Kumbaya Watch: All We Need Is Love
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 4, 2001 3:00 p.m.

n 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.