NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 14, 2001
To tell the truth
Time heals but it also reveals the extent of our changes. In the first moments in the shock of recognition after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 we thought the world had changed. We could see the cause we could almost immediately guess the effect: "a world at war". ... "Nothing will be the same as before." ... But to tell the truth little changes in the first weeks after such a catastrophe. Susan Sontag and others walked straight into the abyss together with what seemed like several hundred commentators on Canada's CBC. It has been said that pacifists like generals are always preparing for the last war. She they couldn't imagine a conflict in which the United States was not at fault the ultimate author of its own misfortune. Years of feminist sloganeering had taught them not to blame the victim so there were spontaneous concessions to those in grief. ... "I feel really badly about what happened but ...". By now I think most would like to eat their words. Time magazine rushed out an essay announcing the end of the age of irony. It was clever it was actually rather deep in places though it would have been more clever still to announce the end of "political correctness". Robert Fulford wrote something like this essay in the National Post last week. He looked back over our 20th century fin de si?cle the decadence that hit Canada so peculiarly hard. We got into the habit of believing things about the world about reality that were ludicrously untrue. He called it an age of conformity. He made a comparison to the "McCarthy era" of the early 1950s. The chill of the 1990s was something more than that as Mr. Fulford wrote it metastasized into something uglier something for which "political correctness" is no adequate term. The U.N.'s "anti-racism" conference in Durban only days before the end of that era was its final carnival. Canada sent by far the largest delegation of any country to this malign fiesta: our ship of fools. This last decade this age of conformity will perhaps be remembered perhaps unfairly as the "Clinton Era". The retired president of the United States had the ill fortune to typify it. So much of the catastrophe we have inherited is indeed the direct consequence of the eight-year holiday from reality that the U.S. enjoyed under Mr. Clinton -- the president who at the very least had Osama bin Laden at his disposal in 1996 but told the Sudanese who offered to deliver him to let him go to Afghanistan. The president who when the evidence of Iraqi and other foreign state complicity in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing became irrefutable elected to look the other way. Who sent jokers to the state department of the calibre of Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright; who could put a woman like Janet Reno over the FBI. Whose leading security expert was telling us as recently as July in an op-ed of the New York Times that we had to get over our paranoia about Islamist terrorism it wasn't a serious threat. These manifestations of incompetence were not isolated acts. They were the product of a total refusal to look in the face of reality. In so many ways Bill Clinton was the creature we had all become and with whom we even identified. The man delivering public feminist nostra while making it with an intern in the back room; the only president ever credibly accused of a rape. The man who "feels your pain" who is still at this moment wandering around Manhattan feeling up everybody's pain; who declaimed against "the politics of personal destruction" and did not hesitate to wreck the life of one person after another to preserve himself in power. It is unfair to make Mr. Clinton in this sense the "poster boy" for the 1990s merely his misfortune to have been president through that time and therefore posing for the picture. For to tell the truth he was very popular. There was something about him that appealed subliminally and sometimes directly to both old and young intellectuals on the make. I am thinking just now of several specific fairly well-known Canadian intellectuals of my acquaintance media figures who also teach in universities -- the libel laws alone prevent me from naming them. Each of them is a Clinton each to my fairly certain knowledge uses his position to seduce his students. Each has had after all a selection of young women pleased at least initially to be so used. It comes naturally. Let me be distasteful and suggest that this hypocrisy is as fundamental to what they are as the "left-wing" worldview is fundamental. The instinct to fanaticism to believing and espousing ideas in conflict with demonstrable reality is of this nature. It did not surprise me to learn that Mohammed Atta and other suicide terrorists could drink vodka and pay for lap-dancers and whores. It would rather have more surprised me if they didn't -- for the great "puritans" have always been like that legislating morality for others. (Look at the Taliban patrolling Kabul in their tailored robes behind their Rayban sunglasses and with rap lines in American English airbrushed on their flashy pickup trucks.) The very lust for power is of this nature it is at the centre of Pride. For more than a decade I had been observing this phenomenon of "political correctness" -- often from close quarters from the many times I found myself in its way. I mean at the simplest the attempt to shut down argument by using such terms as "racist" fascist victimization and so on. The kind of thinking exhibited by poor Timothy Findlay when he spoke to the oil patch in Calgary recently (an author whose novels I had long since dismissed as a shimmering moral fog). He equated terrorism with oil prospecting. Or Sunera Thobani's rant against the West subsidized and patronized by the Canadian taxpayer. How strange in both cases that they were being paid directly by the people they were attacking and were expecting their applause. The truth is they suddenly found themselves living in another era. With each week with each month that passes our society our "intellectuals" are being reformed made over by this extraordinary encounter with reality itself. I am not even proposing to attack them; only to say goodbye to all that. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top