Tuesday, November 23, 2004
"Whitewash as Public Service"
Check out this piece from the October '04 issue of Harper's.
In it, Benjamin DeMott (Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst College) deconstructs the 9/11 Commission Report, exposing it for what it is:
In fact, as DeMott argues, the two treatments were only superficially equivalent. Clinton hesitated to attack Bin Laden for reasons of prudent foreign policy; W simply ignores the real need for any foreign policy that requires more than yahooish swaggering and bluster.
Here's how DeMott's essay concludes -- can you get a sense of what he thinks?
In it, Benjamin DeMott (Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst College) deconstructs the 9/11 Commission Report, exposing it for what it is:
The plain, sad reality—I report this following four full days studying the work—is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation. Because it is continuously engaged in scotching all attempts to distinguish better from worse leadership responses, the Commission can’t discharge its duty to educate the audience about the habits of mind and temperament essential in those chosen to discharge command responsibility during crises. It can’t tell the truth about what was done and not done, thought and not thought, at crucial turning points. The Commissioners’ immeasurably valuable access to the principals involved offered an extraordinary opportunity to amass material precious to future historians: commentary based on moment-to-moment reaction to major events. But the 567 pages, which purport to provide definitive interpretations of the reactions, are in fact useless to historians, because a seeming terror of bias transforms query after commissarial query—and silence after silence—into suggested new lines of self-justification for the interviewees.Most salient of DeMott's criticisms, I thought, were those leveled at the Commission's view of the Clinton Administration's (non-)handling of Bin Laden vs, the Bush (mis)Administration's non-handling of Bin Laden.
In fact, as DeMott argues, the two treatments were only superficially equivalent. Clinton hesitated to attack Bin Laden for reasons of prudent foreign policy; W simply ignores the real need for any foreign policy that requires more than yahooish swaggering and bluster.
Here's how DeMott's essay concludes -- can you get a sense of what he thinks?
The Commission, in sum, offers peace through exculpation, evasion, and entertainment—and in doing so dangerously reenergizes a national relish for fantasy. Given a chance to brace the electorate with incontrovertible evidence that the search for leadership must be a search for flexible intelligence, endlessly curious and rapid, devouring in its appetite for the whole body of knowledge bearing on fateful choices, the Commission speaks out for loose-limbed feel-good geniality and artful dodging. Its vote for harmony is perfectly comprehensible, but as the costs of the vote are weighed, the imperative of protest against it stands forth as immensely more comprehensible—and just. “In all the general concerns,” James Fenimore Cooper wrote long ago, in 1838, “the publick has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and republican quality . . . [American] institutions are converted into stupendous fraud.” Faced with The 9/11 Commission Report, this country’s true need now is to shout Shame!Read it.
