Bill Kristol (Again): With Defenders Like These ...

At Slate Jack Shafer has written a column entitled "Who is Afraid of Bill Kristol?" in which he chides liberals and leftists for objecting to The New York Times hiring Kristol as a columnist. This is the second time I have responded to a Shafer column. He is no closer to the mark now than he was the first time. Then he was intent on defending the integrity of journalism against what he called "The Lies of Ryszard Kapuściński." This time he is defending the The Times offering Kristol a columnist columnist slot despite the fact that he is, as I already have said [1] [2], an inveterate bullshitter who has never earned a job (or much else) in his life. I will not repeat myself here. Instead, I'll offer a couple of gentle rejoinders to Shafer's by and large incoherent defense of Bill.

[A] "Kristol is a political operator. . . . Kristol lives to brawl and make enemies. To him, writing is fighting."

So, having gone out of his way to make enemies of them, the various folks Shafer cites ought to applaud when Bill is offered column inches at The Times? Or perhaps, those who are concerned with the health of American journalism are mistaken to think that inviting a belligerant ('political operator') like Kristol is simply a bad idea for a respectable paper? It seems very odd that the preoccupation with journalistic integrity that "induced grand mal seizures" in Shafer when he discussed Kapuściński doesn't carry over to his assessment of Kristol.

Perhaps, Jack, no one is afraid of Bill Kristol. Perhaps people object to his appointment because he is a political hack. You essentially concede that characterization, in the process undermining the deciders at The Times who tried to justify hiring Bill on the grounds that he is a 'respected conservative intellectual.' Talk about howlers! That is a point on which you and Bill's critics agree: Kristol indeed is "a naked opportunist" who "gravitates to power." As a result, it hardly seems unfair to infer that he lacks the political principle and intellectual acuity to write for anything beyond propaganda sheets like The Weekly Standard. You'll excuse me if I am not impressed by your assurances that, despite his opportunism and lack of qualifications, Kristol is "not exactly a suck-up." Do we really need to split hairs?

[B] "Oh, you say, Kristol's journalistic crime is not just that he was wrong about launching the war but that he has been absolutely wrong about every chapter in the war since the shock-and-awe bombs lit up Baghdad. Well, not wrong at every turn. From where I write this afternoon, he looks pretty goddamn prescient about the wisdom of mounting the "surge" and adopting a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq."

Nice try. Let's put to one side the actual causal story and agree with your premise that the 'surge' is responsible for the decline in violence in Iraq (instead, that is, of it being the result of, say, an already accomplished campaign of sectarian cleansing or the voluntary stand down by Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia). And let's set aside too the opportunity costs of pursuing the Iraq fiasco. Just think we might've been using resources devoted to the 'surge' to attend to matters in say Afghanistan (or, in non-military ways, even Pakistan). Instead of dwelling on those distractions, let's remember what the point of the 'surge' supposedly was. It was meant to suppress violence so that the Iraqis could make political progress. Ooopps! Excuse me if I don't quite see how the complete lack of political progress in Baghdad over recent months makes Bill "pretty goddamn prescient?" (Having said that, I am happy to have all those folks who are now or ever have been cheer leading BushCo and their idiotic foreign policy called on the carpet too.)

[C] "As one who speaks to Republican leaders hourly, Kristol will perform similar service, rewarding liberal readers with dispatches from the "alien" world of conservatism."

First, if liberal readers need a dose of conservatism they have plenty of outlets from which to choose. It is not exactly like we lack for sources of right-wing media blather including, of course, the various posts from which, thanks to Daddy Kristol's rich friends, Bill already spews his bullshit. The problem is that conservative views hardly are 'alien'; unfortunately they are all to familiar.

Second, when will, say, the rabidly right-wing Wall Street Journal ed page invite somebody as far to the left as Kristol is to the right (which is very far) to be a regular contributor? How about, say, the Chicago Tribune? Or the rest of the mamby-pamby papers like my hometown Democrat & Chronicle or any of its Gannett-owned brethren across the country? Don't folks who read all those right of center rags need some alien views from the left?

Third, does The Times need one of each sort of conservative? They already have David Brooks (so what if he and Kristol are not clones) writing for the ed page, Alex Rosenthal running it, and Sam Tannenhouse running the book review. And in their reporting staff they still have the Judith Miller wannabes too. I am frankly sick of the mainstream media playing at being in some vague sense 'liberal' while it in fact sucks up to the right.

Liar! Liar! ... Tempest in a Journalistic Teapot

When reading, we must be careful to ascertain the point of statements and reports and other sorts of speech act. If we recall that fairly simple point we can cut through a recent, highly irritating polemic. In Slate this week, journalism/media critic Jack Shafer has published a scorching essay entitled "The Lies of Ryszard Kapuściński." As the title suggests, Shafer takes Kapuściński to task for fabricating facts and purveying untruths, passing them off as journalism. It s only fair to accuse Kapuściński of lying, however, if we are sure that the works that prompt Shafer's ire properly are classified as journalism and so as bound by the conventions of that enterprise.

Shafer mentions a number of glowing obituaries for Kapuściński who, as I noted in this post, died earlier this week. He demurs from all the praise, insisting that "there's one fact about the celebrated war correspondent and idol of New York's literary class that didn't get any serious attention this week. It's widely conceded that Kapuściński routinely made up things in his books." Shafer seems bent on policing the boundaries of journalism and insuring that we do not include Kapuściński's books in that category. I don't really have a problem either with Shafer's self-appointed role as defended of the realm or with his desire to exclude Kapuściński.

That said, there is no reason to join Shafer in labeling Kapuściński a liar. The Times obituary explicitly notes that Kapuściński's books are not strictly speaking journalism. According to The Times Kapuściński "spent his working days gathering information for the terse dispatches he sent to PAP [the Polish National News Service for whom he worked], often from places like Ougadougou or Zanzibar. At night, he worked on longer, descriptive essays with phantasmagoric touches that went far beyond the details of the day’s events, using allegory and metaphors to convey what was happening." Hence, for instance, The Emperor, a book that appeared in 1978, while "ostensibly about Ethiopia," actually was "an allegory of absolutist power everywhere." In much the same way that Tocqueville was writing about France in Democracy in America, readers commonly recognize that Kapuściński may well have been writing about authoritarian regimes elsewhere (Poland, maybe?) under the guise of a "report' about Ethiopia. So perhaps Jack needs to calm down just a smidgen. At the very least he needs to stop treating readers like literal-minded morons.

Sure, The Times obituary describes Kapuściński as "a globe-trotting journalist." But that description seems accurate insofar as he indeed regularly filed news reports from the field. And while Shafer relies on a highly critical review from the TLS to clinch his case that Kapuściński's books are fiction, the evidence regarding his respect for the factual news-reporting hardly is cut and dry. And for someone trying to defend the integrity of journalistic truth, that should matter to Jack Shafer.

Let's assume for purposes of argument that on matters of "fact" the author of the review is correct and Kapuściński's books are wrong in each disputed instance. And let's assume too, that the cumulative weight of those errors is such as to render the books something other than journalism. A couple of things seem important. First, there is no indication in the TLS review that its author has read any of the reports Kapuściński filed with PAP. So, unless we presume that the PAP reports and his books are identical, we have no sense of whether, if at all, Kapuściński was purveying fiction to his employer and thereby to his Polish readers. Kapuściński's news reports and his books may simply be different genres. That is an empirical question, of course, and I may be wrong in my suspicion that there likely is a significant divergence between the news stories and the books that Kapuściński wrote. The important thing is that neither Shafer nor his source are in a position to prejudge the matter. Kapuściński may well have been a perfectly accurate reporter when he was writing for the Polish press.

Second, the reviewer rightly cautions that we mustn't read Kapuściński 's books as straight journalistic reportage because Kapuściński himself explicitly endorsed interpretations of The Emperor, for instance, that see it as allegorical in much the way The Times depicts it. Likewise as the reviewer remarks of Kapuściński's later writings on Africa (about which he is most exercised): "The baroque note in Kapuściński’s prose confirms the movement away from fact towards the realm of fantasy and symbol." So I guess I don't quite see why, if as Kapuściński himself provides explicit and tacit warrant for so doing, we ought not to read his books as ficitonalizations of events and places and people.

In the end, of course, Shafer concedes that perhaps such a gerrymander (i.e, making up a new "genre" for books like Kapuściński's) would safeguard journalism and that the resulting "truth in packaging for wall-straddling authors would calm [his] savage, beating heart." But he just cannot let things rest. He insists that such a new category of work might nonetheless tarnish the image of "other geniuses of foreign correspondence" who hew to a just-the facts-ma'am approach to writing. This seems a considerable stretch to me. We can (we hope) rely on reporters and correspondents to purvey "the facts." And we need not buy Shafer's rhetoric that the only way to defend Kapuściński is by insisting that, as compared to standard press accounts, his books "contain a higher truth, if you will." The issue of truth may be moot. We might instead ask if there is something that we can learn from non-journalistic reportage, from the fictionalization of actual affairs. If there is, then Jack Shafer's diatribe about Ryszard Kapuściński is simply beside the point.

Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007)

Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński died in Warsaw on Tuesday, probably of cancer. You can read the obituary from The New York Times here. I have read only a little of Kapuściński work (and not just because much of it has never appeared in English), but The Times is right to paint him as being perhaps as important for having challenged genre boundaries as for any single piece of his "reportage." In his essays Kapuściński trampled across the border of journalism and literature for reasons that seem immediately important here because of a recent post on Amos Oz. Here are a couple of paragraphs from his obituary in The Times:

"Mr. Kapuściński (pronounced ka-poos-CHIN-ski) spent some four decades observing and writing about conflict throughout the developing world. He witnessed 27 coups and revolutions. He spent his working days gathering information for the terse dispatches he sent to PAP, often from places like Ougadougou or Zanzibar.

At night, he worked on longer, descriptive essays with phantasmagoric touches that went far beyond the details of the day’s events, using allegory and metaphors to convey what was happening.

“It’s not that the story is not getting expressed” in ordinary news reports, he said in an interview. “It’s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town; the smell; the thousands and thousands of elements that are part of the events you read about in 600 words of your morning paper.”"

So Kapuściński and Oz agree that to convey the realities of battle and other sorts of mayhem one needs to focus on details - e.g., the smell - that are extra-ordinarily difficult to put into words. The two writers simply approached that difficulty in different ways. Oz deems it beyond his capacity; Kapuściński proceeded, if not undaunted, at least with determination and considerable success.