. Sean Fitzgerald doesn't know what the deal would be if the intern was black, and asks for enlightenment. Whither the "Breakfast Table"? Regular readers make their comments in this thread, and have suggestions for future participants.]
First of all, it isn't about the supposedly unique attractiveness of Jewish women. Both Clinton and Condit had relationships with other women who were not Jewish. The attractive quality was not Jewishess, but availability. These guys, especially Clinton, had limited opportunities to meet available women. So how are Jewish interns available to Democratic politicians? Two American cultural traditions play a role:
First, internships go to families connected to campaign contributors, and American Jews are disproportionately represented among large contributors to the Democratic party. No surprise that many Democratic interns come from Jewish families.
Second, there is an American Jewish tradition of supporting adult children through more years of education (including unpaid internships) than is standard in other U.S. cultural communities, even at comparable parental income levels. Some connect it to the yeshiva tradition in Eastern Europe, where supporting a scholar who never holds down a job was a matter of pride for an extended family. Why this tradition stuck over the generations even among the nonreligious is an interesting question. Both Chandra and Monica were still apparently supported by their parents well into their mid-twenties.
Put these factors together, and a high proportion of young democratic DC interns are Jewish. It's not a surprise that some of the women get involved with the bosses.
This pop sociology comes from the inside, as I was young and Jewish in the DC intern world myself once, and later a parentally-supported Jewish law student.
--Arthur Stock
(To reply, click here.)
As I see it this "Breakfast Table" manages to give any Frayster a choice of ticking time bombs to try and disarm (or throw at other Fraysters). First, a discussion of the sexual mores of Jewish women. While I have identified a Jewish conspiracy to take all my money and life-force, the conspiracy appears limited to my wife and children. Moreover, a first person comment on whether I think Jewish women are easy for Presbyterian men, would leave me in a deeply compromised position if my wife read it. So I will boldly leave this issue alone. The raising of the second issue reminds me of a little boy who has forgotten what happens when you hit a hornets nest with a stick. So I will simply confine myself to saying that Republicans are low-life fascists who don't deserve to ever hold office in a free country.
--Neill Hamilton
(To reply, click here.)
It doesn't help anybody to understand these situations by pretending that the women involved were empty little china dolls broken by big, bad men. I don't know what the deal is with Levy and Condit, but anyone who read that turgid Starr report saw that Monica Lewinsky was a participant, not a puppet, in what happened.
There are women who are attracted to power, and there are women who play on the shortcomings of powerful men for their own reasons. To suppose otherwise is to deny them the very three-dimensional existence that women's empowerment is supposed to provide. To suppose otherwise is to do a shocking disservice to the thousands of young women who cycle through Washington, DC, every year, working hard and getting ahead and never once thinking that it would be all right to sleep with a married man who insisted you not bring ID on your "dates."
--Shark
(To reply, click here.)
(7/16)