The Lucky Frown

This story is way old, but I just realized there is no online record of the article I’d written last year on the Beauchamp scandal, in which I tried to capture the “big picture.” Here it is…

The fog has finally cleared the set of this summer’s blockbuster sequel starring Scott Thomas “Scott Thomas” Beauchamp. Time to stop ignoring the “big picture.”

Lest you haven’t heard, Beauchamp is the liberal, anti-war aspiring writer who’s been impersonating a soldier since 2006 “just to write a book” and “add a legitimacy to EVERYTHING i do afterwards, and totally bolster my opinions on defense.” As an insincerely enlisted Army private, Beauchamp wrote three dispatches from Iraq for The New Republic exposing “disturbing” behavior by his comrades while cleverly casting himself as a central culprit. The Army now reports that much of it was fabricated in Beauchamp’s quest to be “the next Hemingway.”

So far everyone has focused on The New Republic’s fact-checking methods, but that’s never been the most relevant matter here. You should be fundamentally offended by Beauchamp. You could be ultimately sympathetic to his mission of exposing the reality of war. But you can’t truly care about factual accuracy unless you’ve developed an addiction to TNR apology-prose and need your fix. Vulgar cruelty happens in battle even if Beauchamp’s mundane version of it was invented.

No, the relevance lies elsewhere. Beauchamp’s work was justified on a literary and moral basis. Judged accordingly, it betrays a crime—and trend—far worse than fabulism.

Clarifying that crime becomes easier once we consult the sequel’s original. I speak, of course, of The Caine Mutiny.

The classic 1954 character trial resonates like a birthmark for its artful combination of complexity and moral clarity—an utter contradiction in contemporary terms, as proven further by the saga of Beauchamp. Preachy amoralism and nonjudgmental moralizing are the preferred paradoxes of our moment. “Complex,” used today, refers either to an apartment building or to that kid who has a crush on both Jessica Rabbit and Oscar the Grouch.

Humphrey Bogart is black and white in one of his rare Technicolor roles as Captain Queeg, a troubled whip-cracker put in charge of a wayward Navy ship during World War II. Battle-fatigued and paranoid from a long naval career—and with a habit of finagling two brass balls when he’s nervous—Queeg’s hypocritical instability in crunch-time leads to a mutiny that saves the ship from disaster. A military tribunal ensues to determine whether or not it was justified. We’re sure it was.

But “the man who should have stood trial” turns out to be one Lt. Thomas Keefer, a magazine writer trying to get a novel out of his necessary wartime stint so he can (in Beauchamp’s words) “return to America an author.” Unable to avert his sensitive literary gaze, Keefer instigated the mutiny with continuous, well-tempered criticisms of Queeg’s mental state. When all is said and done, he gets Bourbon in the face and a gavel in the groin from defense counsel:

You always hated the Navy. Then you thought up this idea. Maryk will be remembered as a mutineer. You’ll publish your novel, make a million bucks, marry a movie star—and live with your conscience. If you have any.

Sound familiar? But the most important parallel is the least obvious. Keefer’s understanding of Queeg is revealed to be insensitive and lacking in sympathy, which is ultimately Beauchamp’s greatest crime against his comrades. They become stick-figures to feed his supposedly-friendly fire.

Reading Beauchamp’s blog dispels any doubt that he was in G.I. drag because he lacks the talent to be an armchair writer. (Maybe he’s just prone to writing straight from his…wrist: “Cut your wrist let it bleed onto the paper in unique soulpatterns of mindthoughts.”) But even a purple-prosing poser can impart interesting information about his subjects. Assuming Beauchamp’s entire unit isn’t on loan from the editorial offices of Mother Jones, his comrades offer a distinct narrative to be explored. After all, they volunteered from the detached postmodern affluence of millennial America to bear the certain gravity of a distant war. How does the experience relate to their view of themselves and the world?

Let’s consult the TNR dispatches. His three shocking conclusions, in order of appearance, are:

1.

[T]he more guilt I felt about being unable to help a specific person, the more ambivalent I became toward the population in general. It felt very un-American to have such a subtle balance of apathy and rage and remorse and fear operating simultaneously….All of the Joes feel this way. We rarely mention it back on base—maybe because it’s so obvious and maybe because there isn’t any point.” (01-29-2007)

2.

“I was relieved to still be shocked by my own cruelty—to still be able to recognize that the things we soldiers found funny were not, in fact, funny. Not everyone was capable of such distinctions.” (07-13-2007)

3.

“Funny? Of course not. But many of my friends were laughing anyway. That is how war works: It degrades every part of you, and your sense of humor is no exception.” Ibid

Passage #1 describes those subtle, simultaneously operating un-American balances we all know and love. Passage #2 offers the ever-amusing example of someone condescending from below. And TNR editors say passage #3 is “about the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war.”

Did some of our leading arbiters of literary taste really fall for that? Or were they intrigued by Beauchamp’s “strange mix of sadness and regret” because their own feelings of regret tend to be accompanied by thigh-slapping jubilation? I don’t know. Either way, Beauchamp’s observations reveal nothing of depth about his subjects, apart from how they ostensibly blow off steam.

What the dispatches actually reveal is “the morally and emotionally distorting effects” of Beauchamp’s own narrative—formed by a humanities education in which Shakespeare is taught as anti-Semitic misogyny, Henrik Ibsen is taught as Betty Freidan, and Arthur Miller is taught. Political correctness may have lost its power to silence political incorrectness, but its more profound effects persist. One of them is to ensure that most artistically ambitious people grow up with a miniature imagination.

Welcome to the big picture. Considering all the “sensitive” souls who flocked to his defense, Beauchamp’s impoverished sensibility is indeed (citing him again) “all in our time, here and coming back to america.