Bitter? - We've seen the
Bitter? - We've seen the symptoms:
- Anti-Bush protesters, marching in their thousands (or, lately, hundreds or dozens) complaining that the government and the "corporate media" are shutting them up. All x thousand/hundred/dozen of them.
- "anti-war" activists who've had to successivily fall back from position to position; from "Afghanistan will be a quagmire" to the current "We won the war, but we will lose the peace" and "the "liberation" [always with the sneer quotes] of Iraq wasn't worth the human or social cost", and all the many, many steps in between (anyone remember "War won't work, Inspections will"? Weren't those quaint, trifling days?), and laying the groundwork for the next fallback position
- The endless conspiracy-mongering - like yesterdays' bogus, specious attempt to debunk the celebrations in Baghdad, to the creating of a vast, Zionist conspiracy between the US and Israel, to promote Jewish hegemony in the Middle East
What are these? They are hallmarks of people who've taken some reverses in life, and the experince has made them bitter and recriminatory rather wiser.
Eliana Johnson and Jamie Kirchick, in an excellent article in Frontpage Magazine, explore how this paranoid bitterness is manifested at a "teach-in" at Yale:
Wrongfully assuming that the audience was filled with antiwar students, [History Professor Glenda] Gilmore found herself at a loss for words when her tenuous reasoning was accidentally exposed to critical questioning. It became clear that Gilmore was never in fact silenced. The opposite occurred; her views were exposed, disseminated, and legitimately criticized by those who disagreed with her. Coming from the insulated world of leftist academia, Gilmore assumed that criticism and denunciation of her vitriol was evidence of a conspiracy against her.
We're seeing this in the Twin Cities, too. On political discussion lists, criticism of leftist thought is being attacked - sometimes viciously - as "thuggishness" and "anti-free speech". As conservative talk host
Jason Lewis has been saying for years, for these people, freedom of speech is
not, apparently, for other people. It's the last refuge of the bully - in this case, the intellectual bully; to beat up one's opponent, and then cry "foul" when stood up to.
It goes on:
Rather than present well-developed or coherent arguments against the war, she filled her allotted time attempting (successfully) to elicit pity from her audience. It was a spectacle of self-aggrandizement.
Perhaps more than anything else, Yale’s anti-war “teach-in” shed light on the divide between the hawks and the doves that grows as American success in Iraq increases. While pro-war students have been vindicated by the liberation of Iraq and were rightfully ebullient on Wednesday, a common trope of the professors and their sycophantic followers in the student body was that a quick and easy military operation in Iraq should not be equated with a victory in the war.
"We could still lose the peace!", don't you know.
Here's the payoff:
Indeed, the conspiracy theories espoused by Gutas and Gilmore are a symptom of the hateful bitterness that characterizes the campus left in the face of American success. As Wednesdays’ panel demonstrated, vicious prevarication has become a substitute for honest argumentation. The jubilant celebrations in the streets of Baghdad, the crushing of Saddam’s Stalinist regime, and the kisses from Iraqis on American soldiers’ cheeks, undermine the words of Ivy League professors who purport to defend the interests of the people of Iraq from American military might.
Like most great academic theories (perforce of the left, since academia, especially in the social sciences, is so violently skewed that way), the theory doesn't often survive contact with the real world.
This is good news. We have a generation of college kids who, despite appearances at places like MacAlester, are much more conservative than their teachers. Deeply impacted by September 11 (as deeply as I was by the denouement of the Cold War, personally), they seem to be starting to reject the tropes of their elders. Perhaps we can look forward to a more enlightened, less insular, more genuinely diverse academy in 20 years.
Not a moment too soon.
Posted by Mitch at
April 11, 2003 10:31 AM
