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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Malcolm's letter, and the perhaps imprecise historical analogy it contained ("We are in a time now that is as fearful as the period after Munich"), occasioned Leon Wieseltier to write, "This is what now passes for smart" in his Aug. 8 New York Times Book Review piece on "Checkpoint." Rightly chiding the intellectually sloppy (and historically insensitive) Bush-equals-Hitler analogies that have sprung up lately, Wieseltier nonetheless managed to sound like the supercomputer that rules the city in Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville," meting out punishment to anyone who deviates from strict rationalism.
I don't have much more patience than Wieseltier for loose talk, lazy analogies or demagoguery from either side. But if Wieseltier cherishes facts, then fear seems a perfectly reasonable reaction to the facts that have accumulated over the last few years. No one has done a better job of compiling them than Craig Aaron in "Missions Accomplished?" an article in the Summer 2004 issue of Dissent. This is the real "Fahrenheit 9/11," and one that doesn't need speciously strung-together factoids, half-truths and fictions to lay out a case against George W. Bush. There is the Justice Department's refusal to identify immigrants detained after 9/11 (Oct. 29, 2001); Rumsfeld's declaration that the Guantánamo prisoners had no rights under the Geneva Convention (Jan. 11, 2002); the report that Bush activated a shadow government following the attacks without telling Congress (March 1, 2002); John Ashcroft's permitting the FBI to monitor political and religious groups without probable cause (May 20, 2002); the April 17, 2002, report from sources in the administration admitting that military mistakes allowed Osama bin Laden to escape during the battle of Tora Bora; and a United Nations official's Oct. 29, 2003, warning that Afghanistan will "once more turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists." There are dozens of other items in a report that goes on for pages.
How do you read a Newsweek report from July that DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, wrote to Tom Ridge and asked him to give Soaries' commission the power to postpone the presidential election if there were a threat of terrorist disruption, and not feel fear?
Even the sober language of "The 9/11 Commission Report" can leave you in a state of rage. This is the passage in the report about the administration's response to the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin [sic] Determined to Strike in US":
"We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. [CIA director] Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17 and participated in PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period."
Wieseltier may think of "Checkpoint" as a "scummy little book." He is even right in identifying it as part of the degradation of political speech that affects the left as well as the right in this moment. He is right in saying that in condemning the Iraq war as an example of American power used for ill, some have refused to acknowledge that American power can be and has been used for good. But Wieseltier writes from an inhumanly lofty position. It may be that the wind flutters his silvery mane fetchingly at such a height. Yet nary a trace of fear or rage -- or even the consideration that such feelings are understandable right now -- flutter a syllable of his prose, and his intimation that only hysterics feel anything like fear or rage at this moment is superior.
Strangely enough, like Wieseltier, "Checkpoint" winds up dismissing that fear and rage as an unreasonable state.
It would be nice to think that Baker is using Ben to parody liberal ineffectiveness. Ben is the type of guy who tries to calm Jay's despair over the state of the world by telling his friend that the small pleasures of the world -- leaves and trees and fog -- are still there "for everyone to enjoy. So who cares then about George W.? He's irrelevant."
