“Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals… and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, – yet, general ends are somehow answered… the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.

 ”God save us always from the innocent and the good…”

The voice of Graham Greene, spoken by the British journalist Fowler in Greene’s prophetic novel of Vietnam, The Quiet American, published in 1955. Quoted anew in Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head.

Pico Iyer — my monitor on the global spirit in conversation and books — hears voices: of the Dalai Lama, Henry David Thoreau, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell among others. But the strongest dialog in Iyer’s busy brain seems to run between Emerson and the late English novelist Graham Greene (1904 – 1991), the Catholic agnostic who prayed to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in, and the subject of Pico Iyer’s shivering introspection, The Man Within My Head. Emerson is “the God within,” as Harold Bloom has said, a companion in the daylight hours. Greene is “the fallen man within,” who keeps turning up in dreams and the subconscious. “Graham Greene is more of a warning than an illumination,” Pico Iyer is telling me. “Thoreau and Emerson and the American Way have shown me where I want to go; Greene is pointing to all the ditches and the cracks in the road along the way.”

I am wondering: where’s our American Graham Greene when we need one? Greene’s peers in school after World War I, Pico Iyer writes, “were learning strength and how to go out and administer Empire, already in its first stages of dissolution. Greene, meanwhile, was learning the opposite: how to take power apart, how to do justice to its victims, on both sides of the fence, how to make a home in his life for pain and even fear. As classmates set about making the official history of their people, he began picking at its secret life, its tremblings, its wounds.” Greene, in Pico Iyer’s line, was “an Englishman in flight from English-ness.” So I am asking: who are our exemplary strong antidotes to American exceptionalism and heedless folly in the world?

The names that immediately come to my head are Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, perhaps. Robert Stone is almost a direct heir to the Greenian legacy: a troubled Catholic who goes to the warzones of the world to see the soul in peril in all senses but also to see what America is up to in these shadowy corners… But the other thing is that American literature is currently being written and re-written by the latest newcomers from Russia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Korea — … think of Chimamanda Adichie, Gary Shteyngart, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lee Yun Hee and many others. And what they’re doing, among other things, is they’re remaking America… importing the wisdom of their ancestral homes and making new combinations. So that’s all promising. The American soul is taking on new colors now, and our President is another example of that. If nothing else, no matter how you feel about Obama, I would say we’ve never had a President who understands life in Indonesia as he does. We’ve never had a President who knows the complications of interacting with Kenya and therefore with many other impoverished nations, at least on the human level, as he does. He hasn’t always managed to translate that into policy but it’s certainly a step forwards because in terms of global understanding which is the currency of the moment, he has it.

Driving past the Roxbury Court House one afternoon in mid-February [1968], Kevin White spotted a large circular crowd in an empty parking lot. “Stop the car; it must be a fight,” he said, pouncing out and pushing his way into the center of the crowd. Two schoolgirls were wrestling on the ground, one astride the other, pummeling her in the face. “This is the Mayor,” White shouted to no avail, “I’m telling you to stop.” Even when he seized the bigger girl’s arm, she kept flailing with the other as he kept saying, “This is the mayor!” Finally she looked up at his face and froze: “Oh, Kevin!” she said. “How could I tell it was you?”

Draft notes for a magazine piece I wrote about Kevin White for the Washington Monthly, 1969.

Ride the Orange Line end to end and share the sense that the Seventies in Boston — the vision and activism of, let’s call it, the Kevin White era — left the city a gift that keeps on giving and seems still vastly under-appreciated. I call it the Benjamin Moore corridor of renovated houses and recycled neighborhoods, of a city saved from the skids in the nick of time — not least by the fight to block US Rte 95 from the city and to rebuild transit instead. Toward Oak Grove in Malden, the Orange Line rider next to you is more likely to be Asian-American; closer to Forest Hills, on the far edge of Jamaica Plain, probably African-American. Night and day all the way, the train is full of fresh actors in an old Boston cast of high school students, church folk reading Bibles, musicians with their axe cases, restaurant workers still in uniform, cops, secretaries, lawyers with attache cases, Red Sox hats, Bruins jerseys, me, you, no look-alikes, nobody reading the same book or newspaper. I’m the only one who remembers Bill Bulger’s St. Patrick’s Day crack from the early 80′s: “Get on the Orange Line with a golden chain; get off with a Purple Heart.” Actually the old elevated version felt worse in my boyhood when my brothers and other Roxbury Latin School geeks worried about the white toughs with ducks ass do’s around Egleston Square and the Dudley Street Station. But nowadays on the Orange Line, everybody’s busy, everybody’s comfortable.

I’m just reminding myself: it didn’t have to be that way.

A week after Kevin White’s funeral, three impressions are still coming clear to me: first, Boston was closer to the ragged edge, socially and infrastructurally, than we knew at the time, and that if Louise Day (“You know where I stand…”) Hicks had won the mayor’s office in 1967 for the fighting spirit of South Boston, the city might be as gaunt and vestigial as Detroit is today; second, that Kevin White had more scope, purpose and overall integrity than friends like me understood; and third, that our aspirations in journalism to perspective and judgment of character are pretty feeble at best. But we do keep our notes!

White swings unpredictably from mood to mood. What gets him down is not fear of the city’s social or racial difficulties but the decrepitude of the city’s physical plant (“The sewer system is so old it’s a joke — it could go any day now”), the rigidity of the civil service system and the unavailability of administrative talent, or the antiquity of the city itself (“Sometimes I look around at our housing and decide I ought to lead the militants who want to burn the town to the ground.”)

… When Smokey Robinson and the Miracles sang at the Mayor’s “Summerthing” series of neighborhood festivals in 1968, the city’s amplifying equipment broke down at the Carter Playground concert in Lower Roxbury and a few disappointed teenagers started a looting spree. The community security patrol challenged the police department’s jurisdiction. And older Roxbury leaders said the Mayor had violated a long-standing rule against any mass entertainment or night-time gatherings in the ghetto. But Kevin White spoke of the summer’s first incident with something close to exhilaration. “Of course the sound system was our fault,” he said immediately afterward. “But it won’t happen again, and I think people know we were trying. I was walking around Carter Playground by myself all evening and I talked with an awful lot of people. I know that the mood of that crowd was good — really good — no matter what a few kids did. We’re going to try again…”

… Earlier on the same night, Smokey and the Miracles sang on Columbus Park, a vast open field on the edge of Boston Harbor, between Irish South Boston and the largely Negro Columbia Point housing project. Smokey’s audience was big and thoroughly mixed. Milling about alone, White leaned over at one point to an Irish old-timer who was tapping her foot and smiling at the blues. “You’re just a kid,” said the mayor. “My musical taste stopped developing about the time of Bing Crosby and ‘White Christmas,’ but you’re still with it.”

… on himself at age 39: “Every ambitious man approaches a critical point around 40, when he discovers whether or not he really has what it takes to go all the way. I know now, in myself, that I have it. I may never go any further than Mayor of Boston, but I know today that I have everything it takes to be governor, or president. I’m good at my business. There aren’t ten politicians in America who are as good at their jobs as I am.”

… of Boston’s New City Hall, of which Kevin White was not the builder but the first occupant. Wolf von Eckhardt of the Washington Post had called it the most most important public building — anywhere — of the 20th Century; others mocked it as “some sort of Sumerian temple.” Kevin White told me: “That massive use of concrete isn’t my idea of pure beauty, but I’m coming around… On the outside it suggests a fortress; on the inside it’s a maze, an intricate puzzle. You could get to Hitler at Berchtesgaden quicker than you could get to the mayor inside the New City Hall. I have to walk around corridors, in and out of hidden elevators and through secret passageways for about 20 minutes to get from my office to the public outside, and anybody knows that’s not my taste… I think it’s a handsome building.”

… on John Lindsay, then mayor of New York. “There’s no one I admire more in public life… Is there anyone anywhere that doubts that John Lindsay works his job, that he’s a good man, that he gives every ounce of himself for New York? Yet he’s in terrible trouble. My own instinct is that he’s going to be alright, but nonetheless… One of the hard things to learn in politics is that there is always going to be a day of reckoning, the inexorable day when it can all be taken away from you… It’s a tough, tough business, and the end of the road is almost inevitably defeat.”

… on being a mayor: “It’s having to deal with a thousand unrelated pieces of junk. It’s as if somebody came into your office on a Monday morning and dumped a wastebasket on your desk — and then said, on the way out, ‘I’ll be back every morning this week with a new load.’ The cities are exposed to the heaviest public demands but have the least power to solve real problems.

… on his city: “There’s life in the neighborhoods. I’m really very hopeful.”

Draft notes for the same magazine piece that nobody read and I scarcely believed, 1969.

Kevin White and Tom Winship were the odd couple that taught my generation ground-up politics and what passed for journalism in 1960s Boston. Kevin, in a backroom of his Secretary of State’s office, was both school-master and high gossip monger for young State House reporters like Bryant Rollins, Tim Leland and me from the Globe, Frank Tivnan of the Herald and out-of-towners like Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal. Tom was the quirky, hard-driving “reform” editor of the Globe who directed our fire at his targets.

Even then we knew that this dear, dizzy pair were curiously linked — rivals more than pals, co-dependents now inseparable in memory who together defined the times. Both owed everything to a mix (puzzling especially to themselves, I think) of rank nepotism and huge talent. Tom’s father, Laurence Winship, had been the Globe editor before him. Old Joe White of the Boston City Council had conspired with Johnny Powers, the state senate president, to put his untested son Kevin on the all-green (meaning, in those days, all-Irish) Democratic state ticket in 1960, the Kennedy year. We could imagine Kevin and Tom both muttering dismissively that the other was just “his father’s son.” But they both turned out to be energetic originals, bold and brilliant talent-pickers, far the most creative forces the town had seen in either of their jobs. Winship got the truss adds off the Globe’s page one, put heart and sizzle in political endorsements, oppposed the war in Vietnam and hired the nonpareil local, daily columnist George Frazier. White brought drama and flair to City Hall even as he decentralized city government. Through the busing turmoil of the 1970s, White never let the exaggerated racial divide define what the city was about.

With Councillor Tom Atkins and the legend James Brown, negotiating the concert that calmed Boston after the M. L. King Jr. assassination, 1968

Not the least of what White and Winship shared, I came to think, was a secret hang-up that afflicted me too, growing up. It was the puzzle of Boston’s provincial scale. Was it really a smaller version of New York? Or a bigger version of Quincy, or maybe Worcester? Could Tom Winship pretend see himself in the same league as Abe Rosenthal at the Times, or his friend Ben Bradlee at the Post? Was Kevin White, for all his gifts, in the same game as John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Dick Daley? I made a cheeky remark to Bradlee on the radio once that the problem with his paper, in the halcyon days of the Style section, was that it made Washington seem more fun, more human than it really was; and that the Globe’s problem was that it made Boston less interesting than it’s always been. But it seems to me now that Kevin White’s vision of the “world-class city” was a wistful evocation of what this Boston-Cambridge core of New England has in fact become: the best big college town in the country, arguably the intellectual capital of the world — a tolerant and cosmopolitan old address with durable Brahmin and Irish inlaid veneers, an endlessly charged, stimulating place to live. Kevin White’s sort of city, in short, and still today a work of his fervid imagination.

He had glimpses of bigger domains — the governor’s office in 1970, a vice-presidential run with George McGovern in 1972. But in truth he’d grown up in the view — from James Michael Curley, and then from John Collins in the early 60s and his redevelopment chief Ed Logue — that the Mayor’s office in Boston was the perfect stage for an imaginative and halfway imperial politician. (Why did you suppose I ran for the job in 1993?) Overnight and without consulting anyone Mayor White could turn the main drag of his Beacon Hill neighborhood, Charles Street, one-way the other way, to keep truck traffic out. Presidents can’t do that. In his Frank Lloyd White persona, he could second-guess the designs of developers like Mort Zuckerman and architects as eminent as Moshe Safdie and I. M. Pei. He had no legislature to contend with, and no restraint on his own famously idiosyncratic eye for personnel — for ingenues like Barney Frank, Micho Spring and Fred Salvucci, but also for professionals older than he, like Hale Champion, who’d been finance director of California, and Jeep Jones, a street worker in Roxbury who became a deputy mayor. The mayor freed himself to run an improvisational lab school of city politics, a version of jazz world’s University of Art Blakey.

With the same gambler’s panache he had picked a wife for me and ordered me to marry a girl I’d never met, never heard of. “Well maybe you’ll introduce me,” I said. He did, and with Cindy Arkelyan it was love at first sight and for 42 years afterwards. I returned the favor by introducing him to Barney Frank, then a law student, at a moment when Kevin White had just won a runoff slot in the 1967 mayor’s race with only precinct pols in his retinue. Barney showed up for his interview at Kevin’s house, took Joseph Dinneen’s Boston novel Ward Eight off the shelf, then read for three hours waiting for the would-be mayor. Finally Barney left the empty house, with the book. Two days later he returned Ward Eight, met the candidate, took over Kevin White’s public life and founded a big biography of his own.

There are buildings, schools, parks and careers to point to as Kevin White’s monument but I think it was the charm and spectacle, sometimes the effrontery of his performance that he expected us to remember. Himself on stage with James Brown, if you can believe it, looking good, and comfortable in his own pale skin! At the end of one of the long free-range gabs we recorded every year for the Ten O’Clock News on WGBH-TV, he congratulated himself on a heroic talking jag. “Christ-ah-pha,” he said, “that was a helluvan interview!” His press agent George Regan piled on: “A great interview, boss.” Breaking a stunned silence, I said: “But Kevin, it was ragtime!” He paused half a second. “But Christ-ah-pha, it was quality ragtime!”

“Quality ragtime” has stuck in our family phrase book, whenever people run on. So have a lot of other Kevin coinages. “Hey, I’ll talk to ya,” meant that the conversation was flagging, that you (or Kevin, in the old days) were ready to hang up the phone or leave the room. “And I like Eddie McCormack…” was Kevinese that meant you were about to lower the boom on someone. “How aah ya, dahlin’?” we all began to greet men or women alike, “I’m the mayah.” “Mother ‘a gawd!” we’d say in outrage. Of rough diamonds, or characters considered dubious, like Kevin’s friend Bob Crane, the State Treasurer, he and we would say, “there’s quality thay-uh.” He was a commentator like none other on politics elsewhere. He called Jimmy Carter, who was my assignment at the Times in 1975-76, “a three-legged hoss.” I can hear it now. “Christapha! Politicians are like dogs. They smell each other! Jimmy Cahtah is the only politician I ever met who has no scent at all.” He had good general rules, too. “Christapha, politics is not about where you are; it’s about the direction you’re moving in!”

The best conversation we ever recorded was inadvertent — a strange coda to a TV interview in the mayor’s office in 1978. The formal Q and A was over. Bobby Wilson, the WGBH cameraman, was shooting wide-shots and cutaways, but our mikes were still on when I asked Kevin White about Bill Bulger‘s rise toward the presidency of the Massachusetts State Senate in 1978. “You’re the guys that have no guts,” he erupted at me, for the general news silence around Bulger’s gangster brother and FBI informer James, the infamous “Whitey.” “If my brother were a licensed killer, you’d be nothing but nice to me,” he shouted. And then the anecdote that for years I left off the record. “In the ’75 fight,” meaning his run for a third term, “everybody knew the mob was out to get me.” Kevin had come out of the South Boston Tennis Club on the Waterfront one night at 11 o’clock, he said, when he realized in a flash that Whitey Bulger was going to shoot him on the way to his car. He could see it clearly: “Whitey takes me out, and they win all the marbles.” Better, he decided, to stay in the tennis club overnight and drive home in daylight. Call it a fantasy, a waking nightmare, but Kevin White was articulating an unvoiceable dread of Bulgerism that preyed on a whole class of Boston and Massachusetts politicians for almost 30 years. And he was talking straight, even if the assumption was that his story would never be aired.

His fascination with power could sound Nixonian but it was never uninteresting. When I moved back from the New York Times Washington Bureau to lead the Ten O’Clock News on WGBH, he asked me one day: “Who do you think you’re working for over there?” I ran through the masthead of managers, from David O. Ives on down and the institutional trustees until he cut me off. “No, no, who has the power in that place?” I barely knew what he was driving at, but months later it was explained to me that the Lowell Institute (which holds the WGBH license) had been founded in 1836 by Judge John Lowell of the textile barons and the city of the same name, with the strict proviso that executive authority would rest forever with the line of his male heirs — down to the banker Ralph Lowell, at the moment of WGBH’s birth, and his son John. And then one day I got around to asking Kevin White: “Is that what you meant?” Yes, he said, I’d figured it out: that public broadcasting in Boston was a family heirloom. “Christapha,” he added impatiently, “it’s your job to know that kind of thing.”

It was distressing these last three years and more to see Kevin White wandering in the daze of dementia around the flat of Beacon Hill, always with one of his five stalwart kids, or his exquisite wife Kathryn, or a dedicated attendant. But it wasn’t so sad after all. I discovered that if I shouted “Mistah Mayah” as soon as I saw him, the years and the Alzheimers seemed to roll right off him. For a few moments at least he brightened and beamed. “How aah ya?” he’d begin, before drifting off into the wilderness. He didn’t know me, or maybe anyone, “from a cawd o’ wood,” as he would have said years ago. But the last several times I saw him, his last words came from the heart of the man: to me, to all of us, to the world. “I love you,” he said.

Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption. The short form of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is that we’re on the verge of Liebniz‘s (and Candide‘s) “best of all possible worlds.” Much more than that, Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of dense, witty prose, distilling and explaining the ever-steeper downward trends in battle-deaths, state executions, murder, rape, wife-beating and child-spanking, among others things. “Interesting if true” was my instinctive newspaper-guy response. After a month’s immersion, and this conversation, I’m staggered and stunned, avid for the new Enlightenment.

In William James Hall, high above Harvard Yard, Steve Pinker is setting his own conclusions in the context of intellectual forbears and peers in this field of violence and human progress.

Among them:

” …the survivors of one successful massacre after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our contemporary races spring… Man is once for all a fighting animal; centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out of us.”

William James: Oration at the unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston to the all-black 54th Regiment of the Union Army. May 31, 1897.

“History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed… Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for war’s sake, all the citizen’s being warriors. It is horrible reading — because of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making “history” — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen…

Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity…

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War. 1906

I like to think that William James would appreciate the argument of the book, which is, despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

I call William James the first evolutionary psychologist. He was indebted to Darwin and he made no bones about the fact that we come from ancestors who had to prevail in constant contests of bloodshed, and so we have violent urges. Nonetheless, James was certainly an optimist in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” arguing that it is certainly possible to set up institutions that would minimize war. And I like to think that a hundred years after his death he is being vindicated. Now of course, if he had lived ten years longer, if he had lived 35 years longer, he would have found this hard to believe, because the two world wars are a rude interruption in humanity’s movement towards non-violence. But if he had held on just a little bit longer, he would see that we are living through an era now in which it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that war is going out of style.

Steven Pinker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 2, 2011

“… the ultimate symbols of the [20th] Century are not space probes and computers but gas chambers and Hiroshima. The slaughter in the two world wars, the pogroms, the various holocausts starting with the Armenian and Jewish ones and ending with the Cambodian and the Rwandan, the Stalinist terror, the carpet bombings and the fire bombings in various wars — they all constitute a rather impressive performance. Twentieth-century science may have produced many wonderful discoveries and miracles, but the gas chambers and the mushroom clouds remain its most resilient symbols.”

“… change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.”

Ashis Nandy, “Violence and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Time Warps, 2002.

Among my questions here: How are we to categorize the violence of poverty in a half-hungry world? How do we calculate the risk of a single nuclear attack that could smash the conceit of better living through science? In American popular culture, what does Steve Pinker make of the rise of Mixed Martial Arts and the decline of boxing? In George Carlin’s sainted name, what about the rise of TV football and the decline of daylight baseball — where the object of the game is to “be safe, at home!”?

Has Steve Pinker been watching the Republican presidential debates — the whooping and hollering for the death penalty, Texas-style, and the Get Your War On rhetoric pointed at Iran, the Arab world, even Hugo Chavez and Venezuela? Of course he’s been watching — “I share the revulsion” — because he watches everything. “The crazies have all crashed and burned and probably the survivor, Mitt Romney, hell, he was our governor in Massachusetts. A lot of the sound and the fury coming out of the right, I think, is in part a reaction to the fact that they keep losing. Go back to the sixties; what the liberals were in favor of then, the conservatives take for granted now: racial integration, women in the workforce, women in the military, no spanking of children, toleration of gay people.”

Does robot warfare by predator drones fit a pattern of progress? “It’s a great advance. I can’t say I’m a fan exactly, but compared to carpet bombing, it’s a fraction of the deaths, a great advance.”

How, on this steep downward slope of human violence, do we explain that the United States — in one of those imperial fits of absent-mindedness — slipped into an immeasurably destructive $5-trillion war in Iraq, then Afghanistan and — who knows? — maybe tomorrow Pakistan?

By a lot of these measures, the United States is not at the vanguard of enlightenment. The United States is a bit of a laggard, and of course the Iraq war was famously opposed by France and Germany, some of our closest allies, and there was some considerable opposition in this country. It’s a little misleading to concentrate on the United States, because the United States is a bit in the rearguard of this.

Even then, the actual Iraq war itself, was by historical standards a far less destructive war than earlier wars — like Vietnam, Korea, Iran/Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan — in terms of the number of people that it killed. Interestingly, it’s now been eight-and-a-half years, and it might be the last of the old-fashioned wars, where two national armies fight each other on the battlefield. There’s a sense in which it didn’t lead to permanent war; this may have been the last gasp.

Steven Pinker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 2, 2011

It’s a main premise of Steve Pinker’s science that, as he says, “You have to have a quantitative mindset to understand history.” My last question: what if not all our critical measures are quantitative?

Anatol Lieven is explaining how the so-called allies in the so-called War on Terror have come to pot-shotting each other on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. In the Financial Times last May (“How American folly could destroy Pakistan“) Lieven was warning of the perverse logic of confrontation in US policy. The killing last weekend of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air strike for which President Obama is refusing to apologize can be taken as confirmation of the hazard. Ever since the US Navy swoop on OBL early in May, the risk in Lieven’s eyes was that the US would overplay its hand with demands on the thoroughly alienated Pakistani Army. The American demand-too-far (Lieven is saying emphatically today) is that the Pakistani Army go to war on the Taliban home bases in the Pashtun tribal wilderness. That demand cannot, will not, be met: (a) because the Taliban is a big part of the network that Pakistan counts on to protect and project its interest in Afghanistan when the US forces shrivel, then leave; and (b) because the big majority of Pakistanis — army, elite and masses — see the Taliban in Afghanistan as a legitimate resistance force fighting foreign occupation, like the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets, or Communist guerillas who fought Nazis in Europe. When Pakistan under Pres / Gen Musharraf undertook a half-way offensive against the Taliban in the border wilderness, “they set off an Islamist rebellion inside Pakistan which continues to this day… The Pakistanis do have a case: thanks to the U.S., they have a civil war inside Pakistan which has claimed far more Pakistani lives than Americans killed on 9.11. … We keep talking about wanting to support democracy. Well, the democratic majority in Pakistan wants us to go to hell.”

Anatol Lieven — among the earliest, clearest, scathingest dissenters on the “profoundly reckless” Iraq War — is by now the author of the solid new manual on Pakistan: A Hard Country, from which he’s been reporting for the London press since 1988. He is walking us around a few of the paradoxes that abound around Pakistan: the “strong society” with the “weak state,” for starters; the corruptions of feudal political culture and power that block all the obvious routes to economic reform and growth; the risk in American policy of “losing” Pakistan (6th largest population in the world) to save the unsaveable in Afghanistan; and always the missing page in the story: India. Anatol Lieven is confirming my guess that “Af-Pak” is a deceptive mis-”branding” of the mess we’re in. As we kept hearing in our travels last summer, “Indo-Pak,” embracing the Kashmir nettle and the tragedy of Partition in 1947, more nearly suggests the sub-continental shape of the problem.

Ha Jin‘s darkest fear about China is that the control-freak regime he fled 25 years ago has enough cash on hand to buy a lease on life — in Washington and the West, at the expense of its own people. The “myth” of an imperial rivalry with the US seems laughable to him, still moreso to sophisticated Chinese visitors who tell him “one good American museum is worth a few Chinese cities.” At the core, China is still a poor country, a very difficult place to live, without the social structure to guarantee safety or rights. Even at the top there’s no fun in being the world-record creditor when China waits more anxiously on American orders than we do on Chinese credit to pay for them. China’s second-worst fear must be that a bad tumble in the US economy would collapse theirs. The primal panic in the rich ruling circle, he’s saying, is about losing their one-party monopoly on power.

In the context of Brown University’s Year of China, I am scrambling to catch up, to get past the numbers, to imagine “reading” China. Ha Jin reads bloggers for news and outrage — over the wreck last week, for example, of a country school bus: 69 kids on a 9-seat vehicle, at the same moment the official press was crowing about the sale of luxury buses in Europe. He reads the published writers more and more available in the U.S. like Su Tong and Yu Hua; and the multi-media star Murong — exploding everywhere now in the New York Times and in his latest post, “Caging a Monster,” as he heads home from Oslo. Ha Jin endorses the steady clarity of the husband-wife reporting of Peter Hessler in the New Yorker and Leslie Chang in the Wall Street Journal — specially on the point that China’s boom has been bad for happiness and sanity. And of course he reads his friend the Nobel Peace Prize poet Liu Xiaobo, under house arrest in China but more and more widely read for his exquisite Tienanmen elegies.

We’re talking too about Ha Jin’s new novel, Nanjing Requiem, a book to be taken to heart on opposite faces of the earth. The re-creation of the vicious Japanese occupation of Nanjing after 1937, focused on the fate of a college campus for women, is bathed in sympathy for China’s suffering at a low-point of humiliation. But the heroic role in this reality-based fiction goes to an American teacher, Minnie Vautrin, for her fortitude and indomitable purpose. Official culture long buried the Nanjing chapter of China’s helplessness and shame as well as the history of faithful foreign friends (Germans, Brits, Americans and others) who stood tall under the same abuse and, after World War Two, drove the war-crimes trials of many Japanese officers in Nanjing. Ha Jin has brought alive a moral drama of suffering and solidarity — of decency transcending difference, as he says, “that should be remembered even today. People are human beings. Their sufferings are the same.”

Mark Blyth is flying us over the embattled Eurozone — populations aging, economies flagging, and now democracy shrinking as technocrats in bankers’ gray stand in this week for the elected political chiefs in Greece and Italy. The New York Times is in an editorial panic this morning about “Europe’s Contagion” — even “financial catastrophe.” Which sounds like what Professor Blyth, the political economist and excitable Scot on our Watson Institute corridor, was warning us about when Ireland’s crisis was the proverbial cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. It’s a year now of the Blyth color-commentaries on a rock slide — in which over-leveraged banks foisted their debts on their “sovereigns,” and a banking crisis fused a chain of political and national crises — and from there a crisis of European unity, maybe the Decline of the West. Somewhere near the core of the problem, in the Blyth narrative, is the fashionable fixation on public-sector austerity, choking the growth that might refloat the European economy and our own. Part of what’s thwarting a rescue of the Euro this week is the illusion that Europe’s single-currency zone is a single economy. I am wondering what it would take for Europe to go the last kilometer to an economic union, with a single central bank as powerful as our Federal Reserve. What would we learn from a popular referendum on the United States of Europe?

If you can’t listen as fast as Mark Blyth talks, by all means listen twice.

Usually you do referenda in Europe to stop things happening. The Greeks were a classic example of this: would you like to have ten years of deflation and most of the smart people leaving the country and to be left with no tax base? No, thanks. It was a bargaining chip.

If you want to say at this point, let’s sign up to what Merkel wants, “more Europe,” well what does that mean? … It assumes that the whole world can work as Germany, which is basically a giant exporter that runs a permanent surplus against the rest of the world. This is madness. You can’t run a permanent surplus. Somebody has to be importing for somebody to be exporting. Who’s going to buy all those BMWs? We can’t all export to Mars.

CL: China does …

China does precisely because America gives it the credit to. Germany was able to sell all that stuff to Southern Europe precisely because it gave it credit. Now they’ve stopped the credit lines. That’s the problem. What they should be doing is turning on the taps to provide credit, not to continue to buy things they can’t afford, but to allow enough liquidity in the economy to stop the banks seizing up. What’s happening is just that: the banks are seizing up…

Mark Blyth with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, November 17, 2011.

It’s still a banking crisis pretending to be an economic crisis, Mark Blyth would tell you. But couldn’t it still become a civilizational crisis unless the rest of us, non-bankers, wake up?

David Grossman is considering my question: why the “good guy” solutions have availed so little in the Middle East, over such an ominously long time.

Patriot and peacenik, critical-thinker and oppositionist, Zionist and humanist, David Grossman is a good guy, and then some. I feel grace, something like nobility, in his presence as in his prose. One knows that his son Uri was killed, age 20, at war in Lebanon in 2006, when David Grossman was in the thick of writing To the End of the Land, his epic novel of 21st Century Israel. But the nobility of suffering is not what I’m looking for or feeling as much as the steady brave honesty of the inquiries that David Grossman undertook even before Uri was born — of the unrelenting question “What happened to us?” as he put it almost a quarter century ago. The Yellow Wind, translated into English in 1988, was his non-fiction examination of the brutal, brutalizing occupation of the West Bank. “I could not understand,” he wrote, “how an entire nation like mine, an enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as a conqueror without making its own life wretched… The history of the world proves that the situation we preserve here cannot last for long. And if it lasts, it will exact a deadly price.”

David Grossman has seen more deeply into the Middle East nightmare, and been seared by it more than most of us could bear. And still I’m unclear after our long conversation here whether his brilliant penetration of the madness has equipped him and us to find a way out.

The basic Grossman diagnosis in The Yellow Wind was that by the 1980s, Palestinians and Israelis were living under a curse “placed on both peoples — the curse of self-destruction, the curse of the fear of peace.” Both parties are much worse off today, he tells me: programmed to hate and now paralyzed to help themselves — deeply damaged, disabled people, desperate for outside intervention. This is the strong case for putting the Middle East into locked-up receivership. But don’t we also keep seeing the power that paralyzed people develop to fend of their best friends?

Can we imagine a peace “contract” fair enough, and political leaders dedicated enough, to create a ten-year interval of stability that would begin to change hearts? Or must changes of heart come first? How many more “wars for peace” can we rationalize, like the Second Lebanon War? And how should we apply the curious strategy that David Grossman has contrived in To the End of the Land for his heroine Ora, as a means of distancing herself from the madness, “the general almost eternal conflict” that has engulfed her for 40 years? With the help of her Palestinian driver, Ora dutifully, grudgingly delivers her son to his Army unit for an extended tour of duty. “Don’t hurt anyone… and don’t get hurt,” she admonishes the boy, and then she deliberately disappears in a long hiking tour of the Galilee. Her thought is that no bad news about her son can be delivered if she cannot be found to receive it.

It’s important to David Grossman that President Obama is reported to have read To the End of the Land on vacation last summer, but I am still figuring how the book might instruct him. Barack Obama remains for David Grossman the one figure on the political landscape with the “contradictory capacities” to present a transformative vision of peace to the Middle East and at the same time rescue two damaged peoples from a trap of their own making.

Barry Moser wood engraving, in the Arion Press (California) Moby-Dick

Harold Bloom is giving us a one-man performance of a one-act play. He invited us months ago to his class at Yale on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and finally here it is and here we are. Because this is Harold Bloom on stage, himself the “living labyrinth” of literature, his jazz-like solo improvisation is endlessly allusive — to Lear (“81 years old, my age”), to Macbeth and other Shakespeareans; to Yahweh, Job and Prometheus; to the canonical American writers from Emerson, Hawthorne and Henry James to Dickinson and Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane; to the 20th Century novelists Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. But only Walt Whitman sits at the pinnacle with the author of Moby-Dick. “These are the two great American books,” Professor Bloom is remarking on our way into Harkness Hall, “Leaves of Grass in its various editions, side by side with this miracle of a book Moby-Dick, almost flawless, I think. What else is of that eminence?” How strange, he adds, that Whitman and Melville, exact contemporaries in the ambience of 19th Century New York, never acknowledged each other. “I don’t know what to call them. They’re not ships. Whales maybe, leviathans — passing in the night and never taking note of the other. And yet I can no longer read one without reading the other.”

“Moby-Dick is not a novel,” Professor Bloom remarks. “It is a giant Shakespearean prose poem, quite deliberately.” And Captain Ahab of the Pequod is no more villain than hero. He is an Emersonian figure, “self-reliance gone mad.” He is a dark hero on the Greek scale, our American Prometheus. It’s not the least of Melville’s genius that Moby-Dick is new on every reading. Not the least of Harold Bloom’s genius is that, having read the book hundreds of times, he never teaches it quite the same way. He is speaking here, with barely a written note, in a classroom with about a score of Yale undergraduates. He reminds me of Sonny Rollins playing his tenor horn, drawing on a lifetime of memory and imagination, devotion and practice.

To have these ferocious killers of the natural world, these great hunters of whales, who, after all, in relation to these harpoons, are at a terrible disadvantage — except for this great monolithic vast Leviathan, straight out of Job — it’s very unfair. And you can feel, at times, submerged in the book, Melville’s own horror at what is happening. And of course we know what the ultimate consequence of this is, the decimation now of these great beasts, who are, by the way, mammals: warm-blooded breathing creatures like ourselves, almost destroyed now, for all our “Save the Whales” campaigns…

There has to be, though I don’t understand it myself, some peculiar inverse ratio between the trope of whiteness in this book and the horrible paradox that these killers — including the gentle Starbuck, still the best lance out of Nantucket, the bravest man in a boat, and the fearful Ahab — are Quakers: opposed to war, to this day, opposed to conscription. Although I always remember President Richard Nixon was a Quaker. Heaven help them all, and us.

What should we do with the paradox of a hunt in which we cannot possibly be on the side of the human hunters, Quaker or not, and have to be on the side of Moby-Dick, even though that goes against the deep Biblical symbolism which is involved? And Melville is all too aware of this…

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon at Yale University, October, 2011.

Photo by Michael A. Jones. Copyright 2005 by Sacramento Bee

Joan Didion is reading from her second smashing meditation on death, Blue Nights. And I’m her interlocutor and foil again onstage in Cambridge. With a woman of the considered written word, not the spontaneous spoken word, it’s a tricky job. And it didn’t solve for me the puzzle of Didion’s power. But how could I not share it, or you not respond?

Joan Didion’s a writers’ writer gone suddenly, in her seventies, rock star and phenomenon, meeting a hungry market for introspections on death both sudden, as in the case of her husband John Gregory Dunne and Didion’s 2005 best-seller, The Year of Magical Thinking; or slow and almost unfathomable death, which came to Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana Roo, at 39, and prompted Blue Nights. Six hundred readers bought books and tickets to hear Didion and pack the First Church in Harvard Square last night.

One beauty of Blue Nights, I am saying toward the close, is that when Joan Didion writes “frail” about herself, what we remember is the oppposite: “indomitable.” But I’ve got to get down the odd gaps in this book. They’re disquieting, then illuminating. This is her Quintana book, for the adopted daughter who died, but there are scant traces of Quintana in it. The mother and writer has preempted all the suffering and mourning in this sad story. Quintana’s wedding day is central but the man Quintana married is just barely named. About Quintana, we learn that she had abandonment issues — as an adopted only child under the roof of two driven writers; that she graduated from Barnard, became a photo editor at Elle, that she drank too much and got desperately sick twice in her thirties, and died… But we do not meet Quintana past her teens. We learn, as Didion writes, that “Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.” Blue Nights is Joan alone — Joan’s loss, Joan’s frailty, Joan’s inadequate mothering: it may be tracing the arc of Joan’s writing career more than Quintana’s life, as Nathan Heller writes in a penetrating comment in the New York Times Magazine.

So the book about Quintana is really about Joan, and for me the evening with Joan is about the audience, including me. Were we there as inadequate parents, as mortals in fear of death? Were we there generously as a Didion support group that came to feed more than be fed. Or not so happily, as groupies around a brand, famous as Didion is for dropping the brandnames of cake-makers and grand hotels? Would we have been there last night, would I have posted these words, if her name weren’t Joan Didion?

Thanks to the Harvard Book Store for hosting the reading and recording the conversation.