A month or so ago I found myself in the local Border's, walking the aisles waiting for something or someone, and happened to see Mark Danner's book displayed on one of the shelves. This surprised me at the time— political journalists don't typically command much attention from booksellers, especially ones like Danner, who don't blow horns for those in power. But he's a Bay Area local, and this was Palo Alto after all, so it did make some kind of sense. Of course, I had to buy it.
I've been a subscriber to the New York Review of Books for a long time, since I was in my late 20's. Somehow I'd managed to get through college and several years of work without taking a strong, public position on any political issue. But a colleague of mine at the time, Sha Xin Wei, was fond of political discourse, and through the encouragement of his example I slowly started to take sides on issues of the day. He subscribed to the NYRB, loaned me some issues, and I eventually subscribed myself. Though eventually I dropped most of my many magazine subscriptions, I've kept the NYRB (and the New Yorker). So it was that I was fortunate enough to read Mark Danner's articles during the Iraq War.I came of age just as Nixon resigned. I remember the Viet Nam body counts on the TV every evening at the dinner table, the asassinations of Martin Luther King and of Bobby Kennedy, the assurances by Henry Kissinger that "peace was at hand" in the lead-up to the election in '72, the secret Christmas bombings in Cambodia, my mother's occasional swearing at the TV... I was 14. If ever there was an era to make you cynical about politics, that was it. Then on into the mid-70's, with drug burn-outs on every street corner putting the lie to the tune-in/turn on/drop out sex/drugs/rock'n'roll mantra floated by folks cashing in on the late 60's hippie mystique. Then to the 80's and the Reagan era— the shining city on a hill, tax cuts combined with increasing military expenditures, trickle-down economics, massive debt, presided over by a congenial but uninformed TV personality turned politician. Cynicism about politics and social movements is second nature to me (btw, if you ask me cynicism gets an undeservedly bad rap). But even I was unprepared for the strident, overweening mendacity of the Bush presidency and the ease and completeness with which it swept aside all rational, informed discussion among the media and power elites who shape the political climate in the US. What a dismal, dismal time it was.
Mark Danner was one of the very few who kept my spirits up. Now, that's an odd way to put it, because he often brought some very discouraging and chilling news. But he also brought his deep moral clarity and understanding of war, what it means to those who wage it and are caught within it. I cannot begin to describe what relief it was, reading his articles and understanding that he knew what suffering was being wrought, knew it and abhorred it. The way politicians and pundits talk about war, like a football game— an event you go to, participate in, and leave— well, it's just nauseating. People like Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, talking tough, making the "tough" choices— there's no true understanding, no empathy, in these people. They just do not appreciate, nor do they care to appreciate, the human consequences that result from the choices they make. It is their very job not to understand these things— otherwise they could never wield or retain power.
Mark Danner does understand. It comes through in his writings. He's not strident, not accusatory. He's informed, rational, clear, calm, methodical— and moral. His style of journalism requires that the journalist not only investigate and report the facts as fully as he can, but also bear witness to the events that unfold.
So, I was curious about the book. What else had he written? "Stripping Bare the Body" is a collection of his war reporting over the last two-and-a-half decades. The pieces, he says, are for the most part presented as originally written. I can't find at the moment information about where each piece was published, though the introduction says he was in Haiti on assignment for the New Yorker in when he was doing work on the first piece, "The Legacy", published in '89. (Turns out he, like me, was born in 1958, so he was 31 then.) This chapter describes, first hand, in chilling and bloody detail, killings and anarchy during the first few years of military rule after Baby Doc Duvalier was removed from power in '86. It's difficult for me to imagine living and reporting in such an environment. I, at age 31, was a new father and still (as now) unformed and immature in many ways. I would have neither the courage nor the ability to live and report in such a place. But I can imagine what impact that would have upon one, the first-hand experience of the rawness of violence and power. He's quite aware that he's protected, but just barely, by the thin bubble of his whiteness and foreignness. Just reading this is exhausting, experiencing it must have been several orders of magnitude more so.
It's a long book, around 600 pages not counting the references and end notes. I've only read the Haitian sections so far. Following those are pieces from Sarajevo, another sterling period and place in human history. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book with an admixture of dread, but I read these stories because I must— you can't truly know our times without knowing these things, our humanity demands it— and because they are so compellingly written.
George Packer's review in the NYT is not positive. While commending the early first-hand reporting, he's critical of the later work based on other sources. There's more going on here than just a book review, of course, George Packer (and the NYT) was an early supporter of the Iraq war, one of the "Liberal Hawks" along with folks like Tom Friedman. These people were, shall we say, a bit overcome by their anti-Saddam fervor and forgot what they should have learned about politics and war growing up in the Vietnam era— good intentions aren't enough, and none of the actors has completely good intentions in the first place. We'll see what I think when I finish the book.
