Open Letter to Jeanne d’Arc

Posted on April 3, 2003 in Reflections

First a note of thanks for your series on the meaning of “extremism”. Not so long ago I took a political orientation quiz that diagnosed that I was more libertarian and more to the left than Gandhi. This brought the label of “extremist” on me (as if my articles hadn’t already) and I felt very much alone in the world, an odd duck bleeding from thousands of shotgun pellets and waiting for still more to come from all quarters.

All my life I’ve tried to live with and answer to my peers. Being a pacifist, I’m always being put on the spot for my beliefs. In addition to the usual “What would you do if an Iraqi soldier had your wife on the chopping block and was going to make goulash out of her?” questions, I’m also called a coward and a zealot. I’m not a sign-carrier — I haven’t been to a demonstration since 1994 — and I am actually used to living with people who disagree significantly with me. I live in Orange County, California, for Christ’s sake.

What hurts the most is that being who I am merits an out and out dismissal when my beliefs get put on the line or if I question the rationale behind someone else’s view. Talking to a centrist is like being put inside a coffin and rolled down the hill: the whole object of the discussion is disorientation without revelation. In one recent exchange for example, when I started putting questions about how my antagonist felt about the issues that we were discussing, I was told that they were “none of my business”. I told this person that once you enter a debate, you are obligated to reveal your side. But it’s clear that most centrists do not wish to do so and I suspect that they are ashamed of the fact that they haven’t thought it out or that they’ve allowed some pretty damn ugly “pragmatisms” to enter their minds.

It’s not, therefore, about extremism, so much as it is about secrecy and, maybe — this could be wishful thinking — guilt. The thing that unites me with a few others “out here” is that I am very open about what I think and feel. I tell people — partly as an exercise towards personal betterment and partly as an attempt to educate others about the nature of the ideas that drive our society — what I think. I am changeable, contrary to the image others have about me, and open to criticism. But the middle thinks that it’s constructive criticism to call me “extremist” or “crank” and ridicule to suggest that their ideas may be inconsistent or founded on false facts and propaganda.

Anti-intellectualism has a long history in the United States and I pay the price heavily, standing as I do on my own without foundation, university, or the support of a large personal fortune. Denying the capacity of the mind to arrive at conclusions that transcend current platitudes is, in itself a outrageous conformity. When you see the sheer mass of the thing in the center, I’m just a little moth fluttering around screaming at a rock band’s speaker in a moth’s voice. They call me a “danger”, but I’m not advocating the deaths of Iraqi civilians just so we can “get Hussein” (obtain more oil) nor dropping cluster bombs. I would think that given our much-touted senses of American fair play and justice, that I would be speaking for the majority. It is to these and to our ancient morality which states very plainly that “Thou shalt not kill” that I appeal. I do not sell out, I do not flip flop, I do not endorse spending tax dollars to be hyper-prepared to attack wherever we please when it pleases us. Is this peculiarly American, I wonder? Most Americans that I know say “No, we’re just like everyone else. They’re just jealous of our wealth.” and everyone else says “Why are you Americans so arrogant that you think you can set your rule on everyone else?”

A comment about that letter which you printed from Donald Johnson. He writes “in 1994 in Rwanda, maybe it was the US or nobody”. He labels that as an attitude which we might healthfully adopt on the left, but frankly I see that as an example of centrist thinking with its love of the war machine and the idea that the United States possesses the special virtue to be the world’s policeman. If I endorse intervention in Rwanda (and Johnson has closed his mind to other possible solutions, such as earlier, proactive diplomatic action), I may find that the language of my diatribe for such an action will be taken up by the powers that be to drive an evil that beggars the imagination.

This present war, I think, draws much of its power from people who could not finish a sentence declaring their opposition to this war without saying “even though I don’t like Saddam Hussein and I think, perhaps, that he should be assassinated”. The center, I dare say, has been paying a lot of lip service to the work of the real extremists — who want to see genuine human beings like Raed bombed into extermination — and calling those seeking more rational and less sanguinary solutions “extreme”. The center buys the extreme that thou shalt kill the ones you do not like, thou shalt stockpile horrendous weapons which, if they do not explode on immediate use, will linger under the desert sands for years until some poor soul steps on them and gets both legs blow to bits. Then, if he is alive, he will spend the rest of his existence in a hospital bed and then crawling around the streets of Bagdhad slavering after U.S. soldiers for a handout.

My “extreme” message has been this: stop and investigate the facts. Weigh them out. Watch what you say. Have a reasonable and consistent morality. Judge, if you must, by a single standard for all. I stand for checking facts like a scientist and acting upon them like the most holy of hermits. I leave out neither analysis nor emotion when I write. Though I am agnostic on the matter of God, I still have faith in conscience and I am impressed by the stands of some devout people — stands that get overlooked by the overhasty condemnations of religion by most atheists — against the black tide of mud, the occultism of the magical mystery tour promising that through excessive power we might establish Pax Americana throughout the world. (I consciously steal my imagery from Freud and bend it to my own uses here.)

The center wants two things: morality and amorality. They call for open minds and close theirs to mine. They want justice and they stay silent while our nation perpetrates injustice. They want peace and they cheer the war. They want individualism and they run as Donald Johnson nicely put it, as a herd of massive bison, trampling the intellectual landscape until it is as flat as the Great Plains, which the first American explorers called “The Great American Desert”.

It’s tempting to say that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”, but that’s not my message here. This extremism — this hunger for blunt, heavy-handed resolutions that has seized the imagination of the middle these days — IS a vice.

I fight for people, for their right to live and to imagine. I cannot entertain the thought of intervention because it always comes far too late. What, I dare ask of Donald Johnson and other left centrists who believe as the rest do in the inevitability of some interventions is: what would happen if we put the minds that we currently invest in the making of weapons into waging peace and building a better world economy? What if we didn’t worry about the offensive wild card that we keep stocked up our sleeve? What if we set ourselves to avoiding war by listening to the grief of other nations and adjusting our extravagant lifestyle to better live with them in this planet that none of us can escape? I don’t think it would be as hard as we fear: it’s a step in national therapy. (Fear of change is always worse than change itself.) A brave step to become a whole new national consciousness, proud of being America without the necessity to constantly shove our spectres into the background or paint their bare bone faces with a layer of red, red rouge.