Chickenhawks and Turtledoves

The New Republic has an excellent essay by Lee Siegel which bears the title above that starts out well:

I guess we're all contrarians now. And we're all intellectual heroes now. Bush and his cronies are so stupid, dishonest, and incompetent that all you have to do is mock or contradict them and you're George Orwell, Patrick Henry, and Martin Luther King Jr. rolled into one. This new style of self-congratulatory "heroics" is giving real opposition to this administration and its policies a bad name.

There were honest supporters of the Iraq war and dishonest jingoists banging and shouting on the invasion-bandwagon, and the latter can now beef up the appearance of integrity by criticizing Bush at every turn--that way they can also qualify their conservatism while appearing "contrarian" (i.e. marketable) to all sides. And without the unambiguous shame and shamelessness of Bush et al., there would hardly be a liberal blogosphere, much of which rests on herdlike ideological certitude.

The best thing is that you don't have to pay any kind of price for saying the most adolescently stubborn and contrary things against Bush. You are operating inside the safe shell of a mostly liberal culture. But these brave so-called liberal writers working inside their snug and smug shells are to culture what the neoconservative chickenhawks are to foreign policy. They're turtledoves.

The latest instance of turtledove courage occurred this past Sunday on The New York Times op-ed page, in an essay by David Thomson, the film historian. Thomson was opining about United 93, natch.

Siegel laughingly accuses girlie-man Thomson of having a spine and imagines the frisson of brave heroic emotion Hollyweirdo Thomson has dissing GWB. Que huevos!!

Fatuity after fatuity, Thomson the film historian patiently built his way toward his turtledove conclusion. He praises United 93 for not being a conventional action film, but then denigrates it for focusing exclusively on American "courage and enterprise." Because it is in the nature of art to see that everyone has his reasons, Thomson would like to see a film about Flight 93 that made an "equal effort to show the courage of the terrorists." You could almost feel the self-conscious shiver of Patrick Henry-like boldness running up Thomson's spine when he wrote those words. Bush called them cowards; well, then, the most powerful blow you can strike for peace in the Middle East and for sanity and decency at home is to call them the very opposite thing. Take that, Mr. Decider. And if you want to send me to prison and torture me, or at the very least, blacklist me, so be it.

Siegel is right. Thomson's poses and heroic postures rival the Kossacks' chest-thumping manifestoes and clarion calls for sheer phoney fatuous flimflammery. Siegel ends with a last swipe at the chattering-class urbane cheesiness of a second-rate imposter who pranced his best on the NYT Sunday Op-Ed burlesque show.

But there will be no penalty for Thomson--not that there should be. There will be champagne toasts and complimentary phone calls and emails. And anyone who dissents from Thomson's thrilling dissent might just as well be Billy Kristol's right-hand man.