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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 11, 2003
Dribble
Consider the following the first two paragraphs from an article signed Margaret Drabble published in Britain in Thursday's Daily Telegraph: "I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much much more ill than I had expected. "My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world." I would quote more -- the article contains 21 such paragraphs -- but could only do so at the risk of infringing copyright. And anyway the point is already made: the woman who wrote this is indisputably barking mad. She is moreover exposing her pathology in a public place. It is hardly the first time she has done so. And yet she has risen to the top of the Oxbridge establishment in England and has admirers elsewhere. One can feel only pity for her -- she needs help and is unlikely to get it -- but alarm for a society in which this kind of mental disequilibrium is put on display and goes untreated. For this is not an isolated case. Material of this nature appears on newspaper op-eds every day and the Daily Telegraph is among the more sober broadsheet papers. And I get mail almost every day from persons frothing every bit as copiously as this Ms Drabble. There are equivalent remarks to be found by people on what is called the "right" as well as the "left" of the political broadband. Ernest Zundel has been in the news in Canada once again: there is one example and I'm sure I could find more -- of lunatics persuaded of strange international conspiracies who blame the Jews or someone else for everything that ever went wrong in their heads. But such rightwing ravings are unlikely to appear in mainstream newsprint; even in the tabloids. They are properly considered to be beyond the pale of polite or intelligent society. Thus the examples we see daily are almost invariably from the left of the spectrum. The term is inexact for there is so much overlap between fanatical positions. Instead of a line extending from left to right it is more useful to imagine a compass circle in which something approaching sanity is marked "north" at the top and the left and right slip over its horizons converging in the insanity at the bottom. And this compass of our sanity is itself rotated somewhere off true as the magnetic pole of political fashion shifts through the generations. And in moments of local magnetic disturbance it goes completely haywire. Anti-Semitism for instance is something shared at the extremes of both left and right. But whereas the thing itself is approached with the word "Jew" from the right from the left the preferred term is "Zionist". The anti-Americanism tends also to be shared so much that the proposed anti-American foreign policy of France's failed presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen could be plausibly labelled "extr?me droit" when it was mixed in with his other bigotries. But it became "gauche" -- a leftward feint -- when adopted and put into practice by the winning candidate Jacques Chirac. Likewise so much factual speculation and ideological blather by such leftwing commentators as Noam Chomsky Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer could easily pass for rightwing speculation and blather. Little more is necessary than to substitute the by-line of say one of America's more prominent self-styled "paleoconservatives". And I'm sure that if it weren't for this confusion of labels Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan could share a ticket in the next U.S. presidential election for most of their policies are essentially the same. Fashion determines the kind of label that will pass muster on the op-ed page or equivalent. There were times in the 20th century in countries such as Germany Italy France or Spain where anything that could be labelled "right" might pass as respectable no matter what it actually said. And in the time since when labelled "left" the same ideas have passed often into the same typography. I am thinking for instance of the French daily Le Monde in the vanguard of the left today and a voice constantly intoning against "the Anglo-Saxons" and "the neoconservatives". It rose phoenix-like in liberated Paris from the very presses of the pre-war Le Temps -- same typography and much the same staff. But whereas Le Temps a voice constantly intoning against "the Anglo-Saxons" and "les juifs" had had to be closed because it was discredited for Nazi apologetics Le Monde would soon enjoy great intellectual prestige as an apologist for sundry Communist regimes. A paper of the right became a paper of the left with just a quick adjustment of vocabulary. Or today's satirical weekly Le Canard Enchain? which baits the same kind of bourgeois from fashionably-received left assumptions that the pre-war Charivari baited from the fashionable right. (Our Ottawa paper Frank is a distant echo of the same phenomenon: hunting down and persecuting just those people hunted and persecuted by others for their fashion crimes.) But this is not meant as an essay on mislabelling. For as the reader will see from the examples I have given the labels are often meaningless. They serve only as indicators of attraction or repulsion acceptance or disdain. You call something one thing and it means that you like it you call it the other and it means that you don't -- but it could easily be the same beret. One moment it is on Benito the next on Che. What intrigues me today is not the label but the madness not the hat but the head that wears it. For the most extraordinary nonsense can pass into common currency if printed with the correct marks. And the worst of it will almost invariably come from the second-rate intellectuals absurdly organized into poisonous little phrases. Why? ... Why are supposedly "educated" people -- the intellectuals -- more prey than others to notions that smack of dementia? The answer is hardly new. It is because they are the people who observe words not things; whose eyes remain fixed on the labels. And you can lead them by the label over any cliff. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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