The Paper of Record, Ha ha ha ha / gary indiana
“No one makes a concise case for her art”
“Evidence did not suggest that the rampage had been an act of terrorism”
What constitutes an “act of terrorism”? Would the “mistake” of shooting down a civilian Airbus passing over the Persian Gulf qualify as an act of terrorism? A drone aircraft bombing a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan? Just what is terror, terrorization, and what is it intended to accomplish?
An Army psychiatrist “facing deployment to a war zone” runs amok on a military base in Texas, perpetrating “one of the worst mass shootings ever on an American military base.”
Let’s look at that phraseology and ponder, for a moment, the richness of implication larded into it. The perp being described is, by definition, not a terrorist, because he’s an American Army psychiatrist. In other words, a person with a medical degree who has carte blanche to dispense the dazzling array of pharmaceutical products manufactured to induce the illusion of normality in persons indisposed to regard their endless recycling from one war zone to another as “normality.”
A bit further on in this article of November 6, 2009 in The New York Times, we find this remarkable utterance by someone identified as Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone: “Horrible as this was, I think it could have been much worse.”
This is merely a quotidian example of what The New York Times routinely deems an act of thinking. The aptly named General Cone, of course, cannot be faulted for his choice of words, which, in any case, has undoubtedly been altered by reporter Robert D. McFadden—virtually no one, and I include myself, has ever been accurately quoted by The New York Times, since the long-vanished era when The Times published, at great length, actual transcripts of interrogations, trials, documents of a politically significant nature such as the Pentagon Papers: even a reporter quite friendly to me has twice garbled, in the paper of record, utterances that consisted of no more than two brief, consecutive sentences. As I am hardly a person frequently or even seasonally quoted in The New York Times, I leave it to the reader to imagine how routinely those who are often tapped for their “thoughts” are transformed into glove puppets by the ever-diminishing reporting staff of a newspaper currently funded by the thug who owns Mexican Telecom, who stepped into the breach with laundered narcotics money when the ostensible owners of The New York Times, the Sulzberger Family—about which, more anon—discovered that their cash cow was bleeding profusely from numerous self-inflicted wounds.
The rampage at Ft. Hood, “one of the worst” mass shootings on an American military base, was implicitly one among many, yet Robert McFadden’s article, rather than identify other mass shootings on American military bases, deigns to identify in “compare and contrast” fashion the killing of 13 people at an immigration center in upstate New York earlier in 2009, and the killing of 32 people in a classroom at Virginia Polytechnical Institute in 2007.
Here, clearly, is where the superannuated enterprise from which the elite classes, America’s purported intellectual classes, derives its opinions tips its hand. The Army base shooting reminds the reporter of other mass shootings that have only an adhesively conjured relationship to the mass shooting under scrutiny; the “normality” of mass shootings qua mass shootings, and their underlying pathology, is taken for granted as a staple of American society, akin to various brands of toilet tissue or toothpaste. Rather than an examination of what could possibly trigger mass shootings on American military bases, by American military personnel, the consumers of the Times are treated to the reporter’s invocation of statistical casualties in recent domestic mass killings which did not happen to involve military personnel, but simply exemplify the ease with which weapons of all sorts, including military ones, may be obtained by any American citizen, or subject, for the purpose of stocking a home arsenal and one day running amok among whatever group of people he—it is, invariably, a he—is nurturing a resentment towards.
In other words, the taking of many human lives by a free-lance murderer is without cause, “senseless,” and, ergo, whatever venue the enterprising free-lancer vents his rage in is a relative matter. From the point of view of Westchester County, the venue can be considered almost arbitrary.
I shall attempt a bit further on to draw some salient connections between this debased form of news reporting to the linguistic tactics employed in the Times’s cultural pages, and an article in the same issue of the New York Times crayoned by its current premier art reviewer, Roberta Smith, in itself by no means anomalous or arbitrary, but an effusion of ressentiment of a somewhat different flavor than the physical slaughters described in what used to be known as the above-the-fold news reporting; I assure you that these connections are not the product of free association a la reporter McFadden, but dots that any sentient individual ought to be able to connect without assistance. But let’s stay with General Cone, the perp at Ft. Hood—one Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan—and the Times’s account of Maj. Hasan’s killing spree for a bit.
Major Dr. Hasan, we’re told from the get-go, was “facing deployment to a war zone.” “Investigators,” unnamed, had, on November 6th, begun “piecing together how and why” the Ft. Hood massacre occurred. These anonymous investigators have, as per McFadden, commenced their scrutiny of the incident with what has to be the most irrelevant area of inquiry: whether Mr. Major Doctor Hasan “had registered the two handguns used in the shooting.”
Irrelevant, but hardly arbitrary. “He could have just brought it [sic] onto the installation,” a Col. John Rossi, Army spokesperson, is quoted or misquoted in McFadden’s article as having told the reporter. Meaning the two handguns Hasan used to murder twelve soliders and one civilian and wound 28 other human beings.
Crisis management and damage control are not the strong suits of the American military establishment, but the effort underway is a sincere one. It would be salubrious for the Army if it were established that Major Doctor Mr. Hasan brought the weapons onto the Army base from outside the base, rather than pilfered them from a weapons depot on the base itself, or had them issued to him by the Army, either in preparation for his looming deployment to a war zone or simply as tools of last resort in his capacity as an Army psychiatrist. Maj. Dr. Mr. Hasan, himself shot by a “first-responder”, a woman “wounded in the exchange,” has survived his own rampage, albeit in a condition less than virgo intacto, as he is now “on a ventilator…but in stable condition.”
Consider how the tiles begin clicking into place when, in the third paragraph of McFadden’s story, a retired Army colonel is reported to have said that Major Hasan—who is referred to willy-nilly as “Mr. Hasan,” or “Major Hasan,” but never once as “Dr. Hasan”—“had voiced the hope that President Obama would pull American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan [and] had argued with military colleagues who supported the wars and had tried to prevent his own deployment.” That would be Major Dr. Mr. Hasan’s deployment. Note the grammatical and syntactical slippages that now run rampant throughout the paper: did Hasan try to prevent his own deployment, or did the colleagues he argued with? This is hardly a mere quibble: it makes a world of difference, in understanding the circumstances, which it was.
We’re next informed that a “widespread” investigation is being conducted by the military, the FBI, and, presumably coordinating these and the inquiries of “other agencies”---which other agencies?—is none other than that brainchild of Administrations past, the Department of Homeland Security.
What does the capo di cosi fan tutti of the current Administration have to say about the Ft. Hood slaughter by Dr. Major Hasan? Well, for starters, President Obama, referred to as “Mr. Obama,” characterizes the massacre as “a horrific outburst of violence,” and, in the reporter’s account, “urges Americans to pray for those who were killed and wounded.”
Next, the hoof-and-mouth disease afflicting our first African-American-Hawaiian President manifests itself for all to read. “It is difficult enough when we lose these men and women in battles overseas…It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil.”
As opposed, one surmises, to men and women coming under fire at one of the thousands of American military bases spread all over the planet, from Kazhakstan to Diego Garcia to Antarctica to every sovereign nation in the EU, South Asia, Korea, Japan, the Middle East with the exception of Iran, and—well, just stick a thumbtack into a world map while blindfolded and you’re likely to pinpoint the proximity if not the actual location of an American military base. The word “soil,” incidentally, is virtually never used to describe the physical surface of a nation state except in instances where military atrocities have taken place, or, less frequently, when a visiting Pope, alighting from an aircraft, prostrates himself in order to kiss the tarmac of a high security airport landing strip.
“Military records indicated that Major Hasan was single, had been born in Virginia, had never served abroad and listed ‘no religious preference’ on his personnel records. Three other soldiers, their roles unclear, were taken into custody in connection with the rampage.”
The plot, as it were, now thickens into obfuscatory glop. The fact, if it is one, that Major Hasan was unmarried is dropped in to stimulate speculations of sundry kinds, from “homo” to “deranged loner,” and his lack of any religious parti pris will instantly resonate against the President’s exhortation for Americans to “pray,” not only for the wounded, but for the dead—implying an afterlife, in which said prayers have either redemptive or therapeutic utility, or both.
In any reputable investigation, the ancillary detainment of those three other soldiers, “their roles unclear,” would not be tossed out to the press as bits of cud for the public to masticate while their unclear roles in the massacre, if any, became clarified. The motivation of Dr. Mr. Major Hasan may or may not hinge upon whether these three, presumably not on a respirator, assisted Hasan as he went about his homicidal business, supplied him with the handguns, or engaged in “loose talk” which a third party may have transformed on his or her own initiative into complicity with the perp.
Here is where those endless pages of transcripts the Times published in its days as a legitimate purveyor of news become most conspicuous by their absence. You can take it as given that whatever the three soldiers impart to their multi-agency interrogators will never appear in the form of verbatim transcripts. Given the steep decline in veracity or even plausibility the Times’s news reporting has undergone over the last thirty years, any reference to the three soldiers “taken into custody” may well disappear from whatever follow-up stories the Times chooses to foist upon an amnesiac and, let’s face it, indifferent public.
To recapitulate somewhat: an atheist or agnostic Army psychiatrist who reputedly opposed America’s military follies in Iraq and Afghanistan goes on a killing spree on an Army base. Whether this military psychiatrist acted alone or in concert with others, his lunacy or their conspiracy serve equally well to fortify support of our two most prominently advertised ongoing wars; only a maniac or a cabal of the state’s enemies within the Army would have the temerity to oppose the mass killings our military establishment is engaged in.
Let us now turn to, of all things, an art review filed by Roberta Smith in the same November 6, 2009 issue of The New York Times. Here is the indefatigable Ms. Smith’s opening salvo in a jesuitically slimy attack upon the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of works by the artist Roni Horn—an attack, that’s to say, upon the very person of artist Roni Horn, woven with all the guile and ascerbity the ever-dreary Roberta Smith is capable of mustering: “Sometimes it seems as if Roni Horn’s art were considered the greatest thing since sliced bread, at least in certain regions of the art world.”
It’s superfluous to parse the acrimony, condescension, and hubristic bile compressed into this opening sentence. What Ms. Smith is really up to is quickly revealed in the subsequent three sentences: “Right now, the Whitney Museum is one. It has accorded two floors to Ms. Horn’s exhibition of sculpture, drawings, photographs and artist’s books, which is one floor too many. In places the show is so spaciously installed that her work looks lost.”
An important American cultural institution has dared to present an exhibition that does not meet with the approval of Ms. Smith and those exalted regions of the art world in which Ms. Smith enjoys the status of gatekeeper, dictator of opinion and taste, aesthetic gauleiter. This transgression is particularly objectionable because, as soon becomes obvious, Ms. Smith has what my father would’ve described as a hair across her ass vis-à-vis the artist whose work Ms. Smith is “reviewing.” Intoxicated by the institutional power Ms. Smith wields as the lead critic for the Times—that is to say, an institutional power which the lead critic for the Times no longer possesses in an art world that has slipped out of the stranglehold the Times, once upon a time, was able to exercise on any artistic endeavor—the intrepid Ms. Smith forges ahead with a grotesque and blatant display of folie de grandeur, its subtext of bitterness and personal animus against Roni Horn herself as plain as the nose attached to Ms. Smith’s generally unhappy visage.
Every vaporous notion that passes through Ms. Smith’s mind and appears without benefit of reflection of any sort in her “review” has the same baseless, weirdly manipulative, jargon-ridden quality we find in Robert D. McFadden’s reporting of the mayhem at Ft. Hood. While the subject matter of the two stories is entirely different, the absence of any cerebral activity on the part of either writer is the same.
“Sometimes it seems,” “it seems excessive,” “even more symptomatic,” “an admittedly luscious, 4-by-five-cube,” “If Ms. Horn has been given too much acreage in the galleries, she dominates the catalogue”—all this “seeming” has no legible grounding in anything resembling a credible point of view, “admittedly” is one of myriad examples of grudging amelioration of Ms. Smith’s vicious pathology, “If Ms. Horn has been given too much acreage”, etc., takes for granted that Ms. Smith’s initial assertion that the show occupies “one floor too many” is a proven fact rather than simply the opinion of Ms. Smith.
It is the language of coercion, of intimidation, in this instance the veritable shreik of someone whose absolute authority has met with defiance by an artist, a museum, the artist’s work: Ms. Smith’s fantasy that Roni Horn’s exhibition has been contrived with Ms. Smith’s approval or disapproval in mind, that Ms. Horn’s work as assembled at the Whitney has anything whatever to do with the direction in which Ms. Smith’s opposable thumb might be pointed, belongs to an occult realm where absolutely anything can be asserted about anything with utter impunity.
By tapping into this realm, Ms. Smith extracts from it a veritable smorgasbord of buzz phrases, cliches, weasel words and passages of such baffling obtusity that all clarity, cogitation, and any sort of aesthetic sense is shown to be beyond Ms. Smith’s grasp, though she exhibits an adroit capacity for grasping at straws, any straws, that might lend an air of knowingness to her apparently hermetic incomprehension of any art object that her gaze encounters.
Ms. Smith is a writer of twaddle. It was, for a long time, and occasionally still is, innocuous twaddle, and were it always such, one could simply dismiss it as the blathering of a constipated schoolmarm and leave the poor thing to churn it out without commenting on it. However, in her increasingly frequent eruptions of vehemence, Ms. Smith has arrived at that sorry pass where “the house critic” with institutional backing becomes a public menace.
“Ms. Horn’s work has both benefited and suffered from what might be called ‘curators’ art.’ ‘Curators’ art is indisputably, even innocuously, elegant—with clear roots in Minimal and Conceptual Art and not much else.”
This is twaddle of truly tawdry coin, the winsome little tweak of Smith minting, if indeed she has, the term ‘curators’s art’ reflecting Roberta Smith’s dim idea of wit. Oh, and really? Roots in Minimal and Conceptual art and not much else? Why, then, does Smith’s subsequent paragraph dilate on the following: “For example, Ms. Horn, who is gay, prides herself on her androgyny. With her closely cropped hair and sports jackets and pants, she almost passes for a man. She has linked her use of doubled forms or images and the ambiguity of many of her pieces to androgyny. Consequently, her work has been seen as an indirect form of identity art.”
The terms “curators’s art,” “identity art,” indeed every word of this paragraph is entirely meaningless. The flourishes of Smith’s specialty: winking to whatever ghastly suburbanite constituency consumes her writing, telegraphic banalities, phrases that provide an artspeak of “smart for the stupid”; Smith knows that her job depends upon marginalizing anyone who can’t be easily assimilated to the cozy middle-class bubble that she and her readers inhabit, and, as if to prove the point, her next paragraph begins, “Ms. Horn’s art has a niche in art history.” A little niche, thank you.
Smith’s resentment against women artists who can write about their own work or anything else far better than Smith can write anything has been in evidence for the eon of the void, but it may also have some relevance here that at one juncture in Smith’s surprisingly rich erotic life, in her faraway fuckable days, she was banging Donald Judd, who happened to have had a brief friendship with Roni Horn. And so it goes. That’s where the calculated “Conceptual and Minimalist roots” derive from in Smith’s hackery here, rather than any detached scrutiny of Horn’s art.
Smith’s review of Roni Horn’s exhibition would certainly merit use of the term vagina dentata if Smith’s snatch had any teeth left in it, but the more important point is that this is what the Times has degenerated into: a platform for questionable reporting of news, and, in its “cultural pages,” a venue in which mediocrities inflict their absurdities on artists and writers who don’t happen to conform to a Westchester County, ant farm conception of the universe. In the Op-Ed section, contributions from tame catamites and fifth-rate novelists, preferably ethnic, to provide the illusion of wide diversity in its parochial range of permissible opinion. Colson Whitehead springs to mind, if only because he’s dropped a few of his wry little nuggets of misfired humor in the Op-Ed pages lately.
In the next installment of this essay, I shall discuss the Sulzberger Family and its rich, sordid history.
