Gorgeous George
Lamer, Jeremy
For whose benefit did President Bush invade Panama? How does it affect this country that Bush did not consult Congress? Will the invasion result in better living conditions for Latin America?...
...I was among those who admired a profile of Dan Quayle by the New York Times's White House reporter, Maureen Dowd, which appeared in the summer of 1989...
...If the reader could supply any knowledge about the world's political problems, the facts of the piece subtly but unmistakably revealed its subject's fatuity...
...At this point, then, Bush was batting with two strikes...
...The newsworthy fact was that Bush had now "pulled the trigger," and according to a subhead, "The decision to invade bespeaks the President's competitive side...
...I've thought there was something phony about every one of these presidential projections of macho toughness, and I can't forget candidate Bush confiding to a dock worker that he'd "kicked some ass" in his debate with Geraldine Ferraro...
...His reasons at either moment have something to do with public perception —but don't they also have to do with power, money, and control...
...Some of my liberal friends resented the article's detailing of Quayle's strategic preparations, his way of working hard at his job...
...strategy...
...Is Lee Atwater's glorification of his patron news fit to print...
...To me, the piece was value-free, in the fashion newspapers commonly require...
...A political jackpot," Lee Atwater gloated on the front page of the Times—and the reporter, Michael Oreskes, did not feel obliged to point out Atwater's peculiarly limited use of the word "political...
...The American people had now seen Panamanians cheering their "liberators" on television, and even Democrats agreed, and a quote was available from Robert Strauss, not a mere publicist but a coordinator of publicists, who said, "Politically, he's probably pretty well out of a mess in Panama...
...American presidents are offensive enough—never mind the latest polls—when they swaggeringly present this country as the world's Number One Team...
...From Kennedy on, every president has tried to put on the football helmet of masculinity each time he initiated military action without democratic debate...
...But when the reality of publicity is presented with unblinking literalness, it tends to supersede other sorts of reality—and even more strength is acquired by those who would create both leaders and policies through unceasing manipulation...
...Even Dowd could not find a way to step outside the earnest idiocy that has characterized the massive "coverage" of recent events in Panama...
...That was the impetus behind the students who gave their lives in China—the resentment of new capitalist elitism as controlled by a Leninist ruling cadre—and the same feeling is reflected in, say, the Polish desire for strong labor unions and religious freedom...
...The article wound up with Lee Atwater comparing George Bush to Babe Ruth: "It's the political version of Babe Ruth pointing to the fence . . . and then he knocked it out of the stadium...
...The authority she chose to quote was not hampered by involvement with any issue or program...
...Partly because reporters accompanying the U.S...
...And what is the news significance of the weeks of front-page polls that followed, announcing Bush's popularity at an all-time high, comparable, say, to John Kennedy's after the Bay of Pigs...
...When editors pressure reporters for "analysis," this is what they tend to get...
...By and large their actions have been catastrophic blunders that debased American influence and propped up political privilege and oppression in various parts of the earth...
...But there is something disturbing also in the administration's current greeting of the newborn success of internal liberation movements in communist countries...
...Yet at this point, the picture was not a clear one, and the reporter had to step outside the circle of inner "strategists" to gain perspective on what had gone awry...
...Will it further long-run objectives of peace, justice, freedom...
...But the straight reporting of silly calculations falls short in situations where political circumstances are in dispute...
...The details of policy and nonpolicy that contributed to this impression were omitted...
...He was "Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic consultant," that is, a publicist on the defensive team...
...True enough, most Eastern Europeans seem to favor some form of "free market...
...For Noriega had been released from the Vatican embassy and taken to Miami as an American prisoner...
...He referred to Bush's public "image," which the invasion had helped by replacing "a perception that he was timid or indecisive with one that he was disciplined, firm, patient and willing to use force...
...The Times added an ironic little kicker: "Many sports historians dismiss the story as a myth conjured to enlarge Ruth's heroic image...
...If we see a picture of Noriega laughing on the beach someday, it will be the functional equivalent for George Bush of the crashed helicopters for Jimmy Carter...
...The walk he takes, how he planned it, and how his plans seemed to succeed are all factual matters, and deserve to be reported as news...
...forces were confined to quarters, the bulk of what the public saw and read centered on the public relations aspects and proclaimed Bush a winner...
...A year ago, Bush, with the very same yelping voice and febrile snigger, proclaimed the cause of the students in Tiananmen Square...
...Let's pick up Dowd's analysis as of December 24, 1989, when more troops and civilians than anticipated had perished, yet deposed Panamanian president Manuel Noriega had escaped, bloody resistance continued, and Latin American governments were appalled...
...But Dowd's inside analysis dealt with Bush's personal calculations...
...Moreover, Bush felt that he had been "unfairly depicted in the press and Congress as lethargic and indecisive...
...Today, he announces renewed relations with their murderers, oppressors, and jailers...
...Elsewhere in the Times, one could find political reasons why they were appalled...
...I saw the writer's tongue steadfastly in her cheek...
...264 • DISSENT...
...Afew weeks later, however, all was changed—if not in Panama or in the turbulent, deadly struggles of Central America, at least in the American media ratings...
...But they also want democracy, and for many of them that means a society where the rich don't necessarily grow richer at the expense of the ordinary citizen and the feeling of communal decency...
...The president—according to "counselors," "advisers," "trusted officials," and "top officials"— felt that Noriega "was thumbing his nose at him...
...Symmetrically, as flacks gain power, media coverage increasingly concerns itself with a description of P.R...
...The United States needs such a debate badly, but we won't have it as long as we follow politics like wrestling fans, encouraging leaders who pose in costume, speak in vulgar simplicities, and concern themselves above all with how they are getting their acts across...
...Despite reversing an image of himself that had hurt his feelings, he had failed to achieve SPRING • 1990 • 263 Culture Notes whatever it was Ronald Reagan achieved in Grenada...
...One more word on politics as slogans and poses...
...Capitalism does not equal democracy, and Eastern Europe, for all its dangers and miseries, is entering into a welter of passionate debate about the adjustment of economic activities to ideals of justice and humanity...
...Atwater referred not to the political arrangements of Panama, nor to the living conditions of Latin America, nor to American policies to change those conditions...
...Forgive the obvious questions...
...We can now read in a number of memoirs that Ronald Reagan thought he was George Gipp with a distinguished service record in World War II...
...Some were annoyed that the profile contained no perspective on Quayle's assumptions—what else he might be thinking, doing, reading, saying...
...Fair enough—but why bother then...
...I'm aware they've been taken up by the odd editorial writer and columnist, but the overall message of American media coverage was that they didn't matter...
...Here I mean "political" in the sense relating to the distribution of power and control, not to the perception of bellicosity that attaches to a given American president...
...White House statements simply fail to distinguish between the desire for freedom and the desire for capitalism...
...Here is where we really could use a bit more "coverage...
...Henry Kissinger told Oriana Fallaci he pictured himself as the Lone Ranger, walking down the middle of the street in a frontier town—not long before he turned Chile over to the death squads...
...Since publicity represents a kind of actuality, Bush is currently able to walk down the street and have the population admire his new clothes...
...But what I think or what the public thinks of these idiot images has little to do with the motives of foreign policy...
...Said Garin: "Panama was not as clean for George Bush as Grenada was for Ronald Reagan...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
