Reviewing Arundhati Roy’s Power Politics and The Algebra of Infinite Justice for The New Republic, Ian Buruma offers several sharp observations:

[…]when Roy attempts to tackle a wider world, fulminating against the American intervention in Afghanistan, or against ‘globalization,’ her tone and her stylistic tics become more than irritating. Her demonology of the United States takes on the foaming-at-the-mouth, eye-rolling quality of the mad evangelist. Un fortunately, it is this side of her, and not the campaigning against dam projects, that has found a worldwide audience. Roy has become the perfect Third World voice for anti-American, or anti-Western, or even anti-white, sentiments. Those are sentiments dear to the hearts of intellectuals everywhere, including the United States itself.

The litany is well-known. America is the most belligerent power on earth. Its government is committed to ‘military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and un imaginable genocide (outside America).’ The economic policies of the United States, otherwise known as globalization or imperialism, are ‘merciless’ and rapacious, destroying economies ‘like a cloud of locusts.’ This means, in Roy’s view, that ‘any Third World country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower like America in … would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.’ This rather ignores the historical fact that it is precisely America’s old “client states” in East and Southeast Asia — South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan — that have done rather well, politically and economically. South Vietnam, had it remained under American patronage, would no doubt have been among them.

If American economic imperialism is bad, American militarism is worse. Not only is America responsible for the deaths of millions in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Central America, but also, according to Roy’s account, in … Yugoslavia! So the belated American intervention, which saved countless Bosnian and Albanian Kosovar lives, is now also a part of America’s bellicose record. Rumpelstiltskin’s empire is an evil, evil place. To drive this home, Roy uses the usual tricks of the demagogue. One of those tricks is the misleading quotation. The other is what used to be called, in Cold War days, moral equivalence.

Then, further along:

[…]There is one verbal tic that keeps recurring in Roy’s writings that may help us to understand her feelings–for that is what they are, more than coherent thoughts. She refers a great deal to India’s ‘ancient civilization,’ usually to show how humiliating it is for an ancient people to defer to a jumped-up, uncivilized place such as the United States. About President Clinton’s visit to India, she observes: ‘He was courted and fawned over by the genuflecting representatives of this ancient civilization with a fervour that can only be described as indecent.’ This speaks of the same snobbery that informed Roy’s remark on American television about Mickey Mouse and the mullahs.

Rich, rampant America shows up the relative weakness and backwardness of India. This is hard to take for a member of the intellectual or artistic elite, educated by nationalist professors, whose thoughts were often molded by British Marxists from the London School of Economics. The genuine popularity of American pop culture among the urban masses in India makes the elite feel marginal in their own country, which sharpens their sense of pique. For India, you could also read France, Italy, Japan, or even China. Thus Roy’s voice is less representative of the Third World than of a global intelligentsia, floating from conference to conference, moaning about the effects of globalization.

Being more civilized, wiser, older, and more spiritual is the last wall of defense against superior power. Again, about September 11, describing the reaction in the supposedly more civilized parts of the world, Roy notes ‘the tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around, eventually comes around.’ How could the callow denizens of the New World ever match such ancient understanding? Since many American intellectuals, be they novelists or academics, share Roy’s contempt for American pop culture and the vulgar patriotism of the American media, some are inclined to applaud her sentiments. This in itself would be of little consequence, were it not that better informed, more intelligent criticism of American policies, foreign and domestic, is needed more than ever.

Arundhati Roy’s overheated prose gives criticism a bad name. She makes it too easy for unthinking patriots to dismiss any foreign skepticism toward American policy as mere envy or prejudice. And the effect of her voice in the non-Western world might be worse. The Iraqi intellectual dissident Kanan Makiya observed in his book Cruelty and Silence that Edward Said’s Orientalism contributed to a pervasive lack of a sense of responsibility among young Arab intellectuals for the problems of the Middle East. If everything is the fault of a supposedly omnipotent America, or of ingrained Western colonial attitudes, then there is nothing to be done at home, except lash out in a rage.

Soon after the 911 terror attacks, a friend of mine — a novelist living in New York City — forwarded me Roy’s now infamous blame America screed (along with his own short note, which advised, “you might want to read this”). The implications, of course, were clear: Before you react viscerally to these islamokazi attacks, Jeff, you might want to take a couple of steps back and examine the “root causes” of terrorism — in short, you might want to ask yourself, “why do they hate us?” And here to guide you through that obligatory “informed circumspection” (we academics are expected to bathe in nuance, you understand), is a text by Arundhati Roy — an urbane and educated citizen of the world — not to mention an “authentic” voice of the outraged Other (whose litany of America’s vices will prove useful and instructive as an historical topography onto which to map the collapse of the WTC and the death of so many innocent civilians and rescue workers).

Fine.

So I read Roy’s arrogant, presumptious, and remarkably condescending claptrap, and sure enough, it did change my way of thinking forever. Because no longer (I swore) would I countenance the kind of shoddy logic I find so endemic to the “thinking” of Roy and her ilk — regardless of how such iconoclasty might damage me professionally. Nor would I fall prey to rhetorical formulations relying on vile moral equivalencies disguised as thoughful respect for the voices of the Other. Liberal guilt is silly in times of peace. In times of war, its suicidal.

In fact, such garbage needs to be consistently highlighted and — once highlighted — denounced and ridiculed.

Mission accomplished, Arundhati. You shrill and snobby twit, you.

And thanks for waking me up, by the way…