At 05:13 PM 2/8/2003 -0500, you wrote: >Steven McGraw wrote: > >>Plenty >>of public intellectuals have an equally uncomplicated view of the world > >Like who? Fred Barnes? Howard Zinn? > >Doug > >
In this case I'm thinking mostly of mainstream-to-liberal commentators. Don't wanna name too many names in case some are on this list. Here's an example from Greil Marcus of the sort of thing i'm talking about http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-06marcus-speech.html Exerpts from the speech: --- Novelist Rick Moody, best known for The Ice Storm, really put the nail in the coffin of that headline. "The attack," said Moody, "is a web of narratives." Words used in that manner, that kind of naming, are an insult to whoever is unlucky enough to hear them; they laugh at your confusion, they mock your fear. They parade their confidence, their certainty that there's nothing that can't be folded into the language of the day before. The acknowledgment that something can take place in the world that never happened before might be the starting point of any real intellectual activity. Q: Is there intellectual work to be done to try to understand bin Laden, or at least his attractiveness in certain segments of Islam society? A: I'm not sure there is intellectual work to be done to investigate those questions. I think at some point there may be. But there are times when it's indecent to immediately seek to understand the motives of someone who wants you dead. There is intellectual work to be done to explain and understand. Members of minority groups are sometimes familiar with that notion, but citizens of the U.S. as such have not experienced that. The Second World War was not about the wish or the will of the Axis powers to exterminate, to send into oblivion all American citizens, and I believe that this war is. --- I don't think O'Reilly is likely to say anything remotely as 'sophisticated,' but when you cut off most of the fat, Marcus is asserting that 1) We don't need historical perspective to understand 9/11 and 2) We don't need to understand the political and economic conditions that give rise to terrorism. These are perfectly conventional and grievously stupid responses to 9/11, but they sound impressive coming from Marcus. O'Reilly would probably put it this way: 1) The world changed september 11th, this is all completely new 2) We don't need to understand evil, we need to kill it.
