Salon's greatest interviewer meets the Bush era's great bullshit artist

[DonViejo]

ERROL MORRIS ON RUMSFELD

Errol Morris on Rumsfeld, the truth and “The Unknown Known”

Our greatest interviewer meets the Bush era's great bullshit artist, who has no doubts, no regrets and no questions

ANDREW O'HEHIR

“I think Mark Twain was wrong: History does not rhyme,” Errol Morris said, after I had switched off my recorder and we were having coffee. “It’s all just smugness, self-justification and self-satisfaction.” We were sitting in a crowded, noisy New York restaurant trying to make sense of the philosophical universe of Donald Rumsfeld, which could put anyone in a dark mood. If there’s a lesson in Morris’ new interview film “The Unknown Known,” which is both a twist on Rumsfeld’s most famous phrase and a description of its subject, it might be this: We’ve convinced ourselves we won’t make the same mistake and believe a self-convinced con artist like Rumsfeld again. But we haven’t actually learned anything from his example.

The great subject of Morris’ filmmaking career is people’s “unrestrained enthusiasm for bullshit,” as he said near the end of our conversation. He means that most of us, most of the time, are delighted to believe stories about ourselves or other people or the world that are powerful or convenient but do not happen to be true. Morris is an Enlightenment thinker, an empiricist, and an anti-postmodernist. We may not always be able to find or recognize the truth, he would admit, but it exists, and can be discovered much oftener than it is. Whether the subject is a man wrongfully convicted of murder, the Abu Ghraib scandal, Stephen Hawking’s ideas about the universe or the foreign policy disasters of the Vietnam War, Morris is always looking for those areas where we embrace myth and mystification rather than the tougher subject of what actually happened.

Donald Rumsfeld, then, is almost the perfect foil or adversary to Morris, and part of the absurd magic of Morris’ extended interviews with Rumsfeld is that they almost never feel adversarial. Rumsfeld comes off as a contented and cheerful senior statesman, a dozen years after pushing the United States into a disastrous war with Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” the then-secretary of defense assured us. He became a media star for his suave and cryptic Pentagon press briefings — “Stuff happens,” he said, after the priceless antiquities of Baghdad were looted – and at one point he polled an 80 percent approval rating.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/04/02/errol_morris_on_rumsfeld_the_truth_and_the_unknown_known/