Step Across This Line (50 page)

We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the Cold War, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the Human Genome Project; in the minus column, a new kind of war against new kinds of enemies fighting with terrible new weapons. We will all be judged by how we handle ourselves in this time. What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like his hate-filled, illiberal mirror-image, or will we, as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged lands of plenty, go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice? Will we become the suits of armor our fear makes us put on, or will we continue to be ourselves? The frontier both shapes our character and tests our mettle. I hope we pass the test.

February 2002

ENDNOTES

To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or "Return to text."

*1 See Aljean Harmetz’s definitive
The Making of the Wizard of Oz
(Pavilion Books, 1989).
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*2 When I first published this essay in 1992, the idea of “home” had become problematic for me, for reasons I have little interest in rehearsing here. (But see Part II, “Messages from the Plague Years.”) I won’t deny that I did a great deal of thinking, in those days, about the advantages of a good pair of ruby shoes.
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*3 According to some contemporary revisionists, Major Doyle never got the 350 Munchkins, and the filmmakers had to settle for 124.
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*4 After the publication of an earlier version of this essay in
The New Yorker,
I received an appreciative letter from the Munchkin Coroner, Manfred Raabe, now living in a Penney Retirement Community in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He liked what I had to say so much that he sent me a gift: a color photocopy of a picture of his big moment on the steps of the Town Hall, holding up that big scroll with its Gothic lettering reading “Certificate of Death.” Under this lettering he had painstakingly filled out my name. I don’t know what it means to have a Munchkin death certificate, but I’ve got one.
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*5 There were those who criticized me for making this comparison. Apparently I am the only person not allowed to make fatwa cracks. My job, no doubt, is to be the butt of them.
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*6 Mr. Naipaul—now Sir Vidia—published a new novel,
Half a Life,
five years after making this statement. We must thank him for bringing the dead form back to life.
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*7 Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the
Metamorphoses
of Ovid (Harcourt Brace, 1993).
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*8 M.D. Herter Norton’s translation, from
Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
(W. W. Norton, 1993 reissue).
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*9 When this piece was first published in
The Observer,
a caustic reader wrote in to say that although he supposed (wrongly) that I probably hadn’t had much sex in recent years, he really didn’t want to read about my lusts. Well, too bad, pal.
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*10 Some of these thoughts found their way into the mind of Ormus Cama, the hero of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
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*11 However, it is deeply disturbing to discover that the club records contain no reference to this game, although there was an Arsenal–Real Madrid friendly in September 1962, which Real won 4–0. It seems I have somehow constructed a phantom memory, on the veracity of which my mind continues to insist, in spite of the documentary evidence to the contrary. An early indication, perhaps, that my métier would turn out to be fiction.
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*12 A joke with legs. In 2001 it happened again. Sol Campbell, the Spurs’ captain and star defender, decided to switch allegiances to Arsenal as well.
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*13 This love affair didn’t last. Eventually Graham’s true nature reasserted itself and Ginola was sent packing. But not so long afterward, Graham was sent packing too. That’s soccer, as they say.
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*14 George Graham’s sacking made possible the Second Coming of Glenda. He took over at White Hart Lane and kept the spiritual stuff to himself.
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*15 They haven’t knocked it down yet. Instead, in the great tradition of British fiascoes—cf. the Bouncing Bridge across the Thames, the Millennium Dome—the super-stadium plan has hit snag after snag. Will there be a new stadium in North London or not? Who knows?
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*16 When first published in two slightly different versions, this essay caused howls of protest and condemnation. Almost all Indian critics and most Indian writers disagreed with its central assertion. Readers are accordingly warned that mine is an improper view. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong.
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*17 One OFD who managed to allow a bullet-proof Jaguar to be stolen while in his care was instantly named the king of Spain by his colleagues, because the king of Spain (say it aloud) is Juan Carlos.
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*18 See page 129, in “Farming Ostriches.”
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*19 Gianni Pico, who negotiated the release of many of the Lebanon hostages.
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*20 Nicholson and Temple-Morris have both left the Conservatives: Nicholson is now a Liberal Democrat MEP, and Temple-Morris joined Labour.
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*21 Aziz Nesin did survive the Sivas attack. He died in 1995.
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*22 The cost of my protection has always stuck in the throat of many British commentators. Estimates ranging from the wild (one million pounds a year) to the surreal (ten million pounds a year) have been repeated so often that they have become pseudo-facts. The British authorities have over the years placed me in an invidious position by refusing to clarify the facts while “senior Home Office sources” regularly leaked misleading information. The truth is as follows. First, although the “thirty different safe houses” provided for me, according to the
Mail,
at “an estimated cost . . . of ten million pounds” are by now a well-established myth, the fact is that
no safe house was provided for me at any time.
I always found, and met the cost of, my own accommodation. The cost to the British taxpayer was nil. Second, I was protected by officers who, had they not been allocated to me, would still have been on the police payroll; the additional cost to British taxpayers of protecting me was therefore limited to overtime expenses. Third, during these dark years I have paid a great deal of income tax on those big book deals and large royalties of which segments of the media—and Islamic members of the House of Lords—so disapprove. I would suggest that the British exchequer has actually made a net profit on our strange relationship. Finally, the U.K. taxpayer has never footed the bill when I’ve been out of Britain.
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*23 The
Mail
had attacked me for responding to the Prince of Wales’s reported view that too much public money was being spent on me. I had been asked by a Spanish journalist what I thought of Ian McEwan’s remark that Prince Charles cost much more to protect than I did but had never written anything of interest. I had replied light-heartedly that I agreed with Ian. The wrath of the
Mail
—that same
Mail
which had devoted dozens of pages to Prince Charles’s desire to be Ms. Parker-Bowles’s tampon!—knew no bounds.
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*24 Or he didn’t. It now looks probable that Malraux’s much-quoted dictum, “The twenty-first century will be a century of religion or it will not be at all,” which he is supposed to have come up with not long before he died, falls into the same category of never actually made remarks as “Play it again, Sam,” and “Come up and see me sometime.” I’m relieved to discover this. It’s nice not to have to think of Malraux—for so long so sophisticated on the subject of religion—as an old fool at the last.
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*25 Or, in the new world of the George W. Bush administration, when America tries to foist a useless missile shield, and maybe a new arms race, on us all; or when America withdraws from the Kyoto environmental accords, or refuses to sign a treaty designed to outlaw chemical weapons . . . In spite of all Bush’s attempts to turn the USA into a pariah state, however, it remains the case that American culture isn’t the enemy. Globalization itself isn’t the problem; the inequitable distribution of global resources is.
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*26 Apparently this wasn’t a joke. I later found out he’d said the same thing, quite seriously, to Lou Reed as well.
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*27 Now that the Bush administration has revealed itself to be a hard-line, ideological right-wing regime, this article looks ridiculously naÏve. It is the columnist’s fate to be rendered absurd by events.
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*28 On March 6, 2002, Arundhati Roy was given a “symbolic” one-day jail sentence, and fined two thousand rupees (approximately fifty dollars), for contempt of court. The court said it wanted to show that it could be magnanimous and had taken into account that Arundhati Roy was “a woman.”
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*29 When I wrote these words, I’d meant to say that we’d probably be subjected to more annoying, intrusive checks at airports. I failed to foresee the eagerness with which Messrs. Ashcroft, Ridge, et al. would set about creating the apparatus of a more authoritarian state.
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*30 Translated by John Mavrogordato in
Poems by C. P. Cavafy
(Chatto & Windus, 1951).
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*31 From T. H. White,
The Sword in the Stone.
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*32 From an article in
The Guardian.
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*33 In the film
Little Big Man,
the old Cheyenne chief, who calls the Cheyenne “the Human Beings,” which is apparently what “Cheyenne” means in Cheyenne, explains mournfully to the eponymous hero that there is no resisting the advance of the white man because, while there appears to be an inexhaustible supply of white men, there is a strictly limited number of Human Beings.
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*34 By Stephen Ives and Ken Burns, from their documentary
The West
; see
www.pbs.org/weta/thewest
.
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*35 “The Frontier in Medieval History,” American Historical Association (1955).
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*36 Q.v., “Columns,” April 1999.
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*37 In
Lectures on Russian Literature,
1981.
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PERMISSIONS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC:
Excerpt from “Songs for a Colored Singer,” from
The Complete Poems 1927–1979
by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, L.L.C.

Grove Atlantic, Inc.:
Excerpt from “What the Doctor Said,” from
A New Path to the Waterfall,
by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Jalma Music:
Excerpt from “Big in Japan,” by Tom Waits. Copyright © 1999 by Jalma Music (ASCAP). Reprinted by permission of Jalma Music.

Andrew Marlatt:
Excerpt from “Angered by Snubbing, Libya, China, Syria Form Axis of Just as Evil,” by Andrew Marlatt from Satirewire.com. Copyright © 2002 by SatireWire, LLC. Used by permission of Andrew Marlatt, Oligarch of SatireWire and author of
Economy of Errors
(Broadway Books, 2002).

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.:
Excerpt from “First Part, #7,” from
Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright 1942 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed 1970 by M.D. Herter Norton. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.:
“A Villanelle,” from
The Country Without a Post Office,
by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright © 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Orion Publishing Group:
Excerpts from “The Ancients of the World” and “Those Others,” from
Collected Poems
by R. S. Thomas, published by J. M. Dent, 1993. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group.

Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.:
“Ithaca” and “Waiting for the Barbarians,” from
Poems,
by C. P. Cavafy, translated by John Mavrogordato. Translation copyright © 1951 by John Mavrogordato. Reproduced by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powls Mews, London W11 1JN.

Sony/ATV Music Publishing:
Excerpt from “Revolution,” by Lennon/McCartney. Copyright © 1968 (renewed) by Sony/ATV Tunes LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to those journals and institutions already acknowledged during the course of this book, I must particularly thank Gloria B. Anderson and her team at
The New York Times,
who syndicated all the columns collected in Part III; and
The New Yorker,
where nine of these pieces first appeared in print: “Out of Kansas” (also published as a British Film Institute booklet, “The Wizard of Oz”); “In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again”; “Reservoir Frogs”; “Heavy Threads”; “On Leavened Bread”; “Crash”; “The People’s Game”; “Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!”; and “A Dream of Glorious Return.” “Step Across This Line” was written for, and first delivered as, the 2002 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale. “In the Voodoo Lounge” originally appeared in
The Observer,
and “U2” was first published in the
Sunday Times.
“The Best of Young British Novelists” and “Beirut Blues” appeared in
The Independent on Sunday.
“On Being Photographed” appeared (in French translation) in
EgoÏste.
Many thanks to Richard Avedon and to Nicole Wisniak, publisher and editor of
EgoÏste,
for allowing the Avedon portrait of me to be reproduced in this book. And to Article 19, especially Frances D'Souza and Carmel Bedford, who led the Rushdie Defence Campaign; to all those who participated in the Rushdie Defence Committees in various countries, to all those writers, publishers, booksellers, readers, politicians, diplomats, security officers, and well-wishers who joined us in the struggle, I offer deeper gratitude than I have words to express.

S.R.