03.04.11
WikiLeaks book review laff riot
Yesterday’s lunch saw Martin Bashir on MSNBC devoting some time to WikiLeaks, specifically Bradley Manning and additional charges brought against him by the Army. One of the guests was a friend of Manning’s who related that solitary confinement was destroying the person he knew.
However, there’s always an obvious problem with the story. It has to do with the celebrity of WikiLeaks and the aspect of the two, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.
Neither are sympathetic even though the treatment of Manning is unconscionable. Every time you see the now common pictures of him a little voice in the back of the head says: There’s a kid who was the most senseless and fit for the job.
The accumulated fame, gained by the regular hyping of Cablegate and its use by the big mainstream media has apparently effectively choked WikiLeaks.
Where is the revelation on the ecosystem of corruption at a big US bank? Where’s all the stuff the HBGary dirty tricks operation was aimed at discrediting?
Maybe — hopefully — it will arrive.
But if it does, will it make a difference now? After the Guardian and the New York Times squeeze their rewards from it as official deliverers, framers and monetizers?
Which makes a review of the Guardian’s tell-all book on WikiLeaks a necessary read.
It’s hilarious, encapsulating the reality left unspoken in the places of high celebrity:
It’s a story, not of brave whistleblowers revealing a specific piece of explosive information, but of an agitated bloke, bored in his army base, Facebooking about how much he missed his boyfriend Tyler, deciding to take Washington’s own disarray to its logical conclusion by vomiting all of its documentation into the hackers’ arena. It was more Oprahite than it was principled, more therapeutic than tactical, more Jeremy Kyle than Daniel Ellsberg. In hilariously comparing this farcical leaking with the Pentagon Papers, describing it as a political event of unprecedented importance, ‘Leigh’ and ‘Harding’ nail the self-importance of Guardian hacks brilliantly. They kill with a satirical sword the attempts by the Guardian and others to doll up the contemporary, much-celebrated and thoughtless cult of let-it-all-out whistleblowing as a stand against warped political authority. I literally LOLed as I turned the page from reading about Manning’s childish informational incontinence to pages containing words such as ‘historic’ and ‘brave’. Brilliant.
The spoofers are also excellent at capturing the media’s cult-like embrace of Assange. ‘Harding’ and ‘Leigh’ recount what a creep Assange is, yet they then profess their ‘own’ and other Guardian journalists’ borderline crush on him! So in one section of the book, we’re told that Assange once signed up to an online dating site with the words ‘I am DANGER, ACHTUNG????????????!’, labeling himself as ‘87% slut’ and someone who likes ‘women from countries that have sustained political turmoil, [because] Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane’. In short, he likes to have sex with exotic blacks rather than boring white birds because – ACHTUNG! – he’s a political rebel.
The rest is here at Spiked-Online.