THE WANDERER, JANUARY 6, 2005

JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH

Tragedy and Politics

     The tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which was felt from 
Africa to Australia, stunned even those of us who saw it 
only on television. Here was a natural disaster so huge 
and unexpected that it made all our ordinary public 
concerns seem petty. Some 60,000 are estimated to have 
died violently, and as many more may die of malaria, 
cholera, diarrhea, and other afflictions in the 
aftermath, despite all frantic relief efforts. And these 
figures don't count those who are missing.

     "On horror's head horrors accumulate." It was 
awesome, incomprehensible. Millions of poor people lost 
their homes in a flash, and felt blessed if their 
children didn't disappear too. All comment seemed 
hopelessly inadequate to this gigantic tragedy. One could 
only pray. 

     You might think that such a colossal act of God 
would banish thoughts of politics. But in our time 
everything this side of the planet Pluto gets 
politicized, and a (Norwegian) United Nations official 
accused the United States of being "stingy" with 
emergency aid. Secretary of State Colin Powell denied the 
charge, announcing that the U.S. was immediately 
increasing its donation from $15 million to $38 million. 

     How much is enough? One might wryly reflect that 
$38 million is still a lot less than the $5 billion or so 
the U.S. annually gives to the state of Israel, one of 
the world's richer countries in per capita income. It's 
also a lot less than the U.S. is spending on the War on 
Terror, in response to an attack that claimed fewer than 
3,000 American lives. It's probably best not to search 
for rationality in governmental distributions of wealth. 
Once again we are reminded that, despite all humanitarian 
rhetoric, the state's money always goes to politically 
powerful interests. 

     And we are reminded that all human power is as 
nothing. God's purposes are veiled from us; we can no 
more understand why He permits such evil to strike so 
many than why He shows such mercy to the rest of us.


Bin Laden and Islam 

     Feeling communicative, Osama bin Laden has 
reappeared on video to declare that anyone who votes in 
Iraq's U.S.-sponsored January 30 elections will be deemed 
an "infidel." He also has praise for the terrorist Abu 
Musab al-Zarqawi, whom he has promoted to the rank of 
"emir," urging Muslims to "listen to him."

     Bin Laden has also reportedly been trying to acquire 
nuclear weapons, though apparently without success. Let's 
pray that he doesn't get them. He'd clearly be willing to 
use them. 

     Though I can understand his fury at the West, his 
readiness to kill millions of innocent people seems to me 
unfathomable. How does he reconcile that, in his own mind 
and heart, with Muslim morality? 

     True, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, both 
Christians of sorts, were willing to kill countless 
people with aerial bombing, but they didn't profess to be 
religious leaders. They didn't make Christianity a 
synonym for fanaticism and mass murder. Bin Laden, if he 
got his way, would, it seems, make Islam a synonym for 
evil without shame or regret. 

     Maybe he's a madman. If so, he recalls Chesterton's 
definition of a madman as "one who has lost everything 
but his reason." But how do other, presumably normal 
Muslims regard him? Even in their rage at America, do 
they really want such a man representing Islam in the 
eyes of the world? And even in their own eyes? 

     The terrible fact is that more Muslims admire him 
than deplore him. Muslim denunciations of him have been 
notably few and tepid. I'm all for interfaith harmony and 
understanding, but this certainly doesn't reflect well on 
their religion. 


Voice of the Sixties Left

     Susan Sontag, the most glamorous intellectual of her 
generation, has died of leukemia at 71. She became famous 
in the 1960s for her political and esthetic radicalism, 
her popularization of "camp," and such oracular 
pronouncements as "The white race is the cancer of 
history." She combined striking good books with a 
fondness for quoting European intellectuals nobody had 
ever heard of. 

     She liked to shock. In the sixties she was the pinup 
girl of Radical Chic, taking the part of Castro and Ho 
Chi Minh. She wrote avant-garde novels and made 
avant-garde films, while uttering rather obscure 
aphorisms. The NEW YORK TIMES has eulogized her as "a 
rigorous intellectual dressed in glamour"; I certainly 
noticed the glamour -- I once passed her on a Manhattan 
street; you couldn't miss her -- but not the rigor. I 
found her expository prose so hard to make sense of that 
I never even tried her fiction. 

     For all that, Miss Sontag had her creditable 
moments. In 1982, perhaps tiring of Radical Chic, she 
stunned the New York Left with a speech at Town Hall in 
which she denounced Communism as "fascism with a human 
face," adding the stinging opinion that you could get a 
far truer understanding of the Soviet Union from READER'S 
DIGEST than from THE NATION. Tom Wolfe couldn't have said 
it better. And it took some nerve: Probably 90% of her 
Town Hall audience subscribed to THE NATION, whereas I'd 
be surprised if there was a single DIGEST subscriber in 
the place. But then, nobody ever accused her of lacking 
nerve. 

     Three years ago she outraged neoconservatives when, 
only days after the 9/11 attacks, she wrote in THE NEW 
YORKER, "Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of 
Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." That was 
certainly out of step with the mood of the moment, but 
she had a point. The jingoistic denunciations of the 
terrorists were getting out of hand. If evil men were all 
cowards, the world would be a lot safer.

     After suffering from cancer, a mastectomy, and two 
years of grueling radiation therapy, she apologized for 
her infamous youthful remark about the white race. One of 
her later novels resulted in charges of plagiarism 
against her; she vigorously denied them, claiming she had 
"completely transformed" the source material she used. 
Maybe so; at least I find it hard to imagine her needing 
to steal anyone else's words.

     Susan Sontag was a headlong representative of a 
heady time -- a leftist intellectual who recovered more 
of her sanity than most of her generation. 

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     SOBRAN'S reflects on the gulf between Christ and the 
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                                        --- Joseph Sobran

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