Sunday NYT June 19, 2005
Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks
TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells's time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.
That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, "The War of the Worlds." The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast's phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled "Terror by Radio," The Times darkly observed that "what began as 'entertainment' might readily have ended in disaster" and warned radio officials to mind their "adult responsibilities" and think twice before again mingling "news technique with fiction so terrifying."
That's one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn't make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of "The War of the Worlds," the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.
Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on "Oprah," the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, "Batman Begins." Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.
But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles's, there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.
The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We'll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on "Desperate Housewives."
Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with "War of the Worlds," and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece "Citizen Kane," a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it's only in the past few years that Welles's ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of "real" celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized "reality" shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and Paris Hilton's mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."
Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they're being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer - in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.'s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned "Ask the President" campaign town-hall meetings - at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons - were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles's bogus "War of the Worlds" bulletins.
But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush's 60-stop Social Security "presidential roadshow," his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn't repeated the success of "Ask the President." Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise's desperate repetitions of his love for his "terrific lady."
The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn't "worth it," and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include "fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found" and "the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military's progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its "last throes." But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries "freedom fries" (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it's fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it's hard to get the audience to fall for it again.
This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his "War of the Worlds," the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war "news" of 1938.
Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq - a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, "Top Gun." Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.
Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.
Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell
ARE you confused that the newly styled Backstreet Boys, hoping for a comeback, look an awful lot like the stars of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"? Are you curious why Brad Pitt, to promote his new film, dyed his crew cut so blond that even his hairdresser is scratching his head?
Well, how about that guy you see in the locker room, changing out of his Prada lace-ups, Hugo Boss flat-front pants and Paul Smith dress shirt and cuff links into a muscle T-shirt and Adidas soccer shorts. Does he wear that wedding ring because he was married in New York - or in Massachusetts?
Or those two 40-something guys walking in the park in pastel oxford-cloth shirts and khakis, collars turned up and cuffs rolled, one of them pushing a stroller? Is that baby his - or theirs?
Confused? You are not alone. It is late June, when many cities across the country celebrate gay pride, and bare-chested he-men dressed in very little are out in the streets again. But look past them, and June is more confusing. As gay men grow more comfortable shrugging off gay-identified clothing and Schwarzeneggerian fitness standards, straight men are more at ease flaunting a degree of muscle tone seldom seen outside of a Men's Health cover shoot. And they are adopting looks - muscle shirts, fitted jeans, sandals and shoulder bags - that as recently as a year ago might have read as, well, gay.
The result is a new gray area that is rendering gaydar - that totally unscientific sixth sense that many people rely on to tell if a man is gay or straight - as outmoded as Windows 2000. It's not that straight men look more stereotypically gay per se, or that out-of-the-closet gay men look straight. What's happening is that many men have migrated to a middle ground where the cues traditionally used to pigeonhole sexual orientation - hair, clothing, voice, body language - are more and more ambiguous. Make jokes about it. Call it what you will: "gay vague" will do. But the poles are melting fast.
The new convergence of gay-vague style is not to be confused with metrosexuality, which steered straight men to a handful of feminine perks like pedicures, scented candles and prettily striped dress shirts. Gay vagueness affects both straight and gay men. It involves more than grooming and clothes. It notably includes an attitude of indifference to having one's sexual orientation misread; hence the breakdown of many people's formerly reliable gaydar.
"I don't have a clue anymore," said Brad Habansky, whose four-month-old men's store and salon, Guise, in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, specializes in fashionable men's wear. "Some of the straight guys who come in, I never would have thought were straight, and some of the gay men, I never would have guessed either."
Confused as he is, Mr. Habansky can at least relate. "A lot of guys think I'm gay," he said. He added that it is his gay customers who need the most convincing that he's straight.
"Have I been called gay a gazillion times?" said Robert Vonderheide, a straight man who is a sales representative for a several clothing lines in New York. "Yes. Do I give a damn? No." He added, though, that it does not happen as much lately, as he sees less difference between gay and straight men in terms of how they express masculinity outside the bedroom.
"If you don't care less, it just adds to your appeal now," said Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan. She pointed out that Seth, the sensitive, moody character played by Adam Brody on "The O.C.," who is constantly razzed by the straight jocks on the show for seeming gay, has become the surprise heartthrob among viewers.
Just as there are gay-vague television characters, there are gay-vague bands like the Bravery (which was photographed by Steven Klein for L'Uomo Vogue looking like 1970's gay hustlers). The group's single "Honest Mistake" seems to be about getting your best friend's sexuality wrong; but then again it may not be. The lyrics are kind of vague.
"The codes have broken down completely," said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "The other night I was at a dinner sitting next to someone who was talking about how he couldn't tell anymore, that he just didn't have any gaydar. And it was so funny. I couldn't tell if he was gay or straight."
WHAT has sped the change is the erosion of the time-honored fashion hierarchy. For years gay men were the ones to first adopt a style trend - flat-front pants, motorcycle jackets, crew cuts - and straight men would pick up on it more or less as gay men tired of it. Now gays and straights are embracing new styles almost simultaneously.
"The lag time between gay innovation and straight appropriation is nonexistent now," said Bruce Pask, the style director of Cargo magazine, who is gay. "They're picking up the trends as fast as we are."
Marshal Cohen, the chief analyst of the NPD Group, which researches trends in the fashion industry, noted that far more men now feel free to indulge an interest in style. In 1985 only 25 percent of all men's apparel was bought by men, he said; 75 percent was bought by women for men. By 1998 men were buying 52 percent of apparel; in 2004 that number grew to 69 percent and shows no sign of slowing.
"We have left the era when the defining line for men is one of sexual preference," he said. "Now, it's either 'I want to be stylish' or 'I don't.' " With the coming of the Internet, men, away from the scrutiny of salespeople, are free to shop in places they might not visit in person and to buy clothes that, stripped of the context of a store, lose not only gay or straight meanings but also intimations about class, age and race.
The result is a full-blown category of men's wear that draws equally from skateboard and surf culture, the preppy canon and the runways of Prada and Marc Jacobs, hot brands like James Perse, Rogan, Rogues Gallery, Trovata, Energie, Original Penguin, Le Tigre and Libertine.
Even the once gay-oriented underwear brand 2xist, now credits straight men, a spokeswoman said, with 50 percent of its roughly $40 million annual business, a statistic helped along by mentions on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and numerous sightings of the 2xist waistband on Justin Timberlake.
"All the brands I rep are gay vague," Mr. Vonderheide said, referring to, among others, Modern Amusement, a mainstay of Urban Outfitters; Wash; and the sexy Da'mage line of denim. He does not use the word metrosexual - "that horrible term" - because he thinks it marginalizes fashionable men by implying that there is something unusual or unmanly about liking clothes. "Men are aware of fashion, and they're not afraid of it anymore, gay or straight," he said.
Ms. White of Cosmopolitan said that her teenage son and her husband, who used to shop with her, have been going out stag and bagging some interesting choices. "My husband came home with a sheared beaver coat," she said. "He said he thought it was shearling. He never would have been shopping for that, but the salesguy whipped it out, and . . . " Beaver or not, the coat stayed. "He loved it too much," she said. "It's definitely gay vague."
Overall she and her readers approve of the trend, but there is a limit. "You like the fact that's he's paying more attention," she said, "but on the other hand, the thought of him getting a pedicure makes some women a little squeamish."
Some gay men are of like mind. As they shift their athletic interest from the gym to sports or become parents and find it hard to work out as often, the classic gay gym body is becoming just one of several options. The term "Chelsea boy," denoting a bronzed, buffed, waxed gay ideal, has even acquired a pejorative tint.
"It's easier for gay men to come out of the closet as slobs, just as it's easier for straight men to be dandies," said Brendan Lemon, the editor of Out, the gay men's magazine. "One of the things that's breaking down how gay guys are seen is that people know more kinds of men who are gay, nonstereotypical ones like soldiers and athletes rather than stylists and fashion designers and decorators." The lack of any one gay sensibility has meant that Out and other gay publications have struggled to reconcile a host of identities, while gay-vague magazines like Details and Cargo, aimed squarely at savvy, fashion-conscious men, are having a heyday.
Mr. Lemon suggested that for a generation that grew up watching "The Real World" on MTV, in which the gay and lesbian characters were no more or less flamboyant in dress or persona than their straight counterparts, being gay carries neither the stigma nor the specialness it once did. That, he said, has also altered the landscape of men's style.
"If you can hang out with your straight buddies and be part of the group," he said, "why would you feel the need to look different as an assertion of identity? That show is a great example of normalization and dressing to reflect sexuality."
Mr. Pask agreed that many gay men, younger ones especially, don't want to feel, or look, that different. "They didn't need to assert their place in society, their right to be who they are," he said. "They're not fighting for visibility. We got it; they don't need it." Young men may associate the gay looks of the late 1980's and early 90's with the anger and anguish that AIDS wrought on the gay world, a time they have little connection with.
Of course there are still places that gay men will go that straight men will not. The Speedo swimsuit is still off limits to even the most vain heterosexual American men, as is knowing the words to Kylie Minogue's latest hit single.
And Alice Eisenberg, who works the door at several New York gay bars, said her supersensitive gaydar remains infallible. Last weekend she surprised onlookers when she stopped a gay-vague guy, complete with a fedora, in line at the Boys Room, an East Village bar, asking him, "You know this is a gay bar, right?"
"The jeans were right, the loafers were right, and he had a good body," she recalled. "But the shirt was completely untucked, and I think it was Old Navy."
The guy thanked her, turned and fled.
Pleasure Domes for Millionaires, and Other Lost Boys
MICHAEL JACKSON has been acquitted of child molestation, but his Neverland Valley Ranch still stands accused, at least in the public mind. Throughout Mr. Jackson's trial, prosecutors treated the estate as a virtual co-defendant, a malevolent presence that helped him entice children into his clutches. It seems unlikely ever to regain its image as a place of innocence and delight, where Mr. Jackson, like Hamlet, bounded in a nutshell, could be a king of infinite space.
Some nutshell. The Neverland ranch covers some 2,600 acres, with 16 amusement park rides, a miniature railroad and a zoo with giraffes, orangutans and tigers, as well as something ominously called a serpentarium. The theme of amusement carries into the house, which includes an arcade room, a toy room and a doll room (though Mr. Jackson's publicists call it the craft room). The annual upkeep for all of this has been estimated at $3 million, an outlay he may well find difficult to maintain in his reportedly cash-strapped state.
Whether he sells or not, Neverland will long be symbolic of Mr. Jackson's strange inner life. But it is not the only American house to be single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and fantasy. It recalls many other of California's celebrated residential retreats, including Hearst Castle, the Getty villa in Malibu and the Playboy Mansion.
Such houses are architectural calling cards, the physical manifestation of their owner's personality. Because of their highly personal quality, a visit cannot help but be an intimate thing, on the order of an overnight stay in someone else's mind.
There is no official name for such an object - half amusement park and half Versailles - though it might be called a pleasure dome, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's term for the palace in his poem "Kubla Khan." It conjures a despot's fanciful playground Xanadu, with immense gardens watered by the great rivers of the earth, and the poem can easily be read with a map of Neverland in hand. Or perhaps with that of Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills, similarly outfitted with a grotto, an aviary and a monkey house.
The pleasure dome is a curious artifact. It can be any style or shape (though not perhaps in any climate; the illusion of perpetual well-being seems to demand palm trees and temperatures in the 70's). Its only requirement is that it suggest an entire imaginary world, complete unto itself. Here it fulfills that characteristically American belief in the possibility of limitless self-invention. So long as its owner is at the center of a flattering universe, it has accomplished its purpose.
This accounts for the spurious completeness of Neverland, with its railroad stations, movie theater and Michael Jackson museum. It is even populated, though mostly by life-size dolls and mannequins (as is, in its way, the Playboy Mansion). It is a gated sanctuary, turned inward to flatter the owner, and not to address the community. This is why George W. Vanderbilt's Biltmore and Elvis Presley's Graceland, however excessive or vulgar, are not pleasure domes.
And this is why American pleasure domes, almost without exception, have been built in California. Nowhere else offers quite the same freedom for self-realization. Nowhere else is the American freedom from inherited social status and family destiny so fully realized. It is easy to see why the Playboy Mansion - first located in Chicago - moved to California in 1971.
For many years the Playboy Mansion was clearly America's most celebrated pleasure dome. The mansion proves that the essence of a pleasure dome is not its architecture: the house itself was not distinguished, a 1925 essay in the Baronial Gothic, though its monastic origins heighten the sense of liberation and the casting off of restraint. A house need not be a palace to fulfill the definition of a pleasure dome, so long as it presents a complete world to the owner: a Potemkin village of the mind.
It is easy to see why Hollywood, built on illusion, has a weakness for houses predicated on dreams. The best known example is the house of Norma Desmond, as played by Gloria Swanson, in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." There Norma maintains the tragic illusion of her glory days as a movie goddess, sustained in her fantasy by a retinue of one. But one imagines that there must be many diminutive pleasure domes in the hills around Hollywood, and that Neverland is an exception only in its scale.
For only one building really dwarfs Neverland, and that is Hearst Castle, San Simeon, the greatest pleasure dome of them all. William Randolph Hearst was over 50 when he began work on the house in 1919, the same year he entered the movie business, with the intent of promoting the career of his 22-year-old mistress, Marion Davies. The house was under continuous construction for the next two decades (and would still be unfinished at the time of Hearst's death in 1951).
Designed by Julia Morgan, it is a Spanish colonial fantasia, luxuriating over 165 rooms and decorated with architectural fragments that Hearst was able to ransack from war-impoverished Europe. It is so massive that its three guest houses could be mansions in their own right, though alongside Casa Grande, the main house, they are mere bungalows.
Hearst Castle is a thrilling success in every respect except as architecture. The grand rooms fail to relate to one another, and each is an independent vignette; a door that is Gothic on one side might be Renaissance on the other. But the conception of the house is not architectural but cinematic.
Rather than being arranged for ease or living or circulation, it is conceived like a movie set. Its long vistas are camera angles, its stupendous spaces dressed sound stages. Of course Hearst built his scenery out of reinforced concrete and Italian marble rather than canvas, but it is scenery nonetheless.
Orson Welles recognized this, and in his 1941 "Citizen Kane," his cruel burlesque of Hearst's life, Hearst Castle became the film it always aspired to be. There its high-ceilinged banquet chambers and long mournful halls acquire an authority their real-life counterparts lack. Welles, recognizing the house's ultimate origins, called it Xanadu.
"Citizen Kane" is not the only work of art inspired by Hearst Castle. Even more perceptive, and malevolent, was "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan," Aldous Huxley's 1939 novel. It tells the story of Jo Stoyte, another California tycoon with a young mistress and a mansion bursting with pilfered bric-a-brac: "Greece, Mexico, backsides, crucifixions, machinery, George IV, Amida Buddha, science, Christian science, Turkish baths."
But Huxley, a British novelist who lived in Los Angeles for many years, saw something that Welles missed. His protagonist yearns not for power but for youth, which his sinister physician provides. His pleasure palace is a fortress against death, and its palm-shaded swimming pool is a sublimated fountain of youth.
Every pleasure dome croons that same soft melody, the promise of eternal youth. The houses of Hearst, Mr. Hefner and Mr. Jackson were all designed with younger denizens in mind, and also younger versions of the owners. (As Mr. Hefner ages, this becomes all the more obvious.)
For all its abundant charms, the pleasure dome is the most artificial of worlds, suited for those whom the real world has passed by, or - as last week's events have shown - those who may never have been ready for it in the first place.
'Lord Byron's Novel': Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Read
ALMOST 20 years after the publication of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' in which she challenged Americans to do something about the horrific crime of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe challenged the British to do something about the horrific crimes of Lord Byron. In ''Lady Byron Vindicated,'' Stowe circled like a predatory bird around what she delicately called his ''improper intimacy'' with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumors about Lord Byron -- famously ''mad, bad and dangerous to know,'' according to one of his lovers -- are again unleashed in John Crowley's intricate and stylish romp, ''Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land.'' Lady Byron (dismissed by one of Crowley's characters as ''the Wicked Witch of the West'') must be turning in her grave.
Crowley's premise is a simple one. In the fall of 1813 -- a little more than two years before his wife left him (because of incest, attempted sodomy, ''affairs with boys when he was in Greece'' or some other impropriety) and he departed from England for good -- Byron claimed he had begun a novel but burned it ''because the scene ran into reality.'' Crowley conjures Byron's lost novel, phoenix-like, from the ashes.
The genre of the rediscovered manuscript -- Nabokov's ''Pale Fire'' and A. S. Byatt's ''Possession'' come to mind -- seems peculiarly suited to our time, when the alleged death of reading runs up against the textual playgrounds of cyberspace. Fittingly enough, in ''Lord Byron's Novel,'' Crowley takes advantage of the fact that Byron's ''only legitimate child,'' Ada (more shades of Nabokov), was a mathematician who worked closely with Charles Babbage, a Cambridge don who tinkered with codes and ciphers and invented a precursor of the computer. What if Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, had come into possession of her father's lost novel, and what if her control-freak mother, Lady Byron, had ''wanted it burned''? Might a clever mathematician like Ada find a way both to save and to delete (so to speak) her father's creation, preserving it in a numerical code for future readers?
Crowley, by no means leery of narrative complication, has divided his book into three parts: the lost novel itself (titled ''The Evening Land''); Ada's annotations on the novel; and an e-mail correspondence involving the various people bent on cracking the code. The principal sleuth is an American historian of science named Alexandra Novak, who travels to England to update the entry on Ada Byron for ''an online virtual museum of women of science'' and comes across the mysterious manuscript, which she decodes with the help of her partner, Thea (conveniently a professor of mathematics), and her estranged father, Lee (conveniently a former Byron scholar).
Crowley is less interested in Byron's botched marriage than in his relations with his daughter. He cites Benjamin Woolley's biography of Ada, ''The Bride of Science,'' in which Woolley sees the incompatibility of Lord and Lady Byron as less personal than historical: Byron represented an earlier generation, devoted to art and passion, while Lady Byron was part of the emerging Victorian era, with its preference for science and moralizing rationality. Ada's ''enciphered version'' of her father's novel -- and, by extension, Crowley's own novel -- can be seen as a synthesis of art and science. Just as Ada, in Crowley's telling, finds her way back to her notorious father (''a flawed and inconsistent but ultimately a great-natured and good and endlessly, wisely entertaining man''), so Alex moves toward a gradual acceptance of the philandering Lee.
The pages devoted to Alex's e-mail exchanges are incisive and funny and poignant. ''DONT WRITE TO THAT BASTARD,'' Thea warns Alex about Lee. ''ITS LIKE CHECKING INTO HELL JUST TO GET KURT COBAINS AUTOGRAPH.'' Alex turns out to be a livelier literary critic than her father. Reading an over-the-top description of a bullfight (''Bounds with one lashing spring the mighty brute'') in Byron's ''Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,'' she comments, ''Now isn't that exactly like those scenes in old cartoons set at bullfights, where Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck has to be a matador, and the door flies open and the bull comes out, with steam snorting from his nose?''
THE biggest disappointment in ''Lord Byron's Novel'' is the deciphered novel itself, a sprawling pastiche of Gothic extravaganza, Oriental tale and picaresque adventure. Lee's summary, alas, is accurate enough: ''Well it begins as a Gothic -- the ruined abbey in the moonlight, the somnambulation -- interaction with scary animals -- immurement -- a family curse, or evil taint -- flight in the dark. . . . Parricide, or apparent parricide; a mysterious pursuer, the hero's double. . . . But then the story seems to lose the Gothic furniture and becomes a society novel about marriage and affairs.'' This mishmash is meant to be, as Lee remarks, a coded version of Byron's own life, ''but as in a masquerade.''
Maybe so. But no single page of ''The Evening Land'' could be mistaken for a page of Byron's. In his letters and journals, Byron was a great prose writer, at once ironic, concrete and wistful. Crowley's imitation is flat and clichéd, cluttered with stilted archaisms like ''I saw that not,'' ''What does he here?'' and ''I know no other that I may so ask.'' Where Crowley summarizes (''he crossed the Rhine -- climbed the Alps -- he saw the Avalanche -- the mountain torrent -- the Glacier''), Byron's journal lingers lovingly: ''Arrived at a lake in the very nipple of the bosom of the Mountain. -- left our quadrupeds with a Shepherd -- & ascended further -- came to some snow in patches -- upon which my forehead's perspiration fell like rain making the same dints as in a sieve.'' Only occasionally does Crowley strike the right Byronic note: ''I have also attended two executions, and a circumcision -- two heads and a foreskin cut off.'' You almost wish that Crowley, instead of trying to imitate early-19th-century mannerisms, had followed Frederick Prokosch's lead in his 1968 novel of rediscovered Byroniana, ''The Missolonghi Manuscript,'' and adopted a racy modern idiom.
Crowley's real achievement in ''Lord Byron's Novel'' is not a convincing imitation of Byron -- not even Byron, who was pudgy and pale and walked with a limp, could always pull that off. More persuasive by far is the suffocating world of encryption and code, coincidence and conspiracy, paranoia and parapsychology that Crowley summons from his 19th-century documents and 21st-century decoders. His fatherless daughters and daughterless fathers search for one another across this uncannily familiar terrain, longing for a unity that seems just beyond their grasp. ''Happy endings are all alike,'' Ada Byron slyly observes in one of her annotations, but ''disasters may be unique.''
'Doonesbury' at War
I have always found it odd and a little frustrating that the largest, most concentrated cohort of Garry Trudeau's core constituency -- that is, we readers of this newspaper on newsprint -- must go elsewhere to read ''Doonesbury.'' And so as a New Yorker who only occasionally buys The Daily News and always forgets that the strip also runs every day in Slate and at nytimes.com, I have had a relationship with ''Doonesbury'' not unlike my relationship with the Metropolitan Museum and ''Nightline'' and the Union Square Cafe and my siblings: they've been around forever, so I take them for granted, and get to them more seldom than I'd like, although when I do I am always reminded, in a kind of self-flagellating D'oh! moment, just how splendid they are.
''Doonesbury'' collections ordinarily have titles that are funny (''The Revolt of the English Majors''), funnyish (''Talk to the Hand'') or at least jaunty (''Flashbacks''). The title of this compact new anthology -- ''The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time'' -- is earnest, without any wink or embedded irony whatsoever. And that's because it is all about the disabling war injury suffered by B.D., the quarterback-cum-coach serving as an Army officer in Iraq. In April of last year, a rocket-propelled grenade hit his Humvee near Fallujah, nearly killing him, and ''The Long Road Home'' is just that -- B.D.'s evacuation to Baghdad, recuperation at Army medical centers and convalescence with his family back in the States. The cover illustration shows B.D. in a wheelchair with an artificial leg and (for the first time ever) without a helmet. There is no joke in the first strip, or the second, or the third. And the whole 84-episode series is thick with arcana about Army hospitals and prosthetics and rehabilitation.
But Garry Trudeau has not, thank goodness, fallen victim to Woody Allen Syndrome, neither Stage 1 (trying too desperately to be serious) nor Stage 2 (losing the ability to be funny). There's certainly more bittersweetness and melancholy here than in, say, ''Buck Wild Doonesbury,'' but only as a matter of degree. Trudeau has always leavened his main dish -- social and political satire, bobo comedies of manners -- with flavors from the wistful and elegiac end of the shelf. And there are plenty of chuckle-out-loud punch lines in the book. As when, during B.D.'s first phone call to his wife from the hospital, he beats around the bush about the particulars of his injury: ''Well, the good news is I'm finally down to my ideal weight.'' And when a visiting buddy shields his eyes from B.D.'s stump and says, ''Thanks for your sacrifice, dude.'' And when Boopsie, Mrs. B.D., reconsiders her plan to buy him a fabulous giant-screen TV because a nurse has warned her it could make him too sedentary, and he screams: ''No! That's wrong! The data on that is weak!'' And in maybe the funniest strip in the book, the hippie-slacker Zonker, now nanny to B.D. and Boopsie's daughter, tells the child they need to prepare the family home for her father's return by ''taping the wall sockets.'' She pauses and says, ''I thought that's for babies,'' and Zonker replies: ''Um . . . is it? I saw it on some program.''
So a story of war and amputation and depression and physical therapy manages to be funny and, maybe more surprisingly, entirely devoid of antiwar argument. The merits of the war in Iraq are never questioned or debated. For more than two years, Trudeau has used ''Doonesbury'' to rail against the war on every ground possible, but none of that material is here. Missing from this collection, for instance, are the exquisite Rumsfeld parodies to which one of B.D.'s men defaults like a tic; the Hunter S. Thompsonesque character, Duke, liberating the city of Al Amok; and one Army officer's explanation of the present Catch-22 -- that ''we've got 150,000 troops in Iraq whose main mission is to not get killed.''
TWO weeks into the injured-B.D. series run in newspapers, Bill O'Reilly wrote a column accusing Trudeau of ''using someone's personal tragedy to advance a political agenda.'' This was an odd and disingenuous criticism on a few counts. When are important political agendas -- antiwar or pro-war, anti-abortion or pro-abortion rights, whatever -- not advanced by telling stories about ''someone's personal tragedy''? If one weren't otherwise aware of his hard-core lefty politics, it would be reasonable to infer that the author of ''The Long Road Home'' was conventionally pro-military, maybe even a Republican. When he went on television last year to defend these strips, Trudeau had it exactly right: ''Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not,'' he said to George Stephanopoulos, ''we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name.''
Getting John McCain to write an introduction to the book was the perfectly shrewd move to inoculate himself against any further carping from O'Reillyland. Trudeau's cheerful, love-the-warrior-but-hate-the-war sympathy for American soldiers is longstanding and seems altogether sincere, not (like, say, Michael Moore's) a cynical posture in the service of his political and commercial interests. Moreover, it has been reciprocated: during the war in Vietnam, ''Doonesbury'' ran in Stars and Stripes; during the early 90's, the Pentagon mounted a touring show of Trudeau's gulf war strips for the United States troops stationed in the region; and the military invited Trudeau to postwar Kuwait to award him medals of commendation.
O'Reilly and Moore notwithstanding, most people don't ideologically vet their entertainments before permitting themselves to enjoy them, just as good artists don't let political messages outshine story and character and sensibility. Plenty of veterans and pro-Vietnam War Republicans (like my father) loved Robert Altman's ''MASH,'' for instance, since its boyish black humor and foxhole existentialism were the point, not its presumed antiwar subtext.
''The Long Road Home'' is very ''MASH''-like, although as a result of the single-minded focus on B.D.'s injury, it seems more like the TV series (soft, sensitive, wise) than Altman's masterpiece (sexy, wild, anarchistic). ''MASH'' came out in 1970, the year Trudeau graduated from Yale and took his college paper's comic strip national. Trudeau has collaborated on TV projects with Altman, and calls him one of his great influences (along with Jules Feiffer, Charles M. Schulz and E. L. Doctorow). Perhaps it's through Altman that Trudeau has channeled the spirit of another artist of that older generation, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose presence seems to hover over the Iraqi war strips and particularly ''The Long Road Home.'' Mauldin enlisted as a regular G.I. before World War II, but by the end of the war his cartoons for Stars and Stripes were appearing in civilian papers in the States. His main characters were a pair of irreverent, non-gung-ho grunts, and General Patton raged about ''Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline.'' One of those cartoons -- a bedraggled, downcast soldier in a rainstorm with a caption that began, ''Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory'' -- was mentioned by the Pulitzer judges when they awarded Mauldin a prize in 1945. Sergeant Mauldin was 24 (two years younger than Trudeau when he won his), and had a great career as a (liberal) newspaper editorial cartoonist for another half-century.
''The Long Road Home,'' given its absence of any explicit ideological line, reminded me why ''Doonesbury'' has managed to endure so long and to be so fine so much of the time. Trudeau is a great comic writer whose devotion to politics and capacity for moral outrage are apparently undiminished after 37 years, but he is a great comic writer first, with the intellectual honesty that implies. He does not give a pass to the flaws and hypocrisies of his political comrades, and never has. Not only did he portray President Clinton as a grotesque, he was satirizing John Kerry at a time it was really politically incorrect to do so, just when Kerry had become the darling of the liberal media-political complex. In a ''Doonesbury'' from 1971, the 23-year-old Trudeau has a young man approach the strip's two main characters and tell them: ''If you care about this country at all, you better go listen to that John Kerry fellow. . . . He speaks with a rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!'' B.D. asks Mike, ''Who was that?'' and Mike tells him, ''John Kerry.'' In another strip in the series, Kerry thinks to himself, ''You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppy.'' It is hard to imagine ''Mallard Fillmore,'' the comic strip Bruce Tinsley began syndicating 11 years ago as a kind of conservative ''Doonesbury,'' taking equivalent shots at its author's fellow travelers. And whereas Tinsley seems concerned only with politics, narrowly defined, Trudeau is interested in the whole range of passions and quirks and flaws of his two dozen major characters. (Again, it was this way from the start: a good half of his original, proto-''Doonesbury'' strips from The Yale Daily News between 1968 and 1970 were not, rather amazingly, about Black Panthers or the war or politics, but dating and football -- the Yale of George W. Bush, class of '68.)
Another significant difference between ''Doonesbury'' and all the other ''political'' strips, from ''Pogo'' to ''Shoe'' to ''Mallard Fillmore,'' is that Trudeau's characters are not talking animals but human beings. The stakes and daily writerly challenge seem inherently greater. For their first 15 years of existence, the characters in ''Doonesbury'' were like the Simpsons (and nearly every other comic-strip character in history except those in ''Gasoline Alley''): they were ageless. When Trudeau entered middle age himself, he started letting his creations grow older -- and then promptly took an almost two-year hiatus. That could have turned into his shark-jumping moment, when the familiar rules of his fictional universe were overturned in a reckless bid for new juice. But instead of jumping the shark, which is born of boredom or creative bankruptcy, Trudeau actually raised his stakes some more. His characters graduated from college, got married, had children (who became characters themselves), got divorced, died. The strip became more ambitious, not less.
As his characters grew more real, he pushed ''Doonesbury'' more into the actual world as well, sometimes undertaking true journalistic tasks. His strips about a Palm Beach ordinance requiring servants to carry ID cards led to a Florida statute eliminating such crypto-racist laws. Where did I learn that the current president and vice president have been arrested five times between them, and that 29 Reagan administration appointees were convicted of crimes? For better or worse, in ''Doonesbury.''
As most of the characters became more human, it seemed to inspire Trudeau to make others more surreal. I don't love every result of this tendency -- depicting presidents and vice presidents as feathers, waffles, points of light, Stetsons and Roman legionnaire's helmets is a Trudeauvian trope I found much funnier the first time than the 500th. On the other hand, I never tire of Duke, and the whimsy of the propagandistic talking cigarette, Mr. Butts, was brilliant.
''The Long Road Home'' is ''Doonesbury'' at the other, ultrarealistic extreme. The point is that Garry Trudeau, who by all rights should be phoning it in by now, still takes his responsibilities to the strip and his audience seriously, and in service to them still takes large and interesting risks. Which is one reason I am much more enthusiastic about the Democrats' favorite comic strip than I tend to be about the Democrats.
Kurt Andersen is the author of ''Turn of the Century.'' His second novel will be published next year.
his article, and it appears to be his own invention.
"Gay-vague" is a term that was coined by a business
journalist, Michael Wilke. The phrase appeared in his
reporting for Advertising Age from 1994-98.
Shouldn't David Colman at least acknowledge this
source in his article? Without crediting the source,
is this plagiarism? "Gay-vague" is not a commonly used
phrase in the New York Times. It appears that only one
article from the New York Times archive used this
phrase, back in 1996.
Information about journalist Michael Wilke's use of
the phrase "gay-vague" appears at the URL below:
http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/inside/2002/wilke.html (Comment this)