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      in World Politics

      Ken Burns’ Misunderstanding of Pronouns

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      Last week, David Marchese interviewed filmmaker Ken Burns for The New York Times. It came on the occasion of yet another in the growing series of Burns documentaries about the iconic people, objects and trends that most Americans recognize as the pillars of their culture. They include baseball, jazz, the Roosevelts, the Civil War, the Brooklyn Bridge and the war in Vietnam, among many others. The latest, which will premiere next month, is on Ernest Hemingway.

      Marchese detects an underlying motive in Burns’ work: the wish to affirm and highlight the importance of certain historical artifacts, if only to remind sometimes forgetful Americans that they possess a common culture. Burns is engaged in a valiant effort to convince Americans that they must recognize a powerful cultural identity capable of uniting them. Burns wants his fellow citizens to believe that military might and monetary clout are not the only forces that define American exceptionalism. He believes that the soft power conveyed by remembering the cultural icons and important moments of the past may endow the nation with a new source of vigor.

      As Marchese notes, Burns wishes to correct the impression that the nation is condemned to flounder in an increasingly complex set of culture wars that, to all appearances, have undermined the once vibrant national spirit. Burns, a 67-year-old baby boomer, admits his attachment to the feelings of pride he experienced in his youth when, despite the obvious contradictions that emerged with the Vietnam War and a “turned on” counterculture, there was a sense among white, middle-class Americans — regardless of their political preferences — that the nation was engaged in the noble mission of fulfilling the project its founders had imagined nearly two centuries earlier. 

      Ron Johnson’s Binary Thinking

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      Burns was 7 years old when John F. Kennedy stirringly called people to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” — and the entire nation seemed to agree that that was a good idea. Sixty years later, the slogan in most people’s minds has become: Grab whatever you can for yourself because no one out there is going to help you.

      Marchese asks Burns whether his optimistic project isn’t “quixotic.” Burns replies enigmatically that he has “made films about ‘us.’ All of the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all the majesty and contradiction of the U.S. But the thing that I’ve learned is that there’s no ‘them.’ This is what everybody does: make a distinction about ‘them.’ It’s just us.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Them:

      The most impersonal of the personal pronouns in the English language, particularly prized by people with a paranoid cast of mind. In US culture, the pair “they/them” has come to mean those who are not like us and who should therefore be thought of as a threat.

      Contextual Note

      Burns stresses the fact that the two letters, “U” and “S” spell not just the name of the nation but the people who compose it in their collective identity: “us.” He appeals to the idea of solidarity in the midst of diversity, in conformity with the Latin motto that appears on the nation’s Great Seal: e pluribus unum. Out of many, one. The one, according to Burns, is “us.”

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      When Marchese suspects the denial of the existence of “them” may sound naive in a clearly fragmented nation, Burns defines his position as a categorical moral imperative that all Americans should embrace. He calls it “a nonreactive state, which is the state of observation.” In his role as a cultural journalist, he even appears to believe that it’s “part of a journalistic discipline.” It means struggling with oneself to avoid categorizing other people as “them.” At one point, he evokes John Keats’ concept of “negative capability,” which he interprets as meaning listening to all sides. Keats might have found Burns’ interpretation somewhat superficial. In any case, American culture has always preferred positive force to negative capability.

      Burns attempted to put negative capability into practice in his series of films on the war in Vietnam. Though the media critics acclaimed the film for its inclusive breadth, the historian Andrew Gawthorpe, writing for the Journal of Strategic Studies, judged that “Burns and Novick’s superficial telling of the history of the war fails to get to grips with the deeper ideas and structures of belief that led the USA into the Vietnam debacle in the first place – and which, if not tackled, threaten to lead it down similarly unwise paths in the future.”

      In the conclusion of his article, Gawthorpe describes the nature of that delusion that consists of believing in the capacity of a documentary filmmaker to transform the perception of “them” into “us.” “The ‘national healing’ Burns wished for implies not a useful confrontation and interrogation of these controversies and errors, but rather a soothing return to the status quo,” he writes. Throughout his work, Burns generously hopes that the divisions created by past and present traumas may be healed. But at a moment in history when belief in the nation’s institutions is crumbling, redefining the warring groups as a potentially unified “us” resembles a form of voluntary blindness.

      Historical Note

      Andrew Gawthorpe notes that Ken Burns’ hankering for a return to a comfortable status quo evident in his Vietnam War documentary reflects the mentality that “has led the USA to recently repeat in Iraq and Afghanistan many of the same mistakes made in Vietnam and gives us no reason to suspect it will not do so again in the future.” As a final thought, he adds: “[A] superficial rendition of [history] presents us with the risk that we will treat only the symptoms of what ails us and not the deeper malady.” The “us” Gawthorpe refers to is suffering from a “deeper malady.” For a nation that has never managed to create a functional health care system, this becomes particularly worrying.

      Ironically, former President George W. Bush proved to have a more secure sense of history and a better understanding of the concept of “them” than Burns. During his first presidential campaign in 2000, Bush offered this thought, framed in his inimitable style: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

      Bush understood that since the Second World War, the US economy and political system depends on its fear of a threat from some group that can be labeled “them.” The glorious expansion of the economy during the Cold War existed thanks to the stability of Americans’ perception of the Soviets as the indispensable “them.” The permanence of the Soviet threat (real or imaginary) justified a series of aggressive actions across the globe as well as the imposition of standards and cultural memes — American soft power — that no one dared argue with.

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      Today, the vast majority of Americans, encouraged by the media, have been taught to believe that the Taliban, the Iranians, the Venezuelan “socialists” and the Chinese are not people and nations, but simply “them.” They are perceived not just as others to whom we can be indifferent, but as a threat to America’s being and its values. Thanks to the confusion of the 2016 US presidential election, the Democrats and their media have elected the Russians as the dominant them.

      The difference between the media-induced perception of foreign policy during the Cold War and today is that we now have multiple “thems.” That is the ultimate effect of the consumer society that celebrates choice and encourages the affirmation of personal identity not only through the brands each consumer adopts, but through the choice of an enemy each citizen or group of citizens is free to make.

      Focusing on the nation itself, Burns hopes that Americans will not treat one another as belonging to a group of threatening “thems.” He believes that if Americans at least occasionally listen to Louis Armstrong and read Ernest Hemingway while attempting to admit only to forget their foreign policy blunders of the past (such as the Vietnam War), all will be well again in the consumer empire.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      In Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing President and a Crucial Spouse

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhite House MemoIn Lady Bird Johnson’s Secret Diaries, a Despairing President and a Crucial SpouseA new book reveals how the former first lady not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade Lyndon B. Johnson to stay in office.Lady Bird Johnson in 1961. The first lady kept a diary, but she ordered that a part of it be kept secret for years after her death.Credit…Associated PressMarch 11, 2021Updated 9:51 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — He had been president for only two years, but that night in fall 1965 he had had enough. Lyndon B. Johnson had spiraled into depression, and from his hospital bed after gallbladder surgery, he talked of throwing it all away and retreating into seclusion back home in Texas.To a visiting Supreme Court justice, he dictated thoughts for a statement announcing he was indefinitely turning over his duties to Vice President Hubert Humphrey while recovering from fatigue. “I want to go to the ranch. I don’t want even Hubert to be able to call me,” he told his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. “They may demand that I resign. They may even want to impeach me.”Eventually, Mrs. Johnson coaxed him through that period of doubt and despair, enabling him to complete the final three years of his term. The episode was hidden from the public, and although Mrs. Johnson documented it in her diary, she ordered the entry kept secret for years after her death. But a new book reveals the full scope of those once-shrouded diaries as never before, shedding fresh light on the former first lady and her partnership with the 36th president.The diaries reveal how central Mrs. Johnson was to her husband’s presidency. She not only provided a spouse’s emotional ballast but also served as an unrivaled counselor who helped persuade him to stay in office at critical junctures, advised him on how to use the office to achieve their mutual goals, guided him during the most arduous moments and helped chart his decision to give up power years later.While she is remembered largely as a political wife and businesswoman with impeccable manners, an easy laugh, a soft Texas lilt and a quintessentially first-lady-like White House portfolio promoting “beautification” efforts, the diaries make clear that Mrs. Johnson behind the scenes was also a canny political operator and shrewd judge of people.“The pre-existing image is one of two-dimensionality and stiff-upper-lipness and not a hair out of place,” said Julia Sweig, who spent five years researching the diaries for the biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,” set to be published on Tuesday. “But when you get into this material, you see what a rounded, multidimensional human being she is.”Mrs. Johnson began her diary shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy vaulted her husband to the presidency in November 1963, and she dutifully kept it up through the end of their time in the White House in January 1969. She released carefully edited excerpts in a 1970 book titled “A White House Diary,” but some portions remained sealed until long after her death in 2007 at age 94.Ms. Sweig, a longtime Washington scholar, learned about the diaries from a friend and became captivated when she visited the Johnson presidential museum in Austin, Texas, and stepped into an exhibit that featured Mrs. Johnson’s voice from the taped diaries describing the day of the Kennedy assassination. The first lady’s voice was activated by a motion detector, so Ms. Sweig repeatedly stepped in and out of the museum room to hear the diary entry over and over.She then embarked on a project examining all 123 hours of tapes and transcripts, the last of which were not released until 2017, combined with other research to produce the biography and an accompanying eight-part podcast, “In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson,” produced by ABC News, that features Mrs. Johnson’s voice narrating her time in the White House. (The fourth episode airs on Monday.)“It’s very unusual to find such an unexcavated and contemporary record of such a recent period of history that we thought we knew and understood about a presidency that we thought we knew and understood,” Ms. Sweig said.President Lyndon B. Johnson with Mrs. Johnson in 1963. She advised her husband through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War.Credit…Associated PressJohnson scholars said Ms. Sweig’s examination of the diaries flesh out the popular understanding of that era. “She fills out this picture now that we have of the Johnson presidency,” said the historian Robert Dallek, who spent 14 years researching two books on Lyndon Johnson.Born Claudia Alta Taylor in a small East Texas town, Mrs. Johnson was a force in her husband’s political career from Congress to the White House. She advised him through the civil rights movement, the enactment of the Great Society program and the Vietnam War, and she helped figure out how to handle the arrest of a close aide and used her beautification program to promote an environmental and social justice agenda.Perhaps most consequentially, she steered her husband through his inner turmoil. As early as May 1964, six months after taking office, he contemplated his departure by not running for election in his own right that fall. Mrs. Johnson drew up a seven-page strategy memo as well as a draft letter forgoing election to show him what it would look like. But she told her diary, “I hope he won’t use it,” and encouraged him to stay the course, which he did.At the same time, her strategy memo presciently outlined his eventual course, suggesting he run for election but serve just one full term, then announce in March 1968 that he would not run again.There were moments when he almost upended the plan, as in October 1965, after his gallbladder surgery. There was no particular precipitating event, and he was arguably at the height of his presidency, having passed major civil rights legislation while not yet mired in the worst of the Vietnam War. Indeed, he signed 13 domestic policy bills from his bed during a two-week convalescence at Bethesda Naval Hospital.Yet for whatever reason, he became overwhelmed with the stress of the job one night as Abe Fortas, the longtime ally he had just appointed to the Supreme Court, sat at his bedside. The beleaguered president told his wife and the justice that he could handle “not one more piece of paper, not one more problem,” and he dictated thoughts about how he could escape the burdens of the presidency to Fortas, who wrote them out longhand.“He was like a man on whom an avalanche had suddenly fallen,” Mrs. Johnson recorded. She knew his drastic mood swings better than anyone but had missed this one coming. “So here is the black beast of depression back in our lives,” she told her diary in a section she marked “close for 10 years, and review then.”The diary entry reinforced how important she was to keeping her husband centered. “L.B.J. often let his demons roam with her, knowing that she would quietly ward them off by appealing to his better angels,” said Mark K. Updegrove, the president of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation and the author of “Indomitable Will” about the Johnson presidency. “He used her not only as a sounding board but revealed his subconscious to her, including expressing his darkest thoughts that he was trying to work through. She helped to work them out — or exorcise them.”Mrs. Johnson helped exorcise them that fall, but by 1968, she, too, thought it might be time for him to move on. He had a secret ending drafted for his State of the Union address in January announcing that he would not run for re-election, but he was uncertain whether he would deliver it. Before he left for the Capitol, Mrs. Johnson noticed that he had left the secret draft behind, so she rushed over to tuck it in his suit pocket.She then watched from the House gallery as he delivered his speech, not knowing herself whether he would use the secret ending or not. He did not. But then, when it came time for an address to the nation announcing a de-escalation in bombing North Vietnam, he finally issued the surprise declaration. That was in March 1968 — exactly according to the timetable Mrs. Johnson had outlined four years earlier.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in US Politics

      'This is not freedom': a militarized US Capitol is being called a ‘war zone’

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      In early 2003, as government buildings across Iraq were being looted, Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, “Freedom’s untidy.” Iraq was “being liberated”, he said. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things.”Iraqi journalist Ali Adeeb Alnaemi was in Baghdad at the time. “I was driving around and seeing looting and burning while American soldiers were standing there, and they would say to me, ‘We have no orders to interfere,’” he said.He knew what he was seeing: “This is not freedom.”Almost two decades later, supporters of a different Republican president invaded and looted the US Capitol and left five people dead. Amid a huge security crackdown in the aftermath, a secure “Green Zone” has even been created in the heart of Washington DC – just as the US military did in Baghdad.Alnaemi watched the news coverage in shock. It was like “living a nightmare again”, he said.Also as in 2003, the chaos and violence he was witnessing had originated from lies spread by the US president and his administration. The invasion of Iraq had been justified by false claims about weapons of mass destruction. “Now it’s, ‘take back your country’, ‘Stop the steal’,” Alnaemi said. “Different lies, but they have similar effects.”In the past week, tens of thousands of National Guard troops have filled Washington DC. There are checkpoints to get into government buildings, fortified by fences and concrete barricades, and troops with rifles patrolling street corners downtown. The images of a heavily militarized Washington have left local residents disoriented, and prompted condemnation from military veterans in Congress“I expected this in Baghdad. I never imagined this in Washington,” said Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts congressman who fought in Iraq, to the Guardian.“It’s hard to see the pantheon of our democracy fortified like the war zones I used to know,” tweeted Jason Crow, a Colorado congressman, saying that he had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan “so we could enjoy peace at home”.Other American veterans said the images from Washington were surreal, but not exactly surprising. Matt Gallagher, a writer and Army veteran who served in Iraq, described “this strange sense of inevitability”, as he looked at the photographs of concertina wire and traffic control points and “young national guardsmen, many of whom were probably born around 9/11”.“Their America has always done this elsewhere,” he said. “Now it’s happening here.”Captioning a photograph of troops on Capitol Hill, he wrote, “We’ve done forever-warred ourselves.”There’s been plenty of pushback to attempts to compare the current state of Washington DC to a war zone.“The troops are not speaking a foreign language, manning checkpoints, traveling in convoys so secure that they would be authorized to shoot cars that drive in between them. They’re not raiding homes. Let’s not trivialize military occupation,” Laila Al-Arian, an American journalist, wrote last week.Tom Porter, a policy spokesman for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told the Guardian that veterans had been making plenty of dark jokes about Washington’s Green Zone, asking whether the city was now disposing of trash and human waste by setting it on fire with jet fuel in giant “burn pits”, as the military has done in the Middle East.“Those that have actually been to a war zone know that our city and Capitol does not actually resemble a war zone,” he said, adding that he thought officials should have chosen a different name for the secure area of Washington during inauguration.“When we established the Green Zone there were for years questions about the amount of money we were spending fortifying the central part of the city,” Porter said. “There were questions about, ‘How long are you staying?’ ‘Is this an invasion?’ ‘Are you going to be here forever?’ I don’t think that’s what our security personnel and the secret service and the federal government want Americans thinking about.”Gallagher said veterans had reacted with “great amusement” to the concern Americans had expressed at seeing members of the National Guard sleeping on the floor of the Capitol building.“I mean, they’re indoors, they’re fine,” he said. “You know, if you’re worried about them, think about the ones in Afghanistan still getting shot at.”For some Iraqis, the impulse to compare Washington to occupied Baghdad was infuriating, and all too familiar.“There are many people who will always associate Baghdad or Iraq with violence and instability,” Hamzeh Hadad, an Iraqi political analyst, said. “When something politically inevitable but shocking happens in the US, the first thought is to compare it to the place that they think is exceptionally bad.”But the experience of dictatorship, invasion, and stark internal division is not “exclusively Iraqi”, Hadad said. “Democracy is fragile everywhere and needs to be maintained. The fact that they don’t realize this, means that they misunderstand both Iraq and the United States.”The US government response to Trump supporters storming the Capitol is already beginning to mirror the tactics of America’s global war on terror, with discussions of placing the invaders on “no fly” lists, and a former intelligence official suggesting that the lessons learned fighting al-Qaida could now be used against domestic terrorists.For some Americans, including the Muslim and Arab Americans who have faced decades of government surveillance and suspicion, the war on terror has always been operating at home. But the reaction to the 6 January attack may represent a new stage of the “imperial boomerang”, in which tactics developed by empires to maintain control abroad end up being used against the residents of the homeland.It’s not simply that the wars gave “training and operational experience to insurrectionists like the Navy SEAL and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran who posted to the internet that he breached the Capitol”, Spencer Ackerman, a former Guardian national security reporter and author of the forthcoming Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, said.The War on Terror also created “a paranoid, racist and militarized atmosphere of permanent emergency”, he added. And because the war on terror has never ended, it creates a “volatile atmosphere” for people obsessed with American invincibility, fueling frustration that “the war’s failure is due to internal subversion”.“When you tell people for an entire generation that their enemies are among them, some of them are going to act accordingly,” Ackerman said.America’s foreign wars have fueled waves of racist extremism at home for at least a century, including a huge resurgence of Ku Klux Klan membership in the wake of the first world war.Historian Kathleen Belew has also documented how white veterans of the Vietnam war, and non-veterans obsessed with the war’s failure, played a crucial role in violent white power movements in the 1970s through the 1990s. The deadliest domestic terror attack in recent decades, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was carried out by Gulf war veteran Timothy McVeigh.Some American veterans pushed back on the idea that the presence of veterans among the Capitol invaders was particularly significant.Porter, of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said that veterans were “upset” and “angry” about the alleged presence of military veterans among the attackers, and felt it did not reflect their values.He also said that it was not “an accurate description of what is actually going on in the United States”, to say that America’s forever wars had now come home, and that the Capitol attack, which the veterans group had condemned strongly, was very different from the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.“It’s disgusting to me that any veteran would be among the rioters, but it’s still a strikingly small percentage,” said Moulton, the Massachusetts congressman and Marine Corps veteran. “Just keep in perspective: there are probably 2,000 times as many troops defending the Capitol as there were veterans assaulting it.”“Most veterans know what it means to protect and defend the constitution. They’re patriots and law abiding citizens.”Moulton said he did not see much connection between the current moment and the experience of America’s recent wars.“The division in American politics today is due more to Donald Trump, not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. The crisis in the United States had “deep roots in racism, income inequality, educational disparities and other things”, he said. The aftermath of America’s long wars “might be a small part of it, but I don’t think it’s the core cause here”.But Alnaemi, the Iraqi American journalist, said he saw fundamental connections between the current moment and how America had fought its wars. The same political approach was evident in both, he said: ignorance, arrogance, the desire for control, the “refusal to see the facts as they are”.“It’s not Trump v Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney, it’s a way of thinking, an attitude, that causes this failure,” he said.Alnaemi, who became a US citizen three years ago and now teaches at New York University, said he was hopeful his fellow citizens would take the attack seriously, demand accountability for those who participated, and find a way to safeguard their democracy.But he said he found it “mind-boggling” when he saw a poll that only 56% of Americans supported impeaching Trump after the Capitol invasion. That meant “43% of the people who were asked are still thinking that, well, you know, maybe this is not a big deal”, he said.“The things that you are proud of have been attacked, have been insulted, in front of the whole world,” he said. “Is there anything else that you need to stand up and defend your country? What does the flag stand for if it does not stand for this?”News reported about authorities monitoring for improvised explosive devices in Washington had left him shaken, remembering what it was like living in Baghdad, where news about IED attacks, with “two people wounded, or three or five, was a daily item in our news”.“This is my home now,” he said. “Life is not enough for you to keep pursuing another home, all of your life. Once is enough.”Gallagher, the army veteran, said that one of the deepest similarities between the aftermath of the Capitol attack and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was that there was no clear end in sight, that the conflict was “open ended”.“Everybody knows this is the beginning of something,” Gallagher said. “Getting through the inauguration may be the short term goal, but it is hardly the end of whatever this is going to be.” More