Culture Vultures: Our Post-Television War
Steyn, Mark
TU E VULTW by Mark Steyn Our Post-Television War American apathy on Kosovo and China is unspeakable. 0 n the Sunday before Memorial Day, I went down to my small north country town's annual...
...I think those nutso Commies are being hopelessly optimistic: "Dateline NBC" isn't going to pre-empt its JonBenet update for anything so footling as a nuclear strike on Canada...
...If the wind changes direction and residents of Plattsburgh, New York, and Burlington, Vermont, find themselves alarmingly depilated and giving birth to two-headed babies, Dan Rather will turn up in a decontamination suit and ask whether it's something to do with La Nina...
...But even the most hard-headed vet was happy to indulge the little moppet's sappy noodlings...
...In this instance, the Balkan war is real...and it can hardly get on the news shows at all...
...Yes or no...
...But, until then, Kim Jung II, like Slobo and the Politburo, is definitely not ready for primetime...
...In less developed television cultures, like Britain, the failure of the president to engage his people is unnerving the governing elites...
...In America's living rooms today, a few people are strongly in favor of the war, a few people are just as vehemently opposed, and the vast overwhelming majority don't give, as Oliver North remarked in another context, a rat's patootie...
...Likewise...
...Meanwhile, the usual fetishists for "bipartisanship" are deploring the "worst case" spin the GOP's Chris Cox has put on the report: He should have toned down his assessment of Chinese nuclear penetration, and then it wouldn't have looked as if it was just those Clinton-hating Republicans out to get the president again...
...And in the course of this very simple and traditional service not a single speakMARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...And then, of course, there is Kosovo, or "Madeleine's War," as Time called it in an appropriate headline with the first big black-and-white picture...
...Time was serious, and corporate policy probably forbids it from making fun of itself, anyway...
...Madeleine Albright has never been the type to sit by her phone knitting, waiting for guys to call, unless the guy is the president and the date is with History," it said in the very first sentence of its story...
...John Foster Dulles said that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role...
...I wonder what the rationale this time is: Everyone lies about sex—and Chinese espionage...
...That wacky satire is a paragon of sanity compared to what's happening here...
...If the Chinese are happy to go on making all those cuddly toys and souvenir knickknacks we buy at Disney World's "Main Street USA," why begrudge them the odd nuclear secret...
...Itseems even being president of the United States isn't enough to insulate your prose from the random assaults of New York Times copy-editors...
...The Chinese Politburo...
...But not here...
...What a snoozefest...
...William Jefferson Clinton, "the 42nd President" according to his New York Times byline, attempted in an op-ed column to justify the war, but he needn't have bothered...
...The American people had the wisdom and maturity to appreciate this...
...Clinton's behavior were told that, in fact, the American people were showing their usual sound judgment: They were sophisticated enough to distinguish44 If China's taking ail our nuke secrets can't grab our attention, what can...
...No one wanted to know...
...Well, er, no, not really...
...Relations with China and Russia have deteriorated...
...Satire depends for its effectiveness on recognition, and what we recognize tends to be a step or two behind the curve...
...But if the Chinese taking all our nuke secrets can't grab our attention, what can...
...The reason the public didn't mind Bill Clinton turning to Monica as a distraction from serious politics is because it had itself turned to Bill Clinton as a distraction from serious politics...
...America's allies have been surprised to find that the world's only surviving superpower has no stomach for war, or even for following a war on TV...
...50 July 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Albright's reputation has been in decline ever since the first bomb fell, and it is now beyond redemption...
...Switch on ABC, CBS, whatever: You sit through the exciting news about the new fat pill, and the story about the importance of wearing a safety helmet when you're out bicycling, and something about mean-spirited Republicans refusing to go along with a new bipartisan approach to gun control, and a timeless feature about whether anti-wrinkle creams can really stop aging, and, as for the war, well, about 20 minutes into the bulletin, 48 July x999 The American Spectator you'll get the regularly scheduled "Apology of the Day" feature in which the NATO spokesman concedes that yes, they may well have accidentally hit (a) a children's ward...
...They give us what we want, we give 'em what they want...
...See previous answer...
...0 n the Sunday before Memorial Day, I went down to my small north country town's annual parade and service on the common...
...It's amazing how quickly the media and the Democrats have lapsed into the "So what...
...There was a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies...
...Even the standard acknowledgments of jobs not yet finished and wars not yet won were confined this year to one token reference...
...And, as in the fundraising investigations, it's all about Republican racism anyway: The New York Times has already weighed in with an op-ed column tutting that these reckless accusations against those with Oriental surnames are an unfair slur against the integrity of all Asian-Americans...
...Wreaths were laid...
...Clinton...
...The Establishment was striking back...
...er uttered the word "Kosovo...
...It also had a gushing contest with Newsweek...
...Come on, he said, out with it: Are you in favor of full-scale war with China...
...And then the crowd slowly drifted over to the general store for ice cream, the men pausing only to admire the town sexpot in her scout-mistress's uniform of shorts and white socks...
...Right now...
...As for the civilians, they didn't mention the "conflict" in the Balkans because, to be honest, it slipped their minds...
...assured the House Judiciary Committee that a "gentleman," by definition, is obliged to lie about his lady friends...
...In part, that's due to the particular character of American hegemony...
...Time had admired them, too, but it out-gushed Newsweek by descending into girl-speak...
...The coverage was absurd at the time, and since then it has looked even sillier...
...The band played "Anchors Aweigh," "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," "God Bless America," and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens's "Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)" (Billboard Number One, May 1970...
...But in Britain imperial sunset was accompanied by a deep, wistful sense of regret that still The American Spectator • July 1999 49 lingers...
...protectorates...
...Next time you see the flag on a proud American chest, remember: These colors don't run...
...Actually Time was defending one of its own...
...One of the town's selectmen gave a short speech, so did a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recited the Gettsyburg Address, the classic Great War poems, etc...
...In that movie, you'll remember, the president hires a Hollywood producer to stage a fake Balkan war to fill up the evening news and distract from his sex scandal...
...But after the Star Wars cover ("EXCLUSIVE PICTURES from the movie"), with Obi-Wan Kenobi and QuiGon Jinn in robes, holding light sabers, and looking determined, there was the Madeleine Albright cover ("EXCLUSIVE: Behind the scenes with the Secretary of State as she pushes for victory in Kosovo...
...Eight hundred...
...Newsweek had asked, and thencarried on admiringly about her cojones...
...The British think they see a great power on the eve of inevitable imperial decline —and, if anyone should know, they should...
...And doubtless, if you happen to be in a Serb hospital or Chinese embassy or Albanian refugee convoy when the $2 million cruise missile drops out of the sky, it seems real enough...
...As a matter of policy, "we" are not "in" Kosovo at all: we are 15,000 feet above Kosovo, on cloudless nights...
...But I'm surprised those bone-headed literalists on the op-ed page allowed him to get away with his opening sentence: "We are in Kosovo...
...Tough-talking Tony Blair has all the qualities of leadership except followers...
...between the serious abuse of presidential power and the natural and understandable lying concomitant to a regrettable personal lapse...
...Readers may recall that a couple of months ago in these pages I had cause to denounce the Times editing process, so I have every sympathy for Mr...
...b) a commuter train...
...In the story inside, managing editor Walter Isaacson JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...
...It also presents satirists with a problem...
...Impeachment is over now and we've got back to those "real issues" we were told the American people wanted to talk about — war, ethnic cleansing, national security, nuclear technology—and the American people can barely stifle their yawns...
...This is America's first post-television war...
...wrote that Albright seemed "touchingly eager for approval," and "anxious" about how the story would turn out, but that he told her "rest assured—the pictures are good," and certainly from an Establishment perspective that was true...
...In London, Her Majesty's Government talks the talk but can't walk the walk: It has scrapped and merged and downsized British forces to a point where it can muster barely more than the Canadians...
...It's out there somewhere, far away, on the fringes of the map...
...The other day in the New York Times Thomas Friedman advised the president to issue a challenge to those in Congress and the press kicking up a fuss about Beijing...
...To understand this, What matters is where you figure on the A-list...
...What makes Madeleine Albright so tough...
...When Clinton nominated Albright as secretary of state, Time, along with other big news organizations, had suspended all its critical faculties and adopted her...
...Everyone lies about sex...
...c) a KLA-held village that had been providing NATO with intelligence reports on which Serb-held villages to hit but which, alas, had failed to take into account the Pentagon's casual attitude to foreign spellings...
...Will Professor Schlesinger step forward to explain that, naturally, a gentleman always lies not only about his lady friends but also about whether or not his energy secretary drew his attention to any breaches of nuclear security...
...For example, Wag the Dog is a funny enough film, but it gets everything exactly backwards...
...Nonetheless, the Brits, Canucks, and Western Europeans, having sheltered under the American security umbrella for half a century, are aghast to discover that the world has somehow wound up being run by a superpower that will don a helmet to ride a bicycle but not to wage war...
...The transition is eerily seamless: Ken Starr...
...Why should Bosnia, Kosovo, you name it, regard themselves as U.S...
...But what exactly is at stake if you're not willing to spill the blood of your own...
...Saddam Hussein has grown stronger...
...At that Memorial Day parade, one of my neighbors turned up with a popular T-shirt displaying the Stars and Stripes and bearing the slogan "These colors don't run...
...they despised this phony campaign, and the politicians conducting it, and, if you prodded them deeply enough, they felt that this so-called first "progressive," "humanitarian" war dishonored the very concept of soldiering...
...During the long thirteen months of Monica and thongs and DNA, as the so-called "job approval" polls refused to budge, those of us who were boorish and provincial enough to be concerned about Mr...
...they balked at including the Balkans on their roll-call of honor...
...Any more, says the defense minister, would leave it massively overstretched...
...But nor am I in favor of living in a world dominated bythe only dictatorship that's managed to find a form of Communism that's economically viable...
...The Vietnam war was supposedly lost in America's living rooms...
...the Kosovo war can barely get in there...
...The Canadian papers recently reported that the North Koreans have now got missiles targeted on Quebec, their reasoning being that blowing up Montreal would demonstrate to the Americans that they're serious but, unlike blowing up Cleveland, would not invite instant nuclear retaliation...
...The president has a point: The term "war" presupposes you have something at stake...
...after all, if you're going to be a woozy pacifist, fifth grade's the time to be it...
...A modest clutch of veterans from the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf—several bearing the same surname— marched around the green, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders...
...Albright was in a bomber jacket, talking into a cell phone, looking determined, and apparently calling in F-16s...
...Slobo...
...The only ones who didn't were a few sex-obsessed neo-McCarthyite Republican wackos...
...Chinese T-shirt technology has improved almost as spectacularly as Chinese nuclear technology...
...A Just and Necessary War" said the Times headline, prompting fury at the White House, since columnist Clinton had gone to great lengths to avoid using the word "war" in his article...
...The nominal majority party is so sensitive to these criticisms that the leadership reflexively gives the impression it would prefer not to raise the issue at all but to wait until Beijing looses a missile or two on the off-chance they take out Barney Frank or Maxine Waters...
...Hey, everyone does it...
...Canada, which had a quarter of a million men under arms in 1945, now says that the most it can commit to NATO action in the Balkans is ...Soo...
...Let us grant that most of these guys are humbugs...
...We knew Bill Clinton's a pudgy sensualist who keeps Yasir Arafat waiting in the outer office because he needs some instant gratification from Monica...
...excuses of earlier scandals...
...They were in old-fashioned black and white, not color, and meant to link Albright with the past: JFK and Cuban missiles, Johnson and Vietnam, even Bobby and Bed-Stuy...
...As always, one of the fifth-graders felt moved by the horrors of war to write her own poem for world peace...
...What's more worrying is that he may be an apter embodiment of the general citizenry than we could ever have contemplated...
...Albright has conducted foreign policy by mixing threats, bluffs, and empty moralizing, and the result has been a series of disasters...
...But they do slowly, remorselessly, fade away...
...On the face of it, this is extraordinary: The United States and its allies are at war, and no one mentions it, even at military occasions...
...Time wanted to confirm that no matter what anyone thought, Albright was still one of the boys...
...only a "cad" would do otherwise...
...With a surging Dow, America is on a roll and has no desire to found an empire...
...But in the chancelleries of Europe, they're pretty sure they know what it portends...
...If the T-shirt was made in China, as it most likely was, I wonder if the 70-an-hour factory worker gave a little chuckle as she sent it on its way...
...High-tech long-distance Nintendo warfare detaches the populace from the "conflict" as surely as it does that of a decadent, ramshackle nineteenth-century sultanate that contracts its soldiering out to mercenaries...
...Why, the distinguished historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...Afterwards, I buttonholed the old soldiers and endeavored casually to bring up the subject...
...And yet, when all the criticisms of the president and the Democrats and the Republicans and the media have been made, you're left with the saddest indictment of all: the indestructible indifference of the American people...
...In America, who cares...
...Taiwan, too, come to that...
...PRESSWATCH by John Corry Madeleine's War N o, it was not a parody...
...Giving the Commies all our nuke secrets...
...Like the president, we're too distracted by what's in our lap—Dunkin' Donuts, large pepperoni, supersize shake —to give our attention to foreign affairs...
...The Middle East peace process is expiring, and North Korea still exports missiles...
...they're watching the wrestling, or the home shopping network, or the wainscoting channel...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
