Conversations with Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus: Interview

157 Greil Marcus: Interview Oliver Hall/2005 From Perfect Sound Forever, March 2005. Used by permission of the author. Perfect Sound Forever: The Rose & the Briar (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004) has come out during an election year, a year in which not only have there been no good protest songs, but hardly anything on the radio could make you think twice about the way you live. Do you see this book in any way as an appeal to the memory of the country, or to the soul of the country? Greil Marcus: No; I think if anything is under that umbrella, it’s more an argument that the country has changed, or changes, less than it might seem. Certain themes and obsessions have been part of the country always, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be. And those obsessions have to do with murder as a solution to all problems, and with people continually putting their trust in people who mean them nothing but harm. There is a strain of real sadism in the country that we’re deeply attracted to, both as entertainment and something more psychotic than that. We thought about this book—we thought it up two years ago—and we weren’t thinking in terms of when it would be finished, when it would come out, what kind of milieu it would enter when it was published. So, maybe it’s a naive bet that regardless of the enormous transformations that the country may be in store for, it may be a kind of bet that they won’t be as significant as they appear to be. PSF: Then the question is, why is Bush so distressing to you and to so many other people? I haven’t read Philip Roth’s new book [The Plot against America , which Marcus reviewed for the Los Angeles Times], but my impression is that one of the things the book’s about is how much an election can really transform a nation, and how much can really be at stake in the identity of the president. 158 CONVERSATIONS WITH GREIL MARCUS GM: Well, Roth’s book is funny that way, in that it’s questionable whether Lindbergh becoming president transforms the nation, or whether he simply is able to draw on aspects of the national identity that had never really been exploited before—or exploited on such a mass scale—essentially turning the entire country in the early 1940s into what the Klan was able to turn states like Indiana into in the 1920s. So it’s not as if the country’s being remade out of whole cloth—hardly. And it’s also quite odd that at the end of the book, Franklin Roosevelt rides in over the Hill with the cavalry and puts everything to right again, and the country goes on as if nothing had happened, as if this strange interregnum had been some kind of fantasy. So that’s very tricky. The thing about Bush is that he’s an extraordinarily effective demagogue. So was his father. They know how to play on people’s fears, and even more than that, on their bigotries. Both of them—George W. Bush more so than his father, I think—are in essence bullies. They take pleasure in lording it over other people, pushing other people around, in stomping people in the face metaphorically, and by going to war, not metaphorically at all. These are very small-minded people with large talent, and they’re frightening because certainly Bush—more than his father—understands how to use power. One thing that Ronald Reagan should have taught everybody is that this whole idea of political capital . . . if that phrase has any meaning, then it is capital. And when you spend capital, if you spend it wisely—or if you spend it with verve, and take chances that other people are afraid to take—then you don’t expend your capital, you don’t use it up; you make more. The way you amass political capital is by spending it, by using it, and Bush understands that very, very well. If you’re timid, then you have a limited amount of capital to work with, and you spend it slowly, sooner or later it’s all gone. And that’s not the way Bush works. So, he’s a frightening figure because he’s very, very good at what he does, and he is...