Posted on 09/28/2001 1:06:34 PM PDT by LibertarianLiz
On September 11, a colleague of mine rang Henry Kissinger to ask if he'd write something for the op-ed page of Sunday's paper. On the Thursday, my friend called him back just to be sure he was still doing the piece. "Ah," the good Doctor growled dryly, "so this story has not been superseded?"
Kissinger makes a good point, though not just about the news media. The urge to (in the dread Clintonian phrase) "move on" is the natural condition of our culture. If anything, the news operations tend to be a little behind the curve. When so many people watching TV that morning said it was "like a movie" — like Independence Day or Armageddon or Swordfish — I began to get nervous. Not because it wasn't like Independence Day, but because the defining characteristic of those movies is not the "money shot" of the atomized White House or any of the other special effects but the fact that they're huge, boffo, smash, record-breaking mega-blockbusters for three weeks and then utterly forgotten. Movie's over. What's next?
Is something similar happening here? On September 22, the Miss America pageant went ahead as scheduled. If ever there was an event ripe for a bit of star-spangled symbolism, Old Glory wrapped around the flower of American maidenhood, this was it. The host, Tony Danza, began by justifying the decision. "We don't carry on to make less of what happened, we carry on to make more," he said. One of the producers had explained beforehand that they'd had to make a lot of changes — as a result, it would be "more of a USO show."
I wish. The urge to "move on" was almost palpable. When Danza asked one contestant what she liked about Manhattan, she replied cheerily, "More than any other city I've ever visited, it's just so full of life!" I wouldn't have minded if this had been delivered as an infelicitous cry of defiance, but instead its blank-eyed perky ingenuousness all but advertised the fact that the young lady had entirely forgotten the slaughter of ten days earlier. Instead of awkward, clunky, heartfelt patriotism, the whole event was suffused with an awkward, clunky, desperate embarrassment at even having to acknowledge what had happened.
What would a 2001 USO show look like? There was a report that Bob Hope is eager to stage a special benefit. Bob is 98, just back from the hospital and recuperating from pneumonia, but he may be the only guy in Hollywood who's not uncomfortable with uncomplicated flag-waving. Sixty years ago, the radio shows were full of lame gags about the Yanks putting ants in the Emperor's Japants. On the comic-book covers, Batman and Superman forgot about the Joker and the Penguin and took on Nazi spies. Can anyone imagine popular culture conscripting itself in similar fashion today? The forces we are up against and the governments that shelter them are Neanderthal, racist, misogynist, homophobic, fundamentalist, and an affront to democracy. They sound, in other words, like a typical Republican candidate — and yet for once the cultural Left won't hear a word against them, for fear of giving even hypothetical offense.
Indeed, there's a reluctance to admit there's any "enemy" at all. It was not a good sign when New York City decided to entrust its special prayer service at Yankee Stadium to Oprah, and it would have been too much to expect Oprah to forgo Oprahfying. "May we leave this place," she concluded, "determined to now use every moment that we yet live to turn up the volume in our own lives, to create deeper meaning, to know what really matters. What really matters is who you love and how you love."
Not right now, Oprah. What really matters is who we get to Afghanistan and what they do once they're there. Oprah's line isn't pacifist. Pacifism in the honorable sense is Mahatma Gandhi, a determined nonviolence that bent a mighty empire to its will. What's happening now is not pacifism but passivism — a terrible inertia filled with feel-good platitudes that absolve us from action, or even feeling. It was thus inevitable that an all-network, all-star telethon should have featured John Lennon's anthem for fluffy nihilists:
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today . . .
You may say he's a dreamer, but he's not. A couple of years ago, it emerged that Lennon was a very generous contributor not just to organizations that support and fund the IRA, but to the IRA itself. He could "imagine there's no countries" and "nothing to kill or die for," but until that blessed day he was quite happy to support an organization that blows up people in shopping centers and railway stations. It's heartening to know that, though he grew rich peddling illusory pap to the masses, he didn't fall for it himself.
Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times summed it up better than he knew: "The rock 'n' roll descendants of blues and folk artists, who would have been excluded from earlier prime-time showcases as voices of rebellion, have become the ones the country turns to as voices of unity. The defining moment during a national World War II radio benefit: Bing Crosby singing Irving Berlin. There was still a place for Berlin on Friday, as Celine Dion sang 'God Bless America.' But the telethon's central moments involved rock artists, including Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Neil Young, who drew upon the music and/or spirit of Bob Dylan and John Lennon."
These are the words Celine sang:
God bless America,
Land that I love.
Berlin wrote those lines sincerely and without embarrassment: He said it simplest and he said it best. He was a Jew and he endured slights. When he married a society girl, Ellin Mackay, she was dropped from the Social Register. When Ellin's sister took up with a Nazi diplomat in New York and went around sporting a diamond swastika, she suffered no such social disapproval. Nonetheless, through that and a thousand other idiocies, Berlin remembered the alternative — being a child in Temun, Siberia, when the Cossacks rode in and razed his village, sending his parents scuttling west. About his adopted land, he had no doubts. And, if John Lennon and U2 are now the "voices of unity," it's worth asking: Unity for what? "God Bless America" is a song to go to war to. Is "Imagine"?
Being a member of an NGO (non-governmental organization, as they call them at U.N. conferences), Osama bin Laden can easily "imagine there's no countries": He's been doing it for some time. By contrast, the distinguishing characteristic of people who stand around holding candles and singing John Lennon seems to be a colossal failure of imagination. When some bozo guns down his schoolyard, the day generally ends with him dead or in custody. The vast squadrons of grief counselors who descend on the joint faster than the local SWAT team and start drooling about "healing" and "closure" do have a point to this extent: The event is over, there is something to "close." But you can't begin "healing" until the guys have stopped firing. And in this case they haven't. This isn't Independence Day. It's not a movie. It's an old-fashioned radio serial, with cliffhanger endings week after week after week. Whoever is responsible for September 11 already has well-advanced plans for the next atrocity — probably nothing to do with planes; maybe a gas line, maybe just a shopping mall in some town you've never heard of. A terrorist is an opportunistic warrior. If he can kill the president, he will. But if he can't, he'll kill you. Imagine that.
So we need something a little more robust than the soothing drone of Lennon and Oprah. We need people willing to speak truth to evil. Saying you love everyone in general is like saying you love no one in particular. It's like being told "Gee, that was really special" by a hooker.
Here is my worry: At one end of the national spectrum are the anti-American elite, the Edward Saids and John Lahrs secure in their redoubts. At the other end are the great full-throated "These colors don't run" patriots. But in between is a big wobbly blurry mass trembling on the brink of making this just another wallow in victimization — the "dominant discourse" (as Said would say) of the day. Five years ago, Bob Dole wondered, "Where's the outrage?" Three years ago, Bill Bennett wrote a book called The Death of Outrage. In Europe, the ferociously anti-American Left is plenty outraged — it is raw, visceral, passionate, and none the worse for that. If we can't get outraged — not sad, not weepy, not candle-in-the-windy, but outraged — over thousands of people killed for no other reason than that they went to work, then we're really in trouble. If cultural passivity — love the world, be non-judgmental, everybody does it — co-opts even this awesome event, then the sleeping giant isn't sleeping so much as comatose.
This is war. Save the love-in for later.
Words to remember.
Mark, stop it, you're killing me!!!! Great piece, TS. Thanks for the ping. fsf
Billybob
The symbols of harshness in the films of WW-II, by virtue of contrasting images, tend to mislead the American people into thinking that Hitler overwhelmed Germany, and anti-Semitism overwhelmed the Germans.
But we now witness how the loss of individual courage among the Germans, is really what was necessary for the darkness to prevail over people who should know better.
As hard as it was for the Germans to see --- repeat, to see --- themselves in their darkest hour, so it is now true for Americans.
We look around and still much of our lives seems "normal" and orderly.
But Americans are now different and afraid to act in defense of our neighbors.
I probably did not "know a soul" among the dead of 11 September, but they were my neighbors.
I have not lost that.
This is a great article. I'll keep some quotes from this handy. Thanks for posting and the ping.
Bears repeating.
I read in another article somewhere recently (can't recall exactly where) a question posed by the author.
Are we too politically correct and racially sensitive to win this fight?
I hate to say that I think we might be; but that is my gut reaction to the question. What do you think?
And he did it in the usual "important high up in the Republican ranks" fashion, about 30 seconds.
He, Rush Limbaugh, et al, who "champion" competitive enterprise, are all petrified of actually investing, sacrificing, in it.
As well-circulated as those talking heads may be, they are woefully insufficient to be a presence in our everyday lives where we need something to combat the monopoly of definition which is the bounty of socialists.
Socialists are able to define who we are [supposed to be].
Pakistani ISI and Taliban "leaders" have defined who and what are their followers, and who and what are such peoples' enemies.
And so we suffer from lies.
Whom do you know, subscribes to The Washington Times?
Whom do you know, does that as a gift subscription to their local library?
If the liberals are able to continue to "teach" people [thru the 'liberal media'] that there is only the color red, and the conservatives have a few blue ink blots but not much else, we may expect people to act on the information available to them:
Red.
Now we can continue to sit and complain about all the talk about Red and how unfair it is that the color Blue doesn't get equal coverage ...
... and therefore we can continue ...
... and therefore we can continue ...
Well forget that, if you want to at least have a fighting chance.
This country most hurts because good people get bad information.
Is it not apparent by now that the 'liberal media' are NOT going to provide good info?
Yep.
So we must compete.
And the answer to your question is in the short term, Yes, but in the long term, No.
We have really good people in America.
They need good information to act upon.
Think about it.
The liberals participate in a war of information, in this country, but the conservatives do almost nothing but complain about how unfair it is.
That nearly is, literally, sickening; because it appears that the conservatives [who are so full of talk about how self-determined they are], are unable to operate an ongoing enterprise without government favoritism. Meaning, that their version of what must be done about the 'liberal media' is that their should be laws leveling the playing field.
That's conservativism? Capitalism? Free Enterprise?
No!
And so we witness how poor are our leadership.
It is disgusting.
What we can do is to encourage Freepers to get the word out about the available conservative media and then get that media into the public eye.
When in Washington, DC, pick up copies of The Washington Times and then distribute them. Give a stack to a truck driver who'll pass them along. Give a stack to a river boat tug crew.
Take a stack back to Hometown, U.S.A. and pass 'em out to your friends.
In other words, do what you can to take away the 'liberal media's' monopoly on defining who you are, and you'll find that some people recover their sense of individual responsibility and duty.
Because they know of possibilities other than Red.
But we now witness how the loss of individual courage among the Germans, is really what was necessary for the darkness to prevail over people who should know better.
Your reply is eye-opening. I don't know if it is loss of individual courage these days, seems more like selfishness--oh well, they're dead, and I'm not, and it happened 3,000 miles away, and I don't know anybody that died, anyway, and they're not showing the planes flying into the buildings on TV anymore, and even if they were, it all happened so very long ago, and I sent in a donation, and I'm so tired after working eight hours--or perhaps it's lethargy--it takes a lot of energy to be outraged to the point of action--and the whole thing is so terribly distasteful and far away--it's messy killing people and breaking things, after all, even though all these people died on U.S. soil, our government is sending soldiers not out into our streets to find these people (supposedly the FBI is doing that) but somewhere "over there," far away where funny sounding people wearing funny clothes living in dirty shacks live, they're practically subhuman don't you know?
Nah, you're right, it's lack of courage.
Hey Oprah, did you see this quote? It certainly sends a chill up my spine.
No doubt! And this woman with all her New Age, liberal, wacko ideas has done more to damage the fundamentals of our society than most.
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