Gimme Some Truth

Kenneth Wright salutes a new collection of American writing shot through with the belief that fearless journalism can forge a better world

LEFT-WING American politics, we assume too smugly this side of the pond, is a contradiction in terms as flagrant as the Swiss navy or the snakes of Ireland. Although the Right goes all the way from old-fashioned Eisenhower Republicans like the Gary Doonesbury’s little old lady Lacey Davenport, to a large congregation of rednecks, Dittoheads*, and allied trades, the Left goes very little further left than Barack Obama.

Well, yes and no. Though invisible in the corporate media and almost so in electoral terms - except in that a few little towns with names like Earlobe, North Dakota occasionally elect a socialist mayor - there is in fact a large though scattered radical Left in America. Its existence can be inferred from the health of bracingly pink-in-tooth-and-claw weekly publications such as Harper’s Magazine (circulation 220,000), The Nation (160,000) and New Republic (60,000). Beside these, the unpopularity of Britain’s closest equivalents, the New Statesman (current circulation under 25,000) and Tribune (a wretched 3000), suggests the British Left has little cause to get snotty about the political development of the tractor-pulling savages who dwell between Canada and Mexico.

It is from Harper’s Magazine that this collection of “submersion journalism” is drawn. Submersion journalism is the style that Harper’s, though it did not invent it**, has in recent years made its own. It is roughly speaking a combination of the ancient American school of no-holds-barred, yellow-press muckraking; the I-am-the-story New Journalism of writers as diverse as Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton and Hunter S Thompson; and regular undercover journalism a la Woodward and Bernstein, with the difference that submersive reporters not only report from undercover, but pretend to be part of the institution they are out to expose.

The ethics of this kind of dirty work at the crossroads have been controversial, some pointing out that when the police act like this with criminals every good liberal yells “entrapment!”, but when David takes on Goliath, most of us feel inclined to cut David a little slack in the rules of engagement. As Harper’s editor Roger Hodge points out, the notion of open public and media access to public affairs has of late been spun into a mere polite fiction, a situation that would have turned Richard Nixon green with envy.

The results as collected here are almost universally impressive: detailed and diligent, passionately and often humorously written. The 15 selections, all from the Dubya years, are divided into Politics; Violence; Illness; Vice; The Arts; and Confessions of War. The subjects chosen are pleasingly often quirky and left-field as well as conventionally Left-wing, straying far off the beaten track of Republican shenanigans and the Iraq war, though not neglecting those.

Alas space does not permit me to do more than concentrate on three of the more unexpected articles by way of sample, and let Harper’s amiable habit of giving almost Dickensianly long and informative titles and sub-headings to each item speak for the honourable mentions.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s provocative Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch, starts with her own diagnosis of breast cancer and develops into an attack of controlled ferocity upon the queasy optimism of survival stories, support message boards and dubious “alternative” treatments. All these, she argues, both infantilise the sufferer and turn the public narrative of cancer into an archetypally American cult of the winner. Survival is presented as a kind of spiritual excellence, while those who do not survive are subjected to the faint pity reserved for those blamed for their fate, caused by lack of moral fibre. The long-exploded notion of the “cancer personality” is far from dead in the popular mind. Ehrenreich (still alive seven years after diagnosis), is scathing of this cruel quasi-religion and its amulets of “teddy bears, pink-ribbon brooches, and so forth”, vowing “I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.” Nothing better has been written on the subject since Susan Sontag’s On Cancer.

At least as daring is Charles Bowden’s Teachings of Don Fernando: A Life and Death in the Narcotics Trade, in which the writer goes inside the Mexican drugs business via the alarming reminiscences of the friends and enemies of the titular long-term Drug Enforcement Agency informer, who had the surprising good luck to live to the age of 83, though he did not carry that luck far enough to die in his bed. What might in other hands have been a bare-chested thriller of the Hemingway school is actually an extremely canny and sceptical reflection on the official version of America’s “war on drugs” and its anointed heroes and villains, and a ripping good yarn too.

From the Arts section, Jake Silverstein plays the sucker in What Is Poetry? And Does It Pay?, a sardonically funny expose of the thriving American sub-culture of phoney poetry prizes and conferences. In the exploitation-prone tradition of self-improvement, the unwary are bunco’d into entering competitions that make up their prize money, and a great deal more for the promoters, from the large entry fees and subscriptions coughed up by hundreds of mute, inglorious Miltons. This entry has an engagingly Mark Twain/David Mamet flavour to it, and though the topic hardly matches cancer and narcotics for weight of iniquity, I enjoyed it most of all.

These are the best of the other stories, mostly self-explanatory:

In Politics: Bird-Dogging The Bush Vote: Undercover with Florida’s Republican Shock Troops, Their Men in Washington: Undercover with DC’s Lobbyists for Hire, Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover Among America’s Secret Theocrats.

In Violence: The Line is Hot: A History of the Machine Gun, Shot (hanging out with some Second Amendment gun nuts).

In Illness: Manufacturing Depression: Notes on the Economy of Melancholy (an expose of Big Pharma’s medicalisation of unhappiness).

In Vice: A Foreign Affair: On the Great Ukrainian Bride Hunt, My Undertaker, My Pimp: Looking for Grace in a Desert Brothel, They Came Out Like Ants! Searching for the Chinese Tunnels of Mexicali (a truly strange tale of coolie labour exploitation in Mexico).

In Confessions of War: Misinformation Intern: My Summer as a Military Propagandist in Iraq.

As I read through this entertaining and ideologically stirring book, I found myself gloomily pondering why we don’t have this kind of thing here. Why is there such a big market for radical journalism in the most avowedly capitalist nation on earth and such a small one in Britain? In America the Left still lives in hope - and far be it from me to call that hope illusory. Cynicism is not one of America’s many faults. But in their enthusiastic excoriations of public and private abuses, the submersion journalist’s faith in the final fulfillment of the Pledge of Allegiance’s promise “and justice for all” reminds me of an anecdote by one Private Eye veteran, Auberon Waugh, about another, Paul Foot.

Waugh was the Eye’s Tory-anarchist gadfly, Foot its industrious Trotskyist investigative reporter, who fortnightly filed searing indictments of political and industrial scandals. Regularly, Waugh writes in his autobiography Will This Do?, Foot would burst into the Eye offices waving a sheaf of inflammatory typescript and crying “We’ve really got the bastards this time!” Duly the shocking exposes would be printed, and would occasionally succeed in getting some important bastard to resign; yet, Waugh reminds us, the general class of bastards remained in charge, still being bastards. I remember, as a teenage firebrand devoted to 1970s TV documentaries like World in Action, the same exhilarating sensation that, now that everything had been explained, the age of reason and truth would shortly be upon us. I never think so now.

Perhaps the freedom of the press and of protest really amounts to no more than the comfortable formula of the Roman emperor who declared: “My people and I have come to an arrangement: they are to say what they like, and I am to do what I like.” The submersion journalists obviously don’t believe that. Perhaps they’re wrong in their optimism, perhaps we old cynics are right in our pessimism. But there are circumstances in which wrong can, at least morally, be the right thing to be.

*Devotees of the wit and wisdom of Rush Limbaugh, a depressingly popular right-wing American talk-radio presenter, to all of whose opinions they are proud automatically to cry “Ditto”.

**That honour, at least within modern times, goes to Gunter Wallraff, proudly self-titled “The Undesirable Journalist”, who in 1970s West Germany posed as, inter alia, a Turkish Gastarbeiter, to expose the survival of fascist attitudes in modern Germany.

Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine

Edited by Bill Wasik

Available from http://www.thenewpress.com