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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In that moment, Ben is immediately recognizable. He's one of the people Pauline Kael once wrote about, the ones who couldn't remember that in the original "Manchurian Candidate," when the liberal senator is shot, he appears to bleed milk. He is also, unfortunately, Baker's voice of reason. After sitting through "Fahrenheit 9/11," in which Michael Moore refuses to consider Bush or anyone in his administration as anything resembling a human being, or reading Tony Kushner's ludicrous agitprop play "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy," which revels in a cultural superiority as elitist as anything ever spouted by the likes of Gertrude Himmelfarb or Allan Bloom, you might almost be grateful for Ben's dogged insistence that George W. Bush has not forfeited his status as a human being (especially if you don't share a Rousseauian view of what human beings are).
When Ben tells Jay that killing Bush would be a capitulation to the very violence Jay claims to hate in his target, Ben understands that the use of violence always diminishes us morally. If Jay had read Hannah Arendt's "On Violence" he would no doubt agree with Arendt that violence is always launched from a position of weakness, after negotiation or defense has failed. But like his creator, Ben seems unable to understand that violence is sometimes necessary, so he becomes an inadvertently damning portrait of liberal squeamishness.
In the middle of "Checkpoint," Baker has given Ben a speech in which he condemns every American president since Truman, presumably because, at one time or another, each one resorted to violence. It's useful to examine one or two of his points. Clinton is dismissed because, Ben says, "What's the first thing he does when he gets into office? He sends planes into Iraq, some 'sorties,' just to show he's no slacker." In the context of a book written in protest largely over Bush's invasion of Iraq, it seems strange that Baker would falsify the reason for that 1993 bombing raid. Clinton sent those planes because of an Iraqi plot to assassinate George H.W. Bush while the elder Bush was visiting Kuwait. The bombing effectively ended all Iraqi plotting against the United States. In other words, it made it even harder for George W. Bush to justify an invasion begun 10 years later on grounds of national security.
This myopia makes sense in a writer who has never evidenced a worldview larger than that of white, affluent metropolitan America. Ben's speech comes from a cushy, liberal, white, reasonably prosperous point of view. If Baker wanted to prove that Ben really had the courage of his convictions, then he needed to write a scene in which Ben confronts Southern blacks who can go to the polls and vote without being harassed, the elderly who have Medicare, the kids who have been through Head Start, and tries to convince them that Lyndon B. Johnson was a bad president. Baker would need to write a scene in which Ben justifies his revulsion at Clinton and Wesley Clark's bombing of Belgrade to the Bosnian Muslims who were saved from Milosevic's genocide.
There is, of course, a perk to turning away from war in genteel revulsion -- it spares you from dealing with the irresolvable, soul-dirtying choices war entails. The only effective protests against war are those that do not refuse to understand the nature of war. That's why there will never be any antiwar writers stronger than the great war memoirists and poets.
