Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (9 page)

Everything else follows a priori from these two claims. So,
for example, what if the White House is headed by a president who does not share these goals? It doesn’t matter: the power behind the throne is what counts. How does one decide whether to back the USA or its enemies in any given conflict? That’s easy: never back America. Because its motivations are never benign, you can be sure you’ve backed the right horse if you side against it, even if the enemy appears to be evil. After all, labelling anyone who stands in the way of US hegemony ‘evil’ is a tactic favoured by the powers that be to create a moral smokescreen for their selfish intent. The enemy of my enemy (the USA) may not quite be my friend, but he should certainly be granted a benefit of the doubt not accorded to America. Given that the USA is often criticised for being too quick to side with the enemy of its enemy, this is especially ironic.

This may look like a gross caricature: surely no one could buy into such a one-dimensional, simplistic view of international relations? But the frightening thing is that if you take this account to be true, it passes one of the key tests of a scientific theory: predictive power.

Consider, for example, Tony Benn’s farcical interview with Saddam Hussein in 2003.
¹⁷
Benn had travelled to Baghdad, as he put it, ‘to see whether, in a talk, we can explore, or you can help me to see, what the paths to peace may be’.

How would someone who buys into the cod Chomskyian analysis of global conflict approach such a serious task? Well clearly they would assume that any reasons offered by the USA in favour of military intervention were baseless shams, and one would then be as charitable with America’s enemies as you were uncharitable with the USA itself. Of course, that is exactly what Benn did. When Saddam said ‘Every fair-minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something, they are trustworthy’, he didn’t object at all, even though if President Bush
had said something similar about the American government, he would have laughed him out of court. Nor did he flinch when Saddam blamed sanctions, not his own manipulation of them, for the deaths of Iraqi people, because it is obvious that if blame could fall on America or its enemy, it should fall on America.

To say this is not to defend the policy of the USA in Iraq but simply to point out the absurd one-sidedness of an analysis which ends up portraying a mass-murderer and tyrant as a poor, oppressed foreign leader, the innocent victim of neo-colonial bullying.

The same kind of convoluted thinking is found in Pilger’s own Chomsky-inspired analysis of NATO’s campaign in Kosovo in 1999. Whatever you make of the double standards employed by the USA in its foreign policy, explaining why it should get involved in a local conflict far from its shores, with little or no strategic importance for itself, for reasons which fit the cod Chomskyian–Pilgerist picture, would seem to be pretty difficult. This is especially so in this case, because the campaign was fought by NATO, which meant persuading various other states to take part.

Difficult, yes, but not impossible. In an article on the conflict in 1999, Pilger claimed that stimulating the arms trade was the real reason for the war. In particular, ‘[the] terror bombing of Serbia and Kosovo provides a valuable laboratory for the Anglo-American arms business’.
¹⁸
Amazingly, all the other NATO member states were somehow hoodwinked into committing their soldiers to fight a war solely to help the US and British military–industrial complex. After all, NATO is now simply ‘an instrument of American global control’.

You could not wish for a clearer example of non-clinical paranoia. First, there is the
prima facie
plausible complaint:
the USA is a global bully which never acts ethically. Then you have the problem that its actions in Kosovo don’t seem to fit this mould. No problem, in comes the second-level thinking: the reasons are there, it’s just that the USA is so good at hiding its intentions and getting other people to bend to its will that it can get all its Western allies to take part in a war that doesn’t benefit them at all. You are thus forced by the logic of your own position to end up with a hypothesis of a state which has incredible power and control over foreign governments.

Once you start down this road, there is no going back. For example, there would appear to be a huge contradiction here: despite its supposedly enormous power, the US government has clearly not been in control in Iraq, or even back at home, where it failed to deal properly with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – politically and practically – and George W. Bush’s approval ratings went into free fall. But facts can always be made to fit the theory: you just need to claim that any
apparent
lack of control is all part of the plan. Disorder in Iraq is not incompetence: it’s strategic neglect.

You can see how this leads us to the mark of paranoid thinking: nothing can count as negative evidence. If Iraq is brought under control, the USA is getting its way; if it is not, it is still getting its way, because it wants the country to be a mess. If the USA intervenes in foreign states, that is neo-imperialism; if it doesn’t, it’s evidence that it lacks the moral commitment to end the suffering of a people. If it tried to intervene against every tyrannical regime, it would be a hubristic bully; if it goes into Kosovo and Iraq but not Zimbabwe or Darfur, it’s inconsistent and hypocritical.

The US government seems to attract more paranoid complaints than most, and there is a good reason for this, which takes us back to the problem of following the Aristotelian
mean for credulity. The truths that fuel the paranoia are that the USA is the most powerful state in the world, that people do lobby it to pursue their own narrow interests, and that politicians are not incorruptible. Therefore an attitude of suspicion is entirely fitting. Indeed, it is surely worse to err on the side of gullibility than on the side of cynicism. But where it all goes too far is where, in order to sustain the coherence of the primary complaint of abuse of power, a second-order complaint has to be invoked that ascribes to hidden forces a power that the evidence suggests no government has ever had.

Woody Allen sends up the absurdity of this in
Annie Hall
, when Allison, an exasperated girlfriend of the protagonist, Alvy, sums up just who exactly would have to be in on the conspiracy, if the Warren Commission was fixed, namely ‘the FBI, and the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover and oil companies and the Pentagon and the men’s room attendant at the White House’. ‘I would leave out the men’s room attendant’, says Alvy, almost biting the whole bullet. (The pay-off is perhaps even more truthful. Allison says, ‘You’re using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid sex with me’, and Alvy replies, ‘Oh my God! She’s right!’)

I’m not saying that all the non-clinically paranoid are sublimating their sexual desires into totalising theories of mass deception, but having such an all-encompassing theory of why things are both wrong and prevented from being known as wrong certainly gives you a false sense of being in on something important. Such complaints can take over your life, for, if right, they are clearly more important than almost anything else we have to deal with.

Which takes us back to the joke about how paranoiacs may nevertheless sometimes be right. A rather different film,
Independence Day
, makes good sport with this idea. A raving
conspiracy theorist is talking about the famous Roswell incident, in which it is claimed a UFO was captured and taken to the secretive Area 51, where it has been kept ever since. The president of the USA tells him, ‘Regardless of what the tabloids have said, there were never any space craft recovered by the government. Take my word for it, there is no Area 51 and no recovered space ship.’ At which point his chief-of-staff clears his throat and says, ‘Uh, excuse me, Mr President, but that’s not entirely accurate.’

One of these days what I have called a paranoid complainant is going to turn out to be right. To hit the Aristotelian mean on credulity we have to be careful not to dismiss all apparently outlandish claims as outrageous. However, unless we recognise the perverse logic of paranoid complaints, we’re not going to be able to distinguish the apparently implausible from the merely extraordinary.

Of all the things that are not as they should be, other people surely come top of the list. The list of complaints we have about ‘people today’ is endless: they watch too much television, especially reality shows; they are unable to appreciate orchestral music and just listen to bite-sized chunks on commercial radio stations, or buy compilations as background mood music; they eat rubbish; everyone is just out for themselves and doesn’t care about society any more; attention spans have reduced to virtually nothing; we take our democratic freedoms for granted; and so on and on and on.

I have to admit some of those criticisms sound plausible to me. But I’m suspicious of them because so often I think the
real complaint is simply that ‘people are not like me’. Accepting that people are different seems to be so hard: we much prefer to believe they are inferior.

Music is perhaps the prime example of this. It seems that we cannot drop the habit, acquired in the playground, of judging people according to their musical taste. Virtually everyone feels an involuntary, strong desire to say that the music they despise is really, factually, not very good, rather than just not their cup of tea. Take Dick, who works in the record store in the film
High Fidelity
. When a customer asks him if he’s got ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’, he refuses to sell it to him because ‘it’s sentimental, tacky crap’. Abominable though his behaviour is, like many who saw the film, I was instinctively on his side. The thought that someone who likes Stevie Wonder’s worst three minutes must be defective in some way is irrepressible. This is despite the fact that there are no reasonable criteria of what makes some music better than others, nor any evidence that musical taste is a marker of good moral character.

Lovers of classical music in particular seem prone to snobbish judgements on the basis of musical taste. Their prima facie justification for this is that their favoured music is more complex, nuanced and sophisticated than mere pop or rock. It obviously takes a more refined sensibility to appreciate Mahler or Beethoven, because it takes time and careful listening to even be able to appreciate it properly. In contrast, the simple tunes and rhythms of hip beat combos popular with the kids are like Blue Nun compared with Château Lafite. So it is that the connoisseurs of high music do not just observe the fact that others do not appreciate it: they believe that such unappreciative souls should know better, and at least ought not to go crazy for the aural bubblegum they do listen to.

Such complaints have no basis. It is bad enough that
classical music lovers disagree fervently among themselves as to what is truly great or not: Tchaikovsky even called Brahms talentless. Far worse is the fact that there are numerous factors we can cite when judging music to be good or bad, and no style has a monopoly over them.

Take, for instance, the case of funk. To the classical music buff funk is music at its most brain-dead. It is repetitive, melodically simplistic and usually verbally crass. Yet great funk can be all those things, and none the worse for it. The whole point about funk is that it is based on the rhythm section, building on looping bass lines. The great innovation of funk, as made by its leading practitioner, James Brown, was a simple rhythmic one: the beat fell ‘on the one’ – the first beat of the bar, not the second. The change was a genuine innovation, no less so for being so basic.

What makes a great funk track is that it builds up a good groove. Even here, though, there is room for great musicianship. Not many musicians can be as ‘tight’ as James Brown’s greatest backing band, the JBs, who hit every note and beat at just the right time, with the right emphasis. (If they didn’t, Brown would dock their wages.) Funk sounds free and rambling, but to play it well you need tremendous control.

Even the lyrical simplicity is part and parcel of the joy of funk. For a singer like James Brown, words – as well as grunts, moans, shrieks and screams – are essentially sung for their percussive quality. If you try to read the words of ‘(Get up I feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ as poetry, you really are missing the point.

Today, of course, there are serious musicologists who will vindicate funk’s worth by describing it in similar terms. But its quality is proven before the analysis: music is first judged to be worth listening to, and then people describe what makes
it notable. When it comes to that first judgement, there is no objective way of saying whether it is right or wrong.

It might be argued, in reply, that although no one genre is objectively better than any other, it is still the case that some examples of that genre are better than others. So, for example, pop is no better or worse than Baroque chamber music, but the Beatles are better than the Cheeky Girls. When we complain that people listen to rubbish, we are therefore legitimately saying that they ought to be listening to one kind of music rather than others.

This argument may be one way of saving a kind of objectivity for judgements about musical taste, but it does not vindicate the complaint that people ought not to listen to inferior artistes, because it does not imply that people ought to take their music more seriously. I am very tempted to accept that if you really like soul, for example, you’d be better-off listening to Isaac Hayes or Marvyn Gaye than you would the latest ersatz product of a TV talent show. But what I can’t defend is the view that you are wrong if you don’t make the effort to seek out these better practitioners of the art. If you’re satisfied by listening to second-grade soul in the background, then there is no particular reason why you should sit down with a copy of
What’s Going On?
and see how it really should be done. The complaint that people ought to take their music more seriously is no more justified than the complaint that they listen to the wrong kind of music. The rational case for both has been definitively shattered by the stark empirical fact that all sorts of nasty, immoral human beings have been musical connoisseurs.