[A-List] Moving on

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine (August 2005)

He looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean, well-oiled fowling piece,
he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel encrusted with rust, the lock
falling off, and the stock worm-eaten. - Washington Irving


Having kept the secret a secret for thirty-three years, W Mark Felt at the age
of ninety-one emerged on May 31 into the sunlight of network television to say
that it was he, Felt, employed in the summer of 1972 as associate director of
the FBI but operating undercover as the notorious "Deep Throat", who had set up
the hit on the Nixon Administration. The news footage showed an old man in poor
health waving from the porch of his daughter's house in California, and on
seeing him smile for the camera as if in hope of a long overdue welcome and
reward, I was reminded of Rip Van Winkle in Washington Irving's famous tale,
asleep for twenty years in the Catskill mountains, awakening to find his gun
rusted, his beard turned gray, the American Revolution come and gone. The sky
was still blue, the birds still singing in the trees, but what was nowhere to be
found was the world as it once existed in the minds of Van Winkle's fellow
countrymen.

So also Felt's return to a world far different from the one in which he had
tipped the Washington Post to the criminal modus operandi of President Richard
Nixon's Praetorian Guard, furnished Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with lines
of inquiry that led from a burglary at the Watergate complex to a congressional
investigation, to the arrest of twenty-seven federal bagmen, and eventually, in
August 1974, to the president's resignation. The story unfolded over a period of
two years, the nonpartisan anger of an aroused, citizenry sustained by the
boisterous freedoms of a not yet muzzled press, supported by the actions of the
Justice Department and by a ruling from the Supreme Court, grounded in the
belief that a democratic republic could defend itself against the arbitrary
abuse of power.

But that was long ago and in another country, and who now can imagine, much less
pay to see, a politician (any politician, Democrat or Republican) coming into
Congress, as did Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina in the winter of 1974, to
speak for three hours on the topic of the Constitution; or an attorney general
resigning his office, as did Elliot Richardson in the autumn of 1973, rather
than carry out an unethical order from the White House; or a national news media
unafraid to bite the hand of the Pentagon zookeepers who bring the noonday fish?

President Nixon was forced from office in 1974 because democratic government was
thought worth the trouble of preserving. Although his crimes were standard
political issue (obstruction of justice, small-time extortion, contempt of
Congress, third-rate burglary) and no different in method than those approved by
Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, the dishonesty was discovered in
the light of a heightened vigilance on the part of an electorate coming to
understand the lesson of the Vietnam War - how the lies told in Washington
resulted in the killing of 58,000 American soldiers in Indochina. Thirty-one
years later, the Bush Administration commits crimes of a much larger magnitude -
tampering with the last two presidential elections, a war of imperial conquest
in Iraq marketed under the labels of holy crusade, America's civil liberties
systematically disassembled or destroyed - but it doesn't occur to anybody to
suggest that maybe the president should be impeached. The American people might
know (on their own reconnaissance if not from court documents) that their
government is both incompetent and corrupt, but who among them wishes to be
reminded of the fact? The story of a democratic republic confronted with a
mortal threat to both the letter and the spirit of its laws doesn't draw a crowd,
gets in the way of the regularly scheduled programming, doesn't sell the
high-end soap.


For the sake of appearances the newspapers greeted Felt's reappearing act with a
son et lumiere of front-page headlines, but the dutiful attempts to invest the
spectacle with some sort of moral or political purpose suffered from a general
disappointment in the quality of the material - overly complicated, depressing,
low-concept, nothing in the script for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump. The
television anchorpeople knew that the Watergate story once had been important,
but they were hard-pressed to remember why. The cable news channels rounded up
opinions from Nixon's prominent and still surviving associates, among them Henry
Kissinger ("I don't think it's heroic to act as a spy on your president when
you're in high office") and Charles W Colson, who wanted "kids to look up to
heroes" and thought it shameful that Nixon (that wise prophet and noble
statesman) had been airlifted out of Washington in a cloud of undeserved
disgrace. The bland hypocrisies met with no attempt to place them in either a
past or present context; without objection they were allowed to float in the
vacuum of virtual reality with the cartoon captions that bubble out of the
mouths of late-night Hollywood celebrities. Nobody cared to make the point that
Kissinger in his capacity as Nixon's national security adviser routinely tapped
Nixon's phone, or that Colson, as a White House special counsel, once proposed
bombing the Brookings Institution and served seven months in prison for his work
as a moonlighting thug.

The newsweeklies approached the story from the perspective of film critics. Time
observed that Deep Throat as played by Hal Holbrook in the movie All the
President's Men was more impressive than the theatrically impaired Felt,
"visibly feeble ... speaking haltingly ... like a senior citizen looking to
supplement his Social Security". Newsweek questioned the movie's integrity,
describing it as a far too simple tale told with a too sentimental emphasis on
right triumphant over wrong. What the story really had been about was Washington
office politics, ambiguous and sly, a run-of-the-mill bureaucratic intrigue
blown out of proportion by a "Great Scandal Machine", giving rise to
"antiauthoritarian excesses" that undermined everybody's faith in the wisdom of
the White House, the fair-mindedness of the intelligence agencies, the good
judgment of the Pentagon. President Bush, thank God, was doing his best to
restore the people's trust in government. If sometimes he didn't succeed in his
efforts (occasionally careless with the facts, often "too cocky", almost
arrogant in his attitude toward nettlesome subordinates), at least he knew the
right direction in which to steer the ship of state.

The flow of compressed air kept the balls bouncing through three
twenty-four-hour news cycles, most of the discussion reflecting the concerns of
the journalists sent to fetch the gossip - Woodward's enviable talent as a
sycophant (a wonder to behold), Felt's probable finding of his ignoble motive in
a fit of pique (because he had been passed over to succeed J Edgar Hoover as
director of the FBI), the likely disposition of the book and movie deals. It was
left to the assistant food and beverage director at Washington's Ritz-Carlton
Hotel to speak the last word on the story's true significance and worth. Alert
as always to the differences between a grapefruit and a grape, the assistant
food and beverage director recognized the disclosure of the secret of the
century as an event deserving the honor of a signature cocktail, the "Deep
Throat" (creme de cacao, vodka, and cream), served with "a little secret" in the
glass, a Hershey's kiss that "you don't see until you're halfway through the
drink - or until you get to the bottom of it".


In the magazine's lead essay this month ("None Dare Call It Stolen", page 39),
Mark Crispin Miller asks why the news media don't take a more lively interest in
the voterigging that fouled last year's presidential election in Ohio. Why no
expression of public outrage in response to the report issued by Representative
John Conyers (Democrat Michigan), and why, in the private conversations that
drift across the country's suburban lawns, so little speculation about the
probable molesting of America's child mind on an even grander scale than was
dreamed of in the philosophy of Michael Jackson? It is at least conceivable that
our freedoms of speech have made us speechless and that the force of reasoned
argument (out of favor in the opinion polls, of no interest to the producers of
American Idol) is as ineffective as the firelock on old Van Winkle's rusted gun.
Over the last quarter-century we've learned to talk in rebuses (part word, part
picture), like the mosaics made for MTV or the illustrations in a second-grade
spelling book. It is a language capable of astonishing compression (the
Watergate scandal reduced to a chocolate candy in a cocktail glass, Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass destruction distilled into a vial of white powder on a
table at the United Nations), but it is not a language well suited to the making
of a democratic politics.

I keep a notebook in which I collect stray thoughts encountered in my daily
reading, and among those that refer to the lost vocabulary of meaningful dissent,
I find two that bear directly on Miller's question. The first, from an
appropriately anonymous source identified as "a senior advisor" to president
George W Bush and quoted last October in the New York Times Magazine by the
journalist Ron Suskind. The source was explaining why people like Suskind
(authors, editors, stenographers) have become irrelevant: they belong to "the
reality-based community" and therefore make the mistake of thinking that words
matter, that something can be learned from the study of history or in the
attempt to align causes with effects. But, said the source, speaking in the
disembodied voice of the oracle at Delphi:

"That's not the way the world really works anymore ... we're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -
judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which
you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ...
and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The second observation, borrowed from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia:
Reflections from Damaged Life, I came across as one of the texts cited in a book
proposal submitted by two scholars at the University of Illinois:

"Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying ...
The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a
distinction, and a labour of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of
knowledge ... [marks] the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of
power".

Adorno in 1945 had in mind the deliberate subjugation of thought by the Ministry
of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in the Germany of the 1930s, but his
remark anticipates the systems analysis of the well-placed White House
commandant. The infotainment to which we've become accustomed over the last
thirty years, for the most part made with the machinery of the electronic media,
replaces narrative with montage, substitutes for history the telling of fairy
tales, grants authority to the actor, not the act. The country swarms with
whistleblowers willing to provide particulars about any number of high
government crimes and misdemeanors - whistles blowing every hour on the hour
somewhere in the blogosphere, secrets revealed on every week's best-seller list
- but who among the truth-tellers can compete for attention against the rumors
of Brad Pitt's once and future marriages, or with the news just in that Russell
Crowe has thrown a telephone at the concierge in a New York City hotel?

The sensibility adrift in cyberspace responds to the images of celebrity in the
same way that the sea dances with the light of the moon. What President Bush
says or does matters as little as how well or poorly J Lo sings; it is the
weight of the publicity - face time in front of a camera, column inches in the
magazines - that moves the tide of emotion and alters the geography of nations.
In Washington hearing rooms and Hollywood restaurants, names take precedence
over things (the who, not the what), and in the same way that premodern peoples
assigned trace elements of the divine to trees and words and stones (a river god
sulked and the child drowned; a sky god smiled and the corn ripened); our
postmodern systems of communication award magical powers to whales and
presidents, movie stars and spotted owls. The form is the content, and the
sacred images, like the little throng of familiar deities in the houses of the
ancient Romans, ease the pain of doubt and hold at bay the fear of death.

On television the time is always now, if not at Yankee Stadium or on HBO, then
on channel four in Washington or Los Angeles, on channel twelve or twenty-seven
in London and Rangoon. News broadcasts come and go as abruptly as the
advertisements winking on and off in Tokyo and Times Square, the messages
equivalent in their weightlessness, demanding nothing of the audience except the
duty of ritual observance. Who knows or cares to know whether Rush Limbaugh's
truths are truer than Toyota's? Who can follow a story to the end of the week,
much less over the distance of thirty-three years? Nothing necessarily follows
from anything else, and the constant viewer is free to shop around for a reality
matched to taste, to make use of the advice imparted by a wise old Jedi knight
to the young Darth Vader in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace,
"Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts."


Joseph Goebbels aboard the Death Star that was Nazi Germany taught the same
lesson in what we've since come to know and love under the headings of
aggressive marketing and corporate knowledge management. The propaganda minister
understood that arguments must be crude and emotional, instinctual rather than
intellectual, endlessly repeated. The electronic media do the work on their own
strategic initiative, and without the guidance and supervision once provided by
the Gestapo our written language over the last thirty-odd years has been made to
fill the available time slots and fit the preferred camera angles - downsized
and prioritized (also attrited, deconflicted, embedded, and lifestyled) in
accordance with the key performance indicators that validate delivery strategies
responsive to customer needs for enjoyable and educational experiences.
Refreshingly meaningless, the phrases might as well be made of asparagus or
ravioli, served by the assistant food and beverage directors of the national
media to discriminating diners who prefer spectacle to politics. The language
facilitates the transformation of a democratic republic into a military empire,
moving on from a world in which words once were held accountable for their
meanings, to a land of make-believe, securely defended, as is customary with
empires, by "the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power".


Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/