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CounterPunch
February
17, 2003
The US is a Nation Divided
Can the Intellectual
Left Make a Bridge to the Working Class and the Poor?
by ROBERT FISK
Austin, Texas. The show was over, recorded for one of those
nice liberal local American TV cable channels--this time in Texas--where
everyone agrees that war is wrong, that George Bush is in the
hands of right-wing Christian fundamentalists and pro-Israeli
neo- conservatives.
Don Darling, the TV host, had just turned
to thank me for my long and flu-laden contribution. Then it happened.
Cameraman number two came striding towards us through the studio
lights. "I want to thank you, sir, for reminding us that
the British had a lot to do with the chaos in the Middle East,
" he said. "But I have something else to say."
His voice rose 10 decibels, his bare
arms bouncing up and down at his sides, his shaven head struck
forward pugnaciously. "Yeah, I wanna tell you that the cause
of this problem is the fucking medieval Arabs and their wish
to enslave us all--and I tell you that it is because we want
to save the Jews from the fucking savage Arabs who want to throw
them into the sea that we are about to fuck Saddam." There
was a pause as Don Darling looked at the man, aghast. "And
that," cameraman number two concluded, "is the fucking
truth."
Darling called to the studio manager.
"Where does this man come from?"  he demanded to know. The lady from the
University of Texas--organizer of this gentle little pow-wow--advanced
on to the studio floor in horror: "Who is this person?"
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. All of a sudden, our nice
anti-war chat had been brought to a halt by a spot of redneck
reality. There really were right-wingers out there in the darkness
who really did want George Bush to zap the Arabs. I asked the
guy his name: "Gregg Aykins," he said. "And the
FBI can do nothing to me if you give them my name."
It was a telling moment, a symbol of
the vast gulf of reason between the pro- and anti-war movement
in America. They don't talk to each other. And if they do, neither
comprehends the other. Like the endless chat programs on Pacifica
Radio and all the smaller liberal talk shows from Boston to LA
that serve up inedible dollops of anti-Bush, anti-Republican
rant, there is simply no contact between the intellectual "elite"
of the left and the less privileged Americans who work with their
hands and join the military to gain a free education and end
up fighting America's foreign wars.
At a seminar at the University of North
Carolina, I listened to a group of professors and senior lecturers
and "activists" debating how to influence the "path
to war". "What we've got to do is to reach out to mainstream
press and bridge-build to other activists," a lady with
long gray hair announced, reading a list of proposals--all couched
in the language of academic discourse that ensures her message
is incomprehensible outside academia--which she wished to discuss.
Quite apart from the irredeemable nature
of the "mainstream" press--The New York Times, The
Washington Post and the rest are far too busy carrying more Iraqi
horror stories from "intelligence sources" than reporting
the American anti-war movement--the lady's desire to "bridge-build"
with fellow "activists" was all too familiar a theme.
The people with whom these liberal academics
should be building bridges are the truck-drivers and bell-hops
and Amtrak crews, the poor blacks and the cops whose families
provide the cannon fodder for America's overseas military adventures.
But that, of course, would force intellectuals to emerge from
the sheltered, tenured world of seminars and sit-ins and deal
directly with those whose opinions they wish to change.
When I made this very point at Harvard
and several other universities, I was told, rather patronizingly,
that these people--the phrase was almost identical--had "so
little information" or are "not very informed".
This is, in fact, untrue. I have heard as much sense about the
Middle East from a train crew en route from Washington to Georgia
and from a waiter in a St Louis diner as I have from the good
folks of North Carolina.
Black Americans, for example, are uninhibited
in their sympathy for Palestinians under occupation. But when
I told a lecturer in Austin that I had asked hotel staff and
air crews to turn up to my lectures on the Middle East and America--and
that all had come--I was treated with a kind of weird amazement,
puzzlement that I should bother to ask such unpromising material
to think about the Arab-Israel conflict mixed with faint pity
that I should ever expect them to understand.
Sometimes I rather suspect that the anti-war
left in America likes being in a permanent minority. I mean no
disrespect to the Noam Chomskys and Daniel Ellsbergs and Dennis
Bernsteins; they fight, amid abuse and threats, to make their
voices heard. Yet I have an uneasy feeling that many on the intellectual
left are fearful that America will lose its next war amid massive
casualties--but are even more fearful that America may win with
minimal casualties.
Perhaps this is unfair. But as long as
America's anti-war movement talks to itself rather than to others,
it is going to go on being surprised when the Gregg Aykinses
emerge from the darkness with their hatred and venom intact to
support George Bush's forthcoming war in Iraq.
Yesterday's
Features
CounterPunch News Service
Slow
Lerner: It May Not Help Kids in Iraq, But It Sure Got Michael
Lerner Airtime
Andrew Murray
Tony
Blair Versus the British People
Ben Tripp
President
A**hole
Peggy Thomson
My
Close Encounter with Saddam
Gary Leupp
Meet Mr. Blowback:
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Op and Homicidal Thug
Saul Landau
Bush and Corporate Fraud
Adam Engel
A Civilian Occupation:
The Politics of Israeli Architecture
Anthony Gancarski
Jacksonville in Crisis
Rick Giombetti
Specific Threats to Democracy
Jean-David Levitte
A Warning on Iraq from France:
Make War the Last Option
Ian Gurney
Whose Side is Bush On?
Maria Engqvist
Did
the FARC Shoot Down a US Military Plane in Colombia?
Ron Jacobs
This Madness Must Cease
Josh Frank
Call to Washington:
Stonewall Bush
Website of the Day
Rock
Out Against War
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
Katz, Scott Handleman, and Bruce Tomczak
Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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