Optimistic Pessimist: An Interview with Seymour Hersh

Hey all, sorry for the delayed communications. My baby sabbatical is almost done, so expect many more emails hawking muckraking rants going forward. But one dopeshit interview which I did manage to get done during my blessed downtime has gone up on LA Weekly, print and online, and is out now. Taste the hyperreality of it all here:

Seymour Hersh, Optimistic Pessimist
[Scott Thill, LA Weekly]
The New Yorker's legendary muckraker Seymour Hersh, who will be stopping by UCLA's Royce Hall on October 4 for what will no doubt be a fearsome discussion, has broken some of the most depressing stories in history.

The Vietnam War's My Lai massacre, wherein our troops murdered anywhere from 350 to 500 defenseless Vietnamese, mostly women and children, and then tried to cover it up. The Abu Ghraib scandal, wherein our troops, along with some of the more than 150,000 private contractors currently retained by the Bush administration, tortured Iraqi prisoners in the very facility Saddam used for the same purposes -- and then tried to cover it up.

And now Hersh is sounding the alarm for the United States and Israel's impending attack on Iran, which could destroy America's global standing and currency, as well as millions of people by the time the whole clusterfuck is over.

In other words, reading a Seymour Hersh report is like falling into a dystopian nightmare. Except the nightmare is real, not some simulation, even if all Americans have to hang on to are images and videos culled from the virtual pages of Wikipedia, YouTube and elsewhere.

Hersh’s nose for bullshit famously inflamed Richard Perle, one neocon architect of our occupation of Iraq, to whine to CNN dork Wolf Blitzer that Hersh "is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist." Perle resorted to calling him that because the Vietnam-savvy journalist put two and two together and figured our escapade in Baghdad was reminiscent of another boondoggle that went nowhere. Which says as much about Perle’s impoverished philosophies as about anything Hersh could dream up in the pages of The New Yorker.

But Hersh, an accidental optimist bearing very bad news, remains positive. He doesn’t "think that we’re at the stage where we’re not going to have an election. That’s not going to happen."

Great. We can still have an election. Only in America!
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