Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> >Bits and pieces of this response were scattered across antiwar analysis, but
> >it was marginal to the simplistic "no war" legalisms [clip]
>
> Who heard the damn speeches on February 15? People were there because
> they were hoping to stop the war - all kinds of people, from
> anarcho-kids to church ladies. You're obsessing about this for some
> reason that I don't quite understand, unless it's that you have a
> crush on David Corn.
>
The archetype here is from Antigone's last speech in _Antigone_, in which she says she would not have done the deed if it had been her husband (for she could always marry again) or her son (because she could always have another child), but it was her last brother and her parents were dead, so she would never have another brother, so _there_. She had to do it.
This undercuts all other reasons, both those she has given and (more particularly) the reason many 19th century critics gave (it was a divine obligation to bury bodies). It conflicted so radically with that last reason that some 19th century editors tried to argue that it was a textual corruption.
In effect she was saying, 'cuz! She had to bury her brother or else she was no longer herself.
One can't be for the current anti-war movement (or any anti-war movement that might actually exist) and at the same time be committed to loyalty to the DP as first principle. (There are millions who are of or sympathetic to the anti-war movement and remain Democrats, but they aren't operating -- and there is no reason to begin with that they should operate -- at Nathan's level of self-conscious abstraction.) Nathan has chosen to identify himself with the DP as the only road to the future. He _can't_, any longer, do otherwise and still remain Nathan. So in this conflict between what he is and political reality, he keeps inventing wilder and wilder reasons (as did Antigone) for doing what he has to do. Argument is really pointless, because his position does not depend on any of the arguments he is making.
Carrol
> Doug
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