The Surprisingly Good Guys List: Part II
THE SURPRISINGLY GOOD GUYS LIST, II
Last week on this page, we launched The Surprisingly Good Guys List--as a way to recognize people we assumed would be chattering asses but who have turned out not to be. The response to our invitation for nominations from readers was overwhelming. Every single one of you demanded to know how CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS got left off the list.
Well, call us pedantic, but we can't say Hitch has surprised us. He was already a member in good standing of our secret Good Guys List, a status he achieved during the impeachment struggle of 1998-99. We expected excellence from him, and he has delivered.
Still, you're right. Hitchens has been heroically mucking out the Augean Stables of leftdom and deserves recognition. Our favorite paragraph was this bracing sermon to his readers at the Nation two weeks ago: "The bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. . . . Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon."
Now, on to new business. A reader at Princeton writes to nominate Bill Clinton's favorite historian, SEAN WILENTZ, who "spoke out strongly in support of military action against terrorism at a rally organized by the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism--the student group opposing campus anti-Americanism at Princeton." We were skeptical, but the Daily Princetonian report is persuasive. Wilentz mocked root-causes thinking, pointing out that, based on the biographies of the September 11 killers, this would mean terrorism is caused by "money, education and privilege."
"To say that poverty explains terror," Wilentz continued, "is to slander those caught in poverty who choose to lead worthy lives. [Terrorists] are not the oppressed, but they are parasites on oppression." Wilentz's bracing conclusion: "Our opponents must be crushed, if not eliminated."
There were multiple nominations for SCOTT SIMON, the "archetypical NPR guy," as one reader put it, whose October 11 piece for the Wall Street Journal "should earn him a permanent reprieve, and perhaps a full pardon. Okay, no full pardon till he kicks Dan Schorr off the show." Here's Simon's peroration: "Those of us who have been pacifists must admit that it has been our blessing to live in a nation in which other citizens have been willing to risk their lives to defend our dissent. The war against terrorism does not shove American power into places where it has no place. It calls on America's military strength in a global crisis in which peaceful solutions are not apparent.
"Only American (and British) power can stop more killing in the world's skyscrapers, pizza parlors, embassies, bus stations, ships, and airplanes. Pacifists, like most Americans, would like to change their country in a thousand ways. And the blasts of Sept. 11 should remind American pacifists that they live in that one place on the planet where change--in fact, peaceful change--seems most possible. It is better to sacrifice our ideals than to expect others to die for them."
Finally, a reader forwards a long e-mail from Berkeley feminist TRISTIN LAUGHTER, publicist for the punk label Lookout Records, noting, "it seems things are even changing in Berkeley":
"Dear Colleagues and Friends," writes Laughter. "I have been thinking a lot about the political situation that we find ourselves in, and more precisely, that I find myself in, following the events of Sept. 11. The Left does not speak for me on this issue. I find Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Katha Pollitt, Susan Sontag et al's attempts to blame the U.S. for this mass murder ideologically weak and morally absurd. I have never felt more clearly my alienation from political movements in this country than I do now. To analyze the causation of the terrorists' actions is to accept their violence as a legitimate political expression. I do not. I feel the Left grasping at the idea of anti-Americanism which is its only core now that Marxism has been discredited by history. But this anti-Americanism is not an appropriate reaction to the murder of 6,400 Americans on Sept. 11. I am also not into wrapping a stars and stripes bandana around my head Willie Nelson style and honking in unison with 10,000 Durangos while the Lynard Skynard/W. remix plays from my radio. I am sad, and I am lost. I do not understand this cruel and chaotic side of the human experience.
"My mother and father were anti-Vietnam War activists, and I grew up with a deeply ambivalent vision of the U.S.'s role in the world. Through most of my lifetime, I have adopted a profoundly isolationist philosophy on geo-political matters, and called it pacifism. I believed that the U.S. was the new evil empire, and could not support military action under any circumstances, because I believed that the only political situation which truly motivated the U.S. was economic interests. 'No Blood for Oil' I chanted in DC in 91, and I believed it. . . .
"Now I know, in a visceral, human way, that the United States has enemies in the global arena, enemies capable of a brutality and a barbarism which marks their depravity. If being an American Leftist today means defending that, then I can't be a Leftist."
As before, send your candidates for future editions of the list, along with the work that qualifies them, to Scrapbook@weeklystandard.com.
"I'LL TAKE IT FROM HERE"
The Scrapbook's friends on the USS Theodore Roosevelt e-mailed us the drawing reproduced here, which we found oddly affecting. The cartoon has added meaning for the Roosevelt, because, as our correspondent reports, "The flag seen in the now famous picture of New York firefighters . . . was given to our ship. It has been signed by Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani and stamped by Fire Station #1 in Manhattan. After several hundred people gathered on the flight deck below, the flag was run up the yardarm from the signal bridge." The drawing, apparently by a soldier, is making the rounds via e-mail. If anyone knows the provenance, let us know and we'll give full credit next week.
FLAGS FOR MISS POLLITT UPDATE
Three weeks ago we invited readers to donate flags to Nation columnist Katha Pollitt's 13-year-old daughter, who had been told by her anti-flag mother to buy the Stars and Stripes "with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits."
We're pleased to report that some of you, at any rate, answered the call. Here's an exchange between Pollitt and host Jack Beatty from an Oct. 16 broadcast on WBUR Boston (NPR):
POLLITT: "The Weekly Standard had a sort of 'Send a Flag to Miss Pollitt' [campaign]."
BEATTY: "Have you gotten any flags?"
POLLITT: "I got a few."
We report. You deliver.
October 29, 2001 - Volume 7, Number 7
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