The American Spectator

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Expensive Thirst

6.13.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 6)

SUPERHEROES
Re: George Neumayr's Hollywood Heroes and Villains:

Spike Lee's respectability since Do the Right Thing has been built on the theme that we can't forget the past and pretend it didn't happen. Indeed, Americans of all races must be confronted with the past so that racism can be "dealt with." Whatever else may be said, this is essentially a left-wing sentiment that leads to the notion that a top-down, inorganic rebuilding of society is necessary as the great mass of our fellow countrymen will do no such thing on their own. (The question whether such a project has any possibility of succeeding is left unaddressed. The project aims at a moral quest. Therefore it MUST be done.)

The odd part of this "new" consciousness is that while brutally confronting the past we are to also rewrite history by retro-projecting a modern ideal into the past. The notion is to portray all races and ethnic groups as vitally wrapped up in the great and small events in our country's story. The ends up in the conundrum of confronting the past by encountering a past that wasn't.

All this is as misbegotten as the oft stated imperative to have a "national conversation on race." Contrary to the articles of faith expounded by the self-appointed healers of our racial ills, "forgetting" plays a vital part in attempting a civil public. Multi-ethnic, multi-racial societies are inherently unstable -- more prone to fly apart than meld together. There are many things that go into the glue that holds such a populace together; but a detailed self-examination and demand for justice is not one of them.

Social activists in our various Christian denominations preach the necessity of bringing "peace and justice" to the sins and oppressions of the nations -- implying that a rigorous scouring of the sins of the nation to achieve of full justice will lead to peace. In reality, "justice" is a blood-thirsty bitch-goddess. If given full rein, "justice" unleashes the hounds of unquenchable war. Human beings are only men and women -- not angels. There is only so much justice we can afford. The horrors and crimes of the past call for more blood than we can ever give up.

The truth is we can have justice or we can have peace but we can't have both. In actual practice, we get some muddle of the two. To live together in an imperfect arrangement involves a measure of forgetting and simply closing the door. No doubt, forgetting carries its own price. Many of the "guilty" will never face the bar while others are let free. Many victims (especially those who only exist in memory) will never be made whole. But absolute justice would savage even the innocent and those even yet unborn. We are just men and women -- not angels. We love innocent life more than we love justice.
-- Mike Dooley
Indianapolis, Indiana

George Neumayr notes "the footage of stars jumping to their feet at the Oscars to applaud Polanski in absentia when he won best director for The Pianist contrasts nicely with their sullen sitting during Elia Kazan's award."

Neumayr is quite correct, but there was one important exception worthy of note. When a very frail, stooped, 90-year-old Kazan walked the stage to accept the award, he leaned heavily on the escorting Robert De Niro, who then stood by Kazan while Kazan made a brief acceptance speech (to the sullen crowd).

It would appear that when you've "made it ma, top of the world," you can also show some courage.
-- Frank Natoli
Newton, New Jersey

TORTUOUS
Re: Christopher Orlet's Poetic Justice:

Always like your stuff. I must point out that in Mending Wall it was the guy next door who said, "good fences make good neighbors." Frost said, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in, or walling out."

I won first place in Boy's Poetry Interpretation in ninth grade for my reading of Mending Wall, and it has saved me from an ill-spent life of debauchery.
-- Glenn Yates

Christopher Orlet replies:
Sure, that's one interpretation. Here's another from Sparknotes: "The speaker...goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. Which person, then, is the real wall-builder? The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere-- 'where there are cows,' for example. Yet the speaker must derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here? There is something in him that does love a wall, or at least the act of making a wall."

WILD, WILD WEB
Re: Cord Blomquist's The Unfairness Doctrines:

Sooner than the vested media would prefer to imagine, each of us will gather information not from tendentious, overpaid, power-hungry gatekeepers, but by means of personal information-gathering software that will roam the Web tirelessly, seeking out and reporting back in real time information of interest to its "master."

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