More on the Mendacity of Scott Thomas Beauchamp

The comments to my previous post chug along, and like them, The Once and Future Literary Journalism Instructor Within keeps returning to the issue of what can and cannot be verified.  You see, he spent terminable office hours wrangling with students over what sounds like a very simple question:

What do you know and what can you prove?

There are ways to incorporate what you know but can't prove into an article.  Why would a journalist do that?  Because sometimes what someone knows is important even if it can't be proven.  For instance, it may well be that Beauchamp can't prove what he wrote in "Shock Troops" about the private who wears a skull under his helmet.  It may well be, as an anonymous soldier writes to The Weekly Standard, that

[T]he [Army Combat Helmet] does not have a gap between the helmet and the liner, only pads. It would have been impossible for him to have placed and human skull, of any size, between his helmet and his head.

You’ll note, though, that Beauchamp says “[t]he private wore the skull for the rest of the day and night,” i.e. on his head, without his helmet. You can tell because it sets up the contrast in the next sentence: “[e]ven on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull.” No one would refute that a person can place a piece of skull on the crown of his head and walk around with it, so as the verifiable part of the story, Beauchamp is in the clear.

Furthermore, no one would refute that a person can’t see what someone else has on under his or her helmet. In the next sentence, Beauchamp relates that “[the private] observed that he was grateful his hair had just been cut.” In other words, the private is talking about wearing the fragment under his helmet.  Whether he actually is is another matter entirely from him saying he is.

It may well be that Beauchamp was more concerned with the private's desire to have others believe he's wearing the skull beneath his helmet than with whether he actually is wearing it.  This isn't to say—as someone will say I say it means momentarily—that the truth doesn't matter.  It does.  Think of it this way:

In my podcast, I admitted to lying about the existence of toys I didn't own.  I claimed to have a Hasbro Death Star in my attic.  I didn't.  That I wanted people to think I did says something about it me.  I was upset when I wasn't invited to play Star Wars with my friends because all I had was a X-wing and two Ewoks; which means I was aware, albeit dimly, of the influence of class on the constitution of social groups.  The lies of the toddler may tell you some truths about the man. 

Lies can signify.  Desires are meaningful.

Which is only to say, sometimes you take people at their word even if you don't believe them, because the desires themselves are meaningful even if they don't correspond to reality.  As for the rest of the evidence marshaled against Beauchamp:

First, there are the anonymous stories from soldiers currently stationed at FOB Falcon. They put “Scott Thomas” in quotation marks. This could mean many things: FOB Falcon is large enough that they don’t know Beauchamp, since they didn’t recognize his pseudonym. It is, after all, nothing but his name. If they don’t know Beauchamp, that suggests that there are enough people moving in and out of FOB Falcon that the woman Beauchamp described could have been there and been unknown to the people who also don’t know Beauchamp.

Second, the anonymous soldier writes:

IF there had been a woman with burns covering her face, and IF some undisciplined Soldier(s) had done something like described in this guys story, he would have been dealt with swiftly and harshly.

The anonymous contractor agrees:

Furthermore, even if such a female existed, any Joe would have adjusted the attitudes of those fictional soldiers. Mocking the wounded is simply not done. Period. Full stop. Do not pass “GO”. Do not collect 200 dollars. For a soldier to not only mock, but sexually harass a wounded woman would have brought down the wrath of every senior enlisted and officer in the mess hall.

They say this as if it refutes Beauchamp’s story. It doesn’t. Last we hear, “[t]he disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.” For all we know, the beatdown the two anonymous conrtibutors suggest should take place did take place.  So that’s an evidentiary non-starter.

Third, Beauchamp claims to find “children’s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades.” He continues: “[n]o one cared to speculate what, exactly happened here,” then he does exactly that, speculating that “it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.” As to the evidence, the first anonymous correspondent verifies it as fact:

There was a children’s cemetery unearthed while constructing a Combat Outpost (COP) in the farm land south of Baghdad International Airport. It was not a mass grave. It was not the result of some inhumane genocide. It was an unmarked cemetery where the locals had buried children some years back.

Soldiers in Beauchamp’s unit did find the remains of children.  The issue then is not whether Beauchamp is lying about what he found, but whether his interpretation of it is incorrect.  So Beauchamp’s factually accurate, but he misinterprets the evidence.  Is it possible that he was simply never corrected, i.e. that no one ever informed his unit that they’d found a cemetery instead of a dumping ground?

It most certainly is. 

The matter of the turning radius of the Bradley is debatable—I’m still waiting to hear back from a friend who drives one, both about the possibility of doing what Beauchamp described and on the differences between Bradleys—so I’m reserving judgment on that one.

As it stands, there’s no proof Beauchamp lied, only that he may have wrong and/or misled. All the rest is speculation (as to the beatdown that did or did not follow the mockery), speculative character assassination ("He must be lying because he wants to be a writer," &c.), and bizarre wishful thinking ("Shit happens and there are bad apples, but the brass doesn't stand for it or them, so there are no bad apples and no shit happens").

Stay tuned!  Tomorrow I'll write about literature again.  I promise.

Comments

[JPool]

There was just a brief mention of this affair on On the Media this week. They set the affair alongside the Pat Tillman revelations and the forth-coming accounts of civilian killings and other atrocities in the The Nation. It'll be interesting to see how they follow up on it, as the current brief mention seems to defer to TNR's announced investigation plans.

Accusations of concern trolling aside, the more I learn about this about this case, the more it seems likely that at least many of the objections to Beauchamp were manufactured and inflated by the right-wing blogoshpere. I don't think that really changes my reading of the discussion here, but it does reenforce the context that I had understood for it.

While I appreciate your response to the accusations against Beauchamp, I'm puzzled by the second point in your analysis, of the scarred woman story. If your hypothetical situation where both the anonymous posters who claim to contractors/soldiers and Beauchamp's account were correct, and the supposed beat down happens after we close curtain, that would make Beauchamp's account factually accurate but selective and deliberately misleading. How would that help?

Anyway, I look forward to the lit stuff.

[Dave Burdick]

Your analysis is interesting but not very persuasive. On the skull "fragment" part you left out the part of the story where he "found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit" A crown-sized "fragment" as he is describing sounds larger than the tiny fragment you suggest. While you may be able to parse some of this outlandish story and twist it like a pretzel into a barely plausible truth, you would have to suspend any rational thought or common sense to believe as Beauchmap writes "As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included." So in the entire company, everyone was bent over in laughter at the sight of this person desecrating a grave site. This after the all the crap came down about Abu Gharib. At some point, whether you're a liberal journalist or not, you have to be able to look at something like this and know you're not dealing with an account that resembles anything close to the truth.

[Karl Steel]

forth-coming accounts of civilian killings and other atrocities in the The Nation

Actually, these accounts are in the issue I just received. What it reports is pretty bad, but not as bad as I thought it would be; nonetheless, "pretty bad" does = civilians getting shot by Americans quite a bit.

[Karl Steel]

Dave: what? Once I trim back your overwrought prose and weird paraphrasing ("people" becomes "entire company," for instance), what I get is, "This is untrue because this emotional response is unlikely in the wake of Abu Ghraib." Not much of an argument there, Dave. Treating the body parts of what's identified as the enemy as trophies is far from uncommon in war.

[marc page]

I would like to cast a vote for a return to literary matters. Watching this parade of "partisan hacks" (JPool, I'm looking in your direction) pretend their only concern is for 'the TRUTH' has become numbingly repetitious.

[Karl Steel]

Dave, and the other doubters, I'm reminded of a column by Ezra Klein on CNN's suspicions about Sicko:

Here's a radical thought, though: Maybe if these mainstream media types were as incredulous towards the powerful as they are to Moore, his productions wouldn't pose a threat. After all, there's nothing wrong with fact-checking, and asking hard questions, and raising an oppositional eyebrow towards pabulum and propaganda. The problem isn't that the media is so quick to doubt Moore. It's that they're so trusting the rest of the time.

So, yeah, I applaud your incredulousness. I've no problem with the truth. But I wonder if you were equally concerned with getting the facts right in, say, 2002, before this iteration of the Iraq war, or in any number of rightist enthusiasms. I doubt it.

In other words, I don't trust your motive. You might say you're interested only in the truth, but

[SEK]

Marc, I don't think JPool's doing what you say he is: he's not a concern troll. Comments here all the time, actually. So I don't think you need to look in his direction. Dan, with whom I never agree, but always cordially, doesn't strike me as a concern troll either; Dave up above, however, yes, I smell the faint reek of concern trollery.

You've already nailed him on the slip from "people in the immediate vicinity" to "the entirety of Patton's Third Army, distracted from the important task of defeating evil Nazis, which is why Jews like me were never born." For example:

While you may be able to parse some of this outlandish story and twist it like a pretzel into a barely plausible truth, you would have to suspend any rational thought or common sense to believe as Beauchmap writes "As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included."

I would need to suspend "rational thought and common sense" to believe that a few war-weary soldiers might find a little black humor funny? No, I think the suspension is yours, and is the result of you fervently wishing that soldiers were automatons instead of humans, and thus were subject to forces civilians can't hope to understand, and respond in ways which sometimes offend us.

At some point, whether you're a liberal journalist or not, you have to be able to look at something like this and know you're not dealing with an account that resembles anything close to the truth.

Again, that's only so much wishful thinking. Look, we know soldiers sometimes lose it, abuse and torture prisoners, and snap pictures of the proceedings. However, much more common is the soldier who travels half-way around the world, kills someone for the first time in his life, finds a way to live with himself, and adopts a brand of black humor which you find offensive. Maybe this is why conservatives aren't up in arms about PTSD or the Walter Reed scandals: they prefer to believe in the ultra-modern philosophy of suck-it-the-fuck-up soldier. Wonderful in the abstract, that is, but when you know people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you see how war has changed them, you might come to a different conclusion.

Or you might dismiss me as an out-of-touch-ivory-tower-liberal. Probably will, in fact.

[marc page]

Well, JPool looked in my direction first, and I must say, it kind of creeped me out.

Maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive, but there's something about being called a "hack" that I find irritating.

[SEK]

Understandable, Marc, tensions have been flying high here ... yet another reason to return to the warm balm of academic self-loathing. As I forget every time I venture over to Protein Wisdom, political debates typically devolve into who repeats the same thing the longest, and I just don't have the stamina for it anymore.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Let's not forget that Protein Wisdom's textual analysis was just as bad as its politics. Switching to academia wouldn't help, really.

[marc page]

Ah, "the warm balm of academic self-loathing" ... like letters from home.

But, you know, I've never been entirely certain that "Protein Wisdom's textual analysis" isn't intended as parody.

[Karl Steel]

Let's not forget that Protein Wisdom's textual analysis was just as bad as its politics.

You know what's distressing? Over at Ezra Klein's place, one of his regular guesters, Neil the Ethical Werewolf, wrote a post in favor of 'intent' in interpretation. Aargh. I thought about writing a rebuttal, and then I thought: why not finish the dissertation today? Why not finish reading The Truth of Zizek (heartily recommended to both Holbo and Kotsko)? Why not just fall asleep in the bathroom? Aargh (<-- sound I make when falling asleep).

[Rich Puchalsky]

Karl, perhaps no one else around here seems interested, but I'd be interested in your rebuttal. (You can make it short-form to save time.) When I analyze a text, I often find it helpful to construct a sort of Model Author (a term from Umberto Eco), and theorize an intent for this author that helps to make sense of the text -- but I don't think that this need have anything to do with the real intent of the real author. However, I'm also predisposed towards treating interviews and the like as additions to texts; if the author is interviewed as saying "When I wrote book X I meant to do Y", I think that it's often helpful (though not obligatory) to take that into account.

I do think that there are elementary facts about texts that people don't seem to take into account often enough that could come under the heading of intent (though not in the ridiculously inflated form often seen). For instance, if you're reading a book of fiction, there are really only a limited number of conscious or unconscious motivations for an author to have written and a publisher to have published one.

[Karl Steel]

Short form, which allows me more holes than usual. First I think of what someone over at the Valve said, viz., that we should be analyzing texts, not people. Then I think of a few examples that strike me as particularly hard to comprehend by thinking of intent: say, Macbeth, where there's good evidence for quite different versions being performed on different occasions (which version represents Sspeare's 'intent'?), or Wordworth's Prelude, because of its continuous revisions, or Frankenstein (with the intervention of Percy into Mary's work), or William Langland's Piers Plowman, whose interpretation is difficult for many, many reasons: it might be pseudonymous, there are several versions of the text around, each quite different (the A, B, C, and maybe Z versions), and within those versions, we have differences, perhaps representing different stages of Langland's writing, perhaps representing the interventions of scribes, professional or not, who each had his or her own reasons for reading (where writing in manuscript culture is a kind of reading) Piers Plowman in a certain way.

Where does 'intent' get us with such works? Not very far, at least not very far so long as 'intent' means what some individual author wanted to do. Let's set aside the obvious poststructuralist suspicions about the unity of the subject and the obvious psychoanalytic suspicions about the unity of intent: I'm not saying this stuff is bad or boring; I'm saying we can all fill in the blanks easily here.

I'm more interested, right now, in how we do a intentional reading of a text from an alien culture, say, that of late 14th-century London. Even if we have an author whose biography we know pretty well, like Chaucer, and we have a good guess about what might have motivated him to write something, to understand that motive, we need to immerse ourselves in the particulars of his culture(s), his historical moment(s), and even the means of production and distribution for poetry. Then I suppose we need to determine how to distinguish Chaucer from his milieu(x), if such a thing is possible. Once we start doing that, we're miles away from any unitary or even binary intent; we're into questions of psychological and historical agency, we're into questions of readership and interpretation, and we're doing, in short, what we should be doing as literary scholars.

And if we say, well, okay, we at least know our own culture: but why not take what we (have to) do with Chaucer as a model for unsettling our confidence in the knowledge of our own culture and own selves? But you knew I'd say something like this.

In short, intent strikes me as a thickheaded panacea (let alone as a silent ally of neo-liberalism because of its assurance in the straightforwardness of individual agency) for the complex, insatiable, unending task--and joy--of interpretation.

How's that?

[Bizarro Karl]

thickheaded panacea

That's weird.

[marc page]

On the subject of an author's (alleged) intent, I have often pointed to "The Waste Land." (Arguably the finest poem of the 20th century; certainly one of the premier Modernist texts.) Anyway, when asked early on, the most Eliot would 'cop to' on the question of meaning/intent was that it was "a rhythmical grumble against life." As the Eliot Industry began to grow, several critics unearthed Eliot's 'True Intent': -- to express the disillusion of his generation in the aftermath of World War I.

More recently, a very persuasive reading (-- the author's name escapes me for the moment) gives us the poet describing his own difficult marriage.

So, whatever Eliot believed he intended, can the text itself intend some of the above? all of the above? without the conscious awareness of its author? I think so, particularly if, as suggested above, we consider "the historical moment," the author's health (physical and mental), etc.

The Goldsteins (as much as I can make out) seem to be insisting that the author has a singular, conscious, clear intent for his text, and that the reader is not allowed to speculate. Almost as if we, the readers, must do something like Holden Caulfield imagined, and if we have any questions, get the author on the telephone and have him dictate his intent for us.

Of course, look at the recent suggestion from the RightWing about Mr. Beauchamp: since he aspired to be a writer, he is therefore predisposed to be a liar. (All writers who are not conservative naturally being liars, you understand.)

So, if I could ask Mr. Eliot for the True Intent of his poem "The Waste Land", would he tell me the truth? Would he know the truth?

[marc page]

On the subject of an author's (alleged) intent, I have often pointed to "The Waste Land." (Arguably the finest poem of the 20th century; certainly one of the premier Modernist texts.) Anyway, when asked early on, the most Eliot would 'cop to' on the question of meaning/intent was that it was "a rhythmical grumble against life." As the Eliot Industry began to grow, several critics unearthed Eliot's 'True Intent': -- to express the disillusion of his generation in the aftermath of World War I.

More recently, a very persuasive reading (-- the author's name escapes me for the moment) gives us the poet describing his own difficult marriage.

So, whatever Eliot believed he intended, can the text itself intend some of the above? all of the above? without the conscious awareness of its author? I think so, particularly if, as suggested above, we consider "the historical moment," the author's health (physical and mental), etc.

The Goldsteins (as much as I can make out) seem to be insisting that the author has a singular, conscious, clear intent for his text, and that the reader is not allowed to speculate. Almost as if we, the readers, must do something like Holden Caulfield imagined, and if we have any questions, get the author on the telephone and have him dictate his intent for us.

Of course, look at the recent suggestion from the RightWing about Mr. Beauchamp: since he aspired to be a writer, he is therefore predisposed to be a liar. (All writers who are not conservative naturally being liars, you understand.)

So, if I could ask Mr. Eliot for the True Intent of his poem "The Waste Land", would he tell me the truth? Would he know the truth?

[marc page]

Oh crap, I'm sorry. Please believe me when I say, as the author of that boring comment, I had no conscious intent of posting it twice.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Interesting, Karl. (I agree that we can fill in the blanks easily enough.)

I don't think that textual variation in itself says much about anything but a very naive version of intent. When I look at a text, I assume that it is a product of many "authors", including the people who copied it, who may have introduced errors -- and those count as intent as much as anything does. For instance, there's a PKD book, The Unteleported Man, that was published in a version expanded from its original magazine publication (as PKD wanted) but with four pages missing, because he'd died and no one could find them. The missing four pages make it, in my opinion, probably a better book than it would have been with them, because the make the ending of a PKD book that's already about multiple versions of reality even more radically indeterminate. But the version with pages missing was created through a version of intent that isn't much like intent is usually thought of: by, perhaps, the intent of the publisher to go ahead despite the missing pages.

(The textual history of this book is complicated: see here and here if interested.) If you want the version with gaps, you need to buy a specific Berkley Books edition. The Gollancz edition as "Lies, Inc." contained some frankly horrible connecting paragraphs by John Sladek, and should be avoided. There was a later Vintage edition that contains the original four pages, which had in the interim been found.)

In any case, with a weak definition of intent, you can say that any text that you are not the first to read involves some human intent -- even if you're looking at found poems, or randomly generated text from a computer program, someone had to decide to select that text to send to you. But that doesn't seem to be intent as the people who are into intent think of it.

[SEK]

Karl, I met Neil the Ethical Werewolf at UnfoggeDCon, and he struck me as amenable to nuance. (He and Jeff Goldstein make odd bedfellows.) When I saw that post, I was too tired to respond, esp. since any response would require a commitment to slowly walking through the difficulties of transitioning from ordinary to literary language, &c.

There was an interesting psychological study about "found art" which, predictably, I can't seem to find right now; but the sum of it was that if someone took a picture of an object of found art, people attributed intention to the photographer; if someone then described that photograph, they attributed it to that author; if someone restaged the piece based on the description of the photograph, &c.

Not that this means intentionalist arguments are necessarily any good, only that since intentionalism is the default setting, it should be incorporated into the discussion. Very few people dismiss it altogether. Your argument, in fact, may as well be mine. Only I'd call it "intentionalist."

But I love reading radical anti-intentionalist tracts which cite sources, for I am an asshole.

thickheaded panacea

That's weird.

I happen to like Guinness.

Marc:

[W]hatever Eliot believed he intended, can the text itself intend some of the above? all of the above? without the conscious awareness of its author?

I love the phrase "whatever Eliot believed he intended," because that captures the problem perfectly. If you limit intention to conscious intent, you end up stuck with a paradigm in which saying "I'm not a racist" must be taken at face value, even if you write a racist novel like The Clansman. Karl captures the complexity a little better than I can manage today -- despite my intentions, I'm feeling slight and muddleheaded today. That arduous reconstruction occurs implicitly for strict intentionalists, which is why the argument against the New Critics -- that they didn't need to look outside the text because they already possessed the knowledge they refused their students the latitude to use -- always worked for me.