Tale from the feminist alternative universe

There is a line that was parroted for years during the Bush years by those on the liberal side of the political spectrum. It declared that the war against Saddam Hussein was a bad war and a distraction. The good war, the story went, was the war in Afghanistan. It was the latter, those liberal politicians, journalists, and entertainers assured us, that was the “good war,” the one that they were rock-solid in supporting. That was the war that the whole world was backing. True to their beliefs that the U.S. should only act in its defense to whatever extent the “international community” approved, liberals felt liberated to be on the side of the U.S. Today, of course, with the Afghanistan campaign heating up after the rout of al Qaeda from Iraq, liberals are abandoning their “rock-solid” support. As Ann Coulter has observed acidly (does she ever observe any other way?), liberals always support the war the U.S. is not fighting, never the one it is.

Now, those of us who actually remember those days recall that the “international community” was less than solid in its support. Widely-publicized celebrations in the Middle East in support of the attackers, and general (understandable) apathy in Africa, Asia, and South America, marred the picture of rousing solidarity. That official organ of international cooperation, the UN, quickly had difficulty doing much of anything. But, then, that’s par for the course. Nothing to see there.

On the domestic front, within a couple of weeks of commencement of military operations against the Taliban, every temporary lull in operations caused journalists in certain newspapers to fret about the operation turning into a quagmire, even as the military routed the enemy. Various celebritards and some politicians denounced American efforts there. Indeed, paid newspaper ads almost immediately after 9/11 opposed any military response. Academics, such as Ward Churchill (I know, the word “academic” has suffered greater devaluation than the dollar), instead laid the blame at America’s feet. Offering at most a perfunctory nod to the dead of 9/11, these same dwellers of cloud cuckoo land engaged in hand-wringing over imagined widespread popular retaliation against Muslims living in the U.S., results that, of course, never materialized.

Among the more astonishing reactions was that of America’s feminists. They should have been delighted at the liberation of Afghani women from the repressive misogynist and sexual paranoia of the Islamistregime in Kabul. Instead, in an exquisite, if unintentional, parody, feminists embraced their multiculti feelings—and blamed the West. In an old, but timeless, column, Mark Steyn returns us to those days of feminist foolishness. Actually, idiocy is a better word. The reason the column is timeless is that the same kind of feminist effluent still spews from the same suspects. It’s the stuff that, in more superficially jurisprudential(and duller) manner, is found in “Women and the Law” courses and in the jargon-heavy written insomnia cures that get feminist law professors tenure. My contempt for the “intellectual” directions of the feminist project (though not for certain ur-feminist quests for relief from demonstrable and concrete conditions of discrimination) echoes that of Camille Paglia.

The Steyn column is a wonderful distillation of the many reasons to be contemptuous. He captures the essence of the weird logic (if I may be excused for using a patriarchal term in describing feminist reasoning—oops, another inappropriate term) of feminist musings that almost invariably miss the point of a particular situation. Looking at things only through a particular political prism will distort the whole. Steyn has a wonderful appreciation of that prism and the feminist jargon that expounds the diffracted view of feminist reality:

“Meanwhile, the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism And War, which includes Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and about 75 other sisters and is ‘Worldwide’ mainly in the sense the World Series is, organized a petition called ‘Not In Our Name’. ‘We will not support the bombing,’they declared, and who can blame them? I dropped out of women’s studies in Grade Two, but, as I recall, a bombing campaign is a quintessential act of patriarchal oppression and sexual domination. The male pilot, looming over the curvy undulating form of the Third World hillside, unzips his bomb carriage and unleashes his phallic ordinance to penetrate his target. Needless to say, he explodes on contact, typical bloody men.”