ORIANA FALLACI & THE NEW YORKER
-- The Liberal NY Establishment Has No Clothes!
June 5, 2006: The New Yorker magazine has, for many years, catered to the anxieties and strivings of wordsmith intellectuals and those aspiring to that status. Is there a psychiatrist's office in Manhattan that doesn't display the magazine in its waiting room? It is a part of the supportive therapy worried wordsmith intellectuals require. It reassures them that, just as in 6th grade, they are still the cleverest ones in the class, whatever the adult world may think. It assures them their sexual confusion is evidence of an elevated metrosexual status. It tells them that their physical timidity is in reality, evidence of a finer, nobler pacifist sensibility and multicultural tolerance. So what if they ran from confrontation in the schoolyard; they were only striving to rise above base human aggression.
Ever since 9-11 scared the hell out of this wordsmith class, the magazine has devoted itself to explaining that there is no real threat from totalitarian Islam, the misunderstood "other", but instead the danger to the world emanates from the person of President George Bush.
Like any shared delusional belief, the community of believers feels special, superior to the unknowing masses, and reassured. While radical Islam is battering at the gates, the New Yorker turns its collective gaze, every week, to the imaginary threats posed by the macho cowboy in the White House.
No reason to be concerned about an enemy who declares war on America and sets about annihilating the infidels. Hey, it's the evil Christian believer, the man who's clear about his gender, George Bush, who must be stopped.
Soothing the anxieties of its readers is accomplished, not only by flattering their sense of moral superiority, but by applying childhood utopian fantasies to real dangers. Multicultural leftism is such a balm to the worried. No reason to fear a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; after all, he is simply articulating a belief system shared by many. We have our own shared liberal faith, and its devil is W. and the Neo-Cons, not totalitarian Islam. Multiculturalism is a form of self flattery, a 'We are the World' incantation, designed to calm the frightened upper west side liberal.
Once upon a time, Orianna Fallaci was a heroine of the very same utopian left that now despises her. She wrote scathing assessments of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Now however, she has become a Churchillian voice warning of the threat posed by totalitarian Islam, and has therefore become the target of former leftist allies. She has been especially scathing towards the appeasing, and cowardly politically correct responses of Western governments, media and intellectual elites. The New Yorker perfectly articulates every P.C. cliche, the denial of reality, the multicultural, appeasing attitudes she fears will lead to defeat of the West. This week the magazine sent its critic, Margaret Talbot, to interview Fallaci. While it is very interesting to hear Ms. Fallaci's views, they are by now pretty familiar. The interview is most revealing though, of the status anxieties of the interviewer and her left-liberal assumptions. In place of thought, we have attitude, stance, tone. It is shot through with the interviewer's smug condescension, as if she is engaged with a fascinating lower form of life, a curious specimen, full of animal spirits but lacking in proper attitudes, good taste and politesse. Ultimately it is Margaret Talbot trying to reassure herself that all is well in the insulated world of the New Yorker.
Talbot is just shocked to the depths of her delicate literary sensibilities by Fallaci's straightforward description of the dangers posed to the West by Islam. She quotes Fallaci saying:
"I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing." She elaborated, in an e-mail, "Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West."
This is just too much for Talbot. You can almost see her reaching for the smelling salts. Not that she offers any reasoned objections to the facts laid out by Fallaci. Instead she has a literary objection, i.e, "Fallaci refuses to recognize the limitations of this metaphor -- say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not the same as an annexation by another state..."
Oh? Talbot utterly misses the facts placed in front of her by Fallaci and instead attributes to Fallaci her own tendency to aestheticize harsh reality and reassure herself with metaphoric equivalences between totalitarian Islam and the threat posed by Christianity in our public schools. When Talbot is on the verge of grasping a point Fallaci makes about the dangers of Islam being taught to young school children, she witlessly interjects: "This is a good reminder of why the American model of keeping religious instruction out of public schools facilitates assimilation."
When Fallaci points to the spread of mosques through Europe, she is not doing so out of concern with their architectural failings, but with the ideology promoted in them. Talbot doesn't get it. Forceful as Fallaci's reasoning is, it makes no dent in the liberal faith of Talbot. From the Olympian heights of her position at the New Yorker, Talbot presumes to cast judgment on Fallaci's unconscious motivations: "Reasonable worries", Talbot writes, "about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism were combined (..in Fallaci) with a visceral revulsion and the need for a new enemy,(our emphasis) in the post-Fascist, post-Communist world..." The subtext here for New Yorker regulars is: 'this nutty woman finds enemies where none exist because of a pathological need. There's really nothing to be so concerned about, nothing more than a little 'reasonable worry' on the same level more or less as worry about Christianity in the schools, so move right along.'
And move along, Talbot does. She is relieved that her next meeting with Fallaci is mostly devoted to talk about food and dress, congenial topics for a New Yorker writer. The reader can almost palpate Talbot's relief at not having to think too hard. She can relax, enjoy the food, discuss styles in womens' clothing, feel pleased to be interviewing a woman who has lived a life far richer than her own.
This author couldn't help but wonder, how did Fallaci manage to remain so polite, listen so carefully and respectfully to Talbot? The twittering conventional wisdom emanating from her must have been hard to tolerate. All the politically correct assumptions rattling against each other in Talbot's head must have been enough to provoke another blast of Fallaci's famous rage, but she remained patient and rather friendly, unfailingly respectful. Toward the end of the interview, Fallaci does, at last, seem to show the strain of listening to Talbot's self referential P.C. cant:
"You've got to get old, because you have nothing to lose," she said over lunch that afternoon. "You have this respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don't give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn't used to say before-you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness-now I open my big mouth. I say, 'What are you going to do to me. You go fuck yourself - I say what I want.'"
I would like to think that the very last sentence was directed not just at the unholy alliance of Islam and the Western hating left, but at the New Yorker's Ms. Talbot herself.
The above article is from The Iconoclast (Canada) -- MG. |
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