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A Harlot's Progress
Hooking With A Press Card
This is an annoyance column, perhaps of little interest. But I'm going to write it anyway. It's what columnists do. In the Washington Post for November 28 I found this lead, by James Grimaldi, about the team of inspectors who will ransack Iraq: "The United Nations launched perhaps its most important weapons inspections ever yesterday with a team that includes a 53-year-old Virginia man with no specialized scientific degree and a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs." Jack McGeorge. The story, a hatchet job disguised as news, was picked up by television. The US is sending perverted amateurs to Iraq. Gosh.
I met Jack over fifteen years ago when I was writing a military column
for Universal Press Syndicate. I then knew perhaps a dozen --"defense
intellectuals" was the phrase. Some worked for beltway bandit outfits
that did studies for the Pentagon. Some were independent consultants.
They were exceedingly bright. I don't mean they were valedictorians
in high school or could have qualified for Mensa. Their baseline IQ
was probably 160. They didn't socialize with reporters, whom they tended
to regard as unprincipled fools. If they liked you, they were splendid
sources and good company.
One such was Don Walsh, a friend of mine now in Bangkok. Don, a former research chemist, knew more about small arms than anyone else I had ever met, and had an encyclopedic grasp of a dozen subjects. I knew the names of various weaponized gases. Don could jot the syntheses on the back of an envelope. I needed a quotable source on gas warfare. Don suggested Jack as very good. Don doesn't think many people are very good. Jack turned out to be as smart as Don. He wasn't pretentious about it (it isn't easy to be pretentious when you look like the Pillsbury Doughboy), but it was there. His knowledge of the military, weaponry, demolitions, chemical and biological warfare was enormous. His company, Public Safety Group,* specialized in counter-terrorism.
If you look at his CV, you will see that he was a Marine Corps demolitions
technician, worked for the Secret Service at the White House level,
and studied at nuclear-weapons school. You will then note years when
he doesn't seem to have been doing much. If you were a reporter for
the Washington Post and sufficiently stupid, which are associated
conditions, you might assume he was unemployed. Grimaldi implies as
much.
I wouldn't bet the college funds. When people work in fields that require security clearances, they usually have blank spots in their resumes. They don't talk about them. Now, why is the Post attacking him? Partly because Grimaldi isn't very good at what he does. Reporters seldom know much about technical subjects. My military coverage coincided with Reagan's administration. I covered the same stories and went to the same bases and briefings as did the Post's military reporters. With the occasional exception, they ran from incompetent to virtual idiots. Men in the Pentagon feared them, yet had to breast-feed them. They didn't know military history, tactics, weaponry, hadn't been in the military. Reporters enjoy power without responsibility. Think of a six-year-old with a large-caliber pistol. I used to wonder why they were so bad, and speculated about pedestrian mentalities or narrow mental horizons. A friend of mine, a long-time writer, said, "Fred. They're stupid. That's all." It isn't literally true. It is close enough. Grimaldi has neither the brains nor the knowledge to judge McGeorge's qualifications. (If he did, he would have.) Reporters who do not know their subjects become prisoners of their sources or, too often, source. He's writing what he was told by someone with an agenda. As for the S&M business: It's true, though I'm not sure what sexual predilections have to do with inspecting weapons. Grimaldi is attempting character assassination by horrifying irrelevancy. He would not write, "Michael Baritone, a notorious homosexual, joined the Washington Ballet…." He wants do hurt Jack. How much should we care about sexual behavior privately engaged in? When I met Jack, I had heard of kinky sex, but had never encountered it. I said so. He invited me to a couple of parties and a bus trip to the old Vault in New York (where I once stood at a urinal next to Danny the Wonder Pony in full tack. Life is nothing if not interesting). I expected the macabre and ghastly, stray organs lying wetly on tables, a collection of budding Jeffy Dahmers. No. This was suburban hobbyist S&M, games for otherwise ordinary bureaucrats and programmers who wanted to be paddled by their girlfriends, or vice versa. An S&M party looks like a Batman convention and smells like a storage room for saddles. The effect on me was like that of a Monster Truck Show: Interesting once, but then more of the same. I concluded that they were as dangerous as a bridge club. In any big city, there's a sprawling sexual underground of people doing everything you've heard of and much you probably haven't. You've got gay bars, leather bars, lesbian dens, nudists, kinks, swingers, transvestites in both directions, surgically altered transsexuals, and men of thirty-five who like to wear diapers and frilly hats and drink from baby bottles. When I rode with the DC cops, around Ninth and M you found incredibly ugly guys who looked like running backs, wearing thong bikinis and size fifty high heels. There are senators quietly notorious for being whipped, important officials who wear lingerie. Maybe I should care. But I don't. Now, did the Post lead with the S&M angle from a principled aversion to perversion? No. Unless things have changed since last I looked, the paper's Style section, a cutesy-sweetsie confection of middle-school puns and saccharine English, is gay as an Easter bonnet. Gays are heavily into kinky sex, Lesbians being closer to Jeffreyette Dahmers than the men. The paper usually covers up the more grotesque aspects of gay marches on the Mall that would not play well with respectable America. It definitely isn't opposed to twistedness. Grimaldi simply recognized it as a character bludgeon. But why the attack?
A friend's explanation: "Some candidate who didn't get selected for
UNMOVIC -- apparently a former inspector -- is pissed that he/she was
passed over in favor of Jack and is feeding this crap to the Post.
Purely a rice bowl issue."
Sounds about right. When reporters don't know much, don't really have sources, don't have time or interest to find things out, they make easy marks for leak artists and slant mechanics. Grimaldi, methinks, was a convenient whore. He got used.
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