A Colossal Wreck (38 page)

PAGE: Journalists are insecure, because they must trade in the unknown. Their profession, said the sociologist Max Weber, is uniquely “accident-prone.” Good management may reduce this insecurity—but the News Corp. style actually uses insecurity as a disciplinary tool. And the seeming assurance of the authoritarian has tactical benefits: Murdoch can swap one attitude for another with zero embarrassment, and it enables him to “deliver” newspapers to any power he approves of. Readers naturally grow skeptical. But this does not yet harm News Corp.’s business model.

It would have been remarkable for Rupert to develop in non-authoritarian fashion, given his inheritance. When his father died he had neither graduated from university, nor gained any real newspaper tradecraft. In order to take control of what was then News Limited, under the trust Sir Keith established, Rupert had to accept his father as a paragon of journalistic integrity: to convince the trustees, believers in that myth, of his desire to emulate it. Exactly when independence is essential for personal and professional development, a spurious parental image descended on him. And he has emulated the political propagandist, not the mythological paragon.

The outcome attracts today’s politicians because a sickness afflicts them. In all developed societies trust in politics has declined: while democracy advances in the developing world, it finds itself ailing in its homelands. Finding themselves distrusted, politicians turn for a cure to tabloid journalism—Murdoch’s especially—which they realize is distrusted still more than themselves. They do so just as victims of a slow, fatal disease use quack medicines if the real cure still seems too strenuous.

The real problem of politics is the increasingly complex, and
therefore occult nature of advanced society. We fancy it has become more open, and it somewhat has. But progress has fallen behind the needs of better-educated, less deferential citizens whose problems grow more daunting intellectually. The state for which politicians are responsible cannot explain itself to its citizens.

It might reverse this by opening itself far more freely to scrutiny. But against this the bureaucrats—public and private—on whom politicians rely for administrative convenience conduct a relentless guerrilla attack. Should politicians choose to fight back, they will not lack allies, for most Western societies still have some competent, independent news media and the demand exists among citizens. In Britain real newspapers, and broadcasters like the BBC, continue to be trusted as Murdoch’s tabloids will never be. But quack remedies still appeal to governments: and all Murdoch asks in return is a little help in extending his monopolies.

Of course if the process goes far enough, only the quack remedy will be available, and democracy’s ailment would then be terminal.

December 31

Count our blessings, an act the eternally pessimistic American left usually shuns.

2003 was a pretty good year. Who can complain about a span of time in which both William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh—exposed as, respectively, a compulsive gambler and a drug addict—were installed in the public stocks amid the derision of the citizenry? Some say that they’ve both winched themselves out of the mud, with Bennett’s sessions in Las Vegas and Limbaugh’s steady diet of OxyContin already faded in the public mind. Maybe so. But still, there’s nothing so enjoyable as the plight of a professional moralizer caught in the wrong part of town.

For a vivid account of just how bad the
New York Times
has been for many, many years, I strongly recommend John L. Hess’s vivid memoir
My Times: A Memoir of Dissent
, published by Seven Stories Press, that came out in September. Hess—cranky, heterodox, cultured,
and irreverent—is the Ideal type of what any member of our profession should be, but who is usually leached out of the system in the dawn of their careers. He was a brilliant Paris correspondent in the ’60s and early ’70s, before he returned to New York and promptly wrote memorable exposés of the Metropolitan Museum (notably the incredible antics of its director Thomas Hoving) and of New York’s nursing homes. Then he and his wife Karen briefly took charge of the food and restaurant column and caused turmoil in that back-scratching sector. Real journalists don’t end up teaching ethics (aka kissing corporate ass) in journalism schools. They write till they drop. John Hess is a real journalist, virtually an extinct breed. Long may he write.

Hess writes the
Times’
obituary as America’s supposedly greatest paper. In his caustic pages there is nothing more savage, and contrite, than his account of what the
New York Times
did not report about the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Every journalism student, and every reporter, should have this book in their backpacks.

Of course 2003 was a year in which the governments, the intelligence services, the military bureaucracies, the intellectual whoremongers and whores of two countries, America and Britain, displayed themselves as brazen and incompetent liars as they maneuvered towards war on Iraq.

So why did the US want to invade Iraq and finish off Saddam? There are as many rationales as there were murderers on Christie’s Orient Express. In the end my mind goes back to something my friend the political scientist Doug Lummis wrote from his home in another outpost of the Empire, in Okinawa at the time of the first onslaught on Iraq at the start of the ’90s. Iraq, Lummis wrote, had been in the ’80s a model of an oil-producing country thrusting its way out of the Third World, with a good health system and an efficient bureaucracy cowed from corrupt practices by a brutal regime. The fundamental intent of the US in 1991 was to thrust Iraq back, deeper, ever deeper into Third World indigence.

In the fall I was in London and across a weekend enjoyed the hospitality of the first-class journalist Richard Gott, also of his wife Vivienne. At one point our conversation turned to the question of
motive, and I was interested to hear Gott make the same point as Lummis, only about the attack of 2003. I asked him why he thought this, and Gott recalled a visit he’d made to Baghdad last year.

This was a time when the natural and political inclination of most opponents of the impending war was to stress the fearful toll of the sanctions imposed from 1990 on. Gott had a rather different observation, in part, because of his experience in Latin America. Baghdad, he said, looked a lot more prosperous than Havana. “It was clear today,” Gott wrote after his visit, “from the quantity of goods in the shops, and the heavy traffic jams in the urban motorways, that the sanctions menace has been effectively defeated. Iraq is awakening from a long and depressing sleep, and its economy is clearly beginning to function once more. No wonder it is in the firing line.”

Eyes other than Gott’s no doubt observed the same signs of economic recovery. Iraq was rising from the ashes, and so, it had to be thrust down once more. The only “recovery” permitted would be on Uncle Sam’s terms. Or so Uncle Sam, in his arrogance, supposed.

2004

January 6

My problem with the Hitler–Bush pairing is not so much the comparison per se, which is solidly in the respectable mainstream of political abuse, but in the strange hysteria of Democrats about Bush as a leader of such consummate evil, so vile that any Democrat would be preferable. Any Democrat? George Bush is by definition a warmonger, but Wesley Clark, one of the contenders for the Democratic nomination, actually issued an order that could have sparked Armageddon. Back in the war on Yugoslavia, in his capacity as NATO’s Supreme Commander, Clark ordered the British general, Sir Michael Jackson, to block Russian planes about to land at Pristina airport. Jackson refused to obey, declaring in one furious exchange quoted in
Newsweek
, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.”

The central political issue this year is the absolute corruption of the political system and of the two parties that share the spoils. Wherever one looks, at the gerrymandered districts, the balloting methods, the fund-raising, corruption steams like vapor from a vast swamp. To rail about Bush as Hitler is to blur what should be the proper focus. If you want to hear an American answer to Hitler-as-warmonger at full tilt go and read the speeches John F. Kennedy was making and planning to make when he was shot.

Hitler, genocidal monster that he was, was also the first practicing Keynesian leader. When he came to power in 1933 unemployment
stood at 40 percent. Economic recovery came without the stimulus of arms spending. Hitler wanted a larger population, so construction subsidies produced a housing boom. There were vast public works such as the autobahns. He paid little attention to the deficit or to the protests of the bankers about his policies. Interest rates were kept low and though wages were pegged, family income increased by reason of full employment. By 1936 unemployment had sunk to one percent. German military spending remained low until 1939.

Not just Bush but Howard Dean and the Democrats could learn a few lessons in economic policy from that early, Keynesian Hitler, whose hostility to unions they also echo. As for warmongering, American presidents and would-be presidents don’t need lessons from anyone. As Hitler freely acknowledged in his campaign bio,
Mein Kampf
, the debt was the other way round.

January 28

My dear friend and late
Nation
colleague Andrew Kopkind liked to tell how, skiing in Aspen at the height of the Vietnam War, he came round a bend and saw another skier, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, alone near the edge of a precipice. This was during the period of Rolling Thunder, which ultimately saw three times as many bombs dropped on Vietnam as the Allies dropped on Europe in World War II. “I could have reached out with my ski pole,” Andy would say wistfully, “and pushed him over.”

Alas, Andy shirked this chance to get into the history books and McNamara survived the 1960s, when, as US Secretary of Defense, he contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands, and death of many millions more round the world. And now here he is, the star of Errol Morris’s much-praised, in my view wildly overpraised, documentary
The Fog of War
, talking comfortably about the millions of people he’s helped to kill. It reminded me of films of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and then head of war production. Speer loved to admit to an overall guilt. But when he was pressed on
specific nastiness, like working Jews or Russians to death in arms factories, he would insist, eyes ablaze with forthrightness, that he knew nothing of such infamies.

The “fog of war” is a tag usually attributed to von Clausewitz, though the German philosopher and theorist of war never actually used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of years ago in
Military Review
that the idea of fog—unreliable information—wasn’t a central preoccupation of Clausewitz. “Eliminating fog,” Kiesling wrote, “gives us a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz’s friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military command to their rightful centrality in
On War
. It allows us to replace the simplistic message that war intelligence is important with the reminder that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in war.”

As presented by McNamara, through Morris, “the fog of war” usefully deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts entirely unobscured by fog. McNamara can talk about confusions, fog, about what actually happened on August 2 or 4, 1964, thus detouring unfogged daylight, of which there was plenty, about the moral failures of US commanders, including McNamara, waging war on the Vietnamese. Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging technique back in the 1950s, with her heavily subsidized
Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision
, which deployed the idea of distracting “noise” as the phenomenon that prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending the information that the Japanese were about to launch a surprise attack. Wohlstetterian “noise” thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted a Japanese provocation, and knew the attack was coming, though probably not its scale and destructiveness.

When McNamara looks back down memory lane there are no real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: “I don’t fault Truman for dropping the bombs”; “I never saw Kennedy more shocked” (after the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem); “never would I have authorized an illegal action” (after the Tonkin Gulf fakery); “I’m very proud of my accomplishments and I’m very sorry I made errors” (his life). Slabs of instructive history are missing from Morris’s film.
McNamara rode into the Pentagon on one of the biggest of big lies, the bogus “missile gap” touted by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign against Nixon. It was all nonsense. As Defense Secretary, McNamara ordered the production of 1,000 Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time when he was looking at US intelligence reports showing that the Soviets had one silo with one untested missile.

To Morris now he offers homilies about the menace of nuclear Armageddon. It’s cost-free to say such things, grazing peacefully on the tranquil mountain pastures of his eighty-seven years.

Back in 1994 (you can find the remarks on page 409 of my
The Golden Age Is in Us
) I had a conversation with Noam Chomsky, where McNamara’s name cropped up. “If you look at the modern intelligentsia over the past century or so,” Chomsky said,

they’re pretty much a managerial class, a secular priesthood. They’ve gone in basically two directions. One is essentially Leninist. Leninism is the ideology of a radical intelligentsia that says, “We have the right to rule.” Alternatively, they have joined the decision-making sector of state capitalist society, as managers in the political, economic and ideological institutions.

The ideologies are very similar. I’ve sometimes compared Robert McNamara to Lenin, and you only have to change a few words for them to say virtually the same thing.