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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Yes, the Italian journalist's new book is peppered with prejudice. But the self-hating left needs to hear her message.
Nov 16, 2002 | "Immediately he caught fire as if he had seen Greta Garbo throwing off her black glasses and parading in a licentious striptease on the stage of La Scala." That's Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, describing the reaction of the editor in chief of a major Italian newspaper when she told him she would break a 10-year silence to write a piece about Sept. 11, a piece asserting what she sees as the unbridgeable divide between the Islamic and the Western worlds. To drive home the comparison, the author photo on Fallaci's "The Rage and the Pride" -- Fallaci in Garbo-like black glasses and hat, seemingly caught by surprise in the backseat of a car -- replicates all those paparazzi shots of the aging Garbo caught on the streets of New York. She knows what's going on in that editor's mind when she agrees to write for him. She knows he is imagining "my readers already lining up to buy the newspaper" or "to crowd into the stalls and the boxes and the gallery of the theater."
The mention of La Scala is not an accidental one. Camille Paglia, another diva of the page, said she based her concussion-grenade prose on '60s acid-rock guitar. For Fallaci the model is opera, with its bigness, its overdramatization, its rising and falling waves of emotion. She writes not to convince or to persuade but to overwhelm, to storm the barriers, to sweep us into a state of transcendent rage. "The Rage and the Pride" is not just Fallaci's aria; it's a full-scale production where she assumes all the roles herself: a pitiless Cassandra, the tragically wronged heroine, the warrior who will turn vengeance into a scourge, burning the nonbelievers and laying waste to their lands with her violence and her passion. If she could find a way to hand out arms to her readers after they put the book down, she probably would.
Sept. 11 would seem the last event on which it is appropriate for a writer to deliver a performance. A few months ago in the New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn suggested that the only fitting reaction to all of the "I was feeding the cat when the phone rang and a friend told me to turn on the TV" writing that Sept. 11 produced is: "Who cares?" The magnitude and horror of the event make the small-scale personal reaction seem almost offensively irrelevant. So how can we possibly justify the egomaniacal reaction that Fallaci has?
"The Rage and the Pride" is double the length of the article that Fallaci delivered to that Italian newspaper, and it's abetted by a 53-page introduction. She doesn't miss an opportunity to point out that she has been warning of the dangers of what Christopher Hitchens has termed "Islamo-fascism" for years. Fallaci, who calls herself a political exile and has been living in New York for some years, compares this book to a 1933 lecture given by Professor Gaetano Salvemini at the Irving Plaza Hotel in which he decried the danger of Hitler and Mussolini.
And Fallaci doesn't hesitate to bring up the peril in which she has placed herself by speaking out. She says that a French "ultra-leftist" Muslim association asked a French court either to confiscate this book or to label each copy with a warning similar to the one found on cigarettes cautioning that it may be hazardous to the reader's health. The president of the Italian Islamic Party has written a book called "Islam Punishes Oriana Fallaci," in which (she claims) he exhorts his followers to kill her. Fallaci also claims that the author's "brothers" (it is unclear whether she means that literally or as a synonym for comrades) are sending her daily death threats.
Yet she will go on, laying aside the novel she has been working on for 10 years (she calls it her "child"), ignoring the cancer from which she has long suffered. The very writing of the book is presented to us as a heroic struggle in which she draws on her years of experience covering wars, traveling the world, fearlessly speaking out. She imagines the book will send her fans into raptures and her enemies into a fury. Basically, she is picturing a world in which everyone is hanging on the utterances of La Fallaci. She even imagines the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi trembling in fear of the judgment she will unleash on him.
It would be wrong to underestimate the levels of ego and arrogance at work in "The Rage and the Pride." Or the xenophobia, the periodic lapses into racism, the outright paranoia. It would also be wrong to dismiss the book. It's not something that journalism teachers would ever teach their students, but we should not underestimate the uses of deliberate overstatement. Sometimes you need drama and polemics to break through indifference, received opinion, the limits that politeness imposes on discourse.
That does not relieve readers of the responsibility of making distinctions. We should feel queasy when Fallaci writes that Italy is not big enough to be a melting pot in the way America is and that the country is in danger of losing its national identity from the influx of Islamic immigrants. We should be appalled when she writes that the presence of Islamic butcher shops in Cavour has transformed the "exquisite city" into a "filthy kasbah." We should question what Yasir Arafat's "smelly saliva" has to do with reporting on his politics other than to reinforce the image of Arabs as dirty.
We should gag at the kitschification of Sept. 11 when Fallaci tells the story of an 8-year-old American boy who can no longer use the sight of the twin towers to guide him home and she writes, "If you get lost now, some good person will help you instead of the Towers." We should object to her ridiculing homosexuals as "devoured ... by the wrath of being half and half," or asking feminists who oppose the war on terrorism if they dream of being raped by Osama bin Laden. Or when she characterizes Albanian, Sudanese, Bengalese, Tunisian, Egyptian, Algerian, Pakistani and Nigerian immigrants as intruders who contribute to the drug trade and patronize prostitutes who spread AIDS. And we should recoil from the paranoia of asking if the passage fees of all Islamic immigrants to the West is paid by "some Osama bin Laden for the mere purpose of establishing the Reverse Crusade's settlements and better organizing Islamic terrorism."
Fallaci can imagine no Muslim who is not a threat. And though she may be linguistically correct when she ridicules the charges that she is a racist ("the problem has nothing to do with race: it has to do with a religion") there is enormous bigotry here nonetheless. Perhaps more bigotry than I've ever encountered in any other book worth reading.
Why is a book that makes you ashamed for its author, even occasionally ashamed to be reading it, still worth reading? Because for all its bigotry and paranoia, all of its ill-informed dismissal of Islamic history and culture, "The Rage and the Pride" is a bracing response to the moral equivocation, the multi-culti political correctness, the minimization and denial of the danger of Islamo-fascism that dogs the response to Sept. 11 and to the ongoing war on terrorism. (That is, if we can assume that war is still ongoing, if Bush, caught up in his plans to invade Iraq, still remembers that it is al-Qaida that poses the predominant threat to the West.) To understand how a book that contains much that is repugnant also has a cogent, coherent argument, we must put it in the context of what is currently passing for discussion of the war on terror.
The most common complaint about public discourse since Sept. 11 is that anyone who dares to criticize any aspect of the U.S. response is labeled anti-American. I don't dispute that. Propaganda rules in wartime. But there's another side, which is how the left has seized on what we've done wrong to dismiss the war on terrorism in toto. The left has used Bush and Ashcroft's obvious attempts to dismantle civil liberties, or idiocies like the State Department's refusal to grant a visa to the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, or the folly of invading Iraq (which is not part of the war on terrorism at all, however much the administration tries to paint it so) as proof that, once again, we cannot be morally justified in defending ourselves.
