Since September 11, political dissent has seemed a decadent luxury, rather than a democratic necessity. The new united-we-stand orthodoxy holds that we’re all engaged in a war of unquestionable good against inexplicable evil–that, in fact, the attempt to understand the enemy’s perception of us is disloyal–and that bombing Afghanistan, approved by 90 percent of Americans, is both morally and practically justified. These assumptions are worth questioning, if only for prudential reasons. But our official opposition party has signed on; so have most of the world’s leaders. And again, the writers won’t get with the program. John le Carre and Alan Gurganus have written to critique the war and the United States’ arrogance; Alice Walker has been ridiculed for saying the only “punishment” that will work on Osama bin Laden is love. (Didn’t this ring a bell with the Bible-reading Christians around the president?) But the most audible voices have been those of Susan Sontag and Barbara Kingsolver, and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.
Sontag, the essayist and author of the National Book Award-winning “In America: A Novel,” drew a bizarrely fierce reaction for a 473-word New Yorker piece. She called the president “robotic” (mild by pre-September 11 rules), said the attacks were motivated by “specific American alliances and actions” (it must have been something), deemed courage “morally neutral” (ask a GI who fought the SS) and broadly hinted that high-altitude bombing was more cowardly than flying airplanes into buildings (inflammatory, but arguable). But her main point was that the government was talking down to us. “They consider their task to be… confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy–which entails disagreement, which promotes candor–has been replaced by psychotherapy.” For this, she was called a “traitor” and a “moral idiot.” On ABC’s “Nightline,” Sontag expressed astonishment; she thinks the bombing is a bad idea, but she’s no pacifist, believes there can be no compromise with Islamist extremism–“and, no, I don’t think we have brought this upon ourselves, which is of course a view that has been attributed to me.”
Sontag denied that the bombing of Afghanistan is morally equivalent to the attack on the World Trade Center; but Roy, author of “The God of Small Things,” believes it is. “Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington,” Roy wrote in London’s Guardian. Her belletristic analysis of bin Laden as “the American president’s dark doppelganger” crosses over into Sillyville. But her image of America is something we should take seriously: “Its merciless economic agenda… has munched the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.” But for Americans, Roy’s strongest argument against the war may be the practical one. “Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It’ll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school?… Will my love come home tonight?”
Both Sontag and Roy declined requests for an interview. But Kingsolver–whom another writer in these pages has called “mindless”–was glad to talk. “Well, I’m babbling,” the author of “The Poisonwood Bible” said after summarizing the essay she’d just sent to her agent about FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech. “You haven’t even asked me a question.” What got my colleague up on his hind legs was a line from a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece, suggesting that the flag has come to stand for “intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?” But Kingsolver was simply talking about the hard right’s co-opting of patriotic symbolism: “My patriotic duty is to recapture my flag from the men now waving it in the name of jingoism and censorship.”
Ever since September 11, Kingsolver has been pouring out editorials and essays. Her dissent, like Roy’s, is both moral and practical. “If our goal is to reduce the number of people in the world who would like to kill us,” she says, “this is not the way to go about it.” She resents having her patriotism impugned. “I’m speaking out because I’m a patriot,” she says. “Because I love my country and I want it to do the right thing.” And she also resents being told–as she has been lately–that she should stick to writing novels. “It’s a nasty slapdown that’s been used against those of us, particularly Arundhati Roy, who have spoken out,” Kingsolver says. “As if the fact of our being novelists disqualified us for any other sort of speech. I can’t make any sense of that. Words are my tools. Words are what I have to offer.”
