“Did you have a good flight?” I asked Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, as he arrived at Roissy/Charles-de-Gaulle airport on an early morning flight from New York.
“There are no good flights,” he quipped, and I knew then that this was the guy whose acid-sharp prose has been nourishing me in Paris for years. He doesn’t pussyfoot. Tall and stately, his reverence for dissent is neatly tucked into a conservative ’50s-ish look accompanied by his trademark cigarette.
In Paris to talk about his latest book, “Theater of War,” which has just been published in French as “Djihad américain,” Lapham is by far the most eloquent and convincing transatlantic critic of contemporary US foreign policy on the media circuit today. And after a television appearance on TF1 and a live interview on RFI beamed around the francophonie, his atypically American call for political honesty may just end up being a bestseller in Oran and Beirut.
“Theater of War” is a far from exhaustive political study, but it does succeed with its 198 pages and 13 topical essay — ranging from “Caesar’s Wives” to “Spoils of War”— in lighting up the sky long enough for us to realize there are strange forces at work in the name of our tax dollars.
“I can’t think of a moment in the last 20 years when a coherent argument against the policies of the present government would be more useful,” he explained as we continued talking in an alcove of the West End Hotel aptly called “The Honesty Bar.”
Stunned by the silence and muted curiosity of the American press, he takes apart the current US administration, quote by quote, statistic by statistic, and you understand that Lapham’s authority comes from the heart of patriotism; he loves America for what it had always stood for. He salutes dialogue and cherishes political dissent.
“The country at the moment stands in need of as many questions as anybody can think to ask,” he writes in the essay “Res Publica,” adding — “Among all the American political virtues, candor is probably the one most necessary to the success of our shared enterprise.” This is the republic Lapham defends, and it’s the oligarchy that has marooned it that he skewers with his wit and battery of damning facts. “It cost Bin Laden and his friends roughly 250,000 dollars to knock down the Trade Towers and we have responded with a 478 billion dollar Homeland Security Department.”
Harper’s, the oldest continually published magazine in America, today is in a league of its own — acting like the big, ad-driven New York monthlies while maintaining an unheard of degree of independence and editorial courage. Under Lapham’s stewardship, it published seven months before the presidential elections an article by Joe Conason titled “Native Son,” which stands as one of the most revealing exposés of George W. Bush’s business dealings.
While on holiday in August, I read the uncorrected proofs of “Theater of War” (New Press) and experienced nightmares as lines from its pages converged with the intensifying language in the daily press on Washington’s determination to attack Saddam Hussein. “For what reason do we possess the largest store of weapons known to the history of mankind if not to kill as many people as we declare to be our enemies? Why then should our enemies not kill us?” Lapham asks in his introduction.
His most recent piece, “The Road to Babylon: Searching for targets in Iraq,” is a compelling argument against the imminent invasion and the president’s call for a “regime change.” For many of us trying to decide who to believe and how to sort out the complicated truth from an elaborate web of disinformation — this is “must” reading. Urgent, even.
....Back at the airport, I watched America’s most controversial editor get frisked by a rigorous security guard who wanted to confiscate his chrome cigarette lighter, which he managed to keep. “So, who won the war?” he asked, and I refrained from wishing him a good flight home.
Other books by Lewis Lapham include "Money and Class in America," " Imperial Masquerade," "The Wish for Kings," " Hotel America," and "Waiting for the Barbarians." He lives in New York City.
David Applefield (david@paris-anglo.com) is the author of Paris Inside Out and the editor of FRANK literary journal.
