Kumbaya Watch: Scheer Nonsense
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 24, 2001 3:05 p.m.

magine you were a mildly hysterical type, desperately worried about the muzzling of "dissent" and the triumph of "government propaganda" in the wake of the September Massacre. Imagine that you wanted to "congratulate" Bill Maher, Barbara Lee, Susan Sontag, Richard Gere (!), and the Berkeley City Council for their willingness to "demur" from pro-war sentiment. Then imagine that you were flailing around for a historical example to illustrate the current state of intellectual freedom in America. What would you come up with? The Red Scare of the 1920s? The McCarthy Era? The "Sexual McCarthyism" of the Clinton Era?

Or how about the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev?

If you selected Brezhnev's U.S.S.R., then Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times is the hysteriac for you. In his latest column, Scheer first hands out kudos to Gere, Sontag, and their compatriots, expressing shock that they have been called "wimps, traitors and worse" by people foolish enough to "blindly accept the actions taken in our name by our government." He goes on to admit that yes, terrorism "needs to be stopped, fast and efficiently." (A bold position, that.) But he worries that it may be "dangerous for a democratic populace weighing if and how to wage war to value unity above all else." As evidence of this imprudent rush to unity, he notes the fact that the New York Board of Education returned the Pledge of Allegiance to classrooms last week — and then, with a flourish, offers the following breathtaking analogy:

To understand the limits of government-sponsored "unity," we might ask the soldiers of the old Soviet Union. They marched with their pledges and anthems into the treacherous terrain of Afghanistan two decades ago, while at home the dissent that could have saved them from military and economic disaster was systematically squelched.

But of course. Richard Gere getting shouted down for making vapid comments is just like the Soviet Union shipping dissidents off to Siberia. And having high schoolers pledge allegiance to the American flag is just the same as indoctrinating them into the marvels of Marxist-Leninism.

Scheer doesn't really believe this, of course — or at least one assumes he doesn't, since no one (Alec Baldwin aside) could possibly be quite that dumb. But you can imagine how the analogy must have tickled him. Gee, he probably thought, we're fighting a war in Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union fought a war in Afghanistan, so I'll compare American censorship to the Russian police state! And then he ran with it, because there's nothing like the fantasy of intellectual martyrdom to give an out-of-touch columnist that special, Look-Ma-I'm-A-Rebel thrill.

Of course, the Soviet Union wasn't just a fantasy — it was terribly real, and so were the torments it inflicted on the Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs who ran afoul of its taste for censorship. And the fact that an insulated scribe like Robert Scheer could even dare to compare today's United States — where a few insulated celebrities and pseudo-intellectuals have been criticized, and nothing worse, for making exceedingly asinine remarks — to that soul-crushing nightmare society demonstrates an utter lack of proportion, common sense, historical awareness, and basic decency.

But hey, Scheer might shoot back, we're making kids say the Pledge of Allegiance again. And if that isn't a step closer to the gulag, then what is?