For The Children

Others have descended on Dennis Perrin's riff on Lileks - the Commish and Fraters lay the smack down, and the Professor has a good synopsis of other links.

Perrin says about Lileks:

Here, Lileks was aping many of his warblogger brethren:

Lileks? A "warblogger"?

What is a "warblogger" in Perrin's world? The pejoratives abound throughout the piece: they "darkened the already unattractive side of the American character, namely its jingoism", "the enlightened few who pelt dissenters with the debris of the Twin Towers", and, with supreme authority, "the warbloggers, the creation of whom is yet another al Qaeda-sponsored crime."

Ouch. Perrin says:

Lileks, in concert with the rest of the "warbloggers", "reduces all lefties into an easily digestible stereotype, as if a starry-eyed teen PETA activist is the same as University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole (who writes an informative, increasingly popular blog of his own (www.juancole.com); and as if Rick the People's Poet from the old BBC sitcom The Young Ones represented the web-savvy anarchists at Infoshop.org.

Never mind that Cole's blog is routinely lit up for its own preening, academic sense of superiority (I suppose to Dennis Perrin, that's better than "jingoism"), and that Infoshop makes Rik Mayall's "Rick" look fairly balanced - Perrin says Lileks reduces the left to a stereotype?

Perrin notes:

Lileks, as mentioned earlier, also devotes a good portion of his Bleats to daughter Gnat, whose every move is recorded for web posterity, and through whom Lileks filters much of this increasingly cruel world. This type of writing has its place, and as a father I would never question Lileks's love for his child. Conversely, I would never go on and on about my kids when writing about imperial war and political corruption. But that's me. Lileks has a different take and agenda.

As if blogging about one's kids and the war we are in are mutually exclusive.

Perrin seems to object to Lileks acting like a "warblogger" and beating "dissenters" over the heads with pieces of the rubble from the World Trade Center on the one hand, and writing about his daughter on the other. He notes that he has two kids himself, and seems to imply that the two are best kept apart.

I have two kids, too. They're 10 and 12, so they're not as cute as Gnat anymore, but I'm still pretty attached to them. I suspect Perrin would call me a "Warblogger", too - and he'd probably be equally flummoxed by the way I juxtapose my kids and my firm belief in the War on Terror so far.

But there's no way to separate the two. And it involves a different pile of rubble altogether.

Perrin wraps himself in the mantel of New York. I grew up in North Dakota, like Lileks. And a few miles from where I grew up - between my Jamestown and Lileks' Fargo, in fact - the fields were liberally seeded with Minuteman III missile silos. I grew up with a constant, keen-yet-constantly-gnawing sense that everything I knew in this world could be erased on thirty minutes' notice if anyone in Washington or Moscow, or Beijing or Paris or New Delhi, for that matter, screwed up badly enough. I could stand at the shore of my little town and look across the sea of dirt and alfalfa and imagine fireballs blooming in the near distance long before "The Day After". And when I started confronting the notion of having kids and raising a family, my most fervent wish, prayer, and I thought forlorn hope was that my kids wouldn't ever have to grow up with that hanging over their heads.

In 1991 - as my daughter came into the world - it came true. Imperfectly so, but true enough for those of us who had driven by the missile silos and radar pyramids and seen the B-52s flaring out over the sugar beets.

The rubble that affected me first was seeing pictures of the wreckage of the Minuteman III silo nearest my hometown, as it was demolished. It wasn't needed any more. Mission accomplished. I held my kids a little closer that night, and thanked God for what I'd seen, and for what they'd never have to.

And while none of us who knew better really believed that all of our worries ended in the other other rubble - the Berlin Wall - still, it was a moment of some of the most profound hope and relief I've ever experienced in my life. I suppose if you never sensed the existence of the threat all that keenly in the first place (and I'll guess Perrin didn't), it's hard to explain. And yes, 9/11 yanked what little that gave us away.

So for me, reading Lileks' 9/11 bleat is, in its own way, more powerful than almost any of the mainstream journalism of the day:

Again, and again, and again: the Towers thundering down. Gnat happily playing with her books.

News reports dancing in the streets on West Bank. Saw TV reports of some little boys whooping it up. Note to self: do not teach daughter to exult when people die

10: 12 The World Trade Center is not America. Oh, in a way it is - a marvel of engineering, a hub of wealth creation, designed by a man of Japanese ancestry, constructed by hand by citizens whose people came from Europe, Asia, Africa. Men who prayed to one God, to many, to none. All colors and creeds constructed that building; like any skyscraper in any American city, the World Trade Center was the legend of Babel refuted in stone and glass...Went to the polling place with Gnat in the stroller, under the small American flag stuck in the door frame at the school. Lots of people voting - the lady who took my information said they had unusually heavy turnout for a mere city primary. ?I think voting means something more today,? I said. ?I think you?re right,? she said. I wore, for the first time, that little I VOTED sticker."

I've read the books, seen the documentaries, heard the friends and relatives who were in Manhattan that day. And very few documents of that day bring it back to me the way Lileks' piece does - because I also still see the day through my kids' eyes, and through wondering about the world they perceive as they grow up.

And I want to ask the Dennis Perrins of the world - how can one not recoil in horror at the world that "Bun" and "Zam" Berg, and Gnat Lileks and, presumably, Sarah Jane and Wellstone Perrin are just becoming aware of? How can one not tie it into your expression about how that world is developing?

For some of us - Dennis Perrin, I'm guessing, and stop me if I'm wrong - the answer is to submerge that horror in pointillistic ideology ("Of all the Bleats I've read, I've yet to come across a hard critique of Israeli violence") and, presumably, a comfortingly compartmented fantasy view of the world (Perrin echoes the left's conceit that this is all just a big criminal case: "I supported the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and continue to support, in concert with other countries, the dismantling of the al Qaeda network", he says, as if shipping every Al Quaeda member to The Hague would end Islamofascist terror).

And for some of us, the response is the same one we get when we find the house on fire: If we can't grab a fire extinguisher, at least we root for the firemen.

And while we root for the fireman, pardon us if we get a little impatient with those who say we deserved the fire anyway. As Perrin says:

But Lileks's conceit, which is widespread in the warblog domain, is that this particular moment is in fact unique.

In our lifetimes and those of our children, in this place, it is.

That because al Qaeda desires to impose a 7th-century theocracy on others means they have the power to do it to us (Lileks likes playing the It's Their Terms or Ours card, as if we're down to house-to-house fighting).

We are. In Israel. Think globally, act locally, as they say.

Not that it's irrelevant - the choice between a seventh-century theocracy and dying in a cloud of smuggled Sarin gas is a fairly moot one, isn't it?

That Saddam Hussein was a real and tangible threat to our very existence, or might've been down the road, or whenever.

"Or whatever". Sheesh.

In any case, we are presumably "safer" now that we're bogged down in Iraq.

Two paragraphs above, he says "Lileks' conceit...is that this moment is unique", riffing him and all warbloggers for not incorporating all of history into every posting (or not incorporating it Perrin's way, anyway). But Perrin considers the war in Iraq in a three-month-long slice of context - one that was out of date last summer, to boot!

And so on. To Lileks, it seems that 9/11 exists outside of history (except for World War II, images of which have adorned many a Lileks rant). Therefore those who try to view subsequent events differently are guilty of either liberal naivete or abject anti-Americanism.

Let's stick with the naivete. It's bad enough in these times.

UPDATE: The Infinite Monkeys explain Lileks as well as anyone.

Posted by Mitch at January 15, 2004 02:41 AM