Step Across This Line Part 13

Sporting failure likewise generates ripples far beyond the playing field. Thus England has reacted to its soccer team's mediocrity and its supporters' violence by plunging into a what's-wrong-with-us fit of self-criticism reminiscent of the gloomy worldview of A. A. Milne's immortal donkey, Eeyore. Not only can England's soccer players not play soccer, their tennis players can't play tennis, and one of them's Canadian anyway. In this Eeyore-ish mood, even victories look like less extreme forms of failure. The England cricket team actually wins a Test match, but the true Eeyore points out that when England lose, as they usually do, they get thrashed, but when they win, which is rare, they win by a whisker. The England rugby team beats mighty South Africa; Eeyore ripostes, ah, but they can't do it regularly, regularly, it's just a flash in the pan. The world heavyweight boxing champion is British, but Eeyore points out that Lennox Lewis, too, speaks with a transatlantic tw.a.n.g. it's just a flash in the pan. The world heavyweight boxing champion is British, but Eeyore points out that Lennox Lewis, too, speaks with a transatlantic tw.a.n.g.

About one thing all commentators seem clear. A nation's sporting performance, its prowess or its inept.i.tude, like the behavior of its fans, has origins far removed from the closed universe of sport itself. It has deep roots in the Culture.

Culture is what we now have instead of ideology. We live in an age of culture wars, of groups using ever narrower self-definitions of culture both as a s.h.i.+eld and as a sword. Culture is touchy. Use the wrong word and you'll be accused of racism by some cultural commissar or other. (In Philip Roth's magisterial new novel The Human Stain, The Human Stain, the word is "spooks"; in a the word is "spooks"; in a New York Times New York Times report from Akron, Ohio, last week it was "n.i.g.g.ardly.") report from Akron, Ohio, last week it was "n.i.g.g.ardly.") These days everything is culture. Food is culture and religion is culture and so is gardening. Lifestyle is culture and politics is culture and race is culture and then there's the proliferation of s.e.xual cultures and let's not forget subcultures, too. Sport, of course, is major major culture. So, when British (and, to a lesser extent, other) louts were misbehaving in Holland and Belgium, it was their culture that was held responsible, and n.o.body saw the irony of using the term to explain the actions of such profoundly uncultured individuals. But if hooliganism is also a culture now, then the word has finally lost all meaning. Which matters only if you think that culture is something else, something to do with art, imagination, education, and ethics, something that broadens perceptions rather than narrowing them, which enables us to see beyond national stereotypes to the richer complexity of real life, in which not all Italians are defensive, not all Germans are efficient, and England, poor England, is not defined by its sportsmen, thugs, and Eeyores; in which "spooks" and "n.i.g.g.ardly" are not racist words, and subtlety is valued more highly than sound bites, and a game is just a game. culture. So, when British (and, to a lesser extent, other) louts were misbehaving in Holland and Belgium, it was their culture that was held responsible, and n.o.body saw the irony of using the term to explain the actions of such profoundly uncultured individuals. But if hooliganism is also a culture now, then the word has finally lost all meaning. Which matters only if you think that culture is something else, something to do with art, imagination, education, and ethics, something that broadens perceptions rather than narrowing them, which enables us to see beyond national stereotypes to the richer complexity of real life, in which not all Italians are defensive, not all Germans are efficient, and England, poor England, is not defined by its sportsmen, thugs, and Eeyores; in which "spooks" and "n.i.g.g.ardly" are not racist words, and subtlety is valued more highly than sound bites, and a game is just a game.

AUGUST 2000: TWO CRASHES.

The speed of life is now so great that we can't concentrate on anything for long. We need capsule meanings to be attached to news events instantly, explaining and pigeonholing their significance, so that we can move on, secure in the illusion of having understood something. In the days after two catastrophic crashes, of the Middle East peace process and the Air France Concorde, an army of commentators has been trying to come up with (on a postcard, preferably) the brief sound bites that bite.

Of the two disasters, the Concorde crash yields up its Instant Message more easily. It represents, as a thousand pundits have told us, the End of the Dream of the Future. In a world in which no Concorde had ever crashed, this most graceful of aircraft embodied our dreams of transcendence. In the new reality that is still smoldering on the ground in Gonesse, France, our expectations must be lowered. Transcendence kills. The pictures tell us so. In our airplanes, in our lives, in our fantasies of what we might be, we must give up the idea of breaking barriers. For a brief, fabulous period we exceeded our limits. Now we are gripped once more by the surly bonds of earth.

Unfortunately, the other crash seems, after a.n.a.lysis, to insist on meaning exactly the opposite thing. Everywhere I've been in the last week or so, and in much of what I've seen, heard, or read, one question has kept coming up: if it were left to you, how would you solve the riddle of Jerusalem? And the op-ed and dinner-table consensus seems to be that the old place must become a free city, a World City, neither Israeli nor Palestinian but capital of both. Seems fair and ultimately do-able. Yes, we like that idea . . . What's that you say? There's a hot breaking news story? Quick, switch on CNN.

Oh, very well, we can go into this a bit more if you absolutely insist. It's simple, really. Barak's government has already given ground, but Israel must have its arm twisted by the United States until it agrees to this essential further concession. And, yes, Arafat was intransigent, in part because Hosni Mubarak persuaded his major backers to insist on the hard-line, we-get-East-Jerusalem-or-bust position. So, the Arab states must have their arms twisted by the United States until they agree to the Only Possible Solution . . .

You see, sometimes people just have to be bigger than what holds them back. We, they, just have to find it in ourselves, themselves, to transcend. Because peace is the Dream of the Future and cannot be denied . . .

Instant a.n.a.lysts are thus faced with an apparent black-and-white Message Contradiction. If the "meaning" of the Concorde crash is right, then the puncturing of human dreams is inevitable. There will therefore be no peace in the Middle East. And when the intifada returns in a more violent form-because now the Palestinians can fight with guns, not stones-Israel will retaliate with maximum force, and the region will slip toward war. But if, on the other hand, the postCamp David, free Jerusalem can be conjured into being, it will give us all new hope, and reinvent the idea of the future as a potential Star Trek Star Trek utopia in which technological marvels-safer, cheaper Concordes, perhaps Concordes for All-arrive hand in hand with a universalist, brotherhood-of-man philosophy of human relations. utopia in which technological marvels-safer, cheaper Concordes, perhaps Concordes for All-arrive hand in hand with a universalist, brotherhood-of-man philosophy of human relations.

In reality, however, the contradiction doesn't exist. In the real world the present is always imperfect and the future is (almost) always a region of hope. The problem lies in the way we all now insist on reacting to the news. Is it a Good Thing? Is it a Bad Thing? What's in it for us? What do they tell us about ourselves? Or about the other guys? Where's the angle? Who's to blame? Gimme the zapper. Let's surf! In her famous essay "Illness as Metaphor," Susan Sontag pointed out the dangers of thinking in this quasi-mystical way, of, for example, seeing curses and judgments in sickness and disease. This argument also applies to the news or, rather, the current obsession with finding symbolic meaning in headline-worthy events. News as Instant Metaphor turns a random catastrophe like an air crash into a generalized cultural signifier or, more dangerously, over-interprets events like the Camp David negotiations until the overlaid resonances and echoes complicate and obscure the difficult, half-resolved, half-stymied thing itself.

News as Instant Metaphor is excessively emotive, often politically slanted, inevitably shallow. It idealizes or demonizes its subjects and dulls or inflames our responses. (The vile murder of young Sarah Payne in Britain, totemically represented as a symbol of innocence endangered by evil, has turned sections of the British media into a frothing lynch mob.) The British government-among others-has recently been attacked for its preoccupation with spin rather than substance, presentation rather than reality; with, in other words, Government as Metaphor. But if the comment-heavy news media themselves-provocative opinion columns, however glib, are so much cheaper than old-fas.h.i.+oned journalism-were less eager to spin the news the moment it happens until it becomes a dazzling, hypnotic blur, we might see more clearly through the political spin doctors' smoke and mirrors.

SEPTEMBER 2000: SENATOR LIEBERMAN.

According to Niccol Machiavelli's cla.s.sic manual of realpolitik, The Prince, The Prince, a prince ought not to be religious but should be adept at simulating religiosity. It would come as something of a relief in this year's G.o.d-bothered American election campaign if it turned out that when the various candidates profess their various degrees of spiritual devotion, they don't really mean it. If they were just trying to look good in the eyes of the notoriously religious American electorate, one might almost be able to forgive them their protestations. To be cynical is merely to be a politician, after all, and anyhow, cynicism is greatly preferable to sanctimony. a prince ought not to be religious but should be adept at simulating religiosity. It would come as something of a relief in this year's G.o.d-bothered American election campaign if it turned out that when the various candidates profess their various degrees of spiritual devotion, they don't really mean it. If they were just trying to look good in the eyes of the notoriously religious American electorate, one might almost be able to forgive them their protestations. To be cynical is merely to be a politician, after all, and anyhow, cynicism is greatly preferable to sanctimony.

No such luck, I'm afraid. Bill Clinton may very well be the most devout of believers, but the sheer enthusiasm and frequency with which he has confessed his sins, the brilliant volubility and star-quality performance of his fallen-sinner-sees-the-light act, has elevated the belief practices of the Leader to the level of major s...o...b..z. His successors, none of them blessed (or cursed) with the fabled Clintonian charisma and pizzazz, have no option but to say what they mean, which means, unfortunately, that they also mean what they say.

The truly Machiavellian candidate would, for example, have noted the opinion polls that followed the announcement of Al Gore's selection of Senator Joe Lieberman for the second spot on the Democrat ticket. This American Prince-spotting that, while more than 90 percent of eligible voters said they had no difficulty in imagining themselves voting for a black, Jewish, or gay presidential candidate, only half of them were willing to consider voting for an atheist-would instantly pump up the spiritual volume, and if he wasn't already adept at feigning a deeply held faith, he would make darn sure he learned how to do so double quick.

So here, right on cue, comes Senator Joseph Lieberman himself, hauling George Was.h.i.+ngton out of his grave to cry that where there is no religion there can be no morality. But while Senator Lieberman may be many things, he's no Machiavelli, as is amply demonstrated by the two-left-feet clumsiness of this attempt to make religion even more important an issue in American public life than it already is. After the Anti-Defamation League's attack on his remarks, he's been backtracking fast. Now he's all for the separation of Church and State, always was, always will be, and no, he doesn't think that people without religious belief lack moral conviction, even though he did raise poor old George from the dead to say exactly that.

All this is alarming to those of us (the citizens of the rest of the world) who can't vote in November but whose fate will be profoundly influenced by the U.S. voters' choice. We're already disconcerted that only about 30 percent of American voters feel it's worth bothering to vote at all, and the thought that the relative perceived holiness of the candidates may be of decisive importance does nothing to rea.s.sure us.

In John Frankenheimer's cla.s.sic sixties thriller The Manchurian Candidate, The Manchurian Candidate, America's enemies try to seize control of the White House by getting a brainwashed American politician to run for president. Today, even the United States' friends are beginning to wish a Rest of the World candidate were permitted to run. We all live under the aegis of the American Empire's unchallenged might, so the victorious candidate will be our president, too. Of the actually available duo, it's plain that the Rest of the World's best bet is Al Gore. Not only is he smarter than his opponent, but he also does appear to know where the Rest of the World is, which gives him a definite edge in our admittedly self-interested opinion. For many of us, George W. Bush's failure to name the president of India was a mistake as irredeemable as Dan Quayle's "potatoe." Bush's fondness for frying his fellow human beings is also a reason for unease. If it was tough to forgive Clinton for executing a mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded man, it's even tougher to accept George W.'s frequent human barbecues. America's enemies try to seize control of the White House by getting a brainwashed American politician to run for president. Today, even the United States' friends are beginning to wish a Rest of the World candidate were permitted to run. We all live under the aegis of the American Empire's unchallenged might, so the victorious candidate will be our president, too. Of the actually available duo, it's plain that the Rest of the World's best bet is Al Gore. Not only is he smarter than his opponent, but he also does appear to know where the Rest of the World is, which gives him a definite edge in our admittedly self-interested opinion. For many of us, George W. Bush's failure to name the president of India was a mistake as irredeemable as Dan Quayle's "potatoe." Bush's fondness for frying his fellow human beings is also a reason for unease. If it was tough to forgive Clinton for executing a mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded man, it's even tougher to accept George W.'s frequent human barbecues.

What a shame, then, that the sidekick chosen by Gore to prove he was "his own man" should turn out to be a moral throwback. Lieberman's attack on the movies in the name of "the family" should have been a straw in the wind. Neither this nor his use of Was.h.i.+ngton as a ventriloquist's dummy will be any easier to forget than Bush's ignorance of President Narayanan's name. Al Gore urgently needs to remind his running mate that people can be moral without being G.o.dly for the simple reason that morality precedes ideology-religion is a way of organizing our ideas about good and evil, and not necessarily the origin of those ideas. And to mention to Senator Lieberman that the Rest of the World would like him to be a little less of a putz.

OCTOBER 2000: THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT.

In the late 1970s, during the pa.s.sage of the infamous British Nationality Act, I was a member of a delegation that lobbied the Conservative minister Geoffrey Finsberg. The proposed act, we argued, was not only racist in intent but a piece of const.i.tutional highway robbery as well. It would arbitrarily abolish a nine-hundred-year-old birthright, the so-called jus soli jus soli under which British citizens.h.i.+p belonged to all those born on British soil. This was to be replaced by a new, multi-tiered concept of nationality as a gift of the state. "Full" British citizens.h.i.+p was to be based on a murky notion of "patriality"-i.e., having at least one British citizen among your four grandparents-which would allow most white South Africans and Zimbabweans to claim it while denying it to many British pa.s.sport holders whose skin was black or brown and whose grandparents had unfortunately grown up in "the colonies" far away. under which British citizens.h.i.+p belonged to all those born on British soil. This was to be replaced by a new, multi-tiered concept of nationality as a gift of the state. "Full" British citizens.h.i.+p was to be based on a murky notion of "patriality"-i.e., having at least one British citizen among your four grandparents-which would allow most white South Africans and Zimbabweans to claim it while denying it to many British pa.s.sport holders whose skin was black or brown and whose grandparents had unfortunately grown up in "the colonies" far away.

In the absence of a written const.i.tution, Mr. Finsberg and the Conservatives were able to shrug the protests off, and the bill duly became law. It was presented as a defense against a flood of alien immigration, and under cover of such scare-mongering an ancient right of all citizens, white as well as black, was stolen away.

That experience convinced me that Britain's vaunted "unwritten const.i.tution" wasn't worth the paper it wasn't written on. As a child of the post-colonial era, I knew that the British left every one of their colonies with a written const.i.tution; why was Britain thought to be somehow above having one itself? Americans and Europeans have long found the British preference for vague, undefined freedoms not only anomalous but bizarre. If these things were worth having, why on earth were they not worth writing down? Yet movements for const.i.tutional reform, such as Charter 88, of which I was a founding member, initially attracted media derision and met with political apathy. That we are celebrating the entry into British law of a statutory Human Rights Act a mere twelve years later indicates a great s.h.i.+ft in British political consciousness, and for that s.h.i.+ft pressure groups like Charter 88, Liberty, Index on Censors.h.i.+p, and Article 19 can take much credit. Members.h.i.+p in the EU has played its part as well. European ideas of liberty were pooh-poohed under the Tories, but now their beneficial influence is being felt.

If further proof were needed of the little-Englander unelectability of the British Conservative Party, its response to the Bill of Rights amply provides it. The party's present, in the form of Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe, its dinosaur past, represented by Lord Tebbit, and their friends in the media have united to attack the new legislation. The law courts will be jammed with "frivolous" cases, they protest. Illegal immigrants and criminals will be rubbing their hands in glee! And, oh, there will be gay s.e.x in the schoolyard, and polygamy, because it's sanctioned by religions such as Islam, will no longer be a crime! This amazing display reveals just how profoundly the idea of entrenched freedoms upsets the British Right. The Human Rights Act has been law in Scotland for most of this year without destroying civil society, and the Scots must be puzzled by the Conservatives' alarmism. (Memo to anti-polygamists: even in Islam, there are legal loopholes. Muslim countries such as Pakistan, where polygamy is not tolerated, use them to outlaw the practice. Where there's a will, there's a way.) Defenders of the Human Rights Act have emphasized the importance of creating a "culture of liberty." Obviously this doesn't mean that the British don't value freedom. But-as the Tory uproar suggests-some of them don't value it enough. A genuine culture of free expression, to give one example, would not tolerate the continued presence on the British statute books of the absurd, anachronistic blasphemy law. This law was tested in the European Court in the Visions of Ecstasy case (1996). In the written evidence I presented at Strasbourg, I argued that "the modern European concept of freedom of expression was developed, by the intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in a struggle, not against the State, but against the Church. Since then, Europe has resisted the idea of Inquisitions, and has agreed that religious orthodoxies must not impose limits on what we think and say." In the end the Strasbourg judges did not overturn the blasphemy law, preferring to leave such decisions to the EU's individual member states. Now Britain is in a position to make the decision for herself. Let us hope that the abolition of the offense of blasphemy is one of the new act's earliest benefits. The likes of Ann Widdecombe and Lord Tebbit will be very upset if it is, which only enhances the attractiveness of the idea.

NOVEMBER 2000: GOING TO ELECTORAL COLLEGE.

The climax of this year's U.S. presidential election briefly conjured up the largely forgotten figure of Benjamin Harrison (18331901), the moderate Republican who, between 1889 and 1893, was the twenty-third president of the United States. You know: Benjamin Harrison? Ohio boy, grandson of the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, and described as a kindly man and stirring orator? Benjamin Harrison, who, as president, signed into law America's first-ever piece of anti-trust legislation, and who presided over the notorious "Billion Dollar Congress," with whose support he squandered the large budgetary surplus his administration had inherited? Well, no, I didn't know, either. But one fact about this now-obscure ex-president guarantees him a footnote in American electoral history. In the election of 1888, he polled 95,713 fewer votes than his opponent, Grover Cleveland-5,444,337 against 5,540,050-but still won the presidency, because the distribution of his votes earned him a majority in the electoral college, where he won handsomely, by 233 votes to Cleveland's 168.

The close-fought Gore-Bush battle has highlighted as never before the unusual way in which American democracy works. One thing we've all learned this year is that you don't need millions of votes to become president of the United States. You need exactly 270, in an electoral college that nowadays numbers 538.

A few days before the election, many political pundits suddenly woke up to the possibility that Al Gore could do a Harrison, get fewer votes than George W. Bush and still be elected president, because the voting intention polls in several battleground states, in the populous industrial North as well as Florida, had started swinging in the direction opposite to the nationwide surveys. As a result, the Gore people took to praising the electoral college effusively, extolling the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who had made such a back-door victory const.i.tutionally acceptable. Now that we've all experienced the drama of the tightest election in American history-one in which, surprisingly, it was Bush, not Gore, who lagged behind in the overall count-the Democrats have done a U-turn and are highlighting the injustice of losing an election to an opponent who received fewer votes. Dizzying as this reversal is, the question remains: how democratic is such a system of indirect election?

A variation on this type of two-step voting was the so-called Basic Democracy introduced in 1960 in Pakistan by President Ayub Khan, and now happily defunct. Ayub had come to power as so many generals have in Pakistan, by seizing it from an admittedly unsatisfactory civilian leader. His interest in representative government was therefore not great, and the system he devised was more basic than democratic. It divided up Pakistan's citizens into "const.i.tuencies" of around a thousand adults, each of whom elected a Basic Democrat, who then partic.i.p.ated in a referendum that "confirmed" Ayub in power.

In 1965, the same system was used to defeat a strong challenge to the Ayub regime mounted by a combined opposition party led by Fatima Jinnah, sister of the nation's founder. It was widely believed in Pakistan that the biggest single advantage of Basic Democracy's electoral college was that its members could be coerced and bribed. Far easier to fix a limited election than to fix one in which all Pakistan's eligible voters partic.i.p.ated fully.

Which is not to suggest that such a thing as a fixed election could ever happen in America, of course; perish the thought. True, the Cubans, Russians, and Chinese are laughing openly at American democracy, calling the USA a banana republic and worse. And when even CNN speaks of an "odor" hanging over the Florida election, and as stories continue to emerge of black voters intimidated by policemen, of polling stations remaining closed so that people were denied the chance to vote at all, and of would-be voters being told that the ballots had run out, those of us with experience of Third World elections can't help wondering why everyone in America is too fastidious even to mention that all this is happening in a state governed by the brother of the fiasco's princ.i.p.al beneficiary. But even if there hasn't been any hanky-panky, the bizarre Florida episode shows why, on the whole, direct elections feel cleaner than indirect ones. The wisdom of the minds that devised the collegiate system doesn't seem so self-evident anymore. My own country of origin, India, is like the United States a large federation of regionalisms, where people define themselves first as Bengalis, Tamils, Kashmiris, and so on, and only after that as Indians. But India, with far fewer resources than the USA, has managed-albeit imperfectly-to run a const.i.tuency-based, direct-election democracy for over half a century. It's hard to grasp why Americans can't do the same.

What the Founding Fathers have unquestionably given us, however, is a system filled with the kind of psephological arcana that political commentators adore. The fact that the electoral college contains an even number of votes creates the possibility of a tie. (An odd number of votes was evidently deemed Unwise, for reasons that were no doubt profound and remain incomprehensible.) Lovers of political esoterica will regret that such a 269269 dead heat is unlikely to occur. If it did, the election would move on to the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would have just one vote. If that process were to result in a 2525 tie, then the Senate would vote. And if they, too, were to end up deadlocked, 5050, then they would have to elect a vice president to break the stalemate. Perhaps, after all, the Founding Fathers were wiser than I've allowed. In an electorate as ballot-shy as the United States, why not choose who becomes the world's most powerful leader by letting it all come down to a single, casting vote? It gives the phrase "one man, one vote" a whole new meaning.

DECEMBER 2000: A GRAND COALITION?.

We've all been put through electoral college by this time, and now most of us would like to "recuse" ourselves from the case or perhaps "vacate" our earlier judgments; we yearn for those innocent days when a b.u.t.terfly wasn't a ballot and Chad was a place in Africa. Whoever wins this loses it, we sometimes say. Bush and Cheney will never live down their 300,000-vote defeat in the nationwide count. Gore-Lieberman will always be Sore-Loserman to half the country. But then again, n.o.body has a memory anymore. Two weeks after one of the combatants is sworn in, all this will fade. So maybe whoever loses it, loses it after all. We give up. We're confused.

We've stopped thinking it's funny, or even sad. This is still the election that Nader wrecked and Elian slanted and Katherine Harris's partisans.h.i.+p derailed and the media screwed up, but most of all it's just interminable and coated in foggy legalese and we almost don't care anymore. But under the boredom we know there has been damage. It will be a long time before America can preach to the world about electoral transparency. This election has been about as transparent as a Floridian swamp.

America reveres its democracy, its Const.i.tution, its presidency, and the past weeks have done damage to American belief in all three. How then is the strength of the republic to be restored? Bush doesn't seem interested in reaching out to Gore, and Gore has been too committed to the fight to pay more than lip service to the notion of a reunited nation. The truth is that these United States have rarely been so divided. America, which so often casts itself as the world's peacemaker, now needs to make peace with itself; and so might benefit from the experience of other divided peoples.

I'm thinking, in particular, of Israel, and of the aftermath of the post-Begin election of 1984. The Israeli national unity government came into being after that election, once it was clear that neither Yitzhak Shamir's Likud nor s.h.i.+mon Peres's Labor Party could command a majority. The two major parties then came together in an uneasy, but nevertheless enduring, alliance. For two years Peres served as prime minister, Shamir as foreign minister; then they swapped portfolios. After the elections of November 1988 failed to s.h.i.+ft the balance of power significantly, the coalition was renewed, with Shamir retaining the premiers.h.i.+p, and Peres still serving as foreign minister. The arrangement finally broke down in 1990, because of the parties' incompatible views of the peace process. While it lasted, it wasn't the world's most effective government, but it did bring down the Israeli inflation rate and, more important, permitted Israel to present a united front to its adversaries for six long years: no mean achievement.

How could such a grand coalition be brought into existence in the USA? Well, if Bush becomes president, d.i.c.k Cheney, citing his ill health, might be persuaded to stand aside from the vice presidency, which could then be offered to the present vice president, Al Gore. And in the increasingly improbable event of a Gore presidency, Joe Lieberman could opt to take up his Senate seat instead of becoming Gore's veep; whereupon President Gore could offer the spot to Bush. After so radical a move, the creation of a genuine coalition cabinet would be relatively-and I mean relatively-simple. As to whether it would be const.i.tutional for the president to step down after two years to allow his deputy a turn, that's an issue for the swarm of litigators presently buzzing around this election to consider.

Impossible? Maybe so. But everything about this election so far has strained credulity. What was once unthinkable might, in these odd circ.u.mstances, actually begin to make sense. It might even have become necessary. There's a satirical text from Zimbabwe, that great democracy, doing the rounds of the Internet at present. Asking us what we would think of the U.S. electoral fiasco if it had happened in a Third World country, this satire, supposedly written by "a Zimbabwean politician," pokes much predictable fun at the alleged corruption of the United States. If America can now be laughed at by Zimbabwean pols, then it's surely time for drastic remedies to be considered. A Bush-Gore alliance might just renew American (and international) faith in the honor of their leaders and restore some much-needed l.u.s.ter to their tarnished inst.i.tutions. It would be a government of strange bedfellows, but better that, perhaps, than four more years of bitter partisan squabbling, which would inevitably drag America's democratic inst.i.tutions-the Congress as well as the presidency, even the Supreme Court itself-further down into the Zimbabwean dirt.

"If only they could both lose." Why not stand the joke on its head? Let them both win. "The people have spoken," Bill Clinton said not so long ago. "It's just that we don't yet know what they meant." Maybe this sort of power-sharing formula comes closer to expressing the people's will than anything else. *27 *27

JANUARY 2001: HOW THE GRINCH STOLE AMERICA.

[A verse for the inauguration, with apologies to Dr. Seuss]Every Vote Vote down in down in Voteville Voteville liked Voting a Lot, liked Voting a Lot,But the GRINCH, who lived West of Voteville,did Not.For Voting was Counting Counting-not just Adding and suchBut finding out if you Amounted to Much.In this case, the question was, who, in a pinch,Amounted to More? Did the Veep? Or the Grinch?The Veep! What a creep!What a CREEP! CREEP! CREEP! CREEP!He simply could NOT be outdone by the Veep.But the Veep was Experienced.He'd done the big jobs,He was smart. (He was smart-a.s.s.)He knew all the k.n.o.bsAnd the levers and b.u.t.tonsThat worked the State's s.h.i.+pAnd the Grinch?Well, re: knowledge he was not too hip.The President of India? The economy? Pa.s.s.He'd never been close to the head of the cla.s.s.So far the poor Grinch hadn't Amounted to zip,He just hadn't Counted. It gave him the pip.(His father! His eminent Dad! His own blood!Compared to him, Grinchy had proved quite a dud.)And now that he'd actually reached his Big DayArgh! Counting the Ballots could steal it away!And what was was a Ballot? Was it silver or gold? a Ballot? Was it silver or gold?Were they counting up treasure? A fortune untold?No! Just some dumb punch-card! They were counting up holes holes!Oh, the holes!Yes, the holes!Oh, the HOLES! HOLES! HOLES! HOLES!The whole thing depended on Circles of Air-Not to mention the half-holes,and holes that weren't there,but that wanted to be there,and thought that was fair.All they would do was to add up! To Count!And they'd count count! And they'd count count!And they'd COUNT! COUNT! COUNT! COUNT!And they'd probably end up with aQuite Wrong Amount!"If they go on counting,"the Grinch shuddered, "Eep!"They may just wind up electing the Veep!"How to stop it?" the Grinch exclaimed with a moanAnd then he remembered he wasn't alone.There were Grinches all over,Big Grinches and small,There were Grinches in Voteville and in City Hall,He knew some news-Grinches,And he could dependOn these inky fellows to shape and to bendTheir stories to help him win through in the end.But the Grinches who'd give himThe edge and the winWere the great Legal Grinches,And Grinches of Spin.So he called on his cohorts."My friends, we must GrinchThe election! 'Nuff Counting!To work! Do not flinch!We must Grinch! We must Grinch!We must GRINCH! GRINCH! GRINCH! GRINCH!We cannot be beaten by circles of airOr circles that only imagine they're there.Every day that they Count them, the total will creepUp and up, until it elects that old Veep!"So they Grinched the election.They Grinched, day by day,Until all the options were whittled away.They Grinched it with lawyers,They Grinched it with writs,They split all the hairsAnd they picked all the nits,And when it came up to the Ultimate BenchThey Grinched it away with one final Wrench.They ordered all Voteville to give up its Count,Before it came up with that Quite Wrong Amount.And the Votes down in Voteville?They've run out of steam.'Tis the season to party, to heal, and to dream.Why worry? The Const.i.tution is strong,The judges who judge it can never be wrong,The Veep may have won, but he's lost.And that's that.Voteville accepts the high judges' fiat. fiat.There isn't a holler, there isn't a scream,Think of the dollar! Let's play for the team!So everyone okays the Grinch's regime,And things are probablyprobablyprobablyprobablyNot as bad as they seem."Four whole years of Grinchdom!"The Grinch cries with glee."There's Only One Person who Counts now . . . That'sME."

FEBRUARY 2001: SLEAZE IS BACK.

One day after France's former foreign minister, the almost impossibly grand Roland Dumas, who is on trial for corruption, denounces the proceedings against him-that a personage as distinguished as he should be subjected to such an ordeal! Zut! Alors! Zut! Alors!-the fugitive businessman Alfred Sirven is arrested in the Philippines and immediately claims that he can provide evidence of corruption against "one hundred names"-that is, most of the political elite of the Mitterrand era.

Meanwhile, in Peru, the seizure of over two thousand secretly obtained videotapes reveals the power of the fallen President Fujimori's secret state over just about everyone in that country's ruling cla.s.s. Journalists, politicians, generals were all being blackmailed for years.

Meanwhile, in India, the Bofors scandal bubbles to the surface again. The rumors of corruption surrounding this 1980s arms deal have already besmirched the reputations of the late Rajiv Gandhi-did he or did he not accept illegal kickbacks?-and the late Olof Palme-was he a.s.sa.s.sinated by a disgruntled middleman? Now, as the Indian courts turn their attention to the activities of the billionaire Hinduja brothers, the old scandal threatens to hurl new dirt across the oceans, at the British government, which became so improbably friendly with the Hindujas.

(A four-year-old child could have warned the Blairites against this a.s.sociation. Unfortunately, no four-year-old child was available, and as a result the British public presently believes New Labour to be almost as sleazy as the grubby Tories they replaced. Almost as sleazy as Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken! Well . . . gosh.) Meanwhile, in the United States, ex-President Clinton is under fire for having pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich, while his successor, "President" Bush, mouths plat.i.tudes about bilateralism while pursuing an agenda of the far right; and this in spite of the growing evidence that he lost the election he "won" thanks to the notorious Supreme Court coup; lost it, in Florida, by a margin of around 25,000 votes.

Yes, sleaze has resurfaced, grinning its s...o...b..ring grin, to remind us that it never really went away-that it remains the great occult force that bends and shapes the age, its existence perennially denied, its empire expanding daily. You can almost admire its inexhaustible inventiveness. Things you never imagined were sleazy-things that actually were never tarnished before-come daily under sleaze's slimy suzerainty, and are hopelessly compromised, or, like innocence or paradise, lost.

Thus, a feature of recent months has been the sleazing-up not only of politics, where it's almost expected, but of sport. Is racing fixed? asks the British press, and you can almost hear the horses laugh. About boxing, n.o.body even bothers to ask. And the former Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar has at last been found guilty of taking bribes. Even cricket, whose very name was once a synonym for integrity, is now up to here in the dirt. As for athletics, the recent "doping Olympics" offered spectacular evidence of trouble: the shot-putter C. J. Hunter's four positive drug tests, the gold-medal gymnast Andreea Raducan's positive test for pseudoephedrine, Carl Lewis's astonis.h.i.+ng comment on Linford Christie's positive test for nandrolone: "They got him at last." So our heroes are at it now, as well as our leaders. In fact, it looks as if they've been at it all along. Is there anything out there that isn't fixed? Reality-TV contests? Literary prizes? University entrance examinations? Your upcoming job interview? Or is it just that we haven't found out how the fixing is being done?

Welcome to the third millennium. The American novelist Thomas Pynchon's redefinition of paranoia has never seemed more firmly on the money: paranoia usefully seen as the crazy-making but utterly sane realization that our times have secret meanings, that those meanings are dreadful, immoral, and corrupt beyond our wildest imaginings, and that the surface of things is a fraud, an artifact designed to hide the awful truth from us ordinary deluded suckers, who keep wanting to believe that things might actually-you know?-be beginning to improve.

The sucker's reaction to much of the foregoing would be to point out that many of the sleaze merchants I've mentioned have received or are receiving their comeuppances. Dumas is on trial, Sirven is in custody, Fujimori has fallen, the Hindujas have been obliged to remain in India pending the outcome of their case, Clinton is history, the bent cricketers were banned, and the doping athletes were caught. So that's all right then.

The paranoid knows better. If the crimes of the past are only now being uncovered, the paranoid will retort, how long will it take before we know about the crimes of the present? Are the "innocent" merely the guilty whose guilt hasn't yet been established? Pynchonian a.n.a.lysis leaves true paranoids with few choices: to become obsessed investigators of the world's secret meanings; to accept their impotence and fall into one of a familiar selection of futile, addled, entropic hazes; or to explode into the kind of rage that wants to blow things up.

I knew a man once whose thing it was to wreck the toilets in office buildings and write a slogan on the ruined walls: "If the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed." I'm beginning to understand how he felt. And to remember how, in a younger, hairier, angrier phase of life, I often used to feel.

MARCH 2001: CROUCHING STRIKER, HIDDEN DANGER.

Without Hollywood, they say, Los Angeles would just be Phoenix with a coastline. This year, as deadlines approach for strikes by actors and writers, L.A. is facing the possibility of becoming, for a time, exactly such a characterless, movie-less sprawl. Rumors are flying: the studios actually want the strikes, the actors don't, though their representatives are talking tough, and the writers? Well, they're only writers, after all. Talks keep breaking down an inch away from agreement. TV companies are preparing to flood the schedules with even more reality-TV programming-it's cheap! it's popular! it's not unionized!-to fill the holes created by The Strike. There's plenty of bad feeling in the air, and a growing sense of inevitability. The shutdown is "going to happen." (Which means either it will or it won't.) And in the midst of this uncertainty, the movie community awaits its annual you-love-me-you-really-love-me festival of big business interests disguised as individual achievements. The lobbying season is over. The city is no longer being bombarded by "for your consideration" videotapes. Rock stars are no longer playing impromptu gigs in old folks' homes in the hope of garnering a few votes for Best Song from elderly academicians resident therein. The votes are in. The Oscars are coming.

The movies are L.A.'s culture. At the weekend, big audiences go to the new pictures the way the opera-loving Milanese go to an opening at La Scala. L.A. is a city of pa.s.sionate moviegoers. I haven't seen such enthusiastically partic.i.p.atory audiences anywhere outside the Indian subcontinent. This can get irritating, for example when a big guy with his a.s.s hanging out of his pants moans and groans loudly every time Penelope Cruz appears on screen in All the Pretty Horses All the Pretty Horses-"my G.o.d, she's so beautiful!-Oh, oh, he's going to fall for her!-Uh-oh, here comes trouble!"-or when a five-year-old insistently asks her parents, during the interminable Cast Away, Cast Away, "Mommy, when is the volleyball going to talk?" (Footnote: Wilson the volleyball's performance is the best thing in this leaden movie. Why wasn't Wilson nominated for Best Supporting Actor? It's a scandal.) "Mommy, when is the volleyball going to talk?" (Footnote: Wilson the volleyball's performance is the best thing in this leaden movie. Why wasn't Wilson nominated for Best Supporting Actor? It's a scandal.) Angeleno enthusiasm can, however, also be thrilling. I can't remember ever seeing a Western audience react to a new film the way a packed afternoon audience in a theater on La Brea responded to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Even by L.A.'s standards, the whooping and cheering was astonis.h.i.+ng. The audience knew it was sharing a very special experience-the arrival of a great, cla.s.sic film-and was simply transported by its brilliance. Anyone who thinks DVDs will someday replace moviegoing should have been there. Even by L.A.'s standards, the whooping and cheering was astonis.h.i.+ng. The audience knew it was sharing a very special experience-the arrival of a great, cla.s.sic film-and was simply transported by its brilliance. Anyone who thinks DVDs will someday replace moviegoing should have been there.

Those PC killjoys who have denigrated Crouching Tiger Crouching Tiger as a piece of latter-day Orientalism, a Western appropriation of Eastern manner and material, would have seen an audience as diverse as America itself-Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans easily outnumbered any WASP-y Orientalists who might have been there enjoying it for the wrong reasons. Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray reached smaller audiences, in their native j.a.pan and India, than the commercial movies of their contemporaries. That doesn't make as a piece of latter-day Orientalism, a Western appropriation of Eastern manner and material, would have seen an audience as diverse as America itself-Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans easily outnumbered any WASP-y Orientalists who might have been there enjoying it for the wrong reasons. Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray reached smaller audiences, in their native j.a.pan and India, than the commercial movies of their contemporaries. That doesn't make Seven Samurai Seven Samurai inauthentic, or the trashy products of the mainstream Bombay cinema "more Indian" than Ray's masterworks. So, yes, Jackie Chan sells a lot of tickets and, yes, inauthentic, or the trashy products of the mainstream Bombay cinema "more Indian" than Ray's masterworks. So, yes, Jackie Chan sells a lot of tickets and, yes, Crouching Tiger Crouching Tiger draws on a long tradition of martial-arts movies. But Jackie Chan movies are cardboard fun, and Ang Lee's beautiful, intimate epic is-one would have thought self-evidently-a luminous work of art. draws on a long tradition of martial-arts movies. But Jackie Chan movies are cardboard fun, and Ang Lee's beautiful, intimate epic is-one would have thought self-evidently-a luminous work of art.

In the context of the Academy Awards and the shadow of the strike, the success of Crouching Tiger Crouching Tiger is especially significant. It's being talked about as the breakthrough movie that has taught Americans to accept subt.i.tled foreign films into the giant cineplexes where the big money is made. And this is why the various players-but the studios above all-may be making a big mistake if they think they can ride out the strike without losing their stranglehold on the market. From the late 1950s to early 1970s, a flood of great non-American filmmakers prized Hollywood's fingers off the cinema's throat for a few years. The result was the golden age of the sound cinema, the time of the great films of Kurosawa and Ray, of the French New Wave, of Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti, of Wajda, Jancso, and Bergman. Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming, in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the ma.s.s audience is ready, at long last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without. is especially significant. It's being talked about as the breakthrough movie that has taught Americans to accept subt.i.tled foreign films into the giant cineplexes where the big money is made. And this is why the various players-but the studios above all-may be making a big mistake if they think they can ride out the strike without losing their stranglehold on the market. From the late 1950s to early 1970s, a flood of great non-American filmmakers prized Hollywood's fingers off the cinema's throat for a few years. The result was the golden age of the sound cinema, the time of the great films of Kurosawa and Ray, of the French New Wave, of Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti, of Wajda, Jancso, and Bergman. Now, once again, world cinema is blossoming, in China, in Iran, in Britain. And it may just be that the ma.s.s audience is ready, at long last, to enjoy rather more diversity in its cultural diet. After all, there are plenty of dreadful American films we could all cheerfully do without.

The Oscars usually show us how Hollywood sees itself. Ridley Scott's technically brilliant but woodenly scripted Gladiator Gladiator is the big-studio candidate for honors, just as the latest sentimental Miramax confection, is the big-studio candidate for honors, just as the latest sentimental Miramax confection, Chocolat, Chocolat, leads the charge of the smaller guys. Comedy comes off badly, as usual-the Coen brothers have to be content with screenplay and cinematography nominations for the wonderful leads the charge of the smaller guys. Comedy comes off badly, as usual-the Coen brothers have to be content with screenplay and cinematography nominations for the wonderful O Brother, Where Art Thou? O Brother, Where Art Thou? There's no nomination for George Clooney's delicious, hairnet-wearing performance in this movie, or, indeed, for Renee Zellweger's moving, subtle work in the t.i.tle role of There's no nomination for George Clooney's delicious, hairnet-wearing performance in this movie, or, indeed, for Renee Zellweger's moving, subtle work in the t.i.tle role of Nurse Betty. Nurse Betty. But behind all this familiar maneuvering, the tiger is crouching, the dragon hides. But behind all this familiar maneuvering, the tiger is crouching, the dragon hides.

And if by some chance the one genuinely great movie to have been nominated this year runs away with the big prizes, it may just be the wake-up call that Hollywood needs. When the world's finest filmmakers are coming after your audience, it may not be such a smart idea to shut your industry down.

APRIL 2001: IT WASN'T ME.

The current hit single "It Wasn't Me" by s.h.a.ggy (featuring Rikrok) celebrates, with wickedly infectious glee, the uses of shamelessness. A man caught red-handed cheating on his girl-a man watched by said girl making love to someone else on the sofa, in the shower, on the bathroom floor-must, or so the song tells us, at all costs, and in the face of all the evidence, deny, deny, deny. Now, who does this remind us of?

There have been some great champions of brazen denial in recent years: Diego Maradona ignoring the video evidence of his notorious hand-balled goal against England and ascribing it to the "hand of G.o.d"; O. J. Simpson swearing to dedicate his life to finding his wife's "real" killer (any hot leads, O.J.?); the British Conservative politicians Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken denying their proven corruption to the point of their economic ruination; and of course the great denier himself, Bill Clinton, pa.s.sim, from "I did not have s.e.xual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," to the rejection of any improprieties in his last-gasp "Pardongate."

The barefaced denial, the giving of the lie direct, has become, in this age of saturation media coverage, an increasingly prominent feature of public life. It is now routine for even the age's greatest monsters-the war criminals of ex-Yugoslavia or Cambodia-to deny their atrocities, knowing that their power of access to the world's airwaves is almost certainly greater than any journalist's power of access to the truth. When great crimes are openly admitted-Timothy McVeigh boasting about the Oklahoma bombing, the Taliban taking pride in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas-it's so unusual that you find yourself fighting the urge to praise the criminals for their plain speaking.

I once sat in a courtroom in Alice Springs, Australia, listening to the testimony of a truck driver accused of murder-of having deliberately crashed his vehicle into a bar he'd been thrown out of, killing and maiming many people. The man had clearly been carefully coached in the important contemporary art of saying the thing that is not. His dress was sober, his eyes downcast, his manner shocked and decent; and for a long time, he persuasively denied his guilt. But in the end the coaching couldn't save him. After he'd repeatedly denied that he could do such a thing, he made the mistake, under cross-examination, of saying why. "For me to half-destroy my truck," he explained reasonably, "is completely against my personality." The jury quickly found him guilty and threw away the key. What did him in was that flash of unpalatable truth. A more skillful liar-or rather, denier-would have known better.

"It wasn't me." Many such consummate exponents of the arts of brazen obfuscation are presently in the news. In Britain, successive governments have colluded with the British agricultural lobby to unleash not one but two plagues upon the world. The first, BSE [Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy], was the result of (1) turning cows into cannibals and then (2) allowing farmers to save energy costs by giving their cattle food that hadn't been boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to kill the deadly germs. But of course the Tory government of the day did not admit its complicity; nor did the farm lobby own up to its part. Instead, both parties pretended, for a long time, that the links between BSE and its crossover human variant, CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease], were "unproven." And now here comes foot-and-mouth, and we discover that three years ago the present Labour government declined to outlaw the use of pigswill as feed (even though many of our European partners had done so) and failed, once again, to ensure that the swill was boiled long enough or at high enough temperatures to be safe. Once again, the decision was cash-driven: the farm lobby wanted to cut corners and save money, and the farm lobby got its way. Do we hear the government or the lobbyists admitting they were wrong? Of course not. "It wasn't us, it was this Chinese restaurant that imported illegal meat." So that's all right then. We can just blame the Chinese. We all know the kinds of things they they eat. eat.

Meanwhile, in India, the BJP-led government has contracted an acute case of snout-in-trough disease. The sting operation carried out by the excellent website tehelka.com-what a difference the Internet has made to press freedoms in India!-showed many of the country's leaders accepting bribes on videotape. There have been some resignations, but no admissions of guilt, and much talk, by the shamed leaders and other governing party figures, of a sinister "conspiracy" against the ruling coalition. The new BJP president has spoken of creating a new code of conduct for people in public life, but at the same time has refused to expel his corruption-tainted predecessor. Apparently, and in spite of the video evidence, it wasn't necessarily him.

And now, as the United States, the world's greatest contributor to global warming, repudiates the Kyoto treaty designed to reduce environmentally harmful emissions, President George W. Bush goes so far as to claim that the link between greenhouse gases and global warming has not been proven. ("It wasn't us.") This is what the cigarette companies used to say about cancer, and it's about as persuasive. But the president has a big megaphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims, he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.

Just sometimes a song stumbles on a truth about the spirit of the age. The s.h.a.ggy-Rikrok hit is cheerfully unrepentant about its amoral little discovery. Deny your wrongs and you will right them. As Nancy Reagan might have put it, "Just say no." It's plainly an irresistible proposition. You hear it everywhere right now, hanging in the air like a mantra. All together now: "It wasn't me . . ."

MAY 2001: ABORTION IN INDIA.

I have always believed myself fortunate to have come from a sprawling Indian family dominated by women. I have no brothers but plenty of sisters (three: believe me, that's plenty). My mother's sisters are a pair of aunts as formidable and irresistible as Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha. In my generation of cousins, girls outnumber boys by two to one. While I was growing up, the family's houses, in India and Pakistan, were full of the instructions, quarrels, laughter, and ambitions of these women, few of whom resemble the stereotype of the demure, self-effacing Indian woman. These are opinionated, voluble, smart, funny, arm-waving persons-lawyers, educators, radicals, movers, shakers, matriarchs-and to be heard in their company you must not only raise your voice but also have something interesting to say. If you aren't worth listening to, you will most certainly not be heard.

As a result, I feel, to this day, most at home in the company of women. Among my close friends the girls far outnumber the boys. In my writing, I have repeatedly sought to create female characters as rich and powerful as those I have known. The men in my books are rarely as flamboyant as the women. This is as it should be: or at least, in my experience, how it has been, more often than not.

It is therefore worrying, to say the least, that these women, or rather their potential successors in the Indian generation presently being conceived, are rapidly becoming an endangered species. In spite of the illegality of the practice-and under cover of spurious health checks-ultrasound tests to determine the gender of unborn children are increasingly being used all over India to identify, and then abort, obscene quant.i.ties of healthy female fetuses. The population is rapidly becoming lopsided, skewed toward male numerical dominance to a genuinely alarming degree.

Here's a tough nut for the pro-choice lobby on abortion, of which I've always been a fully paid-up member. What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses? Many Indian commentators say that if these s.e.x-discriminatory abortions are to end, the refusals must come from Indian women. But Indian women want male children as much as their husbands do. In part this is because of the myriad pressures of a male-centered society, including the expenses of the dowry system. But fundamentally it's the result of modern technology being placed at the service of medieval social att.i.tudes. Clearly not all Indian women are as emanc.i.p.ated as those among whom I was lucky enough to be raised. Traditional India still exists, and its values are still powerful. Women beware women: an old story, given a chilling new gynecological twist.

Ever since Indira and Sanjay Gandhi's attempt to introduce birth control by diktat during the forced-vasectomy excesses of the mid-seventies, it has been very hard to get the Indian ma.s.ses to accept the idea of family planning. Mother Teresa's hard-line attack on contraception didn't help. Lately, Hindu nationalists have made things even harder by suggesting that the country's Muslims are breeding faster than Hindus, thus placing Hinduism "under threat." (This, even though the Hindu majority makes up a whopping 85 percent of the population.) Abortion, along with contraception, has up to now been anathematized by Indian religious leaders. As a result India's population has soared past the one billion mark, and is projected to overtake China's within a decade or so. But now, suddenly, terminations of pregnancies have become acceptable to many Indians, for the most reprehensible of reasons; and the argument over the urgent issues of population control gets even murkier. There are those who claim that the new wave of abortions is actually beneficial, because the bias toward boys means that Indian couples who have girl children will tend to go on having daughters until they have a son, thus contributing to overpopulation. Allowing them to make the choice, the argument continues, will not result in a scarcity of girl children but rather make sure there isn't a glut of them. The trouble with this theory is that the statistical evidence suggests that in a generation's time there will indeed be a girl shortage. Then what? Will girls become more valued than they are today, or will the masculinism of Indian society, reinforced by the weight of numbers, simply create more and more macho men, and increasingly downtrodden women?

Not all problems are capable of instant solution. Even though the nation imagines itself as a woman-Bharat-Mata, Mother India-and even though, in Hinduism, the dynamic principle of the G.o.dhead-shakti-is female, the scandal of the missing girls of India will end only when and if modern India succeeds in overturning centuries of prejudice against girl children.

This doesn't mean that nothing can be done. The government can and should crack down hard on the ultrasound clinics that are allowing people to defy the law. It should provide state benefits for families with girl children and perhaps even, for a time, impose tax penalties on families with boys. Politicians, educators, activist groups, even newspaper columnists can and should batter away at the ingrained prejudices that are at the heart of the trouble. In the end it all boils down to this: is today's India prepared to be seen as the country that gets rid of its daughters because it believes them inferior to men? The parents who are doing this may one day face questions from the children they allowed to live. "Where are my sisters?" What will they answer then?

JUNE 2001: REALITY TV.

I've managed to miss out on reality TV until now. In spite of all the talk in Britain about nasty Nick and flighty Mel or, in America, about the fat, naked b.a.s.t.a.r.d Richard manipulating his way to desert-island victory, I have somehow preserved my purity. I wouldn't recognize Nick or Mel if I pa.s.sed them in the street, or Richard if he were standing in front of me unclothed.

Ask me where the Big Brother Big Brother house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, and I have no answer. I do remember the American house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, and I have no answer. I do remember the American Survivor Survivor contestant who managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers looked like burst sausages, but that's because he got onto the main evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares? contestant who managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers looked like burst sausages, but that's because he got onto the main evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares?

The subject of reality-TV shows, however, has been impossible to avoid. Their success is the media story of the (new) century, along with the ratings triumph of the big-money game shows like Millionaire. Millionaire. Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves, or ought to. Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves, or ought to.

And what tawdry narcissism is here revealed! The television set, once so idealistically thought of as our window on the world, has become a dime-store mirror instead. Who needs images of the world's rich otherness when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself-these half-attractive half-persons-enacting ordinary life under weird conditions? Who needs talent when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?

I've been watching [the British] Big Brother 2, Big Brother 2, which has achieved the improbable feat of taking over the tabloid front pages in the final stages of a general election campaign. This, according to the conventional wisdom, is because the show is more interesting than the election. The "reality" may be even stranger. It may be that which has achieved the improbable feat of taking over the tabloid front pages in the final stages of a general election campaign. This, according to the conventional wisdom, is because the show is more interesting than the election. The "reality" may be even stranger. It may be that Big Brother Big Brother is so popular because it's even more boring than the election. Because it is the most boring, and therefore most "normal," way of becoming famous and, if you're lucky or smart, of getting rich as well. is so popular because it's even more boring than the election. Because it is the most boring, and therefore most "normal," way of becoming famous and, if you're lucky or smart, of getting rich as well.

"Famous" and "rich" are now the two most important concepts in Western society, and et