Anti-militarism has long been an attitude that adversary culture
Marxists and religious pacifists could share. So it remains today.
Thus the General Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee
said: "[O]ur history teaches us that bloodshed leads only to more
bloodshed. . . . We call upon our president and Congress to stop the
bombing. . . . Our grief is not a cry for retaliation. Terrorism must
be stopped at its root cause." This too was the considered judgment
of Vivian Gornick (author of The Romance of American Communism):
"Force will get us nowhere. It is reparations that are owing, not
retribution." If force is not the answer, what is? Love and joy,
apparently. Alice Walker "firmly believe[d] that the only punishment
that works is love." Richard Gere, the actor, similarly advised: "If
you can see the terrorists as a relative who's dangerously sick . . .
the medicine is love and compassion." Oliver Stone, however, detected
no illness; he called the September 11 attacks "a revolt." He equated
the Palestinians dancing on the streets at the news of the attacks
with those who publicly rejoiced at the news of the French and
Russian Revolutions.

Another oft-repeated theme of the adversary culture soon reappeared,
as well: that of America being untrue to its own best values. Thus
Russell Means, the American Indian activist who lead the 1973
uprising at Wounded Knee, said:

"It's what I used to see when I was behind the so-called Iron Curtain
touring Eastern Europe. It's what I used to see in Nicaragua and
Colombia . . . [namely] the ongoing deprivation of individual
liberties and violations of the U.S. Constitution by the Federal
Government . . . the government lost all constitutional
responsibility and has become an outlaw."

Terry Eagleton was equally convinced that "They [the Bush
Administration] will use the crisis as an excuse to trample on our
civil liberties", and the cover of Gore Vidal's new book, The End of
Liberty--Towards a New Totalitarianism, shows the Statue of Liberty
gagged with a U.S. flag.

Alexander Cockburn averred, yet again, as though the Cold War had
never ended, that the war was "about the defense of the American
Empire." Two feminists found no difference between the practices of a
religious police state and the influence of fashions on portions of
the population:

"Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they
enter the public realm. . . . During the 20th century, American
culture has dictated [sic] a nearly complete uncovering of the female
form. . . . The war on terrorism has certainly raised our awareness
of the ways in which women's bodies are controlled by a repressive
regime in a far away land, but what about the constraints on women's
bodies here at home . . . ? The burka and the bikini represent
opposite ends of the political spectrum."

Ralph Nader, meanwhile, was led to conclude that "there is an
escalation of the corporate takeover of the United States. The ground
and soil are ripe for a revolt by the American people."

The best example of an almost purely visceral response, in this case
to the flag and what it stands for, came from Katha Pollit of The
Nation, who, for one, did not join the newly unembarrassed patriotic
liberals. She revealed that "my daughter who goes to Stuyvesant High
School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly
an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag
stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." A physics professor at
the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) shared these sentiments:
"To many ordinary people . . . around the globe the U.S. has done
terrible things. . . . If I think about the flag, I have to think
about it from the point of view of those people." At Amherst College
war protesters (allegedly students from nearby Hampshire College)
burned the flag while chanting "this flag doesn't represent me."

It was not only the celebrities of the adversary culture who found
the events of September 11 an appropriate occasion for reaffirming
their animosity toward American society. One would not know it from
the early writings of Washington-based pundits, but there were
demonstrations on nearly 200 campuses and in several major cities as
a "nationwide network of more than 150 student antiwar groups . . .
[emerged] holding campus vigils, protests, and teach-ins." The
correspondence columns of local newspapers in and around college
campuses were flooded with letters expressing sentiments similar to
those of the better known critics of the United States quoted above.
These critics have a following.

Thus, a professor of journalism at Amherst regarded the attacks as
the "predictable result of American policies . . . [which] ignored
the suffering of Palestinians. . . . How can we fail to see that our
policy has created zealots and suicide bombers." He, too, was
convinced that the adversaries of the United States are helpless
pawns of social and historical forces; only the United States and its
amoral leaders have alternatives to choose from and can therefore be
held morally culpable. A professor in the sociology department at the
same university proposed that we must "find a way to reduce those
alienating actions whereby we create our own enemies." At a Haverford
College meeting on September 14, an emeritus professor suggested that
"the United States was the most violent nation on earth and ended by
saying, 'We are complicit.'" At a teach-in at the University of North
Carolina, "one lecturer told the students that if he were President
he would first apologize to the widows and orphans, the tortured and
impoverished and all the other millions of other victims of American
imperialism." University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen told his
students and peers that the attack "was no more despicable than the
massive acts of terrorism . . . that the U.S. government had
committed during my lifetime." Barbara Foley, professor of English at
Rutgers University, warned her students: "Be aware that whatever its
proximate cause, the ultimate cause [of the attacks] is the fascism
of u.s. [sic] foreign policy over the past many decades."

Members of the Middle East Studies Association, an academic
professional group, also reached the conclusion that the United
States bore primary responsibility for the terrorist attacks (which,
by the way, they refuse to call by that term). At the 2001 annual
meeting of the Association one panelist said, "We have not shown that
our actions differentiate us from those who attacked us." An elderly
professor in the audience declared, "'We ought to be reminded of our
responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and understand that we are
not so good', he received a round of applause." The moderator fully
endorsed his view.

The Attractions of Obscurity

The members of the adversary culture, famous and not so famous, have
something else in common, too, for the most part: an irresistible
attraction to obscure theorizing and arcane jargon. Two explanations
stand forth as to why many social critics prefer esoteric turns of
phrase and opaque abstractions to concreteness and specificity. One
is the parochial elitism of numerous academic intellectuals who write
mainly for one another and whose inaccessible language and
terminology "signifies" their vanguard status. The second explanation
may be the more important, however.

The discontent that animates many critics of American (and Western)
society, and that has become a major source of their sense of
identity and self-esteem, is murky and shapeless. Its origins may not
be clear even to those consumed by it; such diffuse and contradictory
grievances, impulses, unfathomable sentiments and personal
resentments are inherently difficult to express in precise and
accessible language. Form follows function: lack of clarity in style
reflects amorphous motives and beliefs; Jacoby calls them
"postcoherent thinkers." A statement of the "Transnational Feminist
Practices Against War" illustrates what he has in mind:

"As feminist theorists of transnational and postmodern cultural
formations . . . we offer the following response to the events of
September 11 and its aftermath: First and foremost, we need to
analyze the thoroughly gendered and racialized effects of nationalism
and to identify what kinds of inclusions and exclusions are being
enacted. . . . We see that instead of a necessary historical material
and geopolitical analysis of 9-11, the emerging nationalist
discourses consist of highly sentimentalized narratives that . . .
re-inscribe compulsory heterosexuality and the rigidly dichotomized
gender roles. . . . A number of icons constitute the ideal types in
the drama of nationalist domesticity."

It is among the attractions of obscurity that what people cannot
fully comprehend is more difficult to criticize and refute. But it is
also the case that some people are impressed by what they cannot
fully understand, what promises some great, lurking, not fully
penetrable revelation. A paragraph from the newly popular volume
Empire, co-authored by an American literary scholar and an imprisoned
Italian terrorist, provides further illustration:

"In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a
separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity
turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely
intimate. The process consists, in fact, of the moments that are dialectically related. In the first moment difference has to be pushed to the extreme. In the colonial imagination the colonized is not simply an other banished outside the realm of civilization; rather it is grasped or produced as Other, as the absolute negation, as the most distant point on the horizon.  

Doubtless there are connections and affinities between the attractions of obscurity, profound political misjudgements and commonsense defying beliefs. As Orwell observed, only intellectuals are capable of believing certain kinds of nonsense. Could, for example, anybody without the benefits of higher education and not living in an academic setting believe (with Michael Hardt and Antonini Negri, the authors of Empire) that the 1992 Los Angeles riots were "the most radical and powerful struggles of the final years of the 20th century"?  
    
Then and Now

The adversarial generation of the 1960s holds on to a conception of America as malignant and inauthentic and a sense of identity of the fearless fighter for truth and social justice. This is the generation that had the opportunity and pleasure to glorify its youth by linking it to the good causes of the 1960s. Perhaps therein lies the key to its durability, and in their critical mass who came of age together and whose youthful idealism converged with the rise of idealistic social movements and causes of the time.
But age and mortality are taking their toll on the 1960s adversary culture; William Kunstler passed away a few years ago as did I.F. Stone and Eqbal Ahmad. Other influential representatives of this culture are aging; most are well over sixty, often seventy, including the Berrigan brothers, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, William Sloan Coffin, Angela Davis, David Dellinger, E.L. Doctorow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, Stanley Fish, Tom Hayden, Frederic Jameson, Jonathan Kozol, Norman Mailer, Ralph Nader, Victor Navasky, Michael Parenti, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Paul Sweezy, and Howard Zinn. Even Bill Ayers, the cheerfully unrepentant Weatherman-bomber, is approaching sixty. The beliefs of this aging subculture, however, are clearly being passed on to segments of the younger generation, no doubt in part because American society since the end of the Cold War has continued to produce high expectations (which cannot be met) and the corresponding disappointments that often turn into social criticism. Some young people are consumed by the same blend of incoherent discontent and diffuse idealism that characterized the protestors of the 1960s. They, too, seem to be in the grip of the conviction that "something is terribly wrong" with this society-a conviction that precedes the identification of any specific wrongs. When subsequently identified, the specific flaws become proof of the prior, underlying belief in pervasive corruption and nameless wrongs. 

This smaller generation of "peace activists" today also resembles earlier ones in that they appear to be not so much opposed to all wars but only those waged by the United States. Given their conviction that American society is a profoundly unjust system, any war its government may wage has to be inexcusable. However, should there appear on the horizon some new "national liberation movement" or militant cause that uses a congenial and idealistic rhetoric, this putative devotion to peace vanishes and is replaced by support for the new, just, liberating, and authentic revolutionary violence (Chiapas? Shining Path? Maoists in Nepal?).

A recent sympathetic portrait of such young people in the New York Times Educational Life supplement demonstrates how present attitudes replicate those prevalent in the 1960s. The "typical student activist" of our times portrayed in the article is one of the leaders of "Students for Social Equality." He "is fueled by a nagging anger over the fact that there are haves and have-nots, oppessors and the oppressed." (His father is a general contractor on Long Island, and both parents are Republican.) His favorite words are "love", "unity", "solidarity" and "justice", along with "beautiful"-as in "unity is beautiful." In his conversation with the reporter "he searches for the roots of his unrest." This activist and others like him, one radicalized by the writings of Howard Zinn, radiated "an ardor not seen for several decades." The main character in the article was smitten by an anti-globalism demonstration: "It was amazing how many people were out acting on their beliefs and coming together. It was beautiful." A protest at the military training center at Fort Benning, too, "was a really beautiful protest, really spiritual." Union Square in New York city became a "magical place of unity" at an anti-Afghanistan war demonstration. Among the activists, the reporter observed, "there is a lot of raging against the machine."

Many readers, at least of a certain age, will recall that "raging against the machine" was the main theme of Mario Savio's fiery oration during the Free Speech demonstrations at Berkeley in 1964. Then and now "the machine" stood for impersonality, lack of community and feeling, "profits above people" and the fear of being crushed by forces over which one has no control. Then and now, too, for some people the personal ultimately dwarfs, defines and displaces the truly political. American society will continue to generate a mixture of expectations, unease and discontent. That is the hallmark of its nature and its true modernity, and it found new expression in the peculiar dynamics of the personal and political in the adversarial responses to 9/11.

Essay Types: Essay