October 8, 2001

• First, the good news. Besides the fact that obviously none of us have been arrested yet and that I haven't come down with the flu yet (in spite of standing security watch at the sleepout from 1:30 AM to 3:30 AM) -- WHEEL met with the staff at the Frye Apartments today and it looks like we have a space for a women's severe-weather shelter. We'll get word for sure on Wednesday.
  

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  I finished the McAndrew stories a couple of days ago. Then I read Scoundrel Time, Lillian Hellman's intensely personal memoir of the McCarthy era, which I've just finished.

  Twice the Seattle Times has published editorials condemning pacifism in the current circumstances as "evil." This seems an especially appropriate time for Lillian Hellman's famous quote from her letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

  In refusing to name names or testify about any other person, Hellman stood as a beacon of decency during the witch hunt hysteria of that infamous time, when many other famous figures (like Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan) fell all over themselves to slander friends, relatives and strangers in order to proclaim their own ideological innocence and save their careers. Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, whom she lived with and who went to jail during that awful period, didn't save their careers. But they saved their integrity.

  Standing for peace now is harder than it has ever been. But what is the use of standing for peace when the world is at peace? How hard is it to urge people to get along when they aren't angry at each other? When does the government need to be criticized, if not at the time when you think it's making a mistake?

  There have been many claims, some probably true, that Hellman exaggerated or outright made up parts of her life. The things I find valuable in this book, however, have nothing to do with those accusations.

  In his introduction, Gary Wills has an excellent description of the difference between an ideologue and a radical:
  

  "The popular image of the radical is of the wild and irresponsible 'bomb thrower.' But most radicals I have met were extraordinarily civil. They oppose the general degradation, not with a programmatic 'solution,' but with a personal code that makes pride possible in a shameful social order. They do not wish to be implicated in responsibility for society's crimes, which means that they must take a special kind of responsibility for their own acts."

  Later Lillian Hellman says of the effect of the McCarthy era: "My belief in liberalism was mostly gone. I think I have substituted for it something private called, for want of something that should be more accurate, decency."

  I found an eerie parallel in Lillian Hellman's reflections on Henry Wallace's campaign for President in 1948, and my own reaction to Ralph Nader's candidacy in 2000.
  

  "I had seen a third party as necessary in this country--I still do--but I had not wanted all energies turned toward a presidential campaign. I had thought we would concentrate on wards, districts, even neighborhoods, building slow and small for a long future, and I disagreed that so much energy and money, all of it in fact, was being gambled on a man about whom I had many doubts."

  Gary Wills again:
  

  "The radical thinks of virtuous people, while the ideologue thinks of orthodoxy. The radical hates vicious and harmful people, while the ideologue hates heretical ideas, no matter how 'nice' the possessors of those ideas may be. The radical tries to uphold a private kind of honor in a rotten world--like Hammett's 'private eyes,' serving society without respecting it, seeing men and not just abstract Crime in the victims of their hunt. Hammett wielded that most self-wounding of human instruments, irony; and ironists make terrible crusaders. The worst thing one could have wished on the mousy world of Communist ideologues in America was a dozen more Hammetts."

  My sweetie Wes loved those last lines. He is a radical and compassionate man. He is also an ironist, and "a terrible crusader."

  One of the ironies Wes found in the September 11th aftermath was a TV interview with several "top counter-terrorist experts" in which they were asked if they understood Arabic -- and none of them did.

  But then you know what Lynn Cheney, the V.P.'s wife, says. Pushing multi-cultural studies right now, particularly Arabic studies, would "send the wrong message." It might be interpreted to mean that we ought to be trying to understand the Arabs.

  I guess none of those counter-terrorist agents wanted to send the wrong message.

  • 10:33 pm
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