We’ve gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: the world accepts that you can’t open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh, but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Michigan and Falls Church, Virginia. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.
Suppose you’ve got a manuscript about the Saudis. Where are you going to shop it? Think Cambridge University Press will be publishing anything anytime soon?
THE PROGRESSIVE DELUSION
Passivity
I HAVE THE most professional publishers I’ve ever had. Regnery, that is. They’re in the business of shifting product in large quantity, and to that end they’ve had me staggering from one radio or TV interview to another for months on end, plugging my book on the dangerously enfeebled state of western civilization. Mostly to the usual suspects, I have to admit: Fox, right-wing talk-radio, and so on. But a few weeks ago I suggested to my publicist that, much as I enjoyed taking calls that began, “Your book is the best book I’ve read in my entire adult life”, I wouldn’t mind doing a few shows from the other side, down the NPR/PBS end of things.
My publicist pursed her lips. “We could book you on those shows,” she said. “But I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”
“Don’t worry, I can handle it,” I insisted. “It’ll keep me sharp, on my toes, thinking on my feet, responding vigorously to hostile questioning.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she replied. “I meant going on those shows doesn’t sell a lot of books.” As she sees it, your nutso right-wing author does ten minutes on WZZZ Hate-Talk AM at three in the morning and the local Borders sells out the next day. Whereas he’s interviewed for an hour by Terri Gross on NPR, and it sends precisely two listeners out to their bookstore, and only to buy that Andrew Sullivan doorstopper on everything that’s gone wrong with conservatism.
“It’s not about sales,” I protested. “What profiteth it a man if he maketh a gazillion bucks but loseth hith entire thivilithathion?” As she wiped the Niagara of saliva off her face, I explained that we can’t keep preaching to the choir, we’ve got to try and persuade folks of the merits of the case, etc. Well, she promised to do her best, and so I’ve found myself taking the first tentative steps into the hostile territory of various public radio shows.
And a bit dispiriting it is, too. I don’t mind the conspiracy guys and the all-about-oil obsessives. I’m cool with the fellows who say, well, America sold Saddam all his weapons anyway: it’s always fun to point out that, according to analysis by the International Peace Research Institute of Stockholm, for the years between 1973 and 2002 the American and British arm sales combined added up to under 2 per cent of Iraq’s armaments – or less than Saddam got from the Brazilians.
That’s all good knockabout. But what befuddles me are the callers who aren’t foaming and partisan but speak in almost eerily calm voices like patient kindergarten teachers and say things like “I find it very offensive that your guest can use language that’s so hierarchical” – ie, repressive Muslim dictatorships are worse than pluralist western democracies – and “We are confronting violence with violence, when what we need is non-violent conflict resolution that’s binding on all sides” – ie …well, ie whatever.
Half the time these assertions are such watery soft-focus blurs of passivity, there’s nothing solid enough to latch on to and respond to. But, when, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that we’re not always as fortunate to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms of Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as they’re dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin announced that the Prophet’s message to infidels was “I am here to slaughter you all.” Good luck with the binding non-violent conflict resolution there.
And at that point there’s usually a pause and the caller says something like “Well, that’s all the more reason why we need to be even more committed to non-violence.” Or as a lady called Kay put it: “We have a lot of work to do then so that someday a long way down the road they won’t want to slaughter us.”
There may, indeed, come a day when they won’t want to slaughter us, but it may be because by that day there’s none of us left to slaughter. She had just told me that “we’re all in this together. I don’t care if you’re Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist.” Good for you. Unfortunately, they do care. In Gaza, in Sudan, in Kashmir, in southern Thailand, and even in Europe and North America, they care very much. But the great advantage of cultural relativism is that it absolves you of the need to know anything. For, if everything’s of equal value, why bother learning about any of the differences?
On the whole I prefer those Americans who tune out the foreign-policy bores for wall-to-wall Anna Nicole Smith coverage. At least they’ve got an interest – ask them about the latest scoop on the identity of the father of her child and they’ll bring you up to speed. By contrast, a large number of elite Americans are just as parochial and indifferent to the currents of the age; the only difference is that they choose to trumpet it as a moral virtue. And you can’t avoid the suspicion that, far from having “a lot of work to do”, a lot of us are heavily invested in a belief in “pacifism” precisely because it involves doing no work at all – apart from bending down once every couple of years and slapping the “CO-EXIST” bumper sticker on your new car.
Or as I said somewhat tetchily to one caller, “Life isn’t a bumper sticker.”
Which, come to think of it, would make rather a good bumper sticker.
THOUGHTSTOPPERS UBIQUITOUS
The showboating rabbi
“MY THEOLOGY,” writes Rabbi Dow Marmur in The Toronto Star, “prompts me to opt for a concept of liberty that includes the free choice not to exercise it.” Weighing in on the Danish cartoons, Canada’s “human rights” thought police and related matters, the rabbi comes down on the side of self-censorship in the interests of multicultural sensitivity. But, en passant, he observes: