Louis Menand is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York Graduate Center. He writes a sort of cultural column for The New Yorker, which means he is a neoconservative, since the magazine’s cultural editor would allow no other in a slot once renowned for its occupancy by Edmund Wilson. Characteristically, Menand deals entirely in received opinion, which he gently re-tales in a dim run-on sort of style that can best be described as menandering. He is given to broad assertions; then, faced with a sudden dead-end, he . . . well, menanders. One has the sense that without editorial direction, he is essentially apolitical, but since 9/11 and the responses of what he calls most “cultural and political critics,” it seems he does have opinions to share because “It just proves what I’ve always said [to Mrs. Menand?], the attacks were treated as geopolitics for dummies.” But how could they not be dummies, considering a public educational system that no longer teaches geography in primary schools, much less comparative history or even relevant American history.
The half dozen or so “critics” that he quotes “are,” he notes contentedly, “so devoid of surprise as to be almost devoid of thought.” Well, thanks to our educational system and a Media that reports only good news from Corporate America, anyone trying to make sense of why we were recently struck by Moslem zealots will need to have the wheel reinvented for him. This takes a lot of marshaling of the obvious. Like what is a Moslem? But even here Menand is in a bit of a bind. No neo-con wants the reason for the attack to be analyzed too carefully because, sooner or later, we must always go back to the U.S.-Israeli connection, an absolutely taboo subject in our Media not to mention political life. Easier to say that anyone who even suggests that U.S. activities might have brought on the attack is simply an “America-hater” or (lower voice) anti-Semite or worse—as if anything is worse. Since Menand is quite aware of the low quality of our political discourse in this matter, he shifts the 9/11 attack from a deliberate attack by angry parties (which seems obvious to most of us and worthy of analysis) to, of all things, an “accident.” Some accident! To paraphrase Winston Churchill.
Once Menand had done his magic trick, he can say how “disappointing to be told in the books published so far on the ‘meaning’ of September 11th, what we have always been told about ourselves.” Idle menandering, now becomes filibustering: “People who walk away from a car crash in which they might have died . . . sometimes react by assessing their entire lives—as though the accident were a judgment. It wasn’t, it was an accident.” To translate 9/11 as a random car-crash is sublime idiocy of the sort that only an American neo-con, protecting a “secret,” would dare menander.
Our schoolteacher next approaches his principal targets, Noam Chomsky and me. He takes his place in front of the blackboard. Visualize that Manhattan classroom. Lecture hall? I sense an American flag to the professor’s far right. Is there a Graduate Center flag? Furled? A bit of throat clearing. Deep breath; exhale; “Anti-Americanism is the view that the United States is basically a global bad guy” (twinkle in the eye on “bad”—say it ain’t so!), “A nation that was founded on the impulses of materialism and expansionism, and that is getting more materialistic and expansionist every decade.” Chuckle? Raised eyebrow? Homeland Security is watching you, Professor. Stronger voice now: nitty-gritty is on the table. “This (pause) school of thought needs to be distinguished from what might be called dissenting patriotism, which is the view that the United States is basically a virtuous republic that has recently been betrayed by runaway corporate capitalism and by the emergence of a national security state contemptuous of individual liberties and international law. Noam Chomsky belongs to the first school.”
And, according to the professor, I belong to the second. Unfortunately, he has carefully, with the adverb “recently” distorted my position. What has happened to our never-virtuous but always-evolving toward (the Founders had hoped) true republican virtue, has been implicit from the beginning, and the current evils of Corporate America and the National Security State are hardly recent. In fact, anyone who believes that all this is a mere development of the last fifty years is historically naïve, a case the menander would like—clumsily, if I may say so—to make in my case, even though I, not he, am the historian here. But, Hark! Let’s see what he means to do with America-hater Noam.
Menand:
Chomsky does not suggest that September 11 attacks were a legitimate response to American aggression. His point is only that it is naïve to imagine that the United States is an innocent victim. In fact, Chomsky unequivocally condemns the attacks, and bin Laden and his network, and this leaves him with the problem of explaining the causal relevance of the bombing of Al-Shifa (apparently the result of an intelligence failure) and the Iraqi deaths (a claim based on disputed statistics) to the massacres at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Here he has recourse to the highly useful concept of “blowback.”
This is a paradigm of high-gear menandering, particularly the late point of departure, the bombing of the notorious aspirin factory by Clinton as the trigger for 9/11, quite forgetting that the true genesis was the founding of the current state of Israel, midwifed by Harry Truman in ‘48 followed by the later occupations and annexations of Palestinian land in what was, according to Zionist zealots, either empty land or luxury housing moodily abandoned by wealthy Arabs, like the Said family, as they withdrew to their winter quarters at Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel.
Menand is careful to say that Chomsky is not gloating over 9/11, but he has a “problem” establishing a causal link between Clinton’s idle bombing of that aspirin (actually, vaccine) factory in Sudan and 9/11. Apparently, Chomsky, stymied, can only invoke “blowback.” Well, anything in the matter of Israel’s colonial aggression in Palestine is bound to carry with it some—if not a great deal—of blow-back. This is where the menandering style can be useful. Acknowledging no history at all in the Middle East pre-Clinton’s strike, damage can be well and truly controlled. Tit for tat, as they say in neo-con land.
But Menander intuits that he isn’t quite making his case against Chomsky the Moralist. Compulsively, he now makes the first of several false analogies. “Blowback, as the term is used in the literature on September 11, is intended to carry moral weight!” Here it comes: “If you insist on trampling through other people’s flower gardens, you can’t complain when you get stung is the general idea.” So far, so good. “But this is true, without moral implication of any sufficiently complex undertaking.”
Surely, three thousand dead provide more than a considerable sufficiency. Perhaps the adjective “complex” is the key. But where one can fret over the degree of moral complexity in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, one cannot use the same calipers to measure the forces that caused the rain of fire from heaven upon us which, defined by death, brought a great and complex and reverberating moral weight to bear. Menander is now edgily searching for a better analogue. “It is like saying, if you keep building huge passenger ships, sooner or later one of them is going to hit an iceberg. . . .”
False analogy. Start again. He does. The new point of departure is the Afghan resistance movement of 1979 rather than Israel’s partial conquest of Palestine in 1949. Self-rattled, he connects 9/11 causally with the Soviet failed conquest of Afghanistan. He sternly challenges those who say 9/11 was a wake-up call. “Wake up to what?” he cries, still pretending not to get it. Then he menanders: “The fact that the United States is involved in the affairs of other nations?” We have always been involved. He plods on. “If that is a problem, we are left with only two alternatives: isolationism or conquest.” Suicide or murder? Has it come to this? Only two? And who says so? Ah, Professor Menand, I believe. Well, we shall see if he enlists as a sharpshooter in the Cheney-Bush army that will be sent into Iraq, Iran, wherever oil bubbles in the sand.
Then he gets to me. Briefly, as they say every five seconds on CNN news shows, “Gore Vidal is a dissenting patriot, a nostalgist of the lost republic.” But, first, like so many contemporary English teachers, Menand obsesses in the sales of writers who write. Chomsky’s 9/11 became a best-seller . . . “a more interesting fact than the book itself which consists of transcripts of interviews, given mostly to foreign journalists.” The “foreign” hurts, or does it? Actually, Chomsky is largely blacked out by U.S. media, and so he has only foreign interviewers—and his books and numerous readers.
As for me, “The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the success of Perpetual War . . . a paperback best-seller, is that if you put Gore Vidal’s name on the cover people will buy it.” Magari, as the Italians say (“would that it were so”). Professor Menand’s problem is that although he is no doubt some sort of scholar, he is not used to reading anything that might contradict what he thinks he already knows. What Chomsky and I have in common is an interest in public matters and a fascination with the lies that power tells us, lies we deconstruct, lies which also fascinate—and affect—a number of our countrymen who do read seriously. There’s nothing much more to it than that.
The schoolteacher counts the pages in which I deal with 9/11, only 18 out of 160. He is baffled that I give “a twenty-page chart of United States Military Operations, on loan from an outfit called the Federation of American Scientists.” That chart is the reason, dear professor, why people bought the book. Were you ever to write honestly, let us say, of the havoc Israel has wrought in the Moslem world, you, too, will be viewed as an honest messenger. The some two hundred recorded military unilateral strikes that the U.S. has made against Second and Third World countries is a great scandal not discussed in our Media or known to our taxpayers. Your reference to the Federation of American Scientists as a sort of shady anonymous “outfit” is calculated to suggest some sort of conspiracy. For the record, the federation was founded in 1945 by a group of atomic scientists at Los Alamos. They were concerned about the implications of atomic weapons in particular, of science in general vis-à-vis the matter of human survival. Of their current board of sponsors, I counted some forty-five Nobel laureates in science. Some outfit.
The Distinguished Professor affects not to understand why I included my piece on McVeigh and the American “Patriot/Militia” movements “as there is no cogent connection” between McVeigh and bin Laden. “Cogent” is a tired schoolteacher word seldom used by actual writers who are compelled to cogency by nature. If there were not a compelling reason for me to juxtapose a homegrown revolutionary movement against a government seen to them to be alien, punitive and external enemies provoked by that government, I would not have put them together. Most Americans do get the point: others, of course, may be gazing elsewhere.
Finally, he does boldly link me with Chomsky as an “America-hater.” This is on a par with those Nazis who, aware that Thomas Mann hated Hitler, declared that he hated Germany, a very different thing. I cannot think that anyone will ever take seriously the likes of the Menanderer on American patriotism. That others hate, demonstratively, America, we saw on 9/11. I try to give some reasons for their anger. Incidentally, I did not record any of the CIA’s activities, like the overthrowing of governments in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, Haiti, etc. Also, I would never conflate a truly bad—even evil—administration like that of Cheney-Bush with America, a complex of peoples whose republic was largely replaced by the National Security State in 1950 in favor of perpetual war and then, as of Election 2000, the presidency ceased to be within the traditional gift of We the People. Chomsky and I do not hate America, which, after all, is us, too. Or was. We are also not eccentric. The junta at Washington is.
November 2002