Point Austin: Public Accuracy

I momentarily considered calling this column the "Wisdom of Solomon," but that seemed not only too cute but also not in keeping with the straightforward, unadorned manner of Norman Solomon's approach to reporting and writing. There is little of the conventional op-ed pontificator in Solomon's books or his "Media Beat" columns on media and politics. He doesn't go looking for "broad trends" or "big ideas"; he just reports relentlessly on his chosen subjects, most centrally the permanent U.S. war culture and the subservient media culture that feed on and sustain each other. Here he is a few days ago, on the slippery comparisons of the war on Iraq and the war on Vietnam: "We keep hearing that Iraq is not Vietnam. And surely any competent geographer would agree. But the United States is the United States – still a country run by leaders who brandish, celebrate, and use the massive violent capabilities of the Pentagon as a matter of course."

That passage represents, in a nutshell, the Solomon method, which is not arcane. He simply insists on keeping his focus where it should remain, in this case on the primary war-maker in both Vietnam and Iraq (not to mention a myriad of less notorious because more "successful" military actions in between): the U.S. government, through many and bipartisan administrations. In the conventional media approach, our always well-intentioned wars of aggression are misfortunes that "happen" to us, and having stumbled unwillingly into them, we are unable to "extricate" ourselves and find ourselves desperate for an "exit strategy" – which never quite involves an actual exit. So it is that Iraq has now become a Vietnam-like "quagmire," in which the poor U.S. military is up to its knees in muck not of its own making but instead somehow to be blamed on its Iraqi victims.

For Solomon, the primary question is not what Iraq has done to the U.S. but what the U.S. has done to Iraq. This seems so elementary that one might think it would go without saying. Yet compare only the common media devotion to the reporting of U.S. military casualties – real and terrible enough but barely a weight on the scales next to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed and the millions brutalized or sent into exile, as a direct and inevitable consequence of the entirely illegal U.S. invasion. How often does the mainstream U.S. media even mention the latter?

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Uneasy Life

Solomon tries to make certain that such attention is paid. That's in keeping with one of his favorite (although also much neglected) quotations from Martin Luther King. In 1967, King emphasized the necessity of denouncing unprovoked violence wherever it occurs: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government." In the decades since, King's judgment has only been reinforced by subsequent U.S. aggression all over the world – and the parallel persistent and necessary refusal to recognize it for what it is, either by officials, their spokesmen, or their media enablers.

That grim reality is much of the subject of Made Love, Got War, Solomon's just-published intellectual autobiography, as well as War Made Easy, the documentary film he also made this year with the Media Education Foundation. As its title suggests, Made Love is sort of a first-person history of the valiant failures of what is sometimes called the anti-war generation – often blamed for what is sneeringly called the "Vietnam Syndrome" but which in fact can count few successes in even slowing the relentless post-Vietnam U.S. war machine. Solomon was born in 1951 and has been a writer and activist since he was a teenager – so he has a ringside memory of the battles for civil rights, against nuclear armaments, against the Vietnam War, and against all that war's subsequent imperial offspring. He also paints an unstinting but unbowed portrait of the limitations and failures of these movements – yet still imbued with implacable determination, as he closes: "If we want a future that sustains life, we better create it ourselves."

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Getting It Right

Although I've called it an autobiography, there is relatively little of personal incident in Made Love, Got War (rather impersonally subtitled, Close Encounters With America's Warfare State). Yet those are some of the most affecting moments. I learned that at age 14, Solomon's picketing of a segregated Maryland housing complex apparently got him an FBI file; and that a little later, he distributed gubernatorial election fliers on behalf of the less-racist Republican "moderate": Spiro Agnew. (Perhaps he understands how Hillary Clinton began, as a Barry Goldwater enthusiast, although with considerably less sympathy.) And I even discovered that he once wrote actually passable Shakespearean verse in an anti-war parody with the unfortunate title of "King Lethal."

Through years of activist and reportorial energy, Solomon has been one of the handful of radical (i.e., "root") critics of U.S. foreign and domestic policy who hasn't drifted into accommodation or irrelevance. A decade ago he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, a small nonprofit news and analysis agency that does its best to counter, on a systematic, persistent, and quite effective basis, the prevailing media culture of devotion to the official story and submission to the prevailing public winds.

"Public Accuracy" – that's a modest enough but indispensable goal for any reporter and a title quite honorable enough to affix to Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon will speak at 7pm tonight, Thursday, Oct. 25, on 50 Years of the Warfare State, at UT's Thompson Conference Center 1.110 (next to the LBJ School). I'll see you there. Send your own intellectual autobiographies to "Point Austin" at [email protected].