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According to Angela Carter, who wrote perceptively on the subject, ‘the pleasantest, most evanescent kind of fame … is that during your own lifetime’. By the end of her life, Carter had cultivated her own celebrity: she was interviewed on television, adapted her own work for the BBC, and won several awards. Academia is often interested in celebrity when it is, like Carter’s, an adjunct to artistic talent; so much has been written on the celebrity of a Byron or Wilde, a Dickens or Colette. But people who are famous for less august enterprises, or famous for being famous, are often overlooked or dismissed altogether. Celebrity, apparently, cannot be a talent in itself.

Sharon Marcus’s The Drama of Celebrity begs to differ. Celebrity can confer on artists a certain ‘superiority to conventional canons of conduct’ and therefore the freedom ‘to indulge the personal idiosyncrasies that bestow … on each star an aura of uniqueness’. She leans heavily on Erving Goffman – who argued, among other things, that society succeeds by placing checks on individual egotism – and contends that from the nineteenth century onwards celebrities have had an important function in our society as role models, expressing their individuality on a grand scale and so railing against mass conformity. Celebrity in itself, this would suggest, can have enduring cultural and artistic value.

Marcus’s main case study is the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), who is so prominent in the work that it sometimes reads like her biography. Bernhardt’s brilliance blazes throughout: she was hyperbolically described in her day as ‘an Alexander in petticoats’ and ‘A New Joan of Arc’. Henry James wrote that she was ‘poised upon … the ruins of a hundred British prejudices and proprieties’. She could count James, Wilde, Proust, and Freud among her admirers, Shaw and Chekhov among her detractors. She had a talent ‘Dionysian in its physical intensity’, as one critic put it, and her wisecracks might have left Mae West tongue-tied.

Richard Holbrooke was a United States diplomat whose career began during the Vietnam War and ended during the one in Afghanistan, and whose life, according to George Packer, spanned the ‘American century’. He was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and President Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan until his sudden death in 2010. For his role in brokering the Dayton Accords in 1995, he was thought by some (not least himself) to have earned the Nobel Peace Prize. He wasn’t awarded it, nor did he achieve his aim of becoming Secretary of State; his was a life that his biographer describes as ‘almost great’.

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the end of the American century is told through a distinctive narrative voice, not Packer exactly, but a witness to Holbrooke’s story who editorialises freely in the first person. Alternately confiding and grandiloquent, Packer speaks in arresting sentences of a kind one doesn’t usually encounter in biographies of statesmen and diplomats. I happened to read this one on the Fourth of July: ‘We prefer our wars quick and decisive, concluding with a surrender ceremony, and we like firepower more than we want to admit.’ As the Afghanistan War lurched towards its eighteenth year and tanks took up their positions in Washington, D.C., for President Trump’s military parade, I thought, have Americans ever been shy about liking firepower?

These moments remind the reader that the narrator’s ‘we’, like the title’s ‘our’, is doing a great deal of work, and that America as seen by liberals differs from America as seen by conservatives, and both differ enormously from America as seen by non-Americans. Who are the ‘we’ for whom Holbrooke was ‘our man’? Not the Trump supporters for whom this lifelong habitué of Washington and Wall Street would be an archetypal denizen of ‘the swamp’. And not the seemingly resurgent American left, for whom he would emblematise decades of failed US policies. Holbrooke was ‘our man’ for an élite of policymakers and businesspeople who, despite myriad internal spats (exhaustively chronicled here), stayed remarkably unified around a determination for the United States to actively intervene in the affairs of other nations, but whose influence appears to be waning in the present: hence, ‘the end of the American century’. The overlap between this group and the upper reaches of the US media, including prominent magazine writers like Packer, is considerable (Holbrooke himself dated Diane Sawyer during her ascent to evening news stardom).

Holbrooke’s entry into this world combines merit, ambition, and chance. Not himself born to power and privilege, Holbrooke happened to go to high school with the son of the future Secretary of State in the Kennedy administration, Dean Rusk, who encouraged him, once he had an Ivy League degree in hand, to join the foreign service. This took him to Vietnam and face to face with ‘America’s first losing war’. Once back in Washington, he assiduously cultivated relationships with the grandees of the foreign policy establishment, above all W. Averell Harriman, who held a panoply of important diplomatic and governmental offices, but whose power was greater than the sum of his posts. Before entering government, Harriman used his vast inherited fortune to help establish the banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman; among the other founding partners were his Truman Administration cabinet colleague Robert A. Lovett (Harriman was Secretary of Commerce, Lovett was Secretary of Defence) and Prescott Bush, future senator and father and grandfather of the Presidents Bush. When the defeat of the Carter administration ended his tenure at the State Department, Holbrooke emulated this earlier generation of statesmen by embarking on a desultory-seeming twelve years at Lehman Brothers; later he would earn millions of dollars using his networks to ‘open doors’ for Credit Suisse.

One of the remarkable things about this book is how unexceptional all this seems to Packer (and his narrator): their energy is absorbed by the spectacle of Holbrooke’s ascent and by the obstacles he placed in his own path through his monumental ambition, underhandedness, and self-absorption. But a non-American reader is moved to ask: is it normal for a nation’s foreign policy élite to be so coextensive with its financial élite? Is it desirable? Could the recurrent failure of US foreign policy to live up to its stated ideals have something to do with simultaneously pursuing a version of the national interest defined in dollar terms?

Not so for Packer: throughout, he imputes a liberal idealism to Holbrooke that is only partly exemplified by his actual behaviour (which included praising Indonesian President Suharto for his human rights record during the occupation of East Timor, and advising John Kerry to support the invasion of Iraq for the sake of his presidential ambitions). The conceit of this book is that, just as the ugly side of Holbrooke’s personality was as much the precondition for his achievements as his idealism, so have America’s naïveté (Packer uses Graham Greene’s term, ‘innocence’) and vaulting ambition produced both triumphs, like the Marshall Plan and the peace at Dayton, and catastrophes like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. In this new era of Trumpian isolationism, Packer concludes by asking a reader who, he concedes, will already know ‘every failing’ of America in the world: ‘don’t you, too, feel some regret?’

Maybe. But perhaps the end of the American century provides an opportunity for a more thoroughgoing reassessment than the one offered here, along lines suggested by the book’s title. It is peculiar to invoke the shade of Greene with a title like ‘Our Man’, only to dispel it the way Packer does when he comes to discuss The Quiet American (which Holbrooke had read before going to Vietnam):

My god, Greene loathed Americans. Our bathrooms were air-conditioned and our women deodorized and we were too shallow to know good and evil. It was a left-wing Catholic’s version of the usual British upper-class snobbery … But I have to admit Greene was onto something in Vietnam. The intensity of his animus made him clairvoyant.

It wasn’t Greene’s putative loathing of Americans that make him clairvoyant; like Joseph Conrad and George Orwell, he had a long acquaintance with empire and the way that it encourages its practitioners to sublimate self-interest into lofty principle. The essence of American innocence, according to Greene, was a lack of the sense of irony that could catch that sublimation in the act, a trait that Holbrooke seemed to share. One has the sense throughout of Holbrooke’s indomitable voice talking over any critic; yet, the achievement of Packer’s prose is such that it still feels like a voice worth hearing and arguing with.

Stan Grant’s comment on the prolonged booing of the Australian Rules football star Adam Goodes – featured in Daniel Gordon’s new documentary, The Australian Dream (produced by Grant himself) – has attracted much interest, including more than one million hits on one website:

We heard a sound that was very familiar to us. We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering, and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, ‘You’re not welcome.’

Perhaps it was coincidental, perhaps the crowds simply grew tired of jeering, perhaps it was the speech itself (delivered in October 2015 at the Ethics Centre). Whatever the reason, public sentiment began to turn after Grant’s speech. People wore Goodes’s guernsey number and waved signs and banners saying ‘We love you Goodesy’. Celebrities filmed messages of support.

Goodes, having become so broken and dispirited as to remove himself from football, returned to play the last few games of the 2015 season. The booing resumed. Unlike a Sydney teammate also entering retirement, Goodes chose not to be chaired from the ground.

Grant tells us that because of Goodes a new space has opened up, one that will loosen the chains of history so that we might ‘find belonging, find each other’. I’m not so sure.

Adam Goodes in a still from The Australian Dream (photograph via Madman)

Earlier in the documentary, Goodes says he doesn’t know much about what it means to be Indigenous. Oh, but he certainly does. He’s been insulted and rejected. He’s been ‘encouraged’ to lay low and become invisible in order to fit in. As for his critics, as Gilbert McAdam says, ‘What would they know?’

To be Indigenous is often to experience racism and sometimes something even more. You might call it a structural thing: the insistence on a certain power relationship between Australia and its Aboriginal people that is perhaps the defining characteristic of Australian identity. Some have attributed this insistence to an antipodean Occidentalism, even a settler–colonialist psychosis, the result of a continuing collective insecurity and subsequent need for fragments of the mother colony to be bound together by the threat of the Other. It’s an ailment as old as the nation itself, and one that apparently makes it so hard for Aboriginal people to be fully accepted in Australia? It might help explain the treatment of Goodes and the rejection of The Uluru Statement, which says, in part: ‘The dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.’ 

Goodes says he didn’t know much Aboriginal culture and identity. The legacy of a history of oppression can mean that, for many individuals, Aboriginality is just ‘broken glass and stray dogs’. Both men say that it’s hard to know what to do when the ‘smart asses’ call you the names a racist society makes so easily available: boong and coon and nigger and darky and ape. There is the heft of vicious history behind all those terms.

What to do? Ignore them? But it won’t go away, and your children and family and friends remain targets. Stand up and call them out? To do that you need supporters or you end up as isolated as Goodes.

Ironically, Goodes tell us it was the Sydney Swans ‘Bloods’ culture that gave him a sense of identity and the aspiration to be the leader he became, both within his team and within Australian Rules football as a whole. When his academic application to Indigenous Studies made him realise the injustice and oppression of his history, he continued to lead. He called out racism and then spoke compassionately about the individual in question, explaining that it was not her choice as such but the result of a discourse in which she was immersed, one that maims us all.

The booing grew louder.

Stan Grant in a still from The Australian Dream (photograph via Madman)

Another response to racism is to fight. Many Aboriginal people’s life experience teaches them that an effective response to racism is violence. Flog the perpetrator. Nothing else will get it to stop. Goodes couldn’t do that, though his ‘war dance’ was perhaps symbolic of such an approach. In his case – one against thousands – it only exacerbated the problem. The howling mob rose against him, eager for any excuse for self-righteous offence, keen to put him in his place. But that dance also represented an attempt to draw upon his heritage for comfort, for healing, for a solution to the structural dimension of racism.

Goodes’s return to ancestral Country is clearly an attempt to draw upon his pre-colonial heritage for solace, if not a solution. It works, after a fashion. It helps him to return to football. I am not claiming the dance or the journey as substantial examples of connection with Indigenous heritage, but they do signal a new direction.

There’s plenty of evidence highlighting the potential for such reconnection to heal individuals and communities. There’s a growing realisation that such heritages are also important denominations in the currency of identity and belonging for all Australians. Look at the material used to express Australia’s imagery internationally. Look at the rise of dual naming, the increase in Welcomes to Country and the use of language therein. Look at the popularity of Indigenous tourism, films, and literature.

True, in many cases this heritage – in its classical sense – is frail and endangered. And true, in at least some cases, ‘mainstream Australia’ appears to desire heritage but not its custodians. It is the reconnection and recovery of such heritages by home communities, and their empowerment through controlled sharing of them, along with a readiness to challenge ossified certainties, that will provide a more nuanced sense of national identity and will close the door on the hysterical manifestation of national psychosis and Indigenous structural powerlessness that this compelling documentary reveals.

Not a howl – a Voice.