The negotiating process: our man (George Steinbrenner, let us say) and their man (Leonid Brezhnev, perhaps) approach a dance floor that is covered with a layer of wet cement. The tinny band strikes up a slow, interminable version of One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Steinbrenner and Brezhnev come together and lock in a sort of oafish sumo embrace. Slogging, they circle the floor, glaring at each other. They mutter into each other's ears: "Not that way, you clumsy idiot! This way, you capitalist (or Commie) dog!" They wait for something to happen between them: for the music to stop, for the floor to dry around their ankles and hold them forever in place. Or, in one of those rare moments of international grace, for an understanding to blossom. If that occurs, the dancers rush to the lobby, sit down upon straight-backed, gilt chairs and, using 17 pens each, sign documents that look like the wine list in an elegant restaurant.
Negotiation can be an ungainly and primitive business. Sometimes the dance floor is an entire continent (Europe, for example); the superpowers gallumph, they shake the earth underfoot (a premonition of the last dance) and terrify all those who find themselves standing between them. The spectators flap and screech and march. The U.S. and the Soviet Union have been practicing a saturnine transcontinental nuclear muscle-and-tooth display. It is really a form of negotiation, or a preliminary to it. But the thunder-footed dance (the idiot dares the music of doom) has left millions of Europeans in a state of nerves and incipient neutralism.
Anyone who watches such bargaining (watches it in a cold sweat) might conclude that civilization is losing its touch for that sort of thing. It is an optical illusion, maybe, but we suspect it was once done with more style. Eighteenth century diplomatists liked to think of themselves as elegant wits and dissemblers. Henry Kissinger goes in for that kind of ballroom performance (Metternich played by Fred Astaire), but he is temporarily unemployed. Today, in all forms of haggling, from arms-limitation treaties to used-car deals, the art seems to suffer. Despite improvements in some industries, labor and management still spar lumberingly, in brute confrontation, like slow-motion monsters in the Pleistocene. The air-traffic controllers made a bargaining miscalculation last summer that destroyed their union. Through a combination of blind greed and intellectual brownout, the baseball players and owners sacrificed 50 days of the recent season. If that was a sort of surly burlesque, the failure of negotiation in Northern Ireland remains a disgusting tragedy; the ancient bargaining there goes on by bomb blast and spectacles of starvation in the Maze.