Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
635
CONTENTS.
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634
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COLUMNS
638 Beat the Devil
..640 Capitol Letter
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Max
Hope
Cabezag Fire From the Mountain
644 To a koung Novitiate (poem)' '
Victor Navasky
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EDITORIALS.
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Disci
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David Parker,
Ann B Epstein;
Jane Sharples,
Soule; Drrector of
Cookee V. Klein;
Ned Black;
Greta' Loell;
SHlrley Sulat,
'David Acker,RandallCherry.
Director, ,NancyBacher;
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Richard Lingeman;
Elsa Dixler,
Andrew. Kopkind;
Katrina vanden Heuvel;
ElizabetliPochoda;
Maria Margarom;
Poetry
Grace-Schulman;
Wypilewski;
Copy
YaniaDel :Borgo, Judith Long;
tary, Marpes,pDaw,n~Outlaw;
David P. Appell, Juha Burch,
n, oavd Goldlner, Davrd C Lanchner, David L. Laskin,
Paul W.
Todd Lewanj'
Kai
Xatha Pollitt.
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636
10, I986
Letter to
ear Americans,
Let me explainto you why I am, justnow, what
you callanti-American. have difficulty in being
this, since am half-herican mydklf. On my
mothers side I can trace my American ancestry, along five
or six lines,back 300 years. have spent pleasant days huriting out burial stones of ancestors in Rhode Island fields.
My
Judge William Jessup, nominatedAbraham
Lincoln atthe
Republican National
Convention in Chicagoand chaired the committee that drew
up his campaign platform. Hjs son; Henry Jessup, was one
of the founders of the American University in Lebanon,
where my mother was born and grew up.
in
If you were to read Henrys
you wouldfind that in those days there were Americans who
did not regard the Islamicworld as being made up of
wogs or
oras targets for bombardment. (In
1984 the battleship New Jersey lobbed half-ton shells on the
hills around Zahle, where mymother spent her childhood.)
You would alsofind that thetroubles of the Middle
not start yesterday. They were there.before
the stateof Isr 1
existed. In the tormented human mackdoine of Lebang,
bruse and Maronites-Moslem and Christian sects-warred
with each other 150 years ago.
The British and the French in those days sought to reform
the manners of the people with indiscriminate
acts of retalia1840 the British had the brilliant idea of bombardti9n.
ing Beirut. That merely led to the ferocious retribution the
Druse visited upon Christian villages in the massacres of
1860. Because the British gave this example
of diplomacy,
suppose my Britishhalf should congratulate you on
following our example. It is the American half of me that
rises up in outrage.
What has come over you? What has caused this strange.
national, self-exaltation, this isolationism of theheart,
I
10, 1986
637
holidays in Europe forfear that they might gethurt. But we
are slow to learn our right placeand have not yet concurred
in your low valuationof European life.
There are also-if I may-impose on your patience a little
longer-some small political objections. Many Europeans
dont like U.S. policies in Central America, yet ifwe
criticize them we are told that it is your backyard.
But the Mediterranean is more than Europes backyard.
It is part of Europe. It is the cradle of European civilization,
and even on its southern shore there are ancient half-
European cities, a European diaspora. It is not your sea,
and we dont know what you are doing there. Do you? By
what right do you blunder and bomb and bombard its
asked
shores? Dont pretend that something called
you to do this. It did not. It was not consulted. The
allies most closely concerned with
that sensitive zone-Spain,
Italy
Greece-are appalled.
If you decide to fund &d arm terrorists in Nicaragua, we
can do little about it. But if you start bombing around the
fringes of Europe, without any agreement with-your allies,
then NATO is nothing but a hole with,an American jgn
pointing though it.
That iswhy both halves of me, the American and the
British, unitein what you misrecognize-asanhmericanism.
I do not find the demand for.,aneye for aneye (or ninetyseven pairs of Libyan eyes for onepair of American) in LincolGs platform that my great-great-grandfather helped
draw up. In the name of that cousinship-those generations
of Jessups, Blisses, Dodges and Leavitti
devoted their
lives to the complexwork .of understanding between the
American and Arab worlds-I feel only disgust for Americas
public face today.
It is because I .value American traditions that I am now
opposed to the American state, to the ,cowardlybombast of
its reigningpoliticians, to the evil that its racist aggression is
reproducing and the dangers into which it is leading the
whole world. I am not opposed to Americans. think it i4
tragic that the majority has lost its way in the know-nothing
ideological dark.
People are asking, up and down Europe, whether this or
,that nation ought to leave NATO. I see a cleaner and sinipler solution. Let the European NATO allies and Canad,a,
with courtesy and thanks, invite,the United Statesto leave
If it will not leave, then let them expelit. They &an
then attend to their own security needs in what way best
suits them and engage in their own negotiations for mutual
disarmament with the Soviet bloc.
Tridents
We shall certainly feel safer when-your
and Poseidons, Carrie; battle groups and rapid deployment
l
forces have gone home.
will probably feel safer also,
I
and suffer from fewer rushes of blood to the head.
might even find it safe to.take your holidays in the Mediterranean again. Wheqe all of you, except for President
Rambo, will
be
heartily welcome.
THOMPSON
a
of
a founder of
is an