Hey Feemus, Betcha Can't Work Barbara Stanwyck into a Post About David Brooks

Oh yeah? Watch me....


In his nightmare report from Vietnam, Dispatches, Michael Herr writes:

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he answered, "It's easy. You just don't lead 'em as much."

The reporters ask a moral question and get a technological answer. It's a simple misunderstanding. The gunner's solution is appropriate to his understanding of what "how" means and what "women and children" means. His job to to achieve a specific goal vis a vis the women and children: they have only an instrumentalized, symbolic existence only for him.

The neocons have a similar problem.

But to back up for a minute: I knew it was coming, and I still wasn't prepared for it.

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, politicians and the media will engage in endless retrospection. Most of it will be nauseatingly self-serving.

Which brings me to David Brooks's latest column, "The Jagged World," in which Mr. Brooks explains to us the "lessons from the last five years." Oh dear.

Brooks structures his column around two imaginative topologies: how he thought the world was five years ago and how he thinks it is now. These are both very instructive.

Five years ago, Brooks looked around and saw that:

People everywhere seemed to want the same things: to live in normal societies, to be free, to give their children better lives.

The word "normal" is instructive. Brooks's view is an essentially normative one: he looked around and chose to see people who wanted to become Americans. Brooks puts absolutely no pressure on his evaluative terms, "normal," free," or "better." He refuses to acknowledge that these might not mean the same things to all people.

Five years ago, Brooks looked around and saw that:

Globalization seemed to be driving events and the integration of markets, communications and people. It seemed to be creating, with fits and starts, globalized individuals, who had one foot in a particular culture and another foot in a shared flow of movies, music, products and ideas.

What Brooks saw when he looked around was the growth of capitalism. He saw in movies and products the potential to liberate the world. Now that this hasn't happened, Brooks doesn't question the value of globalization through the expansion of Western free-market values.

No, instead he mock-chastizes himself for thinking that there were any points of contact between us and them:

People who live in societies where authority is united - as under Islam - are really different from people who live in societies where authority is divided. People in honor societies - where someone will kill his sister because she has become polluted by rape - are different from people in societies where people are judged by individual intentions.

I guess those "different" people just can't be civilized by having a "foot in the shared stream of" Steven Seagal movies. Heathens.

Brooks follows the party line here: Islam can be fully and unproblematically equated with authoritarianism; we are free and they can't understand/hate freedom; Isalm hates women.*

In his zeal to point up the differences between us and them, Brooks leaves out such examples as illegal surveillance (is that a product of united or divided authority?); detentions without arrest; torture. But no matter. Brooks proves his point that we have very different, perhaps irreconcilable cultures.

Brooks mourns his former naivete, his belief that these differences could be smoothed over by the exportation of American movies and political ideals. But the "Islamists" just weren't buying. They were instead, he writes, forming their own ideological businesses:

Yesterday's high-tech entrepreneurs look like pikers compared to the social entrepreneurs of today. Islamist entrepreneurs have quickly built the world's most vibrant and destructive movement by combining old teaching, invented traditions, imagined purities and new technologies. The five most important people in the Arab world, according to a recent survey, are the leaders of Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Microsoft's market conquest is nothing compared to that.

This is Brooks's main failure of the imagination. He can't think of societies or individuals except in terms of the market. He is faced with a moral question and he gives a technological answer. I think the Marxists call this "reification."

Brooks doesn't really see the world differently from how he saw it five years ago. It's a market model. Sure the valence is different - it was good then, bad now - but his vision is essentially the same. If America can't achieve a cooperative merger, then it will need to proceed with a hostile takeover.

This is dangerous thinking. People aren't just consumers/producers in the market, and neither are cultures. It's when we start imagining the world in this way that we begin trying to manipulate these "markets" as though the lives at stake didn't matter.

In James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, insurance agent Walter Huff describes how he came to kill a man. He says that he couldn't help it. Thinking about the insurance system for so long, he just started seeing all the people involved as "the biggest gambling wheel in the world." Seeing all those lives as just part of a system, what was to keep him from trying to "crook the wheel"?

Huff understands that you might think he's being cynical:

If you don’t understand that, go to Monte Carlo or some other place where there’s a big casino, and watch the face of the man that spins the little ivory ball. After you’ve watched it a while, ask yourself how much he would care if you went out and plugged yourself in the head. His eyes might drop when he heard the shot, but it wouldn’t be from worry whether you lived or died. It would be to make sure you didn’t leave a bet on the table, that he would have to cash for your estate. No, he wouldn’t care. Not that baby.

It should be noted, though, that Barbara Stanwyck's "shape to set a man nuts" might also have been an influencing factor.**

Just sayin'.

*No argument, of course, that many Islamic groups advocate the repression and often brutal oppression of women. But to hear the right trying to pretend to advocate for the rights of women while Bill Napoli spills his rape fantasies, while the FDA wants to make all premenopausal women consider themselves "prepregnant," while the President overlooks mercury and wife-beaters in legislation to protect the unborn - well, it just sickens me.

It's a clever strategy, though. It's counterpart is the equally risible (and equally effective) accusation of anti-semitism for anyone who opposes Israeli policy.

**phew - I wasn't sure I was going to get that Barbara Stanwyck reference in. Just under the wire.