Update on CBC on Qutb & Strauss

Further to my previous post on “The Power of Nightmares” on CBC.

Out of the same perverse desire for spectacle that makes people gaze at corpses beside the executor’s bloc or at least at a car accident, I decided to watch Part One. Let’s just say that this is one of the crudest pieces of knuckle-dragging idiocy I’ve seen since the last time I saw something like this on CBC.

It had incredibly cheap production value, with lots of cheesy music. It also makes simplistic assertions – repeatedly. Perhaps its cheap production value is due to it having been a BBC production from 2004. Its director, Adam Curtis, has been toasted by all the usual Michael Moore-crowd suspects including Cannes (it also won the British Oscar for Best Documentary). Here’s his justification for his postmodern journalism:

My aim in doing this was to say to people: “Look, have you thought of it this way?” as a means of encouraging them to question the received wisdom they are told by governments and the media.

You don’t have to agree with my argument about why this has happened, but what I do hope is that the basic journalism and evidence in the programmes will make people see how weak and partial the official version is.

That is to say, he’s got another set of evidence than what officialdom provides, and, like officialdom, he’s not going to bother considering counterevidence or alternate interpretations. As I’ve noted before, especially of the left (but not exclusively by any means), this is because we live in a fragmented world where “truth” is taken to be elusive at best, which makes innuendo, shaky associations and inferences apparently justified.

The bulk of it focuses on Strauss. Scratch that. More precisely, the bulk of it focuses on inferring associations between Strauss and Irving Kristol’s rejection of LBJ’s Great Society, and then the latter’s coalition with Rumsfeld and Cheney during the Ford administration. It then takes the viewer through the Reagan year’s and the alleged neocon (=Straussian, apparently) conspiracy that overstated the Soviet threat and found ideological kin among the Afghan muhajadeen.

I’m not making this up. I’m incapable of making this up.

And what does this story have to do with Strauss? Nothing, really. But it makes for a simplistic and satisfying (for some) storyline that makes the purported “Gunsmoke” vision of America it alleges Strauss and his epigones to have held, look like a nuanced and subtle series of dialectics.

It also includes interviews with Harvey Mansfield making provocative statements on frivolous relativists (thus inadvertently, it seems, confirming the documentary’s working premise), and Stanley Rosen explaining why Strauss liked TV shows “Gunsmoke” (simple stories about good and evil) and “Perry Mason” (the elite keep things from commoners).

Most laughable is how self-contradictory and illiterate the piece is. Its basic premise is that Strauss and Qutb reject liberalism because of the corroding effects of its liberalism. However, Irving Kristol states that he rejected LBJ’s Great Society because of its statism. I suppose one could say that Kristol’s statement agrees with the documentary’s basic premise if you see that for Strauss and him, individualism leads to bad national projects while he and Strauss allegedly sought good national projects.

What’s the project? Reassert national self-confidence for the plebs by creating a civil religion of national greatness by finding external enemies. The director obviously has no understanding of American history, and the role of civil religion in it. He’s never heard of Jonathan Winthrop or read George Washington’s Farewell Address. Nor does he mention any of the scholars of religion (civil or otherwise) in the US, including Ernest Tuveson, Mark Noll, Robert Bellah, or Jurgen Gebhardt, Ellis Sandoz, and the list goes on.

Of course, even though the show is supposed to center on Strauss, the show never once investigates any single word he ever wrote. No mention of Natural Right and History or of Liberalism: Ancient and Modern, two places you’d think the show would look to find out his views on liberalism, the US, etc.

So there you have it. Knuckle-dragging vulgarity at its finest. All paid for by the British and Canadian taxpayer.

Ok, NOW I miss NHL pro hockey. CBC: please bring back Ron and Don so we can hear intelligent commentary! Better yet, let us rejoice we now have access to Fox News.

For more commentary on this documentary, see Joseph Knippenberg’s comments on this documentary, as well as National Review, where Clive Davis provides more examples of its distorted journalism and interview techniques.

Part Two goes tomorrow and Part Three on Tuesday. I don’t think I need to hear how the neocons created Bill Clinton as a way of creating a crisis (as the commercial for Part Two promises).

UPDATE: Here’s my take on Monday night’s episode.