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 alking
through Union Square a week after the World Trade Center attack,
I overheard a heated exchange between an elderly couple and two
college kids passing out "No to Racist War" fliers. "So
what would you do to the terrorists?" the husband said. "Let
'em get away with it?"
"George
Bush is the biggest terrorist in the world!" shot back one
of the kids.
The second
kid added, "America kills more people than Osama bin Laden
every day!"
The husband
flushed and made a fist, but his wife grabbed his hand and led him
away.
Such is the
rhetoric of the antiwar movement which is now, as the civilian body
count rises in Afghanistan, gathering urgency in the corridors outside
college classrooms. In the coming weeks, many of us, like the elderly
man, will be hard-pressed to restrain our outrage at nose-pierced
dudes and tongue-studded dudettes blowing off their remedial homework
assignments to march down to public parks on weekends and hold forth
on the evils of global capitalism.
As we struggle
to abide them, we should bear in mind that these are the very same
students whose standardized reading and math scores have sunk lower
than Joey Buttofuoco's brow and whose minds are, therefore, as malleable
as fresh Play-Doh. Few of them, for instance, can locate Afghanistan,
Iraq, or Iran on a map; fewer still can define the Arabic word "Islam"
or name its two holiest cities; many, in fact, would be shocked
to learn that Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed didn't live at the same
time.
Still, the
students will have their reasons to rally against war.
The boys will
rally — though many of them secretly long to tool around in
fighter jets, putting to use the Nintendo skills they've accumulated
since potty-training — in order to show their mommies and daddies
how independent they've become . . . and also because rallying is
an inexpensive and intermittently effective way to score with college
girls without actually paying the cover charge at a club, buying
them a drink, and dosing it with Ecstacy.
The girls will
rally — though many of them secretly fantasize about a war-time
romance like Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale in Pearl Harbor
— in order to show their mommies and daddies how independent
they've become . . . and also because rallying is an inexpensive
and intermittently effective way to demonstrate their social commitment
and unwavering idealism to professors who've been regaling them
with tales from their own undergraduate protest days.
Which leads
us to the professors themselves — the field generals of the
antiwar movement. It's worth noting that few of them will come from
math and science departments. Rather, they'll come from the social
sciences and humanities — disciplines whose prominent players
have spent the last quarter century disparaging the very methods
of rational thought, deductive and inductive reasoning, as Eurocentric
hogwash. It's no coincidence that the three most influential thinkers
among social scientists and humanities professors over the last
quarter century have been Les Trois Stoogés of French
Philosophy, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault.
What the three have in common is their insistence that language
creates reality and their denial that facts exist independently
of political perspectives. This is a handy epistemology if you're
a superannuated Frenchman and you spent the early 1940's handing
Jews over to Nazis, or, for that matter, if you're a graying academic
and you spent the late 1960's cowering before snot-nosed sophomores
who demanded curriculum changes at your college.
This became,
in any event, the dominant epistemology of students who earned degrees
in the social sciences and humanities in the wake of the 1960's
— and it's they who've become the tenured radicals pulling
the puppet strings of campus antiwar movements. They will, rest
assured, hold many more "teach ins" — for they are
by now seasoned pros at polysyllabic rabble rousing. Yet they cannot
teach in any meaningful sense of the word since they cannot
think. They are incapable, for example, of thinking through
the basic if-then logic which binds together the denial that facts
exist to the denial of the Nazi Holocaust. Or the European slave
trade.
Or the World
Trade Center attack.
Indeed, if
there's one quality that defines the antiwar movement, from the
generals down to the foot soldiers, it's thoughtlessness.
Absent thought, in the literal sense, the movement is sustained
by gesture. By chanting. By ranting. By guitar-strumming and candle-waving.
The only thoughtful
response to such a movement is to roll your eyes and keep walking.
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