by Michael Buozis

The American male, as a species, is in crisis.  At least in the realm of public life, the norms for masculine behavior in our society have deteriorated to such an extent that American men are now expected to act like frat boys for the rest of their lives.  You just wouldn’t be manly if you acted any other way.  This is the message we get from our popular publications, television and movies.  The wild bachelor party where a prostitute is accidentally (or purposefully) killed and her body must be hidden in the desert has become a comfortable trope of too many popular narratives.  Maxim and Esquire, even Men’s Journal, to say nothing of more overtly pornographic men’s magazines like Playboy and Penthouse have added a sheen of respectability to juvenile behavior.  They provide guides for how to dress for success and debauchery, rules for the etiquette of manliness, liquor and leather ads and a nice war story or two thrown in for political relevance.  Alcohol and women, tobacco and (depending on geography) firearms are not so much to be savored as part of a full life, but instead are the gadgets and gizmos of manhood to be consumed with abandon, in public, on camera.

There have always been American men who have acted this way, who have worshipped at the altar of drunkenness and violence.  But never before in history has it been so widely acceptable for a grown man to sit all day in his pajamas playing violent video games, illegally downloading meaningless television shows and movies, drinking cases of cheap, watery lager, to end the day drenched in cologne preying on women lonely enough to subject themselves to the bar scene.  Better yet, skip the bar and drive down to the strip.  All pleasures can be bought.  Maybe the problem is technology.  Maybe it’s a matter of magnification.  Entourage taught us the allure of the douche bag.  Jersey Shore reminded the world that we love a train wreck, and many young people are magnificent train wrecks.

Fortunately, most of us can avoid these people.  Change the channel.  Read better magazines.  Watch better movies.  Drink at finer bars.  Don’t drink at all.  God help you if you live in a college town.  Despite the prominence of the drunken frat boy in our popular imagination, it’s quite easy to keep such monsters at bay from one’s own social orbit.

“Hire more females.”

This was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recommendation for what should be done if the Secret Service is found to have frequently behaved as they did in Cartagena, Colombia prior to President Obama’s arrival there for the recent Summit of the Americas.  Nine agents were found to have hired prostitutes and engaged in heavy drinking while preparing for their duties protecting Obama.  The incident was brought to the American embassy’s attention when a dispute over payment with one of the prostitutes caused a commotion at the Hotel Caribe.  The initial concern was about any compromise in President Obama’s safety, as angry pimps are known to act unreasonably when provoked.  The agent paid the prostitute, to settle things, but the ensuing attention from the media and the U.S. government has broadened into a discussion of appropriate behavior.  The agents technically did nothing illegal, as prostitution and heavy drinking are both perfectly legal in Colombia.  In fact, the only photographs I can find of the Hotel Caribe show prostitutes walking openly in front of its entrance.

This is to say nothing of the lavish recreational spending and untoward behavior of the General Services Administration.

I don’t want to sound like a prude, but there’s something disturbing in these reports.

I like my artists and musicians, poets and philosophers (even the stray physicist or mathematician) to have frequented his city’s red light district in his youth, but when our public servants act like giddy adolescents, whether on the people’s dime or off, I’m concerned less about moral deterioration and more about professional competency.

Michael Hastings, a freelance journalist known for his feature stories and profiles in the aforementioned men’s magazines, most prominently Rolling Stone, opens his new book The Operators, with the story of a public figure with a distinctly un-frat boy sensibility and narrative.  General David D. McKiernan, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2009 was forced to resign by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other top players in the Pentagon and White House.  Though in practice McKiernan implemented many of the newly adopted counter-insurgency (COIN) measures put forth by superstar General David Petraeus and his civilian and military disciples, Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen were unimpressed with McKiernan’s cool-headedness in his initial briefings to them.  Sympathetic to President Obama, McKiernan refused to push the issue of a troop surge, one of the key elements of COIN, which requires a far larger force than the counter-terrorism doctrine endorsed by Vice President Joe Biden.  Remember, this is before the days of Leon Panetta and the increased profile of targeted drone attacks.  It seems ancient history, when we thought nation building in Afghanistan was a good idea, but then again Petraeus was the first celebrity four-star general in a generation and his word was gospel in the military and the hawkish circles of the government.

So Gates and Mullen replaced McKiernan, a traditional straight-laced Army type, as head of ISAF, with Stanley McChrystal, a Special Forces “A-team” veteran, brash and unapologetically gung-ho about the escalation of America’s war in Afghanistan.  Petraeus had leapfrogged over McChrystal in Iraq, so here was Stan’s chance to shine.

A string of laudatory puff-piece profiles followed in the national media and it looked, for a short time, as though McChrystal might fill the role in Afghanistan that Petraeus filled in Iraq, namely to turn the tide of domestic opinion about the conflict’s success around before the inevitable and anti-climactic denouement.

Enter the intrepid Rolling Stone reporter on assignment in Europe, covering McChrystal’s diplomatic visits to coalition members.

Hastings encounters a jingoistic culture in McChrystal’s staff, full of bullshitting and crudity, a far cry from the buttoned-up professionalism you’d expect.  McChrystal’s brood, which is made up of civilian and military press advisors, including a Brit named Duncan who used to work in hospitality, as well as advisors and other administrative staff, Chief of Staff Charlie Flynn and his brother Major General Michael T. Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence man, are scarily casual around Hastings.  In Paris, one of them threatens to kill Hastings if his piece is not complementary to the general.  They speak disparagingly of Biden (“Bite me!”) the chief rival and detractor to the theory of COIN in Afghanistan.  The presence of alcohol in profusion at nearly every scene Hastings reports of the off-duty general and his staff is remarkable.  They stumble back to the Westminster Hotel and the next morning McChrystal worries that the group they share an elevator with will smell the beer on them.  While we don’t require our public servants to be teetotalers, this level of abandon, especially around a journalist is strikingly immature.  McChrystal hesitates in moments of candor with Hastings, but in the end, his will to be a rock star, an adrenaline- and testosterone-fueled rebel, beats out his better judgment.  After all, it is not McChrystal’s publically aired subterfuge of President Obama’s primacy as the Commander-in-Chief that gets him sacked in the summer of 2010, but the publication of Hastings’s article in Rolling Stone, replete with McChrystal’s brazen verbal defiance of his betters.

There is much more to Hastings’s book than a drunken pub crawl with a four star general.

Not only does Hastings expose the corruption of McKiernan’s ouster and McChrystal’s appointment, but he also shows the delicate balance between objective reporting and the dangers of embedded journalism.  Matthew Hoh, who quits, and Peter Galbraith, who is pushed out, show two different sides of resistance to futility and corruption in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan.

The Operators lacks any of the gravitas of violence and uncertainty in Michael Herr’s Dispatches, a 1977 exploration of the relationship between journalists and the military in the Vietnam War.  Hastings’s books is more of a political comedy of errors along the lines of 2009’s In the Loop, directed by Armando Ianucci, in which the power players, in the government, the diplomatic community and the military are all bumbling bureaucrats of the highest order.  The whole culture of the COINdinistas, based on the failed theories of the Vietnam War and David Galula’s experience in Algeria, is a perfect example of how the military doesn’t learn from history, only distorts it for its own agenda.

McChrystal’s viscerality is an advantage when relating to soldiers on the ground, even those who are disagreeing with his mission, as in the case of Israel Arroyo, a shell-shocked sergeant who writes McChrystal a heartrending letter about the loss of one of his men.  The adversarial politics of the military’s relationship with D.C. and the American public, as illustrated by General Caldwell’s information operations plan, is corrupt and unlawful but will never be prosecuted.

Hastings really hits his stride when writing about the adventure of war reportage and the give-and-take dynamic of the reporter-source/subject relationship.  In Kandahar, he is barraged by the exploding story of the publication of “The Runaway General” in Rolling Stone.  It’s much more interesting to read a Washington outsider’s view of the thought process of Robert Gates and the war machinery than it ever would be to hear the Sunday morning rants of the Beltway’s war pundits.  In the end, Petraeus represents something McChrystal could never achieve, the immunity of military power to judgment.

Still, the most important revelation here is that the general decay of American male culture, the arrested development, the inurement to violence, the endless drunken revelry, is enmeshed in all of society’s tiers, even the top military brass.

Discussed in this essay:

The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, by Michael Hastings. Blue Rider Press. 2012. 417 pages. $28.

Photo Credit:  Time

by Michael Buozis

Apple has always had its adherents.  From the early days of the Macintosh in the 1980s, even through the mismanagement and bloat of the company in the 1990s, and of course into its emergence as the most valuable company in the world, there have been fanboys (and girls) who’ve eaten up everything with a rainbow colored (later white) Apple logo on it.  Steve Jobs unveiled each new product, while in his second tenure at the company, this time as CEO, with a flair for showmanship and drama unimaginable, not only from any other industry, but from any other individual.  Jobs was able to make the introduction of a new high tech device, which rarely had any groundbreaking technological aspect, a great leap into a bright new future for millions of people.  The obsessed wept.  The disinterested, too-cool crowd which is, and always has been, Apple’s bread-and-butter, merely forked up the exorbitant sums for each new product with reckless, straight-lipped abandon.  They were always on the cutting-edge.  All 20 million of them.

But for some, and I count myself among this second group, the spectacle always seemed a bit strange.  What’s the big deal?  Some well-designed gizmo can hold a billion songs.  Now we can throw out all of our CDs and records.  Our phones can finally take consistently decent pictures.  Goodbye Kodak.  The Cloud will store the entirety of our informational existence.  Grey matter becomes obsolete.  It’s not all as sinister as that.  However, as much as Steve Jobs insisted to the contrary, the world is not a better place because Apple makes “great products.”

Late in Walter Isaacson’s best-selling new biography of the Apple co-founder, Jobs takes his family, still young despite his own decrepitude, on a vacation to Turkey.  Dressed in robes and given a royal tour of Istanbul, Jobs gets an epiphany over a specially prepared cup of Turkish coffee.  The kids he sees walking the streets of the ancient city are dressed more like his own kids would be dressed at home than the traditional garb he’s forced them to wear here.  Those kids don’t give a damn about how his cup of Turkish coffee was prepared.  All they want is Western clothes and an I-pod filled with bad pop music.  This is the picture of Jobs’s brave new world – a place where all of our differences have disappeared and we’re much safer and happier for it.  We should’ve bombed Baghdad and Kabul with Macbooks, black turtlenecks and stonewashed jeans.

For all of his delusions of grandeur and science fiction aspirations, Steve Jobs had a humble beginning.  The adopted son of a machinist and a secretary, Jobs grew up in Silicon Valley before that meant anything like privilege.  But he did manage to seek out the privileges of location, including access to the leaders and pioneers of his chosen field.  The story of his adolescence and young adulthood, developing a personal computer in his parents’ garage with Steve Wozniak, has been rehashed a million times, but it all still retains the luster of a dream.  Here’s where the mystique of Steve Jobs was formed.  He’d been to college for a year, then to India for about the same length of time.  He’d tried a slew of foolish fad diets, lived on an apple orchard and collected a tall stack of Bob Dylan bootleg reels.  This all sounds like things you (or your lazy college roommate) could’ve done.  But then the whole world opened up for Jobs.  Sure he had a somewhat better grasp of mechanics than the average guy, but he was never able to build something successful himself.  He needed Woz for that.  What he did know how to do was inspire, and he’d continue to do it for the rest of his life.

Isaacson allows some of Jobs’s less savory traits, including an irascible temper, a tendency to steal ideas and lie, and a lack of emotional sensitivity, show in this otherwise fawning biography.  But all of these traits are turned around into the very qualities that made it possible for Jobs to change so many industries and make such a god-awful amount of money.  By the time he was 23 years old, directly after Apple’s initial public offering, Steve Jobs was worth over 200 million dollars.  Soon after, he denied his paternity of his child with an old girlfriend, bought a mansion in the hills of Woodside, left it unfurnished, sat cross-legged on the floor and became obsessed with the creation of a personal computer for mass consumption.  It’s a bit more complicated than that, but Isaacson (like Jobs) doesn’t traffic in the chaos of real life.

At times, Jobs seems to be nothing more than a lucky businessman whose petulance and inconsiderate nature are the keys to his success; he’s not so much a massive genius as a massive asshole.  But even before Mac became a household name or was even shipped from Apple’s factories, Jobs was a media darling, which suggests that he could’ve packaged “total shit” (as he called anything he didn’t like) and the world would’ve eaten it up.  He was then, and remained forever, the best of marketers, a professional tag he despised.  Though unbelievably wealthy, Jobs burned out before he turned 30 and lost the ability to actually bring any of his (others’) great ideas to fruition.  It took a humbling mid-career string of defeats to bring him back to task at Pixar and again at Apple.

The one truly admirable quality Jobs exhibits is his resistance to ostentatiousness and the pitfalls of extreme wealth.  There was never a yacht in his future.  (Until later there was good reason for a yacht to be in his future, and he had no future at all.)  Though some of the personal information Isaacson reveals about Jobs is revelatory, much of the business story of Apple’s second incarnation seems researched and summarized out of business and technology magazines.

The true story here is of the last charismatic personality of our time.  Jobs’s story shows the power of the strong individual CEO over the wishy-washy meetings and PowerPoint presentations of a typical board.  His pathological personality helped him excel at this.  Jobs’s audacity in using pop stars and untouchable historic figures to define his products seems presumptive and absurd in retrospect, but at the time those Think Different ads were unbeatable.

Where the story does turn sinister is a big reversal of perspective, when Apple becomes the curator of the content most people consume.  In a famous 1984 ad, Apple framed IBM as the Orwellian Big Brother controlling the intellectual fates of the mindless masses, but by the time Jobs died he and Apple were literally controlling what websites and applications millions of people had access to.  Jobs’s moralistic censorship became our own.  Not only in business and technology, but also culture, for Jobs a free and open democracy can not work.

However flawed the vision, Steve Jobs made us feel excited about the future.  Who will fill this role now that he is gone?  Mark Zuckerberg with his vapid Asperger’s stare?  Bill Gates, driven to distraction by malaria?  The Google Guys, trying oh so futilely to do no evil?  Jobs may not have been the greatest, but he appears to have been the last.

Discussed in this essay:

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster. 2011. 630 pages. $35.