MEDIA ALERT: BRILLIANT FOOLS - Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media

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Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:45:54 +0700

MEDIA ALERT: BRILLIANT FOOLS - Harold Pinter, John Le Carré

And The Media

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http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php

 

 

 

Media Lens

 

 

MEDIA ALERT: BRILLIANT FOOLS

Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media

 

 

December 19, 2005

 

Introduction - Factory Labels

 

The most effective way to control people is to control their

assumptions about the world. The task of propaganda is to apply

power-friendly labels and make them stick - it is the key to

everything. The labelling factory par excellence - the machine that

applies the right labels in the right way over and over again - is the

mass media system.

 

Activists have lambasted governments, corporations, whole industries

for decades, but they are swimming against a relentless tide. As has

been demonstrated so clearly in Iraq, governments and businesses can

do pretty much what they like just so long as the media factory is on

hand to label it better: to label away the crimes, the lies, the

outrage, the desperate need for change.

 

The media are, and always have been, the supreme obstacle to change.

But you would not know it because all media corporations apply the

same potent label to such a thought: 'Unthinkable.'

Who Does John Le Carré Think He Is?

 

Naturally enough, high-profile reputations within the mainstream tend

to attract negative media labels to the extent that an individual is

honest in exposing the crimes of power. This becomes particularly

striking when widely celebrated talents choose to focus their energies

on political dissent. Then, suddenly, the brilliant become brilliant

fools - egomaniacs whose craving for yet more attention lures them

into realms of inquiry beyond their competence. Expert wordsmiths

become childish scribblers. Sophisticated storytellers become gauche

and witless. Even world-renowned scientists are suddenly unable to

grasp the most elementary principles of scientific inquiry. The power

of labelling appears to be without limit.

 

This labelling does not involve mere disagreement. As teachers of

meditation have instructed for thousands of years, the mind is most

effectively trained by constant repetition reinforced by emotion. If

labelling is to be effective, it is important that embarrassment,

revulsion and even disgust be generated in the public mind. This

ensures that the required label is fixed both intellectually and

emotionally, and recalled every time the target individual is

remembered, seen or heard.

 

An example is the novelist David Cornwell, who writes under the

pseudonym John Le Carré. For decades, Le Carré received exuberant

praise for his spy novels - until he started to direct fierce

criticism at US-UK foreign policy.

 

In reviewing Le Carré's novel Absolute Friends, the Sunday Telegraph

wrote:

 

" The poor fellow harangues us about globalisation, about George Bush,

about Washington neo-conservatives... With small sense of the

ridiculous, he gives us a popular novel which nods gravely at the

names of such as Noam Chomsky... including, yes, John Pilger.

 

" What turned this much-loved entertainer into a cosmic prophet? What's

eating him? Who does 'John Le Carré' think he is? " ('Unsmiley person -

a new book shows the skilled thriller-writer slipping still further

into the slough of gravitas,' Sunday Telegraph, December 7, 2003)

 

The reviewer concluded: " It is sad, but scarcely tragic... The Spy Who

Came in from the Cold will be read when most of today's polemics,

including those of angry old David Cornwell, are quite forgotten. "

 

The Sunday Times commented:

 

" Le Carré's anger comes across as a bit too raw to work as fiction,

its rhetoric more in line with a Harold Pinter column than a Graham

Greene novel.

 

" I finished Absolute Friends hoping that this greatest of all spy

novelists writes for decades more, not only so he can keep creating

characters like Mundy and Sasha, but also so that he can gain a more

incisive perspective on our troubling times. " (Stephen Amidon,

'Dispatches from an angry old man,' Sunday Times, December 14, 2003)

Swallowing Pinter's Bile

 

Another example is the British playwright Harold Pinter, who was this

month awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature. Pinter is the first

British winner since VS Naipaul in 2001.

 

Pinter has long been equally admired for his dramatic work and reviled

for his political activism. Introducing his Nobel acceptance speech,

playwright David Hare said:

 

" The theatre is what the British have always been good at. And nobody

has so come to represent the theatre's strengths, its rigours, and its

glories, as Harold Pinter. " (Harold Pinter: Nobel prize speech, More4,

December 10, 2005)

 

Reviewers speak in near-mystical terms of Pinter's brilliance. Leading

theatre critic Michael Billington observed in the Guardian:

 

" Although he is best known as a dramatist and screenwriter, Harold

Pinter is an equally remarkable director... As an actor, Pinter also

possesses weight, authority and presence... Pinter's production of

Joyce's Exiles was a masterpiece of psychological insight and dramatic

timing. " ('High-octane Harold,' The Guardian, February 5, 2005)

 

Pinter's use of sparse, menacing language in his drama is deemed the

stuff of genius. But the labels applied to Pinter's anti-war poetry

are different. These poems are " ludicrous, crass, offensive,

second-rate, obscure-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness " , Daniel

Finkelstein declared in the Times: " The great dramatist has the right

to intervene in politics, just as anyone else has. But he doesn't have

the right to be taken seriously. Pinter simply has nothing interesting

to say. " (Finkelstein, 'Warning: what you are about to read is f******

poetic,' The Times, March 9, 2005)

 

Poet Don Paterson dismissed Pinter in the Guardian:

 

" To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about

how crap the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world's greatest

living playwright. Because anyone can do that. " (Chalotte Higgins,

'Pinter's poetry? Anyone can do it,' The Guardian, October 30, 2004)

 

We at Media Lens cannot say if it is true that Pinter's use of words

is brilliant in his plays but absurd in his poems. But we are reminded

of the treatment meted out to Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins School

of Public Health. Journalists everywhere deferred to Roberts as one of

the world's leading epidemiologists when he estimated millions of

deaths in the Congo in 2000 and 2001. But he was judged a fool guilty

of schoolboy errors when estimating 100,000 civilian deaths since the

March 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq.

 

Simon Heffer wrote in the Daily Mail of Pinter:

 

" I don't begrudge Harold Pinter his Nobel prize. I have never seen why

someone's political views - which in Pinter's case are verging on the

barking - should disqualify them from acclaim in any field of the

arts. " (Heffer, 'David, don't be scared of the truth,' Daily Mail,

October 15, 2005)

 

In The New York Times, James Traub declared that " Pinter's politics

are so extreme ... they are almost impossible to parody. " (Traub,

'Their Highbrow Hatred of Us,' New York Times, October 30, 2005)

 

Traub added, " it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore

Vidal who would not choke on Pinter's bile " .

 

The Times wrote that Pinter's recent output has consisted " almost

entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants

against the Iraq conflict. In his anger, Pinter is as spare with logic

as he once was with language " . ('... The Nobel Prize...for

Literature...to Harold Pinter...Hmmm...,' Pause For Thought, The

Times, October 14, 2005)

 

Tony Allen-Mills lamented in the Sunday Times:

 

" Among this year's Nobel laureates are several American scientists who

are being rewarded for brilliant work. Yet their achievements appear

destined to be overshadowed by a rant from a bolshie Brit. " (Allen-Mills, 'This Pinter guy could turn into a pain,' Sunday Times,

November 6, 2005)

 

The Mirror reported Pinter's Nobel prize speech with the headline:

" Pinter rant at 'brutal' US policy. " (Mirror, December 8, 2005)

 

In the Independent, Johann Hari wrote an article titled: 'Pinter does

not deserve the Nobel Prize - The only response to his Nobel rant (and

does anyone doubt it will be a rant?) will be a long, long pause.'

(Hari, The Independent,

December 6, 2005)

 

It is significant that Hari described Pinter's speech as a " rant "

before it had even been delivered - the label exists independently of

the work, indeed of the author, in question. To subject power to

serious, rational challenge is by definition to " rant " . Hari commented:

 

" Ever since Pinter was a teenager, he has been relentlessly

contrarian, kicking out violently against anything that might trigger

his rage that day. "

 

This is the standard, Soviet-style assertion that critics of power are

afflicted by psychological disorder, with the concocted 'sins' of

power randomly selected as a focus for neurotic ire.

 

Compare and contrast the above with a comparable dismissal in the

Observer by Jay Rayner. The title of the article was 'Pinter of

Discontent'. The subtitle read: 'Hated Pinochet; loathed Thatcher;

doesn't like America; deplores Nato; is disgusted when his play

doesn't get a West End run. Good old Harold - he's always bitching

about something.' (Rayner, 'Pinter of discontent,' The Observer, May

16, 1999)

 

Rayner referred to Pinter's obsessive " bitching " nearly thirty times,

using language like: " raging " , " sound and fury " , " growling " ,

" outraged " , " attacking " , " hostility " , " rowing " , " ever ready to pick a

fight " , " yelling " , " barracking " , " fury " (again), " raging " (again).

 

Charles Spencer also pointed to the 'sickly' psychological roots of

Pinter's politics:

 

" Right through his career, he has been fascinated by the relationship

between victim and oppressor, the weak and the powerful, and his

spare, clenched dialogue is full of insults, piss-takes and threats.

From what one hears about Pinter the man, as opposed to Pinter the

playwright, he's pretty good at menace in real life as well as on the

stage. " (Spencer, 'Happy birthday party for Harold Pinter,' Daily

Telegraph, October 14, 2005)

 

Spencer lamented the influence of Pinter's " adolescent politics " on

his plays.

 

A day later, Sam Leith also focused on Pinter's " menace " and rage:

 

" There has always been the permanent scowl; the finger-jabbing rage;

the off-the-peg bohemianism of the uniform black polo-neck; the sense

of vanity begging to be punctured. " (Sam Leith, 'The childish urge to

tease our greatest living playwright is much too delicious to resist,'

Daily Telegraph, October 15, 2005)

 

One of us, David Edwards, has met Pinter several times. Below, we have

provided a link to the full transcript of an interview Edwards

conducted with Pinter in his London office in 1999. We invite readers

to judge for themselves the truth of Pinter's " rabid " , " barking " ,

" adolescent " politics. Is he someone who " simply has nothing

interesting to say " ? Is he " as spare with logic as he once was with

language " ? Consider the claims of irrational rage, of extremist bile.

Notice the rationality and precision of Pinter's political analysis.

Notice the responses of one of the world's most famous writers -

regularly denounced for his aggression and intolerance - to ideas and

suggestions proposed by a younger and almost completely unknown writer.

 

To compare the above flood of insults and smears with what follows, we

believe, is a revelation. To consider the robotically consistent

nature of the smears - and how we find ourselves assuming that there

must be something to them - reveals much about how freedom of

expression is crushed in our society.

 

http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4799#4799

Conclusion

 

It is a brutal fact of modern media and politics that honesty and

sincerity are not rewarded, but instead heavily punished, by powerful

interests with plenty at stake. It does not matter how often the likes

of Pinter, Le Carré, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are shown to be

right. It does not matter how often the likes of Bush and Blair are

shown to have lied in the cause of power and profits. The job of

mainstream journalism is to learn nothing from the past, to treat rare

individuals motivated by compassion as rare fools deserving contempt.

 

The benefits are clear enough: if even high-profile dissidents can be

painted as wretched, sickly fools, then which reader or viewer would

want to be associated with dissent? Then 'normal' - conforming,

consuming, looking after 'number one' - can be made to seem healthy,

balanced, sensible and sane. Historian Howard Zinn made the point well:

 

" Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable

notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often

led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of

what that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to

be sceptical of someone else's description of reality. " (The Zinn

Reader, Seven Stories Press, 1997, p.338)

 

The great task of propaganda is to make dissent seem unrealistic,

embarrassing, and absurd.

 

It is worth considering the level of honesty of even those who buck

this trend to some extent. Thus Mary Riddell commented in the Observer:

 

" On Wednesday morning, the finest living British playwright recorded,

from his wheelchair, an acceptance speech for the greatest literary

prize on earth. Anyone who wished to see an allusion to the talk,

played in Sweden that day, would have searched BBC schedules in vain.

 

" He got no mention on either of the main television news programmes.

Newsnight, voracious for culture, carried nothing. Pinter's speech

would have been restricted to the satellite channel, More4, had

Channel 4 not decided, at the last minute, to put out a midnight

digest. " (Ridell, 'Prophet without honour,' The Observer, December 11,

2005)

 

But Riddell was careful not to give the wrong impression to media

colleagues and employers standing ready with their labels. She added

on Pinter:

 

" He was disgraceful in his misreading of Slobodan Milosevic. The

Stockholm speech included the puerile satire of Pinter at his worst. "

 

Write to us at: editor

 

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