ALL THAT LIBERTY STUFF IS SO UNAMERICAN:

(via Glenn Dryfoos):
Devious Plot (Lawrence F. Kaplan, 03.10.04, New Republic)

One of my colleagues and I have a running bet: Who can find the dumbest reference to "neoconservatism"? Until last week, the honor was Tina Brown's. In a Washington Post piece last year, she recalled "the New Deal for which neocons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as 'that man'"--the problem, of course, being that "neocons" did not emerge until 30 years after FDR's death, and the movement's founders vigorously supported the New Deal. But, in a new play, Embedded (opening later this week at New York's Public Theater), film star and director Tim Robbins outdoes even Tina Brown. Embedded, moreover, is not only dumb. It is poisonous, a production-length conspiracy theory guilty of the very sins it attributes to the "cabal" that it claims to expose.

Embedded, written and directed by Robbins, tells the story of the war in Iraq ("Gomorrah") from three vantage points. The first belongs to a character named Private Jen-Jen (clearly modeled on Jessica Lynch) and her fellow soldiers on the ground, whom Robbins beatifies as victims of the cabal. The second belongs to the journalists covering the war, whom Robbins depicts, with few exceptions, as a craven bunch deferring to military censors at nearly every turn. The third, and most interesting series of scenes, belongs to the cabal itself--the cynical architects of the war, who, from behind their Greek masks, plot the invasion of Gomorrah on their calendars. "Woof" (Paul Wolfowitz, presumably), "Pearly White" (Richard Perle, definitely), and the other cabalists reason that a war will distract the public from the crumbling economy. More important, it will prove once and for all the hypotheses of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss, the cabal's hero and the production's villain, whose hapless visage is projected in the background.

What exactly are those theories? The cabal, despite its repeated shouts of "hail Leo Strauss!" (this, to a Jewish refugee from Nazism), doesn't give us much insight. Fortunately, the program for Embedded, which contains an essay by someone named Kitty Clark, does. (For the New York production at least, someone in Robbins's orbit had the good sense to expunge from the original essay, which I found on the Internet, several pointed references to the Jewishness of Strauss and his supposed adherents.) In the program's telling, Strauss believed that democracy "was best defended by an ignorant public pumped up on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression." As for Robbins himself, in an NPR interview earlier this week he explained that he could only figure out why the neoconservatives supported war in Iraq by looking to their association with "a philosopher named Leo Strauss that a lot of them studied with, who actually conceptually believes in a noble lie for a greater good, coming from Plato." Bull Durham, meet the New School for Social Research.

Leaving aside for a moment Hollywood's reading of Straussian political theory, there is the small matter that the principal architects of the war--Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the president himself--had in all likelihood barely even heard of Leo Strauss before James Atlas penned a piece in The New York Times last year explaining who he was (the piece clearly made an impression on Robbins, who quotes from it). As for the neoconservatives themselves, despite Robbins's assertion that Irving Kristol studied under Strauss--Robbins appears to be confusing Irving, who is well into his 80's and in any case attended City College, with his son Bill--what, if any, debt they owe him remains questionable at best. Nor, if they do owe such a debt, is it at all clear that it is a pernicious one. Strauss's experience as a Jew who escaped the pogroms of his youth and the Holocaust that engulfed his contemporaries made him uniquely sensitive to the dangers of tyranny. Which, in turn, made him ... a liberal. He believed deeply that, as Atlas points out, "to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations." If this is the stuff of conspiracy, then American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton clearly couldn't keep a secret.

The Brits still haven't forgiven the neocons for leading the Boston Tea Party.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 11, 2004 2:19 PM