No Flowers for Rushdie

Today is Valentine's Day. It does not appear marked in either my Filofax or my calendar from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Why is this so? Is it that the English have no patience for love? Do the patrons of the Holocaust Museum fear and tremble before even the mere contemplation of love? Probably not. But perhaps what the English and the American patrons realize is that February is not just a time for expressing a desire for love, but also a time for expressing a desire for justice.

Today, some might recall, is the fifth anniversary of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses. To call this date an anniversary, however, is to approach cognitive dissonance. It is an anniversary for which there are no gifts, no chocolates, no flowers no waltzes.

Last year, towards the winter holidays Rushdie appeared in the White House. Like all his surprise appearances, this one was magical because we do not know either from where he comes or whither he goes. Indeed, our only good measure of his nearness is the distance created by the burly men from Scotland Yard around him.

By hosting Rushdie at the White House--the symbolic representation of the free world--our not-so-feckless leader Bill Clinton morally outdistanced his predecessor, who cravenly avoided the wrath of petrodollars. But Clinton did not go much further. In fact Clinton chose to downplay the glory of his decision by retrospectively characterizing his meeting with Rushdie as brief and insignificant.

To editorialists, novelists and booksellers, Rushdie is now principally a symbol because he now symbolizes, now enbodies, certain principles. By discounting his significant meeting, Clinton rejected the worth of these symbols and the principles which follow them.

But symbols and their signifieds matter to us and others, and hours after the brief meeting, Clinton was excoriated by the imams and their political bedfellows in Iran and other Islamic states. Certainly not all Muslims participated, but in scope and intensity enough to help finely attune our moral compasses once again.

How absurd and obtuse it must seem, then, to look at books entitled "There's no such thing as free speech, and it's a good thing too!" Stanley Fish, the author of this book (published by Oxford!), and his fellow-travellers along the postmodern abyss do not really mean what they say, do they?

I am and must be incredulous against their claims. We all must be. For incredulousness is the only enabling virtue to govern an occasion like this Valentine's Day, an occasion for which even Hallmark, alas, does not have a greeting card.

What is Fish thinking? How rich the moronic irony is when one write not from the sweaty cellars of "safe houses," but rather from the oh-so-radical perspective of Duke University's English department chair. It is Rushdie who must now conjure up an Imaginary Homeland. Fish, mean while, never had his taken away.

Despite the sound and fury of thorough-going academic postmodern multi-culties, they, and not liberal values, are the ones who signify nothing. Because of today, February has joined Eliot's April in its iniquities against the human soul.

Not always, but sometimes, there exist giants and dwarfs. Our task is to tell them apart and treat them accordingly. We do so when we remember Rushdie's Valentine's Day, that is, the one without gifts and chocolates, flowers or waltzes.