coldtype reader 3 2005

TheReaderColdType

Writing Worth Reading s Issue 3, December 2005

HowBob Dylan beat the Press

* WHY I WANTED TO SLAP GEORGE W. BUSH – 1

ColdTypeWRITING WORTH READING FROM AROUND THE WORLD

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A PROJECT OF

INSIDE ISSUE 33. How Bob Dylan beat the press Greg Mitchell

6. The real heroes of New Orleans Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky

11. Why I wanted to slap George W. Bush Carole Coleman

20. The soul of new fast food John Feffer

25. Smoke on the water Casper Greeff

28. Who did you torture in the war, Daddy? Ted Rall

31. Absurdities and atrocities John S. Hatch

34. Robert Fisk’s crazy vocation Shaun Carney

38. Making history on the front line Phillip Knightley

41. Little Miss Run Amok Rory O’Connor

TheReaderColdType

TheReaderColdType

Writing Worth Reading s Issue 3, November/December 2005

HowBob Dylan beat the Press

Editor: Tony Sutton / [email protected] illustration: David Anderson / www.d-andersonillustration.com

The Coldtype Reader–

Surely, one of the non-musical high-lights of the extraordinary MartinScorsese film about Bob Dylan’searly days, airing on PBS recently,

arrives when a press photographer, at abriefing, asks the young rock star to posefor a picture. “Suck on a corner of yourglasses,” the gentleman instructs.

Dylan, fingering his Ray-Bans, rebels.“You want me to suck on my glasses?” heasks incredulously.

“Just suck your glasses,” the photogadvises.

“Do you want to suck my glasses?”Dylan asks, handing them to the photog,who obliges by licking them. “Anybodyelse?” Bob wonders.

This exchange, from 1966, is only one ofseveral press games/battles that play a keyrole in part II of the documentary, NoDirection Home. In fact, they represent theclimax of the film, as Dylan burns out, notjust from the boos that greeted his switchfrom acoustic to electric but from inane

questioning by the press. The film endswith Dylan begging for a long vacation, fol-lowed by end notes revealing that he hadhis famous motorcycle accident a fewmonths later – and then did not tour forseven years.

That’s one way to Beat the Press.But Dylan has always had a combative

relationship with the media, and wrote oneof the most scathing and, arguably, mostinfluential attacks on the press in moderntimes, “Ballad of Thin Man.” That songholds that memorable refrain: “Somethingis happening here, but you don’t knowwhat it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

And he’s still at it. Earlier this year, on“60 Minutes,” Ed Bradley asked him aboutthe passage in his recent memoir “Chroni-cles” where Dylan revealed that he alwaysfigured the press was something “you liedto.” Bob told Bradley that he knew he hadto answer to God, but not to reporters.

Of course, there was a time when somepeople thought Dylan was God.

MEDIA AT WORK

G R E G M I T C H E L L

How Bob Dylan beat the press

“People had a warped idea of me, usually those outside the music industry – ‘spokesman of a generation,’ and all that.”

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In any case, the Scorsese film showsplenty of evidence of why Dylan turned offto the press long ago. Along with many ofhis fans, they just didn’t “get” him, espe-cially when he changed the face of popularmusic in the mid-1960s.

“You don’t sing protest songs anymore,”a reporter asks.

“All my songs are protest songs,” Dylanreplies evenly. “All I do is protest.”

Later, someone at a press conferenceasks him how many other protest singersexist.

It’s as if the man is asking Sen. JoeMcCarthy for the number of Communistsin the State Department. Dylan ponders it,then replies, “About 136.” No one laughs.

“You say about 136 – or exactly 136?” thereporter asks.

“Either 136 or 142,” Dylan says, settling it.On another occasion, a reporter asks

what “message” and “philosophy” he wastrying to impart by wearing a Triumphmotorcycle shirt on the cover of the great-est album of all time, “Highway 61 Revisit-ed.” Dylan says he just happened to bewearing it the day the photo was snapped,but the press guy persists. Finally Dylanpleads, “We all like motorcycles some,right?”

Then there’s the young woman whocredits him with a song he didn’t write(“Eve of Destruction”) and asks if his songshave a “subtle message.” When Bob askswhere she read that, she replies, “In amovie magazine.”

On another occasion, a man asks, “Forthose of us well over 30, how do you labelyourself and what’s your role?”

Dylan laughs, then answers, “Well, I sort

of label myself as well under 30 – and myrole is just to stay here as long as I can.”

It only gets worse. One reporter asks ifhe agrees that his early records were betterthan his latest. Another wonders if he con-siders himself “the ultimate beatnik.” Bobasks him what HE thinks about that. Theman says he can’t comment because he hasnever heard Dylan sing.

“You’ve never heard me sing and yet youwant to sit there and ask me these ques-tions?” Dylan replies.

Just before Dylan announces that hewants to quit for awhile, he is shown in ahotel room on the road discussing presscoverage of his riotous 1966 tour of Englandwith The Hawks, where audience membersshouted out that he was a “traitor” or even“Judas” for abandoning folk music. Dylancomments that one story actually claimedthat “everybody” walked out of one show.

“I saw one person walk out,” he relates.Then he jokes that he will walk out of thenext show. “I’ll tell them Dylan got sick,” hepromises. Which was true enough. Hissemi-retirement soon followed.

In the Scorsese film, the current-dayDylan comments a bit about all of this. “Ihad no answers to any of those questions,”he explains. “But it didn’t stop the pressfrom asking them. For some reason theythought performers had the answers to allthese problems in society. It’s absurd.”

He also says: “People had a warped ideaof me, usually those outside the musicindustry – ‘spokesman of a generation,’ andall that.”

Spokesman or not, “Ballad of a ThinMan” still rings true, exactly 40 years afterit first appeared:


MEDIA AT WORK


You walk into the roomWith a pencil in your handYou see somebody nakedAnd you say, “Who is that man?”You try so hardBut you don’t understandJust what you will sayWhen you get home

Because something is happening hereBut you don’t know what it isDo you, Mister Jones?

Well, you walk into the roomLike a camel and then you frownYou put your eyes in your pocket

And your nose on the groundThere ought to be a lawAgainst you comin’ aroundYou should be madeTo wear earphones

Because something is happening hereBut you don’t know what it isDo you, Mister Jones?

Greg Mitchell (contact him [email protected]) iseditor of E&P, former executive editor ofCrawdaddy, and attended one of Dylan’selectric shows in 1965. This article was firstpublished at editorandpublisher.com

MEDIA AT WORK

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Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonskyare emergency medical services (EMS)workers from San Francisco. They wereattending an EMS conference in NewOrleans when Hurricane Katrina struck.They spent most of the next week trappedby the flooding – and the martial lawcordon around the city

Two days after Hurricane Katrinastruck New Orleans, the Wal-greens store at the corner of Royaland Iberville Streets in the city’s

historic French Quarter remained locked.The dairy display case was clearly visiblethrough the widows. It was now 48 hourswithout electricity, running water, plumb-ing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses werebeginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat.

The owners and managers had lockedup the food, water, pampers and prescrip-tions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens’windows, residents and tourists grewincreasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-

promised federal, state and local aid nevermaterialized, and the windows at Wal-greens gave way to the looters.

There was an alternative. The cops couldhave broken one small window and distrib-uted the nuts, fruit juices and bottled waterin an organized and systematic manner. Butthey did not. Instead, they spent hoursplaying cat and mouse, temporarily chasingaway the looters.

We have yet to see any of the TV cover-age or look at a newspaper. We are willingto guess that there were no video images orfront-page pictures of European or affluentwhite tourists looting the Walgreens in theFrench Quarter.

We also suspect the media will havebeen inundated with “hero” images of theNational Guard, the troops and policestruggling to help the “victims” of the hur-ricane. What you will not see, but what wewitnessed, were the real heroes and sheroesof the hurricane relief effort: the workingclass of New Orleans.

HURRICANE KATRINA

L A R R Y B R A D S H A W & L O R R I E B E T H S L O N S K Y

The real heroes of New Orleans

“We were hiding from possible criminal elements,but equally and definitely, we were hiding from thepolice and sheriffs with their martial law, curfewand shoot-to-kill policies.”

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The maintenance workers who used aforklift to carry the sick and disabled. Theengineers who rigged, nurtured and keptthe generators running. The electricianswho improvised thick extension cordsstretching over blocks to share the littleelectricity we had in order to free cars stuckon rooftop parking lots. Nurses who tookover for mechanical ventilators and spentmany hours on end manually forcing airinto the lungs of unconscious patients tokeep them alive. Doormen who rescuedfolks stuck in elevators. Refinery workerswho broke into boat yards, “stealing” boatsto rescue their neighbors clinging to theirroofs in flood waters. Mechanics whohelped hotwire any car that could be foundto ferry people out of the city. And the foodservice workers who scoured the commer-cial kitchens, improvising communal mealsfor hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost theirhomes and had not heard from members oftheir families. Yet they stayed and provid-ed the only infrastructure for the 20 percentof New Orleans that was not under water.

ON DAY TWO, there were approximately 500of us left in the hotels in the French Quar-ter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, con-ference attendees like ourselves and localswho had checked into hotels for safety andshelter from Katrina.

Some of us had cell phone contact withfamily and friends outside of New Orleans.We were repeatedly told that all sorts ofresources, including the National Guardand scores of buses, were pouring into thecity. The buses and the other resourcesmust have been invisible, because none of

us had seen them.We decided we had to save ourselves. So

we pooled our money and came up with$25,000 to have ten buses come and take usout of the city. Those who didn’t have therequisite $45 each were subsidized by thosewho did have extra money.

We waited for 48 hours for the buses,spending the last 12 hours standing outside,sharing the limited water, food and clotheswe had. We created a priority boardingarea for the sick, elderly and newbornbabies. We waited late into the night forthe “imminent” arrival of the buses. Thebuses never arrived. We later learned thatthe minute they arrived at the city limits,they were commandeered by the military.

By Day Four, our hotels had run out offuel and water. Sanitation was dangerous-ly bad. As the desperation and despairincreased, street crime as well as water lev-els began to rise. The hotels turned us outand locked their doors, telling us that “offi-cials” had told us to report to the conven-tion center to wait for more buses. As weentered the center of the city, we finallyencountered the National Guard.

The guard members told us we wouldn’tbe allowed into the Superdome, as thecity’s primary shelter had descended into ahumanitarian and health hellhole. Theyfurther told us that the city’s only othershelter – the convention center – was alsodescending into chaos and squalor, andthat the police weren’t allowing anyoneelse in. We asked, “If we can’t go to the onlytwo shelters in the city, what was our alter-native?” The guards told us that this wasour problem – and no, they didn’t haveextra water to give to us. This would be the

HURRICANE KATRINA

start of our numerous encounters with cal-lous and hostile “law enforcement.”

WE WALKED to the police command centerat Harrah’s on Canal Street and were toldthe same thing – that we were on our own,and no, they didn’t have water to give us.We now numbered several hundred.

We held a mass meeting to decide acourse of action. We agreed to camp out-side the police command post. We wouldbe plainly visible to the media and consti-tute a highly visible embarrassment to cityofficials. The police told us that we could-n’t stay. Regardless, we began to settle inand set up camp.

The police commander came across thestreet to address our group. He told us hehad a solution: we should walk to thePontchartrain Expressway and cross thegreater New Orleans Bridge to the southside of the Mississippi, where the policehad buses lined up to take us out of thecity. We explained to the commander thatthere had been lots of misinformation, sowas he sure that there were buses waitingfor us. He turned to the crowd and statedemphatically, “I swear to you that the busesare there.”

We organized ourselves, and the 200 ofus set off for the bridge with great excite-ment and hope. As we marched past theconvention center, many locals saw ourdetermined and optimistic group, andasked where we were headed. We toldthem about the great news.

Families immediately grabbed their fewbelongings, and quickly, our numbers dou-bled and then doubled again. Babies instrollers now joined us, as did people using

crutches, elderly clasping walkers and otherpeople in wheelchairs. We marched thetwo to three miles to the freeway and upthe steep incline to the bridge. It nowbegan to pour down rain, but it didn’tdampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armedsheriffs formed a line across the foot of thebridge. Before we were close enough tospeak, they began firing their weapons overour heads, sending the crowd fleeing. Afew of us inched forward and managed toengage some of the sheriffs in conversation.We told them of our conversation with thepolice commander and the commander’sassurances. The sheriffs informed us thatthere were no buses waiting. The com-mander had lied to get us to move.

We asked why we couldn’t cross thebridge anyway, especially as there was lit-tle traffic on the six-lane highway. Theyresponded that the West Bank was notgoing to become New Orleans, and therewould be no Superdomes in their city.These were code words for: if you are poorand Black, you are not crossing the Missis-sippi River, and you are not getting out ofNew Orleans.

OUR SMALL GROUP retreated back downHighway 90 to seek shelter from the rainunder an overpass. We debated our optionsand, in the end, decided to build anencampment in the middle of the Ponchar-train Expressway – on the center divide,between the O’Keefe and Tchoupitoulasexits. We reasoned that we would be visi-ble to everyone, we would have some secu-rity being on an elevated freeway, and wecould wait and watch for the arrival of the


HURRICANE KATRINA

yet-to-be-seen buses.All day long, we saw other families, indi-

viduals and groups make the same trip upthe incline in an attempt to cross thebridge, only to be turned away – somechased away with gunfire, others simplytold no, others verbally berated and humil-iated. Thousands of New Orleaners wereprevented and prohibited from self-evacu-ating the city on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two city shelterssank further into squalor and disrepair. Theonly way across the bridge was by vehicle.We saw workers stealing trucks, buses,moving vans, semi-trucks and any car thatcould be hotwired. All were packed withpeople trying to escape the misery thatNew Orleans had become. Our encamp-ment began to blossom. Someone stole awater delivery truck and brought it up tous. Let’s hear it for looting! A mile down thefreeway, an Army truck lost two pallets ofC-rations on a tight turn. We ferried thefood to our camp in shopping carts.

Now – secure with these two necessi-ties, food and water – cooperation, com-munity and creativity flowered. We organ-ized a clean-up and hung garbage bagsfrom the rebar poles. We made beds fromwood pallets and cardboard. We designat-ed a storm drain as the bathroom, and thekids built an elaborate enclosure for priva-cy out of plastic, broken umbrellas andother scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals couldswap out parts of C-rations (applesauce forbabies and candies for kids!).

This was something we saw repeatedlyin the aftermath of Katrina. When individ-uals had to fight to find food or water, it

meant looking out for yourself. You had todo whatever it took to find water for yourkids or food for your parents. But whenthese basic needs were met, people beganto look out for each other, working togeth-er and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturatedthe city with food and water in the first twoor three days, the desperation, frustrationand ugliness would not have set in. Flushwith the necessities, we offered food andwater to passing families and individuals.Many decided to stay and join us. Ourencampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-poweredradio, we learned that the media was talk-ing about us. Up in full view on the free-way, every relief and news organizationssaw us on their way into the city. Officialswere being asked what they were going todo about all those families living up on thefreeway. The officials responded that theywere going to take care of us. Some of usgot a sinking feeling. “Taking care of us”had an ominous tone to it.

Our sinking feeling (along with the sink-ing city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, asheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrolvehicle, aimed his gun at our faces andscreamed, “Get off the fucking freeway.” Ahelicopter arrived and used the wind fromits blades to blow away our flimsy struc-tures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded uphis truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forcedoff the freeway. All the law enforcementagencies appeared threatened when wecongregated into groups of 20 or more. Inevery congregation of “victims,” they saw“mob” or “riot.” We felt safety in numbers.


HURRICANE KATRINA


HURRICANE KATRINA

Our “we must stay together” attitude wasimpossible because the agencies wouldforce us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our campraided and destroyed, we scattered onceagain. Reduced to a small group of eightpeople, in the dark, we sought refuge in anabandoned school bus, under the freewayon Cilo Street. We were hiding from possi-ble criminal elements, but equally and def-initely, we were hiding from the police andsheriffs with their martial law, curfew andshoot-to-kill policies.

The next day, our group of eight walkedmost of the day, made contact with theNew Orleans Fire Department and wereeventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team. We were dropped offnear the airport and managed to catch aride with the National Guard. The twoyoung guardsmen apologized for the limit-ed response of the Louisiana guards. Theyexplained that a large section of their unitwas in Iraq and that meant they wereshorthanded and were unable to completeall the tasks they were assigned.

WE ARRIVED at the airport on the day amassive airlift had begun. The airport hadbecome another Superdome. We eightwere caught in a press of humanity asflights were delayed for several hours whileGeorge Bush landed briefly at the airportfor a photo op. After being evacuated on aCoast Guard cargo plane, we arrived in SanAntonio, Texas.

There, the humiliation and dehuman-ization of the official relief effort continued.We were placed on buses and driven to alarge field where we were forced to sit forhours and hours. Some of the buses didn’thave air conditioners. In the dark, hundredsof us were forced to share two filthy over-flowing porta-potties. Those who managedto make it out with any possessions (oftena few belongings in tattered plastic bags)were subjected to two different dog-sniff-ing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all daybecause our C-rations had been confiscat-ed at the airport – because the rations setoff the metal detectors. Yet no food hadbeen provided to the men, women, chil-dren, elderly and disabled, as we sat forhours waiting to be “medically screened” tomake sure we weren’t carrying any com-municable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp con-trast to the warm, heartfelt reception givento us by ordinary Texans. We saw one air-line worker give her shoes to someone whowas barefoot. Strangers on the streetoffered us money and toiletries with wordsof welcome.

Throughout, the official relief effort wascallous, inept and racist. There was moresuffering than need be. Lives were lost thatdid not need to be lost.

This article first appeared in the U.S.weekly Socialist Worker(http://www.socialistworker.org)

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George W Bush was so upset by CaroleColeman’s White House interview that an official complaint was lodged with theIrish embassy. In this excerpt from her new book, Alleluia America! The RTEjournalist explains why the president made her blood boil.

With just minutes to go to myinterview with George WBush, I was escorted to theWhite House library, where

a staff member gave instructions on how togreet the president: “He’ll be coming in thedoor behind you, just stand up, turnaround and extend your hand.”

I placed my notes on the coffee table,someone attached a microphone to mylapel, and I waited. The two chairs by thefireplace where the president and I wouldsit were at least six feet apart; clearly Iwould not be getting too close to him.

The room was well-lit, providing thekind of warm background conducive to a

fireside chat. Several people had crowdedin behind me. I counted five members ofthe White House film crew, there was a ste-nographer sitting in the corner and three orfour security staff. I was still counting themwhen someone spoke. “He’s coming.”

I stood up, turned around to face thedoor and seconds later the president strodetowards me. Bush appeared shorter thanon camera and he looked stern and rathergrey that day.

“Thanks for comin’, Mr President” I said,sticking out my hand. I had borrowed thisgreeting directly from him. When Bushmade a speech at a rally or town hall, healways began by saying “Thanks forcomin’” in his man-of-the-people manner.If he detected the humour in my greeting,he didn’t let on. He took my hand with afirm grip and, bringing his face right upclose to mine, stared me straight in the eyesfor several seconds, as though drinking inevery detail of my face. He sat down and anaide attached a microphone to his jacket.

C A R O L E C O L E M A N

Why I wanted to slapGeorge W. Bush

“The president did not see the look of horror onthe faces of his staff as he began to defend hisstance . . . Hands were signalling furiously now for me to end the interview.”

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BOOK EXCERPT

Nobody said a word. “We don’t addressthe president unless he speaks first,” amember of the film crew had told me ear-lier. The resulting silence seemed odd anddiscomforting, so I broke it. “How has yourday been, Mr President?” Without lookingup at me, he continued to straighten his tieand replied in a strong Texan drawl, “Verybusy.”

This was followed by an even more dis-concerting silence that, compounded by thesix feet separating us, made it difficult toestablish any rapport.

“Will Mrs Bush be seeing any of ourbeautiful country?” I tried again, attempt-ing to warm things up by adding that I hadheard that the taoiseach would be keepinghim too busy for sightseeing on his forth-coming trip to Ireland.

“He’s putting me to work, is he? Haveyou not interviewed Laura?” “No, I haven’tmet your wife.” I suggested that he put in agood word for me. He chuckled. By now heseemed settled and the crew looked ready,but still nobody spoke. I was beginning toworry that the clock may have alreadystarted on my 10 minutes.

“Are we all ready to go then?” I asked,looking around the room. The next voice Iheard was the president’s. “I think we havea spunky one here,” he said, to nobody inparticular.

MC, a White House press officer whomI’ve decided not to identify, had phoned methree days earlier to say that PresidentBush would do an interview with RTE.“Good news,” she had said. “It goes thisThursday at 4.20pm. You will have 10 min-utes with the president and Turkish televi-sion will talk to him just before you.”

My initial excitement was dampenedonly by the timing, much later than I hadhoped. The interview would take place justthree hours before I was to fly back to Ire-land to cover his arrival at the EU summitat Dromoland Castle in Clare and just 15minutes before the start of RTE’s PrimeTime programme on which the interviewwould be broadcast. It would be practical-ly impossible to have the president on air intime for this.

“That’s fabulous,” I gushed, “but is thereany way I could go before the Turks?” I hadpreviously explained about the Prime Timeprogramme, so MC knew the situation. “I’lllook into it,” she offered.

The interview sounded like quite a pro-duction. We wouldn’t be able to justsaunter in there with a camera. It would befilmed by a White House crew, whichwould then hand over the tapes to me tobe copied and returned the same day.

MC asked me for a list of questions andtopics, which she said was required for pol-icy purposes in case I should want to asksomething that the president needed to bebriefed on. The request did not seem oddto me then. The drill had been exactly thesame for an interview I had conducted sixmonths earlier with the then secretary ofstate, Colin Powell.

“What would you ask the president ofthe United States?” I enquired of everyoneI met in the following days. Ideas hadalready been scribbled on scattered note-pads in my bedroom, on scraps of paper inmy handbag and on my desk, but once thedate was confirmed, I mined suggestionsfrom my peers in RTE and from foreign pol-icy analysts. I grilled my friends in Wash-


BOOK EXCERPT

ington and even pestered cab drivers. Afterturning everything over in my head, I set-tled on a list of 10 questions.

Securing a time swap with Turkish tele-vision ensured that I saw the president 10minutes earlier, but there was still less thanhalf an hour to bring the taped interview tothe production place four blocks away intime for Prime Time.

Still, with the arrangements starting tofall into place, the sense of chaos recededand I returned to the questions, which bynow were perpetually dancing around myhead, even in my sleep. Reporters oftenbegin a big interview by asking a soft ques-tion – to let the subject warm up beforegetting into the substance of the topic athand. This was how I had initially intend-ed to begin with Bush, but as I mentallyrehearsed the likely scenario, I felt that toomuch time could be consumed by his firstprobable answer, praising Ireland and look-ing forward to his visit. We could, I had cal-culated, be into the third minute beforeeven getting to the controversial topics. Idecided to ditch the cordial introduction.

The majority of the Irish public, as far asI could tell, was angry with Bush and didnot want to hear a cosy fireside chat in themiddle of the most disputed war sinceVietnam.

ON THURSDAY JUNE 24, Washington DCwas bathed in a moist 90-degree heat, thetype that makes you perspire all over afteryou have walked only two blocks.Stephanie and I arrived at the northwestgate of the White House that afternoon,and were directed to the Old ExecutiveOffice building, Vice President Dick

Cheney’s headquarters, and were intro-duced to MC, whom I had spoken to onlyby phone. An elegant and confidentwoman, she was the cut of CJ, the feistyWhite House press secretary on The WestWing television drama.

A younger male sidekick named Colbystood close by nodding at everything shesaid and interjecting with a few commentsof his own every now and then. Colby sug-gested that I ask the president about theyellow suit the taoiseach had worn the pre-vious week at the G8 Summit on Sea Islandin Georgia. I laughed loudly and thenstopped to study his face for signs that hewas joking – but he didn’t appear to be.“The president has a good comment onthat,” he said.

The taoiseach’s suit had been a shade ofcream, according to the Irish embassy. Butalongside the other more conservativelydressed leaders, it had appeared as a brightyellow, leaving our Bertie looking more likethe lead singer in a band than the officialrepresentative of the European Union. Itwas amusing at the time, but I was notabout to raise a yellow suit with the presi-dent. “Really?” I asked politely. But a littlered flag went up inside my head.

Then MC announced that she had somenews for me. “There may be another inter-view in the pipeline for you,” she said.

“Me?”“We’re not supposed to tell you this yet,

but we are trying to set up an interviewwith the first lady.”

She indicated that the White House hadalready been in contact with RTE to makearrangements for the interview at Dro-moland Castle, where the president and


BOOK EXCERPT


Mrs Bush would be staying. As an admirerof Laura Bush’s cool grace and sharp intel-lect, I had requested interviews with herseveral times previously without any reply.Now the first lady of the United States wasbeing handed to me on a plate. I could notbelieve my luck.

“Of course, it’s not certain yet,” MCadded. And then her sidekick dropped hissecond bombshell. “We’ll see how you geton with the president first.”

I’m sure I continued smiling, but I wasstunned. What I understood from this wasthat if I pleased the White House with myquestioning of the president, I would get tointerview the first lady. Were they trying toensure a soft ride for the president, or wasI the new flavour of the month with thefirst family?

“I’m going to give the president his finalbriefing. Are there any further questionsyou want to pass on to him?” MC asked.

“No,” I said, “just tell him I want tochat.”

Stephanie and I locked eyes and headedfor the ladies’ powder room, where weprayed.

“MR PRESIDENT,” I began. “You will arrivein Ireland in less than 24 hours’ time. Whileour political leaders will welcome you,unfortunately the majority of our peoplewill not. They are annoyed about the warin Iraq and about Abu Ghraib. Are youbothered by what Irish people think?”

The president was reclining in his seatand had a half-smile on his face, a smile Ihad often seen when he had to deal withsomething he would rather not.

“Listen. I hope the Irish people under-

stand the great values of our country. Andif they think that a few soldiers representthe entirety of America, they don’t reallyunderstand America then . . . We are a com-passionate country. We’re a strong country,and we’ll defend ourselves. But we helppeople. And we’ve helped the Irish andwe’ll continue to do so. We’ve got a goodrelationship with Ireland.”

“And they are angry over Iraq as welland particularly the continuing death tollthere,” I added, moving him on to the warthat had claimed 100 Iraqi lives that veryday. He continued to smile, but just barely.

“Well, I can understand that.People don’tlike war. But what they should be angryabout is the fact that there was a brutal dic-tator there that had destroyed lives and putthem in mass graves and torture rooms . . .Look, Saddam Hussein had used weaponsof mass destruction against his own people,against the neighbourhood.He was a brutaldictator who posed a threat that the UnitedNations voted unanimously to say, Mr Sad-dam Hussein . . .”

Having noted the tone of my questions,the president had now sat forward in hischair and had become animated, gesturingwith his hands for emphasis. But as I lis-tened to the history of Saddam Husseinand the weapons inspectors and the UNresolutions, my heart was sinking. He wasresorting to the type of meandering stockanswer I had heard scores of times and hadhoped to avoid. Going back over this oldground could take two or three minutesand allow him to keep talking withoutdealing with the current state of the war. Itwas a filibuster of sorts. If I didn’t challengehim, the interview would be a wasted

BOOK EXCERPT


BOOK EXCERPT

opportunity.“But, Mr President, you didn’t find any

weapons,” I interjected.“Let me finish, let me finish. May I fin-

ish?”With his hand raised, he requested that

I stop speaking. He paused and looked mestraight in the eye to make sure I had gotthe message. He wanted to continue, so Ibacked off and he went on. “The UnitedNations said, ‘Disarm or face serious conse-quences’. That’s what the United Nationssaid. And guess what? He didn’t disarm.He didn’t disclose his arms. And thereforehe faced serious consequences. But we havefound a capacity for him to make aweapon. See, he had the capacity to makeweapons . . .”

I was now beginning to feel shut out ofthis event. He had the floor and he wasn’tletting me dance. My blood was boiling tosuch a point that I felt like slapping him.But I was dealing with the president of theUnited States; and he was too far awayanyway. I suppose I had been naive tothink that he was making himself availableto me so I could spar with him or plumbthe depths of his thought processes. Sittingthere, I knew that I was nobody special andthat this was just another opportunity forthe president to repeat his mantra. Heseemed irked to be faced with someonewho wasn’t nodding gravely at him as hewas speaking.

“But Mr President,” I interrupted again,“the world is a more dangerous placetoday. I don’t know whether you can seethat or not.”

“Why do you say that?”“There are terrorist bombings every sin-

gle day. It’s now a daily event. It wasn’t likethat two years ago.”

“What was it like on September 11 2001?It was a . . . there was relative calm, we . . .”

“But it’s your response to Iraq that’s con-sidered . . .”

“Let me finish. Let me finish. Please. Youask the questions and I’ll answer them, ifyou don’t mind.”

His hand was raised again as if to indi-cate that he was not going to tolerate this.Again, I felt I had no choice but to keepquiet.

“On September 11 2001, we wereattacked in an unprovoked fashion. Every-body thought the world was calm. Therehave been bombings since then – notbecause of my response to Iraq. There werebombings in Madrid, there were bombingsin Istanbul. There were bombings in Bali.There were killings in Pakistan.”

He seemed to be finished, so I took adeep breath and tried once again. So far,facial expressions were defining this inter-view as much as anything that was said, soI focused on looking as if I was genuinelytrying to fathom him.

“Indeed, Mr President, and I think Irishpeople understand that. But I think there isa feeling that the world has become a moredangerous place because you have takenthe focus off Al-Qaeda and diverted intoIraq. Do you not see that the world is amore dangerous place? I saw four of yoursoldiers lying dead on the television theother day, a picture of four soldiers justlying there without their flak jackets.”

“Listen, nobody cares more about deaththan I do . . .”

“Is there a point or place . . .”

“Let me finish. Please. Let me finish, andthen you can follow up, if you don’t mind.”

By now he was getting used to therhythm of this interview and didn’t seemquite so taken aback by my attempt to takecontrol of it. “Nobody cares more aboutdeath than I do. I care a lot about it. But Ido believe the world is a safer place andbecoming a safer place. I know that a freeIraq is going to be a necessary part ofchanging the world.”

The president seemed to be talking moreopenly now and from the heart rather thanfrom a script. The history lesson on Sad-dam was over. “Listen, people join terror-ist organisations because there’s no hopeand there’s no chance to raise their familiesin a peaceful world where there is not free-dom. And so the idea is to promote free-dom and at the same time protect oursecurity. And I do believe the world isbecoming a better place, absolutely.”

I could not tell how much time hadelapsed, maybe five or six minutes, so Imoved quickly on to the question I mostwanted to ask George Bush in person.

“Mr President, you are a man who has agreat faith in God. I’ve heard you say manytimes that you strive to serve somebodygreater than yourself.”

“Right.”“Do you believe that the hand of God is

guiding you in this war on terror?”This question had been on my mind ever

since September 11, when Bush began toinvoke God in his speeches. He spoke as ifhe believed that his job of stewardingAmerica through the attacks and beyondwas somehow preordained, that he hadbeen chosen for this role. He closed his eyes

as he began to answer.“Listen, I think that God . . . that my

relationship with God is a very personalrelationship. And I turn to the Good Lordfor strength. I turn to the Good Lord forguidance. I turn to the Good Lord for for-giveness. But the God I know is not onethat . . . the God I know is one that pro-motes peace and freedom. But I get greatsustenance from my personal relationship.”

He sat forward again. “That doesn’tmake me think I’m a better person thanyou are, by the way. Because one of thegreat admonitions in the Good Book is,‘Don’t try to take a speck out of your eye ifI’ve got a log in my own’.”

I suspected that he was also telling methat I should not judge him.

I switched to Ireland again and to thecontroversy then raging over the Irish gov-ernment’s decision to allow the use ofShannon Airport for the transport of sol-diers and weapons to the Gulf.

“You are going to meet Bertie Ahernwhen you arrive at Shannon Airporttomorrow. I guess he went out on a limb foryou, presumably because of the greatfriendship between our two countries. Canyou look him in the eye when you get thereand say, ‘It will be worth it, it will workout’?”

“Absolutely. I wouldn’t be doing this, Iwouldn’t have made the decision I did if Ididn’t think the world would be better.”

I felt that the President had now becomepersonally involved in this interview, evenquoting a Bible passage, so I made onemore stab at trying to get inside his head.

“Why is it that others don’t understandwhat you are about?”


BOOK EXCERPT

He shrugged. “I don’t know. History willjudge what I’m about.”

I could not remember my next question.My mind had gone completely blank. Thepresident had not removed me from hisgaze since we had begun and I wanted tokeep up the eye contact. If I diverted to mynotes on the table beside me, he wouldknow he had flustered me.For what seemedlike an eternity, but probably no more thantwo seconds, I stared at him, searching hiseyes for inspiration. It finally came.

“Can I just turn to the Middle East?”“Sure.”He talked about his personal commit-

ment to solving that conflict. As he did so,I could see one of the White House crewsignalling for me to wrap up the interview,but the president was in full flight.

“Like Iraq, the Palestinian and the Israeliissue is going to require good securitymeasures,” he said.

Now out of time, I was fully aware thatanother question was pushing it, but Iwould never be here again and I had spentfour years covering an administration thatappeared to favour Israel at every turn.

“And perhaps a bit more even-handed-ness from America?” I asked, though itcame out more as a comment.

The president did not see the look ofhorror on the faces of his staff as he beganto defend his stance. “I’m the first presidentto have called for a Palestinian state. Thatto me sounds like a reasonable and bal-anced approach. I will not allow terroristsdetermine the fate, as best I can, of peoplewho want to be free.”

Hands were signalling furiously now forme to end the interview.

“Mr President, thank you very much.”“You’re welcome,” he replied, still half-

smiling and half-frowning.It was over. I felt like a delinquent child

who had been reprimanded by a stern,unwavering father. My face must have beenthe same colour as my suit. Yet I also knewthat we had discussed some importantissues – probably more candidly than I hadheard from President Bush in some time.

I was removing my microphone when headdressed me.

“Is that how you do it in Ireland –interrupting people all the time?”

I froze. He was not happy with me andwas letting me know it.

“Yes,” I stuttered, determined to main-tain my own half-smile.

I was aching to get out of there for abreath of air when I remembered that I hadearlier discussed with staff the possibility ofhaving my picture taken with the presi-dent. I had been told that, when the inter-view was over, I could stand up with himand the White House photographer wouldsnap a picture. Not wanting to waste theopportunity, I stood up and asked him tojoin me.

“Oh, she wants the photograph now,” hesaid from his still-seated position. He rose,stood beside me and put an arm aroundmy shoulder. Taking his cue, I put an armup around his shoulder and we bothgrinned for the cameras.

In my haste to leave I almost forgot thetapes and had to be reminded by the filmcrew to take them. I and my assistantsbolted out to the street. We ran, high heelsand all, across Lafayette Park. Runningthrough rush-hour traffic, I thought that


BOOK EXCERPT

this had to be about as crazy as a journal-ist’s job gets.

I had just been admonished by the pres-ident of the United States and now I wasturning cartwheels in order to get the inter-view on air. As I dashed past a waste bin, Ihad a fleeting urge to throw in the tapesand run home instead.

AT THE STUDIO I handed over the tapes. Myphone rang. It was MC, and her voice wascold. “We just want to say how disappoint-ed we are in the way you conducted theinterview,” she said.

“How is that?” I asked.“You talked over the president, not let-

ting him finish his answers.”“Oh, I was just moving him on,” I said,

explaining that I wanted some new insightfrom him, not two-year-old answers.

“He did give you plenty of new stuff.”She estimated that I had interrupted the

president eight times and added that I hadupset him. I was upset too, I told her. Theline started to break up; I was in a base-ment with a bad phone signal. I took hernumber and agreed to call her back. Idialled the White House number and shewas on the line again.

“I’m here with Colby,” she indicated.“Right.”“You were given an opportunity to inter-

view the leader of the free world and youblew it,” she began.

I was beginning to feel as if I might bedreaming. I had naively believed the Amer-ican president was referred to as the“leader of the free world” only in an unof-ficial tongue-in-cheek sort of way by out-siders, and not among his closest staff.

“You were more vicious than any of theWhite House press corps or even some ofthem up on Capitol Hill . . .The presidentleads the interview,” she said.

“I don’t agree,” I replied, my initial worrynow turning to frustration. “It’s the journal-ist’s job to lead the interview.”

It was suggested that perhaps I couldedit the tapes to take out the interruptions,but I made it clear that this would not bepossible. As the conversation progressed, Ilearnt that I might find it difficult to securefurther co-operation from the WhiteHouse. A man’s voice then came on theline. Colby, I assumed. “And, it goes with-out saying, you can forget about the inter-view with Laura Bush.”

Clearly the White House had thoughtthey would be dealing with an Irish“colleen” bowled over by the opportunityto interview the Bushes. If anyone therehad done their research on RTE’s inter-viewing techniques, they might haveknown better. MC also indicated that shewould be contacting the Irish Embassy inWashington – in other words, an officialcomplaint from Washington to Dublin.

“I don’t know how we are going to repairthis relationship, but have a safe trip backto Ireland,” MC concluded. I told her I hadnot meant to upset her since she had beenmore than helpful to me. The conversationended. By the time I got to the controlroom, the Prime Time broadcast had juststarted. It was at the point of the first con-frontation with the “leader of the freeworld” and those gathered around themonitors were glued to it. “Well done,”someone said. “This is great.”

I thought about the interview again as I


BOOK EXCERPT


climbed up the steps to RTE’s live cameraposition at Dromoland Castle to accountfor myself on the 6pm news next day. Bynow the White House had vented its angerto the Irish embassy in Washington. Tomake matters worse for the administration,the interview had made its way ontoAmerican television and CNN was replay-ing it around the world and by the end ofthe day it had been aired in Baghdad.

Had I been fair? Should I just have beenmore deferential to George Bush? I felt thatI had simply done my job and shuddered atthe thought of the backlash I would surelyhave faced in Ireland had I not challengedthe president on matters that had changedthe way America was viewed around theworld. Afterwards I bumped straight intothe taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who was wait-ing to go on air.

“Howya,” he said, winking.“I hope this hasn’t caused you too much

hassle, taoiseach,” I blurted.“Arrah, don’t worry at all; you haven’t

caused me one bit of hassle,” he smiledwryly. I don’t know what he said to thepresident, who reportedly referred to theinterview immediately upon arrival, but ifthe taoiseach was annoyed with me orwith RTE, he didn’t show it.

When I returned to my little world onthe street called M in Washington, I felt atad more conspicuous than when I’d left forIreland. Google was returning more than100,000 results on the subject of the 12-minute interview. The vast majority ofbloggers felt it was time a reporter had

challenged Bush.At the White House, the fact that I had

been asked to submit questions prior to theinterview generated enquiries from theAmerican press corps. “Any time a reportersits down with the president they are wel-come to ask him whatever questions theywant to ask,” Scott McClellan, the WhiteHouse press secretary, told the CBS corre-spondent Bill Plante.

“Yes, but that’s beside the point,” repliedPlante. Under repeated questioning,McClellan conceded that other staff mem-bers might have asked for questions. “Cer-tainly there will be staff-level discussion,talking about what issues reporters maywant to bring up in some of these inter-views. I mean that happens all the time.”

I had not been prevented from askingany of my questions. The only topics I hadbeen warned away from were the Bushdaughters Jenna and Barbara, regular fod-der for the tabloids, and Michael Moore –neither of which was on my list.

Moore did notice RTE’s interview withthe president and in the weeks that fol-lowed urged American journalists to followthe example of “that Irish woman”.

“In the end, doesn’t it always take theIrish to speak up?” he said. “She’s my hero.Where are the Carole Colemans in the USpress?”

This edited extract from Alleluia America!by Carole Coleman (published by The LiffeyPress – see www.theliffeypress.com) wasfirst published in The Sunday Times Ireland

BOOK EXCERPT

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I’ve just ordered the Mixed Messagesalad at McDonald’s. That’s the Cae-sar salad of mostly iceberg lettuce, acouple grape tomatoes, a sprinkle of

shredded parmesan, croutons, and a gener-ous slab of fried chicken strips. The saladpart is not bad for me, particularly since Iopt for the low fat vinaigrette, courtesy ofPaul Newman. The fried chicken strips,however, remind me that I’m in a fast foodrestaurant. It’s lunchtime, and I’m the onlyone in the place who seems to haveordered a salad. Should I feel good aboutmy choice to forego a Big Mac and fries? Orshould I feel guilty that I succumbed to thecrispy chicken when I could have orderedthe grilled version?

The crispy chicken Caesar is an aptmetaphor for what’s been going on in theworld of fast food. Quick-service restau-rants – that’s the official name for McDon-ald’s, Burger King, and the like – have longflirted with healthier options like saladsand lower fat sandwiches. But in the last

couple years, they’ve kicked their efforts upa notch. They’ve spent millions of dollarson splashy new product campaigns andhave partnered with exercise gurus to getyou off your butt and exercising. Still, it’snot like they’ve turned themselves into fat-free emporiums. Hamburgers, fried chick-en, and greasy fries remain front and centerin promotions and sales. And even thehealthier options, with their gratuitousadditions of fat or sugar, seem to havetaken on the protective coloring of theirenvironment.

Put Ronald McDonald on the couch andhe’d confess to a serious identity crisis.“What am I, doc?” he’d ask his therapist.“Apple slices and aerobics or French friesand couch potatoes? Can you tell me whathealthy fast food is, Doc? I’m worried thatI’ve become just another oxymoron of pop-ular culture, like educational television andeco-cruises.”

The struggle within the fast food worldmay well be the latest chapter in the “cul-

J O H N F E F F E R

The soul of new fast food

“Hardee’s was catering to a young male audience, the tried-and-true constituency for fast food. With its tie-insto Sports Illustrated, it was suggesting that eating itsmegaburger was some kind of X-treme sport.”

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WHAT WE EAT


tural contradictions of capitalism” thatsociologist Daniel Bell identified thirtyyears ago. Our Protestant ancestors whis-per in one ear that we should scrimp andsave and embrace austerity. Our moderncorporate managers whisper in the otherear that if we don’t shop, our economy willdrop. Ronald McDonald oscillates betweenthe two extremes, not Ronald light anddark, but Ronald lite and heavy. How willhe resolve his very American McDilemma?

LAST YEAR, America seemed to wake upfrom its fat-induced stupor. 2004 was theyear of obesity lawsuits and reports thatBig Food was poised to go the way of BigTobacco. The movie Super Size Me engros-sed and grossed out millions. The Centerfor Disease Control made headlines withits charge that America’s fat problem wascosting us over $100 billion a year. The BigLoser debuted on television and scoredhigh enough in the ratings to prove thatviewers prefer watching their fellow citi-zens lose weight to watching paint dry(hitherto considered a toss-up). Conserva-tives claimed that, like global warming andteenage pregnancy, America’s expandingwaistline was all a matter of personalresponsibility. Everyone else pointed fingersat the logical suspects: the purveyors ofburgers, fries and sodas.

Without acknowledging responsibility –for that would cost big bucks in our liti-gious culture – the chain restaurants didmake some changes. McDonald’s convincedcelebrity dietician Bob Greene to walk andbike across the United States to promoteits new adult happy meals. Burger Kingpartnered with the President’s Challenge

Physical Activity Fitness Awards Programto encourage kids to exercise more. RubyTuesday put nutritional information allover its menu. With low fat, low sugar, andlow carb diets each attracting their ownsectarian followings, dieters and diabeticsseemed to be the new, hot demographic.

But that was last year, and a year is along time in the minds of marketers andmedia mavens, both of whom make a liv-ing by sifting through the tea leaves of pop-ular culture to identify often spurioustrends. Now, according to several high-pro-file reports, the chains have reverted toform. The turning point was Hardee’s Mon-ster Thickburger, which came on line at theend of 2004. “People were blown away bythe audaciousness of it,” says Jeff Mochal,public relations manager of Hardee’s.“That’s how we positioned it – a monu-ment to decadence. It was a time when alot of people were going low carb, low fat orlow something. But here we came out witha big, bold audacious burger.”

Hardee’s was catering to a young maleaudience, the tried-and-true constituencyfor fast food. With its tie-ins to Sports Illus-trated, Hardee’s was suggesting that eatingits megaburger was some kind of X-tremesport. In Jarhead, Anthony Swofford’smemoir of the first Gulf War, the newrecruits interpret even the most anti-warwar movies as celebrations of combat. Sim-ilarly, a generation of young hungry guyssees Super Size Me as a how-to manual, itsscare tactics on the level of Reefer Mad-ness. For them, ordering Monster Thick-burgers becomes the culinary equivalent ofcliff jumping.

“We can put salad on the menu, but the

WHAT WE EAT

problem is no one will buy it,” Jeff Mochalsays. “It’s really a business decision. We’vetested salads, and it’s not something thatpeople will buy off our menu. Yes, we offersomething for people on a different diet.But burgers are what we hang our hat on.”

It’s not just Hardee’s. RubyTuesday high-lights their burgers too, including the Ulti-mate Colossal Burger, which outdoes Har-dee’s heftiest by a third of a pound. BurgerKing, meanwhile, has just introduced itsnew Enormous Omelet Sandwich – “sobig, breakfast will never be the same” –that clocks in at 730 calories and 43 gramsof fat (out of a daily recommended ceilingof 66 grams). Despite plenty of criticism, 7-11 has not backed away from its X-TremeGulp of 52 ounces of sugary pop.

So much for portion control. In ourbulimic culture, binge follows purge withguilty regularity. The return to burgers isnot so much a backlash as a tension thathas long resided in American food ways.Fast food restaurants enjoyed explosivegrowth in the 1970s, but so did food coops.Diet books are perennial bestsellers, yetportions keep getting bigger. We want tohalve our cake and eat it too.

DIETICIANS face a challenge. They can tellAmericans what they should eat – thatwhole pyramid thing of more vegetables,more fruit, and more whole grains – andrisk irrelevancy given what the majority ofAmericans eat every day. Or they can fol-low the maxim of social workers and startwhere the clients are. So, voila, frozenmeals are not such a bad thing (nutritionconsultant Carol Meerschaert recommendsowning two microwaves). Eating breakfast

at fast food restaurants is also not such abad thing, at least compared to not eatingbreakfast at all, and hey, the French crullerat Dunkin Donuts has only 150 calories.Bob Greene has devoted a whole book toeating right in all the wrong places, fromArby’s to Wendy’s.

Heart-healthy physician Dean Ornish,like Greene, has taken this approach onestep further by burrowing into the belly ofthe McBeast. Ornish consults for McDon-ald’s, lending his expert cache to the mega-corporation’s makeover. Demonstrating hisecumenical leanings, Ornish also consultsfor ConAgra and Pepsico, though he’s notso proud of any of these affiliations as tolist them in his web bio. ‘’It’s very easy to bea purist and demonize things, but as I getolder I realize that life is shades of gray,’’Ornish told The New York Times earlierthis year. ‘’Are these companies moving asquickly as I might like? Of course not. Butthey’re moving much faster than I everthought possible.’’

Surely Ornish didn’t think that McDon-ald’s would never change. A spokespersonfor the company quoted an old Ray Kroc-ism for me: “I don’t know what we’ll beselling in the year 2000 but we’ll be sellingmore of it than anyone else.” Of course,McDonald’s is not simply interesting in cor-nering the market on Caesar salads. Themotivation of the chain restaurants tochange seems to be threefold. They’realways introducing new products, somehigher fat, some lower fat, in an effort topique the palate, bring in new customers,and perhaps stumble on the killer dish.They also want to have something foreveryone in a group, just in case the beef-


WHAT WE EAT

hater or the Atkins freak might steer theparty to some other establishment.

And finally, as Michael Jacobson, execu-tive director of Center for Science in thePublic Interest, points out, the restaurantswant to protect themselves from litigation.“It’s harder to sue a restaurant if it offeredhealthier options,” he says. “A personcouldn’t complain that ‘it was the onlyrestaurant within proximity and they did-n’t have anything that couldn’t kill me.’”

Keeping one’s critics close at hand hasgenerated some real changes. It’s bothamazing and depressing that McDonald’s,as a result of recommendations from itsGlobal Advisory Council on Balanced Life-styles, offers raw apples as a dessert. Theapples I tried with my Caesar salad wereactually quite tasty. But why gild the lilywith the caramel dipping sauce? And Iended up paying more than $1 for my appleslices, quite a mark-up.

Other attempts to marry a fast food sen-sibility with healthy living verge on theridiculous. “All of our menu items can bepart of a balanced, active lifestyle,” theMcDonald’s spokesperson told me. To mymind, the Big Mac could only be part of thebalanced, active lifestyle of a tree sloth. Itsounds all too much like Coke’s formerCEO Doug Ivester touting the advantagesof his product to Brazilians: “First of all, wehave a very healthy product. Of course, ourbeverage contains sugar, but sugar is agood source of energy, of vitality.” Yes, andso is cocaine, but no one claims that thatcoke should be part of a healthy diet anylonger.

Burger King’s partnership with the gov-ernment’s fitness program, meanwhile, is

the kind of coupling that U.S. politiciansshould really be trying to prohibit. “Itsounds like a joke,” Michael Jacobson says.“The President’s Council [on Physical Fit-ness and Sports] is itself a joke. It has nofunding. It holds a press conference once ortwice a year. It’s just window dressing, justa pretense that the U.S. government isdoing something on nutrition.”

So, how do reputable nutritionists rec-oncile the tension between the ideal andthe practical? Jacobson and CSPI are push-ing for nutritional labeling on the menus ofchain restaurants so that we know exactlywhat we’re eating. Jacobson also urgeschanges at the margins of the fast foodmenu. “You can make invisible changes –gradually cutting sodium in the food, usinglower fat ground beef or mayonnaise,adding some whole grain to the bread ortortillas. These are marginal steps that peo-ple wouldn’t even notice, yet these stepswould significantly improve the quality offoods.”

Marion Nestle is the author of Food Pol-itics and a professor of nutrition at NewYork University. She wants chain restau-rants to offer real choices, which meanssmaller portions at smaller prices. “Studiesshow that if foods taste good and arepriced appropriately, people will eat them,”she says. “That goes for veggies in vendingmachines.”

IN HIS BOOK Amusing Ourselves to Death,Neil Postman argued that proposals toimprove television programming werespectacularly beside the point. “Television,”he argued, “serves us most usefully whenpresenting junk-entertainment; it serves us


WHAT WE EAT


WHAT WE EAT

most ill when it co-opts serious modes ofdiscourse – news, politics, science, educa-tion, commerce, religion–and turns theminto entertainment packages. We would allbe better off if television got worse, not bet-ter.”

If this argument applied to fast food, weshould be campaigning for McDonald’s tostick to what it does best and stay far awayfrom fruits and vegetables. Eating a saladon every tenth visit to McDonald’s salvesour conscience and lulls us into thinkingthat we’re eating healthier. WatchingRonald McDonald jog alongside BobGreene establishes Pavlovian associationsbetween hamburgers and exercise that willmake our kids salivate every time theyapproach the playground.

To paraphrase Postman, the problem isnot what we eat at these fast food restau-rants, it’s that we go to them in the firstplace, that we have ceded control of ourfood supplies to these giants. McDonald’shas become the largest purchaser of applesin the United States. As with its potatosuppliers, McDonald’s demands a uniformproduct, which leads to a further reductionin biodiversity. The structure of the fastfood economy militates against dietarydiversity, not to mention eating local, eat-ing organic, or just plain eating well.

Corporate advisors like Dean Ornish rel-

ish the opportunity to have a large impacton diets by shifting the priorities of entitiesthe size of McDonald’s. But the size ofMcDonald’s is part of the problem. Becauseof its market dominance, it begins to definewhat a healthy, balanced lifestyle is, whichinevitably involves its entire menu. Maybeit was better when chains weren’t experi-encing an identity crisis, when we could goto them for our junk food fix and not begulled into ascribing higher motives to theexcursion.

Or perhaps we don’t need to worry afterall. The giant hamburger is, was, andalways will be the symbol of fast foodrestaurants. Consider my experience withthe McDonald’s media website. Before Icould access the graphics and text, I wasrequired to sign up for a log-on name anda password, neither of which I was able tochoose for myself. After a brief interval,McDonald’s sent me an email with mybrand new secret information.

User ID: fries748Password: burger18friesThat’s the McDonald’s I can relate to –

staying on message.

John Feffer is working on a book about theglobal politics of food. This essay originallyappeared at alternet.com

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GONE FISHING

On board the chokka fleets off Port Elizabeth,South Africa, nocturnal fishermen strain sinew and muscle to catch squid for European dinner tables

We hadn’t even made it out ofthe harbour before we hadto turn back. Somethingwas caught in the propeller,

and a frogman was summoned. He divedoff the harbour wall, and surfaced a fewtimes, asking for various implements –knives, a saw, a hammer.

“There’s always complications,” saidKevin Mears, one of the 14 crew aboard theDolce Vita. “You opt for a simple life as afisherman, and what do you get? Compli-cations. If it’s not something technical, it’sthe weather or the fish.”

After 40 minutes, the frogman managedto cut loose the snarl of rope tangledaround the propeller, and we had permis-sion to leave Port Elizabeth harbour, again.

The shore skipper, Brian Mears – Kevin’s

uncle – told Dolce Vita’s skipper, ShaneSlabbert: “Shane, once you’re out, feel it. Ifit’s right, toot twice on your horn.”

We got past the breakwater, Slabbertgave two toots and we were at sea, insearch of strange creatures. We were hunt-ing Loligo vulgaris reynaudii – chokkasquid. They grow up to 45cm long, have 10tentacles, three hearts, and blood that isblue. They have parrot-like beaks, aston-ishingly large eyes, and squirt ink out oftheir anuses. They are cannibals, and havethe ability to change colour.

They are very tasty, but you are unlikelyto be served chokka squid at your localseafood restaurant – 99.9% of the catch isexported to Italy and Spain.

Port Elizabeth is at the heart of SouthAfrica’s chokka fishing industry, and DolceVita is one of 128 boats that have a permitto catch the rubbery cephalopods. At nightin PE you can stand on Humewood Beachand see the lights of the chokka boats inthe distance. They look like a space station

C A S P A R G R E E F F

Smoke on the water

“It can get rough out here. It’s not unheard of for a skipper to shoot out the lights of another boatwhen it gets too close.”

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in the darkness where sea and sky merge.But that night the Dolce Vita’s lights

would have been invisible to anyone on thebeach – we were going about 45km out tosea. “We’ll just chug along for a few hours,”said , Slabbert, hands on the wheel, lookingat his echo sounder, and plotting a courseon the GPS. It was three in the afternoon,and most of the crew were in their crampedquarters in the fo’c’s’le. They come outshortly before sunset, when the DolceVita’s eight two-kilowatt lights are turnedon to attract the shoals of baitfish on whichthe chokka feed.

The cook, Keith Juries, was busy in thetiny galley, preparing supper. “We’re goingto be eating chicken and chips. Usually it’sboiled beans.”

We would be on the boat for only 24hours. The crew were going to be at sea for21 days. The industry employs 2400 fisher-men, who spend up to 240 days a year atsea. They are at the bottom of a food chainthat ends with an exquisite delicacy servedon plates in Europe.

This year, chokka is selling for R23/kg.The fishermen are paid R4.50 for every kilo-gram they catch. A good fisherman canmake R50,000 [$US8,000] in a year, but it’sbrutally hard work, in grim and sometimeslife-threatening conditions.

Every year a handful of chokka fisher-men fall overboard and are never seenagain. In May this year, 14 trawlermen diedwhen a container ship collided with theirvessel off Port Elizabeth.

The few crew members on the deck ofthe 14m Dolce Vita were preparing theirlines for the night’s fishing. They catchchokka with hand lines on which two jigs

are attached. The jigs are brightly colouredlures with two cruel carousels – circles ofhooks that the chokka grasp with theirtentacles.

We ploughed through a glassy sea, and,as night fell, the crew ate their batteredchicken and greasy chips in silence. Then itwas time to release the large red and whiteparachute that served as our sea anchor,allowing us to drift with the current.

Once this was done, Slabbert switchedon the powerful, balloon-shaped lights –two rows of four dangling from lines abovethe deck on either side of the boat – andwe blazed in the blackness.

We could see the lights of 10 other chok-ka boats, but we kept our distance.

“It can get rough out here,” said Slab-bert. “It’s not unheard of for a skipper toshoot out the lights of another boat whenit gets too close.”

The 13 fishermen were now all at theirstations, wearing woollen caps, oilskins,tatty jerseys, and gumboots. Their faceswere etched by years at sea; a couple hadbeen scarred by knives.

They stood at the gunwale and flungtheir double-jigged lines into the ink-blackwater. Each fisherman had two lines, andonce he had flung them, he tapped eachone with his ring finger, feeling for the tinyvibrations that would indicate a squid onthe jig. The boat bobbed and swayed.There was the smell of diesel, the hum ofthe generator and the swish and plop of thefishing lines. Looking down the deck, a rowof hands could be seen on the gunwale, ringfingers obsessively tapping.

No chokka, though.“They’re not in a feeding mood tonight,”


GONE FISHING


GONE FISHING

said Mears, a cigarette dangling from hismouth, a line in each hand. “I wish theywould bite madly so you guys could get agood taste of it.”

A qualified draughtsman, Mears hasbeen a chokka fisherman for a year. Heenjoys being out at sea, likes the 21-daytrips that “are so long you can start missingsomeone”. For most of the fishermen, whohave at best a rudimentary schooling, it’s ahard grind, the only job they can get.

It’s small wonder that chokka fishermenhave a reputation as hell-raisers on shore.Players in the industry told us the fisher-men blow their money on “casinos, womenand liquor”; that “for them, there is notomorrow”.

After an hour or so of fruitless flinging,the chokka started to bite. The fishermenswiftly hauled their lines in, and when thechokka were out of the water, let themdangle for a few moments, to avoid beingsquirted in the face. Then they brought thealien-looking creatures, all eyes and tenta-cles and startled expressions, on board,gave the jig a little twist and dropped thechokka into a crate.

“It’s weird how they change colour,” saidMears, flicking one off his jig. “Sometimesthey go gold, sometimes they go red. Itlooks like they’re supercharged with elec-tricity.”

At about 1.30am a big red half-moonrose above us and the chokka started bit-ing big time. You had to duck often to avoidgetting squirted by them. Mears gave me aline, and I tried my hand at chokka fishing.

It was something of a bloody business as Iflung a jig into my fingers, but after severalattempts I managed to reach the sea. I tick-led the line, felt an almost imperceptiblechange of tension on it and hauled in fran-tically. But there was nothing at the end ofit – what I had felt was a change in the cur-rent.

After a couple of hours of flinging theline, tapping it and hauling it in, I caught achokka. It squirted me in the face andlooked like it was shrieking silently as Idropped it into Mears’s crate, which wasalmost full. The boat drifted and the longnight passed, and by the time the sun rose,I had caught a couple of dozen squid.

When Slabbert turned the lights off, thecrew had been fishing non-stop for 11 hoursand had earned between R150 and R300 forit. They sorted the chokka and after thatthe crates were labelled, sealed, and blast-frozen at -37°C.

Slabbert turned the boat around to dropus off at PE harbour. The wind came upand the sea showed us a fraction of itsmight.

Brian Mears was waiting for us at theharbour. “I can hardly walk,” I told him aswe got off the Dolce Vita, “because thejetty is swaying so much. There’s only oneway to stop the land from swaying,” hesaid. So we went to the yacht club and hada couple of stiff whiskies.

Casper Greeff is a feature writer for theJohannesburg Sunday Times, in which this article was first published.

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I never miss the Saturday paper.Because it’s the skimpiest and least-circulated edition of the week, it’s thevenue of choice for lowballing the sto-

ries the government can’t completely coverup. September 24’s New York Times, forexample, contained the bombshell revela-tion that the U.S. government continues totorture innocent men, women and childrenin Iraq.

An army captain and two sergeants fromthe elite 82nd Airborne Division confirmprevious reports that Bagram and otherconcentration camps in U.S.-occupiedAfghanistan are a kind of Torture Universi-ty where American troops are taught howto abuse prisoners who have neither beencharged with nor found guilty of any crime.“The soldiers told Human Rights Watchthat while they were serving in Afghan-istan,” reports The Times, “they learnedthe stress techniques [sic] from watchingCentral Intelligence Agency operativesinterrogating prisoners.” Veterans who

served as prison guards in Afghanistanwent on to apply their newfound knowl-edge at Abu Ghraib and other facilities inU.S.-occupied Iraq.

One of the sergeants, his name withheldto protect him from Pentagon reprisals,confirms that torture continued even afterthe Abu Ghraib scandal broke. “We still didit, but we were careful,” he told HRW.

The latest sordid revelations concernTiger Base on the border with Syria, andCamp Mercury, near Fallujah, the Iraqi cityleveled by U.S. bombs in a campaign thatofficials claimed would finish off the insur-gent movement. After the army told him toshut up over the course of 17 months – tacitproof that the top brass condones torture –a frustrated Captain Ian Fishback wrote totwo conservative Republican senators totell them about the “death threats, beat-ings, broken bones, murder, exposure toelements, extreme forced physical exertion,hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivationand degrading treatment” carried out

T E D R A L L

Who did you torture during the war, daddy?

“Another soldier says detainees were beaten with abroken chemical light stick: “That made them glow inthe dark, which was real funny, but it burned theireyes, and their skin was irritated real bad.”

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CRIMES OF WAR / 1

against Afghans and Iraqis unlucky enoughto fall into American hands.

“We would give them blows to the head,chest, legs and stomach, and pull themdown, kick dirt on them,” one sergeantsaid. “This happened every day . . . We didit for amusement.” Another soldier saysdetainees were beaten with a brokenchemical light stick: “That made them glowin the dark, which was real funny, but itburned their eyes, and their skin was irri-tated real bad.” An off-duty cook told anIraqi prisoner “to bend over and broke theguy’s leg with a . . . metal bat.” The sergeantcontinues: “I know that now. It was wrong.There are a set of standards. But you gottaunderstand, this was the norm.”

Torture, condemned by civilized nationsand their citizens since the Renaissance,has continued to be carried out in prisonsand internment camps in every nation. Butsave for a few exceptions, such as France’sovert torture of Algerian independencefighters during the late 1950s, it has beenhidden away, lied about and condemnedwhen exposed. Torture is shameful. It isnever official policy.

That changed in the United States after9/11. Current attorney general AlbertoGonzales authored a convoluted legalmemo to George W. Bush justifying tor-ture. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeldjoked about forcing prisoners to stand allday and officially sanctioned keeping themnaked and threatening them with viciousdogs. Ultimately Bush declared that U.S.forces in Afghanistan would ignore theGeneva Conventions. By 2004 a third ofAmericans told pollsters that they didn’thave a problem with torture.

Torture has been normalized.By Monday, September 26, the story of

torture at Camps Tiger and Mercury towhich New York Times editors had grant-ed page one treatment two days earlier hadvanished entirely. Only a few papers, suchas the Seattle Times and Los AngelesTimes, ran follow-ups.

In his 2000 book “Unspeakable Acts,Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Tor-ture” John Conroy presciently describes thesurprising means by which democracies areactually more susceptible to becoming“torture societies” than dictatorships:Where “notorious regimes have fallen,there has been a public acknowledgementthat people were tortured. In democraciesof long standing in which torture has takenplace, however, denial takes hold and offi-cial acknowledgement is extremely slow incoming, if it appears at all.” Conroy goes onto describe the “fairly predictable” stages ofgovernmental response:

First, writes Conroy, comes “absoluteand complete denial.” Rumsfeld told Con-gress in 2004 that the U.S. had followedGeneva “to the letter” in Afghanistan andIraq.

“The second stage,” he says, is “to mini-mize the abuse.” Republican mouthpieceRush Limbaugh compared the murder andmayhem at Abu Ghraib to fraternity haz-ing rituals.

Next is “to disparage the victims.” BushAdministration officials and right-wingpundits call the victims of torture in U.S.custody “terrorists,” implying that detai-nees – who are not charged because thereis no evidence against them – deservewhatever they get. Dick Cheney called vic-


CRIMES OF WAR / 1


tims of torture at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba(who, under U.S. law, are presumed inno-cent) “the worst of a very bad lot.” Rums-feld called them “the worst of the worst.”

Other government tactics include charg-ing “that those who take up the cause ofthose tortured are aiding the enemies ofthe state” (Right-wing bloggers havesmeared me as a “terrorist sympathizer”because I argue against torture); denyingthat torture is still occurring (numerousBush Administration officials claimed thatAbu Ghraib marked the end of the prac-tice); placing “the blame on a few badapples” (the classic Fox News-Bush trope);and pointing out that “someone else doesor has done much worse things” (thebeheadings of Western hostages by Iraqijihadi organizations was used to justify tor-turing Iraqis who didn’t belong to thosegroups).

Bear in mind: Conroy wrote his book in2000, before Bush seized power and morethan a year before 9/11 was given as a pre-text for legalizing torture.

Citing the case of widespread andproven torture of arrestees by Chicagocops, Conroy noted: “It wasn’t a case of fivepeople . . . doing nothing or acting slowly, itwas a case of millions of people knowing ofan emergency and doing nothing. Peoplelooked about, saw no great crusade form-ing, saw protests only from the usual agita-tors, and assumed there was no cause foralarm. Responsibility was diffused. Citizensoffended by torture could easily retreat intothe notion that they lived in a just world,that the experts would sort things out.”

Ted Rall is a syndicated columnist whosework appears in almost 100 NorthAmerican pubications.

CRIMES OF WAR / 1

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Those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you commit atrocities- Voltaire

Absurdities and atrocities havecome to largely define America inthe new millennium. Who wouldhave thought that the United

States of America would embrace the prac-tice of torture as a matter of policy? Tor-ture, with all its grim, sadistic, soul destroy-ing, screaming implications. The Presidentendorses torture. The Attorney Generalmade it possible. President Karimov ofUzbekistan boils enemies alive. ‘BlowtorchBob’ D’Aubisson of El Salvador loved toburn people. Ronnie Reagan had nunsraped. It was called ‘fighting for freedom’.George is a freedom fighter right up therewith the best of them. The shah was a free-dom fighter. General Noriega, to a point.Pinochet. Enemies of the US hate it for its‘freedom’.

Damn right. Freedom from the rule oflaw. America recently advanced ‘freedom’

by sodomizing young boys at Abu Ghraib,where they torture children to manipulatetheir parents. Did you hear that? Ameri-cans torture innocent children in front oftheir parents to intimidate them. Is thatpossible? Now certain ‘leaders’ are hopingthat the tape of that advancement doesn’tget out. Too much freedom can be a badthing after all.

To date, none of America’s religious lead-ers have spoken out against the use of tor-ture, or the wanton abrogation of civil lib-erties in America or Guantanamo. Okay,maybe a few Lutherans whispered some-thing, and good for them. But where’s JerryFalwell? Franklin Graham? (He thinksIslam is evil.) Pat Robertson? (He wants toassassinate Hugo Chavez.) Where are theCatholic bishops? We know the pope hasdiplomatic immunity, so he can’t be heldaccountable for covering up sex crimesagainst children, but where are the priests?The ministers? The good people?

If organized religion can’t or won’t stand

J O H N S . H A T C H

Absurdities and atrocities

“An America that tortures and murders while preaching ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ is a nation that lives in a make-believe world, a bully world.”

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CRIMES OF WAR / 2

up to the kind of immorality that is sopatently being practiced by the BushAdministration – do you suppose thatJesus would endorse torture? If Christiani-ty has no problem with torture or for thatmatter the wholesale slaughter of inno-cents in Iraq – if Christianity has no issuewith war crimes, crimes against humanityand torture, rape and murder, then perhapsthat religion does not have very much tooffer in terms of moral values or teaching.Its silence has been louder than any prayeror hymn.

Maybe George is a little hard of hearingand God is actually telling him to fuck off.

Indeed, an America that tortures andmurders while preaching ‘freedom’ and‘democracy’ is a nation that lives in a make-believe world, a bully world. America hasalways been good at the superficial, emptyslogan. ‘Land of the Free’ ‘Give Me Libertyor Give Me Death’ ‘Jesus Loves You’. Repeatafter me: ‘We’re Number One! We’re Num-ber One!” Why is no one saying that anation that would deploy depleted urani-um weapons or snipers positioned onrooftops to shoot civilians and even ambu-lances, or a brand new version of napalm,or cluster bombs, a nation that throughineffective sanctions extinguished the livesof five hundred thousand Iraqi babies (andwhose former Secretary of State declared it‘worth it’.

Perhaps even Hitler was not quite socold), is anyone saying that such a nation iscommitting evil, that its leaders are com-mitting acts of vile terrorism that shame allhumanity and must not go unpunished?

Remember, there were no Weapons ofMass Destruction. None. There were

inspections. Bush put a stop to them. ColinPowell lied. Condoleezza Rice lied. Themushroom cloud was only in her brain.Dick Cheney lied. Bush, of course, lied andlied and lied.

As has been so often the case, Americaencouraged a bully, armed a bully, evengave him poison gas. When Saddam usedit against the Iranians (‘I only wish bothsides could lose’ – Kissinger) that was fine.When he used it against the Kurds, thatwas still fine, until it became convenientyears later to call it a crime, which of courseit was. You’d think that boiling people alivewould be disapproved of also, but it didn’tprevent President Karimov from beingfeted at the White house by his goodfriend. I don’t know if Karimov is a Christ-ian (maybe not) but George certainlyclaims to be. It’s funny how easily Chris-tianity seems to accommodate killing.

Anyway, yesterday’s friend is tomorrow’sterrorist a la Saddam, I guess. Clever tocharge him with capital crimes that havenothing to do with America. He can be qui-etly dispatched to Allah or wherever with-out disturbing implications. Will his goodfriend Donald Rumsfeld pray for him?

So, no WMD, no mushroom clouds(except in Dr. Condi’s fetid mind), no mis-siles raining down on ‘Merica, no nothing.But before he even stole office, Bush want-ed to invade Iraq. His people were hopingfor, his people needed a new Pearl Harborevent as they called it, something prettybig, shock ‘n awe to mobilize the Americanpeople, to soften ‘em up to George’s way ofthinking. In one fell swoop of Shock ‘n Awehe’d show Poppy a thing or two, andbecome an instant Middle East muscle-


CRIMES OF WAR / 2


CRIMES OF WAR / 2

man. He just needed a darned event, that’sall. Well, he got his wish.

Such is the advanced state of aviation inthe USA that if a jet strays off course, or ifa transponder is switched off for some rea-son, those facts are immediately known onthe ground. Should a catastrophic eventsuch as sudden deadly decompressionoccur, or a hijacking, fighter jets can bescrambled and on the scene to investigatewithin minutes. None of this happened onthe eleventh of September 2001. Contraryto normal protocol, aircraft were allowed tofly unimpeded into their targets at the Pen-tagon and the World Trade Center. Theycould have been stopped. On orders fromthe highest levels in the White House, theywere not. Bush needed a new Pearl Harbor.He got it. If the administration had fore-knowledge of the desired PH event, itwould not be without precedent.

Remember Operation Northwoods?During the Kennedy administration theentire contingent of Joint Chiefs of Staff, ledby demented right-wing wacko GeneralLyman Lemnitzer endorsed a plan to kill alarge number of American citizens andmake it look like the work of Fidel Castro,thus softening up the public for an invasionof Cuba. Does it sound unconscionable?Straussian? Of course. So is sodomizing lit-tle boys at Abu Ghraib. These brave mili-tary men were willing to sacrifice innocentAmerican lives (not their own of course) tothe presumably greater good of getting ridof Castro and restoring Cuba to the Mafia,perhaps, just like in the goods old days.

So was 9-11 a merely fortuitous occur-rence from Bush’s point of view? Or didsomeone help it happen? The absence ofmilitary intervention sure looks suspicious,as did the way the buildings came down, soreminiscent of controlled demolition. Evenas a result of much hotter fires, no build-ings in the world have ever collapsed inthat manner. Pearl Harbor indeed.

One of the most astonishing aspects ofthe Bush-Cheney putsch (and that’s exact-ly what it was) is that it gave the lie to somuch that Americans believed aboutthemselves. Free. Proud. Strong. Live free ordie. So much talk about freedom anddemocracy and goodness and the Ameri-can Way. All nonsense. All swept away likeso much dust. And all it took was a befud-dled, deluded ex-drunk christian cowboywannabe and a few evil handlers. Giventhe ‘freedom rhetoric’, one would haveexpected another civil war in the defense ofthe nation, but there was barely a whimperas America expired under the weight of thePatriot Act, the suspension of civil rights,habeas corpus and the rule of law, underthe weight of crimes against humanity andwar crimes being committed in the name ofevery single American citizen. The Ameri-can dream was just a vacuous stupor. Nowit’s become a nightmare, perhaps one with-out end.

John S. Hatch is a Vancouver writer andfilm-maker. He can be reached [email protected]://www.jhatchfilms.citymax.com

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When you shake hands withRobert Fisk, it is difficult notto think of Osama binLaden. After all, Fisk has met

bin Laden three times, the last time eightyears ago, in Afghanistan. So this righthand of Fisk’s, gripping mine as we wereintroduced in Melbourne, has also grippedthe hand of one of this century’s monsters.

Fisk’s meetings with the al-Qaeda leaderwere more than fleeting encounters. Eachtime the two men met, Fisk interviewed binLaden and at each progressive meeting, theworld’s most wanted man presented anincreasingly threatening and paranoid viewof power relationships across the planet.On September 11, 2001, Fisk knew enoughabout the terrorist leader’s intentions to beable to conclude immediately that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks on NewYork and Washington.

Fisk has covered the Middle East for 29years, first for The Times and, since 1989, forone of its rivals, The Independent. Before

he was posted to Beirut, he had been basedin Belfast, covering the Troubles in North-ern Ireland. He has seen a lot of sufferingand a lot of violence. With his colleaguePatrick Cockburn, Fisk covers the occupa-tion of Iraq for his newspaper. Later thisyear he will return to Baghdad, where hewill eschew what he refers to as “hoteljournalism” and its reliance on officialstatements and sources, and go into thestreets and shops and write stories aboutordinary Iraqis.

But Fisk’s journalism is of a certain style.His highly personalised reporting and com-mentary has made him a favourite target ofbloggers and conservative columnists.Depending on who is attacking him, Fisk isvariously anti-Western, pro-Palestinian,pro-Taliban, pro-Saddam. When he wasbeaten up by a group of enraged Afghanrefugees in Pakistan in late 2001 and subse-quently wrote that he could understandthe anger that had led to assault, he wasridiculed by some in the media and on the

INTERVIEW

S H A U N C A R N E Y

Robert Fisk’s crazy vocation

“I think there are moral issues when you’rereporting people’s deaths. I think we journalists can afford to be angry. You know, we’re notmouthpieces for government, or we shouldn’t be.”

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internet. Actor John Malkovich once saidthat he would like to shoot Fisk.

At the city restaurant where we met, itwas hard to consider that this 59-year-oldwith the thinning mop of white hair, glass-es perched on his nose, slightly ruddy face,pressed check cotton shirt and neat south-ern English vowels was a hate figure for somany.

Fisk had arrived in Australia to give aseries of talks and also to promote his newbook, a massive tome 29 years in the mak-ing called The Great War for Civilisation:The Conquest of the Middle East. In it, Fiskattempts to gather up everything he hasseen and learnt since first arriving in Beirut.

Does he accept the suggestion that he isan advocate as a journalist? “I think I domaintain an objective distance. I mean, I goto a place, I see a massacre and I have apretty good idea who did it and I say so. Ifyou’re covering the slave trade in the 18thcentury, do you give equal time to the slaveship captain or more time to the slaves? Ifyou’re present at the liberation of a concen-tration camp, do you give equal time to theSS guards?

“I think there are moral issues whenyou’re reporting people’s deaths. I think wejournalists can afford to be angry. Youknow, we’re not mouthpieces for govern-ment, or we shouldn’t be. It seems to methat if you’re going to be covering a storylike Iraq, which is a massive historicaltragedy, especially for the Iraqis, you’ve gotto tell it like it is.

“I’ve got the great advantage of newsreporting. I go to bus bombings in Iraq. I’moutraged at what I see. Morally, if you goand see some terrible crime against

humanity – and I call September 11, 2001, aninternational crime against humanity – ifyou’re just there and you’re a car parkingattendant, say, and you see it, you’re goingto be outraged. Have we got to switch thatoff because we are journalists? I don’t thinkso.”

Another British-born journalist, Christo-pher Hitchens, has famously moved awayfrom the left as a consequence of Septem-ber 11. Fisk says that he felt himself beingpulled in an unexpected direction on thatday, but it was not on the left-right contin-uum.

“On September 11, I was in a plane abovethe Atlantic going from Europe to theStates and I was on the satellite phonetalking to London and they were telling me‘another plane’ and then ‘another plane’, soI went to the purser and he brought thecaptain back. I turned to the stewardessand said, ‘What do you think?’ and shesaid, ‘They must have wanted to kill them-selves. There must have been a lot of plan-ning, a lot of dummy runs.’

“And the purser and I looked at eachother: ‘Who’s on our plane?’ And wewalked around that plane together lookingfor people we didn’t like. And I came upwith 13 or 14 people, dusky Middle Easternappearance and either because they werereading the Koran or they had worry beadsor they looked at me suspiciously, I hadbecome a racist in one minute. That’s whatbin Laden had done. And that’s what wewere meant to do, if you know what Imean.”

Fisk’s assessment of the situation in Iraq,and indeed of the world, as a consequenceof events in the Middle East in recent years,


INTERVIEW

is avowedly pessimistic. “The Americansmust leave. And the Americans will leave.But the Americans can’t leave. And that’sthe equation that turns sand into blood.Apart from the Kurds, I don’t find anyonewho wants the Americans to stay, whetherit be the guy who serves me in the restau-rant, or the guy who cleans the pool or theguy who sells me pot plants for the bal-cony. Clearly it’s a failure. No weapons ofmass destruction. Democracy in the fire?These people are not talking about theirdraft constitution, they are trying to livewith no services, trying to stay alive. TryingSaddam? This is stories to frighten chil-dren, like us. It’s not important to Iraqis.He’s way in the past.” That last commentwill surely attract the attention of his crit-ics.

Fisk believes there is still a reasonableamount of good, fearless journalism goingon – he cites Seymour Hersh’s reports onthe abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as thebest example – but is critical of the spreadof what he regards as American-stylereporting that’s tentative, hedged and lim-ited by obedience to public officials.

He says The New York Times shouldchange its name to “comma, officials say,full stop”. “Newspapers have this thingwhere every three years, just when (theircorrespondents) learned the language andgot to know the place they pull you outand send you somewhere else. You know,‘They’ve been there so long, they’re goingto go native.’ Bullshit! I’m not going to gonative when it’s so dangerous. Give me abreak. The interesting thing is that when Italk to my American colleagues, we canhave dinner and they’re very interesting

but when I open the paper, they’re not veryinteresting because they have suppressedeverything from their report that mightsuggest they have an opinion. What’s thepoint of having a reporter as the nerve end-ing, thousands of miles from your paper ifyou’re not going to put in what he thinks?”

So what does he see as the real purposeof journalism? “Look, I’ll tell you what Ithink. I’m not trying to compare it withmedicine, say, but journalism should bemore than earning your money for Pellegri-no or working in a bank or driving a bus. Itshould be a vocation. And if it’s not, whatare you doing it for?”

At this point of the interview, the restau-rant staff dropped something at the wait-ers’ station making a sharp, banging sound,and Fisk instinctively jumps in his chair. Isuggested that after only a few hours out ofBeirut, he is still being desensitised. “It doeshappen. You see a lot of people in the worldwho think they’re going to live forever.They never contemplate the thought thatthey are going to die. And I do, ‘cause Ihave to all the time.

“When you see an awful lot of peopledead, you realise how easy it is to die.When I see in the mortuary in Baghdad allthese people, hands behind their back, shotthrough the head, (when) I see my col-leagues dead, of course, it’s very easy to bekilled.” He appears to genuinely shudder atthe thought. “Oooohhh.”

Fisk has no interest in the internet oremail, saying that it takes too much time.He takes pictures to go with his reports butnone of that digital stuff; he uses film. “Iread all the time. Read books, read news-papers, read documents, read readers’ let-


INTERVIEW


ters. Go and see the same contacts overand over again in every country you go tobecause they always know something new,and generally never sleep. I am exhaustedall the time.

“Sometimes I used to think that I wasprivileged to see so much history. But I’mnot sure it’s not a bit of a curse. SometimesI see people in London or Melbourne ontrains or in the streets, living their lives insafety with their families and I think‘Hmm, not so bad’ but I chose my profes-sion and I’ve stayed with it. I have a nicehome in Beirut and I go out and go to con-certs and films and restaurants.”

Just before the end of our lunch, ourwaitress, who had earlier told Fisk that she

was of Iranian descent, came by to see ifeverything was all right.

“Do you still speak Farsi?” Fisk asks. “Ido a little bit, not very well,” she replies.Fisk then rolls out a sentence in Farsi. Theyoung woman looks at him quizzically.“You think I’m crazy?”

“No, no,” says Fisk and he repeated thesentence emphasising each word. A look ofrecognition and a smile passes across thewaitress’ face. “Oh, right,” she says. “You’rea crazy journalist. Oh, OK, I see.” Pleased,Robert Fisk grins as she walks away.

This article originally appeared in The Agenewspaper in Melbourne, Australia.Copyright © 2005. The Age Company Ltd.

INTERVIEW

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The Great War for Civilisation:The Conquest of the Middle Eastby Robert FiskFourth Estate £25

This brilliant but enormous book(no less than 1366 pages) hasbeen 16 years in the making. Itsobvious ingredients are 328,000

notes, documents and dispatches andRobert Fisk’s thirty years’ experience ofreporting the Middle East. But there is alsoa hidden element – the author’s ethical,philosophical and moral approach to hislife’s work.

Fisk believes that most journalists whohave reported from the tragedy-strewn andbloody countries of the Middle East havefailed their readers and viewers. He hasdecided that they have been competent –even outstanding – in giving the who, how,where, what and when of events but haveleft out the “why”. He says that every jour-nalist in the Middle East needs to walk

around with a history book in his backpocket to remind him or her why we got towhere we are; why the injustices and hor-rors of yesteryear are engraved in the peo-ple’s minds and why they have a powerfulinfluence on what happens next. This con-viction was put to the test in a most per-sonal manner. Fisk was on the Afghanistanborder in November 2001 when a crowd ofrefugees from the American bombingturned on him and began to stone him. Hishead was split open, blood clouded hisvision and for a while it looked as if hemight not survive. He fought back and thenrealised what he was doing. “What had Idone? I kept asking myself. I had beenhurting and attacking and punching thevery people I had been writing about for solong, the very dispossessed, mutilated peo-ple whom my own country – among others– had been killing. . . God spare me, Ithought. The men whose families ourbombers were killing were now my ene-mies too.” He escaped and decided he

BOOK REVIEW

P H I L L I P K N I G H T L E Y

Making history on the front line

“I would have done what theydid. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any otherWesterner I could find.”

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would not be able to live with himselfunless he stuck to his convictions andexplained to his readers why the Afghancrowd had attacked him. So he wroteabout the humiliation and misery of theMuslim world and how the determinationof the Alliance that “good” must triumphover “evil” even if it meant burning andmaiming civilians and their families.

He concluded that if he were an Afghanrefugee, “I would have done what they did.I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or anyother Westerner I could find.” It is a meas-ure of how intensely Fisk is hated by somethat his mail included unsigned Christmascards regretting that the Afghans had notfinished the job. Americans were particu-larly vicious. The Wall Street Journal car-ried an article which was headed “A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due.” TheCanadian/American columnist, the pugilis-tic Mark Steyn, wrote of Fisk’s account ofhis ordeal, “You’d have to have a heart ofstone not to weep with laughter.” It is notonly Fisk’s efforts to explain the Muslimside of events but to understand them thatmakes him enemies. He is also seen as anapologist for the West’s worst bogeyman,Osama bin Laden. Fisk has interviewed binLaden three times, once in the Sudan andtwice in Afghanistan. The two men got onwell, even though Fisk says that bin Ladentried to recruit him. From Fisk’s descriptionof the meetings we get an impression ofthe man very different from the one gener-ally disseminated in the West. Fisk says binLaden is devout, shy, thoughtful and likeBush and Blair possesses that dangerousquality – total self-conviction. Fisk says binLaden has an almost obsessive interest in

history and believes that it is workingagainst the United States for whom hatred“lies like blanket” over the Middle East.

Fisk got his break on The Times in itsglory days when, aged only 29, the thenforeign editor Louis Heren, offered him theMiddle East as his beat. He had the tem-perament for the job – adventurous but notfoolhardy: “There is a little Somme waitingfor all innocent journalists.” He stayed withThe Times for 18 years and says it wasalways loyal to him and that he had greattrust in its editors.

Then in July 1988 a story he had writtenfor The Times, the results of his investiga-tion into the shooting down of an IranianAirbus by the American warship Vin-cennes, killing 290 passengers and crew,was cut and changed, its meaning distort-ed by omission. “This, I felt sure was theresult of Murdoch’s ownership of TheTimes . . . Readers of The Times had beensolemnly presented with a fraudulent ver-sion of the truth.” So he resigned and wentto the work for The Independent where heremains today. In the book he justifies hislong explanation of why he left The Timesby writing – and any serious reporter hasto agree with him – ”When we journalistsfail to get across the reality of events to ourreaders, we have not only failed in our job,we have also become a party to the eventsthat we are supposed to be reporting.”

Fisk’s critics complain that he is notobjective and detached. This is right. He issubjective and engaged. What’s wrong withthat? We are talking here about differentviews on what journalists, especially for-eign correspondents, are for. Fisk hasthought a lot about this. He writes: “I sup-


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BOOK REVIEW

pose, in the end, we journalists try – orshould try – to be the first impartial wit-nesses to history. If we have any reason forour existence, the least must be our abilityto report history as it happens so that noone can say: ‘We didn’t know – no one toldus.” But he quickly realised that this is notenough. Our leaders present war as adrama, a battle of good versus unspeakableevil and demand that we are either withthem or against them. They promise thatwith God on our side and minus a fewhard-won civil liberties we will march toeventual victory, But, as Fisk points out,“War is not about victory or defeat butabout death and the infliction of death. Itrepresents the total failure of the humanspirit.” Then one day he meets Amira Hass,an Israeli journalist whose articles on theoccupied Palestinian territories Fisk rates

higher than anything written by non-Israelireporters. She gives him a better definitionof his duty – ”Our job is to monitor thecentres of power”. So he began to challengeauthority, all authority, “especially whengovernments and politicians take us to war,when they decide that they will kill andothers will die.”

He continues to fulfill this duty withpassion and anger. As he admits, his work,especially in this powerfully-written book,is filled with accounts of horror, pain andinjustice. His triumph is that he has turneda slightly dubious and over-romanticisedcraft into a honorable vocation.

Phillip Knightley’s books include ‘The FirstCasualty: the war correspondent as hero,propagandist and myth-maker’ (AndreDeutsch)

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UP IN PLAMES

Of all the astonishments in theJudith Miller/New York Timeschapters of the Plamegateaffair, perhaps the most reve-

latory is the way Miller described herselfand her activities within the paper’s sup-posedly staid, controlled newsroom.

As noted in the paper’s own long-await-ed explanation of the affair, Miller calledherself “Miss Run Amok.”

“ ‘I said, ‘What does that mean?’” formerinvestigative editor Douglas Frantz, nowmanaging editor at The Los Angeles Times,recalled. “And she said, ‘I can do whateverI want.’ ”

And so she did, time and again, accord-ing to the Times’s own coverage, “as thenewspaper’s leaders, in taking what theyconsidered to be a principled stand, ulti-mately left the major decisions in the caseup to Ms. Miller, an intrepid reporter whomeditors found hard to control.”

n Editors like Frantz’ predecessorStephen Engelberg, who damned Miller

with faint praise, remarking, “Like a lot ofinvestigative reporters, Judy benefits fromhaving an editor who’s very interested andinvolved with what she’s doing.”

n Editors like onetime foreign editorRoger Cohen, who said, “I told her therewas unease, discomfort, unhappiness oversome of the coverage…There was concernthat she’d been convinced in an unwarrant-ed way, a way that was not holding up, ofthe possible existence of W.M.D.”

n Editors like managing editor JillAbramson, who when asked what sheregretted about The Times’s handling ofthe Miller matter, answered, “The entirething.” (Abramson also decried the factthat the paper’s news coverage of thePlamegate affair had been “constrained”and coldly refuted Miller’s assertion thatshe had “made a strong recommendationto my editor” that an article be pursued,but “was told no.” Abramson, Washingtonbureau chief at the time, said Miller nevermade any such recommendation.)

R O R Y O ’ C O N N O R

Little Miss Run Amok

“Most people I talk to have been troubled and puzzled by Judy’s seeming ability to operate outside of conventional reportorialchannels and managerial controls.”

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UP IN PLAMES

n Even editors like Times top dog BillKeller, who “in one of his first personnelmoves,” told Miller that she could nolonger cover Iraq and weapons issues. Evenso, Keller told his own reporters, “She keptkind of drifting on her own back into thenational security realm.”

So much so, apparently, that Miller –who had been given Pentagon clearance tosee secret information – wasn’t permittedto discuss some of the more sensitive itemswith her editors, who had no such clear-ance.

Miller admitted to the “Miss Run Amok”remark but told the Times she must havemeant it as a joke, adding, “I have strongelbows, but I’m not a dope.” That much atleast seems clear. So too does the fact thather friend in high places, Times publisherArthur “Pinch” Sulzberger – who told hisown paper “This car had her hand on thewheel because she was the one at risk” –not only allowed but enabled and encour-aged her unusual behavior.

Sulzberger also regularly urged editorialpage editor Gail Collins to devote space toMiller’s plight. Asked whether he had anyregrets about the editorials, Sulzberger saidno. “Judy deserved the support of the paperin this cause – and the editorial page is theright place for such support, not the newspages,” Sulzberger said. Miller added thatthe publisher’s support was invaluable. “Hegalvanized the editors, the senior editorialstaff,” she said. “He metaphorically and lit-erally put his arm around me.”

Meanwhile, however, the Times’s newsreporting on the Miller case became evermore “constrained,” to employ Abramson’sterm. Some Times reporters said their edi-

tors seemed reluctant to publish articlesabout certain aspects of the case. RichardW. Stevenson and other reporters in theWashington bureau wrote an article in July,about the role of Vice President Cheney’ssenior aides, but it was not published.Stevenson said, “It was taken pretty clear-ly among us as a signal that we were cut-ting too close to the bone, that we weregetting into an area that could complicateJudy’s situation.”

Then, in August, two other Timesreporters (Douglas Jehl and David John-ston) sent a memo to Washington bureauchief Philip Taubman listing ideas for cov-erage of the case. Taubman said Times edi-tor Keller did not want them pursued,however, adding that he felt bad for hisreporters, but that he and other senior edi-tors felt that they had no choice. “No edi-tor wants to be in the position of keepinginformation out of the newspaper,” Taub-man told the Times, explaining why he haddone so. Both Taubman and Abramsondescribed the overall situation as “excruci-atingly difficult.” Todd S. Purdum, a Wash-ington reporter for The Times, summed upthe situation by saying, “Most people I talkto have been troubled and puzzled byJudy’s seeming ability to operate outside ofconventional reportorial channels andmanagerial controls.”

No wonder that “Inside the newsroom,Miller was a divisive figure,” so much sothat “A few colleagues refused to work withher.” Nonetheless, she “operated with adegree of autonomy rare at The Times.”

And no wonder that Miller felt the needfor an escort when, on October 3, four daysafter leaving jail, she returned to the head-


UP IN PLAMES

quarters of The New York Times on West43rd Street.

Claudia Payne, a Times editor and aclose friend of Miller, said, “Her paramountconcern was how her actions would beviewed by her colleagues.”

As the Times account paints it, “Beforeentering the building, she called her friendMs. Payne and asked her to come down-stairs and escort her in. “She felt veryfrightened,” Ms. Payne said. “She felt veryvulnerable.”

Once safely inside the newsroom, Millermade a speech claiming victories for pressfreedom. “Her colleagues responded withrestrained applause, seemingly as mystifiedby the outcome of her case as the public,”said the Times account.

To which Miller added, “People wereconfused and perplexed, and I realized thenthat The Times and I hadn’t done a verygood job of making people understandwhat has been accomplished.”

Despite the now-voluminous coveragefrom the heretofore largely silent paper ofrecord, neither Miller nor the Times haveyet to do a very good job of making any ofus understand what has been accom-plished. But this is much is now clear:

n Despite Miller’s protestation, her‘ordeal’ has not been a victory, either forjournalists or for the public;

n As its own belated news coveragenoted, “Neither The Times nor its causehas emerged unbruised. Three courts,including the Supreme Court, declined toback Ms. Miller. Critics said The Times wasprotecting not a whistle-blower but anadministration campaign intended tosquelch dissent. The Times’s coverage ofitself was under assault: While the editori-al page had crusaded on Ms. Miller’s behalf,the news department had more than oncebeen scooped on the paper’s own story,even including the news of Ms. Miller’srelease from jail.”

n Finally, let us not forget, as Miller putit in own words, “W.M.D. – I got it totallywrong. The analysts, the experts and thejournalists who covered them – we were allwrong. If your sources are wrong, you arewrong.”

There’s a lesson in there somewhere –for all of us, even Miss Run Amok…

This and other articles by Rory O’Connorare available on his blog atwww.roryoconnor.com

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