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Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all
the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone
shop of the heart.
--W.B. Yeats, “The Circus
Animals’ Desertion”
One of the great benefits of freedom of speech is
that imbeciles are allowed to reveal themselves in
public as imbeciles. Rather than censor or
suppress unpopular or controversial speech,
democracies tend to allow unfettered expression,
in the belief that the polis can recognize a
crackpot when it hears one.
We last saw this concept in action when Amiri
Baraka, the poet laureate of New Jersey, published
“Somebody Blew Up America,” a post-September 11th
poetic screed that revealed that Mr. Baraka is,
indeed, an imbecile. In the poem, he alleges that
the Israelis knew the World Trade Center was going
to be attacked and that 4,000 Jews and Ariel
Sharon stayed away that fateful day (did Sharon
have his office in the WTC? That’s quite a commute
to Jerusalem every day). The public responded as
it usually responds to demonstrations of
card-carrying crackpot behavior: with derision,
scorn and satire.
If this were Iraq, or North Korea, or even that
darling banana republic of liberal fantasies,
Cuba, Mr. Baraka would have been tortured or
executed for his stupidity. In America, he was
merely laughed at. The poet formerly known as
Leroi Jones should be most thankful that the
country and people he hates so much based the
cornerstone of its freedoms on the freedom of
speech.
And now its Tom Paulin’s turn. Paulin is an Irish
poet and anti-Semite, a genuine Jew-hater, who has
referred to Israelis as Nazis and called for the
death of U. S. born Jews. In an interview in the
Egyptian daily Al-Akram he said of Jewish
settlers, “they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing
but hatred for them.” He also said the state of
Israel has no right to exist. Naturally, the left
in America has fawned all over him, inviting him
to speak at Harvard (then disinviting him when his
views caused a controversy, then re-inviting him
because his views caused a controversy) and even
giving him a visiting academic position at
Columbia. The media- and self-styled rebellious
and rabble-rousing Paulin is actually an Oxford
don and television culture chatterer in real life.
Once Paulin was accused of being an anti-Semite,
he immediately followed the favorite European
party line, that he wasn’t anti-Semitic but
anti-Zionist. And in the tradition of the
above-mentioned Amari Baraka, he has also
published a poem: “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic
Card.” The poem confirms that Mr. Paulin is indeed
an imbecile—-and not a very good poet, either.
Poetry and politics usually mix about as well as
the Capulets and the Montagues at a birthday
party. Paulin’s fellow Irish poet Willie Yeats was
able to pull it off. When Patrick Pearse, one of
the leaders of the failed Easter 1916 uprising
against the British, faced the firing squad he
said “If I die it shall be for the excess of love
I bear the Gael.” Yeats wrote:
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonaugh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Eight-seven years later, those lines still cause
shivers.
The politics may no longer be important but the
poetry is immortal.
Or take the American poet Ezra Pound. Now Pound
had some supremely crackpot ideas of his own and
rightfully belongs in the anti-Semites’ Hall of
Fame, but listen to his poetic voice writing about
the waste and carnage of the First World War:
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case...
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor"...
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places...
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
There isn’t a politician or pundit on the left who
could even begin to express an anti-war argument
as brilliant as this one.
Now listen to Paulin. Here’s his poetic apologia
for wishing death on thousands of Jews—-indeed on
the entire state of Israel. After conceding that
the entire history of European civilization has
conspired in the destruction of the Jews and that
looking back on that history “turns ones bowels,”
Paulin writes:
the programme though
of saying Israel's critics
are tout court anti-semitic
is designed daily by some schmuck
to make you shut the fuck up
- so keep your head down
in the sands
or police the Index
of what can and cannot be said
and don't utter a word
or a single sound
and if you do you won't be heard
As political speech, Paulin’s poem is loathsome
enough. He calls the Palestinians “the victims of
the victims.” Right. I don’t seem to recall the
Jews in the 1930’s suicide bombing German
civilians and calling for the destruction of
Germany. As poetry, it’s just a flat-out
embarrassment. Just re-read the Yeats, then the
Pound and then the Paulin. His use of the Yiddish
word “schmuck” is particularly offensive,
considering that the Yiddish language was pretty
much wiped out by the near-extermination of
European Jewry. I guess he didn’t have a Hebrew
dictionary handy.
Years from now, graduate students the world over
will not be scanning the lines of Tom Paulin.
Paulin is dead wrong. In a democracy you have the
right to speak. No one decides what you can and
cannot say. But everyone has the right to decide
whether or not the speaker has his head up his
ass.
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