Step Across This Line Part 12

I was interested to note that a few minutes into the lecture the habitually courteous Indian audience simply stopped listening. The hum of conversation in the room gradually rose until the speaker was all but drowned. Not that this stopped Duane. Like a dinosaur who hasn't noticed he's extinct, he just went bellowing on.

This summer, however, Mr. Gish's lizardy kind will have received cheering news. The Kansas Board of Education's decision to delete evolution from the state's recommended curriculum and from its standardized tests is, in itself, powerful evidence against the veracity of Charles Darwin's great theory. If Darwin were able to visit Kansas in 1999, he would find living proof that natural selection doesn't always work, that the dumbest and unfittest sometimes survive, and that the human race is therefore capable of evolving backward toward those youth-depressing apes. Nor is Darwin the only casualty. The Big Bang apparently didn't happen in the Kansas area, either-or, at least, it's just one of the available theories. Thus in one pan of the scales we have general relativity, the Hubble telescope, and all the imperfect but painstakingly acc.u.mulated learning of the human race; and, in the other, the Book of Genesis. In Kansas, the scales balance.

Good teachers, it must be said, are appalled by their state board's decision. As the new academic year begins, battle is about to be joined, and it may yet be that reason will prevail over superst.i.tion. But respected professors publicly concede that "it's going on everywhere, and the creationists are winning." In Alabama, for example, a sticker on textbooks hilariously suggests that since "no one was present when life first appeared on earth," we can't ever know the facts. Seems you just had to be there.

Or, not so hilariously. This stuff would be funny if it weren't so unfunny. American fundamentalists may be pleased to know that elsewhere in the world-Karachi, Pakistan, for example-the blinkered literalists of another faith have been known to come into university cla.s.ses armed to the teeth and threaten lecturers with instant death if they should deviate from the strict Quranic view of science (or anything else). Might it be that America's notorious gun culture will now also take up arms against knowledge itself?

Nor should the rest of us feel too smug. The war against religious obscurantism, a war many people believed had been won long ago, is breaking out all over, with ever greater force. Gobbledygook is back in style. The pull of stupidity grows everywhere more powerful. The young speak of the spiritual life as if it were a fashion accessory. A new dark age of unreason may be beginning. High priests and fierce inquisitors are cackling in the shadows. There are, once again, anathemas and persecutions.

Meanwhile, slowly, beautifully, the search for knowledge continues. Ironically, in the whole history of the sciences, there has never been so rich or revolutionary a golden age. Big science is unlocking the universe, tiny science is solving the riddles of life. And, yes, the new knowledge brings with it new moral problems, but the old ignorances are not going to help us solve these. One of the beauties of learning is that it admits its provisionality, its imperfections. This scholarly scrupulousness, this willingness to admit that even the most well supported of theories is still a theory, is now being exploited by the unscrupulous. But that we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing. Not all theories are of equal weight. The moon, even the moon over Kansas, is not made of green cheese. Genesis, as a "theory," is bunk.

If the over-abundant new knowledge of the modern age is, let's say, a tornado, then Oz is the extraordinary, Technicolor new world in which it has landed us, the world from which-life not being a movie-there is no way home. In the immortal words of Dorothy Gale, "I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." To which one can only add: thank goodness, baby, and amen.

OCTOBER 1999: EDWARD SAID.

All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented." This is the opening of Out of Place Out of Place by Edward Said, one of the finest memoirs of childhood and youth to be published in many a long year, a work that prompts the critic to reach for his highest comparisons. It can justly be likened to Proust's great novel-cycle because of its own recapturing of lost time; to Balzac, for the clarity of its social and historical perceptions; and to Conrad. The author is a Conradian scholar, but he is also, like the n.i.g.g.e.r of the by Edward Said, one of the finest memoirs of childhood and youth to be published in many a long year, a work that prompts the critic to reach for his highest comparisons. It can justly be likened to Proust's great novel-cycle because of its own recapturing of lost time; to Balzac, for the clarity of its social and historical perceptions; and to Conrad. The author is a Conradian scholar, but he is also, like the n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus, Narcissus, a sick man who is nevertheless determined to live until he dies. (Said suffers from CLL, a form of leukemia.) One of the many things to be said about this book is that it is a heroic instance of writing against death. a sick man who is nevertheless determined to live until he dies. (Said suffers from CLL, a form of leukemia.) One of the many things to be said about this book is that it is a heroic instance of writing against death.

As its beginning shows, Out of Place Out of Place is keenly aware of the inventions, blurrings, and imagination-figments that go to make up our sense of ourselves and our kin. It knows everything there is to know about displacement, about rootings and uprootings, about feeling wrong in the world, and it absorbs the reader precisely because such out-of-place experiences lie at or near the heart of what it is to be alive in our jumbled, chaotic times. How extraordinary, then, that so nuanced, so transparently honest a book, whose every page speaks to its author's immense honesty and integrity, should become the center of an intercontinental political storm! For Said has been malevolently accused of fraud, of having falsified his own life story and having based a lifetime of political involvement upon "thirty years of carefully crafted deception": of, in short, is keenly aware of the inventions, blurrings, and imagination-figments that go to make up our sense of ourselves and our kin. It knows everything there is to know about displacement, about rootings and uprootings, about feeling wrong in the world, and it absorbs the reader precisely because such out-of-place experiences lie at or near the heart of what it is to be alive in our jumbled, chaotic times. How extraordinary, then, that so nuanced, so transparently honest a book, whose every page speaks to its author's immense honesty and integrity, should become the center of an intercontinental political storm! For Said has been malevolently accused of fraud, of having falsified his own life story and having based a lifetime of political involvement upon "thirty years of carefully crafted deception": of, in short, not really being a Palestinian at all. not really being a Palestinian at all.

The author of the current attack, Justus Reid Weiner, has unsavory backers: the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, primarily financed by the Milken Family Fund. Yes, that Michael Milken, the crooked financier jailed for, you've got it, fraud. But even though he boasts of having spent three years on Said's trail, his accusations are flimsy nothings. Weiner can't deny that Said actually was born in Jerusalem. To "prove" that Said and his family don't merit the status of Palestinian "refugees" or "exiles," however, Weiner does claim that Said didn't go to St. George's School in eastern Jerusalem and that the family house there never belonged to them. This is all hogwash. Fellow-students of Said's have come forward to confirm that he did indeed attend St. George's, and that the Saids were well known as an old Palestinian family. At least one of these students said as much to Weiner, who conveniently failed to mention the fact in his attack.

The house in Jerusalem was in the name not of Said's father but of close relatives. To use this as proof of anything is to ignore the everyday realities of extended-family living. And, anyway, how trivial can one get? Is it seriously proposed that Said's out-of-place early life, spent partly in Jerusalem, partly in Cairo, somehow disqualifies him from speaking as a Palestinian? That it's okay for Weiner, an American Jew transplanted to Israel, to speak as an Israeli but not for Said, a Palestinian re-rooted in New York, to speak for Palestine?

When a distinguished writer is attacked in this fashion-when his enemies set out not merely to give him a bad review but to destroy him-then there is always more at stake than the mere quotidian malice of the world of books. Professor Said is no stranger to controversy and, as a reward for being the most incisive and visible Palestinian intellectual of the last quarter century has received his share of death threats and abuse. This latest attack, however, is something new. And in spite of its flimsiness it has been given a great deal of credence, first in Commentary Commentary magazine and then in many leading U.S. newspapers, and in the British magazine and then in many leading U.S. newspapers, and in the British Daily Telegraph. Daily Telegraph.

Even stranger is the fact that no American paper would publish Said's reb.u.t.tals, which eventually appeared, ironically, in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz. Ha'aretz. The Israeli media are thus shown to be fairer than those Western organs acting as Israel's defenders. The Israeli media are thus shown to be fairer than those Western organs acting as Israel's defenders.

Said is a pa.s.sionate advocate of reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians. It isn't hard to conclude that his enemies are not. The attack on Said is also an attack on what he stands for, on the world he has hoped for decades to argue into being: a world in which Palestinians are able to live with honor in their own country, yes, but also a world in which, by an act of constructive forgetting, the past can be worked through and then left in the past, so that Palestinians and Jews can begin to think about a different sort of future. That there are extremists in Israel determined to thwart this vision is not news. That so much of the Western press offers these extremists such ready collaboration ought to be news. It is certainly a scandal.

NOVEMBER 1999: PAKISTAN.

Pakistan's new military strongman, Pervez Musharraf, has promised to purge the state of corruption before restoring democracy. Pakistan-watchers will recall that when an earlier cartoon of a dictator, General Zia of the waxed mustache and racc.o.o.n eyes, was in his prime he, too, used to speak of cleaning up the country and then holding elections. Zia promised and canceled elections so often that it became a joke. His t.i.tle in those bad old days was CMLA, which officially stood for "Chief Martial Law Administrator" but which, people began to say, really stood for "Cancel My Last Announcement." Perhaps fearing such a reaction, General Musharraf has preferred not to announce elections at all. This is hardly an improvement.

Let's ignore for a moment the obvious fact that General Musharraf's refusal to give a timetable for restoring democracy is in itself a corrupt act, his second such misdeed, the coup he engineered being the first. Instead, let's take a look at the condition of the stables he has undertaken to clean up. The Nawaz Sharif government was economically incompetent, unpleasantly autocratic, deeply unpopular, and widely suspected of many forms of corruption, including election-rigging. Its actions merit the most thorough investigation. But how can General Musharraf, who has already accused Nawaz Sharif of trying to murder him, and has called that alleged attempt "treasonable," persuade us that his regime's inquiries will be dispa.s.sionate and credible? A generation ago, General Zia executed Prime Minister Z. A. Bhutto after a show trial. The echoes of that case can already be heard in Musharraf's p.r.o.nouncements on Nawaz, and they're getting louder.

Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto, her People's Party, and her husband, Asif Zardari, also have many questions to answer. They, too, stand accused of large-scale corruption, and Zardari of being involved in the murder of Ben.a.z.ir's own brother as well. When Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, Ben.a.z.ir could and frequently did dismiss such charges as part of Sharif's political vendetta against her. Not very surprisingly, she has rushed to welcome the Musharraf coup. How will General Musharraf convince us that justice will be done in the Bhutto-Zardari case as well?

Look beyond the political parties and you see the real causes of the social wreckage of Pakistan. The poppy fields of the North-West Frontier have been producing opium for as long as anyone can remember. Nowadays they produce great quant.i.ties of heroin as well. To be exported, that heroin must travel a thousand miles south to Karachi-past Army units and octroi inspection points. In the opinion of every expert commentator I know, the Pakistani drug industry simply could not operate without the active cooperation of the bureaucracy and the Army. If General Musharraf would have us believe in his anti-corruption platform, he must first demonstrate that the Army has cleaned up its own act. How exactly does he propose to do this? And what does he intend to do about Karachi, which is presently a terrifyingly wild and all-but-lawless burg, in the grip not only of violent sectarian politics but also of the drug overlords and criminal mafias? Karachi's citizens speak every day of the collaboration between the city's police force and organized crime. What is General Musharraf's plan for the redemption of his country's most important city?

Beneath this suppurating surface lie deeper ills that a military regime is even less able to address. Pakistan is a country in which democratic inst.i.tutions-make that democratic instincts-have never been permitted to take root. Instead, the country's elites-military, political, industrial, aristocratic, feudal-take it in turns to loot the nation's wealth, while increasingly extremist mullahs demand the imposition of draconian versions of Sharia law.

Nawaz Sharif's government grew more fanatically Islamist as it grew weaker. General Musharraf's quickly expressed determination not to permit fundamentalists to take over the state should be welcomed. But can any coup leader hope to create the kind of secular-democratic state in which coups become not only unnecessary but unthinkable? Can any elitist-and a man who believes he has the right to seize control of an entire nation-state is certainly that-be believed when he announces his desire to fight against elitism?

Musharraf has also made placatory noises toward India, and withdrawn some troops from the frontier. Yet he is the man responsible for planning this year's catastrophic military adventure in Kashmir, and he has made many ultra-hawkish comments about India in the recent past. Why should we trust his new softer line when he has shown every sign of having an itchy trigger finger-a finger that now sits upon Pakistan's nuclear b.u.t.ton?

The Musharraf coup is, at present, very popular in Pakistan. So were the Pakistani nuclear tests. There are reports that after these tests ordinary Pakistanis went out to the blast sites and gathered up jars of radioactive earth as patriotic souvenirs. These jars, sitting in pride of place in Pakistani homes, may prove to be less worth having than they now seem. You could make much the same sort of hypothesis about the Pervez Musharraf regime.

DECEMBER 1999: ISLAM AND THE WEST.

The relationship between the Islamic world and the West seems to be living through one of the famous "interregnums" defined by Antonio Gramsci, in which the old refuses to die, so that the new cannot be born, and all manner of "morbid symptoms" arise. Both between Muslim and Western countries and inside Muslim communities living in the West, the old, deep mistrusts abide, frustrating attempts to build new, better relations, and creating much bad blood. For example, the general suspicion felt by many ordinary Egyptians about America's motives has created a heightened, almost paranoiac atmosphere around the investigation of the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990. Now, all information pointing to the pilot Gameel al-Batouty's responsibility for the aircraft's fatal dive is believed to be tainted, in spite of indications that (a) he pulled rank to take over the controls from the co-pilot, even though it wasn't his shift, and (b) the now-notorious religious mutterings immediately preceded the aircraft's steep downward plunge. Meanwhile, theories exonerating the pilot are being propounded in Egypt almost daily-it was the Boeing malfunctioning, it was a bomb in the tail, it was a missile, and in any case it was America's fault. The many proponents of these "anti-American" theories see no contradiction in believing with great fervor notions for which there is as yet no shred of proof, while vilifying the FBI for seeking to draw premature conclusions from such evidence as there is.

A more dispa.s.sionate version of events is needed. The FBI is perhaps excessively p.r.o.ne to seeing air disasters as crimes rather than accidents. That was certainly a problem after the TWA 800 crash. On that occasion it was the National Transportation Safety Board that eventually made the case for a systems failure causing an explosion in a fuel tank. But this time it's the NTSB's preliminary examination of the data that has thrown up the possibility of a pilot suicide.

The much-criticized leakiness of the investigating bodies can also be seen as rea.s.suring: with so many loose tongues around, in the end the truth will out. By contrast, the state-controlled press in Mubarak's Egypt is likely to reflect that government's nationalistic unwillingness to concede Egyptian responsibility for the crash, which could further damage the tourist trade.

Unreason and emotion have by now thoroughly politicized this investigation. Let us hope that those who fear a U.S. cover-up do not create an atmosphere in which American and Egyptian politicians and diplomats do in fact seek to cover up the truth in the interest of their bilateral relations.

Muslims living in the West also continue to feel defensive, suspicious, and persecuted. Hard on the heels of the dispute about the EgyptAir tragedy comes a demand in "multi-faith Britain" that all religious beliefs, not just the established Church of England, be protected from criticism. The West's alleged "Islamophobia" means that Islamic demands for the new law are by far the loudest.

It is true that in many Western quarters there is a knee-jerk reflex that leads to anti-Islamic rushes to judgment, so that British Muslims' sense of injury is frequently justified. But the proposed solution is the wrong cure, one that would make matters even worse than they are. For the point is to defend people but not their ideas. For the point is to defend people but not their ideas. It is absolutely right that Muslims-that everyone-should enjoy freedom of religious belief in any free society. It is absolutely right that they should protest against discrimination whenever and wherever they experience it. It is also absolutely wrong of them to demand that their belief system-that any system of belief or thought-should be immunized against criticism, irreverence, satire, even scornful disparagement. This distinction between the individual and his creed is a foundation truth of democracy, and any community that seeks to blur it will not do itself any favors. The British blasphemy law is an outdated relic of the past, has fallen into disuse, and ought to be abolished. To extend it would be an anachronistic move quite against the spirit of a country whose leadership likes to prefix everything with the word "new." It is absolutely right that Muslims-that everyone-should enjoy freedom of religious belief in any free society. It is absolutely right that they should protest against discrimination whenever and wherever they experience it. It is also absolutely wrong of them to demand that their belief system-that any system of belief or thought-should be immunized against criticism, irreverence, satire, even scornful disparagement. This distinction between the individual and his creed is a foundation truth of democracy, and any community that seeks to blur it will not do itself any favors. The British blasphemy law is an outdated relic of the past, has fallen into disuse, and ought to be abolished. To extend it would be an anachronistic move quite against the spirit of a country whose leadership likes to prefix everything with the word "new."

Democracy can only advance through the clash of ideas, can only flourish in the rough-and-tumble bazaar of disagreement. The law must never be used to stifle such disagreements, no matter how profound. The new cannot die so that the old can be reborn. That would indeed be a morbid symptom.

Once again, a clearer form of discourse is needed. Western societies urgently need to find effective ways of defending Muslims against blind prejudice. And Islamic spokesmen must likewise stop giving the impression that the way to better relations-the path to the new-requires the creation of new forms of censorship, of legal blindfolds and gags.

JANUARY 2000: TERROR VERSUS SECURITY.

Now that the big Y2K party's over, think for a moment about the covert, worldwide battle that took place on and around Millennium Night. Behind the images of a world lit up by pyrotechnics, united for one evanescent instant by gaiety and goodwill, the new dialectic of history was taking shape. We already knew that capitalism versus communism was no longer the name of the game. Now we saw, as clearly as the fireworks in the sky, that the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security.

I was one of the ten thousand gathered in London's Millennium Dome, that same dome off which James Bond bounces while fighting the forces of terror in the latest 007 film. The audience knew-after hours of waiting to be frisked on a cold railway platform, how could it not?-that a mammoth security operation had been launched to safeguard the showpiece event. What few of us knew was that a bomb threat had been made, using an IRA code word, and that the dome came within an inch of being evacuated.

For days, the world had been hearing about nothing but terrorism. The United States had spoken the current bogeyman's name-Osama bin Laden-to frighten us children. There were arrests: a man with bomb-making equipment found at the U.S.-Canada border, a group in Jordan. Seattle canceled its celebrations. One of the leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo cult was released, and j.a.pan feared a terrorist atrocity. President Chandrika k.u.maratunga of Sri Lanka made history by surviving a suicide bomber's attack. There were bomb hoaxes at a British racetrack and at a soccer stadium. The FBI feared the worst from apocalyptic groups and lunatic-fringers. But in the end-apart from poor George Harrison, wounded by one such lunatic-we got off relatively lightly.

Almost all of us, that is, because there was also the Indian Airlines hijack. The events at Kandahar airport have left no fewer than four governments looking pretty bad. Nepal, proving that Kathmandu deserves its terrorist-friendly reputation, allowed men with guns and grenades to board a plane. The Indian government's capitulation to the terrorists was the first such surrender to hijackers in years; what will they do when the next aircraft is seized? And, finally, terrorists trained in Taliban camps and holding Pakistani pa.s.sports disappeared from Afghanistan into, very probably, Pakistan. Thus was a largely defunct form of terrorism given a new lease on life.

Some knees jerked predictably. An Islamist journalist, writing in a liberal British paper of the sort that would be banned in Islamist countries, complained that the "terrorist" tag demonizes members of freedom movements struggling against violent, oppressive regimes. But terrorism isn't justice-seeking in disguise. In Sri Lanka it's the voices of peace and conciliation who are getting murdered. And the brutal Indian Airlines hijackers do not speak for the people of peaceable, vandalized Kashmir.

The security establishment rightly regards the non-explosive Millennium as a triumph. Security is, after all, the art of making sure certain things don't happen: a thankless task, because when they don't happen, there will always be someone to say the security was excessive and unnecessary. In London on New Year's Eve the security operation was on a scale that would have made citizens of many less fortunate nations convinced that a coup was in progress. But none of us thought so for an instant. This was security in the service of merrymaking, and that is something we can be impressed by and grateful for. And yet there is cause for concern. If the ideology of terrorism is that terror works, then the ideology of security is based on a.s.suming the truth of the "worst-case scenario." The trouble is that worst-case scenarism, if I may call it that, plays right into the hands of the fear creators. The worst-case scenario of crossing the road, after all, is that you'll be hit by a truck and killed. Yet we all do cross roads every day, and could hardly function if we did not. To live by the worst-case scenario is to grant the terrorists their victory, without a shot having been fired.

It is also alarming to think that the real battles of the new century may be fought in secret, between adversaries accountable to few of us, the one claiming to act on our behalf, the other hoping to scare us into submission. Democracy requires openness and light. Must we really surrender our future into the hands of the shadow warriors? That most of the Millennial threats turned out to be hoaxes only underlines the problem; n.o.body wants to run from imaginary enemies. But how, in the absence of information, are we, the public, to evaluate such threats? How can we prevent terrorists and their antagonists from setting the boundaries within which we live?

Security saved President k.u.maratunga, but many others died. The security at George Harrison's fortress-home didn't stop the would-be a.s.sa.s.sin's knife; it was his wife's well-swung table lamp that saved him. In the past, security didn't save President Reagan, or the pope. Luck did that. So we need to understand that even maximum security guarantees n.o.body's safety. The point is to decide-as the Queen decided on New Year's Eve-not to let fear rule our lives. To tell those bullies who would terrorize us that we aren't scared of them. And to thank our secret protectors, but to remind them, too, that in a choice between security and liberty, it is liberty that must always come out on top.

FEBRUARY 2000: JoRG HAIDER.

In April 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of Austria's liberation from n.a.z.ism, an extraordinary rally took place on the Heldenplatz in central Vienna. Beneath the balcony from which Adolf Hitler had once harangued his roaring gang, Austrian artists, intellectuals, and politicians, as well as their friends and supporters from elsewhere, united to celebrate Hitler's downfall, and by doing so to cleanse the old square of its a.s.sociation with evil. It was my privilege to be one of the speakers that night, and it was clear to me that the event's more contemporary purpose was to give shape and voice to the "good Austria," that pa.s.sionate and substantial anti-Haider const.i.tuency of which surprisingly little is heard outside Austria itself. Jorg Haider's supporters understood this too, and the rally accordingly became the focus of much ultra-rightist derision. Then, unfortunately, it began to rain.

It rained heavily, incessantly, relentlessly. This was neo-n.a.z.i rain, absolutist, intolerant, determined to have its way. The rally's organizers were worried. A poor turnout would be celebrated by the Haiderites, and the whole event could backfire terribly. In a week's time, n.o.body would remember the weather, but n.o.body would be allowed to forget the spa.r.s.e attendance. But there was nothing for it. The rally had to go ahead, and the rain kept bucketing down. When I came out onto the stage, however, I saw an unforgettable sight. The Heldenplatz was packed, as full as Times Square on Millennium Eve. The crowd was soaked to the skin, joyous, cheering, youthful. The rain crashed down on those young people all night and they didn't care. They had come in numbers to make a statement they cared greatly about, and they weren't going to let a little water get in the way. It was perhaps the most moving crowd I'd ever seen. The purpose of such rallies is to strengthen people's hope. It certainly strengthened mine.

These memories of the Heldenplatz rally make the news of Jorg Haider's surge toward power-eerily reminiscent of the career of the Hitlerish central figure in Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui-all the more unpalatable. In his growing popularity I see the defeat of those idealistic young people standing shoulder to shoulder in the pouring rain.

But it won't do to describe Haider's triumph simply as a victory of evil over good. The success of extremist leaders is invariably linked to failures in the system they supplant. The tyranny of the shah of Iran created the tyranny of the ayatollahs. The lazy corruption of the old, secularist Algeria gave birth to the GIA and the FIS. In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif's abuses of power have made possible the new abuses being perpetrated by his successor, General Musharraf. The incompetence and corruption of the Congress Party in India enabled the Hindu nationalist BJP and its sidekick, the Shiv Sena, to seize power. The failures of the old British Labour Party were the making of Thatcher's radical Conservatism. And the long-running Austrian "grand coalition," that backslapping, jobs-for-the-boys Establishment fix, has disillusioned the voters enough to make them turn toward Haider.

The papers are full of tales of fat-cat corruption these days, and the revelations are a gift to a populist demagogue of the Haider type. (When the heirs of the late Bettino Craxi shrug their shoulders and call the Kohl-Mitterrand-Craxi slush-fund story an irrelevance, they make things much worse. The more Europe looks like a "grand coalition" of arrogant leaders for whom ends easily justify means, the more ammunition the Haiders of Europe will have.) Like Bombay's boss Bal Thackeray, Haider has said he will not himself enter the government-so much easier to run things through proxies and stooges, so much less, well, exposed. But Thackeray's support comes mainly from the ignored, disenfranchised urban poor. Haider, according to the political theorist Karl-Markus Gauss, has pulled off a more European trick. Like Le Pen in France or Bossi in Italy, he has won the support of the wealthy, successful bourgeoisie. What these people hate about immigrants, Gauss believes, is not their race but their poverty. (Credit where credit's due. The politician who invented this trick, who remained in power throughout the 1980s by persuading the employed to vote against the unemployed, is none other than General Pinochet's best friend, Margaret Thatcher.) This system is corrupt, say the placards of the German anti-Kohl protesters. They're right, and the fight against that corruption and the fight against Jorg Haider are one and the same. The EU must devote as much energy to rooting out the slush-fund artists in its own ranks as to closing ranks against Haider and his Freedom Party. say the placards of the German anti-Kohl protesters. They're right, and the fight against that corruption and the fight against Jorg Haider are one and the same. The EU must devote as much energy to rooting out the slush-fund artists in its own ranks as to closing ranks against Haider and his Freedom Party.

At the end of Brecht's play, the actor playing Arturo Ui steps forward and addresses the audience directly, warning it against complacency. Ui-Hitler may have fallen, he reminds us, but "the b.i.t.c.h that bore him is in heat again." The European Union must set its house in order quickly, unless it wishes history to remember it as the latest incarnation of that sleazy, promiscuous canine.

MARCH 2000: AMADOU DIALLO.

[Amadou Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea, was shot dead in the Bronx by four NYPD police officers-no fewer than forty-one shots being fired by the quartet-and all four shootists have just been acquitted of all wrongdoing, in a verdict that has stunned and divided New Yorkers.]

English being the most elastic of languages, the word "mistake" is capable of a pretty big stretch, meaning anything from "innocent little gaffe" to "unforgivable, catastrophic error." This week in Albany, New York, the jury in the Amadou Diallo case stretched it a bit further still.

The jury decided Diallo's death was the result of a tragic mistake or, one might more accurately say, forty-one tragic mistakes, lethal, high-velocity mistakes, fired in quick succession by the four members of the Street Crime Unit, two of whom-Officers Carroll and McMellon-discharged their full sixteen-bullet (no, make that sixteen-mistake) clips into Diallo's body. After a pause, their colleagues, Officers Boss and Murphy, added, respectively, five and four tragic mistakes each.

These mistakes were themselves the consequences of earlier mistakes. The policemen saw a black man on his own doorstep and made the mistake of thinking he was a criminal. They thought he reminded them of a sketch they'd seen of a rapist but, er, they were mistaken. They thought he was reaching for a gun when in fact he was reaching for his wallet: um, bad bad mistake. They claimed to have seen a "muzzle flash," as if a bullet had been fired. (Wallets rarely emit such flashes.) Then Officer McMellon stumbled and fell; his colleagues erroneously concluded he'd been hit, presumably by Diallo's deadly wallet, and shot to kill. And they went on and on shooting because, bizarrely, they thought Diallo, who didn't fall down for a time, was wearing a bullet-proof vest. He wasn't. He was being shot so often and so hard that it was, almost certainly, the force of the bullets that was keeping him on his feet. In his dead body there were nineteen entry wounds and sixteen exit wounds. mistake. They claimed to have seen a "muzzle flash," as if a bullet had been fired. (Wallets rarely emit such flashes.) Then Officer McMellon stumbled and fell; his colleagues erroneously concluded he'd been hit, presumably by Diallo's deadly wallet, and shot to kill. And they went on and on shooting because, bizarrely, they thought Diallo, who didn't fall down for a time, was wearing a bullet-proof vest. He wasn't. He was being shot so often and so hard that it was, almost certainly, the force of the bullets that was keeping him on his feet. In his dead body there were nineteen entry wounds and sixteen exit wounds.

When the police officers discovered their mistakes-"where's the f.u.c.king gun?"-they begged Amadou Diallo not to die. Later, in court, they wept for him. However, they plainly believe they have wept and suffered enough. They hope, according to press reports, to "ease back" into normal life. Through their lawyers, they express displeasure at suggestions that they should resign. They hint, however, that because of all the criticism they may not wish to remain police officers. Amazingly, it seems they have begun to see themselves as the injured parties. (Those courtroom tears are beginning to look even more crocodile-ish than they did at the time.) And their senior officers, facing wrathful accusations of police racism, say that the NYPD feels "disheartened" by the flood of criticisms. There is much that should dishearten it. The Diallo killing has shown that the automatic a.s.sumptions within police culture-when coupled with the stop-and-frisk powers given to the police by Mayor Giuliani, and given the greater power of life and death by the omnipresence in America of the gun-are such that American minority groups now feel that their lives are seriously at risk. To put it bluntly: if you happen to be black, and a police officer stumbles while you are reaching for your wallet, his partners may shoot you dead.

But this is not, unfortunately, why the NYPD feels disheartened. The criticism is what depresses them, not their own mistakes. Because everybody makes mistakes, right? Right. But accusations of racism? Boy, those hurt.

One or two voices have begun to demand that the officers be dismissed from the NYPD, but at the moment of writing, the idea that men should be held accountable for their errors hasn't caught on. Mayor Giuliani, whose baby the much-enlarged Street Crime Unit is, has unsurprisingly defended the police. His political rival, Hillary Clinton, has issued her customary bland, having-it-both-ways nostrums. And the dead man's impressive mother, Kadiatou Diallo, is too brokenheartedly dignified to say anything that might be interpreted as a call for revenge.

But: of course of course the four officers should be fired at once. The idea that they might get their guns back and return to patrolling the streets of New York, with their poor judgment and macho slogans ("we own the night"), is unimaginably awful. No, worse: it's imaginably awful. In the aftermath of the beating of Rodney King in L.A., the sodomizing by baton of Abner Louima, and now the death of Amadou Diallo, people are beginning to be able to imagine the previously unimaginable. the four officers should be fired at once. The idea that they might get their guns back and return to patrolling the streets of New York, with their poor judgment and macho slogans ("we own the night"), is unimaginably awful. No, worse: it's imaginably awful. In the aftermath of the beating of Rodney King in L.A., the sodomizing by baton of Abner Louima, and now the death of Amadou Diallo, people are beginning to be able to imagine the previously unimaginable.

Tragedy happens-"tragic mistakes" happen-when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encouraged them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion. The tragedy of the street vendor Amadou Diallo is that he came as an innocent to the slaughter, made vulnerable by poverty and by the color of his skin. And the tragedy of America is that a nation which sees itself as leading the world toward a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers.

APRIL 2000: ELIAN GONZALEZ.

When the world's imagination engages with a human tragedy as poignant as that of Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old refugee boy who survived a shipwreck only to sink deep into the political mire of Cuban-American Miami, it instinctively seeks to enter into the hearts and minds of each of the characters in the drama.

Any parent can grasp something of what Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, has been going through back in Elian's hometown of Cardenas-the pain of losing his firstborn son, a child who arrived only after seven miscarriages; next the joy of learning that Elian had improbably survived, floating toward Florida on a rubber ring; and then the seismic shock of being told by a gang of estranged relatives and total strangers that they were resolved to stand between him and his child.

Perhaps we can understand Elian's inside-out state of mind a little, too. After all, this is a boy who saw his mother slip into the dark ocean and die, whose father hasn't been there. So if Elian now clutches at the hands of those who have been with him in Miami, if he holds on to them for dear life the way he clung to that rubber ring, who can blame him? If he has constructed a kind of provisional happiness in his new Florida backyard, we should understand that as a psychological survival mechanism, not as a permanent replacement for his father's love.

And if politicians play politics with a small boy's life, n.o.body likes it much, but n.o.body's very surprised, either. Al Gore weighs in with a poorly thought through scheme to turn Elian and his father into U.S. residents (a scheme that Juan Miguel Gonzalez instantly rejects), and we know that he's trying-and almost certainly failing-to win a few Cuban Republican votes. The mayor of MiamiDade County, Alex Penelas, irresponsibly declares that his police force will not execute any order to hand Elian back to his father, and we know that he's playing to his particular gallery, too. Fidel Castro comes up with a succession of grandstand plays, turning Elian simultaneously into a symbol of national pride and of the folly of emigration to the USA, and this, too, comes as no surprise.

Elian Gonzalez has become a political football. The first consequence of becoming a football is that you cease to be thought of as a living, feeling human being. A football is inanimate, and its purpose is to be kicked around. So you become what Elian has become in the mouths of most of those arguing over him-useful, but essentially a thing. You become the proof of the addiction of the United States to litigation, or of the pride and political muscle of a locally powerful immigrant community. You become the location of a battle between mob rule and the rule of law, between rabid anti-Communism and Third World anti-imperialism. You are described and redescribed, sloganized and falsified, until, for the howling combatants, you almost cease to exist. You become a sort of myth, an empty vessel into which the world can pour its prejudices, its poison, and its hate.

All of the foregoing is more or less comprehensible. But what's going on in the minds of Elian's Miami relatives-that's a tough one. This poor boy's flesh-and-blood family has elected to place its own ideological considerations over his obvious and urgent need for his father, which looks, to most of us on the outside, like an ugly, unnatural choice. There is strong evidence-for example, in a powerful New York Times New York Times article written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez-that Juan Miguel Gonzalez is a loving father; so when the Miami relatives' lawyers a.s.sault his good character, it sounds like a cheap shot. And while there is also evidence that Juan Miguel is being used by Castro for political ends, most of us would say, so what? Even if Senor Gonzalez is a fully-fledged Red of the sort most hated by the Florida Cuban community, this does not override the rightness of returning his son to his care, and to argue that it does is, well, inhuman. When the Miami relatives hint that Elian will be "brainwashed" if he goes home, it only makes us think that they are even more blinkered than the ideologues they seek to condemn. article written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez-that Juan Miguel Gonzalez is a loving father; so when the Miami relatives' lawyers a.s.sault his good character, it sounds like a cheap shot. And while there is also evidence that Juan Miguel is being used by Castro for political ends, most of us would say, so what? Even if Senor Gonzalez is a fully-fledged Red of the sort most hated by the Florida Cuban community, this does not override the rightness of returning his son to his care, and to argue that it does is, well, inhuman. When the Miami relatives hint that Elian will be "brainwashed" if he goes home, it only makes us think that they are even more blinkered than the ideologues they seek to condemn.

Garcia Marquez concludes his article by deploring "the harm being done to Elian Gonzalez's mental health by the cultural uprooting to which he is being subjected." This routinely anti-U.S. gibe is surely wide of the mark. President Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno, and the U.S. federal courts have taken a sensible line throughout the protracted crisis, and American public opinion has generally backed their view that Elian's place is with his dad. This compares very favorably with, say, the actions of the German authorities, who have in a number of notorious recent cases refused to return children to non-German parents living abroad.

Plainly, the Elian story is not an American but a Cuban tragedy; and, yes, "cultural uprooting" is at its heart, but not in the sense that Garcia Marquez meant. It is the Miami Cuban community that has evidently been harmed by being uprooted from its island in the sun. Their flight from tyranny has ended, or so it presently seems, in a flight not only from reason but from simple humanity, too.

MAY 2000: J. M. COETZEE.

Just occasionally, a work of literature offers its readers a clearer, deeper understanding of the opaque events being reported in the press and on TV, whose shadowed truths the half-light of journalism fails to illumine. E. M. Forster's A Pa.s.sage to India A Pa.s.sage to India taught us that the great public quarrels of history can make it impossible for individuals to construct a private peace. History forbids the friendship between the Englishman Fielding and the Indian doctor Aziz. "Not yet, not yet," Aziz demurs. Not while imperialism's great injustice stands between us. Not until India is free. taught us that the great public quarrels of history can make it impossible for individuals to construct a private peace. History forbids the friendship between the Englishman Fielding and the Indian doctor Aziz. "Not yet, not yet," Aziz demurs. Not while imperialism's great injustice stands between us. Not until India is free.

After World War II, many German poets and novelists felt that their language had been reduced to rubble by n.a.z.ism, as thoroughly as the bomb-devastated cities. The "rubble literature" they created sought to rebuild German writing brick by brick.

Now, as the aftermath of Empire is acted out on the white-owned farmland of Zimbabwe while Kenya and South Africa watch with trepidation, J. M. Coetzee's acclaimed fiction Disgrace Disgrace is proposed as another such age-defining work, a lens through which we can see more clearly much that was murky before. is proposed as another such age-defining work, a lens through which we can see more clearly much that was murky before. Disgrace Disgrace is the story of David Lurie, a white professor who loses his job after s.e.xual-hara.s.sment charges are laid against him by a female student with whom he has had a joyless series of s.e.xual encounters. Lurie goes to stay with his daughter Lucy on her remote smallholding, where they are violently attacked by a group of black men. The consequences of this attack profoundly shake Lurie, darkening his view of the world. is the story of David Lurie, a white professor who loses his job after s.e.xual-hara.s.sment charges are laid against him by a female student with whom he has had a joyless series of s.e.xual encounters. Lurie goes to stay with his daughter Lucy on her remote smallholding, where they are violently attacked by a group of black men. The consequences of this attack profoundly shake Lurie, darkening his view of the world.

There is something in Disgrace Disgrace that harks back both to the Forsterian vision of the Indian struggle for independence and to the Germans' rubble literature. In Lucy's apparent readiness to accept her rape as her a.s.sailants' way of working out on her body the necessary revenges of history, we hear a much harsher, more discordant echo of Dr. Aziz's "not yet." And Lurie believes (like, one must conclude, his creator) that the English language is no longer capable of expressing the Southern African reality. that harks back both to the Forsterian vision of the Indian struggle for independence and to the Germans' rubble literature. In Lucy's apparent readiness to accept her rape as her a.s.sailants' way of working out on her body the necessary revenges of history, we hear a much harsher, more discordant echo of Dr. Aziz's "not yet." And Lurie believes (like, one must conclude, his creator) that the English language is no longer capable of expressing the Southern African reality.

The bone-hard language Coetzee has found for his book has been much admired, as has the unflinchingness of his vision. The book unquestionably fulfills the first requirement for a great novel: it powerfully creates a dystopia that adds to the sum total of the imagined worlds at our disposal and, by doing so, increases what it is possible for us to think. Reading about Lurie and Lucy on their dangerous, isolated patch of land, we can more readily grasp the condition of those white farmers in Zimbabwe, as history comes calling for its revenge. Like the Byronic Lucifer-in whose name both "Lurie" and "Lucy" can be found-Coetzee's protagonist "acts on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him." He has, perhaps, a "mad heart," and believes in something he calls "the rights of desire." This makes him sound pa.s.sionate, but in fact he's cold and abstracted to an almost somnambulist degree.

This cold detachment, which also permeates the novel's prose, is the problem. "Rubble literature" didn't just strip language to its bones. It put new flesh on those bones, perhaps because its pract.i.tioners retained a belief in, even a love for, that language, and for the culture in which their renewed language was to flower. Lacking that loving belief, the discourse of Disgrace Disgrace sounds heartless, and all its intelligence cannot fill up the hole. sounds heartless, and all its intelligence cannot fill up the hole.

To act on impulses whose source one claims not to understand, to justify one's plunges at women by one's "rights of desire," is to make a virtue of one's psychological and moral lacunae. For a character to justify himself by claiming not to understand his motives is one thing; for the novelist to collude in that justification is quite another.

n.o.body in Disgrace Disgrace understands anyone else. Lurie does not understand Melanie, the student he seduces, nor she him. He doesn't understand Lucy, his own daughter, and she finds his deeds and his "case" for his actions beyond her. He doesn't understand himself at the beginning, nor does he get any wisdom by the novel's end. understands anyone else. Lurie does not understand Melanie, the student he seduces, nor she him. He doesn't understand Lucy, his own daughter, and she finds his deeds and his "case" for his actions beyond her. He doesn't understand himself at the beginning, nor does he get any wisdom by the novel's end.

Inter-racial relations are conducted at the same level of ignorance. The whites don't understand the blacks and the blacks aren't interested in understanding the whites. Not one of the novel's black characters-not Petrus the "gardener and dog-man" who works with Lucy, and certainly not the gang of a.s.sailants-is developed into a living, breathing character. Petrus comes closest, but his motives remain enigmatic and his presence grows more menacing as the novel proceeds. To the novel's whites, its black inhabitants are essentially a threat-a threat justified by history. Because whites have historically oppressed blacks, it's being suggested, we must now accept that blacks will oppress whites. An eye for an eye, and so the whole world goes blind.

This, then, is the novel's acclaimed revelatory vision: one of a society of conflicting incomprehensions, driven by the absolutes of history. Certainly it's coherent enough-coherent in its privileging of incoherence, striving to make of its blindness a sort of metaphorical insight.

When a writer's created beings lack understanding, it becomes the writer's task to provide the reader with the insight lacked by the characters. If he does not, his work will not shine a light upon darkness but merely become a part of the darkness it describes. This, alas, is the weakness of Disgrace. Disgrace. It doesn't, finally, shed enough new light on the news. But the news does add a bit to our understanding of the book. It doesn't, finally, shed enough new light on the news. But the news does add a bit to our understanding of the book.

JUNE 2000: FIJI.

They are trying to steal our land." Such is the emotive accusation made by the failed businessman George Speight and his gang of hooligan usurpers against Fiji's Indian community in general and the deposed Mahendra Chaudhry government in particular. By one of the bitter ironies of the Age of Migration, Speight's insistence on the basic cultural importance of land is very easy for people of Indian origin to grasp. (However, he goes too far, and by his insistence on what might be called the racial characteristics of land-for Speight plainly a.s.sumes that the land is, in its very nature, ethnically Fijian-he tips over into bigotry and folly.) Land, home, belonging: to Indians these words have always felt more than ordinarily potent. India is a continent of deeply rooted peoples. Indians don't just own the ground beneath their feet; it owns them, too. An orthodox Hindu tradition goes so far as to warn that anyone who crosses the "black water"-the ocean-instantly loses caste. The so-called Indian diaspora, which has taken Indian communities and their descendants from their over-populous country across the world in every direction and as far as, well, Fiji, is therefore the most improbable of phenomena. Yet the journeyings of Indians all over the planet is one of the great sagas of our time, an epic replete with misadventures. Idi Amin's vicious expulsion of the Ugandan Asians, the tensions between the black and Indian populations of Trinidad and South Africa, "Paki-bashing" in Britain, the tough treatment of Indian workers in Gulf states, and now Fiji-it's tempting to conclude that the world has it in for these hardworking migrants and descendants of migrants, that their single-minded dedication to bettering their families' lot somehow comes across as reprehensible.

In the United States, many Indians speak almost shamefacedly of their lack of racially motivated trouble; not being the target of American racism, they have been until recently almost invisible as a community, and this invisibility has perhaps excused them from persecution. But there have been triumphs, too. With each generation, Indians have become more fully a part of Britain without losing their distinctive ident.i.ty; while in America, the virtual takeover of Silicon Valley by Indian whiz-kids has got people's attention and earned their admiration.

In Fiji, the century-old Indian presence has been a success story. Indians have built the sugar industry that is the country's main resource; and-as the ethnic Fijian opposition to the Speight coup demonstrates-relations between the communities are by no means as bad as the rebels make out. In the Fijian Parliament, the Chaudhry government was supported by fifty-eight out of seventy-one members. Twelve out of eighteen members of the sacked cabinet were ethnic Fijians. Even among Speight's hostages, fourteen of the thirty-one prisoners are ethnic Fijians. Thus the Chaudhry government was in no sense a sectarian government of Indians lording it over Fijians. It was a genuine cultural mixture. Since its deposition, however, the Speight rebels, abetted by the craven Great Council of Chiefs and by the martial-law regime of Commodore Bainimarama, have dragged Fiji back toward its racially intolerant past. There has been much violence. Many Indians now say they'll have to leave. Meanwhile, the quality of debate deteriorates by the day. Speight's mob points approvingly to Mugabe's land grab in Zimbabwe, and says that the British should be responsible for the Indians they brought to Fiji, just as they "should" recompense the dispossessed Zimbabwean whites.

The fundamentals of the land question have been thoroughly obscured by such nonsense. The obvious truth is that, after a hundred years, Fiji's Indians have every right to be treated as Fijian, as the equals of ethnic Fijians. Preventing Indians from owning land was and is a great injustice-most of Fiji's land, particularly on the main island of Viti Levu, is owned by Fijians but held by Indians on ninety-nine-year leases, many of which are coming up for renewal-and the Speight idea of taking over the sugar farms as the Indians' ninety-nine-year leases expire compounds that injustice.

British Indians have fought to be recognized as British; Uganda's Indians were grievously wronged when Amin threw them out as "foreigners." Migrant peoples do not remain visitors forever. In the end, their new land owns them as once their old land did, and they have a right to own it in their turn. "We don't want Fijians fighting Fijians-our common enemy is the Indians," Speight says, but the final irony may be that his brand of ethnic cleansing is leading Fijians and Indians in western Fiji, the most prosperous part of the country, with most of the sugarcane operations, some gold mines, and the best tourist resorts, to make common cause against him. Secession is being seriously discussed. The choice facing Fiji's remarkably inept political cla.s.s may therefore soon become a stark one: abandon the fundamentally racist notion that your land is ethnically tied to one racial group, or lose the best of that land to those who find your bigotry, and your weakness, impossible to bear.

JULY 2000: SPORT.

France is the most powerful nation in Europe and probably, at present, the world; though Brazil would dispute that. The Germans, usually so organized and efficient, are in an uncharacteristic mess. Italians have flair but are profoundly defensive by nature. The Dutch are sometimes quarrelsome but, at their best, by far the most artistic of the Europeans; Belgium is dull by comparison. Spain is highly gifted but consistently under-achieves at the highest levels. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden seem to be in decline. Yugoslavia and Croatia can both be guilty (like Argentina) of hidden brutalities. Turkey, Nigeria, and the leading Arab nations are rapidly approaching parity with Europe and South America, while j.a.pan and the USA remain very much second-cla.s.s nations. And the English-alas, the English!-are pedestrian, tactically naive, and, of course, hooligans.

The world according to soccer, like the whole sports-page cosmos, differs somewhat from the picture of reality to be found on the news pages but is instantly recognizable, except in the few remaining soccer-free corners of the globe. And in our sound bitedominated era, the crude national stereotypes generated by sport have begun to inform the way we look at the "real" world as well as the narrower arena of sport itself. They even affect the way we-including those of us who lack any vestige of sporting prowess-look at ourselves.

Sporting success can have the most astonishing social, and even political, effects. A couple of years ago there was much talk of France's loss of cultural and national confidence, of a sort of crisis of French ident.i.ty. The World Cup victory two years ago, and the Euro 2000 triumph last week, has silenced all such talk. And the genius of the French Muslim superstar Zinedine Zidane, scorer of the goal that won the World Cup and now the inspiration of the European champions, has done more to improve France's att.i.tude toward its Muslim minority, and to damage the political aspirations of the ultra-right, than a thousand political speeches could hope to achieve.