In the NY Times today, Frank Rich discusses Robert McNamara, subject of the compelling documentary The Fog of War, as the precursor for the era of CEO politicians.
As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty — but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself."
McNamara may be the exemplar of the kind of bureaucratic functionalism that has hijacked our civic life in North America.
In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara's background was something of a novelty. The Bush administration boasts more C.E.O.'s in top jobs than any administration in history — as well as the first president with his own Harvard M.B.A.
With the "business" of government ceded to cynical opportunists such as those who populate the Bush White House, the true character of governance and citizenship are to be found not in the model of government forwarded by people like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, but in the nuances of documentaries such as The Fog of War, and two other successful American documentaries from 2003, Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans.
The Fog of War has more to teach the general public about proper governance (via the mistakes of Vietnam-era bureaucrats like McNamara) than any State of the Union Address and its partisan jingoism. As Rich points out, the lessons of McNamara's follies in The Fog of War share many parallels with current American foreign policy:
The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq.
Similar lessons about the nature of democracy and some of its failings in contemporary America might be taken from Spellbound, a documentary about the national spelling bee competition. Whereas The Fog of War contains lessons about the absence of empathy in US foreign policy, Spellbound examines "otherness" on the domestic front. Why do kids from various geographical regions, races, and classes enter the seemingly mechanical intellectual exercise of a spelling bee? On one level, the film (almost unknowingly, it seems at times) lays bare the American drive to turn everything into a competition, even spelling, as if to offer an intellectual analog for athletic and militaristic agones. Even in the passive pursuit of learning, Americans want to see winners and losers. Does this type of activity produce future CEO politicians, as much as the other violent competitions that characterize being American and being young?
It's not clear if the filmmakers of Spellbound recognize the fine line they are walking between jingoism and satire. For Capturing the Friedmans, however, the ambiguity of the central subject matter is what creates the essential tension that drives the film. Capturing the Friedmans examines the life of a family as it unravels following the arrest of the father and one son on child molestation charges. By the end of the film the question of "did he do it?" is supplanted by issues of the process of American justice and the life of a community in a democracy. What kind of justice system does bureaucratic functionalism create? What kind of community does it create, and how do such communities deal with misplaced trust and abuse?
Documentaries such as these remind us that art still has more to offer the public sphere than business and the people who populate it. Art does not reduce human beings to their exchange value, but instead gives expression to the uncertainties and possibilities of public and private life. The General salutes these documentary filmmakers for showing the frailty, uncertainty, and often erroneous character of human perception in a year in which programmatic rationality and religious zealotry were celebrated by some as strengths of character instead of the bastions of fascism that they are.
1:07:19 PM 
|
|
