A Letter to the Semi-Comatose Left

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Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:44:53 -0800 (PST)

A Letter to the Semi-Comatose Left

 

 

 

Easier read at the website:

 

How is it that so few " public intellectuals " have been found, within

the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy, who can

bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?.... I might be

mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the country is

waiting for this: " Bernard-Henry Levy / French philosopher

 

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_allen_l__060222_a_letter_to_the_semi.htm

 

February 22, 2006

 

A LETTER TO THE SEMI-COMATOSE LEFT

 

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A clear majority of the American public want another choice versus the

policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney ~ but there are few political

leaders who have the courage to offer that choice.

by Allen L Roland, Ph.D

http://www.opednews.com

" How is it that so few " public intellectuals " have been found, within

the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy, who can

bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?.... I might be

mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the country is

waiting for this: " Bernard-Henry Levy / French philosopher

 

Sometimes it takes a knowlegeable visitor, who once experienced

America's former greatness, to travel through our Republic and be

shocked by the ineptitude and passivity of the progressive left.

 

And his key finding,which I also deeply sense, is that a clear

majority of the American public want another choice versus the

policies of George Bush and Dick Cheney ~ but there are few political

leaders who have the courage to offer that choice.

 

Bernard-Henry Lévy, the French philosopher, bemoans " the semi-comatose

state in which I found the American left " in the course of his journey

through America ~ and files this letter of deep concern.(Courtesy of

Mark Jensen )

 

Allen L Roland

 

A LETTER TO THE AMERICAN LEFT

 

By Bernard-Henry Lévy

Translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell

 

The Nation

February 27, 2006 (posted Feb. 8)

 

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060227/levy

 

Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through

America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.

 

I know, of course, that the term " left " does not have the same meaning

and ramifications here that it does in France.

 

And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an

authentic " left " in the United States, in the European sense.

 

But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas

in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This

right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has

brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial

and striking.

 

And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the

other side -- to the contrary, through the looking glass of the

American " left " lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic

ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is

thoroughly enigmatic.

 

The 60-year-old " young " Democrats who have desperately clung to the

old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been

so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting

against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize

politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort,

treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to

the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the

anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one

of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most

Machiavellian) laboratories of the " enemy, " staring in disbelief when

I say I've spent quite some time exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry,

whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard,

ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: " If you hear anything about

those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know " ; the supporters of Senator

Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they

planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win

the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what

the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like

fundraising automatons gone mad: " to raise more money " ; and then,

perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the

left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public

opinion, the intellectuals -- I found a curious lifelessness, a

peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so

many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly

mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called " American Empire " (the

denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have

nothing left to say).

 

For an outside observer it is passing strange, for instance, that a

number of progressives needed, by their own admission, to wait for

Hurricane Katrina before they got indignant about, or even learned

about, the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty blighting American

cities.

 

For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas, it is

simply incomprehensible that more voices weren't raised long ago, in

the name of no less than the force of " the Enlightenment, " to denounce

the ridiculous fraud of the anti-Darwinian supporters of " intelligent

design. "

 

And what about the death penalty? How can it be that there isn't yet,

within the political parties, especially the Democratic Party -- which

everyone knows will never budge on the question without decisive

internal pressure -- a trend of opinion calling for the abolition of

this civilized barbarity?

 

And Guantánamo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in Central

Europe, those areas where the rule of law no longer applies? I know,

of course, that the press has denounced them. I know you have

journalists who, in a matter of days, accomplished what our French

press still hasn't finished forty years after our Algerian War. But

since when does the press excuse citizens from their political duties?

 

Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag -- or

even Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner (with whom I disagree on most other

grounds) on this vexed and vital issue? And what should we make of

that handful of individuals who, after September 11, launched the

debate about the circumstances in which torture might suddenly be

justified?

 

And I'm not even talking about Bush. I won't even mention Bush's gross

lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, except for the sake

of assembling the conclusive evidence. I know, of course, that you

denounce him -- but mechanically, I am almost tempted to say

ritualistically. And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon

because he had spied on his enemies and lied. They impeached Clinton

for a venial lie about inappropriate conduct. How is it, then, that it

took so long to draw a parallel between those lies and a lie about

which the least you can say is that its consequences were anything but

venial? How is it that so few " public intellectuals " have been found,

within the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy,

who can bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?

 

Some will retort that the " public intellectual " is a European

specialty, that we shouldn't blame Americans for their infidelity to a

tradition that is not their own. What do such killjoys make of the

Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of *The Crucible*? Or

of that golden age of civil rights awareness, when great writers

enunciated what was right and good and true?

 

Others will object that the massive, resounding mobilization of civil

society is not an American custom. All you need to do to convince

yourself of the untruth of this is remember the 1960s and the movement

for civil rights, then for the rights of minorities in general, which

were the honor of the country and did not stem, let it be emphasized,

from any of the major political parties.

 

Still others will wax ironic about the disease of writing up

petitions, a French specialty, warded off by American pragmatism. Here

the objection is more serious; and I know the fatuity that can exist

in the mania for nonstop political engagement in the name of myriad

causes -- but aren't you afflicted, my American friends, with the

radically opposite sickness? Hasn't the ethics of sobriety won once

too often, with you, over the ethics of conviction?

 

And how could one not yearn for a petition that would address our

common nausea when faced with the spectacle of a diabetic, blind,

nearly deaf old man, pushed in his wheelchair to the San Quentin

execution chamber in California?

 

I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the

country is waiting for this. Everywhere, in the innermost reaches of

America, you can meet men and women who hope for great voices capable

of echoing their impatience in a momentous way.

 

If I were an American writer, I would try to ponder the lessons of the

totalitarian century and those of democracy, Tocqueville-style, all at

once, in the same breath, and with the same rigor.

 

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer

who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog

and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national

radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net