Our mortuarial media bury the truth shovelful by shovelful and then plant fake grass to hide the crime. Hour by hour, image by image, developments are heaped on the slain body of the big picture.

Take Iraq (we shouldn’t have taken it). The gas bags in Washington endlessly debate troop levels, sectarianism, casualties, Iran, lies, bad intelligence, and no intelligence, while bungling contractors are over there stuffing their pockets. It used to be called war profiteering. Now it’s called nation-building.

The big picture, the repugnant story of corporate piracy at the expense of human life, is buried every day by avalanches of facts. The mortuarial press is hard at work burying the dead body. No body, no crime.

Iraq is the most tragic example of this aspect of news as entertainment, but hardly the only one.

The concept of the newspaper opinion page—news web sites tend to emulate this practice—was to put the unremitting flow of events into proper perspective. But this noble idea has been corrupted by egocentric punditry in which we reward fatheads for being wrong and shun prophets for being right.

The opinion page was meant to exhume the dead body of the truth and
test its DNA. Instead we get well-written screeds by ideologues and ax-grinders of every stripe. The idea of helping people understand what’s going on is in the round file.

Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, has been viewed in the Pentagon for what it tells us about urban warfare. Not a bad idea for the military. But four years before Pontecorvo’s film David Lean (inset) made Lawrence of Arabia, a film whose first 10 minutes foreshadowed the Iraq calamity much more starkly.

T.E. Lawrence, played by the young Peter O’Toole, has stopped at a well with his hospitable Bedouin guide. In the burning red distance a rider approaches. A shot rings out and Lawrence’s guide falls dead. The rider, Sherif Ali, played by Omar Sharif, has killed the man because he deems him a dog who is drinking at Ali’s well.

Sherif Ali is a Sunni Arab, and likely enough so is the dead man. But the message is clear. This is tribal country where feuds do not burn out easily, and even a man like Lawrence, who spoke a number of Arabic dialects and knew all about the enmity between tribes and Sunnis and Shias, did not know enough to avoid pitfalls.

Lawrence and Sherif Ali will become friends. Lawrence has little choice, because he needs Ali’s favor to carry out his mission, which is to stir the Arabs against the Turks. But he is horrified by the shooting and incensed by the reason.

What Westerner in his right mind would barge into this tribal mysterium with his guns blazing? George Bush and Dick Cheney, of course. But then there’s that matter of right minds.

Once human beings learned how to speak and write it was inevitable they would soon start counting everything and everyone. King David, for example, ordered a census, and his critics, more obsessed with counting than their king, added it to their list of his sins. Herod even more infamously started counting people.

Attic and Roman numerals were almost as awkward as stacked rifles. They stood around like lounge lizards. The much more fluid and elegant Arabic numerals advanced the cause of counting almost magically, especially when the Arabs began savoring the potential of the Hindu zero.

After that it was only a matter of time that those geniuses Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would invent calculus, almost simultaneously.

None of them—Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Europeans—imagined a society in which counting would be used to measure excellence. Today, when we define success by sales figures and view the world much as race-track habitués, we would be appalled to be invited to see this state of affairs as a degradation, a cheapening, of the idea of counting.

There are probably more people still splitting hairs about the theological implications of King David’s census than there are worrying about a society that confuses sales with merit. I like to think King David would sling a shot at this philistinism.

Each human face has its own climate and weathers. We respond not so much to the cut of another’s face as its micro-expressions. And so it is with speech. Words have their spectra of subtleties and so do tones. We overlook such distinctions at our peril. We may hear the words but miss the body language. We may applaud a conclusion but miss the way it was arrived at. Our transactions with each other are not unlike a tromp in the woods. We come home thinking we’ve had a great time, but in fact we’re tick-bitten and have contracted Lyme disease.

Last Friday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said President Bush is rushing more troops into battle in Iraq, betting Congress won’t cut off funds once our soldiers are in harm’s way. The deputy presidential spokesperson, Dana M. Perino, responded that Mrs. Pelosi’s remarks were “poisonous.” Nothing remarkable there. Poison is cheap in Washington. What is remarkable is that Ms. Perino (inset), from her aerie at Bamboozle Central, formerly called The White House, referred to the speaker as Pelosi, not Speaker Pelosi, not Congresswoman Pelosi, not even Mrs. Pelosi, but plain Pelosi, as if the speaker didn’t deserve the honorific the people have clearly given her. I call this contempt for ordinary civility poisonous.

We’re trying to bring up our children to be respectful to each other. We’re trying to nurture a society in which we’re all respectful to each other. We’ve just sent a message to Washington that we want both parties to work together for our mutual good. And here we have somebody in the highest place in the country refusing to grant her proper title to the first woman in our history to become speaker of the House of Representatives. And who is withholding this respect? Regretfully, another woman.

It’s tempting, and a bit facile, to think Fernando Botero, the Colombian painter, was prescient, foreseeing our transfat world of obesity in his blown-up human figures. My take is that Botero understands the nature of psychic blimps, people who take up more space than they’re entitled to.

You know the type. We elect them, marry them, flee them, cringe against the wall in their presence, make way for them on streets and in hallways. They’re the blimp gods who crowd us out and make us feel we weren’t allotted any space of our own. When they dance we fear for the building. When they picnic we fear for the earth. When they speak we fear for our pockets and our future. They may not be fat at all. They may be anorexic fashion models or overpaid athletes or gaunt preachers. But whoever they are, their ego-bloat takes up too much room.

I’ve always been blinded, in exactly the way that Botero (inset) is not, by the gorgeous self-absorption of the blimp gods. Their exhibitionism terrifies me, as if they were coiled rattlesnakes, but it amuses Botero. That’s why I always find him reassuring. When I encounter his work in museums I relax and smile, luxuries with which I find it hard to indulge myself. I feel as if Botero is my friend, counseling me that I don’t always have to paste myself to the wall in the presence of the blimp gods.

Botero understands that we’re buffeted and importuned by inflatable people. And if you give him the attention he deserves he’ll invite you to ask yourselves why you give these psychic hogs so much wallowing room. For some of us, it’s because we were raised by them. For some of us, it’s because we feed on them. But incontestably they feed on us.

Too bright, too big, too loud, too close, they represent our psychotic break in the midst of a plenty we don’t enjoy.

Do violent games make people violent or are violent people drawn to violent games?

Back in the 1960s my two daughters used to watch The Three Stooges
on television every Saturday morning. One Saturday one of them—I can’t remember which one—hit the other one with a skillet, just as she’d seen
the Stooges do.

I thought of that recently when I read an interview with a New York City homicide detective who said the hardest part of his job was trying to get his mind around the fact that a fourteen-year-old couldn’t get his mind around the fact that he’d terminated a human life.

I myself “killed” an untold number of people in childhood games, remorselessly, with no second thoughts. And that was before video games. It’s true I didn’t grow up to kill anybody, but I’m convinced I might have had a great deal more empathy for others had it not been for those games. They certainly don’t teach us to walk in each other’s shoes, do they?

I said I didn’t grow up to kill anybody. I also didn’t grow up very fast. In fact, I’m still trying to grow up. I have a sense about what helped me grow up. Books did, violent games didn’t. I think baseball did, I’m not so sure about hockey, both of which I love.

My guess—I’ll be long gone before there’s any evidence one way or another—is that violent games, and all video games, are slowly and surely reorganizing the architecture of the human brain. If I could choose the architects, the designers of violent games wouldn’t be among them. I don’t trust such people, not even when they say they just do it for the money. They could do a lot of other things for money. People rob banks for money. These people may be robbing human evolution; we don’t know for a fact they are, and we don’t know they’re not.

We have a comfortable sense of what the Romans looked like. Visit Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian or the classical section of The
Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and there they are, looking practically familial. Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, too beautiful for anyone’s good. Plotina, Trajan’s wife, whose mouth is more serious than empire. Hadrian in youth, his truthworthy severity thundering down through the ages. Marcus Aurelius in youth, already the Stoic contemplative. We understand them. They are us.

But the Greeks are another matter, and not only because sculpture had become more realistic in Roman times. We fail to grasp their looks. Even if the paint from their statues had not faded, they would still elude us. Their statuary is as idealistic as they were, and often we are unsure whether we are seeing gods, demiurges or Greeks. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They were intimate with their gods. The Romans weren’t. The gods were politically and socially convenient to the Romans. To the Greeks, they were the prime movers of life’s unremitting comedies and tragedies.

We’re not free to imagine the Romans. They’re too imposing. Their impact on us is immediate, obvious. We are uncomfortably like them, especially in our imperial hauteur. The Greeks had an even more powerful influence on us. In a sense we still live in an Hellenic world. But they remain mythical. The Romans stare straight at us, chiseled in their austerity. But the glass eyes have fallen from the Greek statues, or the paint has worn away, leaving only a distant gaze, as if their eyes were still on the gods. We’re free to imagine them as demiurges. Tragedy had to be born among them, because they towered and fell mightily. They dared to live far above themselves, in the clouds. We can’t imagine them sickening themselves with fecund excess in vomitoriums, as we can imagine the Romans. They’re inextricably bound up with their inconvenient gods, while the Romans were merely tolerant of their convenient gods. We can’t even imagine our own literature without the Greeks and their gods, whereas we suspect the Romans would covet corner offices in the Pentagon.

When he was but thirty one Julius Caesar wept because he had not conquered nearly as much as Alexander in his eternal youth. Of course not. Alexander was a god. Didn’t he himself raise the question? We’re pretty sure we know what Caesar the Resolute looked like, Roman stone portraiture being what it was. We’re less sure about Alexander. There are some sculptures and mosaics. They agree only that he had strange eyes and magnificent hair. But the more we think about him the more he doesn’t seem human at all. No actor, not Richard Burton or Colin Farrell, can convey his grandeur. We can’t think of him as we do Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus, Caesar. He’s too close to the gods. Achilles is his constant companion, not Hephastion. He was born to myth and died in its embrace. Not even Aristotle could shake it off him. He did suspect he was at least half god, and his soldiers did too, and that suspicion haunts the intervening centuries. Richard and Saladin were heroes, and many others, but Alexander was something else.

The Greeks lived with Homer singing in their ears. Intimacy with The Iliad and The Odyssey wasn’t the same as intimacy with the prophets or with Virgil’s Aeneid, which in any case came to the Romans much later than Homer’s epics had come to the Greeks. Homer was a household guest, and the Greeks were inhabitants of his world, not tourists. The prophets you could heed. Or not. But they were a forbidding lot. Virgil you might visit for a long time, but eventually you had Roman affairs to tend. To the Romans the past was past, and there were always new challenges, such as the Gauls and the Picts, but to the Greeks the past never died. It belonged to them forever, and they belonged to it. That’s why Alexander thought so often of Achilles. They were first cousins, except that Alexander disdained to sulk for long. He was too enthusiastic.

I think this difference between the Romans and Greeks persists, not as the difference between Italy and Greece, or even the differences in their influences on us, but rather in the way we perceive each other. I have seen my Greeks and I have seen my Romans. I have seen the ones whose eyes I can make out and remember, and I have seen the ones whose eyes I can never remember and never could define. I have seen those whom I suspected were otherlings, not wholly human, and I have seen those who were all too human. I have seen those upon whom my imagination could paint and those upon whom nothing could be painted. I think I have seen the gods, or at least some of them. Artemis, Athena (inset), Pan, but not Zeus or Hera or Neptune. The ones who allowed me to see them, them I’ve seen. But I’ve never seen a Roman god, although I’ve seen their pretenders. All too much.

Not that Greek civilization was fey. It wasn’t. Not like the Celts’. But rather the sea and sky were seamless. Nothing tore at this seam. And their society with their gods was seamless, yet frightening and endlessly seductive.

The Romans would have none of this. They had their work cut out for them, bringing order to the world. They had no time to play gods’ games, no use for frivolity. Look at their mouths. No comedy there. Not much use for tragedy either. Look at Plotina’s mouth. She knew Hadrian would make a good emperor, don’t bother her about anything else. Look at the young Marcus. The Christians weren’t going to worry him, but his generals worrying about them worried him. The gods had their business, he would mind his and, hopefully, not displease them.

This wasn’t the Greek way. The gods meddled with them and they meddled with the gods. They rubbed off on each other and got each other in trouble. It was a high old game, and even Alexander, long after the gods had begun to snooze, played it.

—DM

Gustave Flaubert, the great French novelist, left unfinished at his death a Dictionnaire des idees recues, dictionary of received ideas. It was a hill of notes, for the most part, when he died in 1880, but in 1913 it was published.
Flaubert (inset), who wrote the famed Madame Bovary, was a realist. He hated platitudes, which suggests he would have been driven mad had he been forced to listen to the Bush Administration for the last six years. But in fairness to President Bush and his platitudinists, the giant Flaubert had zero tolerance for any politician.

If ever there was a time that needed to hear Flaubert grumping about received ideas, it’s now. Writing to fellow novelist George Sand in 1871, he says, “All our trouble comes from our gigantic ignorance. When shall we get over empty speculation and accepted ideas? What should be studied is believed without discussion. Instead of examining, people pontificate.”

Why didn’t at least one of them say this to his or her cowed peers in Congress when they were stumbling all over themselves to come across as sunshine patriots, taking us blindly into a war on the word of President Bush and his crew of crackpot blatherers? Surely someone in Congress had read Flaubert. Flaubert knew that ignorance is seductively convenient. He knew lies beguile us, while the inconvenient truth now made famous by Al Gore simply annoys us.

We can hardly read our newspapers, watch television or the Internet without encountering received ideas. One cable anchor recently confided in a knowing aside that the Sunni-Shia enmity is thousands of years old, by which she did or didn’t mean the 7th Century. The Arab-Israeli conflict is often couched in the same terms, which holds water only if one is making the stretchy ethnological claim that the Canaanites and Hittites and many of Israel’s other ancient enemies were Arabs. They certainly weren’t Muslims, but I expect to hear that received bonbon before long.

If you know anything about anything, really know it, sooner or later you’ll hear an accepted notion that stupefies you with its wrong-headedness. And yet we seem to be running a society on the basis of received ideas. I don’t know where we’re running it, but it has a great velocity and cocksureness. Who was ever more cocksure of his facts than our president leading us into a disastrous war? Or at least that’s the way he came across, the way he always comes across about everything, which worries me more than anything else. Like Flaubert, I’d like to hear a few of our leaders say, I’m damned if I know, but I’ll find out. Isn’t that what they went to college for, to learn how much they don’t know, to learn how to find out? Or is it? I’m not sure any more. Maybe they went to college to sound self-righteous and dead-bang right about everything. For that we have to pay tuition?

I have an idea. Why don’t we—by which I mean you, because I’m too old and too busy scribbling down my cockamamie notions—write a New Dictionary of Received Ideas? Wouldn’t it be fun? Do you think anybody would buy it? I know I would, but if I’m so smart, why ain’t I famous? Now there’s a received idea for you—fame. I’d like to live in a world where it meant success at being nice to each other, but we all know what a forlorn idea that is. Worse yet, there’s no money in it. If there was, we’d all be nice.

(Note: Speaking of dictionaries, I owe the foregoing ideas and information entirely to Penguin’s incomparable Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory, first published in England in 1977 and more recently in 1999, and edited by J.A. Cuddon).