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 ventually,
perhaps, Katha Pollitt will get around to writing a constructive
essay about the shape of the post 9/11 world. Maybe. For now, though,
she's content to sit on the sidelines, taking potshots at just about
everyone — and her
latest column is an absolute gem, five sneering paragraphs without
a single original thought to be found.
First, Ms.
Pollitt takes to task poor Robert Putnam, for having the temerity
to suggest that Americans should "come together in 'civic community;'
as they did during World War II." Putnam, she complains, actually
writes approvingly (the idea!) of "victory gardens in nearly
everyone's backyard, the Boy Scouts at filling stations collecting
floor mats for scrap rubber, the affordable war bonds, the practice
of giving rides to hitchhiking soldiers and war workers." Fortunately,
Pollitt can see right through his nostalgia, to the crypto-fascism
lurking beneath. "Those would be certified heterosexual, Supreme-Being-believing
scouts, I suppose," she writes, "and certified harmless
and chivalrous hitchhiking GIs, too — not some weirdo in uniform
who cuts you to bits on a dark road."
It's difficult
to know what to make of such an irrelevant and bilious aside —
but then, for Ms. Pollitt, it's the perpetually snarky attitude
that counts, not the actual content of her commentary. And no sooner
has she blindsided the reader with one broadside then she is on
to another, blasting American liberals for "defending the moral
legitimacy of bombing Afghanistan and damning Noam Chomsky to hell"
while ignoring "the real-world consequences of this war."
These include, apparently, "five and a half million Afghans
starving .... thousands of new Taliban fans and recruits for anti-American
suicide missions ... (and) a protracted war with a determined, hardy
foe that draws in Central Asia, enrages the Muslim masses and destabilizes
Pakistan or Indonesia or another country to be named later."
After this
little laundry list of worst-case scenarios, the time might seem
ripe for a segue into Ms. Pollitt telling us, finally, just what
America's response to September 11 should be. But no such
luck — she has bigger fish to fry. For one thing, there is
the "gendered element" in this conflict, defined by the
"absence of female bylines in op-eds about the war," the
booing of Hillary Clinton at Madison Square Garden (an affront to
women everywhere!), and "the slavish eagerness of the media
to promote the callow and inadequate Dubya as a strong leader whose
'cockiness' (interesting word) and swagger are just what Americans
need in the hour of crisis." (Just who has praised George W.
Bush's "cockiness" is never revealed — but hey, it
makes good copy.)
And then Pollitt
produces this pearl: "9/11 and its sequelae have definitely
rehabilitated such traditional masculine values as physical courage,
upper-body strength, toughness, resolve. The WTC attack is men vs.
men — firefighters v. fanatics. (It would seem positively ungrateful
to ask why, in a city half black and brown, the "heroes"
were still mostly white, and, for that matter, still mostly male.)"
Why yes, Ms.
Pollitt, it would be positively ungrateful. As would putting
heroes in quotation marks, one would think. But then, presumably
Katha Pollitt can see right through "heroism," just like
she can see through everything else.
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