Michael Kelly

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“What Do Our Lives In Today’s World Mean?”

March 30, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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The 1993 version of Hillary Clinton probably would have been far more appreciated in 2016 than this year’s model, but that iteration wasn’t so popular back then. Soon after her husband’s first inauguration, Michael Kelly published “Saint Hillary,” a NYT Magazine article that concerned what Clinton believed was her spiritual mission as the freshly minted First Lady.

Her views seem New Agey in retrospect and were no doubt spurred in part by grief over her father’s death, but Kelly, who was later killed as an Iraq embed, did unwittingly pen the piece at the perfect time to capture the moment prior to the sea change in the culture due to the decentralization of the media, the rise of the Internet and the emergence of Reality TV. It was just before our communications matured and we regressed. Any deep conversation now is just waiting to be trolled. We’re better but we’re worse.

An excerpt:

Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

When it is suggested that she sounds as though she’s trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, “That’s right, that’s exactly right!”

She is, it develops in the course of two long conversations, looking for a way of looking at looking at the world that would marry conservatism and liberalism, and capitalism and statism, that would tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of Communism and the beginning of the third millennium, crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teen-age mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, the cynicism of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community.

The point of all this is not abstract or small. What Mrs. Clinton seems — in all apparent sincerity — to have in mind is leading the way to something on the order of a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life. A lot of people, contemplating such a task, might fall prey to self doubts. Mrs. Clinton does not blink.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she says. “But we can’t get scared away from it because it is an overwhelming task.’

The difficulty is bound to be increased by the awkward fact that a good deal of what Mrs. Clinton sees as wrong right now with the American way of life can be traced, at least in part, to the last great attempt to find The Answer: the liberal experiments in the reshaping of society that were the work of the intellectual elite of . . . Mrs. Clinton’s generation.

THE CRUSADE OF HILLARY Rodham Clinton began on April 6 in Austin, Tex. There, speaking from notes she had scribbled on the plane, she moved swiftly past the usual thanks and jokes to wade into an extraordinary speech: a passionate, at times slightly incoherent, call for national spiritual renewal.

The Western world, she said, needed to be made anew. America suffered from a “sleeping sickness of the soul,” a “sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough — that we lack at some core level meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are.”

She spoke of “cities that are filled with hopeless girls with babies and angry boys with guns” as only the most visible signs of a nation crippled by “alienation and despair and hopelessness,” a nation that was in the throes of a “crisis of meaning.”

“What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today’s world mean?” she asked. “What does it mean in today’s world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?”

These questions, she said, led to the larger question: “Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?” The answer to that was “all of us,” all required “to play our part in redefining what our lives are and what they should be.”

“Let us be willing,” she urged in conclusion, “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.”•

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“Viewers Would Record Their Opinions By Marking Computer Cards, Which They Would Mail To Regional Tabulating Centers”

June 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1969, computer-processing magnate Ross Perot had a McLuhan-ish dream: an electronic town hall in which interactive television and computer punch cards would allow the masses, rather than elected officials, to decide key American policies. In 1992, he held fast to this goal–one that was perhaps more democratic than any society could survive–when he bankrolled his own populist third-party Presidential campaign. The opening of “Perot’s Vision: Consensus By Computer,” a New York Times article from that year by the late Michael Kelly:

WASHINGTON, June 5— Twenty-three years ago, Ross Perot had a simple idea.

The nation was splintered by the great and painful issues of the day. There had been years of disorder and disunity, and lately, terrible riots in Los Angeles and other cities. People talked of an America in crisis. The Government seemed to many to be ineffectual and out of touch.

What this country needed, Mr. Perot thought, was a good, long talk with itself.

The information age was dawning, and Mr. Perot, then building what would become one of the world’s largest computer-processing companies, saw in its glow the answer to everything. One Hour, One Issue

Every week, Mr. Perot proposed, the television networks would broadcast an hourlong program in which one issue would be discussed. Viewers would record their opinions by marking computer cards, which they would mail to regional tabulating centers. Consensus would be reached, and the leaders would know what the people wanted.

Mr. Perot gave his idea a name that draped the old dream of pure democracy with the glossy promise of technology: ‘the electronic town hall.’

Today, Mr. Perot’s idea, essentially unchanged from 1969, is at the core of his ‘We the People’ drive for the Presidency, and of his theory for governing.

It forms the basis of Mr. Perot’s pitch, in which he presents himself, not as a politician running for President, but as a patriot willing to be drafted ‘as a servant of the people’ to take on the ‘dirty, thankless’ job of rescuing America from ‘the Establishment,’ and running it.

In set speeches and interviews, the Texas billionaire describes the electronic town hall as the principal tool of governance in a Perot Presidency, and he makes grand claims: ‘If we ever put the people back in charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues, you’ll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet, pirouetting around the stage getting it done in unison.’

Although Mr. Perot has repeatedly said he would not try to use the electronic town hall as a direct decision-making body, he has on other occasions suggested placing a startling degree of power in the hands of the television audience.

He has proposed at least twice — in an interview with David Frost broadcast on April 24 and in a March 18 speech at the National Press Club — passing a constitutional amendment that would strip Congress of its authority to levy taxes, and place that power directly in the hands of the people, in a debate and referendum orchestrated through an electronic town hall.•

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“Evil Must Be Opposed. Good Would Triumph.”

April 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

You can feel deep sympathy for the parents, wife and children of the late Atlantic journalist Michael Kelly, who was the first member of the press to be killed covering the Iraq war, and still be critical of the wrongheadedness he displayed which led not only to his demise but also contributed to the death of tens of thousands of other human beings. Like many pundits and politicians, Kelly, in the wake of 9/11, developed a blind spot–a lethal one. Unless we figure out why that happened, why so many otherwise smart people became dumb at a really bad moment, it will happen again.

In a provocative Gawker post, “A Stupid Death in a Stupid War,” Tom Scocca examines Kelly’s thought process in the run-up to the invasion, ten years after his death as an embed. An excerpt:

“People who supported the invasion of Iraq and now regret the results tend to say that it was a good idea that was badly planned or poorly managed. Yet there was no idea but the planning and management of it. The decision to invade was not a change of principles, a repudiation of mushy-headed pacifism and appeasement; it was a change of strategy.

Even that gives it too much credit. It was half a change of strategy, really: regime change with nothing to change it to; an invasionary force without a plan for occupation; an open-ended commitment of military personnel by a nation too politically cowardly to draft enough bodies to do the job. Thousands of reservists and National Guard troops found themselves serving multiple tours abroad, trapped in what Kelly had envisioned as ‘total limited war…brutally effective in its killing power while being miserly of American life and property.’

‘You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,’ Donald Rumsfeld said, thereby sparing Kelly and Andrew Sullivan and everyone else in the press from the shame of having said the single most fatuous and destructive thing about the invasion of Iraq. It is hard to find a shorter, clearer description of how wars are not won. The United States did not attack Berlin or Tokyo with the army it had in December of 1941. The U.S. Navy did not sail up the Thames in 1812. You fight the battles you can win with the army you have.

That Kelly was brave in going to cover the combat does not change the fact that he chose to be bold with other people’s lives. It was time to do something about Iraq—’to turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,’ as Rupert Brooke wrote in 1914, in a sonnet celebrating the chance to go fight the Great War. A year later, Brooke died of an infected mosquito bite on a troop ship, taking his place among the 16 million corpses.

The premise of Kelly’s argument for invasion was that escalating the war, carrying it to Baghdad on the ground, would settle the problems ‘easily and quickly.’ Like his fellow poets, Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, he presented his romantic vision as clear-eyed advice. Evil must be opposed. Good would triumph. Anyone who disagreed was benighted, mistaken, immoral.”

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