The Electric Windmill.

The Electric Windmill

WHEN TOM BETHELL first came to this country over 25 years ago, he was your basic snotty limey: "From the moment I stepped off the ship, I was opinionated about all I saw. . . . Americans were . . . childlike, rich as a rule, sometimes quite amusing, often generous, uncultivated of course, and often possessed of a surprising degree of expertise in technical topics such as engineering or whatever: boring, but for all one knew, important. . . . In addition, it was understood that they were themselves frequently aware of their shortcomings and more than willing to take self-improvement lessons from an educated Englishman such as myself." But he had a saving grace: he loved jazz. Indeed, he took a teaching job at a prep school in Virginia "because I knew it to be in the South and hence imagined it to be near New Orleans." After realizing this and other errors, he began a career in journalism out of which The Electric Windmill has been assembled.

He's still giving lessons to Americans, of course. Readers of NATIONAL REVIEW will be familiar with this mode, from his articles on land reform, arms control, immigration, whatever. (I have thought sometimes of calling him up and saying, "Tom, we'd like four thousand words on the Middle East--and could you throw in Social Security as a sidebar?") But the pieces collected here--mostly from The American Spectator--work a different vein, the reporter as impressionist, and they are a garden of delights.

Tom Bethell can parallel-park an argument more neatly than anyone else going. Consider this aside, from a piece on a screenwriters' strike in Los Angeles: "Whenever you hear about people going out on strike, you always have to consider the possibility that they are striking not because they are being paid less than the market can bear, but because they are being paid more. And they are looking to keep it that way--by keeping out rivals who will work for less." The most extended argumentation in The Electric Windmill occurs in two pieces on natural selection that appeared in Harper's, and which end with this remorseless QED: "Either you think that complex organisms arose by non-natural phenomena, or you think that they arose by natural phenomena. If they arose by natural phenomena, they had to evolve. And that's all there is to it." The words, incidentally, are not Bethell's, but those of geneticist Richard Lewontin, whom Bethell patiently interviewed. If you don't see why they are simultaneously unanswerable and useless, read the pieces.

But his preferred tools here are eye and ear, the simplest in a reporter's kit. Bethell often adopts the persona of the casual passerby: "I happened to be walking nearby, down Constitution Avenue . . ." "Curious about the overnight appearance of wigwams and other quaint structures, I parked my car near the Mall . . ." The casualness is an act: a lot of energy goes into this passerby's attention. But since this energy is expended on the subject, not the observer, the result is to render Bethell clear as glass, empty as a mike.

And what things we see and hear through him. The Electric Windmill is an anthology of voices. Meet Big Jim Garrison, the conspiracy theorist: "Sooner or later, because people are lazy, you catch them out on propinquity." Or Sidney Hook, in round umpteen of the Jewish bout with justice: "I don't expect the innocent man to be vindicated tomorrow. But I do expect him to be vindicated before he goes to the scaffold. I don't expect the tyrant to be struck by a thunderbolt. But I would expect, if there is a God, that he would not die comfortably in his bed." Or an AIDS victim in a Roman Catholic hospice: "I've had so many people before me who died. Some had longer tails than the devil. . . . But in the end they grasped the peace." Or Arnold Beichman, contemplating the Winter Palace: "Kerensky, that jerk. One bullet could have changed history. A lot more people would be alive today."

Sometimes Bethell's subjects lay out a whole philosophy, the hidden engine of entire movements. Consider this blast from Mitch Snyder, the impresario of homelessness. "I believe in hell. I believe we're there right now. . . . Look around you. Look at where you are! What could be worse? . . . Everybody struggles with the same infinitely stupid questions, because we're of the flesh. So we pay a price for that." There it is--the credo of a blocked gnostic. This world is vile, so Snyder will wallow in its vileness. He helps the destitute because he hates them, along with himself and everybody else. What could be plainer?

I have one quarrel with this book, which concerns the reason why we were lucky enough to get Bethell in the first place. In a review of Andrew Porter's music critism, which he quite properly thrashes, Bethell goes on to argue that, since music " `translates' the emotional content of some other world" into sounds, "a redescription, in words, of the content of this `other' world should be the ultimate task of those who write" about it. It is a plausible approach, and he cites Aldous Huxley and Shaw as critics who have pursued it (to whom one might add Nietzsche, Mann, and H.L. Mencken, who wrote the perfect epitome of Debussy: "a pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one"). So why hasn't Bethell done it himself?

One reason may be his regular, almost principled, avoidance of metaphor. Metaphor has problems; it fogs the pane, plays games with the mikes. But it can help writers re-create, in words, the emotional content of this world, in ways that even the plainest speech can't (take the metaphor out of Mencken's Debussy, and there's nothing left).

He should do the music anyway. If he says he's expected to stick to politics, that's no excuse. I can't imagine any editor rejecting anything submitted by Tom Bethell.