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| Fifth Column |
| Mark Steyn on The 'Cold Civil War' |
| 2007-10-23 |
William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word "cyberspace," way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:Alejandro looked over his knees. "Carlito said there is a war in America." That's quite a concept: "A cold civil war." Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it's tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author's formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'd dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Someone else says, "America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government." Etc. But it's that one phrase that makes you pause: "A cold civil war."... Indeed. A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.... No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse. Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the "regime change" and "inside job" types have set the pace. But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies. In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop's Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn't exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things -- the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus -- but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained -- the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance -- but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place. Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:... I tried to excerpt the high points. Anyway, I get the feeling that people who live in glass houses shouldn't brag about what big iconoclasts they are. I also wonder... these self-proclaimed iconoclasts have proclaimed themselves to be enemies of the fascists, but they haven't done anything to fight fascism per se, they've just worked to cut away the middle ground between surrender and aggressive fascism. I doubt the result will be good. |
| Posted by:Abdominal Snowman |
| #4 Bingo Zen. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2007-10-23 19:46 |
| #3 I have a gnawing sense of dread that it's not going to stay cold much longer. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-10-23 18:01 |
| #2 "A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground." Thin sliver, indeed. So thin you may as well call it nonexistent. If it hasn't vanished entirely already, it will soon if we remain on the present course. "Cold Civil War" is a damned good description for what we're in right now-- but I have a gnawing sense of dread that it's not going to stay cold much longer. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2007-10-23 17:44 |
| #1 I have finished reading Spook Country and I had a hard time getting through it (and I am a person who has read Proust). It is like a "beatnik" sci-fi version of WoT with overtones of Truthers, Ron Paulism and Indo-hispanic mysticism. The may have to make a movie in order for us to understand it. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2007-10-23 16:16 |