Notebook, April 2016

Harvesting the little notebooks I often carry, filled with scribbles of words -- some mine, some others -- that seemed urgent and then are forgotten until I return to a stack of the notebooks, looking for something I can't quite remember. Was this it? This? This?

Notes from a little yellow pocket notebook I carried during April 2016.

: "...a place for the profane as a theological weapon..." -- my friend Rev. Osagyego Uhuru Sekou, visiting my friend Aimee Bahng's #BlackLivesMatter class, talking about protesting in Ferguson -- putting his body into police power to keep his soul free.

: "The Pascalian wager of attempting to prick the conscience of a state that might not have one." -- Sekou.

: "Working within the illusion of constitutional restraints" -- Sekou, on the protest as a means of imagining state power curbed.

: "Behomithic" -- a word invented by John Comerci, a student in the advanced literary journalism course I teach at Dartmouth

: "When you're confronted with absence you can make a world of it." -- Sarah M. Broom, visiting my "Raising the Dead" class to talk about her forthcoming book, The Yellow House, built around her New Orleans family house destroyed by Katrina.

: "A fact is not a story." -- Sarah M. Broom

: "A house is like a child." -- Sarah M. Broom

: My thesis student, Mary Liza Hartong, writing a comedic novel talks with me about improv shortly after I return from reporting on several Trump rallies. Mary Liza thinks Trump's doing improv. Improv as demonstration of confidence, confidence not undermined but proven by the comedian's ability to roll past "jokes" that fall flat. Confidence demonstrated by the display of vulnerability inherent to improv. As if Trump says, I'm so powerful I can be vulnerable in front of you -- even my vulnerability is invulnerable. Or: Listen close, true believers, because you'll get what outsiders won't: Here I am, power incarnate, giving you my intimacy.

What I Read Instead of Work, 1/5/13

Not-work is a subtle exercise. Sometimes work can creep up on you. This morning I accidentally woke up early and read George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss to put me back to sleep. But I love George Eliot now like I loved Tolkien when I was twelve, and pretty soon I was so happy with words I decided I could do some work. That meant re-reading, for the fourth time, James Baldwin's "Down at the Cross." Which provoked a perusal of Cornel West's 1982 first book, Prophesy Deliverance! The combination resulted in the mini-essay I needed to write on Baldwin for an anthology of literary journalism, the essay that had been defeating me for weeks. I should have kept going--next up was a mini-essay on Mailer's Armies of the Night--but I decided to take a break with Lucas Mann's excellent forthcoming book of literary journalism, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere. I could justify this as part-work, since I'd promised to write a blurb for the book, but the truth is it was a pleasure I didn't want to interrupt with a re-reading of Mailer.

I decided to relocate to my office. I don't have internet at home--to save me from even further distraction--so the first thing I did was look at the New York Times. "Just the headlines," I told myself. But how could I resist "Former CIA Officer is the First to Face Prison for a Classified Leak," especially since it led with a happy photo of said spook putting a sneaker on his laughing 8-year-old daughter, a sure sign that his imprisonment is an injustice. Or that the NYT thinks so.

A passing reference to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in the article caught my interest -- the spy had been invited to teach there, and had even taught Liberty U students surveillance techniques in Washington. It wasn't hard to find a picture of the class, which suggests that these students may not have such stellar careers in front of them. From there I wandered around the spy studies programs of Liberty and even further right Patrick Henry College, both dedicated to applying a "Christian worldview" to intelligence work. Their faculties are full of retired heavies with still-active consulting gigs, and their alumni seem to get placed. I justified my digression by tweeting it. Maybe somebody will do some actual journalism.

Back to Mailer, only to be interrupted by an essay by my pal Nathan Schneider, author of a great forthcoming book called God in Proof.

Back to Mailer. Phone call. Need to get my head back into the work. How? By poking around the internet, of course, and landing on this: "Be Wrong as Fast as You Can," by Hugo Lindgren, on work that never gets written.

Journalists & Stenographers

Since, sadly, I'm not a graduate of what Jeremy Scahill calls the "Joe Klein/David Brooks/Peggy Noonan School for Caviar Correspondents," I've only met Brooks, the special subject of Scahill's contempt for his recent NYT column declaring that the duty of journalists is to keep the secrets of their fellow members of the ruling class. (The dereliction of this duty that provoked Brooks to re-swear his allegiance to the Beltway was Michael Hastings' exposure of General McChrystal in Rolling Stone.) My brief meeting with Brooks was at a junket in Key West sponsored by a conservative think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Since EPPC had gathered its flock (besides Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Elisabeth Bumiller, and reporters and editors from all the other usual suspects) with money from the Pew Trust, and I was also on the Pew teat at the time through the NYU Center for Religion and Media, I got an invite to "observe." That meant a chair against the wall, in which I was to sit quietly. All the better to marvel at caviar correspondents new, old, and converted -- the last of these being Christopher Hitchens, who proposed loyalty oaths for American Muslims, a position that allowed Brooks to play his favorite position: Liberal. Not that he is liberal. His specialty is in moving the spectrum so far rightward that he looks broadminded by comparison.

But "Hitch," as those who claim to know Hitchens call him (I don't) was, apparently, determined to test Brooks' liberalism. My memory is shaky here, because while I wasn't allowed to talk with the VIPs during session was I encouraged to drink, heavily, with them afterwards, but as I recall Brooks' wife was there and some journalist for some wonk magazine -- I don't remember who -- wove over to Brooks, holding forth on "respectability," or "the vital center" or some such -- to warn him that Hitchens was over by the rail of the dock with Brooks' wife, seemingly determined to seduce her or tumble into the water.

What is the point of this story beyond gossip about the mandarins? Nothing other than that it's a fine example of what Brooks says journalists shouldn't do: Tell tales about people more important than them. To be honest, I tried not to at the time; I thought this short report for my Pew-funded project was very respectful. I did say host EPPC and its leader, Michael Cromartie had created an amiable forum -- Brooks' wife, as far I know, went back to the Brooks' room, and Hitchens went back to his bottle.

But Cromartie didn't think so. Maybe that's because he plays a significant part in the archives of the Family, a group which had decided I was no good after I'd first published on them in Harper's. At the time, Cromartie told me I'd gotten it right -- that their theology was sort of a vapid, perverted Buddhism. But later he popped up in a "review" -- the sort that invites the subjects of a book to talk back -- by yet another attendee of that Key West junket, Jay Tolson. Cromartie said nasty things about my book, but that's not breaking the rules, since I'm not important in Washington. (Or anywhere, really, except maybe my apartment when my daughter wants to go to the park.) But I knew we were on the outs long before that -- I never got invited back to Key West, and he wouldn't return my phone calls. That's saying something for a man who makes his living trying to influence journalists. I'm not even worth influencing. Thank God.

But David Brooks is. "So much of what is wrong with journalism today can be gleaned from a simple RSS subscription to David Brooks's columns," writes Scahill, author of the investigative bestseller Blackwater.

In his world, those who have access to the powerful guard their darkest secrets--not their affairs or infidelities or alcohol problems [those, too, actually; journos love trading naughty tales they'll never print lest they lose access to the sources of their copy], but the kinds of views McChrystal and his aides expressed in Hastings' article, the kind of conduct they condone and order in US wars. In a responsible society, one with a vibrant and independent press, the job of journalists should be to hold those in power accountable. Part of the job of journalists is to do precisely what Hastings did--catch powerful figures in their true element, not simply portray their crafted public personas and loyally transcribe their prepared public statements. "McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched," Brooks writes. "And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter."

To Brooks, Hastings's conduct was a part of the decay of the private, sacred relationship between the press and the powerful.