The media have a dark secret they’re not worried about in the least because they know you don’t want to hear it: the public is hopelessly addicted to cheap drama, to the modern equivalent of the penny-dreadful.

Every so often some goody-two-shoes kvetches that the media don’t give us enough positive stories. For a while there’s a spate of positivism, like a spoonful of castor oil, on the front page and the screen, but it soon gives way to the reliably bad news and our reliable revelry in it.

The good-news story is the media’s listless pro forma nod to criticism that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. They know our bread and butter is rotten news, nasty remarks, dirty deals, scandal, polarization, blather and the exquisite delights of ignorance.

So when we talk about a better world we’re talking about curing our addiction to theatrics, and we’re no more ready to go cold turkey when it comes to that than we’re willing to stop shopping at Wal-Mart because it’s a labor-busting plug-ugly Grendel.

That’s what the media love about us, our addiction to the very news we complain about. We love to read it, watch it, and complain about it. If the media gave us what we say we want—good news—we’d be so bored they’d have to close up shop.

Under the circumstances, having somebody more effective than Kofi Annan at the helm of the United Nations, having someone more truthful in the
White House, having someone sane running Iran and Venezuela might help a little bit, but what would we do for entertainment? How would we cope with all that sickeningly positive news?

Let’s face it, we’re the problem. We’re at the threshold of a big election and we’re talking about throwing all the rascals out, left and right, getting ourselves a real congress, taking matters into our hands, but we know darned well we’re going to elect more liars, more crooks, more ideologues, more of all those second-raters who keep getting our dander up, because we love them. And we love the media we say we hate because they keep us so permanently het up about the things we have no intention of changing.

We listen to all those men and women of the cloth—any old kind of cloth—talking about the good news that’s being suppressed, and we nod and clap and say hallelujah, knowing all that good news is happily where it should be, in the round file. But we sure do enjoy complaining about it being there.

Cold turkey would be having to read and hear and watch all that good news. We’d be clawing the mortar out of the walls if we couldn’t hear about all the dirt somebody did so-and-so the other day. Why else have the soaps been so popular all these years? They’re not exactly set in the world the preachers say we ought to have but for the media’s heedless disregard of truth in the search for dirt.

Donald Rumsfeld, he who always sounds so condescendingly plausible in the midst of the wreckage he’s wrought, is spending tax money to bring us the good news from Iraq, you know, all the news those bad guys in the press aren’t telling you. Maybe he’s not a cynic after all, maybe he really doesn’t know how much we love bad news. But the one thing he knows for sure is how to spend our money.

We’re all wallowing in the dirt. We rub it on, we eat it, we throw it, and if that weren’t the plain old terrible truth, we’d have exactly the media the preachers say we deserve, and we’d have it yesterday, because if you believe the media aren’t giving us exactly what we want, why you’d believe almost anything, wouldn’t you? You might even believe me, and then where would you be? Hmm?

We not only don’t see what others see, we often don’t see what’s there or we remember seeing what was never there.

The art conservator Roxanna Lehmann-Haupt and her husband, the bassist Lou Bruno, brought this home to me not long ago. Lou had been watching a television show in which a neurologist showed six people passing a basketball. Three wore black and three wore white. What did you see? the neurologist asked after showing the film clip. Well, some saw the ball passed ten times and some saw it passed twelve times. But none mentioned the huge gorilla that shambled into view, stared into the camera and shambled off.

Oh, I said, that’s a variation on the elephant in the room, isn’t it? But surely we see the gorilla. And the elephant. Don’t we? I stood still and silent for a moment, to see where my mind would go. I thought of the huge elephant in our political parlor. With hardly a murmur we watched a president take us to war for highly suspect reasons, and three years later a near majority of us still believed his widely discredited reasons. So we believe what we choose to believe, and it doesn’t matter if the elephant rampages and shakes the room apart or drops dead in the middle of it.

Lou’s story prompted his wife to tell one of her own. Most conservators, Roxanna said, take before and after photographs. Sure, I said, to show what a great job they did, or maybe to show how hard it was to do. Yes, she said slowly, but there’s another reason. And then she told us about the curator who, picking up a bucolic British landscape from a conservator, asked, Where’s the cow? What cow? said the conservator. The one that was right here in this field, the curator said. He suspected an oafish conservator had purloined the bloody cow. But there hadn’t been any cow. The curator’s mind had played a trick on him, and of course before and after photographs would proof a conservator against such fiascos.

So we don’t see what we don’t want to see and we persist in insisting that something should be there that isn’t there. There should have been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even if all we found were weapons of mass distraction. There should have been a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, so we’ll just go on insisting there was, and we’ll never take another painting to that damned conservator. That will teach him not to tell the truth.

My aunt, the much-respected abstract geometric painter
Irene Rice Pereira, had an idea that the light of the mind makes an exchange with the light inherent in a painting. Many of her paintings, with their impossible depths, invite you to lose yourself in them, not in the pleasure of considering them but in their deep interplay of light. I thought of her work as I considered the stories Roxanna and Lou had told me. We can choose to engage the complexities and interplay of things, or we can withhold the light of our minds from them.

My guess is that in wanting to be avenged for 9/11, a majority, a chilling majority, of Americans have withheld the light of their minds from the facts in front of them. Certainly they were invited to do so by a mendacious White House, but the onus remains on the people for willfully ignoring the gorilla and the elephant, for insisting there had been a cow when there had been none, and for refusing to engage with the facts.

I’m glad I don’t have to fill twenty-one inches of news space when I write, because what I have to say today isn’t half so cumbrous.

Be afraid, very afraid, is what the Grand Old Party is telling American voters in the hope we’ll be afraid enough to vote for blunderers and political squatters again. What I find so despicable about this strategy is its contempt for the American character. We are not scaredy-cats. We do not vote for big-daddy protectors. We vote for leaders. We are a habitually brave and resourceful people, so what the hell are they talking about?

Why is Rick saying, Here’s looking at you, Babe, in the 1942 film Casablanca so memorable? Is it because of Humphrey Bogart’s body language, the strange immobility of his mouth, the eternally noirish sound of his voice? Or is it something else, something in the words themselves? We don’t, after all, look at each other as if we really wanted to know something. Not often anyway. Not habitually. Ingrid Bergman, playing Ilsa, Rick’s long-lost love, knows perfectly well, as does the audience, that nobody is ever going to look at her like that again, not even Roberto Rossellini.

Being seen, really seen, is the issue in Randall Jarrell’s poem Next Day where a woman of a certain age in a supermarket wonders why the bag boy loading her car doesn’t see her. Jarrell understands, and he makes us understand, that looking is not seeing, making eye contact, which some of us find hard enough, is not seeing. He makes us understand looking directly at each other when speaking, as we’re instructed to do by people who fear sneakiness in others, is not the same as seeing each other.

What then is this phenomenon of seeing, once we carry the question beyond opthamology? It seems to be a lot easier for most of us to decide where to put our money than our eyes. When we read that the eyes are the window of the soul, we roll them. The insight seems metaphysical in the way the official church suppressed Gnosticism because it was arcane and couldn’t be popularized.

I address such questions this way: there is among us a rare species, perhaps not entirely terrestrial, whose eyes fall where they may and rest there easily. Finding members of this species is more rarified than growing hybrid roses or mushroom picking in strange woods.

There are glances, gazes, blinks, winks, tics, stares, daunts, blanks, glazes, averts, and every other kind of look. Google the sidelong glance and you’ll find rock groups, software, and much else. But rarely are we admitted to a regard perfectly untroubled by the exigencies of time or emotional baggage.

Be it blue, green, black, brown, amber, violet or gray, you are different in the kaleidoscope of those rods and cones than the moment before, and in a way you will never be the same again.

Society yearns to catch us looking and disapprove. When we’re caught looking society can project its unhealthier concerns on us. But there is a species, as I’ve suggested, that doesn’t give a damn about being caught looking, that looks to heal, to reassure, to affirm, to bless, and to inquire. To look and not to look away is rarer than the most exquisite mole in the most secret place, and to be seen, to be willing to be seen, is almost as rare.

The people of this species are demiurges; without them we are shades. In their light, the light of their eyes, we blanch or brighten, according to our wont. I live to encounter them. The darkness of our preoccupations is seeded with them, like a moonless sky, but the most stunning aspect of our being is how perversely we avoid them.

Sneaking looks at what we momentarily deem desirable in each other is merely flirting with the possibility that someday someone’s arresting look will transfigure us. On film others do this for us, relieve us of the burden and reenforce our comfortable conviction that such transfigurations don’t really take place in real life. If it’s true that films influence our lives in profound ways, it’s also true they relieve us of the job of living them.

I’m not talking about the hard stare in which the hidden room is padlocked. I’m talking about the palace doors swung open and the music heard inside.

Only rarely can we inhabit such a gaze—humanity pushes us along—but when it happens it gains admittance to our blood and does its secret work until long after we are dirt and ash.

Nothing frames the clash between the West and the rising number of Muslim jihadis more clearly than President Bush’s October 11th press conference. He used the word caliphate as if it had a metallic taste, displaying his vast ignorance of Islamic history.

The President refers to the caliphate as misguidedly as the al-Qaeda and Salafist extremists. The extremists, he said, wish to reestablish a caliphate, as if that would be worse than North Korea joining the nuclear club.

He and his neo-con strategists don’t understand the caliphate any better than the Muslim crackpots do. There were three major caliphates in Arab history: the earliest Umayyad caliphate in Damascus, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad that brought down the Umayyads, and a second Umayyad caliphate in Cordoba. Each of them represent a high-water mark not only of Arab but of human civilization. Each of them left dazzling heritages of which we ourselves are beneficiaries. And, most importantly, the Abbasid and later Umayyad caliphates left us unforgettable models of tolerance and moderation.

There were other caliphates, notably the non-Arab Turkish caliphate, which also at various times provided us with a model of religious and ethnic tolerance.

The nostalgia of the fanatics for the caliphate is weirdly misplaced. The great caliphates of Islamic history would have had little truck with their brand of ignorance and misrepresentation of the Quran. Indeed the fabulous Cordoban caliphate (inset) was brought down by Muslim extremists whom today’s North African Salafists closely resemble, not by the Christian Reconquista.

Bush’s appalling misuse of the word signals to Muslims who understand their own history that he knows nothing of it and cares less. To their fanatics he merely signals they’ve gotten his goat.

The mathematics we use to reach into space, to push the envelope in medicine and science, and to efficiently kill Iraqis derive in large part from the caliphate at Cordoba. Our banking system, starting with the British exchequer under Henry I, was fashioned by Arab mathematicians from
Toledo in Spain. If President Bush had shown the slightest appreciation of such matters he would have gone a long way towards letting educated Muslims know that we know something of the achievements of which they’re so justifiably proud. Instead he used the word caliphate as if it were a cherry plunked in his martini.

The Muslims have little experience with democracy. They perceive it, coming from the West as it does, as neocolonialism, and watching our soldiers rush to protect the oil fields while allowing the museums to be looted did little to mitigate that impression. But they understand the glories of their caliphates, and they know that caliphs (successors to the Prophet) like the Umayyad Mu’awiya or the Abbasid Haroun al-Raschid of Arabian Nights fame, or Abd ar-Rahman of Cordoba would have rolled up the likes of Osama bin Laden and his ilk in the wink of an eye.

The caliphates of Islam empowered the scientific West and showed how the races of man can live creatively under the same tent, provided their government is benevolent and moderate. Is this the model the President thinks we must fear, or does he think we should fear the fanatics’ ignorance of their own religious history?

No reporter challenged his use of the word the other day, and so we have semi-officially informed the Muslims that we’re as stupid when it comes to understanding their caliphates as the angry nitwits who have murdered more than 600,000 of their own people in Iraq.

The press found a lot to palaver about in the President’s used-car rant, but they missed the key to the darkest side of his Middle East policy: he doesn’t care who they are, where they’ve been or what they hope to become. Anyone who does would never use the word the way he did, as if it were an evil idea. And if he’s so concerned about Islam’s religious right, why isn’t he concerned about our own religious right, poking us ever closer to a theocracy? Or Israel’s, for that matter?

The idea that we live in a computer simulation is the subject of imaginative debate. Here’s another idea. Perhaps some of our justly famous do-gooders, like George Soros, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, et al, could buy buildings near the UN, in Baghdad’s green zone, on Washington’s Capitol Hill—anywhere functionality is subject to question—and fund computer simulations of how matters might be in a braver, more compassionate world. How hard could that be? Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, among quite a few others, are accustomed to creating other worlds, and some of them have been a good bit better than the one we’re used to. Surely Mssrs. Spielberg and Lucas could join forces with Mssrs. Soros, Gates and Branson to give us public spaces of contemplation where we could envision a better United Nations, a better Congress, a West and a Middle East liberated of petrocrats and their toadies. What we can imagine we can do, right?

Too bad the visionary Ted Turner didn’t spend an iota of the billion dollars he gave the UN to build a computer simulation of a UN that works.

We’re always saying we want good role models, we want values, so let’s have them, and let’s plunk them right under the noses of the so-called leaders who refuse to give them to us. Let’s remind them that we know how the United Nations and the Congress and all the world’s other closets of suits are supposed to act, and since they won’t do it, we’d like to show them how.

We could enlist our finest actors to the cause. If Helen Mirren can bring us a likeable Queen Elizabeth, who knows, Morgan Freeman should be able to give us an honest and effective UN secretary general, and Harrison Ford might restore our faith in the presidency.

We could see, we could envision, we could savor a Baghdad restored to something like its 8th Century glory, with Shias and Sunnis helping each other instead of killing each other and picking off Americans in their spare time. We could watch people living in societies where compassion, not greed, is the ruling force.

If we could really see such places, such times, such lives, wouldn’t it bring them a little closer to reality? Wouldn’t it prompt us to wonder why the ideals we give voice to on Sunday seem so elusive on Monday? Wouldn’t it embolden us to think that integrity and courage in government are birthrights?

We can make such worlds. At least we can simulate them. We’ve shelled out money to Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Lucas to allow us to momentarily inhabit such worlds, why shouldn’t we ask those of us who have been fabulously fortunate to salt the world’s trouble spots with glorious simulations of how things might be with just a little pluck and insistence and a lot less hypocrisy?

And while we’re at it, might we not redefine the world’s trouble spots? We’re inclined to think they’re in Waziristan or Baghdad or Pyong Yang or Tehran or Gaza, but in all honesty are they not also on First Avenue in Manhattan, on Capitol Hill in Washington, in Beijing, in Moscow, in Riyadh, London, and dozens if not hundreds of other places where business is said to be conducted normally but is in fact betraying humankind?

My inspiration for this modest proposal comes from three Baltimoreans, Dr. Natalya Yasdarov, a psychiatrist, Dr. Dom Maggiore, a metallurgist, and Paolo Maio, an artist. They’re bulding a magical room for an abused child, hoping to heal the wounds he has suffered. They are themselves children of my own imagination, but once I imagined them they became my guides—you can find them building little Sacha’s room online—and that’s exactly what I think simulation museums can do, guide us.

Let’s have some alternate realities by which we can judge this increasingly morose and unjust reality we call our own. Let’s apply mankind’s majestic imagination, not just to movies, but to simulations of how the world might be if it were sane, if it were honest, if it were generous, if it were just. And who knows, we might just find ways to get there. Why not? We can think this thought. We can entertain this notion. How far is it then to the reality?

You remember Buck Rogers? It wasn’t so far from the 1930s to the moon and the planets, was it? And when C.S. Lewis created Narnia what was he doing but giving us the notion that by dint of our noblest visions we could create worlds far better than the one in which we suffer the blathering misdeeds of fools and liars?

So, ahem, Mr. Soros, Mr. Branson, Mr. Gates, could we have your attention please? Could you find time to create for us some better realities to which we might all aspire? Could Donald Trump afford a lobby somewhere near the UN to show it how it might live up to its charter? It wouldn’t be anywhere near as expensive as some of your grander schemes, and it might do at least as much good. And all manner of wonderfully creative people would give you a hand and be, in all likelihood, as generous as you have been.

If Oliver Stone could give us Babylon don’t you think you could give us a handful of way stations on the road to Utopia where we might reflect on just what we deserve and whether our leaders are giving it to us? And would you please put these way stations where our leaders can’t bloviate their way around them?

(Note: If the idea of simulating better institutions captures your fancy, you might like reading about Sim City.)

On the balmiest days Washington, DC, is fetid with the hot air of politicians and their plutocrat overlords, but the Mark Foley affair is generating enough hypocrisy and schadenfreude to justify calling a national emergency.

Knowing full well the pervasiveness of alcoholism and misconduct that routinely flourish on Capitol Hill, the press is demonstrating operatically how much it is a part of the problem by acting as if the Floridian’s fall from grace is a singular illness in an otherwise functional body politic.

The influential congressman has resigned, naming himself the victim of childhood molestation by a clergyman and saying his secret alcoholism played a role in his sick behavior toward young congressional pages.

By this standard a major sector of government and the press corps should resign with him, confessing to alcohol-related misbehavior. And for good measure, the damage done to civilization by child abusers should be cited as a contributory factor. Then a catharsis might be at hand.

The enemies of this troubled man and his panicky Republican colleagues exhibit a revolting schadenfreude, but the hypocrisy inherent in the failure of the politicians and the press to expose the universality of alcoholism and child abuse is a tragedy and a disgrace.

Mark Foley’s collapse is neither cause for glee nor the press’s overwrought clucking and tut-tutting. The press that now so noisily hypes Bob Woodward’s “discovery” that the President misled us into war was only short years ago beating the war drums. Go back and check CNN’s drums-along-the-Mohawk soundtrack during the run-up to the Iraq war.

Anyone who believes it wasn’t widely known Mark Foley is gay, anyone who believes our Capitol pages were in safe hands until now, anyone who believes that sexism doesn’t cause human suffering every day in Washington, anyone who believes our laws are not pre-soaked in alcohol… well, hey, George Bush has a war against Iran to sell you.

Some people have generic faces, still others necessary faces.

Of course it depends on who’s looking, doesn’t it? We see each other through the filter of our experiences, our prejudices.

To me, the actor Mel Gibson has a generic face, a sort of convenient, all-purpose handsome face, albeit a little worse for the turmoil in the man.

Now I recognize genetics enters this contemplation. Obviously Thailand isn’t full of Mel Gibson lookalikes, and, more speculatively, you could argue not too many people in Norway are going to remind you of Colin Farrell.

And then there’s the question of stereotypes. How could we have made movies about the Nazis without Hardy Kruger and the impeccably useful Kurt Krueger? We could hardly imagine young Nazis looking differently. But we could have done without a bleached Marlon Brando playing one of the Young Lions.

No, I don’t mean stereotypes, racial or otherwise.

Take the lovely and astonishingly durable actress Jo Beth Williams. It’s so reassuring to have her image in your memory banks when you’re trying to think of someone quintessentially attractive and decent. But generic is not the same as indispensable. The great French actress Danielle Darrieux had an indispensable face. Once you had seen it you could no longer imagine a life lived not having seen it. More recently, the actress Natascha McElhone has blessed us with a face so memorable we dread its absence the moment it appears on screen.

The same may be said of George Gordon (Lord) Byron. You had to have seen that face. We still need to see it, because the world has been changed by its very existence.

Take the Queen Nefertiti bust in the Altes Museum in Berlin. Generation after generation of men and women have fallen in love with that eternal face, and we know we’re unlikely to encounter one like it. But Mel Gibson, much as we enjoy his infectious humor, is always just around the corner.

And what about the Italian actress Alida Valli or the French actress Michele Morgan? We know the palpable quietude of their beauty was incomparable. Nothing will ever equal the privilege they afforded our gaze. Not even Catherine Deneuve than whom there will never be another.

Our lives are filled with faces we’re grateful to have seen, sometimes only once, sometimes every day. And then there are the faces we had to see because without them we wouldn’t be who we are. They have played a role in forming us, sometimes transforming us.

Each of us is the one and the only, but I sometimes feel that if I never wrote a poem or a story, if I never won an award, or even if no one ever loved me, I would still have had a destiny to see certain faces, to somehow encounter them, and of course the camera has been a faithful servant to this conceit.

I’m sure the faces we encounter early continue to influence how we react to other faces late. But I suspect, against all rationality, that we’re destined to gaze on certain faces. They used to be in the neighborhood, but now they could be across the world and someday perhaps on other worlds.

A few years ago an old man stopped smack-dab in front of me on First Avenue in Manhattan. Are you God? he asked. We looked into each other’s eyes, two old men forming cataracts, and I said, smiling, Yes. He put palms on my chest, grinned and moved on. I thought of the actor Paul Muni when he was elderly. I don’t know who the other old man thought of. I’m sure my answer was right, and I’m sure he understood, and that’s exactly how I feel about those faces that stop me cold on the street, or the ones whom I arrest.

I’ve been trying for years to remember the Spanish court painter who painted me in the lower righthand corner of a painting bowing before the king. There he was back there in late Renaissance Spain, looking more like me in middle age than any conceivable twin brother. Now why would God use this face again, I wondered? Was it serviceable? Well, sure, why not? Generic? Nah, nobody would expect to meet me at Yankee Stadium or The Metropolitan Museum. Indispensable? His majesty, who looked altogether effete to me, didn’t look as if he thought so; the man was a courtier the king could do without. So I could too. I left the museum—I think it was The National Gallery of Art in Washington—saying, Hold the fort, pal, I gotta see about a life.

Let me try again to get this idea across. If I had never seen
Clark Gable’s face, I don’t think it would have mattered one bit. Same for Alan Ladd or hundreds of other famous visages. On the other hand I am who I am today in some small part because of Richard Conte’s movingly melancholic face. And I think I would somehow be less than I am for not having seen Emily Mortimer’s face.

True, we’re predisposed to be moved by certain faces, and so millions of us are unmoved by the faces that speak so poignantly to me. And my intelligence isn’t amped up enough to know whether this sweeps away my contentions.

But I’ve never stopped being delighted by the incontestable fact that every once in a while a certain face stops us in our tracks. Something far from the realm of logic is speaking to us, drawing us to each other. Psychologists think they understand it, but they’d have to charge us big bucks by the hour to explain it. Mystics think they understand it, but we’d have to enslave ourselves to cults to get it, and then only maybe.

The truth is we understand it. We get it. And nine times out of ten it scares us, and if it doesn’t, it ought to. We get that we’re set up, predisposed to encounter certain others, to run from them, to kill them, to marry them, to betray them. This, I think, accounts for much of the power, the terror even, of the story of Jesus the Christ. People whom he encountered were driven to love him, to betray him, to kill him. And this, I think, accounts for the way in which the camera has changed the world. We see each other close up, and we see more of each other than we have seen before, and we are enthralled. That’s why, as a writer, I don’t fret about films competing with books. Our perceptivity, our consciousness of one another is heightened by the camera.