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COMMENTARY
October 30, 2004
Letter to USA, V
No matter who wins Stateside on Tuesday (or next May if the race is close enough for the lawyers to throw into the courts) I shall be disappointed. My regular readers will by now have guessed that I am hoping nay praying for a Bush victory. More than that: I am hoping for one that is so shockingly decisive that it will bring the Democrat Party to its senses and leave major figures in the mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere asking themselves serious questions about life. But this is really too much to hope. I shall be disappointed because even if Mr. Bush wins I have seen the face of defeat. It is obvious to me at the end of the most gruelling political campaign that I can remember over the most extraordinary stakes that the elites in the media in the academy in the legal and other public professions -- the "intellectuals" considered together as a class; the "clerisy" as Coleridge called them; the people upon whom a society depends for its thinking -- are in America as much as elsewhere in the West morally rotted through. This has been most evident in the media because the big newspapers TV networks and the repulsive entertainment industry of which they have become increasingly a part are what we see from day to day. Yet the people in the media whom polls have shown overwhelmingly support Kerry seldom do any original thinking. They are more reflective of the conditions that made them; they represent the thinking of the larger class. It could be said of this larger intellectual elite in the United States that when their own country under attack by a lethal entrenched and unambiguously evil enemy rose in self-defence they pretended to be neutral. But it was only a pretence: for as we've seen through the media the battlefield reporting and the rumour-mongering has been consistently slanted. There was no mistake nor presumed mistake made by American forces or the U.S. political leadership that was not blared across the front pages and the television screens. Conversely there has been only the most perfunctory coverage not merely of American successes and accomplishments in the field -- which have been many and some astonishing -- but even of the real problems U.S. forces have encountered. How with such media on their backs could the allies have defeated Hitler? Now here in my view is the heart of the matter: Michael Moore's "documentary" film Fahrenheit 9/11 presented a crackpot conspiratorial view of events in which easily established facts were wildly skewed. It did not play to small audiences. I believe the view of reality presented in that film -- with its leading suggestion that 9/11 itself was merely a convenient pretext for the Bush administration -- is actually embraced by America's intellectual elite. Worse they believe it because they want to believe it. This is the face of defeat. And the fact that the Democrats have been willing to appeal to this constituency yet still hope to win the presidential election speaks tawdry volumes. Consider: that a presidential candidate whose senatorial achievements have been nugatory and whose Senate voting record is to the left of Edward Kennedy's ran for months on his exploits in Vietnam. But what did he do in that era? Here is a man who without evidence publicly accused his fellow officers of the most hideous war crimes tapes of whose testimony in Congress were played to break the spirits of U.S. prisoners of war in Hanoi. A man who met illicitly with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Paris while still under the terms of his military service. Who has been exposed in such lies as his claim to have spent a Christmas in Cambodia. And who still has some prospect of becoming President of the United States. We were all young once but note: Mr. Kerry has never apologized for any of this past behaviour; and in the conditions of public life today he has never felt the need to do so. In this last week it was all brought together as Mr. Kerry repeated very dubious media allegations about stockpiled weapons and how they went missing in Al Qaqaa Iraq. More than three decades have gone by since his Congressional testimony -- but here was Mr. Kerry still winging it. The fact of Mr. Kerry is a symptom only. I'm afraid the disease that has made his candidacy not only possible but competitive goes much deeper than that. And it is from that in the end I pray America will recover. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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