We find
nothing truly funny in service to fascism or communism.
But we may find that communists and fascists have otherwise promoted
their totalitarianism by way of great and glorious contributions to
film, music, and the performing arts - which is to say that
anti-individualistic political persuasions may produce fine works of
aesthetics, but apparently not humor.
This may lead us to
suspect that humor is not subject to whatever strings together the
totalitarian-accessible arts. It may also lead us to be wary of a
political movement that has lost its ability to put forth comedic works
in defense of itself and in opposition to its enemies. Political humor
is heavily dependent on
the ability to perceive and present irony; if a political population
consisting of tens of millions of people cannot produce at least a few
competent political humorists, we might draw some insulting conclusions
about such a population.
For over a decade, the finest political humorist in America was P.J. O'Rourke, a reporter and veteran of National Lampoon
who had made a gradual transition from Maoism to conservatism.
O'Rourke's conservatism was never of the populist strain; he simply
favored free market economics and a somewhat hawkish foreign policy
stance in such situations as that a hawkish foreign policy stance might
be in order.
One of the more common elements
of O'Rourke's earlier, readable work was scorn for the histrionics of
mass politics, and particularly the empty ritualism of marches and
protests. Conservatives, he asserted on several occasions, did not
attend protests because they have jobs. But in 2008, when the ongoing
descent of conservatism into populism and
anti-intellectualism reached its completion with the extraordinary
farce of the Palinist tea party movement, the same humorist who had so
consistently mocked the mentality of the protest-goer could now find no
humor in large gatherings of misshapen, chanting people. Instead, he
criticized those media outlets that had been insufficiently respectful
of such things. A piece that O'Rourke wrote for The Weekly Standard
in August 2009 is incredible in the extent to which it consists purely
of rambling, anti-elitist boilerplate. The article begins as follows:
Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To
put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate
has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's
citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers."
"Burkean" is probably not the first term I would use to characterize
large demonstrations by self-described "regular folks" in opposition to
some perceived contingent of political elites, but then O'Rourke is
certainly entitled to his hilarious delusions.
He complains
about a sidebar by Alec MacGillis in which the reporter begins with the
assertion that "[h]ealth care reform is not that hard to understand,
and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive."
O'Rourke chooses to take this, as well as the entire piece, as some
sort of elitist assault on his Burkean masses, to which he responds
with a sarcastic quip that is supposed to summarize the intent of the
piece: "All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home."
This is an odd interpretation of the article in general and the first
sentence in particular, as the very next sentence of MacGillis' piece
goes on to say: "Reform
proponents exaggerate the complexity of the issue to elevate
their own status as people who understand it; opponents exaggerate it
to make the whole endeavor out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity," and
the rest consists of a summary of the major elements of health care
reform proposals that were then under debate - who was objecting to
what and why and what compromises were likely to be reached as the
process continued and that sort innocuous thing. But O'Rourke repeats
his bizarre characterization of what this is supposed to convey: "But
calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so."
Or, rather, it didn't. But it did assign a reporter to compose a sort
of political fashion piece discussing the particular slovenliness of
the heckler crowd, as O'Rourke explains.
Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent
Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to
various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes...
Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional
polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."
We learn, then, that making fun of other people's clothes now
constitutes "idiocy" according to O'Rourke.
O'Rourke once
began an article on the 1990 Nicaraguan elections with a
multi-paragraph critique of the sort of clothes worn by those visiting
American liberals who supported the Sandinistas. He included similar
critiques of liberal dressing habits in an article on the 1994 Mexican
elections. He spent a good portion of an essay on the general increase in
world travel decrying the fashions of tourists in general and the
French in particular, and elsewhere took issue with the appearances of
those among the Great Unwashed who now fly on commercial airliners. He
made fun of those who appeared before the Supreme Court in opposition
to a flag burning ban for their general ugliness. He spent much of the
'90s mocking youngish leftists for wearing nose rings and black outfits
- in fact, he did this so much as to actually ruin it for everyone else
through overuse - and did so on at least one occasion in the pages of The Weekly Standard
itself. He's written an entire article in which he and his girlfriend
roam around an Evangelical-oriented theme park and make fun of everyone
present for their general sloppiness. And he once wrote that Hillary
Clinton should stop messing with her own hair and instead "do something
about Chelsea's."
He was right. Aging liberals who run around Latin America and Mexico
dress like idiots. Half of the people one today encounters on a
domestic flight would have been correctly barred from the plane by the
captain in a more civilized age. I don't even know where to start with
the sort of French people who wander Manhattan in August. Earnest young
leftists should be wearing suits or at least a button-down shirt
instead of whatever the fuck they think they're doing now. You can
probably imagine what a bunch of Middle American Evangelicals look like
when they're at the mall.
Seeing hacks like William Kristol pretend to admire the innocent
primitivism of
the sort of people with whom he would himself rightfully never
associate is one
thing; Kristol has never been of value as an honest observer. But
O'Rourke was once the
greatest political humorist of the conservative movement, as well as a
strong advocate of taste back when taste still favored Republicans.
Today he must defend the people he once despised; the GOP is now filled
with little else.
***
If we agree that the inability to produce humor on its own behalf is a
sign of degeneracy on the part of a political movement, and if we
identify the modern American conservative enterprise as being incapable
of producing viable political humor relative to its counterparts, and
if we understand humor to be dependent on irony and understand irony in
turn to be a sign of intellect, we may reasonably conclude that the
actual intellectuals produced by such a movement as this will be rather
mediocre. Perhaps we should check to be sure. Or, rather, I'll go
check; you stay here with the rifle and guard the women. Our supply of
water ought to last for two more days, assuming we don't have any more
incidents like we had this morning. At any rate, there are enough
sleeping pills in the medical kit for everyone to die painlessly. But
we're not planning to die, friend; our goal is to live. Lock the door
behind me and don't open it for anyone, no matter what goods they may
offer for barter. And for God's sake, keep checking the radio.
Like O'Rourke, Charles Krauthammer is a refuge from liberalism who
eventually became a highly effective advocate of conservatism. Unlike
O'Rourke, Krauthammer is just as talented today as he's ever been. Also
unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer was never particularly talented, as shall
soon be demonstrated at grueling length.
These things being
relative, he is today considered - rightfully - to be among the
Republican Party's greatest intellectual assets. In a profile piece that appeared in mid-2009, Politicos Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be a
coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president and
a central conservative voice in the Age of Obama. Around the same time, New York Times
mainstay David Brooks characterized him as the most important
conservative columnist right now. When Krauthammer was presented with
an award that summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having
done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick
Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate the veteran commentator.
In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an
award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis
Brandeis.
Krauthammer's prestige is such that, when foreign publications find
themselves in need of someone to explain the conservative outlook, they
are likely to turn to our chapter subject. In October of 2009, Der Spiegel published
a particularly comprehensive interview in which Krauthammer held forth
largely on foreign policy. Among other things, he derides Obama as a
wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:
I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be
so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He
has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international
norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international
consensus, something called the international community, which to me is
a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless
international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a
doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.
In pronouncing judgment upon a president's competence with regards to
foreign policy, Krauthammer thereby implies that he himself knows
better. It is a fine thing, then, that we may go through the fellow's
columns from the last ten years and see for ourself whether this is
actually the case. Whatever shall we find? Oh, it shall be such an
exciting escapade!
***
In 1999, NATO sought to derail yet another potential humanitarian
disaster in the Balkans by way of an air bombing campaign against
Serbia. Krauthammer promptly denounced Bill Clinton in a column that
begun thusly:
On Monday, as "genocide" was going on in Kosovo (so said the State
Department), Bill Clinton played golf. The stresses of war, no doubt. But perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he
needed to retreat to shaded fairways to contemplate the consequences of
his little Kosovo war.
Our columnist seems to have since
changed his mind on the propriety of playing golf in the midst of
conflict, but then if we are to concern ourselves with every little
thing for which he has denounced his opponents while giving a pass to
his allies, we will be forever distracted, so knock it off. Better for
us to note that Krauthammer uses the term "genocide" in quotes and
implies such a characterization to be the work of the foolish
Clintonian State Department; the intent here is to cast suspicion on
Clinton's judgment. And in the very next paragraph, when Krauthammer
asserts that NATO intervention thus far has led to "savage ethnic cleansing,
executions of Kosovar Albanian leaders, the forced expulsion of more than
100,000 Kosovars" - with no such terminology being put in quotes this time - the intent is to cast even greater suspicion on Clinton's judgment.
Krauthammer goes on to argue that air strikes would be insufficient to force Serbian forces from Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he even tries to convince his readers that General
Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim
Lehrer, we never thought that through air power we could stop these
killings on the ground. No doubt due to space constraints, Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clarks answer,
in which it is explained that the person who has to stop this is
President Milosevic and that the purpose of the air campaign was to
force him to do just that - which it did.
Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer
remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also
predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement would sever Kosovo from
Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state,
unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of
neighboring countries. When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in
Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt
himself vindicated, announcing that
the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion, making several
references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the
region as a quagmire. The violence ended within the year, having
claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and is now recognized by
three of five permanent members of the Security Council; as of late
2009, Macedonia is preparing
for membership in NATO as well as the European Union.
Like most others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer
bumbled into the Afghanistan war in a haze of
amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. When New York Times
contributor R.W. "Johnny" Apple wrote a piece in late October proposing
that the conflict could develop into a "quagmire," our columnist
ridiculed him for using a term that he himself had mistakenly applied
in his Balkans-as-Vietnam column from earlier in the year. The Apple
article in question proved to be among the more prescient compositions
of that period; unlike Thomas Friedman, who was in those days
proclaiming that Afghans don't really mind having bombs dropped on them
and was otherwise engaged in the inexplicable application of scare
quotes around the word "civilians," Apple predicted that civilian
casualties would become a major source of discontent among the
population and that this might very well be problematic for U.S.
efforts to win them over. He ended the piece by pointing out that there exists "a huge
question about who would rule if the United States vanquished its foe. Washington
never solved that issue satisfactorily after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem
in 1963, and solving it in Afghanistan, a country long prone to chaotic competition
among many tribes and factions, will probably not be much easier." And, of course, he was right.
Long after others had abandoned the illusion of quick and longterm
success in Central Asia, Krauthammer was still mocking anyone foolish
enough to express concerns about whether the illusion had been
illusory. "Before our astonishing success in
Afghanistan goes completely down the memory hole, let's recall some
very recent history," Krauthammer politely suggested in a December 2004
column. "Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban
overthrown. Then
the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a
deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as legitimate
president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.... What do
liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush
administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies." This was indeed
noted by liberals of the time - along with a whole range of other
concerns that Krauthammer does not bother to address, with one
exception:
The other complaint is that Karzai really does not rule the whole
country. Again the sun rises in the east. Afghanistan has never had a
government that controlled the whole country. It has always had a
central government weak by Western standards.
But Afghanistan's decentralized system works. Karzai controls
Kabul, most of the major cities, and much in between. And he is
successfully leveraging his power to gradually extend his authority as
he creates entirely new federal institutions and an entirely new
military.
As it turns out, this "deeply respected democrat" won the 2009 election
by deeply undemocratic means, further de-legitimizing himself in the
eyes of Afghans already angry over the corruption that marks not only
Karzai's cabinet but also certain members of his own family. The former
monarch's authority, meanwhile, has not so much been "gradually
extended" as it has dissipated to such an extent that he controls only
Kabul and a few other regions, and American analysts are now virtually
united in their contempt for the fellow.
"What has happened
in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle," Krauthammer continued.
In the days before its new, miraculous age, after all, "Afghanistan had
suffered under years of appalling
theocratic rule, which helped to legitimize the kind of secularist
democracy that Karzai represents."
Question: What kind
of secularist democracy proclaims Islam to be its official religion,
holds that none of its civil laws may violate the teachings of Islam,
and punishes conversion from Islam by death? Answer: Why does Charles Krauthammer have a fucking Pulitzer Prize?
Oops, I answered a question with another question. Luckily, Krauthammer
himself poses yet another question in the same column: "The interesting
question is: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?"
Question: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?
Answer: Because our nation's foreign policy is informed in large part by people who thought we had succeeded in Afghanistan.