The Electric Windmill

...Looking it over, Tom noticed that the propellers were moving even though there was no breeze, and an inquiry revealed that the windmill was in fact plugged into a power outlet...

...Number Four was unpersuaded by Tom's argument that "the South" no longer existed as a single, homogenous entity...

...Exactly...

...One said how much things had changed, another said how little they had changed—both written by me...

...He was writing his piece and wanted detail...

...Again Tom's finger pointed out that the emperor was without clothes...

...As he explains in his just-published book, The Electric Windmill...

...As I did so, I picked up just the whisper of a sweet scent from his bandaged hand, only for the briefest of moments...

...We arrived in time for the Mass, during which Brother Gino sat on the altar, stone-faced...

...In the event Number Four duly arrived, girlfriend in tow (heightening Tom's suspicions about the real nature of the trip), and over oysters and beer they discussed the story angle...

...Still no fragrance...

...Then the Washington editor himself put in an appearance and deftly produced a third story compatible with the first two—quite a feat...

...The follow-up phone call was typical: Tom noticed everything...

...The point is that, although I knew nothing about politics or government or economics, I did know which political responses were considered in good taste and which were offensive to polite society: which evoked a murmur of assent and which elicited looks of worried reappraisal...

...We then went up to him one by one, where we kissed his hand and received a small picture of Our Lady of Fatima in return...

...It wasn't demonstrating the production of electricity," he writes...

...Outside Tom discussed the dramatic difference with the day before...

...As assistant managing editor for TAS, I had long dealt with his columns, typed on yellow foolscap with neat little notes and emendations written in the margins, and many was the evening I had trudged down to the Bloomington Post Office to coax a reluctant mail clerk to take just another look in the pile of Express Mail for a certain letter from Washington...

...Yet in contrast to the outraged tone of run-of-the-mill muckrakers, Tom has something of an admiration for the audacity of it all, perhaps feeling that in an odd sort of way the windmill did indeed reflect the "old-fashioned American ingenuity" it was supposed to celebrate...

...What impressed me about our foraywas not Gino but Tom...

...Certainly there is an affinity between jazz and American conservatism, both rooted in the public, and Tom occasionally—all too rarely—takes up that theme, or indeed music at all...

...A priest came up to us and asked if we wanted to go back inside...

...us both to Europe on the same trip...

...Clinical in scope, the Bethell eye is that of an enthusiast undeadened by routine...

...What saved Tom was jazz...

...He reports that at first he was surprised to find out that the writers who scribbled so authoritatively every day were not authorities who'd spent years in study, but he seems to have caught on quickly...

...Naturally, he was drawn to New Orleans, where he first started writing regularly, for the Vieux Carte Courier...

...More to the point, he sifts through his observations so that every detail tells...

...without having ever been there, you know just what the East Wing of the National Gallery is like, for example, when Tom notes that "the main museum space is perfect for cocktail parties...

...Our first stop was Rome, and, on the third day, after Fortune had intervened to cancel a scheduled meeting and thus provide us with a free afternoon, Tom and I strolled along the Via Veneto on our way to St...

...Though the portraits Tom draws are bitingly accurate, for all but the sanctimonious there is nonetheless something loving about the brushstrokes, especially when Tom stumbles across an honest-to-god nut...

...Of course," he conceded, "I imagine you could find whatever story you want if you set out to look for it...

...If pressed," he writes, "I would have described myself as a liberal, and in conversation I would have sounded like one...

...He remembers thinking at the time that no Frenchman or Englishman would ever put up with that sort of thing himself...

...F ar from putting new faces on old cliches, the stories Tom includes here exhibit an impressive variety and concomitant grasp of the huge differences within America itself—regional, cultural, and economic—that Americans often forget and foreigners never recognize in the first place...

...Now a fourth was needed...

...How often have we met the expert who cannot explain his field because he can't recall the mental state of not understanding it...

...The title itself is taken from Tom's visit to a 1979 technology fair, where he gravitated toward a wind-powered generator built with the help of a $150,000 grant from the Community Services Administration...

...Afterward we went around to a back room where Gino—a stern-looking fellow almost the exact opposite of the tenderhearted Francis of Zefferelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon—eventually came in and blessed rosary beads and suchlike...

...In the first chapter of The Electric Windmill, "I Was a Wishy-Washy Liberal," Tom recounts his arrival in the American Colonies on August 28, 1962, fresh from Cambridge (the real one...

...There had been at least three stories on the subject in the paper...

...One of the more amusing asides deals with a Financial Times reporter whom Tom met while he (Tom) was a New Orleans-based stringer (regular, nonsalaried contributor) for that paper...

...A month later, Tom called me from Washington to ask if I would track down some plant that he thought had the same scent, .a green plant with white flowers whose name I forget...

...An Inadvertent Autobiography, even ignorance can be a blessing: The journalist turns his own unfamiliarity with a subject to advantage...

...Electricity was demonstrating it...

...Throughout the pages of The Electric Windmill they parade by, frauds, zealots, pests, hypocrites, and, on occasion, the genuine visionary...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988...

...I worried that the remaining interpretations open to us were becoming distinctly limited...

...And this critical perception that the politics of the left is less a matter of politics than of propriety is what has made Tom's columns so effective...

...In addition to jazz, politics, and the New South, The Electric Windmill includes pieces on a New Orleans real estate mogul, condom week at Stanford University, a district attorney with whom Tom worked to try to find out who "really" murdered JFK, evolution, professional faster and nuisance Mitch Snyder, longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, and a Manhattan hospice for AIDS victims run by Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity...

...An hour after the call I was at the Bloomington nursery bending down at dozens of green flowering plants, to the great amusement of a number of ungodly Hoosier gardeners...

...It doesn't hurt to have Tom's sense of irony, either...

...Overpowered myself by Tom's enTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 43 thusiasm, two hours later I found myself on the bus to San Vittorino to see Brother Gino with Tom...

...Tom had been there the day before and described it to me: the smell of flowers, what the pious call the "odor of sanctity," had been overpowering...

...We were trying to figure out how to make use of our unexpected free time, and Tom mentioned a holy man who lived about an hour's bus ride from Rome who was supposed to bear the stigmata, the wounds of Christ...

...The kind of criticism that was so readily accepted is equally revealing, for Tom was in fact rather apolitical at the time...

...We returned to Rome, and, eventually, to our respective homes...

...Reading it through, one suspects it might even force a smile from the good Brother Gino...

...one of the few times Tom gives himself up to a tender moment is his ac count of being asked by Punch Miller to pick up a trumpet and join in...

...Tom went back in, where Gino, still unsmiling, apparently gave him a short sermon the gist of which was not to waste his time writing about San Vittorino (Tom wrote it up anyway for the National Catholic Register) but to tell people to stick to the straight and narrow...

...But I hadn't actually met Tom until a USIA junket sent William McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...

...He's the guy who puts his finger on something we all know is wrong but can't quite express why...

...He is able to transmit to the reader the pleasure of discovery, of understanding something for the first time, in a way that is nearly impossible for someone who has been studying a subject for years...

...There was no fragrance...

...John Lateran...

...I remember one woman holding up jugs of water...

...he was firmly committed to the OldSouth-is-still-with-us angle...

...More important for our purposes here, jazz got Tom out of New York and Washington and into America...

...Unlike those graduates of creative writing courses whose essays are tedious piles of adjectives, Tom knows how to sum up the whole by presenting just the right part...

...The FT's Washington editor rang Tom up to ask if he could help out a reporter passing through looking for an angle on a series about the South: Happy to, I said, and then sat down to think up a new wrinkle on the "New South" theme...

...I realized this was getting iffy from the FTs point of view...

...Even before he came to America he was a jazz buff, and the subject and its practitioners form a disproportionate share of this book...

...Like others who have found the egalitarian Americans enchanted by a British accent, Tom reports how from the first he started making innumerable and ill-informed criticisms of virtually everything he saw, all to the remarkable approval of his hosts...