An interesting email that speaks to the Anti-Jihadi Manifesto. I have withheld certain names at the emailer’s request:
re: Rushdie and the left. Hold your breath. My uncle [name withheld] is a friend of his, a leftist artist, all that crap. [He] is a politcal creature, a class A sycophant in those circles. He would not sign that [Manifesto] or anything like that. If Salman was not a famous writer, he’d be an outcast in some of the circles he runs in. As I now am.
I live in NYC and was born into this “caste” for lack of a better word. You have no idea what we are up against. You literally cannot open your mouth and say anything not liberal for fear that your kids will lose their playdates. People (including my uncle) and a lot of his friends stopped talking to me when they found out I voted for Bush.
If this is the beginning of a trend, god I hope so. But I doubt it.
[My emphasis]
The emailer further reinforces—even in his skepticism—the very reason I find the Manifesto itself (warts and all, if you believe such to be the case) so very important: it marks a break with a rather familiar progressive intellectualist dogma that provides knee-jerk cover for collectivist thought by way of the Orientalism of Edward Said, which has (ironically) risen, in circles whose entire philosophical worldview is based around the “tolerance” of Otherness, to the level of an unassailable universal prescription (to be enforced by such things as “hate crime legislation).
As I’ve been arguing, the way to push back against Islamic totalitarianism is to re-embrace our own western liberal traditions—a philosophy of individualism and universal rights that has been weakened by a pernicious strain of relativism that grows out of a misuse of the signifying chain (whether cynically or out of a genuine confusion over the nature of signification).
To see some prominent members of the left beginning to recognize this need is an enormous first step, I believe.
Jeff, You might be interested in an op-ed written by Cathy Seip (sp?…I believe her blog is Cathy’s World). She discusses the reaction to her article over at the Volokh Conspiracy (she provides links). Reading the otherwise fairly literate commentary is revealing. Apparently ANY discussion of the challenges we face from militant Islam are verboten and will be villified as bigotry or worse.
Pat Moynihan was an important intellectual who broke with the orthodoxies of the left– and nobody followed him. The only solution here is the enlarging of the right, and to make sure the right is as broad, inclusive, networked and armed as possible. Rudy Giuliani recognizes this, reaching out to the Christain Right. I think this is the trend to bet on and hope for. Betting on sanity breaking out in the left is a poor one.
Betting on sanity breaking out in the left is a poor one.
Spot on.
“I live in NYC and was born into this “caste†for lack of a better word. You have no idea what we are up against.”
– Actually I believe most resonably educated, and politically astute people, are aware of what we’re up against. Even for those individuals that are intentionally self-isolated from the hour to hour political soap opera. Almost every day the claxon sounds, like a partisan dinner bell, and people like Dean, Pelosi, and Reid call to the gaggle to proclaim the latest BDS screed in breathless faux outrage. This political clown act has been amply displayed in the media in all their frenetic, obbsessive splendor for all too see.
– So while I won’t for a second minimize the potential impact, or nettlesome problems that perception over substance can temporarily effect, like all cult-like excesses it generally fails under the chrush of its own profligate over-reach and sillyness.
Playdates?
I take it you don’t have kids, actus?
I rather dislike the term myself. It is a prearranged time/place that parents have their kids get together to play. Isn’t that a needlessly obtuse way of saying “have the kid(s) come over to play”? Oy.
I was one myself. I don’t think I had playdates. My parents got together with other parents, and hung out while the kids hung out. Although they were and are still social with those people. So I don’t think it was for the kids to play. Maybe its an east-coast liberal elite thing.
Not necessarily liberal, and hardly east-coast elite.
It’s used especially among homeschool parents, and parents with preschoolers. If there’s a scarcity of children for your child to play with in the neighborhood, then you get together with other parents similarly situated so that the kids can all play together.
Ours was yesterday.
No, actus, unfortunately it isn’t just an “east coast liberal thing”, nor is it just an obtuse way to invite the kids over to play. It’s a consequence of low fertility combined with the Precautionary Principle and a liberal (!) touch of private-enterprise tyrannism, and it’s becoming pervasive among the educated classes.
Given low fertility, kids are precious. Given the Precautionary Principle, all avoidable risks should be avoided at all costs. And given the tendency just about everybody has to want to be In Control, controlling people you can control is ego-gratification—and one group you can always control (to a first approximation) is your kids.
The result is that an incredible number of people grow to what they and those around them consider to be “maturity” without ever having had an unstructured moment of life unless asleep. I mean, 0900-1530 School [subschedule attached]. 1530-1545, Come Home From School [police called at 1546, with attendant hysterics]. 1545-1600, Dress Appropriately for Appointment. 1600-1700, Have Fun With Dick and Jane. 1700-1800, Dinner… you get the picture. It guarantees that the kids are as safe as possible, because they’re monitored and scheduled every moment. And it’s egoboo for the parents, because they’re in charge with a vengeance.
It’s one of the reasons we have disproportionate results in military recruiting between “Red” and “Blue” areas. In reality, the disproportion is between wealthy, educated urban areas and their surroundings. The military only looks highly structured from the outside. In reality, the structure is a skeleton upon which a great deal of spontaneous and essentially undirected action is required. Potential recruits who’ve had their lives scheduled since infancy see the structure and go, “been there, done that, no more, thank you.” And if they do join expecting a continuation of their comfortable, somebody-else-arranges-it existence, most of the time they aren’t successful because they can’t adapt to the requirement for initiative.
Sad, in both the American and British senses of the word.
Regards,
Ric
tw: woman. I will not expand on that.
OT alert: playdates.
Oh yes, playdates. A horrible term for what can be an innocuous coffee klatsch all the way up to an opportunity for surreptitious critique of your “friends’” parenting. When I was a kid of 4, 5, and 6 (and my siblings were 1 & 3 years younger than that) in a suburb of Phoenix, the strictures on my movements were (1) play in our yard, our neighbors’ yards, and no further than thus-and-such a yard; (2) no going into a friend’s house without permission from both the friend’s parent and my parent; (3) no crossing the street. My mom pretty much did inside stuff, and we pretty much did outside stuff.
When my first child was the same age, we lived in a 30-year-old neighborhood barely inside the Dallas city limits that was juuuuuust starting to turn – maybe a third of the houses had non-original owners. So there was a lot of space between our house and the next house with kids my kid’s age. Hence, playdates. The four of us moms who participated became great friends, to the point that we FORCED our kids to play together so WE could spend a couple of hours yakking, but it isn’t always that way.
Now we live in a ‘burb of Philadelphia and have finally achieved nirvana: even our two-year-old, holding his four-year-old sister’s hand, can toddle up the hill in the backyard to play with the kids whose backyard borders ours. No fences; lots of stay-at-home or odd-shift parents of both genders; only one through street and it’s deceptively labelled to keep traffic through the neighborhood down; kids ranging from birth through babysitting high schoolers. My kids haven’t had a playdate or belonged to a playgroup since we moved here. As God is my witness, I will nevah live in a playdate neighbahhood again!
Back OnT: The courage to break with the consensus is what we saw in the Manifesto. The twelve signatories have sufficient courage to create their own consensus – not quite the “consensus of one” that shows utter intellectual cojones when your cause is just, but not bad nonetheless; and there’ll be a few here and a few there who, seeing those twelve names, will be willing to hitch on with them… and with any luck we’ll get all the GOOD ones eventually. I have (limited but present) faith in honest-to-goodness liberals: surely not all of them have been suborned.
Let Chomsky stay right where he’s at.
“It was hell!” recalls former child.
SB: short
and sweet
I read the Manifesto. The overall point, that radical Islamism is anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment, is spot on.
It’s also trivial. You would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of non-Muslim Americans or Europeans who think Osama’s a good guy. It’s also true that cigarettes cause cancer. No one, except a few nuts, are going to disagree with you, but it’s a trivial thing to go out of your way to assert. Unless there’s a specific reason for it. And the numerous issues at play in the toon wars, the ostensible reason for the statement, are not addressed intelligently or effectively merely by restating the patently obvious – radical Islamism sucks – which is all this statement does.
Nevertheless the fact that it’s trivial is not really a reason not to sign it. The serious problems come in the wording. As translated, the document confuses “Islamism” with “radical Islamism.” They are not the same, any more than Jewish support for Israel by Americans is the same as the radical Zionism of Meir Kahane and Richard Perle, who was caught at least once, during the Reagan administration, betraying his country to Israel (can the charge of anti-semitism, folks; it’s radical Zionists who have betrayed Israel, not the rest of us whose support for Israel has never wavered by morphing into fanaticism).
In addition, the term “cultural relativism” is used very sloppily. And again, the point made is one that no one seriously disagrees with. Of course, Muslims deserve freedom and equality. And if everyone would just love each other and sing Cumbaya, the world would be a better place.
Because of these criticisms, the statement is quite unacceptable to me, although two of the signers, Rushdie and Warraq, are writers I often respect (Rushdie far more than Warraq).
Perhaps a better translation would make these criticisms moot. But as translated, it’s a perfect example of a trivial, poorly phrased declaration which gives the anti-Enlightenment right a perfect opportunity to pretend that because the rest of us won’t sign on to something that’s meaningless and flawed, we therefore support the anti-liberal agenda of radical Islamism. Which we couldn’t do any more than we could support the radical Christianism of Randall Terry or James Dobson.
I’m so sorry that the sins of one’s parents fall on their kids. No child should be refused a playdate because their parents are rightwing lunatics. We have never restricted access to our daughter’s playmates based on politics. It is anti-liberal to do so, reminiscent of the fully isolated gated communities that seem to be the latest trend amongst America’s Christianist extremists. Both are deplorable.
By the way, a fine alternative statement is in the current print edition of the New York Review of Books, but not yet posted.
It makes the same point as the one you link to, but does so far more eloquently and precisely. In addition, it addresses many more of the issues at play in the toon wars.
Hmmm… contrast and compare the following:
“You literally cannot open your mouth and say anything not liberal for fear that your kids will lose their playdates.”
Versus:
“No child should be refused a playdate because their parents are rightwing lunatics.”
So, if you “say anything not liberal,” you are hereby a “rightwing lunatic”?
Uh. Huh.
I detect a breakdown in wingnut discipline here.
1. Wingnuts love Salman Rushdie because radical Islamists hate Salman Rushdie.
2. Wingnuts love Salman Rushdie because of his signature on the new “Radical Islam Sucks” manifesto.
3. Wingnuts hate Salman Rushdie because he is a pansy intellectual who drinks espresso in salons in many of the world’s most candy-assed cities.
If I was a young person thinking about becoming a wingnut, this apparent set of contradictions would throw me off.
And once again, Adam demonstrates the level of arguement brought to the table from the opposition.
Why is Ayaan Hirsi Ali a “liberal”? She’s an MP from the Dutch equivalent of the financial-conservative wing of the GOP. She’s as far right as you can go in Dutch politics without getting into the Pat Buchanan -ish territory of the leftover loons from List Pim Fortuyn.
I mean, she is literally a “liberal”, because her party is called the “Liberal Party”. But that’s because “liberal” in Europe means “laissez-faire free-market”, the opposite of what it means here.
I think she’s great, in her very idiosyncratic way, though I often disagree with her; but I’d hardly call her a liberal. Unless all Muslims, or all Europeans, are naturally “liberal” by American standards.
Percy Dovetail,
That’s exactly right. Anyone who’s not a liberal is a rightwing lunatic by definition. It’s black and white, either/or, because as you know, liberals are incapable of shades of gray. (sarcasm)
If my kid wanted to play with Christie Whitman’s kid or kids, I wouldn’t mind even though Christie Whitman is a conservative. If my kid wanted to play with Santorum’s kid(s), I wouldn’t mind even though he’s a right wing lunatic.
This cannot be emphasized enough.
I find it quite interesting (and annoying) how one is more than welcome to discuss and/or embrace the values and history of another culture but when it comes to Western values and history one is supposed to condemn and disown them. And when negative aspects of other cultures are brought up, one is shouted down, lied to, or made to be an aggressor against a victim culture. Absolutely utterly ridiculous.
Personally, I am very much a fan (per its current connotation as well as what it’s short for) of Western values and history. I have seen and lived on the other side, where the grass is hardly greener and is, in fact, quite dead.
Anyone who can reason can see that Western liberal values brings success, harmony, and development while other cultures’ values maintain harmony through oppression.
I agree with you, Jeff, that the key to winning to war with “Islamic radicalism” is to shore up our own side against Islamic radicalism’s onslaught.