Finally, we have reached the end of the beginning of the “Scott Thomas” affair. Of all the sad media misadventures we’ve seen over the past four years, this one will almost surely go down as the most pathetic.
Here’s one thing we know for sure about Scott Thomas Beauchamp. He went off to war to become a writer. Earlier today, I suggested that he might be this war’s John Kerry. But from reading Beauchamp’s blog, that’s clearly not what he had in mind. As a commenter in a previous post noted, he wanted to be this war’s Oliver Stone or Anthony Swofford – a guy who emerged from his time at war as an artiste in full flower.
I must note how much Beauchamp’s blogging confessionals differ from the comments of the many soldiers I interviewed for “The 9/11 Generation.” To a man, the men I interviewed joined the Armed Forces to serve their country. Beauchamp seems more like the poster-boy for the self-esteem generation as it heads off to war. It was all about him, and his simultaneous quests for legitimacy and artist-hood.
The war-bound artiste had a decided predisposition to what kind of stories he was going to tell. Following in Swofford’s and Stone’s footsteps, he was going to document the absurdity and barbarism of war. It’s a measure of Beauchamp’s immaturity that he decided what his autobiographical story would be before he actually lived it. This is one seriously pitiable individual.
Lest you think I’m going all mushy on you in terms of appraising Beauchamp, let’s be clear – Scott Thomas Beauchamp went to war with the specific goal of ridiculing and belittling the war effort. Yes, he wore the uniform. In virtually all cases, that’s praiseworthy. But in Beauchamp’s case, he wore the uniform as a means by which to make his artistic bones; he knew that in making those artistic bones, he would undermine the efforts of his brothers in arms. In short, he went to war with the specific purpose of weakening the war effort. I doubt he ever thought it through to that extent. In spite of his pretensions to the contrary, he doesn’t seem like a deep thinker who gets off on serious introspection. Nevertheless, there are words that describe his intentions in going to war – very serious words.
These are the acts of not only a pathetic individual, but a morally obtuse one as well. I don’t need to perform a semiotics-based analysis to predict with some confidence that Scott Thomas Beauchamp will turn out to be a sorry figure, albeit an unsympathetic one.
THE REAL VILLAIN OF THE PIECE so far is The New Republic. We still don’t know how TNR and Beauchamp hooked up, but we do know that TNR enabled Beauchamp’s descent into highly publicized pathos. The stuff TNR published will greatly complicate Beauchamp’s immediate future; they’ll probably detrimentally affect the rest of his life. TNR’s role here as regards Beauchamp could be compared to a full-grown adult giving a gun to suicidal grad student.
As for what happens with TNR from this point forward, there are two possible scenarios:
1) Beauchamp’s tales are proven; or
2) Beauchamp’s tales are disproven.
Either way, as I’ve been saying all along, TNR’s conduct here is reprehensible. As regards the potential veracity of Beauchamp’s Diarists, the people at TNR knew that they had a not-particularly-reliable narrator working for them in Baghdad. Or given their rigorous fact checking procedures, they should have known. The fact that they ran his stories with minimal if any corroboration, especially in light of TNR’s recent history with stories that were too delicious to check, can’t be chalked up as a coincidence.
TNR employed as its Baghdad correspondent a guy who was there specifically to mock the war effort while he hopefully advanced his own career as a writer by doing so. Beauchamp’s champions (not that I’m aware of any) have the potential defense that he was a young man who didn’t know any better. TNR’s editors do not. They gravitated to Scott Thomas Beauchamp because he would have the “moral authority” necessary to slander the troops with impunity, a moral authority that Franklin Foer and company of course lack.
One other note: Scott Thomas Beauchamp’s life will be a smoldering ruin when this affair has run its course. His partners in crime at The New Republic will still have jobs and careers. Will they see Scott Beauchamp in their nightmares? And will they see the 160,000 honorable and noble troops that together they conspired to malign?
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