Sunday’s Zaman, Turkey
March 7 2010
The price of harmony
by MICHAEL KUSER
Last week I noticed three new or refurbished wig shops on TarlabaÅ?ı
Boulevard. This struck me as I had thought of the old wig shops as
historical oddities. Is this tiny sector booming on the strength of
the number of transvestites moving into the neighborhood?
A journalist has to keep his eyes open, observe everything. A friend
of mine has a theory about television news — the most interesting
stories are in the little snippets that run on the ticker, not in what
the presenter is talking about. I wasn’t sure of that, partly because
I don’t like to read those flashing banners. They are equivalent to
the producers admitting that this news segment may not be fully
engaging your attention, so try thinking about this at the same time
to keep your brain busy.
To test it out, I turned on Bloomberg TV, a particularly vile specimen
of information overloading. The lower right side of the screen told me
that the South African market was trading sideways, that the yen/euro
exchange rate was so and so¦ plus they had a real ticker tape running
across with New York Stock Exchange quotes, in alphabetic order.
Then on the left I saw another headline: `Wild Alice Roosevelt Was
Famous Wit, Dad’s Decoy.’ I have to say this was on Sunday, usually a
slow news day in business or any other journalism. But is the daughter
of Teddy Roosevelt really news, under any circumstances?
My laptop sat on the table right next to me, so I went online and
found the story, which began, `She smoked, smuggled whiskey in white
gloves and took potshots with her revolver from the back of a speeding
train.’ Sounds wild, all right.
The story by Lewis Lapham said he had interviewed James Bradley,
author of `The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War,’ a
book about the diplomatic mission that President Roosevelt sent to
Asia in 1905 and for which Alice acted as hostess. My first thought
was for the author: What a curious little corner of history you have
bedded down in.
At the very bottom of the Web page the editors explained that Lapham
hosts `The World in Time’ interview series for Bloomberg News. So the
whole thing was nothing but a promo spot, a teaser. Oddly enough, the
Web page had active links to Lapham’s magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, to
the man himself, to the author and his book, but none to the show
being promoted.
The choice of using that book to highlight an interview show struck me
as curious, for a few reviews led me to perceive it as an uneven work,
a blanket indictment of Teddy Roosevelt and all acts of American
imperialism following the Spanish-American War. The author brings his
condemnation of US foreign policy full circle there, for a hundred
years before the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, some
Americans were condemning US soldiers’ use of water-boarding against
Filipino insurgents.
Bradley’s father was one of the soldiers who put up the flag on Iwo
Jima in World War II. The younger Bradley wrote about it in `Flags of
Our Fathers’ and resents Teddy Roosevelt for laying the groundwork for
Japan’s militancy and later attack on Pearl Harbor by giving the
Japanese a free hand in Korea in exchange for leaving Hawaii and the
Philippines alone.
William James wrote of the move to empire that he was astounded how
America could puke up its ancient soul in five minutes¦ but all
Bradley can do is whimper. He takes political correctness to extremes
in that he strives too hard to be a contemporary liberal, seeing
nothing but greed and stupidity in US foreign policy.
Considering the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign
Affairs vote on the Armenian issue, maybe he’s got a point. But
Bradley goes too far in condemning Teddy Roosevelt and all his works.
After all, didn’t the man father the wild Alice?
As a Washington hostess, Alice had a needlepoint pillow on her couch
that read, `If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right
here by me.’ And I wonder, what would Alice say about these new wig
shops on TarlabaÅ?ı Boulevard?
07.03.2010
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