PATRIOT MISSILES: Tonight I attended a very interesting event, a symposium on the Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism legislation at the downtown New School (in the same auditorium as the famous Andrew Sullivan-Richard Goldstein smackdown of last year).
The intellectual star power was almost overwhelming- the panel included author Kurt Vonnegut, Harpers editor Lewis Lapham, Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, author and CourtTV founder Steven Brill, ACLU head Nadine Strossen, and New York Sun Managing Editor Ira Stoll. I was also pleasantly surprised at the tone of the discussion: while I was expecting a nonstop Bush- and America-bashfest, the conversation remained civil while not in lockstep, nobody (unlike those idiots in Union Square the other week) called America a "police state," and only Lapham referred to the Bush Administration as "fascist."
The occasion of the panel was the 9/11 anniversary, as well as the release of Hentoff's new book on "The War on the Bill of Rights." Hentoff spoke first, and while I sometimes disagree with him, I acknowledge that he is one of the bravest and most admirable reporters in the country, and was greatly interested in what he had to say. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Vonnegut: senility clearly seems to have set in for the 81-year-old novelist. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to like-minded Brandeis professor Gordon Fellman, Vonnegut rambled for ten minutes about Bush liking to dress up and pretend he's in a movie, spoke the absurdly incorrect statement that Iraq is "the worst strain American soldiers have ever been subjected to," said Bush is "at war with all of the Arabs," and then launched into a bizarre tangent about the Democrats being the "party of perversion," not even mentioning the Patriot Act or civil liberties at any point in his comments. Vonnegut, apparently realizing he'd bit off more than he could chew in agreeing to take part, didn't speak again for the remainder of the evening, except to say "I should've been in the audience." Maybe he should stick to fiction.
Token conservative Stoll, who used to write the anti-NYT SmarterTimes.com blog, filled the Alan Colmes role, as the spokesman for the minority viewpoint who was essentially set up to fail. But Stoll didn't help himself, stumbling through his opening statement, offering no original or substantive commentary whatsoever, and essentially punting whenever another panelist challenged or asked him a question. Every third word out of Stoll's mouth was "um"- if this guy can be the #2 editor of a daily newspaper in America's largest city, then I suddenly feel a lot better about my long-term career prospects.
The most impressive of the panelists was Brill, the founder of Brill's Content and author of "After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era," whose role was to act as an all-purpose bullshit detector for both sides of the debate. Brill pretty much articulated my own position: The Patriot Act itself has gotten a bum rap because it is essentially innocuous, and the majority of the "new" powers therein merely consolodated those that already existed. However, Brill argued, the real complaint civil libertarians should have with John Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies is his imprisoning of "enemy combatants," as well as the dragnet that resulted in hundreds of Muslims being detained. Brill, a lawyer by trade, also handled himself impeccably in the debate portion, having to argue the pro-Bush side at times because Stoll was napping.
The ACLU's Strossen was surprisingly pragmatic and sensible, but a few things she said stuck out: she argued that anti-terrorism measures as a rule "cannot be effective," (to which Brill retorted that they have been and inevitably will continue to be). Then Strossen spoke of having attended an ACLU leadership meeting at a coffeeshop in Washington on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, to discuss a response to whatever the Bush Administration's response would be. Remember that afternoon? Could you have imagined sitting down at that moment to plot strategy?
But most outrageous of all was Harpers' Lapham. One of those old liberals who has been turned by the events of the last two years into a stammering nutjob, Lapham went off on a long rant that was full of wacky statements- he ran through a laundry list of usual talking points about the "Bush-Ashcroft Administration," stating that they hate the American people, and are "more scared of American democracy than they are of the Jihadists," before predicting that one day the Wall Street Journal will praise Bush for his "fascist regime" (?)
In the panel discussion portion of the evening, Lapham was at it again: he referred to the War on Terrorism as "an elective war," which practically had me on my feet ready to take him on, and later stated that he doesn't understand why Al-Qaeda poses any more of a nuclear threat to the US than the Soviet Union did when, as any college freshman in Intro to International Relations could've told him, Al-Qaeda is a greater threat because, as terrorists who value martyrdom, the Cold War-era doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doesn't apply to them should they acquire nuclear weapons. Not to mention that Al-Qaeda has mounted an attack on the continental US, something the Soviet Union never did. Even Hentoff, a well-credentialed man of the left and perhaps America's foremost civil libertarian, acknowledged that we're in a war with barbarians whose goal is to destroy civilization- a fact apparently lost on Lapham, who seems to think Bush is the true barbarian.
The moderator, Brian Lehrer, noted before the program that this event took place before an audience in Greenwich Village, where by survey not a single audience member either supported the Patriot Act or had voted for George W. Bush. But Lehrer also told of another poll, by Gallup, which stated that 50% of Americans think the Patriot Act is just right, 22% think it goes too far, and 21% don't think it goes far enough. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but keep one thing in mind: in a country with no rights or liberties, such a panel would of course never be possible.