I love Aaron Sorkin's new drama on HBO "The Newsroom."
But I am warning my conservative friends to not get so upset by Aaron Sorkin's opinions that they end up
not watching the show. Truthfully, like so many "progressives" Sorkin is a conservative in the sense that he defends a fictional past as
the time when American's were better, in this case because the press was so much better.
Sorkin's views were clearly stated at the beginning of the pilot which you can
read here where Sorkin explains how to
write effectively. While I got all teary-eyed because it was effective writing,
this is Sorkin's fantasy. As with all fantasies it's a view based on fiction and
even while I was taken in by the emotion I knew rationally that the monologue
was like all propaganda, using some elements of fact mixed with fiction to persuade the listener to believe the fantasy.
History is a continuous line of cause and effect. So it's pretty easy to pick
the monologue apart. First Sorkin sprinkles in some facts:
We're seventh in literacy,
twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in
life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median
household income, number four in labor force, and number four in
exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of
incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe
angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the
next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.
Then he adds the argumentative fiction:
We waged wars on poverty,
not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put
our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We
built great big things, made ungodly technological advances,
explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world's
greatest artists and the world's greatest economy.
Finally, he concludes with a statement about some newsmen who flourished in the period from 1948-72:
And we were able to be all
these things and do all these things because we were informed. By
great men, men who were revered.
The problem is statistically and
anecdotally the facts don't support this view of history.
Sure, we built a huge economy doing the many things he lists. But we beat our
collective chests continuously from 1945 on. And we created many of our current
problems with the best of selfish intentions even though the problems were
foreseeable and, therefore, avoidable if only we
had been informed by the great men of Sorkin's mythical
newsrooms, newsmen who were revered.
While inventing many great things after the WWII, we built ourselves hundreds of
thousands of suburban homes in thousands of Levittown's across the nation
by leveraging government credit through the FHA and VA programs. And by using
government debt we built streets and highways to commute to work in obviously
fuel wasting, polluting automobiles we purchased using private debt. And we beat our chests about these
accomplishments and learned to feel good about being in debt.
Beginning in the 1960's, we stopped putting our money where our mouths were
when the Kennedy Administration began reducing the marginal tax rate. And the
Johnson Administration invented the let's-don't-sacrifice-anything-collectively
"Guns and Butter" economy, not George W. Bush. And so we felt even better about being more in debt.
What Sorkin doesn't say is that me and my generation and he and his generation created a mess for our
grandchildren by "living off the fat of the land" partly because we, in fact,
weren't informed.
In his second episode, Sorkin uses the Arizona immigration law to emphasize how a really good news show might deal with the subject. While the folks in the newsroom screwed up, if they had succeeded the implication was we would have been a much better informed America. But would we have?
Let's look at a longer view of American history and Mexico, which is ignored in the whole
somewhat-silly-picture of the Arizona immigration law Sorkin presented.
Mexicans aren't a people in some country across an
ocean like Italians or Koreans. While we want to define this as a legal issue about immigration, in fact it is a traditional human population "migration"
pattern across some invisible lines on the ground, creating a controversy that based in part on the difference between these two historical maps:
It is a controversy that stems from the Mexican-American War about which
Wikipedia notes in phrasing reminiscent of discussions over many of our much more recent wars:
American territorial
expansion to the Pacific coast had been the goal of President James
K. Polk, the leader of the Democratic Party. However, the war was
highly controversial in the U.S., with the Whig Party and
anti-slavery elements strongly opposed. Heavy American casualties
and high monetary cost were also criticized. The political aftermath
of the war raised the slavery issue in the U.S., leading to intense
debates that pointed to civil war; the Compromise of 1850 provided a
brief respite.
When you take a long view of history, it's not surprising that Arizonan's 160 years after the Mexican-American War
find themselves in the middle of a controversy. It's one a historian could easily
provide comparable scenarios in Europe and Asia dating back thousands of years.
While "progressives" and "conservatives" argue about a law in Arizona, over
periods of decades and centuries people will migrate to wherever they can find a
better life, whether its towards access to more food and other "stuff" or away
from civil wars (such as the one going on in Mexico today). And most assuredly they will do so when it can be done "on foot."
I'm emotionally susceptible to Sorkin's monologues. Sorkin's
fantasy - about an America being informed by a wise and knowledgeable
free press so we can somehow make better decisions - is my fantasy.
But unlike Sorkin, I would assert we've not had that in my lifetime. In my opinion, one of the worst failures of the American
press occurred between 1945-55.
Walter Cronkite, one of those "great men who were revered" was a
journalist I greatly respected. But, I know that the time for
Cronkite to take a hard look at American policy
on Vietnam was in 1945, not in 1968, - when Cronkite belatedly went out to take a look, changed his view on the
Vietnam War, and then told us about it .
It's always the history that we don't know that causes us problems.
Consider the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Most Americans still don't know that from
1911-13, he lived in the United States.
Most Americans still don't know that following World War I, under
the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc he petitioned for recognition of the civil
rights of the Vietnamese people in French Indochina to the Western
powers at the Versailles peace talks, but was ignored. Citing the
language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence,
Quốc petitioned U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to help remove the
French from Vietnam and replace them with a new, nationalist
government. It is said that his failure further radicalized Nguyễn,
while also making him a national hero of the anti-colonial movement
at home in Vietnam.
Following the fall of the Japanese-controlled Empire of
Vietnam in August 1945, the Viet Minh occupied Hanoi and proclaimed
a provisional government, which asserted national independence on
September 2, 1945. This could happen because America's "Greatest
Generation" fought a war in France so people of all nations could determine
their own future ... at least that's what we were told.
But the Provisional French Republic sent the French Far East
Expeditionary Corps – originally created to fight the Japanese
occupation forces – to restore French colonial rule.
This could have
been prevented by the United States at the time. But there was no
Murrow or Cronkite telling us about it. They were focused on Europe.
And they simply did not know that their ignorance could end up in
the death of thousands of young Americans.
After all the lofty language about self-determination that came out
of our collective mouths after WWII, did our failure to stop the
French in the aftermath of WWII make this Vietnamese national hero
more than jaded and angry? Could an informed press told us about it?
Might he not have turned to the Soviet Union for support if we actually did support the idea that people of all nations could determine
their own future?
We'll never really know because Aaron Sorkin's heroic news team
failed to inform us at a critical moment.
Perhaps this is true because while at times individual reporters and photographers can be heroic, but otherwise we expect too much of the press and too little of ourselves when it comes to being informed.
And that's the way it is in my humble opinion, July 3, 2012.
