When there&#8217;s nothing left to say, self-parody is the way
<p>I&#8217;m just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of<br />
the 1960s and 1970s.  I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and<br />
I disagree with the anti-war Left&#8217;s agitation against a war on Iraq<br />
today.  But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert<br />
Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these days, I wonder if I&#8217;m<br />
getting old and allowing a golden haze to cloud my recollection of<br />
past decades.  Because I find myself feeling almost nostalgic for<br />
the anti-Vietnam-war Left.</p>
<p>Yes, yes, I still think &#8220;Hanoi Jane&#8221; and her crowd were basically<br />
wrong.  Wrong about the consequences of a North Vietnamese victory<br />
(Communists turn out to be murderously repressive &mdash; what a shock!);<br />
wrong about the motives and interests of the U.S.; wrong about almost<br />
everything except the level of incompetence, buffoonery, and myopia<br />
afflicting the generals and politicians running that war.</p>
<p>But there was one important difference.  The anti-Vietnam-war Left<br />
may have been deluded and prone to masturbating in front of Che<br />
Guevara posters&#8230;but if you sifted through enough of their ranting<br />
you could detect the outlines of a principled case, or several<br />
principled cases.  There was one argument on which they persuaded me;<br />
though I was not of draftable age, I found I agreed with them that the<br />
military draft was an intolerable form of slavery years before I<br />
encountered Robert Heinlein&#8217;s pithy objurgation that &#8220;A nation that<br />
cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself will not survive<br />
&mdash; and does not deserve to.&#8221;</p>
<p>But try as I might, I can&#8217;t detect a principled case anywhere in today&#8217;s<br />
anti-war Left.  Which is all the more curious since I think they<br />
could be making one.  Several, in fact: starting with the argument<br />
that we should abandon the path of war not even because of what it does<br />
to our enemies but because of what it does to ourselves.  At every<br />
level from the personal to the political, warfare is a brutalizing<br />
experience that erodes our freedoms and empowers the nastiest elements<br />
of human psyches and societies.</p>
<p>There are principled responses to that case, but that particular<br />
argument is not my point.  My point is that today&#8217;s anti-war<br />
rhetoric, as exemplified by reports on a planned September 11<br />
&#8220;Teach-In and Panel regarding Oppression&#8221; at UCLA, never seems<br />
to even confront the question of whether war against Afghanistan and Iraq<br />
is justified by the Islamist threat.  Instead, the topic is &#8220;U.S. Law<br />
and Policy Against Immigrants of Color&#8221;, as if there is any kind of<br />
equivalence between the U.S.&#8217;s border policies and the catastrophic<br />
mass murder of 2,500 people.</p>
<p>There is a curious kind of evasiveness at work here.  We can see it<br />
at work in the arid deconstructionism of Susan Sontag&#8217;s NYT op-ed, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/opinion/10SONT.html">Real<br />
Battles and Empty Metaphors</a>.  Even the title announces that she&#8217;s<br />
going to lucubrate about the relationship between language and<br />
reality, not confront reality itself.   A similar denial is evident<br />
it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war,<br />
he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow<br />
banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear<br />
weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them.</p>
<p>Maybe I&#8217;m getting senile, but it seems to me that the Left of my<br />
teens was in better contact with reality than today&#8217;s crew. There<br />
really was a military-industrial complex and the desire for war<br />
profits probably did drive some of the political support for the<br />
Vietnam war.  The military-industrial complex is still with us today,<br />
but the Left seems to have forgotten even the little it once knew<br />
about political economics and isn&#8217;t even bothering to raise that<br />
issue.  Perhaps this amnesia is a post-traumatic effect of watching<br />
Marx take a header into the dustbin of history; we&#8217;ve come to strange<br />
days indeed when I have to conclude that my libertarian self could<br />
easily write a better Marxist critique of Dubya&#8217;s war propaganda than<br />
anyone on the Left has yet issued in public.</p>
<p>Instead, what we&#8217;re seeing is a rhetoric that is half a retreat<br />
into language-chopping and half an expression of contempt for the<br />
U.S. &mdash; contempt so out of balance that it&#8217;s doomed to be tuned out by<br />
anyone less far to the left than the unlamented former Congresswoman<br />
<a href="http://www.house.gov/mckinney/">Cynthia McKinney</a>.</p>
<p>When did the Left descend into such empty self-parody?  And why?</p>
<p>Watching &#8220;real existing socialism&#8221; self-destruct must have been<br />
part of it.  I speculated on the psychological effects of that<br />
political collapse in a previous essay <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200205#75">Socialists<br />
to the Stars</a>, about Scottish SF writers Ken McLeod and Iain Banks.<br />
But something weirder and more diffuse happened to the Left on<br />
<em>this</em> side of the pond, and I&#8217;m not sure what it was.</p>
<p>Some days I wonder if Greg Egan, the reclusive West Australian<br />
author who has produced some of the best hard SF of the last decade,<br />
may not have called it right in the following passage from his novel<br />
&#8220;Teranesia&#8221;:</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and<br />
all the other social justice movements were getting more and more<br />
support.  So, in the 1980s, the CIA [...] hired some really clever<br />
linguists to invent a secret weapon; an incredibly complicated way of<br />
talking about politics that didn&#8217;t actually make any sense, but which<br />
spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded<br />
so impressive.  And at first, the people who talked like this just<br />
hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else<br />
let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless.  But<br />
then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;So instead of going to the people in power and saying, `How about<br />
upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?&#8217; the<br />
people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like `My<br />
truth narrative is in conflict with your truth marrative!&#8217;. And the<br />
people in power replied `Woe is me! You&#8217;ve thrown me into the briar<br />
patch!&#8217; And everyone else said `Who are these idiots? Why should we<br />
trust them when they can&#8217;t even speak properly?&#8217; And the CIA was<br />
happy.  And the people in power were happy.  And the secret weapon<br />
lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone<br />
who&#8217;d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit<br />
what they&#8217;d done,&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>Egan&#8217;s account is implausible only because it seems unlikely that<br />
the CIA is quite that subtle.  But he&#8217;s right in pointing out that the<br />
rise of the language of postmodernism &mdash; the sterile, involuted,<br />
pseudo-profundity famously skewered by the <a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/">Sokal Hoax</a><br />
&mdash; seems to be an important correlate of the decline of the<br />
American Left.</p>
<p>Self-parody is where you end up when you have nothing left to say.<br />
And when all you can talk about is `discourse&#8217; that&#8217;s a damn short road,</p>
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