I Sing the Body Politic: History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature 9780773576285

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: History Repeats Itself Repeats Itself
1 Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History
2 The Historature of the American Empire: Joseph Heller’s Picture This
3 The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq
4 Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference
5 Living in Fictitious Times: Michael Moore’s Awful Truth about America
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Citation preview

I SING THE BODY POLITIC

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I Sing the Body Politic History as Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature EDITED BY PETER SWIRSKI

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn-978-0-7735-3603-6 (cloth) isbn-978-0-7735-3633-3 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication I sing the body politic: history as prophecy in contemporary American literature/edited by Peter Swirski. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3603-6 (bnd) isbn 978-0-7735-3633-3 (pbk) 1. Literature and history – United States. 2. Literature and society – United States. 3. Politics and literature – United States. 4. American fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 5. Motion pictures – United States – History – 20th century. 6. United States – In literature. 7. United States – In motion pictures. i. Swirski, Peter, 1963– ps169.h5i2 2009

813’.5409358

Typeset in Sabon 10/13 by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

c2009-901805-5

To Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Arthur Asa Berger, John Howard, Susan Castillo, Sherrill Grace, David Rampton, Nick Ruddick, Mike Zeitlin, Gordon Slethaug, Alice Tse, and other Americanists, whomever and wherever they may be.

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Contents

Introduction: History Repeats Itself Repeats Itself 3 1 Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History 12 D AV I D R A M P T O N

2 The Historature of the American Empire: Joseph Heller’s Picture This 47 PETER SWIRSKI

3 The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq 82 MICHAEL ZEITLIN

4 Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference 113 GORDON E. SLETHAUG 5 Living in Fictitious Times: Michael Moore’s Awful Truth about America 149 NICHOLAS RUDDICK

Bibliography

183

Contributors

201

Index

205

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I SING THE BODY POLITIC

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Introduction: History Repeats Itself Repeats Itself PETER SWI RSKI , G O RD O N E . SLETH A U G , N I CH O LA S RU D D I CK , MI CH A EL ZEI TLI N , TI M B LA CKMO RE , D AVI D RA MPTO N

Set against the backdrop of the Potomac River and Tidal Basin, Washington, dc, is a beautiful capital city with well-designed squares and circles, broad avenues, lush parks, and monuments to American heroism. The gracefully designed white-marble, Greco-Roman federal buildings, arranged splendidly along the National Mall, which runs from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Building, present a vision of elegant simplicity and harmony. As it has grown architecturally over the past two centuries, the city on the Potomac has fulfilled the vision of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French engineer who designed it so that avenues of communication would “connect the separate and most distant objects with the principal” in order to “preserve through the whole a reciprocity of sight.”1 L’Enfant believed in the new republic and wanted an open design of the capital to correspond with the Athenian ideals of honesty, integrity, and public responsibility – never mind the greedy and blood-soaked history of the Athenian empire. And yet, strikingly, in the middle of the National Mall, the oddly dark-brick NeoGothic Smithsonian Castle stands as a reminder that this most white of international cities harbours darkness within. Indeed, even in their neoclassical beauty, the ambient monuments reflect America’s history of conflict with itself and with the world, from

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the Washington Monument commemorative of the Revolutionary War as well as of the first president, the Lincoln Memorial commemorative of the Civil War and its president, down to the memorials of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. First-time visitors to the National Mall are occasionally overcome by awe, perhaps even shock. All of a sudden, the ambient aesthetic grandeur compels all to take stock not only of the republic’s foundational ambitions but also of its mind-numbing contradictions. Here, lofty proclamations of freedom and democracy rub shoulders with everyday racism and human bondage; the westward expansion of opportunity with the slaughter and confinement of indigenous peoples; baseball, jazz, Emma Lazarus, and the American Dream with the kkk, the cia, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the Patriot Act. The prospect of immense pastoral space squares off with endless industrial desecration, and the creation of great wealth with the production of massive poverty, ghettos, and crime. The end of George W. Bush’s imperial presidency means that this wreckage of the republic’s political ideals is now subjected to a vigorous reassessment, with everybody probing the country’s immeasurable resources for signs of redemption. And because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, and the living continue to be replaced by the dead, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall is an especially fitting place in which to anatomize the republic’s neocolonial past and future. As though on cue, in Dispatches, Michael Herr defends a vision of Vietnam as a sacrificial altar not only of millions of human lives, limbs, and futures but also of America’s misdirected energy. If only that energy, quintessentially American and essentially adolescent, “could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain, it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”2 Instead of light, however, there’s fire, a burning crackle of history on the National Mall, which slowly fills up with stories of the dead to which the living must pay perpetual tribute. It is as though the whole of Arlington National Cemetery, that exquisitely welltended garden of death across the Potomac overfilled with its obscene load of young men and women, were ready to disgorge its contents across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, itself like a

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loaded rifle, the projectile of the Lincoln Memorial at its tip. Held for a moment in that chamber of peace – a sign for what might have been a better America – the bullet then flies straight at the White House, from which, once again in recent years, men and women have been sent to kill and get killed by those who themselves avoided the draft or outright refused to serve. In L’Enfant’s centre the imperial cannon points outward, as though designed for protection of the republic. Metaphorically, that same cannon is now used for pre-emptive strikes, warmongering acts that violate not only international law but also the much older common law of ius ad bellum. It is used against what the increasingly incoherent Bush administration dubbed “rogues” – as though life were some child’s pirate story about misadventure on the high seas. If only. Alas, even after four useless decades of Cold War, the American empire may never have seemed more manifest than now, as the first decade of the new millennium draws to its bloody close. Bloody, indeed. Ultima Ratio Regum – the ultimate argument of kings – was a warning stamped on Louis XIV’s cannon barrels. Now we have serial numbers stenciled on the boost-and-thrust sections of nuclear-tipped rockets – thousands of them menacing the world with their final, total solution to peace on earth. Constructed between 1792 and 1800, the White House stands at an aloof distance from the seats of the legislative and judicial branches huddled on Capitol Hill. The executive residence’s splendid isolation, floating above the great axis of the National Mall, denotes the importance of the head of the American state and government. Indeed, that the White House has become a metonym for the greatest concentration of power in history is a testimony to how much the presidency sets the tone for our times. That said, even though the previous occupants of the Oval Office have robbed it of most of its mythic glow, never in living memory has there been a presidency so devoid of substance, so exploited by the arms-and-oil contingent in the president’s Cabinet, and so dangerous to the global order than that of Bush II. The bunker mentality that has come to pervade Washington, dc, starts at the White House. The Executive Mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, nw, is now almost impossible to access.

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Since no one wants a replay of the security panic in the wake of the homemade terrorist attack in 1995 in Oklahoma City, daily public tours are a thing of the past. Americans wanting to experience the West Wing must contact their congressional representative and cultivate patience. Naturally, framed by Jefferson’s lawns, its brown sandstone covered by a forever refreshed coat of gleaming white paint, the presidential domicile offers a highly visible target to the airborne terrorist. Still, Flight 77 – the only hijacked airliner to reach Washington on the morning of September 11, 2001 – ploughed into the Pentagon instead. Flight 93, heroically brought down by its passengers in a Pennsylvania field, was aimed at the Capitol Building. Why? Had the seventeen hijackers and their al-Qaeda controllers guessed that America’s commander-in-chief would be away from home? That he would be idling the morning in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, reading a story about a pet goat to second-graders? That, as Michael Moore documents in his Palme d’Or-winning film Fahrenheit 9/11, he would continue idling with a children’s book in his hands even as reports of the mayhem were streaming in? Had the hijackers perhaps realized that the best way to destabilize the American imperium was to ensure that a political bubblehead and his administration of defence contractors would remain securely in place to lead the bogus response to the attacks? It is one thing to proclaim, as Philip Roth already did a halfcentury ago, that life in America outdoes the most ardent satirist’s capacity for invention. It is another to make sense of this surreal reality. Yet, ready or not, it is precisely what everyone invested in America’s future now has to do – beginning with America’s writers. Historically speaking, novelists, journalists, scriptwriters, and war-memoirists have always been fascinated by and active participants in political affairs. Much like the politicians, soldiers, and industrialists, many of America’s writers were actors in and thus makers of America’s history, sometimes as politicians, soldiers, or industrialists. First and foremost, however, they were commentators on the country’s socio-political institutions, helping to forge a political culture in a republic whose official history is barely more than 230 years old.

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The seventeenth-century attempts to create an American theocratic state, for example, were to a considerable degree orchestrated by writers who happened to be politicians as well. Governor John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” was the most famous among those literary-religious visions. But the notion that the eyes of the world were watching, and that there was a special doom prepared for a country that did not live up to its own ideals, was a recurrent one among the Puritans. In the next century, figures like St John de Crèvecoeur and Benjamin Franklin were anxious to defend the republic by explaining to Europeans what made it so admirable, even as they did not gloss over its many imperfections. Significantly, in their time a writer could still make a difference in the country’s affairs. Indeed, the founding fathers offer any number of examples of politicians and writers rolled into one. As John F. Kennedy remarked, when addressing a group of fifty American Nobel Prize winners whom he had invited to Washington, “Never has such varied intellectual talent gathered at the White House since Thomas Jefferson sat down to dinner alone.”3 And yet, as the nineteenth century unfolded, and as the socio-political gap widened between the ideal city on the metaphorical hill and the real city on the reeking Potomac, American writers became more circumspect about their country’s achievements – and more critical of its failings. Outraged by the blatant rapacity and hypocrisy he saw everywhere he turned, in 1849 Henry David Thoreau thundered for no less than another American revolution: “This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”4 In his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” the former slave and future vice-presidential nominee Frederick Douglass similarly insisted that the business of the first revolution was far from finished. From his vantage point, the fourscore-yearold American republic undermined its political heritage, shackled its promise of freedom, destroyed the “manhood” of its citizens, and sabotaged its future by failing to free its slaves. The ardency, not to say urgency, of such exhortations only gathered steam as the Gilded Age and the robber barons took their toll. In between his successive editions of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman excoriated

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the lobbyists and me-firsters who descended on the capital like the plague, taking crass advantage of a country that, in his mind as much as anyone’s, ought to be dreaming bigger dreams. Fast-forward to the twentieth century. Concerned, then appalled, writers never stopped taking the pulse of the nation’s soul as it was being sold wholesale to the devil. There was, after all, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Dos Passos’s U.S.A., John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, Richard Condon’s Death of a Politician, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C., Joseph Heller’s Picture This, Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist, Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! – and countless others. But now a novel theme grew in importance: increasing dismay and outrage over the fact that all those novels, columns, opinions, and polemics were not making a shred of difference to the country’s political managers and executives. Hollywood also tried to get involved – locally, nationally, and increasingly internationally. Film adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath, Advise and Consent, and All the King’s Men became boxoffice hits. Others came directly from script to screen, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Manchurian Candidate, Wag the Dog, Primary Colors, Bob Roberts, Bulworth, Nixon, Good Night, and Good Luck, or Charlie Wilson’s War. All to little avail. America may have been founded by a generation of writerpoliticians, but few of America’s contemporary politicians cared to listen to what the writers had to say. But not so America at large. Although the popular opinion rallying behind these novels and films did not directly correct the ways of those who would witch-hunt, persecute, spy on, and lie to the American people, the electorate did demand and in some cases get what it wanted – change. Just as the government finally had to listen to the populace up in arms against the Vietnam War, so it had to listen to the belated and stifled, but nonetheless passionate, murmurings against the second Iraq War. It takes, of course, no less than a major upheaval to alter the government’s course of action. But the erosion of America’s social ideals during

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the past twenty years – from Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution, through George H.W. Bush’s and Bill Clinton’s centre-right business-as-usual, to Bush II’s neocon revolt – was clearly enough to drive novelists, scriptwriters, and even soldiers to put pen to paper once again. It is all too clear that the American agony of September 11 was cynically turned into a casus belli for another of the republic’s colonial wars. Not much, it seems, has changed from the colonial wars waged by ancient Athens, Persia, or Rome – or from the way early modern mercantile and industrial empires, be they Dutch or British, carried the torch of “progress” around the world. Yet, for political fiction to have an impact that goes beyond the shock of “I told you so,” its readership must accept its social responsibility both for the conditions that led to the problems and for finding solutions. In the United States, where we are so preoccupied with what we buy rather than with how we vote, that is the ultimate challenge. For most citizens of the republic, after all, the mall that matters most is not the ritual space in Washington, dc, but the local mall, which sells everything we don’t need but must have in order to be Americans. Fortunately, the drive toward improving on history (always uppermost in the Puritan mind) shows no sign of abating in American political literature. From the utopias at the end of the nineteenth century to the dystopias at the end of the twentieth, these narrative thought experiments in social engineering are a record of so many futures past – roads to imaginary Edens that do not envision economic growth as the measure of all things. They exemplify what Sacvan Bercovitch identified as the American jeremiad, a narrative and political form practised and perfected by the Puritan divines. And if the jeremiads are too daunting in their raw political involvement and revolutionary fervour, remember this: if you aren’t prepared to heed the bad news, if you are too tired from bargainhunting to concern yourself with who really rules America, others will be sure to get into the act. History is as eloquent as can be in this respect. And then there will be more grief-stricken and enraged people whose family members have been killed by American bombs and firearms, who have had their lives torn open and been left to rot in the sun by surges, thrusts, and other “Freedom”-tagged

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military invasions schemed up by those who have been termed, perhaps too leniently, sentimental imperialists.5 In the harsh but salutary words of one of America’s great soldier-authors: If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made a victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.6 When your daily narrative is delivered to you down the barrel of an M1A2 Abrams tank or on the boot of a terrified and triggerhappy soldier, you do not have the leisure to pause and reflect on where the United States came from and where its manifest destiny is taking us. We, American literature scholars, together with the American writers who speak to us from their novels, films, and war-memoirs, do have that leisure and that duty. Thus the book in your hands reflects a meeting of minds united in the purpose of bringing the United States to narrative and critical justice. Here, “meeting of minds” is more than a loose metaphor. Not to look too far, the introduction you are reading was crafted in a succession of “blind” round-robins, conceived and executed – just like the Iraq War – without a plan, direction, or consultation with other members of our “coalition.” Whether it and the entire book emerge triumphant from this experimental tactic, we leave to our readers to judge. In brief, here is our plan of attack. I Sing the Body Politic opens with David Rampton’s “Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History.” Setting the tone for the rest of the book, it lavishes attention on the writer’s recent trilogy – Roth’s U.S.A. – and, through it, on the contemporary history of America’s war on its own ideals. Chapter 2 takes on a writer whose novel-as-history explores in even more devastating detail the geopolitical map of the world with the United States at its centre. Alternating between the Athenian, the Dutch, and the American imperial republics, Peter Swirski’s “The Historature of the American Empire: Joseph Heller’s Picture This” metes out critical justice to this complex novel, to the realpolitik of the American empire, and to the writer whose humour is equalled only by his ire.

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Michael Zeitlin’s pivotal chapter, “The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq,” focuses on two of the most intense, harrowing, and ultimately political war-memoirs from the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003. Its historical theme ushers in a face of American literature we do not often see: the first-hand experience of war veterans as live – or at least lived – history. It is flanked, in turn, by Gordon Slethaug’s comprehensive look at “Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference.” Weaving literature, film, civic history, and personal history together, this chapter delivers a new and striking portrait of the post-Civil Rights Act decades. Finally, as passionate as it is polemical, Nicholas Ruddick’s chapter, “Living in Fictitious Times: Michael Moore’s Awful Truth about America,” balances Moore’s prolific career as a writer, scriptwriter, and essayist with his flamboyant persona as a filmmaker, cultural icon, and political gadfly in the side of Bush II. As writers and critics, Americans and Americanists, all the contributors have an extraordinary amount to say about the American ship of state and the course it has been charting through the Persian Gulf to the promised land. But even as it does so, we must not forget that our present is only the latest chapter in the book of history, which continues to be written day in and day out. Appropriately enough, gracing the entrance to the United States National Archives in Washington, dc, hangs George Santayana’s warning that those who airbrush history condemn themselves to repeat it. We, the authors of I Sing the Body Politic, offer this book of history and literary criticism in the hope that it will help put an end to history repeating itself repeating itself ...

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6

Smith and Pistolesi, 4. Herr, 44. Quoted in Barber, 82. Thoreau, 231. See Thomson, Stanley, and Perry. O’Brien, 68–9.

1 Stupidity’s Progress: Philip Roth and Twentieth-Century American History D AVI D RA MPTO N

And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that it was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen’s naiveté? I’d hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan politics, but now, having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child – the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage to remain in America without America’s ever again being absorbed in me. Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

In Exit Ghost (2007), Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman meets up with a couple in their late twenties who want to exchange their apartment in New York for his Connecticut retreat. It is election day, November 2004, and they have just learned that the early exit polls giving the Democratic contender John Kerry the lead were wrong, that the Democrats are going to lose, and that America is in for four more years of George W. Bush. One of their friends asks: “how do we live with something so grotesque? How do you manage to insulate yourself from stupidity so bottomless?”1 This idea of life in America as an ongoing battle with different kinds of stupidity is important in Roth’s fiction, for obvious reasons: there is a lot of it around, its effects are far-reaching, and escaping it proves to be difficult.

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Nathan’s response to the question raised by this new generation underlines the magnitude of how its sensibilities have been affected. “Kerry’s loss to Bush was taking a prominent place in the cluster of extreme historical shocks that would mentally shape their American kinship, as Vietnam had publicly defined their parents’ generation and as the Depression and the Second World War had organized the expectations of my parents and their friends.”2 This comment neatly summarizes Roth’s focus in his American trilogy – the three novels he wrote at the end of the twentieth century in which the principal characters go head to head with powerful and complex versions of American stupidity. They are all defeated, but the battles in which they involve themselves enable the writer to anatomize his country and characterize his attitude to it in intriguing ways. Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000) are essential for judging the effects of some of the historical shocks that have shaped his generation’s “American kinship.” Naturally, it often seems as if the only sure thing to be said about his position on any given subject is that no sure thing can be said about it. It often seems like sheer folly to try to piece together the views of this master of self-creation, this connoisseur of role-playing, who in his work has assumed more shapes than Proteus and tried out more identities than the late George Plimpton – in short, a writer whose books represent the apotheosis of evasive self-reflexiveness. The man who told Time in 1983 that subjectivity was one of his main subjects, who clearly conceives of fiction as a many-voiced dialogue of multiple selves, and who gave the word “counterlife” a whole new meaning is surely someone destined to remain elusive. His best critics concur on this point. Mark Shechner notes that “We seldom if ever get closer to the heart of Roth’s fiction by isolating the voice of responsibility.” Debra Shostak concludes that Nathan Zuckerman embodies “an impersonation that, because it is neither disinterested nor omniscient, always undercuts the historical realism of the tales he narrates by casting his dominance over the facts into doubt.” And Ross Posnock, having pointed out how relentlessly Roth makes his literary engagements and allusions the subject of his fiction, warns us against “pigeonholing critics

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who would anchor him to his historical coordinates” by ignoring the fact that he resides in a world “without frontiers, be they national, regional, or aesthetic.”3 Mindful of these caveats, I propose to think about the trilogy as the place where a more or less coherent authorial voice invites us to believe in the possibility of mapping out twentieth-century America’s historical coordinates. Even though Roth is predictably hard to pin down, and although many of the positions taken by various characters in the novels are consistently undermined, all three books plot a carefully wrought hero (however flawed) against an opposing society. And as the individuals in whom he is interested enter history, we learn a lot about it – and about them. We learn about how the positions they take should be evaluated, what kind of positive valences can be attached to them, and – crucially – how the different kinds of stupidity manifested in them can be understood. Considering the novels in the order of the eras they engage with, we infer from them, if not exactly a guide for negotiating recent American history, then something to help us make the transition into the twenty-first century. I’M WITH STUPID

Politics is the great generalizer … and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other – they are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrongheaded, dull, something that makes no sense and that really oughtn’t to be. Why? Because the particularizing impulse is literature. Philip Roth, I Married a Communist

The history lesson of I Married a Communist centres on Ira Ringold, a man consumed by the idea of working for social justice. Performer, writer, autodidact, philanderer, labourer, proselytizer, faithful Communist Party member, Ira is the figure Roth invents to study political idealism and its discontents in the 1930s and ’40s, a sort of twentieth-century reincarnation of Tom Paine, at least in the version Howard Fast made popular in Citizen Tom Paine.4 His egalitarianism and enthusiasms are Whitmanic, his patriotism robust, his flaws lovingly documented, his status

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emblematic, and his ultimate destitution complete. Ira’s brother Murray – Nathan Zuckerman’s octogenarian English teacher who tells Ira’s story over six consecutive nights – says of him: “I had never before known anyone whose life was intimately circumscribed by so much American history, who was personally familiar with so much American geography, who had confronted, face to face, so much American lowlife.”5 The book takes its title from a tell-all memoir written by Ira’s ex-wife, Eve Frame. Its revelations lead to Ira’s downfall once the forces of reaction publicize his sympathies with the left in the hysteria of the postwar anti-communist years. Narrating the story, Nathan recounts the milestones of his own political education: the Dewey Commission, the American Communist Party under Earl Browder, the Popular Front, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the Progressive Party, the Wallace campaign in 1948, and other events that shaped the beliefs of the Old Left in the 1930s and ’40s. Part of Nathan’s education comes from listening to Leo Glucksman, one of his reality instructors, on the differences between politics and literature. Among other things, the mentor explains that the artist seeks to find and represent the “tormented human being” that exists within the contradictory and chaotic world of the individual, whereas the activist interested in making a political point must eschew chaos and present all that is “disciplined, organized, contained, predictable scientifically.”6 All this is somewhat ironic. Glucksman is a rather predatory figure, intent on impressing Nathan and then seducing him, and the high-minded, distinterested pose he strikes is undercut by his hysterical outburst in the very next scene, when Nathan’s commitment to politics threatens to take him away from Chicago. Leo’s account leaves a rather large excluded middle as well: he is arguably talking about propaganda rather than political literature per se. Pointing out the differences between a political manifesto and a novel may be important, but this is hardly the last word on a large and complex subject. And then what if politics is doing the tormenting on which the genuine artist thrives? The world stage on which Leo imagines only bland and robotic interacting seems a little unreal. And, although Nathan’s hortatory, message-filled radio play may be a travesty filled with such interactions, Roth’s

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novel makes clear that the clash between the individual and the historically concrete is as worthy a subject for the writer as anything else. There are metaliterary echoes here as well. Posnock has pointed out the similarities between Leo’s agenda and the case Lionel Trilling tries to make in The Liberal Imagination for the disinterestedness of literature. Therein, one of liberalism’s most articulate spokesmen and critics seeks to assert the authority of modernist literary culture, defending it as “the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”7 Yet Trilling suggests that the variegated, complex, and difficult world explored in modernist literature eschews politics as a subject, because it is the personal rather than the political, and the irrational rather than the orderly, that intrigue the best twentieth-century writers. In exploring the excesses committed in the name of arid rationalism, Roth’s trilogy represents an important revision of the Glucksman/Trilling point of view. The story of progressive politics in the decades Roth has recreated so vividly is a compelling one, particularly because this era featured a cacophony of voices vying for the ear of the American people – precisely the sort of noise to which Roth responds so well. Take the 1948 Wallace campaign, which occupies a substantial part of I Married a Communist. What makes this story so gripping is the human drama of it. Here is the progressive third-party candidate, Roosevelt’s right-hand man, bitter opponent of the Truman doctrine, who, in one of the most famous speeches in American history, defined the twentieth century as the century of the common man. His was an alternative or collaborative (depending on your point of view) vision to the communist one, an attempt to capture America’s imagination and the world’s. The debates that his campaign initiates – between Nathan and his father, then between Ira and a black domestic who refuses to vote for Henry Wallace – replay those that Wallace initiated in progressive circles across the country. Like Nathan, his followers extolled their candidate’s high ideals: he refused to speak, for example, to segregated audiences in the South. Opponents worried about the communist influence on his party, his idealistic solutions to complex geopolitical problems, and the risk of splitting the democratic vote and electing Thomas Dewey.

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Wallace is a fascinating figure for the young Nathan, the last of his kind in a number of ways. He compared Lenin to Martin Luther and John Calvin, admired the efficacy of centralized economic planning, saw Soviet-American cooperation as crucial for the defeat of fascism, thought Alexis de Tocqueville’s conviction that Russia and America would come to dominate the world prescient, and imagined some combination of the two systems would result in true political and economic democracy for both. But in the postwar years, Wallace’s yearning for a rapprochement with the Russians and his sense of how it might be effected showed just how out of touch he rapidly became. His stand was incomprehensible to Harry Truman and the major players in the Cabinet, and Wallace ended up being fired for a speech he made on American-Soviet relations. More important, his sympathetic view of the Soviets left him out of step with the majority of the American people. Impressed by all the “get tough” talk coming out of the Truman Cabinet, eager for a new villain to replace Hitler, and suspicious of Soviet intentions in the postwar world, the electorate massively turned its back on Wallace in the 1948 election, giving him just 2.3 per cent of the vote and relegating him to a dismal fourth behind Truman, Dewey, and Strom Thurmond (another Democrat who split the party, this time to make room for the racist concerns of the Dixiecrats). Used by the communists, it took Wallace years to understand that there was simply no room for liberals in their worldview. His noble vision of how liberalism would underwrite the century of the common man by working for social justice in America and taming totalitarian primitivism in the Soviet Union – bringing it and America together by seizing on the best aspects of both worlds – died with his defeat in 1948.8 What Roth sees as ubiquitous American stupidity in all this is readily apparent – but there are important distinctions to be made. Wallace was naive not to have seen through Joseph Stalin’s lies and hypocrisy. In fact, half an hour with Vladimir Lenin’s vicious critiques of every pre-revolutionary party that deviated from his line, not to mention the latter’s special contempt for liberals, would have taught Wallace how fruitless the quest for rapprochement with Lenin’s successors would be. But Roth is relatively gentle with Ira and Nathan and their fervent defence of Wallace’s cause.

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They were working to reduce the amount of human suffering, not justify its exponential expansion. In contrast, I Married a Communist makes starkly clear Roth’s revulsion for the careerists and the hypocrites on the right, those who are anti-communist not so much out of conviction as out of political expediency. And he reserves a special opprobrium for those who hurt a lot of people in the process. Stupidity manifests itself most obviously in what all these people say, in the way rhetoric makes them lose touch with reality. In this, the toadies at the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) listening to and mimicking the greatest of performance artists, Joe McCarthy, are caught mouthing platitudes or goofy exaggerations, carried away by their own sincerity. Ira comes in for criticism from this point of view as well, having endorsed the party line even as it made its tortuous way via Stalin’s paranoid changes of mind in the 1930s. Like poor old Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party in the United States, Ira twists and turns as the new dispensation is announced and is twisted and turned for his pains. His political stupidity is related to the personal: his credulity, impulsiveness, lack of imagination, singlemindedness, and self-destructiveness are as obvious in his life as they are in his political adventures. And so with all the rest. Eve’s stupidity stems from a lack of the sense of realpolitik, an inability to understand just how brutally she will be dismissed once Ira’s foes have what they need from her, and it informs everything she does – most amusingly perhaps the slushy romances she writes. Roth even includes an excerpt from her Eloise and Abelard: “Her head fell back. Her mouth parted to receive his kiss. One day he would suffer castration as a brutal and vengeful punishment for this passion for Eloise, but for now he was far from mutilated.”9 When, in a similarly turgid and overblown style, she writes a romance about her life with Ira, her stupidities actually wreck people’s lives, and that is why she too is judged so harshly. At the other end of the scale is someone like Johnny O’Day, the loyal party member. He is far from stupid in any conventional sense. Tough, principled, single-minded, he ends up being one of the most memorable in a gallery of superbly drawn minor

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characters. Yet his ascetic quest for purity – his conviction not only that a single life has a shape and a purpose but also that Karl Marx has identified something similar for humanity writ large – constitutes a stupidity that has been responsible for a lot more human misery than escapist romances. The “blood on the bricks” that O’Day refers to so matter-of-factly, the blood that will flow of necessity when the traitors like Ira are dealt with, is what makes Roth so intrigued and frightened by him.10 Remarkably, in a novel devoted to America in the 1940s and ’50s, Roth takes time out to include an account of Richard Nixon’s funeral in 1994. Ira’s brother mocks the right-wingers who were with Tricky Dicky from the start (“For stupidity … there is no cure”).11 He jeers at the way Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Bob Dole, and California governor Pete Wilson praised him so effusively and intimates that Nixon is beyond the pale when it comes to the dialectics of history. Part of this is intellectual condescension: Nixon’s anti-intellectual poses irked many of Roth’s generation. Moreover, the former president could be singularly unimpressive in person. Someone once compared listening to Nixon speak to watching a man dump hot coals in his path and then try to dance across them, no matter whether he was lying to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam or trying to say something about his feelings on the day of his daughter’s wedding. More important, Murray Ringold cannot forgive Nixon for what he did in the 1940s and ’50s, for his red-baiting and other vicious tactics. As the incarnation of anti-integrity in an era whose very theme was betrayal, Nixon was a profoundly divisive figure. In Roth’s view, those who conveniently forgot Nixon’s appalling deficiencies as a president deserve our contempt as much as Nixon does. Towards the end of the novel, Murray quotes Shakespeare about how “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”12 In Twelfth Night the line refers to an ambitious character who becomes a victim of class prejudice in Duke Orsino’s court. Here, it evokes the grand political machinations in postwar America. Now a whirligig can be a singularly unpleasant cage in which the victim is imprisoned and then spun around, with gruesome consequences, or a piece of kinetic art that twists in the wind for the aesthetic

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pleasure of the spectator. Historical time in Roth’s novel is a whirligig in both senses. It imprisons its actors in their respective cages until they finally escape into isolation or death, and it lays everything out in narrative form for the edification of those looking on. In the end, it is Nathan who is alone. Murray’s story about betrayals has made it pretty clear that this solitude is a therapeutic part of the human condition, but it too can be overdone in a search for an impossible purity. In an America given over to systematic betrayal, the whole idea of the values of the community can often seem like a cruel illusion. Nathan’s musings about being alone lead to one of the most lyrical, moving endings in all of Roth’s fiction, one that comments in important ways on the political drama we have just witnessed. It begins with an evocation of the disembodied human voice. Nathan compares the sound emanating from the bedside radio when he was a boy to Murray’s voice telling the story of his brother’s rise and fall: voices from the void controlling everything within, the convolutions of a story floating on air and into the ear so that the drama is perceived well behind the eyes, the cup that is the cranium[,] a cup transformed into a limitless globe of a stage, containing fellow creatures whole.13 Nathan goes on to spend the whole night lying out and looking at the stars, and the account of this interaction with the nonhuman constitutes the novel’s oblique comment on the political world it recreates so vividly. A childhood experience, in which he was told that when people die they “go up to the sky and live on forever as gleaming stars,” makes Nathan think about the difference between all those larger-than-life actors he has been hearing about and what is left of them: some memories, an echo, unidentifiable dust. The stars tell him that “Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny.”14 Even when they were alive, the extent to which their ideas or expectations affected how things worked out was far from clear, given the chaos of mixed motives,

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reversals, jealousy, and greed that the novel has so painstakingly evoked. In the end there are no mistakes for Eve or Ira to make: There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience or its absence … There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crow, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. There are no utopias.15 This lyrical peroration has been described as an example of “Roth running his scales, trying out a five minute moderato at the end of his six day furioso, if only to demonstrate that he can do it and that he is not maddened with revenge.”16 Perhaps. But the lurking ambiguities do provide a useful commentary on the story that has just been told. The anaphoras of “There is” and “There are” at once refer to something out there in the cosmos and to human constructs, ephemeral when seen in cosmic terms. On the planets orbiting the galaxies’ white dwarfs and red giants, there is no evidence of human life. Sitting on his mountain in Connecticut, staring up at the stars, Nathan feels the ascetic thrill Henry David Thoreau did when he went looking for the essence of life 150 years ago and found it in solitude. The moment provides the mental serenity to enable him, provisionally at least, to get a sense of what he has just heard. In a way, then, the stars at the end of I Married a Communist serve as a gigantic relativizing device, making earthly affairs seem negligible even as they show us extraordinary grandeur and superb vistas. But the stars can keep us close to the world as well. There is something reassuringly anthropomorphic about Nathan’s attempt to domesticate galactic immensity by personifying the lights that shine to us. David Hume liked to remind his readers that the grandest, material-based inquiry can end up inducing the shivers of solipsism: Let us chace [sic] our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of

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existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.17 And Tom Paine, whose revolutionary zeal is referred to so often in the novel, invokes the stars in a similarly grandiose and inspiring way at the end of his Age of Reason, using his conviction that there are planets like ours revolving around other suns as part of his humanist attack on Christianity. God, writes Paine, gave us not a solitary globe but a plurality of worlds for the benefit all the different sets of inhabitants that implies, who “behold the revolutionary motions of our earth, as we behold theirs.”18 Using this sort of literary echo, and describing the stars as “the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand,” Roth makes them the ultimate whirligig, beautiful to look at but infernal.19 They create an awe-inspiring spectacle that prefigures our own demise when the sun, our contribution to the galaxy of fire, performs its final expanding act. Between now and then, if our obligations to one another entail that we need to assume a more than spectatorial role in matters affecting our own planet – as Ira Ringold and his like believed – we should be inspired by this vision of the end of things. There is something eminently satisfying about staring at something that is so splendidly nonhuman – but only for a time. The fact that “error” and “antagonism” do not obtrude in the immensity of space suggests how different we are from it and that, once we have taken our awestruck measure of the stars and their colossal simplicity, it is time to return to the earth. STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. The results are in for the class of January 1950 – the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed – is that not astonishing? To have lived – and in this country, and in our time, as who we were. Astonishing. Philip Roth, American Pastoral

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The point of departure in American Pastoral is a high school reunion of the class of 1950 and Nathan’s summary of what it was like to be an American teenager after the war. His recollection of the extraordinary energy of that time sets the scene for the ways that the progressive view of history starts to unravel for his generation. The novel tells the story of a Jewish family from Newark whose American kinship is defined by the Civil Rights Movement, riots in the inner cities, and protests against the Vietnam War. Handsome, athletic, intelligent, industrious, responsible, Seymour “The Swede” Levov turns the glove factory he inherits from his father into an extremely prosperous enterprise, marries a former Miss New Jersey by whom he has a daughter named Merry (for Meredith), and moves to the suburbs to mark his arrival as an American success. Nathan sees him as representative “by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world” and admires his assimilation because “he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the American-guy way.”20 The Swede has inherited his father’s set of values, particularly the Roosevelt-style liberalism that in his view made his country a genuine democracy. But Newark explodes in violence in the mid1960s, and eventually it is impossible to run a business there. Determined to strike back at the government that is massacring innocents oversees, Merry plants a bomb in the local post office and kills an innocent passerby. The Swede’s wife takes a lover. His life, so carefully orchestrated, seemingly destined to be the ultimate success story, falls apart. Meeting his brother Jerry at their high school reunion, Nathan hears some details concerning this extraordinary turn of events. What he fills in constitutes the rest of the novel. Anthony Hutchison points out that American Pastoral “represents several contrasting positions on questions of American culture and politics.”21 The point is well taken. But, as in I Married a Communist, Roth is far from disinterested in his presentation of these different points of view. Through his account of the life of Swede Levov, the poster-boy for how splendidly the American Dream can be achieved, Roth skewers the teleological conceptions of his country’s history. The Swede’s story is, after all, a “disruption of

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the anticipated American future that was simply to have unrolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smarter – smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before.”22 Roth is eager to know why, if everyone is getting smarter, learning from the mistakes and profiting from the experience of their parents and grandparents, stupidity seems to be making the country go around. The critical approach to the relation between the novel and the American Dream has been mixed. In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, Sandra Stanley sees American Pastoral as an inquiry into why this vision of democratic idealism and romanticism goes awry, all in the framework of the tradition of the Great American Novel articulated in the academy of the 1950s and early ’60s. She argues that this tradition is part of the “academically inspired ideals of high modernism filtered through the language of New Criticism,” as exemplified by F.O. Mathiessen’s American Renaissance, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam, and Leo Marx’s The Machine and the Garden.23 In her view, these studies naively hypothesize an American literature that is transcendent, ahistorical, and apolitical, assuming the existence of a common “social narrative” and a set of national traits in the process. She concludes: Foregrounding and interrogating the literary language of the myth and symbol school, Roth demonstrates that the American mythos is not a self-contained artifact, able to legitimize its hegemonic status by self-written rules. His characters reread American history, forced to see it not as a transcendent, utopic myth but as an ideological construct that foreshadows the demise of earlier stories of nationhood. Paradoxically, Roth writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the mythic tradition of the “Great American Novel” – a tradition that romanticizes individuals such as Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby, who enact national conflict in the guise of an individual identity crisis – at the same time that he bears witness to the illusions inherent in the mythic foundations of such a tradition.24

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Such criticism is a typically even-handed and insightful way of delineating the profoundly dialogic nature of Roth’s imagination. Where there is an American pastoral, there is the American demonic. Where there are blithe assumptions about upward mobility, there are the workers chained to their stations in the factories. Where there is prosperity for the upper half, the other half, downsized and staring at the poverty line with no medical insurance, loses out to the forces of globalization. The comforts of the suburbs are simultaneously a cover for seething discontent. The ideals of the founding fathers are used to justify the most blatant kind of imperialism. As Stanley suggests, notions about the ways these things can be represented are also part of this dialogical reality. The idea of the central character as hero and the artist as a kind of seer is sabotaged by a collectivized, post-individualistic age. Of course, this sort of analysis raises as many questions as it seeks to resolve. For example, which earlier stories of nationhood are we talking about, and what precisely is the “transcendent, utopic myth” that is being debunked? Thomas Jefferson’s egalitarian notion of an agrarian America, stretching endlessly into the unexplored West, led by a “natural aristocracy” of the talented? But it was Alexander Hamilton’s centralized federal system, with a strong national bank and an emphasis on trade and commerce, that laid the foundations of modern America (even as John Adams poured scorn on Jefferson’s notion of a natural elite as early as 1812). And what about Andrew Jackson’s racist populism, Abraham Lincoln’s high-minded defence of the country as the very essence of democracy, Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic internationalism, and Calvin Coolidge’s “The business of America is business”? That is quite a competing set of transcendent myths, and we haven’t even got to the Kennedy-Johnson years with their very different takes on the meaning of American nationhood. And then there are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and William James, nineteenth-century thinkers who had their own quite distinctive visions of America, along with figures as various as Eugene Debs, Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King in the twentieth. To what extent is the Swede implicated in this debunking of the American mythos? Timothy Parrish notes that his success derives

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from exploiting nonwhite, non-mainstream black and Puerto Rican Americans and concludes: By conflating Merry’s revolt against her father with the social unrest of the sixties that included race riots in the major American cities … Roth suggests that the unrest of the sixties was caused not by American foreign policy but by racial inequities exacerbated by the American belief in cultural transformation as an inherent social good.25 There is a striking resemblance between this assessment of the situation and that of Merry’s friend Rita Cohen, the ideologue of the student left. What it leaves out is all the things Roth goes on about at some length: the loyalty of the Swede’s employees, their gratitude for having a job and their interest in doing it well, their determination to defend their factory in the 1967 riots, and so on. Roth seems to suggest that the Swede is working at eliminating racial inequities by staying in Newark and treating his employees properly – presumably the very reasons that, except for the actions of white vigilantes, the riots leave his factory untouched. As for the error resulting from the assumption that cultural transformation is “an inherent social good,” one has only to think about Newark’s destruction after the unrest in 1967 to realize that there has not been nearly enough of such transformation – that, for a number of reasons, the way out of the black ghetto has proved to be too difficult for too many. The Swede does make a serious error in identifying Americanness with Old Rimrock gentility – what can be more American than growing up as a Jew in Newark? But we risk compounding his mistake by judging him too harshly for it and forgetting that the dynamic quality of cultural transformation has been one source of America’s great strength. These assumptions about the direction in which America was moving received a huge reaffirmation in the postwar period, and in American Pastoral Roth is careful to include specific references to the changes that have made the country feel as if it was about to take a giant leap forward.26 One of them is a speech that Nathan writes for his high school reunion, a speech that is essentially a

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description of the America in which the Swede grew up. Here, the vitality of the labour unions, the egalitarian influence of the gi Bill, the surge in upward mobility generally, the commitment to community, and the relative lack of friction between the generations combine to make for an impressive composite portrait. The importance for Roth of such a nationwide community feeling can hardly be overemphasized. Speaking to one interviewer about the significance of origins for what one becomes, Roth said: If I’m not an American, I’m nothing. It was how I was given to live … I wasn’t just given life and breath and a body and a brain, I was given a birthplace and everything that flows from it. And what flows from it is everything. Everything. The way we speak, what you see, what you say.27 If, like Roth, Nathan Zuckerman had a second self ready to sabotage his meditations, that self would point out that all this immersion in the neighbourly mundane would have likely fostered a satiric rebellion against its constrictiveness at least for some of its inhabitants. Equally, it might point out that Nathan’s nostalgic revisionism half a century hence is hardly definitive, or even to be trusted. True enough, this hymn to America at mid-century can be dismissed as self-indulgent fantasy – analyzed in class terms as the predictable smugness of the aspiring petit bourgeois, as the wilful occlusion of the inequalities confronting the sexes, and so forth. But the fact that Roth gives his narrative alter ego so much time to make such a fervent case shows clearly that the dialogic quality of his trilogy has its limits. It is particularly these details of America that fascinate him, details that in all their multifaceted “thisness” represent an unmitigated good. Like Whitman, Roth can hear this America singing, and what makes this history all the more remarkable is that, despite the lingering myth of its democratic accessibility, this experience no longer seems to resonate for his fellow citizens. Contemplating what happened between 1950 and the early 1970s (say 1974, the year Nixon resigned), Nathan is struck by how inexplicable America’s situation becomes if one attempts to

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understand history in terms of progression or at least a clear movement: Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.28 Put that on a graph and explain it, Nathan seems to be saying. That is in itself as hard to fathom as the Swede’s daughter turning into a terrorist bomber. Harder, because it involves so many people, not a single aberrant one. Since progress had been so linear, so steady, – why should they be blamed for assuming that it would continue? Nathan’s exhaustive description of Newark reminds us of just how quickly the city was to change. The postwar boom led to the urban renewal that gutted the very neighbourhoods that he anatomizes so lovingly, the ones where both the poor and the houseproud made their lives. Interstates literally destroyed whole sections of downtown Newark and helped to precipitate the suburban exodus, while federal housing projects grouped the poor and the unemployed in a huge single central ghetto. Le Corbusier-style high-rises, the sort that made Brasilia the postmodern nightmare, were stuffed into these empty spaces in the 1950s and ’60s, only to be abandoned and eventually torn down in the mid-1990s, just before American Pastoral was published. In the exodus to the suburbs, the white population of the city dropped precipitously, while unemployed blacks arrived seeking work that was in the process of leaving the city. The scene was set for the riots that end up causing the departure of the Levov glove factory from where the Swede’s father had first set it up.29 From his vantage point of thirty years on, Lou Levov is eerily prescient. He describes the unemployment and the filth, the poverty and the dropouts, the riots and the police corruption, and announces that “Newark will be the city that never comes back.”30 Those who identified the one-parent families in black ghettos as part of a cycle of human misery in America – and who predicted

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that large numbers of males having children out of wedlock and refusing to care for them would create massive problems for America’s cities – were dismissed as racists in the 1960s but proved to be right. Indeed, the future for Nathan and the Levovs is part of our history. The authors of a 1975 survey for Harper’s concluded: “The city of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst city of all. It ranked among the worst cities in no fewer than nineteen of twenty-four categories, and it was dead last in nine of them … Newark is a city that desperately needs help.”31 Two decades later, a year before American Pastoral was published, Newark continued to rank as the most dangerous city in the United States. The novel does not present in a favourable light the forces dreaming of a new American revolution that might right these wrongs, and Roth has been taken to task in this regard. Robert Boyers complains, for example, that the novelist sets up as representative figures “who are mad and whose attachment to disorder is so pathological that they make it impossible for us to consider seriously the actual sources of discontent in American society.” Making a distinction between Merry the daughter and Merry the bomber, Shechner dismisses the latter as someone who fails to become human, and in general maintains that Roth’s revolutionaries are all “off the shelf.”32 While there is some truth to this, it is difficult to accept that the most extraordinarily gifted ventriloquist in American fiction inexplicably lost his voice when he most needed it. Perhaps this feature of the novel has more to do with Roth’s narrative methods than with his tendentiousness. We never get Merry from the inside, because Nathan doesn’t choose to tell the story from her point of view. Instead we get excerpts from dozens of conversations between father and daughter, in which we learn about how bitter Merry is and the ostensible causes for it: the war, American imperialism, and the insulation of its self-satisfied upper middle classes. Her character is actually quite sharply drawn in the dozen pages summarizing these conversations. They are all about stupidity, in the form of incomprehension, talking at cross purposes, and the failure of reason in the face of an obsession. Roth has a great ear for this kind of inter-generational dialogue, important in I Married a Communist as well. He uses it to show

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how limited this would-be revolutionary’s insights into the Vietnam War are. Merry’s compassion turns out to be somewhat selective: she weeps for Southeast Asian families, but she’s not so keen on “the privileged people of New Jersey leading their peaceful, s-s-secure, acquisitive, meaningless l-l-l-little bloodsucking lives!”33 Challenged by her father, she insists that she does not want that kind of peace and security for the Vietnamese; however, she cannot say exactly what she does want. The Swede’s approach may seem plodding and unimaginative, but in coolly staying the course with his daughter and registering his own opposition to the war, he makes her revolutionary zeal look like the ineffectual, transitory thing that it eventually reveals itself to be. This hardly exempts him or his generation from blame for their complicity in the lemming-march horror that was Vietnam. American Pastoral pays implicit tribute to the New Left for pointing out how, in the course of projecting its power worldwide, America ended up killing and maiming millions of people in a way that made a mockery out of the ideals it was founded on. The Swede’s own opposition to the war, as half-hearted as it is, is a vivid illustration of the efficacy of millions of people taking to the streets to protest against American aggression. It has been argued that the Swede embodies the weak liberalism of the age, that he is afraid to challenge or confront, full of tolerant respect for every position. But if that is so, why does he put himself through countless disagreeable confrontations with his daughter, disagree systematically with her hyperbole, point out the inconsistencies in her position, and forbid her to go to New York when she breaks the rules? In effect, the Swede does everything right in these exchanges, keeping his daughter talking, refusing to lose his temper, and drawing clear lines. Anyone who has dealt with a rebellious teenager will be impressed by just how tough a liberal the Swede manages to be. Roth does suggest where some of Merry’s political ideas come from, but he does so rather obliquely. Her father imagines her reading Frantz Fanon, the Algerian thinker who sang hymns of praise to absolute violence, fought against French colonialism, and wrote of a brave new world purified by war and cleansed of class and racial categories. Fanon’s disgust at the corruption of the elite

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is matched only by his enthusiasm for their destruction. Herbert Marcuse is on that imaginary list as well. His impatience with democracy’s repressive tolerance is echoed in Merry’s critique of Old Rimrock’s ineffectual liberalism as she understands it. She as much as calls her father a one-dimensional man, drawing on one of Marcuse’s central notions. Enamoured with this sort of standard 1960s fare, only tangentially relevant to America, rich in abstraction, and starry-eyed in its utopian conjurings, kids like Merry are out of touch with what is actually happening in their own country. Here again, Roth is thinking about the kinds of stupidity that distinguish Rita and others: the need to see the causal links of history in simplistic terms, the nonsense of conflating someone such as the Swede and Simon Legree, and the refusal to identify or adopt any kind of melioristic approach to workers’ rights in the mid-twentieth century (if only because more exciting apocalyptic scenarios beckon at every turn). For Rita, a glove factory in the heart of Newark does not solve anything by providing someone a livelihood; it is the problem. Her instant response to a social issue is to think in world-historical, eschatological terms – never mind the inevitable chaos that ensues when one tries to bring such different perspectives together. Roth’s revolutionaries may be bright and loquacious and energetic, but they are stupid in one crucial sense. Ignorant of recent and not so recent history, they are cut off from the world they ostensibly want to improve. The political education they espouse is what one chronicler of the 1960s called “the slightly crazy attempt to raise insubordination into a culture.”34 In retrospect, the Students for a Democratic Society and their adherents look to Roth like a lost generation, partly because, in cutting themselves off from the Old Left and dismissing workers as lobotomized by too much television, they had no real sense of how to change the lives of ordinary people for the better. What their representatives in American Pastoral say about the country’s workforce, its factories, and its place in history, in the sense of the ordinary citizen’s experience and potential, can only be explained in that light. They also express themselves in clichés, which makes for more stupidity. And, in their different ways, they are as

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unreflective as Swede Levov is about the market economy that has made them all rich. But here we must be careful with such an equation. At various points in the novel, he too is described as stupid, as an innocent, or as unthinking, or as presumptuous, particularly where the problems of assimilation are concerned. But Roth is far less harsh with naiveté than he is with stupidity rooted in aggressive ignorance. Rereading radicals’ memoirs of the 1960s is a sad business, not so much because it reveals hypocrisy or venal sins but because every one of the survivors is so rueful, having lost whatever faith they had. Yet what is often lacking in such accounts is the recognition that whatever apocalyptic vision they were championing at the time, it was destined to fail simply because life goes on in all its myriad complexity or dreary simplicity, and because we perish each alone. For Roth, this is not so much a counsel of despair as the politics of realism, and it underscores the limit of the radicals’ imaginings and ultimately of their power to effect change. Sighs Nathan: My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness – not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it.35 That may not be a profound political truth, but in Roth’s view it profoundly affects the status of such truths. As politically unsophisticated as he is, the Swede understands this aspect of human life better than the radicals. “Paradise Remembered,” the chapter on Merry’s political coming of age, concludes with her blowing up the post office, the general store, a local doctor, and “the metal pole on which Russ Hamlin – who, with his wife, owned the store and ran the post office – had raised the American flag every morning since Warren Gamaliel Harding was president of the United States.”36 Where does Harding fit in all this? Elected in 1920 by more than 60 per cent of the electorate because he looked like a president, he used celebrity endorsements to influence the voters, spoke fluent cliché, and was

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singularly uninterested in social justice. A Republican who thought there should be less government interference in business and more business people in government, he was opposed to what he called statism, government intervention of any kind. Fabulously popular while in office, Harding is regarded by historians as one of the country’s worst presidents. His administration is a watchword for corruption, and one of his cabinet ministers was the first ever of such rank to be sent to jail. The people’s opposition to his candidacy took the form of Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate for president who received almost a million votes the year Harding was elected, even though he was forced to conduct his campaign from a prison cell. America had changed a lot in the forty years since Harding was elected. Showing that those of the latest generation assume that their world emerged full-blown the day before they developed a social conscience, American Pastoral also shows the implications of the “other” revolution. Sex and politics come together in the novel most dramatically during Rita Cohen’s attempt to seduce the Swede. After all, one of the criteria for a card-carrying member of a revolutionary group in the 1960s was a willingness to sleep with anybody. Roth’s take on Deep Throat, one of the first hardcore pornographic films to attract a large audience in America, is even more germane. Who is going to see it, sneer the Swede’s friends: all those respectable Republican types who just gave Nixon a landslide victory in 1972 against George McGovern, or the McGovernites themselves? His father objects (“What does McGovern have to do with that lousy movie?”) because – like Roth himself – he campaigned for the Democrat and can’t see any connection between this earnest senator with a doctorate in American history and Linda Lovelace.37 Nevertheless, the questions of sexual politics and censorship that the counterculture popularized in the 1960s and ’70s constitute an important link. Whole areas of life could now be talked about more openly in America.38 Not that this new permissiveness helped McGovern, whom the press had great success smearing with an “amnesty, abortion, and acid” tag. But as Roth implies, the changes in America following his failed bid were profound. The candidate who ran on the most left-wing platform in American history – 100 per cent inheritance

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tax on fortunes of over $500,000, slashing defence spending, and working out a redistributive, populist economic program for the nation – lost in spectacular fashion. This happened partly because of the clever campaign the Republicans ran against him, but partly because the workers whose support he sought did not like the idea that, if they ever succeeded in making money, they would not be able to pass it on to their children. Against all odds, the power of the American Dream endures. The division between the left’s chattering classes and the Democrats’ electoral base, between the pragmatists who pander to populism and the liberal intellectuals who stand aloof from it, is the abiding legacy of the era. McGovern’s dispirited loyalists lost hope in the possibility of electing a candidate with a mandate to change the country. Recognizing how deeply alienated they were from working-class voters, they surrendered the Democratic Party to a new breed of centrists and learned to satisfy themselves with pipedreams about the end of the nation-state, of late capitalism, and of power relations. In the novel, Roth apportions blame liberally. The Republicans in Old Rimrock are drunken and duplicitous nonentities who don’t even know what the ideals of the republic were. But the Swede’s friend Marcia Umanoff, the left-wing English professor, is judged even more harshly, for the society she laughingly dismisses as “going under” is not going anywhere but on.39 She has not penetrated more deeply into the inner workings of history than Nixon’s supporters have. One of the first figures that Nathan uses to give us a sense of the Swede’s extraordinary abilities is drawn from the John R. Tunis baseball books of his youth. The heroes in these novels often suffer some catastrophic injury at a crucial moment, struck down for no apparent reason. Nathan calls Tunis’s books “the boys’ Book of Job.”40 Like Job, their heroes suffer some grievous injury or heartbreaking defeat, but that is not the end. Victorious or defeated, there is no sense in which they are self-aware enough to interrogate the order that has victimized them, no confrontation between them and a sardonic god who puts man in the dock, no sense of release derived from the feeling that God’s paradoxes and aggressive nonanswers are more comforting than anything Job’s comforters can come up with. For Roth, Tunis’s books are a reminder that American life can be recorded and examined in all its twists and

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turns, yet one at a time, the individual lives of people in America who end up suffering the way the Swede has are shown to be as incomprehensible as Job’s life is. Towards the end, the language of American Pastoral is curiously like the judgment Nathaniel Hawthorne passes on Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter. There, he says that the stern and sad truth about human weakness is that, once the breach has been made, it can never be repaired. Here, Roth says of the Levovs: “the breach had been pounded in their fortification, even out here in secure Old Rimrock, and now that it was opened it would not be closed again.”41 That said, there is an important difference, and the last words of the novel underline it. Dimmesdale internalizes the community’s judgment and actually triumphs in revealing his guilt to them at the end. The Swede and the chronicler of his story do nothing of the sort: they are still asking questions and still sizing up the enemy, the different groups of people who condemn and reject his life. Despite his blindness, the Swede is not responsible for the random cruelty of human life, any more than Job can get a satisfying explanation from a God who has connived with Satan to test and torture him. The society that has let its own dream die in a frenzy of mutual recrimination cannot be let off the hook so easily. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE STUPID

Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security – was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Roth’s decision to locate The Human Stain in the Clinton years at first seems odd. The threat of impeachment that hung over the

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president because he lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky hardly constituted the sort of historical shock Roth identifies as his subject in the trilogy. Although it obsessed the nation at the time, one is naturally reluctant to attribute worldhistorical significance to fellatio in the White House. However, like its predecessors, The Human Stain is central for the political debates of the 1990s. As Anthony Hutchison points out, the Clinton years are particularly interesting for the writer because of the political allegiances they generated and because of the values that made Clinton such a divisive figure.42 This is not to mention the resemblances between Clinton and Nixon, political animals who redefined a political centre. The Clinton era was also the one that introduced identity politics to the generation raised in the 1960s, leading the country to interrogate its sexual mores in ways that would make it redefine its ideals. The Human Stain tells the story of Coleman Silk, former dean and professor of classics at Athena College, who is forced to resign after an unfounded charge of racism is brought against him by two black students. The ironies compound. Not only was Silk responsible for hiring many of the professors who refuse to support him as the witch hunt proceeds, but he is a black man who has been passing for white most of his adult life. He takes up with Faunia Farley, a young woman half his age, incurring the wrath of her ex-husband, a Vietnam veteran – and the wrath of the chair of his department, an elegant, young woman named Delphine Roux, who resents what she sees as Coleman’s sexual exploitation of an illiterate and threatens to expose him. When Coleman and Faunia are killed in a car accident caused by her ex-husband, the omnipresent Nathan Zuckerman, Coleman’s friend, sets out to piece their story together. The torrent of opprobrium that descends on Coleman’s head when he asks if two students who have not been attending his class are real or “spooks” is a manifestation of the moral stupidity that spins the wheels in America. It also spins the narrative wheels in the novel, indirectly causing three deaths (Coleman’s wife dies of a stroke, which he blames on the ways he and his family are persecuted) and blighting a clutch of other lives in the process. Roth wants readers to be as indignant about Coleman’s plight as

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Zuckerman is, and he is as willing to absolve him as the academic community is quick to condemn. That community stands indicted for its willingness to countenance accusations of a racist slur when context, lexical register, and even syntax make clear how ludicrous they are. Yet, for some readers at least, the chances of finding stable ironies and fixed meanings in Roth’s work are so slim that even this bedrock assumption has been called into question. Debra Shostak, for one, points out the irony of a classicist with a professional interest in language being undone by a word, particularly when that word “embraces a complex of ideological associations resulting from the long history of American injustice he has sought to transcend.” She adds: “‘Spooks’ names the identity [Coleman Silk] wishes to circumvent – ironically, since, although his utterance suggests antipathy to that very identity, it cannot be understood by his audience as self-loathing.”43 But for an utterance to suggest self-hatred there has to be an utterer who understands himself to be making – or whom we understand to be making – a derogatory comment about race. The idea of some force taking unconscious revenge on Coleman for his attempt to deny his origins does not seem very convincing either. The immediate issue is that an administrative failure of nerve encourages the students to invoke victimhood as an excuse for not doing their work. Lest we miss such an important point, Roth supplies a verbatim account from one of the documents submitted during the inquiry into the incident. In defending one of the students, Delphine Roux writes: she is ready, willing, and able to change her approach to living. What I have seen coming to birth in her during these last weeks is a realization of the seriousness of her avoidance of reality.44 Coleman dismisses this as “just too sickening,” terms that recall the vehemence with which figures like Nixon and Bush are vilified in I Married a Communist. Why such strong language about a carelessly written note advocating compassion for a student who may not have received the nurturing she needed?

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Coleman goes off on a rant because it is precisely this sort of response that shows how much academic integrity has suffered in the university. He has a clear idea of what constitutes intelligence. Avoiding cant, striving for clarity, and admiring the achievements of Western civilization are all part of it. It maddens him to think that some feckless underachiever, someone who would not even be in a postsecondary institution anywhere else in the world, is being encouraged to judge her judges rather than take responsibility for her actions. For him, this student is a reminder of how far we have fallen. He says in conversation with Delphine Roux that his students represent “far and away the dumbest generation in American history.”45 Significantly, he deems it so in part because this generation is taught by a group of professors whose sentimentality, uncertainty about the rightness of what they are doing, and lack of connection with the world in which such students must be taught to function make his former colleagues all too willing to exculpate the lazy and the manipulative. He also knows that this generation and its sympathetic professors are bound up together in the persecution campaign launched against him. So these clichés and the sloppy writing are not just corrigible errors; they are battle cries in the struggle between those defending the intellectual high ground and those worried about making their student clientele feel uncomfortable. Roth complicates Coleman’s encounter with history by presenting his character obliquely and using others’ lives as a commentary on his. As a number of reviewers have pointed out, Delphine Roux and Coleman Silk are in many ways very similar. They are both intrigued by ideas, condemned to self-imposed isolation because they are so exigent, and eager to plot their own courses and escape from the expectations of their families.46 She is more enamoured with theoretical approaches than he is, but their exchange about how to read Euripides reveals that both think that feminism, if it is used in a crude and amateurish way – e.g., Euripides’s Hippolyta is poorly written because it might upset contemporary women – threatens to denature great literature. In her way, Delphine is as fascinated by history as Coleman Silk is, and this fascination manifests itself in her penchant for discussing

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history and economics with Arthur Sussman, a Boston University professor who unsuccessfully tries to get her into bed. Partly this penchant is the pleasure of sexual flirtation, partly a desire to deal with someone who frequents the corridors of power and has some genuine ideas. Roth makes a great deal of her interest in discussing Marx’s The German Ideology with Sussman. What is so interesting about this particular book? Perhaps she recalls it from a course at one of France’s elite “hautes écoles” as the volume in which Marx criticizes the Hegelians for developing a national philosophy that is cut off from a national reality – for hopelessly abstract theorizing in a real Germany with real problems in the middle of the nineteenth century. Marx sees these thinkers as talking only among themselves by virtue of a specialized kind of jargon, as only interested in connecting with the world long enough to further their careers with lectureships at universities, as eager to shock the public with attacks on commonsense notions of truth just to make conservative guardians of morality explode in stern denunciations. In short, there may be something about this particular work that makes Delphine Roux do some critical self-examination of her own. For this is the book in which the great materialist has a go at the nineteenth-century version of the poststructuralist ethos, the one that produced Delphine Roux. Moreover, to go back to Marx is to rediscover a simplicity untainted by all the misreading and applications that have interposed themselves between him and us. This is after all the book in which he makes the case for the individual against the collective, sees individualism as a positive force thwarted by capitalism, and thinks countries like America will develop more rapidly because of the potentially progressive sensibilities of the discontented individuals who founded it. Finally, The German Ideology is the volume in which Marx says that philosophy is to science what masturbation is to sex. Delphine has the philosophy, but she wants the science, at least science in the sense Marx is using it here: she wants her ideas to make a difference. All of these things make the prospect of discussing it with someone like Sussman, the economist whose ideas on the national debt might actually affect public policy, particularly attractive to her.

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Roth suggests that Delphine is self-conscious enough to understand how impoverished her politically correct culture is and to see how stupidity can flourish even in academia. The feminists in her department have formed a cabal against her, gossiping and insinuating, so there is no intellectual exchange there. But it is not just these people Delphine feels cut off from. She thinks to herself at one point that “the only American she understands is academic American, which is hardly American.”47 Because this language involves large-scale borrowings from French thinkers and because it has sabotaged discussion about practical social and economic matters with abstruse cultural theorizing, there is nothing particularly indigenous or useful about it. Coleman speaks that other language in which she is so interested, the language that suggests that her upbringing and her education have cut her off from something important that she does not know how to articulate. For Roth, politics and culture have always been bound up with sex, and it’s no wonder that Zuckerman calls the latter “the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly mindful of the matter we are.”48 One of the reasons that references to the pagan gods and their sensual adventures are so plentiful in this novel is that Roth wants to establish a political and cultural context in which such things are judged differently. Sex is also an answer offered to the deterministic view of history. Faunia, described as the untransformed and unforeseen, is someone who lives in the moment. This is not to escape history – after all, she is the one who tries to tell Coleman that his willed isolation from his family will have unhappy consequences. She is rather an example of someone whose willed stupidity has beneficent effects. At the end of an erotic dance she does for Coleman, trying to get him to live in the moment and forget about everything that can distract him, she says: “Being stupid Faunia – that’s my achievement, Coleman, that’s me at my sensible best.”49 She knows a stupid but very powerful proof of the existence of God, the conviction born of the intensity of sensual pleasure derived from dance and erotic arousal. She calls herself stupid because she inhabits the world in which the passion aroused by music – immaterial notes passed from one consciousness to another via sound

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waves made by a musical instrument – offers an answer to the atheist’s confident assertions, reminding us that there is more to life than a mere material explanation can explain. This is presumably why it is Faunia who defines the book’s title in her meditation on what makes us human. She calls it the human stain, the trail, the imprint we leave, and gives an intriguing set of examples: “impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen – there’s no other way to be here.”50 On the face of it, this is quite an eclectic list. The concluding references to bodily functions are a way of making an obvious point about our being mammals, but the others all have normative notions attached to them. The idea of “impurity” suggests the taint of mortality. Much as this afflicts everyone, the would-be pure are doubly impure in Roth’s world: Johnny O’Day faced with the multiple passions of Ira Ringold, Merry in her scourging war-criminals mode or aspiring to the utter detachment of a Jain, revolutionaries repulsed by the compromises of the bourgeoisie, ideologues of American innocence shocked by the goings-on in the Clinton White House – the trilogy is full of such figures. There is also our enforced resignation to impurity in everyday life, what Roth calls our penchant for error, for getting things wrong. So “impurity” and “error” are presumably not bad things in this context but rather defining characteristics. That leaves “cruelty” and “abuse,” and these we can choose to indulge in or avoid, condone or condemn. Simply because life throws us into situations with others, we may end up treating them badly despite our best intentions, but these stains are not inevitable in the way that the others are. They are truths about social relations, not some kind of human essence. There is always the retreat, the cabin in the woods for Nathan, the iron mine for Ira Ringold, the house in Old Rimrock, the place where we can get away to avoid being implicated in those relations. CODA

Flaubert discovered stupidity. I daresay that is the greatest discovery of a century so proud of its scientific thought. Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently:

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it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education … Flaubert’s vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress! Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

How, then, are we to sum up the interaction between the personal and the political in the trilogy? Given the conclusions to all three novels, it is probably better to think of that interaction as a work in progress. Hutchison puts it this way: If figures such as the Swede, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk are “representative,” they are so in complex, “overdetermined” ways – as both the agents and the victims of the various social, cultural, and ideological forces of their times. They are not only accused of “betrayal” on the basis of reductive interpretations of their character but … also “betrayed” themselves by the promise of a specific midcentury expression of American liberalism.51 As part of the Old Left, they believed in the possibility of working for social justice within the system, and they voted for Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson in the hopes of keeping that project alive. They were immigrants from every corner of the planet, but they belonged to an America that was larger than race or class. Their unapologetic commitment to one of the most powerful ideas of America, adds Hutchison, seems deeply rooted “in the aspirational, optimistic, yet pragmatic politics of the founding fathers.”52 Examples include Ira Ringold reciting the Gettysburg Address in defence of his ideals, Nathan imitating Norman Corwin’s radio plays, Lou Levov excoriating Nixon, and Coleman Silk believing that individualism and hard work will allow him to shed his humble origins. It is an idea that leads them seriously astray, yet even its humbler version has a certain nobility. The conviction that an attempt to live up to the lofty ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence can lead to an increase in social justice, act as a force for equality, and be used to justify a non-

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interventionist foreign policy animates a great deal of the intellectual exchange in these novels. The forces with which such characters must do battle – the jingoistic Americanism of the McCarthyites, the wilful blindness and seductive nihilism of those in thrall to imperial fantasies, or the hysteria of propriety that characterized the Clinton years – win out in the novels precisely because they appeal to unreason, to the fears and hatreds that motivate citizens in the absence of something positive to strive for. Roth suggests that the allies of the benighted in this unequal contest are the intellectuals on the left, who labour mightily to find excuses for whatever lies and cruelty have official sanction, and the intellectuals on the right, who must be constantly conjuring up new demons and paltry justifications for their illiberal acts. What begins as “aspirational” or “optimistic” in late Roth ends in a mess, not because his protagonists are mixed up kids like Portnoy, or hedonists like David Kepesh, but because the America in which they live has a particular aversion to the “aspirational.” Does this rueful recognition of the limits of the politics of his youth make Roth a neoconservative? The answer has to be a resounding “No.” Roth isn’t a liberal who has been mugged by reality – if anything, he is the one doing the mugging. Besides, a neoconservative can hardly disbelieve in a world ripe for the continued export of American-style turbo-capitalism and in an ominous external threat against which a divided and effete republic must fight. As Michael Lind puts it, “For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and Chamberlain, and it is always 1939.”53 Add left-wing intellectuals sapping the country’s pride and morale, stir in clear-eyed and courageous fundamentalists capable of seeing the dangers, and season to taste. Far from rueing the supposed mistakes he made in the past when drunk on some anti-authoritarian, antiAmerican binge, Roth announces in these novels that such mistakes, if that is the right word, are inevitable for those who try to fight to free themselves from the malignant forms of American stupidity – and from their own. Indeed, far from learning from the errors of the past, Roth’s characters are participants in a carnival of stupidity that promises to run on and on. When Delphine Roux goes to Paris, it is to listen

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to Milan Kundera, whose life was profoundly affected by the events around which the trilogy is organized. In 1948, when the Soviets murdered Jan Masaryk, the leader of Czechoslovakia, they condemned the country to forty years of tyranny. Yet when the 1960s’ radicals became convinced that the United States was an evil empire, they went looking for revolutionary wisdom in the teachings of the very people whose ideas had inspired those suppressing freedom in eastern Europe. When Kundera quotes Gustave Flaubert on the progress of stupidity, he has this grotesque series of events in mind. Roth has his own: the American Communist Party, the McCarthyites, the Weather Underground, the spectatorial left, and the acrimonious right-wing guardians of a specious morality. Here is stupidity’s plenty, his novels tell us. Yet the note of quizzical uplift, the lyrical praise for therapeutic isolation, and the acceptance of the incomplete and imperfect at the end of each novel make the trilogy much more than some grim counsel of despair. If all we can hope for is “an age in which prevalent varieties of stupidity will cause less unnecessary pain than is caused in our age by our varieties of stupidity,” we should proceed to engage it with enthusiasm and alacrity.54 At the rate he is going, Roth may still be around to record the results. And, at the rate America is going, given the iniquitous duplicity of those on the right and the sectarian bickering among those who oppose them, we are going to need him.

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Roth, Exit Ghost, 97. Ibid. Shechner, 4; Shostak, 267; Posnock, xiii. Published in 1943 and discussed at length by Ira and Nathan. Roth, I Married A Communist, 189. Ibid., 223. Posnock, 52; Trilling, xiii. See White and Maze, 257–82. Roth, Married, 133.

Stupidity’s Progress 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

45

Ibid., 289. Ibid., 277. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 321. Radio figures prominently in the novel: Roth singles out for special mention Norman Corwin’s “On a Note of Triumph,” the program that marked V-E day in Europe, an extraordinarily powerful tribute to the “little guy” of American democracy and the allied soldier who helped him to conquer Hitler. It was the most listened-to radio program in American history. A complete original version of this is available at http://www.npr.org (viewed 10 November 2007). Nathan praises it for its exaltation of the extraordinary power of the ordinary, its insistence that “greatness and the people were one”; see ibid., 41, original emphasis. Ibid., 322. Ibid. Shechner, 179. Hume, 67–8. Paine, 321. Roth, Married, 323. Roth, American Pastoral, 89. Hutchinson, 114. Roth, Pastoral, 85. Stanley, 21. Ibid. Parrish, 138. Gould, 43, suggests that, although most of us realize that the history of man shows anything but a clear and predictable progression, we know it as “a phrase to be uttered, but not as a concept brought into the deep interior of understanding.” Quoted in Shostak, 236. Roth, Pastoral, 237. See Jackson. For background and analysis of American (sub)urban history and culture, see Swirski. Roth, Pastoral, 345. Harper’s, January 1975. Boyers, 41; Schechner, 160. Roth, Pastoral, 108. Berman, 8.

46 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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Roth, Pastoral, 226. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 350. See Hutchinson, esp. 133. Gentry, 81, sees Dawn, Merry, and Marcia Umanoff as heroic for disallowing the Levovs to force them into accepting conventional gender roles, contending that they, along with Jessie Orcutt, have the last word by seeking to defy “the law of the father.” Roth, Pastoral, 9. Ibid., 423. Hutchison, 178. Shostak, 259. Roth, The Human Stain, 18. Ibid., 192. Safer, 121, dismisses Delphine as “farcical” and says that “Roth laughs [her] off the stage.” Roth, Stain, 276, original emphasis. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 233–4. In The Counterlife, 37, Roth says of one character: “watching him one wondered if in fact the passion to live and the strength to prevail might not be, at their core, quite stupid” (original emphasis). Roth, Stain, 242. Hutchison, 167. Ibid. Lind, 28. Rorty, 161.

2 The Historature of the American Empire: Joseph Heller’s Picture This PETER SWI RSKI

And it led as well to that prolonged sequence of events in which Athens suffered defeat; the empire was destroyed; the democracy was outlawed and restored; Socrates and Asclepius were tried, found guilty, and executed; Plato wrote his philosophies and started his school; Aristotle came to Athens as a student and departed as fugitive and was later, during a different war, painted by Rembrandt in Amsterdam contemplating a bust of Homer that was a copy, and, as a consequence of this, as a conclusion to centuries of hazardous travels, and as a matter of verifiable fact, made in 1961 his triumphant passage from the Parke-Bernet Galleries on Madison Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in the city now called New York to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street before John F. Kennedy was shot between the Korean War and the Vietnam War and was succeeded as president by Lyndon B. Johnson, who, counseled by an inner circle of educated dumbbells associated mainly with Harvard and other prestigious universities, lied to the American people and the American Congress and secretly and deceitfully took the nation openly into a war in Southeast Asia it could not win and did not, persevering obstinately on that destructive course as resolutely as did Pericles when he moved Athens ahead onto her self-destructive course of war with Sparta. Joseph Heller, Picture This

In 1961 a first novel by an unknown writer won the National Book Award, edging out another first novel by a then unknown writer. But whereas few today remember the winner, Walker Percy’s

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Moviegoer, the runner-up looms bigger than ever before. With tens of millions of copies sold worldwide, with translations from Finnish to Chinese, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 boasts entries in Englishlanguage dictionaries from Webster’s to the OED . A modern classic and a staple of college curricula, it is also – despite its pacifist tenor – a required reading at the US Air Force Academy (which in 1986 sponsored an academic symposium to mark the quartercentenniary of its publication). This last accolade is less odd when you consider that, for the 1970 film adaptation, Hollywood assembled not only a cast led by Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Martin Sheen, Martin Balsam, John Voight, and Bob Newhart but also a bomber fleet ranked twelfth largest in the world. Much of this enduring success owes to Heller’s reader-friendly aesthetics: acerbic humour, immaculate if complex plotting, a pleiade of oddball characters, and an almost countercultural iconoclasm. But, at the end of the day, the even weightier reasons have more to do with history than with aesthetics. Ostensibly set during the Second World War, Catch-22 came to mean so much to the decade it ushered in because it so uncannily presaged the mindset of the 1960s. Little wonder that, while their government waged war to make peace, pacified Vietnamese villages and villagers in order to save them, debased language into a public-relations spin, and turned democracy into a comedie bouffon, Americans turned en masse to their up-and-coming master of black comedy. A decade and a half later, reviewing Heller’s subsequent novel Something Happened for the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ventured that it would be to the 1970s what Catch-22 was to the ’60s: ostensibly rooted in the past, farsighted about the future. If he had been writing toward the end of the 1980s, he might have said the same about Picture This, a historical tour de farce written after eight years of Ronald Reagan, which reads as though written after eight years of George W. Bush. Masterpiece satire and experimental aesthetics aside, this prophetic intimation of the future past is a compelling reason to revisit this extraordinary novel from the writer who passed away in 1999, after completing his farewell Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.

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With the accuracy of a latter-day Nostradamus, although without the latter’s equivocations, Heller breezes through two and a half millennia of history, politics, economics, and art to deliver his most searching sermon and his darkest satire. Reviewing some of the less-known episodes of Western history, time and time again he fast-forwards to his Reagan-era present, which uncannily resembles our Bush-era future. Naturally, the cynic in him has few illusions about the efficacy of literature against ignorance, apathy, or worst of all, television. “If there was never another novel written,” shrugged the author in a 1971 interview with the Los Angeles Times, “the world would still go on. It wouldn’t change anything, no one would care. But if there was no more television, everyone would go crazy in two days.”1 Heller’s cynicism is even more corrosive in Picture This. “You will learn nothing from history that can be applied,” he scoffs on the second-last page of this novel-as-history, or history-as-novel, “so don’t kid yourself into thinking you can.”2 Yet the artist in him belies the cynic. Having confided to the US News and World Report that he was no good at nonfiction, now he self-reflexively yokes his genius for the surreal to the investigation of sober fact. Having confided elsewhere that the easiest part of writing for him was the dialogue, now he crafts a novel with scarcely any dialogue at all. Having traded ink for acid, he takes the artistic risk of his career by composing a summa historiae that stands out from his oeuvre like an Arab in the Knesset. In the autumn of his career, like the elder, vitriolic Mark Twain, Heller takes on a subject of epic proportions: the American empire. On a narrative canvas equally ambitious in size, he clothes Periclean Athens and the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic in rich historical robes and compares their rise and fall with the state of the American union. He is, of course, too canny a historian and satirist to close his eyes to the differences among the three superpowers. But the stirring consonance of his juxtapositions suggests that the differences may be only superficial, while the analogies are profound. And if his thesis is right – if the dissimilar historical superstructures are driven by the same political-military engine – Picture This goes a long way to explaining why Americans today find

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themselves at war with countries many could not even place on the map. LITERARY HISTORY

The Rembrandt painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer may not be by Rembrandt but by a pupil so divinely gifted in learning the lessons of his master that he never was able to accomplish anything more and whose name, as a consequence, has been lost in history. The bust of Homer that Aristotle is shown contemplating is not of Homer. The man is not Aristotle. Joseph Heller, Picture This

Is Heller really a prophet? Or is it just that we don’t care to learn from history? In the year Picture This came out, the author favoured the latter alternative: “No one can change history, but it keeps on repeating.”3 Indeed, the pity and pathos that permeate the book arise largely from Heller’s focus on the historical invariants in human affairs, particularly when it comes to war, politics, and money. Barring military technology and the means of economic production, precious little, after all, has changed from the Golden Ages of the Greek and Dutch republics. “I went back to ancient Greece because I was interested in writing about American life and Western civilization,” recalled Heller in an interview with Bill Moyers. “In ancient Greece I found striking – and grim – parallels.”4 Shuttling back and forth between the internecine war on the Peloponnesus and the colonial heyday of the Dutch East India Company, Picture This lives up to its author’s confession of being “a book about money and war.”5 Albeit a gross simplification, the above quotation does identify the twin concerns that impose on this scattershot novel an almost classical unity of theme. Donning the chiton of Cassandra under the burgomaster’s surplice, Heller tops them both with a fool’s cap and proceeds to dissect three different bodies politic that have succumbed to the same imperial hubris. That is why behind his sometimes puckish and sometimes scathing ad libs aimed at the Greek imperial democracy and the Dutch corporate regime always lurk the decades that, for better or worse, belonged to John F. Kennedy,

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Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. Stitching together these disparate epochs is the painting depicting of one of the world’s greatest philosophers, executed by one of the world’s greatest painters, purchased in 1961 by one of the greatest American museums for the greatest sum then ever spent on a work of visual art. The result is a narrative structure already perfected in Catch-22: time-warps replete with cyclically amplified flashbacks and flash-forwards to a handful of central episodes – the book’s structural and thematic leitmotifs. One of these is the life and death of Socrates, the philosophical gadfly on the Hellenic body politic. Another is the destructive and, as the author is at pains to document, self-destructive war between Athens and Sparta. Finally, there is the genesis in 1653 of the painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer by Rembrandt van Rijn and its subsequent vagaries on the international art scene. Even without Heller’s ironic asides, it does not take a degree in history to recognize in the Greek and Dutch empires the archetypes of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the conservative revolution under Reagan, and the neoconservative one under Bush II. Projected onto a multiplex historical canvas, the three empires become the catalysts for ruminations on the nature of democracy, war, law, art, money – and, not least, human nature. That in 1609 Henry Hudson seized a prime chunk of real estate on America’s Eastern Seaboard in the name of the Netherlands only tickles Heller’s sardonic bone. So does the fact that mercantile Holland was in its time as fearsome a commercial power as is the US today. And likewise the fact that, enshrined as the democratic leaders of Western civilization then and now, both Athens and America got there on the backs of domestic slavery and overseas militarism. Picture This takes no prisoners when satirizing the discrepancies between the accepted historical commonplace and the actual historical circumstance. The chronological time-warps and jump-cuts only underscore the fate of any republic that comes down with a case of manifest destiny. So overriding, in fact, is this sense of history that some critics expressed reservations about whether Heller’s novel is a novel at all. Judith Ruderman complained, for example, that it “seems more like a history text in which the pages

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have been scrambled than it does like a novel.”6 In a syncretic novel like Picture This one can, of course, debate where fact ends and poetic licence begins. But there is no debating that what holds its thirty-seven chapters together is not a traditional hero or storyline but history. Heller cribs from a staggering number of sources, among them Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Diogenes Leartius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Xenophon’s Hellenica, Aristotle’s Poetics, Metaphysics, and Ethics, and Plato’s Apology, Laws, Republic, Seventh Epistle, and Symposium as well as Hesiod, Aristophanes, Aeschines, Homer, and who knows who else. Furthermore, he lifts entire sections from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, particularly on the bloodbath on Corcyra, the deliberations before the massacre of the city of Melos, and the calamitous war against Syracuse. His portrait of Rembrandt and his times owes at least as much to Gary Schwartz’s Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings, Paul Zumthor’s Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, and John Motley’s morethan-a-century-old yet still unsurpassed treatise The Rise of the Dutch Republic. In the face of this cornucopia, some critics threw up their hands in despair, sounding for all the world like Mordecai Richler, who used to grouch that Richard Condon’s books were “not so much to be reviewed as counter-researched.”7 True enough, Picture This flouts everything taught in creative writing courses. Piling facts upon facts upon trivia, it digresses – among myriad others – into thumbnail biographies of Alexander the Great, William of Orange, Philip II, and Baruch Spinoza; disquisitions on curing herring, the Dutch shipbuilding industry, and the invention of the telescope; Rembrandt’s birthweight, schooling, and extra/marital life; and even such crumbs of art history as the fact that the corpse in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was that of a man hanged for stealing a coat. At first blush all this may seem to be just a slapdash inventory of historical ins and outs, no more than narrative fodder for rhetorical flourishes and ironic editorializing. Heller’s reflections on his craft offer, however, a good reason to believe that this freeassociative exterior conceals a studiously orchestrated design. “I

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tried to avoid … the conventional structure of the novel,” explained the author of Catch-22; “I tried to give it a structure that would reflect and complement the content of the book itself, and the content of the book really derives from our present atmosphere, which is one of chaos, of disorganization.” Seemingly unstructured and repetitive, the story was constructed “with a meticulous concern to give the appearance of a formless novel.”8 This is not to deny that Heller elevates redundancy – be it in the form of repetition, refrain, periphrasis, or amplification – to the status of a major structural principle. In style, however, he opts for minimalist aesthetics, with staccato sentences frequently chiselled down to a single line and paragraphs dramatically lineated to highlight – or give breathing room to – successive ideas. Look at all this one way, and you indeed see what Heller himself dubbed tongue-in-cheek as “excessive excess.”9 Look again, and you see exquisite dramatic counterpoint, tragicomic fusion, and ontological syncretism from a writer of sterling credentials: Ivy League master’s degree in literature, Fulbright and Christensen scholar at Oxford, and Distinguished Professor of English at the City College of New York. To be sure, Picture This is not a historical fiction in the manner of Alexandre Dumas, père – but neither is it “tedious and static.”10 Far from having written a documentary transcription, Heller is never happier than when he can serve history with a twist, typically by resorting to ironic conceit, anachronistic paraphrase, or reductio ad absurdum. The novel’s pages are peppered with oneliners that flow from historical incongruities, such as: “One of the effects of capitalism is communism.”11 At the opposite end of the scale lie complex dramatic scenes that illustrate how, driven by strategic, political, or economic expediency, imperial history looks like so many catch-22s. The mood, too, ranges from solemn during the kangoroo trial of Socrates to surreal, as when Rembrandt reflects on the payoffs of imitating paintings by his apprentices, which, although imitations of his own, are deemed by the public to be more Rembrandt-like. Even though Vladimir Nabokov called the mingling of fiction and fact a mangling of both art and truth, Heller could not care less. His title is the best case in point, being a double entendre that

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swivels between Rembrandt’s historical picture and our capacity to picture things that are not – the prerogative of fiction. Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle is, of course, real enough, but since no one has any idea what historical Aristotle looked like, the artist had to invent his likeness, much as that of Homer, of whom no one knows anything except his name. As for Socrates, the sole figure in Picture This who approaches the status of a hero, although we have a historical source about Socrates in Plato himself, the latter met Socrates only briefly, only as a young man, and only when the sage was already past sixty. To conclude that Plato’s picture of Socrates might well be a composite of fact and fiction would be a truism. The ontological distinction between fiction and nonfiction occludes the fact that both novelists and historians are writers who use all manner of stylistic, rhetorical, and structural tropes to convert readers to their point of view. To muddy the waters even further, the historical roots of “faction” hark back more than two thousand years before the new journalism of Tom Wolfe or the nonfiction novels of Truman Capote. One of its unapologetic practitioners was, in fact, none other than Heller’s narrative model from antiquity, Thucydides. Availing himself of what we would call today ethnographic fieldwork – including, notably, personal interviews – the Greek historian resorted to rhetorical and satirical flourishes to convey the full cruelty and senselessness of warfare between the Mediterranean superpowers. Like the author of Picture This, alternating in tone between magisterial and personal, Thucydides also did not shrink from judging the merits of historical figures and events. Taking issue with a number of inherited clichés, he did not even spare the Trojan War, which, he asserted, “falls short of its fame and the prevailing traditions to which the poets have given authority.” Equally to the point, neither did he shy away from putting words in people’s mouths, although strictly in accordance with their historical backgrounds and personalities. “My habit,” he wrote in self-defence, “has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded by the occasion, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”12 If Thucydides is a narrative historian of power politics who used dramatic attribution to make his themes – be they war, governance,

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or the state of the empire – more salient, so is Heller. The latter’s Aristotle, for example, seems to have all the fun in the world using the Socratic method, as described to us by Plato himself, to poke holes in the latter’s blueprint for a just government. “In my virtuous communist republic, it will be the role of the individuals to do the bidding of the state.” “And if people don’t agree?” “They will be oppressed, for the good of the state. The Guardians will make them.” “Who will make the Guardians obey?” inquired Aristotle. “Where is the stronger force to compel them?” “What difference does it make?” said Plato, vexed. “What people do in this world is of no consequence.” “Then why are you bothering? Why are we talking? Why did you write your Republic?”13 It is, naturally, ironic that the very democracies that permitted Thucydides and Heller to crucify them in writing afforded them so much to crucify. In his classic study The City and Man, Leo Strauss suggested, in fact, that even though Thucydides’s philippics were tolerated by the authorities, their doing so may have been a calculated move to take the heat off their imperial ambitions. To his credit, Heller takes full account of this irony by turning the tables on himself. Writing history or writing about history entails making choices not just about causality and context but also about relevance. Even the most conscientious chronicler must perforce select and collate his or her data and at times make conjectures about them. Be that as it may, Heller-as-historiographer never wavers: much as we need history, we need truth more. If Heller had lived to our millenium, he would be dismayed to learn how right he was. Having for decades imitated the White House, which had always called the Vietnam offensive a “police action,” the French admitted only in 1999 that their brutal eightyear war against Algerian independence was a war rather than an “operation to maintain order.” The echoes of George Orwell’s MiniTru are, however, more sinister.14 In November 2005, to howls of derision from former colonies and historians at home, France’s

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parliament voted to uphold a law traditionally ordaining that history textbooks drum up the benevolent side of its colonial rule. Eventually, the furor reached such a crescendo that the offensive statute was abrogated, but the moral is clear: new and better history is only a vote away. The French are not alone, of course, in taking procrustean liberties with history. No need to invoke Joseph Stalin’s ussr, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq either. In The Clash Within Martha Nussbaum recounts how the current Hindu right – the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) and its allies – attempts to rewrite Indian history to elevate Hindus at the expense of Muslims. In Taiwan, for reasons linked to the country’s struggle for acceptance as a sovereign democracy, the authorities are removing the name of Chang Kai Shek from streets and even the national airport. Chechens were freedom fighters before being rebranded as terrorists when the US needed Russian compliance in the Security Council. In 2007 protests erupted in Okinawa against Japanese orders to alter high school history textbooks which teach that during the Second World War the Japanese army ordered Okinawans to kill themselves rather than surrender. In Poetics Aristotle deemed poetry “a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”15 Picture This – whose working title was at one point Poetics – is preceded by another of the philosopher’s epigrams: “Tragedy is an imitation of an action.” Instead of mimetically, however, Heller interprets Aristotle historically as a tragic cycle of political actions that bore no fruit in the past and, imitated, are doomed to sterility in the future present. The unity of his novel emerges from the blend of ironic – not to say olympian – detachment and intense compassion with which he surveys the ways individuals act in societies that, despite invocations of liberty and democracy, seldom afford opportunity to practise them. IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY HELLER : Even in the Revolutionary War, there were huge sections of the population that didn’t want to separate from England. I have a feeling they were right, that we’d be better off if we were a part of England.

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PLAYBOY :

Why? We’d have a better form of government. The parliamentary system would be a vast improvement over what we have now. Our constitution looks good on paper and probably worked quite well with 13 colonies and about 72 registered voters. But now there’s too much distance between the citizenvoter and his elected representative. And with over 200,000,000 people, the Presidency has become a kind of public-relations enterprise for the party in power. PLAYBOY : But do you really care about politics? In 1972, you said you hadn’t voted for a President in 12 years. HELLER : Then I voted for McGovern. PLAYBOY : Why? HELLER : Nixon made me do it. Joseph Heller, Playboy interview, 1975 HELLER :

Although Athens is hailed as the premier democratic state, and democracy itself as its greatest legacy, the lion’s share of commentary from the ancient times is highly critical of both. Plato himself cautions that, by being accountable to the untutored and impulsive multitude, democracy commits the philosophical (and political) sin of irrationality, leaving itself at the mercy of bigotry, demagoguery, and ignorance. Similarly, Heller’s Socrates is faithful to the historical archetype when he rails at the premise that democracy necessarily brings “unity, coherence, contentment, good government, intelligence, equality, fairness, justice, honesty, peace, or even political freedom.”16 True to his word, the historical Socrates was sentenced to death for political unorthodoxy by the Athenian democrats. At best, democracy all too often condemns its practitioners to unhappy mediocrity. At worse, it becomes a politically correct fig leaf sustained by internal and/or external (i.e., propagandist and/or paramilitary) coersion. Yet things are more complicated still. Plato is correct to caution that the emotional – not to say anti-rational – propensity of the demos can become easily exploited. Sober facts and rational arguments seldom prove equal to the manicured iconography of public-relations spinners in the employ of democratically elected autocrats. But the philosopher passes in silence over the fact that propaganda may be a necessary evil in political

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life, even if only because more than judicious suasion it is capable of galvanizing and uplifting nations in times of crisis. Historically, democracy is but another child of realpolitik. In the fourth century bc, with the Ionion and Aegean regions balkanized into hundreds of city-states ruled by oligarchies or monarchies, Pericles established a democracy to secure a power base independent of the hereditary aristocracy and the landowners who might frustrate his imperial ambitions. His demokratia, or peoplepower, put an end to the privileges of the Aeropagus, transferred the legislative power to the Assembly, and enfranchised every adult male citizen to participate in public affairs. Yet from the start, participation in democratic self-rule was strictly limited. Women, slaves, and foreign-born Athenians were excluded outright, and although most public officials and jurymen were selected by lot, the poor could ill-afford to hold office because they needed to make a living. Power to the people meant in practice power to the people at the top. From John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, the founding generation of American nation-builders also took it for granted that the political leaders of the new country would be people from the top rungs of the social ladder. Recasting Plato’s ideal of the virtuous tyrant in neoclassicist Enlightenment rhetoric, they expected them to be men like themselves: well-born, well-bred, and well-to-do, which was somehow supposed to ensure that their public service would be virtuous. Historically, of course, virtue in politics has proven to be in conspicuous abeyance, time and again blighting the myths of free speech and political liberty for all – so much so that already Plutarch scoffed that people would be happier if only kings were philosophers and philosophers kings. The Athenian democracy, Plutarch observed elsewhere, has produced the most delicious honey but also the most deadly hemlock – a political irony that plays straight into the hands of Heller and his faction. For if, according to one contemporary historian, Athens has bequeathed us “the ideal and the reality of a democratic polity,” the United States has in many ways carried this progressive, egalitarian torch forward. And just as Athens mal-practised democracy with “cruel and imperial domination, the slaughter and enslavement of its wartime opponents, the occasional genocide

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of another polis, not to mention the ownership of tens of thousands of domestic and industrial slaves” – so has America.17 How easily one can fall afoul of American democracy is sadly exemplified by the fate of its greatest scientist. In February 1950, foreshadowing by a decade Dwight D. Eisenhower’s own warning to the nation, Albert Einstein went on television to condemn the de facto military government within the government. Much like Picture This, his words have lost nothing of their relevance today: concentration of tremendous financial power in the hands of the military, militarization of the youth, close supervision of the loyalty of the citizens, in particular, of the civil servants by a police force growing more conspicuous every day. Intimidation of people of independent political thinking. Indoctrination of the public by radio, press, school. Growing restriction of the range of public information under the pressure of military secrecy.18 The next day Hoover dispatched a top-secret memo to all fbi offices authorizing a hunt for any defamatory information on America’s leading physicist and pacifist. The official smear campaign to paint Einstein as a communist lackey, even a spy á la Klaus Fuchs, continued until his death in 1955, by which time the file had grown to over 1,800 pages of defamatory allegations and allegedly subversive statements. Picture This has no illusions about life in a liberal democracy. “There is full freedom of expression. Any unorthodox view can be expressed, provided it is an orthodox unorthodoxy.”19 Tell this to Steve Downs, who, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, sat down in a mall food-court near Albany wearing a t-shirt with the logo “Peace on Earth.” Confronted by mall security, the sixty-year-old man was told to remove the t-shirt, leave the mall, or face immediate arrest. When Downs, the Albany director of the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, refused, he was handcuffed and arrested for trespassing in a public place – a charge punishable by one year in prison.20 Just another brick in the wall of what, back in the 1960s, Richard Hofstadter diagnosed as the paranoid style in American politics.

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A paranoid government – or, more ominously, one for whom it is merely convenient to appear so – is a familiar spectacle in the post-9/11 world. It brands contrary opinions disloyal, un-American, and a threat to the democratic order. It hyperbolizes dissenters into a near-omnipotent enemy against which the populace is conditioned to stay constantly on alert. A full thirty-five years before the stolen 2000 US presidential election, David Shapiro identified in Neurotic Styles the essence of Bush II’s behaviourist experiment on the national scale: a permanent keep-’em-scared orange-level alert for the public allegedly in danger. “Paranoid people live in readiness for an emergency. They seem to live in a more or less continuous state of total mobilization in which catastrophe is always imminent.”21 As far as “traitors” and other seditious elements go, writes Eli Sagan in a study subtitled Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America, “any measure taken against them is justified and moral.”22 To ward off the alleged threat to democracy, in other words, the government may resort to undemocratic and unconstitutional measures, such as indefinite detention, torture, extraordinary rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, or full-scale military invasion. Needless to say, such imperial policy is a classic case of “what you see is what you get”: it creates enemies out of thin air, who then have to be defended against on a suspicion that they may act on their suspicion of our suspicion. Thus in Picture This Alcibiades convinces Athenians of the profitable necessesity of overseas invasion of Syracuse because of the latter’s possible alliance with Athens’s other enemies. Déjà vu? Not without a hint of Schadenfreude, Heller compiles examples of such Cold War paranoia wherever he turns. “Whose side are you on?” snarls the closest thing to Bush II, the democratically elected Cleon, at anyone antagonistic to his warmongering. A lone moderate who objects to the slaughter of Mytilene is villified as “un-Athenian, a bleeding heart, and a knee-jerk liberal.” Indeed, when Anytus sums up the hysteria gripping Athens (“One can be pro-war or pro-peace, but nothing else”),23 he could pass for John Foster Dulles, who in 1954 famously told Vietnam that if it was not 100 per cent behind the US, it was 100 per cent against it. Or he could pass for Bush II himself, who in 2001 put the world in

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its place in a speech to the joint session of Congress: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”24 Every American generation is conditioned anew to fear the bogeyman. In the cold decades after the Second World War, that dubious honour belonged to the erstwhile ally who had just lost 20 million people in the Great Patriotic War and was itself paranoid about security. Only in 1984 did the CIA quietly admit that its data on the military spending by the Soviet empire had been systematically falsified since at least 1975.25 Similar propaganda, misinformation, and outright deceit lay behind the hysteriawhipped 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on allegations of weapons of mass destruction (wmds) and links to al-Qaeda – two fairytales born of naked cupidity. And if history and the 2002 National Security Strategy teach anything, it is that the step from imperial agitprop to outright coercion is a small one: We must adopt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objective of today’s adversaries. The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.26 Stripping the varnish from textbook history to expose the splinters beneath, Picture This remonstrates that democracy does not automatically guarantee good government and peace – nor that the zerosum “with us or against us” polarity has anything to do with the complex worldwide web of reciprocal interests. Twisting political bromides into a verbal equivalent of an Escher sketch is Heller’s cure for hypocrisy that has not changed an iota in twentyfive centuries. Pericles, he points out, was not only the founding father of democracy and an outstanding statesman but also an imperial tyrant content to wage politics by Carl von Clausewitz’s

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other means. “The age of Pericles,” writes Heller, “began with fifteen years of war and ended with the beginning of the one lasting twenty-seven.”27 Even Thucydides, who extols Pericles’s uprightness and judgment, concurs: “Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her first citizen.”28 How much has changed since? Much ink has been spilled over the growing disequilibrium between the three branches of government, engendered by a steady aggrandisement of the presidential powers at the expense of the congressional. One of them, of course, is the power to wage war. Constitutionally, the power to declare hostilities is vested in Congress. The president, as commander-inchief, is supposed to carry out the policy determined by the people’s representatives. Nonetheless, presidents could always wage war without declaring one, the fact formalized in the 1973 War Power Act, which permits America’s ceo to send troops abroad for up to three months without prior congressional consent. From Jefferson on, American presidents have in fact sent troops into action abroad more than two-hundred times – on average once a year. Of the twelve full-scale wars in that figure, only five were declared by Congress.29 The Gettysburg Address assures Americans that they have a government of the people, by the people, for the people. But march and blog as they might, the people do not get a chance to vote down the wars their government gets them into. Neither do their elected representatives. Each of America’s recent full-scale wars – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq Redux – was launched without Congress. Indeed, in October 2002 the people’s representatives passed Joint Resolution 114, in which they essentially divested themselves of their constitutional powers by authorizing the president “to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate.”30 Not to beat around the bush, like an imperial monarch of yore, the commander-in-chief received the mandate to use the American forces at his discretion. Before the 2003 invasion, a prominent US senator claimed that “Saddam’s fall would touch off a wave of democratic reform in the region.”31 Contra such naive – or self-serving – ahistoricism, Heller underscores the cyclical nature of Western military diplomacy. “From Athens to Syracuse by oar and sail was just about

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equivalent to the journey by troopship today from California to Vietnam, or from Washington, D.C., to the Beirut airport in Lebanon, or to the Persian Gulf.”32 It is hard to shake off the feeling that, by means of this single matter-of-fact geographical juxtaposition, he captures both a horrific constant in human affairs and the cornerstone of American foreign policy. After all, like the United States and Vietnam or Iraq, Athens and Syracuse were neither territorial nor commercial rivals, nor did they desire any part of the land of the other. Heller has no patience with claims of promoting democracy advanced by empire-builders throughout the ages. “The motives of Athenians in establishing democratic societies elsewhere were not to establish democratic societies but to remove hostile neighbors and obtain absolute compliance from societies guided by governments in liege to them.”33 Asked why he browbeat the assemblymen into invading the nonbelligerent Syracuse, Alcibiades replied that it was to attract attention to himself, make a profit, and display the glory of Athens. Together or separately, these reasons were as laughable as those manufactured in our time by Bush II, George Tenet, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and Condoleeza Rice. Despite that, most Athenians voted for the war even when they did not fully understand the reasons behind it.34 BENEVOLENT HEGEMONY HELLER :

The power to exercise the dictatorial control over the military is manifest in the office. A President can make war in a moment of personal panic or insecurity and no one in Congress will stop him. PLAYBOY : But Congress claims to have learned its lesson from Vietnam. Wouldn’t it now be tougher for a President who asked for war powers? HELLER : If another President faked another Gulf of Tonkin incident, there would still be only about two Senators voting against the resolution, and they’d be tossed out in the next election. Joseph Heller, Playboy interview, 1975

“Who can doubt that there is an American empire? – an ‘informal’ empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial

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paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet?” asked Arthur Schlesinger at the peak of Reagan’s presidency.35 Certainly no one in the reigning administration. “We’re an empire now,” proclaimed flatly a senior aide to Bush II in 2004, adding with bravado rooted in history unlearned or scorned: “We’re history’s actors.”36 Not that either claim is in doubt. As Charles Krauthammer notably argued in the early 1990s in the pages of Foreign Affairs, the implosion of the ussr left the US in a unipolar moment in which it could dominate the world culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily like no other nation since the late Roman Empire. In the late 1990s two neoconservative ideologues rationalized this imperial domination into what has since become the bedrock of the American political canon. Rehashing Plato’s idea of a virtuous tyrant – while ignoring how easily Aristotle demolished the scheme – William Kristol and Robert Kegan proposed that, in this new geostrategic configuration, the United States should take it upon itself to exercise “benevolent hegemony.”37 The benevolent domination begins, of course, with the international and global institutions such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (imf), World Bank, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, to take one example among many, the United States had the imf and the World Bank rewrite Russia’s economic statutes to grease the skids of its transition to capitalism – and allow itself access to the new regime’s oil and markets. Naturally, as with Plato, the bottom line of this virtuous tyranny is military. The 2000 National Security Strategy and the 2004 National Military Strategy make no bones about the terms of the Pax Americana. The target is full-spectrum dominance: military might sufficient “to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the full range of military operations.”38 After all, contrary to what many Americans believe, the self-appointed Globocop does not enjoy undisputed hegemony in firepower. Russia, for one, has nukes. China has its navy. Vietnam has jungle fighters. Iraq has suicide bombers. What the United States has, however, is enormous economic power with which to finance conventional forces capable of being shipped around the world, guns ablaze.

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This, in turn, is enabled by a neocolonial network of military real estate maintained to safeguard its global interests. As per the Defense Department’s own 2003 “Base Structure Report,” the Pentagon currently owns or leases no fewer than 702 overseas bases in 130 countries worldwide. This is not counting an additional 6,000 military bases in the United States, its territories, and its protectorates.39 Mind-boggling as these numbers are, even they fall short of the actual military installations America operates globally. The Defense Department does not, for one, account for bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Quatar, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan – the colossal build-up since 9/11 throughout the so-called arc of instability. None of this has, of course, anything to do with promoting security or democracy. American foreign policy, as triangulated by the White House, the Pentagon, and the Bechtel-Boeing-HalliburtonChevron-Lockheed Martin-Raytheon lobby, has demonstrably led to higher instability in the world – beginning with arming and financing militant Islamists such as bin Laden and, during the 1980s, militant secularists such as Saddam Hussein. According to the Department of State, in 2006 alone acts of terrorism shot up worldwide by 25 per cent – not even counting those orchestrated by the United States itself.40 That’s why, snickers Heller, since the renaming of the US Department of War as the Department of Defense in 1947, America was never again in danger of war. It was in danger of defence. Indeed, there was less terrorism before the War on Terror, less illicit drug use before the War on Drugs, and less poverty before the War on Poverty. The only wars, it seems, America does not declare are the clandestine wars waged by the cia or full-scale military invasions like Vietnam or Iraq. “Use It or Lose It,” seems to be the superpower’s approach to power, much like that of the Greeks, who, sighs Heller’s Aristotle, seemed “always to be in conflict with everyone all over the world.”41 And while the democratic Athens oppressed its neighbours, as much to coerce fealty as out of fear of losing this coercive leverage, so does the American democracy oppress its neighbours. Indeed, nothing documents it better than the blood-soaked history of its interventions in Latin America.

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One can pick examples almost at random. Agrarian and economic reforms in the 1950s in Guatemala, including notably legitimizing trade unions, were seen as a menace to American interests insofar as they threatened not only US capital but the capitalist system. Something had to be done, lest the socialist disease spread throughout the region, and in 1954 the democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown and replaced by four decades of US-backed dictatorships. Recently declassified White House files document the same fear of social reforms initiated in Chile in the 1970s. They also document Nixon’s orders to keep the democratically elected Salvador Allende from taking office or, barring that, remove him by all means available, from covert operations to a coup d’etat. An almost illegible handwritten note from the then cia director Richard Helms records the heat-of-the-moment orders from the president of the United States: 1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!; worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,000 available, more if necessary; full-time job – best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action.42 In the end, Nixon got his wish. A 1973 cia-engineered coup replaced socialist Allende with a military junta that morphed into a quarter-century of Pinochet dictatorship. At the time of the latter’s death in 2006, hundred of charges were pending against him in Chile for gross human rights violations ranging from disappearance to torture to assasination. On Reagan’s watch, as a consequence of its social reforms, Nicaragua was declared a threat and had to be brought to heel, even at the cost of illegally selling arms to America’s other enemy – Iran. In the 1990s, with the world distracted by the splendid little wars in the Persian Gulf and in the Balkans, Colombian peasantry and left-wing guerrillas became targeted under the mantle of the War on Drugs by means of chemical warfare (“fumigation”), which destroyed crops and livestock and drove them from their land. Meanwhile, according to their own manual, US Special

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Forces trained friendly regimes in “guerrilla warfare, propaganda, subversion, intelligence and counter-intelligence, terrorist activities, civic action, and conventional combat operations,” all in the name of benevolent hegemony.43 Heller’s diagnosis of the Athenian empire – the “cause of all these evils was the desire to rule which greed and ambition inspire”44 – is applicable in equal measure to the American. There is no better explanation for the “fictition” that Iraq’s nonexistent wmds constituted an imminent danger to the US. Only in February 2003, on the eve of the American invasion, did it become clear that Tony Blair’s intelligence dossier on Iraq was mostly “rumint” (rumour-intelligence), for the most part plagiarized from old academic essays. Crucially, that same dossier, renamed “Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation,” was employed by Colin Powell to browbeat the un Security Council. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge, blew the whistle when he realized that he had seen the allegedly secret information before. “Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services,” wrote Rangwala in the postmortem of the scandal, “it indicates that the uk really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq’s internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data.”45 Indeed, the alleged link between the fundamentalist al-Qaeda and the secular regime of Saddam never existed, owing to incompatible ideologies and mutual mistrust. Neither did the “slam dunk” wmds. But the Iraq War went ahead simply because it had been planned since the 1990s. Tracing the historical constants in the United States petromilitary strategy, David Armstrong documents the history of neoconservative planning for the Iraq War. Both the War on Terror – which, for the record, began under Reagan – and the invasion of Iraq had been painstakingly elaborated over the preceding decade, undermining the myth that 9/11 changed everything. “The Plan” goes, in fact, all the way to the 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance” (dpg). Drafted by the then secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, the dpg would ensure the expansion of military spending after the collapse of the Soviet Union.46

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The bottom line came in the form of two recommendations. First, the United States military should be sufficiently powerful to prevent the emergence of any rival to its power. Second, perceived threats to its interests should be pre-emptively and if necessary unilaterally neutralized. Elaborated upon by the neoconservative think-tank Project for the New American Century in its 2000 manifesto “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the doctrine became the bedrock of Bush II’s National Security Strategy and, as we know all too well, foreign policy. In a 2004 article for Foreign Affairs, the would-be moderate Colin Powell reiterated pre-emption as a doctrine for making the world a better and safer place: If you recognize a clear and present threat that is undeterrable by the means you have at hand, then you must deal with it. You do not wait for it to strike; you do not allow future attacks to happen before you take action.47 Compare this to the terrorist manifesto of Ayman al-Zawahiri, released that same year, and you might be forgiven for the feeling of déjà lu: We shouldn’t wait for the Americans, English, French, Jewish, Hungarian, Polish and South Korean forces to invade Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, and Algeria and then start the resistance after the occupier had already invaded us. We should start now.48 Indeed, once the clouds of dust from the World Trade Center and the clouds of disinformation that followed in its wake had dispersed, it became clear that – never mind the evidence, reason, or even long-term American interests – the Bush administration had decided long in advance that it would go after Iraq’s oil. This, however, is only one half of the story. As every illusionist knows, the trick lies in distracting the audience while you’re pulling out the rabbit with the other hand. So, while the world’s attention was fixed on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, American troops were pouring into oil-rich central Asia: 4,000 into Afghanistan,

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2,000 into Uzbekistan, a new base in Kyrgyzstan to home 3,000 more, and another long-term base in Tajikistan.49 The invasion of Iraq, which was to touch off a wave of democratic reform in the Middle East, instead touched off a wave of antagonism toward the United States and the escalation of instability and violence. Already, 9/11 was a backlash against the US presence in the region, and although anti-American sentiment is by no means a new phenomenon, the war in Iraq has elevated it to unprecedented heights. Even so, not all analysts seem to be convinced that behind the benevolent hegemony lies a bona fide empire. In his 2004 “The Imperial Temptation,” Stein Tonneson argued that the United States “is not an imperial power in the strict sense of the term and is not likely to become one because an empire is a system of formal, territorial control which carries prohibitive cost and that is incompatible with basic American values.”50 Having written that for “a democracy [to own] an empire was not thought peculiar,”51 Heller would probably dissent. It may not be amiss, however, to finish with the question of territorial control and prohibitive costs. Despite its vaunted supremacy, the US shares with Athens the thorny problem of “imperial overstretch”. The phrase gained prominence in the wake of Paul Kennedy’s 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which argued that, because of vast strategic commitments, the US ran “the risk so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called ‘imperial overstretch.’”52 A decade earlier, Heller had already pinpointed it as the factor that sucked Athens into a vortex of political expediency, paving the way for a foreign war that eventually brought the city to its knees. And although Americans have not yet suffered a calamity of comparable dimensions, it does not mean that they do not suffer the consequences of imperial overstretch. Never mind the 32,000 (and counting) American casualties in Iraq alone: 4,000 dead and more than 28,000 maimed.53 The combined war and homeland-security costs match the percentage of the country’s gross national product (gnp) from the Vietnam War. Indeed, there is no politically correct way to spin the fact that annual American military outlays make up almost half of

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Earth’s total, in absolute numbers approaching the gnps of Netherlands and Greece – combined.54 There is good reason, in short, to see the American military industry as a government within the complicit government. And the social and financial cost is incalculable: hospitals unbuilt, schools unrepaired, teachers not hired, policemen not trained, immigrants not integrated, schoolchildren without meals, 40 million people without medical coverage, 40 million functionally illiterate, civil infrastructure crumbling, fuel and production costs skyrocketing, environment amok. SOCIAL CAPITAL

The American economic system was barbarous, resulting, naturally, in barbarianism and entrenched imbecility on all levels of the culture. Technology and finance mass-produced poverty at increasing speed, the sole manufactured item in the whole industrial inventory that had not once suffered a slackening rate of growth in the last fifty-five years, not in acreage or in populations. Communism was a drab, gray, wintry prison at the end of a cul-de-sac from which no turning back was imaginable. And this was with a revolution that had succeeded. What else was there? Imperialism, that faithful ogre? The receding of colonial imperialism had not brought peace, riches, or liberty to the emancipated peoples; instead, there were oppressions, corruption, and warfare. Joseph Heller, Picture This

Equipped with better data and better analytic techniques, we may be overdue for a change in the way we reckon economic development. That, at least, appears to be the message from Alan Blinder, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System and member of the Presidential Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton. His new monograph, The Quiet Revolution, brings into the open what most of us have known anyway. Market forces, free trade, deregulation, and austerity measures are far from always good. State interventionism, protectionism, debt relief, and minimum wage are equally far from bad. It is, of course, ironic that it takes a federal banker to propose that social good, be it improving collective decision making or a decline in alienation, is not measured in gnp or per-capita dollars.

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None of this would be worth mentioning, except that, in classical micro- and macroeconomics, theory still trumps reality. Take a homo neoeconomicus, the theoretical ultrarational wealthmaximizer, and put him side-by-side with a homo noneconomicus: your cousin, high school teacher, or the immigrant family down the block. Or take most companies’ incentive structure, geared only for quarterly profit, and put it side-by-side with real-life communities or even countries that act out of complex motives involving altruism, communal interest, self-sacrifice, gratification deferment, tribal loyalties, aesthetic considerations, or environmental concerns – sometimes on the scale of their children’s lifetimes. Isn’t it a little like comparing the Crime and Punishment cartoon from the Comics Illustrated of the 1950s to the epic by Fyodor Dostoyevsky? For a lesson in comparative economics, Heller goes to the fountainhead of modern corporate capitalism: the seventeenthcentury Netherlands. Once again, the histories of the American and Dutch republics exhibit startling parallels, from winning their respective wars of independence from a colonial superpower down to establishing an empire of their own. Ruled by their own business oligarchy, the Dutch turned Amsterdam – later overtaken by New York, a.k.a. New Amsterdam – into the nexus of world commerce and finance. Urbanized, prosperous, tolerant of immigrants, the city and the country became ethnicultural melting pots as people flocked in to escape religious persecution and to make a guilder. René Descartes, who himself sought refuge there, remarked: In this great town where apart from myself there dwells no one who is not engaged in trade, everyone is so much out for this own advantage that I should be able to live my whole life here without ever meeting a mortal being.55 The business of Holland was quite simply business, with politics, religion, and even art subsumed in that category. Owing in a large degree to the economic boom fuelled by a virtual monopoly on tulip bulbs, spices, fine textiles, herring, and other commodities, like in America, Holland championed a series of civil liberties. By the mid-seventeenth century, for example, Dutch children could

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no longer legally work for more than fourteen hours a day. In some municipalities religious disputes were banned as being injurious to business. Even slavery was outlawed within the United Netherlands – although slave trading was not, permitting capacious Dutch fluties to continue the lucrative business of running blacks from west Africa to the Americas. Although the Dutch were primarily interested in commercial rather than territorial development, their methods could mislead one into thinking otherwise. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a governor general of the overseas territories of the Dutch East India Company, is but one example of the historical continuity between the Athenian and Dutch empires, having – as Heller dutifully records – massacred the entire city of Jakarta. Chided by his bosses at home, he replied: “There is nothing in the world that gives one a better right, than power and force added to right.”56 The Jakartans would probably agree with Sir William Batten as quoted by Samuel Pepys as quoted by Heller in one of the epigrams to Picture This: “I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.” The seemingly invulnerable empire, which at its economic peak stretched halfway around the world, also financed a Golden Age in culture. The burgeoning purses of Dutch burghers could patronize any number of artists, among them Rembrandt van Rijn, whose life provides perfect ammunition for Heller’s satirical salvos. Paralleling his country’s cycle of economic boom and bust, the painter’s social and artistic career also traced a cycle of financial woes involving his wife’s dowry, inheritance, real estate, exmistress’s demands for maintenance payments, and not least compensation from his patrons. Indeed, the only extant documents in the painter’s own hand are his seven letters to Prince Frederick Henry’s agent, Constantijn Huygens, wheedling for money. Or take this letter, surviving only in translation, to Rembrandt’s patron in Sicily: In addition Your Lordship complains about both the price and the canvas, but if Your Lordship wishes to send the piece back, at your own expense and your own risk, I will make another Alexander. As regards the canvas, I found I had too little white while painting, so that it was necessary to add to

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its length, but if the painting is hung in the proper light, no one will notice this at all. Should Your Lordship be satisfied with the Alexander this way, everything is in order. Should Your Lordship not wish to keep the said Alexander, the lowest price for a new one is 600 guilders. And the Homer is 500 and the cost of the canvas. The expenses are of course for Your Lordships’a account.57 One may be forgiven for thinking, alongside Heller, that to Rembrandt art is less about aesthetics than about commodities to exchange for credit or cash. No wonder, quips Heller, that his figures have sad faces: they worry about money. The chief consequence of the invention of money in the seventh century bc, continues the writer, is servitude, as people are “free, like Rembrandt, to borrow at interest and go into debt.”58 Indeed, as in America’s Gilded Age, the Dutch Golden Age created two classes of citizenry: the property owners and the vagrant poor, the latter numbering in the millions in Amsterdam and in the provinces. Rich is the country that has plenty of poor, concludes Heller, for even though the Dutch had no slaves, “they always had enough poor to work like niggers and, for a living wage, to go to sea and to war.”59 When it comes to money, nothing can compare to the Dutch East India Company, a name practically synonymous with capitalism. In its time a major source of income for the entire Netherlands, the company is noted as much for the invention of shares and perfection of a comprehensive banking system as for its ruthless rape of the colonies. Founded in 1602, it promptly secured a monopoly charter for all the seas and lands east of the Cape of Good Hope, controlling world commodities from spices to textiles. Its counterpart was the West India Company with a monopoly charter for trade between Africa and the Americas – including, notably, shipments of up to fifteen thousand slaves a year. As Heller reports, the East India Company’s revenue averaged 300 to 500 per cent and the shareholders’ dividends 40 per cent – truly a business empire within an empire. Fast-forward to the future and America’s own business molochs. Subject of a multiplicity of denunciations, lawsuits, community

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protests, and exposés, Wal-Mart, for example, is also noted worldwide for the high cost of its low price. As the eponymous 2005 muckraking documentary brings into the open, wage slavery, unpaid overtime, anti-union practices, grand larceny of public funds (by cheating employees out of healthcare), and a pervasive atmosphere of fear and exploitation characterize this biggest business success of recent years. Crucially, capitalization and commodification affect not only the workers overseas but also the workers in the nation. But as with the Dutch East India Company, the stockholders are not complaining. In 2006 Wal-Mart’s net sales and net profit rose almost 10 per cent to a record level of more than $0.3 trillion and more than $11 billion respectively.60 A closer look at the United States through the lens fashioned by the Dutch empire explains Heller’s joke about Picture This being a book about money and war. As in the Enlightenment-era Netherlands, American capitalism is umbilically linked to war. Insofar as war production means federal appropriations, which, in turn, mean profits for the manufacturers, readiness for war is a permanent state in the economy driven by the military-industrial complex – the very syndrome Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 valedictory as being intrinsically harmful to democracy and liberty. So did Plato, when he wrote that “every individual, because of his greed for gold and silver, is willing to toil at every art and device, noble or ignoble, if he is likely to get rich by it – willing too, to perform actions both holy and unholy – nay, utterly shameful – without a scruple.”61 Once the country’s economy becomes entwined with military production, there is no easy way to reverse the course, precisely because military production is too profitable. Military outsourcing companies – producing and servicing weapons, munitions, clothing, fuel, meals, transportation, accommodations, and supplies of any kind – know that wars and lucrative contracts go hand-inhand. So do politicians who peddle wars as employment to their constituents. This secures their re-election, which means more of the same politicians voting to maintain military production, which means more wars, more re-elections, and so on. Nothing highlights it better than America’s spending on peace. Although roughly half the federal discretionary budget goes to war, only 1 per cent is

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allocated to international affairs, and only 0.6 per cent of that 1 per cent goes to peacekeeping operations.62 War has, indeed, been a historical boon to the American economy. During the Second World War, for example, the more than two thousand largest firms reported a 41 per cent rise in after-tax earnings. One defence contractor reported that his salary climbed from more than $7,000 in 1940 to more than $82,000 in 1945; another saw his equity expand from over $80,000 to over $435,000. All this was a fitting prelude to the 1950s, when investments in companies specializing in Cold War defence work were nearly twice as profitable as investments in nondefence firms.63 War production is a prerogative of an empire, and as the Congressional Research Service reports, the US share of world arms-exports rose from over one-third in 1990 to over one-half in 2000 – roughly 2.5 times the value of the second (Great Britain) and third (Russia) largest exporters, 10 times the level of France, and 19 times that of China.64 The subcontracting mechanism that allows private contractors to provide services to the military – anything from peeling potatoes to manufacturing war materiel to training in warfare tactics – creates quasi-monopolistic leviathans that hark back to the Dutch East India Company. With former Halliburton ceo Dick Cheney in the White House, is it really news that the company’s subsidiary Kellog, Brown and Root got a contract worth more than $2 billion to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure?65 The result of such nepotism is, naturally, an inundation of waste and abuse. In one instance, the 2003 Department of Defense’s own audit revealed that Halliburton had charged $2.27 per gallon of gasoline for more than 56 million gallons brought into Iraq since the war began. That was more than a dollar more than the government was paying another contractor – a $61 million giveaway.66 There is money to be made out of Iraq – as John Dos Passos would put it, “Big Money.”67 The 2003 audit by the General Accounting Office discovered that the Pentagon has misplaced more than 1 trillion dollars. Paul Bremer, after replacing Jay Garner as the colonial governor of Iraq, ordered an airlift of thirtysix tons of federal cash for the country’s reconstruction, which disappeared without a trace. Even prior to the invasion of Iraq,

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Lockheed Martin’s stock went up by 36 per cent. Boeing got $38 billion out of 2003 homeland-defence contracts alone. In 2003 Bechtel secured the bid to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure (current price tag: $3 billion and rising), while 2004 and 2005 marked the most profitable years in Chevron’s 126-year history.68 If money could indeed talk, it would no doubt go on the biggest talk show equipped, in the manner of Ross Perot, with two simple pie charts. Whereas after the Second World War corporate taxes made up 28 per cent of federal revenue, by 2003 their share of the deferal tax-pie had dropped to 7.4 per cent. During the same period the tax burden of ordinary individuals went from 43 per cent to almost 90 per cent.69 And the War on Terror, we are told, has only just begun. It is a sobering thought that, with the cumulative cost of war in Iraq estimated to be between 1 and 2 trillion dollars, the 9/11 attack cost only about $500,000 and the lives of nineteen men. And to every president who seeks refuge behind Lyndon B. Johnson’s “We make war that we may live in peace,” Heller offers this advice: Do not make war in a hostile distant land unless you intend to live there. The people will outnumber you, your presence will be alarming, the government you install to keep order will not keep order, victory is impossible if the people keep fighting, there is only genocide to cope with determined local military resistance.70 One must not, of course, generalize from the United States to capitalism at large. Not all market-driven countries let their military tail wag the socio-economic dog. Not to look too far, democratic Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden – whose economies rank as the world’s three most competitive according to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Competitiveness Report 2006–2007” – enjoy enviable standards of living under mixed-market capitalism and statist welfare. Nor, much like the Dutch, have they invaded anybody of late. The conclusion is hard to escape. If there is something rotten in the American machinery of state, it is endemic to the United States, not to capitalism sui generis.

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CODA

There are outrages and there are outrages, and some are more outrageous than others. Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow. The death of Socrates had no effect upon the history of Athens. If anything, the reputation of the city has been improved by it. The death of no person is as important to the future as the literature about it. Joseph Heller, Picture This

“The truth is cruel,” wrote George Santayana in “Ideal Immortality,” “but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”71 By his standard, Heller may be a free man, having fashioned a book out of imperial history served at its most cruel. Indeed, it is for this very reason that the author referred to Picture This as his “most damning, critical and pessimistic” book.72 Not that this pessimism has stopped him from vying for his share of the American reading public and winning with the millions for whom the release of each new Heller novel was an event measured on the Richter Scale. Not least because, implicitly corroborating Philip Roth’s adage about reality exceeding novelists’ powers of invention, his novels rarely strayed far from contemporary history – or controversy. Whereas Catch-22 seamlessly worked into its Second World War plot Joseph McCarthy’s infamous vilification of a US Army major who would not sign the loyalty oath, Good As Gold carried not only a mass of current news clippings but also this squib on the then secretary of state: “I always thought of Kissinger as a greasy, vulgar, petulant, obnoxious, contemptible, self-serving, social-climbing Jewish little shit.”73 Indeed, the quotation perfectly sums up Heller’s opinion of the professional managers of the American foreign policy, economy, and way of life. Thus it finds a fitting embodiment in Picture This in the novel’s top-down, panoramic perspective on Greece and Holland at the height of their imperial glory and in the more intimate factional biographies of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Rembrandt, which reconstruct history bottom-up from their trials and tribulations.

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If Heller’s historical summa teaches anything, it is that the more things do not change, the more they remain the same. So does the famous, although probably apocryphal, story of Rembrandt stooping to pick up coins painted on the floor by his apprentice, Govaert Flinck. Both tales are reminders of how easily we confuse appearances with reality, how quickly we are led astray by duplicity, how gullible we are when warmongering spin-artists get to work on our bearings – which begs the following question: if Saddam can be tried and hanged for his culpability for the killing of 148 Shi’ites, what about the culpability of Bush II for the death of at least a quarter-million Iraqis since March 2003?74

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Quoted in Powers, 137. For background on Heller, see Seed. Heller, Picture This, 340. Haynes, 290. Moyers, 279. Quoted in Reed, 68. Ruderman, 10. Richler, 4. Quoted in Krassner, 276–7. Green, 57. Ruderman, 179. Heller, Picture, 89. Quoted in Zagorin, 28, 30; see also 24–6 for background. Heller, Picture, 281. See Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Aristotle, 68. Heller, Picture, 81. Sagan, 2; for contemporary democratic (mal)practice, see Trend. Quoted in Eliot, 13–14; see also Jerome, 158, 172. Heller, Picture, 314. McConnell, D2. Shapiro, 68. Sagan, 23. Heller, Picture, 164, 91, 314. Bush, online.

The Historature of the American Empire 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

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44 45

46

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Zinn, 354. White House, “The National Security Strategy,” 15. Heller, Picture, 15. Quoted in Zagorin, 72; see also Thucydides, 178. Vice President Dick Cheney, quoted in Stromseth, 872. US Government Printing Office, online. Quoted in Klein, 46. Heller, Picture, 198. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 90, 202. Schlesinger, 141. Unidentified aide to Bush II, quoted in Suskind, 51. For more on American empire, see Robin; Mann; Kegley and Raymond; Lefever; Mirra; Ferguson; David and Grondin; and http://www.americanempireproject.com. Kristol and Kegan, 12; for a digest of the limits of benevolent hegemony, see Fukuyama, 111–13. US Department of Defense, “Joint Vision 2020,” 6. US Department of Defense, “Base Structure Report,” online. See Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Heller, Picture, 32. White House, “cia, Notes on Meeting with the President,” online. For more on American involvement in Latin America, see Wiarda; and Chomsky. Quoted in Stokes, 60; on fumigation war in Columbia, see Chomsky, 59–60. In a reflection on a century of US assistance to Latin America, Senate hearings in the 1970s “uncovered persistent and mounting evidence of torture, disappearances, and killings by police trained and equipped by the United States”; see Huggins, 4. Heller, Picture, 168. Much of the dossier was extracted from an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs dating back to 1993; see Rangwala. For parallel accounts, see Lashmar; and Halper and Clarke. Powell’s performance is documented in Greenwald, Uncovered. See Caldicott, xxi–xxv; and Armstrong. Other prominent neoconservative ideologues involved in the various stages of the plan were Richard Perle, Lewis Libby, Stephen Hadley, William Kristol, and Robert Kegan. Powell, 24.

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48 Quoted in Hegghammer, 30. For all the neocon smokescreen of combatting terrorism using the military, jihadism is impossible to eliminate so long as new suicide bombers flock to the cause, mobilized by American atrocities and charismatic Islamic radicals and harnessing the Internet for raising funds, forming networks, and recruitment. 49 See Akbarzadeh; Duskin, online; and Rasizade, online. 50 Tonneson, 333. 51 Heller, Picture, 151. 52 Kennedy, 515; for background, see 515–35; and Burbach and Tarbell. 53 Data for January 2008 from ICasualties.org; the data do not include some 100,000 “medical evacuations.” For background, see Hanahoe. 54 Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; American figures reflect the Pentagon budget plus annual appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 55 Wilson, 42; for background, see Cook. 56 Quoted in Heller, Picture, 109. 57 Quoted in ibid., 239–40. 58 Ibid., 49. 59 Ibid., 178. 60 Wal-Mart, 12. For background, see Business Week Online; on the Dutch East India Company, see Schama. 61 Plato, 135. 62 US Department of Defense, “fy 2003.” 63 Data from Brandes, 264, 265, 275; see 356–7 for desultory criticism of the entire concept of the military-industrial complex. For background, see the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize documentary, Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight? 64 See Shah, online; and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. 65 Briody, ix. Claiming his links with Halliburton were severed for good, Cheney forgot to mention the six-figure deferred salary he has been receiving since he left the company and unexercised stock options; see ibid., 228–9; and Ivanovich. 66 Briody, 234. 67 Dos Passos authored The Big Money (1936). 68 See Abate, online; Caldicott, 190–202; ChevronTexaco, “2004 Annual Report” and “2005 Annual Report”; and Pirog, online. For more data on the Iraq War and profits, see Rampton and Stauber. 69 Data from Collins and Yeskel, 100, 102.

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Heller, Picture, 198. Santayana, 107. Quoted in Haynes, 290. Heller, Picture, 274. In their original Lancet study, Burnham et al. estimated the number to be 600,000. Recent, more detailed tallies of the Iraqi dead place it at about 150,000 through June 2006. By now this number is almost certain to approach or even exceed 200,000; see bbc News. For a sustained attempt to legally formulate a murder case against George W. Bush, see Bugliosi.

3 The American Wars: History and Prophecy in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq MI CH A EL ZEI TLI N

In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died – and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized – unplanned … For as the war’s presumed ending – constructed from carefully crafted images of triumph, of dictators’ statues cast down and presidents striding forcefully across aircraft carrier decks – has flickered and vanished, receding into the just-out-of-grasp future … the war’s beginning has likewise melted away, the original rationale obscured in a darkening welter of shifting intelligence, ideological controversy, and conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all sides by the mounting dead. Mark Danner, “Iraq: The War of Imagination”

In his 2006 essay “Iraq: The War of Imagination,” Mark Danner remembers the warning sounded by the late George F. Kennan almost exactly six months before George W. Bush launched the attack on Iraq on 19 March 2003. “Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”1 Danner invites us to trace the current situation in Iraq back to the war’s elusive beginnings, and thus to organize the history of the conflict into a logical sequence. The American invasion began with the “Shock and Awe” campaign of 20 March 2003. The first symbolic attempt at closure was made by President Bush on 1 May 2003, aboard the uss Abraham Lincoln with the notorious, posted declaration:

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“Mission Accomplished.” In effect, as Thomas Ricks wryly notes, “[i]n both image and word that day what Bush did was tear down the goalposts at halftime in the game.”2 In reality, the current, open-ended, postsurge phase of the war in Iraq remains, pace General David Petraeus, an agonizingly incompetent occupation. Ricks continues: It now seems… likely that history’s judgment will be that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history. It was a campaign plan for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory. Its incompleteness helped create the conditions for the difficult occupation that followed.3 The invasion brought an end to the “phoney war” of weapons inspectors and spectral weapons of mass destruction (wmds), while the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, marked the close of the vague, ten-year latency period of “containment” and no-fly zones that followed the Gulf War ceasefire of 28 February 1991.4 Thus the attacks of 9/11 vaporized not only the towers, the planes, and the people within but also any symbolic distance between the terrorist hijackers and Saddam Hussein. As Richard A. Clarke tells us, within hours of the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration had already selected Saddam as the primary target of retaliation. “Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking.”5 Thus was the Gulf War of 1991, its ambiguous conclusion held in decade-long suspension, rejoined. There is indeed a strong sense in which the current war in Iraq must be seen as continuous with the Gulf War of 1991: “The seeds of the second president Bush’s decision to invade were planted by the unfinished nature of the 1991 war, in which the U.S. military expelled Iraq from Kuwait but ended the fighting prematurely and sloppily, without due consideration by the first president Bush and his advisers of what end state they wished to achieve.” Ricks adds: “The 1991 Gulf War, which was celebrated as a great victory at the time, now

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appears to have been the opening skirmish of a very long war.”6 In short, the Gulf War has not come to an end with the lightning faux victory of January-February 1991, nor with the “Mission Accomplished” banner of March 2003, nor with the toppling of Saddam’s statue in April 2003, nor with Saddam’s subsequent capture in December 2003, nor with his execution on 30 December 2006. Back in May 1991, Jean Baudrillard could lament in his notorious essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”: We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like. We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like.7 Well, now we know. Equally seduced by the idea that an American war in Iraq could be a “mission accomplished,” Slavoj Žižek, in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2004), noted that “after the rapid end to the war (in a kind of repetition of the 1991 Gulf War) and the disintegration of Saddam’s regime, there is a universal sigh of relief, even among many critics of US policy.”8 Žižek, who naturally was not alone in such optimism, then dug himself more deeply into a false position: The line of argument which tried to demonstrate how the US occupation would hurt the Iraqis was simply wrong: if anything, ordinary Iraqis will probably ultimately profit from the defeat of Saddam’s regime in terms of their standard of living, and religious and other freedoms.9 Here followed an absurd hyperbole: “The true victims of the war are not the Iraqis, they are elsewhere!” (presumably, in America, the 300,000,000 captives of Bush’s political paranoia).10 However, in another moment, Žižek recovered his sense of presentiment: The danger, following the logic of a self-fulfilling prophecy, is that this very American intervention will contribute to the emergence of what America fears most: a large, united,

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anti-American Muslim front. This is the first case of a direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country – how could it not generate universal hatred in reaction? One can already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the US government to impose a state of emergency, permanently on high alert.11 The mobilization of international, anti-American Muslim forces based in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced to America’s attack on Saddam’s army from its base in Saudi Arabia in January 1991. That attack was, in turn, a direct reaction to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait with three Republican Guard Divisions on 2 August 1990. The invasion was a reaction to a welter of crossed signals and suddenly made, and as suddenly unmade, covert alignments. Saddam’s move seems to have been based on a fundamental misreading of American diplomat April Glaspie’s signal that the US had “no opinion” on the dispute with Kuwait, tacitly implying that it would respond only with a verbal reprimand to any military developments. The broad assumption was that, in accordance with the realpolitik of the 1980s, the US would continue to support Iraq as a bulwark against Iran. Saddam, a dictatorial strongman, well-armed with wmds and inhibited by no discernible scruples when it came to deploying them, was deemed crucial to US interests. But all that changed in a heartbeat. Thus the Saddam who crossed the border into Kuwait is to be understood as a revenant of Kurtz, as conceived by both Joseph Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola. That is, he is at once “a remainder of some barbaric past … [and] the necessary outcome of modern Western power itself,” a key symbol of that “vicious cycle of the System which generates its superego excess and is then compelled to annihilate it.”12 As with Saddam, one is compelled to note, so with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban who emerged from the cia-financed and trained anti-Soviet guerrilla movement in Afghanistan. The video hanging of Saddam on 30 December 2006 merely opened a space for hydra-headed Batthist “elements” to emerge, along with the ever ghostly aqi (al-Qaeda in Iraq). And so the

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Gulf War – divisible into its major phases, Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm – continues with the War on Terror and its major theatre of battle, Operation Iraqi Freedom. And the oedipal wreckage of Saddam and the Bush tandem of father and son continues to scatter itself across the deserts and cities of Iraq. It is this very long war in Iraq – at least seventeen years and counting – that I explore through two fundamental American accounts of its opening phase. The first is Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. It has achieved widespread visibility, serving as the basis for a blockbuster Hollywood film. The other is Alex Vernon’s The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War, with contributions from Neal Creighton Jr, Greg Downey, Rob Holmes, and Dave Trybula. Reviewed and discussed primarily by American military personnel and professional historians, it has not yet gained the wider public readership it deserves. Both of these books are crucial in helping to illuminate in narrative terms the ways that the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War are bound up in complex webs of American cultural memory and historical repetition. My focus is primarily on the experience of loss, mass killing of overmatched enemy “regulars,” and the collateral killing of civilians. Amid the unbelievable firepower once at their command, the voices that speak to us from these narratives of both personal and national history enable us to grasp the extent to which the Gulf War was experienced by these American soldiers as a lost war, morally and politically. And as veterans of this war, Swofford, Vernon, and the latter’s fellow tank commanders align themselves, both consciously and unconsciously, as I suggest, with the veterans of America’s earlier lost war, Vietnam. Swofford’s and Vernon’s memoirs also give us a vivid testimony of the ways that the Gulf War – conventionally misremembered in terms of mythic speed, computer screens, and aerial smart bombs – was really the first stage of a “strategic defeat” for the United States, in the words of army colonel Douglas Macgregor.13 The American soldier’s experience of the Gulf War, as recorded in these accounts, harbours its own premonition of the current, slow,

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dirty ground war (in both Iraq and Afghanistan) – the war of “dumb” roadside bombs (ieds, or improvised explosive devices), accidental civilian deaths, friendly fire, mangled limbs, cultural hatred, refugees, and steadily mounting American military casualties, including Gulf War Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) among the veterans. In these respects, too, the current American land war in Arabia follows the fundamental pattern of the American land war in Asia from 1961 to 1975.14 The tracing of narrative patterns across the American wars in Vietnam, the Gulf, and Iraq might invoke such premonitory urtexts as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), William Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958), and Neil Sheehan and colleagues’ The Pentagon Papers (1971). In them everything is already presciently contained, starting with the buildup of “American political, military and psychological stakes” in a far-flung region of the globe.15 There is, of course, much more: the collision of American “innocence” with the reality of other cultures and other geographies; the unconscious imagery of quagmire and corpses; the spectacle of a national ideology dumbfounded in the face of its slow-motion military, political, and moral defeat by technologically “backward” nations. Such uncanny patterns of compulsive repetition extend across literary and historical sources, unfolding over a diversity of narrative modes, including novels, memoirs, oral histories, blogs, films, and videos accessible on such Internet sites as Ogrish and YouTube. Yet amid this complexity of depictions, the embodied, first-person, sand-level reports of Swofford and Vernon, among others, are especially valuable. For many Americans the 1991 Gulf War still evokes little more than picture-perfect camera shots of computer-guided missiles, depicting war, in Žižek’s words, “as an abstract computer game.”16 VALKYRIES

As a military project Tet [the Tet Offensive of early 1968] failed; as a lesson it succeeded. The VC came into My Tho and all the other towns knowing what would happen. They knew that once they were among the people we would abandon our pretense of distinguishing between them. We would kill them all

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to get at one. In this way they taught the people that we did not love them and would not protect them; that for all our talk of partnership and brotherhood we disliked and mistrusted them, and that we would kill every last one of them to save our own skins. To believe otherwise was self-deception. They taught that lesson to the people, and also to us. At least they taught it to me. Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War

The spectre of Vietnam haunted George H.W. Bush, Colin Powell (then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and General Norman Schwarzkopf as they developed a war plan in response to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. They knew that this first major conflict of the so-called New World Order – following the economic and political implosion of the ussr – would be played out against the backdrop of American losses in Vietnam: more than 58,000 killed, some 350,000 wounded, and countless numbers more shattered by alcoholism, drug abuse, unemployment, and ptsd, all of them culled from 3 million Americans who served in Southeast Asia in the last chapter of Vietnam’s thirty-year war of liberation from colonial rule. The doctrine of “force protection,” whereby minimizing American casualties becomes the overriding objective, would be facing its first major test since America’s quick, but hardly comforting, victories in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989.17 In his book The Commanders (1991), Bob Woodward gives an account of a conversation in November 1990 between Colin Powell and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia: “If we don’t have to fight, it will be better,” Powell told the prince. “If we have to, I’ll do it but we’re going to do it with everything we have.” Powell said that the President had ordered that this not turn into another Vietnam. The guiding principle was going to be a maximization of firepower and troops. Later, [Secretary of Defense] Cheney told Bandar, “The military is finished in this society, if we screw this up.”18 In Iraq, only the maximization of firepower – as exemplified by the Shock and Awe campaign of March 2003 – would be repeated.

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The key term of the Powell doctrine, the maximization of troops, would not. The distinction is crucial. Shock and Awe expressed Donald Rumsfeld’s dream of overwhelming firepower and conclusive victory, evincing, in the words of Danner, “a terrible power – enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake a threatening world.”19 The vision, it seems, was that the population surviving the barrage would be awed into greeting the American forces as liberators. The war would thus be the catalyst for a great “Islamic perestroika.”20 When this failed to happen, it became clear that firepower without the maximization of troops would be insufficient to build democracy in Iraq (one of the professed motivations for the war). And, as a host of journalists and historians have now demonstrated, Paul Bremer’s “Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1 – DeBaathification of Iraqi Society” – whereby tens of thousands of Saddam loyalists in the army, police, and political bureaucracy were dismissed from their posts – also helped to create a massive insurgency, which would, in turn, generate the belated strategy of “the surge.” Once the horse had galloped away, in other words, they tried to close the barn door. Meanwhile, the barn itself was on fire. In any case, as John Gray points out, the question of firepower and troops is almost beside the point. For if America is facing strategic defeat … the reason is not that its forces … are insufficiently numerous. It is that their operations have never served any political goal that could be realized … The underlying political reality in the region is pervasive hostility to American power … The difficulties faced by US forces in Iraq do not come from any lack of prowess or firepower. They come from the deep mistrust of much of the population and the condition of near anarchy that prevails in most of the country. Overcoming these obstacles – assuming such a thing to be feasible and necessary – requires a labor that extends over decades or generations.21 The French defeat in the First Indochina War should have taught Americans that the population’s deep mistrust and hatred of the French were obstacles not overcome over decades or generations.

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On the contrary, such colonial labours generated the very insurgencies that proved, in the end, unconquerable: first in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and second on 30 April 1975 in Ho Chi Minh City.22 It seems that, for the young American soldiers to be sent in 1991 to fight in the Gulf War, everything except the historical memory of defeat in Vietnam was mobilized at the outset of the campaign. Reminisces Swofford: After hearing the news of imminent war in the Middle East, we march in a platoon formation to the base barber and get fresh high-and-tight haircuts … Then we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. They also buy a hell of a lot of beer. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of these damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we headbutt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals.23 So much for the jarheads.24 Vernon, former army lieutenant and tank commander in the Gulf War, decorated with an Army Commendation Medal with V-Device for valour in combat, observes: “The Gulf War’s younger generations of soldiers had grown up with the images of Vietnam tattooed over our military corneas. We had seen the movies and the television shows of preadolescent Vietnamese civilian girls throwing their bomb-strapped bodies at U.S. soldiers. And jihad was in the air.”25 Along these lines, Swofford gives an account of how, as a twenty-year-old sniper in a surveillance and target acquisition platoon from August 1990 to August 1991, the rock’n’roll imagery of Vietnam War films was part of his platoon’s essential psychic preparation for its deployment in Saudi Arabia. The jarhead does not view the Hollywood blockbusters as representations of history, much less as representations of defeat or atrocity, even when innocent civilians are accidentally “wasted”

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during a panic attack. Nor does he view such movies as “melodramas of moral courage [that] provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events.”26 Indeed, John Wayne’s Green Berets had long been an obsolete paradigm for this postmodern generation fluent in the symbolic discourses of cynicism and satire. Rather, for the jarhead, the fascination of these films is essentially “hyperpyrotechnic” (Swofford’s word), historically ungrounded, and virtually self-referring: We rewind and review famous scenes, such as Robert Duvall and his helicopter gunships during Apocalypse Now, and in the same film Martin Sheen floating up the fake Vietnamese Congo; we watch Willem Dafoe get shot by a friendly and left on the battlefield in Platoon; and we listen closely as Matthew Modine talks trash to a streetwalker in Full Metal Jacket … There is talk that many Vietnam films are antiwar, that the message is war is inhumane and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended … we watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar – the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not … The supposedly antiwar films have failed. Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.27

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Here, Apocalypse Now serves the function of a kind of Orwellian hate session. Even as they rage at the screen, the jarheads realize that the enemy they will face in Arabia, like the projective Vietnamese enemy on screen, is both mysterious and opaque. And like the Vietnamese enemy, the enemy in Iraq will remain curiously abstract long after Swofford has returned home from the war. Nevertheless, as the desert war becomes real for these young American soldiers, the persistent – and literally projected – official message that war is a rock’n’roll adventure induces in Swofford steady increments of nausea: Psy-ops helicopters fly overhead all day, playing tapes of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, and I’m not sure that we aren’t as unnerved by the music as our enemies might be. The psy-ops bastards continue playing the loud rock-and-roll music. I like rock music, but I don’t think it belongs in my war. It was fine in the movies, on the boat with Martin Sheen going up the fake Vietnamese Congo or with the grunts patrolling the Ho Chi Minh as they take a hill and heavy casualties, but I don’t need the Who and the Doors in my war, as I prepare to fight for or lose my life. Teenage wasteland, my ass. This is the other side.28 After victory in the Gulf is declared, “Vietnam” as psy-ops projection and “fake” cinematic remembrance is suddenly displaced by an all-too-real Vietnam veteran who boards the jarheads’ bus during the victory parade in the final pages of Swofford’s memoir: As we neared Twentynine palms, Crocket pulled a Vietnam vet onto the bus, a hard Vietnam vet, a man obviously on and off the street for many years, in and out of va hospitals. The man had no shoes on his dirty feet and wore tattered jeans and a faded camouflage blouse of indeterminate origin. Tears fell from the man’s eyes and rolled down his deeply wrinkled and hurt face, the surface of his face not unlike the topography of the Desert.29

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Here, the nameless vet signifies the enduring cost of the war borne by the soldiers who survived it, a cost whose meaning Swofford is now suddenly in a position to grasp in the figure of his own father, who had served in the jungles of Vietnam for twelve months starting in February 1969. Only with time will young Swofford become aware of his own analogous condition. The Vietnam vet is a walking piece of social, psychological, and economic wreckage. Yet Swofford, a young veteran just home from the Gulf War, fails as yet to see him as a prefiguration of his own postwar condition. In the opening phases of the memoir, Swofford refers ambiguously to “the ghastly end”30 that awaited him and the broken figures of his platoon mates, Fergus and Fowler. It is only by reference to the figure of the vet that this ghastly end becomes intelligible – a theme the film version of Jarhead fails utterly to represent by focusing on one strand of the grunts’ experience: the mental, physical, and logistical dimension of desert combat. Over the full course of the memoir, the Vietam vet on Swofford’s victory bus begins to signify a genuine socio-historical process connected and continuous with Swofford’s own experience as a Gulf War veteran returned home. Swofford’s narration of the Vietnam veteran operates in ways one should come to expect in light of Jerry Lembcke’s The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. Lembcke clearly demonstrates how the “origin of the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veterans lies in the propaganda campaign of the NixonAgnew administration to counter the credibility of the anti-war movement and prolong the war in Southeast Asia.” Moreover, the idea that Vietnam veterans were greeted with contempt “gained prominence during the fall of 1990, when the Bush administration used it to rally support for the Persian Gulf War.” Lembcke also illuminates “the connection between the general cultural disparagement of Vietnam veterans and the evolution of the psychiatric category, post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd)”: “By broadbrushing Vietnam veterans as crazy, prone to violence, and otherwise disabled by the war, all Vietnam veterans were stigmatized and pushed to the margins of American consciousness.”31 This marginalized position allowed authorities to turn the radical political behaviour of veterans into a pathology. Indeed, by the

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early 1980s “the image of the traumatized, psychologically impaired veteran had almost totally displaced the image of the politically active anti-war veteran in American memory” and thus “their true place in history as gallant fighters against the war.” The image of the veteran racked by physical, emotional, or mental trauma also helped to repress the ugly cultural memory of “an America that waged a war of aggression against a small and poor nation struggling to be free.”32 (We should recall that Swofford’s father helped to build runways for the American bombers.) As one might expect, the Gulf War veterans’ accounts of their own homecomings are self-consciously framed in terms of generational contrast and comparison, the distinction they seek to make between themselves and their Vietnam fathers and uncles succumbing to psychic blurring, guilt, and misrecognition. Notes Lieutenant Dave Trybula: I arrived at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, on the first flight returning from the Gulf just after midnight on 9 March 1991. I had anticipated a small reception. We were instead met by hundreds of cheering, screaming people and multiple television crews. I was overwhelmed. I had never experienced anything like it. Everyone treated us like heroes. Still, I had … concerns. The first was how the Vietnam War veterans were going to take the reception we were receiving, certainly unlike anything they had ever known. I hoped they would feel that the military had finally overcome its former misplaced image. I wanted them to be a part of this celebration of America’s military.33 Such accounts rely on two linked axioms of American cultural memory: that the Vietnam veterans were neither welcomed nor thanked for their service (indeed, that they were “spat” upon) and that their experiences were so horrible as to be virtually impossible to talk about. In Jarhead, then, the figure of the Vietnam vet encodes a painful recognition struggling unsuccessfully to negate itself. Who else can the vet be but myself: “I am a spitting image of my father,” writes Swofford. And it is the desert sand that mirrors something essential

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in his soul. Swofford’s first deliberate act of remembrance is to descend to his basement and open his ruck: “I open the map of southern Kuwait. Sand falls from between the folds.”34 The sand is a material symbol of the real, even as it seeps through the tears in the filmic Vietnam map that Swofford had been taught to project upon the surface of the Arabian desert. The shreds and tears in the tattered map facilitate the interpenetration of the real and the symbolic domains. At another point, the sand reminds Swofford of “a timekeeping device from the board games of your youth,” the slow-motion draining of sand grains into the hourglass.35 The sand in the Americans’ Vietnam hourglass contained 58,000 grains – one for each dead American soldier. At the beginning of the Gulf War the hourglass was turned over again to become “a perpetually escalating conflict with many poor, dead, sad fuckers.”36 As a book about the Gulf War, Jarhead looks back to Vietnam in order to see into the future, and in this sense Vietnam is its fundamental epistemological baseline. And what Jarhead seems to know in the totality of its textuality, symbolism, and imagery – as though the méconnaissance that had dominated the jarheads’ viewing of the Vietnam films was now dissolved by the deferred action of their actual war experience – is that the 1991 “Operation” in the desert will extend itself, after a feeble hiatus, into the dirty land war of the past several years. Alex Vernon captures some of the complexity, guilt, ambivalence, and ambiguity inherent in the Gulf War veterans’ comparative understanding of their own homecomings. “How dare a Gulf vet, after all, mope down like a dropped sack into a barstool next to a veteran of a real war? Yet how dare we dismiss our experience.”37 In fact, the more these Gulf War veterans remember their experience, the more solid their grounds for comparing it with that of the Vietnam vets. Vernon makes it clear that his experience in the war was fundamentally of moral defeat, and this is what aligns it with that of the Vietnam veteran. Hence the honorable welcome the latter-day soldiers receive remains highly problematic. In One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, a veteran of the current war in Iraq, Nathaniel Fick, also explains that there are worse fates than being ignored by one’s home culture upon returning from war. After leaving the marines, Fick was at a loss.

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Combat, as he reflects, had nearly unhinged him. Worst of all were the “blanket accolades and thanks from people ‘for what you guys did over there.’ Thanks for what, I wanted to ask – shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes?”38 Indeed, Swofford, Vernon, and the latter’s fellow lieutenants make it difficult to draw any clear line between their experience in the Gulf War and Fick’s experience in the current phase of the Iraq War. The deliberate, accidental, or just collateral killing of civilians is, of course, the prototypical category of either experience. And the last word on this must go to Lieutenant Greg Downey: Neither of us saw the red truck. Before we could stop firing, it had driven between us and the enemy. The bmp [Iraqi personnel carrier] exploded first, then the truck burst into flames. I can’t describe how it felt. Shock maybe. Panic. Seized. Overcome. We had inadvertently shot innocent victims. I raced my section to the truck’s location. What I saw sickened me. An old man, two women, and six children were jumping out of the burning truck. My soldiers poured out of our Bradleys, ran to them, and tried to administer first aid. They were in awful shape, especially the old man. He had taken a 25–mm armor piercing round through his chest. The majority of the children were injured from the high explosive rounds. One woman had lost her leg below the knee. I felt angry and helpless … I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. His face was blue from his lungs giving up. I tried to block it out, but the mental imprint it left would stay with me. He had been caught up in something out of his control, and it cost him his life as he tried to protect the lives of his family. This was the lowest, darkest side of combat. I wished I had not experienced it. This incident continues to haunt me.39 IA DRANG,

1965

Lying under bushes at the tree line were a father and two children; all had been hit by napalm. Their skin at various parts of their bodies was hanging off

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or, in the case of the badly burned girl, was dragging on the ground as they approached, the father gesturing with his two hands together in front of his face, as if in prayer … I saw the damage that the napalm had done but didn’t understand the mechanism that could cause such burns to still smolder as we sat opposite them. The children seemed to sleep but never cried. The father cried and continuously spoke to us and to himself. Neither I nor my buddy had any idea what he was saying. Through gestures, we offered him water, but he either didn’t seem to understand or was not interested in our help … We simply sat there for at least a half hour, listening to the sounds of men dropping grenades into bunkers and wells, firing shotguns at livestock, and then watching both the children die as the father vainly attempted to slap them both back to life as each one stopped breathing. I went for help after the first one seemed to go still. My platoon lieutenant came back with me and called a medic over the radio, who came as the father gasped for air in gulps, then fell over dead. Only then did we see that his entire back flesh had been completely burned through, exposing ribs and organs darkened from the burning. The medic looked at the children and walked away. He said nothing to us. Rifleman Jay Lazarin, quoted in Eric M. Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam

One can isolate the moment when the killing of civilians on a massive scale would become a major consequence of American tactical operations in Vietnam. This is the essential way that one must read the subtitle of a harrowing book on the subject, We Were Soldiers Once … And Young: Ia Drang: The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam, by former Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway. In the account I present below I draw on this book, on Neil Sheehan’s classic A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, and on David L. Anderson’s edited collection Facing My Lai: Moving beyond the Massacre. Starting in 1963, the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, an elite and experimental unit of the US Army, had been perfecting a new kind of military tactic in the hill country of Georgia and North Carolina. The generals called it “airmobility” and were eager to try it out in Vietnam. The basic idea was to take advantage of the agility offered by the new Bell hu-1 Iroquois helicopter for transporting

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assault troops right into the heart of enemy territory. The helicopters could be used for shifting troops around the field in flanking manoeuvres, for resupply operations, and for evacuating the dead and wounded with dispatch. Surprise assault by helicopter formations was also intended to produce shock among Asian fighters, who had not seen such heavily armed machines, let alone devised a means of countering them. Between 1961 and 1963, American planners had coordinated a series of helicopter operations in the Mekong Delta, in which the South Vietnamese troops attacked the loosely organized Viet Cong and produced killing yields beyond the most optimistic predictions. Small groups of black-pyjamaed combatants were strafed from the air or trapped and herded into killing grounds already prepared for them. Those were open areas, usually in the rice paddies, where they could be slaughtered by firebombers or by prepositioned ground battalions heavily armed with mortars, artillery, .50 calibre machine guns, and armoured personnel carriers. This classic “hammer and anvil” tactic found its way into American literature, being transposed allegorically into Norman Mailer’s 1967 grotesque hunting tour-de-force Why Are We in Vietnam? This shock tactic worked with stunning precision until the decisive battle of Ap Bac in 1963, where for the first time, instead of panicking, running, and being slaughtered, the Vietnamese guerrillas learned to face the choppers and focus their fire, thereby shooting down five American helicopters. This was the first major battle of what the Vietnamese would soon come to call the “American war,” or the Second Indochina War, by the end of which 6,000 American helicopter pilots and crew would be killed in combat. Murray Kempton sums up the matter in his review of Sheehan’s book with these words: “The Viet Cong accepted death, looked her in the face, recoiled in alarm from each fresh and terrible machine brought to bear upon it, then took its ground and learned how to endure and overcome every one.”40 The American high command generally ignored the ominous results of Ap Bac. They remained confident that helicopter operations controlled and fought solely by Americans, and coordinated with artillery fire and close air support, would enable them to kill huge numbers of even the highly trained and disciplined North

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Vietnamese Army (nva), which until 1964 had been operating with impunity from bases securely hidden in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. And so, in November 1965, the generals found their chance to test airmobility in action. The mission was not to seize and occupy territory but simply to find and kill the enemy: search and destroy. In one sense, therefore, the trauma of the 7th Cavalry at Ia Drang needs to be read as an uncanny repetition of American defeats at the Alamo and the Little Big Horn. But what went wrong at Ia Drang also yields stunning insight into how the tactic of search and destroy soon became destroy and search. The line between combatant and civilian was effectively erased, as it had been at Wounded Knee in South Dakota on 29 December 1890, where the Sioux men, women, and children where slaughtered by the 7th Cavalry’s rifles and artillery. Just before the 7th Cavalry shipped out to Vietnam, it was given the colours of the historic 1st Cavalry Division, characterized by big yellow-and-black shoulder patches with a horse-head silhouette. The division was led by the sons of West Point and the young Reserve Officer Training Corps lieutenants from Rutgers and The Citadel and Yale. They were the cream of the cream, who had heard John F. Kennedy’s call to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, fight any foe” in the defence of freedom.41 Just how the US Army ended up in Ia Drang – that is, how it ended up getting itself so far west – can be sketched out with a few broad strokes, beginning more or less with John Smith’s paramilitary occupation in Virginia and the Puritan annexation of Massachusetts. What followed in due course was the great expansion westward from the Eastern Seaboard on across the American continent; the series of bloody Indian wars lasting almost three centuries; the laborious clearing of the wilderness and the steady accumulation of miles of iron railways; the gigantic legislative and martial leaps whose magnitude could not literally be charted at the time (starting with the Louisiana Purchase, which gave America control of the Mississippi River and beyond); the war on Mexico, which extended the nation to the Pacific Coast; the “splendid little war” with Spain in 1898, which pushed the western frontier out to the Philippines, making the United States a colonial power in the Pacific – and

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thus making the next century’s wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in some ways inevitable. In this historical sense, the days before Ia Drang might be understood as the American empire’s high tide in the Pacific region. The tide began to recede on 17 November 1965 when the 7th Cavalry blindly descended into a red zone on the map. At a 1994 conference devoted to remembering the My Lai Massacre, General Walter Boomer described the prevailing tactical situation faced by American ground troops in Vietnam: We flailed around day after day, lashing out here, lashing out there. I never recall during my entire experience as a company commander getting one piece of intelligence that was worth a plug nickel. We just seemed to flail, and of course, once you do that you give the advantage to the guerrilla. He then is able to choose the time of battle, and that is exactly what he did.42 Intelligence regarding enemy movements in Ia Drang was indeed sketchy. An advance party had succeeded in capturing an nva deserter, who claimed that somewhere in the hills were several thousand heavily armed and highly disciplined nva soldiers who were “eager to kill Americans.”43 As though to oblige them, the Americans dropped themselves right into the heart of “Indian Country” and were immediately surrounded by two regiments, more than two thousand men. The nva had been resting and regrouping in their sanctuary and were just now preparing to resume combat operations in the Pleiku region. Enter Harold G. Moore, at the time a lieutenant colonel and commander of the 7th Cavalry, who dropped by helicopter into a small clearing the Americans were calling lz (landing zone) X-Ray. Not knowing exactly what they would find, Moore had called for the area to be “prepped” with a twenty-minute artillery barrage, followed by thirty seconds of aerial rocket artillery from specially rigged Hueys, then thirty seconds of .50 calibre machinegun fire by the helicopter gunships. As the smoke from this barrage was clearing, Moore swooped into lz X-Ray in the lead assault ship and, to his astonishment, came under small arms fire within

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seconds. The nva soldiers were rushing down from the ridge opposite the clearing to attack at close quarters. As Moore puts it in his harrowing account of the battle: “My battalion, the 450–man 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army, had come looking for trouble in the Ia Drang; we had found all we wanted and more.”44 Among the first Americans to be killed by sniper fire from nva soldiers, who had climbed into trees surrounding the clearing, were any officers seen to be directing troop movements on the ground and many of the radio operators. When he saw what was happening, Moore directed his first company to move up the ridge in order to establish a perimeter beyond which the enemy could be attacked by artillery and airplanes. But the first American companies were met among the trees at the base of the ridge by the nva regulars, a tactic the Vietnamese called “clinging to the belt,” in which the nva did all they could to keep the killing on an infantryagainst-infantry basis, and thus deprive the Americans of the advantage of air and artillery support.45 In this, they were largely successful, although the Americans, armed with M-16 automatic rifles and the quick-loading grenade launchers called the M-79, eventually were able to establish a perimeter from which to call in what would become thirty-six hours of nonstop artillery and air barrages. Only this bombardment prevented the 7th Cavalry from being annihilated – and thus from repeating the terminal fate of the division’s first general, George Custer, or that of Davy Crockett at the Alamo in 1836, neither of whom had the benefit of close air support. Still, when the fighting was over at lz X-Ray and lz Albany, where a parallel battle was unfolding, 234 American soldiers of the original 450 lay dead. Why remember this particular battle, even as the war in Iraq continues? I suggest that Ia Drang offers an especially clear view of an awesome spectacle: that of an American national ideology discovering, in a series of shocks occurring over a period of years, its own “disabling disdain for Asians [and all the Others] in arms against us [which] may not have boiled up from racism so much as from technological hauteur.” Practising “a style of war as a mechanical enterprise,” the American war-planners in Vietnam were especially fascinated by the helicopter and then, as the war

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got increasingly out of hand, by the fighter-bomber and the b-52 Stratofortress. The commanders “greeted each fresh contrivance from the Pentagon as the magic dragon come at last.”46 Perhaps in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the period of Barack Obama’s presidency, America will discover the means to recognize this way of thinking as historically obsolete. The helicopter, outrigged with machineguns and rocket pods, was to be the army’s bird of the Armageddon, wings outstretched, holding the thunderbolts and arrows of war in its talons. We can superimpose this image of American wrath and power upon that canonical American bird whose extended wings overshadow the entrance to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Custom-House in The Scarlet Letter: Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw.47 This is General Zachary Taylor’s eagle, the eagle of America’s military invasion of and victory over Mexico, by which the United States had just acquired Texas as well as California, the eagle that, on the election of Taylor as a war-hero president in 1848, dismissed Hawthorne from his job as a customs inspector with “a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, [and] a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.”48 After Ia Drang the eagle was bound by fewer restraints, as Colonel Moore puts in perspective in a poignant account of operations leading up to the battle: Before our air assault on the target area, Captain Matt Dillon and I flew a brief, high-altitude helicopter recon mission, selecting landing zones and forming the operation plan. During the flight we spotted a small Jarai Montagnard village, and I made a note to warn the troops that there were civilians, either friendly or at least neutral, in the area. And I decided to forgo using artillery or tactical air-prep fires before landing. Most of the clearings in that area were Montagnard slash-and-burn farm fields. Bad enough we had to land

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helicopters and men to trample through their pitiful yam and cassava patches; we didn’t need to plow them up with the heavy stuff or cause civilian casualties … I was glad we had skipped the prep fires.49 After Ia Drang no significant (or even insignificant) American operation would begin without massive amounts of “prep fire,” whatever the quality of the available intelligence. The slaughter of the civilians would increase exponentially. Ia Drang was indeed, in Colonel Moore’s formulation, the battle that changed the war in Vietnam: On our air assault into the Bong Son on January 28, 1966, I was on the first lift, and charged into the tree line. There was a small thatch-roofed house in the trees; inside, a peasant family huddled, frightened out of their wits by the artillery prep fires that had landed all round them. A lovely six-yearold girl was bloody from a shrapnel wound. She was the same age as my daughter Cecile, back home. I summoned the medics, but I left there heartsick. None of us had joined the Army to hurt children and frighten peaceful farm families.50 The main story of the Vietnam War as told by the American combat veterans (in a huge number of oral history volumes, but also in poems, stories, and novels) is the story of this heartsickness. The telling Vietnam War experience is typically organized around some primal scene of death, mutilation, atrocity, and shameful conduct. After Ia Drang, the air war would be dominated by the napalm-dropping fighter-bombers and the b-52s with their thousandpound bombs, which approached, en masse, the potency of a tactical nuclear weapon. As Neil Sheehan describes them: The eight-engine jets had been converted into monster flying bomb platforms, each capable of lofting in excess of twenty tons. A formation of six b-52s, dropping their bombs from 30,000 feet, could “take out,” in the language of the airmen, almost everything within a “box” approximately five-eighths of a mile wide by about two miles long.51

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The bigger the weapons, the less discrimination, the less accuracy, and the fairly final annihilation of any distinction between civilians and combatants. The grunts, after Ia Drang, had an account of this phenomenon, which they called “the mere gook rule,” namely that “if it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s vc.”52 My Lai would follow Ia Drang in a little over two years. To justify bombing from 30,000 feet, the enemy must be defined as everyone and everything in a free-fire zone. Sometimes these zones were made up on the spot in response to a sniper’s bullet (which very often invited the “calling in” of artillery or air strikes). Or, more typically and more abstractly, they were engendered in the planning room by the simple act of drawing lines on a map. Seldom was the intelligence good enough to justify precisely how the lines should be drawn. The important thing was for the lines to multiply rapidly. Sheehan recalls an exchange he had with General William Westmoreland in 1966. He asked whether the general was worried about the large number of civilian causalities from the air strikes and the shelling. “‘Yes, Neil, it is a problem,’” came the answer, “‘but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?’”53 CODA

I had called the artillery that erased the lives of over six hundred human beings. In forty-five minutes, I had killed more people than what lived in my hometown of Merna, Nebraska. Combat is a series of contradictions. One moment you’re trying your best to kill the enemy, the next moment you’re doing your best to save him. I looked at the shock in the Iraqis’ eyes. For the first time during the ground attack, I felt guilt and sorrow. Greg Downey, in Alex Vernon, The Eyes of Orion

Swofford’s and Vernon’s accounts of the Gulf War describe the massive killing of Iraqis and harbour powerful premonitions of the massive killing to come in the Iraq War. As he waits in his base camp in Saudi Arabia, before the deployment of ground troops, Swofford assumes “that if an attack [by the Iraqis] is committed, it’ll be Lebanon-style, a five-ton truck loaded with enough explosives to blow the entire building to ash.”54 In other

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words, he fears that the Gulf War will turn into the kind of war that continues to unfold in Iraq and Afghanistan as I write these words. In The Eyes of Orion, Greg Downey describes what the electronic coverage of events would not, could not, or in any case, did not actually show: the artillery, which Vernon contextualizes as “historically the largest volume killer among all the army’s branches,” killing the enemy soldiers:55 I watched as Iraqi soldiers ran from bunker to bunker, wagering their lives on where they thought the next artillery barrage would land. Looking through my binoculars, I could see their faces and sense their fear. It was strange being within shouting distance of these guys but experiencing nothing close to what they were going through. I felt like I was watching a movie, totally detached from the agony and suffering.56 The close-up as mediated, cinematically, by the lenses of the binoculars yields to the vision of human beings who are all too real in their unpicturesque suffering and dying. The accounts from the tank lieutenants of The Eyes of Orion are worth contemplation, I suggest, in that they dovetail so frighteningly well with the purpose of Swofford’s memoir – which is to “spread the bad news … the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom.”57 “The warrior becomes the hero, and the society celebrates the death and destruction of war, two things the warrior never celebrates. The warrior celebrates the fact of having survived, not of killing Japs or Krauts or gooks or Russkies or ragheads. That large and complex emotional mess called national victory holds no sway for the warrior.”58 Downey, clearly Swofford’s spiritual brother, remembers: Twenty kilometers later, we met the enemy. My gunner reported targets. We moved closer, discovering the Iraqi soldiers to be young boys and old men. They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight left in them. Their leaders had cut their Achilles’ tendons so they couldn’t run away and then left them. What weapons they had were in bad repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were hungry, cold, and

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scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no business being on a battlefield … Red Section had killed six to eight Iraqis – the 25-mm high explosive rounds did not leave much left of whatever they hit. I didn’t think a body count was really necessary, but battalion was pushing me for one. We counted feet and boots that had feet in them.59 Neal Creighton also remembers, as the carnage continues and the bodies pile up, even after the Americans declare an end to the war: Damn. I didn’t want to shoot any more of these guys. Why on earth were they challenging M1A1 tanks with ak-47 assault rifles? It was plain stupid. And didn’t they know there was a cease-fire? … I watched through the commander’s sight extension as David placed the coax reticle on the lower part of the enemy soldiers’ bodies and let go a one hundred-round burst, cutting most of the Iraqis down at the legs … To my right, one Iraqi lay dead and another lay dying. He looked up at me as we passed, raised his arm, and, looking straight into my eyes, made his last communication on this earth: a peace sign.60 At the beginning of his memoir, Swofford admits that he is “not well.” Vernon, equally, helps us to understand that the feeling of not being well has everything to do with the production of corpses and with the concept of “the enemy” proving susceptible to blurring and decomposition under the tactical pressure of massive firepower. Their memoirs suggest how paltry the gesture of reparation must seem, even as they struggle, courageously, against covering over the dead in the sands of a vast forgetting. Their memoirs are also powerful gestures of mourning for the American dead. The question looms: where does over four thousand American soldiers killed (as of late March 2008) put us in terms of the “mythopathic” chronology of the Vietnam War?61 With the election of November 2008 behind us, one hopes that we’re at least past the Tet Offensive – even as one recalls that after February

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1968 the Vietnam War dragged on, under Richard Nixon, for seven more years.62 Will the Obama presidency bring the “American war” to an end?

NOTES

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

Danner, 81. Ricks, 145. Ibid., 115. This policy of containment permitted Saddam Hussein’s slaughter of the Shi’ite rebels who had been encouraged and then abandoned by the US. See Ricks, 5, 6: But when the Shiites of cities in the south rose up, U.S. forces stood by, their guns silent. It was Saddam Hussein who continued to fight. He didn’t feel defeated, and in a sense, really wasn’t. Rather, in the face of the U.S. counterattack into Kuwait, Saddam simply had withdrawn from that front to launch fierce internal offensives against the Shiites in the south of Iraq in early March and then, a few weeks later, against the Kurds in the north when they also rose up. An estimated twenty thousand Shiites died in the aborted uprisings. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes and crossed into the mountains of Turkey, where they began to die of exposure … Having incited a rebellion against Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government stood by while the rebels were slaughtered. Clarke, 31. Ricks, 5, 395–6. Baudrillard, 61. Žižek, 15. Of George W. Bush’s taunt “Bring ‘em on” (uttered 2 July 2003), Ricks, 172, observes: “The president’s words were reported and remembered in Iraq and across the Middle East.” Žižek, 16. Ibid. Estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq range from 90,000 to over 1 million; see bbc News, online; Dardagan et al., online; and Burnham et al. Žižek, 18. Ibid., 27.

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13 Quoted in Ricks, 6. 14 Vernon, 281: “President Bush’s hasty 1991 declaration that the Persian Gulf War had ‘closed the book on Vietnam’ insulted the American participants of both conflicts.” See also Ricks, 64, who quotes former senator Max Cleland of Georgia (who lost three limbs as a 1st Cavalry Division soldier in Vietnam in 1968): “Thirty-seven years later, and I have another president creating a Vietnam. Kids are dying, getting blown up – that’s me … I see these young Iraq veterans, missing legs and arms and eyes. They are so brave. They have no idea what is down the road for them.” For more on the ugly character of the war in Iraq, see Massing, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs,” in which he reviews important books by Evan Wright and Nathaniel Fick. 15 Sheehan et al., xi. 16 Žižek, 3. 17 Regarding the early discussions by the American planners of the Vietnam War, Sheehan et al. note “an absence of emotional anguish or moral questioning of action” (xv), “the absence of any extended discussion of military or political responsibility for such matters as civilian casualties or the restraints imposed by the rules of land warfare and the Geneva and Hague Conventions” (xxiv). In the end, more than 4 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians on both sides – roughly 10 per cent of the entire population – were killed or wounded. 18 Woodward, 324. 19 Danner, 82. 20 Baudrillard, 72. 21 Gray, 6. 22 For a National Liberation Front perspective on both wars – the First and the Second Indochina Wars – see Truong Nhu Tang; for more on American soldiers’ oral narratives from the Vietnam War, see Budra and Zeitlin. 23 Swofford, 5–6. 24 “Jarhead” is a slang term, like “grunt,” used by American marines to describe the typical member of the corps – the reference is to the “high and tight” haircut that makes the skull resemble a narrow jar. 25 Vernon, 66. 26 Shay, 31.

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27 Swofford, 6–7. See Weschler for a fascinating account of the film version of Jarhead and its deliberate incorporation of the “valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now. 28 Swofford, 199–200, 213. 29 Ibid., 251. 30 Swofford, 37. 31 Lembcke, 94, 2, x, 4. 32 Ibid., 115, 185, 176. 33 Trybula, in Vernon, 253. 34 Swofford, 67, 2. See Vernon, 259: “having been warned that the Saudi customs would not allow a single bit of Holy Land sand to leave. I guess I get the last blasphemous laugh: Working on this book, pulling out maps and letters and items I hadn’t looked at since my return, I dumped two good handfuls of it on my North Carolina apartment floor.” 35 Swofford, 177. See Beckett, 1: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. (Pause.) Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.” And Eliot, 52: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” 36 Swofford, 175. 37 Vernon, 282. 38 Quoted in Massing, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs,” 87. 39 Downey, in Vernon, 243–4. Massing, “The Press,” 44, observes: The abuses that US troops routinely commit in the field, and their responsibility for the deaths of many thousands of innocent Iraqis, are viewed by the American press as too sensitive for most Americans to see or read about … Only by reading and watching such accounts is it possible to fathom the depths of Iraqi hatred for the United States. It’s not the simple fact of occupation that’s at work, but the way that occupation is being carried out, and the daily indignities, humiliations, and deaths that accompany it. If reports of such actions appeared more frequently in the press, they could help raise questions about the strategy the US is pursuing in Iraq. For a crucial Iraqi perspective on the war, see Riverbend’s published blog, Baghdad Burning, which is ongoing at http://riverbendblog. blogspot.com. See also Massing, “As Iraqis See It.”

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40 Kempton, 26. 41 John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961, http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres56.html (viewed 9 February 2009). 42 Quoted in Anderson, 159. 43 Sheehan, Bright, 572. 44 Moore and Galloway, 4. 45 Sheehan, Bright, 574. See also Brown, 276–7: Since the time of his youth, Crazy Horse had known that the world men lived in was only a shadow of the real world. To get into the real world, he had to dream … On this day, June 17, 1876, Crazy Horse dreamed himself into the real world, and he showed the Sioux how to do many things they had never done before while fighting the white man’s soldiers. When Crook sent his pony soldiers in mounted charges, the Sioux faded off to their flanks and struck weak places in their lines. Crazy Horse kept his warriors mounted and always moving from one place to another. By the time the sun was in the top of the sky he had the soldiers all mixed up in three separate fights. The Bluecoats were accustomed to forming skirmish lines and strong fronts, and when Crazy Horse prevented them from fighting like that they were thrown into confusion. By making many darting charges on their swift ponies, the Sioux kept the soldiers apart and always on the defensive. When the Bluecoats’ fire grew too hot, the Sioux would draw away, tantalize a few soldiers into pursuit, and then turn on them with a fury. 46 Kempton, 26, 27. 47 Hawthorne, 8–9. 48 Ibid., 9. 49 Moore and Galloway, 30–1. 50 Ibid., 343. See Anderson, 127, quoting General Walter Boomer: I was twenty-eight years old when I entered Vietnam as a rifle company commander. When I entered Vietnam there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that killing innocent women and children was not only morally wrong, from what I had been taught as a child, but that, if I did this, under the law of land warfare, which I understood very well, I could be convicted by court-martial. No doubt. There was no doubt in my mind, and I believe that there was no doubt in the mind of anyone I served with. Vietnam was a

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62

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place, however, that could become and did become conducive to atrocity situations. For what it was like to be on the receiving end of the barrage, see Truong Nhu Tang, 167–71; and the account of the Missing in Action Remains-Gathering Team in Vietnam’s so-called Jungle of Screaming Souls in Bao Ninh, 3–8. Sheehan, Bright, 618. Anderson, 7. Sheehan, Bright, 621. Swofford, 152. Vernon, 30. See Massing, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs,” 82: Such [voices] have been largely ignored by the mass media, which is too bad, for they provide a grunt’s-eye view of the war that is often far richer, and rawer, than anything available in our newspapers or on tv. As probing and aggressive as the reporting from Iraq has been, it is subject to many filters. There are, for example, “family viewing” standards that make it difficult for journalists to write frankly about such sensitive aspects of military life as the profane language soldiers often use. It’s also hard for journalists to get an accurate sense of what soldiers really think. Through embedding, reporters have enjoyed remarkable physical access to the troops, but learning about their true feelings is far more difficult, all the more so since soldiers who speak out too freely can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Downey, in Vernon, 230. Swofford, 253. Ibid., 114. Downey, in Vernon, 191. Creighton, in Vernon, 246–7. Herr, 47. Speaking of George Orwell’s 1984, Erich Fromm’s afterword to the Signet edition of that novel remains uncomfortably pertinent to our Age of Terror: First of all, [Orwell] shows the economic significance of continuous arms production, without which the economic system cannot function. Furthermore, he gives an impressive picture of how a society must develop which is constantly preparing for war, constantly

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afraid of being attacked, and preparing to find the means of complete annihilation of its opponents … with increasing technical ‘progress’ … the whole society will be forced to live underground, but … the destructive strength of thermonuclear bombs will always remain greater than the depth of the caves … fright and hatred of a possible aggressor will destroy the basic attitudes of a democratic, humanistic society. (262)

4 Spike Lee, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X: The Politics of Domination and Difference G O RD O N E . SLETH A U G

In the wake of the black power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of these voices were silenced by a repressive state; others became inarticulate. It has become necessary to find new avenues to transmit the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a “politics of difference,” should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people … [Postmodern theory] should not separate the “politics of difference” from the politics of racism. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness”

During the past century African Americans laid the foundation for American popular music culture with the development of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock’n’roll, soul, hip hop, and rap. In the past quarter-century blacks have taken the highest prizes in the US for the arts, including Pulitzer Prizes for Alice Walker’s fiction in 1983, Rita Dove’s poetry in 1987, Toni Morrison’s fiction in 1988, George Walker’s music in 1995, Wynton Marsalis’s music in 1997, Suzan-Lori Parks’s drama in 2002, and Leonard Pitts Jr’s commentary in 2004. Numerous other prizes have been awarded to black American artists, from Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize for fiction to the Wexner Innovative Artist Award given to Spike Lee in 2008 for advancing American cinema.

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These accolades did not arise in a cultural vacuum, and the twentieth century witnessed a surge of African American talent, notably during the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement. The first, focusing on fiction, poetry, prose essays, music, and art, was largely confined to the Harlem district of New York City. The second, focusing on human and civil rights, pervaded not only New York but all of the United States, and its leaders are remembered for their impassioned statements about race relations and black liberation. Two of its most influential leaders were Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who between them ignited black and white Americans alike in their pursuit of racial justice, becoming lightning rods for highly divergent philosophical and political positions on African American personal and social identity. During the Civil Rights Movement, their personalities, speeches, essays, and autobiographies entered the larger political and popular culture of the United States, ensuring that their opinions would continue to resonate in their communities and stir the American imagination. One of those most affected was the filmmaker Spike Lee, who became a representative of the thriving African American arts community in New York City from the 1980s to the present – and who used King’s and Malcolm X’s political writings to assess the progress of racial relations and the progress of a black cultural force in New York and in the United States. In this chapter, I first want to introduce King, Malcolm X, and Lee and situate them within New York City, which has some of the most important black communities in the nation and where Lee continues to live and work. I then want to take up two of Lee’s most serious and important works – Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992) – which explore the relevance of these black leaders for the contemporary black community and American race relations. I want to suggest specifically the ways Lee has not only absorbed but also interrogated King’s and Malcolm X’s rhetoric within these scripts. Lee has drawn knowingly from the writings of his “ancestors” to help rid the black community of what bell hooks calls the “politics of domination.” His goal is engagement in “politics of difference” – that is, using the words of the leaders as well as the situations and voices of downtrodden and exploited blacks to

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consider social and political alternatives. Thus in Do the Right Thing Lee has created a dialogue in what Louis Owens calls a “dialogically agitated space” between the positions of King and Malcolm.1 Mikhail Bakhtin argued in The Dialogic Imagination that dialogism is always already political insofar as it places alternatives in front of the viewer, who must ponder and sift those choices, even if a clear resolution is never reached. This is what Lee aims for by having viewers consider the political alternatives championed by the black leaders – showing the shortcomings and the failed outcomes of their promises. In contrast, Malcolm X is an adaptation of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and, as such, less interpretatively malleable than Do the Right Thing. Still, Lee has created a similar dialogue between Malcolm X’s “black rage”2 nationalism and an implicit King-like awareness of the devastating consequences of black militancy. The recurring photographic image of King and Malcolm X standing together in Do the Right Thing need not be taken as a unity of opinion between them or even as a single philosophical and political alternative. It is rather a visual model of the dialogic process. Lee calls the photograph a “synthesis” of King and Malcolm X “trying to find a common ground, a plan they could work on.”3 Synthesis, however, suggests too much concord, because the very image of the two men in dialogue was highly controversial and, according to Malcolm X’s daughter, threatened the positions of black and white, separatist and integrationist at that time.4 Other photographic images in Do the Right Thing function in a similar way. The Italian American Sal hangs pictures of his Italian “ancestors” on a kind of “Wall of Fame” in his pizzeria located in a Brooklyn ghetto, and the black community is anxious to have its “ancestors” share that space. Through these images, Lee urges a retreat from an either/or racial sensibility that results in the burning of the pizzeria and instead pushes for ways to integrate diverse opinions and lifestyles that can build successful black communities and serve everyone equally well. Consequently, even though Lee shows Malcolm as “a man” and draws from numerous speeches and The Autobiography to celebrate his strength and the need for basic human rights for all blacks, he falls short of advocating his militant path.5 And while

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he shows the stature, peacefulness, and compassion of Martin Luther King in his life and writings (“Give Us the Ballot – We Will Transform the South” and “I Have a Dream”), he cannot condone Uncle Tomism, passivity, and inaction in the face of economic hardship, political injustice, and racial threats. In short, the two works – Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X – form a dialogic about ways to construct American society (and especially black communities) in the late 1980s and the ’90s. Other constructions might, of course, emerge in the viewers’ minds. Lee himself remarked that he likes to “let people make up their own minds,”6 so any alternatives must come from the viewers, not from the director. If Do the Right Thing “was meant to force members of the audience to choose their own answers,”7 it was consistent with the writer/director’s self-definition: “My job is to put the spotlight on race relations.”8 MARTIN LUTHER KING, MALCOLM X, AND SPIKE LEE

I remember having seen that photograph of … [Malcolm X and Martin Luther King] and being rather startled by it, because of the popular propaganda that these were two men who were diametrically opposed. But you could tell in that photograph that they had a genuine love, admiration and respect for each other. Spike Lee, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It

The period just prior to the American Civil Rights Movement gave rise to two leaders whose birth dates were nearly identical and death dates very close, who – separately and together – helped to shape African American identity, who showed alternative ways to deal with racial politics, whose lives inspired the black community, and who represented contending views of human and civil rights. Both leaders were preachers – Malcolm X (1929–65) a self-taught and self-proclaimed cleric for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, and Martin Luther King (1929–68) a Baptist Christian minister. Both voiced strong opinions about how to manage complex relations between whites and blacks. Both made specific statements about their places in an America that historically had little “space” for blacks. Both died from assassins’ bullets.

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From King’s writings and speeches, it is apparent that the relationship of the blacks to the whites should be governed by negotiation, conciliation, and forgiveness, leading to integration and a rebirth of the American nation through the growing Civil Rights Movement. For Malcolm X, however, the white race in America was pernicious and racist, the black race was in need of basic human rights and liberation, and confrontation between the races could lead logically to retaliation by blacks and end in bloodshed. Consequently, he rejected the white America that historically had no suitable place for blacks, yearned for a separatist state for blacks, and thought the Civil Rights Movement a fraud and a sham designed to keep blacks in their place through meaningless liberal white (and black) rhetoric. In Malcolm’s own words, The American black man is the world’s most shameful case of minority oppression. What makes the black man think of himself as only an internal United States issue is just a catchphrase, two words, “civil rights.” How is the black man going to get “civil rights” before first he wins his human rights? If the American black man will start thinking about his human rights, and then start thinking of himself as part of one of the world’s great peoples, he will see he has a case for the United Nations.9 Born in 1957 in pre-Civil Rights segregated Atlanta, the writer/ director Shelton J. (Spike) Lee avoided some of the worst segregation of the pre-Civil Rights period only because his family moved to relatively integrated Brooklyn suburbs, where he was saved from the most blatant forms of personal and institutional discrimination. Still, New York City was no racial Shangri La, and Lee grew up in the centre of urban “struggles for power”10 and in the national glare of racial politics. He experienced first-hand the controversy surrounding King and Malcolm X, was marked by their assassinations, and was touched and enraged by everything urban blacks had to endure – especially on his home turf in Brooklyn. So much so, in fact, that when he began writing, directing, and producing, his central concern became the identity and treatment of the black community and the ways they and the American nation as a whole

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reacted to racial tensions and the several crises before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. Spike Lee’s own position on how best to move positive race relations forward is not entirely clear or consistent from his many essays, books, and films, although he is aware that some regard him as “a wild-eyed Black militant, a baby Malcolm X.”11 There is some reason for this: he cites Malcolm X frequently and declares on the paperback cover of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that it is “the most important book I’ll ever read. It changed the way I thought; it changed the way I acted. It has given me courage that I didn’t know I had inside me. I’m one of hundreds of thousands whose life was changed for the better.” He also includes a long quotation by Malcolm X from The Autobiography12 as a headnote to the script of Do the Right Thing: The greatest miracle Christianity has achieved in America is that the black man in white Christian hands has not grown violent. It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors – in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition! It is a miracle that a nation of black people has so fervently continued to believe in a turn-the-other-cheek and heaven-for-you-after-you-die philosophy! It is a miracle that the American Black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell that they have caught, here in white man’s heaven! The miracle is that the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders,’ his preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees, and others who have been allowed to wax fat off their black poor brothers, have been able to hold the black masses quiet until now.13 Lee does not reject the view that he might be a baby Malcolm X and, as a salute to this shared identity, dubs his film company Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks “ya-dig sho-nuff by any means necessary” – “by any means necessary” being the operative phrase for Malcolm X’s militant politics. Still, what he means by “any means necessary” – and what he ultimately thinks of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as models for his generation –

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is not certain from his own experience as a black man in America or, for that matter, from his art.14 His previous films – The Answer (1980), Sarah (1981), Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1982), She’s Gotta Have It (1986), and School Daze (1988) – had been racially noncontroversial, but in Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X he entered the public forum on race relations full square as a filmmaker and as a writer. Indeed, his published text of Do the Right Thing contains a “Foreword,” “Introduction,” “The Journal,” “Production Notes,” and the script itself, giving him ample opportunity to comment on the film and on black-white relations. His scripts, companion books, and autobiography, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, establish him as an important commentator on race in America. From the outset, many were concerned about the political implications and social consequences of Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. When Lee was negotiating with Paramount to produce Do the Right Thing (he eventually signed with Universal) and envisioned the burning of a white-owned pizzeria as the ending, executive Ned Tannen thought the film “too black, too strong” and was “convinced that Black people will come out of the theaters wanting to burn shit down.”15 Lee, however, insisted on that ending, and Paramount passed on the option. After the film appeared, many agreed with Tannen’s opinion that Do the Right Thing was little more than “a call by Spike Lee to advance AfricanAmerican interests by trashing white-owned businesses.”16 Although Do the Right Thing self-consciously addresses the politics of race by depicting both militant and peaceful black responses to daily frustrations and racially charged incidents, no one thinks Lee favours the tactics of King – as indicated by the critiques of Mark Reid, Alan Stone, Douglas Kellner, and Catherine Pouzoulet. According to Reid, in Do the Right Thing (and, by extension, Malcolm X), “Lee is trying to show his multiracial audience that many African-Americans are increasingly rejecting Dr. King’s nonviolent tactics as a means to achieve social and economic equality in the United States.” Stone, of the Boston Review, remarks that Lee, as evidenced by his own articulate comments, sides with Malcolm X in this film and that his subsequent film Malcolm X is a testament to, and affirmation of, this

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position. Kellner agrees that the films show little support for King and “privilege Malcolm X,” but on the whole he thinks Do the Right Thing depicts an impasse between the positions of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that rules them out as models for today’s race relations. Pouzoulet agrees: “the choice between nonviolence and retaliatory violence has no relevance to the working poor who are economically trapped in gang-infested urban ghettos.”17 What is immediately clear in Do the Right Thing is that Lee wants the American public to think about the actual lives of blacks in New York City ghettos and how they can be bettered. He also wants the audience to ask themselves how much has changed decades after the Civil Rights Movement when blacks still do not own their own businesses and are frustrated because nonresident whites and newly arrived Koreans do. Little seems to have changed since Malcolm X lamented: Now I watched brothers entwining themselves in the economic clutches of the white man who went home every night with another bag of the money drained out of the ghetto. I saw that the money, instead of helping the black man, was going to help enrich these white merchants, who usually lived in an “exclusive” area where a black man had better not get caught unless he worked there for somebody white.18 By showing a photograph of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X standing together and by scrolling key passages from their writings on the screen at the end of the film, Lee self-consciously asks the audience what concrete results these activists have had on the economics of black communities and on national race relations. Although it raised the same concerns, Malcolm X entered the political arena in a different manner for a different purpose. For starters, it is not a work of fiction but a biography entirely based on Malcolm X’s life as described in his Autobiography and associated speeches and essays. As such, it aims to show his hard-won emergence from a life of crime to a life of service to the black community and the Nation of Islam. Monitored closely by Minister Louis Farrakhan and others in the black Muslim community, the

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production and screening of Malcolm X could have become a lightening rod of racial discontent but, in fact, has helped to redefine Malcolm’s struggle and, as Lee hoped, to make his views accessible to black and white communities alike. Nonetheless, Warner Bros. was concerned that this picture, too, was inflammatory and would incite racial violence – and thus arranged advance screenings for police so they could anticipate problems!19 Both films set out to depict the real lives of African Americans in the twentieth-century United States and to do so partly through the lenses of two of their great spokesmen, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Significantly, the location of both films in New York City takes advantage of Lee’s intimate knowledge of the city. But to the extent that New York is often taken as a microcosm of the country, the location also serves as an indictment of the US in its treatment of the black community and failure to move ahead on reforms that would bridge the racial divide and alleviate the serious economic disparities between blacks and whites. NYC AND THE US IN THE TWO FILMS

One might imagine New York was a safe haven for the Lee family: far removed from the battles of the civil-rights movement then being waged in Georgia and across the south, from the murders of four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, from the “Jim Crow” laws and from police battering African-Americans for the crime of being black. But in truth the north was no more removed from these battles than Birmingham itself: segregation was just as vicious and carried an insidious de facto veneer. Northern whites could claim that they were not racist because they did not have Jim Crow laws; and yet racial tensions were often higher in tightly packed northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Newark – and New York. Spike Lee, Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It

The New York of Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X metonymically stands for the United States in depicting the collective identity of blacks and the way they have been treated over time across the nation. Although New York City is ranked among the most ethnically and racially mixed metropolises on the planet, racial conflicts have a long history there. Among the earliest and most serious

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were the Anti-Draft Riots of 1863. Led by the Irish demonstrating against a federal policy drafting recent immigrants into military service, this protest turned into a full-blown race riot that targeted blacks over fears of job losses – especially if slaves were freed and could move without obstacle to the North, thus undercutting native and immigrant workers’ wages. Despite the fears of the newly Americanized Irish about former slaves flocking to New York City and undermining the job market, this did not materialize until the 1920s, when the city became a major destination for blacks fleeing southern oppression and seeking employment in northern manufacturing and commerce. After that time, racial uprisings and riots happened on average once in every decade, initially in Harlem with violence against property rather than people, but later in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn when more people were involved. Harlem boiled over in 1935 and 1943 (in the midst of the Second World War), and Brooklyn erupted in 1964, 1965, 1968, and the period from 1986 to 1992. The effects of changes to the immigration laws of 1965 reprised the fears from a century earlier when large numbers of immigrants from third-world countries (especially Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) joined the ranks of unskilled workers competing for local jobs – even as others established local businesses, including the black working-class neighbourhoods of Brooklyn. In time, entrepreneurial Koreans replaced Italian and Jewish shop owners, often commuting into black neighbourhoods on a daily basis and spending the profits outside these communities, reinforcing Malcolm X’s observation that “in New York City, with over a million Negroes, there aren’t twenty black-owned businesses employing over ten people. It’s because black men don’t own and control their own community’s retail establishments that they can’t stabilize their own community.”20 Again, immigration, competition for jobs, and a lack of African American ownership in businesses serving their own communities led to protests and riots. In addition, New York during the 1970s was crippled by a severe economic downturn as residents moved from the urban core to the suburbs and as manufacturing moved south. As a result, “a disproportionate number of minority households became

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socially isolated and increasingly dependent on public welfare programs … which fuelled the urban fiscal crisis after the city tax base had eroded.”21 As Barry Cooper notes in the “Foreword” to Do the Right Thing, Brooklyn – the focus of the film – has had the reputation of being the capital of black society for a long time, and problems there reflect those of blacks across the entire United States: “I seemed to see Black faces for miles and miles. If Harlem was the emotional capital of the [black] world, then Brooklyn’s BedfordStuyvesant, Fort Greene, Crown Heights, and Brownsville had to be our collective solar system.” He adds: “to me, it remains a hieroglyph of millions of Black symbols and characters on a papyrus of asphalt, tar, and steel.”22 Because it really has been the centre of the New York black population, racial problems there have been deeply felt, especially from 1986 to 1992 – when Lee was around thirty. A few incidents stand out. In December 1986 a young Trinidadian immigrant, Michael Griffith, and two friends were attacked outside a pizzeria by a gang of white teenagers in the largely Italian Howard Beach area of Queens, and Griffith was struck by an automobile as he fled onto the parkway. This “Howard Beach incident” created hostility toward the police, who were accused by Al Sharpton and other black activists of being complicit with white gangs. These accusations in turn set off a wave of protests and riots throughout New York and calls for boycotts of businesses in Howard Beach and pizzerias throughout the city. In a closely related incident, two black youths collecting bottles and cans on Christmas night of 1987 were beaten up by a gang of white youths in Bensonhurst, resulting in the hospitalization of the blacks. As part of this racial stew, black youths retaliated and “fired up a white cab driver in Harlem.”23 These were, in fact, the very incidents that prompted Spike Lee to write Do the Right Thing, which he began on Christmas Day 1987. According to the writer/filmmaker: The idea for Do the Right Thing arose for me out of the Howard Beach incident. It was 1986, and a Black man was still being hunted down like a dog. Never mind Mississippi

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Burning: Nothing has changed in America, and you don’t have to go down south to have a run-in with racist rednecks. They’re here in Nueva York. After Howard Beach, I said to myself, yep, that’s it, we’re fed up. I think that the only reason a public disturbance didn’t jump off was because it was the dead of winter. It was just too damn cold for an uprising. But what if a racial incident like Howard Beach or the Edmund Perry and Eleanor Bumpers murders had happened on the hottest day of the summer?24 The year 1987 was also a key time to begin writing a script critical of race relations and employment problems because of the October stock market crash that precipitated corporate layoffs, hastened another round of closures of local manufacturing firms, and led to city and state financial cuts because of lost tax revenue – a revisiting of the economic plight of the 1970s. The crash once again seriously impacted the jobs of the black working class of Queens and Brooklyn, leading to the so-called December 12 Movement, designed by the blacks to take back economic control of their neighbourhoods. Do the Right Thing responds to these events, and a special poignancy was given to the release of the film by the murder of another young black in August 1989, Yusuf Hawkins, shot by a gang of thirty whites in the mainly Italian and Jewish area of Bensonhurst, near Bedford Stuyvesant (“Bed-Stuy”). This killing, as well as the earlier case of Tawana Brawley – a fifteen year old who went missing for four days, then was found supposedly molested by police officers and covered in feces (although this was never confirmed) – led to more protests and confrontations with the police, contributing to the success of David Dinkin’s campaign as the first black mayor of the city. The Bed-Stuy and Flatbush areas became the scenes of other tragedies – the 1991 accidental automobile death of a black boy, Gavin Cato, by a local Orthodox Jew and the retaliatory killing of Yankel Rosenbaum by a gang of blacks. In short, Queens and Brooklyn, home to many different ethnic and racial groups, saw an unparalleled rise in racial hostility that was superseded in magnitude only by the racial riots among

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blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Koreans following the Rodney King case in Los Angeles in 1992. Harlem, a magnet for black migration from the South from 1914 to 1918 and the main setting for Malcolm X, also had its racial flashpoints. As a suburb originally intended for white elite, it enjoyed physical amenities that black Brooklyn could only dream of, and although it attracted philosophers (Alain Locke), writers (Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes), artists (Jacob Lawrence), and musicians (Louis Armstrong, Count Bassie, Bessie Smith) who made it culturally rich, it was not immune from poverty and racial discontent. During Malcolm X’s residence in Harlem, it had a major race riot in 1943, not to mention one in 1935 at the peak of the Depression, when Malcolm was still in Boston. Although its economy was not grounded in manufacturing, its fortunes rose and fell with the rest of New York City as manufacturing firms left and the tax base eroded, but its entertainment culture drew whites from uptown and downtown Manhattan and helped to keep it economically above more marginal black enclaves. After the Second World War, as the black soldiers who had lived and worked with whites in the war zones came back to New York, there was intense pressure by leading black liberal groups in Harlem – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women – to ensure racial equality, promote economic opportunity, better sustain the urban environment through civic revenues, and put black people in key governmental posts at the local, state, and national levels. This was a relatively new focus in the black community since, from the establishment of the Council on African Affairs in 1937, the emphasis had been on recognizing African racial origins and building a pan-African identity. This was not an easy time, however. Many New York City whites were moving rapidly into the suburbs of Connecticut and New Jersey, leaving the inner city with less revenue and fewer opportunities for employment. Harlem did remain the heart and soul of black New York urban culture, but aside from work in the entertainment business, good jobs were increasingly difficult to find until the urban boom of the late twentieth century, when Harlem became

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rapidly gentrified. In short, although Harlem and Brooklyn became beacons for black migration from all over America, life in the Big Apple was rarely easy. DO THE RIGHT THING

DotheRightThing is my most political film to date; at the same time I think it’s my most humorous. Each time out I have tried to make the best movie possible. But with film, it’s always a roll of the dice. Please God, no snake eyes for DotheRightThing . Spike Lee, “Introduction,” in DotheRightTh ing

When Spike Lee wrote and directed Do the Right Thing to engage the issue of racism, he specifically chose Brooklyn because, as the largest of the New York City boroughs, it is home to more than half of New York City’s African American population. As Catherine Pouzoulet remarks: Brooklyn has been Spike Lee’s favorite shooting location. Lee himself never fails to emphasize his Brooklyn roots. Brooklyn is where he grew up and still lives, although he resides with other upwardly mobile young artists and professionals in gentrified neighborhoods in the Fort Greene section near Brooklyn Heights. This is also the neighborhood where his film production company, Forty Acres and a Mule, and his retail store, Spike Lee Joint, are located.25 Yet Lee does not film the gentrified Brooklyn neighbourhood where he lives but the Bed-Stuy neighbourhood, which clearly stands for the black ghetto with its substandard housing and soaring numbers of welfare recipients. Given the representation of this largely black, poor, inner-city neighbourhood, the opening shots of Rosie Perez in hot red colours dancing vigorously to the rap music of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” establishes the need for a “politics of resistance” at the level of narrative, visuals, and music.26 Victoria Johnson argues that although the use of the Public Enemy’s assertive music is decidedly political, so is all the music in the film, which emphasizes various forms of resistance.

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Early in the film it is mediated, for example, by the R’n’B records of Mister Señor Love Daddy, who represents the softer, accommodating, middle-age view that “an idyllic community is realizable. Such a community takes heed of the knowledge of its elders and embraces the present with youthful enthusiasm.”27 As Lee himself remarks, this resistance is aimed not only at the Brooklyn borough and greater New York City but also at the American nation as a whole. His script and journal entries are self-consciously about the United States in their evocation of national and ethnic flags, making it clear that he is talking about an American problem, not just a local one in New York City. “Flags will be a big visual motif in Do the Right Thing. The red, white, and blue Puerto Rican flag; the red, white, and green Italian flag; and the red, black, and green African-American flag. Cops will wear American flags on their uniforms.” Lee’s entry in his journal reads: even “the fire hydrant-johnny pump should be painted fire-truck red.”28 Following the opening shots of Rosie Perez, Do the Right Thing describes the chaotic events of one day at a local hangout – Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn – that ultimately lead to a neighbourhood riot, the killing of one black youth, and the burning of the Italian pizzeria. In portraying the main character Mookie’s participation in, and perception of, a meltdown in black, white (mainly Italian American), and Korean American relations, Lee self-consciously evokes Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s views of race relations. He does this through the frequent display of the only known photographic image of their standing together, through Smiley’s pasting their pictures on the wall of the pizzeria just before it burns, and through statements by each of these Civil Rights leaders at the conclusion. After brief opening shots of Mister Señor Love Daddy of the We Love Radio Station giving his weather forecast for searing summer heat (symbolic of escalating tension in race relations), Love Daddy himself gives a wake-up call to his community. This call to awaken the sleeping black community echoes Malcolm X’s claim in “The Ballot or the Bullet” that “22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at.” It also echoes Malcolm X’s

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statement in The Autobiography that blacks must begin to see the evils of white society that they are up against. This advice seems straightforward enough, reflecting Lee’s own comment: “That is a call to everybody, not just African-Americans, to look at what is going on around them.”29 Still, as Alex Haley reminds in his “Epilogue” to The Autobiography, “Wake up, brother” were the words that an anonymous person used when calling Malcolm X at his hotel the morning of his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom.30 The advice to wake up is thus paradoxical and ironic: it is simultaneously a wake-up call to the black community, a warning of imminent catastrophe, and an indictment of the black community’s betrayal of Malcolm X. Consequently, Mookie’s waking his sister Jade in their apartment and Da Mayor’s waking in his (Mookie and Da Mayor establishing the main generational and ideological components), alert the viewer that these situations and perspectives contain depths of irony and cannot be looked at in a simple way. As the action of Do the Right Thing switches to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria with the Italian father Sal and his two sons, Pino and Vito, arriving from the Italian district of Bensonhurst to open it, the anxiety increases. It is immediately clear that Sal is an outsider to the black community when he drives up in his 1975 El Dorado Cadillac. The Cadillac itself suggests upward social and economic mobility and is, according to Malcolm X, a prime object of black desire.31 This desire for a Cadillac is related to white economic exploitation of black communities – and reason for black anger32 – but the age (thirteen or fourteen years old) of Sal’s Cadillac suggests that the pizzeria has not been making big profits. The only other shop is owned by the Korean couple, who are fob (fresh off the boat), speak little English, and do not seem to understand the products and brands that the community wants, even though they are diligent, anxious to sell, and put in long hours. Lack of black ownership, then, typifies this community, and that becomes the crux of the tension in the film, leading to the race riot. The neighbourhood itself is run-down, and with the exception of Mookie and the dj, none of the blacks works. Granted, the action takes place on Saturday, so the idleness may not necessarily suggest a social problem, but the run-down condition of the

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neighbourhood evidences little work or income. Whether this is a problem caused by the dominant white society’s failure to employ blacks in a meaningful way or by young blacks refusing employment is not shown, but Lee himself has made comments to suggest that the blight in this community is caused by a combination of mainstream politics, absentee white ownership, and the general laziness of uneducated young blacks.33 That combination – and extremely hot weather – makes the city explosive. Blacks who inhabit this neighbourhood include Da Mayor, Mookie, Sal, Radio Raheem, Smiley, and a number of minor figures, including Mother Sister – the “matron of the block”34 and a kind of ancient-theatre goddess sitting on her perch above the community and monitoring the action. There are also the three corner men, “likable, happy-go-lucky characters who are simply shorter on deeds than words” but who “act as a chorus that offers ongoing commentary” on their neighbourhood.35 Da Mayor and Mookie in particular bear the ideological weight of King’s and Malcolm X’s views. Da Mayor, who always has a peaceful, negotiating, Martin Luther King demeanour, is played by Ossie Davis,36 who – although a personal friend of Malcolm X – was against militancy. Still, the “inevitable” conclusion37 tilts the balance toward Mookie, his friends Radio Raheem and Smiley, and Malcolm X’s black nationalistic preference for confrontation and violence – the “bullet” – as a necessary tool to deal with racism and a lack of black empowerment and ownership in businesses. Da Mayor is elderly, unemployed, and likes his beer, but he is centred in the community. Wandering around, he greets children, teenagers, and adults alike, and even when they reject him as a drunken old fool, he continues his friendliness and optimism. When Lee first conceived of Da Mayor on 28 December 1987, he was not complimentary, perceiving him as “one of those Uncle Tom Handkerchief Niggers on the block. He’s one of those people who love the white man more than he loves himself. He tries to stop the riot. He’s in front of the pizzeria urging folks not to tear it down.”38 This description has all the earmarks of a parody of Martin Luther King and liberal sympathizers – the kind of attack that Malcolm X makes frequently of liberal black Civil Rights leaders in his Autobiography.39 But hardly more than a week later

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in his journal entry for 9 January 1988, Lee is much more complimentary: Da Mayor has a special thing for the young people. He feels he’s seen it all and can teach these young kids something. Very few of the young kids bother to listen to him. They think he’s just an old drunk, but he’s not. He’s got some valuable knowledge, if they’d only listen. One of the few kids who does listen is Mookie. He will always check on Da Mayor to see how he’s doing or go to the store and get him a beer.40 Lee’s conflicting views of Da Mayor show his ambivalence about the Martin Luther King tradition, but the character of Mookie also shows his ambivalence about Malcolm X. Mookie is young, unattached, a father, and irregularly employed – part of the young black economic underclass. His name, of course, is distinctly black. As Lee remarked: My character’s name will be mookie. People might think of Mookie Wilson, who plays center field for the Mets. When I lived in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn as a kid, there was a guy named Mookie who was a great softball pitcher. He was left-handed and could throw fast as shit. That’s the first Mookie I knew.41 The name, then, evokes blackness and excellence in sports. In the same context, Lee speaks of the racist epithet “Moulan Yan” as the equivalent of “nigger” – a term that Sal’s racist son Pino uses to insult Mookie – suggesting that it stands for black identity with positive and negative valences. According to his sister, Jade, Mookie has not taken adequate responsibility in supporting and raising his young son, who lives with his girlfriend, Tina, and her mother. He gets by on various low-level, dead-end jobs that do not require much education due to, according to Lee’s own comments, his “feeling of helplessness, or powerlessness, that who you are and what effect you can have on things is absolutely nil, zero, jack shit, nada.”42 He does, however, have a presence in the black

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community and, like Da Mayor, shows kindness to other blacks on the street, but he is essentially lazy and never exceeds what he is strictly hired to do. He even violates the terms of employment by talking endlessly on the telephone to his girlfriend when he should be working, going home to take showers during the heat, and spending time with his girlfriend when delivering pizza. Although he clearly rips off his employer by pursuing his own interests when he should be working, he rejects criticism and is quick to make abusive comments, justifying Spike Lee’s assertion that he manifests Malcolm X’s views: “the character I play in Do the Right Thing is from the Malcolm X school of thought: ‘An eye for an eye.’ Fuck the turn-the-other-cheek shit.” Lee’s journal adds two important points: “If we keep up that madness we’ll be dead” and “it’s my character who sees a great injustice take place and starts the riot.”43 Mookie, then, is an example of troubled black identity in the film. He is not the model worker, rips off his employer, and is morally compromised; he has a chip on his shoulder and is quick to voice resentment. But he also senses injustice and acts on it – something of which Spike Lee totally approved44 and of which Da Mayor probably would not approve because he knows that if you keep up that madness, you will be dead. A third important character in this configuration is Radio Raheem, who carries his radio at full blast and whose confrontation with the white owner of the pizzeria over his loud music precipitates the riot that destroys Sal’s business. Lee again: He’s lost, like a lot of Black youth. Their value systems are all screwed up. They’re after more gold teeth, gold chains, and gold brass knuckle rings. They don’t understand how worthless that shit is in the long run. They are still black, poor, and uneducated. Gold won’t change that.45 Although insensitive, Raheem exhibits an interesting, almost allegorical duality through the brass knuckles he sports on each fist: the right-hand one spells out “love” and the left-hand one “hate.” These are clearly drawn from the publicly defined positions of King and Malcolm X – King equated with a Christian “love thy neighbour ethic” and Malcolm X equated with hate

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toward whites.46 It would appear that love and reconciliation contend with hate and separation and that Raheem could embrace either. When dealing with the Korean grocers, he is initially offensive but then softens and accepts them, indicating the work of love. When he and Buggin’ Out team up to confront Sal and boycott the pizzeria, it is the work of rejection and hate, and he is killed in this action. This tragic consequence may suggest that Malcolm X’s “by whatever means necessary”47 philosophy risks being self-defeating, but Lee seems to suggest that passivity is just as, and perhaps even more, unacceptable. This, too, reflects the position of Malcolm X, who declares: I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem – just to avoid violence. I don’t go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution.48 Counterbalanced with Da Mayor, Mookie, and Radio Raheem are the Italian owners of the pizzeria. They are tough, hardworking, self-interested whites whose views of African Americans run from affectionate to racist. Sal and Vito clearly like Mookie, and neither would admit to racism. But even though they may not be racist, Pino clearly is, so the family as a whole shares the blight. According to Lee, “Some of it had to have been taught him by his father Sal,”49 and Sal’s repeating the line “This is America” is “key” to an understanding of the film,50 for racism exists everywhere and is the defining issue for the United States. This family poses the problem that Da Mayor and Mookie – and behind them, King and Malcolm X – struggle to resolve. Yet another important character is Smiley, who has cerebral palsy and stutters but tries to sell hand-coloured postcards of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X standing together. That Smiley reappears about a dozen times as he listens to Malcolm X’s speeches and tries to sell the postcards suggests the importance of these black leaders to the action. His inability to articulate their names, however, is open to several interpretations: (1) the film’s difficulty in choosing between disparate political positions on race

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relations; (2) “the fading relevance of both Malcolm and Martin”;51 or (3) a dialogue putting them into conversation with possible alternatives that go beyond either position. Because it is Smiley who clearly positions the importance of these leaders and because he is the one who actually burns the pizzeria, Lee considers him the “moral spine of the piece.”52 Because the film is so gripping and the spectre of racial violence so sobering, the audience may well hope for King’s peaceful alternative, even though the film moves inexorably toward Malcolm X’s necessity of violence. After the riot between the Italian owners of the pizzeria and the local black community, Lee actually screens comments by King (“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral … a descending spiral ending in destruction for all”) and by Malcolm X (“I don’t even call it violence when it’s self defense, I call it intelligence”). In this way he gives his audience an opportunity to consider their views with respect to the incident. Although critics such as Mark Reid note that the film portrays many unquestionably favourable aspects of blacks – including their trendsetting clothes and positions in popular culture and the entertainment industry53 – it is the momentum building to the violent climax and “incitement to racial violence”54 that stunned the viewing audience and critics. The ending may be shocking, horrific, even inflammatory, but as Douglas Kellner notes, even though it denies a King-like reconciliation, it raises questions about “the futility of black politics in the present age and allegorically enacts the fading relevance of both Malcolm and Martin.” He views it as an “evacuation of viable political options for Blacks and people of color in the present age.”55 To make the viewers think about the issues and begin to firm up workable social alternatives, Do the Right Thing self-consciously engages the rhetoric and ideology of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X from three of their most famous speeches. Two of these are King’s “Give Us the Ballot – We Will Transform the South” (1957) and “I Have a Dream” (1963), and the other is Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), itself a response to both speeches by King. In addition, the script relies on Malcolm X’s Autobiography for specific incidents, key phrases,

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and governing attitudes. These documentary roots obviously do not limit the writers’ concern to Brooklyn, the South, or anywhere else in particular. Rather, they speak about race in America at large, and the actual language and images of these speeches as presented in Do the Right Thing suggest a sophisticated political discourse at work. Notes James C. McKelly: In the bilaterally configured semiotics of political discourse, the figure “King” has come to signify the ethics of reform: justice, integrationism, passive resistance, patience, forgiveness, constructive engagement, and an altruistic faith in democracy and in the basic goodness of the individuals who compose the dominant majority. By contrast, the figure “X” has come to signify the ethics of revolution: power, separatism, proactive resistance, decisiveness, responsibility, autonomy, and a realistic awareness of the systemic failures of democratic capitalism and the complicity, whether intentional or de facto, of the individuals who comprise America’s capitalist society.56 When Mister Señor Love Daddy of Do the Right Thing laments the fierce heat in this run-down Brooklyn neighbourhood, he reminds the viewer of King’s well-known comment in “I Have a Dream” that “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality … Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.”57 As noted earlier, however, the idea of waking up is also a rhetorical motif of Malcolm X, so this opening scene with Mister Señor Love Daddy resonates with both black leaders, creating considerable ambiguity. Moreover, when Mookie carefully counts his money at the beginning of the film and when he later seeks his salary from Sal, who throws the bills on the ground in front of him after he assists in torching the pizzeria, this preoccupation with money draws the viewer again back to King’s “I Have a Dream,” where he talks about the architects of the American republic signing a “promissory note”:

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When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.58 Malcolm X also picks up on this rhetoric of money, noting that, after “three hundred and ten years [in which they] worked in this country without a dime in return,” blacks would now “collect for our investment.”59 One pronouncement does not trump the other but rather creates a tension that the audience presumably needs to decipher. The short supply of money for Mookie and others in his beaten-down neighbourhood is clear evidence that this promissory note has not been delivered a quarter-century later either – something that Malcolm X would have predicted. Indeed, he asked his black listeners to wake up, see their victimization, and act “by whatever means necessary”60 to overthrow the yoke of oppression in an America that poorly serves the blacks: No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flagsaluter, or a flag-waver – no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes

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of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare. These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at. They’re becoming politically mature.61 Mister Señor Love Daddy’s plea to wake up on this sweltering summer day resonates with Malcolm X’s urgent appeal that whatever means it takes to wake blacks up is satisfactory because Martin Luther King’s gentle prodding has done no good. The “ballot” has not achieved the required results a hundred years after the Civil War, so a “bullet” is necessary. In Do the Right Thing the “bullet” is the systematic destruction and burning of Sal’s pizzeria. That this act denies the local residents a place to hang out and eat is a problem, but in keeping with the force of the film’s symbolic argument based on King and Malcolm X, it is, at least in part, the right thing. Perhaps another part of the right thing is the sparing of the Korean’s business because he insisted “Me colored, too” – actually a direct quotation from Malcolm X in The Autobiography speaking of a Chinese shop owner who tried to avoid having his store trashed in the Harlem riots of 1935 by using that phrase.62 All the same, the dream of brotherhood, freedom, and justice has been denied, and thus, in Malcolm X’s view, the table that offers a false dinner must be destroyed. The film may leave some viewers hoping that perhaps out of the ashes of Sal’s old order something new will arise, but even that is uncertain because the economic and social capital has been spent, and it is unclear how it can be easily replaced. Arguably, however, this film is not about the possibility of integrating black and white or of sitting down at a table together but about creating black manhood for Mookie and others – “liberating the black man in American society rather than integrating the black man into that society.”63 In his afterword to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ossie Davis defends his eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral – and, by extension, the afterword itself – on the grounds that, whatever the differences in their ideological frameworks, Malcolm was “a man”:

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Most [who wrote Davis letters after his eulogy] took special pains to disagree with much or all of what Malcolm said and what he stood for. That is, with one singing exception, they all, every last, black, glory-hugging one of them, knew that Malcolm – whatever else he was or was not – Malcolm was a man!64 This assertion of Malcolm’s manhood places him in a tradition going back at least to Frederick Douglass, who refused to take abuse from a plantation owner and asserted his manhood by fighting back. He also developed his manhood by learning how to read, write, and educate himself to the point that he was considered one of the most learned men of his generation. Since that time, black literature has paid tribute to those who could rescue and fashion their individual identities, and that of their entire race, in such a way. This is not in any way to justify Malcolm X’s particular kind of manhood in treating men and women callously – for example, his white mistress, Sophia, in both The Autobiography and Lee’s film Malcolm X.65 Rather, it is to recognize his great strength in turning from self-abusive drugs and alcohol and a life of crime that included pushing drugs to educating and raising himself while in prison.66 Also, as Kellner aptly remarks, “standing up to the white power structure, fighting back, and acting decisively to maintain one’s self-respect” is part of this manhood.67 MALCOLM X

I believe in political action, yes. Any kind of political action. I believe in action, period. Whatever kind of action is necessary. When you hear me say ‘by any means necessary,’ I mean exactly that. I believe in anything that is necessary to correct unjust conditions – political, economic, social, physical, anything that’s necessary. I believe in it – as long as it’s intelligently directed and designed to get results. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks

The historical Malcolm X was considerably different from the Mookie of Do the Right Thing, not least because he clearly made

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a decision to raise himself from the dregs of society and alter his condition and that of his people – an act of will over some fifteen years. A hipster-hustler in Harlem until he was twenty one, Malcolm became a self-educated prisoner during the next six and a half years, then a minister of Elijah Muhammad, and finally – but all too briefly – an emerging internationalist and pan-religionist trying to escape the traps and exclusivity of white supremacy and Nation of Islam politics. Indeed, Lee’s film shows that Malcolm’s life was a journey – that “there isn’t one Malcolm, there are several.”68 The struggles of this pilgrim’s progress are as apparent in The Autobiography as they are in Malcolm X. Kellner goes as far as to call the latter a “morality tale” or “political morality play” that interrogates “the right thing” for Blacks in both the individual and political sense. In this reading, the figure of Malcolm X is the center of the film, and the crucial transitions involve his transformation from criminal to dedicated black nationalist working for the Nation of Islam and subsequently to a more secular internationalist. The key, then, is Malcolm X as moral ideal, as an enlightened model of a black transformation to self-sovereignty.69 Lee’s Malcolm X – like The Autobiography itself – sets most of the action in New York City, but it focuses on Harlem rather than Brooklyn.70 Harlem is special for African Americans because it possesses a legacy that has come to stand for the richness and diversity of black history and culture in the United States. Neither Malcolm in The Autobiography nor Lee’s depiction of him loses an opportunity to show the variety of Harlem’s life. Regardless of how sorry Malcolm X later was to have misspent his youth so completely, he never laments having experienced the benefits of that culture, including the music of Charlie Bird, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, and other jazz and blues greats. Harlem, however, was also a place where blacks and whites alike came to dance, smoke pot, sniff cocaine, and party at the many bars, nightclubs, and speakeasies. This gave it fame, not to say notoriety, as a place

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where anything went – booze, drugs, and prostitution – for both races alike. In Do the Right Thing Lee had focused on a young person’s New York where the use of drugs, hard liquor, and prostitution were not issues. But in Malcolm X the unemployed, murderous, drug-dealing youth are very much the issue, and Malcolm’s contempt for the American culture in general and whites in particular – and his conversion to an extreme black Muslim view and radical black politics – owes much to his direct involvement in every kind of immoral and illegal activity that Harlem could offer him. In Harlem, as depicted in both The Autobiography and the film, he was a “predatory animal,”71 junkie, pimp, and hustler of the worst sort, smoking marijuana, sniffing cocaine, selling reefers, robbing houses, fencing loot, and taking money where he could find it, including from his white mistress, Sophia. In this period of the 1940s, he saw that whites, who would not offer blacks a job downtown and did not want them as friends and neighbours, had no compunction about coming to Harlem, operating businesses, exploiting black labour, consorting with black women, and buying the booze and drugs offered by the hustlers. Malcolm X came to despise these whites, whom other blacks foolishly emulated but who had “the world’s lowest morals,” even as they made self-righteous and pious statements in public.72 This period of his initiation into the street culture of Harlem, ending with his conviction and imprisonment for robbery (and, he says, for sleeping with white women), takes up fully a third of both The Autobiography and the film. Presented in an uncritical documentary fashion, the latter makes the audience share the exhilaration that a young man would feel in the fast-paced Harlem of that period – and thus makes his reform even more dramatic. Besides being about Harlem, this first part of the film is also very much about the United States as a whole. Malcolm X opens with sustained shots of the American flag and ends with the burning of the flag coupled with scenes of police brutality against Rodney King in Los Angeles. From these images, it is quite clear that the inner-city decay, violence, and brutality that Malcolm experienced in Harlem are exactly the same across the nation,

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providing a warrant for Malcolm X’s conversion to Islam and vitriolic outcry against the whites – and showing the fertile ground for the growth of the Nation of Islam in turning young blacks away from self-destructive behaviour. Coupled with images later in the film, these images also suggest that the US is a violent society that will victimize Malcolm X and Martin Luther King alike – one in which violence is so endemic that it will also take the life of John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States. Malcolm X and The Autobiography make it apparent that the transition from uneducated street hustler and drug addict to selfeducated Muslim preacher was not easy. The critical factor appears to have been Malcolm’s growing belief that the white man is a devil and his Christian religion a cult of Satan (or in the founding myths of Elijah Muhammad, the creation of the evil scientist Yacub): The devil white man cut … black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity. In one generation, the black slave women in America had been raped by the slavemaster white man until there had begun to emerge a homemade, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color … The slavemaster forced his family name upon this rape-mixed race, which the slavemaster began to call “the Negro.” It brainwashed this “Negro” to think he was superior if his complexion showed more of the white pollution of the slavemaster. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, an be humble and to sing, and to pray, and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slavemaster white man enjoyed his heaven.73 Although at least some of this outrage grew out of Malcolm X’s street experiences in Harlem, the philosophical underpinnings

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came from the preaching of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Once past the initial point of atheist resistance to any religion, Malcolm began to absorb the teachings of the Nation of Islam in an unqualified way and set about to read whatever he could in support of the view of the white man’s immoral and evil nature. This had the positive effect of making him a literate and highly moral man, and his transformation is a real testimony to what can be achieved by education and moral improvement. Ironically, these teachings also had the negative effect of extending his uncritical state of mind to his newfound religion and mentor Elijah Muhammad. As part of the mythology of the Nation of Islam that the whites were an inferior evil race, it was justified for the blacks to hate them. Malcolm X took up this rhetoric in public and became vilified in the press for voicing this hatred to whites. In The Autobiography his labelling of whites as devils and his wish for national separation from them elicited a strong response from the media when first covered in an article that used “Hate” as a headline. As he remarks, “in New York City there was an instant avalanche of public reaction. It’s my personal opinion that the ‘Hate … Hate …’ title was primarily responsible for the reaction. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, black and white, were exclaiming ‘Did you hear it? Did you see it? Preaching hate of white people!’”74 His comments on the common perception that he stood for violence are revealing: I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice. I feel that if white people were attacked by Negroes – if the forces of law prove unable, or inadequate, or reluctant to protect those whites from those Negroes – then those white people should protect and defend themselves from those Negroes, using arms if necessary. And I feel that when the law fails to protect Negroes from whites’ attack, then those Negroes should use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves.75 The manner in which he accepted the stories and teachings of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, the intense vilification of all whites, and the unproblematized acceptance of information from

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his selection of reading material suggest, however, an acute lack of perception and critical awareness. It is this that contributes to the film’s interior dialogic, as the audience rejoices in Malcolm X’s reform yet sees the unqualified acceptance of the stories of Elijah Muhammad as extremism, bigotry, and racial hostility. These two aspects are virtually impossible to reconcile but must stand against each other. Despite Lee’s awareness that Minister Farrakhan wanted a sympathetic portrait of Malcolm X, part of what the film – and The Autobiography itself – shows is that Malcolm was always politically, morally, and religiously naive about what he did and believed. He seemed simply to fall into belief in the stories and ideology of Elijah Muhammad in the same way that he fell into a life of crime – without much self-critical thought. Although the manhood he gains has significant personal and social value and is part of the morality of the autobiography and film, it is rendered ambiguous and uncertain by his impulsiveness of thought and belief – an impulsiveness and lack of critical awareness that he noted with regret in his conversations with Alex Haley.76 This ambiguity of self-education and unthinking acceptance is central to the inner dialogic of the film, which places such opposites alongside one another without a resolution. Many of the audience failed to see the importance of this dialogic and hoped for a more clear-cut direction in the film. Kellner, for one, is critical of Lee for presenting Malcolm’s early years as thoughtlessly “attractive” and “sympathetic,”77 even though this uncritical manner is precisely the way Malcolm X presents them in The Autobiography. Lee’s purposes are not the same as Malcolm’s, however. Malcolm X simply describes himself, but Lee shows how his falling into youthful folly was similar to falling into patterns of hatred fostered by the Nation of Islam. Showing one pattern in relation to another, the film does not become a hagiography in defence of violence. This, I believe, endows Lee’s work with more irony than Malcolm’s own, given that the Nation of Islam’s assassination of Malcolm X in a hail of bullets was far more egregious than the indiscretions and crimes that Malcolm committed as a young man – and given that his

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advocacy of violence helped to reinforce a culture of violence in which he would become a victim. The film sympathetically narrates Malcolm’s coming to understanding and recognition – from his youthful indiscretions and early life of crime, through his uncritical acceptance of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, to his journey to Mecca – that whites were not as satanic or blacks as righteous as he had believed. But the reverse side of the dialogic is Martin Luther King’s understanding that vitriolic assertions and racial hatred (whether from blacks or whites) ultimately come home to roost. King does not appear in this film until the very end, and he hardly enters The Autobiography by name, but Malcolm X clearly targets him in a scathing attack on the “biggest Negro ‘leaders,’ so called, in 1960,” accusing them of supporting “good massa” in their attacks on his black supremacy statements.78 Later he equates them with Uncle Tom. King’s historical perspective and legacy become part of the cautionary way the viewer approaches both the film and the book. The concluding portion of Malcolm X spends more time on Malcolm’s fear for his life and on his speeches for several reasons. First, this was the time when he was becoming increasingly famous and controversial, giving numerous speeches and press releases about his split from the Nation of Islam, his hajj to Mecca, thoughts about the universality of Islam, and dawning awareness of the need for rapprochement between races and religions. This was the time when Malcolm started to become a more thinking, self-conscious person – “after twelve years of never thinking for as much as five minutes about myself, I became able finally to muster the nerve, and the strength, to start facing the facts, to think for myself.”79 This was also the time of his realization that he was in peril from the Nation of Islam because he questioned Elijah Muhammad’s virtue and authority.80 Finally, it was the time when he was trapped by everything he had said against the whites and liberal blacks as well as by his negative responses to Elijah Muhammad. Given Malcolm’s vicious attacks on whites, defence of the necessity for violence by blacks, and increasing discomfiture with the mores of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, it was

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difficult for him to formulate positive race relations after his revelation at Mecca. As he saw it, the organization he hoped to build “would differ from the Nation of Islam in that it would embrace all faiths of black men, and it would carry into practice what the Nation of Islam had only preached” – namely the eradication of political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation, as well as the fostering of brotherhood and colourblindness.81 He would not have the opportunity to flesh out this design. This makes the conclusion of the book and the film ambiguous, suggesting there is more work to do in positive race relations if Malcolm X’s too-easy acceptance of black liberationist and nationalist ideology and his later senseless assassination are not to become normative solutions to knotty social problems. Somehow, Malcolm X’s position must be placed in a dynamic relation with that of Martin Luther King so that the strength and weakness of either position does not dominate. As Lee’s rhetoric suggests, Malcolm’s legacy of hate and fear became impossible to overcome in the short period he lived after the hajj. The irony of this may well represent a moment of realization for Spike Lee – that he understands ignoring the problem would not be right, would not be “manly,” but also that hostile and bitter responses tear down society and social relations rather than improve them. Moreover, critical self-consciousness and selfawareness need to accompany all social revelations and revisions. And so the process of Malcolm X’s dialogue with Martin Luther King must go on, with the audience having to think carefully about the strengths and weaknesses of each man’s philosophy. In effect, this means defining racial and community problems that beset the United States, recognizing competing claims for causes and solutions, and beginning to imagine how to construct an American society that can fashion responsible citizens, foster the black community and redress inequities, and be fair and just for all.

NOTES

1 Owens, 48. 2 Stone, 10.

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3 The term “synthesis” comes from Vernier, 79. Lee is quoted in Crowdus and Georgakas, 75. 4 Malcolm X’s daughter is cited in Shabazz, xvii. 5 These are the words of Ossie Davis in his afterword to The Autobiography of Malcolm X; see Davis, 464. 6 Quoted in Crowdus and Georgakas, 72. 7 Reynolds, 140. 8 Quoted in Crowdus and Georgakas, 72. 9 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 182–3. 10 Pouzoulet, 31. 11 Lee, “Journal,” 91. 12 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 251. 13 Quoted in Lee, Do the Right Thing, 120. 14 Lee is not the only person who shares the confusion about what is meant by “any means necessary.” Most interpret the phrase to mean that violence is a valid means to gain the economic and political wellbeing of blacks, but his daughter says: “Malcolm X never advocated violence. He was an advocate of cultural and social reconstruction – until a balance of equality was shared, ‘by any means necessary.’ Generally, this phrase of his was misused, even by those who were his supporters. But the statement was intended to encourage a paralysed constituent of American culture to consider the range of options to which they were entitled – the ‘means’”; see Shabazz, xiii. 15 Lee, “Journal,” 76. 16 Mitchell, 115. 17 Reid, “Introduction,” 8; Stone, 4; Kellner, 85; Pouzoulet, 43–4. Perhaps the lack of relevance of King for the working poor in the ghetto is the reason that Lee did not go on to make a similar film about Martin Luther King. 18 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 197. 19 Crowdus and Georgakas, 69. 20 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 320. 21 Pouzoulet, 38–9. See also Peter Swirski’s All Roads Lead to the American City, which looks at the complex problems facing the development of American cities in the twentieth century. 22 Cooper, 14, 15. 23 See Lee, “Journal,” 32–3, quotation at 33. 24 Lee, “Production Notes,” 118.

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Pouzoulet, 33. Ibid., 34. Johnson, 59. Lee, “Journal,” 83. Malcolm X, “Bullet,” 26; Malcolm X, Autobiography, 217; Lee, My Story, 99. Haley, 439. In Malcolm X, Spike Lee uses that telephone call as one of a string of warnings to Malcolm X about attempts on his life by the Nation of Islam as well as the CIA, so the irony of awakening is clearly on his mind in both films. Malcolm X, Autobiography, 87, refers to young black hustlers who, having come quickly into money, would buy a Cadillac to confirm their new status. See ibid., 93. See, for example, Lee, “Journal,” 36–7, 59, 68, 72; and Lee, “Production Notes,” 109. Glicksman, 15. Pouzoulet, 35. Davis delivered a famous eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral, which Lee uses at the conclusion of Malcolm X. Canby, n.p. Lee, “Journal,” 35. See, for example, Malcolm X, Autobiography, 244. Lee, “Journal,” 52. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 34. It is not entirely clear what Lee means by “that madness.” On the face of it, these words refer to blacks having had to turn the cheek for hundreds of years in the United States, but they could also refer to a violent refusal to do so anymore. Noted in Glicksman, 7. Lee, “Journal,” 59. Malcolm X, Autobiography, 242–3. See Malcolm X, “Bullet,” 26. Malcolm X, Autobiography, 374, original emphasis. Quoted in Glicksman, 18. Lee, “Journal,” 67. Kellner, 84.

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Lee, My Story, 106. Reid, “Introduction,” 5. Ebert, n.p. Kellner, 84, 77. McKelly, 216. King, “Dream,” 218. Ibid., 217. Malcolm X, “Bullet,” 32. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 26. Malcolm X, Autobiography, 117. In Malcolm’s time, this quotation had a legendary status, but it was first reported nationwide in Time, 1 April 1935. Handler, xxv–xxvi. Malcolm X does talk repeatedly about what it means to be a man – racially and sexually – even when talking about youthful indiscretions; see Autobiography, 95. Davis, 464, original emphasis. Almost no one thinks of Malcolm as having any real concern for the rights of women, but his daughter, Attallah Shabazz, in her “Foreword” to The Autobiography, defends him fully as a sensitive supporter of the women in his family. Malcolm X, Autobiography, 102. Kellner, 85. Lee, My Story, 201. Kellner, 86. Malcolm X was born in Omaha, and the family moved to various places in Wisconsin and Michigan before his father was killed, after which his mother was institutionalized and he moved first to Boston and then New York City. Malcolm X, Autobiography, 137. Ibid., 125. Malcolm X provides plenty of examples of blacks’ foolish emulation of whites, but one he cites frequently is their “konking” their heads with lye to straighten the hair; see, for example, ibid., 126. Ibid., 165–6, original emphasis. Ibid., 242–3, original emphasis. Ibid., 373. See, for example, Malcolm X, Autobiography, 419–20. Kellner, 86.

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78 Malcolm X, Autobiography, 244. 79 Ibid., 313. 80 Although Malcolm X had heard stories of Elijah Muhammad’s straying from a virtuous life, he refused to believe them until Muhammad himself confessed to it. See Malcolm X, Autobiography, 244. 81 Ibid., 322, 323, 345.

5 Living in Fictitious Times: Michael Moore’s Awful Truth about America N I CH O LA S RU D D I CK

What is the worst lie a president can tell? “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky?” Or … “He has weapons of mass destruction – the world’s deadliest weapons – which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies.” One of those lies got a president impeached. The other lie not only got the liar who told it the war he wanted, but also resulted in huge business deals for his friends and virtually assures him a landslide victory in the next election. Michael Moore, Dude, Where’s My Country?

Although Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) failed to defeat George W. Bush’s campaign for re-election, the film confirmed Michael Moore as the American left’s most potent political commentator. And although Sicko (2007) may yet fail to shame the next administration into reforming the US health system, its writer/director has already succeeded far beyond revitalizing the political documentary. He has awakened Americans to the possibility that the nation has been hijacked by an unscrupulous cabal; has shown them that, even when their nation is at war, it is not necessarily unpatriotic to question their leader; and has made a strong case to the rest of the world that reflexive anti-Americanism is an inadequate response to turpitude in Washington, dc.

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Much of Moore’s unparalleled success is rooted in his ability to articulate a thesis about contemporary American politics that is coherent, comprehensible, and plausible. As with other political writers of recent years – Joseph Heller or Philip Roth, to name but two – his thesis is well grounded both historically and ethically. In Moore’s case it has evolved over the past twenty years, adapting to changing political circumstances. His major works – whether books of polemical nonfiction or film documentaries – each constitute a chapter of the thesis, with the remainder of his oeuvre providing structural and documentary support. Synthesized and condensed, the thesis as it stands today might run something like this. As the fall of the Soviet Union left no external bogeyman for the US to contend with, the country lost its bearings (Downsize This!). An unscrupulous cabal of corporate executives seized control of the drifting giant and are now running the corporation known as the United States of America for their own profit (Stupid White Men). They moved industrial jobs to cheaper labour markets in Mexico or offshore, devastating the US industrial heartland (Roger & Me). They deflected the anger of the downsized workers onto easy scapegoats by cultivating a climate of fear and simultaneously made a financial killing by encouraging the purchase of weaponry for self-defence (Bowling for Columbine). Aided by compliant media, the cabal of corporate executives subverted US democracy, even fixing the 2000 presidential election. They used the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, as a pretext to cultivate a siege mentality, suppress civil liberties, and cow the American people into submission to their will. Pretending to wage a “war on terror,” they sought to improve the profitability of their investments in the oil and armaments industries by invading Iraq (Fahrenheit 9/11). Shameless in their lack of national pride and in their indifference to the principles of social justice, they strenuously resist all attempts to reform the health system, even though the US, the richest country in the world, is the only industrialized nation without universal healthcare. They know that their continued ascendancy depends on keeping middle-class Americans in a state of constant anxiety to retain their jobs, lest they lose their medical coverage (Sicko).

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On the basis of his books and films, Moore could be described as a living oxymoron: a pragmatic idealist. On the one hand, he appeals to the American people, whom he considers to be fundamentally decent and politically “very, very liberal,” to initiate reform from the ground up.1 On the other hand, he views this majority as lazy and easily distracted – as slackers, to put it bluntly – who need satirical prodding to remind them that they are duty-bound to maintain perpetual vigilance over their leaders and participate actively in the political process if American democracy is to function properly and constitutional principles are to be upheld. Moore’s pragmatism overrides partisan considerations, and his ethical idealism does not inhibit him from changing his mind. In 2001 he chastised Al Gore for running a feeble presidential campaign; he more recently encouraged Gore to run in 2008 because Gore’s opposition to the Iraq War and environmental activism earned his admiration.2 He formerly expressed great admiration for Hillary Clinton; recently, he revealed that she has compromised her claim to be a health reformer by accepting more campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies than any other Democratic presidential candidate.3 Clearly, Moore is no ideologue. If Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and Tony Blair could call themselves socialists, then Moore is not a socialist. If tolerance for all points of view is what makes one a liberal, then he is not a liberal either. He is not against corporations or capitalism per se, nor does he hate Republicans because of their party affiliation or despise the evangelical right because of the unverifiability of its members’ claims to be born again. Instead, Moore’s politics is rooted in an ethics that is conservative insofar as it draws on time-tested guiding principles. For him, the golden rule holds true: “When you treat people well, 99.9 percent of the time they respond in kind … Isn’t it the right thing to do?”4 He is against unfair policies, especially those affecting people without power or status, and is prepared to brand them as “wrong,” “immoral,” or “just plain nuts.”5 He explains his ethics by arguing that corporate profitability cannot be a moral end in itself or we would allow General Motors (gm) to sell crack cocaine.

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Moore is on surer footing when exposing what is wrong with the current political dispensation than when envisioning the details of an ameliorated world. Still, the nature of his idealism is evident from his conviction that America should strive to be “a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we truly need to fear.”6 What excites his indignation most is the disjunction between a public position and a private agenda. He despises individual, corporate, or institutional hypocrisy, especially when it involves a transgression of ethics or constitutional principles. He loathes the Bush administration because it cynically used the worstever enemy attack on American soil to further an agenda of greed, in the process suspending civil liberties and passing a Patriot Act that is “as un-American as Mein Kampf … perhaps the most reckless and irresponsible action our Congress have ever taken.”7 In The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader Moore claims first and foremost to be a filmmaker and artist. Yet he is as far from the prevailing academic paradigm of the highbrow artist – “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” – as possible.8 Not all art is impersonal, however, any more than all journalism is, pace Fox News, “Fair and Balanced.” In my view, Moore is an extremely accomplished, possibly a great artist, who has fully earned his sixty-plus awards. Two of his major films, Roger & Me and Bowling for Columbine, are masterpieces of “subjective non-fiction.”9 In the vein of the novel-with-a-purpose (Tendenzroman), Sicko is a virtuoso example of a documentarywith-a-purpose. Even Fahrenheit 9/11, a tendentious picture that did not quite achieve its purpose of unseating Bush, contains superlative passages of filmmaking. In all his nonfictions, whether books or films, Moore displays the literary artist’s ability to tell good stories. And as with good fiction, the unity, coherence, dramatic structure, and rhetorical power of his narratives persuade the audiences to accept them as true. Most writers approach truth-telling indirectly: they create counterfactual narrative scenarios – fictions – to express truths of a higher order than those available through the slavish reflection of the world as it is. However, even as he employs fictional

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techniques, such as the use of a first-person narrator to enhance audience identification, Moore deliberately operates in the realm of nonfiction. For him, contemporary American political discourse is rotten with fiction, and this rottenness cannot be remedied by adding more counterfactual ingredients to the mix. So he aims directly and transparently to reflect and engage with the world as he sees it, and thereby affect the world as it is. Although, to his detractors, his application of fictional techniques to nonfiction distorts rather than reinforces the validity of his message, Moore has developed a consistent and rigorous critique of the American political system and a satirical method of pointing up its flaws that is artful and manipulative but not disingenuous or dishonest. Although he tells painful stories about the US, he is popular, even at home, because the majority of his audience are persuaded that his stories are true. Most Americans agree with Moore’s low estimate of their leaders, concur that the responsibility for the moral health of their nation ultimately resides with themselves, admire him for his courage in confronting a powerful establishment, and praise him as a true American. Although his detractors have frequently condemned him as a propagandist, Moore is not one by any accepted definition of that term. As John Berger has pointed out vis-à-vis Fahrenheit 9/11: “Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite,” requiring “a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans.”10 Unless one entertains the unlikely idea that Moore’s oeuvre is part of an experiment by corporate America in reverse psychology, it is hard to see how linking Moore with Leni Riefenstahl (as Christopher Hitchens does) or with Goebbels (as Lionel Chetwynd does) could be anything other than desperate attempts to smear him.11 The right rallies its troops under a banner bearing the slogan Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, a gesture not conducing to mature political debate.12 Finding no virtue in trading insults, and conceding that few truths are true in everyone’s eyes, I propose that Moore’s oeuvre stands or falls on its ability to tell the truth as he sees it. I will argue that Moore’s vision of the American political scene is clear, consistent, and plausible and that when he puts his thoughts on

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paper or edits film as a documentarian must, this vision is not betrayed. Finally, I will contrast his work with a recent documentary that attempts to debunk Moore, Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore (2007), in order to reveal Moore’s strengths as a truth-teller. Regardless of their claims to sympathize with Moore’s radical perspective, the directors of Manufacturing Dissent have a much poorer grasp than Moore himself on what makes true eyewitness testimony and how to bring such truth to light. OSCAR

& ME

I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us [applause], and we would like to … They’re here, they’re here in solidarity with me because we like non-fiction. We like non-fiction, and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. [Cheers and some booing.] We, we live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or the fictitious orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush! Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you! And any time [orchestra strikes up] you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against ya, your time is up. Thank you very much. Michael Moore, “2003 Oscar Acceptance Address for Best Documentary Film”

Speaking on 20 November 2002, Bush demanded that Saddam Hussein peacefully surrender his weapons of mass destruction or the US would lead a “coalition of the willing” to disarm him forcibly. Four months later, on 20 March 2003, an American-led coalition invaded Iraq in an action that the White House promoted as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Two days later, in a radio address to the American people, Bush listed the aims of the mission: “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”13 He emphasized that the US-led coalition was broad and consisted of more than forty countries, but he neglected to point out that only three of these countries had provided ground troops to support the US invasion force of approximately a quarter-million.

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Nor did he mention that six coalition members had no military at all. Three days after the invasion, at the Academy Awards ceremony in the Kodak Theatre, Michael Moore received the Oscar for best documentary feature for Bowling for Columbine. Delivered live to a global audience at a sensitive historical moment, his acceptance speech burned with the mixture of outspokenness, humour, and defiance that characterizes his whole oeuvre. Both the text and the context perfectly exemplify not only Moore’s political thesis but also his rhetorical ability to rise to the occasion. In his brief but pointed speech, Moore presented himself as a documentary filmmaker given the opportunity to act as spokesman for his fellow nominees. Like them, he makes documentaries rather than feature films because the political current of the times is “fictitious,” making it every responsible documentarian’s duty to refuse to thicken the prevailing miasma of unreality, denial, and escapism. In Stupid White Men (2001) Moore claimed that “President” Bush was not democratically elected by a majority of the American people but came to power through electoral fraud, cronyism, and media manipulation.14 Anyone watching the Academy Awards ceremony who had read his bestselling nonfiction would have understood what he meant by “fictitious” election results. Anyone who has since seen Fahrenheit 9/11 will know that Moore also considers Bush to be a “fictitious president” because he and his administration are liars and hypocrites who sent the US to war for bogus reasons. They did not order the invasion of Iraq to save the world from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, or to bring al-Qaeda to justice, or to free the Iraqi people. Their aim was to extend corporate wealth and power by gaining greater control of the Middle East oil supply. However, in March 2003 few in Moore’s global television audience could have known for certain what was only revealed after Saddam had been overthrown: that Iraq did not have the weapons of mass destruction that Bush had cited as the casus belli. Moore himself could not have known for certain either, but as his “Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush on the Eve of War” made clear, he was sure that Bush was targeting Iraq to distract Americans from a worsening economy and to enrich his

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cronies with oil wealth.15 That Moore at the Academy Awards could so publicly, confidently, and correctly accuse the president of sending America to war for “fictitious” reasons is a measure of the acuity of his political insight. It is also a measure of his courage: at that time, polls indicated that 80 per cent of Americans supported the invasion.16 The “fictition of duct tape” refers to the Department of Homeland Security’s suggestion on its Ready America website that a good way for American families to protect themselves against terrorist attack would be to shelter under a homemade canopy of plastic sheeting held together by duct tape!17 The “fictitious orange alerts” refers to the five-level colour-coded Homeland Security Advisory System implemented in January 2003. An orange alert represents the second highest “Risk of Terrorist Attack.” Indeed, as Moore was speaking in Los Angeles, the threat level in the US was orange, having been raised on 7 February 2003. “Homeland,” “duct tape,” and “orange alerts” serve Moore as metonymies of the post-9/11 tactics employed by the Bush administration to cultivate a climate of fear. The tactics are “fictitious,” as they are intended not really to keep the American people alert to terrorist attack but instead to make them more docile and easier to manipulate by the administration for its own ends. As congressman Jim McDermott presciently put it, “as long as this administration is in charge … [the terror threat level]’s not going to go down to green or blue.”18 Moore’s nonce word “fictition” is a back formation from the adjective “fictitious,” almost certainly influenced by “factitious” (sham). This may strike one as an uncouth solecism made in the heat of a public moment by a writer/director who, as his critics might point out, did not even complete grade 12 English. The truth is, however, that Moore is rarely flustered by being the focus of public attention, hostile or otherwise. If anything, the public arena tends only to sharpen his rhetorical focus. It is likelier that he perpetrated this “fictitious” usage deliberately by way of alluding to the countless malapropisms and other verbal infelicities, known widely as Bushisms, characteristic of the inarticulate fortythird president (coiner of “misunderestimate,” “embetter,” and “resignate,” among others).19

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Let us for the moment accept that Moore’s speech was – precisely as his arch-detractors David Hardy and Jason Clarke allege – a “calculated ‘outburst’” characteristic of Moore’s “carefully plotted spontaneity.”20 What might Moore have calculated to be the point of coining such an egregious Bushism? Possibly to draw attention to the irony that a president who has degrees from both Yale and Harvard has little facility with the English language. He may well have calculated that, given Bush’s habitual malapropisms, it is highly unlikely that this “functional illiterate” got into two Ivy League schools on intellectual ability.21 A logical inference from this calculation is that family connections or money or both were used to procure Bush’s entry to these elite universities. And if “fictition” was indeed calculated, then it was a calculated reminder that American political discourse, meritocratic ideals, and academic integrity are corrupted by the wealthy elite, whom Bush fronts and who manipulate him as their stooge. The day before the Academy Awards ceremony, the late Pope John Paul II had reacted to the American invasion by stating: When war, like the one now in Iraq, threatens the fate of humanity, it is even more urgent for us to proclaim, with a firm and decisive voice, that only peace is the way of building a more just and caring society.22 This is, of course, the same pope who during the Cold War had bravely opposed the communist regime in Poland by supporting the reformist Solidarity trade-union movement, and whose enormous moral influence had certainly hastened the fall of the Soviet empire. Moore, a practising Roman Catholic, would have taken the pope’s statement on Iraq as strong support for his own opposition to an increasingly dictatorial administration in Washington, dc, and an encouragement to oppose an unjust war “with a firm and decisive voice.” And what of the Dixie Chicks, whose alliance with the Vatican should make a US president tremble? The Chicks are a countryrock trio who in 2003 were the world’s bestselling musical act. Formed in Dallas, they are strongly associated with Texas, George

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W. Bush’s home state. They earned their place in American political history while performing in London on 10 March 2003, when lead vocalist Natalie Maines told the audience at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” Reported in an abbreviated form by the Guardian, the comment was quickly picked up by the conservative American online forum Free Republic, which then began to pressure country-music radio stations to boycott the Dixie Chicks and encourage fans to burn the band’s cds.23 Less widely reported was that a few days later Maines had apologized for disparaging Bush. Nor – at least until the documentary Shut up and Sing (2006) appeared – did the public learn that the formerly apolitical Maines had become so radicalized by the death threats and other excessive reactions that in June 2006, once again onstage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, she repeated her original comment verbatim. The ostensible reason for Free Republic’s outrage was that Maines had disrespected the president on foreign soil during wartime. For the record, her comment was made before Iraq had been invaded, but the speed with which events unfolded in mid-March 2003 was not conducive to a calm debate about chronology. However, that the animus against the Dixie Chicks was largely confined to the redneck right suggests that these core Bush supporters felt threatened by the fact that Texan poster-girls should have minds of their own on political matters. Later, in a hilarious sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore would satirize Bush’s coalition of the willing, including Morocco’s reported offer of supplying 2,000 monkeys to detonate landmines. And to point up the implicit contrast with the bright, articulate Natalie Maines, he would show a bored, gum-chewing Britney Spears pledging her automatic allegiance to the president.24 But at the Academy Awards, in his evocation of the pope and the Dixie Chicks united in their moral opposition to Bush’s war, Moore revealed his ability to dissolve the binaries of elite and popular culture, gender and class, spiritual and temporal power. In so doing, he was rallying the troops of a genuine coalition of those unwilling to support a corrupt political leadership that had

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provoked a war whose justification was fictitious – even if its destructive capacity, both material and moral, would prove to be all too real. THE BIG ONE

As soon as we came up with “The United States of America,” people realized it was too long and just started shortening it to “America” … We need a new name for a new century! Here are my suggestions: The Big One. Short, to the point. “Where you from?” “I ’ M FROM THE BIG ONE !” Nobody messes with you then. Michael Moore, Downsize This!

Moore came to public attention with a film depicting his lone, quixotic struggle against what was then the world’s largest corporation. Using a strategy encapsulated by the feminist slogan “the personal is political,” he adopted in Roger & Me the persona of a downsized blue-collar worker who, pigheaded enough to pry into the reasons for his economic circumstances and shocked by what he found, decided to initiate a reformist campaign. But since his Oscar speech, he has become the de facto leader of an informal coalition of the unwilling, whose members continue his campaign against the fictions that the American political elite deploy to figuratively and literally get away with murder. Insofar as it can be summarized in a sentence, his goal seems to be to raise the consciousness of the economically and socially disadvantaged by showing how the political status quo in the US is not inevitable. As his fame, influence, and wealth grew, however, and the downtrodden role became harder to sustain, Moore began to address himself to a wider demographic. Most recently, Sicko addressed itself to the potentially enormous constituency of middleclass Americans who believe (until they get sick) that they have adequate medical insurance. Indeed, over the course of his career, Moore has imperceptibly adjusted his persona to enable him to serve as the tribune of working Americans. A persona is a mask or disguise assumed by an author or actor when animating fictional characters. When used artfully, it serves as the figuration of a truth whose expression is inhibited or interdicted in real life.

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One of the most famous comic personae on celluloid is Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp with his iconic battered derby hat and illfitting suit. Through this disguise Chaplin embodied the déclassé gentleman pathetically clinging to shreds of dignity in the dog-eatdog, social-Darwinian socio-economic environment. Nothing, perhaps, symbolizes it better than Modern Times (1936). Through his impudent nonchalance in the face of endless tribulations, the Little Tramp as a factory worker conveyed hope to the working poor or unemployed during the Great Depression that modernity might be survived with one’s humanity intact. All this irrespective of the fact that the persona was a pure fiction: in 1936 Chaplin was a wealthy Hollywood star. Moore’s own on-screen persona – “Mike” – is now almost as famous as the Little Tramp. Mike’s baseball cap, owlish glasses, twelve-day stubble, plaid shirt, wrinkled jeans, sneakers, and shambling gait mark him as a laid-off factory worker bewildered that his plant should have been closed when its owners were making record profits. That Moore named the company that produced Roger & Me Dog Eat Dog Films suggests that the socioeconomic climate had not much improved since Chaplin’s time. Mike is a persona enabling the writer/filmmaker to perform his public role more plausibly. Winston Churchill, himself sporting a maduro-chomping persona, noted that most men aspire to be good actors in the drama of existence, but only a very few “are so perfect that they do not seem to be actors at all.”25 Moore is one of these few. Mike, “the idea of a man from Flint,” is not a “fictition” hiding the real Michael Moore but a mask enabling him to be more truly himself.26 For the record, the documentarian was never himself a blue-collar worker, and Mike’s naivety in Roger & Me is entirely faux. An exceptionally intelligent and multitalented youth, Moore grew up in suburban Davison, Michigan, distinguishing himself as the first eighteen year old ever to be elected to a US school board. Although he dropped out of university, he did so from personal disinclination rather than as a result of inadequate intellect or thwarted opportunity. His move to the nearby gm factory town of Flint was no less voluntary. There he founded a pioneering muckraking newssheet, the Flint Voice, turning it into a periodical

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with statewide distribution. Before shooting Roger & Me he had acquired ten years’ experience as a journalist, including a brief spell as editor of Mother Jones magazine. The Mike persona derives from intertwined narratives of family, locality, and American labour history. Moore’s father worked in the ac Spark Plug plant in Flint for thirty-three years. His union job was well paid thanks to the 1936–37 Flint Sit-Down Strike, in which Moore’s uncle Laverne participated.27 From this event emerged the powerful United Automobile Workers (uaw), which underwrote the prosperity of Flint and the Moore family. The subsequent deindustrialization of the Flint area was precipitated by the oil crisis of the 1970s, then accelerated by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) in 1993. Thenceforth it became standard corporate practice to maximize profits by moving auto manufacturing jobs to low-wage Mexico. Moore has done as much as anyone to bring this historical process to general consciousness, and he has done so by connecting the personal and the political. Identifying with the downsized, Moore, who had given Flint a Voice, uses Mike as first-person narrator to represent the inarticulate victims of corporate callousness. Even more than his clothing, Mike’s body authenticates his claim to be the spokesman for America at large. Whereas Chaplin had the diminutive stature of the early twentieth century’s malnourished poor, Mike – and Michael Moore himself – has the massive girth nowadays associated with blue-collar life. And if Mike’s clothing represents Moore’s solidarity with the downsized, his Body Mass Index authorizes his function as their advocate. Obesity (defined as a bmi of 30 or higher) resulting from a diet of cheap, carbohydrate-rich, supersized fast food combined with a sedentary lifestyle is now increasingly the norm for Americans of low socioeconomic status. In 2003–04, 32.1 per cent of American adult males were obese, the highest recorded level in the US and the highest rate in the world.28 In the mid-nineteenth century Walt Whitman ecstatically anatomized his own physiology as the embodiment of America’s burgeoning cultural self-confidence and democratic values. In “Song of Myself” (1855) he celebrated “the spread of my body,” associating its increase with the vital energy suffusing his country and its

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culture. And in “I Hear America Singing” (1860) he reported the “varied carols … blithe and strong” that the American lower orders sang as they worked, proud and free.29 Moore’s oeuvre functions as a “Song of Myself” for debased times. More than any other American artist since Whitman, Moore has been able to successfully forge a direct association between himself and his nation. America has aged, not always in flattering ways, since Whitman’s time. The poet Robinson Jeffers expressed in “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1941) his disillusionment with a nation “heavily thickening to empire,”30 and Moore is the singer of the excessively “thickened” American imperium. The very fact that his song is grimly comic rather than rhapsodic suggests how far America has fallen from its founding ideals. Mike’s massive physical presence, his unignorable bulk, was a key factor in Moore’s initial success as a spokesman for the disadvantaged masses. He rejuvenated the dead metaphors of the bloated plutocrat and the corporate fat-cat by ironic inversion: now the working stiff was fat, whereas the ceo had become practically incorporeal. Thus the dvd cover of Roger & Me shows Mike interviewing an absence: the elusive Roger B. Smith, chairman of gm, is represented by an empty executive armchair. Smith and the type that he epitomizes will never be found in embodied form at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club or the Detroit Athletic Club. Indeed, Moore half-seriously alleges that Smith owes his position only to his “anonymous” name, one so common that the individual bearing it cannot be easily identified in the phone book. An absentee deity whose acolytes have not come to terms with his disappearance, the ceo in his executive suite is inaccessible from Mike’s all too fleshy world. In contrast, Mike ironically celebrates his own materiality in the voiceover to the home-movie footage that begins Roger & Me: I was kind of a strange child. My parents knew early on that something was wrong with me. I crawled backwards until I was two but had Kennedy’s Inaugural Address memorized by the time I was six. It all began when my mother didn’t show up for my first birthday party because she was having my

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sister. My Dad tried to cheer me up by letting me eat the whole cake. I knew then there had to be more to life than this. Like that of the oppressed peasantry of the ancien régime, Mike’s hungry idealism would not be so easily appeased. His battle cry would come from none other than John F. Kennedy: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”31 Yet, even though Moore is a thoroughgoing radical in thought and deed, he incarnates traditional cultural values. He refers to himself as “the all-American boy” who was raised to believe in the American Dream and who “obeyed all the rules” (he has never smoked marijuana) and “worked within our political system” (he was elected to a school board) in order to change it.32 He continues to uphold these values against the corporate elite who attack anyone as un-American who revolts against their culture of predatory greed. The cover of Stupid White Men shows giant Mike towering over a corporate board, threatening the “suits” with a club in the shape of the Washington Monument. It is essential to Moore’s enterprise that his audience realize that America has changed for the worse – that, as he notes in The Big One, “we live in sick times, sick, sick times.” Sicko rigorously develops the analogy between the pathology afflicting the American body politic and the ailing, neglected volunteer heroes of 9/11. In an irony that is almost painfully absurd, Moore must ship them to Cuba, an “enemy” nation, so that they can receive not only affordable treatment but also acknowledgment of their courage from Cuban firefighters and paramedics. As he makes it abundantly clear in his bestselling Stupid White Men, to Moore Americans are an “idiot nation” who “love to revel in their stupidity.”33 How else could they elect Bush II, whose career highlights include being “a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby”? Yet he does acknowledge that the “real” Bush II, before being enlisted as the puppet of his father’s “gang of geezers,” was “one of us – a Boomer, a C student, a partier!” Dividing Bush’s America into “slackers and crooks,” Moore numbers himself among the slackers.34

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His school years were spent in a haze of boredom, inertia, and fast food, and – if you believe him – he dropped out of college because he couldn’t find a parking spot. Hence not for nothing was Moore’s 2004 tour of college campuses – in an attempt to defeat Bush’s re-election – named the “Slacker Uprising.” In the end, the Big One may be none other than Mike himself, who incarnates in his massive bulk all the weaknesses of “this wonderful psycho nation of idealists and accountants.” And when he adds, “I love this big lug of a country and the crazy people in it,”35 his implied acceptance of his own faults alongside those of his country helps to authorize his patriotism. CORPORATE TERRORISM

When a company fires thousands of people, what happens to the community? Crime goes up, suicide goes up, drug abuse, alcoholism, spousal abuse, divorce – everything bad spirals dangerously upward. The same thing happens with crack. Only crack is illegal, and downsizing is not. Michael Moore, Downsize This!

Downsize This! reprints two juxtaposed photographs of ruined buildings under the rubric “What Is Terrorism?” At first glance at least, they seem almost identical. However, one is the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it was blown up by homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh on 15 April 1995, and the other is a former gm plant demolished in 1996 in a post-nafta downsizing operation. To be sure, Moore is not flippantly claiming that gm and its ilk are terrorist organizations. Instead, he argues that unrestrained corporatism, like terrorism, produces a state of fear and alienation among its victims, with the result that some will die by suicide or family violence, others more slowly from self-inflicted wounds caused by drugs or alcohol.36 Industrial capital, which acknowledges only private interests and reduces the individual to a consumer, is essentially rootless, settling wherever profits are highest. American workers must uproot themselves to remain employed, but their pursuit of capital is fruitless as current “free” trade agreements do not allow full mobility of labour. After all, as the “nafta-Mike” episode of the

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television series The Awful Truth makes clear, full mobility would not allow corporate America to exploit low-wage economies like Mexico’s so easily. Moore offers a native’s insights into how the “corporate terrorists” of the auto industry spawn counterterrorism of the traditional kind.37 Flint and its vicinity happen to be a hotspot for neofascist militias. The co-founder of the Michigan Militia, Norm Olson, grew up in Flint and attended high schools near those attended by Moore and his wife. The Militia’s ranks are filled by “those who have been hit hardest by the economy and need someone to blame for their hard times.”38 Michigan, a state full of sport hunters, is a gun lover’s paradise. Even the young Moore had a National Rifle Association Marksman certificate and remains a member of the organization.39 The fury of the downsized in the auto industry and their easy access to weaponry make a lethal combination, but this fury is easily deflected by arms profiteers or unscrupulous politicians onto “welfare recipients, immigrants, gays, and pbs.”40 Some of the disaffected, for example, will target the federal government, sponsor of affirmative action programs, as unfairly discriminating against “true” Americans. Timothy McVeigh, son of a gm worker, and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, attended meetings of the Michigan Militia when they lived on a farm near Flint owned by Nichols’s brother James.41 The symbol of their downsized lives is the rented Ryder moving truck.42 Ryder truck people deracinate themselves to pursue mobile capital, but because they are not insulated by wealth they are psychologically damaged by the endless instability. McVeigh and Nichols turned their Ryder truck into a bomb to vent their fury against their perceived federal oppressors. Although Moore cannot condone their actions, he can understand them, and he berates the left for its failure to counsel those in Flint and places like it who had the American Dream ripped from them during the 1980s. The pursuit of the American Dream, which all too often translates into the pursuit of endlessly mobile capital, necessitates uprooting and remaking the self. In American culture the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) epitomizes the process. In the course of reconstructing himself as wealthy Jay Gatsby of Long Island, James Gatz revises his birth name, obscures his

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lowly rural North Dakota roots, and rejects his parentage, even as Fitzgerald’s ironic masterpiece reveals the psychological dangers of such revisions. Moore suggests, however, that to the American corporate classes, Gatsby’s self-fictionalization is to be embraced without irony, scruple, or regret – it is as normal and necessary as breathing. In Roger & Me the wealthy of the Flint region hold an annual “Great Gatsby” party at the estate of a gm executive where unemployed local people (mainly African Americans, it would seem) are hired to stand around as human statues dressed in Jazz Age outfits. Apparently, the rich rejoice in their power to silence and dehumanize the dispossessed, while the purchased presence of blacks supposedly exonerates the white partiers from racism. This flagrant pantomime, a denial of humanity and community, suggests that the wealthy of Flint do not live in a real city – rather, they live off Flint parasitically. Driving the point home, Moore follows this scene with one depicting an all-too-real eviction by bailiff Fred Ross. The not-so-natural habitat of the wealthy is the private golf course, a terrain drained of geographical specificity and made over to resemble an aristocratic estate. As a denatured landscape, it represents the irresistible power of wealth. Having personal access to such real estate has little to do with sport or exercise: it serves chiefly as a sign of one’s high social status. In Roger & Me wealthy female golfers of suburban Flint drive about in electric carts or practise their swings, all the while complaining about the idleness of the poor. This scene is also followed by one showing the eviction of a black family. Unlovely Flint is Moore’s spiritual home. Two scenes in Roger & Me reveal its centrality to his project of exposing how American community has been betrayed and violated by the corporate elite. After ludicrous attempts to turn Flint into a tourist destination fail, Mike interviews gm lobbyist Tom Kay, who says to him: “I don’t understand your connection that by saying because General Motors was born here it owes more to this community. I don’t agree with that.” When Mike asks “Why not?” Kay retorts: “It’s a corporation … It does what it has to do to make a profit. That’s the nature of corporations or companies. It’s why people take their

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own money and invest it in a business so that they can make money. It isn’t to honour their hometown.” Later, upon the closure – two weeks before Christmas – of the gm plant where the Flint Sit-Down Strike had taken place, Mike asks gm spokesperson Mrs McGee for an explanation. She scornfully replies: “You don’t represent anybody. You’re a private interest and, no, I won’t speak to you.” Mike protests: “We happen to be citizens of this community here. That’s not a private interest.” He is dismissed with: “We’re all citizens of the community.” Both of these corporate mouthpieces inadvertently reveal that American capitalism in its present incarnation is about maximizing owners’ profitability, not about building a strong society. “Hometown” and “citizens of the community” are terms with no moral weight in the corporate lexicon. Moore’s portraits of Flint show a city devastated physically, economically, and psychologically. In Roger & Me foreclosed, boarded-up houses on trash-strewn lots slide by to the sound of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” The song, an evocation of an innocent young couple’s American Dream, is almost unbearably poignant as a soundtrack to this abandoned suburbia: Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true Baby then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do. Moore’s marriage of sentimental lyrics and appalling imagery is as masterly as Stanley Kubrick’s at the end of Dr. Strangelove (1964), when humanity nukes itself into extinction to the tune of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” The function of the sequence with “Bunny Lady,” the woman reduced to the necessity of breeding rabbits for pets or meat, is to raise a question specifically about Flint: “Is this the Third World – or is it the hometown of the world’s richest corporation?”43 Moore does not mock Rhonda Britton; rather, he admires her goodhumoured stoicism under grotesquely constrained economic circumstances. The bailiff Fred Ross is also portrayed sympathetically. Unlike the “fictitious” entities who control him, he must be physically present to do the dirty work of evicting families who

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cannot pay their rent. Moore follows him long enough for us to realize that his poker face and resigned manner hint at repressed guilt and shame. Like Britton, he is making the best of the bad hand that gm – not fate – has dealt Flint. Finally, there is the footage of Roger Smith presiding over a “traditional General Motors” carol service in Detroit. His stiff platitudes about warmth and human companionship become the counterpoint to Ross’s Christmas Eve eviction of a distraught mother and her children for failing to pay $150 in rent. The undistinguished Smith, finally cornered by Mike, refuses to “come up to Flint” to bear witness. For all he seems to care, gm headquarters and Flint might be on two different planets, and it is almost unimaginable that the ceo, a shape-shifting alien doing a soulless impersonation of humanity, might ever descend on Flint in the flesh. It is more than a coincidence that Flint, where the stiffening corpse of the American Dream is everywhere visible, was the scene of America’s youngest school shooting. Six-year-old Kayla Rolland was shot and killed on 29 February 2000 by fellow first-grader Dedrick Owens at Buell Elementary School. In this incident lies the seeds of Moore’s argument in Bowling for Columbine that the epidemic of US gun mortality is not the result of the ubiquity of weapons or of an American “history of violence.” Instead, it stems from social breakdown caused by unrestrained corporatism, which uses fear-mongering, fanned by organizations such as the National Rifle Association (nra), to maintain its dominance. The shooter’s mother, Tamarla Owens, was in Michigan’s Welfare to Work, a privatized social program that, under the pretense of social responsibility, scapegoats poor single black mothers. Tamarla lived in inner-city Flint, where there were no jobs, so to “work off” the welfare that the state had given her, she was bussed each day to wealthy Auburn Hills, an eighty-mile round trip. There she worked up to seventy hours per week serving at a restaurant and a fudgery, and these businesses benefited both from her cheap labour and from tax breaks that they earned for employing a welfare recipient. Yet even with two jobs Tamarla couldn’t make enough money for her and her children to live on. Moreover, she was unable to

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perform her duty as lone caregiver to dependent children. It is highly unlikely that Dedrick would have gone to school with a loaded firearm if his mother had been available to supervise him. Through the case of Kayla Rolland, Moore reveals the moral chaos that ensues when the primal social bond between mother and dependent child is broken. The physical and social destruction of Flint go hand-in-hand, and both can be traced back to corporate decisions taken by executives who are in absentia, literally and spiritually, from the world over which they preside. Every level of Flint society suffers from the resulting moral vacuum. When Mike props up the photograph of Kayla, victim of corporate neglect if not terrorism, in the courtyard of Charlton Heston’s Beverly Hills mansion, he inserts a memento of a real tragedy into the heart of the dream-factory. Charlton Heston – real name John Charles Carter, born in Evanston, Illinois, son of a mill operator – is a persona like Mike but a noxious and hypocritical one. Heston gained a factitious cultural authority by impersonating warriors (Ben Hur) and lawgivers (Moses) in the movies. Then, disingenuously exploiting his make-believe prestige, he used his political position as president of the nra to mislead the American public about where the real criminal threat to society resides. MOMENTS OF TRUTH

Q. Are there any techniques for storytelling that should not be used in documentary film making? A. Well, I think you have the right to employ just about everything you can to make a good movie that’s entertaining as long as you’re telling the truth. Michael Moore, Toronto Film Festival, 1989, quoted in Debbie Melynk and Rick Caine, dirs, Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore

One obvious danger of making documentary films that are strongly subjective and that borrow fictional techniques is that truth may be compromised. Moore’s detractors often claim that he has sullied the supposedly objective purity of documentary truth.44 But from Roger & Me through his two television series, TV Nation and The Awful Truth, Moore refined a documentary technique that showed, if not the truth, then a truth that the majority of his audience

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would immediately recognize as valid. He would bring this truth, typically hidden behind the flummery of public relations and spin typifying contemporary American politics, to light in a way at once hard to watch and impossible to tear one’s eyes from. In Adventures in a TV Nation, a book-length companion to his widely successful television series, Moore expressed his truthseeking motto eloquently, if not quite accurately: “The path to truth is through the delivery entrance.”45 In fact, he has always preferred the formal reception area of the corporate headquarters as the way to enlightenment. Here, his physical progress is certain to be hampered by receptionists, security guards, and publicrelations spokespersons. But these minions of the corporate powers, unprepared for Moore’s tactical mastery of confrontation, often expose, as much through body language as words, the naked truth about their bosses. Moore deserves an apter motto – one borrowed from an American poet with a genius for articulating awful truths by stripping accretions from words and paring sentences to the bone. “I like a look of Agony,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “Because I know it’s true – .” It is only in the physical pain preceding our own dissolution, or in the emotional distress of confronting the imminent decease of those we love, that we put aside our disguises and show our true faces. And it is only then that the poet begins to trust, for “Men do not sham Convulsion, / Nor simulate, a Throe –.”46 That Moore would probably endorse the poet’s predilection for agony is evident in The Awful Truth episode set in the lobby of the corporate headquarters of the tobacco company Philip Morris. Attempting to bring home the human effects of smoking to those who profit from it, Mike conducts a choir of laryngeal cancer sufferers who gamely sing “Deck the Halls” and “Joy to the World” by breathing into artificial voiceboxes through their tracheotomy stents. As they do so, there is a brief cutaway shot of a woman in a grey business suit watching with sheer dismay. The anonymous corporate functionary betrays emotions that her ceo would be likely to construe as signs of weakness or incompetence. Her expression damns Philip Morris even more than the diseased choir’s Christmas carols.

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The episode of The Awful Truth dealing with the case of Chris Donahue, denied coverage for a pancreas transplant by the health maintenance organization Humana, serves as the paradigm of Moore’s trust in the eloquence of emotional distress. Although Donahue’s appalling physical condition is obvious to any viewer, it is his silence when imagining how his four-year-old daughter will soon be left fatherless that speaks most forcefully of the injustice of his plight. Naturally, Humana’s public-relations frontman Greg Donaldson at corporate headquarters in Louisville is paid to fill awkward silences with soothing platitudes. But when Donaldson’s patience wears thin and his professional smile vanishes as he says to Mike “Shall we move toward the door so I can research Mr Donahue’s case,” once again an awful moment of truth is revealed. Donaldson doesn’t mean to put scare quotes around “research,” but his involuntary tone and gesture imply that the word is a corporate euphemism for “do nothing.” In Bowling for Columbine the most alarming moment of truth comes in the lengthy interview with James Nichols, brother of Oklahoma bomber Terry. Mike has just spoken with members of the Michigan Militia, who seem remarkably banal for gun nuts. One of them, a real estate negotiator, even soberly notes: “It’s an American responsibility to be armed. If you’re not armed you’re not responsible.” In this context, Nichols, a grower of certified organic soybeans, may first strike the viewer as merely another concerned citizen, a salt-of-the-earth Midwestern farmer. It is only when Mike asks about the police investigation at his farm into the Oklahoma bombing that the mood changes: nichols: Them people – law enforcement if you wanna call ’em that – were here and they were shaking in their shoes. They were physically shaking, they were scared … to … death. mike: Of … ? nichols: Because they thought this was going to be another Waco. Because certain people … namely my ex-wife and other people … said I’m a radical, I’m a wild man, I gotta gun under every arm, down every leg and every shoe, every corner of the house. You say anything to me I’ll shoot ya [laughs]. If

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the people find out how they’ve been ripped off … and, and enslaved in this country by the government, by the powers to be … they will revolt [voice cracks] … with anger … with merciless anger. There’ll be blood running in the streets. With minimal prompting, Nichols shows by word and facial expression that he is seething with paranoid fury. His ex-wife and other people have betrayed him to the tyrannical federal government, so according to his insane logic it is his duty as a patriot to overthrow it. A human time-bomb, he is a real and present danger even to himself. When he takes Mike into his bedroom (just off camera) to prove that he keeps a loaded .44 Magnum under his pillow, the normally affable filmmaker cannot hide his dread lest Nichols blow off his own head then and there to prove that the firearm is genuine. Bowling for Columbine is rich in such revelatory moments. Denny Fennel, a breezy home-security consultant in Littleton, Colorado, bursts into tears in mid-pitch after mentioning the word “Columbine.” Tom Mauser, a father whose son was killed at Columbine, is overcome with emotion as he pleads publicly for gun control. And the aftermath of Kayla Rolland’s shooting in Flint is recorded in two contrasting portraits: the narcissistic reporter Jeff Ross of Fox-2 News, obsessed with his on-camera image; and Kayla’s head teacher at Buell Elementary, trying to be stoical but choking up so badly with shame and remorse that Mike must put an arm around her shoulders to steady her. Bowling for Columbine’s closing scene at the Heston mansion balances the earlier one at the Nichols farm. Heston has been heard sonorously announcing, “We have … evil to defeat and a country to unite.” In contrast with the agonized silences of gun victims, such rhetoric now seems more like rabble-rousing. Moore suggests that the nra appeals directly to those, like Nichols, simmering with unfocused anger. Emotions that should be directed at redressing social injustice are instead channelled into buying deadly armaments for use against scapegoats. Heston simulates patriotic defiance – “from my cold dead hands!” – of a factitious menace, one that arms manufacturers have themselves fabricated to enrich themselves.

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The movie star, like James Nichols, is proud to reveal that he keeps loaded guns around the house: “I’m exercising one of the rights passed on down to me from those wise old dead white guys that invented this country.” Mike presses Heston on why he thinks the US has a murder rate so much higher than countries with a history of violence (Germany) or with ubiquitous weaponry (Canada): heston: Well, we have probably more mixed ethnicity than other countries … some other countries. mike: You think it’s an ethnic thing? heston: No, I don’t, it’s … I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. We had enough troub … we had enough problems with civil rights in the beginning. It’s … but, uh, I have no … no answer for that. Although he retreats quickly into a defensive posture, Heston has given himself away. The reason for the massive toll of gun deaths in the US is a race war between the descendants of “those wise old dead white guys that invented this country” and the heirs of those who caused “problems with civil rights.” Perhaps Heston’s senility, like Nichols’s insanity, spares him from full responsibility for his words or deeds. All the same, the two are spiritual allies. Heston’s comment about mixed ethnicity supports Moore’s thesis that America lives in a climate of fear induced and exploited by profiteers. As he phrases it in Stupid White Men – his single most sustained effort to elaborate his thesis in writing – they covertly appeal to “the one basic unspoken fear all whites have: that sooner or later, the blacks are going to rise up and get their revenge” for the long history of slavery, racism, and oppression.47 By the same token, inverting standard racial profiling, Moore warns Americans that they have every reason to fear respectable-seeming white men rather than poor black delinquents. For Moore, the Bush II regime is literally criminal both domestically, in passing legislation that violates the Bill of Rights, and internationally, by invading a sovereign nation in violation of the United Nations Charter. It is metaphorically criminal in its ignorance of history and refusal to heed the warning signs of an

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impending terrorist attack. But there is an even more shocking narrative underlying these. Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairytale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” inculpates not the pathetic monarch himself but his sycophantic subjects. Moore’s version of this scenario, in which he himself assumes the role of the clearsighted whistleblower, functions similarly. Early in Fahrenheit 9/11 we find ourselves in a Sarasota, Florida, elementary school classroom. Suddenly, Bush receives a warning that his nation is under attack. Under a sign saying “Reading Makes a Country Great!” the functionally illiterate president looks abstracted, sucks his lower lip, and takes up the reader containing “The Pet Goat” while endless minutes pass. And as the agony on the streets of lower Manhattan unfolds, the commander-in-chief sits in the Florida classroom, a deer frozen in the headlights of history. Exposing Bush’s inability to demonstrate leadership when it was most required, Moore’s implicit question rings in the long, uncomfortable silence: who are we to have allowed this slacker to assume the most powerful office in the world? HALLUCINATING DUPLICITY

I’d like to thank the Canadians. If you weren’t there, we’d have no idea what was wrong with us. Michael Moore, Dude, Where’s My Country?

Manufacturing Dissent: Uncovering Michael Moore (2007) was directed by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, a pair of Canadian documentarians. Early in her commentary, Melnyk states that she was “inspired by the honesty” of Moore’s Oscar speech and wanted to take a deeper look at the writer/filmmaker. But as the documentarians gathered biographical material in Flint, met his former associates, followed his Slacker Uprising tour, and notably failed to get an extended personal interview, they gradually became disillusioned and recast their film as an exposé of an uglier Michael Moore beneath the popular image. To be sure, Manufacturing Dissent pays lip-service to evenhandedness. A former colleague on TV Nation testifies to Moore’s act of generosity, an elderly Davison resident is proud of him, and

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Kevin Rafferty, director of The Atomic Café (1982), admires Moore as a fellow documentarian. But for the most part, the film casts Moore as a self-serving hypocrite with more than a touch of paranoia. It dwells on the well-known facts that Roger Smith did grant the writer/filmmaker short interviews, that the active resistance of the labour movement in Flint to the downsizing of the 1980s was edited out of Roger & Me, and that this film’s chronology is deliberately vague and hence misleading if the documentary is viewed as a historical account. It also suggests that Moore showed unreasonable resistance to granting an interview to Melnyk, followed by antipathy once he suspected that her documentary was intended to debunk him. An important segment of Manufacturing Dissent consists of an excerpted interview between Moore and the well-known Canadian novelist and broadcaster David Gilmour. First televised by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), the interview took place shortly after the release of Moore’s only feature, Canadian Bacon, in 1994. The long build-up to the replaying of this archival cbc footage suggests that it is central to Melnyk and Caine’s case against Moore. Thus it seems reasonable to use the interview and related material as a test of their documentary veracity. Early on, Gilmour is shown in the narrative present, reminiscing about Moore: “He’s a very, very, very manipulative guy, but it’s extremely transparent, and also, I didn’t like him, I didn’t like him from the minute he walked in the room till the minute he waddled on out.” As the film’s anti-Moore perspective has already been established, Gilmour’s words promise an imminent display of damning evidence that will justify his outspoken dislike. But it is not until late in Manufacturing Dissent that Gilmour continues his recollections of the interview: “I suspected, and it turned out to be true, that the second I asked him about the first thing he didn’t like to hear, the little persona of the sweet little boy, the regular guy, that mask slipped off, and I thought, ‘That’s the real Michael Moore.’” Before we see any of the 1994 interview footage, then, we have been coached about what it will reveal: a sharp disjunction between Moore’s charming outward persona and the ugly reality beneath. As one of Moore’s chief aims as a political writer is to expose fictitiousness, the revelation

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of this “real” but hidden face should seriously undermine his pretensions to integrity. At last, the much-anticipated interview itself is shown. Gilmour begins by suggesting to Moore that reviews of Canadian Bacon have been poor. Moore asks to see a list of these poor reviews, and Gilmour replies that he has a long list. Melnyk and Caine then patch in a selection of bad reviews. The archival footage resumes with Gilmour summarizing the reviewers’ objections. gilmour: They think it’s amateurishly shot … badly directed … and not funny … which is a problem for a comedy. moore: Well, those people like art house films, you know, I made a film, you know, for people like me. Some critic said, this is the first left-wing film for the mall crowd. I don’t know if he was knocking people who go to shopping malls, or live in trailer parks, whatever, but I consider that a compliment. I mean, where you from? gilmour: Toronto. moore: Yeah? And where d’ya … gilmour: [interrupting] Where did I go to school? I went to private school. moore: So, you know, you come from a different class than I come from … so, you might like different things than I like. gilmour [raising voice and gesturing emphatically at Moore]: I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the highbrow intellectual crowd. I think it’s possible you didn’t make a good film. I think you gotta acknowledge that, and not dismiss the people who don’t like your film, as if there’s something wrong with them. moore: Well, I don’t have to acknowledge it. I think I made a very good film, a film that I’m very proud of. The documentary then cuts back to Gilmour reminiscing in the present: “It was really quite a schizophrenic interview, because I could tell that he wanted me dead, but at the same time, I had him on film, and the only way that he was going to get that off film was to make me like him again.” Then the interview footage concludes:

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moore: … but some people won’t love the film. It’s okay, you don’t have to love the film. gilmour: Okay … moore: [smiles] You know, I’ll still talk to you. [Gilmour laughs and then they both laugh.] Finally, Gilmour sums up in the narrative present: “Here’s a guy who makes his living going around dropping in on people, putting a camera on them, catching them in awkward positions, and them filming them. All I’m saying is, if you’re going to do that for a living, you gotta be prepared for it to happen to you, and when it does happen to you, you’d better behave with some grace. Otherwise, you’re going to look like a hypocrite.” Gilmour’s synopsis of the reviews of Canadian Bacon is fair, and even Moore’s biggest fans would probably admit that his feature, although enjoyable, is no masterpiece. However, Gilmour’s retrospective account of the interview, with which Melnyk and Caine frame the interview itself, is belied by the interview footage. In it, Moore is certainly unwilling to acknowledge to Gilmour that he has made a bad film, yet at no time does he lose his cool or even raise his voice. It is Gilmour who does both of these things, embarrassed after giving the answer “I went to private school” to a question that wasn’t even asked. Moore, ever affable, immediately uses the information to query the critic’s ability to judge his film fairly. Gilmour’s misgivings about the overweight, manipulative filmmaker will not have been alleviated by Moore’s point that mallrats and trailer-park boys were the film’s intended audience (viewers can scarcely miss the unspoken corollary: “and not supercilious intellectuals”). It is difficult not to conclude that Gilmour, supplying unbidden the information about his private-school education, disdains Moore as much for his proletarian taste as for his tendency to waddle. More to the point, as far as veracity is concerned, at no time in the interview footage does Moore offer the slightest indication that he “wanted [Gilmour] dead.” What we do see is another example of the writer/filmmaker’s ability to manipulate people into discrediting themselves. But this is manipulation for the purpose of exposing, not suppressing, truth – in this case, that

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Gilmour’s attitude to Canadian Bacon was tainted by his prejudice against the filmmaker. Gilmour is deluded, not merely a victim of an overactive imagination. He has hallucinated Moore’s duplicity in order to cover up his embarrassment at being outed as an artsy patrician. But what is more consequential in this context is that Melnyk and Caine inadvertently reveal that they, too, have fallen prey to a delusion. For they have taken Gilmour’s word that in the interview Moore’s mask slipped, even though the footage records no mask and no slippage. Ironically, Manufacturing Dissent does show a side of Moore that the public rarely sees. Near the end of the documentary, the normally ebullient filmmaker looks dejected as, speaking at a private reception in Flint, he expresses his disappointment that his warnings in Roger & Me went unheeded. Here is an unequivocal example of “mask slippage,” but it hardly supports Melnyk and Caine’s argument. It does, however, reveal more of the Canadian documentarians’ tendency to ignore, or simply fail to see, the video evidence before their eyes. What was the motivation behind Manufacturing Dissent? Moore is a long-time admirer of Canada: “all the amenities of America … without any of the 23,000 annual murders, and none of the stupidity.”48 We could speculate that, as Canadians, Melnyk and Caine expected Moore to embrace their project and grant them the sit-down they craved. But Moore was too busy campaigning to unseat Bush to give them his immediate attention. Smarting from what they may have perceived as a brush-off, they began drawing parallels between Moore’s inaccessibility and Roger Smith’s in Roger & Me, succumbing to the temptation to use this dubious analogy to structure their documentary. Courting Moore debunkers on the left, they were overwhelmed when the woodwork disgorged innumerable jaundiced radicals, jealous documentarians, disgruntled Ralph Naderites, and even Canadians afflicted by reflexive anti-Americanism. In the meantime, Moore himself – wary from unremitting attempts at character assassination by the conservative media, and alive to the possibility of literal attacks by gun-loving extremists – grew increasingly suspicious when his bodyguards alerted him to the doggedness with which Melnyk and Caine were following him about.

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But this is speculation. What is certain is that Manufacturing Dissent does not have the objectivity to which it lays claim. Its directors are not deliberately hypocritical, in that they earnestly believe they have made a serious case against Moore. But, insofar as their Exhibit A reveals the opposite of what they claim, we may safely conclude that their portrait of Moore is contaminated with prejudice. Whereas Gilmour’s failure merely makes him look foolish, the directors’ failure to bear honest witness is disastrous to the artistic integrity of their project. Melnyk’s and Caine’s shortcomings are in key contrast to Moore’s success as a documentarian and artist. He does not claim to be objective, but even though he speaks from what is transparently his own perspective, he sees the political life of his nation steadily and whole, and he tells the truth about what he sees. Moreover, he is able to organize his perceptions and dramatize them artfully, with the result that his best films are as compelling as great fictional narratives. Moore’s films not only tell stories and develop a thesis but also express a vision. Elaborated throughout his oeuvre, it is a grotesque vision of the moral squalor of American politics under recent administrations. The vision reveals, however, a commendable national respect for First Amendment principles – for individuals like Moore who will not “just shut up” even when ordered to by media bullies – and for the truth itself, however unpalatable it may be, insofar as many Americans share his insatiable appetite for social change.49 His United States of America is not a nation evil by nature but one ill-led for so long that it has fallen far short of the eminence to which it aspires. His America has been and may again be a mighty force for good in the world. Michael Moore, at once his nation’s harshest critic and its truest patriot, embodies in his outsize persona the hope that the American people will find the means to restore their nation to greatness.

NOTES

1 Moore, Dude, 165. 2 See Moore, Stupid, 243; and Maher, online. 3 See Moore, Downsize; and Moore, Sicko.

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12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

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Moore, Dude, 127, original emphasis. Moore, Downsize, 285, original emphasis. Moore, Dude, 117. Ibid., 106. Joyce, 217. Head, 775; this useful generic term seems to originate with the Canadian author Farley Mowat. Berger, x. See Hitchens, online. For Chetwynd’s comments, see the “Documentary Discussion” special feature on the dvd of Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine’s Manufacturing Dissent. See Hardy and Clarke; and “Right Voices,” online. For a political, polemical, and rhetorical analysis of Moore’s detractors and of Moore himself, see Swirski. White House, “President,” online. See also King, online; and Milbank, online. Moore, Stupid, 1–28, 103. Moore, “Letter,” online. See Rapoport, 6. US Department of Homeland Security, online. Quoted in Moore, Official, 53. Blork, online, was probably the first to suggest that Moore deliberately coined a Bushism; see cnn, online, for Bushisms. Hardy and Clarke, 6. Moore, Stupid, 37. Sky News, online. Clarke, online. See Moore, Official, 77–8, 82–4. Churchill, online. Schultz, 12. Moore sketches his education in Downsize, 10; and Stupid, 92–101. His early years are detailed in Schulz, 18–60; and Rapoport, 17–112. Moore, Downsize, 141. Ogden, online. Whitman, 700, 47. Jeffers, 9. Kennedy, online. Moore, Downsize, 10.

Living in Fictitious Times 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Moore, Stupid, 85, 87. Ibid., 46, 31, 173, 95. Ibid., 237, 91, original emphasis. See Moore, Downsize, 5, 18–19. Moore, Dude, 116. Moore, Adventures, 14. Moore, Downsize, 10. Ibid., 186. See ibid., 20, 299. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 78. See the discussion in Nolley. Moore, Adventures, 42. Dickinson, 110. Moore, Stupid, 70. Moore, Downsize, 46. Shafer, online.

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Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Barber, Arthur. “The Citizen, the Scholar, and the Policy Maker.” Background 8, no. 2 (1964): 79–86. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1991. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990. Smith, Bruce R., and Andrea Pistolesi. Art and History of Washington, D.C. Florence, Italy: Casa Editrice Bonechi, 1999. Thomson, James C., Jr, Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry. Sentimental Imperialists: the American Experience in East Asia. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. Ed. William Rossi. New York and London: Norton, 2008.

CHAPTER ONE

Berman, Paul. A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. New York and London: Norton, 1996. Boyers, Robert. “The Indigenous Berserk.” Review of American Pastoral. New Republic, 7 July 1997, 40–2.

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Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.” Shofar 19, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 74–83. Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. London, uk: Hutchinson, 1989. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Vol. 1. Ed. L.A. SelbyBigge. Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 1888. Hutchison, Anthony. Writing the Republic: Liberalism and Morality in American Political Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Jackson, Kenneth T. “‘Days of Rage’: The Life and Death of Newark.” In James M. McPherson and Alan Brinkley, eds, Days of Destiny: Crossroads in America History, 418–39. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2001. Lind, Michael. “A Tragedy of Errors.” The Nation, 23 February 2004, 28–9. Paine, Thomas. The Selected Works. Ed. Howard Fast. New York: Modern Library, 1945. Parrish, Timothy. “Roth and Ethnic Identity.” In Timothy Parrish, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, 127–41. Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton, nj, and Oxford, uk: Princeton University Press, 2006. Rorty, Richard. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986. – American Pastoral. New York: Random House, 1997. – I Married a Communist. Random House, 1998. – The Human Stain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. – Exit Ghost. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007. Safer, Elaine B. Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Shechner, Mark. Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Sheppard, R.Z. “Goodbye, Nathan Zuckerman.” Time, 7 November 1983, 88–9.

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CHAPTER TWO

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CHAPTER THREE

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CHAPTER FOUR

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikha˘ılovich. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

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CHAPTER FIVE

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Rapoport, Roger. Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast. Muskegon, mi: rdr Books, 2007. “Right Voices.” 31 May 2006. http://rightvoices.com/2006/05/31/ michael-moore-is-a-big-fat-liar (viewed 10 February 2008). Schultz, Emily. Michael Moore: A Biography. Toronto: ecw Press, 2005. Shafer, Jack. “Bill O’Reilly Wants You to Shut up.” Slate, 28 August 2003. http://www.slate.com/id/2087706 (viewed 13 December 2007). Sky News. “Pope Speaks out on War.” 22 March 2003. http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200–12273672,00.html (viewed 10 February 2008). Suskind, Ron. “Without a Doubt.” New York Times, 17 October 2004. http://www.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/play/opinion05/ WithoutADoubt.html (viewed 13 December 2007). Swirski, Peter. “Truth or Dare? Stupid White Men … and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!” In Ars Americana, Ars Politica: Partisan Expression and American Nobrow Culture. Forthcoming. US Department of Homeland Security. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Ready America, February 2003. http://www.ready.gov/america/other/ faqs.html#q5 (viewed 10 February 2008). White House. “Homeland Security Threat Level Raised to Orange.” 7 February 2003. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/ 20030207–6.html (viewed 10 February 2008). – “President Discusses Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.” 22 March 2003. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2 0030322.html (viewed 10 February 2008). Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

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Contributors

david rampton is a professor of English and since 2002 has been chair of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. His research includes twentieth-century American and comparative literature. His books are Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (1984), Vladimir Nabokov (1993), Familiar Ground (editor, 1993), Prose Models (editor, 1997), Short Fiction (editor, 2004), and in the Literary Lives series, William Faulkner: A Literary Life (2007). He is particularly interested in kindling enthusiasm for canonical works of literature and in developing a historical understanding of the role of literary discourses in the formation of culture. nicholas ruddick is a professor of English and director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Regina. An Americanist by training, he has published on a wide variety of North American and European authors from Atwood to Zola. His books are Christopher Priest (1989), British Science Fiction: A Chronology 1478–1990 (1993), Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (1993), State of the Fantastic (editor, 1992), and The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (2009). Recently, he published new scholarly editions of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (2001), Caesar’s

202

Contributors

Column by Ignatius Donnelly (2003), and The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen (2004). He is currently editing a new scholarly edition of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in the Broadview Editions series. He served as vice president of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (iafa) from 1992 to 1995 and was appointed University of Regina President’s Scholar from 2002 to 2004. gordon e. slethaug is a visiting professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Previous to this position, he was Visiting Lingnan Professor at the University of Hong Kong (hku) and at Sun Yat-sen University (sysu) in Guangzhou, China, where he worked under the auspices of the Lingnan Foundation (New York City and Yale University), linking hku and sysu through the Transnationalism and America project. He had been chair of the Department of English and associate dean of arts for Graduate Affairs at the University of Waterloo and director of American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He was also Senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies and English at the University of Southern Denmark-Kolding. His research centres on contemporary American novels, film, and culture as well as crosscultural pedagogy. His books are Understanding John Barth (coauthor, 1990), The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction (1993), Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction (2000), and Teaching Abroad: International Education and the Cross-Cultural University Classroom (2007). peter swirski is a professor of American literature and culture and Director of American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans post-1900 American literature, history, and culture as well as interdisciplinary studies in literary theory, aesthetics, and science. He is also recognized internationally as a Stanislaw Lem scholar. His books are A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997), Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, the Cognitive Sciences, and Literary Knowledge (2000), From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem (2006), All Roads Lead to the American City

Contributors

203

(2007), Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (2007), Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution (2010); and Ars Americana, Ars Politica: Partisan Expression in American Nobrow Culture (forthcoming). michael zeitlin is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on American literature, with especial emphasis on William Faulkner and war narratives. His books are Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative (co-editor, 2004) and Méconnaissance, Race, and the Real in Faulkner’s Fiction (editor, 2004). A co-editor of The Faulkner Journal, he has authored a series of essays on William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Donald Barthelme, theories of postmodern subjectivity, and other twentieth-century and contemporary subjects.

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Index

Academy Awards (2003), 155–6, 158 Adams, John, 25, 58 Advise and Consent, 8 Aeropagus, 58 Aeschines, 52 Afghanistan (war in), 4, 65, 68, 83, 85, 87, 102 Alamo, The, 99, 101 Alcibiades, 60 Alexander the Great, 52 All the King’s Men, 8 Allende, Salvador, 66 al-Qaeda, 6, 61, 67, 85, 155 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 68 American Communist Party, 15, 44 American Dream, 4, 23–4, 34, 136, 163, 165, 167–8 American empire, 4–6, 10, 44, 49, 50–1, 53–8, 60–4, 64, 69–70, 73–5, 77, 162. See also empire

American political-military doctrine (militarism), 10, 49, 51, 59–70, 74–5 Andersen, Hans Christian, 174 Anderson, David L., 97 Anytus, 60 Ap Bac (battle of), 98 Apocalypse Now, 91, 92 Árbenz, Jacobo, 66 Aristophanes, 52 Aristotle, 47, 50–2, 54–6, 64–5, 77; Poetics, 52, 56 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, 50–1, 54 Arkin, Alan, 48 Arlington Memorial Bridge, 4 Arlington National Cemetery, 4 Armies of the Night, The, 8 Armstrong, David, 67 Asclepius, 47 Ashcroft, John, 63

206

Index

Athenian empire (Athens), 3, 9, 10, 47, 49–51, 54–5, 57–8, 60, 63, 67, 70–2 Auburn Hills, mi, 168 B-52 Stratofortress, 102, 103 Baldwin, James, 8 Balsam, Martin, 48 Bandar, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 88 Batten, William, 72 Baudrillard, Jean, 84 Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” 167 Bechtel, 65, 76 Bedford Stuyvesant, 119, 122–4, 126–7 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 9 Berger, John, 153 Bergerud, Eric M., 97 Beverly Hills, ca, 169 Bill of Rights, 173 bin Laden, Osama, 65, 85 Blair, Tony, 67, 151 Blinder, Alan, 70 Bob Roberts, 8 Boeing, 65, 76 Boomer, Walter, 100 Boyers, Robert, 29 Brammer, Billy Lee, 8 Bremer, Paul, 75, 89 Bright Shining Lie, A, 97, 193 Britton, Rhonda (“Bunny Lady”), 167–8 Brooklyn 115, 117, 122–7, 130, 134, 138 Browder, Earl, 15, 18

Buell Elementary School shooting. See Flint, mi; Moore, Roger & Me Bulworth, 8 “Bunny Lady.” See Britton Burdick, Eugene, 87, 193 Bush I (George H.W.), 9, 88, 93 Bush II (George W.), 4–5, 9, 11, 12–13, 37, 48–9, 51, 60, 62–4, 68, 78, 82–4, 149, 152, 154–6, 174, 178; “Bushisms” of, 156– 7; illiteracy of, 157, 174; Michael Moore on, 163; as Texan, 157–8 Caine, Rick. See Manufacturing Consent Calvin, John, 17 Canada, 173, 178 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 175 Capitol Building/Hill, 3, 5–6 Capote, Truman, 54 Carter, Jimmy, 51 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 4, 61, 65–6, 85 Chamberlin, Neville, 43 Chaplin, Charlie, 160 Charlie Wilson’s War, 8 Cheney, Dick, 63, 67, 75, 88 Chetwynd, Lionel, 153, 180 Chevron, 65, 76 Churchill, Winston, 43, 160 Civil Rights Movement, 114, 116– 18, 120–1, 127, 129 Civil War, 4, 136 Clarke, Richard A., 83

Index Clausewitz, Carl von, 61 Cleon, 60 Clinton, Bill, 9, 19, 35–6, 41, 43, 70 Clinton, Hillary, 151 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon, 72 Cold War, 5, 51, 60, 75, 157 Columbine High School massacre, 172. See also Moore, Bowling for Columbine Commanders, The, 88 Condon, Richard, 8, 52 Congress, 47, 61–3, 75, 152 Conrad, Joseph, 85 Coolidge, Calvin, 25 Coover, Robert, 8 Coppola, Francis Ford, 85, 91 Corwin, Norman, 42 Creighton, Neal Jr, 86, 91, 106 Crèvecoeur, St John de, 7 Crockett, Davy, 101 Cuba, 163 Custer, George, 101 Dafoe, Willem, 91 Danner, Mark, 82, 89 Davison, mi, 160, 174 Death of a Politician, 8 Debs, Eugene, 25, 33 Declaration of Independence, 42 Deep Throat, 33 Depression, Great, 160 Descartes, René, 71 Detroit, mi: gm carol service in, 167; private clubs in, 162 Dewey, Thomas, 16–17 Dewey Commission, 15 Dickinson, Emily, 170

207

Dien Bien Phu, 90 Diogenes Leartius, 52 Dispatches, 4 Dixie Chicks, 157–8 Do the Right Thing, 114–16, 118–39, 145 Dog Eat Dog Films, 160 Dole, Bob, 19 Donahue, Chris, 171 Donaldson, Greg, 171 Doors, The, 92 Dos Passos, John, 75 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 71 Douglass, Frederick, 7 Downey, Greg, 86, 96, 104, 105 Downs, Steve, 59 Drury, Allen, 8 Dulles, John Foster, 60 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 53 Dutch empire (Dutch republic), 9, 10, 49, 50, 51, 70–1, 73–4, Duvall, Robert, 91 East India Company, 50, 73–5 Einstein, Albert, 59 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 59, 74 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25 empire: British, 9; Soviet, 61; Roman (Rome), 9, 64. See also American empire Euripides, 38 Evanston, il, 169 Eyes of Orion, The, 86, 90, 104, 105 Facing My Lai, 97, 191 faction (genre), 54, 58, 77 Fahrenheit 9/11, 6

208

Index

Fanon, Frantz, 30–1 Fast, Howard, 14 Fennel, Denny, 172 Fick, Nathaniel, 95, 96 “Fight the Power,” 126–7 Fire Next Time, The, 8 First Indochina War, 89 Flaubert, Gustave, 41, 44 Flinck, Govaert, 78 Flint, mi, 160, 165, 167–9, 178; ac Spark Plug plant in, 161; as birthplace of gm, 166; Buell Elementary School shooting in, 168; as Michael Moore’s spiritual home, 166; neofascist militias in, 165; Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37 in, 161, 167; wealthy inhabitants of, 166 Flint Voice (newssheet), 160 Ford, Gerald, 51 Fox News, 152 Fox-2 News, 172 Franklin, Benjamin, 7 Free Republic (online forum), 158 Fuchs, Klaus, 59 Full Metal Jacket, 91 Galloway, Joseph L., 97 Garner, Jay, 75 Gay Place, The, 8 General Motors Corporation (gm), 151, 162, 164, 166–8. See also Detroit, mi; Flint, mi; Smith Germany, 173 Gettysburg Address, 42, 62 Gilded Age, 7, 73 Gilmour, David, 175–9

“Global Competitiveness Report 2006–2007,” 76 Goebbels, Joseph, 153 Good Night, and Good Luck, 8 Gore, Al, 12, 151 Gould, Steven J., 45 Grapes of Wrath, The, 8 Gray, John, 89 Greek empire (Greece). See Athenian empire Green Berets, The, 91 Greene, Graham, 87, 193 Guardian (newspaper), 158 Gulf of Tonkin (incident), 63 Gulf War Syndrome, 87 Gulf War (first Iraq War), 11, 82– 4, 86, 87, 90–6, 104 Halliburton, 65, 75, 80 Hamilton, Alexander, 25 Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 32–3 Hardy, David T., 157 Harlem, 114, 122, 123, 125–6, 136, 138–40 Harlem Renaissance, 114 Harvard University, 157 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 35, 102 Heller, Joseph, 8, 10, 47–81, 150; aesthetics of, 48–9, 53; Catch22, 48, 51, 53, 77; Picture This, 8, 10, 47–81; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, 48; Something Happened, 48 Helms, Richard, 66 Herr, Michael, 4 Hesiod, 52 Heston, Charlton, 169, 172–3 history (attempts to rewrite), 55–6

Index Hitchens, Christopher, 153 Hitler, Adolf, 17 Ho Chi Minh, 92 Ho Chi Minh City, 90 Hofstadter, Richard, 59 Holmes, Rob, 86 Homeland Security, Department of, 156 Homer, 47, 50–2, 54, 73 Hook, Sidney, 25 hooks, bell, 113–14 Hoover, Edgar J., 59 House Un-American Activities Committee, 18 Hudson, Henry, 51 Humana Inc., 171 Hume, David, 21 Hutchison, Anthony, 23, 36, 42 Huygens, Constantijn, 72 I Married a Communist, 8, 13–14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 29, 37 Ia Drang, 96, 97, 99–104 improvised explosive devices (ieds), 87 In Pharaoh’s Army, 88 Iraq War (Iraq), 4, 8, 10, 11, 56, 59, 61–5, 67–9, 75–6, 78, 82– 4, 86, 95–6, 101, 104, 150, 154–5, 157–8 Iron Heel, The, 8 ius ad bellum, 5 It Can’t Happen Here, 8 Jackson, Andrew, 24 James, William, 25 Jarhead, 86, 93–5 Jeffers, Robinson, 162

209

Jefferson, Thomas, 6–7, 25, 58, 62 John Paul ii, Pope, 157, 158 Johnson, Lyndon B., 25, 42, 47, 51, 76 Joint Resolution, 114, 62 Kay, Tom, 166 Kegan, Robert, 64 Kempton, Murray, 98 Kennan, George F., 82 Kennedy, John F., 7, 25, 42, 47, 50, 99, 162–3 Kennedy, Paul, 69 Kerry, John, 12–13 King, Martin Luther, 11, 25, 114– 23, 127, 129–34, 136, 140, 143–5, 147; “Give Us the Ballot,” 116, 133, 136; “I Have a Dream,” 116, 133, 134–5 Kissinger, Henry, 19, 77 Kodak Theatre (Los Angeles), 155 Korean War, 4, 47, 62, 68, 100 Krauthammer, Charles, 64 Kristol, William, 64 Kubrick, Stanley, 91, 167 Kundera, Milan, 44; The Art of the Novel, 41–2 Kuwait, 83, 85, 88, 95 Lazarin, Jay, 97 Lazarus, Emma, 4 Le Corbusier, 28 Lebanon, 104 Led Zeppelin, 92 Lederer, William, 87

210

Index

Lee, Spike (Shelton J.), 11, 113– 48; The Answer, 119; Do the Right Thing (film and book), 114–16, 118–39, 145; Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, 119; Malcolm X (film), 114–16, 119–21, 125, 137–44; Sarah, 119; School Daze, 119; She’s Gotta Have It, 119; Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, 116, 119, 121 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, 48 Lembcke, Jerry, 93 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 3, 5 Lenin, Vladimir, 17 Lewinsky, Monica, 36, 149 Lewis, R.W.B. (The American Adam), 24 Lewis, Sinclair, 8 Lincoln, Abraham, 25, 82 Lincoln Memorial, 3–5 Lind, Michael, 43 Little Big Horn, 99 Littleton, co, 172 Lockheed-Martin, 65, 76 London, Jack, 8 Lousiana Purchase, 99 Louisville, ky, 171 Louis xiv, 5 Luther, Martin, 17 Lynn, Vera, 167 Macgregor, Colonel Douglas, 86 Mailer, Norman, 8, 98 Maines, Natalie, 158 Malcolm X, 11, 114–22, 125, 127–48; The Autobiography, 115, 118, 120, 128, 129, 133,

136–43, 145–8; “The Ballot or the Bullet,” 127, 133, 136; Malcolm X (film), 114–16, 119–21, 125, 137–44 Manchurian Candidate, The, 8 Manufacturing Dissent, 154, 174–9 Mao Zedong, 56 Marcuse, Herbert, 31 Marx, Karl, 19, 39, 150 Marx, Leo, 24 Masaryk, Jan, 44 Mathiessen, F.O., 24 Mauser, Tom, 172 McCarthy, Joseph, 4, 18, 43–4, 77 McDermott, Jim, 156 McGee, Mrs (gm spokesperson), 167 McGovern, George, 33–4, 57 McVeigh, Timothy, 164–5 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 152 Mekong Delta, 98 Melnyk, Debbie. See Manufacturing Consent Metropolitan Museum of Art, 47 Mexico, 150, 161, 165 Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, 153 Michigan, 165; Welfare to Work program in, 168 Michigan Militia, 165, 171 militarism. See American politicalmilitary doctrine “Mission Accomplished,” 83, 84 Modern Times, 160 Moore, Harold G., 97, 100–3 Moore, Michael, 6, 8, 11, 149–79; at 2003 Academy Awards, 155;

Index Adventures in a tv Nation, 170; as American, 153, 162–3; as artist, 152–3, 179; attitude to Bush administration of, 152, 173–4; attitude to Flint, mi, of, 166; The Awful Truth, 165, 169–71; The Big One, 163; Bowling for Columbine, 150, 152, 155, 168, 171–2; Canadian Bacon, 176–7; as documentarian, 169–70, 175, 179; Downsize This! 150, 159, 164; early life of, 160–5, 180n26; ethics of, 151; Fahrenheit 9/11 9/11, 149, 152–3, 155, 158, 174; family of, 161; as idealist, 151; “Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush,” 155; “Mike” persona of, 159, 160–1, 163–4; as nra member, 165; obesity of, 161–2, 177; The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader, 152; “Oscar Acceptance Address,” 154, 174; as patriot, 164; as pragmatist, 151; as radical, 163; as rhetorician, 155–6; Roger & Me, 150, 152, 159–62, 166–9, 175, 178; as Roman Catholic, 157; Sicko, 149–50, 152, 159, 163; as slacker, 163; “Slacker Uprising,” tour of, 164, 174; Stupid White Men, 150, 163, 173; as truth-teller, 153–4, 170, 179; tv Nation, 169, 174 Morocco, 158 Mother Jones (magazine), 161 Motley, John, 52

211

Moviegoer, 48 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 8 My Lai Massacre, 100, 104 Nabokov, Vladimir, 53 Nader, Ralph, 178 National Mall, 3–5 National Rifle Association (nra), 165, 168–9, 172. See also Heston National Security Strategy, 61, 64, 68 Nazi-Soviet pact, 15 neocon (neoconservative) politics, 9, 43, 51, 64, 67 New World Order, 88 New York City, 114, 117, 120–7, 138, 141, 147 Newhart, Bob, 48 Nichols, James, 165, 171–3 Nichols, Terry, 165, 171 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 25 Nixon (film), 8 Nixon, Richard, 4, 19, 27, 34, 37, 51, 57, 66, 93, 107 North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), 64, 161, 164 North Vietnamese Army (nva), 98–100 Nostradamus, 49 Obama, Barack, 102, 107 Ogrish, 87 Oklahoma City (terrorist attack), 6, 164 Olson, Norm, 165 One Bullet Away, 95

212 Operation Desert Shield, 86 Operation Desert Storm, 86 Operation Iraqi Freedom, 86 Orwell, George, 55, 92 Oval Office, 5, 35 Owens, Dedrick, 168–9 Owens, Tamarla, 168–9 Paine, Tom, 14, 22 Panama, 88 Parrish, Timothy, 25–6 Patriot Act, 4, 152 Pentagon, 6, 65, 75, 102 Pentagon Papers, The, 87 Pepys, Samuel, 72 Percy, Walker, 47 Pericles, 47, 58, 61–2 Perot, Ross, 76 Persian Gulf, 11, 63, 66, 86, 93 Pet Goat, The, 174 Petraeus, David, 83 Philip Morris Company, 170 Picture This. See Heller Pinochet, Augusto, 66 Plato, 47, 52, 54–8, 74, 77 Platoon, 91 Plimpton, George, 13 Plutarch, 52, 58 Pol Pot, 56 Poland, 157 political paranoia (American), 59–61 politics of difference, 113–14, 142–3 Popular Front, 15 Posnock, Ross, 13, 16 post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), 87, 88, 93

Index Potomac River, 3–4, 7 Powell, Colin, 63, 67–8, 88–9 Primary Colors, 8 Progressive Party, 15 Project for the New American Century, 68 Public Burning, The, 8 Puritans, 7, 9, 99 Quiet American, The, 87 race riots, 23, 26, 28, 122–5, 127, 129, 131, 133, 136 Rafferty, Kevin, 175 Rampton, David, 10 Rangwala, Glen, 67 Reagan, Ronald, 9, 48, 49, 51, 64, 66–7 Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning, 97 Rembrandt van Rijn, 47, 50–4, 72–3, 77–8 republic (American), 3–7, 9–10, 34, 43, 51, 71, 134–5 Republican Guards, 85 Revolutionary War, 4, 56 Rice, Condoleeza, 63 Ricks, Thomas, 83 Riefenstahl, Leni, 153 Rolland, Kayla, 168–9, 172 Rolling Stones, The, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 16 Ross, Fred, 166–8 Ross, Jeff, 172 Roth, Philip, 6, 8, 10, 12–46, 77, 150 Ruddick, Nicholas, 11 Ruderman, Judith, 51

Index Rumsfeld, Donald, 63, 83, 89 Ryder Inc. (Ryder truck), 165 Saddam, Hussein, 56, 62, 65, 67, 78, 83–6, 88–9, 154–5 Sagan, Eli, 60 Santayana, George, 11, 77 Sarasota, fl, 174 Saudi Arabia, 85, 88, 90, 104 Scarlet Letter, The, 102 Schama, Simon, 52 Schlesinger, Arthur, 64 Schwartz, Gary, 52 Schwarzkopf, Norman, 88 Second Indochina War, 98 Second World War, 4, 13, 48, 56, 61, 75–6, 122, 125 September 11, 2001 (9/11 terrorist attack), 6, 9, 60, 68, 83, 89, 150, 163, 174 Shakespeare, William, 19–20 Shapiro, David, 60 Shechner, Mark, 13, 29 Sheehan, Neil, 87, 97, 98, 103, 104 Sheen, Martin, 48, 92 Shepherd’s Bush Empire (London), 158 “Shock and Awe,” 82, 88, 89 Shostak, Debra, 13 Shut up and Sing, 158 slavery, 8, 51, 58–9, 72–4, 122, 140, 172–3 Slethaug, Gordon, 10, 11 Smith, Henry Nash, 24 Smith, John, 99 Smith, Roger B., 162, 168, 175, 178

213

Smithsonian Castle, 3 socialism, 151 Socrates, 47, 51, 53–4, 57, 77 Solidarity Movement (Polish), 157 Soviet Union, 150, 157 Sparta, 47, 51 Spears, Britney, 158 Spinoza, Baruch, 52 Spitting Image, The, 93 Stalin, Joseph, 17–18, 56, 151 Stanley, Sandra, 24–5 Steinbeck, John, 8 Stevenson, Adlai, 42 Stone, Oliver, 91 Strauss, Leo, 55 Students for a Democratic Society, 31 Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation, 8 Swirski, Peter, 10 Swofford, Anthony, 11, 86, 87, 90–6, 104–6 Taliban, 85 Taylor, Zachary, 102 Tendenzroman, 152 Tenet, George, 63 Tet Offensive, 87, 106 Thoreau, Henry David, 7, 21 Thucydides, 52, 54–5, 62 Thurmond, Strom, 17 Tidal Basin, 3 Tonneson, Stein, 69 Toqueville, Alexis de, 17 Toronto Film Festival, 169 Trilling, Lionel, 16 Truman, Harry, 17

214

Index

Trybula, Dave, 86, 94 Tunis, John R., 34 Twain, Mark, 49 Ugly American, The, 87 Ultima Ratio Regum, 5 United Automobile Workers (uaw), 161 United Nations Charter, 173 United States National Archives, 11 U.S.A. (Roth trilogy), 10 ussr, 88 Vatican, 157 Vernon, Alex, 11, 86, 87, 90, 95, 96, 104–6 Vidal, Gore, 8 Viet Cong, 98 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, 4 Vietnam War (Vietnam), 4, 8, 11, 13, 23, 30, 47–8, 51, 55, 60, 62–5, 69, 82, 86–8, 90–5, 97– 101, 103–4, 106 Voight, John, 48 Wag the Dog, 8 Wallace, Henry, 15–18 Wal-Mart, 74 War on Terror, 65, 76, 86, 150 War Power Act, 62 Warren, Robert Penn, 8 Washington, dc, 3–9, 11, 63, 149, 157

Washington, dc (novel), 8 Washington Monument, 4, 163 Wayne, John, 91 We Were Soldiers Once, 97 Weather Underground, 44 Welles, Orson, 48 West India Company, 73 Westmoreland, William, 104 White House, 5, 7, 36, 41, 65–6, 75 Whitman, Walt, 7, 14, 25, 27, 161–3; Leaves of Grass, 7 Who, The, 92 Why Are We in Vietnam? 98 William of Orange, 52 Wilson, Pete, 19 Wilson, Woodrow, 25 Winthrop, John, 7 Wolfe, Tom, 53 Wolff, Tobias, 88 Wolfowitz, Paul, 67 Woodward, Bob, 88 World Trade Center, 83 Wounded Knee, sd, 99 Xenophon, 52 Yale University, 157 YouTube, 87 Zeitlin, Michael, 11 Žižek, Slavoj, 84, 87 Zumthor, Paul, 52