 |
|
|
|
|
Up Close & Invisible
by Paul Maliszewski
November 2004
I moved to Washington, D.C., a little over a year ago. I work as a teacher and a sometime-ghostwriter. I had thought, before living here, that I would feel near to power, and that being in its proximity, I would naturally come to understand it better. I had thought I'd work as a dogged freelancer. I fancied that I'd devote countless enjoyable hours to digging up forgotten or overlooked government documents, discovering the truth in the Archives and the Library of Congress, there all along, in the public domain.
I spent my optimism, such as it was, within the first few weeks. The proximity, which I'd construed as an opportunity to write was in fact only daunting, a reason to read more before even thinking about writing. Proximity produced complexity—maddening complexity—and I struggled even for an analogy capacious enough to convey what I observed. Was government the old elephant attended to by blind men—they were journalists in my analogy—who mistook its tail, its skin, its feet, and its trunk for different creatures, drawing divergent conclusions based on their limited experience? In part, it was, I guessed.
But government was like a mural, too, which told a sprawling tale with many threads and thousands of characters. Each thread was compelling and full of life, each a story in itself, but no thread could even begin to reflect the whole, let alone capture any of the complexity. Metonymy was but a cruel joke, easy enough to contrive and so alluring, but never that accurate. And yet to tell the whole story, to address the mural in its entirety, was to wallow in generality, broad strokes, statistics.
And meanwhile, wasn't government also something like Kafka's parable of the law, which he described as an endless series of gates and gatekeepers? Approaching one gate and gaining passage gave one a vertiginous feeling of being inside, having access, and yet there was—and would always be—another inside, a place of greater inside-ness, before which stands an even larger guard, a more imposing, better armed gatekeeper, who will not permit entry to just anyone.
For several weeks, I struggled with the problem of an analogy, modifying the old elephant into, at one low moment, a massive translucent blob, weighing thousands of tons and filled with jelly that had this ability, a power, I guess, to mimic other animals. Next, I made my mural a painting with nested levels of figures and details, in which an individual brushstroke was as intriguing and worthy of consideration as its overall composition. I struggled with these analogies, I say, playing with them, until I recognized, finally, that it was just play, a game of pulling clever comparisons from the air. The game itself was an analogy for something else. I had the sense that I was merely dancing with shadows in order to avoid having to face squarely the fire behind me all along. That was another analogy, one just as bad and no more exact. Perhaps writing articles about the government was as futile as tossing finely crafted teapots into an approaching hurricane. I still tried it, of course. I still wrote. I made my teapots, and I painted them prettily, but I was increasingly frustrated by their lack of effect. The teapots ended up either crushed, laying in pieces at my feet, or else they ended up ignored, resting in glass vitrines inside a museum no one cared to attend.
Once, on a Sunday afternoon, at a restaurant in my neighborhood, I overheard a man telling two women he was having brunch with all about the government. The man was in his twenties, out of college but just barely, and I remember he said, “I have several qualms about the current federal tax code....” He went on to enumerate those qualms—as I recall, there were three or four—and the women nodded along and listened.
Another time, on the Metro, I overheard an old man talking to his friend. I got on the train at the Foggy Bottom stop and was heading home from teaching. The men boarded later, at Metro Center. Said the old man, “I have to say that I took great umbrage with...” I lost the line of argument there, so caught up was I in hearing the word “umbrage” used in conversation.
My girlfriend has discussed the war in Iraq with a contractor who's doing some work on our kitchen. And she has held forth with the local pharmacist and the cashier, who were both interested to hear her thoughts on why Senator John Edwards failed to carry for the Democrats North Carolina, his home state, and South Carolina, where he was born. She was wearing a Duke University sweatshirt at the time, so they suspected she had reason to know. Together the three of them reconsidered Senator John Kerry's choice of vice presidential candidates, but after some deliberation could come up with none better than Edwards. “Lieberman,” the cashier pointed out, “might as well be a Republican.”
I have, I am afraid, nothing original to write with regard to what happened during the most recent presidential election and what went wrong and now what will the future four years bring. I can improvise expertise, dilating with seeming knowledge about national population demographics moving to the geographic south and the ideological right. I, too, have qualms, after all. And I, too, can take umbrage. I can, for example, suppose almost endlessly about the seeming hopelessness of matching a senator up against a former governor. The governor will almost always win—it's like paper covering rock—because the senator has a clear record of national achievements and failures, while the governor has only managerial know-how to advertise and a blank slate, his beliefs made to order, tailored to suit the new occasion. And I can bemoan the sad state of a country in which a life led in public may appear as a liability, requiring endless justifications and mincing explanations, pained apologies offered for service, whereas the life led in private, for personal gain, earns only envy and admiration. The millions served bow to the millions earned.
But the truth is that I know so little about so many things—and, what's worse, so much about a few things that nobody much cares about, like contemporary literary fiction or the history of satire or hoaxes and fakes, that writing about the government and specifically about our present situation must necessarily give me pause.
Years ago, after graduate school, I worked as a writer and editor at a company that published economic forecasts and reports about more than one hundred countries. Within a couple of weeks of starting work there, the managing editor placed me in charge of the Bangladesh report, which had last been published almost a year before and so required updating. I schooled myself on Bangladesh. I read articles from The Economist, when I could find them, and The Financial Times, when I could get through them. Mostly, I monitored the wires, watching AP and CNN for new dispatches on the country's political situation. An election loomed, the political parties jockeyed for attention and a coalition that might rule. I read the CIA's background report and imposing compilations of World Bank statistics. Life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy and average education levels, yearly income. By the end of my first week of working on Bangladesh—we referred to the reports as the countries, as if our report was interchangeable with the country, the analogy a convincing substitute for the object of study—I felt I was acquainted with the major issues that the country faced. By the end of the second week, I fooled myself into thinking I knew what I was talking about. The third week of study found me feeling ready to make predictions about this or that party and the fate and future of this or that political actor. We called them actors, as if the entire country were a play, a piece of theater performed for our benefit.
With my hastily cobbled-together education to guide me, I updated Bangladesh and then turned it in. As I waited to hear back from the managing editor, I continued to read any new articles that came in. I felt a curious obligation, mostly to the report and making sure it was as correct and up-to-date as I could manage, but also to the country, which I felt deserved such attention, never mind that I hadn't thought much about it at all before starting work. It was a bit like following a soap opera, the action wasn't gripping—GDP projections never are—but I didn't want to miss any developments.
But gradually, I let my reading slide. I forgot Bangladesh. Its political parties blended in my mind with other countries'. The three- or four-letter abbreviations seemed interchangeable, all too easy to confuse. It was around that time, as Bangladesh faded in my memory, growing less and less distinct, like a birthday party several years back or an old story worn down to its bare outline and a couple of main characters, that the managing editor gave me my next big assignment: he needed me to update the United States.
I couldn't have been happier. I knew something of the United States, after all. I said, “That shouldn't be too hard. I'll get right to work on it.”
The managing editor warned me though that the United States in fact was the hardest report of all, and he was right. I knew too much, most of it useless, and what's more, I couldn't so easily fool myself into believing I ever grasped the story whole.
Paul Maliszewski's writing has appeared in Harper's, Granta, The Paris Review and other magazines.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
