I Was a Debater Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Lots of interesting conversations arising from the last few posts. Mostly I haven't responded to them with the thought and energy they deserve, because frankly I can't summon it up. A couple of points from the e-mails:

Mind Reading: I blast the Michael Moores of the world for it (Bush say X, but he really thinks Y!), then play Karnak about Kerry's intentions. Good point, I should be more specific. I don't trust him based on his record, the tenor of the primaries and the stuff he's let slip on the stump. The centerpiece of his campaign is four months in Vietnam--ignoring the thirty years he spent decrying the military, the Cold War and any other action that might give me confidence in his ability to wage this fight. Not to mention that his four months are looking dodgier and dodgier. Holiday in Cambodia indeed.

Speak for Yourself: Why do I quote so many opinion columnists instead of writing original stuff? Because I think other people, who study these issues a lot more closely than I do, frame the arguments in interesting, pellucid ways. And most of the people who read this diary wouldn't ordinarily be exposed to their work.

Bruce: Don't I think people grieved on 9/11? Didn't Bruce help them out and speak to their suffering? As I said in my original post: That's part of the story but not the whole story. I think it was a cheap aesthetic choice that ignored the broader canvas of the attacks. Is it his job to include everything? Who knows? Maybe if the album were better I wouldn't be asking that question. As it stands, it sounds mopey to me--a memorial to the first couple weeks after the attacks, when the music world was in "surround me with candles and play acoustic" mode. ("President Urges Calm, Restraint Among Nation's Ballad Singers"--contemporary Onion headline)

That was fine for the first numbing couple of weeks after the attacks. The only thing I could listen to for days afterward was Aaron Copland's "Quiet City." (My favorite song to come out of that period was David Bowie's cover of "Looking for America," from the Concert for NYC. Track it down, I urge you. It's the creepiest, truest statement about life in the tri-state in September 2001 that you'll ever hear.) But life continued, and so should aesthetics.

I didn't lose a spouse or a sibling in the attacks; just a distant friend and a way of life. If it sounds cavalier to comment on other people's pain and how they deal with it, I'm sorry. In purely aesthetic terms, I'm not denying that pain and loss stay with you; I'm saying that I don't like the artistic mind-set that makes mourning the only valid way to approach the attacks. "You loved me as a loser," as Leonard Cohen said. "Now you're worried that I just might win."

So what do I want? Laughter and war. G.K. Chesterton, at unconscionable length. Bear with it:

The usual verdict of educated people on the Salvation Army is expressed in some such words as these: "I have no doubt they do a great deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and profane style; their aims are excellent, but their methods are wrong." To me, unfortunately, the precise reverse of this appears to be the truth. I do not know whether the aims of the Salvation Army are excellent, but I am quite sure their methods are admirable.

Their methods are the methods of all intense and hearty religions; they are popular like all religion, military like all religion, public and sensational like all religion. They are not reverent any more than Roman Catholics are reverent, for reverence in the sad and delicate meaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels. That beautiful twilight you will find in Euripides, in Renan, in Matthew Arnold; but in men who believe you will not find it-- you will find only laughter and war.

A man cannot pay that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble; they can only be reverent towards a beautiful lie. And the Salvation Army, though their voice has broken out in a mean environment and an ugly shape, are really the old voice of glad and angry faith, hot as the riots of Dionysus, wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for a philosophy.


Emphasis mine. That's as good a description of pop culture's take on 9/11 as you'll find. The closest it can come to edification is reverence--mourning something that's been lost. Enough with the kvetching; I want music that rallies us around the "truth solid as marble." Even if you hate Bush and his particulars, can't you summon up a song about the culture that the Islamofascists want to destroy? To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, speaking to fellow leftists: The terrorists hate all the things about Western civilization that we like.

Is it fair to be glib about progressives, another e-mail asked? Well, aside from Hitch and a handful of others, the "progressives"* have punted on the question of Islamist terror, retreating to their tropes and reducing it all into a matter of politics and personalities. Or, as Bruce appears to be doing, they've turned it into yet another call to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Or give everyone a pony--details are hazy. As I've written about five zillion times here, I don't care if you hate Bush or the way he's managed this fight--but for Chrissakes don't deny that we're in one. That's dumb and dangerous, and I feel absolutely no compunctions about making fun of it.

---

*By progressives here I mean public intellectuals and entertainers who serve as the public voice of these causes--not, say, friends who have written me thoughtful notes about these issues from a progressive point of view and for the most part do not deny the seriousness of the situation we're in. I don't necessarily agree with the place they're coming from but I respect their opinions. Again: Celebrities and famous spokespeople dopey. Thoughtful, concerned friends not dopey.

@ 7:08:00 AM,

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