December 11, 2002

HAROLD PINTER, CANCER SURVIVOR

     Gratitude has never been a prominent feature of human nature. We all tend to feel a sense of entitlement for our good fortune. Nowhere is this more obvious than amongst our creative and intellectual elites. These people frequently asssume their talent exempts them from ordinary obligations, and that they possess indispensable expertise which they are only too glad to bestow on their benighted and limited fellow citizens. Curiously, Harold Pinter begins an incoherent (creative?) diatribe against the West, particularly the United States of America, by recounting his medical/surgical battle with cancer. We are encouraged by the juxtaposition to conflate his cancer with what follows: a diatribe against America. In the vitriolic denunciation("..the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary.") that follows, is there any recognition that his life was saved by the medical and surgical advances made by Americans and Brits and Israelis working in democracies that encourage the untrammeled pursuit of scientific knowledge? Don't hold your breath. Instead, there are warnings about the illness of the West, Pinter being the diagnostician. For all of his denunciation of the West, I rather doubt that Pinter flew to Gaza hospital for treatment, nor am I aware of any bio-medical advances in the Islamic world, for which Pinter sheds crocodile tears. Along with a characteristic lack of gratitude he displays a sense of entitlement that makes it quite natural to take his good medical fortune for granted. In fact, this article uses his cancer experience as a bona fide validating his political stance--as if, recovery from cancer lends special weight to his denunciation of America. In my own experience recovering from cancer I found myself deeply grateful for the treatments available, thanks to the advances of Western science. However I kept that gratitude to myself. I didn't consider its metaphoric potential for larger literary-political meaning. Perhaps that's why I'm not a playwright, since I would never consider the potential for using my illness as a vehicle for denouncing my country and lending support to Islamic totalitarianism. Pinter deploys his writer's passion in a depraved defense of a people whose major contribution to civilization is the perfection of suicide bombing. Contrast Yasser Arafat, devotee of death, with Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann was a scientist who felt that the state of Israel should be a bastion of democratic freedom wherein the pursuit of scientific knowledge was primary. The country's strength, he believed, would come from this pursuit and it has remained by and large true to his vision. The Weizmann Institute he founded has become one of the world's foremost centers of bio-medical research, pursuing enquiry into the causes and potential cures for the cancers that afflict patriots and traitors alike. One of the strengths of Western democracies is also one of its vulnerabilities: it grants freedom to the scientific pursuit of knowledge but it also celebrates creative artists, like Pinter. It flatters their sense of entitlement, condescension and ingratitude, and gives them a platform to externalize their self-hatred and to rage against the very society that coddles and cossets them. And still, forgiving those who would destroy us, we offer them the best of our medical science to give them more time and energy to gnaw incessantly at the hands that feed them.

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