New York Times Death Spiral Watch (William Kristol Edition)

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? The mind boggles at the idea that somebody--William Kristol--and some newspaper--the New York Times--could actually deploy George Orwell in an attempt to support the proposition that a government needs fewer not more checks-and-balances controlling its ability to spy on its citizens.

Why am I not surprised that William Kristol is unable to read either George Orwell or Rudyard Kipling? But I am still surprised that Kristol is still employed by the New York Times. The rot--Rosenthal, Keller, Sulzberger--is very far advanced indeed.

Here is William Kristol:

Democrats Should Read Kipling: Browsing through a used-book store Friday -- in the Milwaukee airport, of all places -- I came across a 1981 paperback collection of George Orwell's essays. That's how I happened to reread his 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling.... One shouldn't be surprised that its argument would shed light... on contemporary American politics....

If I may vulgarize the implications of Orwell's argument a bit: substitute Republicans for Kipling and Democrats for the opposition, and you have a good synopsis of the current state of American politics. Having controlled the executive branch for 28 of the last 40 years, Republicans tend to think of themselves as the governing party -- with some of the arrogance and narrowness that implies, but also with a sense of real-world responsibility. Many Democrats, on the other hand, no longer even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like. They do, however, enjoy the support of many refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans. (And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats' academic and media supporters -- a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition -- seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted)...

Here's Orwell on Kipling:

George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling: [T.S.] Eliot... falls into the opposite error of defending [Kipling] where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a "nigger" with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct -- on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly....

Kipling, morally or politically... was not a Fascist.... An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from "Recessional", "Lesser breeds without the Law". This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the "lesser breeds" are "natives", and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite... "lesser breeds" refers... to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are "without the Law" in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German....

[Kipling] in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: "Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain." It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no "Law", there is only power.... [This] is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling's outlook is prefascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling's jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things.... He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase.... Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this....

[B]ecause he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which "enlightened" people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties... have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment", demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep".... He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them....

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries)....

When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’ motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away:

I 'eard the knives be'ind me, but I dursn't face my man,
Nor I don't know where I went to, 'cause I didn't stop to see,
Till I 'eard a beggar squealin' out for quarter as 'e ran,
An' I thought I knew the voice an' — it was me!

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,
An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go,
They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow.

Compare this with:

Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives are dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous pension.

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say... it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have... from the body of Kipling's early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army — the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like.

On about the same level they will be able to learn something of British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling's opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible.... It took a very improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple bells...

Paying writers like William Kristol $5 a word for prime content holes, I don't give the New York Times as we know it another decade.

Comments

[benny lava]

"Many Democrats, on the other hand, no longer even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like"

Yeah, it's been forever since they had anyone in the executive branch. Not since olden times.

[Dan S.]

"Browsing through a used-book store Friday -- in the Milwaukee airport, of all places -- I came across a 1981 paperback collection of George Orwell's essays."

I don't suppose it happened to burn his fingers when he picked it up?

[anne]

"And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats' academic and media supporters -- a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition -- seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted"

This, from the vile servant of Rupert Murdoch. What a disgusting wretch.

[Neal]

A very Rovian tactic--attacks based on the apparent area of strength of the opposition.

The hackiest-hack of the fascist wing of the language-distorting, ever-lasting war party attacking the Democrats using Orwell!?!

What RPM is Orwell at today?

Kristol-satiric master or dunce?

[Neil B.]

Brad has good takes on the awfulness of the SCLM etc, but the sad thing is: enough people want that trash out (like the ones that gave us the last seven+ years) even in a paper rag, and there are enough that will buy on momentum, that the NYT can blunder on for decades to come. What we need, is someone like Soros to buy it out and clean house.

[Neil B.]

Brad has good takes on the awfulness of the SCLM etc, but the sad thing is: enough people want that trash out (like the ones that gave us the last seven+ years) even in a paper rag, and there are enough that will buy on momentum, that the NYT can blunder on for decades to come. What we need, is someone like Soros to buy it out and clean house.

[macheath]

Too bad Kristol (the advocate of invasions) didn't underline and use this passage from Orwell's essay:

No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no "Law," there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold.

[bob]

Nice to think, though, that Kristol Lite surely paid far more for his Kipling than the going rate (Renaissance is a rip-off bookstore). Of course that is if he bought it; maybe he just read it there, or stole it?

[low-tech cyclist]

Orwell says: "Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards."

Things have changed since Orwell's time, and it's the American left, not the right, that's done its best to expose the shameful way our soldiers have been used up and discarded.

On the other hand, it's the Bush Administration that had National Guard units deployed for 729 days, not because it was a particularly nice number (which it is), but because deployment for 730 days was the threshold for their receiving benefits that would have cost the government a hefty sum. It's the Bush Administration that's done its best to claim that the Iraq War version of shell-shock was attributable to pre-existing conditions so the government wouldn't have to pay. It's the Bush Administration that made a mess of Walter Reed.

And the outrage from the patriotic right? Must've been deafening, because I don't hear anything.

[Cal]

Orwell's first paragraph pretty much sums up the Southern Strategy employed by the Republicans since Nixon. Kristol's analogy is apt and, as part of the machine, unmasks his own immorality. He sees nothing wrong with it. None of them do.

[Gene O'Grady]

Are we supposed to believe that Ms. Himmelfarb's son had never read that essay until he found it by chance in the Milwaukee airport? Gimme a break.

[Doctor Jay]

Where was that "sense of real-world responsibility" when Katrina made landfall? Where was a good "quality of thought" at Abu Ghraib? It's not that we shouldn't fight, but that where and who and how we fight matters.

One shouldn't be surprised that every text seems to Kristol a Rorshach inkblot, in which he sees his own world-view reflected. He's done too much in the cause of blood to see anything else.

[MobiusKlein]

Why is William Kristol held in any greater respect than Jonah Goldberg? It's as if ignorance of source material is a prerequisite for conservative punditry.

(I still remember the smackdown delivered here to JG about fires on the American prairie. )

[giulio]

>Paying writers like William Kristol $5 a word for prime content holes, I don't give the New York Times as we know it another decade.<

And we get an, in context, extract of such a beautiful piece by Orwell for free! Thanks Brad

[James Wimberley]

Orwell found Kipling "aesthetically disgusting" though admitting his quality as a writer. This suggests a partially tin ear. It's a travesty to reduce Mrs Hawksbee (with a w), Kipling's razor-sharp Simla doyenne, as "posing in front of palm trees" - of which, as Orwell must have known, there are none in this mountain resort; the Raj built the place to get away from the heat. Orwell also disapproved of Gaudi as vulgar. He's admirable, but his tastes are not authoritative.
But both Kipling and Orwell understood, from very different starting-points, the temptations and vices of imperialism. Kristol just doesn't get it.

[PDB]

Whenever I read something like this, I am reminded of a Jon Stewart quote which pretty much sums up the article's/post's sentiment:

"Oh, Bill Kristol...Are you ever right?"

[John]

What got me is that Kristol expounds on Orwell's essay on Kipling, but hasn't read Kipling. At least, not that I can tell.

[ferd]

Kristol is the one sniggering, here. He puts zero effort into this crude psychological trap, but he obviously believes the Republican base is so inept and so damaged that they'll fall right in.

[macheath]

it may well be that the Times is actively seeking new, neo-con readers. Consider just the very recent inanities on the Op-Ed page: Maureen Dowd with crude sexist jokes, Nick Kristoff with a apology for John McCain (Nick: McCain's lying shows what a straight talker he is); and Kristol using the author of 1984 to argue for more government latitude in surveillance on its citizens. There's been a drift in the Sunday Book Review to more far-right reviewers as well. I tend to think its more just the brain ossification that affects the Sulzbergers ("he quoted Orwell? What an intellectual!"), but maybe there's a business strategy--how many more liberals can they get to subscribe to the paper, anyway?

[Robert Waldmann]

Kristol is a strange target. So idiotic that it is hard to miss, but idiotic in so many ways that you must leave dozens of targets un-hit in the first few salvos.

Like you I noted the absurdity of claiming that Orwell supported warrantless wiretaps (you know *he* never really loved Big Brother but, it seems, Kristol missed that subtlety).
http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2008/02/william-kristol-on-orwell-and-kipling.html

but, like you, on my first try, I neglected to mention that Kristol's paean to responsibility concludes by saying that it is irresponsible to not grant amnesty to lawbreakers
http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2008/02/kristol-meth-not-responsible-below-i.html
and to expect the executive to respond to questions asked by legislators (Bush is the paladin of irresponsible government in the technical meaning of the term).

I have not yet noted just how far in opposition Orwell was when he wrote his essay on Kipling (let's just say very close to Ward and very far from Whinston Churchill).

However, I don't know about this death spiral business. I resisted the temptation to pay for Time select just to read Krugman, but if I had to pay to access the incomparable comic excellence of Kristol, I would be seriously tempted.

[Patrick]

Until you understand fascism, you cannot understand the way modern America views its soldiers. Until you understand the way a nation can pick one man, and elevate him to a myth- to believe him to be the embodiment of all the positive traits they associate with their country, you cannot understand why American soldiers are so sacrosanct.

Nor can you understand why we turn on them so quickly when they fail to live up to our mythical visions.

[baiano8]

NYT as we know it dead in ten years?

Consider how thoughtless and ill-informed most readers are. How many of them only glance at the front page and then skip to the sports section? Will they even notice something is inaccurate when they read it? Is there enough active opposition to such nonsense to actually change something? How many kids these days play video games instead of reading?

[ptm]

You read Kristol (and the NY Times) so I don't have to. Thank you.