All We Are Saying, Etc.
Chanting, ranting, guitar-strumming, & candle-waving.

By Mark Goldblatt, a writer in New York. His novel, Africa Speaks, is due out in February.
Novemeber 1, 2001 8:50 a.m.

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.