Step Across This Line (36 page)

SEPTEMBER 1999: DARWIN IN KANSAS

Some years ago, in Cochin in South India, I attended the World Understanding Day of the local Rotary Club. The featured speaker was an American creationist, Duane T. Gish, who attributed the malaise of Today’s Youth to the propagation, by the world’s school systems, of the pernicious teachings of poor old Charles Darwin. Today’s Youth was being taught that it was descended from monkeys! Consequently, and understandably, it had become alienated from society, and “depressed.” The rest—its drift, its criminality, its promiscuity, its drug abuse—inevitably followed.

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 accumulated 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 superstition. 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 classes 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
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 Nigger of the
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.

As its beginning shows,
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,
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
magazine and then in many leading U.S. newspapers, and in the British
Daily Telegraph.

Even stranger is the fact that no American paper would publish Said’s rebuttals, which eventually appeared, ironically, in the Israeli paper
Ha’aretz.
The Israeli media are thus shown to be fairer than those Western organs acting as Israel’s defenders.

Said is a passionate 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 raccoon 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 title 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 dispassionate 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 pronouncements on Nawaz, and they’re getting louder.

Benazir 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 Benazir’s own brother as well. When Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, Benazir 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 quantities 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 institutions—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 button?

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.