Politics and Press

As The General Speaks His Mind, Journalists Lose Theirs

Jeff — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:41:04 +0000

“[McCain] hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron. I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Retired General Wesley Clark set off a brief firestorm over the weekend with the above quote and Senator McCain and the press immediately went nuts. Now, it is easy to understand that McCain would be a little upset since having been shot down and suffered imprisonment seems to be one of his most salient features, but what the hell is wrong with the press?

One can parse Clark’s quote a thousand times and still not come to the conclusion that he was saying anything other than what he said – that “…getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is [not] a qualification to become president.” But the print and TV press went bozo over it, implying that to have said that was to criticize McCain’s service to the country, thereby implying that getting in a plane getting shot down actually IS a presidential qualification.

Having gone through a long, tedious primary season we now look forward to the familiar process of the press avoiding analysis of issues and focusing on the “horse race” via the meaningless minutia that the press deems worthy of blowing up into something superficially serious.

It will most likely be ugly, nasty, and stupid. And come next January we will have a new president who will most likely have been elected without benefit of a smart, sophisticated, analytical press.

The Great White North celebrates

Mackenzie Brothers — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:28:37 +0000

It’s July 1, Canada Day, and my brother Doug and I have decided to finally give into the many annual requests from around the globe and, in our role of Canadian idols and icons, help the world celebrate the event. Canada Day, as many will now realize, takes place exactly four days before rival US Day, documenting the speed of the Great White North’s fathers and mothers of confederation - loyalists, Quebecois and First Nations working together - in establishing the globe’s largest nation (at the time, Russia not having yet expanded eastward) exactly four days before the rebel USers followed suit. It is a tale told by an idol, full of sound and fury and signifying the birth of a nation reaching from sea to sea to suddenly unfrozen sea. As my brother Bob put it in a moment caught by one of Youtube’s most revered sites, this land is great because it is great, white and north. In addition, as other sites will testify, it is the only nation which will pass along crucial tips on how to roll your owns while wearing mittens and how to get a mouse in the Molson bottle so you get a free 12 pack.

When America Stood Tall: The Berlin Airlift of 1948

Jeff — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:45:46 +0000

Sixty years ago, on June 24, 1948 Josef Stalin blocked all routes through East Germany into the divided city of Berlin in an attempt to force the Western powers (Britain, France and the U.S.) to give up their sectors of the city and turn all of Berlin over to East Germany. The alternative seemed to be the slow starvation of the more than two million people of Berlin.

But two days later American and British pilots began flying in the food and other essentials needed to keep the city alive. Over the next 11 months nearly 300,000 flights provided one of the greatest humanitarian lifelines in history. The effort was not without its dangers with flights landing every two minutes regardless of weather conditions and potential Soviet attacks. That the airlift could be operational within days of Stalin’s actions was a tribute to American and British political will (the French initially declined to participate, joining the effort months later). At its peak the airlift consisted of 1500 flights daily, each one carrying tons of food and supplies. Berlin citizens, working around the clock, organized the unloading of planes. 39 British and 31 American pilots died in accidents during the airlift; a memorial to them stands at Berlin’s Templehof airport.

In some ways this was the opening shot of a 40-year Cold War. The fact that it stayed a ”cold” war was due in part to President Truman’s reluctance to confront the Soviets with a direct military action, which would have risked a new “hot” war in a war-tired Europe. The airlift became a powerful symbol of American and British resolve and commitment in the face of a new and dangerous threat and and represented the first serious resistance offered by the West to the expanding hegemony of the Soviet Union.

In the early 1990s my wife traveled to Berlin to visit the father of a German friend. After WWII he had become a policeman in Berlin and when introduced to this young American woman literally broke down in tears of thanks for the airlift’s contribution to the freedom of his city some 45 years earlier. This year Germans will once again commemorate this singular American/British act of humanitarian relief and in May 2009, Berlin will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the lifting of the Berlin blockade.

During the current period when there is much discussion of the need for a strong American public diplomacy program, the Berlin Airlift reminds us that strong public diplomacy begins with a sensible foreign policy and that for now we need to wait for a new group of national leaders to move America back to its core values.

An apology that might mean something

Mackenzie Brothers — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:22:22 +0000

My brother Doug and I are suspicious of official apologies by governments who are convinced by election polls that they might win some ethnic votes if they recall how miserably a specific ethnic group was treated a century ago. But this week the Canadian government made an official apology that might actually have been meant and which might have a meaningul impact. Prime Minister Stephen Harper read off an unambiguous apology to the assembled First Nations Chiefs in the House of Parliament regarding the way native peoples have been treated since Canada existed and in particular with regard to what happened during the lengthy period when residential schools were used to “take the Indian out of the Indians” as Harper put it. Children were removed from their families and their homes and transported to remote live-in schools where they were punished for using their native languiage, taught the ways of the white man and untaught the ways of their parents. Even worse, if that can be imagined, is that these children in far too many cases, were also sexually exploited by the people who were supposed to be teaching them.

It was a miserable cultural performance of the highest order, and its abject failure can still be felt a generation after the last residential school was closed. Not only have many of the former students never really recoverd from their ordeal, in many cases they have passed on their existential disillusionment to their own children. The results can be seen in many of the poverty-stricken reserves, particularly in the north, that remain Canada’s darkest secret, though it is no secret to any alert Canadian living today. For the problems are also sadly present in the drug-dominated sections of too many Canadian cities. where the attempt at enforced assimilation has led only to despair. Some natives were not interested in Harper’s belated apology, but many more seemed to be genuinely attentive, no doubt in the hope that a page is finally turning and that the native peoples can soon regain their rightful place on their home turf. Let’s hope they are right.

Shipping Up to Ontario

Jeff — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:08:39 +0000

Our pals the MacKenzies have for some time tried to lure us north of the border but rumors of walrus blubber meals, national curling championships, screech cocktails, dollars called “loonies” and an insufficient number of liquor stores kept us for the most part happily ensconced well south of the 49th parallel. But seven years of George W. Bush, the tediousness of the Democratic primaries, and the lure of the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen conspired to get us on the road – headed north.

Leonard brought his “golden voice” to the concert in Hamilton, Ontario and his lyrics were as darkly powerful as ever. While the current tour includes only dates in Canada and Europe, he did dedicate “Democracy” to his “friends in the United States” and the implicit irony was not lost on the mostly Canadian audience. At 73 some worried that Cohen would not be up to a full concert but 3 hours after the concert’s start he was going at full strength. He began the concert with a gracious thank you to the crowd for coming out “on a school night” and ended it with another gracious thank you for allowing him to sing to them. The Canadian press often refers to him as “our Bob Dylan” but to this friendly neighbor from the South it might really be vice versa.

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left nor right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

L. Cohen in “Democracy”

Sports and Politics - Part Four - Demographics and Football teams

Mackenzie Brothers — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:17:51 +0000

The current European football championships offer a fascinating look at the changing demographics of nations both in and out of the European Union. Some of the countries offer team rosters in which every single player has a name that reflects the traditional ethnic line that once formed the critical mass of almost any country in the map of Europe as we know it. Turkey, Greece, Romania, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Austria and Poland are all nations without colonial ambitions (in two cases we should probably add “since the end of World War One”), and none of them has a team that includes any sign of the immigration of populations from former colonies. And none of them has been much interested in encouraging new immigrants, though Poland has a rushed-through a New Pole from Brazil on its roster (he has scored their only goal so far), and Austria has a collection of names from the old Habsburg Empire, plus a couple of Turkish ones. But none of these countries has a single non-Caucasian player unlike the rainbow teams of the powerhouses.

In general one can conclude that the lesser football powers have not benefited from either having had a former colonial empire or a desire to bring in fresh blood, while the major powers have. France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Germany - the favourites - all certainly do, as would the English team if it had managed to qualify, which it didn’t. There is an exception that proves the rule, world champion Italy, which certainly has had colonial ambitions in the past and has much immigration these days, but no player on its national team has a non-italian name. And Switzerland, with a team as multicultural as France, plays a neutral role, even on the football pitch, and has already been eliminated. Russia is a world of its own, more in Asia than in Europe, but its football team seems to be made up of European Russians.

Obama speaks at Wesleyan as Belichick joins Hall of Fame - Sports and Politics, part 3

Mackenzie Brothers — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:32:29 +0000

Just when it seemed that the US Democratic primary campaign was going to sink into the quicksand of complete disinterest, Barack Obama has made a deft move that is sure to focus attention on more interesting topics than the exact delegate vote not including Michigan, American Samoa, the Virgins Islands and Florida. My brother and I, lost in the snows of the tundra, haven’t been able to grasp the nuances of that mathematical formula. What we have figured out is that Middletown, Connecticut will be the centre of world attention this afternoon as Obama steps in in relief of his stricken brother-in-arms Ted Kennedy, who will be sitting in the first row as his stepdaughter graduates from one of the premier US East coast elite liberal Arts universities and his son celebrates the 15th anniversary of his graduation. But Wesleyan is also probably the premier elite small university in another area: sports, and my brother Doug thinks that Obama is hoping to gain stature by being in the presence of some of the heroic figures who are already in the Wesleyan Hall of Fame as Bill Belichick joins it along with legendary marathon runner Bill Rodgers.

But it is not only Rogers and Belichick, the winner of four Super Bowls with the New England Patriots and the most successful football coach in recent NFL history, who will be present, but also former Wesleyan student and current arch Belichick nemesis Coach Eric Mangini of NFL’s New York Jets, who will be there for his fifteenth reunion. For Wesleyan is the only university to have produced two current NFL coaches, and Doug and many scouts feel that Wesleyan’s combination of intellectual depth and athletic grace has led to the development of a number of quarterbacks wearing the red and black, who would surely have dominated the football fields of America if they hadn’t gone into more scholarly pursuits.

So give credit where it is due. Obama has made a very smart political move by moving into this territory. He will surely deliver an excellent commencement address, and do his friend Ted a favour while doing it, even if his own elite university background is limited to mainstream Harvard. But with any luck, the sports journalists will also be there to keep watch over Belichick and Mangini, and to see how Rodgers is running along these days. Obama can relax in the afterglow of some heavy hitters from the world of sports, whose chumminess would be most helpful to his popularity among the blue collar working folk.

Michaelle Jean makes a visit to France

Mackenzie Brothers — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:02:01 +0000

My brother and I are afraid that our headline may not mean much to our wide readership outside of Canada and Bavaria. Therefore some background information. Michaelle Jean is the splendidly photogenic Governor-General of Canada, whom the separatist Parti Quebecois likes to identify as “the Queen of England’s representative in Canada”. But Michaelle Jean is no easy target for that once revolutionary party that is beginning to look more than a little frumpy and is losing support because of it. She is currently representing Canada in Paris at celebrations jointly celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City, the end of the Second World War and France’s national Day on Saturday marking the end of slavery in 1848. Michaelle Jean causes the separatistes great problems. She is an immigrant from Haiti, speaks French natively and English with Gaulic charm, and she is a very articulate and intelligent commentator in both national languages on cultural matters. In a luncheon speech before the French Senate, given of course in French, she identified herself in a way that few (no?) other western leaders could do: “The great-great-granddaughter of slaves, I cannot remain indifferent to the legacy of racism and intolerance left behind by decades of slavery and that continues to be felt in our communities, at times openly, at times more insidiously.” Eat your heart out, Senator Obama.

She also happens to be the best-looking First Lady in the world, a fair distance ahead of the second-place French First Lady, something that seems to have stunned the French so deeply that photos prove that Nicolas Sarkozy could not have bent over more deeply while kissing her hand. Le Monde wrote that Canada’s titular head of state was “La presque reine du Canada” - “the enlightened face of humanity, intelligence and beauty’. Holy moley! Michaelle Jean has done more to foster French/Canada relations in one week of public appearances than decades of those boring old kind of Canuck politicians, including the endlessly whining separatisten that France used to love to coddle. As for M. Sarkozy, he not only accompanied Mme Jean to the Normandy D-Day landing sites, but also asked if he could join her at the Canadian military cemetery at Beny-Riviers near Juno Beach where 2000 Canadians died in the D-Day invasion. When was the last time that a French prime Minister knew it was good politics to be seen with the Governor-General of Canada? A word of advice to M. Obama. As far as Canadians can tell, he has only made one reference to Canada in his career as a politician, saying that he would love to meet the (non-existent) President of Canada when he becomes President of the US. This was taken as a bad omen for the future of US foreign policy given the last 8 years, but perhaps Obama can do a little research about his neighbours in the next months. If he doesn’t he is in for a monumental surprise when he meets the Governor-General of stodgy old Canada.

Campaign ’08: The Other Edwards Speaks Out

Jeff — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:58:41 +0000

Sunday’s NY Times carried an Op Ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards (Bowling 1, Health Care 0) on the role of the press in the campaign and it is a dandy. It is no secret that she is a smart and honorable woman who is widely admired by people on both sides of the political aisle but the skill and grace with which she skewers the press is remarkable.

She suggests that we are getting a kind of “Cliffs Notes of the news”, and that the press’s group decision to ignore serious candidates like Senators Biden, Dodd and Brownback simply eliminated them from serious consideration leaving the press to its search for various personality cults. As she says:

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. …

…Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

The next time the NY Times is seeking a regular columnist they could do a lot worse than recruiting Ms. Edwards.

Campaign ’08: A House of Cards

Jeff — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:04:01 +0000

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. - Graham Greene

Watching the first segment of House of Cards, a 1990 BBC series, recently I began to think that I had seen it already, but with an American cast. In the British version Ian Richardson plays Francis Urquhart (“F.U.” in the headlines) a tough, cynically self-serving Member of Parliament bent on gathering as much personal power as possible regardless of the cost to other politicians or his country.

I was particularly struck with the portrayal of a young, ambitious reporter who unwittingly becomes one of F.U.’s tools in destroying his political enemies. Urquhart simply provides her with “off-the-record” information that she then uses to beat up on whomever is next on Urquhart’s list. It is all easy work for her and effective politics for Urquhart.

And a lesson for all journalists covering today’s political campaigns in America: do what it takes to get “access” to the players, jump on anything smacking of scandal, pump it up and by furthering the interests of your “player”, enhance your own career. House of Cards has become a playbook for many of today’s American politicians and their friends in the press but it is a helluva lot more entertaining as fiction.