In recent weeks, you’ve come out publicly in support of this war, as you say, “ruefully and fretfully.” I don’t want to talk about politics, because you probably get to do that about as much as you get to talk to people about Spy. But a lot of your work in the last 10 years, is of a piece–you seem to be turning into an apologist for the baby boom generation now that you’ve stormed the corridors of power, taken the reins of media, and…
…and invaded Baghdad! Apologist? I’ll reject that. I mean I don’t spend much time thinking about myself as the voice of my generation, or anything like that. But you know, yeah, you grow up. The baby boom as an idea doesn’t disgust me, but it sort of bores me. In many ways, I feel often more in sync with people 10 years younger than I am than those who are 10 years older. In a way, what I was coming to grips with in that piece in the Times was coming to grips with not reflexively defaulting to this way of looking at the world and conceiving of America and this war, that occurred to us the first time we ever thought of that stuff, i.e. 1969. And yet, in my own struggle with this, as I find myself reacting often against anti-war…
You’re a contrarian.
…I guess that’s part of it. But I had to consciously not make that push me toward pro-war. I mean being pissed off at some stupid anti-war thing, not that all anti-war arguments were stupid at all, because I harbor and share some of them. But to be anti-anti-war isn’t the same as being pro-war, and that’s the sort of the weird ambivalent gray zone where I was for a long time, and still remain, I guess. It’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of my work as sharing that theme, but I think it’s fair to say.
As editors, of course, our first instinct is for freshness, and that makes us automatic contrarians, we automatically reject established cliches.
Yes. On this particular thing with Iraq, I can’t understand how anybody can have absolute conviction on either end, frankly. So I’m both a contrarian, I guess, and a kind of chronic ambivaloid. And together, you probably can predict my feeling about things. No, I agree about the freshness. It’s like, tell me something I don’t know. Part of my impatience with many people that I work with, that I know and see, is the kind of visceral, reflexive anti-Bush feeling. I mean, I didn’t vote for him, I’m not going to vote for him, but I don’t hate him. I was similarly baffled by the anti-Clinton heat of his term. I am skeptical of reflexive conventional wisdom. Sometimes conventional wisdom is correct, but you know it has to prove itself to me more than an interesting new way of looking at something.
In your New York Times magazine piece, you propose that we maybe lost the battle in Vietnam, but we won the war– ostensibly because it has since opened up as a market for capitalism. Give that, and given that terrorism is a kind of response to cultural imperialism, is it possible that we’ll do the opposite in Iraq–win the battle and lose the war?
Absolutely. In fact, originally I had an ending for the piece that was almost that sentence. That is indeed exactly what worries me. But then I thought maybe that was too glib of a parallel, but it does worry me
. Now, I also wonder, however, to what degree terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist anti-Americanism is a response to Baywatch and MTV. I don’t know, maybe. I’m sure there’s some truth in it, but I have yet to be utterly convinced about how large of a fraction of the anger that represents. I mean, Israel represents a big fraction of the anger. That’s hard to discuss in this country in any kind of civil way–that’s another one where everyone sort of defaults to the polar positions. You know, they hated Rome 2000 years ago. And they hated England 200 years ago. So part of it is, we’ve ended up in the current round as the winners in geopolitics, there’s some irreducible amount of anger and resentment that’s going to exist and a challenge is to figure out how to minimize, how to make that not translate into physical threats to me and my children and you and your friends. Part of me thinks while I ruefully, and fretfully, and reluctantly supported this invasion, that this may well not be the correct group of people the right administration to do everything that’s required starting today.
American media coverage of the war seemed to me to be sanitized to the point where it had no meaning at all. The rumor is that war involves killing people, and you wouldn’t have known it from American media.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think that’s entirely true, and one of the failures of how television reported this war. Since I happened to be out of the country, I had the whole smorgasbord of Arab, Chinese, Japanese, BBC, the rest of it, to have this balanced diet of biases. You know, the point that has been made about Fox news–and Fox news is only a matter of degree, it seems to me, compared to MSNBC, and CNN, in terms of the biases and the inevitable prism through which events are viewed–the equivalence of Fox news and Al Jazeera seems to me almost inarguable. Anytime big groups of people, whether they’re in Cairo or in America, sort of sit in their self-contained silo of information that conforms to their views, I find that depressing and disturbing. Why I was, in my masochistic way, happy to be in Vietnam when the war began, especially as somebody who thought we gotta do this, I wanted to be faced with the memory, the residue of real war. Which as you say involves ugly, hideous things. I don’t know about you, but to me, rather than being a triumph of cable news or whatever, I found in terms of excellence and clarity and everything else, it was a triumph for newspapers and still imagery. That amazing report from Dexter Filkins, I think, in the New York Times, of the Marine sharpshooter who said to him, talking about how he accidentally killed civilians when he was shooting the enemy, he shot a woman, and he said, “I’m sorry but the chick got in the way.” Whoa! What a funny and ghastly thing, of a kind that one didn’t see on TV. Forget pictures of bloody dead bodies, just that kind of terror that we have to face if we’re not going to be pacifists–that was missing so substantially from television.
How do you think “live coverage” played, really? I mean, those of us who are editors and work in print had this kind of reflexive response that it lacked shape, that it really needed editing.
I think you’re absolutely right. I think the lack of digestedness. Even the New York Times, which was my main media source, I had never seen it so undigested, and as under-edited (probably inevitably so) as those Nation at War Things were. But at least someone had to go back to a keyboard and figure out their own little bit of the war that they were reporting.
It was interesting at first, just the novelty of those weird, pixilated images. You know, once or twice, suddenly he firefight starts, and there’s this strange Devo-like depiction of it. It was interesting, I guess? But it was all about sensation and tedium in some weird amalgam, and not about illumination or clarity. In the end, I just found it deeply unsatisfying.
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