The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  Seen in their proper context, these comments would probably not strike anyone as noteworthy. If anything, they showed how sensitive Sotomayor and everyone else in the room had become to fears of an “activist court.”

  A look at the full “Latina woman” speech at Berkeley reveals another crucial misinterpretation.

  To his credit, Richmond posted as much of the speech as copyright law allows, attempting to present the most important sentence in context. But he still missed the point. Sotomayor’s argument was not that she sought to use her position to further minority interests, or that her gender and background made her superior to a white male. Her central argument was that the sexual, racial, and ethnic makeup of the legal profession has in fact historically informed the application of law, despite the efforts of individual lawyers and judges to rise above their personal stories—as Sotomayor noted she labors to do. Her comment about a “wise Latina woman” making a better judgment than a “white male who hasn’t lived that life” referred specifically to cases involving racial and sexual discrimination. “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences … our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging,” she said. This is not a remarkable insight, nor is it even in dispute. Consider, say, how an African American Supreme Court justice might have viewed the Dred Scott case, or how a female judge—Sotomayor cited this in the speech—might have looked on the argument, advanced to oppose women’s suffrage, that females are “not capable of reasoning or thinking logically.” The presence of blacks and women in the room inherently changes judicial deliberation. She said that although white male judges have been admirably able on occasion to rise above cultural prejudices, the progress of racial minorities and women in the legal profession has directly coincided with greater judicial recognition of their rights. Once again, her point was not that this progress was the result of deliberate judicial activism, but that it was a natural consequence of fuller minority and female participation.

  One of her central points was that all judges are, to an extent, defined by their identity and experience, whether they like it or not.

  “I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences,” she said, “but I accept my limitations.”

  Richmond seems a bright and fair-minded fellow, but he makes no bones about his political convictions or the purpose of his research and blogging. He has some of the skills and instincts of a reporter but not the motivation or ethics. Any news organization that simply trusted and aired his editing of Sotomayor’s remarks, as every one of them did, was abdicating its responsibility to do its own reporting. It was airing propaganda. There is nothing wrong with reporting propaganda, per se, so long as it is labeled as such. None of the TV reports I saw on May 26 cited VerumSerum.com as the source of the material; this disappointed but did not surprise Richmond and Sexton.

  Both found the impact of their volunteer effort exciting. They experienced the heady feeling of every reporter who discovers that the number of people who actually seek out new information themselves, even people in the news profession, is vanishingly small. Show the world something it hasn’t seen, surprise it with something new, and you fundamentally alter its understanding of things. I have experienced this throughout my career, in ways large and small. I remember the first time I did, very early on, when I wrote a magazine profile of a promising Baltimore County politician, Ted Venetoulis, who was preparing a run for governor of Maryland. I wrote a long story about him, examining his record as county executive and offering a view that included both praise and criticism. I was twenty-five years old and had never written a word about Maryland politics. I was not especially knowledgeable about the state or the candidates, and the story was amateurish at best. Yet in the months of campaigning that followed, I found snippets from that article repeatedly quoted in the literature put out by Venetoulis and by his opponents. My story was used both to promote him and to attack him. To a large and slightly appalling extent, the points I made framed the public’s perception of the candidate, who, as it happened, lost.

  Several hours of Internet snooping by Richmond at his upstairs computer wound up shaping the public’s perception of Sonia Sotomayor, at least for the first few weeks following her nomination. Conservative critics used the snippets to portray her as a racist and liberal activist, a picture even Richmond now admits is inaccurate. “She’s really fairly moderate, compared to some of the other candidates on Obama’s list,” he says. “Given that conservatives are not going to like any Obama pick, she really wasn’t all that bad.” He felt many of the websites and TV commentators who used his work inflated its significance well beyond his own intent. But he was not displeased.

  “I was amazed,” he told me.

  For his part, Sexton says: “It is a beautiful thing to live in this country. It’s overwhelming and fantastic, really, that an ordinary citizen, with just a little bit of work, can help shape the national debate. Once you get a taste of it, it’s hard to resist.”

  I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context—all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain people pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

  In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise—there is only acquittal or some degree of guilt or responsibility. But isn’t this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn’t there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn’t the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes a blood sport.

  Television loves this, because it is dramatic. Confrontation is all. And given the fragmentation of news on the Internet and on cable television, Americans increasingly choose to listen only to their own side of the argument, to bloggers and commentators who reinforce their convictions and paint the world only in acceptable, comfortable colors. Bloggers like Richmond and Sexton, and TV hosts like Hannity, preach only to the choir. Consumers of such “news” become all the more entrenched in their prejudices, and ever more hostile to those who disagree. The other side is no longer the honorable opposition, maybe partly right; but rather always wrong, stupid, criminal, even downright evil. Yet even in criminal courts, before assigning punishment, judges routinely order presentencing reports, which attempt to go beyond the clash of extremes in the courtroom to a more nuanced, disinterested assessment of a case. Usually someone who is neither prosecution nor defense is assigned to investigate. In a post-journalistic society, there is no disinterested voice. There are only the winning side and the losing side.

  There’s more here than just an old journalist’s lament over his dying profession, or over the social cost of losing great newspapers and great TV news operations. And there’s more than an argument for the ethical superiority of honest, disinterested reporting over advocacy. Even an eager and ambitious political blogger like Richmond, because he is drawn to the work primarily out of political conviction, not curiosity, is less likely to experience the pleasure of findin
g something new, or of arriving at a completely original, unexpected insight, one that surprises even himself. He is missing out on the great fun of speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. A reporter who thinks and speaks for himself, whose preeminent goal is providing deeper understanding, aspires even in political argument to persuade, which requires at the very least being seen as fair-minded and trustworthy by those—and this is the key—who are inclined to disagree with him. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.

  This is what H. L. Mencken was getting at when he famously described his early years as a Baltimore Sun reporter. He called it “the life of kings.”

  The Great Guinea Hen Massacre

  Atlantic, December 2009

  I live on a small farm in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and this summer my wife, Gail, and I decided to install on our modest acreage a flock of guinea fowl.

  Birds are colorful and entertaining, worthy of cultivating for their own sake, but we had a darker purpose. Guineas eat deer ticks. Like every unpaved acre in this part of the world, our property harbors an ever-growing herd of white-tailed deer, and is thus infested with the little Lyme disease–carrying arachnids. In the world of ticks, we were assured, guinea hens are feathered hell.

  They arrived as chicks, twenty-five of them, small enough to fit quivering in the palm of our hands; quickly grew into rambunctious and noisy keets; and by the end of August were about the size and shape of rugby footballs, wandering around our property in a chattering flock. There were whites, royal purples, pearls, and lavenders. All sorts of grotesque wattles and growths popped out of their heads, above and below their orange beaks, but they had lovely plumage. The pearls, in particular, are so named because their dark gray coloring shows off an even spray of white specks.

  One stood out. From birth, this bird was fearless. Whenever Gail and I would appear to change their water or clean their box, the flock would form a writhing, screaming mass trying desperately to merge itself into the far corner, or become invisible. This one, a pearl, whom we named Luke, after Cool Hand Luke, would sit alone on the top perch and eye us up and down, as if to say, “You again?” He would sometimes fly out of the box and strut around the bathroom, and when we stooped to pick him up, he didn’t even try to get away. We figured he was either the world’s smartest or stupidest guinea fowl—the latter distinction being highly competitive.

  When they became too raucous, and started tearing apart their jury-rigged cardboard nest, we built a coop. Actually, less of a coop than a poultry condo, complete with a fourteen-foot ceiling and five roosting levels. The coop was roughly twenty times more expensive than the birds, but once you have hand-raised a flock, it is harder to abide the idea of a fox, dog, raccoon, or feral cat digging its way into their lair and turning them into a poultry smorgasbord. We have plenty of wild predators on our farm, and even if we didn’t, we have a Jack Russell named Duey who, beneath his deceptive puppylike cuteness, is a ruthless serial killer with a particularly fowl appetite.

  Put it this way: Duey once saw a chicken. Seconds later the bird was no more. Duey 1, Chickens 0.

  Make that, Duey 2, Poultry 0, since he nailed one guinea when Gail left the door to the coop open behind her for an ill-advised split second. The Jack Russell has ever since been biding his time in close confinement, nose pressed to the screen. Mind you, dogs are especially good at biding their time.

  Guineas have four modes: eating, sleeping, chattering, and screaming in terror. Chicken Little had some guinea in her. Here’s what you need to know about a flock: they have no idea what is happening, they are scared of everything, they make noise constantly, and their long-term memory is about five seconds. You may note a resemblance here to the way news disseminates on the Internet and cable TV.

  Their communications are very simple. In English, it would go something like this.

  “I’m OK.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Good over here.”

  “I’m OK, too.”

  “Wait!”

  “What was that?”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Look out!”

  “Look out!

  “Run!”

  “Run!”

  At which point they are all fleeing and fluttering pell-mell. The unbridled terror lasts for just a few seconds, which is as long as it takes for them to forget whatever it was that prompted the stampede. The behavior repeats.

  We let them out of the coop for the first time when they were about three months old, well past the recommended age. At first they sensibly refused to step out, all except for Luke, that is, who promptly hopped into one of the pastures and started chasing around our Andalusian mare as if he owned the place. It took the others a few hours to more timidly venture forth.

  And then … they ran off. Contrary to encouraging advice about the breed, gathered mostly from books and the Internet, which assured us that they would not stray far from their coop, they took off like unleashed teenagers, the whole flock of twenty-three (another, alas, had expired in the coop on the hottest day of August, prompting the installation of a fan). They bore southwest and just kept on going, as if drawn by some poultry siren over the horizon, making their way across several broad Thoroughbred horse pastures, then across Route 472, and so on toward the setting sun. After it became clear they were not planning to turn around we made a heroic effort to herd them back, leaping tall fences; crossing the road; and, with curious Thoroughbreds peering over our shoulders, driving them before us with long sticks. The guineas were having none of it.

  We gave up, and the guineas vanished.

  Gail took it harder than I did. She is of the Bambi school, while I am more of a “nature red in tooth and claw” person. I was more resigned than saddened. We had given it our best shot, I figured, and had succeeded only in serving our neighborhood foxes, dogs, and hawks a movable feast. Neither of us ever expected to see the guinea fowl again.

  But, lo! Three days later they were back, chattering away in our middle pasture, minus two. One of the missing was Luke. We admire fearlessness, but it is a poor survival strategy. I thought, not bad, all in all, only one fatality per night in the wild. The flock seemed chastened, and had temporarily lost its appetite for wandering.

  Temporarily.

  Then came the great guinea hen massacre.

  We have a fairly large property, so the flock has many safe acres in which to roam, chatter, panic, and vacuum ticks. But some madness weeks later propelled them once more to alien pastures. You would think that aeons of evolution would have clued the guinea to Labradors. But, no. Amber, the chocolate Lab in question, is an especially obedient and friendly dog. She never saw a human hand she wasn’t eager to lick, and never strays from her own farm.

  “She just tore into them,” said our neighbor Chuck, Amber’s owner, who witnessed the slaughter and came away shocked by the flock’s stupidity. “I kept thinking they would try to get away,” he said.

  Chuck found four carcasses, and five others just vanished, either down Amber’s gullet or felled by sheer terror in the high weeds.

  The rest returned, an even dozen, less than half of those we raised. Duey is still biding his time. Gail is afraid to let the guinea fowl out of the coop. At night, mixed in with the usual racket of tree fro
gs and katydids, I swear I can hear deer ticks out there laughing at us.

  Rebirth of the Guineas

  Published as “Rebirth of the Guinea Hens,” Atlantic, March 2011

  Animal husbandry is not for sissies. It has now been more than a year and a half since my wife, Gail, and I first brought a box of chirping, week-old guinea fowl home to our small Pennsylvania farm, and began diligently rearing them. We built them a luxurious coop and provided them with warmth, food, drink, and sixteen acres to roam.

  Deer ticks were infesting our acreage, thanks to a Malthusian proliferation of their white-tailed hosts, and we were assured that the guineas would make short work of the little bloodsuckers. An organic solution! We never got a chance to see if it worked, because when our rambunctious flock of two dozen was turned loose, the birds proceeded to defy all predictions of guinea-fowl behavior—that they would not wander far from the coop; that they would establish a predictable daily routine; that they would return to the safety and warmth of the coop every evening; that they would fly up to a tree branch to avoid danger …

  Ours made haste to their own demise. They showed no ability or even inclination to avoid the onslaught of neighborhood carnivores, and were thus dispatched, one by one, by foxes, hawks, and that most deadly scourge of local poultry, Amber, the ever-cheerful chocolate Lab who lives next door—a course of events that I documented earlier in this magazine.