corrente

Yes, I know, Plato's forms, or archetypes, or universals, or ideas aren't meant to exist in the everyday world, Plato not being a big booster of "the word made flesh" type of proposition, but you tell me if this NYDaily News column by Stanley Crouch isn't a form of clueless perfection.

For years, Crouch has cultivated a maverick reputation, a man too independent, too free of cant, too original to be pegged with left/right labels. Personally, I've usually found him entirely too pegable, but this little poisened pen letter to "the press," taking "it" to task for its "coverage of casualities in Iraq" reaches new depths, even for Crouch.

Contemplating that coverage, he's glad this press corps wasn't around 150 years ago, when two years into the Civil War, Lincoln, faced with "unprecedented" casuality lists, needed time to find a new General who could win the war, i.e., Grant, because, golly gee, with them being all negative and harping on casualities like they do today, well....Crouch never says, "damn, if the Union might not have been defeated," but you're meant to fill in the blanks.

Crouch allows that Bush et al have made some mistakes.

In our moment, President Bush puffed out his chest too soon, and now too much is expected in too short a time. Plus, the stated goal, the purpose, of the war in Iraq changes shape too often for the President to get an understandable message through to the nation.

And what's Crouch's problem with the rest of the media noticing the above? Actually, so clueless is his explanation, I'm not sure, although perhaps what we have here is nothing more nor less than the obligatory careerist reference to "Bill Clinton" as an icon of the unsavory.

This is all grist for a press corps that has had nothing messy to talk about in high places since Bill Clinton was literally caught with his pants down in the Oval Office. That was scandalous, but it didn't have the dramatic power of Watergate or the uprising against the war in Vietnam or the Pentagon Papers.

The media have been itching for big trouble at the top, and so now the efforts of a small group of determined terrorists is being described as creating a quagmire.

Of course what was unsavory was less what the President did or did not do with Monica Lewinsky in the oval office than what Ken Starr and his merry band of men and elves did in their search for "the whole truth," one more reminiscent of Savanorola than of Jefferson, Adams, or Madison, i.e., ascertain and then publish the minutest details of private sexual behavior between two consenting adults that turned out to have no relevance to anyone beside the principals themselves and those who knew and cared about them. [see the first ten pages of "The Human Stain."] So, in that same spirit, let me point out that we still can't be sure whether the President's pants were actually "down," or whether they were "up" and only his fly was open.

As it happens, Crouch's history lesson is as clueless as his commentary. During those first two years of losing major battles to the south, the press attacks on Lincoln and his war policies were brutal and unstinting. A cursory glance at any issue of Harper's Weekly for those years makes hash of Crouch's basic supposition. Nor is discussion of press attacks on Lincoln missing from any decent book on the Civil War.

The press today, bad press, bad press, is faulted for not putting the number of casualities in perspective, showing that they're remarkably low, compared, I guess, with Civil War casualities, when, remember, to be wounded was pretty much a death warrant.

But what brought my epiphany that what was before me, shimmering in the light of my computer monitor, was an actual Platonic form were these words:

Our greatest American skill has almost always been improvising, discovering the solution in motion, looking away from the music paper and following the dictates of our ears when we heard something in our heads that sounded better than what we were looking at on the paper.

That is where we are in Iraq, and the Bush administration would do well to make that clear to the public.

Improvise? This President? Change policies, "in motion," to meet the demands of an ever-changing situation on the ground? Our "bold" "bring 'em on" leader, steadfast, unmovable, who never acknowledges a change of policy even on those rare occasions that there is one, which is actually okay, because it turns out it isn't a change at all, only a shift in how we're meant to percieve the policy? That President Bush? Should make clear to us that we need to give him room to "riff?"

Mr. Crouch, sir, Bush's whole Iraq policy is just one long riff, and he is as likely to be able to riff on his riff, as a shark is to improvise a new way to attack. Both creatures are designed to move only forwards; neither is capable of looking back, or sideways, or at themselves.

Okay, maybe I'm over the top, with all this talk of Platonic forms.

Maybe I should just have called what Crouch has to say "hooey." But give me this, if it is just an example of hooey, it's hooey of a very high order.