In 1986 Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson founded a satirical magazine
called Spy that took a no-holds-barred toward the rich and the powerful.
After the magazine went under, both made career shifts that landed them
editorial positions at celebrity-worshipping magazines of exactly the kind
that Spy excoriated. Carter runs Vanity Fair, whose latest issue has an
exclusive on Greenwich, Connecticut's new rich: "Viewed from above, the
sprawl that is the Cohen estate resembles Buckingham Palace, or Windsor
Castle. Even people unfazed by luxury are startled by the excess. One
billionaire, whose name I've promised not to reveal here, said his jaw
dropped the first time he visited." Just the kind of journalism that the
world has been waiting for.
Meanwhile, Anderson is a columnist at New York Magazine, a citadel of
middle-class appetites. If you want to find out where to get a bargain on
Gucci handbags, New York is just for you. I like to check in on the
magazine's website in the largely vain hope that I might find an
interesting film review, but also to check up on what the once impertinent
Kurt Anderson now has to say after becoming part of the
Establishment--largely out of a morbid interest in the art of selling out.
In an article describing their drift, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post
had the following to say:
"One sign of the times: While Spy frequently ridiculed zillionaire Donald
Trump as a 'thick-fingered vulgarian,' Carter was among the glitterati at
Trump's wedding to Marla Maples -- and put the newlyweds on the cover of
Vanity Fair's March issue."
In the latest issue of New York Magazine, Mr. Anderson weighs in on the
differences between Vietnam and Iraq, a subject of some interest to me
since the Irish BBC once interviewed me on the topic (the ingrates never
sent me the $100 emolument they promised me.) The article
(<http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/imperialcity/17271/>http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/imperialcity/17271/)
is titled "The Vietnam Obsession Its the analogy that wont quitand wont
fly, either. But could Iraq end up like Vietnam? We should be so lucky."
It seems that Mr. Anderson has hopes that after 30 years Iraq could also
become a source of cheap labor like Vietnam: "In fact, if during the next
three decades Iraq itself follows a course something like that of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnamthat is, if it becomes an authoritarian
country run by our nominal enemies yet stable, peaceful, prosperous, and
apparently happywe should count ourselves extremely fortunate indeed."
(So, of course, does Thomas Friedman.)
Although Anderson is far too much the urban sophisticate to put things in
the same way as Sean Hannity, the message amounts to basically the same thing:
"In Vietnam we were fighting on behalf of not-so-good-guys against
not-so-bad-guys. In Iraq, we really are fighting on the side of the
majority of the people (and their not-so-bad-guy leaders) against bad guys.
Back then, we fought to prevent a regional domino effect of communist
overthrow; in Iraq, we started fighting to provoke a regional domino effect
of democratic overthrow. But the fact that this time we are fighting on
morally high(er) groundfor bigger stakes against no remotely noble
enemiesprobably makes the hell-bent, largely avoidable
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld mismanagement of Iraq more egregious than the
Johnson-McNamara-Nixon conduct of the war in Vietnam."
This heavily qualified exercise in obfuscation could be rendered more
simply as the following: "Iraq, unlike Vietnam, is a just war. And it is
really too bad that the Bush administration screwed things up so badly."
Besides questions of winnability, Anderson seems interested in the public
mood. "But otherwise . . . how many of us care passionately about the war?
How much does it color American life and culture? Compared with Vietnam,
the fundamental apathy on all sides is remarkable."
Mr. Anderson attributes this to the fact that this is a lower-intensity
war: "Twenty-four Iraqis died in Haditha, while at My Lai several hundred
civilians were murdered." Of course, there was even less militancy
throughout the 1980s when low-intensity warfare was occurring throughout
Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa. As somebody who visited Nicaragua
during this period, I was always reminded of how a mother felt after her
son had been killed by the contras. From her perspective, the war was
always highly intense.
Of course, some of the apathy might be as well attributed to the failure of
the news media to do its job. Mr. Anderson informs us that the antiwar
protests in New York City have not been so large lately. Maybe if his
editor assigned somebody to write about them, they would be larger. I
certainly do understand that this might take away from valuable space now
being allotted to matters such as "Will Sudoku Kill the Crossword Puzzle?"
or "Cheating at the Montauk Shark-Fishing Tournament?"
For Mr. Anderson, the basic difference between the 1960s and now has a lot
to do with the American people, and students in particular, becoming more
apathetic, a theme that Time Magazine revisited all through the 1980s and
90s. Our former Spy opines, "And in a way that the sixties were precisely
not, this is also an Age of Whatever. Thus the Iraq war, even if it ends
badly, will cause no great disillusionment about Americas heroic white-hat
nobilityyou cant lose your virginity twice."
I imagine that Mr. Anderson is quite the expert on losing one's virginity,
given his peregrinations throughout the rather mercenary world of
commercial media. As it turns out, he was fired from New York Magazine in
1994 for, according to Mr. Anderson's blog, being "too annoying in its
coverage of the then-owner's business and social and political associates."
Knowing full well how expensive NY can be and what it means to be out of a
job, I can certainly empathize with Mr. Anderson's decision to no longer
annoy anybody else in positions of power.
--
www.marxmail.org
- [PEN-L] Kurt Anderson on Vietnam and Iraq Louis Proyect
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