LOOK! STRAW MAN ON FIRE! [by Michael Tomasky]
Rosenbaum went to an anti-war rally in Central Park a couple Saturdays ago and discovered, mirabile dictu, that a lot of the anti-American palaver he heard there was insipid, reflexive, and, worst of all, guilty of a grotesque tendency to see only America's evils and not those of al Qaida or Saddam or Joseph Stalin. So Ron says goodbye to all that, evoking the title of a famous 1929 memoir by Robert Graves upon leaving his native England (also used, as Ron must know, by radical feminist Robin Morgan in a 1970 essay denouncing patriarchal hierarchies, or, to put it more simply, men).
I actually agree with much of what Rosenbaum asserts about this left. In fact I wrote a lot of it myself in a book called "Left for Dead."
I published that book six years ago. I was three or four years late with my critiques, but at least when I did it, this left had some influence, and the culture wars were still raging. Granted, this left still exists (I didn't manage to slay it!), and there's nothing like the prospect of the United States going to war to bring them out of their time-warped woodwork.
In truth, though, this left is tiny - vocal, yep; disproportionately represented in the intellectual class, no doubt. But it's even smaller and less relevant today than it was when my book came out. Besides which, going to an anti-war demonstration and finding a couple of embarrassing nuts to poke fun at is not really one of journalism's tougher assignments.
Instead, Rosenbaum might want to interview my mother (although I act as her press agent, so he may have blown his chance). Last week she celebrated her 80th birthday. She lives in small town in a red state. She believes in the United States and was horrified as a young woman to see her native Italy fall into alliance with Nazi Germany. She's never read a word of Chomsky. She understands how evil Saddam Hussein is. She goes to church every Sunday, and sometimes more.
But she detests the Bush administration and she distrusts instinctively its stated motives for this war. There are tens of millions of Americans like her. They don't march, they don't apologize for Stalinism, they don't equate the United States' overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 with the gas chambers. They - I should say we, since I'm part of this constituency - know very well that Osama bin Laden is a bigger threat to the world than John Ashcroft. But we also get the strong feeling we're being lied to by this administration and that a lot of the media, actively or passively, is not being skeptical enough of its claims and is therefore complicit in the lie.
Engaging this America requires some thinking and some throwing stereotypes out the window (it also requires leaving Manhattan). But how much more fun it is to set fire to straw men!
I'm usually a fan of Rosenbaum's work, but this column reflected a larger problem one finds in the work of many liberal writers - that the fashionable stance is to be critical of everything and never, ever affirmatively for anything that's larger than oneself. These writers are against the right wing of course, but are also wary of liberalism and scornful of the left; against George W. Bush, but even more disdainful of Al Gore (sure enough, Rosenbaum takes a swipe at him, too).
But Gore isn't the point, and batty protesters aren't either. What kind of country this will be is the point. The Nation may print some doctrinaire stuff, but at least it cares about that. So do the millions of Americans like my mom, who are alarmed at the way things are going under this administration precisely because they believe in the country's ideals, but who carry on in quiet desperation because it often feels to them like no one except Robert Byrd is listening to them or speaking for them. Attacking a tiny constituency instead of defending this broad one is just a way of ducking the real debate.