- The true meaning of "fun, travel and adventure"
War in Iraq, exploitation in Africa and the death squads of Central America: acclaimed American journalist Christian Parenti has reported from the world’s hotspots with verve, panache and integrity. But it’s not all about sensational stories and adrenaline-drenched reportage, as Sebastian Kennedy discovers.
In a dusty Baghdad backstreet just months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, a small group of foreign journalists and translators are first on the scene following the bombing of a US military Humvee vehicle. Creeping along between the rows of shuttered shops and parked cars, they approach the flaming remains of the burnt-out vehicle. 
A handful of troops are huddled behind a military transport truck a short distance away.
“Bizarrely, there’s no firing, no yelling, no talking, no radio traffic, no-one screaming,” recalls American journalist and author Christian Parenti, writing afterwards about the event in his book The Freedom. Just as Parenti and his fellow journalists are tentatively surveying the scene, a ferocious firefight erupts around them between the troops and a sniper in an office above. Everyone dives for cover.
As the troops advance, the journalists follow cautiously. “The whole action is slow and methodical. In many ways it encapsulates the larger dynamics of the war: confusing and labor-intensive, overtly and dysfunctionally technological, awkwardly urban. The US troops have far more firepower than they can use, but they don’t know exactly where or who the enemy is,” writes Parenti. “Undisciplined fire will mean scores of dead civilians.”
A medical helicopter arrives to remove two seriously injured GIs, but “like much of the military’s technology,” it, too, is rendered useless: the web of overhead power cables prevents it from landing.
After two hours of shooting and shelling, the mayhem finally subsides. Amid the carnage and debris, Parenti observes an innocuous but somehow revealing moment.
“A cooler of sodas is spilled on the sidewalk. Further away two civilians lie dead, caught in the cross-fire. A soldier peeks out from the hatch of a Bradley and calls over to a journalist.
‘Can you grab me one of those Cokes?’”
Such instances of sharp insight are a defining feature of Parenti’s journalism. His unique mix of first-hand experience of conflict, steadfast political independence and rigorous research skills puts him in the league of writers such as Mark Danner, Naomi Klein and Charles Glass. At just 39 years old and with three published non-fiction titles to his name – as well as a whole slew of investigative articles on international issues for US and UK political magazines – Parenti has made a name for himself as an erudite alternative political analyst who loves getting his hands dirty digging out obscure stories from turbulent or forgotten corners of the world.
His latest book, The Freedom, is a revealing – and harrowing – first-person account of life in post-invasion Iraq. He reports from both sides of the conflict by “embedding” with both the US military and the Iraqi resistance to bring readers what No Logo author Naomi Klein calls an “honest, compassionate and pissed off” guide through occupied Iraq.
The Freedom is regularly compared to Hunter S. Thomson’s prose, and it’s easy to see why. Parenti’s embedding with warring factions is reminiscent of Thomson’s cruising with outlaw gangs of bikers for his undercover book on the Hell’s Angels and their chequered relationship with provincial American media and police.
There are stylistic similarities too. His traumatic frontline stories of mindless brutality and raw horror are peppered with pithy gonzo-esque snippets of troop banter that convey a deeply cynical, war-worn sense of humour. In one passage, a machine gun-toting trooper introduces himself as, “John Crawford. I work in population reduction.” In another, a trooper with a young daughter back in the US who accidentally “blew the head off a little girl” is taunted by anonymous jibes from fellow “grunts” over the radio: “Man, what’s wrong with you? We would’ve given you twenty bucks if you’d brought her corpse over here while she was still warm.”
With his designer stubble, chiselled chin and broad-set shoulders, Parenti could be described as a curious hybrid of young Harley-riding motorhead from a black and white road movie, and stern, straight-laced, slightly uptight American academic. Underneath the dashingly rugged all-American façade broods a sharp intellect that absorbs information like a black hole sucks in light. He has the demeanour of both a man of action and a man of words, but only a man of deep thought and uncompromising intention can command the sort of earnest aura that surrounds him.
“He is super smart. Really, it’s crazy,” says Parenti’s 29 year-old photographer girlfriend Jessica Dimmock. “When we first met just over a year ago he struck me as sweet, but intense – which is pretty much true.”
“He might come off as a bit tough and aggressive but he’s also a fairly introspective and appealing fellow all-round,” says fellow author-journalist friend Doug Henwood. “He’s very thoughtful, sceptical, committed, but also seriously analytical. The combination of intelligence and toughness is very appealing, he’s not some Chuck Norris character.”
Radical anti-establishmentarianism is in Parenti’s blood. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he is the only child of Michael Parenti, an established writer and academic, and author of titles such as Against Empire and How I Became an Activist for Social Justice. His mother, still living in Vermont, is also a radical academic who has had “various fits and starts to her career”.
When Parenti was born his parents were already in the process of getting divorced. He was brought up by his mother and spent most of his childhood moving between rural New England and a small fishing village in California, most notably staying for a few years in a progressive community of “back-to-the-land types” and attending a “progressive boarding school” in Vermont.
As a child Parenti was dogged by dyslexia and only learnt to read at 13. (He still appears to struggle slightly when reading from texts, visibly relaxing when he looks up to talk off-script.) He first went into journalism “to learn how to write” – his ultimate ambition being to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an academic. After a brief training period at a community radio station in California, his reporting career took off at 22 when he dropped out of college and jetted off to El Salvador to report on the brutality of US political and military interventions in Central America. But the journalism didn’t pay enough and he was forced to cobble together a living moving furniture until he finally finished college in New York at age 25.
After obtaining a PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics, Parenti’s ambition came true and he finally entered academia – only to find himself repeatedly frustrated by the “paramilitary structure of the [academic] priesthood”, and the “formalistic conservatism” practiced there. “I remember when I was an academic moving from writing about prisons to [writing about] policing was seen as almost too eclectic. Then, in a second book, moving from writing about prisons and policing to [writing about] surveillance people were like, ‘Whoa, that’s broad range!’ I mean, how fucking narrow-minded can one be?”
Parenti broke away from these restrictions by returning to journalism, which allowed him to produce a wealth of articles on all manner of topics: from illegal logging in the Congo to the use of child labour in the chocolate industry in the Ivory Coast, from the increasingly insurgent Taliban in Afghanistan to the “revolutionising” of the oil industry in socialist Venezuela.
“Christian is motivated by the state of the world, and the injustices that arise out of disparities in class. I think a lot of this can be seen in his work,” says girlfriend Dimmock. Referring to the soldier asking for a Coke amid the debris of Western Imperial aggression, she comments: “He gets focussed on small things, and is able to find details in a situation that say so much about the context he is writing about.”
These factors, combined with the broader academic insight and analysis he offers on the places he visits, really distinguish Parenti’s writing from the slew of first-person reportage that now tends to emerge from conflict zones. Documentary film-maker Ian Olds, who met Parenti whilst filming in Iraq, explains:
“The quality of a lot of war reporting is highly mediocre because often the reporter’s only credentials are that they are adept at surviving and operating in these kinds of environments, but they don’t necessarily have anything insightful to say about the place or the political situation. The thing about Christian is that he always takes a clear and rigorous analysis of history and power to these places so that when he comes back it’s not just the gung-ho aspect of having survived. That’s so important and so rare.”
You might expect a man who has seen so much human savagery, exploitation and incompetence to foster a deeply apocalyptic vision of the future, or to at least show signs of disaster fatigue. But Parenti’s curiosity and measured enthusiasm for knowledge appear indefatigable.
“You know, I don’t quite understand why people feel the need to look away from bad news,” he says. “Once you know there are these problems it is at least some sort of symbolic control to understand them. In some ways I feel more depressed if I’m not looking at stuff knowing that there are great problems unfolding.
“It is easy to make the case logically that this civilisation as it is now is headed for a major breakdown in the next 100 years, given the threat of climate change and the myriad problems of war and poverty and local environmental degradation. But at the same time humanity has pulled through other profound crises in the past so there’s ways to go.
“Maybe it’s just the old Gramscian thing of ‘pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will,’” he concludes with a half-smile.
When I ask how he would like his obituary to read, his eventual reply is tinged with the same dryness so favoured by the war-weary US troops in his book: “I guess I would like it to say, ‘His life was full of fun, travel and adventure.’” At first I am convinced that he is palming me off with meaningless fluff, until he explains that this was a running joke shared between jaded war hacks in Baghdad.
“Back in Vietnam, the troops used to put FTA on their helmets, which stood for ‘Fuck The Army’. Then when questioned by officers ‘what does that mean?’ they would say, ‘oh, that means Fun, Travel and Adventure, sir’. That was a phrase that some of us would use to motivate each other in dark moments in Iraq. It was like, ‘aah, the life of Fun, Travel and Adventure…’”
And with another wry half-grin, he pretends to tail off into a deliberately false reverie inspired by the inevitable despair of war reporting.
To see clips of Christian Parenti's video journalism and listen to interview extracts, check out the Multimedia section of the site
To see clips of Christian Parenti's video journalism and to listen to interview extracts, check out the Multimedia section of the site
