f the US population evidently disagree with Beard’s assessment. But of course we know how spurious this ‘fact’ is. As Jameson tells us, the people ‘are united by the fear of saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media consensus’.
Fear, one wonders, of what? Has Jameson ever been silenced for his views? Beard, in any case, goes on to complain about our ‘glib definitions of “terrorism”’ and our ‘refusal to listen to what the “terrorists” have to say’. ‘There are,’ she continues, ‘very few people on the planet who devise carnage for the sheer hell of it.’
Well, I suppose it depends on what one means by ‘the sheer hell of it’. By analogy to terrorism, perhaps we should not have bothered with definitions of Nazism or Fascism, but should have listened to what Hitler and his friends had to say. I seem to recall that Neville Chamberlain tried just that; he even had ‘a piece of paper from Herr Hitler’. But as Churchill knew, ‘an appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile thinking it will eat him last.’ As it turned out, after all that ‘listening’ at Berchtesgaden, there were quite a few people on the planet who were quite happy to devise carnage ‘for the sheer hell of it’, taking that phrase quite literally. Hell is, in any case, what transpired.
It is true that the US has committed some atrocities in the Middle East and that, say, Clinton’s bombing of the wrong target – a beautiful new hospital – in the Sudan was a major crime. Does it therefore follow that ‘the US had it coming’? And which of us in the US are included?
I have been a subscriber to LRB since the journal’s inception some twenty-five years ago. But I hereby cancel my subscription and shall urge my Stanford students and colleagues to boycott the journal. Let me end, however, on an upbeat note that speaks to Beard’s ‘of course’. The man who takes care of our garden in Pacific Palisades, Ruben Vargas, was here the other day. A Latino who came to California from Mexico not all that long ago, Vargas has a daughter who is a freshman at UCLA. Some of us like to think that such upward mobility is what makes the US unique. I asked Ruben what he thought of the attack. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least now we’re all in it together.’ I responded: ‘But Ruben, many of my friends think it’s all America’s fault.’ He smiled and said: ‘Excuse me, Marjorie’ – yes, in California, one has only a first name – ‘but isn’t that a minuscule part of the population?’ Of course!
Marjorie Perloff
Los Angeles
Leave a Reply