January 03, 2003

HORSEFEATHERS NOMINATES JOURNALIST FOR MORAL CONFUSION AWARD: First nomination of 2003.

JIMMY CARTER BROODS, FEELS HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED

Sipping my heart-healthy, single-malt Scotch the other evening I watched the tranquilizing “Jim Lehrer News Hour” on our local PBS channel. Soon Terence Smith began one of his highly polished interviews and I was at first surprised, then astonished, and finally outraged by the humorless young prig who was being interviewed. The young man turned out to be Chris Hedges the author of a recently published masterpiece of folly, entitled: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. I knew that Horsefeathers would want to warn the unsuspecting world of this highly publicized book full of self-righteousness and—well, horsefeathers.

Chris Hedges can’t decide whether he wants to be a journalist or a preacher, and his book partakes of both professions—superficiality and sermonizing—but in perverse ways. He has been a correspondent for The New York Times since 1990, and the dust jacket says that he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. But more important, Hedges has spent the last fifteen years of his professional life as a war correspondent.

And his experiences during that time have taught him the following truths: (1) War is hell; (2) The romance of war is a myth; (3) Neither politicians nor the press can be counted on to tell the truth about war. Happily, most of us understood these cynical little truths of everyday life just about the time we were ready to leave home and didn’t need 15 years on the front lines to discover them.

Hedges turns out to be a modern Candide with the cognitive apparatus of a teenager who never outgrew his adolescence or his religious otherworldliness. He was born the son of a Christian Minister and he says that his book is “…a product of the education I received in English literature and Christian theology, at Colgate University and Harvard University.” He has a master of Divinity degree from Harvard.

It is clear from reading his book that the man loves to hate war. But the book is not about war, it is about Hedges and his journey from worldly innocence to utter confusion. Apparently he has been seeing his wartime experiences through ideological spectacles—part political, part theological—and they have kept him from understanding the realities of war, politics, or human nature. He has been seeing things the way he thinks they ought to be, not the way they are. And now—guess what—he is disillusioned. Terence Smith says, “Reading the book, I got the impression that you wrote it in a kind of fury, and that fury was maybe partly directed at yourself.” And Hedges responds: “Yes, a fury. It was a hard book to write. Parts of the book were very painful to write. If there was a fury, it was a fury at all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war—all of the things that we’re told about war that I had to find out the hard way and very painfully are not true. And if there’s a fury at that, it’s the mendacity of the entire enterprise.”

Unfortunately, the book is also about this man’s psychopathology. He has been covering every war he could find for the past fifteen years and, as he himself suggests, he became a war addict—not the soldier of fortune kind who becomes addicted to action and fighting, but the kind who searches out and finds, pain, suffering, terror, and injustice wherever he can, the kind who gets some queer pleasure from a sense of outrage when he finds the suffering he is looking for.
The ordinary American soldier sometimes goes his whole professional life without ever hearing a shot fired in anger. Some manage to participate in battle for a few weeks or months (Somalia and the Gulf War are examples), and some may take part in full-fledged wars that may last five or six years (World War II). Hedges sought out war almost constantly for fifteen years—nothing a normal professional soldier would willingly do. “War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I began covering the insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia and finally to Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by the Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian Mig 21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits iron fragments. I have seen too much violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. …”

Two or three of these assignments, or even a couple of years’ worth would demonstrate that Hedges was a serious, conscientious and very brave journalist. But fifteen years of the worst kind of war—third-world war—interminable, anarchic, ruthless, chaotic and completely outside of the Geneva Conventions? Wars fought by barbarians with other barbarians and where there is no right or wrong, but only thrust and counter-thrust? Who but a man who has lost his way in life would choose to live like that for fifteen years? And yet he seems vaguely proud of his life, his suffering. Even now he doesn’t really get it. When we’re young most of us yearn for novelty and adventure of some sort. But there comes a time when we want to settle down to a regular life with someone we love and who loves us. Apparently Hedges loved to hate war more than to love people.

The book is overflowing with the pornography of war—showing us endless details of horrors, suffering and injustice, all in the service of moralizing against the possibility of the reader falling victim to the addiction of war the way Hedges had.

Although he says that his fury is directed only at “all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war….” he tells us the following: “When I finally did leave [El Salvador, after five years], my last act was, in a frenzy of rage and anguish, to leap over the KLM counter in the airport in Costa Rica because of a perceived slight by a hapless airline clerk. I beat him to the floor as his bewildered colleagues locked themselves in the room behind the counter. Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.” You don’t have to listen too carefully to hear the pride and triumph in his victimhood associated with this mad outburst. The last sentence is supposed to justify his behavior—‘see what war can do to people.’ Horsefeathers. War isn’t sick—it’s not a person—it just is what it is, a complex social phenomenon that has horrific consequences but is sometimes necessary because it is the lesser of two evils. This man needed a few years on the couch long before he ever heard his first shot fired. War didn’t make him sick, he made war into a sickness—his obsessive love-hate relationship with war and pain.

The trouble is that he and his publishers have tried to transmute psychopathology into moral philosophy. Hedges wants his 15 year obsessive preoccupation with war and suffering to be recognized as the credentials of a war expert. And one of the galling aspects of the interviews on PBS, National Public Radio, and other venues is the uncritical, even worshipful acceptance of the generalizations which Hedges authoritatively tosses off. But because war for him is a passion, even an obsession, he is no more able to teach us about war than an addict can teach us about addiction. He can tell what it is like to be an addict (which he does repetitively) but not much more than that.

In fact that is Hedges’ main message. He says that for him war heightened his sense of excitement, gave him a high and something to live for—to report on life at its extremes. And this was more pleasurable than the boredom of everyday life. Of course there is a grain of truth to this observation. Everyday life can often be boring and frustrating, but we all manage to get by creating everyday novelties and excitements for ourselves—we go to the theater, have parties, play tennis, and go on holidays. But this is only true in countries that are free and democratic.

And it is important to note that almost all of Hedges’ life as a moral masochist and collector of injustices has been spent in dictatorships, in states of civil war, anarchy, chaos and barbarism. The only war he has covered in which the United States has taken part with ground forces is the Gulf War and in that one he managed to get himself captured and mistreated by the Iraqis despite the fact that 400,000 other Americans—soldiers—managed not to get captured and mistreated. It is clear that this man’s mind is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

What he is afraid of is that you and I are like him—with his needs and passions. He’s afraid we’ll become, like him, war addicts. “…as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them….We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence….” It may be true that everyone has a capacity for some degree of violence—some more, some less. But what Hedges hides behind this generalization is the high degree of his own capacity to give and take violence.

“…. And we will court our own extermination. By accepting the facile cliché that the battle under way against terrorists is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.”

Hedges’ book was published by “Public Affairs Press” a small publishing company founded by a group of ultra-left pundits. There is I.F. Stone, famous for the past fifty years for his left-leaning writing; Peter L. Bernstein, a publisher of political dissent; and Morris B. Schnapper, old-time liberal gadfly. The publishers saw an opportunity to exploit Hedges’ moral confusion to send a message from the left by someone who might easily be mistaken as an expert on war. In addition to his pacifist point of view, he also has something anti-American to say about our current interest in the Middle-East. “We did not fight the Persian Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, but to ensure that we would continue to have cheap oil. But oil is hardly a cause that will bring crowds into the street.” In the past sixty years I have never seen a political crowd in the streets in America except to celebrate peace (in 1945) or protest war (in 1970). Again Hedges tends to see American political action through his own distorted experiences in the second and third world.

“I was with young Islamic militants in a Cairo slum a few weeks after the [Gulf] war….These militants spent their days at the mosque. They saw the Persian Gulf War for what it was, a use of force by a country that consumed 25% of the world’s petrol to protect its access to cheap oil. The message that was sent to them was this: We have everything and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you. It was not a message I could dispute.”

It is too bad that Hedges could not bring himself to tell his militant young friends that the reason they have nothing and have no hope for the future is that their government deprives them of education, freedom, and democracy, and that they have fallen under the sway of self-destructive theocratic leaders who will get them nothing but death rather than paradise. But he is as confused as they are. He makes no distinction between good wars, bad wars, and ambiguous wars, which most wars turn out to be. He would never agree that the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II were unambiguously good wars, that they were fought for important moral and political principles that were worth fighting for and even worth dying for.

If I knew his address I would send Mr. Hedges a cheerful get-well card and hope that he recovers his mental balance soon.