All of this put you in mind of the mass displays organized and staged by Hitler's impresario, Albert Speer: sports events and mass fascist rallies borrowed from each other. Ravelstein's young men were well up on basketball. In Michael Jordan, of course, they had a genius to watch. Ravelstein felt himself deeply and vitally connected with Jordan, the artist. He used to say that basketball stood with jazz music as a significant black contribution to the higher life of the country-its specifically American character. No less than bullfighters in Spain or tenors in Ireland or Nijinskys in Russia were the guards and forwards in the U. S. On that evening, in any case, President Bush had given the U. S. a military triumph; and Ravelstein, commenting on the black American servicemen, said what a credit they were to the country and to the U. S. military-how well-spoken they were on TV and how expert technically, how well they knew their jobs. For this he gave the Pentagon high marks.
For reasons of all sorts, Ravelstein was big on soldiers. He spoke with deep feeling about the American pilot shot down over North Vietnam who battered and bruised his own face, who deliberately broke his nose on the wall of his prison cell. This he did when he was told that he would have to appear with other prisoners on Ho Chi Minh's TV in order to denounce U. S. imperialism.
At his basketball parties, Ravelstein passed pizza slices among his graduate-student guests, his bald head swiveling toward the busy, colored TV screen behind him. His lot, his crew, his disciples, his clones who dressed as he did, smoked the same Marlboros, and found in these entertainments a common ground between the fan clubs of childhood and the Promised Land of the intellect toward which Ravelstein, their Moses and their Socrates, led them. Michael Jordan was now an American cult figure-small boys saved his apple cores as relics. A children's crusade might be possible even in the present age. Jordan, the papers said, had "bionic" powers. He could suspend himself in the air out of the reach of blockers, and you could trace his deliberations in his actions, with time enough to change hands while he soared-a man who earned $80 million a year, not a cult figure but a hero who moved the hearts of the masses.
Inevitably Ravelstein was seen by the young men he was training as the intellectual counterpart to Jordan. The man who introduced them to the powers and subtleties of Thucydides and analyzed the role of Alcibiades in the Sicilian campaign as no one else could-a man who expounded the _Gorgias__ to his seminar, literally in sight of the steel mills and the ash heaps and street filth of Gary, its ore boats coming and going across the water-could also hang in the air, levitating just like Jordan. A man of idiosyncrasies and kinks, of gobbling greed for penny candies or illegal Havana cigars, was himself a Homeric prodigy.
Ravelstein the host coming now with a cheese platter, saying, "What about a chunk of this Vermont cheddar…?" ineptly brought the cheese knife, with uncontrollable nervous discharges in his fingers, down on the five-pound round of Cabot's supersharp.
When the cellular telephone in his trouser pocket rang, he drew apart to exchange a word or two with somebody in Hong Kong or Hawaii. One of his informants was calling in a bulletin. There were no security violations. Top secrets he neither heard nor asked to hear. What he loved was to have the men he had trained appointed to important positions; real life confirming his judgments. He'd go aside with his portable phone and then he'd return to tell us, "Colin Powell and Baker have advised the President not to send the troops all the way to Baghdad. Bush will announce it tomorrow. They're afraid of a few casualties. They send out a terrific army and give a demonstration of up-to-date high-tech warfare that flesh and blood can't stand up to. But then they leave the dictatorship in place and steal away…"
It gave Ravelstein the greatest satisfaction to have the inside dope. Like the child in the Lawrence poem sitting under a "great black piano appassionato,"
"in the boom of the tingling strings," while the child's mother plays.
"Well, that's the latest from the Defense Department…"
Most of us knew that his main source was Philip Gorman. Gorman's academic father had strongly objected to the Ravelstein seminars in which Philip was enrolled. Respectable professors of political theory had told old Gorman that Ravelstein was off the wall, that he seduced and corrupted his students. "The paterfamilias was warned against the bugger-familias," Ravelstein said.
Of course old Gorman would be too rigid to be grateful that his son did not go into business administration, Abe said. "Well, Philip is right now one of the Secretary's closest advisers. He has a powerful mind and a real grasp of great politics, this kid, whereas statisticians are as common as minnows."
Young Philip was one of the boys Ravelstein had educated over a span of thirty years. His pupils had turned into historians, teachers, journalists, experts, civil servants, think-tankers. Ravelstein had produced (indoctrinated) three or four generations of graduates. Moreover, his young men were mad for him. They didn't limit themselves to his doctrines, his interpretations, but imitated his manners and tried to walk and talk as he did-freely, wildly, pungently, with a brilliancy as close to his as they could make it. The very young ones-those who could afford the prices-also bought their clothes at Lanvin or Hermes, had their shirts made on Jermyn Street by Turnbull Asser ("Kisser Asser," as I revised it). They smoked with Ravelstein's erratic gestures. They played the same compact discs. He cured them of their taste for rock and they now listened to Mozart, Rossini, or, farther back, Albinoni and Frescobaldi ("on the original instruments"). They sold their collections of the Beatles and the Grateful Dead and listened instead to Maria Callas singing _La Traviata__.
"It's only a matter of time before Phil Gorman has cabinet rank, and a damn good thing for the country." Ravelstein had given his boys a good education, in these degraded times-"the fourth wave of modernity." They could be trusted with classified information, the state secrets they naturally would not pass on to their teacher who had opened their eyes to "Great Politics." You could see the changes their responsibilities had made in them. Their heads looked more firm and mature. They were absolutely right to withhold information. They knew what a gossip he was. But he himself had very important secrets to keep, information of a private, dangerous nature which only a few could be trusted with. Teaching, as Ravel stein understood teaching, was tricky work. You couldn't afford to let the facts be generally known. But unless the facts were known, no real life was possible. So you made your choices with a jeweller's touch. There were two people in Paris who knew him intimately and three on this side of the Atlantic. I was one of them. And when he asked me to write a "Life of Ravelstein," it was up to me to interpret his wishes and to decide just to what extent I was freed by his death to respect the essentials-or the slant given by my temperament and emotions to those essentials, my swirling version of them. I suppose he thought it wouldn't really matter because he'd be gone, and his posthumous reputation couldn't matter less.
Young Gorman, you may be sure, edited the information he gave to Ravelstein. He wouldn't have gone beyond the facts in tomorrow's press release. But he knew what pleasure it gave his old prof to hear the inside dope, so he briefed him out of respect and affection. He also knew that Ravelstein had masses of historical and political information to update and maintain. This went as far back as Plato and Thucydides-perhaps as far back as Moses. All those great designs of statesmanship-going back through Machiavelli via Severus or Caracalla. And it was essential to fit up-to-the-minute decisions in the Gulf War-made by obviously limited pols like Bush and Baker into a true-as-possible picture of the forces at work-into the political history of this civilization. When Ravel stein said that young Gorman had a grasp of Great Politics, something like this was what he had in mind.