Remora


Terry Eagleton begins his review of Michael Moore's book -- the one about White Men, or that has White Men in the title, or something like that -- with a few choice kicks at the US of A. Now, LI enjoys kicking Uncle Sam ourselves. It is a pity that Eagelton's kicks are so lackluster and lacking, beginning with a silly exaggeration, going on to make a valid point about Saddam Hussein (although the point should be qualified, since France and the Soviet Union were Hussein's main arms suppliers), but damning it with the lukewarm phrase, "backing" (instead of specifying the real wickedness of US policy -- namely, tilt towards Iraq during the first phase of the war, supplying the country with a four hundred million dollar loan and taking it off the blacklist of terrorist states and all that jazz, and then tilting towards Iran when it appeared Iraq had reconciled with the evil empire, as this Z Mag article documents). Finally, and most pathetically, Eagelton a leftist in editorial heat, decides to ecrasez l'infame that is oppressing high school students everywhere by making them, shockingly, change their politically charged t shirts for more neutral gear. Is this swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat, or what? In his lather at such nazi like tactics, he overlooks the imprisonment without cause or trial of some 3,000 persons of middle eastern origin. This, however, is sadly typical of the left in high dudgeon. There should be courses taught, somewhere, in how to get in high dudgeon without making a fool of yourself.


It is a pity that the Land of the Free lacks a free press and media. CBS and the Wall Street Journal are not in the business of reminding their customers that Osama bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, or that the USA once backed Saddam Hussein in a war which left one million Muslims dead.They are not given to trumpeting the truth that the US is a democracy with a fraudulently elected president, or that it turned a blind eye to Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor while pummelling Iraq for moving non-genocidally into Kuwait. It is not every evening that Fox TV, in denouncing Iraqi weapons of mass slaughter, castigates in the same breath the nuclear weaponry of an increasingly state-terrorist Israel.Since September 11th, political dissent in the USA has become not only muted but positively perilous. Radical academics have been threatened with dismissal for sounding less than gung-ho about the Afghanistan adventure, while a schoolgirl who sported a T-shirt reading "Neither Bush nor Bin Laden" was ejected from her school for fear of contaminating her fellows.

It is this kind of shopping list that exasperates LI. When Marx thundered against Louis Napoleon, he did not consider Louis' oppression of lycee couture. He had a grasp of the macro features of oppression, and was able to convey them. Eagleton, on the other hand, whines like a ponce in the hands of the cops. Is it any wonder the left is becoming a sideshow cult?

We can only hope some of those radical academics are dismissed, thereby taking their anger to the street, instead of distributing it, over cheese on crackers, at the English faculty party.