None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I’ve never been a big fan of the process known as “Fisking”; it’s a lazy and intellectually dishonest practice, and I refuse to accord it any legitimacy by lowercasing the “f,” as if it had somehow achieved common currency in our day-to-day language. (A quixotic, canutian gesture, to be sure; then, I do so love stubborn futility, except when I don’t.) And really, if we were to be honest with ourselves, go back to Fisk’s original, celebrated, storied report, and read what actually happened—
Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan. Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands—perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush—and uttered a lot of Salaam Aleikums. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank.
Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back. How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all “salaam aleikum” a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low.
Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on,” he shouted. I did. That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me.
—we’d have to agree: a process that fancies itself “logical” (or at least aiming to be; an “E” for effort, then?) doesn’t quite resonate with the all-too-human fury and outrage that lashed out at Robert Fisk, a pale mean substitute for the retribution it sought (yes, yes: how to find a mob’s IQ, none of us is as dumb as all of us, we’re better than that, honest—which is why we band together and jackboot anyone who dares suggest otherwise). —An individual administering “a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words” by “quot[ing] the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text”—that hardly rises to the rich metaphorical possibilities of chucked rocks and anonymous mob violence. (To say nothing of imposing a regrettably partisan spin on the procedure: can we on the monolithic Left not Fisk? Such a shame…)
No: it’s what’s being done to Nathan Newman and Kathryn Cramer that richly deserves the term “Fisking.”
(Meanwhile, that rough beast just keeps slouching: the American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps opened fire on American troops; our Marines are being airlifted out by Blackwater “civilians”; it’s increasingly obvious that the folks nominally running the show have “no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work”; and our President is as chipperly clueless as ever. “I mean, in other words, it’s one thing to decide to transfer,” he said. “We’re now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty.” —I suppose that’s one way to spin a civil war…)
