Ghost Story

Mark Fuhrman: Murder in Greenwich

National Review, September 14, 1998

SUMMER reading is supposed to be light. But those who prefer a bit of darkness to give them some shade from the heat of the sun may wish to consider this fascinating book by Mark Fuhrman, whose theme may put them in mind of Shakespeare. Yes, Shakespeare, Yes, that Mark Fuhrman. "Murder," wrote the Bard, "moves like a ghost." For a ghost always leaves trails of ectoplasm behind it, and so in its way does murder. Its victims haunt us, and it has long been believed that their restless spirits wander the earth calling for revenge. And that is the real subject of this book. Murder in Greenwich is about the revenge that the Moxleys of Greenwich, Conn., have yet to enjoy for the savage murder of their daughter, Martha. It is about the continuing revenge of Dominick Dunne (who inspired this book) on the criminal-justice system that freed the killer of his own daughter after the shortest of sentences. And it is about Mark Fuhrman's dreams of revenge for a career destroyed by O. J. Simpson's vicious carnival.

The Moxleys moved to Greenwich in 1974, when Martha was 14. Blonde and vivacious, she settled easily into a life of country-club fun, high-school success, and Ice Storm-style high jinks. Within little more than a year she was dead, her skull shattered by that most Greenwich of weapons, a six-iron.

But an unusual six-iron, a "Toney Penna" in fact. A rare brand, but one favored by Martha's neighbors the Skakels. The Skakels were rich, well connected (Ethel Skakel had married Bobby Kennedy), and wild. And theirs was a wildness which could have, some said, a dangerous edge.

Martha was with two of the Skakels, Tommy, 17, and Michael, 15, the night she died. Tommy is the last person known to have seen her alive. The murder itself took place not far from the Skakel property, a property that was never systematically searched by a police force that was curiously diffident in interrogating its inhabitants. Well, they were royalty, sort of. The boys (who have denied any involvement in the killing) were RFK's nephews, after all. Were the police, perhaps, just a little too deferential?

Dominick Dunne thought so. His 1993 best-seller, A Season in Purgatory, is a fictionalized version of the Moxley case. The golf club is turned into a baseball bat and the murderer becomes young Constant Bradley, scion of a family that is part Skakel, part Kennedy, and all Borgia. The hero bears some resemblance both to Kenneth Littleton, the Skakels' tutor, and to Mr. Dunne himself. He is a writer who "like[s] to cover trials. [He is] specifically interested in people who get away with things. People who go free."

Which is where Mark Fuhrman comes in. Dominick Dunne had grown to admire him in the aftermath of the Simpson fiasco. Meanwhile, Mr. Fuhrman himself was "looking for an unsolved murder to write about." So Mr. Dunne passed the baton, handing his files to Mark Fuhrman. As he explains, "Say what you want, the guy is a great detective."

Or at least a good prosecutor. Murder in Greenwich is just one side of a case that has yet to come to trial. We never hear from the defense. Nevertheless, Mr. Fuhrman runs briskly through the facts. Not quite a literary classic, Murder in Greenwich is still a compelling read, a real-life Agatha Christie novel. Drawing on his years of police experience, the author reviews the evidence, the alibis (he is unconvinced by Michael Skakel’s), and the rival suspects, to come to his conclusion. The only '"N word" he uses is "nephew."

At the same time, however, the reader is left in no doubt that Murder in Greenwich is another chapter in the O.J. wars, "the Simpson case all over again." And, so far as Mark Fuhrman is concerned, that means that, once more, the rich have got away with it. The author reveals enough class hatred in this book to launch a Gephardt presidential campaign, reinforced, doubtless, by the somewhat cool welcome he received in Greenwich.

Which should have come as no surprise. The O.J. trial turned Mr. Fuhrman into a pariah, but, in the phrase of America's prim totalitarians, he still doesn't quite get it. A Valjean who thinks that he is a Javert, he seems to believe that a case like this will give him back his respectability. He is wrong. It may be sweet revenge, but it will never restore him to what he was and what he wants to be again: "'Mark Fuhrman, Detective."

Nor, one suspects, will another trial, another conviction., and another sentence bring peace to Dominick Dunne. He is a crusader now, raging against the cruelty of his daughter's fate and its unjust consequences. He picks at his psychic wounds, unable to let scar tissue form. He prefers to return to the scenes of other crimes to ensure that they, at least, have an appropriate ending. Obsessive, certainly, morbid, perhaps, but who are we to judge a parent's grief?

Martha's mother, Dorthy, can. And she has welcomed the publication of Murder in Greenwich. "That's my life, these days," she has recently been quoted as saying. "The hope that someday we'll know who did this." She may get her wish. A Connecticut judge has now been appointed as a one-man grand jury to investigate the Moxley case. In early August that judge heard testimony from Kenneth Littleton, the Skakels' tutor. Once seen as a possible suspect in the murder, Mr. Littleton testified in exchange for immunity, which suggests that the field of suspects is narrowing still further.

And if, after all these years, there is a trial and a guilty verdict? Maybe, finally, Mrs. Moxley can put Martha's spirit to rest.

For our ancestors were right. The murdered do live on as ghosts, but they are phantoms that haunt our minds, not our homes. For a killing brings grief, but also uncertainty. A "foul, strange, and unnatural" ending, it leaves our world askew. The restless souls belong to the survivors, not the departed. A trial and a verdict can restore the illusion that things are as they should be. If Murder in Greenwich can hasten this process for Mrs. Moxley, Mark Fuhrman will have written a very good book indeed.

Achy Breaky Hearts

National Review, July 20, 1998

Nobody wants to get a report telling him that he has cancer. My father certainly did not. But, as his secretary tells it, his only response as he read the note from his pathologist was a muttered "Well, well, well." One radical prostatectomy later, he should, with a bit of luck, survive for many years. But reactions as calm as his may not. Understatement, not making a fuss, is a vanishing virtue. Our culture, allegedly, respects it; Rose, the heroine of Titanic, picks up her life after the ship goes down. She does not mention Jack, the love she has lost, for the next 86 years. This is portrayed as a good thing. But it is a false tribute, a polite compliment to a god in which people no longer believe. Understatement is passé, perceived as a musty, rather masculine quality that is no longer quite relevant.

Even the Republicans have realized this. Their 1996 Convention was a lugubrious, weeping procession, designed to mask the fact that the GOP had gone to the old school for its candidate. The American people were not fooled. They wanted their mush, and they wanted it convincing. And so they rejected a laconic war veteran in favor of a President capable of choking up over the life and hard times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Or at least faking it, secure in the knowledge that there were votes to be won from such an embarrassing display.

The Stoics would have been disgusted. Wise old Greeks, they understood that there was no emotion that cannot usefully be repressed. It was a philosophy that elevated calm rationality and an acceptance of the misfortunes that life may bring. It was a point of view that was to linger. It had to. As successive generations were quick to realize, life could be "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And they dealt with it. Stoicism was a habit, not a philosophy. In a world where disease, childbirth, and war conspired to keep life expectancies short, there was no time for therapy. Whining would not work; grim determination just might. To be sure, religious belief provided some support, a mechanism for accepting the savage unpredictability of existence. As a popular nineteenth-century tombstone epitaph for a child explained, "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.'' Especially since, it was widely believed, he offered the righteous the prospect of a sweeter hereafter. Notions of immortality made suffering in this life much easier to bear.

So did the force of example. We liked our heroes tough. The English general Lord Uxbridge was unfortunate enough to lose a leg at Waterloo. He did not, however, lose his sense of humor, noting within a few minutes of the amputation that he had enjoyed "a pretty long run. I have been a beau these 47 years." It was time, he said, to give younger men a chance. The leg received a decent burial. As for Lord Uxbridge, he returned to the scene some wars later and insisted on dining at the table where he had lain as his leg was sawed off.

What he never did was write a book about the problems of the differently abled. To be sure, his stoicism was praised at the time, but it was also, to a degree we find unimaginable today, expected. As an ideal, at least, acceptance of adversity was something to be aimed for, part of a series of interlocking obligations that made an often hard life bearable. People did not want to feel each other's pain. They had quite enough of their own.

And yet they coped—grumbling, certainly, but moving on with their lives. Which, over time, got better, and as they did old attitudes began to fade. Science smoothed out life's rough edges, but what was left, paradoxically, became harder to bear. We defined disaster down, leaving each succeeding generation to mutter that the young do not know how lucky they are.

That may not have been immediately apparent in 1914. The soldiers in the trenches during the First World War persevered under appalling conditions, but when they followed their officers over the top, their stoicism died with them. The soldier's stolid acceptance of adversity came to be seen not as his ally, but rather as an accomplice in his destruction. Stoicism was a mug's game, evidence only of a deadened sensibility. It was a quality enjoyed only by men who had ceased to care for themselves.

This view had been anticipated by Freud. Even before the Great War his bizarre tales of trauma and repression had been finding an audience. For the first time, technology had created a society where a large number of people had time on their hands. And they were using that time to worry. Freud played on this anxiety, and his ideas spread rapidly in a culture that was too shattered by Passchendaele and the Somme to argue back.

Particularly against something so seductive as psychoanalysis. It was so easy. Suffering in silence no longer made any sense. Moaning could be medicine, a ''talking cure" that worked. Dignity died on the psychiatrist's couch and self-control was caricatured and turned into a vice. Look at the couple glaring out of Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930). Thin-tipped and somewhat intimidating, these ordinary Midwesterners (the artist's sister and a local dentist) have been transformed into icons of repression.

Well, they may not have been the Waltons, but they, and others like them, were probably doing their best. And, often, their descendants still do. From time to time we see them on CNN, piling sandbags on the levee as flood waters rise somewhere in the Dakotas, or rebuilding a small town after yet another Texas tornado.

These stories are breaking news, but they have the feel of a rerun, a Capra movie perhaps, shot in black and white, the echo of an older, wiser America. Traditional resilience is a quiet story, ill suited to an age that colorizes its dramas. So we rewrite the script, twisting the language of stoicism to describe something entirely different.

The bedraggled individuals on daytime TV may be encouraged to proclaim themselves "survivors" (normally of some graphically described form of "abuse"), but the tough talk is an illusion. Encouraged by our culture of therapy, these "survivors" have turned their troubles into theater, a ludicrous soap opera with themselves as the stars and us as an all too appreciative audience, our voyeurism justified as part of the "healing process." They have not overcome their trauma. They have embraced it and let it define their existence. And we let it define ours, secure in the knowledge that we too will have our chance, that everyone can become a victim.

Even the real survivors. The night of the World Trade Center bombing, a New York television station showed a group of schoolchildren who had been stuck for an hour or so in one of the building's elevators. Trapped in the dark they may have been, but their teacher had kept their spirits up until rescue came. It was a sweet, brave story. The children seemed fine. They had gone through an adventure, not a trauma. And then the anchorwoman leaned forward, her face twisted into the mask of concern usually reserved for a famine in a faraway country. Would the children be receiving "counseling"? She already knew the answer. And so did I.

Well, well, well. Perhaps it is time for stoics to complain.

Cable Gal

National Review, May 4, 1998

I'm watching Lifetime." These are words that no man wants to hear, especially from his girlfriend. The evening ahead has just been poisoned. He will be transformed from Top Gun into Tailhook. He will be shunned as a suitor who just does not "get it." He will be accused, indicted, and condemned, found guilty by association with his shabby fellow males and their vile crimes—the crimes that Lifetime, cable's "Must-She TV," loves to detail. As part, no doubt, of its mission. Lifetime is now available in 69.5 million households. The channel's purpose is, it claims, to provide "contemporary, innovative entertainment and information programming of particular interest to women." And so you find cooking shows, reruns of The Golden Girls, and programs about babies. But, above all, you find movies about bad guys. Lots of them. There are men who murder, chaps who cheat, and husbands who hit. Taken individually, these movies (most of which are not actually made by Lifetime) are unexceptional, but show them day after day and they become something else. In effect Lifetime uses its movie selections to create one endless loop of The Perils of Pauline, with a script by Anita Hill and special effects by Lorena Bobbitt.

Within a few recent Lifetime days, viewers could see men batter (The Burning Bed), fool around (When Husbands Cheat, helpfully shown on Valentine's Day), and kill (The Babysitter's Seduction). The villainous spouse in the last of those films almost pulled off a trifecta. He killed his wife, slept with the baby-sitter, and then nearly (you cannot have everything) managed to have the baby-sitter blamed for the murder.

Well, he wore a suit, and that was the giveaway. The Lifetime criminal tends to be urbane and easy on the eye. In his youth he was probably a frat boy, like Billy, perhaps, in Full Circle. Billy, a Banana Republic ad gone bad, with his floppy blond hair and red polo shirt, rapes the daughter of the woman who is being strung along by his father. The assault is covered up, and Billy will doubtless go on to commit further outrages in his middle age, by which time he will probably be played by Robert (Spenser for Hire) Urich, a man frequently present at Lifetime's death scenes.

In Deadly Relations Urich cheats on his wife, lingers perhaps a little too long on that goodnight kiss with his daughter, kills not one but two sons-in-law, and then shoots his own hand off in a botched attempt at insurance fraud. Outwardly, of course, he is eminently respectable, a war veteran, exactly the sort of male authority figure that Lifetime loves to show as the most dangerous threat of all.

Men like this operate under cover of the position given to them by, so the argument runs, our violently patriarchal society. They are camouflaged by their good jobs, smart cars, and conservative suits. Away from the office there will be lots of plaid, Eddie Bauer perhaps. The Lifetime villain will be clean-shaven; his eyes will not stare. His only distinguishing characteristic is deceitfulness. He is no Freddy Krueger, no Leatherface, no Jason. A Lifetime killer would not be seen dead in a hockey mask. He could be you or me.

Which is just the point. It may be MacKinnon Lite (a channel that features Celebrity Weddings in Style cannot be all bad), but don't be under any illusion. Lifetime is Rodham country. The not-so-subtle message of its dim movie-of-the-week feminism is that women must circle their wagons against the enemy with a penis.

After all, those predatory white males aren't isolated cases. They are all over the place. Traditional villains understood that dark deeds had to be confined to the graveyard, the dungeon, or the haunted house. Not this lot. They will do their worst anywhere: in the mall, the executive suite, and, surprisingly often, the kitchen. No one can be trusted, not even Michael Gross, the genially ineffectual father from Family Ties, who reappears in With a Vengeance as a dentist and serial killer.

But not an efficient one. One of his victims, played by a Melissa Gilbert who has strayed a long way from that little house on the prairie, survives. Carelessly, though, she forgets the whole incident, and it is only when her amnesia fades that his problems begin.

In this case the recovery occurs quite quickly. However, in another film on Lifetime, Shattered Trust: The Shari Kamey Story it takes the forgetful Miss Gilbert about a quarter of a century to remember years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. He, of course, is an educated man, a journalist. And just in case we don't get the message, our heroine warns against disbelieving allegations in regard to another suspected child molester just "because be looks good in a suit."

But why stop at child abuse? Much as it enjoys that subject, Lifetime also offers some gymnast abuse (Little Girls in Pretty Boxes) and even a bit of biathlete abuse (by Montana mountain men in The Abduction of Kari Swenson).

To be fair, not all men are bad, even on this channel. Harry in Full Circle is kind. sensitive, and a wonderful father. A good man. Significantly, perhaps, he ends up in a wheelchair and dies. But if the good man is an exception in a Lifetime movie, the good woman is not. She may be a little weepy, but she can generally survive life's challenges, be they a murderous husband, a bard day's shopping, or a bout with cancer.

She is not perfect, of course, but when she slips Lifetime understands. And shows something of the double standard that we see further revealed in the titles of two recent "Lifetime Originals" (movies specially commissioned by the channel). So far as Lifetime is concerned, When Husbands Cheat they are to be cut no slack, but when the missus plays around, her misbehavior is merely The Indiscretion of an American Wife.

The indiscretion enjoyed by the American wife in question (Anne Archer, avenging the wronged spouse she played in Fatal Attraction) is romantic and forgivable. Her husband, Russell, a WASPy diplomat whose insensitivity is revealed by his lack of interest in modern dance, is dumped in favor of a handsome Italian, Matteo. And who can blame Miss Archer? Matteo owns a vineyard and a villa.

Lifetime's unfaithful husbands, however, generally have to make do with a motel room. Their infidelity is usually portrayed as a tawdry, rather selfish affair. Big hair and little dresses will be on display, and it will all end badly. The man is left begging for forgiveness, humiliated or worse. In House of Secrets the betrayed wife—played by, yes, Melissa Gilbert—dies, but no matter. With the help of some voodoo she comes back from the dead and frames her husband for his girlfriend's murder.

How unusual. One Lifetime is enough to see off most men.

Ghost Town

National Review, March 27, 1998

Stalin, behind Lenin, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

You wouldn't have wanted to live there, but the Evil Empire was fun to visit. Every empty shop was an ideological vindication, each dismal meal the basis for a grimly amusing anecdote. The tourist could play Dissident (Visit an oppressed church!) or Spy (Lurk outside the Lubyanka in a raincoat!). And what about that air of menace? You could be tailed by the police, harassed by goons, or even, if you were very, very lucky, get caught in a KGB sex trap. Everything was forbidden, and thus enticing. Pointlessly, but excitingly, train stations could not be photographed. Nor could bridges. Take that, Mr. Reagan! And as for bringing in Samizdat? Try explaining freedom of the press to the suitably surly ("You want to make trouble in our country?") border guards as they confiscate The Hunt for Red October. These were people who wanted to bury us. And they were not going to apologize. And they still aren't. Which is why, even now, Moscow remains the place to go for a sinister, Stalinist thrill. To be sure, there have been changes, but many of the old Soviet ways persist. That Russian talent for the gothic and the just plain weird has also survived. And so will most visitors.

Even if, as true nostalgics should, they check into the Hotel Ukraina. Not the usual Intourist concrete block, the Ukraina is one of the six Stalinist wedding-cake skyscrapers that still dominate the Moscow skyline. It is a grimly lit and exuberantly totalitarian hulk, festooned with crumbling concrete stars, hammers, and sickles. Other Cold-War relics can be found inside, including seedily threatening security men, a jolly mural of Soviet Ukraine, and, incredibly, a group of earnest Americans over to talk "people to people" about peace. In a few years, the Ukraina will be a place of luxury and pseudo-sophistication filled with New Russians and old investment bankers. But that moment has not yet arrived. Like Russia itself, this hotel is in transition, and the journey can be a little rough. Which is why it is better to dine elsewhere.

Ukraine Hotel, Moscow, 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Just down the road, in fact, by the cheerfully unrenamed Barrikadnaya (Barricades) Metro station. Le Gastronom is one of the best restaurants in Moscow. Located at the bottom of another Stalinist tower, it promises yet more dictatorship chic. Vast, dominated by overlarge chandeliers, over-officious security men, and clumsy marble pillars, it is a Cecil B. De Mille, nose-pressed-to-the-window idea of how the rich should live, something all too suitable for the Stalinist bureaucracy and the morbid tourist. It's bogus, unfortunately. Gastronom was a food store, not a restaurant. Stalin never ate there.

Nor did he dance his cares away at the nightclub called Titanic. In his day, the evening was for arrests, not discos. Now there is a nighttime scene as shifting and evanescent as anything found in Manhattan. If a bit tougher. That explains the airport-style weapon detectors at the entrance to many of the better spots. In New York they may be the sign of a bad high school. In Moscow they herald a great night out.

And having them may be prudent. At Titanic, notes one English-language paper, "you won't get laid, but you might get shot." But then this is typical of an expatriate press only too pleased to wear its "aren't we tough to be in Moscow" credentials on its sleeve. Amid the stock prices and the guides to eating out, the pages are filled with entertaining summaries of recent scandals, crises, and crimes. Cannibalism seems unusually popular at the moment. Perhaps the restaurants are to blame.

The determined tourist can also visit the sites of earlier, more traditionally Soviet atrocities. NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria's Moscow mansion, for example, still stands. These days it's the Tunisian Embassy. Tunisian diplomatic intrigues take place over the network of cells in which Beria's victims were tortured, raped, and murdered. For the Tunisians have left the basement much as they found it. The cells are dank and sinister, accessible by dark stairs and gloomy passages. "I don't believe in ghosts," explained one diplomat.

That's strange, as Moscow is a city where the dead don't always know their place. Hitler's jaw is on a shelf in the archives of the Russian Counter-intelligence Service and, some say, can be viewed for a fee. Meanwhile, at Moscow's Brain Institute they have Lenin's brain, sliced into 31,000 pieces and carefully preserved on microscope slides. Famously, the rest of the old Bolshevik's remains remain in their mausoleum above ground, as embalmed as the attitudes of his supporters. In the Duma they continue to talk of the proletariat, imperialism, and the Glorious October Revolution. Outside, where the Lenin Museum used to be, unpleasant old people still gather, Stalin banners in their hands, anti-Semitic pamphlets in their pockets. A tape of some of Stalin's better speeches can be bought for $1.

Outside the old Lenin Museum, Moscow, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

An even less reliable record of the past is available down the road, at the Lubyanka. K, G, and B have been replaced by more tactful initials, but the old yellow building still holds secret policemen and a small museum that details some of their achievements. With a few gaps.

Elsewhere, Moscow could do with a few more gaps, particularly where statues are concerned. For all the changes, the hugely increased freedom, and the chance of a greater prosperity, this is still too much the city of the Soviets. Its buildings, its monuments, its manners and morality still deliver that old malevolent charge. Looking at the St. Petersburg of the 1830s, the waspishly reactionary Marquis du Custine snidely noted that it was "barbarism plastered over." Well, at least someone had tried.

It would be more difficult to say the same of the Moscow of the 1990s. Lenin still enjoys his public spaces. Lenin in iron, Lenin in concrete, Lenin as statue, bas-relief, or painting, thoughtful, brave, and wise. His victims? They get a bare rock taken from the site of the first Gulag. It sits across from the Lubyanka, just a few minutes' walk from a monumental statue of Karl Marx.

That comes as no surprise. To be fair, some streets have been renamed, and a Bolshevik statue or two taken down, but for the most part the relics of the ancient regime survive alongside, or under, the shiny construction of the new era.

And so Stalin's Metro, the showpiece that actually worked, continues to function. Its escalators still thunder at alarming speed down past marble torn from a cathedral. And the idols still stand in its halls: Red Army men, workers, and peasants reminding you that the State will prevail and that, yes, the train will arrive soon. And it just might.

The Plot Sickens

Daniel Pipes: Conspiracy

National Review, December 31, 1997

Poor, sad Princess Diana. Within hours of the tragedy in Paris, her death was being honored in the way most characteristic of our time: a conspiracy theory relayed over the Internet. She was murdered, you see, by British intelligence. The mother of a future King of England could not be allowed to marry an Egyptian. Ridiculous, of course, although Muammar Qaddafi seemed to think that there was something to it. Which would not surprise Daniel Pipes. His fascinating, though all too brief, new book traces the development of conspiracy theories from the time of the Crusades to the Roswell era. Naturally the Libyan leader makes an appearance. But, to be fair, he is no more deranged than many in the dismal crowd that Mr. Pipes summons for our inspection. For, as he explains cheerily, "this book is the opposite of a study in intellectual history. [It deals] not with the cultural elite but its rearguard, not with the finest mental creation but its dregs . . . So debased is the discourse ahead that even the Russian secret police and Hitler play important intellectual roles." Well, that's encouraging. With depressing effectiveness, the author shows how we have allowed ourselves to be seduced again and again by variants of the same couple of stories. And if there is a conspiracy there must be conspirators. Freemasons, perhaps, or maybe the Trilateral Commission.

And don't forget the Jews. The conspiracy theorists never have, something that Daniel Pipes dates back to the Crusades. Jews became a convenient local proxy for the Muslim enemy.

In a cruel paradox, as the pogroms intensified so did the idea that the Jews were planning a terrible vengeance. That fear in turn provoked further repression, and the cycle that was never really to end had begun. It is a plausible view, but, as the author concedes, it has a problem. Why pick on the Jews when "Muslims constituted a so much more substantial presence and threat"? Mr. Pipes never says, preferring merely to point to a pattern whereby "alleged conspirators are rarely those whom logic might point to."

For this is not a book that dwells on the psychological causes of conspiricism. This is a pity. It is a central question, and the answer is probably not too difficult to find. Take an obsessive personality, pour in a trauma or two, and garnish with a little paranoia. Add war, revolution, economic depression, or plague. When we are confronted with such vast, often incomprehensible cataclysms, a conspiracy theory can be a comfort. It provides an answer to people's questions and an object for their anger. It can also be fun. Winston Smith enjoyed his Hates.

Mr. Pipes touches on this, but he spends far more time describing the symptoms of the disease. He does this well. And it is a disease. At least from the point where an interest in conspiracy theories tips over into "a way of seeing life itself. This is conspiracism. . . It begins with belief in an occasional conspiracy theory . . . and ends with a view of history that dwells largely or exclusively on plots to gain world power or even destroy the human race."

Compulsively autodidactic, conspiracists live in a dark universe illuminated only by a vast and self-referential literature (two thousand books on the Kennedy assassination alone since 1963). Bolstered by obscure factoids and outright forgeries, its authors peddle theories of astonishing complexity. The right answer is never obvious and the obvious is never right. Readers are pushed further and further into irrationality. Which is not surprising. As the core belief of conspiracism is that all appearances are intended to deceive, reality itself becomes an illusion, a dangerous trick rather than a wake-up call.

In the West, at least, Pipes feels that conspiracism is in retreat, discredited by the twin failures of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. "Hitler and Stalin had established the hideous price of conspiracy theories running rampant."

Let's hope so. But there is something a little Fukuyama-annish about such a view. We live, after all, in an age of rapid and highly unpredictable change. Even in this relatively benign era conspiracy theories continue to flourish. Most are not serious, just couch-potato mythologizing: but they can act, Mr. Pipes concedes, as a pathway to more dangerous fantasies--Timothy McVeigh is, apparently, a believer in UFOs. Above all, they chip away at the shared assumptions of truth that must underpin society.

In the case of American blacks this may have already happened. Mr. Pipes list some of the conspiracies that circulate within this community, but without appearing unduly concerned. He may be too relaxed. From the idea that AIDS was developed as a genocidal tool (as a supplement, doubtless, to the crack distributed in the ghetto by the CIA) to kente-clad anti-Semitism, there is plenty to suggest that a dangerous conspiracism has already taken root in an important part of American society. Its success may suggest that conspiracism remains more of a threat than Mr. Pipes would have us believe.

Perhaps he is trying to trick us.

Into the Vortex

National Review, Dec 22, 1997

Center for the New Age, Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Sedona, Arizona

It was time, explained the man in touch with an angel, to follow the joy and the excitement. I could take the sensible approach and leave by the door or I could choose excitement.

Why not scramble out through the window? Why not choose joy? Because I write for NR, that's why. I used the door.

Besides, he was exaggerating. We were in Sedona. And in Sedona it sometimes seems that there's nothing much that's very sensible. But that's unfair. Roughly halfway between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, it is a nice little town with plenty of Norman Rockwell trimmings: an Elks lodge, air cadets, even a good diner or two. People come here to retire. At an elevation of 4,500 feet, Sedona enjoys a pleasant climate. It also boasts long meandering canyons, punctuated by massive sandstone outcroppings. Permeated with rust, their colors shift through the day, turning a deep red as the sun sets.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

It is the red rocks that draw the tourist crowds. And not only tourists. Back in the early 1980s there was a revelation. The rocks were exposed. They were not just lumps of rusty sandstone. They were vortices! There had been rumors before. But the full details are reportedly given to a Page Bryant, a psychic, by "Albion," a being. A vortex is a "power spot," a point where you can plug into the earth's electro-magnetic field and boost your own psychic energy. Got it? Many did, and they came to live in Sedona. There have been disappointments, of course. Bell Rock was supposed to float off to Andromeda in 1987. It is still here.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

And so is the New Age community. In force and, some say, backed up by spaceships. Vortex energy is UFO catnip. This is a place where Contact is old news and Men in Black is a home movie. Naturally, a saucer crashed here (in 1994, apparently) but this is no mere Roswell. That town has two paltry UFO museums and some scrub masquerading as a crash site. No aliens have come calling since 1947. Perhaps they prefer Sedona —and not just for the vortices. The Arizona town can offer better scenery and a metaphysical infrastructure that supports more than ufology.

Red Planet Diner, Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

So, if you want to visit a vortex, there will be someone to help. As an earthling, it is best to go on an inspirational tour. You can circle a medicine wheel, and chant thanks to the Great Spirit. It doesn't matter if you don't know the words. Everyone else seems to. "From Pagan Worship," explained a friendly lady from Indiana, matter-of-fact!y. Souvenirs? Sedona is a spiritual supermarket. There is enough here for the most demanding of metaphysical shoppers. Books, of course, and psychic tchotchkes for every purpose—candles for that meditative moment, crystals for healing, an inner-self manifestation bowl for, er, inner-self manifestation. The approach is ecumenical. You worship it and they will sell it. A statue of Ra? Or a pair of Birkenstocks? No cult is too strange.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Or need too obscure. In Sedona there's a "lightworker" for every purpose, someone to tell your future and find your past (life, that is). And auras can be photographed (mine was red, slept too near a vortex).

In a way, this is just an updating of an old tradition, nothing more sinister than the old gypsy woman telling fortunes. But the New Age is now. It echoes and reinforces our pancredulity. When everything is OK and people believe that nothing can really be proved one way or the other, that's not much of a challenge. Our entrepreneurial mystics know this. They understand their market. They flatter our self-esteem.

While feeling our pain. The gypsy's caravan has become a clinic. This is a New Age for victims. The hocus-pocus has to "heal." Witches must be Welbys, psychic Kildares tending our inner children. And sorting out our cholesterol, while they are at it. There's a lot to do, but angels apparently can help out. Even the dolphins will have a go.

But, if Flipper flops, don't panic. Sedona is on your side.

Center for the New Age, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

There's Alpha Body Relaxation Therapy, Aromatherapy, Axiationa! Therapy, Color Therapy, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Regression Therapy, Reiki Therapy, Trager Therapy, Trigger Point Therapy, Vibration Therapy, and Coning. Coning? Used in Atlantis, apparently. Cotton strips are dipped into an herbal beeswax mix, rolled into a cone, and left to harden. The broad end of the cone is then set on fire. Smoke spirals down the cone and out through its tip, which is in the patient's ear. The idea is to draw physical and emotional debris (which, this patient noted, was black and gooey) out into the cone.

And why not? Atlantean medicine may have had a lot going for it. It is, after all, ancient. And that plays well in the New Age. Science doesn't. The New Age prefers the old ways. Particularly if they can be traced back to cultures where people wore robes or, best of all, were Native Americans. Except for an enlightened few (steps forward, lightworkers!), modern Americans find it difficult to accept this. Or so it is argued. Luddite, elitist, self-importantly self-hating. And where have we heard this tone before? Did anyone say EPA?

Carol Browner would fit in here. As a priestess perhaps, worshiping the Earth (or Gaia, as she is more respectfully known). For the New Age will be feminist. Judging by Sedona, at least, its psychics and its shoppers are mainly female. Women, we learn, are especially caring, intuitive, spiritual; all around better people than another sex I could mention. But then, in an era of soccer matriarchy, this is little more than conventional piety.

To be sure, Sedona can also be guaranteed to see some unconventional piety. But nothing too onerous. At a women's spirituality conference this past fall, there was plenty of ritual and ceremony, but also, as advertisements made clear, a focus on "optional nurturing activities"such as . . . "shopping, napping etc."

Napping? Someone should keep awake in case the Goddess shows up. That's the Goddess to you, figurehead of a supposedly "woman-centered" prehistory. Some say she may be returning to her domain. Far-fetched? Not if you believe that a small town in Arizona is built near the site of a great Lemurian city. Is the Goddess Gaia? Perhaps. But there is another candidate, a woman of great influence. And strange powers. A woman who can communicate with dead First Ladies.

Bill, be very, very careful.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Loch Roswell?

National Review, September 15, 1997

Loch Ness, 1997, © Andrew Stuttaford

You don't believe that a saucer crashed at Roswell, New Mexico? After all, there were, they say, witnesses. Sort of. Military men, a rancher, maybe some archaeologists. Well, to the folks over by Loch Ness that is nothing. They have got a saint, Columba no less, who allegedly saved a swimmer from a "savage beast" in the loch over a thousand years ago.

And it doesn't stop there. The legend survived, and so did the monster—or its descendants—to reappear before John Mackay and his wife in March 1933. Interestingly, they were the proprietors of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, which overlooks the loch. Other sightings soon followed. The world press picked up the story, and the Drumnadrochit Hotel filled its empty rooms.

Loch Ness, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

The sightseers have never really gone away. Drumnadrochit is today still Nessteria's epicenter, visited by well over one hundred thousand people each year. That's not bad for a little Scottish village. To find it, take the hopelessly inadequate A82 west from Inverness. Be prepared to drive slowly behind tour buses, and wait until you see that Barney profile and long green neck rising from the waters. Not inappropriately, it's a fake, a concrete creature wallowing in a Pond Ness rather than the more majestic loch nearby. Nevertheless, it signals arrival at the "Official" Loch Ness Monster Exhibition Centre.

Loch Ness, 1997, © Andrew Stuttaford

Official it may be (who says?), but it is not alone. The Original Loch Ness Visitor Centre is just down the road. Relations between the Loch Ness pair are not too good. Asking at the Official for the way to the Original is as well received as asking a Montague for directions to the Capulet place.

Loch Ness, 1997, © Andrew Stuttaford

After all, why go elsewhere when the Official Centre is, it claims, the home of the authoritative exhibition? It is certainly impressive, a multi-media presentation with spooky music, "authentic relics of the search" (if not of the monster), clever illuminations, and tantalizing talk of creatures that may, just, perhaps, have survived the Ice Age. Showroom dummies with ZZ top beards are dressed as ancient Celts. Was the monster their folk memory of dragon-prowed Viking longships? Other mannequins, similar faced but with late disco-era hair, prefer to be more scientific, crouching in a bathysphere or standing on the deck of a research vessel. They stare out blankly - at the tourists, who gaze vacantly back.

Perhaps they should go and see the movie at the Original. There's speculation, scenery, and a good collection of eyewitnesses. A sturdy lot they are too: a priest, honest-looking men in tweed caps, slightly old-fashioned rural faces out of an episode of Miss Marple. Exactly the sort of people that Agatha Christie warns us not to trust.

And how right she was. The Loch Ness story is a handbook of human error, more damaging to the notion of eyewitness evidence than Johnnie Cochran. Some people see what they want to believe. An otter becomes a monster's neck, a wave a plesiosaur's wake. Others just make it up. Baron Muenchausen should have settled in Drumnadrochit. He'd have found plenty of hoaxers only too pleased to lend his tales a hand. Or a hippopotamus foot (the 1934 "tracks"). Even the "Surgeon's picture" (the famous one, with what looks like an umbrella handle coming out of the water) was probably a model attached to a toy submarine. Or so says one confession. Which may itself be a hoax.

But there have been serious attempts at research as well, if often of a rather British kind. Cameras have gone adrift and negatives been lost. American money has been asked for (and criticized). Nevertheless, the loch has been surveyed, scrutinized, and sonared. And little has been found. To be sure, there has been an ambiguous photo or two, even a mysterious echo, but little more - Less conventional approaches have done no better. Everything has been tried — psychics, a wizard, bacon. All failures. Perhaps an earlier exorcism was to blame.

We may never find out. The science may be against Nessie, but proving a negative (in this case, that the monster does not exist) is never easy. And the nature of the loch does not help. More than 800 feet deep, 24 miles long, and a mile wide. Loch Ness contains the greatest volume of fresh water in the United Kingdom. The waters themselves are dark, stained with peat. Visibility is poor. To some, underwater photographs from the 1970s can show a flipper, a gargoyle-like head, or "anal folds." To others the pictures merely reveal a tree stump or other debris. But, in Loch Ness finding nothing proves nothing. No one has even been able to locate the remains of the one monster that is certainly there: a mechanical Nessie sunk, tragically, during the filming of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

If Sherlock cannot find the beast, neither, probably, can we. And that is just fine with Drumnadrochit. The tourists will keep coming to the centers, the restaurants, the shops, and the pubs. They will buy their "monster" ices at the Coffee House and their groceries at Nessie's Nessessities. At the Nessie Shop, the bagpipe muzak will continue to play. There will be T-shirts to buy, plesiosaur-shaped shortbread to munch, and "Monster's Choice" whiskey to drink.

Loch Ness, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Serious? No, not very. And this Is how It should be. Whether she exists or not, Nessie is indeed a survivor, a relic from an earlier, better era. Mysteries used to be fun, tales for late at night. We enjoyed believing them, even if we knew, deep down, that they were not really true. From the Yeti to Eldorado, they brought fun to millions, but were an obsession of only a few. Now, with rationalism under fire, we want more from our myths. They have to mean something and be, in some way. real. Yet proper research is far too much trouble, and may lead to a disappointing result. So we turn legends into a pseudoscientific, paranoid cosmology, with a Roswell just another focus for a vague, superstitious unease.

Lucky Nessie has escaped all this. She swims on, Moby without Ahab, an enjoyable outing, a pleasant fantasy. And only one conspiracy theory.

Just what was the real reason for Inverness-shire County Council's refusal, allegedly on zoning grounds, to allow the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau to maintain its headquarters at nearby Achnahannet? We should be told.

Loch Ness, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Lost in Space

Jim Marrs: Alien Agenda

National Review, July 28,1997

Red Planet Diner, Sedona, Arizona, 1997  © Andrew Stuttaford

So now we know. The controversy is over. UFOs are real, and never mind the latest Air Force denial, hopefully entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed. Armed with the credibility that comes from a previous book that was "a major source for Oliver Stone's film JFK." Jim Marrs's "monumental undertaking" is, in the opinion of his publishers, "no less than the last word on the subject." Even for those members of the "smug . . . intelligentsia" who persist in their disbelief, this could make for an interesting read. For, as Mr. Marrs makes clear, UFOs are now part of our culture. That is why HarperCollins publishes this book, and why NR reviews it. Aliens infest our airwaves and our bookstores. "Documentary" footage of the autopsy performed on one unlucky extraterrestrial has been shown on prime time. UFOs have been the subject of congressional hearings, and a President (well, Jimmy Carter) has reported a sighting. According to Gallup, more than 40 per cent of American college graduates believe that our planet has been visited by UFOs. Not always successfully. July sees the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the saucer "crash" at Roswell, New Mexico.

So a cogent presentation of current beliefs about UFOs, even if from a partisan viewpoint, would be welcome. Alien Agenda doesn't fit that particular bill, though it begins well enough. There is interesting speculation about the real nature of the moon ("The greatest UFO"), followed by a brisk discussion of the von Daniken "God was an astronaut" school of ufology. But then we enter hyperspace.

As so often happens, the first sign of trouble comes with the "black-clad" SS. Can the 1947 UFO wave be explained by Nazi work on saucer technology? Mr. Marrs never really says. He merely leaves open the possibility, a possibility that he buttresses with anecdote and hearsay. True, he concedes that the idea of a secret Nazi base in Antarctica "stretches belief to the breaking point." But this is a pseudo-skepticism, typical of the somewhat unconvincing "objectivity" that permeates this book in the hope, doubtless, of giving it some faint plausibility. It is a clever approach, not too dissimilar from that used in other, less savory, areas of revisionist history, A defender of Stalin, for example, might "concede" that there were "excesses," while denying the existence of a deliberately murderous Gulag. In Alien Agenda Mr. Marrs may reveal his doubts about the Third Reich's Antarctic extension, but "there can be no question that the business and financial network created by Bormann wields a certain amount of power even today."

Note too the way that statement is carefully qualified. Writing that the Bormann crowd enjoys only a "certain" amount of power makes the assertion more difficult to challenge. The author manages to sound even-handed while at the same time leaving the impression of a still effective Nazi network. This is typical of a book where the author often will affect a studied neutrality over a particular UFO incident while leaving no doubt as to the general conclusion his reader should be drawing.

To be fair, Mr. Marrs never conceals his agenda. Moreover, his choice of evidence seems selective, to say the least. Inconvenient facts tend to be treated cursorily, if at all. His language is just as revealing. The waspishly pedantic Philip Klass, whose skeptical writings are the best in the field, is little more than a "debunker." By contrast Linda Moulton Howe, the best-known proponent of the theory that aliens are experimenting on Western cattle, is an "expert."

Well, Mr. Marrs does not appear to be one. There have been sightings that are genuinely difficult to explain, but the details are lost as the author hurtles on in search of ever wilder stories. Even Jacques Vallée,  one of the more prominent ufologists and no skeptic, will on occasion concede that a given UFO case runs into a "wall of absurdity," To Mr. Marrs, this seems to be no problem. He just jumps right over it into the arms of people like "Billy" Meier (or rather, arm—Billy has only the one), the Swiss handyman allegedly in touch with a civilization from the Pleiades. The other side of the wall is a place where our science (too puny, too materialistic) is deemed not to apply and the idea of objective truth is a mirage. It sounds, in fact, a bit like the United States.

Which is why this book has found a mainstream publisher. In a saner time. Alien Agenda would have been a crudely mimeographed pamphlet, pushed into your hand by a disheveled gentleman on a street corner. In the America of 1997 it will probably be a hit. And there is a sting in this campfire tale. The UFO myth mingles with and reinforces the other folk beliefs that increasingly shape a country where reason has gone quiet. Stories of alien abduction can easily shade into a belief in ritual child abuse. "Memories" can be recovered, families shattered, and innocents jailed.

This, taken to an extreme, can even lead to a Timothy McVeigh. In a way, this is not surprising. Saucer buffs have long reflected America's healthy distrust of government. When ufologist Stanton Friedman describes Roswell as a "cosmic Watergate," he can strike a chord with reasonable people, which Mr. Marrs then amplifies, Governrrient becomes a monstrously untrustworthy, threatening presence. "If they lied about one thing [in the context of Roswell], it stands to reason they would lie about another." Really?

But Mr. Marrs is not so much a militiaman in the making as a potential leader of ufology's Buchananite wing. There is dark talk of the ruling elite. The alien agenda itself seems, by the way, to be something New Agely spiritual, but Jim Marrs is much more interested in the conspiracy down here. There is a cover-up, naturally. "They" don't want us to know what is going on. Even the "notorious" Trilateral Commission rates a mention. Silly stuff, yes. But of itself, not dangerous, just another drop in an ocean of nonsense. Why the cover-up? Oh, the usual. Monopoly of alien technology, that sort of thing. Buy the book if you still care. But here's a clue. WFB is mentioned not once, but twice.

Now are you scared?

Off Center

James Gardner: The Age of Extremism

National review,  June 30, 1997

"It will not," writes James Gardner, "be obvious to everyone why O. J. Simpson's name should appear at the head of a chapter that touches upon Darwinism, the Holocaust, and French post-structuralist philosopy." Quite. But, as The Age of Extremism makes clear, we live in an age of doubt. If nothing can be proved absolutely, then nothing can be absolutely true. But this is a flawed skepticism, one that paves the way for extremism. For, as Mr. Gardner explains, its corollary is a willingness to believe anything—" as long as it is at variance with received opinion or unadorned common sense." The Holocaust never happened, O.J. is innocent, and the world was put together in seven days. The French post-structuralist? Oh, he believes the Gulf War never really took place. To be sure, there's nothing new about nonsense, but now the extremes seem omnipresent and no one is arguing back. This thought-provoking book gives us the Kooks' Tour. It is a sharply written and often amusing guide. Klansmen, we learn, are old hood, Shriners from Hell lacking that "manic, Nietzschean edge to which the neo-Nazis and certain militia groups aspire." Perhaps these should look to the Church of Satan, "whose quest for self-actualization suggests vaguely right-wing, yuppie leanings."

But it is when he turns to his specialty, the arts, that Mr. Gardner, NR's art critic, hits his stride. By the time he has finished, our "extremist culture" is eviscerated, dismantled as effectively as the corpse in a Joel-Peter Witkin photograph. What's left is not pretty; it is little more, the author concludes, than a childish attempt to "gross out" the audience. "Performance artist" Mike Kelley probably achieves this when he defecates onto stuffed animals, but so what? As a gesture in the tradition of the rebel artist it's pretty lame, an angry shoving at an open door. For we live in a society where the Center (a term that Mr. Gardner uses to mean the broad consensus) accepts these gestures. Mr. Witkin's photographs were at the Guggenheim, Reservoir Dogs (torture, burnings to death) wows the film critics, and American Psycho (torture again, cannibalism, Grey Poupon) is in a bookstore near you. In Mr. Gardner's view, this artistic "rebellion against the Center has become one of the fixtures of the Center, and thus, in the final analysis, it is really no rebellion at all."

So we can all relax, then? The United States, Mr. Gardner feels, is becoming more cohesive, not less, as society assimilates those it once marginalized. The remaining outsiders, driven as much by their psyches as by any political or social concerns, are forced to ever greater shrillness just to he heard. But it will not matter. In tones worthy of Star Trek's all-consuming Borg, Mr. Gardner concludes that the Center will probably absorb what it wants from its opponents and move on reinvigorated. "Through its encounter with these extreme voices, the Center will arrive at a stronger and more confident sense of its identity than it had before."

That is unusual optimism from a contributor to NR. Just what is it that the Center is absorbing? Are there any side-effects? With the exception of the arts, Mr. Gardner never really says. Partly this is a function of his definition of extremists as, roughly speaking, those whose sole raison d'etre is a rejection of the Center. This is too narrow. So far as politics is concerned, it leads him to focus on an irrelevant and truly lunatic fringe. The extremists who really matter largely escape his gaze, simply because they have chosen, to some extent at least, to work within the system. They are relentlessly balkanizing America by race and by sex, dopily "spiritual" and nastily closed-minded. But don't look for them in some East Village squat. Try elsewhere: the universities, the media, the White House.

These people are now setting the Center's agenda, and therefore, they cannot really, by James Gardner's definition, be extremists. But, to the extent that they have internalized the attitudes of the Sixties, that is just what they are. Citing the rows over political correctness, Mr. Gardner concedes that the Center has been going through some rough patches, but he sees this as unsurprising in a time of change. He is too sanguine. In refashioning the Center, the new establishment is wrecking it, alienating it from its past, its traditions, and its identity. Elsewhere, the author writes of "that sense of malaise and lingering sadness" that permeates our society. Well, this is why.

And it is going to get worse. A culture fixated on the twin goals of half understood diversity and bogus assimilation is unlikely to succeed, particularly when what core values its elite has are the shifting prejudices and inchoate leftism of thirty years ago. Lacking any degree of real intellectual certainty, it has proved hopelessly incapable of dealing with the extremes. For the Center, therefore, the notion of "inclusion" becomes little more than the formula for an orderly surrender.

Mr. Gardner seems to find this bearable, part of the price we must pay as society progresses towards "a wealth of diversity within a context of a common interest and a common culture." And pigs might fly. Yes, the extremes are ever noisier, but these are bellows of triumph, not cries of despair. Society is moving on, but toward a malevolent shambles truly worthy of Mr. Gardner's descriptive talents.

Gaga Gurus

Adrian Wooldridge & John Micklethwait: The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus

National Review, April 7, 1997

Witch doctors! It's an engaging title, promising bile, sarcasm, and maybe, just perhaps, a sneer or two. After all, this is a book about management gurus, those experts whose ever-changing theories fill bookstores and empty factories. Well paid and annoying, they scream out for a little abuse. In this book, they don't get it. As the authors note, somewhat smugly (they do write for The Economist), "it would have been much easier (and often far more pleasurable) to have trashed the industry." But they reject the hatchet in favor of a "scalpel job." In many respects they succeed. Often drily funny. The Witch Doctors is a succinct guide. If something can be said in a couple of pages, that's all the authors use, an approach that could put Tom Peters in the poorhouse. There are longueurs, but this is a management book that the reader will actually be able to finish. It even has a hero, the "ever-prescient" Peter Drucker.

Born, like so many other terrifying polymaths, in Habsburg Austria, Drucker was one of the first to take management theory beyond the mechanical approach developed by time and motion men such as Frederick Taylor or GM's Alfred Sloan. He also realized that he could make a living out of this. He became, in short, an early "knowledge worker," a Druckerism, typical in both its ugliness and its accuracy, which describes what he saw as a rising class of employees, valued more for brains than for brawn.

Like many Druckerisms it is also rather obvious. Drucker took some genuine insights, added a little nonsense and a bit of hype, and transformed his profession. Shamans to the suits, the management theorists (and their consultant spawn) are now everywhere. Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge summarize the wares on offer. Much is bogus. Yet American managers currently spend $15 billion a year on outside, well, management.

Are they mad? No, say the authors. In a competitive world, a manager has to be seen to be doing something, anything, to keep ahead. Management theory feeds on this fear. Consult dull books with punchy titles, bring in McKinsey, go whitewater rafting with the guys from marketing: it will all help create an image of dynamism. As The Witch Doctors shows, this is all based on the illusion that there is a magic bullet, a permanent solution to problems of management. There is not, of course. For the management industry this is just fine. "The beauty of the system is that none of the formulas work—or at least they do not work as completely as the anguished or greedy buyers hope. The result is enormous profits for the gurus but confusion for their clients." As the authors write about "re-engineering," management theory "is less than it was originally cracked up to be. But that does not mean it is useless."

It is also less important than this book would have us believe. True, the how of today's restructurings may have been thought up by a Bain or McKinsey, but to call management theorists "the unacknowledged legislators of mankind" goes too far. As the authors themselves partly concede, the whys lie elsewhere, in capitalism's relentless process of creative destruction. The consultants may prefer to mask this, to cloak their function with talk of "empowerment," but for the most part this is just chatter. Gradgrinds in Guccis, they are really selling systems intended to motivate employees to be highly productive, but very cheap. Messrs. Micklethwait and Wooldridge probably grasp this, but at times even they can be taken in: "Teams . . . can be vital for innovation. . . Firms lay on special facilities to encourage them. Sun Microsystems offers laundry and dry-cleaning services. . . to members of teams who work round the clock." How generous.

To the NR reader, checking stock prices with quiet satisfaction, this hypocrisy may sound splendid, reassuring even, but it comes with a cost. The happytalk is starting to sink in, something that this book does not really consider. All those sharing, mushy, left-wing sorts of words are beginning to have their effect. The modern corporation is, after all, a soft target. Ownership is diffused, parceled out in tiny units across mutual funds and pension plans. These may have their own agendas, like the state pension funds happy to divest from a Texaco or a Philip Morris, pleased to make a political point with their retirees' savings. Meanwhile, management wants its bien-pensant approval too. Action is affirmative, daughters are taken to work, and everyone recycles. Before too long, people feel free to ask what a company for.

It's a stupid question. One of the answers, what this book calls "that stakeholder thing," is even worse. It takes a village, goes this argument, to run a corporation. A duty is owed to all "stakeholders": employees, consumers, the "community," and, oh yes, even shareholders. The authors are too clear-eyed to agree. German stakeholder capitalism is creaky, and the best way to deal with some of the problems in the Anglo-Saxon model "is to give more power to shareholders, not less."

And then the authors quote Gordon Gekko (Olivet Stone's, not NR's) in eloquent support. This is a bit like inviting David Duke to speak in favor of CCRI. Are the authors ashamed of their own conclusions? Perhaps. They are at pains, after all, to distance themselves from that rough Milton Friedman. He does know what a company is for. One thing only: to make money legally. This, we are grandly told, "looks ever less defensible."

This is not quite political correctness, but more a lofty Bill Bradleyism. It pops up throughout the book and reaches its irritating nadir in a discussion of management "diversity."

This, naturally, is a Good Thing. "America's WASP elite," whatever that may be, is singled out for the usual abuse. It is dominated by men, you see, and it simply lacks the multicultural "experience" essential (did the author ask the Japanese about this?) to mastermind the conquest of world markets. These "middle-aged, blue-suited, white shirted men" are clearly doomed to repeat the failures of their WASP predecessors. Failures, presumably, like the British Empire, the Industrial Revolution, Coca-Cola, and Ford.

Ludicrous of course, but just tough it out. Unlike most books on management. The Witch Doctors is enlightening. And worth finishing.