Letters from Readers

Fooled Again

"We won't get fooled again." The Who

And so it has come to this. The Who sang their 1960s anthem at the
recent Madison Square Garden Concert for New York City (Saturday,
October 20th on VH1 TV) to honor the victims of terrorism on
September 11th. They told us all how proud they were to be there.
And Paul McCartney will probably be back on the pop charts with his
new Freedom song, which had all the performers on stage together at
the end of the concert. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sang "Salt of
the Earth," an appropriate song to honor the firefighters and cops
who did give up their lives to save people at the World Trade Center.

Perhaps healing through music is what is needed right now, especially
for New Yorkers, but I found the performance quite scary. After all,
the crowd booed when one of the star MCs suggested directing energy
towards love, compassion, and understanding. Billy Crystal was
overtly vengeful almost every time he opened his mouth.

Rock music started out as a rebellion against convention and
motivated the 60s generation in their anti-war and civil rights work.
I remember Country Joe and the Fish leading the crowd against the
Viet Nam War. "Give me an F (huge response: F); give me a U (huge
response: U), give me a C (huge response: C), give me a K (huge
response: K)." "What's that spell? (Huge response: FUCK); What's
that spell? (Wild response: FUCK); What's that spell? (Overwhelming
response: FUCK)." And then they went into their anti-war songs. And
what about Marvin Gaye singing "What's Goin' On?" Instead, now we
have Mick Jagger screaming that what the concert shows is, "Don't
fuck with New York!"

It seems that some of those same rockers have indeed turned into
their parents. The balding members of The Who can still play great
music, but they have been "fooled again" and they are legitimating
super-patriotism that makes it OK to bomb civilians in Afghanistan,
and who knows how many other countries in the coming period. How is
it that we have learned so little since the 1970s?

Rock musicians used to be arrested by the cops; but now they wear
police hats and bow down to authority. It would have been
unimaginable to see rock stars wear police hats in the 60s and 70s,
but almost all of them at the concert got in on this new fashion
trend. Yes, we should honor those who put their lives at risk and
those who died trying to put out fires and save lives. But can't we
have some sense of balance here? Let's honor the good deeds and urge
the police to strive for their highest ideals. But let's also not
forget the repression that regularly comes down on especially poor
and darker people by at least some of those who enforce the law.
Have we completely forgotten the Louima case already? Perhaps it is
just too soon to get a reasonable perspective.

Bill Clinton boasted that he hoped Bin Laden was watching the concert
to see the spirit of New York. Well, if he was watching he learned
that so far people have learned absolutely nothing regarding
disastrous U.S. foreign policies. Clinton opposed the Vietnam War to
save himself from fighting, but he was not protesting U.S.
imperialism. Bin Laden's video tape was quite specific. He
castigated the United States for repression of the Palestinian and
Iraqi peoples, and he railed against the United States military in the
holy sites of Islam. Why don't Americans know that U.S. bombs still
fall regularly, every week or two, on Iraq? Why can't Americans
understand that U.S. weapons and billions of dollars back up Israel's
increasingly brutal attacks on the Palestinians? When will we learn
that bombs create enemies, not friends, and that increasingly
desperate people may resort to terrorism?

Revenge is a natural human emotion, but intelligent people also do
have brains that should be thinking of viable solutions other than
bombing and displacing populations and destroying countries. If only
John Lennon were still around to counter Paul McCartney's blind wish
to "fight for freedom" without understanding who or what he is
fighting. Maybe Paul should visit the Afghani refugee camps and see
what this latest "fight for freedom" has already accomplished.

Al Kagan

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The Moral Imperative of Self-Defense

I have been following both the national and local presses since September
11, including your own newspaper, which last week I much enjoyed. The
only exception, however, was Sarah Kanouse's editorial "Democracy Demands Dissent" (p. 3), which I found morally and rhetorically irresponsible and which requires a response.

Kanouse charges that the essence of American military history is "a
history of atrocity, repression, and racism." She proceeds to list a
series of acts of "mass violence and sponsorship of terrorism" that the US
government has perpetrated over the years, ranging from the
Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 to the present. I agree with Kanouse's list, and, as a professor of history at U of I, I could easily multiply the examples. (It is worth noting in passing that similar lists could
easily be compiled for France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia, Brazil,
South Africa, and the large majority of the world's nations. The past is
a very bloody place.) Our nation is indeed deeply stained, especially
in its treatment of ethnic and racial minorities.

My main disagreement is with the grossly lopsided nature of Kanouse's
presentation. Just as easily and consequentially, a second series of
historical events could be cited in which the US government has acquitted
itself well, none of which figure in Kanouse's tendentious and reflexively
anti-government interpretation. Have there been no "just wars" (The War
of Independence, the Civil War, the Second World War) in American history? Was the GI Bill of Rights that educated millions of World-War-II veterans (including my father) a bad thing? How about the Marshall Plan that reconstructed Europe after 1945? Does Kanouse think it is criminal that South Korea remained democratic during the second half of the 20th century and that Saddam Hussein was expelled from Kuwait? The Berlin Airlift, the work of the US Peace Corps, countless instances of humanitarian relief: are all these events and actions irrelevant to her score card? This list, too, could be lenghtened easily. Predictably, Kanouse cites the tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans interred during the Second World War; she is loathe to mention, however, the successful defeat of Japanese fascism and the tens of MILLIONS of European and Asian immigrants (again, like my Italian-American grandparents) who came to and thrived in the US.

My point is not that one list is longer than the other: it is, rather,
that historical acts and episodes must be evaluated on their own merits.
On those grounds, the present situation demands a flexible, multi-pronged
response, part of which must be military. Personally, I have been
uncomfortable with--in some instances, vehemently opposed to--several
American military interventions during my lifetime, and I came of age
politically on anti-Vietnam sentiment. But a direct attack of unparalled
ferocity on the American homeland and its civilian citizenry is surely a
very different matter. I believe it is naive in the extreme to think that
the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who destroyed the World Trade
Center--and who murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981, tried to assassinate the
Pope, killed hundreds of Africans in US embassies, etc., etc.--can be
stopped without the use of force. Of course that force needs to be
targeted and intelligent. I fear, however, that if Kanouse, rather than
Roosevelt, had been president in the 1930s and 1940s, a swastika would now fly over the capitol in Washington D.C. And when the anthrax cloud is spreading over Chicago, and the wind is blowing southward, it will not
suffice to cite the errors of American foreign policy in the Spanish-American War over 100 years ago.

Kanouse self-righteously lectures her readers on the meaning of democracy, the essence of which she percieves to be the right to dissent and diversity. True in part. The earlier reader who telephoned angrily into
her home is obviously out of line. As Kanouse asserts, she is also
certainly entitled to publicize her own views on current events (even if
her "blame America" interpretation, as President Clinton recently dubbed
it, is shared by only a small percentage of Americans, largely from the
Naderite left). But she appears oblivious to the fact that the democratic freedoms she takes for granted are not an inevitable inheritance. They are historical achievements that had to be fought for in order to be secured--often with high loss of life and much patriotic committment--and that may well have to be fought to be preserved again. There is no recognition in Kanouse's editorial of the physical and moral imperative of self-defense.

Mark S Micale