Posted on 09/29/2001 11:32:57 AM PDT by quimby
by celestine Bohlen
The title of his show is "Politically Incorrect," which, until recently, was politically acceptable. But in a time when public discourse is constrained by barriers of taste, propriety and patriotism, the comments on Sept. 17 by the late-night talk show host Bill Maher were denounced as both incorrect and unacceptable by two major sponsors, a dozen affiliate stations and even the White House.
What Mr. Maher actually said was not that different from the comments of his guest that evening, Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative from the American Enterprise Institute, who quarreled with President Bush's characterization of the terrorists as cowards. "Not true," Mr. D'Souza said, according to a transcript. "Look at what they did. You have a whole bunch of guys who were willing to give their life; none of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete. These are warriors."
Mr. Maher replied: "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."
But as it turns out, what you say is not half as important as where you say it. Similar comments had been aired on Slate.com, the Internet magazine, and in a short piece in The New Yorker by Susan Sontag, a prominent member of the New York intelligentsia.
Along with John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Rebecca Mead, Roger Angell and other writers, Ms. Sontag had been asked to contribute her comments on the attacks to the magazine's opening Talk of the Town section in the Sept. 24 issue. In curt, dismissive tones, she took exception to what she called the "self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions" being broadcast on the airwaves. She went on to challenge the assumption that the country had witnessed a "cowardly" assault on "civilization" or "liberty"; rather, she wrote, it was an attack on "the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."
"And if the word `cowardly' is to be used," she continued, "it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."
Like Mr. Maher, Ms. Sontag, too, came under attack, in particular from Charles Krauthammer, a columnist at The Washington Post, and John Podhoretz at The New York Post. Her comments were indeed the talk of the town, debated and dissected by other members of the intelligentsia, many disagreeing vigorously.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said the magazine received more than 100 letters in response, which, he observed, "is a heck of a lot." Most of them were angered by Ms. Sontag's questioning of the word "coward," he said. One letter will be published.
But that is a far cry from Mr. Maher's predicament. As the host of a television show that is watched by millions of viewers across the country and sponsored by national advertisers, Mr. Maher, not surprisingly, caused more of an uproar than The New Yorker, a New York-based magazine with a circulation of 851,000. First he watched as Federal Express and Sears withdrew their sponsorship of his show. Then he issued an apology and appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" and the "Tonight " show to explain himself. Some ABC affiliates initially canceled "Politically Incorrect" and later put it back on the air, although not the station in Washington, where the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, warned on Wednesday that "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do." (The White House later dropped the first half of that warning.)
Ms. Sontag, to be sure, has come in for her share of public criticism. Mr. Krauthammer called her "morally obtuse," while Mr. Podhoretz said she was a prime example of the "hate-America crowd," which he described as "dripping with contempt for the nation's politics, its leaders, its economic system and for their foolish fellow citizens."
Bruised by the criticism, Mr. Remnick defended his decision to offer writers "a forum to react to what had happened from a political point of view or a descriptive or emotional."
"So far as I can tell, part of what is under attack is American culture, and part of that culture is argument," he said.
Among linguists on the sidelines of such battles, there is little debate that the word "coward" is not applicable to the terrorists who piloted the four planes on Sept. 11. According to Webster's New World College Dictionary, a coward is "a person who lacks courage, especially one who is shamefully unable to control fear and so shrinks from danger or trouble."
If only they had been.
I am not a professor, because I really don't care enough to teach rocks. You get it, or you don't.
I believe many will, and it is to those I speak.
...Let him speak, let me choose not to listen.
What about the ramifications of such an idea as Maher's?
By implying that people who commit suicide are brave, Maher might have 'justified' suicide in the minds of some people who are considering ending their own lives.
People who are interested in committing suicide can now think of themselves as "brave" (and, since they won't be killing thousands of other people at the same time, they can even think they are 'kinder' than the terrorists.)
The "all-powerful" Maher has spoken. It's braver to kill oneself than to kill others in defense of your countrymen..
Let's also hope suicidally inclined folks didn't listen to his words, which implied suicide is a brave act.
But seriously, are you implying that there is no absolute truth? Or is that merely a projection of my inner conflict and bullsh!t like that? Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that we can only observe quantities to a certain degree of accuracy; as long as I specify the error or degree of uncertainty on a measurement, it's still meaningful data. It's still true. We entrust our lives to engineers' standard deviation calculations every day.
Not trying to imply that one can carry over the scientific method into the human psyche... Or that one should try. The way I decided to interpret your "gibberish" is, you're right on; liberals have always been much further ahead than we in the realm of psychological manipulation via communication... 'Bout time we turned the tables.
Or get the kind of help they need, if they have warped thinking or emotions.
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