Dissonance from Without and Within
GRAY, PAUL
Writers & Writing Dissonance from Without and Within By Paul Gray In 1999 Jedediah Purdy's first book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today, created a media...
...Walt Kelly's famous reworking of Commodore Perry's announcement at the Battle of Lake Erie comes to mind: "We have met the enemy and he is us...
...But because he isn't afraid to state the obvious—or perhaps does not always know he is—Purdy can offer some helpful insights to those who have thought this problem through many times and can't figure out why so many people hate us...
...Levitas reminds us that the intent of Congress was hardly benign, and that the Act gave the Southern states legislative sanction for nearly 80 years of Jim Crow laws and lynchings...
...Irony has become our marker of worldliness and maturity...
...As he notes near the end: "There are people around the world who want to live in the United States and to see our freedom and prosperity in their countries, but who also—if their words and spontaneous emotions are any guide—imagine that they would be glad to see us destroyed...
...No beleaguered farmer ever got anything from Posse Comitatus except ludicrous advice that made everything worse, but some desperate people continued to seek desperate remedies...
...soil: the April 19,1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the loss of 168 lives...
...During the last century, the struggle has often been waged in the shadows and on the margins of American life...
...After spending the intervening three years at Yale Law School, Purdy, still well shy of 30, has produced another elaborately subtitled treatise: Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World (Knopf, 352 pp., $24.00...
...It is dispiriting to learn that longdiscredited "scientific" treatises on the inferiority of blacks are still circulating in smudged pamphlets, and that the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion is available not just in the Arab world but, in cribbed forms, among some nativist Americans...
...rather, it sprang from the homegrown variety manifested by the radical Right, which he has spent much of his adult life investigating...
...If anything, the poll numbers given could be viewed as promising...
...He disowns his own words...
...But of course U.S...
...At the same time, he insists the threat of such organizations can't be assessed through numbers alone...
...This observation hardly constitutes a stunning insight, especially after 9/11, but Purdy argues that rage against the U.S...
...The next hundred years are—like the previous century—a critical period...
...Purdy's conversations with people he bumps into on his travels—Muslims in Cairo, Hindus in Bombay, Christians in Indonesia, etc.—don't yield any comments that attentive newspaper readers will not have encountered many times before...
...Levitas' survey of the radical Right is by no means limited to one group...
...Farmer's Liberation Army (FLA...
...For instance, he tells us that despite its having no more than a couple of thousand at its peak, "the Minutemen made a lasting impact on the paramilitary Right through its noisy campaigns against gun control and its success popularizing the idea that the Second Amendment right to 'keep and bear arms' virtually compelled individual Americans to accumulate an arsenal to resist Communist and internationalist subversion...
...fringe groups that since 1986 he has frequently been called on as an expert courtroom witness in government trials involving them...
...They died to ensure 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'— again, not North America, not the Western Hemisphere, but the earth...
...The ironic individual practices a style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naïveté—of naive devotion, belief or hope...
...The years Levitas has spent studying the activities of racists, anti-Semites and their ilk have not left him with a warm feeling toward his subjects...
...So immense is Levitas' knowledge about a range of U.S...
...He subtly protests the inadequacy of the things he says, the gestures he makes, the acts he performs...
...What awaits us is not restricted to what we wish for, or even what we can imagine...
...And Purdy's tender years keep showing through in perky truisms that a more experienced hand might have left unuttered: "All opinions about the future of the Middle Kingdom reduce to two views: China will make it or it won't...
...Truth About Civil Turmoil (TACT...
...His argument sometimes rambles off any discernible tracks: a lengthy chapter called "Benetton Politics" seems to belong in a different book...
...He is so eager for us to perceive the same dangers he does that he appears to inflate them on occasion...
...Being America displays both Purdy's admirable earnestness and how very much about his topic he and the rest of us have yet to learn...
...history has evolved as a continuation of that dispute, with the Civil War being only the most obvious and violent example...
...The world,' he said—not the nation but the world—'can never forget' the deeds of the Union dead, because their cause was human freedom itself...
...The central figure in Levitas' book is someone who will be totally unfamiliar to most of his readers: William Potter Gale (1916-88...
...One need not share Gale's contemptible racial and religious hatreds to have a beef with the government...
...While Posse Comitatus never became a terribly efficient or well-structured organization on the Right, as did, say, the John Birch Society for a while, its overriding message—that disgruntled people are legally entitled to take the law into their own hands—was enormously attractive...
...No wonder a racist like Gale found it alluring...
...The cataclysms OF 9/11 also lend urgency to Daniel Levitas' The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right (St...
...Young Americans are not learning to converse in aristocratically accented Hindi so that they will have a chance at joining the global culture and financial elite, at the cost of becoming foreigners to their grandparents...
...He still believed in, well, common things...
...Levitas introduces us to a host of splinter groups with more-or-less militant missions amid a blizzard of initials and acronyms: The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA...
...Furthermore, Levitas' long absorption with the radical Right may have caused a certain loss of perspective...
...Johnson described when he compared, with high Tory misogyny, a woman's preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well...
...Purdy has interesting things to say, too, on another probable source of the resentment: Our self-evident conviction that our way of conducting political, commercial and personal affairs is not simply that—our way—but the goal of all the world's people...
...His facts are impressive enough on their own...
...is not limited to Islamic terrorists...
...He is particularly good at addressing the bafflement Americans often express when their nation's manifest good will and benevolence inspire contempt—or worse—from people living elsewhere...
...Martin's, 520 pp...
...It isn't clear from the text exactly when Purdy conceived and began working on this book, although the terrorist attacks of 9/11 figure prominently in it and lend a timely impetus to his attempt to have us view ourselves as others do...
...Levitas may bring more of his courtroom manner than is warranted to the presentation of this history...
...How can they accuse us, who want nothing but peace, freedom and prosperity for everyone, of imperial designs...
...Anyone who thinks we have grown beyond ignorant prejudices and irrational hatreds will find Levitas' book an unhappy awakening...
...Might Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, so stirring, so obviously true to generations of Americans, strike foreign ears as a tad chauvinistic...
...That outrage, Levitas wants it to be remembered, didnot originate from hatred abroad...
...It is an argument that those hopes are no less necessary for their fragility, and that permitting ourselves to neglect them is both reckless and impoverishing....' Good intentions do not guarantee a good book...
...Purdy's deadline evidently prevented him from addressing this current event, but it is easy to guess what he must think about it: "There is no guarantee of an American future...
...Since the term will be alien to most readers as well, Levitas provides some helpful annotations...
...To cite but one example: "Gale's theological musings had a limited audience, but his opposition to Federal civil rights laws resonated with a much larger segment of the American public...
...For 9/11 superseded what had been, until that day, the bloodiest act of terrorism ever committed on U.S...
...This ban on the use of Federal forces for domestic law enforcement has usually been seen as an important bulwark in defense of civil liberties...
...Against such arid sophistication, which Purdy found exemplified most pandemically in the TV sitcom Seinfeld, he offered For Common Things as "a plea for the value of declaring hopes that we know to be fragile...
...The energy he expends toward this objective, though, seems unnecessary...
...We do not," Purdy says, "receive visits from Argentine economists who inform us that we will have to cancel Social Security payments because our debt is unacceptably high...
...Purdy finds the same universalist assumptions in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, when the President "called the Civil War a test of the founders' gamble, an experiment in whether a nation 'conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal' could survive or would tear itself apart...
...We find it unremarkable that others want the personal liberty and material abundance we enjoy, but we don't realize that trying to obtain those good things involves humiliations we have never had to endure...
...but you are surprised to find it done at all...
...Now it has been done again...
...National Agriculture Press Association (NAPA), and so forth and so on...
...But ah, he cautions, our very success has made us an "invisible empire," a colonizer of hearts and desires...
...Its passage," Levitas writes, "was designed to prevent Federal marshals in the South from using Army troops to protect the lives and rights of blacks after the Civil War...
...that 20 per cent of respondents in Southern states said they favored the forced integration of public schools in 1968 seems close to miraculous...
...And the militia movement that emerged in the 1990s found its imagined legitimacy in the teachings of Posse Comitatus...
...The Terrorist Next Door constitutes a primer on a persistent strain in American political life that can be traced back to the Daniel Shays Rebellion and beyond...
...Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act...
...In 1966, only 48 per cent of whites approved of Federal efforts to promote school integration, and that number fell to 36 per cent in the next two years, and to just 20 per cent in the South...
...He doesn't fully make the case, in spite of the terrible example of Oklahoma City, that the militant Right poses a danger to America commensurate with the one broached by terrorists from abroad, but he does provide plenty of reasons why people should keep their eyes on these weirdos...
...How many of those who buy The Terrorist Next Door are likely to hate blacks and Jews and be looking for a good read to vindicate their feelings...
...By the inflection of his voice, the expression of his face and the motion of his body, he signals that he is aware of all the ways we may be thought silly or jejune, and that he might even think so himself...
...As a whole, though, Being America offers more valleys than peaks...
...Now, these figures demonstrate that school desegregation was a controversial topic during the 1960s, but they do not prove that the millions of Americans who disapproved of desegregation were fellow travelers of the radical Right...
...27.95), albeit not in the same way they inform Purdy's book...
...The author's plea for a touch of humility in America's dealings with the rest of the world seems apposite enough, particularly since, as of this writing, U.S...
...The authors of The Federalist Papers won their day, and the ensuing ratification of the Constitution ought to have ended the argument over the balance between individual liberties and the responsibilities of government...
...Levitas acknowledges that many far Right organizations routinely issue inflated claims of membership, and that in most cases no one, including law enforcement agencies, knows the actual figures...
...Very few points mBeing America haven't been made more forcefully or eloquently by other authors, and Purdy, the conscientious student, readily acknowledges his principal sources: Montaigne, Burke, Tocqueville, Adam Smith...
...His wariness becomes a mistrust of language itself...
...The sense that the American experiment is truly a universal one is of course rooted in the Enlightenment abstractions of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted the Rights of Man rather than the rights of those men currently living as British subjects in North America...
...Do the dizzying number of organizations signify an equally dizzying number of souls ready to do battle, armed or otherwise, with the U. S. government...
...A thoroughgoing bigot and anti-Semite (with Jewish ancestry), Gale was a sometime political candidate in California and, most pertinent to the author's purpose, was the person who formed a paramilitary group he named Posse Comitatus, after a forgotten law that has proven devilishly inspiring to a wide array of extreme groups...
...His method is to argue that fringe ideas on the Right actually echo, albeit screechingly, related ruminations within the American mainstream...
...military action against Saddam Hussein, intended to remake the government of Iraq closer to America's liking, seems foreordained...
...It is naïve to believe that the migratory icons of American modernity—constitutions, regular elections, free markets, shopping malls, MTV—will turn every place into a version of what we already are...
...The Terrorist Next Door is thus both a thorough history and an energetic prosecution of some very strange and often dangerous people...
...indeed, Levitas shows how Posse Comitatus ideas spread into the antitax movements of the 1970s and then into the protests over the agricultural crisis and farm foreclosures during the 1980s...
...Clearly, he loathes these people and wants his readers to do the same...
...but he also turned the notion of Posse Comitatus on its head...
...Purdy wants to find out why...
...America's incarnation dates back to 1878, when the Democratic majority in the U.S...
...While traveling—in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, China—he has talked to ordinary people who harbor simmering ambivalences about America and Americans...
...No one would deny the urgency of the question, yet many may find fault with the cogency and originality of the answers Purdy provides...
...Writers & Writing Dissonance from Without and Within By Paul Gray In 1999 Jedediah Purdy's first book, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today, created a media hubbub...
...Here was a fresh-faced, photogenic 24-year-old, largely home-schooled in rural West Virginia, who had gone on to the academic pinnacle at Harvard and survived four years of presumptive indoctrination in moral relativism and postmodern contingencies with his old-fashioned values intact...
...Prodigies are familiar enough in music, mathematics and chess, but are not appreciable in the area of moral philosophy...
...According to the Act," Levitas writes, "the military can be used in a civilian context (/"doing sois' expressly authorized by the Constitution or by an act of Congress.'" Gale ignored that little wrinkle and began preaching that ordinary citizens had the legal right and sacred duty to oppose any use of Federal force they found unwarranted: "Under Gale's definition, anyone could call out the Posse, not just the sheriff, and if government officials attempted to enforce 'unlawful' legislation the Posse could arrest and put them on trial with a 'citizens' jury.'" Gale formed this harebrained legal theory over some years and began publicizing it in 1971, although Levitas notes that another man, the flamboyant Henry Lamont "Mike" Beach, picked up Gale's ideas and was later often given credit in the press for having thought of them first...
...Some reviewers pounced with feral intent on Purdy's misattributed quotations and his apparent belief that the feckless, narcissistic characters on Seinfeld were offered as paragons rather than the butts of a long-running joke...
...The concept of posse comitatus (power of the county) originated in medieval British common law and had to do with a county sheriff's power to raise a body of citizens in the pursuit of felons...
...The author's tender age, though, won him widespread attention, some of it of the bemused variety that Dr...
...This may be an accurate and dispassionate assessment, yet it seems toward the end to have been written in hot blood...
...This book," he wrote, "is a response to an ironic time...
...We think we know what empire means," Purdy writes, "and we aren't it...
Vol. 86 • January 2003 • No. 1
