[Apology] and bragging about it in a way that distorted the whole story. MIKE DUKAKIS, Let's forget this one matter. I know it would WATCH YOUR MAIL do my heart and soul a lot of good. I assure you that I have no ax to grind with you or, frankly, with anyone else. My illness has taught me From a letter sent last June by , then something about the nature of humanity, love, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to brotherhood, and relationships that I never un- Tom Turnipseed, a Columbia, South Carolina, at- derstood and probably never would have. So torney. In 1980 Atwater organized polling for the from that standpoint, there is some truth and campaign to reelect , a Republican good in everything. Aside from that, I feel like running against Turnipseed for Congress. When the little boy in the manure pile that Ronald Turnipseed, who had undergone electroshock ther- apy in his youth, accused Atwater of using telephone Reagan talked about. He was shoveling away pollsters to falsely inform voters that Turnipseed be- and looked up and smiled and said, "There's got longed to the NAACP, Atwater replied, ''I'm not to be a pony in there somewhere." The closest going to respond to that guy. In college, I under- thing to a pony that I can think of would be for stand they hooked him up to jumper cables." Spence you to help put this thing behind us. won the election. Atwater, who is currently being Sincerely, treated for a' brain tumor, resigned as chairman Lee recently. Turnipseed accepted Atwater's apology. P.S. Tom, this is very sincere!

Dear Tom: Nothing is confidential in politics, but as Ilie [Essay) here and write this letter, I want you to know that that is my intention. As far as I'm con- WHOSE REVOLUTION cerned, you may do as you please with the let- ter, but it is very important to me that I let you IN CENTRAL EUROPE? know that, of everything that has happened in my career, one of the low points remains the so- From "Impressions from a Journey in Central Eu- called jumper cables episode. rope," by Michael Howard, in the October 25, As both of us know, it has never been fully or 1990, issue of the London Review of Books. truthfully explained, and it has been rehashed Howard, who for many years was professor of mod- so many times that we have both been hurt by ern history at Oxford in England, now teaches histo- it. I've been under the weather lately, and it's ry at Yale University. my hope that you'll grant a sick man a favor and try to forget it. Please understand that for the last few years I have tried not to talk about it Casual tourists from the West, traveling in and I've tried to rectify it, but it goes on and on air-conditioned buses and staying in modern due to the Fourth Estate. government-sponsored hotels, may be pleasant- Tom, I want you to know that I clearly under- ly surprised by their first sight of Central Eu- stand that you are a special person. Your talent rope. In what used to be East Germany the and your uniqueness and your specialness never countryside looks as prosperous and cultivated escaped me for a minute. as anywhere in the West. City centers have As I reflect (which I'm doing a great deal been tidied up and carefully rebuilt, while the these days), there are very few people that I feel apartment blocks on the outskirts are no worse a need to get square with, and you are one of than one would find in the United Kingdom- them. While I don't anticipate that we will be- in some places rather better. In Poland agricul- come political allies or that either of us will ture is picturesquely archaic, and in the bustling change our philosophy or our outlook, I do want small towns the people look as well clothed and you to know that I would be one happy guy if we fed as they would at home. In Czechoslovakia could put some of this bullshit behind us. I'd Prague sparkles like a jewel, its streets thronged like to think that if I ran into you at the YMCA with happy holidaymakers. As for Hungary, it is in Columbia that I could get some of that T ur- hard to realize one is no longer in the West: the nipseed humor and philosophy. huge plains being efficiently (to all appear- Tom, I ask that you think about one thing ances) harvested by echelons of combines; the when you analyze this letter, and that's that I'm signs of prosperous well-being in industrial cen- not writing this because of politics or anything ters like Miskolc; the weekenders crowding the of that nature. I made a mistake. I don't want to shores of Lake Balaton; above all, Budapest, a sit down and rehash it, but part of the mistake city in its elegance still more comparable to Par- was being twenty-five years old, acting cute, is than Vienna-is there anything seriously

READINGS 31 wrong here? The region is certainly "backward" economy with unusual skill, nostalgia for the compared with Western Europe and the United good old days when the currency was stable and States, but it alwayswas, The cars and roads are jobs were secure may become a serious problem. smaller, the trains shabbier, the shops fewer and There is something a little disquieting about the selling a more limited range of goods. But so it way in which the new political elites blame was with Spain or southern Italy a few decades their difficulties on the people they have to gov- ago, a "backwardness" almost attractive to the ern: on the sluggish reluctance of bureaucrats to overfed, overurbanized Westerner and, any- take responsibility, on the unwillingness of how, surely remediable by a judicious infusion peasants to take back the land so freely offered of capital, technology, and expertise. to them, on the reluctance to participate in Appearances are not totally deceptive. The elections, on the habits of black-market dealing image of Eastern Europe as a miserable gulag op- and petty corruption that grew up under a com- pressed by Soviet power was always overdrawn. mand economy. The cynic may well recall Even in gulags prisoners find waysto get by. The Bertolt Brecht's advice to the East German re- system worked, up to a point. The hard work of gime after the Berlin uprising of 1953: Rather the Germans, the vitality of the Poles, the inge- than elect a new government, they had better nuity of the Hungarians, the canniness of the elect a new people. For" the masses;" to use that Czechs, all made it work or found ways round it inadequate term, had as little to do with the if it did not. Life was admittedly hell for the in- revolutions of 1989 as they had with those of tellectuals and the entrepreneurial classes, all 1848. The old order fell not as the result of a the people that we in the West knew and liked; great popular upheaval but because it had lost all the people on whom the ultimate progress self-confidence, was not prepared to defend it- and prosperity of their country depended. But self, and crumbled at the first sign of urban in- the industtial workers in the cities and the surrection. The exceptions, of course, were the poorer workers on the land enjoyed a degree of Poles.There the Catholic Church had preserved security, if not indeed prosperity, undreamed of across class barriers a stubborn and universal by their parents. No one was very badly off. sense of national resistance that had gradually Things were very slowly beginning to get better, and peacefully found political expression in much as they had been getting better in France Solidarity: a body so clearly expressive of the na- in the last years of the ancien regime. With con- tional will that the regime prudently decided to tinued suppression of the malcontents, contin- admit it to a share of power. But the Czechs had ued isolation from the West, so reasoned the been too effectively cowed, and the Hungarians apparatchiks, they might go on getting better- were too well fed, to make trouble on a major if they were not already as good as anyone could scale. The Jakes and Kadar regimes enjoyed the reasonably expect, legitimacy of inertia, and that is not a force to It is important to bear this in mind, for once be underrated. The passivity with which they the present excitement is over, and unless the allowed themselves to be swept awayonce it was new rulers manage the transition to a market clear that the Russians would not help them showed how little confidence they had in their own achievements. They did not even try, as Iliescu did in Romania, to recruit strong-arm squads from the factories or the collective farms to deal with the urban, largely bourgeois insur- ACME gents who overthrew them. "The masses" stood LOGGINS (2 by and watched that overthrow with indiffer- ence, if not contempt. Their successors in government are very con- " I scious that they do not yet enjoy the support of •• those masses. They have been at pains to estab- lish their democratic credentials by instituting pluralistic politics, free elections, and elaborate provision for "human rights," but they are deep- ly worried, as we have seen, by the apparent in- difference of "the people" in whose name they have taken power. To blame this indifference on bad habits produced by forty years of com- munist rule is, however, wishful thinking. More likely it results from the caution of the good sol- dier Schweik, who has seen governments come From The Spectator, the London weekly. and seen them go and will judge the new leaders

32 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/FEBRUARY 1991 not by their good intentions but by their results. formal democratic structures will be relevant Democracy has always been a fragile plant in only insofar as it enables them to do so, whether Central Europe, let alone farther east. The sur- through mobilizing public opinion or by attract- vival of the new regimes, and perhaps of the ing essential support from the West. ideals they incarnate, depends less on the demo- Those likely to do well in the new market cratic title deeds that appear so impressive in economies of Central Europe are not the civil- the West than on their capacity to make the ized, Western-oriented intellectuals who come economic system work more effectively than to conferences and seminars and spend a term their predecessors did. The bottom line in American universities, but other elements T is not the ballot box but la paule au pot. not nearly so nice. They will be the former black-marker.operators and the former apparat- 10 survive, the new regimes have to solve chiks-insofar as the two categories are dis- two gigantic problems. The first is to modernize tinct. These are the people who have the their economic infrastructure after forty years of contacts, the local influence, who know how to stagnation and neglect. The second is to move run things. These are, unfortunately, the kind from a command to a market economy-a task of people without whom capitalism cannot get universally recognized to be urgent and neces- going in the first place or continue to function sary but that is bound to be, both politically and for very long-Balzacian creatures, such as socially, deeply traumatic. The establishment of those who laid the foundations for the prosper- ity of Western Europe and the United States. They will be distinctly unpopular with those who lack their dubious talents, and their activi- ties may lead people to wonder whether there was not something to be said for so- [Paper Dolls] cialism after all. THE PRESIDENT'S It would, therefore, not be surprising if quite BIRTHDAY SUIT bitter social conflict were to develop in Central Europe. In fact, the fundamental problems of the region are not political or economic. They are social. They have less to do with the mecha- nism of the state than with the habits of the community-with the nature, or the absence, of what Ralf Dahrendorf and others have called "civil society." There is nothing necessarily wrong with social conflict. The problem is how to create political systems that can contain that conflict and make it fruitful. Some Western models may be helpful and some techniques may be transferable, but only at a very superficial level. Fundamentally, what Central Europe needs today is nor so much formal democracy on the Western model as strong governments com- manding broad consensus, responsive to popular needs, and operating within the rule of law. If multiparty democracy can produce such governments, well and good, but the going will be very tough. Even with Western support on an unimaginably lavish scale, the economic sit- uation is likely to get worse before it can get bet- ter. And here the analogy with 1848-1848 in From Paper Dolls in Full Color, by France, that is-does seem depressingly rel- TrJm Tierney, one of a series of books of presidential pa- evant. If the new political parties cannot pro- per dolls published by Dover Publications in Mineola, duce political stability and economic prosperity, New York. Tierney. a New York City artist, researched they will inherit the popular contempt that at- the clothing worn by President Reagan at various stages of his life. The figure at righr, "The Reagans on the cam- tached to the old order, and their destruction paign trail, 1980," is one of many costumes that can be will be greeted with the same indifference. at cached to the basic Reagan doll ar left. There has been an unspoken assumption in the West that the only obstacle to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe adopting Western

H HARPER'S MAGAZINE/FEBRUARY 1991 values and structures has been the imposition by the Soviet Union of foreign ideology and for- [List] eign domination. It was assumed that once these political shackles were removed, the peo- ASSASSINATION ples could, like released prisoners, resume a "normal" political life. PLOTS However, the history of Central Europe has produced a political culture distinct from that of From a list, distributed to visitors to the Congres- the West. There has not been the growth of sional Cemetery, of people buried there who were self-governing institutions from the bottom, "involved in the events surrounding the life, assassi- such as occurred in Anglo-Saxon societies, or nation, funeral or burial of Abraham Lincoln." The the drastic destruction of the feudal order and cemetery, which contains more than 75,000 the institution of a legal, administrative, and corpses, was originally created in 1807 so that mem- political framework based on a concept of the bers of Congress could be buried in Washington, Rights of Man, which took place in Western D. C. Though members were buried there in the Europe after 1789. In Central and Eastern Eu- nineteenth cenzurv, most sites have been purchased rope centuries of agrarian feudalism and au- by private citizens. thoritarian rule were bound to produce a political culture of acquiescence if not submis- D James W. Pumphrey (1833-1906)-John sion, tempered by skepticism and evasion. Vig- Wilkes Booth rented horse from him. orous individual enterprise was unlikely to D Seaton Munroe (?-1896)-Lawyer, attend- flourish, and those most likely to promote it ed Booth inquest. emigrated in large numbers to the United D Charles Henry Nichols (1820-1889)- Tes- States. In particular, intellectuals unwilling to tified in defense of Lewis Payne [one of four peo- be assimilated into the mechanism of the state ple hanged for their involvement in Lincoln's were forced into interior or actual emigration- assassination]. a situation that won them sympathy from their D James Crowhill Hall (1805-1889)-Physi- colleagues abroad but tended to alienate them cian at Lincoln's deathbed. from their own peoples, of whom they too easily D John Edward Buckingham (1828-1909)- conceived an ideal image very different from the Night doorkeeper at Ford's Theatre. mundane reality. How can we, from such roots, D Charles Allen (1835-1908)-Washington expect model liberal democracies to emerge physician, testified in defense of Dr. Mudd [the overnight? physician who was imprisoned for life for setting It is important, therefore', not to expect too Booth's broken leg after Booth shot the much too soon. Dramatic appeals have been president] . made to the effect that "democracy" is under D Peter Taltavul (1835-1881)-Operated tav- threat in Central Europe and that it is the duty ern next to Ford's Theatre. of the West to pour in money in order to shore it D Henry Pratt Cattell (1838-1915)-Em- up. There are certainly good reasons why we balmed Lincoln's body. should provide the new regimes with all the D Francis Maria Scala (1819-1903)-U.S. help we can in order to modernize their econo- Marine Band member, played often for Lincoln. mies-good, practical economic and ecological D John Alexander W. Clarvoe (1831-1879)- reasons-but such contributions will not neces- Metro Police detective. sarily safeguard "democracy." A "democratic" D Frank T. Sands (1833-1868)-Undertaker, regime that depends on foreign support for its provided coffin and accompanied Lincoln's fu- credibility is something of a contradiction in neral train. terms. Democracy is a matter of political habits, D David E. Herold (1842-1865)-Convicted not of formal institutions, and the development conspirator [hanged for his involvement in Lin- of these habits takes time. coln's assassination]. Above all, we must beware the Manichaean D Charles W. David (?-1870)-Defense wit- tendency, so prevalent in the United States, to ness for David Herold. divide the regimes into totalitarian or demo- D James Henry St. Clair {?-1883)-Usher at cratic, slave or free, and ignore the gradations Ford's Theatre. that lie between. In Central Europe Marxism- D Joseph G. Shelton (1829-1907)-Lincoln's Leninism, with all its cumbrous apparatuses of guard at White House. political and intellectual oppression, has been D Charles Forbes {?-1895)-Lincoln's person- effectively and permanently destroyed. It did al valet and friend, secured box at Ford's not work. But pluralistic democracy may not Theatre. work either, at least not yet. If it does, it is likely to be along lines rather different from our own.

READINGS 35 We must accept that in the new "European the logic of our experience, and trust entirely to house" envisioned by Mikhail Gorbachev there methods that maintain their authority by reduc- are likely to be many apartments, and that in ing everything else to absurdity, No myths some of them we may find ourselves not entirely about the origins of life or the nativity of the comfortable. stars are as staggeringly implausible as the ac- counts of these events we receive from biologists and astrophysicists. Credo quia absurdum est is a first principle of science as well as of theology. [Etymology] And, I might add, with much recent evidence BY A LOGIC to support me, of literary exegesis as well. To return to croker sack. It has nothing to do THAT ELUDES US with croakers. There is absolutely no historical evidence to support it. To croak, of course, is also to die, and this inelegant colloquialism has From the postscript to Billy Watson's Croker been around for a surprisingly long time. So Sack, a collection of essays by Franklin Burroughs maybe a croker sack was a body bag? This con- [t., to be published this month by W. W. Norton. jecture (like the one about the fish) has in fact After completing the first essay in this collection, Burroughs sent it to his agent, Deanne Urmy, for been conjectured; it, too, has no his- comment. In her response she asked, "What was a torical evidence. croker sack?" The following letter was his reply. Burroughs teaches English at Bowdoin College in In the fourteenth century, Englishmen, on Brunswick, Maine. crusade in the Holy Land, discovered saffron, They thought enough of it to smuggle some Dear Deanne, bulbs back to England on the unlikely chance that a spiky, bright-blossomed little plant that I was surprised that you didn't know what a thrived in the arid heat of the eastern Mediter- croker sack was and further surprised to find that ranean would flourish in the damp and chill of Webster's New World Dictionary, Webster's Third their native land. Implausibility being what it International Dictionary, and the Oxford Ameri- is, the plant in fact flourished, and soon vast can Dictionary didn't know either. I had to go to fields of it were established in the dampest and several dictionaries of Americanisms to find it, chilliest of all the English shires, Essex and and even then the results weren't profoundly Cambridge, satisfactory. Saffron is collected from the pistils of the au- In South Carolina the word referred to any tumnal crocus, It was sometimes called crocus, biggish cloth sack-for example, the hundred- and a saffron dealer was called a croker. pound sacks that livestock feed came in. It was a Aha, One pounces. The dealer had a sack, word like any other; I'm certain that nobody and that was called a croker's sack until the sec- thought of it as quaint or archaic. If there was ond s swallowed the first and it became a croker anything notable about it, it was that country sack. Nope. The Oxford English Dictionary, all people were likely to mispronounce it-croakus twelve volumes of it, plus supplements, records sack-and we town folk found this an amusing nothing for croker (or croccer or croaker or cro- rustic illiteracy. I didn't know where the word cus) sack, bag, etc. Croker sacks are purely originated, but then we seldom know the ori- American, And highly regional. They are most gins of the words we so blithely bandy about. likely to be encountered in coastal Georgia, There was one plausible etymology right at coastal South Carolina, piedmont Virginia, and hand, no farther awaythan Mishoe's Fish Mark- Martha's Vineyard. There are people who study et: A croaker is a small, abundant fish of the these things as meticulously as ornithologists drum family, which can be caught in any tidal study, let us say, the migration route and breed- inlet. For all I know, they might have been ing grounds of the Kirtland's warbler, of which caught by the sackful, and, from what I know of more later. These highly specialized folk have their taste, it is easy to imagine two men divid- also determined that the illiterate rustic form- ing up the day's catch and one saying to the oth- croakus sack-was in fact the "correct," or at er: "Look, you take the croakers and I'll take the least the original, one, Croker came into being croaker sack. " Folk etymology is a minor form of when 'the s of sack swallowed the s of crocus, mythmaking; it gives plausible explanations leaving crok-uh, which then succumbed to what about how things came to be as they are. is known as the retroflexive final r (I think this Real etymology, however, is a minor form of is the same thing you hear in the way that many science, and, like science, it requires much people, including the entire· population of Mas- more credulity than the myths it supplants. We sachusetts, pronounce parka: parker). Both the have to abandon the evidence of our senses and evidence of research and the laws of linguistic

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