Wednesday, October 06, 2004
(1:16 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
My disapproval of Robert Kaplan
Robert Kaplan's latest piece in The Atlantic (subscribers only; for the copy that I printed out and will gladly lend to you as long as you give it back to me, click here) is illustrative of most of my problems with the man's writing, which I have been following for about a year now. His argument is that embedding with the military, insofar as it exposes journalists to segments of society with which they don't normally associate, is healthy for journalists, contrary to those who argue that it harms objectivity. I agree with his general point that media elites are largely unconnected to the needs of average Americans; in fact, I would argue that if there is a bias in the media, it is toward rich people. His argument deploys the word "elite," however, in a way that is increasingly characteristic. In his usage, it refers not to those with the most money and power, but to cultural elitists:Journalists are increasingly global citizens. If they themselves do not have European and other foreign passports, their spouses, friends, and acquaintances increasingly do. Whereas the South and the adjacent Bible Belt of the southern Midwest and the Great Plains dominate the military, and the only New Yorkers and Bostonians one is likely to meet in the barracks are from working-class areas, heavily Irish and Hispanic, the urban Northeast, with its frequent air connections to Europe, is where the media cluster. Whereas the military is a lower-middle-class world in which a too-prominent sense of self is frowned on, the journalistic world too often represents the ultimate me, me, me culture of today's international elite.I will not deny anything he says here. I won't deny that journalists tend to be cosmopolitan while military recruits tend to be nationalist -- despite the fact that he offers nothing but anecdotal evidence to back up his claims and is apparently conceding that Fox News does not count as a "journalistic" enterprise. What is really insidious, however, is his ever-more-explicit identification of the values represented by the military with the authentic essence of America. His final paragraph really brings it together:
So although some journalism professors may worry that military embedding is subverting the media, I would argue the contrary. The Columbia Journalism Review recently ran an article about the worrisome gap between a wealthy media establishment and ordinary working Americans. One solution is embedding, which offers the media perhaps their last, best chance to reconnect with much of the society they claim to be a part of.They claim to be a part of our society? Let's see: they are overwhelmingly US citizens (unless I see stats to the contrary, let's assume he's exaggerating the extent to which journalists are all a bunch of Europeans). They work for US companies that produce news stories intended for a US audience. They spend US dollars. They pay their US taxes, although Mr. Authenticity himself, George W. Bush, is trying to help them pay less. They are, de facto, a part of our society. The "elites" of a society are also a part of the society. They aren't Europeans, even if they do travel abroad, any less than Hemmingway is a French author because he spent time in Europe. It is disgusting to imply that society can be made up only of one type of person and that everyone has to collapse down into that group to be authentically part of that society.
In another vein, the organization that he recommends as a way to get in touch with the "just folks" authenticity of the Red State experience is the military. There are two problems with this. First, the military is the most relentlessly hierarchical organization in our society. Whereas people have the option of whether they will act according to the dictates of the "media elites," soldiers do not have similar leeway when it comes to the dictates of the "military elite" -- you know, people like those who attend West Point, who are mysteriously "part" of the military in a way that those who attend Yale are not "part" of American society. Second, when journalists get in touch with the "just folks" authenticity of the Red State experience through military embedding, they are very likely to exaggerate the virtues of the soldiers precisely because they rely on the soldiers in order to remain alive. Is the love that comes from Stockholm syndrome really the kind of love you want the elites to have for the common man?
Kaplan's eloquent militarism and anti-democratic prejudices are representative of a whole strain of post-9/11 thinking that strikes me as completely wrong. The military has never protected the mainland of the US from anything since 1812. The military did not protect and could not have protected the US from the 9/11 attacks. The war in Iraq did not remove a "threat" to the US mainland or even to Israel -- in fact, like most of our military's foolish adventures in the Middle East and in Asia generally, it has sapped our resources and made us even more vulnerable. Far from being the reason that we have the privileges of liberal democracy, the military, by virtue of its very structure and by virtue of its shameful history throughout the 20th century (with the exception of WWII, of course) represents one of the foremost threats to those democracy freedoms.
Perhaps the military is a necessary evil if a democratic society is to survive -- and given the unnecessary evils our military has committed on our behalf and the thirst for vengeance it has stoked around the world, we would have to be suicidal to consider scaling back our military now -- but militarism of the type that Kaplan promotes virtually guarantees the death of a democratic society. We are already dangerously close to being an "army with a country" rather than a "country with an army," if we aren't there already -- we don't need any elite pundits writing clever propaganda to push us even further in that direction.
