Moving on
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://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
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://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
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