two umbrellas

Michiko Kakutani of the NYT writes an article on the consequences of the truth as relative:

We live in a relativistic culture where television “reality shows” are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the “reality-based community,” can assert that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Phrases like “virtual reality” and “creative nonfiction” have become part of our language. Hype and hyperbole are an accepted part of marketing and public relations. And reinvention and repositioning are regarded as useful career moves in the worlds of entertainment and politics. The conspiracy-minded, fact-warping movies of Oliver Stone are regarded by those who don’t know better as genuine history, as are the most sensationalistic of television docudramas.

Mr. Frey’s embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the “writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story,” his casual attitude about how people remember the past – all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey’s new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

If the memoir form once prized authenticity above all else – regarding testimony as an act of paying witness to history – it has been evolving, in the hands of some writers, into something very different. In fact, Mr. Frey’s embellishments and fabrications in many ways represent the logical if absurd culmination of several trends that have been percolating away for years. His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish – that the death of objectivity “relieves me of the obligation to be right”; it “demands only that I be interesting.”

And they remind us that self-dramatization (in Mr. Frey’s case, making himself out to be a more notorious fellow than he actually was, in order to make his subsequent “redemption” all the more impressive) is just one step removed from the willful self-absorption and shameless self-promotion embraced by the “Me Generation” and its culture of narcissism…

By focusing on the “indeterminacy” of texts and the crucial role of the critic in imputing meaning, deconstructionists were purveying a fashionably nihilistic view of the world, suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth elusive. And by focusing on the point of view of the historian (gender, class, race, ideology, etc.), radical feminists and multiculturalists were arguing that history is an adjunct of identity politics, that all statements about the past are expressions of power and that all truths are therefore political and contingent…

…the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb argued that historians have always known “what postmodernism professes to have just discovered” – that any historical work “is necessarily imperfect, tentative and partial.” Yet postmodernists do not merely acknowledge the obstacles that stand in the way of objectivity but also celebrate those obstacles, elevating relativism into a kind of end in itself. They strive to be imaginative, inventive or creative, instead of accurate and knowledgeable.

This, in a sense, is what Mr. Frey has done on a petty scale in “A Million Little Pieces.” But he’s not the only one to indulge in this sort of relativism or these sorts of situational ethics. President Clinton famously answered a question, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, with the words “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” And members of the current Bush administration, as Franklin Foer has written in The New Republic, have promoted “the radically postmodern view that ’science,’ ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda,” arguing that experts (be they experts on the environment, Medicare or postwar Iraq) “are so incapable of dispassionate and disinterested analysis that their work doesn’t even merit a hearing.”

The Bush White House has used similar arguments to try to discredit the mainstream press and its watch-dog role, suggesting that there is no such thing as truly independent reporting or even a set of mutually agreed upon facts, that there are no distinctions between willfully partisan hacks and reporters who genuinely strive to deliver the best obtainable truth.

• Transplant friendship
• Robert Novak leaves CNN for Fox News.

Speaking of truth or the lack thereof, the NYRB has an article relaying the “balance” in American journalism.

Still, there remained firm limits on what could be reported out of Iraq. Especially taboo were frank accounts of the actions of US troops in the field —particularly when those actions resulted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

On the same day The Times ran its front-page story about the two thousand war dead, for instance, it ran another piece on page A12 about the rising toll of Iraqi civilians. Since the US military does not issue figures on this subject, Sabrina Tavernise relied on Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit Web site that keeps a record of casualty figures from news accounts. The site, she wrote, placed the number of dead civilians since the start of the US invasion at between 26,690 and 30,051. (Even the higher number was probably too low, the article noted, since many deaths do not find their way into news reports.) The Times deserves credit simply for running this story—for acknowledging that, as high a price as American soldiers have paid in the war, the one paid by Iraqi civilians has been much higher. Remarkably, though, in discussing the cause of those deaths, the article mentioned only insurgents. Not once did it raise the possibility that some of those deaths might have come at the hands of the “Coalition.”

This is typical. A survey of the Times’s coverage of Iraq in the month of October shows that, while regularly reporting civilian deaths caused by the insurgents, it rarely mentioned those inflicted by Americans; when it did, it was usually deep inside the paper, and heavily qualified. Thus, on October 18 the Times ran a brief article at the bottom of page A11 headlined “Scores Are Killed by American Airstrikes in Sunni Insurgent Stronghold West of Baghdad.” Citing military sources, the article noted in its lead that the air strikes had been launched “against insurgents” in the embattled city of Ramadi, “killing as many as 70 people.” A US Army colonel was cited as saying that a group of insurgents in four cars had been spotted “trying to roll artillery shells into a large crater in eastern Ramadi that had been caused when a roadside bomb exploded the day before, killing five US and two Iraqi soldiers.” At that point, according to the Times, “an F-15 fighter plane dropped a guided bomb on the area, killing all 20 men on the ground.” The Times went on to report the colonel’s claim that “no civilians had been killed in the strikes.” In one sentence, the article noted that Reuters, “citing hospital officials in Ramadi,” had reported “that civilians had been killed.” It did not elaborate. Instead, it went on to mention other incidents in Ramadi in which US helicopters and fighter planes had killed “insurgents.”

The AP told a very different story. The “group of insurgents” that the military claimed had been hit by the F-15 was actually “a group of around two dozen Iraqis gathered around the wreckage of the US military vehicle” that had been attacked the previous day, the AP reported.

The military said in a statement that the crowd was setting another roadside bomb in the location of the blast that killed the Americans. F-15 warplanes hit them with a precision-guided bomb, killing 20 people, described by the statement as “terrorists.”

But several witnesses and one local leader said the people were civilians who had gathered to gawk at the wreckage of the US vehicle or pick pieces off of it—as often occurs after an American vehicle is hit.

The airstrike hit the crowd, killing 25 people, said Chiad Saad, a tribal leader, and several witnesses who refused to give their names….

Readers of the Times learned none of these details.

Death and the horrors of war do not sell advertising space. It’s no wonder many Americans are “cushioned” through the language of television and print news. Jean Baudrillard writes:

It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary…

How long will the simulation of truth be comfortable and in some cases even excused?