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November 17, 2003PALESTINIAN FAMILY VALUESWelcome to the 9th Century! Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
November 15, 2003CIVILIZATION VS. BARBARISMOur Western liberal utopian fantasists regard savagery as a problem to be understood, something produced by early deprivation and failures of empathy. It is not an irreducible phenomenon, an expression of human nature that needs to be subdued and contained by the superior force of civilized peoples. The more primitive its form, the greater the need of our therapeutic utopians to "explain" it, as a reaction to something--injustice, discrimination, lack of empathy. A barbaric culture like that of the Palestinians needs a state, we are told, as if the 21 backward states that comprise the Arab world require one more to appease ancient grievances. What if, however, the sheer pleasure in savagery is real, that the Palestinians who celebrated 9-11 and celebrate the murder of innocents really mean it, that they get a huge psychic charge out of the murder of innocents? Here is evidence that indeed, the Palestinians are a murderous collection of cowardly savages, supported by a genocidal culture that enjoys the pleasure of killling Jews far more than it yearns for the satisfactions of civilized life. Nov. 15, 2003
November 12, 2003THE YOGI BERRA AWARD FOR PROFOUND INSIGHT TO..Al Gore, for saying in the course of a speech decrying the baleful influence of TV: "Our democracy is suffering in an age when the dominant medium is not accessible to the average person..." To see the rest of his Deep Thoughts read here.
November 09, 2003SAUDI EDUCATORS IN OUR MIDST(Washington)… November 7, 2003 …The main author of the Saudi religious curriculum expressed his unequivocal support for the legalization of slavery in one of his lectures recorded on a cassette and obtained exclusively by SIA news. Leading government cleric Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan is the author of the religious books currently used to teach 5 million Saudi students, both within the [kingdom]and in Saudi schools aboard – including those in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
November 07, 2003WARTIME ON THE HOME FRONTDear Friends and Family, I hope that you will spare me a few minutes of your time to tell you about something that I saw on Monday, October 27. I had been attending a conference in Annapolis and was coming home on Sunday. As you may recall, Los Angeles International Airport was closed on Sunday, October 26, because of the fires that affected air traffic control. Accordingly, my flight, and many others, were canceled and I wound up spending a night in Baltimore. My story begins the next day. When I went to check in at the United counter Monday morning I saw a lot of soldiers home from Iraq. Most were very young and all had on their desert camouflage uniforms. This was as change from earlier, when they had to buy civilian clothes in Kuwait to fly home. It was a visible reminder that we are in a war. It probably was pretty close to what train terminals were like in World War II. Many people were stopping the troops to talk to them, asking them questions in the Starbucks line or just saying "Welcome Home." In addition to all the flights that had been canceled on Sunday, the weather was terrible in Baltimore and the flights were backed up. So, there were a lot of unhappy people in the terminal trying to get home, but nobody that I saw gave the soldiers a bad time. By the afternoon, one plane to Denver had been delayed several hours. United personnel kept asking for volunteers to give up their seats and take another flight. They weren't getting many takers. Finally, a United spokeswoman got on the PA and said this, "Folks. As you can see, there are a lot of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we're trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight. We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you're doing, we are here for you and we love you." At that, the entire terminal of cranky, tired, travel-weary people, a cross-section of America, broke into sustained and heart-felt applause. The soldiers looked surprised and very modest. Most of them just looked at their boots. Many of us were wiping away tears. And, yes, people lined up to take the later flight and all the soldiers went to Denver on that flight. That little moment made me proud to be an American, and also told me why we will win this war. If you want to send my little story on to your friends and family, feel free. This is not some urban legend. I was there, I was part of it, I saw it happen. Will Ross
October 18, 2003LIBERAL LOSERS: THE BOSTON RED SOXHorsefeathers wonders if anyone was surprised by the NYTimes editorial board’s ecumenical, multi-cultural yearning for the Boston Red Sox to beat the New York Yankees. No home town loyalty for them; that would be right wing chauvinism. And we all know the Yankees' long and consistent success has engendered envy and resentment, especially amongst the wordsmith intellectuals who imbibe their anti-capitalism early at the Ivy League schools that value verbal intelligence above all else. The Yankees have always represented, in the fevered imagination of utopian intellectuals, the harshness of capitalism—the cruel rapaciousness of exploitative corporations. In our recent discussion of Moneyball, we noted that money alone—and what’s wrong, by the way, with a franchise making money by putting out a consistently good product?—can’t guarantee success. Billy Beane, employing Bill James’s ideas consistently does well at Oakland, within severe budgetary constraints. However, the recent Red Sox-Yankees playoff exposed a flaw in his approach. James’s creative thinking challenged the authority of baseball’s received ideas, while correspondingly downgrading the real life, everyday authority of the on-field manager. In the deciding game 7 of the Yankee-Red Sox series, that proved disastrous. Beane regards his manager as a minor cog, overvalued and easily replaceable-- certainly not an important figure in the overall success of the team. Boston, following Moneyball principles, installed a manager, Grady Little, who by all accounts is a very nice guy, well liked by the players who regard him as a good friend. Boston paid him $500,000—a minuscule amount compared to high ticket players like Manny Ramirez and Pedro Martinez. In devaluing the manager financially, they weakened his authority and essentially put the children in charge of the family fortune. At the pivotal moment of the deciding game, Little consulted with his obviously weakening pitcher and let Pedro decide to continue in the game. Pedro’s “feelings” outweighed the cold, rational calculation needed to win. How modern! How kind and considerate! How touchy-feely! A perfect New York Times, feminized moment. Such emasculated leadership meant that authority devolved to the person least qualified in the heat of battle to make decisions. This is madness, even if the entire editorial board of the Times says it’s fair and right and considerate. Contrast this with the Yankee approach. Joe Torre is highly paid and is clearly the repository of authority for his team. He is the leader, the benign but strong father figure. He makes the decisions and takes responsibility for the results. In a society where paternal authority has steadily weakened this is a rare phenomenon. When Torre decided to drop his highest paid player, Jason Giambi to seventh in the batting order, he simply made the decision, then told Giambi why it had been done, and Giambi graciously accepted, knowing that responsibility for such decisions resides with the manager. There was no lengthy, therapeutic concern for how Giambi would feel. It was assumed he could deal with the unavoidable reality that he wasn’t playing well. Then, when the great Roger Clemens was getting shelled early, Torre didn’t ask him what he’d like to do, he simply and firmly removed him from the game. In any individual game, managerial decisions can be critical. In raising strong questions about baseball’s conventional wisdom, Billy Beane, and Bill James performed a great service. However, weakening the authority of the manager has consequences. The Yankees have the intuitive wisdom to know that a baseball team will function best when responsibility for tactics and strategy resides with a figure of authority. Joe Torre is not a ‘friend’ of his players; Derek Jeter refers to him as “Mr. Torre”. It wasn’t the Curse of the Bambino that cost the Red Sox a trip to the World Series this year: it was the curse of the post-modern collapse of paternal authority, and the sooner the Red Sox 29 year old Yalie general manager realizes it, the sooner the Red Sox will win it all.
October 01, 2003BRAVE AND LEARNED MUSLIM LEADER CAPTUREDHas anyone noticed how many of the men responsible for planning the murders of innocents have the honorific title, 'Sheikh'? Here's the definition according to Britannica.Com. Sheikh: also spelled Sheik, Shaikh, or Shaykh, Arabic Shaykh, Arabic title of respect dating from pre-Islamic antiquity; it strictly means a venerable man of more than 50 years of age. The title sheikh is especially borne by heads of religious orders, heads of colleges, such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, chiefs of tribes, and headmen of villages and of separate quarters of towns. It is also applied to learned men... Meet Sheikh Bassam Sa'adi, described by Reuters as a leader of the "militant" (not 'terrorist'--that would violate Reuters' guidelines)group, Islamic Jihad. This brave and venerable scholar was caught hiding under a car. Evidently his boldness only shows itself when he sends out suicidal adolescents to kill women and children; when it's the IDF he has to face, this man of God behaves like an ordinary, everyday coward.
September 14, 2003MORE CLEAR THINKING FROM THE MUSLIM WORLDInThe Crescent, a monthly magazine published in Pakistan, Muslim thinkers explain the need to slaughter infidels: "international Jewish companies" are secretly placing pig fat, a substance Muslims are barred from consuming, in Pepsi and Colgate-Palmolive toothpaste and all brands of lipstick.
July 02, 2003MICHAEL LEWIS AT THE BAT HE HITS A GRAND SLAM HOMER WITH HIS NEW BOOK, “MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME”
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is about baseball the way Moby Dick is about whaling. It is a hard book to put down once you read the first page or two—and I’m only a fair weather friend of baseball. I love it when my friend and colleague Steve Rittenberg, the other Horsefeather and sage of Yankee Stadium, parts with one of his precious season tickets to invite me to a Yankee game. But, in truth, I never got over the trauma of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. During the long hot summers of the late thirties and wartime Brooklyn when the only air conditioning was in the local movie house there was not much to do for a ten-year-old boy. (In those days the movie theatres had to remind people of this new convenience with a sign outside that said “AIR COOLED.”) You could play stickball if you could find enough other kids to field two teams, or you could read a Hardy Boys adventure, or you could listen to a Dodgers game being announced by Red Barber on the radio. If you wanted to see the Dodgers you had to pester your mother to give you a dollar. That covered ten cents streetcar fare (roundtrip unless you overate), twenty-five cents to buy a bleachers ticket to Ebbets Field, and fifty cents for lunch—a hot dog, a bag of peanuts, and a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda—which left fifteen cents for emergencies. Sitting in those Ebbets Field Bleachers, the sun beating down on you for four or five hours at a time, is probably what has made my aging face so vulnerable to skin pathology, but in 1941 who knew about things like that, and who cared. In those days being out in the sunshine was good for you, your mother told you. (Moral: don’t listen to everything your mother tells you. In fact, I later discovered that it would be better if I didn’t listen to anything my mother told me. Except that she loved me—there she knew what she was talking about. ) Which brings me—almost—to what this book is about—people who know what they’re talking about, and people who don’t—myths, baseball myths and their myth-makers. But, hold on, I’m not quite finished with personal history—the Ebbets Field bleachers. The Brooklyn Dodgers and the Dodger fans were special. The Dodgers were Bums and their fans always knew it. But that never stopped us from loving them and rooting for them and dreaming. The Yankees have always been the classiest team in baseball, and while they lived in Brooklyn the Dodgers were always scrounging and stumbling toward a glory they never achieved until I had already left Brooklyn far behind. They were a bunch of low-paid, cast-off ballplayers, much like the Oakland Athletics team was a few years ago when Billy Beane became their General Manager. The destiny of the Brooklyn Dodgers—Dem Bums—was always marked for tragicomedy. They were good and even near-great at times, and they had heart, plenty of heart, but something, usually something wacky would strike out of nowhere to rob them of glory. The dropped third strike was probably the most famous instance of the gods toying with them and breaking their hearts. It was in October of 1941 and the Brooklyn Dodgers had miraculously won the National League Pennant and now they were up against the mighty New York Yankees in the 1941 World Series. Can you beat that—the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series against the New York Yankees! A David and Goliath situation if there ever was one. The Yanks had won the first two games in Yankee Stadium, and the Dodgers had, with the help of the screaming Brooklyn fans in little Ebbets Field, won the third game. So the score stood two games to one, Yankees favor. And now, in the fourth game in Brooklyn, the Dodgers are in the lead 4 to 3 in the top of the ninth inning and there are two outs. The slugger, Tommy Henrich, comes up to bat to face Hugh Casey, one of the Dodgers’ most reliable pitchers. Slowly Casey works Henrich to a count of 3 balls and two strikes. The Dodgers are one strike away from tying the series 2-2, and maybe doing the impossible, winning the World Series against players like Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Keller. Mickey Owen, the Dodger catcher calls for a curve ball; Casey winds up and delivers and Henrich swings and misses. Strike three. Game’s over, right? Wrong! The feckless God of Catching, makes Owen drop the third strike, thereby canceling the strike call and allowing Henrich to get on base. Within twenty minutes the Yankees get four more runs and win the game 7 to 4. Which means the Yanks go ahead 3 games to 1 instead of being tied 2-2. The next day the Yanks beat the demoralized Dodgers and take the Series. Now if that isn’t tragicomedy I don’t know what is. There is actually a baseball that exists somewhere inscribed by both Mickey Owen and Tommy Henrich telling the story of the dropped third strike each from his own point of view—like some Norse myth inscribed on a walrus tusk. Tommy Henrich wrote: “Curve ball, 3 & 2, guard the plate. Ball -- high -- starts to break. I start swinging - Ball doesn't stop -- keeps curving -- I try now to hold up -- too late -- ump calls me out -- but as I realize what the ball is doing (believe me) I say to myself, maybe Mickey is having trouble, and I look back and there goes the ball. I reach first easily & our power hitters take over. Final 7-4, series 3-1 instead of 2-2. We win WS next day 3-2."
Fast forward 60 years. From a take-it-easy, local, homespun sport, professional baseball has become big, big business. It looks like the baseball of my youth but not really—the way a twenty-five-year-old looks like he was when he was five. You can see the resemblance—but really very different. How did it happen? Among other things, big time, lucrative TV contracts give rise to national recognition of ballplayers—stars are born. Ballplayers form unions and strike for bigger and bigger pieces of the pie. Free agency is discovered: the baseball equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation. After six years of indentured servitude at merely a hundred thousand or two a year, a player begins to be courted by player’s agents, business managers, who promise and get them zillion dollar contracts. What this has led to in Big Baseball is rich players looking out for their own interests and in a constant war with rich baseball franchises (no more teams, franchises), and putting themselves up to the highest bidder. The net result is that the most famous players are paid the highest salaries. Are they the best players? Well, you’ve got to read Moneyball to find out. I’ll tell you this though: the second highest paid team in baseball, the New York Mets, is in last place in its division, and the second lowest paid team in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, is in second place in its division. Until a couple of years ago, the accepted wisdom in Big Baseball was that success followed the money. The more you paid for a team of players, the more wins you would get, the more playoffs you would reach and the more pennants you would win. All of that is going with the wind. And Michael Lewis tells the fascinating story of how and why. Lewis is a journalist with wit, intelligence and a deep understanding of what he writes about. It’s a complex story with many characters, but he’s like a master juggler able to keep all the (base)balls in the air while he teaches you about statistics and entertains you at the same time—all effortlessly. The man who started the revolution in Big Baseball several years ago is Billy Beane, General Manager of the poor little Oakland Athletics—the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 21st century. The problem for Beane became extremely acute after 2001 playoffs when the A’s lost three of their best players to free agency—and thus, to richer teams “—three of their proven stars: Jason Isringhausen, Johnny Damon, and [Jason] Giambi.” Since 1997, when Beane became GM he had been thinking of the way to beat the rich fat Goliath franchises with a secret scientific weapon he had been preparing. 2002 was the season it became imperative to use it or get blown away. Most people who love baseball and write about it well are poets and philosophers of the sport. Not Lewis. The story he has fallen in love with is the struggle to demystify baseball. Which began almost twenty years ago in the antic brain of a guy named Bill James. At the University of Kansas James studied economics and literature, but since then he says about himself, “I’d probably be a writer if there were no such thing as baseball, but because there is such a thing as baseball I can’t imagine writing about anything else.” Studying baseball statistics very closely, James came to realize that most of them—errors, runs batted in, batting average—were meaningless as descriptors of game-winning skills for individual ball-players or teams. The concept of a fielding error, for example, is almost entirely subjective, he realized, and doesn’t tell you much about the player who makes one. Michael Lewis enjoys telling how Bill James developed not only a new outlook about baseball—rational or scientific baseball—but meaningful statistical concepts that could lead to predictable results. And how despite James’ astonishing insights he remained unsung and unappreciated in Big Baseball, that is, until Billy Beane came along. Since time immemorial the search for talented ballplayers has been led by baseball scouts, a cadre of gruff, hard-nosed guys who’ve seen thousands of ballplayers, and even played ball themselves. Every team has a corps of these guys and they all turn out to be, under their gruff, hard-nosed exterior, romantics. Because they’re all looking for some perfect Galahad who can run, hit, throw, and look the Galahad part. Here is Lewis’s beautiful description of the life and dream of the baseball scout: “…the argument ...was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it. You only had to see him once….And if you saw it once, you, and only you, would know the meaning of what you saw. You had found the boy who was going to make you famous.” But Billy Beane, a former discovered Galahad himself—a failed Galahad—had a different idea about how to find major league ballplayers: inside a computer using the new and radical ideas of Bill James. It was in this way that he would boost the power of his little 40 million dollar budget slingshot to bring down the 180-million-dollar Goliath franchises. Using smarts and radically fresh baseball ideas was going out a very long way on a limb for Beane. It meant going against a hundred years of received wisdom and putting his managerial status on the line. But, by god, using empirical data to find ball players who can be put together to field a winning team works. The A’s reached the playoffs in 2001 and 2002 with the second lowest player budget in baseball. Sure, a rational approach takes some of the poetry and romance out of baseball. After all you’re not looking for the player with the best body—the Galahad look—but only the one who can learn to control the strike zone, and walk to first base. Short guys, skinny guys, fat guys, guys with club feet—anyone who has a good eye and the patience to wait for a good pitch please apply. Moneyball will become a small classic and deserves to. In it Billy Beane is the crafty Odysseus of baseball who learns to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds; reason wins out over mystery; Intelligence prevails over money; ordinary guys beat the swing-for-the-fences superstars; and best of all, independent thinking and ingenuity trumps received wisdom and cant.
June 23, 2003HORSEFEATHERS RECOMMENDS: CAROL IANNONE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONThe Supreme Court is about to hand down its ruling on affirmative action in education. All the legal arguments for and against have been heard. None however, directly address the underlying assumptions about human nature held by its advocates. Carol Iannone describes the disastrous effects on higher education of pursuing the unrealizable utopian fantasy of equality of results. She writes: "...supporters of affirmative action tried to reconcile racial preferences with traditional American ideals of liberty, equality, and individual merit. They insisted that it would not mean reverse discrimination, that it would not bring quotas, that it would not require the lowering of standards, that it was simple justice to compensate for slavery and segregation, that it was only a temporary measure, and that race would be just a tipping factor to help schools or employers choose among equally qualified individuals. As those who have followed the issue know, every one of these arguments has been proven false. Affirmative action did mean reverse discrimination, it did mean quotas, it did require the massive lowering of standards, it was not justified by slavery and segregation, it was not temporary, and race was not just a tipping factor but the decisive factor."(Read the whole article here) Why do supporters of affirmative action continue to argue their case in the face of overwhelming evidence of its pernicious effects? In part because they are in the grip of a utopian, therapeutic fantasy that they can impose a shared group identity on variegated individuals. They view human nature as infinitely malleable and improvable through social engineering. Thus we learn of "whiteness studies" to go with "black studies", "chicano studies", "womens studies", etc. etc. designed to enhance or diminish self-esteem, and to make young people think of themselves as members of a victimized or oppressor group, rather than as individuals with unique talents and deficits. How much easier to believe my struggles mastering calculus are caused by oppression. Or perhaps, if I'm a member of a certain minority, I won't even try to master calculus because it was the creation of a dead white male, Sir Isaac Newton. The failure of utopian enterprises always requires scapegoats. In this instance the rational arguments of critics like Carol Iannone are dismissed as "racist". Still, in the end the effort to re-engineer human nature will fail. In the meantime, however, great damage has already been done to higher education. It is no longer surprising that graduates of India's Institute of Technological Training, where admission is strictly based on merit, are widely regarded by our own graduate schools as better educated in the sciences than Ivy League graduates. Given what has happened to our elite liberal arts colleges, those Indian scientists are probably better off for not having their heads filled with the PoMo cant that passes for today's liberal education
June 18, 2003CHURCHILL ON HUMAN NATURE, OR HOW TO DEAL WITH ISLAMO-NAZIS Hitler announced his intentions to the world in Mein Kampf. So too have the Islamo-Nazis. Here are some of the highlights, not to be found in the NYTimes, of the Hamas terror organization's charter: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."... "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "..."There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."..."After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying." .
June 09, 2003THE POST-RAINES NYTIMES GOES TO THE PROM Now that Howell Raines has departed the NYTimes, can we expect its news columns to refrain from hyping a politically correct, radical feminist and multicultural agenda? Don't count on it. In today's paper Patricia Leigh-Brown offers, in the guise of a news report, a starry eyed, multi-cultural celebration of prom night for Muslim Americans. In this account, gender apartheid is presented, through the eyes of Fatima Haque, as a wondrous solution young Muslim women have found to the problem of leering, aggressive, sexual young American males. Ms. Leigh-Brown writes that Ms. Haque and her Muslim girlfriends "dwell in a world of exquisite subtlety in which modesty is the underlying principle.." This exquisite subtlety includes donning hijabs to cover their bodies, and "a commitment not to date or to engage in activities where genders intermingle." What courage! What committment! These young women are hailed as bringing Muslim modesty to crude and macho American culture. As the worshipful Ms. Leigh-Brown puts it: "Ms. Haque's decision to cover herself, which she made in her freshman year, was nuanced and thoughtful." Nuanced and thoughtful? Don't you just love it? It sounds to me more like a troubled adolescent's effort to avoid dealing with her own emerging sexual feelings. But in Ms. Leigh-Brown's narrative this is a tale of brave Muslim young women seeking to preserve their modesty in a corrupt culture, by fending off male sexual predators who surround them. True feminist heroines! Does it occur to Ms. Leigh-Brown to inquire what other values of the "religion of peace" these young women wish to preserve? How about Islamic anti-semitism? Or sharia law which would condemn them to death for sexual activity? Female genital mutilation? One wonders, perhaps avoiding sexual temptation will spare them the primitive wrath of their families. Inquiring minds want to know.
June 03, 2003POETRY CORNER (CONT.) New York Times journalist Chris Hedges first came to Horsefeathers' attention with the publication of his book, War Is a Force That Gives us Meaning, chronicling his disillusionment as a war correspondent. After many years spent seeking out wars, he decided war is awful. Having arrived at this original conclusion he went on to become a vocal critic of America and its military. He was recently booed off the stage when he proclaimed in a commencement address at Rockford College that Iraq had to be liberated from the murderous American military. Mr. Hedges mouthed the usual cliches of the America and Israel hating left and then returned to his day job as a reporter at the NYTimes. It didn't take long for him to find a new way to smuggle his ideology into his reporting. Today's paper carries a flattering profile of an obscure New Jersey poet, Gerald Stern, a man who pressed for Amiri Baraka to be named poet laureate of his state. The profile is called "A Poet Raging Against Pretension". Why would Mr. Hedges be drawn to such a writer? Could it be because Mr. Stern, according to Hedges, raged against pretension in a way that resulted in his spending "six months incarcerated in an Army guardhouse after World War II for a crime he said he did not commit." (italics added) Mr. Hedges doesn't bother to check out the truth of this unlikely assertion; after all he's a NYTimes reporter whose first task is to oppose the "drift" of the country, (see Dr. Kramer's essay New York Times Or Ministry of Truth? below)which clearly has a high opinion of the military. Instead he gives us Mr. Stern's views on the nature of poetry: "Poetry should be passionate and outrageous and political and most of all revolutionary," he said. "I am a radical, although as I get older sometimes I get too soft and am just a liberal." "Here is a child," he said with a mischievous grin, "let's jump on him sayeth the little Bush." I think I won't be adding Gerald Stern to my poetry bookshelf anytime soon.
June 02, 2003POETRY CORNERThe Washington Post, striving hard to fill the credibility gap left by the New York Times, offers us a portrait of the candidate as hunter-poet. "John Kerry eats dove. Even better, he shoots them. From behind the stalks of a Southern cornfield, he'll watch them flutter and dart, and fire. "You clean them. Let them hang. It takes three or four birds to have a meal," said the Massachusetts senator. "You might eat it at a picnic, cold roasted. I love dove."... Kerry then contributed a spontaneously written poem on the topic of hunting:
May 28, 2003HOWELL RAINES GETS SERIOUS!Today's NYTimes's corrections: working hard to restore readers' confidence: "An obituary on Monday about Pepper LaBeija, a leading performer at drag balls in Harlem, misattributed comments in a Village Voice interview about giving up shoplifting of high-fashion garments. They were made by Gerald Dupree LaBeija, a member of the House of LaBeija troupe, not by Pepper LaBeij"
May 27, 2003PSYCHOBABBLE ALERT: LEFT COAST MORON WATCHA New Diagnosis of George W. Bush: Dry Drunk Last October Horsefeathers reported the diagnosis at a distance of George W. Bush by Carol Wolman, M.D.: Antisocial Personality Disorder. According to the psycho-pundits, such a man posed great dangers to the world. Empathy was reserved for Saddam Hussein whose troubled childhood required tactful understanding on our part. Certainly, we were told, the use of force to deal with him was contraindicated. Calamity would follow as such a "narcissistic personality" would ignite the Arab street's rage. Clearly, they told us, it was the 'psychopath' George Bush who required forceful containment. Now that the Iraqi dictator has been defeated and the tales of horror during his reign emerge, our psychotherapists are still seeking to 'analyze' the President and his supposed love of war. "Why the war?", asks Katherine van Wormer, an 'expert' in addictions. Geopolitical reasons are quickly dismissed in favor of "expert" psychobabble. In her article BRAIN CHEMISTRY: The Serotonin Factor, she asserts "Protesters the world over chanted "No blood for oil," but some political analysts and commentators are probing deeper, searching Bush's psyche for the true explanation...." "Deeper", in the language of psychobabble means truer, more authentic, and more open to 'expert' explanation. It flatters the expert who, by seeing deeper, is clearly more intelligent and perceptive than the subject of her profound scrutiny. Van Wormer's 'deeper' explanation: the serotonin levels in Bush's brain, altered by his youthful drinking, have rendered him rigid, obsessive and irrational. Of course, underlying van Wormer's "diagnosis" of someone she has never met, is the assumption that no rational explanation could account for President Bush's policies. Terms like "grandiosity" and "obsessiveness" are bandied about, as Van Wormer tells us that Pres. Bush reminds her of addicted patients she has known. Well, Professor van Wormer reminds me of some psychotics I have known who propose delusional explanations for things they fail to understand. How does she arrive at her clinical impression of W.'s grandiosity? She writes: "Consider Bush's readiness to inflict "regime change" on another nation without any consideration that other nations might dare to do the same. His sense is of a divine mission to see that evil is punished.". Isn't it remarkable how unaware of her own irrational animus is the learned Professor van Wormer? How fortunate we are to live in a therapeutic age! van Wormer is reminded of patients she has known, and that reminder is enough for her to make expert assertions about the President's personality. If only van Wormer had been around to diagnose the grandiose, narcissistic, obsessive, depressive--- genius, Winston Churchill, we might have all been spared World War II and been living happily--except for the Jews-- under Nazism.
March 26, 2003ANOTHER BOLD CINEMATIC ARTIST STRUGGLES TO ARTICULATE HIS VISION"Egyptian actress Wafa Amer has turned down Egyptian folk singer Shabaan Abdul Rahim for the leading role offered in his upcoming film "Ana Bakrah Israel" (I Hate Israel), which is also the name of the popular single for the singer." ---Al Bawaba. com
March 03, 2003ANOTHER KIND OF POETRY"Riding a weeping steel guitar and a big, anthemic beat, country singer Darryl Worley's new single "Have You Forgotten?" hit country radio last week. Singing in a deep, hard twang, Worley states his personal view in no uncertain terms: "I hear people saying we don't need this war / I say there's some things worth fighting for / What about our freedom and this piece of ground / We didn't get to keep 'em by backing down."--Chicago Tribune. And here it is: Have You Forgotten?
SADDAM HUSSEIN, POETRY LOVER"Saddam appreciates and promotes Iraqi poetry, art and literature,' says Abdul Wahid, who says he believes had Saddam not become a politician, he could have been a professional literary critic or a writer."--Abdul Wahid (Iraqi poet) We learn that, even in his hour of peril, Saddam lends support, not just to Iraqi poets, but to poets around the world. And they in turn reciprocate by adding their voices to his, in opposition to the crude, cowboy President of the United States and his oh so un-poetic war.The official government publication Iraq Daily hails the effort, led by American poets, to prevent removal of such a patron of the arts.
March 01, 2003THE NEW 'TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS'Why is there so often an alliance between wordsmith intellectuals-- poets, novelists, playwrights, literary critics, journalists--and anti-democratic, anti-capitalist totalitarians? Not a day passes without a Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, Amiri Baraka, Susan Sontag or Norman Mailer denouncing America. None of these luminaries uttered a peep of protest when the Taliban systematically destroyed centuries old cultural artifacts. Nor did they cheer the liberation of Afghanistan by force of American arms. Even when one of their own, Salman Rushdie, was threatened with death there was barely a murmur of protest against the Islamo-Nazis and their fatwas. More critical passion has been expended by these cultural luminaries against Donald Rumsfeld's bursts of straight talk, than against the rantings of Middle Eastern sheiks calling for death to all infidels. What accounts for the depth of resentment these beneficiaries of our freedoms express toward the countries that have cosseted them? Remarkably, the failure of socialism and the collapse of the Soviet Union has not altered their hostility to our capitalist society, and in that regard they are very much allied with Islamo-totalitarians around the world who denounce our decadent Western capitalist culture. Where does this sense of aggrieved entitlement and superiority come from? Nozick points to the schools. This is the most important and powerful institution that children enter into outside the family. It is a place that gives the greatest reward to the verbally skilled. There the future wordsmith intellectuals ".. were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better....To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist Nozick further observes that the schoolroom successes of the verbally skilled take place in the framework of a centrally organized social structure. Rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. In the schoolyard and the hallways, there is a less formal social system. It's more freewheeling and rewards a variety of talents. There, as in the post-school world, the verbally skilled do less well. One senses in so many of our writer- critics of America a yearning for a maximum leader who could restore them to their schoolroom glory. Their past infatuations with Hitler, Stalin and Mao; their continuing affection for Castro and their idealizing of brutal thugs like Arafat, speaks to a yearning to surrender to a powerful authority who will praise and reward them, as happened in the schoolrooms of their childhood. Nozick omits one important psychological factor: verbally gifted individuals can use their skills to avoid the hurly-burly bumps and bruises of competitive daily life. They can retain a sense of omnipotence and grandiosity by virtue of their ability to spin webs of words. They can occupy those imaginary worlds in isolation from their fellow creatures who might possess the competitive and social skills they lack. Such God-like omnipotence and overvaluation of words ("In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God" -John 1:1) supports a sense of grievance that mere earthly rewards, even when they are substantial , are so much less than what Gods deserve. *The entire essay: Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?is well worth reading.
February 28, 2003WEALTH CREATION: ARAB STYLESadam Hussein ($2,000,000,000)and Yasir Arafat ($300,000,000): roll models for Arab success.
NEWS FROM OUR SEXIST, RACIST SOCIETYOprah joins billionaires club: "While many of the world's richest people saw their fortunes shrink again in the last year, Oprah Winfrey's grew enough to put her on Forbes magazine's list of billionaires - the first black woman to join the ranks."
February 19, 2003EDMUND BURKE WITH THE FINAL WORD ON THE "PEACE" PROTESTERS"Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour."
February 17, 2003OUR FRIENDS THE SAUDISA touching human interest story demonstrating that, for talented individuals, Saudi Arabia is a land of opportunity: A Day in the Life of an Executioner
February 03, 2003I THINK CONTINUALLY OF THOSE WHO WERE TRULY GREATThere are moments in the lives of people when ordinary communication fails, when mere words fall flat, and at these moments we need to hear the voice of a poet to say those things that are in us but ineffable. I THINK CONTINUALLY OF THOSE I think continually of those who were truly great. ………………………………………………………………. Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields Excerpts from I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great By Stephen Spender
January 12, 2003CONFESSIONS OF A FLAG-WAVERHorsefeathers is honored to present a guest blog by the distinguished author, Diane Ravitch* Many teachers and professional organizations have debated the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism. One of my academic colleagues recently argued in a published column that the question, "What lessons should we teach?" is the wrong question because it implies that teachers should transmit a single viewpoint about the attacks. Those who are attempting to answer the question, he claimed, break into two predictable camps: "the flag-wavers and the self-haters." Both camps allegedly share a deeply undemocratic assumption: that kids should agree with what they are taught and with those who teach them. Instead, my colleague argues, students should be presented with the views of both the "flag-wavers and the self-haters" and be allowed to make up their own minds, to come to their own conclusions about September 11th. Someone needs to say a word for teaching America's core values and for waving the flag when appropriate. Here is my explanation. Children are not born with an innate belief in the values of a free society. They are not born believing in the importance of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the other freedoms and rights that we hold dear. They are not born believing in the right to form and organize groups independent of the government. If they were, the world would be a freer, more democratic place than it is. But our daughters and sons do not enter the world knowing these things. They are profoundly vulnerable to what adults teach them, for good or for ill. If anything, we have ample evidence that churches, schools, the law, and the other institutions of society can be used to teach intolerance and hatred for those whose speech, religion, dress, and ideas differ from our own. It makes no sense for parents, for society, or for schools to take a hands-off attitude towards children and assume that they will figure it all out for themselves. Some might conclude that it is OK to discriminate against people who are different; some deduce that it is OK to silence dissident voices; some might decide that it is OK to tie Matthew Shepard to a fencepost and leave him to die. No, I think we must defend and teach the values that we believe in, not because they are ours, but because they are the values that make a free, democratic, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious society possible. Without the civil liberties and political rights that undergird democratic society, we could see those rights and liberties whittled away by forces of passion, intolerance, religious hatred, and ignorance. Where does the flag fit into this discussion? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the flag is a symbol of our rights and freedoms. It is a symbol of the sacrifices that others have made over the years so that we might live in freedom, free to argue with each other, free to sneer at our elected officials, free to practice our religion or no religion at all. Now comes the confession. One of my earliest family photographs shows me and a couple of my siblings in Houston, Texas, holding and waving small American flags. It was taken when I was 6 in 1944. Why were we waving the flag? My uncle Herman was in the South Pacific, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fighting the Japanese. He saw combat in some very bloody battles; many of his friends were killed, some while detained in Japanese POW camps. We were waving it for him and other American soldiers and sailors. Why were we waving the flag? My family is Jewish. My mother arrived in America in 1917, my father's family earlier. In 1944, my mother's remaining family in Bessarabia was being processed into incinerators, as was my father's remaining family in Poland. None survived the war. We were waving the flag for them. We were waving the flag, too, for the American G.I.'s who were fighting and dying in Europe to stop the madman who had unleashed the war. We knew that they were fighting and dying for us. Since 1960, I have lived in New York City where, over the years, I have not seen too many flags except for the annual veterans' parades, which were sparsely attended. All that changed on September 11, 2001. On that infamous date, I rushed to the harbor and arrived in time to see the second plane strike the second tower. It was right in front of me. I stood there watching people burn to death, watching massive flames and smoke pouring out of the two buildings, watching the sky above me fill up with confetti, the detritus from people's desks. People whose only "crime" was to come to work in the morning. My neighborhood in Brooklyn that day was covered by a thick layer of ash that blew across the harbor. By noon, the ash blanketed the cars on the street, the dust so thick in the air that it was like night-time-on a day that began with a brilliant blue sky. A neighbor who lived across the street from me died at the top of one of the towers; she was a vice-president of Morgan Stanley. Everyone knew someone who died, and everyone knew people who had barely survived. Overnight the flags began to appear in my neighborhood. This is a neighborhood that typically votes 90% Democratic. People who never owned a flag suddenly had one hanging over their front door, attached to their car antenna, pinned to their chest. Most of the flags remained in place all year. They all came back again as the one-year anniversary of the attacks approached. Why are people wearing and displaying and "waving" the flag? They are saying, in the shortest short-hand that they know, that we treasure our nation's ideals. We are part of a national community that has struggled to achieve its rights and freedoms, and we are determined to support and defend that national community and those rights and freedoms. Part of the ongoing struggle involves teaching our children what those rights and freedoms are, how precious they are, how easily they have been lost in the past, and how important it is to understand and defend them. I will continue to wave the flag, because I continue to love the ideals that our country represents. If others disagree, so be it. It's a free country. *Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Ravitch is the editor of many publications, including the annual Brookings Papers on Education Policy. She edited The Schools We Deserve, Debating the Future of American Education, and The American Reader. She has many books to her credit including Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms; National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide; What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (with Hoover distinguished visiting fellow and Koret Task Force member Chester Finn Jr.); The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973; and The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980. Her publications have been translated into many languages. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Brookings Review. Ravitch, a historian of education, has lectured on democracy and civic education throughout the world.
January 07, 2003HORSEFEATHERS PICK GARNERS 'BEST OF YEAR' HONORBilly Joe Shaver's "Freedom's Child" was voted Best Americana Recording of 2002 by the readers of Austin Americana's Musicalternatives eNewsletter.
December 22, 2002HORSEFEATHERS 2002 POPULAR MUSIC AWARDPopular music both reflects and shapes our culture. Was it the 60's that produced rock 'n roll, or the music that created the '60's? World War ll lives in many of our memories through the songs it produced. 'Til We Meet Again, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, Oh How I Hate to Get Up In The Morning--a few bars of these songs and an era of national purpose is evoked. Those songs helped create and sustain the mood. What songs will do this for the young people of today, growing up during a climactic clash between civilization and barbarism? Frankly, Horsefeathers has been disappointed by the musical output generated in response to the attacks of 9-11. Bruce Springsteen's seemed a politically correct attempt to generate sympathy for the victims without naming the villains. A kind of generic rock rhythm supported "poetic" and confusing lyrics that seemed to transmute a villainous act into a religious epiphany. The generic victims were redeemed through "the rising" up to a heavenly abode wherein evil would not exist. One might almost think that the murderous slaughter of thousands of innocents provided the welcome opportunity for religious redemption. The lyrics seemed banal and trite, mostly designed to defuse any anger we might feel towards the killers, as we grasped the deeper significance of these tragic events. If a fireman was climbing the stairs of the WTC, not just to try to rescue trapped human beings, but to get to a blissful heaven, how could we feel outrage when he had been granted such an enviable opportunity? Countless songs have been written, most of them instantly forgettable. The country singer Alan Jackson has, however, written an enormously popular song about 9-11, Where were You (When The World Stopped Turning?), but this is a song about victimhood. While tuneful and easily hummable the lyrics are trite--reminding us to pray, love our families and not take life for granted. No anger is expressed, but rather, sympathy and identification with the victims. While it possesses an admirable simplicity and directness, by contrast with Springsteen's conscious 'artfulness', it nevertheless exploits the easy identification with victims. Haven't we all felt unfair pain in our lives? This is easily equated with the losses of 9-11 survivors. Neil Young was first out of the gate with his song, Let's Roll which, unlike most of the banal, culturally sensitive pop music to follow, did honor our own aggressive response to the barbarians. His lyric included the lines:" The problem with Young's song: it was musically gimmicky, with its ringing cellphones to introduce the tune. It seemed too crafted, too clever by half, and ultimately trite. It was more like a documentary dramatization of Todd Beamer's last moments than a musically original response to the events of 9-11. Although a serious and honest effort it lacked the musical emotional resonance to give it staying power. Horsefeathers has found one song, released since 9-11 that is so fine it deserves to live, so powerful it stirs the blood, so affecting it touches the heart. The lyric, simple, affecting, and direct is rendered overwhelmingly powerful by the equally simple, anthem like martial music, a music that evokes righteous anger and a readiness to take up arms against our enemies. The lyric runs strongly against the politically correct tide that insists on empathizing with our adversaries and reasoning with them. The song: Freedom's Child. The composer/singer Billy Joe Shaver, is a man who has lived a life with more than its share of personal tragedy. Rather than assume a stance of poetic self pitying victimization he chooses the path of struggle and resistance, one which conveys a realistic sense of hope. "Freedom's child" will fight to the death against the enemies of freedom and the song has an infectiously vitalizing quality, despite the real tragedy it evokes. The album: Freedom's Child No effete, liberal, political correctness here. The 2002 Horsefeathers, 5 feathers popular music award goes to Billy Joe Shaver for Freedom's Child.
November 30, 2002BARBARIANS AT THE GATES AND UTOPIAN GATEKEEPERS Thanksgiving Day 2002 gave us yet another reminder that our foes really do wish to destroy Western Civilization. Even their cowardly means of assault on unarmed innocents is a murderous thumb in the eye to civilizations' rules of war. Did anyone argue that Hitler and Tojo shared the same philosophy or belief system? Hitler’s Aryan quest for racial purity did not include an honored place for Asians. Tojo’s Shintoism was not embraced by Hitler. And on the allies’ side? Following the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, we joined forces with Stalin. Our goal, the defeat of Germany and Japan, took precedence over our sharp ideological differences. I don’t think President Roosevelt got on the phone to counsel restraint on Stalin at Leningrad. It was clear: Hitler was our enemy. Our current State Dept. appeasers endlessly counsel Israel to be restrained when dealing with assaults by the barbarians. Their utopian fantasy is that Arab hatred of Jews can be tolerated in order to win support for America’s war on Saddam. In other words, the enemies of our friends are not really our enemies; we can explain to them how we understand their aspirations and can overlook their clearly stated goal; the annihilation of Israel and Jews. Another utopian idea, repeated endlessly: Islam is a religion of Peace. This may be true, but only if it refers to the peace of the grave. It encourages us not to notice that the fanatics we fight wish to impose a totalitarian ideology, including strict sharia law on pain of death. Furthermore, if Islam is a ‘religion of peace’, it becomes politically incorrect and evidence of bias, to point out that the Wahhabi sect of Islam, to which the House of Saud belongs, funds and supports assassins like those of 9-11 while using madrassas and mosques to propagandize in favor of killing Jews and their infidel supporters around the world. It is utopian to overlook the uniting force of Jew hatred that connects Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the countless organizations and individuals who support their assaults on civilization. And finally, it is utopian to think that the war on the Jews, whether undertaken by Hitler or by radical Islam, will stop with the Jews. The Jews are surrogates for advanced Western civilization and we are all on the target list
November 15, 2002WAR OF IDEAS: POMOS VS. AMERICA "After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." "Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." While the tactics and weapons are different, there is nothing fundamentally new about our war with utopian Islamists. Islamo-fascists are just the most recent variety of fanatics, the 21st century successors to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and various 20th century utopians. Since utopia, in this instance a perfect Islamic world, requires the elimination of those who contradict perfection, scapegoats are required: Jews and Christian infidels must be killed. The quest for utopia always runs aground on the shoals of reality. But what if, as per Bishop Berkeley, there is no reality? Or what if reality is merely a subjectively constructed fantasy? The quest for Utopia is undergirded by ideas, and here’s where our Postmodern professors lend a hand. Deploying the combination of a vulgar misunderstanding of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, with a dumbed down version of psychoanalytic modes of thought, they conclude that reality is “constructed”. There is no objective reality: all is subjectivity. None of this is new. What is novel is the alliance between these sophists and the Islamo-fascists and their friends. Attention has been paid to such academic luminaries as Noam Chomsky and Stanley Fish, the high priest of the Pomos. Critical assessments of their ideas have been met, not with counter arguments, but with cries of Mc’Carthyism. Fish begins his self defense with a blatant appeal to false victimization in the interest of stifling intellectual debate.Those of us old enough to remember debates with defenders of Stalin will be familiar with this mode of argumentation: instead of discussing the points raised, intimidate your interlocutor by questioning his motives. One of the leading proponents of this new version of Bishop Berkeley’s denial of reality is Judith Butler. While not so well known to the blogosphere as others, she is regarded with reverence in much of the academic world. According to alt.culture, she is "one of the superstars of '90s academia, with a devoted following of grad students nationwide". (A fanzine, Judy!, was published in 1993). Over the years she has devoted herself to assaulting the archaic notion that there is a reality independent of our subjectivity. What has made her immensely influential is the particular reality she has chosen to assault: sexual difference . She claims that ‘male’ and ‘female’ have no underlying reality or intrinsic meaning; they are merely changeable “narratives”, “social constructs”, designed to hold us in thrall to the hegemonic capitalist patriarchy. Years ago it was likely that seriously arguing for such views would, at the very least cause one to be dismissed a la Bishop Berkeley, or at worst get one a quick admission ticket to Bellevue. Now, however, university tenure is the more likely outcome. All of this might be cause for mild amusement, or rueful concern about the value and cost of a college liberal arts education. But something quite sinister happened after Sept. 11. The Judith Butlers deployed their talent for “problematizing” reality in support of our enemies. She delivered herself of an assessment designed to show that we had created a self-serving “narrative” of the events of that day and that other “narratives” were equally valid. Our narrative---claiming we were barbarously attacked by Islamo-fascist terrorists---was created to avoid facing the reality of our own barbarism. Here is a representative passage: “Our own acts of violence do not receive graphic coverage in the press, and so they remain acts that are justified in the name of self-defense, but also justified by a noble cause, namely, the rooting out of terrorism. Recently, it is reported that the Northern Alliance may have slaughtered a village: will this be investigated and, if confirmed, prosecuted as a war crime? When a bleeding child or dead body on Afghani soil emerges in the press coverage, it is not framed as part of the horror of war, but only as a critique of the military's capacity to aim its bombs right. We castigate ourselves for not aiming better, but we do not take the sign of destroyed life and decimated peoples as something for which we are responsible, or indeed understand how that decimation works to confirm the U.S. as performing atrocities. Our own acts are not considered terrorist. And there is no history of acts that is relevant to the self-understanding we form in the light of these terrible events. There is no relevant prehistory to the events of September 11th, since to begin to tell the story a different way, to ask how things came to this, is already to complicate the question of agency which, no doubt, leads to the fear of moral equivocation. In order to condemn these acts as inexcusable, absolutely wrong, in order to sustain the affective structure in which we are, on the one hand, victimized and, on the other, engaged in a righteous cause of rooting out terror, we have to start the story with the experience of violence we suffered. We have to shore up the first person point of view, and preclude from the telling accounts that might involve a decentering of the narrative "I" within the international political domain. This decentering is experienced as part of the wound that we have suffered, though, so we cannot inhabit that position. This decentering is precisely what we seek to rectify through a recentering. A narrative form emerges to compensate for the enormous narcissistic wound opened up by the public display of our physical vulnerability. Our response, accordingly, is not to enter into international coalition where we understand ourselves to be working with institutionally established routes of consensus-building. We relegate the United Nations to a second order deliberative body, and insist instead on American unilateralism. And subsequently we ask, Who is with us? Who is against us? As a result, we respond to the exposure of vulnerability with an assertion of U.S. "leadership," showing once again the contempt we have for international coalitions that are not built and led by us. Such coalitions do not conflict with U.S. supremacy, but confirm it, stoke it, insist upon it, with long-term implications for the future shape and possibility of global cooperation.” Thus is the reality of what occured on Sept. 11 “problematized”, and the United States inculpated as a terrorist country—exactly the position of those who openly proclaim their wish to destroy us. How courageous of her to narrate a story that transforms murderous barbarians, including Palestinian terrorists, into hapless victims of brutal Western imperialist violence. From her utopian vision of a world where sexual differences are eliminated, it is but a short distance to a vision of a world in which no differences between good and evil exist, no difference between civilization and barbarism; in fact no differences at all. In such a utopia there would be no cause for conflict. There's just the small matter of getting to utopia which, regrettably, requires the slaughter of all who stand in the way. How fortunate that our President and Secretary of Defense don’t sit up nights reading PoMo treatises on multiple narrative truths, nor do they direct attention to the scorn heaped on them by the likes of Judith Butler. How fortunate for the ungrateful Judith Butler that our soldiers, under the direction of the President and Secretary of Defense are willing to die to protect the rights of Judith Butler and her fellow Pomos to publish endless outpourings of cant, thus making their contribution to what Dr. Johnson called "the epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper."
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