Mucking About in the Middle

(First published in Bali Advertiser, July 20, 2005)

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. – Revelation 3:16

The middle of the road may be appropriate when dealing with ice cream flavors, but it's completely misplaced when dealing with questions of war and civil liberties. – E-mail from a Bali Advertiser reader

I’m in a muddle this week, mostly of my own making. My last column sparked two dissimilar responses. To the woman who harangued my wife for thirty minutes for my attack on President Bush and America: I think you misread the column. I was criticizing the easy assumption of the standard Bush caricature, not endorsing it. To the reader who emailed saying I had gone light on the president and ignored, among other things, the Bush administration’s violations of civil liberties in conducting the “war on terror”: You are partially correct. I tried to write about a serious subject with flippant humor, didn’t do it justice and ended up in “a quicksand of tripe.”

(The reader’s initial e-mail on the column appears in the Letters to Bali Advertiser section. Some of his comments I refer to come from a subsequent e-mail.)

My intent wasn’t to attack Bush or defend him. In a sense, the column wasn’t about Bush, but about how people come to form conclusions about him. Bush provokes an instinctive reaction from people that makes it easy for them to dismiss him with a shake of the head. Bush becomes the cartoon cowboy, and some people, even reporters writing news stories, interpret every new fact or development in a way that enhances the image.

It was and is the same with the Clintons. Supposedly serious pundits and commentators still trot out as fact the most outlandish allegations: Bill and Hillary killed Vincent Foster and Ron Brown; worked and are working as closet socialists (communists, Marxists, leftists) to destroy America and establish one world government; launched cruise missile strikes whenever the Monica Lewinsky affair got too hot for Bill; and conceived Chelsea only after Bill raped Hillary in the Bahamas. Bill and Hillary are controversial enough that it’s hard to see why people would also want to delve into the purely imaginative.

The reader who e-mailed, though, said he believes his visceral reaction to Bush is fed by facts, not by sensational reporting. Most sensational reporting, by the likes of “FOX and the lily-livered generality of the American press,” favors Bush, he says. He gets his facts from the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books. The problem, though, is that people just as intelligent as my correspondent believe the exact opposite: that the NYT, the IHT, the Post, and the NYRB are the sensationalist, biased press, that FOX gives the straight scoop, or if not FOX, then the more straight-laced, straightforwardly conservative Wall Street Journal.

The American press has been divided like this into the “leftist liberal media” and the “organs of the rightwing conspiracy,” with people reading only publications that reinforce opinions they already hold, denigrating the rest as unbalanced and unfair. The fact is, no paper, no reporter, no editor, no publisher, can completely achieve the goal of journalistic objectivity, assuming that they try. The views of the reporters, editors, and publisher always creep into the pages, no matter how honestly the paper or publication strives to keep them out. I happen to think that the NYT usually does a respectable job of keeping the opinions of its staff and writers confined to editorials and commentary. My e-mail correspondent and I have to accept, though, that many Americans, perhaps even a majority, would scoff at the notion that the NYT reports only objective fact.

I do have concerns about Bush, Iraq, and the violation of civil liberties; I just can’t be as confident as the letter writer that I have a complete picture of what’s happening at any given time. In following any news story, I often come across contradictory presentations of the same set of “facts.” The alternative to reconciling the contradictions into the best obtainable version of the truth is to accept only those “facts” that fit my preconceptions and to abuse the intelligence and question the motives of anyone not reaching the same conclusion. The alternative is what seems to happen every Sunday on the US news analysis shows. For me, I sometimes spend a long time trying to struggle through to a reconciliation of the contradictions.

I still haven’t completely made up my mind about the Iraq war, for example. Many people believe that the search for weapons of mass destruction and regime change were nothing more than cover for a US grab for oil. Yet, a friend in Iraq with the United Nations says Bush made the right decision to invade and remove Saddam. Saddam had been ignoring and skirting UN resolutions and ultimatums for more than a decade, and the US, United Kingdom, and “coalition of the willing,” had to put teeth into the UN rulings, WMD or not. And regardless of the mess that’s been made, Iraq is better off than it was under Saddam, he says. It all seems so much more complicated than that, and I’d like to disagree with him, but it’s hard to argue with someone who’s under the threat of mortar fire in Baghdad and not end up looking foolish.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi