Scrapbook
Scrapbook Jesse Jackson Invites Himself to Afghanistan Like herpes simplex, Jesse Jackson never really goes away—he just lies dormant. Clearly, the present national crisis was too much for him to...
...President Bush, has, after all, warned that this will be a long war, fought on unconventional fronts...
...This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embar-rassing—a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked...
...We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee...
...Reuters, the English wire service, has barred its journalists from using the word "terrorist...
...This, you've probably guessed, is no ordinary mother...
...This, he claimed, was born of his previous relationship with the Taliban (who conduct public executions in their soccer stadium), which he said was characterized by "ecumenical respect...
...Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are...
...Rather an understatement...
...She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets...
...It is horrifying but not entirely surprising...
...Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her...
...How strange, I thought, even then...
...They were excited, very excited," she writes...
...But this is not one of them...
...So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted...
...The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war...
...An exaggeration...
...Chattering Asses, II Pretty soon, you may need a secret decoder ring to read the news...
...And we'll just have to hope they make their way to the proper recipient...
...My daughter] tells me I'm wrong—the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism...
...But I am heartened by something my 19-year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much...
...The Scrapbook recommends queuing up a John Philip Sousa CD for accompaniment: We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans...
...CNN, for its part, told the Wall Street Journal last week that it would not call the men responsible for the September 11 attacks "terrorists...
...officials such as Colin Powell (of whom Jackson once said "Very rich white people can trust him, they can trust him to drop bombs") have warned Jackson against conducting freelance diplomacy...
...Definitely not...
...Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be...
...Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us...
...No Growth Please, We're Democrats "We've got to make sure that these are temporary measures that boost the economy now but don't have long term effects," said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota last week...
...The good news, of course, is that young Miss Pollitt is so sensible...
...When some English adventurer in the subcontinent was told not to interfere with the longstanding local practice of suttee, or widow burning, he said, fine, but don't you then interfere with my nation's longstanding policy of hanging those who burn women alive...
...I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism...
...Nobody looked shocked or moved...
...But we don't really want to intrude any further on the mother-daughter relationship, so we'll simply suggest mailing the appropriate red, white, and blue care packages to Flags for Miss Pollitt, c/o Katha Pollitt, The Nation, 33 Irving Place, 8th floor, New York, New York 10003...
...Especially since we picked on the British press in last week's Scrapbook...
...Plus they're afraid for the safety of their employees and stringers in countries that have a rooting interest in, um, the terrorists...
...Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse...
...There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name...
...They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling—we hope—of Chinese communism, the second most murderous...
...A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming...
...she comments...
...Here's our favorite: David I? Barash, University of Washington: "If it is human nature to seek revenge, then it seems that an equally human nature motivated the perpetrators, who perceive themselves to be seeking revenge...
...Why Do They Hate America...
...With any luck, based on his past behavior, there will be little Jacksons roaming the countryside in just a few years, busting couplets, shaking people down for "donations" to Jackson's nonprofits, and generally haranguing the Taliban for not employing enough ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks...
...We're on the earnestness bandwagon ourselves, while always reserving the right to be ironic about Purdy...
...THE SCRAPBOOK, on the other hand, is a hanging judge and hereby convicts CNN and Reuters of cowardice unbecoming a news organization...
...we have seen it before...
...Additionally, he asserted that he "was surprised that I heard from them...
...In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans...
...How about a more appropriate sendoff: Strap him to the payload of an F-15, then bombs away over Kabul...
...Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours...
...I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes...
...Clearly, the present national crisis was too much for him to resist...
...We would be remiss if we failed to call your attention to a remarkable article defending America...
...Civilisation...
...Chattering Asses, III One bit of conventional wisdom gaining rapid acceptance in the wake of September 11 is that the era of irony and cynicism—the Seinfeldiza-tion of our media and entertainment culture—is now over...
...a bit convoluted, but worth the trouble...
...It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins...
...Barash has forgotten the Victorian rejoinder to such reasoning...
...The full 3,500 word essay by Bryan Appleyard, published under the above title in the September 23 London Sunday Times, can be found at the following address: www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/ pages/sti/2001/09/23/stiusausa01024.html...
...Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told...
...Chattering Asses, I Picture this: A 13-year-old girl in New York comes home from school and tells her mother maybe they should show solidarity with their friends, neighbors, and countrymen by putting up a flag...
...Then she went into a fashionable cafe...
...Then there were others, too numerous to list...
...After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes...
...But wait, says Jedediah Purdy, the dreadfully earnest Wunderkind of the goo-goo Left who made his name denouncing the age of irony in his 1999 book For Common Things...
...To paraphrase Orwell, only a columnist for the Nation could be so obtuse...
...We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions," the company huffs...
...We're guessing readers will agree with us that she shouldn't have to spend her own money on a flag...
...nothing has been judged by a court of law...
...So Jackson last week announced he had received an "invitation" from the Taliban to lead a "peace delegation" to Afghanistan...
...People should think," David Halber-stam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years...
...The most astonishing part of this story is that Katha Pollitt was so self-unaware, she actually built her column this week around this unflattering (to her) anecdote...
...I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its willful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves...
...Of course, Jackson, judicious fellow that he is, subsequently said that he "must weigh what this invitation means...
...Still, we wonder if there might not be a case for deploying the Jackson weapon...
...Strangely enough, last Tuesday—two days before Jackson unveiled the so-called "invitation"—he told Newsday, "We've been reaching out to some of the Taliban religious leaders" to start a "clergy-to-clergy dialogue...
...Purdy—though on the evidence above he is personally incapable of it— thinks that irony is now necessary to restrain the "dangerous excesses" and "extreme convictions" of a wounded America, lest we become too bellicose in responding to the excesses of the Osama bin Ladens of the world...
...America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered...
...If that doesn't have them heading for the Hindu Kush, nothing will...
...It's a spectacular piece of impassioned writing...
...I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits...
...Whose side are you really on...
...But when the chips are down all the most important things are right...
...Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for the Wall Street Journal from Beirut...
...Chattering Asses, Post-grad Division The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a symposium last week on the September 11 attack, which, to be fair, had many sensible contributors...
...If the United States, in its righteous anger, will 'make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them'—in the words of President Bush—then, in view of the fact that many people consider the United States to be a terrorist state, weren't the perpetrators following just such a policy in attacking innocent civilians—making no distinction between their view of the terrorists (our government, our country) and those who harbor them (ourselves...
...The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salem Zaeef, said, "We have not invited him, but he offered to mediate, and our leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, has accepted this offer...
...They would instead be identified as "alleged hijackers" because "CNN cannot convict anybody...
...They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars...
...America is free, very democratic and hugely successful...
...But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese...
...America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands...
...In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud—indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy...
...Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world...
...We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start...
...I just wish it was closer...
...Here are some excerpts, and we like them so much, we aren't even going to correct the British spelling...
...What better way to bloodlessly drive the Taliban to ruin than to send Jackson for a protracted visit...
...While Jackson has said he will go only if he thinks he can make "progress," The Scrapbook believes that with all the possible self-promotional opportunities, the question isn't if he'll go, but how...
...They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music...
...Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them...
...Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th...
...Not as surprised as the Taliban, it turns out, who claim they extended no such invitation—it was Jackson who invited himself...
...A source close to the Taliban, however, tells The Scrapbook, "Three nights ago, I spoke to the ambassador in Islamabad [Abdul Salem Zaeef], and he asked me who the hell Jesse Jackson was...
...They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam—the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter...
...In a textbook example of publicity-savvy jujitsu, Purdy told the New York Times last week that, after seeing 6,000 of its citizens vaporized, the country might actually benefit from a little more ironic detachment: "'In peaceful and prosperous times,' he said, irony is a way of 'keeping the passions in hibernation when there is not much for them to live on, but another kind of irony can also work to keep dangerous excesses of passion and self-righteousness and extreme conviction at bay.' The latter form of irony, he said, might be healthy as the country's mood becomes increasingly bellicose...
...The State Department has put Jackson on notice that he's on his own...
...Probably, I think, a bit like hell...
...The mother says no...
...So long term we want the economy to tank...
...The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi...
...But as Jackson has said, it doesn't really matter how the invitation came about, just that it was made...
...On September 11 the chips went down...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 4
