For the past year Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine since
1976, has used his monthly column to bloody the nose of the man he calls
"the wooden figurehead of President George Bush."
With perhaps a few exceptions, no one has been a more thoughtful or more
consistent critic of this White House. Lapham's essays, collected in the new
book "Theater of War" (The New Press, $22.95), should be required reading
for those on the left and the right.
At his office in Lower Manhattan, Lapham took time this week to discuss
the nation's reaction to September 11, his problems with the current caretakers
of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the onslaught of media coverage that threatens
to obscure the real truths of 9/11.
PopMatters: Where were you a year ago, on September 11?
Lewis Lapham: Right here, writing a piece. I was writing a piece about the Council
on Foreign Relations. September 11 was a Tuesday. The prior Thursday I'd been at
the Council on Foreign Relations and saw the American mandarinate or
oligarchy or ruling class -- however you want to describe it -- at their most
complacent. It was a screening of Steven Spielberg's HBO film, "Band of
Brothers." And there must have been 200 people there, all congratulating one
another about what a mighty empire was America -- without peer, without
rival, no power on earth since Rome, that sort of conversation. Here was the
Spielberg movie to prove it to them. I didn't like the Spielberg movie
particularly. It seemed to me like an ad for the Gap or Ralph Lauren, with
combat footage.
So I was writing a column about that, my normal monthly column. And then
I heard an explosion and thought nothing of it because the World Trade
Center is on the opposite side of the building. I thought, ok, it's
something in Brooklyn. It was not enough to alarm me. Then I heard a lot of
sirens and I knew it couldn't be in Brooklyn.
PM: You've chosen almost exclusively since September of last year to write
your column about September 11, the after-effects and the way our government has
dealt with it. Why?
LL: I thought this would be a chance for a wakeup call, a chance for the
United States, the government, the foreign policy people, to open their eyes
and to think: how did we get to this point? I'm not blaming the United
States, but this doesn't happen without a reason.
So I hoped that there would be a serious conversation about what kind of
country did we wish to become? What kind of foreign policy would we have?
What are our objectives in the world? How much money do we spend on weapons,
the military, as opposed to what we spend on domestic infrastructure? If it
is an empire, what are the benefits to the citizens of that empire? If I had
a son of draft age, how would I explain his going off to Iraq or Saudi
Arabia or Afghanistan?
In other words, I thought that the events of September 11 were sufficiently
dramatic to awaken a conversation about the nature, purpose, meaning, of the
United States' foreign policy. I have been addressing those questions from
various angles for the last year. To my disappointment I don't see enough of
this conversation being carried on in the Congress or in the major news
media.
There are 150 books in the bookstores; every television network is going
to run many hours of special programming. There's so much of it, but the
coverage is about everything and nothing. It almost guarantees that nobody
will say anything worth remembering.
The other thing that strikes me as depressing is this notion of United
States as victim. It is as if we cast ourselves as innocents who have been
unfairly preyed upon by the world's scoundrels, by pollutants in the
atmosphere, by terrorists, by unforeseen events - that we don't somehow
deserve this because we are good and obedient children. But think, for
example, of the number of people killed in the London Blitz in 1940 - the
number was something like 40,000 dead in the first nine months. Think of the
number of people that die every year in the world as a consequence of
malnutrition and preventable diseases. The number is 50 million. As many
people died in the World Trade Center die every hour somewhere in the world.
So something is wrong with the proportion, I think.
I myself am going to be in Paris on September 11, and I'll be glad I'm not in
New York because the hype, the mawkishness, the lack of meaning - it would
be almost unbearable.
PM: Is it a planned holiday - to be away from America?
LL: No, the book, "Theater of War," is coming out in America on September 11
and in France it's coming out on the same day. So I'm going over to France
for the publication of that book, which was on the cards before I knew what
the festivities that are going to take place in New York would be. It's a
coincidence. But I do know a lot of people who are looking forward to September
11 with dread, because of the hyperbole.
PM: I don't see a computer. Do you write longhand?
LL: Yeah, in ballpoint pen. I write it on those yellow sheets, then I
dictate it, give it to my secretary, and she gives me back a draft. I'm
waiting for the computer that you can talk to.
PM: How do you think the magazine has responded to September 11?
LL: I think it's responded very well, because our circulation, our normal
newsstand [sales] was about 30,000 a month. And it is now 40,000 a month.
And the mail has been very strongly supportive of the criticism, or the
questioning, of the war on terror. I think there are a lot more people in
this country that are skeptical and unimpressed by the rhetoric of the Bush
administration than one would be given to think by listening to the network
news and reading the mainline newspapers.
PM: I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges of editing the
magazine over the past year.
LL: Well, why bother reading Harper's if you've already read the story in
the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Vanity Fair and so
on? So you have to find people who will find things worth reading. If I
assign you to a piece today and you did it almost as fast as you can do it,
it's three months before I get it into print. So we have to think of
something today that is worth reading three months from now. That's the
trick. It's always the trick, but it's more of a trick when events are
moving as fast as they've been seeming to move over the last year.
PM: Has it been an exhilarating year?
LL: Oh yeah. There's so much to write about. It's been very exciting. A
great deal of grist for the mill.
* * * *
Kevin Canfield is a writer in Connecticut.
— 10 September 2002
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