French intellectual encounters odd creatures, mistakes them for American liberals

I'm not so familiar with Bernard-Henri Lévy's work. But I did see this article of his for the 02/27/06 issue of The Nation (accessed 02/10/06): A Letter to the American Left.

The piece strikes me as one of those purer-than-thou statements that show up at times in The Nation and elsewhere in which the readers are expected to regard "whiny" as "deep". And, like others of its genre, this one left me thinking, "What the heck is he talking about?"

For instance, take the following items in which he catalogues his dismay at the American "left", by which he seems to mean pretty much anyone opposed to the Halliburton Republicans. When he looks at the anti-Bush opposition, all he sees is "a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void". A cosmic ideological void. Wow. Like Huck Finn marveling at Tom Sawyer's latest creative explanation for something, I'd have to say I have no idea what he means but, boy, does it sound grand!

His catalogue of depressing specimens includes:

The 60-year-old "young" Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era

That would be the people who are worried about the "missile gap", enforcing Brown vs. Board of Education in the Deep South universities and trying to keep Soviet nuclear missiles out of Cuba? Yeah, there are lots of those running around.

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

Now, I live near Berkeley and I know there are a seemingly infinite variety of political opinions to be found there. But did I just dream this, or didn't MoveOn.org originally start by organizing public opposition to, uh, Bill Clinton's impeachment? You know, as in, "it's time to move on"? Somehow I doubt that MoveOn.org activists regard Bill Clinton as "quasi-equivalent" to Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and Kenn Starr. That sounds a bit far-fetched, even for Berkeley!

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

I'm trying to think if any of the churches I've ever been in rates as a "mega-church". I don't think so. But who calls them "laboratories of the enemy"? And I'm just trying to picture "anti-Republican strategists" (which presumably means Democratic strategists) standing there with their mouths hanging open in amazement at hearing that Lévy had visited some of them. It doesn't sound very plausible to me. But maybe that was in Berkeley, too, where the implausible is fairly normal.

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"

He makes John Kerry sound like Keith Richards just before he died. (Yes, I know he has kept on playing with the Rolling Stones for the 25 or so years since his demise. More's the wonder.)

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"

This reminds me of those poll results where the pollster finds that 75% of the American public believes all the moon landings were faked or something like that. The first question that comes to mind is, what exactly did you ask to get responses like this? Fundraising automatons gone mad is another of those Tom Sawyer phrases. Exactly how would an "automaton" go mad, I wonder.

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 ...

Actually, I always thought that unions were the lifeblood of "the left", but, hey. Lévy was disappointed with this vaguely-defined but also impure group, as well, among whom:

... 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).

This is sending me into Daily Howler mode here. Look at that sentence. What sense does it actually make? Who is he talking about, anyway? He sounds like he's describing a bunch of undergraduates stoned on downers. If you were writing a story, there's some good phrases in there that would be tempting to steal. "The haggard, ghostly man sat on the bench, seemingly staring at some dreamy image in the distance. I spoke to him but he only whispered in response. There was about him a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, that I thought must have come from the severe brain damage he sustained when he was confined in a room and forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh broadcasts for 48 hours straight."

So, Lévy's stoners were ghostly and lifeless, haggard and irritable. But apparently they were also "firmly mobilized" by the Iraq War and the American Empire. I'm trying to picture what "firmly mobilized" might mean. But I don't think I'll go there. But they also sadly denounce the "so-called" American Empire "when they have nothing left to say".

I get it! He stumbled into a rally of the well-known group, Zombies for Peace! When they heard the words "Iraq War", they howled in fearsome cannabilistic excitement, getting "firmly mobilized" and all. Then when Lévy asked them about Katrina and Social Security, they subsided into groaning and moaning, finally rolling their heads in despair and saying, "Emmm-pire, emm-pire-eee ..."

Did this guy actually talk to any living, breathing liberals? Heck, I know for sure there are some around in Berkeley. If he was there, he shouldn't have had to look too hard for them.

Because it sounds like his image of American liberals was derived by reading what they say about "liberals" in the Weekly Standard, WorldNetDaily, FOX News and other territories of Freeperville, where "reality-based" is a sneer.

I love this question of Lévy's, too: "Why haven't we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag - or even Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner" on the torture issue?

Now, I'm not exactly sure of the answer. We don't hear much from Gore Vidal because nobody really listens to him. Tony Kushner? Beats me. Maybe he was too busy co-writing the screenplay for Munich.

In Susan Sontag's case, it may have something to do with the fact that she, uh, died in 2004. Lévy may have caught sight of her at the Zombies for Peace rally. But it's not surprising that he might have found her to be less articulate than in her alive days.

Maybe this whole Lévy article is a satire.

Tags: bernard-henri lévy