Rewriting History: Five Historical Novels

Every story is a form of history, no? “Once upon a time…..”

Five of my favorite novels, described below, are historical fiction, a form that inhabits a continuum from the telling of known historical events using real historical characters but with a fiction writer’s omniscient consciousness; to the creation of fictional characters inhabiting an historical period that is front and center (almost, one might say, where the historical period is the story itself); to the inversion or scrambling of known historical events to create an “alternative history.”

(One could, I suppose, spool out the concept of historical fiction to encompass just about any story; after all, anything that happens and that can be told as a story must have taken place at some point in time. But at that same point, if the historical aspect of a story disappears into the mists of a writer’s invention, then it is no longer historical. Historical fiction is, if nothing else, about history, even when what is being offered up is “alternative” to the known facts.)

Three of these books are by the same author who has made the retelling of American history in fiction his vocation. Thomas Mallon has a great gift for getting the inside story. And by that I very much do not mean the Washington journo’s version of the “inside scoop,” though he resides in Washington and the city is the setting for the novels of his I will attempt to celebrate below. I mean, instead, that he understands how events on the public record are driven by the private passions of the men and women who make the history. This is preeminently on display in Watergate which is rendered, in Mallon’s telling, as a story of many private intentions gone haywire. (Okay, Finale does include quite a lot of “insider-y” stuff, the sort of narrative gets traded around among D.C. people-in-the-know in that gossamer middle zone between gossips and news. But it’s there as atmosphere; the real story he tells of the Reagan years is on even deeper-background, where only talented novelists tread.)

The other two, the best of them, my favorites, share something else. Libra, by Don Delillo, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, are masterpieces of sentence writing. One brilliant, wickedly funny or penetrating sentence builds upon another, each one all alone seeming to tell a whole story, each and every sentence wholly original and unspoiled by cliché. I have read both of them over and over, sometimes just picking them up and opening anywhere to begin reading sentences. I should add that they share something else: both of them are, in very, very different ways (to steal Christopher Hitchen’s description of the novels of Wodehouse), incandescently funny: very darkly so in Libra and antically, hilariously in Yiddish Policeman, But the dark is never far away in Chabon’s story either.

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“There’s something they aren’t telling us,” says David Ferrie to Lee Harvey Oswald in a grim New Orleans bar. “Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”

To appreciate Don Delillo’s Libra you need only be an American, and to have imbibed the peculiar American political air for any prolonged period as a sentient adult. For then you will be familiar with the odor of paranoia, never very far off in American affairs, that “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” described by Richard Hofstaeder in “The Paranoid Style in America Politics” more than 60 years ago.

It helps, too, to have wasted a fair amount of time reading all sorts of conspiracy junk about the Kennedy assassination, of which there is no shortage. All of the real-life characters who have figured in conspiracy narratives—Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw—stalk the pages of Libra. Shaw, who also makes an appearance in Fellow Travelers, has only a walk-on role here, appearing as a shamanistic confidant of David Ferrie’s, a host of gay sex parties. In real life, he was the lawyer who was slandered and defamed by the megalomaniac Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who was the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s paranoid blockbuster, JFK. Garrison brought Shaw to trial on charges of conspiracy so paper-thin the jury came back with a not guilty verdict in a matter of minutes. (One of Garrison’s delusions, along the way to becoming the hero of Stone’s movie, was that the Kennedy assassination was a gay “thrill killing” perpetrated by a coterie of New Orleans homosexuals.)

Delillo spins a scarily plausible conspiracy involving embittered CIA and Cuban mercenary veterans of the botched Bay of Pigs operation, Mafia types, and assorted right wing lowlifes (Bannister and Ferrie). The plot originates with the aging CIA guys, sidelined now after the Bay of Pigs, who hope to rekindle the nation’s flagging zeal for toppling Castro by staging a false flag operation, an attempt on the President’s life that will fail—the killers are supposed to miss their mark—but will be traced to Castro.

Oswald appears on the scene in Dallas and New Orleans where he is discovered by the conspirators, out of a wretched and dyslexic background in the Bronx, coddled by and bullying his maudlin, self-pitying mother.  To the conspirators he is a convenient cut-out, mercurial, with a dizzyingly strange and eyebrow-raising background—the stint at a U2 base in Atsugi, Japan, the strangely easy entry into the Soviet Union and the even more strangely easy exit—the perfect patsy.

Along the way, Delillo conjures up magically the chilliness of the coldest episodes from the Cold War: his rendering of a fictional interrogation of Oswald by the KGB after the American U2 spy plane is shot down and Francis Gary Powers is arrested is very good.

Delillo’s portrayal of Oswald is exemplary and prescient. He appears both grindingly plain and pitiable in his grinding poverty, an American everyman, and at the same time surpassingly weird. For the weird version, here’s one of those sentences I mentioned: Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko’s mind as a kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events.

For the plain version, there is this: After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

(Sixty years on, looking back again at Oswald after so many mass shootings by lonely, emotionally disturbed, sexually deprived men with access to a gun, would we today, be so quick to assume a political, rather than a personal motive?)

The original plot spins out of control—it is a genius of Delillo’s storytelling to intuit how really impossible it is to keep a conspiracy contained—and the shooters will assume their own agenda. The story draws oxygen from the venomous hatred that Kennedy inspired in certain quarters, a hatred that was nursed into a poison by some of those who felt betrayed by Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs. (That debacle, one of the great cock-ups in American history, was itself born of a kind of paranoid obsession with Castro). But Kennedy hatred took on a life of its own, was ventilated by the man himself and the primitive feeling of inferiority his own privileged and rarified upbringing could evoke in the susceptible. Listen to New Orleans private detective and right-wing gun runner Guy Bannister cursing the man through his teeth:

We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurt to be great? He thinks he can make us different kind of society. He’s trying engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on my nerves just to look at him…Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets….All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What’s he plotting with Castro?....There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. 

In just this way is Libra only superficially, or anyway secondarily, a version of the Kennedy assassination.  It is really about paranoia itself, how “the truth” becomes a function not of empirical, testable facts, but of our fears and our wishes. Birthers, truthers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe thrive in this zone. Delillo wrote Libra 25 years before Alex Jones came to prominence and another President of the United States would tell an audience, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Libra a story for our time.

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Casting about for how to introduce The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I find I can only reproduce for you one or two of those matchless sentences I mentioned.

“According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.

The problem with this approach is that those are followed by others, only better, only more fun, so I find I have to keep going.  

Meyer Landsman is the most decorated shames in the District of Sitka, the man who solved the murder of the beautiful Froma Lefkowitz by her furrier husband, and caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. His testimony sent Hyman Tsharny to federal prison for life, the first and last time that criminal charges against a Verbover wiseguy have ever been made to stick. He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It’s like there’s a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets.
If you’re not ready the read the book already, you may be dead to language. But, okay, maybe what you need is a story, a plot, so here’s how it is: Meyer Landsman is a cop, a detective and he is the offspring of a Jewish remnant that settled in Alaska after the Holocaust and after the fledgling state of Israel was defeated in 1948. A precarious “interim state” was declared by the United States Congress for the Jews of Sitka, Alaska—interim because, well, no one wants Jews around permanently—and it is in this interim state that  Landsman chances upon a murdered Jewish kinsman in the flophouse hotel in which he lives, and is driven to solve the mystery in the weeks and days before he and his tribesman will be forced, yet again, to wander the earth in search of a home.

The young dead Jew, it turns out, was—before a heroin addiction “turned his brain into a great lapping tongue”—a man of great promise, the greatest promise actually. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the righteous man of his generation, of whom there is never more than one. As Meyer Landsman explains to his supervising officer (who just happens to be his ex-wife):

So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing up for work, one per generation, for the past couple thousand years, right? Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.

The unraveling of the murder of this would-be tzaddik will bring Landsman into contact with a rabbinical Jewish crime family and a gang of militant zealots bent on rescuing the Jews of Alaska before “the Reversion” scatters them to the winds again. Along the way the reader meets chess masters, a husband-wife-and-daughter family famous for baking pies for pilots and passengers at an obscure airport in the frozen north, a midget police officer named Willie Dick, a disgraced Irish journalist with a macroencephalitic head, and a just barely sane dentist who specializes in recreating the tools and utensils of the ancient Temple rituals described in the book of Leviticus.

The hallucinogenic imaginativeness of this set-up allows Landsman to inhabit every single gumshoe stereotype—drunk, cynical, a fuck-up in every aspect except busting bad guys—and yet still seem like no detective you have ever, ever read or heard about. I like to push this novel on people—it’s so much fun, it’s so funny. Yet it is a high, high game that the novelist is playing. It rolls along with every convention of the detective story, but all of those conventions are translated into a higher form of imagination—a story ultimately about that sense of contingency, of living on the lip of an abyss, of ever-waiting and hopefulness leavened by a past of disappointment and disaster that has characterized wanderers of the world everywhere seeking a home, but has been most quintessentially the story of what it means to be a Jew.   

“Landsman has no home, no future, not fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.”

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The scandal known as “Watergate” that ended 44 years ago this month with the resignation of Richard Nixon has had enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how all Americans regard politicians, government, and the very calling of public service. Although it brought down a prominent figure of the right and was regarded at the time as a victory of the liberal left, the scandal’s most lasting impact has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust of government and of what has been regarded for most of American history as the dignity of public service. The seeds of the Trump phenomenon can be found in Watergate.

Such are the ironies of history.

But the episode has “already” accumulated the dust of a distant episode most, or certainly many, Americans can only dimly recall, a quaint relic in the nation’s attic. To recall the names of the period is like coming upon an old middle school year book inscribed with wishes from long lost classmates to “have a great summer!” John Dean. John Ehrlichman. Bob Haldeman. Howard Hunt. Who remembers Tony Ulasewicz, the bagman who delivered wads of cash as “hush money” to Howard Hunt’s wife and talked like a Damon Runyon character when testifying before the Senate investigative committee?

It is a bittersweet relic for some of us who were just becoming politically aware when the scandal was making headlines.  I was fourteen when Nixon resigned, and I grew up outside of Washington in a family that talked politics at the dinner table. The summer before I had a paper route delivering the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein were regularly taking the President to the cleaners. 

Washington at the time had a lively party circuit, hosted by fashionable Georgetown matrons, that was chronicled in the Post’s “Style” section. But in many other ways it was still striving to outgrow John Kennedy’s description of the nation’s capital as a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.”  It was a profoundly segregated city and the ruins of riots six years prior to the President’s resignation still rendered vast stretches of real estate east of the Capitol a no-man’s land (at least for white people).

Thomas Mallon’s novel, “Watergate,” brings it all back to life, intelligently and clairvoyantly. They are all there—the burglars Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and the Cubans, Dean and Haldeman and Jeb Magruder and John and Martha Mitchell. Nixon and Henry Kissinger. His story is a comedy, or a tragi-comedy in which a vast national calamity grows out of a complex history of miscues, crossed signals and half-hearted intentions, a comedy haphazardly propelled by personal (rather than public) motives, misunderstandings and misconnections.

It is a tale of humans in positions of power being hopelessly human, and so his hypothesis--although wildly imaginative--is entirely plausible.  John Mitchell, the attorney general, is hopelessly distracted by his mentally ill and alcoholic wife Martha and is depicted as fatally deferring on a decision about whether to fund the nit-witted Gordon Liddy and his confederates in their plans for subverting the election. Nixon himself is depicted as more of a fumbling neurotic than a paranoid calculator. “I listen to myself on the tapes and hear myself trying to sound like I know more than I really do,” he tells his wife tearfully, when the gig is up.

The central figure in the story is Fred LaRue, a barely recallable figure who nevertheless was at the heart of the scandal. A top fundraiser among southern conservatives that Nixon cultivated for their resentment over civil rights, Larue was the one who scoured up the dough to give to Ulasewicz to give to the burglars to keep them quiet. But LaRue—in Mallon’s telling—also carries a terrible secret from his childhood, one that emerges as central to answering an enduring mystery about the scandal: Why did the burglars wiretap the Democratic National Committee to begin with, and what were they looking for?

This is history from the inside--history written by the random chaos of the human heart--and the proof of the intelligence of his story is the degree to which this tall tale is entirely believable. At the end of the novel, after much chaos has spilled, LaRue ponders the nature of history itself, the fact that each moment, each event, is preceded by other moments, other events; that all of them are linked in a chain of causation, so that searching for the precise origin of any one event becomes an exercise in the absurd.  

No, he wouldn’t do it. Because if he started he would never stop. He would have to wonder whether Watergate had really begun fifteen years before, in that Canadian duck blind, and whether it would have occurred if he’d never made a furtive visit to a lawyer’s office in Jackson, Mississippi; if he’d never met a secretary named Clarine Lander. He would eventually rewind things to the point where he’d be asking if Watergate depended on Fred—or Ike—LaRue’s having been born.

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The paperback cover of Fellow Travelers is a black and white photograph of a young man in a jacket and tie, the tie only barely loosened, hoisting a beer stein with a hearty bonhomie at some happy hour bar with his colleagues. He wears the groomed good look of a stylish young man in the 1950s. The photo might have been taken anywhere, but it somehow perfectly conjures up the kind of young men—combining idealism and ambition—who populated the nation’s capital in the late 1940s and 1950s, the city’s era of enormous postwar expansion.

They sought jobs in the “Situations Wanted” section of the Washington Post, with advertisements like this:

Young man, 27, B.A., Yale, three years experience legislative research. 3 yrs. formal legal training, desires position with trade assoc. or law office. Box 61-V. Star.
Young man, college education desires a responsible position. Wall WO6-8202.
Young man, colored, desires evening or night work of any kind. Phone LI8-5198.

It's those kinds of details and countless other period artifacts by which Mallon recreates an era with nearly photographic precision. This noir story of love and betrayal, secrets and blackmail is everything House of Cards would be if it were set in the 50s and better written. Its a gay love story set  in the era of McCarthy and the “lavender scare” when government officials suspected of being homosexual were outed and dismissed, especially in the State Department where they were deemed to be security risks.

Tim Laughlin, an earnestly Catholic, earnestly anti-communist young Capitol Hill staffer falls in love with Hawkins Fuller, an older, mid-level State Department official who works in the Department’s congressional liaison office. Fuller goes by the name “Hawk,” a bird of prey, and he haunts the city’s gay underground with the casual ease of a man who is never denied, who takes what he wants and discards what he doesn’t. It is an almost painful mismatch—Tim and Hawk. Their affair is played out against the backdrop of the Army McCarthy hearings, and a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and fear and extortion. McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and David Schine are among the real-life characters brought to life again. We also meet one of Mallon's most inspired creations, Tommy McIntyre, a boisterous Irish Capitol Hill player who, driven by his own rage and vengefulness and sense of betrayal, traffics in a sordid marketplace of secrets, of who has what on whom.

The novel renders, in a way that no one can miss, how the closet worked to reinforce the stigma. Not just in the obvious sense (or the sense that should have been obvious even then) that gay men were only security risks because they could not be openly gay; that a gay man who is not ashamed of being gay, and does not care who knows it, automatically ceases to be a security risk.

It is also that the closet actually mandated the behavior that confirmed the stigma. Thus: gay men are presumed to be depraved sex fiends; therefore, they must not be allowed to date or be openly affectionate, let alone have a “courtship” and marriage. So, what are gay men to do? Well, as Mallon depicts—as was true in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, as actually happened—they find an abandoned brownstone building in Foggy Bottom, haul a mattress up to the attic, and have heated, surreptitious, late-night trysts there. See? Very depraved.

Most Americans today regard with a mixture of scorn and incredulity the fact that there was in America a time when a restaurant would refuse to serve black people, as if looking back on a people who were slightly out of their minds. But did you know, as Mallon’s novel recounts, that some government officials, suspected of being gay, were required to read a portion of Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” as a test? If he read it with too much ardor—or something, god only knows—then the secret was out. 

Young gay men should read Fellow Travelers, for a sense of what it was like before the world changed. Tim desperately wants to believe his love affair is the real thing, a love on which God could smile. But the times won't allow it. When it's over he tries to explain to an uncomprehending priest that he cannot be truly sorry it had happened.

Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

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In the thick of Finale, Mallon’s re-telling of the Reagan years, the novelist renders a phone conversation between Richard Nixon and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Nixon was, then, clawing his way back to respectability by playing a deep background advisor and trader of information to the powerful. Kirkpatrick was the ‘80’s era queen of neo-conservativism, staunch defender of Israel, Cold Warrior and anti-communist. They are discussing Reagan’s Reykjavik negotiations with Gorbachev, which form the heart of Mallon’s drama.

    “Well,” said Nixon, “Reagan’s got two sessions to go over there, though only the last one will count. How do you think he’ll do? You’ve seen him face-to-face more than I have in recent years.”

   After a pause, Mrs. Kirkpatrick spoke deliberately. “I told this to my husband when I first met Reagan, all of six years ago: he doesn’t talk like anybody I’m familiar with. He doesn’t sound like a politician, or an academic or a journalist. But I can also tell you that he’s the most impersonally warm man I’ve ever encountered. They won’t know how to figure him out over there.” 

Reykjavik. The Iran-Contra Affair. The AIDS epidemic. Over all of these 80’s era relics hovers the figure of Reagan himself, whom few it seems, outside of his wife, ever really figured out. Mallon captures exactly this astral quality of the man, the impersonal warmth, the sense of a man whom many found to be genuinely there and yet not quite all there.

He captures it through indirection because Reagan, the man himself, only rarely makes an appearance in the book. The story of Reagan’s presidency is told instead through the heated doings of his underlings, the conservative activists who gravitated to Reagan after their long, long winter in the years of liberal Democratic dominance; the hangers on and journalists who tried to keep up; and its told through his ever-anxious, ever watchful wife Nancy.

There’s more than literary purpose in this. Joan Didion has observed that the uncanny calm at the eye of all this activity—the man, Ronald Reagan—created a kind of outward centrifugal force of enormous energy. It made for a lot of interesting drama. There was, for instance, the peculiar convergence on the outer rings of the Reagan presidency of a coterie of closeted gay conservatives, fiercely anti-communist, some of whom raised money that was funneled through various interesting ways to the Contras in Nicaragua to fight against the Sandinistas. A few of these men also would die of AIDS, denying on their death bed that they were gay and only very tepidly condemning the Reagan administration for its lethally dismal response to the epidemic.

One of my favorite writers, the late Christopher Hitchens has a large role in Finale working (as he did in `real life’) as a fiercely socialist journalist for The Nation, the Spectator and other leftist journals in the U.K and the states. Hitchens is pursuing several lines of story—the money to the Contras, that coterie of gay cold war cowboys, and who has the President’s ear at Reykjavik (the hardliners, like Kirkpatrick) or those who want him to make an historic deal to end the threat of nuclear war (Nancy).

Mallon was friends with Hitchens and captures the man’s charm, ferocious wit, and terrifying facility with argument. Here he is interviewing one of those cowboys, a fellow named Terry Dolan who is dying of a disease he swears is not AIDS.

“…[I]t wasn’t my intention, but now that I’ve gotten a look at you, I feel the inclination to ask: What do you think of Mr. Reagan’s AIDS policy?”

                “Well, they need to speed up the AZT approval process. Get it out of the FDA bureaucracy.”

               “Ah, yes,” said Hitchens, “the libertarian view. Let’s assume that AZT proves a bit more effective than, say, laetrile did against cancer. And let’s assume that it’s made available to all. How do `all’ afford it?”

                “Oh, the market will work that out.”

                “I thought it might. You know, it would be a welcome spectacle to see people on their deathbeds crying for socialism instead of God. Tell me, Dolan: you’re expressing this faith in the market as someone who does not have AIDS?”

                “That’s right.”

                “What do you have?”

                “Anemia,” answered Dolan. “Complicated by diabetes.”
                “Type 1? Type 2?”
                “Not sure.”
                “Really? How about whether or not you’re a homosexual? Sure of that?”
                “I’m not. A homosexual, that is. But I have nothing against people who are.”

Hitchens is interviewing him, mind you, in a gay bar.

And that isn’t even remotely the weirdest stuff that was going on as the Cold War wound down—take, for instance, Nancy’s consultations with an astrologer named Joan Quigley. 

                “…in a moment of weakness, ten minutes before boarding the helicopter, she had called Joan Quigley, who’d warned her that Uranus, the planet that had caused Watergate (she’d never mentioned that before!) was now fully in league with Saturn in its operations against Ronnie. Uranus was `a throne toppler,’ said Joan, using this term for the first time, while warning that there wasn’t just impeachment to worry about but new threats to Ronnie safety as well.”  

There’s a lot of satire in Finale, but it is in the end an admiring portrait of a presidency. Mallon is a Republican, of the sort that must be now be considered outmoded. (I met the author once, on a Metro train in D.C. He writes on occasion for The New Yorker where, he told me, he is considered “the house Tory.” But then he rolled his eyes and shook his head. “This stuff”—meaning Trump—“I don’t know.”)

 Approaching forty years after Reagan was first elected, liberals must be wishing now they had not been so dismissive. (Although I think they—we—can be certain that Reagan would be contemptuous of current White House occupant, and his enablers.)

It seems impossible not to recognize now that Reagan was the right man for the moment, when a wicked regime would finally fall. In the epilogue, Reagan does appear, dying of Alzheimer’s.

                “…he begins to touch and examine some of the pictures and souvenirs, all of them laid out so carefully, everything recently dusted….He knows that these things are beautiful, clever. They have been brought to him as gifts, and he has sensed the happiness in the givers. Picture after picture, object after object, all of them infused with good feeling, except for the one thing just past the end of the table, the one object that always displeases and perplexes him: a jagged block of concrete, ripped from something immense, smeared with paint and pocked with hammers, bearing the numbers 1961-1989 and placed on a wooden stand all its own. Whatever it may be, this object, too, has been brought here to make him happy, but it is something cruel, different from everything else in the room, and often, when he stands before it, he feels an impulse to knock it down.”

 

 

American Story: Thirty Days by Greyhound and a Meditation on Patriotism

I’d done a year and a half of college, done okay, sort of, but must have felt that it was a path that was being mapped out by someone else, so that summer in 1980 I mapped out my own course, a bus trip across the country by Greyhound, staying at youth hostels, and lit out. I was 20 years old.
          I remember plotting it out over a map of the United States spread out before me on the floor of my bedroom in the suburban home I grew up in. I would go to New Orleans, then up to St. Louis, out across the Rockies to Colorado, then to Salt Lake, then to San Francisco. Id turn back east stopping at the Grand Canyon; make a stop in Ohio to see my grandparents. And then I would come home. That’s how I decided it, just like that, sitting on the floor and looking at a map. I would do this using a Greyhound Bus Ameripass, which in 1980 allowed you to travel for 30 days, wherever and as much as you needed to, for $300, staying in youth hostels along the way.
          It was a humidity-sodden day in July—the kind of day in D.C. when everyone seems to be somewhere else; the kind of day that feels like you could lose it like so much soggy lint in your pocket—that I boarded a bus at the depot in Silver Spring, Maryland, the neighboring town to my own Bethesda, Maryland. Silver Spring, then, was (at least in my memory) a smoggy, congested concrete attachment to the nation’s capital, surfeited with carry-out joints and failing strip malls. This was just how I remember my departure on this adventure of mine across the country—humid, non-descript, a lost little day in mid-summer. The bus depot manager was a moon-faced fellow in a baseball cap from whom I bought the Ameripass that same day, but I told him I was headed to my first stop in New Orleans. I’d be taking the regular bus south to Richmond—it left two or three times a day—and all of the dozen or so other passengers waiting in the dingy little station were heading either to Richmond or to points north of there along the way. I would be switching buses several times in several stations in the old confederacy before reaching my destination; it was early afternoon when the bus departed and the plan was for me to arrive in New Orleans mid- or late-afternoon of the next day, something more than a 24-hour journey. But when the bus was ready to board the moon-faced manager called out “New Orleans” as if I was heading, maybe, across town or across state. I was in gym shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt carrying one large grimy yellow knapsack stuffed with clothes, a smaller pack with books, a camera, snack food and the like, and a waist pack where I carried cash and my packet of bus tickets.
          It was a young man’s adventure, the kind of thing undertaken with not much more forethought or cautionary planning than I have just described. I had tried the college thing—both my brothers had gone off to schools before and were now graduated into the world—and while I hadn’t done badly, it hadn’t been a good experience. I had taken the second semester of my sophomore year off, come home to live with my parents, and worked at a drug store (a local DC chain then called “People’s Drug Store,” that would be bought out later by CVS). There was a plan in the works for me to attend a different school in the fall, but truthfully I wasn’t much focused on that; what I wanted to do was get out from under what felt like everyone else’s script and scout around the great world of my own country.
          It was an idea born of books I had read—especially, as a teenager John Steinbeck’s "Travels With Charley," "Grapes of Wrath," "Tortilla Flats" and "Cannery Row"—and an ethos I had absorbed from other writers and poets and singers and songwriters, the idea that to discover the country you had to go out and visit it, and in visiting it you would be transformed yourself. So that your own self-discovery was intimately linked with your discovery of what it meant—or some small piece of what it meant—to be an American.
Something like that. Sounds a tad melodramatic, perhaps, but it’s a theme that runs deep in American literature. I’ll confess up front, though, that while there are some highlights, viewed from a certain vantage point it can look mostly like a kid in sneakers and a t-shirt on a bus, drinking a shitload of beer wherever he was able. (And I should add that the reader will have to trust me; I have no documentary evidence of this adventure, neither pictures nor the diary I carried have survived, and some pockets of this excursion have blurred with time.)
And yet…I have today, more than 35 years later, a great affection and respect for my younger, adventurous self, and it was a journey that has stayed with me. I go over these recollections every now and again, trying to polish and make shine what it was that stays with me, what it is that seems significant today. It did change me, and it was one in which I did come to know my amazing country more intimately. This is an American story.

************
It went mostly as planned. I toured the French Quarter in New Orleans, then stayed two nights in a dormitory at Tulane and rode the streetcar up and down the Garden District; spent one night in a homeless shelter in sweltering St. Louis (it was something like 111 degrees) because I arrived on a Sunday and the hostel was closed (so that didn’t go quite as planned); spent four nights in Boulder, Colorado, trying to absorb the fact that people there casually walked around doing their business with those mountains in their backyard; spent a couple of nights in Salt Lake, treating myself to a Holiday Inn (what I mostly remember is how clean the city was, and my amazement that there were non-Mormon churches, plenty of them, there.) From San Francisco, I hitchhiked north to the wine country, and south down the coast to Carmel (receiving a ride in a pick-up truck I will never forget). Turning back east, I stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona where the youth hostel at the time was atop a bar-café called Charlies; because of its proximity to the Canyon, it attracted young people from all over the world as well as students from Arizona State, and folks from the town--it was a lively place at night and in the morning you could hitch a ride to the Canyon, 90 miles north.
          I learned a lot that summer and I wonder why it feels slightly embarrassing to say that one of the things l learned was to love my country. Certainly, I thought I loved my country before, or would have said so if someone had asked me—after all, I had said the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school and sung (or lipsynced) the National Anthem at ballgames and had been told through twelve-plus years of American public school that I had everything to be grateful for being born here. But getting to see the colossal land of my birth or a fraction of it, gave me a physical, sensual sense of the country I hadn’t had before. I suppose it may have first come to me with my first glimpse of the Rockies; it was a breathtaking source of wonder to awaken in Boulder, Colorado and step outside and see a mountain—not the little green hills we call mountains back east, but a great, jagged-tooth eruption of God’s earth tipped at the top with snow—looming over you. It will humble anyone’s provincialism. Standing on the grounds of the youth hostel in San Francisco at Fort Mason on Fisherman’s Wharf at night, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city, I marveled at the distance I had travelled, and at the vastness of the country, aware for the first time and in a way that has stayed with me, that we are part of something that is larger than our own narrow ideas about it.
        (There are times, I confess, when I sometimes don’t feel very American and think I might “fit in” better in, say, England or some chilly Scandanavian place, where everyone’s emotional temperature is lower. I can’t quite master the habit of sunny optimism, the idea that the trend is always up, that it is always morning in America and I think, in fact, American culture would benefit from a better apprehension of the tragic sense of life. But this is a matter of temperment. The truth is, I couldn’t live anywhere else.)
         Probably, people like me—by which I mean people who identify, with varying degrees of allegiance, with the political left of center—should be less shy about expressing profound feelings of patriotism; that reticence has allowed others, who have the most anemic and emaciated counterfeit of love for their country, to portray us as enemies of a most fundamental sort. It’s an easily manipulated (and easily counterfeited) thing, patriotism. “The last refuge of scoundrels,” an Englishman said of it four centuries ago. More recently, Joan Didion wrote in an essay, “On Morality” that she distrusted the word “morality,” distrusted it’s use in any but the most irreducible sense—as when (this is just how irreducible she meant the only sense in which it was trustable) you vow not to leave a dead body out on the desert, because the buzzards and coyotes will feed it on it. That’s “immoral.” Anything more abstract, or symbolic than that, than vowing not to leave dead bodies on the desert floor, is horseshit. 

          Well, I feel just about exactly the same way about patriotism. To me it means something real, that awareness that struck me when I first saw the Rockies or looked back across the country from the wharf in San Francisco, of the vastness of the country, its variety, its neon-lit gaudiness, the realization that it is larger than my, or anyone’s, imagining. This sense of the whole—derived from a little bit of reading, a little bit of travel, a little bit of education, and, okay, maybe, a little bit of hearsay—is fused inseparably with my own personal experience of being an American: childhood summers in rural Ohio or on the eastern shore, watching the moon landing late at night on a scratchy and crackling television set on the eastern shore, the riotous American abundance at county fairs on warm summer nights. I carry it around with me, this awareness—just as I carry around with me the awareness of my name (though I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my name, or boasting to others, “I am Mark!”).
        The problem, maybe, is that patriotism is easily identified with its symbols—a flag, an anthem—which are then easily fetishized. Consider: some black athletes take a knee during the national anthem; okay, you might say with reason, it’s an act that requires no great courage from young people earning millions of dollars to play a game six months of the year. But it does stem from something real, at least as real as the experiences I have described (if not a lot more so) the felt experience among black Americans that they are more liable to die or be roughly and unfairly treated at the hands of the police. (The game they play, by the way, despite the millions of dollars, is going to discard them when they are not yet out of their youth, and when they may be significantly brain damaged for the rest of their lives).
        But mark the response from the Vice President of the United States who flies to a football game with the express purpose of walking out of the game when the players kneel. Now here is an act that approximates almost perfectly the exact juncture of cynicism, phoniness, opportunism and infantalism. Call this nearly mythical place, Horseshit Central. Here is an act that requires exactly zero courage, costs exactly nothing (to the Vice President; the rest of us foot the bill for the plane ride); it may have leant some thin, short-lived symbolic support to police officers who may feel themselves aggrieved—maybe—but the audience the Vice President was really playing to wasn’t cops, but people whose purchase on ersatz patriotism becomes tighter once they’ve sunk into the barcolounger and started in on that first six-pack. Oh, look! He’s walking out! Look at him go! Yep, there is he, walking out! You can almost hear one of those nameless, brainless “color” commentators who litter the professional football airwaves, saying, “There he goes, Joe, walking out! Is that some integrity? Or What?”
       The tacky and sinister phoniness of this repellent charade is enough to make you read the last rites over American self-government; to borrow a phrase from Christopher Hitchens, you can’t eat enough to vomit enough. For the record, I think I would prefer the players stood during the anthem, if only because their protest contributes to the pervasive sense of entropy everywhere, the sense that things are falling apart. I like patriotic songs and think it is a sweet thing to sing them at sporting events, although—forgive me—the Star Spangled Banner is just a song, not a great one. It's difficult to sing and the lyrics are grammatically a little weird. I prefer God Bless America or America the Beautiful or My Country Tis of Thee.
       It was probably inevitable—given the bad shape professional football is in and its dubious future—that the owners would give in to the President and enact their little ban on freedom of speech. The President’s supporters are free to hail this as some kind of victory, but if mandatory political rituals are your idea of patriotism, you might want to try North Korea. You can stand at attention all the live long day.
       Not every topic of discussion about patriotism, or that evokes declarations of patriotism, is so frivilous and dumb. The debate about immigration engages fundamental questions—What is an American? Who is an American? What does it mean to be an American?—and things real rather than only symbolic. A border is a very real thing—I can show you where it is on a map—and the liberal left (never failing to seize on an opportunity to miss an opportunity) makes a big mistake when it speaks of open borders, or in platitudes such as “no human being is illegal.”
     `But an immigrant (and her child) is also quite real, and the immigrant—almost always throughout American history derided as dirty, disease-carrying, or criminal—is in the realest sense just exactly what America is about. (Want to engage in an act of patriotism? Visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York.)
      The conservative writer Brett Stephens recently made the interesting case that the United States needs more immigration. And he had this to say:

“Immigrants — legal or otherwise — make better citizens than native-born Americans. More entrepreneurial. More church-going. Less likely to have kids out of wedlock. Far less likely to commit crime. These are the kind of attributes Republicans claim to admire.
   Or at least they used to, before they became the party of Trump — of his nativism, demagoguery, and penchant for capricious cruelty. It was nice to hear Republican legislators decry the family separation policy. But there’s no sugarcoating the fact that a plurality of Republicans, 46 percent, favored it, while only 32 percent were opposed, according to an Ipsos poll commissioned by the Daily Beast.
    This isn’t a party that’s merely losing its policy bearings. It’s one that’s losing its moral sense. If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, then opposition to immigration is the conservatism of morons. It mistakes identity for virtue, entitlement for merit, geographic place for moral value. In a nation of immigrants, it’s un-American.”

     Then, too, there is this: It occurred to me that anyone seeking a picture of our possibly bleak future should contemplate not the “illegals” coming over our border, but the face of a white man legally born in the United States—the 21-year old gunman who two years ago shot nine Charleston, South Carolina churchgoers at a Bible study. I suppose this young man might be able to name the author of The Declaration of the Independence, and possibly “Huckleberry Finn.” But I doubt seriously he could say who wrote “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Leaves of Grass,” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve”; doubt seriously he could say the historical significance of Plymouth Rock, Jamestown, or Williamsburg, let alone Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Pearl Harbor, or Selma, Alabama; doubt seriously he had ever visited a National Park, or could even name the state where the Grand Canyon is.
Illiterate, or anyway sub-literate, bereft of any knowledge of our history, literature or geography, he is only nominally American. Jobless, mentally ill, vaguely aware that he is somehow falling behind, he does not have a high school education, but he does have enough information, gleaned from surfing the Internet, to determine that it is someone else who is the cause of his troubles. And he does have access to a gun.
        To carry your country around with you--that is the beginning and end of patriotism. Two of my favorite writers and thinkers are Andrew Sullivan and the late Christopher Hitchens—both of them Anglo-immigrant writers who never declined to extol the virtues of America (they can also be acidly critical of this country). Hitchens had this to say on an interview show when a caller asked him to say whether he thought America is the greatest country on earth:
        "I think I like America most on all the days when people are not going around `USA! USA! We're number one! We're the greatest!' I prefer the days when they don't do that. It's a matter of `always think of it, never speak of it.’"
       But then Hitchens reflected and added, "Of course, objectively as well as subjectively, the American Revolution is now the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success: the idea that you could create a multicultural democracy over a vast expanse of the earth's surface that could possibly be emulated by other people.”

*****

I was on my way back from the Canyon, my last day there, hitching south back to Flagstaff, and I had gotten started late because I had lingered in the Canyon for a few hours before heading back up and by the time I got to the lip and began hitchhiking back it was late afternoon. The traffic going south from the Canyon is on interstate 180, which breaks southeast toward Flagstaff about 45 minutes in, at a little spot on the map called Valle; but some of the traffic continues due south to Williams, and my first ride dropped me at the intersection with Flagstaff still the better part of an hour away.
    The traffic had seemed to slow—most of the families had headed back to wherever they were going earlier in the afternoon—and I looked around at a vast desert around me as the sun began to set. There was, I think I remember, a building of some kind in the middle distance, but it was pretty lonely out there and a sense of foreboding began to build as I scanned the empty highway for southbound traffic. Darkness was not far off.
   It’s a moment that has stayed with me, as defining as any of the other more dramatic points along this journey—arriving at night in New Orleans, seeing the Rockies for the first time, the ride in the pick-up along the Big Sur, the Canyon, looking out at San Francisco at night from the Wharf—but to anyone viewing the scene they would see only a guy with a knapsack and his thumb out over an empty highway. It was an entirely interior moment, but I have never forgotten it, and have come to believe in it as a kind of hinge in my life.
   It was, simply, a decision not to panic, a determination not to be scared—although I was. That’s all I can tell you. I had come this far, I had charted this journey on my own, I had staked a claim of sorts on a vast, vast country, and now I felt myself to be a different, older person than when I had left—and somehow I would work this out. (In truth, I’m not sure what I could have done had the situation really gotten desperate; there was, maybe, that building in the distance—it might have been a post-office or some such thing—and there may have been a payphone there; maybe I thought I would stand on the highway and force someone, or a truck, to stop. Who knows? ) Anyway, I stuck my thumb out and waited. It did start to darken, but of course in time a ride came and I arrived back at Charlie’s well before nightfall.
   Maybe a lot of the most important moments in our life are like that moment of mine on the desert highway—private, interior transitions and epiphanies that can scarcely be conveyed to any others. A few weeks after returning home, I was off to a new school experience, a little bit more mature, more confident that I was capable of writing my own script. I had changed.
   Someday, I would like to recapitulate this adventure (although now I’m not sure I could deal with 30 days on a bus!). I’d like to travel a northern route, through the Great Lakes region, the iron range of Minnesota, the Dakotas, the great Northwest. I’d like to visit my country again.
   At the conclusion of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Chief Broom, newly escaped from the institution to which he had been harnessed his adult life, contemplates the open road and the continent that surrounds him. “I might go to Canada eventually, but I think I’ll stop along the Columbia on the way. I’d like to check around Portland and Hood River and The Dalles to see if there’s any of the guys I used to know back in the village….Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.

“I been away too long.” 

 Me too.

Piano Lesson

Her back is turned to me
A small Asian beauty in black
Straddling the bench at the ominous grand,
A concentrate of my daughter’s face
Behind her in a shiver of light.
Alone, it is just the two of them now,
And they work.

Well, it is I that brought her here,
I say to myself,
Sinking in the sofa in a darkening room,
Apart, and pay the monstrous fee.
I have been undone by small chores
I think, as if dishes were not done too
By elites of discipline I never could muster
And now on the outside looking in, never will.
They work.

Not just piano but pianissimo
Through the hour made long
By the early winter dark
And the repetitions of “softer, softer….”
She is learning, my daughter, from the heir
Of an ancient dynasty, the world is nuanced,
Infinite in believable interpretations
If only you are trained to summon them,
And having summoned, can believe in them,
And by belief give reason to believe.
But that, I suppose, is for the advanced.
We once saw the teacher in a recital hall
Seduce the Brandenburg from a harpsichord
So that we thought it might get up—
I mean the music itself!—climb into the seats
And shake hands with us.

They work until the hour winds down
And the teacher releases her back to me
We look alike, it’s said, and I do bear
The ghost in my face of the child 
My daughter will soon cease to be.
Cease, for I know now in that hour
One of the ways of becoming
Someone other than who she might
Have to be, has been slipped
Into her fingers like a code.
And already as we head to the door
She has become less mine, more her own,
Than she was before.

Reflections at the Lorraine Hotel

  

The modesty, almost the meanness, is what strikes you when you see it, the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel—so familiar from the photo everyone has seen of Dr. King’s friends standing over his body and pointing across the street at the boarding house where the shooter had made his lair—and that room with the thin carpet and the shabby curtains where he stayed. Memphis, is a modest city, Beale street notwithstanding, an American southern city; in the center of town, in the courthouse square—a sweet quiet little green space—a plaque commemorates the first mayor of the town, who proclaimed that his most cherished accomplishment was being able to look out over this little park and watch the birds. The streets around the Lorraine Hotel are modest, too, crooked little streets with grass overgrown in the cracks in the pavement, tumbledown houses and burnt red brick buildings in need of some repair. Millions of people have by now passed this way, through these streets, but it does not have the feel of a tourist destination—at least not as Washington or New York or Chicago would conceive of one.
   Maybe only someone from Washington could be struck by the modesty of the place. How did one suppose an entourage of black men might have been travelling in Tennessee, in 1968, when they weren’t entirely welcome? Or maybe it is the immodesty of our time, when our “leaders” and “spokespersons” are bloated, gorgon egos riding on digital airwaves, tweets, disconnected entirely from the real, deteriorating American landscape they claim to speak for. The hotel, that balcony, the humble room—room 306—preserved as the culminating exhibit in the National Civil Rights Museum to which the hotel is attached, resonate with the street-level realness of the time. King and his friends were there in Memphis, not to attend a conference or to christen a monument or a new building or to receive an award or enunciate a new social theory of race relations. He was there to support a sanitation workers’ strike.
   It’s been said that 1968 was the worst year in American history (I think our time may now make that claim obsolete) but there is a compelling sense of the real, the particular, about the battles of that year and the years leading up to it, as if the period exhales the breath of its excited, hyperventilating participants. Christian theology speaks of a “scandal of particularity”—the outrageousness, the unacceptability of the idea that the divine would make itself manifest into an unwashed human being, in a time and place, dusty backward ancient Palestine. The Bible is repetitive throughout in its assertion that God works in just this way; the arc of salvation history is bent not by people making the loudest noise.
   Writing in Harpers in 1961 James Baldwin said of MLK that “he has succeeded, in a way no Nero before him has managed to do, to carry the battle into the individual heart and make its resolution the province of the individual will. He has made it a matter, on both sides of the racial fence, of self-examination.”
   Baldwin’s writing from the period, too, exhales that breath of the real, like steam coming off the hot summer pavements. I first read his magisterial essay, “The Fire Next Time”—actually published as two separate tracks (“My Dungeon Shook” and “Down at the Cross”)—as a teenager in the 1970s when so much about that period seems to have exhausted itself. How I came across his work I don’t know—it may have been my mother’s influence. Or it may have been simply because I was, at the time, deeply enamored of everything about “the sixties” and felt that I had been born ten years too late; one book may have led to another and to Baldwin.
   If King insisted the “race problem” was a problem of the human heart, Baldwin in his writing took it further to say that it was more explicitly a problem for white people to overcome; it was for white people to liberate themselves—and for black people to insist that they do so—from what Baldwin called “the racial nightmare” of white supremacy. What Baldwin couldn't tolerate was the notion that white people could comfort themselves with the idea that they--we--had done some great deed by letting them eat at the lunch counter, as if it were a privilege, ours to confer. (Contemplate this--something I learned from George Will: when Jackie Robinson made his appearance in the major leagues, and the Dodgers would eat at a restaurant or tavern, some places would throw away all of the plates and silverware on which Robinson might have eaten after the team left. There is a great essay to be written, if it hasn't already been, about the relationship between prejudice and the enormous human fear of germs, of bacteria and of disease) . Anyway, the liberation that Baldwin wrote about (and King testified to) was something more far reaching than than integrated school or lunch counter.
   I have uttered in my time some embarrassingly callow, shallow and fatuous things about race from my protected status—I argued in my twenties in the 1980s that institutional systemic racism was over—so I’ll resist it now, except to observer that perhaps it was too much to expect. I don’t know. Or perhaps the wheels are still turning. It is very hard to stand in front of that hotel, that balcony, in those humble streets of Memphis and not think sadly of the distance that has been travelled, or not, since that time to ours—Black Lives Matter, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, school shootings, Charlottesville, Donald Trump. Baldwin asked us in Down at the Cross to consider the face and eyes of a southern sheriff (and he must have had Alabama’s notorious Jim Clark in mind) for a glimpse at the spiritual bankruptcy that results from the white American grip on its delusion. I shudder to think what Baldwin would make of the men and women who stand in vast throngs at Donald Trump’s rallies braying for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.
   What will become of us? “Here we are,” Baldwin wrote in the thunderous conclusion to Down at the Cross, “at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise….If we do not falter in our duty now, we be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

"7 Days in Entebbe": I Fight So You Can Dance

The opening scene of "7 Days in Entebbe" introduces us to Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company in rehearsal of an electrically weird choreography. I thought: this is going to be different, this is going to be good.
  Alas. The movie was just about sort of okay. "7 Days in Entebbe" turns out to be a fairly conventional “thriller” about the famous Israeli rescue raid in 1976, but the dance number and the film’s none-too-original meditation on the endlessness of the Israeli-Palestinian war over a twice-promised land aspire to give the film some higher calling it doesn’t really live up to.
  The dance itself—apart from whether it works within the structure of this otherwise conventional popular movie—is inspired and the choreography is remarkable. Alongside the narrative of the hijacking of an Air France passenger jet by a Palestinian and West German radical left group, and the planning in Israel of a military operation to rescue the hostages, we witness the dance company, one of whose performers is the girlfriend of a soldier who will take part in the rescue raid, polishing its work. Twenty some performers are seated on chairs in an arc and begin, in shadows, to throw their limbs about in sharp synchrony; it has the feel of something disturbingly unnatural, like the ritualized movements of an autistic child, and conveys the sense of being captive to an exhausting, unnatural, and repetitive exercise, one that will never end. But it is at the same time beautiful in its precision—a violent precision, if that is possible, a marvel of synchronized execution, (just like the raid itself, carried out by a unit of Israel’s most fearsome fighters). And over and over, as they rehearse, one of the dancers always falls out, pitches forward from the chair, collapses on the floor.
   One soldier, Jonathan Netanyahu (whose letters I first read in my 20s) was killed in the operation. The raid has become legendary, a model for heroic planning and lethal precision. In fact, it did not go off perfectly as planned, and a lot could have gone wrong. The narrative of the preparation for the raid revolves around the endlessness of the war and its inescapability. Like the dancers, one of whom is the girlfriend of a soldier who will take part in the rescue raid, the combatants on both sides are trapped in a repetitive and profoundly unnatural exercise. “I fight so you can dance,” the soldier tells his girlfriend.
   Compelling as the choreography is, its juxtaposition with—or its insertion into—a relatively workaday narrative feels slightly forced. The rest of the movie (that’s how distinct these two mechanisms feel; there is the dance and there is the rest of the movie) is a mixed bag. There is at least one really fine performance by Lior Ashkenazi who plays Rabin—cautious, tortured, a former fighter and general who knows the realities of war and is reluctant to commit 200 of his very best men to a mission that might have been calamitous. His military underlings, too, play their part with a plausible verisimilitude.
   What is distinctly weird and off-putting, though, is the depiction of Shimon Peres. Played by Eddie Marsan, he looks, first of all, just plain bizarre—over made-up, maybe, or shot at angles that seem to emphasize an odd shape to his head and face. The character is played with an unsmiling, shifty-eyed calculation, meant to convey the sometimes Machiavellian political maneuvering for which Peres was known. (His rivalry with Rabin, who regarded him as an inveterate conniver, is legend among Israelis of that generation.) The effect though is, again, weird; he comes off more like some drugged Manchurian candidate.
   A little better is the depiction of the two German terrorists, Bridgette Kuhlman and Wilfred Bose, deluded idealists sidelined in the operation by their Palestinian counterparts who don’t harbor any illusions about the Israeli’s willingness to negotiate. They are plagued by their German-ness, and aware of “how it looks”—Germans singling out Jews for death when it comes time to separate the Israeli passengers of the Air France flight from the others. The portrayal of Kuhlman, especially, hints at the thin border that divides radical idealism and mental illness. For a really electric dissection of that border go see, "The Bader-Meinhof Complex," about the Red Army, the West German underground group of which Kuhlman and Bose’s  Revolutionary Cells, was an off-shoot.
   The makers of "7 Days in Entebbe" want to tell us something more than a story about a daring rescue mission. It doesn’t really come off. But it did make me want to go learn more about the Batsheva Dance Company.

A Conference in Hawaii

A conspiracy of intention brought the delegates together

To the mirrored halls of these meeting rooms

And the marble lobby with its water falls and stone statues

Of Island gargoyles designed to invoke
A colonial benevolence no one recalls.

It began in the conventional way.

The heat grew desperate in the rooms
Amid a panic of commitment,
Opposing positions took on a flesh
That seemed to walk among us,
And for a while it became possible to think
That our sullen flesh might soon be shorn  
For a new and unimaginably brilliant habitation.

But then from the 23^rd floor
A stick figure in black like a doodle by Kafka
Lofted a dove from its hands
That fluttered a while before it fell
Through a shaft of Hawaiian light,
Turning as it dropped into a clutter of littering confetti.
And when I looked up again
The earnest delegates and their forbearing wives,
Their motions and resolutions,
Were gone.