December 24, 2001

[Letter to "Mother Jones" magazine. (Links not in original.)]

At the end of "Blaming America First," Todd Gitlin is described as having been "president of SDS in 1963." I don't know if that's intended to establish his radical credentials, but it did make the article itself bitterly amusing, since with a few substitutions of names and dates much of what he says becomes what was said about him and his like-minded cohorts (including me) those many years ago.

"Reflexive anti-Americans," he cries. A "vocal" "minority," "isolated on campuses...where reality checks are scarce." Impractical "fairy-tale oversimplification." They ignore (Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, communists, Viet Cong atrocities). Déjà vu strikes again.

Now as then, a sufficient answer to that last accusation is that I for one focus on the US precisely because I am an American and yes, I am more concerned about that which is done by the nation, the people, of which I am part, that which is done in my name, than I am about that done by those over who I have no control and with who I have no greater identification than "fellow human being." As deeply as I mourn the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, as much as I admire the dedication of the firefighters and rescue workers, the EMTs and RNs, who rushed to get to the place everyone else rushed to get away from, as hard a wrench as I felt the first time I saw the post-attack profile of New York (with sky where the twin towers should've been), I still insist that the question for us as Americans is not, cannot be, what Osama bin Laden could have or should now think or do differently, but what we could have or should now think or do differently. The clock of history did not start on September 11 and refusing to face our own complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions of desperation-driven fanaticism in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow (and continue to recruit) is the surest way we as a nation can guarantee a continuation of terrorism directed against us.

I expect Todd Gitlin would largely agree, which makes me suspect that his denunciation of "left wing fundamentalism" is more visceral than analytical, more an angry rejection of those who do not share his sense of mourning and renewed patriotism than any reasoned consideration of their beliefs and motives. (Or is an Iraqi villager saying of Saddam "His aggression got us into this mess" without giving equal attention to America's prewar support and the postwar sanctions, displaying "anti-Iraqism?")

Indeed, Gitlin's argument would ring truer and louder if he'd cited more than vague generalities in its support. But perhaps that lack is because when he does go for specifics, he's quite unconvincing:

Contrary to Gitlin, Noam Chomsky did not "bend facts." Rather, he noted that if the death toll is our standard for judging the evilness of an attack (and you include related as well as immediate deaths), the Sudan bombing, with deaths perhaps reaching into five figures from lack of medicines, was worse^* than the World Trade Center atrocity. Gitlin's desire to place America's mourning above Sudan’s is betrayed by his own words: Sudan was merely a "misguided" attack on a building, with no reference to an effect on people; the WTC was a "massacre." (Would a resident of Khartoum who said the WTC assault was worse be displaying "anti-Sudanism?")

Meanwhile, Edward Said is slammed for saying the US is "almost constantly...in some sort of conflict" with the Islamic world. But if he had said that on September 10, would Gitlin have assailed him? I doubt it. Did those conflicts disappear the next day? Are they now irrelevant, to be forgotten?

And Arundhati Roy's sneeringly-described "queenly declaration" that Americans "ought to know it is not them but their government's policies that are hated" is actually a direct answer to the oft-asked question "Why do they hate us?" Yet Gitlin can't see it as such. (His parenthetical slap that "the murderers did not trouble themselves with such distinctions," thus sweeping up not only all anti-US terrorism, but a significant portion of the Islamic world, into one cruelty, must be ignored as the kind of angry outburst one regrets the next morning.)

So if indeed there are those who are "seeing old stories" and "retreating to old formulas," it must be said that Todd Gitlin is among them. Except that his old formula is one where our actions have only a vague connection to others' reactions; one where he is "reasoned...serious...practical" and others are "smug...gloat(ing)...anti-Americans"; one which promotes "force in self-defense" but offers neither definition nor limit, positively inviting separating means from ends, as we have clearly done (or, perhaps more accurately, continued to do).

The thing is, in terms of the policies we would have our nation pursue, the kind of society in which we would hope to live, I suspect that Todd Gitlin and I are not that far apart, certainly well within hailing distance. And I agree with him that to make those changes we must overcome (with respects to Anne Taylor Fleming) what nearly 15 years ago I called "the myth of American innocence." But the "old story" that he tells here, one where we "wake up" those who cling to that notion while vituperating and damning those who reject it, actually does less to challenge that cultural myth than it does to embrace it - and to that same extent those changes are, yet again, deferred.

^*The link is actually to a piece Chomsky wrote in July, 2002, which explains his argument a little more fully than the single-sentence reference to which Gitline objects.