Richard Cohen
I am at this moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
- John Kennedy O'Toole
"A Confederacy of Dunces"
Certain things are obvious, or at least seemingly obvious after having been pointed out. The implications of these obvious things, though, tend towards obscurity.
***
In April of 2009, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen expressed some concern over America's ongoing debate on the subject of torture, a discussion he worried had been infected with silly arguments about utility: whether it works or not. Those silly-billies who believe that it does not work, we are told, are simply being gloomy gusses. Of course it works sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works, he hypothesized, or something.
Fair enough; there are quite a few commentators who believe likewise, and Cohen is certainly entitled to his opinion. In fact, he is apparently entitled to two of them. In another column written just a couple of weeks later and in which Cohen again talks torture on the occasion of Cheney's latest declarations in defense of such things, our latest chapter subject suddenly goes from confirmed Jesuit to open-minded agnostic. I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth i.e., torture works, he wonders, allegedly. Perhaps his earlier certainty that torture does indeed work had simply slipped his mind at this point; two weeks is, after all, a long time in which to maintain a very strong opinion, or even to remember what that opinion might be. More likely, he was hoping to suddenly cast himself as undecided on the issue in order that he might portray his end-of-column contention that torture may indeed work as something he's come to suspect just recently, and only after having given due consideration to some new and very convincing insight that should presumably convince the reader as well.
Looking back to 2007, we find Cohen proposing that the real concern everyone should have had about Hillary Clinton is not whether she's smart or experienced but whether she has how do we say this the character to be president... In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark. Throughout 2007 and 2008, in fact, Cohen had plenty else to say about Clinton. She would, it seems, rather be president than be right. More damningly, She is forever saying things I either don't believe or believe that even she doesn't believe. All in all, he tells us, She is the personification of artifice. Fair enough, and we may even agree with Cohen on this - but if we do, we're in for a rhetorical beating from Cohen himself, who has more recently decided that those who said in 2008 that Clinton had no integrity, no character, and lied about almost everything and could be trusted about almost nothing are guilty of having perpetrated a calumny, a libel and a ferocious mugging of memory itself. But it was believed. By, uh, Cohen, who in this case is very much akin to a narc who hands you a joint and then arrests you for having it, except that the narc is doing his job.
***
In July of 2005, Richard Cohen alerted his readers to the perils inherent to our age:
I am forever coming across columns I've totally forgotten writing and I now, routinely, have to check to see if I have already staked out a position on some matter of importance - and what, exactly, it may be...
I yearn for the freedom to be what I want to be. I don't want to lie, but I want to be comforted by my own version of the truth. I want to own my life, all of it, and not have it banked at Google or some such thing. The trove of letters that some biographer is always discovering, the one that unmasks our hero and all his pretensions, has been moved from the musty attic to sleek cyberspace. I am imprisoned by the truth, a record of what I wrote and the public's silly insistence on consistency - a life sentence without hope of parole. For me, the future is the present. It's not that I cannot die. It's rather that I cannot lie.
In the months running up to the arrival of the year 2000, a number of feature articles appeared in various American news publications in which the technological innovations of the last century were summarized and put into context. Many of these began with an anecdote involving a U.S. Patent Office employee who had resigned at the end of the 19th century, complaining that there was nothing left to be invented. There is no evidence that any such amusing incident actually occurred, and in fact The Skeptical Inquirer had investigated and debunked the story in 1989. The freelancers in question surely meant no harm; neither the Inquirer article in question nor any summary thereof was easily accessible at that early point in mankind's collective effort to organize its cultural products into a searchable database, a project that would have been virtually impossible just a half-century ago but which was foreseen by some and which is now quite famously coming into fruition. A decade after the myth was ubiquitously touted as fact - just a few days before the onset of 2010, that being the time of this writing - it took me less than 30 seconds to check on the veracity of that claim and find it lacking.
In writing and researching this book, I have read hundreds of op-ed columns and nearly as many articles on the subjects discussed therein. I have studied eschatology, the politics of modern Russia, the history of false flag attacks on the part of nation states, the U.S. elections of 2006 and 2008, New Age mysticism, the chronology of a half-dozen military conflicts, federal documents relating to crime rates before, during, and after Prohibition, the interlocking structure of American Evangelical political action committees, trends in wheat production and consumption in China from the turn of the century to the present day, and early French pulp fiction, among other subjects - a regimen of research that would have been prohibitively time-consuming were it not for the nature of our nascent century. I have also run comparisons of various keywords by columnist - "Krauthammer," "Arab," and "democracy," for instance - in order to discover any hypocrisy or even simple confusion on the part our subjects on such occasions as I have had reason to suspect such things. Such a book as this could not have been written just fifteen years ago, at least not in any way that would have accomplished its purpose.
Any individual who decries the arrival of the communications age on the grounds that the truth has become more accessible is an enemy of truth and of man's ability to discover it. Still, anyone whose assertions are confused, whose facts are false, and whose opinions are occasionally composed in service to the expedience of the moment rather than some steady guiding principle is correct to despise the dynamics of our rising era, just as the lion would have been correct to despise the spear.
There is an exception to this, as there are dangers inherent to the universal accessibility of certain sorts of information, particularly the sort that informs us in the methodology of killing as many people as possible. The second part of the 20th century was in some part defined by this exception; our own age will likely be defined by it to an even greater extent.
***
In 1914, H.G. Wells wrote a story in which the armies of Europe made use of a fanciful new weapon that could level a city in a single strike. He called this the "atomic bomb." The tale ended with the world's nations coalescing into a single planetary government as a means by which to ensure that the inevitable dissemination of such technology did not result in unprecedented and perpetual disaster.
In 1940, Robert Heinlein wrote two short stories dealing with the potential consequences of nuclear power and radiological weaponry, respectively, before either such development had actually occurred. In the latter story, a congressman decides that the only proper course of action is to have the U.S. - now in possession of the world's greatest supply of radioactive dust and thus capable of destroying dozens of cities at a time if need be - demands that the world's nations cede their sovereignty to a single planetary government as a means by which to ensure that the inevitable dissemination of such technology did not result in unprecedented and perpetual disaster. The story was entitled Solution Unsatisfactory.
Both Wells and Heinlein predicted the advent of atomic weaponry before such weaponry came to exist, and both were successful in that prediction. Both Wells and Heinlein posited a consequent world government with the intent of preventing such an age from turning into one of unprecedented and perpetual disaster, and both were unsuccessful in that prediction. Both Wells and Heinlein, it seems, underestimated the curious and collective nonchalance that humanity seems to exhibit in the face of unprecedented and perpetual disaster. They may be excused for this, as it is easier to predict the advent of technology than to predict what social changes that such technology might bring forth; Heinlein himself never tired of noting that many saw the automobile coming but that no one saw how such an invention might change the nature of courtship in particular and the family dynamic in general. Additionally, before 1945 there did not seem to be the potential for such things as unprecedented and perpetual disaster, at least not as we can imagine it; gather up all the infantry you'd like and march across the globe, but you'll still be operating on the same fundamental level as Attila, Genghis, and Tamerlane, which is to say the world will always recover even if it vaguely remembers your name. After 1945, the stakes had become so much higher as to be fundamentally different in nature; the obliteration of civilization was now possible, and forever will be.
Of course nuclear Armageddon never actually got around to occurring; by several twists of fate, the Allies obtained the bomb before the desperate Nazis could have managed it, and by the time the Soviets had managed to overcome the hurdles inherent to the new weaponry, it was too late for anything but a wary stalemate. Incidentally, congressional hearings that occurred shortly after the war included testimony by several supposed experts - generals, mostly - to the effect that it would take from five to ten years for the Russians to develop their own nuclear weapons, if not longer. The Soviet Union tested its first bomb 1949.
The weapon that Wells hypothesized a few decades prior had been invented, tested, and used within the space of half a decade; its availability had spread to several other governments just a few years on and continues to spread today, as it will tomorrow. The accelerating ingenuity of our species is such that our circumstances can now change dramatically and without warning, and even those who see these things coming are often at a loss to guess as to what will come next.
And what, we might now ask, will come next?
***
Call him Ishmael. Call him a terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything else you want, but understand that he is willing -- no, anxious -- to give his life for his cause. Call him also a captive, and know that he works with others as part of a team, like the Sept. 11 hijackers, all of whom died, willingly. Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy.
I'm probably not in a position to make fun of the flamboyancy of anyone else's prose; what the Reader finds above is quite breezy compared to what the Reader will find below. Still, it would be difficult to convey how terrible it was to have read through some hundred or so of Richard Cohen's Washington Post columns. The average Richard Cohen column is not particularly bad; rather it is simply not worth reading, even to mock. Part of the problem, at least from the standpoint of a smartass on the prowl for smartass fodder, is that Cohen himself is indeed adequate to the task of, say, pointing out that some obviously dishonest politician is dishonest or noting that racism is mean, and so most of his columns are not particularly wrong. The other, far more significant part of the problem is that this basic level of competence is today considered worthy of column space in such a significant national outlet as The Washington Post, the editors of which must either be unaware of Cohen's deficits or indifferent to them.
Let me be so presumptuous as to make an assumption about The Reader. First, I'm going to stop calling The Reader The Reader because the novelty wears thin very quickly. I am going to be so additionally presumptuous as to give The Reader a name, as if he or she were some kind of dog. It will be a good name, though, as opposed to a dog's name, so I am not being quite as presumptuous as it may appear. I shall call you Augustus Alexander Tiberius Ataxerxes Aurelius Khan. Now, Augustus Alexander Tiberius Ataxerxes Aurelius Khan, let us assume that you spent your youth in study and contemplation, familiarizing yourself with the various attempts that have been made to get the universe all nice and figured out - anarcho-syndicalism, existentialism, Christianity, the Green Party, germ theory, goofy Ayn Rand novels, electronic voice phenomenon, romantic love. At some point in adolescence you came to realize the horrifying truth that human affairs are run terribly, and that the most capable and otherwise virtuous of men do not seem to have nearly as much control over the global apparatus as we might prefer. It also sounds like you may be descended from royalty, on account of your name and all.
Now, let us say instead that you are only of moderate intelligence and don't know much about much, in which case you might be inclined to read Richard Cohen. He will explain to you that Hillary Clinton's campaign rhetoric was not particularly honest, for instance, or that the Bush Administration was in many ways a travesty. But in telling you such things, he will often tell them to you late, or will even contradict himself on the very same issue some time later. And so the reader of moderate intelligence has some use for Richard Cohen in the same sense that anyone would have use for a sip of water when one is thirsty.
Let's go back to assuming that you are rather intelligent. That's better. Now let me tell you the problem as I see it - the sort of people who are most likely to get these ever-lasting gigs as columnists are the same sort of people who are willing to apply for such a gig. And how does one go about doing that? Often, one first serves as a reporter. Then one perhaps writes a sample column. The sample column is mediocre. The reporter or whoever it was is nonetheless accepted as a columnist, at which point he becomes, to some extent or another, known. In being known as a newspaper columnist, one of course takes on a degree of prestige which just as of coursely increases over time. Finally we have reached the point at which we have some moderately-capable columnist in such a position that would more properly be occupied by, say, a very capable columnist.
We have, at this moment, very capable columnists already. In preparation for this book, I spent several hours reading through the work of Michael Kinsley until such time as I realized that Michael Kinsley is not in the habit of saying anything stupid and is thus useless for my purposes. So to hell with Michael Kinsley - or, rather, kudos to Michael Kinsley. Gail Collins, Nicholas Kristof, George Will, William Safire assuming he is still alive, and even David Brooks are all, to some or another extent, rather good at what they do. I mean, you know, relatively.
But if it is our intent to be as well-informed as we possibly can, we must entirely abandon print newspapers. As a means of delivering time-sensitive information, they have already been rendered obsolete by the new formats now available to us by way of the internet. As a means of providing the citizenry with accurate and relevant opinion and analysis, even the best of our columnists have collectively failed to match the quality of output we find among the best of our republic's bloggers, as shall be demonstrated at the end of the book. Incidentally, books are not obsolete. They smell nice, for instance, and can also be used as coasters. We must always account for the needs of the flesh, after all, and particularly mine.
***
When top Cheney aide Lewis Libby was indicted on half a dozen counts of wholesale malfeasance, Richard Cohen knew this to be simply a manifestation of the left-wing id. An unpopular war produced the popular cry for scalps and, in Libby's case, the additional demand that he express contrition - a vestigial Stalinist-era yearning for abasement. Indeed, Stalinism reigned supreme in the dark days of 2005, when federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald stalked the land in search of new victims with which to fill his minimum-security gulags. At the urging of the liberal press (especially the New York Times), he was appointed to look into a run-of-the-mill leak, summarized Cohen, who occasionally gets the liberal press mixed up with the CIA, that being the entity which actually requested the investigation in the first place. After the dust had settled, Cohen wrote, Libby was convicted in the end of lying. Actually, Libby was convicted on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and another count of making false statements to investigators, but then Cohen was probably just trying to save space.
Still, Cohen wrote, This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. The problem, one may suppose, is that both Fitzgerald and the jury were unaware of the little-known dark art of politics clause whereby anything that can be characterized as such by a notable columnist is perfectly legal. If only Richard Nixon had been reanimated as some sort zombie, the defense could have brought him in to explain all of this on an amicus curiae basis. Of course, someone would have to explain to him how it came to be that a liberal columnist for The Washington Post has necessarily excused Watergate by way of the accidental implications of what he'd stupidly written; that Zombie Nixon would already be drunk would only add to the confusion.
Better yet, they could have brought in Richard Cohen himself, who has the uncanny ability to determine the guilt or innocence of a given party simply by virtue of being Richard Cohen. Amidst the 2007 investigation into whether or not Justice Department officials had been practicing the dark art of politics in conjunction with the suspicious firings of several U.S. attorneys, among other things, Cohen explained to his readership that Alberto Gonzalez, Karl Rove, and George W. Bush had unforgivably politicized the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys and Congress is not only right in looking into this but also has an absolute obligation to do so. But looking into this is where the absolute obligation should end, explained Cohen, who worried that anything more substantial than peeking could result in something unthinkable, like actual jail time for someone working in the Beltway. Justice Department deputy director Monica Goodling, for instance, having already been in danger of having to answer to Congress for crimes that she may have either witnessed or conducted herself, had just then opted to plead the Fifth lest she potentially incriminate herself. At the time, Cohen noted that some thought has to be given to why Monica Goodling feels obligated to take the Fifth rather than merely telling Congress what happened in the AG's office. Many of those less astute than Cohen had assumed that Goodling had plead thusly in order to avoid any real accountability for the crimes she had committed, in the same sense that one might bring an umbrella outside on a rainy day. But Cohen knew better; Goodling, as he explained with the same degree of certainty he'd felt about Clinton's dishonesty (before later concluding that she was honest) and about the obvious utility of torture (before later pretending that it wasn't obvious after all), was completely innocent, but still at risk of having her life destroyed in some Stalinist purge of the sort that had already brought down the likes of Lewis Libby and... well, he was the only one. As Cohen concluded, She's no criminal - but what could happen to her surely is.
Contrary to the conclusions of Cohen's non-investigation, Goodling did indeed turn out to be a criminal (and I should note for clarity that I use the term "criminal" to denote someone who has committed crimes, in contrast to Cohen's usage as a term denoting someone who has committed crimes while also not being important enough that Cohen himself might run into such a person at some cocktail party). After Congress agreed to grant her immunity in exchange for information, Goodling herself told the nation that she may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions, adding that she had crossed the line in these and other respects. And so by her own admission, she had violated the Hatch Act, which makes it a federal crime for civil servants to take political affiliations into consideration when making hiring decisions; this was also the conclusion reached after a later investigation conducted by the Department of Justice, the officials of which seem not to have realized that Cohen had already declared her to be innocent.
But Cohen's concern never seemed to hinge on whether or not any crime had been committed. Rather, he worried aloud about the chilling effect that would result from the possibility that Very Important People could be punished for violating something as irrelevant as federal law. Now, he wrote, only a fool would accept a juicy federal appointment and not keep the home number of a criminal lawyer on speed dial," particularly if that person intends to violate federal laws barring partisan cronyism while serving with a government entity that concerns itself with federal crimes. Worse still, ordinary politics - leaking, sniping, lying, cheating, exaggerating and other forms of PG entertainment - have been so thoroughly criminalized that only a fool would appear before Congress without attempting to bargain for immunity by first invoking the Fifth Amendment.
Cohen knows foolishness, having studied the subject since at least 2003, when he proclaimed that Colin Powell had recently proven that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them" and putting the issue to rest thusly: "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could conclude otherwise.
Conveniently enough, this brings us back to where we began, with Cohen ruminating on the possibility that Cheney is right about torture's utility. Being a left-of-center columnist, though, Cohen feels obligated to attack the former vice president a bit first, recognizing that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Cheney is a one-man credibility gap, Cohen wrote. In the past, he has said, 'We know they (the Iraqis) have biological and chemical weapons,' when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort. By we, Cohen is presumably referring here to fools and Frenchmen, and not to Cohen himself, who knew all of this just as well as Cheney did and who gleefully mocked the vice president's opponents for not knowing this as well.
But Cohen has as much contempt for Cheney as he does for those who once deemed Clinton to be untrustworthy. As a used car dealer, he quips, he would have no return customers. It's hard to see why not; The Washington Post still has subscribers.
***
Let's back up a bit.
The Neolithic hunter who wandered Europe after the most recent ice age was not particularly erudite. No matter his innate intellectual gifts, his gaze was largely limited to some patch of woodland or another, his focus necessarily restricted to the herds upon which his livelihood depended - and of course the herds provided only so much stimulation by which to increase the range of his thoughts. A few times a year, he would stop at one of the small settlements that we know to have dotted the continent at that time; he would trade bits of antler, the teeth of a deer, a skin, some desirable root, and in return he would perhaps receive some number of seashells.
These seashells, which we find scattered even hundreds of miles inland among the simple dwellings of that era, would have come from those who peopled the northern coast of the Mediterranean, and who themselves capitalized on the genius of their location by trading these natural art pieces with those who'd chosen to settle farther north. In some instances, these were provided as gifts to communities dwelling among nearby inland locations, the members of which would reciprocate with some commodity that was either lacking on the coast or so desirable that one could never have too much of it. Such exchanges, our archaeologist-historians suspect, were a means by which to smooth over the hostilities that might otherwise arise between two populations finding themselves in relatively close proximity to each other. On other occasions, and increasingly through time, this very practical ritual evolved into trade in the modern sense, conducted more for purposes of material advancement than in conjunction with the necessities of Neolithic diplomacy. At any rate, it was these exchange networks that brought seashells from the coast to the hillocks by way of perhaps a dozen hand-offs or more, and thus eventually into the possession of our Neolithic hunter.
What did our hunter know of these seashells, other than that he found them pleasing? He would only know what he was told by those from whom he received them; his access to knowledge about these and, of course, all other matters were limited to his circumstances, as is the case with every individual. Being either unable or disinclined to travel to the seaside villages himself, he would never have truly direct knowledge of the massive expanse of water from which his new property derived; even to the extent that he could conceive of such a thing as the Mediterranean as seen from the coast, his conception of it would be flawed to some extent or another.
Those residing in the seaside village from which the seashells were gathered did not live the same sort of existence as our hunter, and as such would be less informed than he on the habits of the herd - as ill-informed, perhaps, as was our hunter on the subject of seashells. In terms of seashells and herds, then, our villagers and our hunter are basically matched in their ignorance and knowledge - but of course these early human networks conveyed other products than these, along with the cultural conceptions that go along with any observable thing, and our seaside village is located deeper in the network than is our hunter. Makeshift boats arrive, bringing all manner of those products that together make up the "Neolithic package;" the products bring with them new perceptions, and thus fodder for new thoughts. All in all, they bring memes - a unique design found on a piece of pottery from Greece, where we find relatively high levels of variance in terms of decoration during this era; a previously unknown improvement on a common tool; and most significantly, if perhaps not fundamentally different from a zigzag pattern or a better carving knife in terms of their value as intellectual stimuli, they would bring all manner of information of the purely immaterial variety. These would include assorted items of vocal collateral consisting of everything from simple sounds to complex songs, the locations and traits of other population centers, and other data of the sort that would enhance the awareness of those receiving it. To the extent that humanity had collectively increased the level of novelty to be found anywhere in the human world, we would find the greatest degree of it in the early villages well before we would find it among the outlying nomads with whom the villages interact. Thus it was that the mind of the villager who lives within a node of the thought-product network would be familiar with all of these things in a manner that the occasional rural visitor would not, the latter merely existing on the edge of the network rather than being connected to it by perhaps a dozen links.
The cultural apparatus of our village increases over time, slowly but consistently, some artifacts being discarded but others being invented or improved upon; the progeny of our earlier villagers will have seen perhaps a dozen unique designs on the pottery that arrives at its makeshift port, and perhaps some among the new generation will be inspired to invent new patterns, these being built upon the foundations of those already existing and thus potentially more complex than anything yet seen. These younger villagers will have had the advantage of their circumstances, after all; they have access to as much information as anyone else, and generally more. And thus the average villager, having been conceptually stimulated to such a relatively high degree, could be depended upon to produce new additions to the thought-product network in such a way that we could not expect from our rustic hunter, who has little conceptual fodder with which to create anything; one is at pains to improve upon that of which one is unaware.
The village, and in turn the city, remained the incubator of new developments due to the advantages of proximity - perpetual proximity to one's fellow city dwellers with whom one could interact in such a manner as to increase the complexity of thought-products, as well as proximity to other population centers from which additional new stimuli could sometimes be obtained as well. To the extent that the city is located towards the center of the thought-product network, and to the extent that those raised in such an environment will have had their minds long exercised by the highest availability of stimuli, and to the extent that they would in addition be able to draw upon these specific stimuli as the foundations by which to create new thought-products of greater complexity, we would look to these population centers in searching for the most intellectually advanced individuals of the Neolithic age.
Proximity in the literal sense began to decrease in importance with the development of such early technological media as the alphabet; such things serve the crucial purpose of expanding our ability to communicate in space-time to a greater extent than is possible by way of our biological endowments, such as gestures and speech. Information could increasingly be conveyed to other locations without the communicator being present, and it could now be conveyed through time as well, though only forwards. To this extent, one need no longer be punctual or even present to convey one's own cultural contributions or to receive those of others. But the physical limitations inherent to tablets, papyrus, volumes, copied books, and eventually books of the printed sort were still such that it was generally better to live in Alexandria than in some backwater settlement without a significant library; even as such limitations were reduced by the evolving field of information technology, access to knowledge remained subject to the barriers of time and space, though thankfully to a lesser extent. This would be the case throughout human history, even to the present day insomuch as that there is still some advantage to living in New York or Berlin or some such major node; one is more likely to encounter cultural products of value or novelty when one's circumstances entail physical proximity to those working in cultural pursuits. But today, the same people may also be encountered from anywhere else in time and space. And the ones from whom one might benefit most in terms of creative exchange can now be found and conversed with more easily by way of our new technological circumstances than by way of wandering the bars, the art receptions, the public squares, and other such once-crucial sub-nodes of the thought-product network - because, of course, the thought-product network has of late gone through an absolute revolution that has already begun to turn our civilization and its institutions upside down.
Ten thousand years ago, we would find our most stimulated thinkers in the city. Twenty years ago, we would still find our most stimulated thinkers in the city. Today, for the first time in human history, we can find them anywhere. More importantly, they can find each other. The implications of this are still obscure to many, and of course even the most astute observer will be limited in his ability to predict where this is all going. Nonetheless, if we put this development into context and familiarize ourselves with certain of the results that we have seen thus far, we can say with extraordinary certainty that we are headed into an age of such dynamism and unpredictability that there is no sufficient way by which to finish this sentence. We will return to the subject momentarily, though, as this subject is second, more supremely important crisis with which this book is concerned and to which our original subject - the failures of our respected opinion-drivers - is simply peripheral. Richard Cohen is only relevant to the coming world by comparison; his irrelevance is wonderfully relevant.