PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas The Real Barbarians As we ruefully, painfully marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the corrupting legacy of that war was driven home by two very...
...The Times never mentioned the government's role in murdering this man's family, even though the paper's Sunday magazine section, just a few months ago, exposed the whole tawdry business...
...Despite Will's reassurances, camouflage-clad, armed militia-types are stockpiling anti-tank weaponry in their woodsheds...
...The second story was, by contrast, entirely about dead bodies...
...After all, "the clearest expression of violent hatred of the U.S...
...The first, publication of Robert McNamara's In Retrospect, was ever so genteel...
...When is someone going to point out the similarity between Will's reasoning powers and those of Dan Quayle...
...In another FBI-absolving version of history, the Times cited what has come to be, for militia groups, another example of federal assaults on civilians: the attack on Randy Weaver's family...
...McNamara himself, in the face of enormous criticism, is already rewriting his book and history, as when he insisted on MacNeil/Lehrer that he couldn't possibly have spoken out in 1967 because it would have "brought aid and comfort to the enemy...
...It is this kind of hypocritical insistence on the absolute authority of the government, right or wrong, that is responsible for the current cynicism McNamara claims to deplore...
...Kissinger, a perennial favorite of the network news and talk shows, has laid low, and has never had to account for the approximately 35,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese and Cambodians who were killed under his and Nixon's waging of the war...
...This is indeed scary and repugnant...
...I don't want white supremacists who believe they have computer chips implanted in their butts stockpiling weapons or encouraging lunatics to plant bombs underneath day-care centers...
...Both stories have their sorry, sickening roots burrowed deep into the rot of the Vietnam war...
...Government" was, according to Will, Oliver Stone's movie, JFK...
...Fortunately, George McGovern was also on this show to remind viewers that another man with blood on his hands, Henry Kissinger, was getting off scot-free in this debate...
...Mc-Namara's mistakes," insisted Enthoven, "were America's mistakes...
...George Will urged America not to get hysterical over "a tiny fringe group like the militias...
...The second, the bombing in Oklahoma City, was not...
...The passive voice was everywhere, on TV, in The New York Times, as in: "Waco, which resulted in" or "Waco which led to a fire that killed eighty members of the Branch Davidians...
...In an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Alain Enthoven, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Johnson, we were asked to "Give McNamara a Break...
...You know, it just kinda happened...
...Her column appears in this space every month...
...What about the thousands of people who, by 1967, had taken to the streets denouncing the war, and the soldiers who already knew the war was unwinnable and said so...
...That's why many of us saw Waco through the cynical eyes bequeathed to us by McNamara and his ilk...
...Media coverage of these stories reflects the press's own tortured relationship to the federal government...
...But when these same militia-types rail against a gun-happy FBI whose murderous exploits remain ignored or whitewashed by the mainstream press, many of us find ourselves in creepy and unwanted agreement...
...Then, in typical official doublespeak, he argued that dissenters had a right and responsibility to protest the war, but when they got drafted they were obliged to follow the orders of their government...
...Both stories focused on killers—those who are viewed as justified in sending people to their deaths and those who most certainly are not...
...Will also accused Clinton of "McCarthyism" for denouncing those who "spread hate...
...Weaver, a white supremacist wanted on weapons charges, saw his wife and teenage son shot to death by federal agents in an assault condemned even by the FBI itself...
...PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas The Real Barbarians As we ruefully, painfully marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the corrupting legacy of that war was driven home by two very different events...
...The pundits lost no time in getting back to the real barbarians: liberals...
...And let's not forget how, in the name of the war, the government covertly spied on, harassed, and raided those whose only crime was opposing the war, and then denied vehemently they had ever done anything of the sort...
...This month we got some agonizing reminders of how cancerous such selective absolution can be.M Susan Douglas teaches at Hampshire College...
...In the first story, many experts—mostly white men in suits—attacked or defended McNamara in nice, posh TV studios, the kind of shiny, insulated power centers in which the former Secretary of Defense is most comfortable...
...After all, we have not forgotten COINTELPRO, and many on the left condemned the raid on Waco two years ago...
...This makes us sensitive to the revisionism around Waco now...
...Using the passive voice again, the Times simply noted that Weaver's wife and son "were killed" and that Weaver "was acquitted of all but two lesser charges...
...There were no dead bodies here, but many, many ghosts...
...The whole nation was caught up in what proved to be a tragic error...
...But both events underscore the Vietnam War's most corrosive bequest to our society: the widespread feeling that the federal government, through its highest officials, all too often lies with impunity, sacrifices our more "expendable" citizens to those lies, and then acts like the deaths were someone else's fault...
...We have a press that, simultaneously, loves to bash the federal government whenever possible and then, in the next moment, will stop at nothing to buttress federal authority—especially when it is turned against non-elites and deviants...
...Speak for yourself, buster...
...And while certain men with blood on their hands, like McVeigh, are rightly excoriated by the press as "barbarians," federal officials with blood on their hands are absolved, ignored, or, worse, treated with deference...
...But the powers that be in this country—and that includes the mainstream press—reinforce a lethal double standard that permits some men, usually in the name of national security, to get away with murder...
...The connections between McNamara's highly circumscribed—not to mention belated—public act of contrition, and Timothy McVeigh's act of savagery may seem threadlike...
Vol. 59 • June 1995 • No. 6
