Peter Birkenhead is a writer living in Los Angeles. That’s what it said at the bottom of the article, and no more. That’s very mysterious. A quick bit of research seemed to point to the journeyman actor – “Steve” on Ally McBeal in 1998-99, and someone named “Steven” on West Wing in 1999, “Doctor Orsen” on Grey’s Anatomy in 2005, and more recently, on Medium (2007), he plays the “Lie Detector Guy.” The full list of his credits is impressive – steady and substantial work without stardom and fame, which may be the ideal life in Hollywood, as no one bothers you much. This man may be everything Paris Hilton isn’t.
As for that show Medium, its seems to be one more silly crime show, even if produced by the wry Kelsey Grammer and starring the ever-odd Patricia Arquette, as in this –
Allison DuBois may seem to most like a normal wife and mother of three, and she would be if it weren’t for her visions and dreams of dead people that she’s been having ever since she was a child. Allison is a medium - while awake she can read other people’s minds and see dead people walking around, and while asleep she has visions from the past or future, usually involving the victim of a murder or a murderer. Allison must then interpret these often cryptic visions and encounters and use them to solve murders and crimes that usually only she can solve, due to her abilities.
Yeah, right. And what about her sister Blanche?
Playing the “Lie Detector Guy” on this show could drive you mad, or into fits and giggles.
So, if we’re talking the same Peter Birkenhead, it’s no wonder he’s written an item on the virtues of doubt that appeared on SALON.COM – Better to be Hamlet than Prince George. He’s taken his role as the “Lie Detector Guy” to heart. He likes doubt – “Without it we have the tragic bluster and empty optimism of political culture today.”
That’s good. We accept bluster from political leaders, of course – it’s what political leaders do. The tragedy is another matter, and perhaps a judgment call. But it’s the empty optimism that drives many us up the wall.
Or maybe it’s the rhetoric of certainty that is so maddening, as in the items Birkenhead quotes –
“There’s no doubt in my mind that each person who has been executed in our state was guilty of the crime committed.” – George W. Bush, June 2, 2000
“There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world.” – GWB, Jan. 28, 2004
“There is no doubt in my mind that this country cannot [sic] achieve any objective we put our mind to.” – April 20, 2004
“There’s no doubt in my mind we made the right decision in Iraq.” – GWB, Sept. 2, 2004
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Afghanistan will remain a democracy and serve as an incredible example.” – GWB, Jan. 5, 2006
“There’s no doubt in my mind [warrantless surveillance] is legal.” – GWB, Jan. 26, 2006
Well, the man is sure of himself, and assumes, probably correctly, that that is what impresses the American people, even when he’s flat-out wrong. We’re all suckers for that.
Birkenhead is nostalgic for the old days, when he thinks we all agreed that “a capacity for self-doubt was a prerequisite for self-knowledge and a hallmark of maturity.”
Did we ever think that? Really? It seems an odd concept now. But we get this perspective –
To put it another way, can you imagine John F. Kennedy walking with the swagger of George W. Bush? Kennedy walked like what he was – a man in pain from injuries he suffered in an actual war, and he allowed himself to be photographed hunched over with worry during the Cuban missile crisis. That picture, now an iconic image of heroic doubt, is sadly anachronistic.
Yes, times have changed, and what gets to Birkenhead is what Kennedy said forty-five years ago, on another June 11, to the graduating class at Yale – “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic … Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
We call that optimism now. They WILL greet us as liberators, and pay for the reconstruction of their newly disassembled country so we don’t have to, and it won’t take many troops, and so on. The reports of the warning of exactly what would happen that were filed and forgotten are coming to light now. See this regarding the report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee before the Memorial Day holiday, Prewar Intelligence Assessments About Postwar Iraq (PDF), showing the reality was ignored – that the Bush administration ignored critical pre-war intelligence in their rush to invade Iraq –
The report, which the previous Republican Congress successfully kept from being produced for two years, shows that months before the Iraq invasion, the White House knew from U.S. intelligence agencies that a civil war would likely erupt after Saddam’s ouster, that al-Qaeda would quickly move to exploit the American occupation and that Osama bin Laden’s organization would actually gain strength globally due to Bush’s action.
And on June 11, 1962, Kennedy was telling the youngsters to “move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.”
Birkenhead says Kennedy was urging the students “not to let the establishment, which he represented, get away with anything.” Ah, those were the days – “Submit its rhetoric to the fiercest scrutiny.” It was the sixties – “Think for yourself” – and maybe you just had to be there. It seems 9/11 changed everything, and more than we ever imagined. Who would say such a thing now?
But Kennedy had had that Bay of Pigs thing two years earlier –
His Yale speech seemed infused with regret at not having treated the CIA’s intelligence with more skepticism before the invasion. (The agency had promised that the exiles could “melt into the mountains” if the plan failed – mountains that it failed to notice were 80 miles away.) The speech also foreshadowed his own fierce scrutiny of the rhetoric of Gen. Curtis LeMay and other administration hawks, who urged an attack during the missile crisis.
Oops. Reality matters, and there can be wisdom in doubt.
But Birkenhead doesn’t want to rag on Bush alone (Bush graduated from Yale a full six years after the Kennedy speech) –
… it would be lazy and wrong to think of George Bush as the source from which the modern disdain for doubt flows. The truth is, we, as a culture, don’t value self-doubt the way we did in the time of Kennedy or of other famous doubters, like Lincoln or Jefferson. We have created the political culture of mythology JFK warned us about. We have the president and, as the recent presidential debates have shown, the potential presidents we deserve.
You see, it’s us, really –
Let’s face it, George Bush doesn’t have to doubt himself, any more than Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney do. We live in a culture where they will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Of course, they have been denied the true confidence of people who are brave enough to face their doubts and who know there are worse things than feeling insecure. Like, say, feeling too secure. Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world. But that hasn’t stopped them, and won’t stop others, from succeeding in a society that is more enamored of a non-reality-based conception of leadership than previous generations were.
That perhaps needs to be unpacked a bit. The contention is that we live in a culture where those we venerate as leaders will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Maybe so – we are frightened by anything like self-doubt, and “thinking” looks just like that to a lot of people, especially thinking that involves considering possible scenarios, including those “worst care” scenarios. If our leaders aren’t completely and utterly sure that this or that decision is flawless, and low-risk, what will become of us? No leader now says “this will probably work, but there are risks, and they’re substantial, but we ought to try.” We want more than that – everything wonderful. Fear can do that to you.
As for “doubt-free sentimentality” – well, that’s what we live on, and it has been massively profitable for Fox News. And a non-reality-based conception of leadership is necessary for that. This is, of course, fantasyland.
And the fear thing plays into it all, as Birkenhead notes –
JFK’s generation had been warned by FDR about the corrosive peril of fear, and they took the admonishment to heart. But imagine if they had approached their moment in history with the grandiose self-image with which we’ve approached ours. Without the wisdom of doubt, without the grace of humility and the simple ability to learn from mistakes, would anyone have called them the Greatest Generation? (And by the way, don’t we do them a disservice with that moniker – didn’t they fight against all things “greatest” and on the side of splendid imperfection?) Imagine what the world would look like if they’d had the disdain for humility we do, if they’d relied on a conception of themselves as innately good, if they’d allowed themselves to think they knew everything and therefore learned nothing.
Think about that. He just said the ‘greatest generation” thing is a bit of a crock. It was the Axis folks who said they were the greatest. We just acknowledged we were far from perfect but would fight against the idiots who were talking about the master race and all the “we are great” crap. We weren’t. We knew it.
Birkenhead, a bit over the top, sees us now this way –
… our generation has erected a culture that confuses happiness with a lack of discomfort, and leadership with an almost psychotic form of false optimism. We have ingeniously insulated ourselves from self-scrutiny and fear. We tuck ourselves away in gated communities, hibernate in food courts, or sleep in front of televisions, swathed in layer upon layer of soft and soporific comfort to protect ourselves from the bracing draft of doubt. We can barely feel our own culture anymore.
And add that “our pretend fearlessness has made us timid” –
Most of us are getting our information from only a few sources, and it’s infused with narcotic banality: pillow-embroidery sentiment and locker room aphorisms that induce the waking sleep of consumerism. We’ve been convinced that good things go to people who “want it more than the other guy,” that wealth is a reward, and poverty a penalty. That the highest compliment we can pay each other is, we know what we want and how to get it, which makes us sound brave. But by banishing doubt we have cultivated fear. We’ve stopped looking under the bed for monsters.
… We’ve forgotten how valuable, even vital, it is to be bravely unsure of ourselves. We’ve forgotten that doubt is the hill that hope climbs, that without it our spirits atrophy.
Okay, that’s way over the top – but you get the idea. Doubt can be helpful, particularly when considering most of those who want to be the next president –
They puff up their chests and bray in the absolutist style of the guy who got us into the biggest mess of our lifetime. They clumsily and desperately make up facts, conflate enemies, and endorse the worst kinds of behavior, all to seem more certain than the next guy that evil is all around us. They present themselves as even less troubled by reality than our freedom-frying, deaf, dumb and blind dauphin. And at the same time they seem excruciatingly un-free, as if they’re straining against the straitjackets of political convention.
Our current presidential candidates could do us all a favor and read the words of a president who had to wear a confining back brace every day and who would often wince in pain, slump with doubt, and exhibit all sorts of human flaws – but also gave the impression that he could swim three miles in the South Pacific if he had to, even in his suit and tie.
Well, the man stood up to Curtis LeMay, whose solution to everything was to nuke the other guys. One has a hard time imagining that every time Cheney urges Bush to nuke Iran now, Bush is consumed with self-doubt and wonders about the consequences – geopolitical, practical and moral. More likely he turns to Karl Rove, who frowns. The political blowback would be awful.
But then, we’re good and they’re bad, and they hate us for our freedoms, and God made him president. It’s all very simple.
We’re not in 1962 any longer, are we?
And this Peter Birkenhead is probably not the television actor either.
