Joshuah Bearman

One More Reason I Love The Grey Lady

Despite, say, past indiscretions with ham-fisted Kristol, there is room for diamond-sharp short essays occasioned by archaeology on the op-ed page:

...What good can be said of a woman who sleeps with two of the most powerful men of her age, however? The fathers of Cleopatra’s children were men of voracious and celebrated sexual appetites. Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton seductress. She is the original bad girl, the Monica Lewinsky of the ancient world. And all because she turns up at one of the most dangerous intersections in history, that of women and power.

She presides eternally over the chasm between promiscuity and virility, the forest of connotations that separate “adventuress” from “adventurer.” Women schemed while men strategized in the ancient world, too. And female power asserted itself regularly, if more covertly than it had on the Greek stage. In a first century B.C. marriage contract, a woman promises to be faithful and attentive — and to not add love potions to her husband’s food. Clever women, Euripides had already warned, are dangerous women...

...She does not so much bump up against a glass ceiling as tumble through a trapdoor, the one that dismisses women by sexualizing them. As Margaret Atwood has written of Jezebel, “The amount of sexual baggage that has accumulated around this figure is astounding, since she doesn’t do anything remotely sexual in the original story, except put on makeup.” In Cleopatra’s case, the sheer absence of truth has guaranteed the legend. Where facts are few, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history...

...Of course we mean to resolve the unresolved. We clamor for the black box of history. In some essential way we want confirmation too that we live on the same planet as did the legend that inspired two millenniums of overheated prose, that what feels like myth was really history. We thirst for exactitudes. We want to see and fondle the myth in all its scintillating splendor, forgetting that as we do so it turns back — the reverse Midas touch — into the dross of history. If and when we find Cleopatra, if and when a face can be fitted to her, do we promise to give up Elizabeth Taylor once and for all? Will we opt for the lady or the legend? Is something lost when she is found? Octavian had his agenda, and we have ours.

No matter what the tombs of Taposiris yield, they are unlikely to offer up an answer to the vexed question of women and power. For that we have to dig elsewhere. It may take a little longer.

Even The Media Hates The Media

It took no more than thirty seconds inside the Time Warner Official Media Welcome party Saturday night to be reminded why our country’s voters are the worst-informed and least participatory in the industrialized world.

Out on the streets around Madison Square Garden you can pick the press from the delegates without seeing their credentials just by the way they walk. The press always try to look important. They hurry. Or manage to look hurried even while standing still. The print people are mostly schleps, and the television world loves to get all dressed up for no good reason.* Everyone wants to feel like they’re going somewhere, spatially and professionally. And when they get where they think they ought to be going, they want to know everyone in the room. Which is why the multiple levels and bridges of the shopping complex where the party was held were brimming with people dropping their salmon tartar cones and wiping flan-covered fingers on their pants to shake Larry King’s hand and you couldn’t take one sip from the Margaritas that looked like they were poured the day before without hearing someone say, “Ohhhh . . . Mr. Blitzer . . . I’m [insert name here] from [insert network here].”

This doesn’t mean there aren’t many journalists I admire and whose abilities I can never hope to match; but as a whole, the media seem far more interested in careers than truth. And for a group that’s supposed to be relating a whole lot of complex ideas about the world, they sure do seem parochial.

I know, I know — the poor journalists are easy targets. Don’t they suffer enough humiliation at the hands of a ruthless right-wing libel machine that’s pushed them on a slow defensive slide towards irrelevance? Yes, they have in fact suffered at the hands of a ruthless right-wing libel machine — only adding to my annoyance. Because they don’t fight back. They get beaten up for supposed bias, but the real problem is the worn shield of false objectivity they feebly raise as their sole resistance. Wandering with the crowds past the strategically scattered hors d’oeuvres tables and the strange display of a woman in what seemed to be an immobile dress conically shaped out of magazines, I kept wanting to run into Michael Dobbs and demand to know why the nut graf in his Washington Post investigation into Kerry’s military record would include the line “both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place.”

Such a statement may be technically accurate, but that statement alone fails to represent the accompanying context and scale and intent. One set of claims, on the Swift Boat side, are vicious fabrications made by people with a vendetta and are being exploited by the cruelest knee cappers to rule politics since the days of hand-bills and the pamphleteering assassins of the nineteenth century.

Whatever paperwork discrepancies exist between Kerry’s paperwork and diaries and so on are not commensurate with the Swift Vets’ flat-out intentional and politically motivated falsehoods. Contrary to the dogma of J-schools across the country, there are not always two sides to a story. Balance is often necessary and indispensable, but there are times when the media might have to, um, mediate a bunch of information and make a judgment. And in those instances, presenting contrasting information as if it’s equally important is, in fact, the false representation — more false than saying, “I’ve gathered a lot of material and vetted it all, and here’s my assessment.”**

Just because you can always find a counter quote, or an “expert” who will say that evolution is a disputed science, or some guy who will tell you that Kerry didn’t go to Cambodia doesn’t mean you should repeat it. Here’s a new principle they might add to the J-School dogma: don’t quote people who are lying just to have “both sides” represented. And here’s a tip: don’t source with fringe nuts. That’s not objectivity; it’s retarded. If you want to saunter around the Time Warner Center looking so satisfied with yourselves as the guardians of information, then the least you could do is live up to your role. Don’t be afraid of judgment. It’s all you have left.

All this torment over the state of our news is probably why the scene wasn’t fun. It certainly wasn't as much fun as the DNC media party, and that was a pretty lame party, even with the chocolate fountain and the ferris wheel. I did run into some Air America folks, and had a nice conversation with an editor at the foreign desk of NBC, who shared my grievances about the people swirling past us. But in general, the feeling in the place was weird, so I left for the Sleeping With The Enemy Party at the Tank. That's where young progressives and Republicans were purposely invited to the same place and asked to co-mingle to see if any of them could find some common ground, if you catch my meaning.

On the way out I missed a surprise photo op with Bloomberg, and, sadly, never got to see Don King, leaving me wondering, as I always have: Is that guy even real?

_______

* Is it unfair to make fun of the way our media friends dress? After all, you might say, it's not their job to be sartorially current. Except that they’re the ones who tried to sink Wesley Clark because the guy decided that as a civilian, he might want to don a few sweaters. And they got on Gore for his tweeds. Don’t defend them; they’ll turn on your duds in a second.

** For a good example of how the “both sides” compare and contrast seems to give validity to claims that have none, see the Christmas in Cambodia section of the little insert box accompanying the Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete article in the Washington Post. It’s called “A Record Questioned,” and is a disaster of unintended graphical misrepresentation.

Smackdown: Swifties V. Tiger Force

This second swift boat veterans ad, the one about Kerry’s anti-war testimony after his service, is making me crazy. The anti-Kerry crew are harboring a thirty year grudge against the man they believe betrayed them by speaking the truth about the war in Vietnam. But why is truth betrayal? Let’s take a second to recall what he said when testifying to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations in 1971:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

This, they say, is unpatriotic, an affront to the soldiers. In 1971, John O’Neill pointed at John Kerry on the Dick Cavett show and said, "this man has attempted the murder of the reputations of 2.5 million of us [servicemen], including the 55,000 dead in Vietnam." Today, O'Neill and other anti-Kerry swifties are being quoted daily saying how much Kerry’s remarks hurt them.*

Which would maybe be valid complaint — if it weren’t that everything John Kerry said was true for chrissakes. You can’t cry foul when the criticism is fair. Kerry did not say, “all soldiers are bloodthirsty demons”; he said that for some soldiers, the war was corrupting their souls and taking their lives unfairly, and with that famously eloquent line towards the end, he made a patriotic plea for the country’s colossal mistake to end. The anti-Kerry forces have drilled down into the details of the Winter Soldier Investigation, which is the testimony Kerry cited at the hearing, trying to impugn the credibility of some of those soldiers’ specific comments. But who cares? It’s not like those didn’t happen — it happened. Everyone knows it. My Lai was already front page news in 1971. And as for today — how could any one try to dispute the war crimes committed by some American forces in Vietnam? It’s a pathology of self-delusion that they’d need a whole new chapter in the DSM-IV to describe.

And if we didn’t already have proof enough, why hasn’t the entire country been re-reading the Toledo Blade’s excellent investigative report into the activities of the Tiger Force unit in Vietnam? The series describes how a culture of atrocity was cultivated among some soldiers in Vietnam. The only place I saw reference to the series in connection with the Swift Vets’ hallucinatory memory of Vietnam was in the Jerusalem Post, where they always read our news more closely than we do. The series, which barely got play when it came out, managed to win the Pulitzer, but that didn’t seem to help get it noticed again when the question of Vietnam war crimes became front-page news again.

I urge everyone to check it out.

The whole discussion gets at a sinister problem infecting the language of this election, which revolves around the question of what's more important: truth or loyalty? Of course, the Swifties for Truth are uninterested in truth; their declared highest value is loyalty — loyalty to your brothers-in-arms, to your country, right or wrong, and so on. This is what John O’Neill & Co. continued on to say on the Dick Cavett show, and it’s become the boilerplate of their crusade against Kerry today. In their view, any criticism, even truthful and moral, is somehow disloyal. But isn’t it the opposite? Isn’t the greatest loyalty one that is unshakable even when calling your country’s judgment into question? Isn’t it more loyal to want your country to correct it’s errors and right itself?

It is not patriotic to be a blind follower. O'Neill said that he’s been taught to support the army no matter the circumstances; that criticizing them breaks an unspoken military ethic. That’s what the Swift Vets call patriotism — to not think for yourself; to subjugate your entire identity to a higher authority; to become a reflexive part of some larger apparatus; to become, in essence, less human?

That’s O’Neill’s understanding of duty to the patrie if you take it at face value. And they have a name for that. It’s called statism, and it’s a failed political philosophy pioneered by one Benito Mussolini and improved upon by a fella named Adolph Hitler. O’Neill is basically saying that a soldier should never question orders, even if those orders entail war crimes or emanate from a government making a grievous error. It sounds familiar, because it's what the Nazis said at Nuremburg — “we were only following orders.”

Immoral orders, of course, don't have to be followed. That's called morality, an endowment that comes with our human agency. It seems the vets should be more pissed off at Bob McNamara and the government that sent them there, rather than the guy who had the temerity to say what even McNamara has now admitted: that the war was a mistake?

Which is what opponents of today’s war in Iraq are trying to avoid. Do we really want another Commander-in-Chief who won't try to correct an obvious error? Holding a steady course is only a valuable characteristic if the captain knows where he’s going. Not so for the Swift Vets. They don’t mind that our little Ahab from Texas has lashed himself to the helm and is muttering to himself about Iraq links to Al Qaeda while taking us straight into a goddamn gale. Can’t mutiny, the false patriots say, he’s the captain. But without a little mutiny, we're headed for Davy Jones' Locker.

_____

* What kind of soldier is it, anyway, who would be "hurt" by senate testimony? A guy who spent who knows how long crawling around in the mud dodging punji sticks is now so thin-skinned that a few honest words would scar them for three decades? It doesn't hurt him that cynical bureaucrats put him near those punji sticks? Feh.