LOONY LEFTISTS (CONT’D) We thought perhaps the London Review of Books was getting better. It could hardly get worse after its Oct. 4 parade of writers denouncing America. Columbia historian Eric Foner wrote: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and others chimed in, with perhaps the most egregious essay by Cambridge’s Mary Beard. The Oct. 18 issue, however, printed a number of sharp replies. The most succinct came from a reader named Todd Ojala: “When I visit England sometime I’m going to stop by your offices and shove your loony leftist faces into some dog sh–t.” But the most interesting was from the postmodernist literary critic Marjorie Perloff, who wrote: Mary Beard, writing from Cambridge, surely one of the most idyllic safe havens in the world, tells us “the United States had it coming” and this is “of course” what many people “openly or privately think.” . . . Outside the ivory gates, 95 per cent of the U.S. population evidently disagree. . . . But of course we know how spurious this “fact” is. As Jameson tells us, the people “are united by the fear of saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media consensus.” Fear, one wonders, of what? Has Jameson ever been silenced for his views? Beard, in any case, goes on to complain about our . . . “refusal to listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say.” “There are,” she continues, “very few people on the planet who devise carnage for the sheer hell of it.” Well, I suppose it depends on what one means by “the sheer hell of it.” By analogy to terrorism, perhaps we should not have bothered with definitions of Nazism or Fascism, but should have listened to what Hitler and his friends had to say. I seem to recall that Neville Chamberlain tried just that. . . . As it turned out, after all that “listening” at Berchtesgaden, there were quite a few people on the planet who were quite happy to devise carnage “for the sheer hell of it,” taking that phrase quite literally. Hell is, in any case, what transpired. Alas, the London Review of Books has done little since but publish letters attacking Perloff. And Todd Ojala wrote a second time to apologize, saying, “You are in no danger of me . . . doing anything remotely violent with dog-doo.” It’s a shame. We were ready to buy him a ticket to London. BABBLERS Meanwhile, the banner of saving a place in the world for looniness has been picked up by Newsweek, which carried an article in its Nov. 19 issue by David Gates defending Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy, and Barbara Kingsolver, three novelists who’ve had some of the worst things to say since Sept. 11. When Kingsolver declared the U.S. flag stood for “intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, and homophobia,” Jonathan Alter used his column in, ah, Newsweek to call her “mindless.” But Gates doesn’t mind trashing his colleague and anyone else who thinks these writers somewhat less than informed. Gates concedes that when Roy called bin Laden “the American president’s dark doppelganger,” it “crossed over into Sillyville.” That’s one way to put it. Another is to say it’s repulsive. Still, the article did produce one memorable line, about Gates’s interview with Kingsolver: “‘Well, I’m babbling,’ the author of “The Poisonwood Bible” said after summarizing the essay she’d just sent to her agent about FDR’s ‘Four Freedoms’ speech.” Jonathan Alter could have told her that. Books in Brief The Human Embryo Research Debates by Ronald M. Green, (Oxford University Press, 231 pp., $29.95) Ronald Green recounts his unsuccessful struggle to obtain federal funding for destructive embryonic research as a member of the Human Embryo Research Panel in the mid 1990s. Green laments the new research “ice age” that thwarts advances and interferes with the right to reproduce. He blames the panel’s failure on religious activists (“if this narrative has a villain, it is Richard Doerflinger,” from the Catholic bishops’ conference) and conservative politicians. Green contends that since life and death are “processes,” there is no line to mark a life possessing worth. And so we must be “active choosers” of which lives we will protect. It is of little concern to Green that this leads inevitably to the killing of devalued humans and their reduction to natural resources to be harvested. Indeed, he seems to welcome it–always presuming, of course, that he gets to be one of the choosers. –Wesley J. Smith Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews (North Point, 175 pp., $22) “‘Tracks,’ said Piglet. ‘Paw-marks.’ He gave a little squeak of excitement. ‘Oh, Pooh! Do you think it’s a-a-a Woozle?'” No, the hunt is neither for a Woozle nor a Heffalump; it’s actually Frederick Crews on the trail of postmodern theorists. Four decades ago Crews skewered academic pretensions in “The Pooh Perplex,” a casebook applying the latest interpretive methods (New Critical, Marxist, Freudian, etc.) to “Winnie the Pooh.” Now Crews imagines an MLA session in which the Best Bear in the World is deconstructed, found to be sexist and hegemonic, and moves from the mirror stage to the symbolic register. The trouble is that it hardly seems a joke any more. Of what use is parody in a world that parodies itself? –R.V. Young Jews in American Politics edited by L. Sandy Maisel and Ira N. Forman (Rowman & Littlefield, 512 pp., $39.95) A useful reference volume and a highly readable contribution to political historiography, chronicling American Jewish politicians. Alongside surveys of such big topics as identity, Jewish involvement in the radical left, and the turn toward neoconservatism, the book contains a selection of short biographies and useful lists. Who remembers that the first Jewish cabinet member in America was Judah P. Benjamin, attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state in the Confederate administration of Jefferson Davis? The personalities range from the early 20th-century San Francisco political boss Abe Ruef to a rising star, Virginia’s first term Republican congressman Eric Cantor–not to mention everyone from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Alan Greenspan. At best, a book to have on your desk for odd moments of quiet. At worst, bin Laden’s greatest nightmare. –Stephen Schwartz BOOK OF THE WEEK Victor Davis Hanson argues that as we fight, so we are. By J. Bottum Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson (Doubleday, 492 pp., $29.95) As the Taliban retreat and America considers what comes next, it’s worth reading Victor Davis Hanson’s excellent “Carnage and Culture,” an account of nine landmark battles between the West and other cultures. A classicist at California State, Fresno, Hanson suggested in his 1989 “The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece” that the discovery of the effectiveness of tight-packed phalanxes of infantry forced upon the ancient Greek cities what has become the paradigm of Western war: decisive battle, maximum force, and the attempt to obliterate enemy armies. In “Carnage and Culture,” Hanson explains what it takes to get men to fight this way. The unaristocratic phalanx required ordinary people to accept military duties, which required shared political power, which required rational habits of mind, which required that war be decisive. The Western way of war produced Western politics, philosophy, and science, while Western politics, philosophy, and science were busy producing the Western way of war. We forget, for instance, that the Romans weren’t all that skilled at battle. They sometimes had a Scipio or a Caesar. But a real tactical genius like Hannibal destroyed nearly 50,000 of them in one afternoon at Cannae. And then the Carthaginians settled down for the winter, while the Romans raised another legion–and another, and another. The Romans were political genuises, and against that, Hannibal had no chance. They knew how to make soldiers out of citizens, how to fight together, and how to push on to
strategic victory. Most of all, they knew Carthago delenda est. It’s this bringing of massive force to a brutal point that fascinates Hanson. It’s what makes him insist, in his account of the Zulus’ attack on Rorke’s Drift, that the greatest fighters in Africa were pale, scrawny Victorians from the London slums. They weren’t the most skilled; they were merely the deadliest, because they were well-disciplined members of an army from a culture that insisted on the lethalness of war. The Persians were defeated at Salamis by Western politics, the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan by Western technology, the Ottomans at Lepanto by Western economics, and the Japanese at Midway by the creativeness of Western individualism. Or so Hanson claims: What we are makes us fight this way, and fighting this way makes us what we are. To battle otherwise–to practice the “flower war” of the Aztecs, or the self-doubting war Hanson describes in his chapter on the Tet Offensive, or even the gestured wars of the Clinton era–strikes not just at Western military doctrine. It also weakens the very Western culture we mean it to defend. November 26, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 11
