Give me a break. Sullivan was doing nothing but being forceful in his convictions: utterly serious, his words and tone rich with his awareness of the crucial moment in which we find ourselves. On the other hand, Pollitt was like a twittery, giggly schoolgirl who had nothing but platitudes to offer. She clearly has no sense of what's really going on, and is content to work out of nothing but cliches.
Her chatty tone was particularly shocking considering that she lives in New York. Her daughter's school is 4 blocks from the WTC site (her daughter made famous, incidentally, by her mother's column about their conflict over hanging a flag in the wake of the attack. She wanted to, mom wouldn't have it. Proof that nurture isn't everything.)
Doesn't Pollitt live in the shadow of this? Doesn't she know the smell of it? Doesn't she walk and work on an island of which one corner has become a mass grave for 5,000 bodies? How can she maintain that chirpy tone in the face of such horror?
She kept saying that the present American action is essentially "bombing Afghanistan" and that this action was being done as some sort of quick fix, ultimately hopeless. She obviously hasn't been listening to Bush, et.al, who have been constantly reminding us that this is, indeed, a complex situation, and breaking the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists could very well take a long time and involve much more than Afghanistan.
The host had his own snide contribution to make, introducing the program (this is a public radio station in Boston, remember) with a call to all "minds with shade" to continue their profound reflection on the issues at hand. Sullivan didn't fail to notice the implication - that if you feel strongly about the matter, especially in support of a forceful response - that's somehow crude and intellectually unsophisticated.
It's distressing, but I suppose not surprising that some feel that Sullivan was somehow (to put it bluntly) mean to little Katha. But that's been the case for a while now. Stating a strong case, particularly from a "conservative" perspective (whatever that means) is routinely described as "divisive" and "uncivil." It's nothing but an attempt to discredit and even stifle certain viewpoints.
Most striking, of course, was Pollitt's inability to present any alternative course of action, which is rooted in her devotion to relativism, but at a deeper level, the implicit assumption, which she may not even see in herself, that all, in the end, is essentially symbolic. We shouldn't "do" anything, apparently, except write articles, have commission meetings and show solidarity. With someone.
It's all about symbolic gestures, which is the ultimate province of the privileged who are used to having freedom at other people's expense, whether it be the hired help or the despised military and intelligence forces who, in case she doesn't know it, are all that are standing between Katha Pollitt and a burqa (or perhaps a nice case of smallpox or just simple nuclear-induced vaporization) right now.
