Esquire — Blowing the Same Old War Trumpet
Written byPosted on August 17, 2005
Filed Under Journalism, War
The July 2005 issue of Esquire celebrated “10 Men” — presumably, ideal men that other men (read: that pivotal 18-34 male demographic) can look up to. What was perhaps most shocking about this dubious fete was Thomas P.M. Barnett’s masturbatory article, “Old Man in a Hurry,” a profile that set aside any and all criticisms of the Secretary of Defense for such passages as:
RUMSFELD POPS OUT of his chair with the speed of the weekly squash player he still is at age seventy-three and strides over to shake my hand with a big, welcoming smile on his face, employing the enthusiastic, familiar tone one associates with longtime acquaintances. “Hey, how are ya? Nice to see ya!” I’m surprised by how short he is, as I can look right over his head.
and
This is a room you smoke cigars in and decide the fate of the free world.
and, in describing a conversation with a general
Then the general clinches the deal. “So I’ve finally figured out why we get along so well,” he says. “We’ve both run with the bulls at Pamplona!” Rumsfeld shrieks in delight and then launches into a fifteen-minute reverie about the time he ran with the bulls. And for fifteen glorious minutes, he put away the goddamn wire brush.
This cuddly avuncular approach, which makes no reference to Abu Grhaib or Guantanmo Bay, is rather astonishing for a magazine that cut its teeth in the 1960s on hard-hitting journalism that dared to expose and penetrate. And I, for one, will soon be writing a letter canceling my subscription for such a disgraceful piece of journalism.
What’s particularly interesting is that the writer of this article, Thomas P.M. Barnett, has a blog. What’s interesting is that rather than atoning for his inability to throw a baseball faster than a amicable lob, Barnett (who, no surprise, has kids to feed, making dealing with the devil more justifiable) has written a post expressing surprise that his efforts would be greeted with such outrage. He concludes, “I wanted to write up Rumsfeld in the way I saw him in history for the transformation process he has unleashed, not simply replicate the hundreds of articles that blame him for Iraq. My choice? Yes. Don’t like it? Fine. But criticize the choice without implying that the only way the man can get a profile that doesn’t crucify him is for the journalist to be fooled.”
Fair enough. But as Norman Solomon has argued, the overall questions to Rumsfeld haven’t exactly been hardball. In fact, as FAIR reports, during a September 18, 2002 interview with Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Lehrer failed to call Rumsfeld on factually inaccurate statements. And as Salon reported last December, it took ordinary soldiers to ask the tough questions that journalists typically shied away from.
It would seem to me that Barnett, far from taking the hard alternative route, settled for the same old song. And if Barnett, with his continued fatherly references to “the old man,” genuinely believes that he wasn’t fooled, why the deliberate efforts to portray this seventy-three year old man as some virile squash player? Why the continued masculine assertions? Why nothing in the way of tough questions?
There’s an old Chinese proverb: “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”
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Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
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The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
[...] Subjects Discussed: The relationship between government policy and media, the U.S. government as advertising model, war as product, Charlotte Beers, the element of casualties, use of the flag, “We’re Number 1,” criticizing government without having access to national security documents, the relationship between raw war coverage and antiwar sentiment, transformation of media and propaganda over the past forty years, new media vs. old media, bloggers, Matt Drudge, journalists who face retaliation for war coverage, Laurie Garrett’s resignation letter, wild reactions to Solomon’s work, examples of good journalism, the American public’s interest in foreign affairs, Jim Hightower and Disney, Donald Rumsfeld and Esquire, 9/11 and “Fortunate Son.” [...]