home
about us
subscriptions
supporters
benefactors
contact us
....................................
The War
By Charles O'Brien
Peace
Timothy Mayer
....................................
© 2001, 2002 First of the Month
|
Nothing New Under the Sun
By Greil Marcus
I came here tonight to talk about the response of American intellectuals
to the events of September 11 -- and I use the neutral, meaningless term
“events” to start off right where any intellectual response
begins, with an attempt to name what took place, or to avoid naming it.
We are all familiar with the words that quickly turned into buzzwords,
or evasions. Some of these I’ll take up later: “tragedy,”
“crime against humanity,” “major atrocities.” Some
are now just shorthand: “9-11,” “September 11.” “Terrorist
attacks” was somehow too much of a mouthful. Some names that seem
to me the most weighty—enormous words that force the speaker or the
listener to confront what they mean, where they came from, what ground
they share—have been used by a few and have then disappeared, never
entering the common conversation at all: “massacres,” “mass
murders.” Intellectuals are supposed to care about words, to respect
them, to understand their power to deprive public talk of meaning, or
their power to block clichés. But intellectuals are also afraid
of words—afraid not only of what they can do, but of how they can
make one who uses them appear. Who wants to look like a fool, unserious,
as if one doesn't know what to say? The New York Times on September 12
caught me right in the throat with its headline, a headline, I realized
the instant I saw it, that I been certain I would never see:
U.S. Attacked
The country itself. The idea of the country. Its territory. Its citizenry.
Its past and its future. “U.S. Attacked.” But after that, use
of language as a blunt object dissolved into logos, each one, you could
imagine, immediately trademarked by whatever news organization was using
it: “America Under Attack” on CNN; “America Strikes Back”
on Fox News and MSNBC; “A Day of Terror” and “A Nation
Challenged” in the New York Times. That sense of shock, of the sudden
recognition of a truth, that I’d gotten from the first Times headline
had somehow been returned to the conventional, to the predictable, to
the manageable, until I saw the headline on the satirical weekly the Onion.
It announced the truth, but in words intellectuals wouldn’t use as
their last words: “Holy Fucking Shit.” Against this, my favorite
certified intellectual attempt at naming, far beyond composer Karl Stockhausen’s
“the greatest work of art ever . . . the greatest work of art for
the whole cosmos”: novelist Rick Moody, best known for The Ice Storm,
beginning a mid-September essay by throwing his hands in the air—”The
Attack—what else can I call it?”—and then proceeding to
use his hands to smooth the paper before him: “‘The Attack,’”
Moody said, “—is a web of narratives.”
Words used in that manner—that kind of naming, that kind of instinctive
intellectual work—are an insult to whoever is unlucky enough to hear
them. They laugh at your confusion. They mock your fear. They look down
at you. They parade their confidence, their certainty that there is nothing
that can’t be folded into the language of the day before, their refusal
to entertain the possibility that something might have happened that never
happened before.
The acknowledgment that something can take place in the world that never
happened before might be the starting point of any real intellectual activity.
Acts can be taken, events can occur, that demand a whole new way of being
in the world, of looking at the world, of speaking about the world. It
may be the most common instinct, in the face of the new, to flee to the
old: to analogies, to precursors, to whatever old name can be used to
cover up the need for a new one, anything to avoid having to say “I’ve
never seen anything like this before”—”Holy Fucking Shit,”
in other words—which means having to say, “I don’t know
what to say.” So one says what one knows how to say. One says that
this it not so new as it appears, not that surprising, not that shocking—and,
doing that, one takes one’s place in Bob Dylan’s greatest protest
song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” from 1963, with
its saddened, angry chorus naming “those who philosophize disgrace,
and criticize all fears.” Those who claim to know what to say in
the face of something new precisely criticize the fears of those who sense
in their bones that something new has taken place—and who realize
that they no longer know precisely what their place in the world might
be. “The Attack—what else can I call it?—is a web of narratives.”
My idea of an intellectual is Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who found
her voice in the United States after the Second World War. As a scholar
and a professor she was also always a student—a student of what she
called the human condition. Her books—The Origins of Totalitarianism,
On Violence, On Revolution, Men in Dark Times—were often attacked
as ahistorical, or even anti-historical. That was because, to many, the
stories she told—and she was most of all a storyteller, like a guide
in the catacombs of history—were set less within a solid frame of
reference, where every seemingly new event has its analogy, than they
were anchored—anchored by the Athenians, the philosophers and the
dramatists, more than anyone else. And Arendt was often condemned as antihistorical
because she knew that sometimes anchors come loose, and the that the ships
they were meant to hold to solid ground go adrift. “Thinking without
a ground” is how one student of hers characterized her work. She
is best known, certainly in the American Jewish community, for her 1961
book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she wrote these lines which, to me,
anyway, sum up her idea of what the human condition is made of.
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once
made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind
stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become
a thing of the past . . . Once a specific crime has appeared for the
first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence
could ever have been.
This may seem like a truism, but in fact it goes directly against the
grain of what, in most times and places, intellectual discourse takes
itself to be—against what it most often takes its purpose to be.
When confronted with what might seem like something new, most intellectual
discourse says that what appears new is not: that to the contrary it fits
into familiar categories, can be described, explained, and analyzed with
familiar concepts, can be fixed with familiar words. Hannah Arendt was
on the other side of the mirror. Between Past and Future was the title
of one of her books, and the title spoke for her understanding of how
the world works, what the human condition is. There can be a breach between
past and future, and if there is such a breach, the future must be something
new. It may be terrible, formless, incomprehensible, even mute, but it
will be new—in truth, every time there is such a breach between past
and future, a new event has taken place, for no such breach can be the
same. “Originality,” Arendt wrote in 1953, “is horrible,
not because some new ‘idea’ came into the world, but because
its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions; they have
clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards
of moral judgment.” The past floats away like an unmoored, unanchored
ship. We remember it; like a Spanish galleon loaded with Peruvian gold,
as it drops over the horizon it carries off our treasure, our memory.
As the ship disappears, we can imagine ourselves on it. We can even name
it: the Flying Dutchman.
Feeling herself living in the space between past and future—feeling
herself, if not the philosopher of that space, its storyteller—Arendt
actively sought what had never been before. Listen to her language: “Every
act that has once made its appearance and been recorded in the history
of mankind”—it is a philosophical assertion that an act that
has not been made before can be made. What the Nazis did, she argued at
the end of Eichmann in Jerusalem—and, really, everywhere in her work—was
something new: they altered the limits on human action. Now, crimes that
heretofore were literally unthinkable—for which the conceptual, philosophical,
legitimating apparatus did not exist—were, by the very fact they
now were facts, easy to think. More than easy: it was impossible not to
think such crimes. It was impossible not to imagine what the Nazis had
done to the Jews in Europe in the 1940s being done to anyone else, anywhere
else, at any time.
Arendt looked for the new, for what was making its appearance in the
history of mankind. She found it in totalitarianism; she found it in the
American revolution. And she wrote with such grace, seductiveness, and
force because in such an intellectual quest, so much was at stake: the
chance, which might not come again, to identify, in that gap between past
and future, what the particular opportunities and dangers were—the
opportunities that had never come before, the dangers that had never come
before. As she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented
from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities
that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer
felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden
which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence
or submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the
unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever
it may be.
Almost immediately after the fact, I found out that the mass murders
perpetrated in the United States by Arab terrorists—that’s one
of the things one can say instead of “the Attack”—might
lead to very particular breaks between past and future: they could lead
to breaks between friends. It came at a Yom Kippur dinner when I found
myself shouting at an eighteen-year-old who had said that what had happened
was more than anything “a cry for help.” It came when a friend
said on the phone that he was trying to come to terms with “who was
really culpable here,” by which he meant the degree to which the
United States was culpable—“How about the people who hijacked
the planes?” I almost yelled at him. It came when a British friend,
a professor, said that “Anti-Americanism was a necessity” in
any attempt to come to grips with “the Attack” and I instantly
found myself on the far side of a great divide, in another country from
the one we had both inhabited a second before, one in which I imagined
that I was at home, and imagined that my friend was not, and didn’t
want to be.
Friends aside, the recognition of such a breach can be liberating. The
first premise of intellectual work, of thinking without a ground, is to
trust your first response—and my first response to reading the leftist
intellectual Noam Chomsky’s first statement on the massacres was
disgust. “The terrorist attacks were major atrocities,” he said
on September 13, as if this was something that was in doubt—or a
line that had to be laid down before what was really important could be
said. “In scale,” Chomsky went on, “they may not reach
the level of many others—for example, Clinton’s 1998 bombing
of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical
supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.”
What caused the bile to rise in my throat was not the formal accuracy
or legitimacy of the particular things Chomsky was saying—Chomsky,
an eloquent speaker in the movement against the war in Vietnam, a defender
of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in the 1980s, today a relentless
critic of American power everywhere at all times. It was the assumption
of simplicity, of obviousness. It was the absolute denial of surprise.
Chomsky’s words were those of someone who had seen all the way
around the major atrocities even before they happened. There was no possibility
that they contained, that they signified, anything new. Rather, they were
a confirmation that, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, “Things
are more like they are now than they ever were before.”
That Chomsky’s statement was an act of bad faith—less as a
citizen of the United States, who has the right to say what he likes,
than as an intellectual, who has an obligation to words and ideas—is
borne out in the interviews he gave after September 13, and which he collected
in a book he titled 9-11. The fact that, to impress upon people that he
was appalled by the acts of terrorists, he did not bother to put his own
thoughts in his own words, but again and again quoted the reporter Robert
Fisk to that effect, meant, “Get this out of the way so we can talk
about what matters.” “I mentioned,” Chomsky said on September
21, “that the toll of the ‘horrendous crime’ committed
with ‘wickedness and awesome cruelty’ may be comparable to the
consequences of Clinton’s bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in August
1998”—and so on. In other words, Chomsky’s earlier “major
atrocities” was not serious. What he really meant was this: In the
context of the world order as established by American power, what happened
on September 11 was an ordinary and not even particularly egregious action
by people resisting that power by those means left to them. It was of
a piece with Robert Fisk’s own insistence, in his position as a veteran
Middle East reporter who had himself interviewed Osama bin Laden several
times, that the thousands of deaths were “a crime against humanity.”
This sounds impressive—serious—until you find out what it means:
“policemen, arrests, justice, a whole international court at the
Hague if necessary.” In other words, the New York Times headline
“U.S. Attacked” was hysterical. Rather, “Humanity”
was offended. The United States has no right to respond. There was no
war—except, as the book in which Fisk’s statement is collected
titles it, September 11 and the U.S. War—a book which, with its cover,
in four photos, demands that one acknowledge an idiot symmetry: smoke
rising from the World Trade Center, smoke rising from a target in Afghanistan;
Ground Zero in New York, a bomb site in Afghanistan.
I am not going to spend any time tonight taking apart Chomsky’s
comparison of the New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania mass murders
and Bill Clinton’s attempt to retaliate against Osama bin Laden’s
bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Others have done
it. What I want to talk about is the way in which American intellectuals
have seized on the unprecedented acts of last year as an opportunity not
to think—and I should say now that when I say “American intellectuals,”
I mean left-wing intellectuals. That is because I think leftist intellectuals
come out of, and must necessarily draw on, a tradition of open inquiry
in which neither questions nor answers are fixed in advance. It doesn’t
matter if the ancestors one chooses were, in some real sense, conservatives.
In 1831, when he published Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
was a conservative intellectual. So was Hannah Arendt. Their sense of
gravity drew them to the past, even if they knew it could never be recovered.
As intellectuals they were Robinson Crusoes, scavenging whatever could
be rescued from the shipwrecks of their place and time as they tried to
navigate in an altogether unfamiliar world. But like Karl Marx, Sigmund
Freud, Albert Camus, or Edmund Wilson—all, in their way, deeply conservative
thinkers—they understood that they were, in some significant sense,
ignorant, deaf, blind, and mute. To make sense of a new world, or the
gap between a past and a future, they would have to ask questions that
had never been asked, and consider answers that to their ancestors would
have made no sense at all. It may be that my inability to take right-wing
intellectuals seriously as intellectuals is nothing more than my own lack
of imagination—but as far as I can see, right-wing intellectuals
in America today are propagandists before they are anything else. They
speak and write not to ask, but to answer. They are literally bought and
paid for—in so many cases, their titles awarded, their salaries paid,
and their publications subsidized by the Hoover Institute, the American
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and
the racist, eugenicist Bradley Foundation.
In the wake of the mass murders, leftist American intellectuals spoke
again and again of the need to resist the attempts of the Bush administration
and other right-wing powers in American life to use the excuse of war
to do things they might otherwise not be able to do: to “highjack”
the war, as people are beginning to put it, in favor of the curtailment
of civil liberties, new tax cuts for corporations and rich Americans as
part of an “Economic Security Act,” drilling in the Alaskan
Wildlife Refuge as part of an “Energy Security Act,” and the
like. But there is no chance to even begin to talk about what is right
about a war and what is wrong about it, what is right about the United
States and what is wrong about it, when leftist intellectuals no less
than rightwing propagandists speak the same language—the language
of flattery. If most right-wing intellectuals write to flatter those who
pay them, so many left-wing intellectuals, who may be paid nothing to
write, write to flatter themselves.
An international Gallup poll conducted in late February—”face
to face interviews with 9,924 residents of Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia,
Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia”—determined
that “sixty-one percent did not believe Arab groups carried out the
September 11 terrorist attacks.” The first I heard of such a notion
came not from the Middle East, but from Berkeley, on September 12 or 13,
when an anonymous e-mailer sent a leftwing thread my way: “Who has
the most to gain?” one person asked, and immediately answered: “Mossad.”
Though within a week it would be plain that it was George W. Bush who
had the most to gain from the mass murders—and who has, as a skillful
politician, gained the most—no one suggests that he carried out the
massacres. But the confluence between Arab public opinion and leftist
intellectual analysis is quite stunning. Arabs are often quoted to the
effect that Arab terrorist groups are incapable of the acts of which they
are accused—technically incapable, imaginatively incapable, of insufficient
intelligence, it’s never spelled out. American intellectuals seem
to procede from the assumption that Arabs are incapable of defining their
own destinies or making sense of their own actions.
To read through the writings and interviews of Chomsky and so many like
him is to be told that everyone and anything the United States was or
might be attacked by is in fact the direct creation of the United States.
The Taliban. Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda. The Pakistani secret service.
Saddam Hussein. Leftist intellectuals from Chomsky to the scholar Michael
Parenti to the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt to the social commentators
Barbara Ehrenreich and Vivian Gornick to the historian Howard Zinn write
as if to say, if America did not literally plan and carry out an attack
upon itself, it might as well have. As Robert Fisk puts it, most crazily,
if not really outside the boundaries of the common discourse: “Our
broken promises, perhaps even our destruction of the Ottoman Empire, led
inevitably to this tragedy.” This tragedy—a terrible occurrence,
in its formal definition, brought about by the arrogance, by the overweening
pride, of he or she on whom the terrible occurrence is visited. A terrible
occurrence, in its commonplace, everyday usage, that just happens, and
for which no one can really be blamed. In either case, neither a crime
nor an act of war.
It has been said by revolutionary theorists that it is the duty of every
revolutionary to explain his or her actions. It was said by our own: “When
in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and
to assume among the powers of the earth, separate and equal station to
which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the
causes which impel them to the separation.” But one of the many things
that was new in the astonishingly successful, staggeringly symbolic, overwhelmingly
physical act of war committed against the United States last September
was that, as an act, it was without speech. There was no manifesto, statement,
or justification addressed to the opinions of mankind, let alone those
who were to be killed—implicitly, anyone and everyone within the
borders of or holding any allegiance to the United States. It was as if
the reason for the murders was, in the next phrase of the Declaration
of Independence, “self-evident.”
But for so many American intellectuals, this was not sufficient. When
one makes one’s living speaking in public, nothing can be self-evident;
otherwise, some people would be out of a job. So one learned, again and
again, that the acts taken against the United States were the result of
crimes the United States had committed against others—against Guatemalans,
Chileans, Nicaraguans, Philippines, Japanese, Angolans, Serbians, Sudanese,
Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, Saudis, and, most of all, most deeply and
most hideously and most proximately, Palestinians. It was the United States,
through its client state Israel, and the client state’s general Ariel
Sharon, one read, who was responsible for the massacres of Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon in 1982—and the death of every Palestinian man,
woman, or child killed by Israelis since. That by the same logic one could
say that the United States was responsible for the death of every Israeli
man, woman, or child killed by a Palestinian was not remarked upon; that
from a different logic one might wonder why it is only the United States,
or Israel, that is held responsible for the 1982 Lebanon massacres, and
not the Lebanese Christians who in fact carried them out, was as far as
I know mentioned only by Fredric Smoler, a professor of literature and
history at Sarah Lawrence, in the leftist New York tabloid First of the
Month.
“Responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it,”
the novelist Salman Rushdie wrote in 1990. He was speaking, most specifically,
of the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini—the death
sentence passed on him for his supposedly blasphemous book The Satanic
Verses. What he meant, I think, was that should he be murdered, as the
leader of the faith had commanded that he be, the person who killed him
should be held fully responsible. That person, Rushdie was saying, would
have made a choice. He—for only a man would have been considered
worthy of the act—would not have been impelled by, and could not
be justified by, any religious belief or historical necessity. Men and
women make their own decisions, and rightly suffer for them. The greater
cause only exculpates; only the individual can take responsibility. But
this was not a notion that one has much heard from American intellectuals.
Not only had the United States, as a world power, or a military apparatus
serving as the protector of American capitalism, created the attack on
itself; as good Americans, American intellectuals were obligated to explain
and justify it. And this was only one more of the many things about the
beginning of the war that was new.
There were many exceptions, and they were drowned out, or appeared in
relatively obscure or specialized publications. In First of the Month,
co-editor Charles O’Brien wrote from the heart, condemning Noam Chomsky
and others as “the Vichy left,” and saying, finally, more than
anyone else was saying, right or left. The left always speaks in terms
of its “task,” its “duty”; almost mockingly, knowing
who he was up against—that is, most of those who might be reading
a leftist New York tabloid—that was the language O’Brien took
up.
It is the duty of the left in this time not only to be a party of
war, but to be the maximalist party of war. Hostilities must extend
not only to Iraq, Sudan, etc. but to the supposed friendlies, the darlings
of so many on the domestic right: Saudi Arabia, the [United Arab Emirates],
and Pakistan. We can do no better, to use Chomsky’s phrase, than,
first to disregard Chomsky utterly (along with such organs of disinformation
as Z and Counterpunch as well as the more genteel Harpers, [the London
Review of Books] and the Nation). But more important, we can do no better
than to emulate revolutionary France: which, with audacity, without
indulgence, summoning up the people, carried the war, across whosever
borders, to the enemies of the republic.
In Artforum, Homi Bhabha, a professor of English and African American
Studies at Harvard, and as an intellectual most distinguished for his
translation of the political concept of “plausible deniability”
into literary discourse—putting every word of potential meaning in
scare quotes, to indicate that he does not accept any meaning anyone might
attribute to it—as in, “putting every ‘word’ of ‘potential’
‘meaning’ in ‘scare’ quotes”—wrote a piece
with only three such quotes: and rather than provide meaning, or explanation,
simply merged himself with the event, which he somehow saw as a crowd
of men and women climbing up and down on Jacob’s Ladder. With startling
eloquence he spoke of something he called “the Unbuilt.” “Gardens
of solace and towers of regeneration may heal the wound,” he wrote.
But the Unbuilt that haunts the space is the spirit of those, firefighters
and rescue workers, who climbed an endless ladder, descending into the
circle of death, to do their duty to those who had to escape. In that
movement there is a sense of “making progress,” step by step,
without a transcendent form of progress. And in that action there lies
the un-utopian ethic of the Unbuilt. There are no available images of
this act of ascent; progress here is a lateral or adjacent move toward
the stranger as toward the neighbor.
But those were oddities. The insistence on America—which is to
say Israel— which is to say Jews—as, on the level of deepest
truth, the true author of the massacres, was so pervasive, and often so
automatic, that when I read the following—”The attack on September
11 was certainly not about people hating our freedoms. It was purely in
response to America’s foreign policy; and it was primarily about
our monetary and military support of Israel”—I barely thought
to look for the byline. It was American Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader David
Duke, but it could have been any number of people on the left.
All of this is summed up nowhere so well as in Susan Sontag’s instantly
notorious short comment that ran in the “Talk of the Town” pages
in the September 24 issue of the New Yorker.
Sontag, since the 1960s the most ambitious, respected, controversial,
and politically engaged of New York intellectuals, was surrounded in those
pages by many voices. There was the repulsive, epicene eyewitness account
of the destruction of the World Trade Center by the novelist John Updike,
watching from Brooklyn, searching for words that would divert attention
from the event itself and toward his ability to gild it: “We clung
to each other as if we ourselves were falling. Amid the glittering impassivity
of the many buildings across the East River, an empty spot had appeared,
as if by electronic command, beneath the sky that, but for the sulphorous
cloud streaming south toward the ocean”—I can’t read any
more. There was the novelist Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections,
imagining, as a novelist is supposed to do, the possible contours of life
and death: “the scene inside a plane one moment before impact. At
the controls, a terrorist is raising a prayer to Allah in expectation
of instant transport from this world to the next, where houris will presently
reward him for his glorious success. At the back of the cabin, huddled
Americans are trembling and moaning and, no doubt, in many cases, praying
to God for a diametrically opposite outcome. And then, a moment later,
for hijacker and hijacked alike, the world ends.” One of the bombs
planted in Franzen’s sentences may not go off right away: “huddled
Americans,” from the “huddled masses” emblazoned on the
Statue of Liberty, in the moment reaching out to the huddled few flying
over it, as if, somehow, huddling is an American condition, our version
of dust to dust.
In this context, Sontag’s few words were imperious, unsurprised,
impatient, and ice-cold. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before—not
really. When Sarajevo was under siege, she had traveled there again and
again, to direct a play; she was, as she wrote in 1995, “a veteran
of dread and shock,” “comfortable,” after her experiences,
only with “those who have been to Bosnia, too. Or to some other slaughter—El
Salvador, Cambodia, Rwanda, Chechnya. Or who at least know, firsthand,
what a war is.” She knew. So it was no problem for her to cut through
the shock and dread of virgins—of those who, unlike her, had never
seen anything like this before, who had never imagined anything like this
before—who, even if they had imagined the destruction of the World
Trade Center, which, since it was built, many people casually have, had
never remotely experienced in their imagination the reality of what they
imagined. Sontag had already been there and gone. She could speak like
Ronald Reagan talking about redwoods: “Seen one war, seen them all.”
What happened, Sontag said in her first sentence, was simply a “monstrous
dose of reality”—and I think one can take the “monstrous”
as a grace note. Like Chomsky’s “major atrocities,” it
translates into “ordinary events,” and even more quickly: “dose
of reality” takes you where she means to go. You have been living
in a dream world, Sontag said; now, you have been forced to wake up. There
is no mystery, there is nothing to wonder about.
Sontag wrote to close questions, not to open them—and as if hers
was the only voice brave enough to say what had to be said: “Where
is the acknowledgment,” she wrote, “that this was not a ‘cowardly’
attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’
or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed
superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances
and actions?”
Again, the bile rose in my throat, and for the same reason as when I
read Noam Chomsky’s first interview. “Specific American alliances
and actions”—there was apparently no need to say what they were.
It’s the language of the hipster: If you have to ask, you’ll
never know. But certainly the writer, the thinker, did not have to ask.
It had all happened before—that is, to those who understood, the
event had happened even before it happened.
In a questionnaire Sontag responded to in 1997, she wrote that “You
have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced
firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country,
war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about.” Forget what the
response of Sontag, or anyone, would be if the government, or a rightwing
propagandist, were to say the same thing: “You have no right to a
public opinion unless.” There’s no unless in the Bill of Rights,
anyone would say. But that is not the point; establishing one’s superiority
to any event, and to any of one’s fellow citizens, by denying the
existence of anything that one’s conceptual apparatus cannot enclose
is the point.
Or rather the point is that real intellectuals admit that it is in the
nature of the human condition that it will inevitably, at unpredictable
times, in unpredictable ways, produce events that leave every conceptual
apparatus in ruins, and that real intellectuals value nothing so much
as the chance, which comes only to a few, to do their work there.
|