In Iraq, you should expect the unexpected. Like this:

Iyad Allawi’s bid to become Iraq’s prime minister again has received an endorsement from an unexpected source: the Baath Party. A spokesman for the exiled leadership of Saddam Hussein’s old party told TIME that Allawi “is the best person at this time to be given the task of ruling Iraq.” He said he hoped that Allawi would pave the way for the Baath Party to “return to the political life of Iraq, where we rightfully belong.”

Allawi, of course, is a Shi’ite.

Then there’s Moqtada al-Sadr, who is also doing whatever it is that Iraqis have to do to get their act together:

The radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr on Wednesday said that he was suspending for six months his Mahdi Army militia’s operations, including attacks on American troops, only hours after his fighters waged running street battles with Iraqi government forces for control of Karbala, one of Iraq’s holiest cities

Over at The Plank, Michael Crowley says:

it also happens to come at an extremely convenient moment for the Bush administration–just before the Petraeus-Crocker report and a new round of war funding votes in Congress

Yes, the timing is rather convenient for Bush’s new spin cycle. So what? It’s yet another indication that traumatized Iraqis are trying to move forward and deal with their reality: a broken, divided, shattered country plagued now not by Saddam and his vast network of enforcers but by sectarian militias—and also by al Qaeda, as Engram, a blogger I only recently started reading, notes repeatedly over at Talk Back.

Forget what you read in the political blogosphere, where, as screenwriter William Goldman said about another fantasyland, “Nobody knows anything.”

Check the interstices.

Out, out damn’d spot!:

Clinton to give away fundraiser’s cash

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton will give to charity the $23,000 in donations that she has received from a fundraiser who is wanted in California for failing to appear for sentencing on a 1991 grand theft charge.

Typical Hill: always doing the right thing—after the fact.

The quote of the day:

Since news of his arrest broke, [Senator Larry] Craig appears to be in deep political trouble.

Read all about the depth of his trouble here, if you care. But you might as well just read what McCain said:

“I believe that he pleaded guilty, and he had the opportunity to plead innocent,” said McCain, of Arizona. “So, I think he should resign. My opinion is that when you plead guilty to a crime you shouldn’t serve.”

I was thinking about what a historian would make of this, from The Economist’s blog:

AS EVERYONE knows by now, Larry Craig, a senator from Idaho, was arrested in June for tapping his foot suggestively in an airport restroom

I laughed till I cried.

Then I read Slate, whose editors are all over the map about this story. In the end, though, this pretty much sums it up for me: also from The Economist:

Many people still believe that putting gay marriage on state ballots helped George Bush eke out a win in key states in 2004. Whether this is true is arguable. Whether Republicans sought to do this is not. The Republican Party sought to cash in on homophobia, pure and simple. And Mr Craig signed onto that project. Many feel sorry for the man. I feel sorry for his wife and his children, but he himself is suffering a Hell of his own making. Dante could not have written it better.

Unrelated but also suffering from a hell of his own making:

The Daily Mirror reports (I know: it’s the Mirror. The important part of the story is true enough, though):

Actor Owen Wilson’s suicide bid followed a three-day drugs binge on crystal meth and deadly pills dubbed hillbilly heroin, it was revealed last night.

And the troubled star, who overdosed and cut his wrists, had a history of slashing himself, it also emerged.

The news came as police phone records confirmed they rushed to his home after a frantic call about an “attempted suicide”.

Owen, 38, is believed to have rounded off his narcotics bender by downing a bottle of powerful Oxycodone painkillers.

Sadly, there’s nothing new about actors flaming out. Also, despite Mickey Kaus’s totally valid point from a journalism and business point of view, there’s nothing new about the L.A.Times trying to bury this kind of story, which makes lots of people look very bad indeed.

Which leads me exactly to my point. What has happened to Hollywood? A few years back, there would have been a phalanx of publicists on hand keep the pack of beasts at bay. Instead—instantaneously, and on thousands upon thousands of globally linked news and gossip sites—all the sad, pitiful, deeply private details of Owen Wilson’s private hell are available for the rest of us to relish.

In the Era of No Secrets ^TM, it appears that Hollywood has given up. It isn’t even making an attempt to sell us fantasies anymore.

Shadi Hamid thinks the Dems need one.

Ezra Klein thinks they don’t—they already have one:

Globalization and its attendant economic forces have destabilized the working class and the corporate welfare state they relied on, so the government should step into the breach and guarantee what employers no longer can.

Welp, back in the day, that was known as socialism. Today, it’s known as statism or, somewhat less politely, the nanny state. And somehow I just don’t think it will do as a successful pitch—it’s more like a rallying cry for Republicans to do what they do best: build a massive wall of resistance against “tax and spend” Dems and then bury them.

A more somewhat more contemplative discussion of the subject appears in the comments to Hamid’s post. I particularly liked this one by SteveB, who gets the concept of a narrative—i.e., a simple story (not unlike a fairy tale) that relies on popular prejudices (for example: the past was better) and that pits the good guys on your side against the bad guys on the other:

[All] narratives require a narrative arc, and the easiest way to get that arc is to build on the “virtuous past, corrupt present” theme. Thus “Government was efficient until Bush and his cronies screwed it up”, or “The poor were thrifty and virtuous until welfare made them lazy and dangerous.” This sort of narrative naturally comes easier to a conservative who wants to turn back the clock than to a progressive who wants, you know, progress.

But there are ways to turn this theme to a progressive purpose. For example, here’s a narrative promoting national health care:

“Once, health care was about helping people, and not about getting rich. Sure, the local doctor was better off than most, but not outrageously so, and most hospitals were local and non-profit. The for-profit hospital chains, the HMO’s, and the pharmaceutical companies changed all that, and now we pay considerably more per-person that other countries do, and get less for it. We need to get back to the idea that our health care system should be about providing care to anyone who needs it, and get greed out of the system.”

That’s good storytelling—and, yes, the Dems need it. But not more than they need a credible candidate who’s got the “vision thing” and can deploy it consistently, as Bill Clinton did. Obama’s got it (we worship an awesome God in the purple states), but he can’t get traction for it. Edwards (two Americas) is trying. Hillary has nothing except the “responsibility gene” (and the entire Democratic establishment backing her).

Unfortunately for the Dems, Rudy is the one to beat. Folks trying desperately to poke holes in his Mr. 9/11 image are barking up the wrong tree. Rudy’s narrative is powerful because he has spent a lifetime building it, and believing in it. He was, let’s not forget, a Kennedy Democrat once upon a time. That will be a fearsome weapon to wield against his Democratic opponent, once he gets the nod from his party (which I believe he will, and which I predicted a year ago that he would).

Democratic storytellers, unite! You’ve got your work cut out for you.

Who said this about Michael Vick?

Commenters on my favorite channel (ESPN) keep saying that Michael Vick may never play football again. Why? Because he committed heinous acts? It sure looks like he is going to be punished for them, and that he will apologize. I’m sick of criminalizing black youth. Once he’s out, Vick should be allowed to play again. That’s America. We believe in renewal, redemption, and paying your price. Also talent. Vick is a gifted athlete. Let’s see him back on the field, after he does time. [e.a.]

That’s Philip Weiss, who I promised not long ago to mock mercilessly.

How’m I doin’?

I hope Rachel Sklar isn’t saying that America’s network news anchors—you know: the people who bring us word about war, mudslides, floods, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, government incompetence, corporate greed, national security, housing-bubble bursts, and so forth—can improve their credibility with a skeptical public as a source of information by playing along with one comedian’s provocations.

But I’m afraid she is:

Comedians (and, specifically, comedic interviewers like Stephen Colbert) create situations that people have to react to. It’s a test: If you play along you’re funny and cool, and if you don’t your’e stiff and boring. So how people like Brian Williams and Katie Couric and Bill O’Reilly react to him are an indication of what they are really like - . In the case of news anchors, that’s about as far from “Voice of God” as you can get - their interactions with Colbert take place outside of their tightly-scripted and minutely-produced 22 minutes of news.
…

It’s not part of the traditional job description of the network news anchor to either make jokes or take jokes - but because Colbert is bringing this kind of comedy into the world of news, suddenly handling this well speaks to character, which is pretty important when deciding who you want to spend half an hour with every day - or who you instinctively turn to in moments of national crisis.

Where to start? How about here:

[anchors']instinctive reactions are measures of their good humor and authenticity and humanity

Um, no. Anchors’ “instinctive reactions” are the finely honed on-air mannerisms of people who make their living in front of a camera. Some of them are naturally “authentic”; some of them are deliberately over-the-top. All of them are trained professionals, the product of speech lessons and wardrobe advisers and image makeovers.

We know nothing about them, much less their characters. Some of them are indeed very skillful at coming across as authentic. So what? Their very presence in the anchor chair gives them a huge advantage: they’re there, night after night, steady as she goes. The predictability of their appearance night after night gives them presence and authority—the Voice of God—beyond their personal tics, quirks, and “humanity.” Well … unless they’re this guy.

As for Colbert’s “bringing this kind of comedy into the world of news”—is that a good thing? Why should Charles Gibson, who’s at the top of his game and who took his news broadcast to the top of the heap with his deliberately old-fashioned amiable-but-also-stern-when-need-be manner, play along with Steven Colbert? To show Rachel Sklar that he’s got a sense of humor? I don’t think so.

Besides, is that what we want?—to muddy the waters between news and entertainment even more? Surely what ails journalism is not an absence of a sense of humor about itself.

In 1994, the cultural sociologist Joshua Gamson wrote about the allure of infotainment, and about the slippery slope of treating news as play. For some reason The American Prospect has it listed in the archives as having been published in 2002.

The popularity of infotainment is based on accepting the summons to treat information as play.

Play is best when consequences are small. This is the heart of the matter and the truly disturbing part. Only when people perceive public life as inconsequential, as not their own, do they readily accept the invitation to turn news into play. When the outcome matters, it is not so easy to switch gears and give up the need for significant and trustworthy information. Today, a shrunken sense of political efficacy makes possible the unsurprising conversion of news into infotainment. [e.a.]

I’ve got more to say, but it’ll have to wait. Meanwhile, you could read the whole thing.

Welcome, ETP readers! Have a look around. Especially for your benefit, I’ve corrected the spelling of Joshua Gamson’s name (see above). All other typos since February 2006 remain in place, as does our affection for ETP.

The Rolling Halberstam Tour is coming to a bookstore near you.

The command post is a set of Manhattan publishing offices, and the foot soldiers include Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen, Alex Kotlowitz, Paul Hendrickson, Samantha Power and Bill Walton. They are going on David Halberstam’s book tour for him.

It’s going to be huuuuge:

An authorless national author tour “doesn’t seem to me to have been done before,” said Constance Sayre, a principal in the Manhattan publishing consulting firm Market Partners International. “What’s going to make it effective,” she added, “is the fact that his best friends are high-profile people, big names. You can also put them on local television and radio. It should create a wave of news because each person is going to say something different.”

It’s going to create a wave of news? Why not a tsunami of news? I mean this is so, so special. Who could possibly stay away?

Is there any intellectual discipline more removed from the realities of everyday life than economics, with its talk of “income inequality”? I dunno, but consider
this, which no economists or policy types ever seem to take into consideration:

Employee X:
The X employee is most typically an hourly employee, but can also be a salary employee, but is always required to put in their 8 hours a day, no matter the work load. This type of employee shows up at 8am, takes a 15 minute break at 10am, takes an hour lunch at 12pm, another 15 minute break at 3pm, and is out the door at 5pm. It does not matter what the work load is or the importance of the work being time-sensitive or not. This is the schedule they have been given by there employer for them to follow so they follow it. Very rarely will you ever see this employee in the office early or still in the office after 5pm. The X employee does exactly what they are told to do being sure not to do more or less than what their job description says they do.

Employee Y:
The Y employee is typically a salary employee and comes and goes as he/she pleases, but is always there when it is necessary. This employee may work 2 hours in a day or may work 12 depending on what needs to be done. This is a very task oriented employee that tracks their progress by what is getting done versus the time they have put in. This employee will come up with new ways to get things done more efficiently in order to allow them to have more free time or more time to get other things done. This employee does everything in their job description and many things in other peoples job descriptions.

The Forward steps up to make the case—again—against Walt and Mearsheimer. Only this time, they’ve read not just the professors’ juvenile article but their book as well:

The professors’ basic argument is that America’s support for Israel is an anomaly. Israel’s origins and behavior are so reprehensible, they wrote, that “neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel.” No, it’s all because of the influence of the “Israel Lobby.” There is, they cautioned, nothing illicit about lobbying. Lobbying is part of American democracy. But the Israel Lobby has “a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress,” controls key access to the executive branch and suppresses dissent throughout society. Its “not surprising” goal, they wrote, is to weaken Israel’s enemies to the point that “Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.”

More shocking, considering the professors’ distinguished resumes — Walt was academic dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, Mearsheimer a leading foreign policy expert at the University of Chicago — was their shoddy research. They invented historical facts.They twisted quotes. …

Most of the paper’s flaws survive in the book, but the longer format allowed the introduction of whole new stretches of substandard work.

The substandard work and shoddy scholarship will survive, because the professors’ charges are sensational—as they intend them to be, which the Forward makes clear. But they’re a long way from reaching their goal of freeing America from the immoral, reprehensible, dark influence of satanic Israel.

Rudy Giuliani said it best in his Foreign Affairs article:

America’s commitment to Israel’s security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy.

Well, “permanent” is a strong word. But a 10-year $30 billion commitment is pretty darn close.

The good professors’ timing is a wee bit off. But the work of anti-Semites is never done. Which is why I and people like me—who know that public anti-Semitism is the harbinger of humanity’s darkest impulses coming to the fore—will not rest until every one of their words and innuendoes has been revealed for the pernicious, evil scapegoating it is.

And we will mock Philip Weiss mercilessly.

So much for the netroots’ great shake-up of the Democratic Party:

Hillary Locks Up The Backing Of The DC Democratic Establishment

–From the K Street lobbyist corridor to the major gay and lesbian organizations to the city’s kingpin consultants and fundraisers to the big feminist groups, Hillary Clinton has acquired a near-lock on the Democratic establishment in the nation’s capital.

The level of support here for the junior New York Senator approaches what an incumbent president seeking re-election might expect.

Even Andrew Sullivan has decided that she may not be so bad after all.

Well, knock me over with a feather. I thought Barack Obama was going to be the feel-good candidate. But get a load of Rudy:

[In New Hampshire] Rudy Giuliani was telling a roomful of voters about a dream he had three times, when he interrupted himself. “Any psychiatrists here? Want me to lay down and tell you this? You do dream analysis, right?”

Minutes later the former New York mayor had moved on to the “fear of abandonment” his city suffered after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his people’s need to be “embraced,” and America’s need to buck up because “when you concentrate on your problems so much, as a person or as a society, you sometimes lose perspective.”

Most of my fellow New Yorkers in the cohort—those who don’t scoff at the notion that he might actually get the Republican nomination, much less win an election against Hillary Clinton—are terrified of his authoritarian streak and his provocatively hectoring ways. Me, not so much. What drives me mad is his relentless, shameless, credit-seeking self-promotion; his jack-in-the-box ability to be right smack in the middle of every gathering of cameras and microphones in a 50-mile radius of City Hall; and his testy, prickly need to respond to every culture-war flare-up with a fusillade of insulting verbiage.

But Rudy 2.0 seems to be stickier than our Rudy.

On a trip [to New Hampshire] last week, Giuliani, 63, was thanked time and again for his leadership after the 9/11 attacks and almost as often for making New York a livable city. Those are the pillars of his candidacy, and he promotes them to the hilt.

Can you believe that we New Yorkers are going to get the celebrity smackdown we were so cruelly denied in the summer of 2000? If it weren’t downright tragic, it would be a hoot.

She was a fixture of downtown New York, a stellar writer, and a woman with a most generous heart:

Hillel Italie writes:

In many ways, Paley wasn’t a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer “identity crises.” Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs anxious to have them as members.

“People talk of alienation and so forth,” she said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don’t feel alienated from it. I feel disgusted with it, or mad, but I don’t feel I’m not in it.”

Somehow the AP manages to make this sound like bad news:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.

To me, it sounds like an improvement over the situation a few years ago:

In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled “Reading at Risk” found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a 4 percentage point drop in a decade.

Yet the AP goes on to thunder:

Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn’t read a single book this year?

The derision is misplaced. Some fifteen years ago, in 1993, Philip Roth, crying the same tune, nevertheless gave this argument (that readers are superior to non-readers) nuance and heft—not by sneering at the dolts who don’t bother to read at all but by praising “serious” readers above all others:

“There’s been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That’s inescapable. We can’t fail to see it. It’s also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That’s a tragedy. By readers, I don’t mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I’m going to read for two hours. That’s what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don’t watch television or answer the phone.

“So if that’s what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I’ve described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that’s it, and that is bizarre.”

Roth was joking, of course. … Or was he?

One thing’s for sure: Times have changed. You would never see Roth’s kind of elitism in the pages of today’s New York Times Book Review.

Though you do, of course, see some astonishing things.

Such as, for example, Howard Zinn asserting that there is no moral distinction between terrorism (the intent to kill innocent civilians) and the inadvertent killing of innocent civilians during war:

The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.

Or, for example, a “reviewer” extolling the poetry that has emerged (with the blessing of the U.S. Army) from the hideous torture chambers of Guantanamo and, for good measure, claiming that it is completely unfair to, you know, criticize the poetry:

The poems — some by accomplished writers, others by first-time poets — suffer “some flaws,” as the book’s editor, Marc Falkoff, himself a lawyer for 17 detainees, puts it. It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse, several of them held in solitary confinement, some of them likely subjected to practices that many disinterested parties have called torture.

See, criticism is beside the point coming from a book critic. This book is beyond criticism. It’s your moral duty as an American to read it.

You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.

And guess what? Despite this nonsense, I still love to read—not only books but even the New York Times Book Review.

Reading is here to stay for a good long while. But our narrative forms are changing, and our human craving for narrative—for stories—can be satisfied in many different ways, through many different gadgets and many media channels. Why, maybe we’re evolving. Fancy that!

David Gergen, adviser to more presidents than I can count, on Bush’s invoking Vietnam:

CNN asked Gergen about Bush’s statement that “there’s one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam, and that is the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”

Gergen added that “everybody understands” there’s going to be a US pullback in Iraq when the surge ends in the spring. “We’re not going to stay there forever to prevent killings,” he stated. “When we start pulling back, there’s likely to be a bloodbath in Iraq, too.”

Gergen further pointed out that “Vietnam … after 30 years has actually become quite a thriving country. … So there are those who say … ‘Yeah, when we pulled back, there was bloodbath in the immediate aftermath, but after that the Vietnamese started putting their country together.’ Is that not what we want Iraq to do over the long term?”

Yep—inside the Beltway, they’re quite comfy with genocide, just as Ron Rosenbaum said.

ETP’s Rachel Sklar composed a playlist for our late-August all-day and all-night showers here in NYC, but she forgot one:

“Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” / Travis

That’s all she wrote.

It’s been three weeks since the advance team of Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon published their narrative-shifting op-ed in the New York Times, which prepared the ground for the budding American hero David Petraeus to lead us wisely out of Iraq (first as general, then—say, eight years down the road—as president?).

Perhaps I give PRopaganda ^TM czars too much credit, but someone is doing great work building his image, which the New York Sun notes in passing:

The general, who oversaw the drafting of the Army’s first counterinsurgency manual since the Vietnam War, will also be running his own press strategy in Washington as opposed to delegating this task to either the White House or the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, Petraeus himself has got the gift of spin:

“You have to pinch yourself a little to make sure that is real because that is a very significant development in this kind of operation in counterinsurgency,” General Petraeus told the Associated Press. “It’s all about the local people. When all of a sudden the local people are on the side of the new Iraq instead of on the side of the insurgents or even Al Qaeda, that’s a very significant change.”

I don’t know what to believe about Iraq except that it’s a mess that we’ll be engaged in until we can find a graceful way out—that is, something we can frame as a win. Indeed, it’s vital that we win the propaganda war against players from al Qaeda to Iran to Hezbollah. I believe the information-war component of the conflict we’re engaged in is the most important component—and potentially, in the long term, the most effective. It’s the PRopaganda ^TM—the consumer-model selling—I can’t stand.

We are at least halfway up—or is it halfway down?—”bullshit mountain,” as Norman Mailer called it the other day:

“… [B]ullshit mountain has grown again. We are a country that lives under the oppression of bullshit mountain, and none of our politicians have the power of grace, wit, or the simple lack of self-preservation to attack it.”

Indeed.

President Bush addresses the nation from aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1 [2003] with the banner in the background.

A little while back, NYT film critic Manohla Dargis, writing about her earliest passions, explained (without intending to) why most of us are not addicted to, say, PBS’s NewsHour and NPR but rather to, say, the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Countdown with Keith Olbermann—that is to say: we’re drawn to infotainment rather than “the news.”

It has to do with the human need to let our imaginations roam free with the aid of storytelling:

… Comic-Con [is] where people can give physical form to the passions that the rest of the year remain safely hidden from the cruel world. This is where you let your freak flag fly without getting beaten up by the playground bullies. …

I never became a comic book geek; then, as now, I got my fix from watching movies. [e.a.]

Whatever form of narrative we’re addicted to, we all need our fixes. We are all suckers for a good story. Marketers of all stripes, marketers of everything—from Viagra to the iPhone to the Iraq war to the Bourne Ultimatum to jihad to celebrity gossip—take advantage of our love of spectacle and our desire to suspend disbelief and our need to abandon ourselves to the pleasure and pain of feeling for someone else so that we will be alleviated, if for just a little while, of the burden of being ourselves.

When it comes to TV, the news as a narrative form just doesn’t do it for people; sensational storytelling—infotainment—does.

Last night, I linked to a Pew report released on May 25 which concluded that while the media’s number-one issue in the first quarter of this year was “Iraq,” the focus of most of the “Iraq” reports was the debate about the war— which took place here in the good old U.S. and A. I noted Americans’ narcissism, and suggested that the media simply feeds it: goes along to get along.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project that has just released a report about news coverage in the second quarter of this year, who is quoted in today’s NYT, appears to back up that finding.

“It’s a lot easier to cover [the war] as a political debate in Washington than to cover it on the ground in Iraq,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, which is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington.

While the amount of coverage of Iraq-related events declined in the second quarter in favor of campaign coverage (there lots of conflict there for all you infotainment fans), so-called “Iraq-related events” were still mostly about Americans.

The report notes:

Another finding in the first quarter was how much the war coverage focused on Americans rather than on Iraqis. Fully half of the coverage about events inside Iraq was about American combat and casualties as opposed to Iraqi casualties, Iraqi internal affairs, reconstruction efforts or other matters.

In the second quarter, the picture looks similar. News from inside Iraq became even more U.S. focused. Fully 55% of coverage about events on the ground dealt with U.S. combat and casualties, U.S. troop activities and soldiers charged with crimes. [e.a.]

So there’s no need to wonder why we don’t know more about how Iraqis feel about secularism or about nationalism (vs. the more popular narrative notion of endless sectarian conflict/civil war). The answer is simple: even when the media is reporting “about Iraq,” the reporting is all about us.

I daresay I was prescient about Americans’ focus exclusively on themselves even during the run-up to the Iraq war; see this post about my April 2003 conversation with the actor Ron Silver. I wrote:

I like to think that perhaps I had something to add to his understanding when I floated my insight—that American anti-war sentiment was not about Iraq. Anti-war sentiment as expressed primarily by our cohort was primarily a culture war issue: for them, it was about their own self-image. They were afraid that expressing war-like sentiments would make them look bad. (To whom? I wonder). They were American narcissists, self-involved, and most of them couldn’t give a shit about Iraq, about which they knew nothing (ignoring the fact that in our globalized world, the status of Iraq, among other Middle Eastern nations, is about America). They cared what their friends and peers thought about them. In America, it is always about peer pressure.

My thoughts and feelings haven’t changed about that. It’s more than a little disappointing, though, to see that, if anything, the narcissism is even more entrenched. Maybe that’s the best reason that America should never go to war: we are unprepared, in our own eyes, to be the bad guy.

Shadi Hamid says neoconservatism is dead.  I doubt it—and since I’m not an ideologue, I don’t care one way or the other—but I’ll play along, because apparently my only other option is to believe that there’s a Vast Neocon-Wing Conspiracy in the Foreign Policy Community of Very Serious People and that it is sending virginal, peace-loving Americans to war at the drop of a hat, because the United States is an imperialist menace.

Gawd.

Andrew Sullivan reports about a study (from Eastern Michigan University, not the University of Michigan as he writes) which shows—surprisingly— that Iraqis have grown increasingly secular and nationalistic since 2004.

  Sullivan writes:

[The results] seems to fly in the face of much evidence and reporting from Iraq in the past four years.

I say: what evidence?

What reporting?

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, in a quarterly report published on May 25, found that, while Iraq war coverage “dwarfed” all other new topics in early 2007, almost none of it was about Iraq—it was mostly about Americans:

The majority of the war coverage, 55%, has been about the political debate back in Washington. Less than a third, 31%, has been focused on events in Iraq itself. And about half that coverage has been about American soldiers there.In all, just one in six stories about the war has been focused on Iraqis, Iraqi casualties or the internal political affairs of their country, the report finds, while more than eight in ten have focused primarily on Americans or American policy.

I don’t know if Iraqis are feeling more nationalistic—it sounds implausible, considering that a reported 2 million of them have fled the country, but what do I know. More to the point: what can we know, if our media do not report on what is happening on the ground in Iraq, to Iraqis?

Americans may watch a lot of TV, but the news isn’t a big part of their menu. The Pew Research Center tracked the news habits of Americans over the twenty-year period from 1986 to 2006 and concluded that

the average percentage of adult Americans following all stories “very closely” is 26%. …[This] suggests that, at least with respect to most day-to-day reporting, the American news audience is only modestly interested

Of the stories they followed, these were the most popular types:

disasters 39% followed very closely

money 34

conflict 33

political news 22

tabloid news 18

foreign news 17

Of particular interest to those of us interested in news-as-infotainment are this counterintuitive gem (p. 5):

Disaster News rivets audiences. … Tabloid News fails to do the same.

Journalists might well predict and easily accept that disaster stories always “sell.” But journalists might not predict that tabloid reporting sells so poorly. … Skepticism notwithstanding, both of these patterns of news interest have manifested themselves repeatedly during the last three decades: Disaster News engages audiences; Tabloid News, not so much.

This finding is more predictable, to me at least (p. 3):

Conflict News—stories about war, terrorism, and social violence—consistently elicits much more news attention than does Tabloid or even Political News.

Conflict—protagonist vs. antagonist—is the sine qua non of storytelling. TV “news” trafficks in these stories. They boil down complex issues into bite-size pieces. The result is lacking in nutrition, but it’s tasty. And it satisfies our need (a human need—that is to say: nonpartisan) to have easy answers, even (perhaps especially) when there is no easy answer.

These answers—the comfortable certainties of partisans on both sides—are provided both by pop culture (deliberate entertainment) and by infotainment (news served up via entertainment values), which, while serving people’s desire for distraction and need to be entertained, also imparts some information, rallies the faithful, infuriates the opposition, and ensures an audience hungry for more bread and circuses.

I mention this not because it’s the theme of this blog. Not this time anyway. I intend it as a response to Shadi Hamid, who, in response to this post of mine, wonders why liberals can’t educate the electorate rather than respond to it.

I responded in the comments, but I’ve got more to say, if you’ll permit me to equate, even if just for the sake of the argument, the electorate with the news-viewing (or non-news viewing) audience. At the very least, these two groups overlap.

The Pew Center’s study makes one of my points for me: the electorate isn’t looking to get educated—it’s looking to be entertained. At any given time, about 75% of the television audience (many voters, presumably) are not watching the news (which is where we’re likely to be offered the kind of information affecting policy that Hamid wants to get across to people).

When they are watching “news,” mostly they’re mostly interested in rubber-necking the tragedies of others (disasters) or in tracking their finances (or prospects for making or losing money) or in being spectators to some kind of fight (conflict). They just don’t want to know from government policies (much less foreign policy, which is among the categories of least interest to Americans,+++ along with celebrity and political scandals ***).

Louis Menand, in his July 9 New Yorker review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, makes another point for me.

Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.” [e.a.]

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). …

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith,

I note that Caplan is an economist, and addresses only the economic prejudices of voters. But if Caplan is right about this—and I think he’s on to something—the electorate would be expected to have other prejudices, too. (I recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on the subject of contemporary prejudices.)

It is some of those prejudices that Rudy Giuliani is appealing to, both in his public image and in the foreign-policy stances outlined in his Foreign Affairs article. Whatever, he’s doing, by the way, it’s working (and note that his strongest opponent is Hillary Clinton, who is the most hawkish among the Democrats).

Hamid’s problem—the problem of all ideologues trying to sway the public this way or that through a cogent debate about the issues—is that people have prejudices. They are not necessarily open to reason; rather, they’re given to emotional responses. To me, Americans seem to be feeling rather more hawkish than dovish—which was where I entered the conversation with Hamid.

—————-

+++ This particular finding is a bee in my bonnet. Americans have always been wrapped up in themselves. But the extent to which they continue to be wrapped up in themselves post-9/11, in the face of all we have learned since then about the dangerous world outside our shores and in the face of all we have to do to engage with that world, is nothing short of astonishing to me.

But then Caplan suggests a reason for that in his book, too. Menand writes:

Even apart from ignorance of the basic facts, most people simply do not think politically. … And, over time, individuals give different answers to the same questions about their political opinions. People simply do not spend much time learning about political issues or thinking through their own positions. They may have opinions—if asked whether they are in favor of capital punishment or free-trade agreements, most people will give an answer—but the opinions are not based on information or derived from a coherent political philosophy. They are largely attitudinal and ad hoc.

[e.a.]

*** It would be interesting to examine what accounts for the amount of interest in the various categories. My guess about the audience’s lack of interest in celebrity and political scandals is that people expect celebrities and politicians to behave badly. We may fawn over them, but when they get in trouble …yawn. It’s dog-bites-man: not news worth following.

Tell me something I don’t know or didn’t expect: that is something I’ll watch.

The lament of “realists” Walt and Mearsheimer, who have been cruelly denied their right to speak in Chicago in support of their upcoming book, for which Farrar Straus & Giroux paid them close to $1 million:

Our book does not question Israel’s right to exist and does not portray pro-Israel groups in the United States as some sort of conspiracy to “control” U.S. foreign policy.

Why do these two shitballs keep apologizing if they’ve done nothing wrong?***

——————-
*** I’ve written way too many posts about these reprehensible so-called scholars and am too lazy to link. If you’re interested, do a search.

This should be interesting—PETA vs. Hamas:

International animal rights group PETA on Wednesday condemned a “shocking and sickening” video clip produced by a Hamas-run TV station and posted on the YouTube Web site that showed the abuse of animals.

PETA said it would protest to the TV station over the program that showed animals being abused as part of a program aimed at teaching children not to hurt animals.

A PETA representative explains the obvious:

“Any lessons meant to be contained in this segment are almost certainly lost on most children, who are more likely to imitate people they see treating animals cruelly rather than understand this behavior is wrong,” Mersereau said.

There is no right and wrong in Gaza. There is only brutalization, in varying degrees.

Lesley Chamberlain’s new book Lenin’s Private War should give pause to those in the leftosphere with an urge to purge

Carlin Romano explains:

In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these “bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brains, they’re the shit.” He told Stalin in a note, “We are going to cleanse Russia once and for all.” An earlier Bolshevik poster already showed Lenin sweeping enemies from the globe over the caption, “Comrade Lenin cleanses the filth from the land.”

Wikipedia illustrates:

Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Filth from the Land

William Grimes, writing in the NYT, elaborates about how it all went down:

She sees the episode as a continuation of the armed conflict between Red and White forces, part of what she calls the “Paper Civil War,” in which the Bolsheviks closed down independent journals, purged universities and took the first steps in creating a new intellectual class of militant Marxist-Leninists.

“Only when Lenin deported the liberal intelligentsia in 1922 did the overall conflict end,” she writes.

Ms. Chamberlain’s narrative divides into three parts. The first, and the most interesting, deals with the Paper Civil War. Relying on archival material that has surfaced in the post-Soviet period, she traces the quiet campaign by Lenin and his underlings to identify dangerous thinkers, round them up, manufacture legal cases against them and expel them permanently. The thinking and the procedures behind the expulsions resonate profoundly. They are the dress rehearsal for Stalinist terror to come.

Meanwhile, inside the Beltway, the ‘Crat Pack ^TM, heady with its great victory in Chicago and as blissfullly ignorant as ever, continues on its merry way, auditioning for positions (any positions!) in the regime of the ‘Crat Who Would Be President—whoever he or she may be. Happy job hunting, all you whippersnappers! (And I hope your parents taught you that you should always have a Plan B.)

It’s always interesting to get a glimpse of how others see you. Sometimes, though, it’s mind-blowing.

Gabor Steingart, the Washington-based editor of the German magazine Spiegel, sees an America that Democracy Arsenal’s Shadi Hamid doesn’t recognize:

I found this article from Der Spiegel International to be genuinely bizarre. It reflects, in my view, a serious misreading of American politics. The basic jist [sic] is that liberals are moving to the right on national security (apparently the author doesn’t read blogs), a reality reflected by the hawkishness of the three Democratic presidential contenders. He makes a weird reference to “Barack Bush-Obama,” a term which couldn’t be more unfair to the only candidate who got the Iraq war right. Then this:

The wind has shifted in Washington. America, not just its president, is at war. The Democrats are still critical of the failed Iraq campaign, but they are no longer opposed to the “War on Terror” in general. It has been accepted, and not just as a metaphor.

Really? DA readers, would any of you agree with this assessment?

Actually, I would agree with this assessment. I agree with this too, from the Spiegel article:

Opinion polls have shown consistently for months that while most Americans disapprove of Bush, very few are opposed to the worldwide fight against terrorism. Most Americans believe that the campaign against al-Qaida and its ilk is the only conceivable — in fact, the natural — reaction against the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The president is not faulted for his declaration of war against the terrorists, but he is blamed for having botched the war in Iraq.

And with this:

[W]hen voters hit the ballot box in November 2008, they will be looking for more than just a candidate charismatic and clever enough to lead the country politically. They will also ask themselves which of the candidates is sufficiently tough, crafty and brutal to win the multi-front war that the Bush administration has begun.

In these early weeks of the 2008 presidential campaign, the candidates from the two major parties are literally vying for the distinction of being the most crafty and pugnacious of the lot in the public eye. The Republicans, especially former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have kept their steel-plated combat armor on. Their take on the fight against terrorism is to up the ante.

Indeed, Steingart wrote that even before Giuliani laid it all out in an article in Foreign Affairs, which I haven’t read. But the Sun’s Eli Lake has read it.

In a sweeping repudiation of the conventional wisdom that America’s war on terrorism must address Palestinian Arab national grievances, the leading Republican contender for the presidency is warning of the dangers of pressing too soon for Palestinian statehood and is asserting that Israeli security is a “permanent feature of our foreign policy.”

That language appears to be a direct shot at President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, who are making just such a push for final status negotiations between President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert in September, despite Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in June.

The former mayor’s vision for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is also a repudiation of the approach of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, a panel on which Mr. Giuliani served briefly. In its final recommendations on Iraq policy in December 2006, the commission urged America not only to re-engage in the peace process, but also to explore ways for Israel to cede the Golan Heights to Syria.

It looks to me like Rudy Giuliani and his brilliant if hawkish foreign policy team are aiming directly for that part of the electorate which Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart describes:

Anyone who hopes to win the support of middle America — geographically, sociologically and politically — has to perform a balancing act of appearing capable of leading the country in war while at the same time not coming across as too eager to fight. Americans want a strong leader, a tough decision maker, not an adventurer. The worst charge one could hurl at a presidential candidate these days is that he or she is soft on terrorism.

Shadi Hamid doesn’t live in middle America, though. He lives (spiritually, at least—I have no idea where he actually lives) inside the Beltway, indeed inside a little cocoon in the Beltway where they’re trying to downplay—literally, with lowercase letters—the terrorism angle:

Personally, I’ve started to decapitalize [sic ---ouch! ed.] the term, to distinguish the real fight against terrorists from Bush’s distinct “War on Terror” - the latter having failed miserably, antagonizing 97% of the world, alienating Muslim moderates, and emboldening terrorists the world over. Anyway, the attempt to distinguish our “war on terrorism” from the Bushies’ “Global War on Terror” seems to be the trend on the Left.

For his part, the ‘Crat Pack’s ^TM ideological sharpshooter Matthew Yglesias, who is exceptionally busy these days trying to purge liberal hawks, is pushing the line that terrorists are mere criminals (and, for good measure, the notion that Giuliani is “batshit insane“)

Of course, we’ll see in November 2008 who correctly picked up the American electorate’s signals. Just a guess: I think it’s Steingart (and Giuliani too). He’s reading things broadly. Specifically, he sees America as:

the third-largest nation on earth, a country spanning four climate zones.

Hamid and Yglesias need to get their noses out of all those policy papers. Actually, they don’t even need to do that. All they have to do is watch a little reality TV.

At every level and in every sphere—social, professional, political, economic, military, corporate,  etc.—America is a nation of ruthlessly competitive people who will stop at nothing to win.

I don’t know which part is more interesting in the following story—a “comic genius’s” advice to an up-and-coming stand-up or the stand-up’s immediate implementation  of the advice. The “comic genius” is Sam Simon:

The guy who is both a creator and executive producer of The Simpsons. A guy that has written, directed or produced for shows like Taxi, Cheers, Friends, The Drew Carey Show…must I go on?

The advice?

He told me to use my art to bring people together. He said that love should be the driving force behind humor.

And that makes sense. If the driving force behind your art is to find that which is common within us all, it seems you would only appeal to a wider audience. Ergo, an act that brings people together gives you a shot at the big time instead of making a room full of retards laugh for 20 dollars and a six-pack of Fat Tire.

I think I just dropped the bit about setting up check-points between my front door and bedroom every time my Palestinian ex-girlfriend used to come visit me. I think I’ll add in the one about knowing that the Apocalypse is upon us because Starbucks just announced that they will be opening a Starbucks inside the bathrooms of all existing Starbucks.

Oh, and Ben Affleck has a very symmetrical face.

Bloggers and other hypersensitive people, take note:

Insults didn’t stop Rizzuto from living a wonderful life

This post is dedicated to the memory of Cathy Seipp, whom I tried to honor here.

Every society has its status symbols. In HezbollahLand, anyone associated with martyrdom is in like Flynn:

The mother [whose son was killed in a 1988 Hezbollah operation] explained that she now has a special status among the people who now show her more respect. She is also looked after by the party and is frequently invited to visit religious sites in Syria or Iran. She repeatedly says that “a female Hezbollah official” frequently takes her by the hand when she attends a function and lets her sit-in the front row. She added, “Do not believe that the mother of a martyr is unhappy. She may cry sometimes but she is happy.” The father then turns to me and says, “Do not forget that we gain a lot of support. The Martyr’s Institution covers all our medical, housing, and school expenses.”

Bribery, corruption, intimidation, preying on the weak and needy, exploiting the religious beliefs of simple people, feeding on their anxieties and fears—that is how “charitable” organizations like Hezbollah operate: they’re mini-totalitarian societies. You give what you have—your sons’ lives—to the cause. In return, the party takes care of you and your entire clan for life.

Here he comes to save the day. (Single-handedly!) Mighty Anderson is on the way:

No two ways about it, the Fourth Estate is on life-support — and the public is eager to pull the plug. Once regarded as the noblest of professions, journalism has toppled from the heights of David Halberstam to the muck of Judith Miller.

Still, there’s one decidedly silver lining in this clouded sky — Anderson Cooper, the prematurely gray, ultra-soigné Anderson Cooper, whose award-winning coverage of everything from Bosnia to Katrina has been heralded as creating a new genre of journalist: the “emo reporter.” Capable not only of dealing with disasters both natural (New Orleans) and man-made (Somalia), but doing so with something resembling identifiable human empathy, this feisty yet elegant man-about-the-globe has quickly become the sine qua non of reportorial style. And what complements a celebrated style better than a celebrity scent?

Hey, wait. AC wouldn’t really do that, would he?

Initially Cooper turned him down,

Whew. That’s better. It must be all that good breeding I mentioned a while back. Hold on, though. “Initially” he turned it down? Then what happened?

…  but Mom (that’s Gloria Vanderbilt to you) thinks it’s a swell idea. And being the Marie Curie of celebrity product placement, she certainly knows what she’s talking about. So Cooper is reportedly going to give it some thought.

And why the hell not? It’s not as if anyone respects TV “news” personalities anymore anyway.