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May 16, 2008
Exclusive: Looks Can Be Deceiving: A Review of Steven Marshall's 'Wolves in Sheep's Clothing'
One of the seemingly last remaining independent bookstores is near my house on Capitol Hill. There I can find many new titles not available elsewhere. I go there nearly every Saturday, after my daughter's soccer game. Why do I bother, when in 2008 I can buy books online? It seems that the ability to conveniently find online any English language book ever published does not replicate the quaint, hands-on experience of browsing actual volumes for sale on the shelves; shopping with your eyes and hands rather than in front of your computer. This fact makes me doubt whether globalization and the Internet will run the little book merchant into extinction. Sure, you know less about what you're buying from a bookstore, since there are no reader comments to view. Still, tangible inspection can still allow one to spot self-published books, which I tend to avoid. I like at least a modicum of outside discipline, and adult supervision, in my reading choices.
A few Saturdays ago, I came across a book entitled "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America," by Steven Marshall, published by an outfit known as Disinformation. Glancing at the back cover, I noticed that the picture of the author - a bearded filmmaker - did not fit what one would expect of writers of conservative screeds. A quick look confirmed that it had footnotes, which is always a good sign. The cover sleeve says it is written in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, both writers I admire. I went ahead and bought it.
Back at home, I started reading. "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing" starts out with a statement that the destiny of the U.S. will lie in the hands of kids born after 1990. So far, so good. Though somewhat trite, I kind of like this kind of message. "The Generational Legacy," "Our Children's Future," etc. I got all the way to page 2, where I noticed something slightly amiss. The author, without a trace of irony, describes how Muslims are claiming that the American liberal project is dead. Warning, I thought to myself. I would rather not be lectured on enlightenment by a group of people who think a secular government is merely a middle stage that leads to Shari'ah. I pushed on to page 3, where the author bemoans that "the most eloquent and influential liberals in the country backed the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia, the first Gulf War, and the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq." Yikes. It seems that the author has assigned himself the task of discovering what drives people to abandon "their youthful anti-militarism and sanction the kind of warfare that ultimately destroys and destabilizes entire communities," as if all of these military operations were, like, totally gnarly, in a bad way. By now, I knew I had been had. This is not what I though I was buying. Houston, we have a problem.
The packaging of "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing" might be a poster child for false advertising. Marshall's thesis is not that we have become too complacent and multicultural to effectively stare down the threat of radical Islam, which seeks to force Medieval political systems on the unwilling. Nope. His complaint is that American liberals cannot be trusted because they have moved too far away from Marxism that they are now traitors to the anti-globalization cause. If neocons are wolves on the hunt for food and territory, he argues, liberals are wolves in sheep's clothing, because they are no longer socialists. That's where he's going.
The need to pass this book off to the public as somehow mainstream is evident from the author's first-person account a few pages later of his pitch to the reluctant publisher, not something you often see in a work of non-fiction. After the aspiring author finishes his breathless speech about how true American liberalism is like a wounded animal, limping through the forest, the would-be publisher says, "Okay, so what is this book about?"
These bad signals did not deter me. I had already crossed the Rubicon, having plopped down $16.95 plus tax to buy a copy of the professional-looking, quality paperback. The political leanings of a book was irrelevant, for I read all types of stuff, and defiantly carry written material that spans the political spectrum, from Mother Jones to the Weekly Standard. I do this as if daring the non-readers on the subway to suggest that they have some say in how I exercise my personal freedom. "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing," however, is off the charts, and something you're likely to find soon in the remainder bins, along with John Perkins' "The Confessions of an Economic Hitman" (which, inexplicably, was a bestseller, perhaps owing to the packaging that made it looks like an edition of the Harvard Business Review.)
As annoying as "Wolves" was, I got through it. It was not always easy. The author has an early section, entitled "Notes on Style and Structure," where he proclaims "I have chosen to write ‘Wolves' much in the style in which I make documentaries." You go, Boy. He's just getting started.
SCENE:
So there the he is, in Samarra, Iraq, getting a little face-time with those blood-thirsty American enlisted guys, maybe looking for a little Michael Moore-style ambush to capture enough absurd working class Americana to make the military look ridiculous. There's a young sergeant, who opines that the Iraq war is being sold as one of liberation, but it's actually for the cause of free markets and capitalism.
FADE TO BLACK
SCENE
The narrator is flying over the Atlantic. It disgusts him that everyone on the plane is reading Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat," for, according to him, "there is probably no other liberal who fits the description of a wolf in sheep's clothing than America's globalization advocate." What has the narrator brought to read? A thin essay by the 75-year-old Marxist intellectual Samir Amin, entitled "The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World." It describes globalization as a disease, alienating and pauperizing three billion peasant farmers, who will be eventually be forced into the cities to live under apartheid. Perhaps Amin is right, and Friedman is wrong. The narrator author looks out the window at the dark blue Atlantic Ocean, a view that stretches west for 1,000 miles, and thinks to himself, The world is not really flat! The world is actually round! Friedman must be wrong!
FADE TO BLACK
So who exactly are Marshall's wolves-dressed-as-sheep? They were all people who used to be liberal and anti-military, and now actually have said things to suggest that they have joined the American Enterprise: Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Todd Gitlin, Chris Hitchens and, of course, David Horowitz (though he does allow that "Radical Son" is an engrossing memoir). They have all sold out, and Marshall claims they present the more insidious danger than people like William Kristol or Dick Cheney. Being a liberal is apparently much like being a Muslim. Once you give it up, you are more odious to the remaining adherents that if you had never started.
The wolves described by Marshall are only wrong if one thinks that democracy and free markets are a bad thing (count me among the suspicious on this point) in addition to possibly benefiting American corporate interests. It's a win-win situation called regional stability, which is promoted when people have their own property and therefore a stake in the future. It works. Just ask South Korea.
Not to Marshall. A true Leftist, it is feelings that matter. "What if the truth is that American capitalism is in decline and that globalization is just another facet of foreign policy, one that has become so wedded to corporate interests that the War on Terror is just the means of extending U.S. capital into crucial new markets." So it's not about the impact about what's happening, but what motivates it, or how the U.S. feels in its collective heart.
Here's an example: Marshall claims that the NATO bombing of Serbia splintered the liberal and Left wings of Western countries. Huh? I thought that the Serbians, after some streets protests, eventually came around and welcomed the departure of Milosevic. In a later footnote, he elaborates on what he means. There is apparently some debate in Leftist circles about whether the bombing of Belgrade was motivated by humanitarianism or the cause of market democracy. So it is not what the bombing accomplished, but how the American pilots felt while doing it. To answer this question, Marshall asks how could the NATO members feel they were engaged in humanitarian intervention when genocide in Darfur and Rwanda remained without any military intervention. Here's an alternative explanation for the inconsistency: NATO was created for European security, and Africa is not in Europe. Is Marshall perhaps suggesting that the military should have been used in Rwanda or the Sudan? He'd surely be offended if one suggested that maybe he is a wolf-in-training.
His complaint with Friedman is his assumption that anyone who opposes globalization from the developing world is driven by a deep sense of shame about their poverty and inability to keep up with the West. Friedman's view, he argues, excludes and invalidates the political will of an entire hemisphere of the planet, which stands in the way of economic justice for these people. He doubts Friedman's claims that the forces of liberalism have only left rich and industrialized countries in their wake, claiming that Friedman is "living in a dream world." If Marshall wants to see a dream world, he might look at the colonial "victims" of British Imperialism: the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and Singapore. Not bad company. These countries are the dream worlds, in the sense that their current GNPs make most people dream of living there.
Marshall suggests that Jamaicas may have been excused if they had acted out the way al Qaeda did on 9/11, in light of the impact globalization has had on the ability to poor dairy farmers to continue to sell poor quality milk at high prices. He fails to credit what makes globalization is so inevitable - it inures to the benefit of consumers, and forces indigenous sellers to modernize, and even helps them get to that stage. It seems so obvious.
Perhaps I am simply out of touch, despite the volume of my reading. Maybe the views that Marshall holds are mainstream among a significant segment of America, the would-be book purchasers, and I never saw the change coming. I admit that I have not yet read Naomi Klein's book (though I promise to if her publisher sends me a free copy). However, I did read John Perkins, and thought it bizarre. Perkins, for example, maintains that he secretly served as an "economic hitman" for the U.S. intelligence community - which he claims assassinated two Latin American leaders recently - despite never having received a government paycheck. His basis? He once interviewed for a job at the NSA before he hooked up with a Boston-based management consultant. He also claims that the U.S. seeks to bury developing countries in debt so it can coerce them into "voting" the way the U.S. wants at the UN. (Perkins should visit New York sometime. He might be surprised that the UN does not vote, nor does it enact legislation.) No, I refuse to believe that Steve Marshall and John Perkins' hold mainstream views.
However, "Wolves" was not a wasted effort. It confirms what I had concluded, in the face of my wife's adamant denials: there are plenty of educated Americans who hate the current administration so much that they would like to see their own country lose a war, because it would represent a black eye for the legacy of President Bush. Here I agree with something Marshall quotes Paul Berman as saying: blinded by their hatred of Bush, the peaceniks had failed to investigate the pathological roots of Jihadism, and people should realize that things the United States is against are not automatically good. Berman might be a wolf, but here he is absolutely right on this point. So is David Horowitz, who claims that there had never been a free country without capitalism, and never will be. He's right, in more than just his politics.
In the end, Marshall notes a peril that is of legitimate concern to me: the prospect that the overly competitive nature of American materialism will ruin what made the U.S. an industrial power - the Protestant work ethic. What if too many Americans are unable to practice self-restraint in chasing money, and most American school children say their main ambition is to go on "Survivor?" If that is a concern, what are we to say about someone who tries to sell his book by packaging it as something it's not, and who (as described in the final pages of "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing") spends $5,000 to take special yoga lessons in a sauna in order to brace himself for the final writing push? I am also not convinced that globalization is bound to ruin civilization, as many seem to think. After all, I bought "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing" at a brick-and-mortar bookshop that was not online, or a Barnes & Noble, or Borders.
Here is an alternative take on globalization, and the threat of the U.S. military, which pulls people like Marshall up short. The research and development we undertake in order to maintain American hegemony inevitably results in consumer products that people in the developing world simply cannot live without. Remember the Sony Walkman? More than Pershing Missiles in Western Europe, this revolutionary product drove poor East Germans crazy, and they went home and got their hammers and chisels, to take their frustrations out on an ugly wall. Perhaps the next revolutionary product will be a blanket that renders one invisible, or a device that fools the senses and allows two people a world apart to communicate (or have sex) with each other as if they were in the same room. Either way, its creation will almost certainly have been made possible by technology that was funded by the Pentagon. Globalization and the Internet (another military invention) will cause news of this product to reach people in the Third World, and make them realize that they absolutely must have this new toy. The inventors will become billionaires, and the users will be emancipated, since they will no longer be controllable by governments that stay in power by enslaving their own people. We will be, once again, at the End of History.
The views in this article are not those of the Department of Justice.
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