Feed His Head: Reason’s presidential readinglist

From the December 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 7)

Ted Galen Carpenter ([e-mail]) is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and has written or edited many books on international affairs, with NATO Enters the 21st Century forthcoming from Frank Cass Publishers.

Alt.cult Cults

By Tim Cavanaugh

The next president should have some understanding of alternative media, a statement that conjures up dismaying visions of George W. or Albert Jr. leafing through some loser’s zine about Italian splatter films. Further complicating matters is the ontological chestnut about whether forms of “alternative” media that haven’t been “co-opted” by the “Culture Industry” can even exist. If Dubya digs into Motorbooty, the infamous Detroit-based pop-cult zine, can there be meaningful dissent? If Gore gets jiggy with the latest issue of the hip-hop magazine Vibe, is he making contact with a vibrant urban culture or aiding and abetting a bunch of corporate sellouts?

Why alternative media? The arguments and ideas put forth there are important precisely because they represent perspectives very much left out of mainstream thinking. As it happens, and for better or worse, the literature that can currently most believably lay claim to the “alternative” title is the growing crop of anti-globalization books, magazines, and Web sites. Here are three representative sources, from the left, the right, and the Great Beyond.

Whatever you may think of anti–World Trade Organization protests in the world’s second cities, you’ve got to admire the organizational capacities of San Francisco–based Global Exchange. The human rights group takes up the cases of Zapatistas and Haitian progressives against the unelected elites they say are masterminding the New World Order of Trade. While the logic and rhetoric are frequently sub-Ciceronian, any of the reading materials to be found at globalexchange.org—from Sandalista travelogues to anti-capitalist agitprop— will at least offer the president a wistful look back on dear college days.

It’s a sign of, well, something that the new left’s closest philosophical relatives can be found among America’s most venerable right-wing kooks. Sure, you won’t find many vegans fighting gun laws or trying to get the Panama Canal back, but when The New American, the official magazine of the John Birch Society, starts harping about those World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, the extremes come within sight of each other. To the extent that it can ever endorse the actions of long-haired freaks, The New American, available on the Web at thenewamerican.com, has actually been fairly sympathetic to this year’s globoprotesters.

The Birchers, of course, see the WTO as merely one step in the long, slow march toward World Government, and as the magazine is fond of pointing out, the idea of global trade, regulation, and law has worked its way from fringe media to the mainstream. But when it’s ABC or CNN doing the talking, none dare call it treason.

And did you know that Satanism is on the rise in Russia? That cross-dressing priests are among the masterminds of the tragedies in Bosnia and Kosovo? That the Vatican is ignoring an anti-Catholic holocaust in China? That Perestroika itself was all a trick to put us off our guards so that the You Know Whos can continue to call the shots from inside the Kremlin? You would if you had been reading The Fatima Crusader (fatima.org), whose tissue of calls for the consecration of Russia and rants against the Godless United Nations bring together two great tastes—fringe Catholicism and religious anti-globalism. If nothing else, the news that Old Scratch is being worshiped in the Vatican should encourage even devout Catholics to re-examine the wisdom of taking marching orders from a Roman dictator.

Close observers may carp that the above selections do not contain a fiction selection. Those of us who are Catholic are bound by papal order to believe everything we read in The Fatima Crusader, so we’d argue that the utopian depictions of Cuban collective farms at Global Exchange and the vision of an idyllic pre-U.N. United States in The New American are sufficiently unrelated to reality to qualify as the very best in modern fiction. But the larger issues (if not the actual treatments) raised in all three publications—opposition to the erosion of individual rights, calls for greater local sovereignty, and attacks against rule by all forms of self-appointed experts—are some?thing that we hope our next president will take seriously when it comes time to act. Or even better, not to act.

Tim Cavanaugh ([e-mail]) is editor of the Web site Suck.com.

Scandology

By Charles Paul Freund

Sooner or later, every president has a scandal on his hands. As it happens, there are a lot of books on the subject, though eight unremitting years of Bill Clinton have rendered the whole library obsolete. (Best quick study on Clinton’s presidency: Christopher Hitchens’ 1999 book No One Left to Lie To.) Still, it’s a good idea to bring some perspective to the matter. Upon winning the White House, every president should have a staffer read the following and give a terse executive summary first thing in the morning.

An academic view of scandology is offered in The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies (1988), edited by Andrei S. Markovits and Mark Silverstein. This work is not exactly Washington Babylon; rather, it’s the sort of work that schematizes scandal abstractly. Figure 1.1, for example, offers an overlap of circles marked “The logic of power” and “The logic of due process.” Locate yourself on that page, and you’re ready to lead.