The Knife in Studs’s Back
Ayers and Dorn weren’t the column’s only target. Neal also pulled the trigger on Terkel, noting that “the former radio personality…who does a pretty fair impression of the village idiot, gushes that this book is ‘a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world. Ayers provides a tribute to those better
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Neal jeered Falwell for appearing on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and blaming the terrorist attacks on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and People for the American Way, all of whom had angered God. As for Terkel, he “was also quick to blame America.”
Neal had heard an interview with Terkel that WBEZ taped September 12 and broadcast two days later on its Eight Forty-Eight show. “By all means, find the perpetrators,” Terkel said, “and obviously, put them out of commission one way or another. Obviously.” But he didn’t want Americans to think only of doing that. “The more important thing,” he went on, “is who we are in this world.”
Neal wrote: “Terkel asserted that the United States ‘knocked off a lot of women and kids’ during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. According to more reliable sources, less than 2 percent of the casualties were civilian.” Terkel was commenting on war’s law of unintended consequences. “Who did we knock off?” he mused. “We didn’t knock off Hussein. We knocked off a lot of women and kids.” He was being rhetorical, and it was rhetoric grounded in reality–a British UN official posted to Baghdad said when he retired in 1998 that 4,000 to 5,000 Iraqi children under the age of five were dying each month as a result of the sanctions against their country.
Terkel had this dumbfounding gratuitousness in mind when he composed his response to last Friday’s Neal column. “I’ve known Neal ever since he first arrived in Chicago from Portland, Oregon,” Terkel wrote. “He had just joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune. In fact, I was one of the first people he approached.”
Not that Neal’s likely to run into trouble from the top by getting after liberals. A Sun-Times editorial last Sunday made the important point that understanding what happened is not the same as “accepting, excusing or forgiving.” But, it went on, “some of this nonsense that the United States deserves what it got Sept. 11 is a perverted form of old fashioned self-loathing. We must be guilty because we are bad. This translates into the kind of antipatriotism you hear on National Public Radio, the simplistic ‘My country, right or wrong’ met with the equally extreme ‘My country–wrong.’”
