So there is yet another book about the Watergate break-in, cover-up, and leak of same.  Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, by Max Holland, hit the shelves last March.  In it he explores the intriguing question of the title:  Why does a high-level official — No. 2 at the FBI, in fact — set out to destroy a president?

I haven’t read the book, I’ll admit, but the premise of the book matches with what came out several years ago when Felt was finally outed as Deep Throat, Woodward’s and Bernstein’s anonymous source.  More to the point, it seems that Felt, so far from being some sort of quasi-mole for civil rights within the FBI, courageously sacrificing all to put a stop to a presidential administration gone rogue at the very highest levels, was actually an ambition-soaked bureaucrat looking to advance his own career and destroy those of his competitors.  In other words, just a human like everyone else.  The nasty monkey-shines he exposed — break-ins, unauthorized wiretaps, and the like — were in fact nothing more than what he’d personally green-lighted himself in other cases.  Destroying a president and grievously wounding the presidency itself was just collateral damage for Mark Felt.

 What interests me more than the question of why Felt did it is the little matter of how Woodward and Bernstein fit into Felt’s plans.  In plain English, they got used in an attempted palace coup.  Did they know they were being used?  It’s hard to think they wouldn’t have.  You can’t work as a reporter in Washington for any length of time and not understand that nothing at all is entirely what it seems.

Generations of would-be “journalists” have grown up since the 1970s, and for them W & B have been lodestars.  Everyone is looking for the next Watergate story, every source is to be the next Deep Throat.  The image of the crusading journalist bringing down not just the high and the mighty — by, say, exposing a corrupt paving contract down at the street department — but crashing the highest and the mightiest in the world, is part of the mental landscape which today’s journalists carry with them.  The Fourth Estate is to be the guardian of all our liberties, reining in the megalomaniacal entrenched power elites, and so forth and so on.  Those are the stars which today’s budding J-schoolers bring with them in their eyes.

What if that’s not how it is at all?  What if reporters willingly make themselves tools of power factions?  What if they’re nothing more morally exalted than the same tribe who set up a flagrantly partisan — and almost comically fact-divorced — press from the days of Jefferson’s war against Adams, or Jackson’s wars against his sundry opponents?  What if the “truth” they peddle is no more than what is deigned to be shared with them by the hand of the chess-master who is moving them about a board, his board?  What if, in other words, the press has become no more than rent-seekers, attempting to glean a living — and power and influence to go with it — from the chips that fall when the powerful clash? 

Yes, there was a “story” in what Mark Felt had to tell Woodward and Bernstein.  But it was a “story” that was, in all truth, about as penny-ante as they get.  A politician’s aides had a shadowy group of operatives try to get the dirt on his opponents.  They decided to accomplish this by breaking in to someone’s office and sifting through files.  Woo-hoo!!  And it’s not like the fruits of the break-in did or would have influenced the drubbing that Nixon administered to McGovern in 1972 in any event.  There was no way, unless Nixon had been caught with the live boy or dead girl of the proverbs, that we would ever have had a President McGovern.  Or to put it in context, Harry Truman (as related in David McCullough’s biography) was petrified that someone would insinuate a female into his presence and then a photographer would pop out from behind a potted plant to snap a picture to wreck Truman.  And in fact on at least one occasion related in the book it appears that such very nearly happened.  That was how politics was practiced at that level.  In other words, the Watergate break-in, and even the subsequent cover-up, just weren’t in and of themselves big stories.  They were made Big Stories in a collaborative effort by two reporters and an ambitious careerist, working together in the fertile soil of one of the most cordially despised politicians (even before he got caught up in it) in American history.

The fact is that dragging out into broad daylight what high-stakes politicians have doubtless been engaged in since time immemorial (it was scarcely precedent-setting when that boob went sifting through Sarah Palin’s garbage and rented a house looking over into the family’s back yard) has forever damaged the institution of the American presidency.  Everyone who has been hopelessly smitten with love must know that, as a purely physiological proposition, there are some things which the Adored must periodically attend to.  We don’t need, in other words, Jonathan Swift to remind us that Celia shits.  Woodward and Bernstein rubbed our collective noses in that fact, though, and they did it as the subservient creatures of Mark Felt.

 The recent devolution of the American press into a more-or-less open cheerleading section for a particular faction of a specific party is all of a piece with the history of Woodward, Bernstein, and Felt.  And it’s not just domestic coverage (or increasingly, non-coverage), either.  It’s things like CNN admitting — after the fact, of course — that it went soft on Saddam Hussein in order not to jeopardize its “access” to his murderous regime.  The present White House now demands review and approval authority for quotations.  And today’s press meekly grants it.  JournoList gets together behind the scenes and coordinates what will and will not be covered, and how the stories that are covered will be.  The modern news industry is quite simply thoroughly corrupt, whether out of ideological grounds or the simple desire for fame, wealth, and power.

Whenever the point is made of the corruption of the modern press, the Watergate Story is trotted out as the Reason We Need a Free Press.  That’s the narrative.  A couple of intrepid reporters stand athwart the path of the government juggernaut.  That’s why we need to await breathlessly the next Film at 11 from whatever talking head flickers across our screens.  That’s why we need to wade through the 75% of the NYT that’s advertising.  That’s why we ought not make up our minds until we’ve been told how to make them up.  Remember Watergate!

Except it turns out the narrative is bogus.

Andrew Klavan over at PJ Media has a thoughtful piece prompted by the sight of the reinauguration as president of the fellow who may be the most viciously anti-American, anti-Western, grossly in-over-his-head demagogue in public life.  The man’s political instincts are — proudly, and self-proclaimed — straight from the gutters of Chicago, a place that’s become a metaphor.  Back in the mid-1800s, they raised, physically raised, the city by about four feet in order to get it out of the slime of the lake-side swamp where it had been built.  They may as well have saved themselves the effort.  We as a nation have now twice wished that man, who has enthusiastically embraced the Chicago ethos, on ourselves as our leader.

Klavan — correctly, as I would suggest — sees the explanation for Dear Leader’s comfortable win after a campaign that strenuously avoided any discussion of his actual performance in office not in the usual analysing-the-horse-race of the television talking heads, but in something deeper, something much less comforting.  He sees it in human nature itself, and more particularly in the nearly universal craving for personal validation.  I’m good.  I want what’s right.  I am virtuous because I want what is virtuous.  These are ur-motives of modern human existence. 

Klavan spins his ruminations on this drive for validation in the context of thinking about a new(ish) play, The Party Line, written by PJ Media’s Roger L. Simon and his wife, Sheryl Longin.  [Note:  I haven’t read the play.  Yet.]  The play is an interwoven tale of two stories, both taken from events which actually happened.  The first is Walter Duranty, Stalin’s lick-spittle, whose cover-up of the Holodomor earned him a Pulitzer which The New York Times still has not repudiated.  The second is of Pim Fortuyn, who had the poor manners to point out the implications of the Religion of Peace permeating Dutch society, and was assassinated for his troubles.  Both of those stories and, just as important, the reaction of the people Thos. Sowell describes as the Deep Thinkers to them, are what gives Klavan pause.  The play, so Klavan, is about “the triumph of credo over truth, the ferocious commitment that decent, intelligent, educated people make to virtuous-sounding ideals and well-intended programs that are, in fact, the sure road to atrocity.”  He concludes:  “I’m embarrassed to say it, but in my youth I thought humanity stumbled slowly but surely toward the light of truth. Now I believe that we cling desperately, even violently, to the sense of our own virtue — and that the light of truth, which reveals us as we are, is our natural enemy. We would rather destroy the world than know ourselves.”

He’s right, of course.  We do cling violently to those things which we think make us virtuous.  The less effort and sacrifice it imposes on us, the more we like it.  This phenomenon is something of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was getting at in his notion of “cheap grace,” grace which asks little from its claimant.  Some — including some of my near acquaintance — have taken this idea and from it derived a duty of Christians to embrace socialistic preferences in public policy.  I admit I have difficulty making all the dots in those arguments connect.  As near as I recall, the injunction was to give one’s own property to the poor and follow Jesus oneself, not plunder one’s neighbor and give his stuff away, and imprison or beggar one’s fellow citizens if they do not follow Jesus, all the while standing around in evening attire drinking expensive liquors, eating fine foods, and enjoying the frisson of superiority with one’s equals.  I also must admit I do not fully understand how Christianity can be not merely consonant with, but can actually make obligatory, policy choices which can be mathematically shown to increase misery, want, and encroachments on humanity’s moral agency which is the very essence of our nature’s as God’s children.

It is, you see, that moral agency which alone separates us from the beasts of the forest in any meaningful sense.  We are not the only creatures to use language (whales communicate over vast distances with aural methods).  We are not the only  ones who use tools (other primates do).  We are not the only ones who are socialized into intricate and closely bound organizations for our mutual benefit (most canids are, ditto lions, elephants, and other species).  We are not even the only ones which engage in warfare (chimpanzees and, if memory serves, bonobos as well do).  Now, it’s true that thanks to opposable thumbs we have very advanced fine motor skills across a whole range of activities, but in terms of the basic locomotions of existence, whether running, swimming, or flying, we are out-classed by enormous numbers of animals.  No.  What makes us as humans special among the beasts is our moral agency; we alone have the ability to choose between virtue and iniquity.

What makes marxism and socialism so monstrous is not the mere fact of the heaps of corpses which those ideologies have piled up in less than 100 years.  What makes them abominations is that in their determinism, both as an historical understanding of human history and as prescription for action, they negate the moral agency of the person.  I am not good or bad, my existence is not a blessing or a curse to my fellow men, based upon what I do but upon my “membership” in something they call a “class” the existence, extent, and characteristics of which is defined by something they describe as “production.”  I am not to be dealt with, either by my fellow citizens individually or by the state in which we exist, as an independent moral actor, attempting in the flawed way of human nature to discern the Truth, the Right, and act upon it in my daily existence.  No: I am to be allocated, slotted, constrained, confined within channels that others have chosen for me based upon what they determine — at the level of millions of individual humans — to be abstract “justice”.  This nirvana-like end-point of their thinking shows how sloppy it actually is.  Marxism and its milque-toast bastard daughter socialism proudly describe themselves as being objectively materialistic.  “Justice” is, however, not an external material state but an internal moral condition that is inherent, present or absent, in the human being and his conduct.  Justice is not something you have but rather something you do.

Klavan’s musings put me in mind of a film I saw a couple of years ago, Good.  The protagonist is a professor in 1930s Germany.  At the film’s beginning the Nazis have just come to power and, in the middle of a class, there is a disturbance outside.  He goes to the window and it’s the students piling up books to be burned.  If I recall the scene correctly, all his students but one, a drop-dead gorgeous girl, go streaming out to join in.  He’s horrified.

The rest of movie takes you through his evolution.  Of course he gets involved with the girl, and it’s she who, during a walk in the park, suggests that maybe they attend a function just to see what it’s like (or something of that nature; I’ve slept since I last saw the movie).  The professor also has a mother who’s in the advanced stages of senility and must be Dealt With; a book of his speculating on the subject of euthanasia is picked up on by the authorities and he’s invited into the orbit, so to speak.  Eventually he becomes what is spun as a “consultant” to the SS, which works out to be what you’d expect: about as independently affiliated as an “adjunct” member of the Gambino family.  At some point he protests (feebly) when someone identifies him as associated with the SS that he prefers to be known as a professor.  Ho-ho, the viewer is tempted to say.  And of course being a professor he starts the movie with a very learned, very successful Jewish friend.  By the end of the movie he’s looking for what happened to his friend, and all he can find is that he was deported to a specific camp on a particular date.

But that is, as they say, only the plot.  Several reviewers at IMDb.com take the movie to task for showing the supporting characters as being too one-dimensional, too wooden, too stock.  I suggest that the subject of the movie is the progressive degradation of one specific man’s soul from righteous outrage to willing if unthinking bureaucrat drudge pushing papers into files, across desks, into drawers, heedless of the fact that it’s people he’s destroying.  It’s not about the character development of the others; in the universe of the movie they are not loci of action but functional devices.  The girl is of course a siren, a beautiful woman who softly purrs into Our Hero’s ear that, oh come on, it can’t hurt just to look.  The Jewish friend is not just A Friend; he’s the human face of a catastrophe.  He’s the face, the voice, the soul, the human connectedness which the protagonist must abandon on his journey into savagery.  The professor does try to help his friend Get Out; even fraudulently buys him train tickets to leave.  Of course it doesn’t help and the friend is swept up in a pogrom; it’s the professor’s new wife who’s ratted him out. 

The professor lamely tries to hold onto his identity as such, and both his interlocutor and the viewer know it’s much, much too late in the game for that.  One of the reviewers at IMDb specifically mentions that line, but doesn’t give it the dramatic weight it deserves.  You have to understand that “professor” in Germany means something quite a bit more than “I teach at a post-secondary institution.”  This is a culture in which “professor” is not just an academic but a social rank as well.  When greeting a senior academic and a junior academic in each other’s company, do not dare address the elder and the younger both as “Herr Professor”; that would be perceived as grossly insulting.  The elder is “Herr Professor Doktor,” and the younger would be simply “Herr Doktor.”  If writing to someone who has doctorates in multiple areas (not at all uncommon in Germany), one would address the envelope to “Herr Professor Dr. Dr. So-and-So.”  Thus it’s extremely significant when the Good Professor vainly tries to clutch on to his pre-Nazi identity.  You understand that his boat has long since pulled away from the pier, and there is no way back.  The poor sod doesn’t get it himself until the last scene in the movie.

 What Good is about is the ease with which we humans adapt ourselves to, internalize, what is convenient, what is aggrandizing to us, what we are told is Truth and The Right, rather than what we know to be true.  The professor starts the movie understanding the repugnance of the Nazis; he knows it without engaging in any complex critical exercise.  By the end he’s just one more cog in a machine that grinds out dead bodies at a rate unmatched anywhere outside Stalin’s domains.  And each step of the way there was someone with him to usher him onwards, someone to pat him on the back, someone to compliment him on his learning and erudition.

So Andrew Klavan is, I’m afraid, terribly, awfully, depressingly right.  The worst of it is that I’m not sure that, having climbed down we as a polity can ever rise again.  It’s much easier, after all, to blow up a building than it is to erect it.  At 10:00 p.m. on February 13, 1945, the Frauenkirche in Dresden was one of the architectural treasures of Europe.  Thirty-six hours later it was a very tall pile of smoking rubble, and so it stayed for 45 years.  Having embraced a principle of social and political organization that panders to the most corrosive instincts of the human soul, can we truly expect the broad mass of humanity to turn away from it?  Can we un-ring that bell?

But on all the ones I can find hereabouts, what we can call the violent phase, or at least the publicly violent phase, of the Civil Rights Era didn’t really get going until the late 1950s and of course the early 1960s.  True, Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was 1955-56.  Both of those events sparked enormous public interest and outrage.  Eisenhower sent the federal army to Little Rock in 1957.

So the author of this piece is partially correct that during the period she seems to focus on, 1950-63, the existence and enforcement of, and the struggle against, racial segregation was beginning to occupy a much greater bandwidth (sorry for the anachronistic use of the expression) in common American awareness than it had until that point.  Across Black America, of course, it had never not occupied stage center.  What with two world wars and a Great Depression sandwiched between them, however, most of the country outside the old Confederacy just had other problems to think about.  However poorly it speaks of human nature in general, when your own children are inadequately clothed for an Upper Midwest winter, you’re just not likely to spare a whole lot of energy thinking about the oppression of some child several hundred miles away.  As cruel as it may be to say it, but worrying about “social justice” is a luxury for societies who can feed, clothe, and house themselves.

On the other hand, Brown v. Board of Education (actually, it was the second round of that litigation that became famous) was a case from Topeka, Kansas.  Not exactly Spanish-moss Mississippi, in other words.  And that case wasn’t decided until 1954.

So there’s a bit of a problem with presenting the — I hesitate to call it “dominance,” but then I’ve never paid any attention to the beauty pageant scene, and I do understand that with the possible exception of a mafia turf war, it can be one of the more vicious venues of human interaction — of the old Confederacy as some sort of regional or even supra-regional conspiracy to whitewash the racial poisons of the place.  According to the author the run started in 1950, but by any reasonable standard the civil rights fireworks as something splashed across the news on a nearly daily basis would not have begun until the latter half of the decade at the earliest.  The Freedom Riders came in 1961.  Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963.  The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in 1960.  Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in 1964.  The 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963.  Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive time line of the civil rights era, and looking at it you can see that while things were by no measure quiet during the 1950s, they didn’t really begin to hot up until the later part of the decade.

In short, the time frames for the two developments this author wants to correlate just don’t match up.  Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a hoary logical fallacy, but pre hoc ergo propter hoc is goofy.  And according to this article the Southern girls’ run pre-dated the mass consciousness of the Civil Rights Movement by a half-decade or more.  More to the point, time line or no time line, how do you present contestants from one-fifth of the pool winning fifty percent of the time as being a quasi-conspiracy of Southerners to gloss over events in the South without some pretty massive assistance from contest judges from around the country over the course of fourteen years?

And of course the run died out in 1963, which would have been shortly after the time things really started to get very publicly ugly.  To the extent that the effort behind seven Southern girls winning the Miss America crown in fourteen years was some sort of effort to distract public attention from what was going on in the South or as some kind of loopy compensatory behavior, it has to be counted one of the least successful P.R. efforts in history.

As stated, I’m probably the last person on earth who’s fully competent to opine on the dynamics of beauty pageants and what makes them go, but if I were looking for a plausible explanation of why girls from one specific part of the country did disproportionately well over a period of time, I’d refer the gentle reader back to Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, a book which, while hilarious as all get out and certainly more than a little tongue-in-cheek, still has a hard kernel of truth at its core.  And the world it describes strikes me as nearly a perfect petri dish for beauty contest champions as anything conceivable.  [Every time I read her (no doubt made-up) example of a wedding announcement garbled together with tobacco price quotations I nearly wet myself.  It’s that funny.]

One of the more tiresome aspects of public discourse outside the South is how everything relating to what is happening or has happened inside the South is, however strenuous the effort, somehow tied back to Keeping the Black Man Down.  It’s as if nothing else ever happened, and everyone bent his thoughts, hopes, and efforts solely to one objective.  I’m quite comfortable that for some people, some places, some of the time, that was true.  But then in all places, at all times, and with all large issues, there have been people who made that issue the core of their existence.  OK.  But trotting out the stick-to-beat-the-South with every time you’ve got some otherwise empty newsprint to fill up is tedious and not terribly enlightening any more.  On the other hand, if the New York Times is reduced to running articles demonstrating how beauty pageants are the most-recently discovered mechanism for perpetuating White Supremacy in the South, then surely they can’t be far from the bottom of the barrel.  What’s next, a solemn piece on “Racial Politics and Traffic Control Devices in the South, 1948-67”?

Gimme Flo King and ornate piercin’.