On 1/8/07, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you were supporting my position with your quote then I would say 'hear, hear,' but knowing you and your sympathies I suspect you are aiming it at me rather than those I am accusing of being unable to explain themselves.
Dear Lawrence,
To use a famous political _expression_, "I have no dog in your fight." As you may have noticed, I have ceased to participate in the regular Punch-and-Judy shows that you and Irene provide for us. The reason is simple. Neither of you has demonstrated the slightest willingness to change your positions for several months now. You are each in the grip of your own fixed ideas, I know what they are, I learn nothing new from either of you. In our brave new world where the electronic either is filled with millions of voices all clamoring for attention, the signal to noise ratio in what you both say is now too low to be worth the bother.
This is not, I hasten to add, an accusation that either of you is illogical. Given the premises that frame your positions the output is incommensurable. You talk past each other, only growing angrier that the other fails to accept the conclusions implicit in your assumptions. "Oh that, again," one sighs and hits the delete key and moves on to something else.
Nor is this an accusation that either of you is insane, outside this particular discussion. In your particular case, you are saved from a twit filter by the grace of your poetry, which I often find quite moving.
The annoyance that moved my posting the quote from McCracken is one that many on many different email lists, blogs, etc., provide. Who knows, it may be the fault of the lawyers from whom we have all been taught to be reflexively litigious. It could be the fault of education so focused on getting kids to express themselves that the values of self-reflection and open-mindedness are degraded. What ever the cause the effect is everywhere, people who assume that every discussion is about them, that simply asserting an opinion makes the opinion valuable, and that labeling people Left or Right, kikes or wogs, pink or purple add value to what they say.
But you, Lawrence, are far from the worst of offenders. I hold in the highest respect the fact that you have gone out of your way to read a lot of books about the Middle East and read them seriously. When you note disagreements among your sources, what you say is often interesting. I am, however, concerned that you depend on a relatively limited range of authors who share a similar point of view agreeable with your own assumptions. I could easily recommend a similar list from "the Left" that would be equally biased in other directions. Thus, to me, the disagreements you note sound to me like theologians debating the differences between transubstantiation and consubstantiation, or Freudians or Marxists dissecting fine points of difference in their own authorities.
I am, as you know, a professional propagandist, a modern sophist trained in the wicked arts of advertising. Please consider my professional advice. If you want to break through and actually change the minds of the people you are writing for, eschew name-calling and blunt confrontation. Both arouse resistance and leave you with no one listening but your partners in the same folie a' deux. The rest of us will get on with our lives and find more interesting games to play.
You might, by the way, find it interesting to look up a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times. I have no URLs handy since I am reading them on paper on page 12 of the Japan Times where they are reprinted. By eminent historians Harold Holzer, Joseph Ellis, and Adrian Goldsworthy, they address the questions what would Lincoln, Washington, or Caesar do about Iraq. Ellis on Washington comes closest to my own appreciation of the current situation there.
"It's a ridiculous question: 'What would George Washington do about Iraq?'
"Well, if you plopped him down in the Iraqi capital, he would be utterly lost. He couldn't find Iraq on a map. Show him a cell phone, a helicopter or a Humvee and he wouldn't order them into action, he'd be mesmerized.
"He is simply unavailable for a conversation about Iraq.
"But suppose you could contact Washington, and suppose you posed a question to him that never mentioned Iraq yet described the dilemma facing the United States.
"It might go like this:
"'Can a powerful army sustain control over a widely dispersed foreign population that contains a militant minority prepared to resist subjugation at any cost?'
"Washington would recognize the strategic problem immediately, because it is a description of the British Army in the colonies' War for Independence.
"And, more than anyone else, Washington's experience during the war as the leader of an American insurgency allowed him to appreciate the inherently intractable problems that faced an army of occupation in any protracted conflict...."
"The administration never appreciated the odds against its success, and it disastrously confused conventional military superiority with the demands imposed on an army of occupation.
"No leader in American history understood those lessons better than Washington, who viewed them as manifestations of British imperial arrogance, which he described as 'founded equally in malice, absurdity and error.'"
That to me is not "a Leftist" speaking, but rather someone with a deeper than usual understanding of history and the ability to grasp both its tragedies and ironies.
But the lesson of the day is not about George Washington; this is, after all, no more than a hypothetical argument. It is my personal and professional recommendation that you listen carefully to Joseph Ellis' voice. You are a poet; you know what I mean. With a bit of careful study, you may come to understand why Ellis goes from strength to strength and has won a Pulitizer prize, while Lawrence is increasingly ignored.
John
