the ball game
The US media is obsessed with impeachment. But the people believe life has rarely been so sweet, says Ed Vulliamy
During the week that the first impeachment trial of a United States president this century began in earnest, another record bit the dust.
This one concerned the proverbial diamond-in-the-dust, as it happens: a record price paid for a baseball.
The ball was that with which Mark McGwire of the St Louis Cardinals hit his 70th and last home run in an epic season, during which he and Sammy Sosa of Chicago both smashed the supposedly invincible record of 61 homers set in 1961.
The ball went at auction to an anonymous collector for more than $3-million, crushing the previous record price even more spectacularly than the home runs themselves. The title had been held by the ball which Babe Ruth slugged for his first home run, and which fetched $126 000.
It was fitting that McGwire’s achievement – and the good fortune of the man who caught the ball, 26-year-old scientist Philip Ozersky, now a millionaire – came during the year that the American epic novel also asserted its global superiority.
This was the year of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a doorstopper charting half- a-century of US history, based loosely around the hunt for the home-run ball with which the New York Giants clinched the 1951 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Nor was the record breaking confined to sports. Titanic was the biggest box- office movie of all time: the relative cost of America’s water-of-life, petrol, hit an all-time low; and cities reported plunging crime rates, the lowest in decades, notably in those whose names had become synonomous with violence – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago.
But within the Washington Beltway and in the mass media, such tales are no more than agreeable flip-sides to the outgoing year, which President Bill Clinton surveyed in his State of the Union speech this week.
These things may be worth celebrating, say the right wing and the networks, but are luxuries alongside the urgent business of the moment: the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.
But which is the real luxury? McGwire’s baseball or the scandal? In a recent New Yorker, Joe Klein writes: “Scandal is something of a luxury … If the times were bad – if there were an economic collapse or external threat, if lives were on the line – the public would have no patience with the sexual obsession of legislators and reporters.”
As it happens, the public has repeatedly said it has no patience for these obsessions, but what interest there is has no doubt been kindled because “the times” are not bad at all – indeed, they are quite the reverse.
Four years ago, film-maker Ken Burns chattily explained to The Observer why he had chosen to follow up his award-winning series on the American Civil War with a series on, of all things, baseball.
Burns had established himself as a guardian of US popular social narrative history, who had turned peoples’ TV sets into electronic hearths around which to tell stories.
“I think baseball is the logical sequel,” said Burns, of a series which would harvest him even more awards. “The Civil War was about the foundation stones of US democracy.
“Baseball was and is the best way of telling the story about what America did with that democracy.”
Burns found metaphor and allegories everywhere: in the push west to California by big East Coast clubs eager for bounty; in the eventual emancipation of the blacks in the negro leagues, and desegregation of the major league.
There were many people in Washington who tried to postpone Clinton’s State of the Union speech, in the Capitol where he is on trial (a prospect the president is said to savour enormously).
The timing of events, argued many Republicans, was unfortunate; the confluence of themes in the same place made it inappropriate for the president to deliver his speech.
It will go ahead, decreed the new speaker, out of “deference to the office of president”. But what was it the right wing was so unwilling to hear? Maybe it was that they could not face another fusillade of good news from the president who is supposed to have torn the nation’s moral guts out.
His Saturday morning radio broadcasts have become an almost comic counterpoint to the scandal headlines: he talks about investing in youth programmes while the anchors talk about a semen-stained dress.
But when it all comes together in one speech, the president’s enemies get more nervous.
After all, what is the state of the union? And which union anyway – that of the people, or of the politicians? Which is the best way to measure the state of the union: Ken Starr’s report or Mark McGwire’s baseball? If Ken Burns is to be believed, it should be the baseball.
The 50th anniversary commemorations of Babe Ruth’s death, and the great Joe DiMaggio’s deathbed brokering of a truce between warring factions in the New York Yankees, evoked a tidal wave of emotion and sensitivity to a lost epoch in a way which entwines the past with the present.
There is a strong sense, in the baseball revival – reflecting society at large – that the past is venerable and worthy of respect, but that the present is easily up to the task of justifying itself.
This is a cornerstone not only of the ball game, but of the US’s view of itself.
Clinton loves to use the word “renaissance”. He used it again in Detroit recently, talking about the latest blinding economic figures. His “renaissance weekend” in 1994 (at which he assembled an awesome crowd of the US’s brightest brains to hammer out the guiding principles) was hailed as the zenith of his since clouded presidency.
And there is a way in which Americans now look upon their founding fathers, their Constitution, their history, that resembles that of the 15th-century Italians in their invocation of the ancients.
It is the idea that you can stare history confidently in the face, not only to learn from the former glories, but in order to improve upon them.
It is fairly obvious what the baseball allegory refers to. Two weeks ago, the US posted the lowest unemployment rate – 4,3% – in four decades, and new jobs are being churned out at a fast clip.
The only man who continually reminds the US that the boom cannot go on for ever is the man at the helm of it: Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. But no matter: in the eye of the beholder, Greenspan is King Midas, a fiscal hawk with a liberal, reforming boss, and the US believes that so long as he is on the treasury throne, he will continue to turn the harvest into gold.
Indeed, the economy is so strong, that there has even been a renaissance for its enemies – a return of labour and union militancy. While the Teamsters elected Jimmy Hoffa Jnr on a swashbuckling ticket of defiance, the unions have won strike after strike, against American Airlines, UPS and General Motors.
Education has been pumped full of cash, and the crime figures are remarkable: robberies down by 17%; burglary is half what it was in 1973. The environment is high on the list of priorities, with the government (only just) winning the battle for land conservation in the wild West.
America will be America: and there have of course been dark undercurrents rippling beneath the shiny surface. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen.
There have been episodes that send shivers down the spine: a spate of schoolchildren being gunned down by classmates, culminating in a bloody massacre at Jonesboro, Arkansas. In Texas, a black man was chained to the back of a truck by three white men, and dragged until his body was decapitated and ripped into 75 pieces.
But even in these horrors, there was cold comfort: Jonesboro and the other schoolyard massacres were followed by the first serious questioning of gun culture in the rural reaches. The funeral of the man hewn to death in Texas brought out columns of whites as well as blacks, confounding those who saw a return to the days of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the most ominous undercurrents is the unstitching of the union into states and regions, with the paramilitary militias as the mouthpieces of fragmentation. The movement against the union has created a genuine abyss between Washington and the public.
But no one expected it to play out like it has. Americans have been trying to say something for over a year now, their plea falling largely on deaf ears. It was exactly a year ago that Clinton testified in the Paula Jones case, the day regarded as the genesis of the Lewinsky scandal. The day the frenzy began.
But with steadfast – almost boring – consistency, Americans have tried to say that they do not care. They have menaced the media with the prospect of a nightmare: a more or less contented populace, more or less happy with a president it associates and credits – rightly or wrongly – with their contentment.
There is broad consensus over the priorities and even over what should be done: for taxation, for social security, in education, against crime. Lewinsky was all that was left to get the mud flying.
Clinton has a curious relationship to the usually routine State of the Union speech. Last year, unforgettably, it was delivered just as the Lewinsky scandal exploded.
Before that, there was the interminable ramble which the pundits and punters loathed, but which was his most popular of all in the nation. In his first, in 1993, he panicked his aides by departing from the script to ad-lib, joke, and offer random, uncharted pledges.
The president was dancing the tango in the White House last Tuesday night. Hillary took the floor with Argentine President Carlos Menem, while her husband glided around with the glamorous Amanda de Fernandez, wife of the finance minister.
Now Clinton has to dance two tangos: that with his audience, seated next door to what will have that day been his courthouse, the Capitol, and that with the public, whom he has always partnered so well. A public that has been trying to say for a year that the state of union is, well, pretty cool.