THE
OPPORTUNIST
Through
all his incarnations – youthful Pop Fronter and author
of "Stalingrad," an ode to the USSR; sometime quasi-Trotskyist;
West Side rad-libber; "Scoop" Jackson conservative Democrat;
"neo"-conservative Republican – a pattern emerges, the
leitmotif of Poddy's career as polemicist and professional
scold, and that is his instinct for the main chance. He knew
just when to jump on the latest liberal-lefty hobbyhorse –
and, more important, when to jump off. His chameleon-like
powers, an uncanny ability to blend into whatever landscape
he found himself in, to be the first to wear the new colors
of the season, are here documented in self-loving detail.
The origins of this survival strategy are perhaps explained
in the section where he describes the often painful process
of "Americanization" he underwent at the hands of his WASPy
teachers, who got rid of his foreign accent and inculcated
in young Poddy the virtues of cultural (and political) conformism.
In this memoir he confesses that as a student at New York's
Columbia University "I could never quite get over the feeling
that I was not as 'real' an American as someone whose people
had come here earlier than mine." My Love Affair With America
can be read as the author's attempt to finally prove, beyond
the shadow of any doubt, that he is not only a real American
but the spokesman of the only true Americanism at the
center of US politics, the uncompromising guardian against
"anti-Americanism" on the Right as well as the Left.
ODES
TO THE WAR GOD
If
self-love, the celebration of himself and his friends and
associates, is the overarching theme of the Podhoretz's autobiographical
series, then the love of war is a major sub-theme, one especially
noticeable in the present work. Recalling the music that accompanied
some old war movie – "Boots – boots – boots
– tramping up and down again! / There's no escape from
the war" – he writes that those lines
"Gave
me an early inkling of what words could do and evoke, not
only through what they signify but through their placement
in rhythmic patterns and the uses of their very sounds to
reinforce and make the meaning more vivid and immediate. I
could hear in the harsh spondees . . . the endlessly stomping
boots, and this then propelled me into an intimation of the
endlessness of the war and the inescapable doom it promised."
THE
APOLOGIST
This
early inkling gave rise to a full-blown career as a wordsmith
in the service of the war god. Podhoretz is amused by his
own youthful indiscretions of a ideological nature, such as
his epic poem, "Stalingrad," which he describes as "my own
contribution to the hosannahs that were being sung all over
America and that wiped out all remaining traces of disgust
with Stalin." He is "happy to report that there are no surviving
copies of this juvenile effusion of mine," but historiographers
of Podhoretziana need not despair. For it is very likely that
this lost effusion is similar, in style if not content, to
his more recent apologias for the Vietnam War, the Gulf war,
the Balkan war, and indeed any and all wars, especially World
War II. In this volume, in an account of the "fanatical" isolationists
on the Right who opposed that war, he pulls out all the familiar
smears – anti-Semite, pro-Nazi, etc. ad nauseum
– which is not too surprising. What is surprising
is that he even lays into his own dear grandmother in
a display of invective that has to be read to be believed.
WHO
IS HE, THAT UNCLE SAM?
It
seems that Esther Malkah, his maternal grandmother, was listening
to the radio one day, with her little grandson, the budding
young Popular Frontist and aspiring poet, when she first heard
the slogan "Uncle Sam Needs You!" Podhoretz provides the context:
her son, Maxie, had just been drafted, an event she had not
exactly greeted with delight. After coming from Galicia, deserted
by her husband and left with five children, hadn't she had
to bear enough in her life? "With all that behind her,"
as Podhoretz puts it, "did she now have to endure the anxiety
of waiting to hear that her youngest son had been killed in
yet another war?" A perfectly reasonable fear, that one might
certainly expect her grandson to not only understand but empathize
with: not little Norman, however, or, for that matter, even
the older and yet still no wiser Norman, who writes:
"It
was just too much, and so turning to me sitting next to her
on the couch, she cried: 'Ver iz er, der Ujcle Sam? Im
hob ikh extra in dr'erd!' ('Who is he, that Uncle Sam?
Him I would especially like to send six feet under.')"
CUT
ME SOME SLACK, JACK
Young
Poddy, around eleven or twelve at the time, though "filled
with wartime patriotic fervor," knew better than to argue
with this formidable woman, at least at the time, but now
does not hesitate to take out after her in the pages of his
memoir, scolding her in retrospect for her narrowness and
provincialism. He avers that "whenever I have told this story,
I have been asked in wonderment how it was that my grandmother
should have felt so little stake in the American war against
the Nazis." He asks: "Why on earth should her fury have been
directed not against Hitler but against 'Uncle Sam?'" The
idea that it would be at all unusual for a mother to resent
having a son conscripted may seem counterintuitive, and we
might expect more understanding from the author on account
of this being his own grandmother and all, but oh
no, Poddy doesn't cut her any slack:
"The
answer is that so beaten-down and withdrawn was this stooped
and wizened old woman with the face of a thousand wrinkles
and so exclusively preoccupied was she with her private troubles
and woes, that it is entirely possible she knew nothing about
the war and its connection with the fate of the Jews of Europe.
. . . But even if she did know more or less what was going
on, she was altogether incapable or minding anyone's business
but her own, which extended to her children and grandchildren
and not a micromillimeter farther than that. Compared to their
welfare, nothing was of any importance; and anything that
harmed them (a category that self-evidently included being
drafted into the army) was bad, period, with no discussions
or elaboration needed or even allowed."
"THAT
PITEOUS WOMAN"
What
a wonderful credo, and what a loving person, whose loyalty
was the patriotism of the family – and who, the author
informs us, later gave up her life to spare that of her granddaughter
by throwing her own body in front of a speeding automobile.
Yet, strangely, this admirable woman is described by Podhoretz
as "this piteous creature": in spite of the author's obvious
affection, Esther Malkah is depicted as an essentially ignorant
and narrow-minded person, who selfishly ignored the plight
of her own people in pursuit of her own private ends. She
was, in short, one of the dreaded "isolationists," who don't
realize that they have a moral obligation to mind everyone
else's business but their own – and who would pop up
again (on the Left) during the cold war, during the Vietnam
era, and again in the post-cold war era, this time on the
Right. Each time, the Patriot Podhoretz would rise up, like
St. George of the War Party intent on slaying the isolationist
dragon, as if to reenact his ancient quarrel with old Esther
Malkah, whose wisdom he failed to absorb. For who can answer
her irrefutable argument that, compared to her family, nothing
was of any importance – and that Uncle Sam's claim on
the life of her son did indeed represent a mortal threat?
GRANDMA
MALKAH'S AMERICANISM
Podhoretz
does not try, even now, to answer this argument, implicit
in his grandmother's imprecations hurled at Uncle Sam, but
instead attempts to explain it away as a function of her immigrant
roots, of her separateness, her inability or unwillingness
to learn English and assimilate into American culture. But
Podhoretz is missing the point, as usual, and still hasn't
gotten it even after all these years. For Esther Malkah's
reaction to the idea of conscription, her immediate and visceral
rejection of the concept that the State has a primary claim
on everyone's life, is quintessentially American –
far more so than the author's shocked reaction. Grandma
Malkah's cantankerous individualism seems to emanate from
the very soil of this country like a sulfurous mist, but young
Poddy was apparently immunized from the effects of this cultural
vapor by his Commie teachers at public high school (he tells
us that he later found out that one was a Communist Party
member, the same one who lauded his youthful ode to Uncle
Joe Stalin).
PET
HATREDS
The
usual motivation for writing such a memoir, aside from touting
the genius and moral superiority of the author, is in large
part to give vent to his pet hatreds, and on this score Podhoretz
indulges himself to the full. Gore Vidal, with whom he has
conducted a feud for years, is smeared as an "anti-Semite"
without evidence or even any coherent explanation: Podhoretz
cites an article from the Nation, but only quotes a
couple of words from it (not even a complete sentence) and
then pretends to believe that he has proved his case. Henry
Adams is also similarly denounced, with the same sort of non-evidence:
we are supposed to believe that Podhoretz's views on matters
such as these must be accepted on faith, for no reason other
than that he has pronounced them. Naturally, Pat Buchanan
gets the same treatment, along with the editors of Chronicles
magazine, whose great sin was that they praised Vidal's
novels and opposed increased levels of immigration (this is
described by Podhoretz as "nativism," a curse-word in the
neo-conservative lexicon, and a hate crime in modern parlance,
but which my dictionary defines as "love of one's own country
above all others.") Yet Podhoretz's all-too-familiar smears
– how long has he been peddling the same recycled complaints?
– have a tired, unconvincing ring to them, obligatory
and halfhearted. Nobody outside of Podhoretz and the editorial
board of Commentary magazine believes that Gore Vidal
is an anti-Semite, just as the same charges against Buchanan
have failed to stick no matter how long and insistently they
are repeated by America's neoconservatives – all seventeen
of them.
NEOCONSERVATIVES
AND THE CULT OF POWER
Of
course, it helps that sixteen out of these seventeen are newspaper
columnists and/or television talking heads, but it matters
much less than the neocons imagine. On the Right, they are
distrusted – with the Weekly Standard's embrace
of GOP contender John McCain just the latest in a long line
of maneuvers that underscore their essential nature as pursuers
of the main chance at any price. The career of Norman Podhoretz,
one of the godfathers of neo-conservatism – the doctrine
of ex-liberals who were "mugged by reality" and turned rightward
– is emblematic of this whole political tendency, whose
other godfather is Irving Kristol, Standard editor
Bill Kristol's father. It is the ideology of the status quo,
of whatever is popular or about to be popular at the time,
not a body of ideas so much as a sense of political fashion.
This is the real story of Norman Podhoretz and his
alleged love affair with America – it is the tale of
a faddist with a purpose, a man always positioning himself
for maximum access to the one thing he truly wants and worships
– power.
A
NOTE TO MY READERS
I
want to say a word about the recent, uh, discussion over the
relative virtues of Slobodan Milosevic and my recent polemic
directed at one of my favorite writers, George Szamuely. I
did not mean to imply that George is in any way a conscious
apologist for dictators of any sort, and I did go a bit overboard:
unfortunately, his column appeared at the exact moment when
a vigorous discussion of how we should cover the Yugoslavia
election was taking place within Antiwar.com, and I'm afraid
he got caught in the crossfire. While I disagree with his
viewpoint, in retrospect it seems that I might have used a
more nuanced approach: a "more in sadness than in anger" tone
rather than a savage attack. I only hope he'll continue to
write for us – and that we can continue to collaborate
in the ongoing battle against interventionism.
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