The Crybaby Left

...He wouldn't know, for no one would tell him...

...Dissent" of the kind heard from the left comes not from the ranks of those active in politics, but from the literate fringe—the professors, the pundits, the critics, the "artists"—not people who deal with the world and with power, but who push words around in their heads...

...Outside, in the great world, the Terror raged on...

...Patriotism threatens free speech with death," said novelist Barbara Kingsolver, who then was invited to elaborate on her views—that "the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia," and many more evils—in some of the biggest newspapers in the country, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, where she complained at great length of oppression...

...The left has not been suppressed, just overwhelmed, by a vast swell of common-sense public opinion...

...other students who had cheered the attacks was threatened with discipline...

...and were said as automatically and to as little effect...

...At Florida Gulf Coast University, the dean of library services ordered employees to remove stickers reading "Proud to be an American," an order later revoked by the university's president...

...To these people, angry letters pouring in to a "dissident" writer are an assault upon free expression...

...Jennie Traschen, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, told a town meeting (on September 10) that the American flag is "a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression...

...For the hard left, however, disliking the country is the main point...

...Exhibit A in the tale of this great reign of terror is Richard A. Berthold, professor of history at the University of New Mexico, who, while the Pentagon still was on fire, told his class, "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon would have my vote...

...The hard left asserts that this country deserves to be hated...

...Roy, the most anti-American, got a full-page glamour shot in color...

...It seems they are being suppressed, by a reign of terror...

...Meanwhile, Jensen has his job, Sontag has her clique of devoted admirers, and dissent, such as it is, does roll on...

...In their eyes, Robert Jensen suffers a "public humiliation" when his university's president disputes his ideas...

...Doesn't everyone think the armed forces are vile...

...At the State College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, a department head took down a flag hung up by a secretary in honor of her late friend Todd Beamer, one of the passengers who helped force down Flight 93...

...In a sane world, Berthold would make his apology, have it accepted—along with a nice check to the firefighters of Arlington County and the families of the victims of the crash at the Pentagon—and go back to his classroom a much wiser person...

...I thought we were a rowdy, rambunctious, quarrelsome democracy," Sontag said...

...The students met anyhow, and had their pamphlets vandalized by radical dissidents...

...Kingsolver said the flag stood for oppression and censorship...

...Such is the cost of dissent in flag-waving America...

...Two journalists on small papers lost their jobs since September 11 for tastelessly mocking the president...

...But this is debate, and she does not like it, as people are rambunctiously angry with her...

...Having benefited for thirty years from the double standard that says that feminists, gays, and ethnic minorities must not be insulted, but that Catholics and veterans should be attacked (and must pay for the privilege via NEA grants to spurious artists), it is finding out that more conventional people also have feelings, and scream loudly when these are hurt...

...Hence the support for the war and the country is really something quite different: the informed response of a free people to a great threat and great wrong...

...At the University of Massachusetts, dissident students received a permit to hold an antiwar rally...

...The flag-wavers had broken the unwritten rule...

...At Central Michigan University, administrators told students to remove posters of eagles and flags from their dorm, as being "offensive" to others...

...Days later, other students requested permission to rally in the same place, this time supporting the war and the government...

...Don't all the best people agree...

...How was he to know that his bad nervous joke—for he quickly realized how ghastly it sounded—was not funny to everyone, and especially not on that morning...

...Sontag compared Congress to a Soviet parliament...

...Tsk tsk...

...BY NOEMIE EMERY More than two months after the terrorist attacks that took the lives of 4,000 people, and ripped up the lives of ten times that number, leftists in this country have found victims to cry for: themselves...

...Some people think otherwise...

...In the past, debates were about policy, about what best served the national interest...

...Bill Maher's TV show lost two sponsors after he tastelessly mocked the dead in the towers...

...But according to FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonpartisan group that fields complaints from all comers—for every case like Berthold's, of someone in trouble for mocking the war or the country, there are ten other cases on campuses of students or teachers who have been threatened or suspended or received a reprimand for supporting the country and the war...

...Now, his case is undergoing review by university officers, and he may be suspended...

...In the great world outside of the campus, too, a price has been paid for free speech...

...Who thought the rules the leftists wrote could hurt them...

...Such is the body count, in mainstream America...

...When you live in your head, it is possible to make up an ideal world, and call your country evil when it fails to achieve this perfection...

...The answer is, they live with it, as generations of conservatives have done...

...At Lehigh, a vice provost removed a flag from the campus bus (and later apologized...

...And who thought, too, that pious dissenters from the national mainstream could find themselves faced with dissenters from their leftist pieties...

...Jensen has tenure, but worries greatly about the "chilling effect" upon less lucky people...

...And common sense is something the hard left has lacked...

...He was moved for some time off campus in concern for his safety...

...She was then featured, along with Sontag and Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, who had said that Bush and bin Laden were moral equivalents, in Newsweek, where the three were played up as brave dissident heroines...

...Norman Thomas, Charles Lindbergh, and Joseph IP Kennedy greatly misjudged the Most Americans love their country while disliking certain things in it, and work hard to correct what they see as its flaws...

...and Ann Coulter, a conservative firebrand, was dismissed as contributing editor to National Review online for tastelessly urging the killing of Muslims...

...It is also possible to think you can wish away war...

...It seems now that it was the bad luck of poor Richard Berthold to have lived much too long in a setting where lighthearted jests about blowing up the Pentagon were as common as "Good morning, how are you...

...How were leftists to know that patriots would suddenly decide to do what activists have been doing for ages, and cry out when offended...

...Mysteriously, this does not sell well to the American people, who are aware of the faults of their country, but who know that the balance— especially when compared with other real-life countries and cultures—is nowhere as grim as all that...

...threat of the Axis, but their concern for the nation was never in question...

...And nary a censor in sight...

...Not only do these people live in their heads, but they tend to live among like-minded people, where their thoughts are not tested by argument...

...At San Diego University, a student who argued with Noemie Emery is a contributing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Most Americans—left, right, and center—love their country while disliking certain things in it, and work hard to correct what they see as its flaws...

...What he had said about suicide bombings was, "I want to see the Arab world stand up and say, 'This is wrong.'" There is Charles H. Fairbanks, fired (and rehired, under media pressure) from his post at Johns Hopkins's School of Advanced International Studies, for remarks considered "hurtful" by his Muslim students in the course of a post-strike debate...

...In the context, of course, this did not seem too funny, and students, legislators, and community leaders soon demanded his job, or his head...

...even, and frequently, making things up...

...Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic attended a meeting of MIT activists, and found them mainly afraid of their country...

...Meanwhile, on the campus—the one place in the country where speaking your mind really can get you in serious trouble—the tumbrels roll on...

...Actually, they are free expression...

...Today, the debate is about whether the country itself is worth saving, a quantum difference...

...But it turns out we have increasingly become incredibly conformist, and very afraid of debate...

...In discussing "dissent," it might help us to realize just what the present crop of leftist "dissenters" are against...

...The question," he asked a reporter, "is, how do students and junior faculty respond to such a public humiliation...

...One reason the left feels a little unsettled is that it is being held now, for the first time ever, to the standard it set...

...This is their main goal, and a work of devotion...

...But most people realize that force—which freed the American colonies, saved the Union, ended slavery, put Auschwitz out of business and destroyed the regime that created it—is quite often justified, and has accomplished a great deal...

...Another victim was one Robert Jensen, professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, who said in an op-ed that the United States was a terrorist nation that had more or less earned what it got...

...In 1941, few Americans thought that their country had Pearl Harbor coming...

...No action was taken to punish the vandals...

...This left defines itself in opposition to country and culture, and works back from there to find reasons for opposing it...

...There is Kenneth Hearlson, professor of political science at Orange Coast College in California, suspended at once and without a hearing when he complained about Muslims' silence in the face of attacks upon Christians and Jews...

...In response, he was called "a fountain of undiluted foolishness" by the university president, and received much angry mail...

...In the New York Observer, liberal columnist Molly Haskell noted the tendency of some of her friends to switch the subject from mass murder to American guilt...

...Susan Sontag, whose short piece in the New Yorker dripped contempt for this country, was "being vilified everywhere," the Nation's Katha Pollitt complained...

...Permission was granted, then quickly revoked...

...Threats are abhorrent, and words should not be answered by violence...

...And so it is hard to tell thought from posturing, and it is hard to tell what words mean...

...No wonder it's not catching on...

...What has not caught on either is the left's parallel theory: that armed force solves nothing, and always is wrong...

...Did she mean anything by this, or was it just patter that thoughtlessly rolled off her tongue...

...His misfortune is that he does not live in a sane world, but in one set up by the left for its uses, where an unfounded complaint can get someone fired, and "insensitivity" charges can end a career...

...By contrast, after September 11, there was no shortage of precious opinion denouncing America as a fountain of terror, and the flag as a blood-crusted travesty...