JESSE JACKSON INVITES HIMSELF TO AFGHANISTAN Like herpes simplex, Jesse Jackson never really goes away—he just lies dormant. Clearly, the present national crisis was too much for him to resist. So Jackson last week announced he had received an “invitation” from the Taliban to lead a “peace delegation” to Afghanistan. Of course, Jackson, judicious fellow that he is, subsequently said that he “must weigh what this invitation means.” Additionally, he asserted that he “was surprised that I heard from them.” Not as surprised as the Taliban, it turns out, who claim they extended no such invitation—it was Jackson who invited himself. The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salem Zaeef, said, “We have not invited him, but he offered to mediate, and our leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has accepted this offer.” Strangely enough, last Tuesday—two days before Jackson unveiled the so-called “invitation”—he told Newsday, “We’ve been reaching out to some of the Taliban religious leaders” to start a “clergy-to-clergy dialogue.” This, he claimed, was born of his previous relationship with the Taliban (who conduct public executions in their soccer stadium), which he said was characterized by “ecumenical respect.” A source close to the Taliban, however, tells THE SCRAPBOOK, “Three nights ago, I spoke to the ambassador in Islamabad [Abdul Salem Zaeef], and he asked me who the hell Jesse Jackson was.” But as Jackson has said, it doesn’t really matter how the invitation came about, just that it was made. U.S. officials such as Colin Powell (of whom Jackson once said “Very rich white people can trust him, they can trust him to drop bombs”) have warned Jackson against conducting freelance diplomacy. Still, we wonder if there might not be a case for deploying the Jackson weapon. President Bush, has, after all, warned that this will be a long war, fought on unconventional fronts. What better way to bloodlessly drive the Taliban to ruin than to send Jackson for a protracted visit? With any luck, based on his past behavior, there will be little Jacksons roaming the countryside in just a few years, busting couplets, shaking people down for “donations” to Jackson’s nonprofits, and generally haranguing the Taliban for not employing enough ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks. If that doesn’t have them heading for the Hindu Kush, nothing will. While Jackson has said he will go only if he thinks he can make “progress,” THE SCRAPBOOK believes that with all the possible self-promotional opportunities, the question isn’t if he’ll go, but how. The State Department has put Jackson on notice that he’s on his own. How about a more appropriate sendoff: Strap him to the payload of an F-15, then bombs away over Kabul. CHATTERING ASSES, I Picture this: A 13-year-old girl in New York comes home from school and tells her mother maybe they should show solidarity with their friends, neighbors, and countrymen by putting up a flag. The mother says no. “Definitely not….The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. [My daughter] tells me I’m wrong—the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism….I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.” This, you’ve probably guessed, is no ordinary mother. To paraphrase Orwell, only a columnist for the Nation could be so obtuse. The most astonishing part of this story is that Katha Pollitt was so self-unaware, she actually built her column this week around this unflattering (to her) anecdote. The good news, of course, is that young Miss Pollitt is so sensible. We’re guessing readers will agree with us that she shouldn’t have to spend her own money on a flag. But we don’t really want to intrude any further on the mother-daughter relationship, so we’ll simply suggest mailing the appropriate red, white, and blue care packages to Flags for Miss Pollitt, c/o Katha Pollitt, The Nation, 33 Irving Place, 8th floor, New York, New York 10003. And we’ll just have to hope they make their way to the proper recipient. CHATTERING ASSES, II Pretty soon, you may need a secret decoder ring to read the news. Reuters, the English wire service, has barred its journalists from using the word “terrorist.” “We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions,” the company huffs. Plus they’re afraid for the safety of their employees and stringers in countries that have a rooting interest in, um, the terrorists. CNN, for its part, told the Wall Street Journal last week that it would not call the men responsible for the September 11 attacks “terrorists.” They would instead be identified as “alleged hijackers” because “CNN cannot convict anybody; nothing has been judged by a court of law.” THE SCRAPBOOK, on the other hand, is a hanging judge and hereby convicts CNN and Reuters of cowardice unbecoming a news organization. CHATTERING ASSES, III One bit of conventional wisdom gaining rapid acceptance in the wake of September 11 is that the era of irony and cynicism—the Seinfeldization of our media and entertainment culture—is now over. But wait, says Jedediah Purdy, the dreadfully earnest Wunderkind of the goo-goo Left who made his name denouncing the age of irony in his 1999 book For Common Things. In a textbook example of publicity-savvy jujitsu, Purdy told the New York Times last week that, after seeing 6,000 of its citizens vaporized, the country might actually benefit from a little more ironic detachment: “‘In peaceful and prosperous times,’ he said, irony is a way of ‘keeping the passions in hibernation when there is not much for them to live on, but another kind of irony can also work to keep dangerous excesses of passion and self-righteousness and extreme conviction at bay.’ The latter form of irony, he said, might be healthy as the country’s mood becomes increasingly bellicose.” Purdy—though on the evidence above he is personally incapable of it— thinks that irony is now necessary to restrain the “dangerous excesses” and “extreme convictions” of a wounded America, lest we become too bellicose in responding to the excesses of the Osama bin Ladens of the world. We’re on the earnestness bandwagon ourselves, while always reserving the right to be ironic about Purdy. NO GROWTH PLEASE, WE’RE DEMOCRATS “We’ve got to make sure that these are temporary measures that boost the economy now but don’t have long term effects,” said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota last week. So long term we want the economy to tank? CHATTERING ASSES, POST-GRAD DIVISION The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a symposium last week on the September 11 attack, which, to be fair, had many sensible contributors. Then there were others, too numerous to list. Here’s our favorite: David P. Barash, University of Washington: “If it is human nature to seek revenge, then it seems that an equally human nature motivated the perpetrators, who perceive themselves to be seeking revenge. If the United States, in its righteous anger, will ‘make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them’—in the words of President Bush—then, in view of the fact that many people consider the United States to be a terrorist state, weren’t the perpetrators following just such a policy in attacking innocent civilians—making no distinction between their view of the terrorists (our government, our country) and those who harbor them (ourselves)?” Barash has forgotten the Victorian rejoinder to such reasoning. When some English adventurer in the sub-continent was told not to interfere with the longstanding local practice of suttee, or widow burning, he said, fine, but don’t you then interfere with my nation’s longstanding policy of hanging those who burn women alive. WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA? We would be remiss if we failed to call your attention to a remarkable article defending America. Especially since we picked on the British press in last week’s SCRAPBOOK. The full 3,500 word ess
ay by Bryan Appleyard, published under the above title in the September 23 London Sunday Times, can be found at the following address: www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/09/23/stiusausa01024.html? (a bit convoluted, but worth the trouble). It’s a spectacular piece of impassioned writing. Here are some excerpts, and we like them so much, we aren’t even going to correct the British spelling. THE SCRAPBOOK recommends queuing up a John Philip Sousa CD for accompaniment: We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn’t start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming. Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for the Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. “The cafe’s sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited,” she writes. “Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved,” she is told. “An exaggeration?” she comments. “Rather an understatement.” It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud—indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes. How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam—the whisky, in Samuel Beckett’s words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them. But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling—we hope—of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered. Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world. “People should think,” David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, “what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years.” Probably, I think, a bit like hell. There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down…. Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer. I am sick of my generation’s whining ingratitude, its willful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19-year-old daughter said: “America has always been magic to us, we don’t understand why you lot hate it so much.” Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing—a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted. Whose side are you really on?
