Step Across This Line Part 11

Tony Blair's New Labour government duly took office, winning a landslide victory on May 1, 1997. On Thursday, September 24, 1998, during the UN General a.s.sembly in New York, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and Iran issued the joint statement that has effectively brought the story of the fatwa to an end: not immediately [see February 1999 in "Columns"] [see February 1999 in "Columns"] but gradually. As they say in the movies: but gradually. As they say in the movies: (Slow fade.)

PART III

Columns

DECEMBER 1998: THREE LEADERS.

Man is by nature a political animal, said Aristotle, and so the public life of a "good" society must reflect the nature of its members. Many of the great Macedonian's a.s.sertions-that the slave is "naturally" inferior to his master, the female to the male, the "barbarian" to the Greek-now sound archaic. And yet Aristotle's basic proposition still rings true. The travails of three leading political figures-Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, and Augusto Pinochet-reveal how deeply we believe in natural justice.

President Clinton's probable escape from his domestic pursuers can be ascribed in part to his foes' astonis.h.i.+ng folly. He has been lucky in his enemies: the s.e.x-crazed, mealymouthed Kenneth Starr and his backers on the Christian Right, who remind us that "fundamentalism" is a term born in the USA; Newt Gingrich, who overplayed a winning hand and lost his s.h.i.+rt; and Linda Tripp, the wicked witch of the wire, who, like Nixon, didn't understand that by bugging herself she would only prove her own villainy, even with the expletives deleted. When an ancient force, puritanical fanaticism, combines with the contemporary tabloid dogma that public figures have no right to privacy, and when the Was.h.i.+ngton political and media elites work themselves up into a mighty pompous froth, even the president rocks on his throne. But Clinton survives, because he has human nature on his side. Human nature distinguishes between s.e.xual dalliance and political misconduct. It can be brutal; the word on Monica and Paula is that Americans just don't care about them. They have come to know Bill Clinton far more intimately than they normally know their leaders, and he, of course, has always known them better than any other politician. Clinton is winning his fight because he is like his people; because, you could say, he's a natural.

In the matter of Iraq, however, the U.S. administration's understanding of human nature has been deficient, to say the least. The hypothesis that bombing raids might provoke a coup against Saddam was always flawed. On the whole, people do not see as allies those who are dropping quant.i.ties of high explosives on them from the sky. Like Yossarian, the hero of Catch-22, Catch-22, they take the bombs personally. they take the bombs personally.

Apparently some Iraqis seriously believe that Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky were p.a.w.ns in an international Zionist conspiracy designed to make Clinton bomb Baghdad. The recent aborted American-British attack has the merit of demonstrating the two ladies' declining international influence but otherwise plays right into Saddam's hands. Threatening to bomb and then not bombing has the advantage of killing fewer people but the disadvantage of making oneself look silly.

Those voices advocating a rapid end to sanctions, and a subsequent opening up of the Iraqi market to Western goods and ideas, may not find much favor with America's military a.n.a.lysts, but an Iraq freed from the privations of the embargo and the threat of aerial attack is more likely to think of the West as a friend. The best way to topple Saddam Hussein may be to help bring into being an Iraq in which his tyrannies are not only hateful but anachronistic.

The case of the month's other tyrant ought to be getting easier. Pinochet, after all, has earned the right to be called the most evil man presently alive on earth. (Sorry, Saddam.) The British law lords have decreed that he isn't immune from extradition. The crucial principle of universal accountability has thus been upheld. Atrocity is not to be excused by the occupancy of high office.

Why then has the British home secretary asked for extra time to decide Pinochet's future? The ex-tyrant was well enough to hang out with Lady Thatcher just the other day but now claims that the pressure he's under has provoked a stress-related mental ailment. The families of the dead must be disgusted by this ruse. Pinochet must not escape on such flimsy "compa.s.sionate" grounds. Jack Straw should confirm at once that for the ma.s.s murderers of the world, there can be no compa.s.sion.

"Human nature exists, and it is both deep and highly structured," writes Edward O. Wilson, the biologist and writer whom Tom Wolfe calls "a new Darwin." If it did not, let us be clear, then the idea of universals-human rights, moral principles, international law-would have no legitimacy.

It is the fact of our common humanity that allows most of us to forgive Bill Clinton his faults. It is why so few people think that bombing innocent Iraqis is the right way to punish Saddam Hussein. And it is why we want to see Pinochet brought to justice. A world that hounded Clinton but turned a blind eye to Pinochet would indeed be a world turned upside down.

JANUARY 1999: THE MILLENNIUM.

If it's January, it must be the Year of the Millennium. Except that it isn't, because at the end of 1999 we'll have had, er, exactly 999 years since the last millennium. This year's millennium fever is like applauding a cricketer's century, or Mark McGwire's home-run record, at the beginning rather than the end of the crucial run.

We're also celebrating the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ, as Catholic cardinals and British Domemakers and believers of all stripes continually remind us. Never mind that this puts Jesus in the odd position of having two birthdays in the s.p.a.ce of a week (Christmas Day as well as the Millennial Instant), or that all serious scholars and even church leaders now agree that he wasn't actually born on either of them. Faux-Millennium or not, it's the only one we're going to get.

But will the faux-Millennium turn out to be a dark celebration of what one might call faux-Christianity? The year already boasts some striking examples of faux-Christian behavior, for instance General Pinochet attending Midnight Ma.s.s-which brings up the interesting question of the role of his confessor. Many of us would be very interested to hear the general's confession. But one man presumably already has. The issue of penance is therefore worth a moment's thought. Exactly how many mea culpas and Hail Marys was the general asked to say to atone for his crimes?

Hard-line but essentially counterfeit Christian "values" have been the driving force behind the rabidly partisan attack by U.S. Republicans on their s.e.xually deplorable president. To an observer whose admiration for American democracy was born at the time of the Watergate hearings, those grave, scrupulous, bipartisan deliberations over an earlier president's genuinely high crimes, the tawdry Clinton impeachment debate has been a disillusioning spectacle. Down into the dirt we tumble, in the name of the gentle Christ. But one of the Christian soldiers, Speaker-elect Robert Livingston, is already hoist on his own sanctimonious petard. Now the p.o.r.nographer Larry Flynt's exposes may skewer several more, and no less a moral authority than the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker has been seen on CNN, attacking his own Christian cohorts for their un-Christian uninterest in forgiveness and healing. How low can we go?

There's another name for the American Right's fork-tongued Christianity: hypocrisy. And Was.h.i.+ngton, that ugly School for Scandal full of Sneerwells, Backbites, and Snakes, has been for months in the grip of a kind of hypocrite fundamentalism. If the Senate now brings the sorry saga to a close, it will be because sober considerations of state have finally gained the ascendancy over mad-dog G.o.dliness; because worldly-wise politicians have put the faux-Christians back in their kennels at last.

President Clinton, who reportedly prayed with his spiritual advisers while the impeachment vote was being taken, is no slouch in the faux department himself. Of course his present, astonis.h.i.+ng popularity rating is in part a reaction to the Starr troopers' sheer vileness, but it is also due to the popularity in America of his decision to bomb Iraq. Did Clinton discuss that with his spiritual advisers, too? Did his equally devout British ally, Prime Minister Blair, agree that those essentially pointless strikes were the moral, Christian way to go?

I well know that faux-religion isn't an exclusively Western vice. Believe me (to coin a phrase) I know something of the hypocritical fervor with which the militants of other faiths-Muslims, Hindus, Jews-invoke their G.o.d or G.o.ds to justify tyranny and injustice. No amount of Western hypocrisy can come close to Saddam Hussein's faux-Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Yet religious zealots have the nerve to accuse G.o.d-free secularists of lacking moral principles!

For an unG.o.dly person like myself, the overarching issue in this millennium year is not any of the stuff on the G.o.d squads' agendas. It's the so-called Debt, the multi-trillions of owed dollars that keep the poorest countries of the world in hock to, and under the thumb of, the richest. Even in the most fiscally conservative circles, there is a growing consensus that the Debt must be wiped out, unless we want a third millennium marked by the resentment, violence, fanaticism, and despotism that must be the inevitable effects of this global injustice. Why not, then, make the cancellation of the Debt the human race's millennium gift to itself? Now, that could make 1999 a real milestone in human history. It's an idea in which our interests and principles coincide, wherever we come from, rich North or poor South, whoever we are, friend or faux. It's a policy that would erase the memory of 1998's shabby lewinskyings, and put Clinton's presidency into the history books for a genuinely high moral reason.

Cancel the Debt for the Millennium! It's even the Christian thing to do.

FEBRUARY 1999: TEN YEARS OF THE FATWA.

Yes, all right, on February 14 it will be ten years since I received my unfunny Valentine. I admit to a dilemma. Ignore the politics (which I'd love to do), and my silence must look enforced or fearful. Speak, and I risk deafening the world to those other utterances, my books, written in my true language, the language of literature. I risk helping to conceal the real Salman behind the smoky, sulfurous Rushdie of the Affair. I have led two lives: one blighted by hatred and caught up in this dire business, which I'm trying to leave behind, and the life of a free man, freely doing his work. Two lives, but none I can afford to lose, for one loss would end both.

So I'll have my say, and because everybody loves an anniversary, no doubt much will be said elsewhere by the armies of bigotry and punditry. Let them volley and thunder. I'll speak of bookish things.

When asked about the effect on my writing of the ten-year-long a.s.sault upon it, I've answered lightheartedly that I've become more interested in happy endings; and that, as I've been told that my recent books are my funniest, the attacks have evidently improved my sense of humor. These answers, true enough in their way, are designed to deflect deeper inquiry. For how can I explain to strangers my sense of violation? It's as if men wielding clubs were to burst loudly into your home and lay it waste. They arrive when you're making love, or standing naked in the shower, or sitting on the toilet, or staring in deep inward silence at the lines you've scrawled on a page. Never again will you kiss or bathe or s.h.i.+t or write without remembering this intrusion. And yet, to do these things pleasurably and well, you must shut out the memory.

And how to describe the damage? As, perhaps, a heaviness. As something remembered from boarding-school childhood: I wake and, lying in bed, find I can't move. My arms, legs, and head have grown impossibly weighty. n.o.body believes me, of course, and all the children laugh.

"I can't go on," says Beckett's Unnamable. "I'll go on." A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.

Amid the cacophony of the professionally opinionated and the professionally offended, may a voice still be heard celebrating literature, highest of arts, its pa.s.sionate, dispa.s.sionate inquiry into life on earth, its naked journey across the frontierless human terrain, its fierce-minded rebuke to dogma and power, and its trespa.s.sers' fearless daring? In these years I've met and been inspired by some of the world's bravest fighters for literary freedom. I recently helped set up a house for refugee writers in Mexico City (more than twenty cities already belong to this refuge-city scheme) and was proud to be doing a little to ease the struggles of others in danger from intolerance. But as well as fighting the fight, which I will surely go on doing, I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammeled, uncowed books. So, beyond grief, bewilderment, and despair, I have rededicated myself to our high calling.

I am conscious of s.h.i.+fts in my writing. There was always a tug-of-war in me between "there" and "here," the pull of roots and of the road. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides. Now I've come down on the side of those who by preference, nature, or circ.u.mstance simply do not belong. This unbelonging-I think of it as disorientation, disorientation, loss of the East-is my artistic country now. Wherever my books find themselves, by a favored armchair, near a hot bath, on a beach, or in a late-night pool of bedside light: that's my only home. loss of the East-is my artistic country now. Wherever my books find themselves, by a favored armchair, near a hot bath, on a beach, or in a late-night pool of bedside light: that's my only home.

Life can be harsh, and for a decade St. Valentine's Day has reminded me of that harshness. But these dark anniversaries of the appalling Valentine I was sent in 1989 have also been times to reflect upon the countervailing value of love. Love feels more and more like the only subject.

It's reported that the remains of St. Valentine himself are to come out of hiding. Instead of the cardboard box in which they were ignominiously stored for years, they will have a reliquary in Glasgow's roughneck Gorbals district. I like this image: the patron saint of fluffy romance discovers the gritty verities of life in the real world, while that world is enriched in turn by the flowering, in its mean streets, of love.

MARCH 1999: GLOBALIZATION.

A couple of years ago a British literary festival (at Hay-on-Wye) staged a public debate on the motion that "it is the duty of every European to resist American culture." Along with two American journalists (one of whom was Sidney Blumenthal, now more famous as a Clinton aide and impeachment witness), I opposed the motion. I'm happy to report that we won, capturing roughly 60 percent of the audience's vote. But it was an odd sort of victory. My American co-panelists were surprised by the strength of the audience's anti-Americanism-after all, 40 percent of them had voted for the motion. Sidney, noting that "American culture" as represented by its armed forces had liberated Europe from n.a.z.ism not all that many years ago, was puzzled by the audience's apparent lack of grat.i.tude. And there was a residual feeling that the case for "resistance" was actually pretty strong.

Since that day, the debate about cultural globalization and its military-political sidekick, intervention, has continued to intensify, and anti-American sentiment is on the increase. In most people's heads, globalization has come to mean the worldwide triumph of Nike, Gap, and MTV, the metamorphosis of Planet Earth into McWorld. Confusingly, we want these goods and services when we behave as consumers, but with our cultural hats on we have begun to deplore their omnipresence.

On the merits of intervention, even greater confusion reigns. We don't seem to know if we want a world policeman or not. If the "international community," which these days is little more than a euphemism for the United States, fails to intervene promptly in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, it is excoriated for that failure. Elsewhere, it is criticized just as vehemently when it does intervene: when American bombs fall on Iraq, or when American agents a.s.sist in the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Clearly, those of us who shelter under the pax Americana are deeply ambivalent about it, and the United States will no doubt continue to be surprised by the level of the world's ingrat.i.tude. The globalizing power of American culture is opposed by an improbable alliance that includes everyone from cultural-relativist liberals to hard-line fundamentalists, with all manner of pluralists and individualists, to say nothing of flag-waving nationalists and splintering sectarians, in between.

Much ecological concern is presently being expressed about the crisis in biodiversity, the possibility that a fifth or more of the earth's species of living forms may soon become extinct. To some, globalization is an equivalent social catastrophe, with equally alarming implications for the survival of true cultural diversity, of the world's precious localness: the Indianness of India, the Frenchness of France.

Amid this din of global defensiveness, little thought is given to some of the most important questions raised by a phenomenon that, like it or not, isn't going away anytime soon. For instance: do cultures actually exist as separate, pure, defensible ent.i.ties? Is not melange, adulteration, impurity, pick 'n' mix at the heart of the idea of the modern, and hasn't it been that way for most of this all-shook-up century? Doesn't the idea of pure cultures, in urgent need of being kept free from alien contamination, lead us inexorably toward apartheid, toward ethnic cleansing, toward the gas chamber? Or, to put it another way: are there other universals besides international conglomerates and the interests of super-powers? And if by chance there were a universal value that might, for the sake of argument, be called freedom, whose enemies-tyranny, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism-were the enemies of us all; and if this "freedom" were discovered to exist in greater quant.i.ty in the countries of the West than anywhere else on earth; and if, in the world as it actually exists, rather than in some unattainable Utopia, the authority of the United States were the best current guarantor of that "freedom"; then might it not follow that to oppose the spread of American culture would be to take up arms against the wrong foe?

By agreeing what we are against, we discover what we are for. Andre Malraux believed that the third millennium must be the age of religion. *24 *24 I would say rather that it must be the age in which we finally grow out of our need for religion. But to cease to believe in our G.o.ds is not the same thing as commencing to believe in nothing. There are fundamental freedoms to fight for, and it will not do to doom to their fates the terrorized women of Afghanistan or of the circ.u.mcision-happy lands of Africa by calling their oppression their "culture." And of course it is America's duty not to abuse its pre-eminence, and our right to criticize such abuses when they happen-when, for example, innocent factories in Sudan are bombed, or Iraqi civilians pointlessly killed. I would say rather that it must be the age in which we finally grow out of our need for religion. But to cease to believe in our G.o.ds is not the same thing as commencing to believe in nothing. There are fundamental freedoms to fight for, and it will not do to doom to their fates the terrorized women of Afghanistan or of the circ.u.mcision-happy lands of Africa by calling their oppression their "culture." And of course it is America's duty not to abuse its pre-eminence, and our right to criticize such abuses when they happen-when, for example, innocent factories in Sudan are bombed, or Iraqi civilians pointlessly killed. *25 *25 But perhaps we, too, need to rethink our easy condemnations. Sneakers, burgers, blue jeans, and music videos aren't the enemy. If the young people of Iran now insist on rock concerts, who are we to criticize their cultural contamination? Out there are real tyrants to defeat. Let's keep our eyes on the prize. But perhaps we, too, need to rethink our easy condemnations. Sneakers, burgers, blue jeans, and music videos aren't the enemy. If the young people of Iran now insist on rock concerts, who are we to criticize their cultural contamination? Out there are real tyrants to defeat. Let's keep our eyes on the prize.

APRIL 1999: ROCK MUSIC.

I recently asked Vaclav Havel about his admiration for the American rock icon Lou Reed. He replied that it was impossible to overstate the importance of rock music for the Czech resistance during the years of darkness between the Prague Spring and the collapse of Communism. I was just relis.h.i.+ng the mental image of the leaders of the Czech underground grooving to the sound of the Velvet Underground playing "Waiting for the Man," "I'll Be Your Mirror," or "All Tomorrow's Parties" when Havel added, with a straight face, "Why do you think we called it the Velvet Revolution?" I took this to be an instance of Havel's deadpan humor, but it was a joke of the sort that reveals another, less literal truth; a generational truth, perhaps, because for popular music fans of a certain age the ideas of rock and revolution are inseparably linked. "You say you want a revolution," John Lennon had sneered at us. "Well, you know, / We all want to change the world." And indeed with the pa.s.sage of the years I had come to think of this linkage as little more than youthful romanticism. So the discovery that a real revolution had been inspired by rock music's glamorous snarl was pretty moving. It felt like a sort of validation. *26 *26 Because now that n.o.body smashes guitars or protests about much anymore, now that rock 'n' roll is middle-aged and corporate and the turnover of the leading mega-groups exceeds that of small nation-states, now that it's music for older people remembering their salad days while the kids listen to gangsta rap, trance music, and hip-hop, and Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin get invited to sing at presidential inaugurals, it's easy to forget the form's oppositional origins, its anti-Establishment heyday. Yet rock 'n' roll's rough, confident spirit of rebellion may be one reason why this strange, simple, overwhelming noise conquered the world nearly half a century ago, crossing all frontiers and barriers of language and culture to become only the third globalized phenomenon in history after the two World Wars. It was the sound of liberation, and so it spoke to the free spirits of young people everywhere, and so also, of course, our mothers didn't like it.

After she became aware of my fondness for Bill Haley, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis, my own alarmed mother began eagerly to advocate the virtues of Pat Boone, a man who once sang a sentimental ballad addressed to a mule. But singing to mules wasn't what I was after. I was trying to imitate the curl of Presley's lips and the swoon-inducing rotation of his hips, and I suspect boys everywhere, from Siberia to Patagonia, were doing the same.

What sounded and felt to us like freedom looked to the adult world like bad behavior, and in a way both things are true. Pelvis-wiggling and guitar-smas.h.i.+ng are indeed liberty's childish fringe; but it's also true, in all sorts of ways we have learned much more about as adults, that freedom is dangerous. Freedom, that ancient foot-tapping anarchy, the Dionysiac ant.i.thesis of Pat Boone: a higher and wilder virtue than good behavior and, for all its spirit of hairy late-night rebellion, far less likely than blind obedience and line-toeing convention to do serious damage. Better a few trashed hotel suites than a trashed world.

But there is that in us which doesn't want to be free; which prefers discipline and acceptance and patriotic local tunes to the wild loose-haired love-music of the world. There is that in us which wishes simply to go along with the crowd, and to blame all naysayers and pelvis-wigglers for rocking our comfortable boat. "Don't follow leaders," Bob Dylan warned in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Watch the parking meters." Yet we continue to want to be led, to follow petty warlords and murderous ayatollahs and nationalist brutes, or to suck our thumbs and listen quiescently to nanny states that insist they know what's best for us. So tyrants abound from Bombay to Mumbai, and even those of us who are notionally free peoples are no longer, for the most part, very rock 'n' roll.

The music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. As long as Orpheus could raise his voice in song, the Maenads could not kill him. Then they screamed, and their shrill cacophony drowned his music, and then their weapons found their mark, and he fell, and they tore him limb from limb.

Screaming against Orpheus, we too become capable of murder. The collapse of Communism, the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the Wall, was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. Instead, the postCold War world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many of us stiff. We retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller stockades, imprisoned ourselves in narrower, ever more fanatical definitions of ourselves-religious, regional, ethnic-and readied ourselves for war.

Today, as the thunder of one such war drowns out the sweet singing of our better selves, I find myself nostalgic for the old spirit of independence and idealism that once, set infectiously to music, helped bring another war (in Vietnam) to an end. But at present the only music in the air is a dead march.

MAY 1999: MORON OF THE YEAR.

In the battle for the hotly contested t.i.tle of International Moron of the Year, two heavyweight contenders stand out. One is the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who has astonished even his most fervent admirers by his current series of impa.s.sioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic; and who, during a recent visit to Belgrade, received the Order of the Serbian Knight for his propaganda services. Handke's previous idiocies include the suggestion that Sarajevo's Muslims regularly ma.s.sacred themselves and then blamed the Serbs; and his denial of the genocide carried out by Serbs at Srebrenica. Now he likens the NATO aerial bombardment to the alien invasion in the movie Mars Attacks! Mars Attacks! and then, foolishly mixing his metaphors, compares the Serbs' sufferings to the Holocaust. and then, foolishly mixing his metaphors, compares the Serbs' sufferings to the Holocaust.

His rival in folly is the movie star Charlton Heston. As president of the U.S. National Rifle a.s.sociation, Heston made a response to the ma.s.sacre of innocents recently perpetrated by young Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, that was a masterpiece of the moronic. Heston thinks America should arm its teachers; he seems to believe that schools would be safer if staff had the power to gun down the children in their charge. (Little Johnny reaches into a pocket for a pencil-and Blam! Blam! his geography teacher blows him away.) I will not draw glib parallels between NATO's aerial bombardments and the Colorado killings. No, the larger violence did not breed the lesser. Nor should too much be read into the accidental echo between Milosevic's. .h.i.tlerian tendencies and the lethal celebration of Hitler's birthday by the so-called Trench-coat Mafia; or the even more eerie a.s.sonance between the video-game mentality of the Colorado killers and the real-life aerial videos the NATO publicists show us every day.

In the matter of the war, let's agree, too, that it's okay to feel ambivalent about the confused, changing-policy-on-the-hoof manner of the NATO action. One minute we're told Milosevic's savage retaliatory a.s.sault on Kosovo couldn't have been foreseen; the next minute we hear that it should have been. Or again: we're not going to use ground troops. On second thought, maybe we are. And our war aims? Strictly limited; we seek only to create a safe haven to which the Kosovar refugees can return. No, no, we're going to march into Belgrade and get Milosevic, we're not making that old Saddam mistake again!

But objecting to vacillation and contradiction is not the same thing as Handke's half-crazy, half-cynical fellow-traveling with evil. The moral justification for NATO's intervention is the humanitarian disaster we see on TV every night. To blame NATO for the refugees' plight is to absolve the Serb army of its crimes. It needs to be said again and again: the people to blame for death and terror are those who terrorize and kill.

And in the matter of the Colorado killings, let's agree that guns aren't the sole cause of the horror. The killers learned how to make pipe bombs on the Internet, and got their trench coats from The Matrix, The Matrix, and learned to put a low value on human life from-whom? Their parents? Marilyn Manson? The Goths? Which is not at all to adopt Mr. Heston's unrepentant position. "This isn't a gun issue," he tells us. "It's a child issue." "Moses" Heston has new commandments to hand down these days: Thou shalt defend the right to bear arms in the teeth of all the evidence, and Thou shalt certainly not be blamed just because a few kids got iced. and learned to put a low value on human life from-whom? Their parents? Marilyn Manson? The Goths? Which is not at all to adopt Mr. Heston's unrepentant position. "This isn't a gun issue," he tells us. "It's a child issue." "Moses" Heston has new commandments to hand down these days: Thou shalt defend the right to bear arms in the teeth of all the evidence, and Thou shalt certainly not be blamed just because a few kids got iced.

Kosovo and Colorado do have something in common. They show that in our unstable world, incompatible versions of reality are clas.h.i.+ng with one another, with murderous results. But we can still make moral judgments about the rival versions of the world that are at war. And the only civilized view of the Handke and Heston versions is that they are indefensible.

Never mind that Handke is co-writer of that great movie Wings of Desire; Wings of Desire; condemned as a "monster" by Alain Finkielkraut and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the Serbian novelist Bora Cosic, he deserves to be, as Susan Sontag pithily puts it, "finished." (Intellectually, that is, not literally. In case anyone was wondering.) Never mind, either, that Heston, his face as subtly mobile as Mount Rushmore, has helped millions of moviegoers s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours of peaceful sleep in darkened cinemas. He deserves to be "finished," too. condemned as a "monster" by Alain Finkielkraut and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the Serbian novelist Bora Cosic, he deserves to be, as Susan Sontag pithily puts it, "finished." (Intellectually, that is, not literally. In case anyone was wondering.) Never mind, either, that Heston, his face as subtly mobile as Mount Rushmore, has helped millions of moviegoers s.n.a.t.c.h a few hours of peaceful sleep in darkened cinemas. He deserves to be "finished," too.

Who wins the prize? Peter Handke's folly makes him complicit with evil on a grand scale, but fortunately he is almost entirely powerless. As America's foremost gun lobbyist, however, Heston is doing his best to make sure that guns remain an integral part of the American household; and so, one day soon, somewhere in America, another young man will take up arms and begin to shoot his friends. So, by reason of his folly's greater effectiveness, I hand Charlton Heston the palm. But the year's not half done. Greater morons may yet step forward to challenge him. Watch this s.p.a.ce.

JUNE 1999: KASHMIR.

For over fifty years, India and Pakistan have been arguing and periodically coming to blows over one of the most beautiful places in the world, Kashmir, which the Mughal emperors thought of as Paradise on earth. As a result of this unending quarrel, Paradise has been part.i.tioned, impoverished, and made violent. Murder and terrorism now stalk the valleys and mountains of a land once so famous for its peacefulness that outsiders made jokes about the Kashmiris' supposed lack of fighting spirit.

I have a particular interest in the Kashmir issue, because I am more than half Kashmiri myself, because I have loved the place all my life, and because I have spent much of that life listening to successive Indian and Pakistani governments, all of them more or less venal and corrupt, mouthing the self-serving hypocrisies of power while ordinary Kashmiris suffered the consequences of their posturings.

Pity those ordinary, peaceable people, caught between the rock of India and the hard place that Pakistan has always been! Now, as the world's newest nuclear powers square off yet again, their new weapons making their dialogue of the deaf more dangerous than ever before, I say: a plague on both their houses. "Kashmir for the Kashmiris" is an old slogan but the only one that expresses how the subjects of this dispute have always felt; how, I believe, the majority of them would still say they feel, if they were free to speak their minds without fear.

India has badly mishandled the Kashmir case from the beginning. Back in 1947 the state's Hindu maharaja "opted" for India (admittedly after Pakistan tried to force his hand by "allowing" militants to swarm across the borders), and in spite of UN resolutions supporting the largely Muslim population's right to a plebiscite, India's leaders have always rejected the idea, repeating over and over that Kashmir is "an integral part" of India. (The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is itself of Kashmiri origin.) India has maintained a large military presence in Kashmir for decades, both in the Vale of Kashmir, where much of the population is based, and in mountain fastnesses such as the site of the present flash point. This force feels to most Kashmiris like an occupying army and is greatly resented. Yet until recently most Indians, even the liberal intelligentsia, refused to face up to the reality of Kashmiris' growing animosity toward them. As a result the problem has grown steadily worse, exacerbated by laws that threaten long jail sentences for any Kashmiri making anti-Indian statements in public.

Pakistan, for its part, has from its earliest times been a heavily militarized state, dominated by the Army even when under notionally civilian rule and spending a huge part of its budget-at its peak, well over half the total budgetary expenditure-on its armed forces. Such big spending, and the consequent might of the generals, depends on having a dangerous enemy to defend against and a "hot" cause to pursue. It has therefore always been in the interest of Pakistan's top bra.s.s to frustrate peacemaking initiatives toward India and to keep the Kashmir dispute alive. This, and not the alleged interests of Kashmiris, is what lies behind Pakistan's policy on the issue.

These days, in addition, the Pakistani authorities are under pressure from their country's mullahs and radical Islamists, who characterize the struggle to "liberate" (that is, to seize) Kashmir as a holy war. Ironically, Kashmiri Islam has always been of the mild, Sufistic variety, in which local pirs pirs, or holy men, are revered as saints. This openhearted, tolerant Islam is anathema to the firebrands of Pakistan and might well, under Pakistani rule, be at risk. Thus, the present-day growth of terrorism in Kashmir has roots in India's treatment of Kashmiris but also in Pakistan's interest in subversion. Yes, Kashmiris feel strongly about the Indian "occupation" of their land; but it is also almost certainly true that Pakistan's Army and intelligence service has been training, aiding, and abetting the men of violence.

India's and Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons makes urgent the need to move beyond the deadlock and the moribund fifty-year-old language of the crisis. What Kashmiris want, and what India and Pakistan must be persuaded to offer them, is a reunited land, an end to Lines of Control and warfare on high Himalayan glaciers. What they want is to be given a large degree of autonomy, to be allowed to run their own lives. (A dual-citizens.h.i.+p scheme, with frontiers guaranteed by both Pakistan and India, is one possible solution.) The Kashmir dispute has already exposed the frailty of the Cold War theory of nuclear deterrence, according to which the extreme danger of nuclear a.r.s.enals should deter those who possess them from embarking on even a conventional war. That thesis now seems untenable. It was probably not deterrence but luck that prevented the Cold War from turning hot. So here we are in a newly dangerous world, in which nuclear powers actually are going to war. In such a time, the special-case status of Kashmir must be recognized and made the basis of the way forward. The Kashmir problem must be defused, or else, in the unthinkable worst-case scenario, it may end in the nuclear destruction of Paradise itself, and of much else besides.

JULY 1999: NORTHERN IRELAND.

Even before Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern spelled out the details of the latest Northern Ireland peace plan, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble was describing those urging him to accept the terms as "willing fools." Since then, his colleague Ken Maginnis has spoken of "betrayal," and Trimble has announced that he has "great difficulty in seeing how we can proceed with this." So are Blair and Ahern and Mo Mowlam and the other mediators really history's idiots, the IRA's foolish dupes and therefore fellow-travelers of evil, h.e.l.l-bent on permitting terrorists "into the heart of government," as the Unionists imply they are?

Newspaper reports speak of a meeting between Blair and Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness at which, after recording equipment was switched off, McGuinness said he was now speaking on behalf of the IRA, and made the offer that persuaded the British prime minister that the prize of IRA disarmament was within grasp.

Has Blair been deceived? We know that General John de Chastelain, head of the decommissioning body, thinks he has not. The general's report states that there is a basis for believing that the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries will fully disarm by May 2000. But Trimble and his team, suspicious of the reasons for delaying the report's release by a couple of days, are worried that de Chastelain had his arm twisted, and that the final version of his text was slanted toward the Republican position by British spin doctors.

Up to a point, it's possible to sympathize with Trimble, who took one courageous and politically risky step for peace a year ago, and who is now asked to endorse a further strategy that the unreconstructed ma.s.ses of Drumcree marchers and the rest of the Unionist faithful will utterly detest. It's easy, in particular, to understand Unionists' exasperation with the infuriating brand of doublespeak still practiced by Sinn Fein, whose leaders insist, on the record, that their party is not to be confused with the IRA while, off the record, they speak powerfully on the Provos' behalf.

It's clear, too, that between Unionism and Sinn Fein there exists a mutual loathing so deep that no peace process can wipe it away. One remembers the distaste with which the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin took Ya.s.ser Arafat's proffered hand. Trimble feels at least as much disgust for Gerry Adams as Rabin felt for the chairman of the PLO. And it probably hasn't escaped his memory that Rabin's handshake cost him his life. But, as Israelis and Palestinians know only too well, peace is not the same thing as reconciliation, it's not about kissing and making up with the foe you've fought for generations. Peace is simply the decision not to fight. Reconciliation may come after that, very very slowly, or it may not. And right now, most citizens of Northern Ireland-like most Israelis and most Palestinians-agree that peace without reconciliation is what they want. The silence of the guns will do.

This is the a.n.a.lysis-the gamble, really-on which the Blair-Ahern peace initiative is based: that the longer the cease-fire in Northern Ireland can be maintained, the harder it will be for the paramilitary war to resume. However imperfect the cessation of hostilities, however vicious the continued punishment beatings, however inflammatory the language still used by the two sides about each other, this lengthening stretch of minimal violence, this breathing s.p.a.ce, may just enable peace to take deep enough root to last. It may get the distrustful communities of the Six Counties so used to their unreconciled peace as to make a return to war intolerable.

Risky as it is, this "peace gamble" remains the only game in town, and Unionist refusals will quickly come to be seen (as Tony Blair has warned) as unforgivable sabotage. Right now, Gerry Adams looks like he's dragging the IRA kicking and screaming toward the war's end, while Trimble is making us wonder whether he has become convinced that the peace on offer is a mirage, or simply that its price is too high. If he digs in his heels now, those conclusions will be hard to avoid. When, as Blair keeps saying, the prize is so great, then such intransigence looks like a greater folly than excessive "willingness."

David Trimble is right to insist that there must be no fudges, that disarmament must be real, prompt, and verifiable. But if Unionist stubbornness derails the peace train, the party will always stand accused of being history's "unwilling fools," who s.h.i.+rked the risk and refused to travel toward hope. And David Trimble may then be remembered as Northern Ireland's Netanyahu, not its Shamir or Rabin.

AUGUST 1999: KOSOVO.

In the wake of the Gracko killings, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to the Albanians of Kosovo to set aside their enmities. "We fought this conflict," Mr. Blair said in the provincial capital Pristina last Friday, "because we believe in justice, because we believed it was wrong to have ethnic cleansing and racial genocide here in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, and we didn't fight it to have another ethnic minority [the Kosovan Serb minority] repressed." These are good-hearted, high-minded, decent words, the words of a man who believes he has fought and won a just war, and for whom "justice" includes the idea of reconciliation. But they also indicate a failure of imagination. What happened to the Albanians in Kosovo was an atrocity whose dark effect on the spirit may lie beyond the power of decent men like Mr. Blair to wish away. What happened may be, quite simply, unforgivable.

Tragically, this is not the first such imaginative failure. In the conflict's early days, many Kosovar Albanians also failed to grasp the scale of the horror that was coming their way. In many villages, the men decided to flee, convinced that Milosevic's army was intent on ma.s.sacring them. They vanished into the woods, over the mountains, out of the Army's murderous reach. But they made a miscalculation: they left their families behind, unable to believe that their wives, children, and infirm parents would be at risk from the advancing soldiers. They underestimated the human capacity for the atrocious.

Now let us imagine the refugees' terrible return at the conflict's end. Nervously, hoping for joy, they near their village. But before they get there they understand that the unimaginable has occurred. The fields are littered with bloodied garments and severed limbs. Carrion birds flap and strut. There are odors. The men of this village must now face a truth in which profound shame and humiliation mingle with great grief. They are alive because they ran away, but the loved ones whom they left behind have been murdered in their stead. The bodies that they now carry in farmyard carts to the burial ground speak accusations through their shrouds. My son, in the weakness of my old age you were not there to save me. My husband, you allowed me to be raped and slaughtered. My father, you let me die. My son, in the weakness of my old age you were not there to save me. My husband, you allowed me to be raped and slaughtered. My father, you let me die.

The village's survivors tell the returned refugees the story of the ma.s.sacre. They tell them how some of the Serbs in the village put on Serbian Army uniforms and used their local knowledge to help the killers flush out the terrified Albanians from their bolt-holes. No, they said, don't bother to search that house, it has no cellar. Ah, but this house, there's a cellar under that rug, they'll be hiding in there.

These Kosovan Serbs have fled now. But Milosevic doesn't want them in Serbia, where they are the living proof of his defeat. And Mr. Blair, too, wants them to go home and be protected by K-FOR [the UN's Kosovo peacekeeping force]. They are reluctant to return, fearing vengeance. And guess what? They're right. They're right, and Tony Blair, with his vision of a new Kosovo-"a symbol of how the Balkans should be"-is wrong.

I supported the NATO operation in Kosovo, finding the human-rights evidence in favor of intervention to be powerful and convincing. Many writers, intellectuals, artists, and left-leaning bien-pensants thought otherwise. One of their arguments was, if Kosovo, then why not Kurdistan? Why not Rwanda or East Timor? Oddly, this kind of rhetoric actually makes the opposite point to the one it thinks it's making. For if it would have been right to intervene in these cases, and the West was wrong not to, then surely it was also right to defend the Kosovans, and the West's previous failures only serve to emphasize that this time, at least, they-"we"-got it right.

The anti-intervention camp's major allegation was and is that NATO's action in fact precipitated the violence it was intended to prevent; that, so to speak, the ma.s.sacres were Madeleine Albright's fault. This seems to me both morally reprehensible-because it exculpates the actual killers-and demonstrably wrong. Set emotion aside and look at the cold logistics of Milosevic's ma.s.sacre. It quickly becomes apparent that the atrocity was carefully planned. One does not make detailed plans to wipe out thousands of people just in case a speedy response to a Western attack should be needed. One plans a ma.s.sacre because one intends to carry out a ma.s.sacre.

True, the speed and enormity of the Serbian attack took the NATO forces by surprise (another failure of imagination). That doesn't make it right to blame NATO. Murderers are guilty of the murders they commit, rapists of their rapes.

But if "we" were right to go in, and the war was indeed fought for idealistic motives, the idealism of the present policy looks increasingly starry-eyed. The reality, as reported by experienced foreign correspondents who have returned from Kosovo to say that they have never seen anything like it, is that there are few Serbs left in Kosovo, and it is probably impossible to protect them. The old, multicultural Sarajevo was destroyed by the Bosnian war. The old Kosovo is gone too, very probably for good. Mr. Blair's ideal Kosovo is a dream. He and his colleagues should now support the construction of the free, ethnically Albanian ent.i.ty that seems like a historical inevitability. The aftermath of a war is no time for dreaming.

SEPTEMBER 1999: DARWIN IN KANSAS.

Some years ago, in Cochin in South India, I attended the World Understanding Day of the local Rotary Club. The featured speaker was an American creationist, Duane T. Gish, who attributed the malaise of Today's Youth to the propagation, by the world's school systems, of the pernicious teachings of poor old Charles Darwin. Today's Youth was being taught that it was descended from monkeys! Consequently, and understandably, it had become alienated from society, and "depressed." The rest-its drift, its criminality, its promiscuity, its drug abuse-inevitably followed.