Sep 02, 2008 03:48 PM
by Stefan Beck
According to a New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, “Many guests can report seeing [him] step out of the room after dinner, write a column, then step back almost before the topic of conversation has changed.” Pretty speedy—and yet not even he can keep up with the rapid succession of pseudo-scandals setting up camp in the popular imagination. With coverage like this of the newest member of the Palin family, does he really think anyone wants to revisit McCain’s condominium conundrum?
Probably not, but they ought to. Hitchens’s piece offers a few examples of what the great Joyce Cary called “tumbrel remarks,” which are “unguarded comment[s] by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines.”
The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, “I see no point at all in being poor.” The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, “That was a lot of money in those days.” The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper “in any of my houses.”See what I mean? It’s easier for some reason to imagine this in the tones of the English upper class, though you do get examples of it in American accents as well. A Bostonian donor to my old college at Oxford was named Coolidge, and when I asked him if he was related to the president of the same name, he acted offended, and said: “Why, no. I believe he was one of the working Coolidges.”
Hitchens offers these examples in order to show why McCain’s ignorance of “how many houses he owns” was (a) not a “tumbrel remark” at all and (b) completely irrelevant, anyway. “Every four years,” he writes, “we suddenly discover that the only people worth noticing or mentioning in the United States are those who are ill, or unemployed, or uninsured, or underpaid, or homeless, or some combination of the above.” Whatever one thinks of McCain, it can only be a service to American politics to reject this dishonest (or is it honestly resentful?) approach to success. Topsy-turvy as it sounds, it just may be that those best equipped to solve a problem for the nation are those who have solved it first for themselves.