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Zoë Heller and James Wolcott

the breakfast table
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from: James Wolcott

"Cultural Libertines, Occupational Drones"

Posted Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001, at 3:45 PM ET

Dear Zoe,

The dead hum from a tape recorder on play-back is every interviewer's nightmare. The follow-up one is forgetting to make sure the wheels are turning and realizing the recorder stopped taping 15 or 20 minutes earlier and all that material's been lost. (Some machines don't click off at the end of one side, but quietly come to a dead stop.) The catch is that by periodically checking to make sure the machine is recording, you're glancing away from the narcissistic interviewee and introducing a nervous tic into the proceedings. And waiting until the subject completes a thought or anecdote doesn't always work because some of them go into a Joyce Carol Oates stream of consciousness that never reaches the sea.

I'm not surprised by the D.A. pushing for the death penalty--we're talking Texas, after all--but it seems obvious from what's been written that Andrea Yates was a deeply distressed, depressed person who horribly, tragically snapped. I admit I used to support capital punishment in certain instances, but the Karla Faye Tucker case turned my conscience around, and I now think capital punishment and the penalization of so much of our population is one of America's greatest shames. (A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal today, about how rural communities are benefiting from adding prisoners to their census rolls, helps explain why we keep shoveling more and more people into the system even as the crime rate declines.)

The irony of the Andrea Yates case is that she and her husband did everything they could to lead culturally uncontaminated lives. They were born-again Christians, they home-schooled their children, and she wasn't allowed to work. It was the kind of life that might have been mandated by William Bennett, a complete rejection of secular humanism. And since those terrible killings can't be blamed on permissive parenting or the welfare state (remember how Gingrich tried to make those associations in earlier child murders?), pundits on both sides are forced to dust off their furrowed brows and confront the nature of evil. I believe there is evil in the world, conscious cruelty for its own sake, but that's what I see in Andrea Yates' dead eyes.

Because of the president's stem-cell announcement, my appearance on Charlie Rose has been bumped to a later date. Damn Bush's grandstanding!--doesn't he realize some of us boys have books to hustle? (To quote Truman Capote.) Charlie Rose's studios are in the Bloomberg complex, which is the most technologically advanced office I've ever seen--they even have video monitors embedded in the floor. So I can believe they'd have a software snoop capable of dropping nets from the ceiling should an employee log onto the Victoria's Secret site or forward dirty limericks. We're in a complete schizoid culture: a pop world where anything goes (from Scary Movie's scatology to shock-jock radio to pro-porn articles in the Times) and a work world where increasingly everything is being monitored, regulated, and circumscribed. Cultural libertines, occupational drones.

Jim

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819
from: James Wolcott

"Cultural Libertines, Occupational Drones"

Posted Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001, at 3:45 PM ET
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Zoë Heller is a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph and author of the novel Everything You Know. James Wolcott is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and author of the novel The Catsitters.
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