The Leveling Wind. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

HERE WE have a collection of newspaper columns written by a very intelligent, learned, eloquent man. He provokes. He instructs. He amuses. Since the days when he taught university students and served on the staff of Republican Senator Gordon Allott, I have charted his growth. There has not been that much; there has not had to be. George Will has always been a sober, civilized man with serious political principles buttressed by wise historical insights.

I remember his telling acquaintances when he began his syndicated column that he planned to do something special with it. That special thing was to raise commentary from the daily descant that it had become. He would do only two columns weekly--not three or four or five, all done on the wing. And in those columns he would discuss matters in high style and according to high principle. He would advance a Tory point of view for the edification of his readers. After proceeding through several hundred pages of the last four years of his column writing, I can assure you that Mr. Will has lived up to his own high standards. At home among his books, he inhabits his kind of world, a world populated by Churchill, de Gaulle, Andrew Jackson, James Madison, John Donne, and William Butler Yeats (whose poetry provides the title for this collection). For Mr. Will, leaving home must be a hell of a letdown. At Washington dinner parties, or seated across from Sam Donaldson on Sunday mornings, he must be very much alone.

Why is George Will so alone? His world of stupendous figures and historical issues would improve our own, but look around you and there is almost no sign of that world anywhere. Mr. Will does his best with the paltry stuff of our time. He swats at such figures as Saddam Hussein, "a 1930s figure" (he has Mussolini in mind); George Bush ("conservatism faces it sworst identity crisis since Goldwater and Reagan"); and Jim Morrison, he of the "short shabby life." Will also visits with oddities: the repellent fellow who doubts the Holocaust took place, the young English lady who catches his eye as she runs what remains of the Anti-Slavery Society.

Of course even when treading water with the oddities and inflating the mediocrities, he hands down prose written with the seriousness of Lippmann or Bagehot, but again I am brought back to the aforementioned point: George Will is alone in the world. He and the small handful of other pundits of his rank--Charles Krauthammer and Michael Barone spring to mind--should have Lippmann's stature among the populace, but they do not. In fact, almost no Americans have stature, not even the stature of their immediate predecessors. Why is, say, Antonin Scalia not as much a presence to his fellow Americans as the Holmeses were to their contemporaries? Why does Bill Gates not cast a shadow across our time comparable to that of Henry Ford in his day? (Perhaps Gates does, but I am in doubt.)

One of the reasons Will and his compeers--whether in journalism, the arts, science, or politics--lack the stature of earlier Americans is the universality of television. Television simplifies, idiotizes, and wrings the dignity and danger out of the world of great figures, great issues, and great evils. It diminishes "what unearthly stuff rounds the mighty scene," as Yeats put it. Its co-conspirator is public relations. The PR virtuosi feed the journalists their stories, give the dramatis personae their lines, and hype squalor and banality, to the exclusion of serious matters. A theme of this collection is the collapse of the Marxist utopia and of the Soviet reality. In the last four years Russia began its first territorial reduction in a millennium. Yet through it all, television news spent equal time on the domestic tumult of two slobs, the Bobbitts; of two well-born mediocrities, the Prince and Princess of Wales; and of such lowgrade performers as Michael Jackson and Madonna.

No wonder a serious man such as George Will falls into the shadows. Mr. Will's favorite contemporaries seem to be Kenneth Minogue, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Shelby Steele, James Q. Wilson, Charles Murray. But in the end I am brought to the unhappy observation that most of the luminaries he invokes are grey with age. They have been on the scene a long time and they are passing from the scene. The urban crisis remains. The denaturing of the educational system continues. The culture's decline into the hands of perverts and mountebanks will not be stopped, not by George Will or by five thousand Italian craftsmen leaping out of Florence and Venice and heralding a new Renaissance. Frankly, Mr. Will, arty America prefers the lady besludged in chocolate sauce, dancing like a drunken septuagenarian and paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Which brings us to two other poisons even more important to serious people's loss of stature among their contemporaries: the politicization of our culture and the end of the liberal epoch. Pffft, almost all the issues that have commanded serious attention throughout this century are viewed as boring or moribund.