I periodically get letters from readers complaining that I write too much about movies they’ve never heard of, some of which come from countries they know little about. A good many examples of these kinds of films are playing over the next couple of weeks at the 37th Chicago International Film Festival.
I’m as eager as anyone to find and punish the terrorists–even if the U.S. helped to empower them as it has our other favorite foreign devils, such as Noriega and Saddam. But I’d feel a lot better about such an undertaking if I weren’t worried that innocent, impoverished Afghans are more likely to get killed than anyone else.
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Maybe some Americans unconsciously think we aren’t part of the world because we simply are the world and everything else has something to do with subtitles, exotic vacations, fancy food, bad television, lots of weird people wanting nothing except to have what we have, and a certain amount of physical discomfort and danger. Isolationism has overtaken this country in recent years–a more extreme form in some ways than during the cold war, when the perceived split was between the “free world” and the “communist world” rather than between this country and everywhere else–but it’s questionable whether the world can sustain such divisions and still survive. So it’s encouraging that Americans may be changing what they usually mean when they say “we.” The world has become too small to tolerate claims of exclusivity, whether they come from American yahoo solipsists or Middle Eastern religious fanatics.
If Congress were to declare war, whom do you think it should declare war against?
Palestinians: 4%
Needless to say, polls of this kind are problematic, especially because, as in movie test marketing, the questions the pollsters ask play some role in determining the responses and people are obliged to come up with snap judgments rather than careful reflections. Still, these poll results suggest that a lot of people accept the notion of collateral damage–at least as long as it doesn’t include them. It’s certainly telling that the pollsters collapsed “Afghanistan” and “Taliban” into the same category–implying that if we can’t declare war on one, the other will do just fine–and that twice as many people opted for declaring war against Iraq than against Saddam Hussein. (“U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With,” reads the lead headline of my current favorite nonconservative newsweekly, the Onion.)
