Theater of War
By Lewis Lapham
The New Press, 2002
202 pages, $42 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Back in 1961, when Lewis Lapham was a young reporter in New York listening to US President John F. Kennedy, plump with "good intentions" of reviving "liberty" in Vietnam and improving the character of Cuba, Lapham "was still inclined to think that the words of an American president were convertible into the currency of truth".
Forty years of disillusionment later, Lapham, now a very angry editor of Harper's Magazine, repays their deceptions with some of the best dissenting essays this side of Noam Chomsky.
Theater of War, Lapham's latest collection, runs against the tide of official commentary since September 11, 2001, because he adopts the premise that the terrorist attacks were to be expected. "Taking into account Washington's repeated experiments with the bombing of civilian populations as a form of propaganda meant to sell the splendour of democracy", it should come as no surprise that some of those enduring America's idea of "freedom" might stage their own "low-budget version of the Pentagon's Operation Enduring Freedom" by crashing planes into the symbols of US military and economic policy.
Lapham points out that for 70 years US militarists and capi- talists had a dependable enemy, red in tooth and ideology, to justify their domestic and foreign interventions: "The evil Soviet empire was the enemy of first resort, as necessary to the American economy as General Motors".
Nine presidents stoked fear of a "worldwide communist conspiracy" to drape their economic and military conquests in the flag of the good.
With "Communism" gone, however, a new opponent was needed in the "battle for the soul of mankind" (and for the welfare of the defence budget and all who rely on it). In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic were two of the character actors who passed the audition for the role of the terrible monsters who must be fought with cinematic pomp. Over Belgrade and Baghdad, US and British planes "dropped their bombs like sermons from the superior altitudes of moral certainty".
The corporate media came early to this propaganda party by hiding the reality of war behind video game images and "high-sounding abstraction". Let the viewers get too close to "the putrid smell of rotting flesh or the presence of a newly headless corpse seated in a nearby chair, and most people forget to sing patriotic songs" and start to question their leaders' motives. Better to keep the propaganda fog machine on high, bringing "urgent bulletins, every hour on the hour, from the frontiers of dread", whether they are "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq or terrorists getting hold of surface-to-air missiles or smallpox.
The refrain from political lecterns and television anchorpeople remains constant. Foreigners commit crimes against humanity; "Americans" make, at worst, well-intentioned mistakes (as in Vietnam): "Foreigners incite wars, encourage terrorists, manufacture cocaine; Americans cleanse the world of its spiritual impurities".
So when the US lost its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, the assembled ranks of "gold-plated American opinion (prominent journalists, responsible politicians, dependable historians)" rushed onto the stage. "Resembling late-Victorian British admirals on loan from an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan", their "initial expressions of disbelief swelled into an uproar of heavy sarcasms, dark frowns, indignant manifestations of injured vanity, wounded virtue, baffled omnipotence", Lapham writes.
Had the countries who voted against the US, especially the ungrateful Europeans who were supposed to be their friends, "forgotten that they owe their freedom to sit around overpriced restaurants to America's benevolence, America's money, America's air force?". Splenetic official opinion could not conceive how human rights, the International Criminal Court and treaties on greenhouse gas reduction, on the one hand, and US money and bombs on the other, added up.
"Hollywood patriots" lend their hands to the laundering of US foreign policy and motives for war. Gushing enthusiasts of the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks television series, Band of Brothers, trade on the "good fight" against the Nazis in World War II to invest the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq with moral righteousness, noted Lapham: "Mobilising the infantry and manoeuvring the aircraft carriers, drawing the comparison to Pearl Harbor and declaring another day of infamy, calling out the dogs of war."
As the 101st Airborne Division advances from Normandy to the Rhine on the television screen, so the US Army is always and is everywhere "not only inevitably victorious but also universally loved, its motives always pure, its principles always just, its soldiers welcomed by pretty girls bearing flowers".
Hollywood is also giving the soap treatment to another deserving client the CIA. With a reputation sullied by wholesale spying on US citizens, toppling "inconvenient governments", political assassinations and being AWOL on September 11, the time has come "to repair and improve the public understanding of the CIA", and the proposed CBS prime-time dramatic series, The Agency, should do the trick "each week before the last commercial, a bomb defused, a terrorist captured, a city rescued from bubonic plague".
The television apologists have a big job on their hands, however, as too many people have drawn subversive conclusions from the record of US foreign policy, which has been terrorism writ large and a history of "invariably choosing for its allies the despots who operate their countries on the model of a prison". This behaviour, repeated and ruthless, is undertaken for the benefit of "our corporate overlords", not the people of the USA or the world.
There is barbarism in Washington, not just in Kabul and Baghdad, only it doesn't wear turbans or military fatigues. It wears, instead, "the smooth-shaven smile of a Senate resolution sold to the highest bidder for the drilling of the Arctic oil fields or the lifting from the rich the burden of capital-gains tax<%0>, for bigger defence budgets, reduced medical insurance, enhanced surveillance."
The class interests behind "disarming Iraq" are the ones that "run (and run very nicely, thank you) the country the corporations including the media syndicates". These corporate forces subcontract the management of the national economy to establishment politicians, and the high point of the tendering and bidding process takes place at the presidential nominating conventions.
In August 2000, the money was in plain sight as a roll-call of the corporate great sought the services and largesse of Democrat Al Gore and the Republicans' George Bush, both of whom "might as well have been wearing canvas jumpsuits, similar to those worn by professional race-car drivers, stamped with every logo in the encyclopaedia of American corporate enterprise", Lapham adds.
The Republicans raced off with the auction spoils, thanks to their five friends on the Supreme Court who voted Bush Jr into the Oval Office after the Republicans heisted the Florida vote by disenfranchising Democratic-voting African Americans. The US$193 million corporate investment by US capitalists, particularly the oil and armaments industries, in the Bush campaign would soon pay handsome dividends.
Trillions of dollars in tax relief and "economic stimulus" were soon passed to "the people who had paid his ticket to the White House". While civil liberties are curtailed in the "war on terror", "heavy concentrations of large capital remain at liberty to do as they please poison rivers, cut down forests, experiment with lethal chemicals, deny medical care, eliminate species, live handsomely beyond their incomes". Bombs and smokestacks "contribute to the patriotic sum of the gross national product".
Establishment opinion regards dissent as treasonous in time of war (which US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld says might last 40 years), and "contraband opinion" is routinely screened out by the guardians of power and wealth. Lapham, fortunately, has managed to evade the net.
His scything wit leaves very few illusions (from the "war on terror" to "democracy") standing. Lapham may not be sure what to re-sow the cleared political space with (having tumbled the corporate culprits, "true American ideals" seems a much poorer remedy than socialism) but as a stylish destroyer of illusions, and with a wrath level set at red-hot, Lapham is an unsurpassed critic of private wealth and its murderous wars.
From Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003.
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