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 y life, that is.
Nothing too irritatingly personal, I hope, and some large themes
to be glimpsed in the background.
Got up early Monday, rode the train into Manhattan and joined the
NR editorial table at 9:45. We picked away for a while at
the previous issue, which had included Rick Brookhiser's review
of Pat Buchanan's Death
of the West. I passed some remarks about the book and about
Rick's review, which I said caught very nicely the Nixo-Kissingerian
declinism that is fundamental to Pat's outlook. Then we batted around
ideas for editorials in the next issue. At noon I collected my editorial
assignments and started wondering what to do with the afternoon.
I didn't feel like writing, and anyway have got into the habit of
sleeping on my assignments and writing them up Tuesday morning.
There was no point going home. It's close to two hours door to door,
and I was due to appear on a panel discussion for Columbia Political
Union at 7p.m.
I called Wally
Fekula and we arranged to have lunch. Wally, once my boss, is retired
after a long career on Wall Street. He lives up on 85th Street by
the Park and spends his time doing good works. We met for lunch
up there, a nice little place called Demarchelier on East 86th.
I ordered oysters and sea bass. We cracked a bottle of wine. Wally,
a great music lover, talked about opera singers. The New York Met
is currently doing Prokofiev's War and Peace. Wally, who
is of White Russian ancestry, had persuaded some big-name Russian
singers from the production to perform for free at one of the charity
functions he helps organize. He chuckled with satisfaction over
this coup. Then he told me about Lang Lang, a terrific new young
Chinese pianist he's discovered. We talked more, wandered off into
books and movies. I had the crème brûlée. Then
we had coffee and liqueurs. It was a fine, delicious, civilized
lunch.
Demarchelier
has a bistro-style layout, tables close enough together that you
get talking to your neighbors at the least excuse. While I was concentrating
on my crème brûlée, Wally struck up a conversation
with the young couple next to us. They had been to see an exhibition
at the Guggenheim. The lady, it turned out, was from Denmark. Wally,
who has the combative trading-floor style of making conversation,
challenged me to say anything intelligent about Denmark. I muttered
something about the Schleswig-Holstein question, a diplomatic issue
that had racked northern Europe for decades during the 19th century,
but is now utterly forgotten — even by Danes, confessed the
lady. (I got my fragmentary knowledge of it mostly from reading
Royal
Flash.) Then, feeling the sea-floor sloping away under my feet
unpleasantly fast, I asked the lady how things were going in Denmark
nowadays.
"Terrible,
terrible. Much crime. It's all mixed up with the immigration problem,
of course. We just had an election in November. The anti-immigration
party got a lot of votes. People are getting fed up with immigration."
Death of
the West still on my mind, I asked if Danish people were reproducing
themselves. How many kids does a married couple have in Denmark?
"Married
couple? Nobody gets married any more. I am the only person I know
that's married. People just live together."
The lady proceeded
to redraw my mental picture of Scandinavia, which up to this point
had been stuck around 1975: pale, hygienic, taciturn folk, sleeping
through winter under the Northern Lights and spending the daylight
months practicing bourgeois virtues, manufacturing ugly cars and
polishing their cradle-to-grave welfare states to smug perfection.
No, she claimed, it's not like that now. All these countries are
being overrun with immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, and
disorder is starting to spread. Why do people put up with it? I
asked.
"Something
in our character. Our men, especially. They will never complain
about anything. Just go along, go along."
What about
their vigorous ancestors, ravaging the coasts of my ancestors
— gold-decked, sword-bright, Beowulf and Hrothgar, Viking and
Norseman, Guthrum and Harald and Cnut? Nothing wishy-washy about
those guys!
"That
was a thousand years ago. We've had the good life too long."
Hedonism
is death! There's a nice thought to have in a posh restaurant
on the upper East Side while scarfing down crème brûlée
and Cointreau. Most likely true on the civilizational scale, none
the less.
After lunch,
most of the afternoon still to kill, a bit woozy from the wine and
liqueurs, I decided to walk up to Columbia, figuring the cold March
air would clear my head. I went crosstown to Fifth, up past the
Metropolitan Museum — closed Mondays — and into the Park.
Round the Reservoir, out and up the West Side, into Harlem. They
can talk all they like about gentrification, it still looks like
a slum to me. Fell in with a Japanese guy in Morningside Park. He
was totally lost, trying to find Columbia. Climbed up the steps
with him. How are things in Japan? Pretty bad, but people don't
mind much. Just put up with it.
I spent a blissful
two hours in the math library at Columbia, researching some points
for my book. Where is civilization more obviously present all around
you than in a university library? Columbia has every math periodical
you could imagine, and then some: Matematicheskii Sbornik,
The Journal of Differential Equations, Revista Matemática
Hispano-Americana, Nagoya Mathematical Journal, any number
of Comptes Rendus, Suomalainen something something
— that would be Finnish, wouldn't it? How many people want
to read mathematical papers in Finnish? But if you want to, Columbia
has them. That's civilization. Does Finland have an immigrant problem,
too, I wonder? Time magazine says the terrorists may have
a nuke, for use against New York. Not here, please, not Columbia.
Don't nuke Columbia, don't fry these neatly-bound ranks of Seminario
Matematico Rendiconti and the Mathematical Intelligencer.
Don't fry me, with a book unfinished and my kids not grown.
Down to Lerner
Hall for a snack before the event. There's a little cafeteria there
in the lobby. I stood in line, noticing the things we are not supposed
to notice: four Columbia undergrads ahead of me in line, two obviously
Jewish, two East Asian. Four servers behind the counter, making
the sandwiches and working the register, about the same age as their
customers, but all black.
The CPU event
was upstairs. It was a panel discussion — me and three other
windbags at a long table facing a roomful of students, talking about
whether we should strike at Iraq. I was there representing the aggressive
option, the view that we should defend our civilization vigorously
and confidently. I don't think we should sit around waiting for
something to happen that we can react to; I think it's someone else's
turn to do a spot of reacting. Why Saddam? Because he's already
had way too much time to develop his atom bombs and germ bombs.
Let's take out him, and them, before he gets any further along.
The other panelists were old NSC war-horse Gary Sick, Paul Starr
from The American Prospect, and a guy named Carmen (sic)
Trotta, from a pacifist-anarchist group called the Catholic Worker
movement. We all said our piece, then bandied the issues politely
for a while, then took questions. Good crowd — well-mannered,
thoughtful people, intelligent questions, surprising number of conservatives.
The anarchist guy took heat for calling this country — his
country — "the cancer of the world". A floor vote,
if we'd had one, would probably have gone for Gary and Paul, who
basically argued containment; but no-one seemed to mind my position.
I used the
men's room on my way out. There was a poster tacked to the door:
"INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS: DO YOU WANT TO WORK IN THE U.S.
AFTER GRADUATION? The U.A.W. strongly opposes giving H-1B visas
to skilled foreigners and has lobbied against legislation... "
Rode the subway down to Penn Station, thinking about civilization
and its enemies and all the things we're not supposed to notice.
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