With most people I know in Washington, the problem last week was the traffic, what with the sniper terrorizing our city. With me, it was the mail.
You can deal with a dozen or so letters from your readers that are the standard response to a column you compose weekly for this page. You weed out the hate mail and then find time to respond to the rest. Easy. And enjoyable. But what happens when a torrent of e-mails arrives in your box vehemently taking you to task for what you had to say?
The sensible thing to do here is to write another column elucidating your point, clearing the air, and getting back in these folks’ good graces
The article in question, "Moral Majority in the sewer," which appeared last week, berated Jerry Falwell for his malicious remarks about the Muslim faith and its Prophet, and dismissed the Christian right for its kooky interpretation of the Bible, especially its rapturous vision of the Last Days, or the Armageddon, in the Holy Land.
Most readers had no problem with that. One representative response, from Michael Collingwood, was this: "Please be assured that, despite evidence to the contrary, most Americans view Falwell as a person who is bigoted, racist, undisciplined and intent on instigating trouble with anyone who has different viewpoints from his own."
Another, from JM, was:" Jerry Falwell is an idiot and every time he opens his mouth, foolish words spill out, corrupting the minds of the fools who follow him. I also believe that Falwell continues to display his ignorance not only in regards to Islam but also other Christian faiths, especially Catholicism."
Kurt Ringleben put it succinctly: "I would like to respond to your article on Jerry Falwell by saying that he does not represent the views of the majority of Americans. Most people I know regard the man as a crackpot and consider his credibility highly compromised. Just please know that this man doesn’t speak for all of us and we are ashamed of his hateful comments. Jerry Falwell is not what America is all about."
That’s what I thought too, Kurt.
Rather, the problem my correspondents had was with my suggestion that the national mood in American society today is, if not welcoming of, at least responsive to, the kind of hateful rhetoric that Falwell spouted in his 60-Minutes interview, and with the rhetorical question I had raised about why on earth would the Euro-American West, whose political system never once acted as an impediment to bestialities and wanton slaughter over the last two centuries, presume to be superior to the East.
From Michael A. Palmer, professor and chair at the department of history, East Carolina University: "I first read your work back in the early 1970s as an undergraduate and have always found your writing reasoned, though provocative." Provocative enough, it would appear, that he erroneously assumed I had implied in my column a plus-minus dichotomy between Western and Islamic cultures — which clearly I did not and would not advance as an idea anywhere in my work.
The professor, however, attributed that to me just the same by writing that though Falwell’s words were indeed hateful, "I have yet to see born-again-Christians assaulting Muslims," whereas, he added, "infuriated Indian Muslims went and killed Hindus." This made him wonder: "What their connection was to Falwell I cannot fathom." He reminded me that "the other day Iranian clerics called for the murder of Falwell."
James Fields wrote irately: "Where do you live? Where have you been? If you are going to report on US culture, at least know what you’re talking about."
OK, OK, fellows. It would seem that, as the prison warden in "Cool Hand Luke" told Paul Newman: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
I was not trying to belittle or put down American culture in toto (those who have read this column over the years would know that). Nor, God forbid, was I trying to hold a brief for "infuriated Indian Muslims" going on a rampage, or for "Iranian clerics" calling for the murder of Jerry Falwell. To silence or incarcerate an individual, let alone off him, because you disagree with his views, regardless of how egregious, is the mark of a fascist. I am hardly one such.
And Jim, you got it all wrong, my man. I don’t know how old you are, but I have lived in this country probably since long before you were born. I should know what I’m talking about, you say, when I talk about "US culture"?
With all due modesty, I proffer this short resume: Four books put out by reputable New York publishers over the years, all becoming required or suggested reading at colleges around the country, a position at SUNY-Buffalo as writer-in-residence where I offered a course called "Culture and Communication in Terra Media," and don’t dismiss my having been, again probably before you were born, in the vanguard of the counterculture, the New Left and the anti-war movement, whose legacies have entered the repertoire of American idiom, music, social values and, well, yes, culture.
Am I then qualified to talk about "US culture," right or wrong, interesting or pedestrian though my analysis may be? Excuse me, but the answer is yes. Ideas are worthless unless they are lived. And trust me on this one, when I share my ideas with readers, I don’t grab them out of thin air.
My whole point in choosing to write about the Falwell controversy was to see where it fits in the ambience of the political discourse in the US today. That is, context, context, context.
A reporter, for example, will objectively and detachedly report what Jerry Falwell’s comments on Islam were, or, say, that President Bush stated his intention today to bring "regime change" to Iraq, or that Ariel Sharon’s occupation soldiers killed six Palestinian children last Saturday (what the heck, it was a slow weekend), or that Saddam Hussein won the election by 100 percent of the popular vote, and leave it at that, as a news reporter is expected to do, but it takes context to make sense of these events and allow people to form an informed viewpoint about them. Hence my attempt to locate where Falwell’s observations fit in the contemporary political culture of the United States.
For months now the public debate, imbued with militaristic sloganeering and cultural chauvinism, fostered by both officialdom and the media punditocracy, has moved along on the fuel of its own pontifications that people who follow it have lost the imagination to rethink its premises.
The public debate, in other words, has today created dangerous symbols, and symbolic representations of that kind insinuate themselves, almost by a process of osmosis, into our everyday lives and change the way we think and act, in this case reducing the way we see the world to a sort of semiotic shorthand, designed to tingle our emotions without engaging our minds — terrorist infrastructure, regime change, exporting democracy, and the rest of it. Symbolically loaded buzzwords have the ability to fashion a society’s intellectual environment. Nearly fifty years ago Walter Lippman observed that "he who captures the symbols by which public policy is for the moment contained, controls by that much the approaches of public policy." And, I may add, cultural life.
It is all the more unfortunate that, in today’s post-Sept.11 climate, commentary has become dominated by semiliterate oafs, bigots, hawks and those without sufficient imagination to become successful checkout operators at Safeway.
Sure, I’m an advocate (that’s what writing a column is all about) and sure, I’m an adversarial voice (as a child of the sixties, a major part of me has stayed up there) and yes, of course, I expect to be taken to task by readers. That’s why we call the public debate public. A free for all. Heck, let’s tell it the way it is.
There is always someone like Justin Raethel out there, who wrote me this: "Kudos for your article. Please continue to push the cause of fairness, openness and tolerance. It is something no society can take for granted."
I hope that’s what for the most part I’ve been doing, if evidently not always so convincingly, via this column, all these years.
24 October 2002
