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Andrew Sullivan's jihad
Since Sept. 11, the British journalist has declared himself the
mullah of the media world, sitting in judgment of American writers'
patriotism.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Talbot
Oct. 20, 2001 | I like and respect journalist Andrew Sullivan, though
I often disagree with his opinions. I find much of what he has to say
about soggy thinking on the left to be a bracing tonic -- which is
why Salon has published his views, along with those of David
Horowitz, Norah Vincent, Camille Paglia and other conservative or
independent critics of lockstep, left-wing thought. On the few
occasions I've had the pleasure of his company, I've enjoyed his wit
and charm. Since the horrors of Sept. 11, however, Sullivan's voice
has become a shriek, hitting an ear-piercing decibel that, whether
intended or not, drives out the possibility of rational discussion.
In recent weeks, Sullivan has taken it upon himself to evaluate whether his fellow
writers and commentators are sufficiently patriotic. He broods darkly -- in the pages
of his native British press, on his Web site and on
the Op-Ed pages of the Wall Street Journal -- that America harbors nests of traitors,
or in his words "decadent left enclaves on the coasts [that] may well mount a fifth
column." And like all Manichaean guardians of natio
nal security, from the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts to those of Joseph
McCarthy, Sullivan has turned his pumped-up and disproportionate rhetoric toward
rooting out these disloyal Americans in his midst.
On his Web site, he does not just engage antiwar writer Katha Pollitt, whose tortured
ruminations in the Nation on whether to fly a flag from her New York apartment window
were admittedly neurotic and absurd. He seeks to
obliterate her, gloating after a lopsided debate with her on public radio that "I took
no prisoners." In the church of Sullivan, those who criticize or express ambivalence
about the bombing of Afghanistan are not just wro
ng -- they are corrupt souls who must be excommunicated from the American congregation.
Turning his gaze of moral reproach on Salon, Sullivan has branded Gary Kamiya an
appeaser for proposing that it's time for Washington to put pressure on the Israelis
and the Palestinians to reach a peace settlement -- eve
n though the tough and worldly men Sullivan so ardently admires in the Bush
administration began taking this very line days later. And Friday, Sullivan lashed
into me for conducting an interview "on [my] knees" with Susan
Sontag, in which she characterized the bin Laden terror network as implacable and
deadly foes while criticizing the bombing campaign's impact on civilians. Sullivan was
as incensed by Sontag's remarks as he was by my int
roductory comments about the efforts of Sullivan's conservative colleagues to banish
her from the world of acceptable intellectual discourse. "These pampered journalists,"
he fumed, "who have never seen a moment of real c
ensorship in their lives, and who have marginalized conservative voices for their
entire careers in their own organs and field of influence, take the occasion of the
massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens to worry
about themselves -- and preen self-righteously at the same time."
Since Sullivan has unleashed the hounds of patriotic fury, I'll respond with some
nationalistic zeal of my own. It's repellent to be lectured about my commitment to
America, which is deep and true, by an arrogant and self
-important Brit. And it's equally galling to be scolded about my supposed intolerance
of conservative dissent in Salon when I have made a consistent effort to include
Sullivan's own voice and that of many of his fellow co
nservatives in our pages. Sullivan has often fallen to his own knees before President
Bush in Salon. In fact there is no political journal in the country -- on the left or
right -- that publishes as eclectic a mix of opin
ions as we do. The same week we published the interview with Sontag, Salon ran a cover
essay by her son, David Rieff, blasting the Berkeley City Council's anti-bombing
resolution and the "depraved rationalizations of the
American left." When Sullivan seeks ideological variety, does he eagerly reach for the
latest National Review or Weekly Standard? His own site is rigorously monochromatic --
one-note blasts from the increasingly narrow co
nfines of his own head.
Earlier this year, Sullivan was exposed by the gay press for advertising for
"bareback" sex (unprotected by condoms) in an AOL chat room and denounced as a
hypocrite by his liberal gay critics for engaging in risky sexual
practices after attacking President Clinton for his own incautious behavior. Salon
was among Sullivan's most vocal defenders, running two pieces that condemned the
invasion of his sexual privacy and the political motivat
ions behind his "outing." It wasn't FreeRepublic.com that rallied around Sullivan;
those conservative "enclaves" are too busy tossing kindling on the pyres to burn the
sodomites. Their latest cause is blasting the Bush ad
ministration for apologizing on behalf of the Navy crewmen who painted "hijack this,
fags" on missiles headed toward Afghanistan.
Speaking of the "decadent left enclaves on the coasts," who does Sullivan think fights
for his right to enjoy the sexual pleasures of his choosing? His increasingly
intolerant rhetoric is an affront to the very culture th
at protects him. If a right-wing theocracy ever came to power in America, guess who'd
be the first person whose ass would be rounded up, self-described "power glutes" and
all? And guess which Web journalists would be amon
g the first to demand his freedom?
Sullivan's Taliban style of argument and his rigid habit of separating the world into
the blessed and the damned turns American politics into a free-fire zone where any
deviation from his view of the national program is i
mmediately leveled. His absolutism has no way to account for someone with my views --
and there are many like me --without grossly caricaturing them. I strongly support the
U.S. air and ground war against bin Laden and th
e Taliban. I believe unrelenting military force is the only way to destroy this
ruthless enemy. I proudly display an American flag in my window. But I also believe
that unless America works just as hard at making peace in
the Middle East as we currently are at making war, our country will never be safe.
And I believe that the American cause is served, not sabotaged, by those who disagree
vehemently with my positions.
It is true that the urge to censor comes not just from the right, but also from the
left. When U.C.-Berkeley's student government denounced a campus cartoonist for his
allegedly culturally insensitive swipe at Islamic ter
rorists and clamored to put his editors in a reeducation program, these young
centurions of correct speech were rightly blasted throughout the media world and
quickly wilted under the fire. But journalists, including Sull
ivan, should be particularly vigilant against censorship when it's advocated by the
government. It may strike Sullivan as "pampered" for American journalists to worry
about this, but our ancestors fought and died for the
right of free speech. During every crisis in our country's history, this freedom is
the first to be challenged by self-proclaimed patriots as a threat to national
security. If the press and the public don't fight for free
dom of speech at times like these, it will quickly become a hollow right.
Andrew Sullivan is an insightful and intelligent man. He needs to pull back from his
current jihad. There is too much testosterone pumping through his veins these days. He
is right to be furious. The country has suffered
a grievous blow -- one stunning in its premeditated wickedness -- and we are still
being afflicted with threats to our security. The terrorist assault demands and is
receiving a ferocious response. But it also demands tha
t we all think deeply and carefully about how to make the country and the world safer,
not just scream in outrage.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
David Talbot is Salon's founder and editor in chief.
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End<{{{
&&&&&&&&&&
From
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011008&s=pollitt
}}}>Begin
Printed from http://www.thenation.com
© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.
Back to Web View
COLUMN | October 8, 2001
KATHA POLLITT
Put Out No Flags: Subject to Debate
My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the
World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our
window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and
vengeance and war. She tells me I'm wrong--the flag means standing
together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way
we're both right: The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol
right now. In New York City, it decorates taxicabs driven by Indians
and Pakistanis, the impromptu memorials of candles and flowers that
have sprung up in front of every firehouse, the chi-chi art galleries
and boutiques of SoHo. It has to bear a wide range of meanings, from
simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim
bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson
around the country and harassment on New York City streets and
campuses. It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom
the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins's Ear, the
connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a
world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a
flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because
that's hers, but the living room is off-limits.
There are no symbolic representations right now for the things the world really
needs--equality and justice and humanity and solidarity and intelligence. The red flag
is too bloodied by history; the peace sign is a retro
fashion accessory. In much of the world, including parts of this country, the cross
and crescent and Star of David are logos for nationalistic and sectarian hatred. Ann
Coulter, fulminating in her syndicated column, calle
d for carpet-bombing of any country where people "smiled" at news of the disaster: "We
should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."
What is this, the Crusades? The Rev. Jerry Falwe
ll issued a belated mealy-mouthed apology for his astonishing remarks immediately
after the attacks, but does anyone doubt that he meant them? The disaster was God's
judgment on secular America, he observed, as famously s
ecular New Yorkers were rushing to volunteer to dig out survivors, to give blood,
food, money, anything--it was all the fault of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and
the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians...the AC
LU, People for the American Way." That's what the Taliban think too.
As I write, the war talk revolves around Afghanistan, home of the vicious Taliban and
hideaway of Osama bin Laden. I've never been one to blame the United States for every
bad thing that happens in the Third World, but it
is a fact that our government supported militant Islamic fundamentalism in
Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979. The mujahedeen were freedom fighters
against Communism, backed by more than $3 billion in US aid--
more money and expertise than for any other cause in CIA history--and hailed as heroes
by tag-along journalists from Dan Rather to William T. Vollmann, who saw these lawless
fanatics as manly primitives untainted by the W
est. (There's a story in here about the attraction Afghan hypermasculinity holds for
desk-bound modern men. How lovely not to pay lip service to women's equality! It's
cowboys and Indians, with harems thrown in.) And if,
with the Soviets gone, the vying warlords turned against one another, raped and
pillaged and murdered the civilian population and destroyed what still remained of
normal Afghan life, who could have predicted that? These p
eople! The Taliban, who rose out of this period of devastation, were boys, many of
them orphans, from the wretched refugee camps of Pakistan, raised in the unnatural
womanless hothouses of fundamentalist boarding schools.
Even leaving aside their ignorance and provincialism and lack of modern skills, they
could no more be expected to lead Afghanistan back to normalcy than an army made up of
kids raised from birth in Romanian orphanages.
Feminists and human-rights groups have been sounding the alarm about the Taliban since
they took over Afghanistan in 1996. That's why interested Americans know that Afghan
women are forced to wear the total shroud of the
burqa and are banned from work and from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a
male relative; that girls are barred from school; and that the Taliban--far from being
their nation's saviors, enforcing civic peace with
their terrible swift Kalashnikovs--are just the latest oppressors of the miserable
population. What has been the response of the West to this news? Unless you count the
absurd infatuation of European intellectuals with t
he anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of fundamentalist warlords (here we go again!), not
much.
What would happen if the West took seriously the forces in the Muslim world who call
for education, social justice, women's rights, democracy, civil liberties and
secularism? Why does our foreign policy underwrite the cle
rical fascist government of Saudi Arabia--and a host of nondemocratic regimes besides?
What is the point of the continuing sanctions on Iraq, which have brought untold
misery to ordinary people and awakened the most backw
ard tendencies of Iraqi society while doing nothing to undermine Saddam Hussein? And
why on earth are fundamentalist Jews from Brooklyn and Philadelphia allowed to turn
Palestinians out of their homes on the West Bank? Be
cause God gave them the land? Does any sane person really believe
that?
Bombing Afghanistan to "fight terrorism" is to punish not the Taliban
but the victims of the Taliban, the people we should be supporting.
At the same time, war would reinforce the worst elements in our own
society--the flag-wavers and bigots and militarists. It's heartening
that there have been peace vigils and rallies in many cities, and
antiwar actions are planned in Washington, DC, for September 29-30,
but look what even the threat of war has already done to Congress,
where only a single representative, Barbara Lee, Democrat from
California, voted against giving the President virtual carte blanche.
A friend has taken to wearing her rusty old women's Pentagon Action
buttons--at least they have a picture of the globe on them. The
globe, not the flag, is the symbol that's wanted now.
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