Let's Do the Time Warp

Some mornings, as I sit in the dining hall gobbling my grits and cheese and dropping chunks on whatever campus publication is spread before me, I encounter some things to make my gorge rise. Last week’s Salient offered up some choice bits for those of us who thrill to have our sensibilities so viscerally offended. For a conservative publication run by two members of what is “supposed to be the more prudent, discreet sex” (I quote its publisher, Mary C. Cardinale ’02-’03), it is absolutely obscene.

In her latest screed entitled “Women Behaving Badly,” Cardinale accuses us “ladies” of, in a way, having brought disrespect (and violence) on ourselves by behaving in a manner as “crass and libidinous” as our male counterparts. I feel my heart beat faster and my skin begin to tingle at this bit of warmed-over anti-feminism from a not-so-distant past (that of Wendy Shalit and A Return to Modesty), and I look around the dining hall to see others with their jaws agape, gasping for breath and possibly drooling because of a publication produced with shameless gusto by women who love to shock and provoke. There must be a thousand grit-stained copies of the Salient quickening pulses and/or churning stomachs in the Harvard dining halls. We read on out of the same “morbid fascination” with which Cardinale claims to watch “Joe Millionaire”—not because the arguments are compelling or even new to us, but because it’s so…wicked.

When I seek a less unsettling read, I switch to the Crimson’s tamer fare, which even when disagreeable is at least of my historical epoch. But in past months its value as a respite from absurdity has declined, as news from “The Real World” is dominated by the latest escalatory tactic in this prelude to a war that can only be described as “crass and libidinous.”

Current events look more than ever like projections off a grainy film reel escaped from the vault of abominations past. Despite certain revisions necessary for a postmillennial American public, the ideological script is remarkably easy to follow. Now if, as someone said in class the other day, “terrorism is the new communism,” the rest follows neatly: coming out of Washington are “Red Alerts” and “Freedom Fries,” while coming out of us is grim humor and heavy irony. Meanwhile our freedom endures a precipitous rise in CIA funding and the renewed persecution of left-wing groups. A thin pretext for attacking a maligned third-world country is in its refining stages and may be ready for use by the end of the month.

On the homefront, the INS, aided by local police, continues to round up men from Pakistan and other Muslim countries and trap them by the thousands in detention centers throughout the country, where some are deported and others are kept indefinitely. There are at this moment over a hundred such men locked up in the Kearney, N.J county jail, according to calls for action circulated over e-mail listservs. The Department of Justice is a party to these deportations, which are largely legal even if unconstitutional, thanks to the powers granted by Congress to federal enforcement agencies. If the guys happen to be “innocent,” they can just head home (shipped in shackles to Islamabad) or just wait until this whole thing blows over. Appeals to due process are a relic of the still more distant past.

There are so many intricate pieces to the Bush regime’s all-out war on Arabs and the Constitution—not the least of which is Bush’s underhanded use of federal judgeships to turn back the clock on secularism, abortion rights and desegregation—that the news is getting hard to follow. Dazed in the face of such successful historical backpedaling, I obsessively read the news in order to situate myself in the nostalgic world of Bush’s making. In the words of Salient editor-in-chief Claire V. McCusker ’04, “these are tricky times, and one cannot be too informed.”

We may be horrified, or amused, but let’s not be deceived about what it all means for us. The greatest travesties of American foreign and domestic policy were committed under the noses of a confused citizenry which wrinkled its brow but for the most part didn’t lift a finger.

When it comes to the war and everything else, our disdain is not enough. We have to accept the moment on its own terms. This doesn’t mean lying down in the flow of history and letting it wash over us like so much toxic waste from a munitions factory; but rather recognizing our part in it and doing what’s necessary to stop the war at home and abroad. And even though it feels a little grandiose, the actions required of us are not at all.

Throughout the pageant of American history, there were people who opposed internment camps, who resisted McCarthyism and nukes, who refused to accept the principle of destroying countries in order to save them. It’s hard to know the difference they made, but we are obliged to assume it was real. Let’s all sign the walkout pledge, and when the day comes, walk out. Let’s not titter in horror over the news and then turn the page. As we feel our blood rise, let’s not be ashamed to react.

Madeleine S. Elfenbein ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.