Alan K. Henderson – Page 4

I looked on with horror at this news story about a fountain recently unveiled in Vienna, Austria. A city that for centuries has been associated with some of the highest works of art paid actual money for an amateurish sculpture that ranks with that ruined fresco in Borja, Spain.

I immediately thought of Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story Harrison Bergeron. (Probably a coincidence, but her initials spell “damage” without the vowels.) In this tale, the year is 2081, and recent amendments to the constitution have empowered the Federal government to artificially “handicap” the more intelligent, attractive, and athletic citizens such that these advantages are brought brown to a lower common denominator. This paragraph describes a few applications of this policy:

“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

Many professors at Columbia University are dismayed that a campus culture with a long history of demonizing Israel as a barbaric imperialist state, and little to no history of criticizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in the past, now actively embraces such attacks against Israelis today. “We are horrified that anyone would celebrate these monstrous attacks or, as some members of the Columbia faculty have done in a recent letter, try to ‘recontextualize’ them as a ‘salvo,’ as the ‘exercise of a right to resist’ occupation, or as ‘military action.’”

This attitude toward Israel is an outgrowth of the modern leftist doctrine that the West is history’s greatest aggressor. The sum of the West’s interventions in non-Western lands is automatically regarded with cynicism, including the post-WWI nation-building in the former Ottoman provinces – and especially the formation of Israel. Anti-Zionist leftists blindly trust the Arab side of the story, that the Israelis and not the Arabs instigated the 1948 war. Many if not most of this group – certainly the loudest – reject the notion that Jews have rightful claims to any of the territory west of the Jordan River; it was Arab-ruled before the Turkish occupation (albeit under governments headquartered outside of the region), it should be Arab-ruled again.

The Vonnegut-Lewis Theory of Modern Art

Edward Said