I’ve never read any John Le Carre. Too much, as I understood it, darkness, betrayal and death. It wasn’t so much that I thought that being a spy was glamorous and jolly (a read of the actual James Bond books will quite dispel that illusion), it’s just that I really didn’t need to be entertained, or moved, by angst and duplicitousness.
Which is why, in keeping with that theme, Le Carre’s current op-ed piece on how “The United States of America has gone mad” isn’t something that I would have read on my own, save for Andrea’s mentioning of it.
The basic theme is the mantra of the anti-war crowd. Blah, blah, blah, it’s all about oil, blah, blah, Iraq is no worse than other folks, blah, blah, Bush is either an evil greedy bastard genius or else an idiot, or maybe both, blah, blah, blah.
A few items stand out that are worth noting as being indicative of the reasoning that Le Carre uses.
As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded.
Le Carre says this, in different ways, several times. The only actual reasoning or evidence or example that he cites is at the very end.
Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: “Peace is also Patriotic”. It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.
Good Lord. Someone removed a bumper sticker that they didn’t like. Must have been the Bush Secret Police! No, wait, they would have simply disappeared the author’s friend off to the underground gulags beneath DIA. No, it must have been some Horribly Intolerant Private Citizen.
Impolite, certainly. Even cowardly. But hardly a sign of McCarthyism, erosion of legal dissent, or the jack boots of a Mad America.
Of course, the War on Terrorism, and the prospective War on Iraq, ar emerely smoke screens for the Bushies.
Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place …
Get. Over. It. I thought the Supremes were stupid in their decision, and I rooted for Gore until the bitter end. Bottom line, though, Bush won. Simply repeating “Stolen Election!” like a mantra was getting old in January 2001, and it hasn’t aged well in the succeeding two years.
But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.
How, and in what ways, the American public is being “browbeaten,” or, given the Internet (and the noble efforts of Mr Le Carre) it is being kept in ignorance is not explained. It’s simply enough to simply bandy about words like neurosis and conspirators, and leave it at that.
In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another’s, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.
For the record, Le Carre either ignorantly or intentionally makes three people sound here like five, like there’s some vast Bush dynasty (unlike, say, the Kennedys or the Roosevelts in their day). George H.W. is both the ex-CIA director and the ex-Pres. Dubya is the President and ex-Governor of Texas. Jeb is the Florida Governor (God help them). Whether Le Carre doesn’t realize this, or is simply intentionally trying to distort the truth, doesn’t speak well in either case to the rest of his meager “facts.”
Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God’s work.
One can certainly question the Bush Administration’s energy policy, or even whether its various members background in the oil industry gives it a distorted view of such matters.
On the other hand, Rice is the National Security Advisor, not the Secretary of Energy. Bush’s experiences with Arbusto (“Shrub”) sound to have been something less than Evil Big Business in nature. And what involvement in the oil industry has to do with the Bushies being any better or less able to do what is right is only sneered at here, not intelligently argued.
I could go on, but basically Le Carre doesn’t like Bush’s policies, is willing to imply any number of malevolent and/or crazy motivations to him, and contributes little to the debate over Iraq (or to the debate over what he calls “poor mad little North Korea,” those darned crazy kids) than a tired, and not terribly coherent screed.
I’m usually not impressed when actors get on their high horses about public policy issues, not because they shouldn’t be free to express their opinions, but because their uninformed opinions are usually not worth listening to. It seems that writers of fiction are not immune to that state, either.
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Lileks does a sight finer job on the above article than I do. With statistics.
In defense of one argument you make — the Internet isn’t the greatest source of information. You could, by happenstance, land on a hard-right site (or several), and not realize what the agenda was, if you didn’t know what you were doing. Ditto the other way around.
It’s a tricky area. Yes, folks are becoming more and more internet savvy, but in my job, I see people who should know better taking things at face value.
So as a result, you get this from a recent poll:
“As far as you know, how many of the September 11th terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens: most of them, some of them, just one, or none?”
Most of them — 21%
Some of them — 23%
Just one — 6%
None — 17%
Don’t know — 33%
Food for thought.
What, you’re not going to bash Dave for impugning the rights of fiction writers to speak out politically? You’re slipping, Scott…
Nothing can force people to not be ignorant. My point was that any ignorance, so far as it exists, is not being imposed by the US government on the American people.
Well said. I believe most folks have a comfort zone that their lives operate in. Once they find the truth that fits into this zone, the majority will stop looking farther. It’s either laziness or indifference, not the government, that keeps people in the dark.
So long as information is freely available. While that’s a bit less so than it used to be, I think “The Truth is Out There” for the important decisions we face right now.
Dave, I respect your “rationality” so much!
De nada.
LeCarre, like other liberal, ‘give peace a chance’ eggheads have one common trait. They champion and stridently demand their individual RIGHTS, whilst simultaneously shirking the inherent RESPONSIBILITY that comes with each and every right. The rights I refer to were bought and paid for, as a verifiable historic perspective, by the many decent souls who laid their collective lives on the line each and every time some demonical tyrant threatened them. History shows us that it has been the USofA, as a Nation and people, who have stepped forward when others vacillated and cowered and shirked the responsibility of free men everywhere. Need I revisit history to refreshen those who prefer to rewrite history as to the individual tyrants who, in their time, would extinquish Mssr. LeCarre as soon as he opened his mouth. Wake up! And inhale a few breaths of reality. Those of the LeCarre ilk would have us firmly esconsed on the dungpile of anarchy and rapidly sinking into the quagmire of a fallen civilization. Mankind has a long way to go in the self-improvement area, but burying one’s head in the sand is no shortcut. It only gives one a grainy look at one’s ass.
Shakespeare must have had the then liberal establishment in mind when he incorporated the phrase…”Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing” into his work.
A US Navy vet, who has paid his dues, and a pragmatic realist who never wears rose-colored glases.
On behalf of myself, my progeny and freedom loving RESPONSIBLE PEOPLE of the World my wish to you…, LeCarre, is “Out…out, damned spot”.
Just to be slightly contrarian, I’ll note that
a. John LeCarre is British, not, as you imply (“Mssr.”) French.
b. The US did not involve itself in WWI until 1917, and WWII until the end 1941 (when directly attacked). That doesn’t quite qualify as the US always being “a Nation and people, who have stepped forward when others vacillated and cowered and shirked the responsibility of free men everywhere.”
While there are folks who demand rights without repsonsibilities, I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of all liberals. (Indeed, as you get further left, you find folks who demand that responsibility to society trumps all individual rights.)