Vintage Amis by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429933
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

PHANTOM OF THE OPERA: THE REPUBLICANS IN 1988

The Republican Convention is history now, and history didn’t look too good down in New Orleans, sapped and battered by eight years of Ronald Reagan. Before I develop that thought, though, I feel it’s high time I said a few words about my family. I have a wife and two little boys. Over here to cover the Convention, I happened to miss them very much. Why, just before I left, my three-year-old gazed up at me with those big blue eyes of his and said I was the best daddy in the whole world. My wife and I love our boys. And they love us. Okay?

On closing night it looked like a day-care centre up there on the podium, with the three junior Quayles and Bush’s great troupe of grandchildren. They all romped and cuddled among the balloons and spangled confetti. (And what do balloons remind you of? How tall are the people you know who like balloons?) Candidates can’t keep their hands off the little ones when they’re in public, perhaps because it’s the only time they ever see them. The Quayles’ first task the next morning, I heard, was to hire someone to mind the kids for three months. This childish spectacle at the Superdome provided a new twist on a familiar image: here were politicians kissing their own babies.

Earlier that evening I was in the Media Lounge eating complimentary popcorn and watching the TV monitor. One half of the screen was occupied by a white-haired lady wearing four tiers of pearls and an expression of wry indulgence: the other half showed schoolchildren in slow motion, raising their hands to teacher.

A journalist came up behind me and said, “What’s this?”

“It’s an ad for Barbara Bush.”

“Jesus Christ, what’s going on around here?”

Where has he been? Reagan’s is a style-setting administration, and there has been trickle-down. Nowadays, when Chris Evert gets a regular boyfriend, the first thing she does is make an ad about it. On The Dating Game the dude will report that his new friend is “open” and “communicative”— “and I admire those skills.” Who is the role model of the nascent media-coaching industry? Forces are working on the American self. Thirty-five-year-olds have spent half their adult lives in the Reagan Era. This has gone on long enough.

“George Bush,” Barbara confided to the camera, and to the cameramen and lighting men and sound men and media consultants who were crouched around her at the time, was “as strong, decent, and caring as America herself.” She had loved “this extraordinarily special man,” she went on, “from the moment I laid eyes on him.” Early in the election year the Vice-President had decided that the time was right to tell the public about the death of his first daughter. Now here was Barbara with her side of it, revealing how George’s strength (“He held me in his arms”) had eventually sustained her. It all seemed to shore up the claim of the Texas delegation which hailed George Bush as “the best father in America.

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