Demosophia

Wishing al Qaeda Away, with Pixie Dust

Some of my old friends are touting the notion that al Qaeda isn't real, based on the common-sense logic that if it were we'd have destroyed it by now. Never mind that AIDS is real (though some think it isn't) or that the Cold War took 70 years to win. They believe the concept was invented after 9-11 as an explanation for a kind of generic and disorganized anti-US sentiment that at least sympathetically explains (if not justifies) violence against the heart of the capitalist enterprise. And some also believe the Mujahadeen and the Taliban are synonyms, the former having acquired the latter designation only when the US was finished exploiting them after the Cold War. Well, I have several books that were published about al Qaeda prior to 9-11, and the Taliban aren't the Mujahadeen. (Most were children during the war with the Soviets.) But the real issue isn't that the fantasy is implausible. That's obvious. The real issue is that the fall of the World Trade Center has become not merely the image of an attack against the US or even world capitalism. It's also a metaphor for the decline and fall of the western left. As planes controlled by al Qaeda destroyed the support structures of the World Trade Center they also tore though the self image that had been painfully constructed to weather the fall of the Soviet Union, and is nostalgically recalled in Mike Nichols' adaptation of Angels in America.

A stew of wishful thoughts and nightmares has fascinated the left lately, represented in views expressed by some of its popular heroes (most of whom, ironically, are American). I've speculated elsewhere that this wishful thinking is motivated by the fact that they have no coherent response to calamity, because it doesn't figure into their worldview at all. And Andrew Sullivan has expressed the related opinion that their decline is compelled by an inability to grasp the reality of an enemy that's even more despicable than classically liberal or religious Republicans (or their British counterpart), or neo-conservative Republicans or Democrats (or their British equivalent).

It's not as though the neo-cons or the classical liberals have the world of foreign and domestic public policy sewn up. Nor do they have a monopoly, necessarily, on good ideas. There are not only significant gaps in their problematique, but their implementation is sometimes bungled. So there's plenty of room for an opposition based on good ideas, and competent praxis. The problem is that the left-endians have been in the driver's seat of government for so long they've forgotten how the heck to think critically or creatively. They're like drivers who spend more time looking in the rearview than watching the road. It has been a shock to discover that Democratic Party membership is no longer a majority, having shrunk to about a third of registered voters. And so the Deanites have simply energized the wishful-thinking core of what remains of the Democratic Party, by a powerful, and competent, appeal to community. Meanwhile on the fringe, which tends to define the energized core nowadays, this new but obscure-to-the-point-of-invisibility threat, represented by the cryptic designation "the base," is simply folded into the club of more familiar enemies of capitalism... through some hermeneutic legerdemain that's all-too-typical of Moore and Chomsky admirers. It's not very well thought through, but so what? Wishes aren't exactly based on hard-headed realism. The foundations upon which they rest are more like pixie dust. To whit, they're more like the dust that settled on Manhattan by the ton a few short years ago.

Which brings me to a personal revelation I had while watching Mike Nichol's adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America recently. Steeped in the left myself, for decades, my view of my ideological peers, whether gay or straight, was that they were good people... and almost certainly the only good people. Conservatives just didn't understand misfortune, or even human frailty, very well. I recall an aunt offering the not-too-sensitive opinion that homeless people were homeless because they wanted to be. Faced with that sort of nonsense, which itself resembled a kind of naive wishful thinking in reverse, what choice did I have but to become a "progressive?" One couldn't trust conservatives, not only with government, but with anything personal or revealing.

Andrew Sullivan describes Angels in America as a "leftist screed," but I don't think that's really accurate. There are only a few screed-like passages, at least in the Nichols adaptation, and their tone is self conscious rather than self righteous. Ignoring the dimension of homosexuality, which obscures what my personal revelation was about, the screen adaptation (because I never saw the play) is more a kind of documentary about how the left viewed itself, in the 9-10 era. My moment of self-revelation was about the fact that I know most on the left are good people. But I no longer think they're quite as good as they believe they are, nor do I think any longer that they're the only "good people." My views on that score have changed drastically, and I doubt that I'm alone. So I had forgotten the way I used to see the world, and Angels reminded me. It was a bit like a sojourn I once took to my old boarding school. I spent four years of my life within the confines of that campus (except for summers), and although I hadn't thought about it in years the experience all came flooding back the minute I stepped on the campus some 40 years later.

I had even forgotten the critical role of the token "good conservative," portrayed in the character Hannah Pitt, Mormon mother of a gay son, played in Angels by Meryl Steep. But she was a "convert" to the left by virtue of the contrivance that she wasn't anti-gay... which in that worldview could only be an attitude consistent with an essentially left-endian "human nature." And she was also a natural heretic (a Mormon, after all) whose primary identification was with the sense of community that permeates the left, and both sustains and deludes it.

And this illustrates my point. The Hannah Pitt character was the glue that made the whole worldview seem plausible and legitimate. Without this portrayal, that counterintuitively accommodates "the honorable enemy," the emblem of the left in the screenplay becomes Streep's other portrayal: the traitorous Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg. And without the Hannah Pitt counterweight, it's simply impossible to rehabilitate the left's self image, based on the Rosenberg character, no matter how much you soften her image with chicken-soup Jewish-mother homilies. America is a community founded on the basis of an ideology that Rosenberg betrayed. And if one makes the rectitude of that betrayal the primary test of legitimacy, no matter how evil the portrayal of her nemesis Roy Cohn, there's just no way the left wins that contest.

It's been tough for me to swallow the fact that this community of which I was so long a part was a kind whose acceptance was not as unconditional as it seemed. The Hannah Pitts were transient. A gap, that has far less to do with politics than with who qualifies for social allegiance, friendship, confidences, or even civility, has opened up between people who used to unequivocally all regard themselves as "good," but whose deeper convictions were actually very different. There's the left of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, and then there's the left of Chris Hitchens, Bernard Kouchner, and Paul Berman. And they're not in the same universe any longer. They're as far apart as Paul Faure and Leon Blum were in the late 1930s, in fact. The wise are no longer wise by virtue of their ideological allegiances, but foolish... believing thinly disguised apologist fantasies about tyrants or indulging in indefensible moral equivalencies or outrageous grand conspiracy theories; while the mean, heartless, selfish (or sometimes just naive?) conservatives are on the side of justice and freedom in a way they haven't been since Lincoln, or perhaps Churchill.

(I daresay that for many "liberals" Bush represents the worst of both: the bumpkinlike crudity of Lincoln merged with the class elitism of Churchill. It's a mythic creature, and depending your perspective either has two heads and no tail, or...)

An ancient and unhealed wound was just waiting for a solid whack to be opened by this imaginary entity, al Qaeda. And now that it has been opened it won't tamely heal. It festers, becomes more corrupt, gets deeper and closer to vital processes. In that sense the fall of the WTC towers is also an image of the fall of the western left. Rooted in a self image from the past that Angels so nostalgically documents, people can't let go to recognize how radically things have really changed. If they did they'd no longer be "good" in quite the way that they've seen themselves for decades. How could you possibly feel good about yourself, if you felt in opposition to that? If you no longer saw McCarthyism as the single greatest evil on the planet?

Angels in America is an historical and cultural dramatization, but it's not about America. It's about a bygone era that was literally blown to bits on Sept. 11, 2001. So of course the issue isn't defeating al Qaeda, because its existence was never acceptable. The best remaining option is to wish it away. And any sort of pixie dust will do, because the substance is in the belief, not the quality of the dust. And that encapsulates the tragic descent of the left since 9-11-2001.

[Note: For those interested in al Qaeda, and lack a stake in wishing it away Winds of Change has a nice rundown on the players that'll help put some meat on the bones of "Totalitarianism 3.x." It's still evolving and adapting.]

Posted by Demosophist at December 28, 2003 02:34 PM | TrackBack