Moral Clarity: Shatz v. Packer

Adam Shatz, in his "Moral Clarity" (LRB Blog, January 9, 2015), refers to George Packer’s "The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders" (“News Desk,” newyorker.com, January 7, 2015) and accuses Packer of being “bathed in what liberal hawks like to call ‘moral clarity.’ ” Shatz says,

To demonstrate ‘moral clarity’ is to be on the right side, and to show the courage of a fighting faith, rather than the timorous, context-seeking analysis of those soft on what Christopher Hitchens called ‘Islamofascism’. Packer’s New Yorker article is a declaration of this faith, a faith he confuses with liberalism.

Shatz’s attack stems from Packer’s opinion that the Charlie Hebdo murders “are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades.” Packer says,

It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.

Shatz questions what he calls Packer’s “exclusive” focus on radical Islam’s murderous ideology. He says,

In laying exclusive blame for the Paris massacres on the ‘totalitarian’ ideology of radical Islam, liberal intellectuals like Packer explicitly disavow one of liberalism’s great strengths. Modern liberalism has always insisted that ideology can go only so far in explaining behaviour. Social causes matter.

But in fairness to Packer, it should be pointed out that he doesn’t disregard social causes. In his piece, Packer says,

The answer always has to be careful, thoughtful, and tailored to particular circumstances. In France, it will need to include a renewed debate about how the republic can prevent more of its young Muslim citizens from giving up their minds to a murderous ideology—how more of them might come to consider Mustapha Ourrad, a Charlie Hebdo copy editor of Algerian descent who was among the victims, a hero.

But it’s true that Packer sees the Charlie Hebdo killings as an aspect of “a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics.” I think he’s right. As for “moral clarity,” Packer claims no such thing. In fact, in his “Living Up To It” (in his 2009 collection Interesting Times), he says, “Moral clarity is not why we should fight, it is why the other side fights.”

Credit: The above photo of a tribute at the Place de la République, in Paris, to victims killed during the attack at Charlie Hebdo is by Aurelien Meunier; it appears on newyorker.com as an illustration for George Packer’s “The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders” (January 7, 2015).

April 7, 2014 Issue

George Packer, in his absorbing "Home Fires," in this week’s issue, says, “Journalists and historians have to distort war: in order to find the plot – causation, sequence, meaning – they make war more intelligible than it really is.” He mentions several new works – two memoirs (Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country, Benjamin Busch’s Dust to Dust), three poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise, both by Busch, and Kevin Powers’s Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting), a novel (Powers’s The Yellow Birds), and a book of short stories (Phil Klay’s Redeployment) – and says, “Their work lacks context, but it gets closer to the lived experience of war than almost any journalism.” That “almost” is key; without it, Packer’s claim is too sweeping, disregarding, among other masterworks of war reportage, A. J. Liebling’s “Cross- Channel Trip” (The New Yorker, July 1 & 15, 1944), Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc” (The New Yorker, July 15, 1967), C. D. B. Bryan’s “Friendly Fire” (The New Yorker, March 1, 8 & 15, 1976), Neil Sheehan’s “An American Soldier in Vietnam II – A Set Piece Battle” (The New Yorker, June 27, 1988), Jon Lee Anderson’s “Sons of the Revolution” (The New Yorker, May 9, 2011), Nicholas Schmidle’s “Getting Bin Laden” (The New Yorker, August 8, 2011), Dexter Filkins’s “After America” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2012). These pieces put us squarely there – in the assault landings, tank battles, sniper fire, foxholes, night raids, and many other aspects of war reality. Contrary to Packer’s assertion, these powerful works of journalism aren’t “distortions.” The only “plots” they have follow the course of real events. Their factuality gives them an immense edge over fiction and poetry. Far from making war “more intelligible than it really is,” as Packer alleges, they show its chaos and horror. As Liebling says, in the final line of his great “Cross-Channel Trip,” “Anybody who thinks there was a theme song should have his head examined.”   

George Packer's "Washington Man" Revisited

What to make of George Packer’s “Washington Man”? I first read it when it appeared in The New Yorker (October 29 & November 5, 2012). I remember finding it both admirable and repellant: “admirable” in that it excoriates the Obama administration for missing a tremendous opportunity to reform Wall Street; “repellant” because it too closely identifies with its subject, wealthy lobbyist and “professional Democrat” Jeff Connaughton. Now, reading it again, in its expanded form, in Packer’s The Unwinding, I find I still can’t resolve my feelings about it. What it comes down to, I think, is that I’m a fan of Packer’s writing. And in his “Jeff Connaughton” piece, Packer’s voice on the page blends with Connaughton’s. In fiction writing, this is called “free indirect style.” You rarely see it used in fact pieces. Tom Wolfe uses it. He’s the only journalist I can think of who writes free indirect style. It’s very close writing – too close for journalism, in my opinion. For example, in “Washington Man,” when Packer writes,

One day in August, he [Connaughton] was channel-flipping when Glenn Beck came on, telling an immense crowd on the Mall that change didn’t come from Washington; it came from real people in real places around the country. Beck was an asshole, but Arianna Huffington wrote the same thing in a column two days later. They were right. [Interestingly, the book version of this passage concludes with an additional line: “Connaughton felt a sneaking sympathy with the Tea Party.”]

I wonder, Who is talking here – Packer, Connaughton or both? It’s likely Connaughton’s thoughts that are being conveyed. Obviously Packer sympathizes with them. They’re his thoughts, too. That’s basically his theory in a nutshell: change no longer comes from Washington; it’s part of the unwinding – Washington, as Packer/Connaughton says later, “had been captured by the money power.” But it’s not like Packer to concede his perspective to his subject, especially when his subject has shown himself to be an immensely adept opportunist. Maybe, at bottom, that’s what disturbs me about “Washington Man” – the spectacle of a great subjective journalist allowing an “unwinding winner” speak for him. I yearn for the old Packer, the Packer who writes in the “I,” who wrote (say) “A Boulangerie in Lagos” (in The Village of Waiting, 1988), in which his material is sourced in his personal experience:

I’d arrived in time for dinner. I sat with Marcel – I on the couch, he on a Nido can – while Papa fried up the eggs and potatoes. Papa looked about sixty and had a long Gallic face, lined and weathered, all ears and nose. His French came out hoarse from the throat, nearly incomprehensible after years of Africa and Scotch. His hands moved like a short-order cook’s between the pan, the utensils, and his glass of White Horse; he’d been in the food business in Africa for a quarter century. In the refrigerator I saw fresh butter and slabs of frozen steak, hidden luxuries. Marcel put on a tape of King Sunny Ade and the African beats; it was a good machine and the room filled with the sound of juju music, like a fly buzzing near the ear then flitting off.

That “His French came out hoarse from the throat, nearly incomprehensible after years of Africa and Scotch” is very fine – finer than anything in “Washington Man.” I’m talking about the writing as pure writing. Papa is infinitely more interesting than any of the characters in “Washington Man.” He seems rooted in reality – real reality, not like in Washington where fat-cat lobbyists moan about the decline of their investments and the prospect of purchasing a hot dog from a vendor on C Street is considered “dismal.” 

May 27, 2013 Issue

“Change the World,” in this week’s issue, marks George Packer’s welcome return to first-person narrative. The piece’s opening sentence signals the reversion: “In 1978, the year that I graduated from high school, in Palo Alto, the name Silicon Valley was not in use beyond a small group of tech cognoscenti.” I read that and I inwardly cheered: Welcome back, George! “Change the World” is about a group of “Silicon Valley moguls,” including Mark Zuckerberg, who’ve formed a political advocacy group. In Silicon Valley’s world, this is a groundbreaking development. Like his hero, George Orwell, Packer is an inveterate tracker of political currents (in the Introduction of his 2009 collection Interesting Times, he writes, “My ambition as a journalist is always to combine narrative writing with political thought”). He’s fascinated by Silicon Valley’s libertarianism, particularly its emphasis on less politics. He vividly showed this in his previous Silicon Valley piece, “No Death, No Taxes,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, a profile of billionaire techie, Peter Thiel (“Escaping from politics is a libertarian’s right and a billionaire’s privilege”). Packer is allergic to Thiel’s anti-political thinking. Near the end of “No Death, No Taxes,” he writes, “The next great technological revolution might be around the corner, but it won’t automatically improve most people’s lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly, but also inescapable. The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.” Packer further develops this theme in “Change the World,” where he says, “Technology can be an answer to incompetence and inefficiency. But it has little to say about larger issues of justice and fairness, unless you think that political problems are bugs that can be fixed by engineering rather than fundamental conflicts of interest and value.” However, in “Change the World,” he’s got a fresh actuality to consider – the rise of FWD.us, the Silicon Valley political-advocacy group organized by Zuckerberg and other fat Valley plutocrats to push for immigration reform. You can tell that Packer has mixed feelings about this development. On the one hand, he shows that the motivations of FWD.us’s founders are (to borrow Marc Andreessen’s memorable phrase, quoted by Packer) “relentlessly self-interested.” On the other hand, he sees the Valley’s decision to enter the political arena in order to effect change as an advance on its heretofore escapist libertarian thinking. In the last sentence of his piece, he says, “But if Silicon Valley’s idea of itself as a force for irresistible progress is running up against the unlovely reality of current American politics, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might mean that the industry is growing up.”

“Change the World” is a brilliant pointillist construction of a variety of glinting materials - talks with Silicon Valley leaders and thinkers (e.g., Marc Andreessen, Joe Green, Reid Hoffman, Gavin Newsom, Joshua Cohen) visits to various locations (e.g., Apple University, a private club called Founders Den, Andreeseen’s office on Sand Hill Road, a café in San Francisco’s Mission District), quotes from various publications (e.g., a London Review of Books article by Rebecca Solnit, Alexandra Lange’s The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, Gavin Newsom’s Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government). My favorite passage in “Change the World” is Packer’s description of the Woodside School Foundation gala, which, in its over-the-top extravagance, could be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Jay Gatsby’s decadent East Egg parties:

I attended it two years ago, when the theme was RockStar, and one of Google’s first employees sat at my table after performing in a pickup band called Parental Indiscretion. School benefactors, dressed up as Tina Turner or Jimmy Page, and consuming Jump’n Jack Flash hanger steaks, bid thirteen thousand dollars for Pimp My Hog! (“Ride through town in your very own customized 1996 Harley Davidson XLH1200C Sportster”) and twenty thousand for a tour of the Japanese gardens on the estate of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and the country’s highest-paid chief executive. The climax arrived when a Mad Men Supper Club dinner for sixteen guests – which promised to transport couples back to a time when local residents lived in two-thousand-square-foot houses – sold for forty-three thousand dollars.

Money is, of course, a major source of power, but it isn’t the only one. Journalism, when it’s written as effectively as Packer writes it, in “Change the World,” is a potent influence, too.

October 29 & November 5, 2012 Issue

There are two very different narrative methods on display in this week’s issue. Dexter Filkins’s brilliant “Atonement” uses first-person narration. George Packer’s equally brilliant “Washington Man” uses third-person narration. First-person narration strikes me as more reliable, and I generally prefer it. I am speaking here solely with respect to factual writing, not fiction. As Russell Baker observed in his essay on A. J. Liebling (“A Great Reporter at Large,” The New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004), “Liebling was almost always present in his reporting. It is a way of treating readers with respect. A glimpse of the party who is doing the reporting helps the reader judge how far he can be trusted.” Filkins’s remarkable piece is almost a form of memoir. It’s about an Iraq veteran named Lu Lobello and his quest for absolution from the Kachadoorian family, three of whom were killed by Lobello’s unit in a chaotic Baghdad firefight. Lobello contacted Nora Kachadoorian, whom he remembered from the battle, on Facebook. He also contacted Filkins who’d written about the Kachadoorians’ tragedy in the New York Times and asked him to arrange a meeting with the family. “Atonement” is Filkins’s firsthand account of that meeting. It’s a tremendously moving piece that cuts from the present (Lobello’s search for the Kachadoorians) to the past (Lobello and Filkins in Baghdad, 2003) and back to the present (Lobello and Filkins visiting Margaret and Nora Kachadoorian in La Jolla). One of its most interesting aspects is Filkins’s attempt to fathom what happened during “the firefight on Baladiyat Street.” He writes, “It is difficult to know exactly what happened on April 8, 2003. But, as I talked to the Kachadoorians and Lobello, and a half a dozen other members of Fox Company, it became clear that things were far worse than anyone had acknowledged at first.” “Atonement” contains and conveys not only Lobello’s story, but also Filkins’s pursuit of that story. As Richard Brody recently said of Jia Zhanghki’s 24 City, “it has its footnotes built into it” (“Ben Affleck’s Argo and Hollywood Nostalgia,” “The Front Row,” newyorker.com, October 12, 2012).

In contrast, George Packer’s “Washington Man” is a classic example of what Brody calls “external storytelling.” It’s written with superb authority, but the author doesn’t enter into it. Packer doesn’t use the first person pronoun even once. It’s a profile of Washington insider Jeff Connaughton. Except for the occasional “As Connaughton later wrote” and “As Connaughton recalled,” Packer rarely indicates his sources. Most of the story appears to have come directly from Connaughton. Packer’s identification with Connaughton’s point of view is extremely close. So close that Packer, at times, seems to be writing free indirect speech. For example, Packer writes,

One day in August, he was channel-flipping when Glenn Beck came on, telling an immense crowd on the Mall that change didn’t come from Washington; it came from real people in real places around the country. Beck was an asshole, but Arianna Huffington wrote the same thing in a column two days later. They were right.

Who owns these words – Packer or Connaughton? It’s Packer who’s writing them, but it sounds like Connaughton. The passage is an example of free indirect speech. It’s the first time I’ve seen it used in a New Yorker profile. I’m not sure its use should be encouraged. Packer’s words seem to have become inflected by his subject’s. Does he think Beck is an asshole? Does he think Beck and Huffington were right? Or is he simply reporting what Connaughton thinks? It’s unclear.

That said, I confess I found “Washington Man” irresistible. Even though it’s a long piece, I couldn’t stop reading until I finished it. It’s an exciting, vivid, inside story about how Washington has been captured by the “money power.” Packer’s/Connaughton’s view that “One fastball at Wall Street’s chin – a few top executives going to jail – could have had more effect than all the regulations combined” is my view. I silently cheered as I read it.

George Packer: The Breaking of Style

George Packer’s gone objective, and it’s affected his tone. It’s like he’s switched from tenor sax to clarinet. His colors aren’t as warm or rich. He’s shriller. In 2003, when he started out with the magazine, his style was literary, descriptive, and gloriously subjective. Remember his great “Gangsta War” (The New Yorker, November 3, 2003)? Its opening line is classic Packer: “From my balcony on the eighth floor of the Hotel Ivoire, I could see downtown Abidjan across the lagoon in the mist.” Remember his brilliant “The Playing Field” (The New Yorker, August 30, 2004)? Reading it was like being in the company of a lively, adventurous flâneur (e.g., “To watch the Costa Rica game, I rode the metro down to the stadium with a group of four young Iraqis”). Remember “The Moderate Martyr” (The New Yorker, September 11, 2006), which contained such inspired details as Hasan al-Turabi’s “flower-patterned polyester socks”? That was amazing! Remember his superb “The Ponzi Scheme” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009)? It’s narrated in the first person (e.g., “Recently, I drove around some of the subdivisions on State Road 54, as well as in other parts of Tampa Bay and in southwest Florida”), as is his terrific profile of the Israeli novelist David Grossman, “The Unconsoled” (The New Yorker, September 27, 2010): “When I visited, in July, the phone was constantly ringing, a cockatiel was singing in its cage, and Ruthi was practicing 'Good Vibrations' on the piano, while Michael and Jonathan came in and out of the living room.” These pieces all have a voice as well as an effect. But last year, Packer changed his style. He banished his “I” to the margins and adopted a flat, third-person perspective. “A Dirty Business” (The New Yorker, June 27, 2011), “Coming Apart” (The New Yorker, September 12, 2011), “No Death, No Taxes” (The New Yorker, November 28, 2011), and “All the Angry People” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011) are all essentially third-person reports. They’re less descriptive and more argumentative. I’m not the only one who's noticed this. Regarding “No Death, No Taxes,” a profile of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the blog “Reading the New Yorker” (readingthenewyorker.com) recently observed: “Unfortunately, writer George Packer didn’t do himself any favors by turning the last page into an anti-Thiel rant.” Of course, we can’t expect great writers to stand still stylistically. Look at how Norman Mailer deliberately roughened the prose of The Deer Park because he found the first draft “too self-consciously attractive and formal, false to the life of my characters, especially false to the life of my narrator who was the voice of my novel and so gave the story its air” (see Mailer’s extraordinary essay, “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” included in his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself). But it’s hoped that the new style will be more satisfactory than the old. It was in Mailer’s case; it’s not in Packer’s. In “The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” Mailer says, “The most powerful leverage in fiction comes from point of view.” The same is true of journalism. I hope Packer gets back to first-person narration, of which he’s a master. I hope he gets back to limning cool details. I hope he gets back to describing the pattern of people’s socks.

Credit: The above artwork is by Mark Ulriksen; it appears in The New Yorker (November 3, 2003) as an illustration for George Packer's "Gangsta War."