Jesus wept, Dan Rather stifled sobs on the David Letterman show, and my sister writes me that last week she broke down crying one day, out of the blue. I did too -- the tears seemed always close to welling up, last week, whenever the news was on.

Tears, male tears, always have a monumental glister if shed prominently enough. This week it was Rather who shed/didn't shed them -- rather he fought them back, swallowed them, allowed no leakage. Causing the commentariat to rush into print with glosses on his close call. Here's Mr. Showbiz :

"Rather, who has been working extended shifts as the CBS News anchor, described what it was like at the crash site. Fighting back tears, he told audiences that they'll never hear the lyrics to "America the Beautiful" the same way again.

Rather also pledged his support to President Bush. "Wherever he wants me to line up, tell me where," Rather said."

The rather odd willingness of this sixty something man to line up whereever Bush wants him to line up (to do what, exactly?) received barely any comment. Unless George Bush has been transfigured in some way, he is still the airy headed guy we've always known, which makes me think that Bush might tell Rather to line up at the wrong place, at the wrong time, to recieve the wrong thing. There is something vaguely schoolboyish about the whole scene -- Rather fighting back tears, pledging to line up. Is he going to get a tremendous whacking? Has he been a bad boy?

Walter Cronkite
was interviewed by Leah Garchick about the subject of Dan Rather's tears, and recalled tears he'd shed himself.

"At a news conference before he spoke at an annual banquet sponsored by the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, renowned newsman Walter Cronkite, who broke down in on-air tears when reporting the assassination of JFK, discussed Dan Rather sobbing on David Letterman's show this week."

Cronkite concluded that a man's a man for a' that.

On the subject of tears, John Sutherland of the Guardian this spring wrote a little article that swiped at Clinton for his labile lachrymal ducts, citing a well known video of Clinton laughing at Ron Brown's funeral until he spotted a camera, when his face became transformed into a regular map of tears. Sutherland made a prediction about Bush's solvency - into tears, that is:

"I don't feel your damn pain" is the message currently emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Not being a cry baby has been strong for Bush. Hanging tough, walking tall - that's what the new guys are about. Did Colin Powell cry after Desert Storm? Did he hell.

"The 43rd president has been conspicuously dry-eyed under pressure. At some point there will be another Columbine slaughter, Challenger disaster, or Oklahoma bombing. It will be interesting to see if Bush weeps. I doubt he will. Not even one tear. Now he's got the White House, he can be an uncompassionate conservative again."

So far, Sutherland's call was on the money.

Tears, gentle tears... These are all tears of sorrow. There are also tears that litter other occassions. I have surely not been the only person to be surprised, while having sex, to feel my eyes start to brim with salty liquid. The larmes of eros, except I felt ashamed of the tears, felt that they would certainly shock the woman in my arms. Freud talks about religion as correlating with an 'oceanic feeling" - I think a little brine from that ocean is what was in my eyes on these occassions.

But how about the tears released by spectacles of unbearable public events? When I first saw the broadcast of the WTC collapsing, I was stunned, not tearful. It wasn't until I heard a voiceover -- an interview with a man who managed the restaurant at the top of the Tower. He was fine until he suddenly broke down, reporting that the staff was probably dead. And then I lowered my head.


In a famous passage in the Reflections on the French Revolution (full of soaring language, but politically nutty), Edmund Burke describes the end of Marie Antoinette, replying to the celebrators of the fall of the French Monarchy with a hot charge:



"Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price, and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse?�For this plain reason�because it is natural I should; because we are so made, as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult to the base, and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical, order of things. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds (as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly."

Interesting that, for Burke, presented tears bear a different meaning than hidden tears. The hidden tear is shed because 'we are made so.' The presented tear, on the other hand, are shed because we know that others know that we are made so. That meta lever, thrusting self from self's natural core. Even as Burke is coining one of the great images of conservativism, he is at the same time operating along distinctly Rousseauist lines.

Perhaps this is what I meant above, when I said I was ashamed to be tearful in the middle of what should be carnal bliss. Presented tears are immediately subject to someone else's interpretation, and the feedback from that is to make them somehow fake. In an inappropriate situation, they are worse than fake -- they are a mark of something gone wrong. To be tearful in the midst of copulation confesses, perhaps, a bit too much tenderness, a bit too much neediness. To be that sensually overwhelmed is, well, to be too exposed.

All this, and the case seems to be that in the end, Dan Rather mastered his tears. It is the American way of monumental male tears -- they are few, they are proud, and they are mostly not shed. This isn't true for the French. In the National Convention, according to Simon Schama, at the same time Burke was displaying his non-displayed tears, real tears were frequent as the delegates would be moved by oratory or revolutionary sentiments of fraternity. But the American attitude is best expressed in Emerson's essay,

Experience:

"In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, -- neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us."

All the elements here seem to point to tears, but not a tear is mentioned. Grief, being torn, the sense of distance, the summer-rain, and finally that Para coat that sheds every drop -- drops of fresh water, not salt, not from the eyes - was there ever a passage that so exuded the tears of things, and avoided the tears themselves?