Category Archives: Current Events

What’s Wrong with the New York Times? (3)

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david-brooks3 Thomas_Friedman

Sigh.  David Brooks and Tom Friedman.

I confess I cannot write extensively about either because I can no longer stand to read them.  Brooks is a highfalutin reformulator of the conventional wisdom, a perennial apologist for the powers that be.  (He’s supposed to be the thinking liberal’s conservative, but for my money the person who matches that description is Andrew Sullivan.)  As for Friedman, it’s hard to imagine another serious columnist so undeserving to be taken seriously.  He talks and talks and talks and talks.  He says almost nothing worth hearing.  He’s the Ross Douthat of “liberalism”, proving that, for the privileged, there’s apparently no greater privilege than watching the privileged enjoy their privileges.

But if I can’t rise to the occasion beyond ad hominem characterizations of professional hackery, I can at least leave it to someone who is very very good at it, and reads both closely enough to write extensive uproarious takedowns of their pretensions and considerable intellectual shortcomings — Matt Taibbi.

Taibbi holds Hunter S. Thompson‘s old position at Rolling Stone as chief political correspondent.   Like Thompson, he’s as profane as he is articulate, and openly contemptuous of those who abuse their power.  He’s also an old school journalist who does the legwork, gets the facts, and provides reportage that is not just cold-filtered polemic (take note, Maureen Dowd).  Taibbi is the only high-profile, mass-circulation journalist to take on Goldman Sachs.  Last year he produced a notorious article that had them running scared and included this often repeated formulation: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Here’s a little taste from a post (“Let Them Eat Work“) that encapsulates Taibbi’s estimation of David Brooks:

Would I rather clean army latrines with my tongue, or would I rather do what Brooks does for a living, working as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are? If sucking up to upper-crust yabos was my actual job and I had to do it to keep the electricity on in my house, then yes, I might look at that as work.

But it strikes me that David Brooks actually enjoys his chosen profession. In fact, he strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back. And here he is saying that the reason the poor and the middle classes are struggling is because they don’t work hard enough. Is this guy the best, or what? Does it get any better than this?

Now, that’s speaking truth to power.  (More Taibbi on Brooks here and here.)

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Noah Richler: “What We Talk About When We Talk About War”

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bannersbybrianbranch2

An except from Noah Richler’s talk at the Frye Festival last month, soon to be published in its entirety by Goose Lane Press.

We Are at War

If Parliament remains true to the decision it made in 2008[1], then by December 2011, Canadian soldiers will leave Afghanistan and our participation as combatants in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force will have ended. I’m not speaking to you, today, to judge this undeclared war—though technically speaking, we are not fighting a war but are involved in a “counter-insurgency” operation[2] and so conveniently not bound by the Geneva Conventions. No, appropriate to the Festival’s flattering invitation I come to the topic of this war, let’s call it a war, in the shadow of the master, Northrop Frye. As someone with a keen interest in story, I am fascinated by how the manner in which we narrate our lives lays the way for the journey we make through war’s repeating cycle of insult, escalating injury and then exhaustion. I am here to consider how we have talked ourselves into this war[3], through it—and now, finally, are talking ourselves out of it.

The Canadian Military Then and Now

Ten years ago Canada considered itself a ‘peacekeeping’ nation despite having a diminishing presence in actual UN peacekeeping operations around the world. More than 100 000 Canadians have participated in UN operations since 1948[4] but a mere 317 Canadians in blue helmets were serving in small numbers in various missions around the world in September, 2001[5], when Canada’s rank among contributing nations had plummeted to 33rd among contributing nations[6].

Now (at the end of February, 2010) it ranks 57th.[7] Today, our Forces are still nowhere near the 1.1 million who fought over the course of the Second World War when, despite our relatively meager population—of which more than 45 000 gave their lives—this country had the third largest navy, the fourth largest air force and six land divisions fighting[8], but it is probably fair to say that at the present time the Canadian Forces enjoy a much higher and more visible profile than they have done for fifty years and that the solemnity with which Canadian military fatalities are honoured is the envy of other armies and countries fighting in the ISAF in Afghanistan.

It’s unlikely that the character of Canadians was altered so fundamentally in that time, but there is no question that a wholesale revision of a couple of our myths of identity at least provided the suggestion of such a change. It is this occurrence on the narrative plane that I wish to examine through the limited evidence of the voices of a few of the soldiers and their families but more so the journalists and pundits who write and comment on the war for the Canadian news media. Today, in a hyper-narrated world that I believe Northrop Frye would have found tremendously exciting, not just poets but you and I and especially the press are Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Reporters[9], in the heat of the moment, articulate the national story and in this regard I believe their pronouncements to be reasonably scientific barometer of how not just the content but also the form of stories have been manipulated to permit the war and, in the very moment we are living in, are about to excuse us from it.[10]

How Stories Work (According to Northrop Frye)

Stories are the mirror of a society’s worldview and present themselves to us in myriad forms, the range of which is no longer academic. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, presented a “Theory of Modes” in which the form of a story could be classified by the relative “elevation” of its characters who were superior or inferior to we mortals in kind or in degree. Gods, superior to us in kind, operate in a world not subject to the laws of ours mundane one in stories Frye called ‘myths’. Stories that feature characters living in the same world that we do and who are like us in kind but superior to ordinary humans in degree, are romances with heroes. The hero, says Frye, “is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” He is a hero in a high mimetic mode—the hero “of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.”[11] The hero is in low mimetic if he is utterly like us in kind and in degree. Such a character is, says Frye, “of realistic fiction”—and not very grand at all. He is, writes Frye, “one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.”

Frye, however, reluctantly toiling in the ‘Bush Garden’ (a phrase he borrowed from a student of his called Margaret Atwood), was in the habit of judging stories at a remote distance. Today these story forms are close and immediate. We negotiate not just with Islamism but a host of creeds that as recently as fifty years ago entered the imaginations even of scholars merely on paper or as the result of anthropological travels to distant lands. Now they live not just down the street, they’re next door and inside the house and in your son’s or daughter’s bedroom. We live in a world where the means to fabricate or subscribe to a story and disseminate it have never been more powerful or more commonplace—means that are, quite literally, at our keyboard fingertips, and we have come to understand their astonishing power because ordinary life has taught us to recognize and to use our viral capacity as their agents. Stories have never been less remote. They are dynamic to the point of being positively volatile and—I’m much influenced by the English biologist Richard Dawkins’s notion of memes, here—they act as the foot soldiers of narrative cultures that are virulently, intensely competitive.

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What’s Wrong with the New York Times? (2)

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dowd

“Obambi”.  That’s Maureen Dowd‘s nickname for Obama which she employed right through the primaries until his nomination in 2008.  The problem with it?  Well, it of course has nothing to do with anyone recognizable as Barack Obama, a remarkably capable politician who, by the time he’d announced his candidacy, had already made a career of overseeing the self-destruction of his opponents.  But Dowd pushed the “Obambi” conceit for almost two years because she could.  As is regularly the case, she lacked the discipline to weigh whether or not she should.  This, remember, is the same person who during the 2000 election gleefully perpetuated the fiction that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the internet”, and suggested that he is “so feminized” that he is “practically lactating”.

And that’s a pattern of behavior with Dowd which is disturbing for at least a couple of reasons.  The first is that she never lets a fact get in the way of a low blow she regards as clever, and the second is that she has an unmistakable tendency to feminize males in order to dismiss them — and moreover does so almost exclusively with Democrats, calling them “the mommy party” (you can guess who “the daddy party” is).  She likewise occasionally masculinizes women for much the same purpose, most especially Hillary Clinton — or “Hillzilla”, as Dowd dubbed her during the primaries.  Gender stereotyping is one of a number of strategies that Dowd regularly resorts to in place of anything that might be characterized as responsible criticism.

Here are some notable examples of Dowd’s effort to emasculate Obama — because girly-men are, you know, self-evidently a joke that everybody gets: “diffident debutante“, “America’s pretty boy“,  “effete“, “emotionally delicate“, “weak sister“, “legally blonde“.  Ask yourself: Does any of this even remotely coincide with your estimation of the man, however you feel about his politics?  And why diminish him with feminine comparisons?  What is going on here?

This is just one thread in a whole skein of such behavior.  Media Matters for America has a more complete catalogue of Dowd’s persistent use of gender stereotypes here.  Allegedly feminized men are not fit to govern according to Dowd, and most certainly not when they are Democrats.  But “tough guys” like John McCain (who once publicly called his wife a cunt) can, when the mood is upon her, set Dowd’s atavistic heart aflutter.  It is so persistent a pattern that it’s difficult not to wonder what lies behind it.

This matters because the Times is the flagship of a supposedly “liberal media”, and its opinion makers still draw a lot of water.  Dowd in particular plays the celebrity circuit with personal profiles in mass circulation magazines and appearances on television whenever she has a book to sell, such as the widely panned Are Men Necessary? We live in a world where we’re apparently required to put up with the lies that Fox News manufactures on an hourly basis in the name of “balance”.  So it’d be nice if the paper of record didn’t propagate twice a week the neurotic, unfunny, unclever babble of Maureen Dowd, which gets said not because it necessarily has anything to do with anything that is actually happening, but because it is formulated by someone who isn’t responsible enough not to say it.

What’s Wrong with the New York Times?

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The_New_York_Times

It’s no secret that the “traditional news media” are in decline — viewership and readership are down sharply, and, as a generational issue, Armageddon lies dead ahead: the fact is that a large and growing number of people under the age of 30 don’t consult traditional media outlets at all.

The New York Times is the self-declared “paper of record,” and it is, as the right loves to point out, the supposed standard bearer of a supposed “liberal elite”.  And yet the Times is increasingly difficult to engage as a top-down authority in a world where news reporting is no longer merely a matter of professionals trained to provide the public with a healthy high-fibre diet of vetted stories and opinion.  There are real reasons for this, most of them editorial.  The “balance” that journalism is supposed to provide on stories of the day has devolved into ideological warfare in which, if X says one thing, then what Y says in response — no matter how crazy or irresponsible or demonstrably, factually wrong — is fair comment and deserving of equal consideration.  Fact-checking is secondary.  The passive reporting of what gets said is primary.  And the New York Times has only added to the problem in recent years when it should in fact have been combating it on all fronts.

The complicity of the Times in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq is an excellent place to start, and characterizing it requires just one name, Judith Miller, who took insider-access journalism to a disastrous history altering low. In one infamous instance, Dick Cheney’s office provided Miller with unreliable intelligence pertaining to Saddam Hussein’s supposed effort to produce nuclear weapons.  Miller duly published it in the Times on 7 September 2002, and Cheney then cited it the next day on Meet the Press as independent confirmation.  In this way a dubious leak from an anonymous self-serving source became news in the paper of record, which effectively legitimatized it.  It’s no wonder that progressive bloggers disdainfully refer to Washington insiders (whether politicians or journalists) as Villagers.  Miller, of course, was also subsequently implicated in the crazy Rube Goldberg machinations by which Cheney’s office outed CIA agent Valerie Plame as political payback to her husband, Joseph Wilson, for his effort to debunk these same shoddy allegations circulating out of Cheney’s office. 

The Times has never found its footing since the awfulness of the Miller affair and apparently still can’t make amends.  Eight years ago it was willing to publish bogus stories on non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but today can’t in its news pages bring itself to call the abuse the Bush administration inflicted upon detainees “torture“. It prefers instead placebos like “harsh” or “enhanced interrogation,” despite the fact that practices like waterboarding (”simulated drowning” in NYTspeak) are recognized in international law as torture and are therefore prosecutable as war crimes.  Not to call them war crimes is to give war criminals credible cover for their actions: “Some say waterboarding is torture, some say it isn’t.  It’s all debatable.”  But that is not the case.  Waterboarding is torture.  It is a war crime.  Those who are responsible for it should be prosecuted and punished.

If only it ended there.  But last year the Times hired a conservative columnist to replace Republican party operative Bill Kristol, the 29 year old Ross Douthat, who, judging by his mediocrity and meteoric rise, is a familiar example of the Peter Principle for the privileged and well-connected.  Week after week Douthat publishes columns that are a journalistic embarrassment for their intellectual shallowness and occasional incomprehensibility.  All are arguably notable for their ideology driven dishonesty.  What Douthat produces seems designed well in advance to mislead though omission, commission and casuistry.

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CODCO: “Pleasant Irish Priests in Conversation”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iqtkwr-YJI

The skit banned by the CBC in 1991 in the wake of the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal.

The latest child sex abuse scandals in the Church seem to have broken through the last outpost of public forbearance which for so long put the whole issue into a bizarre moral and legal limbo.

Not many people outside of Eastern Canada seem to remember that the scandal actually began in Canada just over 20 years ago — in Newfoundland, in fact, at the Mount Cashel Orphanage.

Anyone who loves Newfoundland culture knows that nothing distills the black humor and native irreverence of the Newfoundland character better than the legendary comedy troupe CODCO.  Some might even recall that head writer and performer Andy Jones quit CODCO’s weekly CBC TV series back in 1991 over the network’s refusal to air the skit featured above involving a deadpan satire on the sexuality of the supposedly celibate.  (As regularly happens with CODCO, you don’t necessarily laugh out loud, but you do wince and cringe, and that’s the way they sometimes preferred it.)

In this case, we can clearly see that satirists at their best are like EMTs — the first on the scene with potentially life-saving aid.  And yet, in this case, sadly enough, the service being offered was refused by antsy Canadian censors, and the public remained in its peculiar state of denial about what all of this really entailed for another 20 years.