In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, novelist, book critic, and GQ staffer Walter Kirn had some Very Important Things to say about burgeoning anti-American sentiment. Apparently, back in 1983, Kirn won a Rhodes Scholarship. Or, as he put it, he “enrolled at Oxford University on a prestigious two-year fellowship meant to promote international understanding.” Anyway, young Kirn was stunned to discover that his fellow “Oxfordians” hated America, and therefore hated him, despite his tweed jacket and his familiarity with various philosophers. “I may have thought of myself as Jean-Paul Sartre,” he writes, “but in the eyes of my anti-American schoolmates I was, and always would be, Merle Haggard.” The experience, Kirn goes on to say, made him into the reluctant patriot he remains today in the face of impending war with Iraq and possibly the rest of the world.
But so what? Do you really want to hear what I think? I don’t, and I don’t want to hear what Walter Kirn thinks either. Here’s a little secret. Writers, including Salman Rushdie, don’t have a single new idea to add to the discourse about the current geopolitical situation. We should all shut up. All of us should shut down our computers and shut our goddamn pieholes. Why don’t we all just shut up?
If we run away, our friends, children we love, gardens
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we’ve planted, birds we’ve watched at our windows,
Who will welcome us home to be who we are?
You have to admire Hitchens—the guy’s stood up against the pope, Mother Teresa, and Henry Kissinger. But this war has made him prosaic and mortal. Last year, probably emboldened by post-September 11 comparisons drawn between him and George Orwell, he published a book called Why Orwell Matters, in which he intimated that he alone has the writerly courage to challenge the left’s prevailing orthodoxies and dismantle its new intellectual hypocrisies. Hitchens’s main point these days is that we’re on the brink of World War III, and all “serious” people need to make a choice between democratic modernity and what he calls “Islamofascism.” Fair enough. I choose modernity. On the other hand, I hope being a serious person doesn’t mean I have to write sentences like this one, picked at random from Why Orwell Matters: “To return to my point about the immense power that his enemies attribute to him, Orwell once wrote about the ‘large, vague renown’ that constituted the popular memory of Thomas Carlyle.”
Let’s move on to the New Yorker. I’ve just plucked an issue from the pile on my coffee table . . . here’s a Hendrik Hertzberg editorial about Important Matters That We Face: “A little more time, especially if it comes with a Security Council resolution unambiguously authorizing force if Iraq does not unambiguously disarm, would mitigate the damage to allied unity, lessen the (largely self-created) isolation of the United States, and . . . ”
