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 hose in the media
seemed startled to see Richard Gere and Senator Clinton roundly
booed at a recent benefit concert for the victims of September 11.
Gere clearly earned his opprobrium, by smugly lecturing the audience
— among them relatives and close friends of the dead —
about the immorality of their desire to punish the murderers. Mrs.
Clinton may have been hissed because the politics of her husband's
administration projected national weakness and timidity, which prompted
these attacks. Or perhaps concertgoers remembered some of her hare-brained
pronouncements about her own purported victimhood during the health-care
debate, when she was bothered by angry callers. Or maybe New Yorkers
in general were just fed up with her past coziness with Palestinian
leaders.
Or was it that
the crowd believed that Gere and Clinton live in a different world
from their own?
There is a
growing class division in this country over the war. Of course,
90 percent of us, of all classes, at least for now profess support
for strong military action. Yet at least a tenth of the country
— a very influential tenth in the media, the university, politics,
foundations, churches, and the arts — is adamantly and vocally
at odds with most Americans. Why is this so?
It is often
not a divide between Democrats and Republicans. Nor does the abyss
always separate the wealthy from the poor. Most strikingly, the
fault line pits a utopian cultural elite against the working middle
class. On campuses, especially public universities such as the California
State University system, one feels the tension constantly. The tenured,
well educated, and relatively affluent among the faculty are adamantly
against the military response in Afghanistan. Yet the students —
mostly children of the working-class of every conceivable ethnic
background — almost uniformly support our troops.
Similarly,
I watch the well-heeled upper echelon on television chastising our
government and then see my twin brother — with decrepit pickup
truck, fighting the lowest agricultural prices since the Great Depression,
losing an ancestral small farm to the bank — proudly driving
in and out with a tattered flag flying from his truck antenna. Recent
emigrants in Selma, my hometown — which is now nearly 85 percent
Mexican-American — have plastered fresh American decals over
faded Mexican flags. Yet when I come to work, professors, who have
done far better in America, suggest that our classes should now
read Edward Said to "understand" the crisis "in its
proper prospective." Those who are not thriving in America
seem incensed by attacks on their country, while the beneficiaries
of this wonderful system of freedom and capitalism are cranky —
like angry puppies who gnaw and chew at their mother's ample teats.
The usual explanations
about the sociology of dissent do not quite make sense any more.
So far, those who are fighting in Afghanistan — mostly highly
trained pilots and special-forces operatives — are not from
among the unwashed poor. The affluent Left, then, is not opposed
to action because the less-privileged are dying in droves. Is it
because the better educated are more sensitive to world opinion?
To the nuances of Islam? To the "Other" in Afghanistan,
who are not male WASPs? To the vagaries of the European press? Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Rather, I think fashionable anti-Americanism and pacifism have now
become completely aristocratic pursuits, the dividends of limited
experience with the muscular classes and the indulgence such studied
distance breeds. Our pampered critics may be as clever as Odysseus,
but they have lost his nerve, strength, and sense of morality. And
so they have neither the ability nor desire to ram a hot stake into
the eye of the savage Cyclops to save their comrades.
In contrast,
those who toil with their hands for a living, who become unemployed
frequently and work two jobs, who take out loans for their kids
to go to college at public universities, and who do real things
like grow food, put out fires, and arrest felons, have a very practical
view of human kind — not all that different from the pessimistic
assessment of the old hard-as-nails veteran Thucydides himself.
Because they see brutality daily, understand how hard it is to survive
and raise a family in the arena of national competition, and know
too well what man is capable of at his rawest, they do not in their
own lives enjoy the luxury of seeing awful people as "ignorant"
in the abstract, rather than evil in the concrete.
If a neighbor
steals communal irrigation water, the farmer knows his grapes will
not come to harvest until he stops the miscreant himself. The tile-setter
calibrates the purchase of his kid's books by how many tiles he
sets on his arthritic knees, the roofer by how many shingles his
ruined back can withstand, the carpenter by how many hours of nailing
a week he can scrounge up, the realtor by how well he hustles to
sell houses. Men and women such as these — the ancestors of
the mesoi who founded the Greek city-state — tell the
uncouth at movie theaters to "shut up," and square off
against bullies at Little League parks, so the rest of us can enjoy
the movie or game in peace.
Not so with
the elite media, the professorate, and many in education and the
arts. They rarely work with their hands or meet those who do. Arguments,
if settled at all, are settled by committee and consultation —
not fisticuffs and two-by-fours — or maybe by corporate pink
slips, with orders to clear out the desk in two hours. Insults among
our elite critics invite sarcasm and irony, never a knuckle sandwich.
For many, there is the lifetime employment of tenure, and summers
out of the classroom. Quite simply, in America, in this its greatest
age of freedom and affluence, we have created an entire leisured
class who were not always born into great wealth, but who nevertheless
have obtained an easy sinecure without worry and danger. They have
completely lost sight of the fireworks when good and evil enter
the realm of muscle and sinew.
Our new smug
aristocrats are convinced that the Taliban and bin Laden are akin
to an angry news producer, a supercilious dean, or perhaps a high
school vice-principal run amok — pushy types who can be reasoned
with or flattered, or, barring that, paid off, out-argued, petitioned,
or ignored. Theirs is the arrogance of the Enlightenment, fueled
by the ease of American materialism, which alike suggest that their
nation is too good, too sophisticated, too wealthy, and too modern
ever to stoop to fight in the gutter with 13th-century terrorists
over a mere 6,000 dead.
Cannot the
hateful gaze of fascists in the Middle East — like those of
the crazed road-warriors on the freeway, or wild-eyed thugs on the
train home — be simply avoided? Or reported to the authorities?
Or — in extremis — reasoned with in polite give-and-take?
Would a man or woman with ample free time, a title, and a nice car
and house — America's critics circa 2001 — risk all that
to tangle with a psychopath who has nothing to lose? And over what?
An insult? A little money? Or perhaps your life?
The firemen
and policemen in the audience know how to deal with bin Laden because
they have seen something like him everyday, and protect those who
have not from his ilk. They suspect that Richard Gere and Senator
Clinton not only know little about real evil — much less how
to deal with it — but most certainly, in safety, will sometimes
scoff at those who do.
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