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spite of everything, the Village Voice stays true to form,
serving up a cornucopia of anti-American inanities. Here,
for instance, is Richard Goldstein, complaining about what we've
lost in our "rush to unity": "Suddenly it seems like
an act of impiety to point out that, in the phalanx of police and
firefighters surrounding Giuliani on Saturday Night Live,
there was hardly a black face to be seen. Or that, in the spectrum
of opinion following this awful event, women were barely heard from,
and so we were deprived of their perspective on the crisis ... If
women were fully included in the national dialogue, it wouldn't
be such a monologue. We might be able to process our feelings without
sedating the culture." Yep, that's been the trademark of post-September
11 America: the silencing of female voices, the muzzling of Maureen
Dowd, the disappearance of Oprah, the quiescence of Anna Quindlen.
Well, maybe not — but Kumbaya Watch is still holding out hope.
Worse, though,
than the supposed erasure of the feminine voice, are the attacks
on intellectuals (well, specifically Susan Sontag) who dare to offer
"voices of dissent." Warns Goldstein, "By demonizing
intellectuals who question common values, we dismiss their ability
to make us see beyond our reflexes. In the current situation, that
could be a deadly error." But fear not, America, because Goldstein
himself is girding up for the good fight. "Back when I was
dodging tear gas thrown by the satraps of the Greatest Generation,"
he writes, "my mantra was 'Question authority!' That old '60s
nostrum is even more necessary now. It's the essence of patriotism."
Or, some might say, the essence of self-indulgent nostalgia for
a misspent youth. But don't tell that to Richard Goldstein —
he's already breaking out the Pete Seeger and heading back to the
barricades.
Still, even
Goldstein's hazy trip down memory lane is more bearable than these
pearls of wisdom from Alice Walker, delivered in the Voice's
forum
for "novelists and essayists." "In a war on Afghanistan,"
Walker muses, "Osama bin Laden will either be left alive, while
thousands of impoverished, frightened people are bombed into oblivion
around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he
seems quite prepared. But what would happen to his cool armor if
he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done?
Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand
the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe
the only punishment that works is love."
Got that? Now
read it again. And try to decide whether to laugh or cry.
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