Issue #28/53, December 3 - 16, 1998  

by Abram Kalashnikov

There are plenty of snobs in the American literary scene, but among them, New York Times columnist William Safire stands out in a league all his own. He is the Michael Jordan of American snobbery, a truly unstoppable individual phenomenon, a cottage industry unto himself. More than anyone else in American letters, Safire is responsible for having made respectability synonymous with being a nitpicking reactionary bore. He has spent half his professional life correcting America's grammar in his fiercely pretentious "On Language" column, and the other half mobilizing public opinion behind his own peculiarly grim, fearful, power-worshipping vision of humanity--a vision in which ordinary people should be compelled to place their faith in a strong executive branch and a space-based missile system to protect them from dangling participles, teen sex and communism.

Safire would be just a slightly more loathsome member of a storied class of tiresome Times pundits were it not for the fact that, unlike the average Times columnist, he has a tendency to be freakishly, comically inaccurate. One of his favorite subject outlets for fallacious wrong-headedness is Russia, about which he writes confidently and often, despite apparently knowing almost nothing about the place beyond what he reads in the newspapers. A column he published last week, entitled "What Russia Needs Now", is a masterpiece of gibberish, and a provides a rare glimpse into the ugly science of influential modern American commentary. Judging from Safire's column, high-level punditry is simply a matter of taking the already oversimplified and sharply biased language of everyday news reports and using it to fashion a pastiche of ultimately incoherent but convincingly stodgy-sounding opinion. Safire's latest Russia piece was so bad, in fact, that it violated outright many of his own fabled "Rules On Writing", a nasal page-long checklist of dreary literary "absolutes" which hangs on the bulletin board of every William Buckley-wannabe in America. Judge for yourself: listed below are a few Safire "rules", followed by the excerpts from his latest Russia column which appear to violate them.

1. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

Here's the lead from Safire's column:

WASHINGTON -- During the spring primary elections in Chicago in 1928, candidates were machine-gunned and bombs at polling places terrorized voters. Desperate to prevent political violence in the November election, the head of the Crime Commission went to the city's most powerful gangster, Al Capone, to plead for help.

Capone, amused and flattered, delivered. With his cooperation, all known local gunmen of his and rival gangs were rounded up on Election Eve. Violence was suspended long enough for peaceful citizens to vote; "not one election fraud," marveled the anti-crime chief at the display of Capone's power. In Russia today, organized gangs of criminals are gunning down reform candidates, honest officeholders and political journalists. The country is out of the Government's control, and nowhere is political crime more violent than in St. Petersburg, heart of Russia's democratic reform.

Safire here appears poised to make the argument that the Russian government should strike a deal with the biggest and baddest of Russia's mafiosi to help restore order. This is a stupid and uninformed idea, but for the time being it still makes for a relatively coherent rhetorical argument.

However, by the end of his column, Safire has abandoned the Capone idea--having never gotten around to showing how it could be repeated in modern-day Russia--and decided to press a different Prohibition-era Chicago parallel:

In 1929, at the behest of a Chicago publisher, the newly elected President, Herbert Hoover, sent in a team of agents to break up Capone's violent politico-criminal empire.

Eliot Ness of Cleveland headed an incorruptible force of a dozen "untouchables." They nailed Capone not for his murders but on a white-collar charge of Federal income tax evasion. He died in jail -- "nutty as a fruitcake," as a gangland visitor reported.

What happened in Chicago 70 years ago can happen in St. Petersburg with Russian "untouchables." It begins with presidential will.

That's how Safire's piece ends. Having begun with the argument that Russia should appeal to its own Al Capone to help rescue democracy, he ends by urging President Boris Yeltsin to choose a crack team of "untouchables" to COMBAT modern Russia's version of Al Capone. When you start your argument by prescribing an Al Capone solution and end by offering an Eliot Ness one, that's mixing metaphors. That in this context it is also a moronic and inappropriate metaphor, that the creation of a Federally-sponsored "Untouchable" force is impossible in a country where the Federal government is completely corrupt itself, that the blanket advocacy of wholly American solutions to specifically Russian problems is a pointless and absurd exercise anyway, and that President Yeltsin cannot hope to eliminate Al Capone while he is busy actually BEING Al Capone--these are merely elements of plain, ordinary bad journalism. But mixing metaphors, that's something else. You wouldn't expect that of William Safire.

2. Avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

I can't imagine a bigger cliche in Russia coverage than "reformer". Safire leaned on it heavily in his piece, most notably in an un-Safirian display of sputtering literary aesthetics which appeared to violate the spirit of another Safire rule:

3. "Verbs have to agree with their subjects".

Here's that line:

"How can we help the embattled reformers in Russia? Certainly not by pouring more monetary aid down its banking system's drain."

I think even William Safire would agree that it would have been more proper to write "How can we help the embattled reformers in Russia? Certainly not by pouring more monetary aid down the drain of their country's banking system." As it stands, the "its" in the second sentence sounds uncomfortably like it is supposed to agree with the subject of the previous sentence, which is the ridiculous but still solidly plural term "embattled reformers". Of course, this is a minor point compared to the fact that there are no genuine "reformers" in Russian politics today, and that the "reformers" Safire describes "hurling defiance at the intimidators" included a man, Anatoly Chubais, who was caught on tape suppressing evidence in contract killings. If this isn't a questionable and misleading use of a journalistic cliche, I don't know what is. Couldn't the great William Safire have sought viable alternatives?

4. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

Here's yet another curmudgeonly chauvinist point made by Safire in the body of his piece:

"That Prime Minister [Primakov] cannot be bothered with political crime; he is too busy denouncing America and Britain for daring to threaten Saddam Hussein, and sending new reactors and technicians to help Iran become a nuclear power despite feeble Clinton protests. (That's the old spymaster's way of thanking the U.S. for supplying thousands of tons of free grain to starving Russians this winter.)"

It's certainly a trend among Western commentators to refer to "starving Russians", even though, locution-wise, it's a little bit of a flaky construct. Wheat-flaky. It's flaky because Russians have their own grain stored up from as long ago as 1993, and have no need for American grain whatsoever. In fact, the shipment of American grain has been widely reported to be actually harmful to Russia's domestic food distribution network, as it will in effect result in price dumping that will hurt domestic suppliers. So Safire might have been inadvertently right when he said Primakov was "thanking" the U.S. for its grain shipment. He might, in fact, have been giving it all the thanks it deserved. Some parts of Safire's piece were merely ridiculous without specifically violating any of his "rules":

"Without condescension, we should offer to share with the Russians our experience in combating organized crime. Our Federal agents and big-city cops know how mafias corrupt officials, and are wise to the latest computer techniques in moving hot money to foreign fronts. Some even remember how to induce rival gangs to 'go to the mattresses' and destroy each other. The point to make to those Russian cops struggling to be honest is that only a few generations ago America had to break the underworld triangle of corrupt politicians, thieving financiers and thugs for hire. We learned how to slice through cozy arrangements by using an elite force recruited outside the establishment."

Uh...Sure, William. Just tell me which branch of government you'd like to have recruiting this "elite force", and we'll get right on it. If you mean President Yeltsin, we'll just be sure to tell the force not to look into the ownership of his 26% of ORT shares, or into his son-in-law's appointment to the head of Aeroflot. The scary thing about all of this is that it is precisely the columns written by people like Safire which shape American foreign policy. It should be a source of general concern that so many of them are made up on the spot, without the backing of any real research, and guided only by the muddled reports of other journalists. It isn't, of course. At least not as much as dangling participles, teen sex or communism.