Who Let the Dogs In? Read online

  Reading Douglas Brinkley’s book Tour of Duty is enough to give one hope for John Kerry, but it also leaves one wondering, “So what the hell happened to the guy?” His career since then is not a profile in courage. The record isn’t bad, but he seems to suffer from extreme political caution. Of course, every criticism of Kerry can be countered with the unanswerable argument “Compared to Bush?”

  Not an inspiring speaker? Compared to Bush? (My favorite is still the time the president informed us we had enjoyed an enduring 150-year alliance with Japan.)

  Flip-flops? Compared to the man who opposed the 9/11 Commission, the Intelligence Review Board, the Department of Homeland Security, nation-building, McCain-Feingold, the Middle East peace process, summits, free trade, the corporate reform law, consulting the UN about Iraq, consulting Congress about Iraq, letting Condi Rice testify, etc.? Hell-o-o?

  What more can be said about the mess in Iraq? The consequences of ignorance in power are disastrous. We knew Bush didn’t know anything about foreign affairs, and the great tragedy of his presidency is that the mother of all foreign policy crises occurred on his watch. But he was supposed to be surrounded by people who knew more. Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq invasion, assured Congress before the war, “There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq.”

  While Iraq is clearly hubris carried to the point of insanity—it’s damn hard to convince people you’re killing them for their own good—there is a quieter and creepier agenda as well: the steady erosion of freedom, the contempt for legal process, the secrecy, and the unleashing of corporate greed on the environment. Through good times and bad, through terror attacks and wars, Bush has remained consistent about one thing: cutting taxes for the rich. They said it would be “the CEO administration,” and so it is. What is astonishing to me is the irresponsibility.

  Fiscal irresponsibility, leaving staggering debts to be paid for by future generations. Economic irresponsibility: As Paul Krugman observed, if you eat ten chocolate bars in a row, you will get a burst of energy, but it’s not good for your health in the long run. Environmental irresponsibility: To simply ignore global warming, to pretend it’s not happening, is so stupid. Mercury, carbon dioxide, mad cow disease, arsenic—they behave as though corporate profits were more important than people’s lives. Irresponsible about terrorism, we have thrown away the goodwill of the rest of the world, ruptured alliances, threatened friends, and publicly dismissed and condescended to the United Nations. We have done nothing but create more terrorists and cost ourselves the most valuable tool that exists in hunting them down: international cooperation.

  Benito Mussolini, who knew whereof he spoke, said “Fascism should more properly be called corporation, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

  “So, Stanley, a fine mess you’ve gotten us into this time.” And what’s to laugh about in this sorry pass? There’s always that reliable cheerer-upper: Things could be worse. For example, the current governor of Texas is a lot dumber than the last one, and he could run for president. And things could get better. I think we have taken a wrong turn, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get back on the high road. It’s already been a great political year, in that the Internet has finally arrived as a major political player, and all to the good. Interactive politics, people participation, and, best of all, money—real, serious political money, being raised in small amounts from regular folks. Wow, that’s new, and that’s important.

  Rejoice, beloveds, we’ll weather this brush with fascism and come out as noisy and as badly behaved as ever, our politics back to the usual national Roller Derby. As Marianne Moore said, “It is an honor to witness so much confusion.”

  How to Survive Reagan

  MANY CITIZENS of progressive political persuasion are finding that, soulwise, these are trying times. To be a liberal in the Reagan Era—not to mention being a lefty, pinko, comsymp—strikes most of us as damned hard cheese. Duty requires the earnest liberal to spend most of his time on the qui vive for jackbooted fascism, in a state of profound depression over the advance of the military-industrial complex, and down in the dumps over the incurable nincompoopery of a people addicted to The Newlywed Game.

  Beloveds, fear not, neither let yourselves despair. Rejoice. I bring you good news. As a lifelong Texas liberal, I have spent the whole of my existence in a political climate well to the right of that being created by Ronald Reagan and his merry zealots. Brethren and sistren, this can not only be endured, it can be laughed at. Actually, you have two other choices. You could cry or you could throw up. But crying and throwing up are bad for you, so you might as well laugh. All you need in order to laugh about Reagan is a strong stomach. A tungsten tummy.

  Mike Zunk is a fellow we used to know who tried to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by eating a car—ground up, you understand, a small bit at a time. He just took it in as a little roughage every day. We always thought of Zunk as a Texas-liberal-in-training. The rest of us toughen our stomachs by taking in the Legislature a day at a time. And now, lo, after all these years of nobody even knowing we were down here, it turns out Texas liberals are among the few folks who know how to survive Reagan. We feel just like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

  It may be true, as Tom Lehrer believes, that satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. But then, as Gore Vidal recently observed in another context, one must never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor. You have to ignore a lot of stuff in order to laugh about Reagan—dead babies and such—but years of practice with the Texas Lege is just what a body needs to get in shape for the concept of Edwin Meese as attorney general. Beer also helps.

  Here are six perfectly good reasons to keep laughing during the Reagan administration:

  • Things are not getting worse: Things have always been this bad. Nothing is more consoling than the long perspective of history. It will perk you up no end to go back and read the works of progressives past. You will learn therein that things back then were also terrible, and what’s more, they were always getting worse. This is most inspiriting.

  • Things could get worse. The fact that they probably will should not be used as an excuse for tossing away this golden opportunity to rejoice in the relative delightfulness of our current situation. Is there anything to cheer us in the realization that Ed Meese is attorney general? Yes. It could have been Jesse Helms. And may yet be. Let us give thanks for Ed Meese while we yet have time.

  • There is always the off chance that adversity will improve our character. Since we are all the spiritual children of the Puritans, we secretly believe suffering is good for us. I am putting this spell in the wilderness to good use myself: That awful tendency we liberals have to bleed from the heart over victims of cruelty and injustice is so off-putting. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to not feel sorry for Texaco, Inc., victim of manifest injustice though it is. I hardly ever heard of anything so awfully unfair as Texaco having an $11 billion judgment put against them when it wasn’t even Texaco that screwed over Pennzoil in the first place. And then they have to pay a $13 billion bond to appeal the case. Gosh, it’s a good thing I have a will of iron or I’d be hard put to suppress those little twinges of sympathy.

  • We’re not responsible for any of this stuff. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how much they foul things up, it’s not our fault. We’ve got a guilt-free eight years here, team, and given the amount of guilt we have to carry around with us when we have any say in how things get done, this should be our shining hour.

  • A redundant reason to keep right on chortling through the Ronaldan Age is on account of lefties are more fun than righties by definition. Ever been to a YAF convention? By comparison, SDS was a Marx Brothers movie. What’s the point of doing good if you can’t have fun doing it? You want to wind up looking like Jeane Kirkpatrick? So smile.

  • The Reagan administration is genuinely funny, honest it is. From the time we whipped Grenada in a fair fight to the day the old boy dropp
ed off the wreath at Bitburg, this administration has been nothing but laughs. James Watt! Killer trees! Ketchup as a vegetable! Reagan cures the deficit! This is great stuff. You can’t make up stuff this good.

  In fact, there’s another perfectly good reason to be grateful to Ronald Reagan: He’s so amazing that zillions of future writers are daily being discouraged from ever trying their hands at fiction.

  March 1986

  The Fudge Factory

  A FEW YEARS AGO, Jules Feiffer drew an Everyman who offered, in serial panels, these observations about the state of the nation:

  1. Truth hurts.

  2. Before truth, this was a happy country.

  3. But look what truth did to us in Vietnam.

  4. Look how the truth fouled us up in the 1960s and the 1970s.

  5. Truth has changed us from a nation of optimists to a nation of pessimists.

  6. So when the president makes it a crime for government workers to go public with the truth, I say, “Hoorah!”

  7. And when he bars the press from reporting our wars, I say, “About time!”

  8. America doesn’t need any more truth.

  9. It needs to feel better.

  Ronald Reagan, Feiffer observed elsewhere, represented “a return to innocence; a new moral, ethical, and political Victorianism. Reagan’s Victorianism transcends truth. It circumvents politics. It gives America what it demands in a time of insoluble crisis: fairy tales.”

  Lately, through no initiative of its own, the American press has been debunking fairy tales and once more telling depressing, pessimistic, hurtful, unhappy truth. With predictable results. “The nation’s news organizations have lost substantial public esteem and credibility as a result of the Iran-Nicaraguan affair . . . according to a new Gallup Poll for the Times Mirror Company,” said a front-page story in The New York Times on January 4.

  What we have really lost is popularity. People don’t like being roused from the rosy Reagan dream that it’s morning in America, so they turn on the messenger who brings the bad news.

  Here is a sample—a letter to the editor of my local paper, the Austin American-Statesman: “Like sharks circling, the news media are in a feeding frenzy. They would love to bring down a very popular president. From the beginning, President Reagan’s foreign policy has been under attack. First it was Grenada, but that turned out to be a triumph; next it was the bombing of Libya. During that attack, we were deluged with quotes from Pravda and Tass, but, alas, that too was triumphant for Reagan.”

  The letter writer, Jean Whitman, continued: “The media are delighted that irresponsible and traitorous congressmen are leaking top-secret information to them. . . . Consider the media score: They love Castro, hated the shah; they champion the leaders in Zimbabwe and Angola, where tribal murder is now common; they champion the African National Congress, a communistic party, in South Africa. They ignore the plight of Afghanistan. They so divided the country, making heroes out of the SDS and Jane Fonda, that the real heroes came home to hostility after fighting a horrible war in Vietnam.”

  Whitman is as serious as a stroke, and while there may not be many citizens who hold her detailed agenda of grudges, the 17 percent drop in confidence in the television news and the 23 percent drop in confidence in the credibility of newspapers uncovered by the Times Mirror poll do represent a kill-the-messenger response.

  The reaction is predictable, of course, but that isn’t helping the press deal with it. Like the Supreme Court, the press follows the election returns. And the press, like politicians, wants to be popular. The trouble with waking up America so rudely, after six years of letting it slumber happily in dreamland, is that we’re now being greeted with all the enthusiasm reserved for a loud alarm clock that goes off much too soon. “Ah, shaddap!” “Turn it off!” “Throw it at the cat!”

  And when the going gets tough for the press in America, the press fudges, the press jellies. That’s what we’re doing now. We are retreating to a fine old American press cop-out we like to call objectivity. Russell Baker once described it: “In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk. Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will.

  “The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”

  The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its journalistic duty.

  This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject. Thus we see, night after night, on MacNeil/Lehrer or Nightline, people who don’t know jack about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the pea patch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by comsymps. They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight; they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are replete with bias and resistant to fact. The justification for putting them on the air is that “they represent a point of view.”

  The odd thing about these television discussions designed to “get all sides of the issue” is that they do not feature a spectrum of people with different views on reality: Rather, they frequently give us a face-off between those who see reality and those who have missed it entirely. In the name of objectivity, we are getting fantasyland.

  March 1987

  Killing the Messenger

  RON AND NANCY. Let’s face it, they were the eighties. OK, so his mind is mired somewhere in the dawn of social Darwinism, and she’s a brittle, shallow woman obsessed with appearances, but then, it was that kind of decade, wasn’t it? No fair blaming it on them—they were what the country wanted. They never made you think, never had any doubts, never met a problem that couldn’t be solved by public relations, and they didn’t raise your taxes. It was Don’t Worry, Be Happy City—all done on borrowed money, with glitz and mirrors, while the social fabric rotted, the infrastructure crumbled, the environment slowly became nightmarish, and the deficit grew and grew. The least we can do is thank them for the wonderful memories.

  The charm of Ronald Reagan is not just that he kept telling us screwy things, it was that he believed them all. No wonder we trusted him, he never lied to us. That patented Reagan ability to believe what he wants to—damn the facts, full speed ahead—gave the entire decade its Alice in Wonderland quality. You just never knew what the president would take into his head next—or what odd things were already lurking there. His stubbornness, even defiance, in the face of facts (“stupid things,” he once called them in a memorable slip) was nothing short of splendid. It made no difference how often you told him something he didn’t want to believe. The man still thought you could buy vodka with food stamps, that he never traded arms for hostages, and that the Soviet Union has sent billions of dollars of weapons to the Sandinistas. This is the man who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency.

  One of my favorite episodes came early in the administration, in 1981, when then secretary of state Alexander Haig announced to an appalled world (we hadn’t twigged yet) that the Soviet Union was using chemical warfare in Southeast
Asia, spraying a lethal “yellow rain” on remote tribes that led to a terrible sickness and then death. The godless commies were apparently practicing on remote tribal people to see if the poison worked. Oh, the horror.

  Later, scientists around the world identified the “yellow rain” as bee doody. It seems that Asian bees occasionally leave their hives, fly up to a considerable altitude, and dump en masse. The resulting clouds frightened the tribes but never, it turned out, killed anyone. The Reagan administration never withdrew the charge and never apologized for it.