Comments on: In defense of Atrios

By: American Citizen

American Citizen — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:48:09 +0000

I don’t get the Eastwood reference. Partly because there are two Eastwoods, early and late.

By: Jean Lepley

Jean Lepley — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:55:03 +0000

As I early Clark supporter and an appreciative reader of Machiavelli, I applaud this analysis of the liberal “problem.” And I agree: it’s precisely what makes a candidacy that would appeal to “middle America” so difficult to sell to established liberal groups. Thus the near unanimous reaction to Wesley Clark in the Seattle Labor Chorus (to which I belong) was revulsion: how could I even consider lending a general (or as one chorus member put it, “a murderer”) my political support? Why wasn’t I where all good liberals belonged: in the Dean or Kucinich or even the Nader camp? Of course, it didn’t help Clark’s candidacy that he was new to politics and even newer to the Democratic party; but talking to the good people I’d linked hands with in the WTO “battle of Seattle” (and yeah, Clark wasn’t “on board” there), I kept running up against this basic problem. That I was asking them to lower their ethical standards, embracing a villainous political reality myself . . .

By: Seth Edenbaum

Seth Edenbaum — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:10:49 +0000

That footnote amazes me. If moral seriousness were more important than moral responsibility everything would be fine, but it isn’t.
Are those who disagreed with Atrios and most of the world about Iraq, sadistic, stupid, or craven? How about only those who claimed to have an ‘educated’ opinion? I haven’t made up my mind on that one. It’s a sloppy line, but politics is rough business, and all this self-important academicizing is a joke. talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Speaking of intellectual sloppiness: John Wayne the man was a coward who copped out of WWII, for which John Ford mocked him repeatedly. As a political figure he was a hypocrite and a hack. And as far as “defective andreia” goes, I guess you’ve never seen The Searchers, which is a model for late Eastwood.
“That those who want to be considered cinema sophisticates admire Brando and contemn Wayne astounds me.”
Who the fuck are you talking about? You’re the one who’s talking about Rooster Cockburn[!]. ‘Sophisticates’ talk about Stagecoach, Ford and Howard Hawks. Like Brando, Wayne was an actor, a performer and a phony. Art is artifice. But if you want a good description of Wayne’s style (and of American acting in the era before ‘the method’ look up Charles Laughton’s description of Gary Cooper.
No political sophistication, no intellectual sophistication. Maximum self-importance.
Atrios on the other hand has always called himself a political hack; but he’s an honest hack. I read him every day.

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 21:36:56 +0000

Go find Ford’s _The_Horse_Soldiers_. Wayne plays “Col. Marlowe”, a fictionalized version of Benjamin Grierson, a Union commander who led a cavalry raid into Mississippi during the Vicksburg campaign. There is a marvellous scene where Marlowe is setting an ambush that will massacre the pursuing Confederates. His aide notices that he is unarmed, and tries to hand him a pistol. Marlowe jerks his hand back, clearly loathing the killing he is about to lead.

By: CalDem

CalDem — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:58:19 +0000

I think you miss the underlying subtext in Atrios remarks about social position and access to the public sphere. In 2001, we still had the situation where only journalistic and academic elites (such as MK) were allowed to communicate in the public sphere and everybody else was just a “dirty hippy.” This communication process resulted in the worst strategic disaster in U.S. history. The reason philosoraptor and MK no longer like Atrios is his single-minded devotion to the idea that the elites to whom communication was reserved in 2001 did such a terrible job that they should be completely discredited. This included the liberal elites who largely went along with Iraq as well as conservatives. This isn’t an argument that MK or TNR folks are going to be happy with, of course. MK has dealt with it much more honestly than TNR.

By: Altoid

Altoid — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:59:02 +0000

I’m going to take a deep breath and throw a bomb into this thread. The issue isn’t “niceness” vs toughness, whether it comes from Mark or from Philosoraptor (who I’ve not read). It’s Israel. Israel is why people like Beinart can’t think straight about any regime or people in the Middle East. It’s addled many people and not only Jews.
This is not an original observation, God knows, but I think it’s true. If Saddam was a threat to Israel (as an avowed enemy he was) then– if you have a deep and abiding and unwavering commitment to Israel no matter what it does, no matter who runs it, no matter what it does to any people under its protection, no matter what the goals of the people who run it with regard to anybody in the neighborhood– you’re going to be very *predisposed* to see Saddam as a threat to the US when he’s not being nice and very *predisposed* to see his regime as a military problem rather than a diplomatic or economic one. Period, stop, end of story, and it can’t be left out of this discussion.
I don’t say anyone is operating out of bad faith, though I think there have been a few. But I *am* saying that the matter of predisposition is very powerful.
The “niceness” question is hooey. It comes straight from Thomas Wolfe and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a caricature as much as Wayne was a caricature. The Cold War and the Korean War were liberal enterprises; so was fighting off Harry Bennett and his goons; so was creation of Israel in 1948. So was Social Security and so was the Voting Rights Act. “Niceness” is a way for someone like Beinart to fool himself about the importance of Israel in his thinking, without actually addressing it.
The story I want to see from him is the story explaining why Saddam Hussein was a military menace solely to the United States.

By: Bruce Wilder

Bruce Wilder — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 15:49:33 +0000

“So good, compassionate people � liberals � naturally tend to use too little violence. Everyone more or less knows that; the fact that John Wayne is a standing joke among liberals is not lost on our fellow-citizens.”
That connection — between the supposed excessive reluctance of liberals to use violence — and John Wayne (and the characters he played in movies) has been rolling around in my head since I read MK’s post.
The reference to John Wayne, and the supposed suspicion that liberals hold him in contempt, veers far closer to the controlling issues in our political divisions over foreign policy than any high-minded analysis derived from Machiavelli.
The Republican Party has adopted as one of the principal props of its electoral appeal a kind of faux populism, which mobilizes considerable resentment against liberal “elites”. It is what Limbaugh and O’Reilly do; in fact, it is also a part of what many conservative evangelical ministers do, as well, in a modified form. The anger and resentment are political theatre, but they also become political policy.
The Iraq War is a product, in part, of the anger, resentment and frustration of people, who didn’t like the incompleteness and moral ambiguity, of “not finishing the job” of overthrowing Saddam in Gulf War I. The Administration’s North Korea policy, and the opposition to Clinton’s North Korea policy led by McCain, is also a product of the politics of resentment; McCain’s complaint about Clinton’s North Korea policy was all about the political theatre it presented, not about the analytics or mechanics of the policy.
It would be easy to point out the obvious, that John Wayne was an actor, who played heroes in movies — that he was not a real-life hero, and his movies did not portray a world of deep moral ambiguity (beyond, perhaps, a glimpse of regret at betraying the occasional Indian). What is harder to grasp is how deeply the moral world of movies has taken over not just the populist appeal of the Republicans, but their concept of policy.
Go read Newt Gingrich’s history lectures, and you find over and over, lessons drawn from movies. Heroic poses are confused, not just with principles, but with means of effective political action. Do I need to say anything more than the name, Reagan? Arnold?
The foundation for this politics, though, is not idealism. (I actually think classic American movies have a genuinely good moral outlook, for the most part; I like movies, including John Wayne movies.) It is populism, and the key to populism is always resentment. Resentment is the exact opposite of admiration. Resentment loves a fake, and hates a genuine hero.
Effective social and political action is complex, sometimes morally ambiguous. Theatrical posturing is a servant of policy, not its proper guiding light. The core of the American failure in Iraq has been the substitution of theatrical posturing for leadership and substantive policy. And, it’s foundation has been the faux populism and resentment, which is the foundation of Republican electoral politics.

By: Cranky Observer

Cranky Observer — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:26:16 +0000

I can’t speak for Mr. Black, but after reading his blog for several years I can attempt my own summary of his underlying position here: our foreign policy is currently in the hands of some deeply unserious people who not only consider themselves to be the “serious” ones but who have convinced the traditional media and the DC political establishment that they are “serious”, should be taken “seriously”, and that anyone who disagrees with them is a “raving pacifist lefty”. I think that is an accurate description of the current state of affairs, and as much as I respect Mr. Kleiman I don’t think he has contradicted it in his criticism of Atrios. I mean, seriously: Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Cheney, and Rice? Rumsfeld and Franks? Seriously?
Cranky

By: Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:19:37 +0000

Philosoraptor has some seriously discordant baggage. On the one hand, us liberals aren’t nice enough because our rhetoric doesn’t bespeak a sufficiently civil discourse for Winston — typified by his annoyance that not enough us are willing to chant mea culpas for all the Eve Enslers in our midst, but now, apparently, we are TOO NICE because we question a standard that prefers maiming and killing as the default position for interfacing with the world.
How’s this Winston: I would have kept the U.S. out of Iraq the first time around too on the basis that a Saudi Arabia that had to do at least as much as Israel does to defend itself would be more likely to liberalize its political and cultural position in the world. I know, the Kuwaitis would have suffered, and I would have regretted that, but I guess I’m just not nice enough.
Sombebody should get Winston a special bound edition of the Three Bears for Christmas and tell him to stop whining until he has written “I will stop behaving like Goldilocks because she was a spoiled PITA who didn’t contribute a damned thing” at least one thousand times.

By: liberal

liberal — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:23:23 +0000

rilkefan wrote, _Though I don’t think there was a good answer to the Dsquared argument:…_
Yeah, that one is going down as a classic.

By: Ergo

Ergo — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 01:47:40 +0000

Further note on Stewart. He refused to be in combat movies. He took patriotism very seriously. He also took war seriously too.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:54:40 +0000

John Ford (who served in the Navy and received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered at Midway) apparently refers to Wayne as “the Great Dodger” in one of his books. The fact that Wayne’s political feuding with Frank Capra (who enlisted in the Army during World War I, although he didn’t see combat, and made the Why We Fight series during World War II) led Wayne to eventual make a crack about shipping Capra back to Sicily is the icing on the cake. I love Rio Bravo as much as the next guy, but there’s a severe mismatch, to say the least, between Wayne’s ultra-hawkish politics and his personal behavior. (Jimmy Stewart’s politics were probably as hawkish, but he served in the Army Air Corps and the Air Force and lost his adopted son in Vietnam.)

By: Bruce Wilder

Bruce Wilder — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:23:48 +0000

Atrios: “Wars are failures. A primary purpose of sensible foreign policy is to stop them. When wars happen, our foreign policy has failed. That isn’t to say there’s never a point when they’re necessary or justified, but that point is simply an acknowledgment that the people in charge failed.”
The kernal of this idea is not fundamentally different from the point MK has made regarding arrest, prosecution and imprisonment as being costs, and, to some large extent, evidence of failure in social control. It is part of the worldview, which makes both Atrios and MK, liberals, even if they differ in matters of personal style.
Philosoraptor, while intelligent and superficially civil enough, appears to have less a coherent worldview than a systematic problem in reading comprehension, combined with a tribalist bad attitude.

By: rilkefan

rilkefan — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:37:37 +0000

Mark: “That doesn’t justify Duncan’s insistence that anyone who disagreed with him about Iraq was sadistic, stupid, or craven.”
Cite? I didn’t think his position was quite that strong. Though I don’t think there was a good answer to the Dsquared argument:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2003/02/and-another-hit-and-run-i-find-myself.html
WS: “that’s a far cry from saying that anybody who advocates any war is a sociopath.”
Straw. Here’s the post in question (regarding wars):
“That isn’t to say there’s never a point when they’re necessary or justified”

By: philosoraptor

philosoraptor — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:06:27 +0000

Though I agree with what you’ve written here, Mark, I just can’t see it as a plausible interpretation of what Atrios wrote.
It seems obvious to to me that machismo is a powerful and destructive force in politics in general and American politics in particular…but that’s a far cry from saying that anybody who advocates any war is a sociopath.
Still and all, I certainly appreciate the thoughtful response, and am well aware that I could be missing something.

By: Paul Gottlieb

Paul Gottlieb — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:55:55 +0000

Can we please tell the truth about the Ricky Rector case instead of endlessly repeating “Bill Clinton executed a retard” over and over? Ricky Rector was not mentally retarded: There was nothing wrong his intelligence on the day he murdered two people, including a police officer, in the course of robbing a convenience store. While he was being captured, he shot himself in the head and was brain damaged. As far as I can determine, there was never the slightest doubt as to his guilt, and it was the type of crime that regularly received the death penalty in Arkansas.
That being said, I would probably not have signed the execution order, but I don�t think it�s an obvious call. In any case, can we drop the �Clinton killed a retard� nonsense? It�s dishonest and ignorant.

By: rilkefan

rilkefan — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:32:56 +0000

I used to be a regular reader of Philosoraptor but his inability to think clearly about liberal critics of TNRism just got too tiresome, esp. since he’s also unable to let the subject go.

By: Prior Aelred

Prior Aelred — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:32:34 +0000

I agree with those who say John Wayne could act but is disliked because in real life he pretended to be a super tough guy when he actually avoided military service — I would compare him to Sly Stallone (not in Nam due to “flat feet”) except that Stallone has not set himself up as an apologist for every American war (in spite of those dreadful Rambo movies). John Wayne was not a bad actor — he was a fake hero — big difference (does this make Atrios right again?).

By: Cranky Observer

Cranky Observer — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:04:02 +0000

> A better analogy is John Wayne’s
> character in ‘Libery Valance’ vs
> James Stewart’s.
Well, James Stewart flew 40 combat missions in World War II, while Wayne and Ronald Reagan sat on the sidelines cheering. Might have something to do with it, eh? Real war and real death tend to do that the people who forced to engage in them.
Now what did Cheney and W Bush, the “strong father figures”, do in Vietnam again? Newt Gingrich? The Bullshit Moose? The rest of the Radical “hawks”?
Cranky

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:01:51 +0000

Are you sure that isn’t Tom Donovan (not Doniphon)?

By: Cranky Observer

Cranky Observer — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:59:12 +0000

The technical and engineer worlds are filled with people who love to swagger around and engage in Yanamoto-style chest-pounding contests, screaming fights, religious wars, and all the forms of “mine is bigger than yours” that 2nd-rank men believe signfiy manliness and dominance.
In my experience, the very best technology people, the ones who can come in, listen to everyone, take a deep look around, and *solve* the toughest problems, tend to be quiet, self-effacing, and acknowledge at every step of the process that they _don’t_ know everything, that they might be wrong about their judgements, and (most importantly) that they expect to learn something from the process of solving this problem that they didn’t know before – even if it is the most boring and routine problem they encounter, they learn something every single time.
Oddly, a non-insignificant percentage of these people are also trained in martial arts, fencing, and similar forms of man-to-man combat. In a word, they could kill most of the people who scorn them with their bare hands. But they don’t talk about that either.
Please compare the Radicals whom you say embody “societal toughness” to, say, George Marshall. Or perhaps Omar Bradley might be a better choice. Then tell me again that Duncan Black is wrong.
Cranky

By: Michael Connolly

Michael Connolly — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:48:21 +0000

Contempt for “John Wayne” (real name Marion Morrison) was widespread among sailors and GIs during WWII, who thought of him as a blustering poseur. Gore Vidal recounts (in Screening History, I think) times when Wayne was booed by the troops he was sent to entertain. The industry that grew up around Wayne has always served the rightwingers, who themselves are ruthless poseurs. Shallow and vicious. I loved John Wayne as a child. But I am no longer a child.

By: Gary Sugar

Gary Sugar — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:41:50 +0000

Heh, John Wayne vs Marlon Brando. I usually say that American idiots prefer football coaches to history professors.
A better analogy is John Wayne’s character in ‘Libery Valance’ vs James Stewart’s. That is the whole point of the movie, after all. Better, but still fiction and fantasy.

By: wcw

wcw — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 08:24:34 +0000

The idea that any polity in the US has ever used “too little” violence ranges from the misspecified to the risible, depending on my interpretation. I shall take this as yet another convoluted mea culpa for your supporting Iraq II in the first place.
Sometimes, I don’t feel bad at all for rubbing someone’s face in his errors. On this subject, you have a lot of company. With due respect, I hope you feel an extra pang with every casualty report and Lancet study.

By: Sven

Sven — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 06:17:32 +0000

Wayne’s best performance was in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail:
Lucian Trescott from the Village Voice and I tried to arrange a brief chat between “Duke” and about two dozen vets from the Lost Patrol. They had just arrived in Miami when they heard Wayne was holding an open press conference at Nixon headquarters in the Doral they decided to stop by and pick up on it…
“Say, man,” a vet in a wheelchair called out to me after I’d used my press credentials to penetrate the cop-cordron, “Can you get that asshole Wayne out here to talk to us?”
“Why not?” I said. “He’s tough as nails, they say. He’d probably enjoy coming out here in the sun and abusing you dope-addled communist dupes for a while…”
But John Wayne was not eager that day for a chat with the Last Patrol. “What the hell do they want to talk about?” he asked.
“Yeah, what?” said his drinking buddy Glenn Ford. They were standing on the front steps of the Doral waiting for a cab.
“They just want to shoot the bull,” said Lucian. “You know, maybe talk about the war.”
“What war?” Ford snapped.
“The one in Vietnam,” Lucian replied. “These guys fought over there-a lot of them are crippled.”
The Duke seemed agitated; he was scanning the street for a cab. Finally, without looking at us, he said: “Naw, not today. I can’t see the point in it.”
“Why not?” Lucian asked. “They just want to talk. They’re not looking for trouble. Hell, the place is crawling with cops.”
Wayne hesitated, then shook his head again as he suddenly spotted a cab. “So they just want to talk, eh?” he said with a thin smile.
I nodded. “Why not? It won’t take long.”
“Bullshit,” Wayne replied. “If they got somethin’ to say to me, tell ‘em to put it in writing.”
Then he waved us away and eased off across the driveway to the waiting cab. “Playboy Plaza,” he barked. “Jesus, I need a drink.”

By: obsessed

obsessed — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 05:58:20 +0000

You really, BADLY, need to go rent HBO’s The Wire.
I love your blog, but John Wayne? The ridiculous one-dimensional characters he plays are – I agree – scrupulously moral to a fault – but the films themselves are such childishly shallow morality tales that how well he plays their comic book heroes is beside the point.

By: liberal

liberal — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 05:28:24 +0000

“But the contempt for him among liberals reflects, in my view, not just a moral error but an aesthetic one as well.”
I thought liberals hold Wayne in contempt because he was a warmonger who didn’t serve when he had the chance.

By: elliottg

elliottg — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 04:58:53 +0000

Anyone who worries about Atrios’s comments and hangs out in Drum’s comments can safely be ignored.