As the pious cataract of eulogies for Benazir Bhutto accumulate and briefly eddy before draining away, the connoisseur of cant is tempted to wade in and examine the specimens: which of these cringe-making hagiographical exercises is the worst? The competition is stiff, if for no other reason than that the Musharraf-Bhutto spectacle made for such facile political drama. I cannot claim to have examined all the contenders; nevertheless I would be willing to cede the palm preemptively to the truly stomach-churning performance by Bernard-Henri Levy in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. “They have killed a woman,” Mr. Levy begins. “A beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman.”
Students of rhetoric will wish to study Mr. Levy’s histrionic communique. What accounts for its singular awfulness? How has he managed to crowd so much cloying insincerity and grating exhortation into fewer than 800 words? I note that the piece was translated from the French, and it is true that piece is even more horrible if read aloud in a faux-French accent (though that has the compensating advantage of bringing out its unintended comic elements). Yet even when all due allowances are made for that imperfect art, most observers, I suspect, will grant that the author, not the translator, is the source of the essay’s emetic qualities.
[N]ow they have killed Benazir Bhutto–killed her because she was a woman, because she had a woman’s face, unadorned yet filled with an unswerving strength, because she was living out her destiny and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists (the jihadists) floats over the human face of women.
Actually, al Qaeda killed her not because she was the latest incarnation of Das Ewigweibliche but in order to remove a prominent (also, n.b., at least intermittently corrupt) critic and to destabilize an already fraught country further. But the breathless fanzine rhetoric Mr. Levy trowels onto his subject obscures that reality under a suffocating layer of unearned moralism and pseudo-concern.
“The best, the most beautiful way of responding would have been for Angela Merkel, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy to have gone immediately to Pakistan for her funeral.”
Really? Or would that have been an act of grandstanding political folly guaranteed to make an already dangerous situation much worse?
Doubtless the Augean stables of sentimentality have more in store for us on this subject. But to date, Bernard-Henri Levy’s intervention is the most appalling piece of sentimentalizing rubbish since irresponsible journalists abetted the transformation of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales from a nuisance for the Paris tunnel cleaners into an international embarrassment.
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24 Comments
1. R.J. Torre:All you say is true, but then there is massive counterweight: Ralph Peters piece in the NY Daily news http://www.nypost.com/seven/12282007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_bhutto_assassination__not_what_she_s_912265.htm
Dec 30, 2007 - 3:20 pm 2. clarice feldman:You can say that again. But then I was the wise guy who thought Antigone was neurotic.
Dec 30, 2007 - 5:15 pm 3. Mark William Paules:History will record that Benazir Bhutto was a retired plutocrat who could not resist the lure of power. Tragedy requires at least a shred of nobility in the fallen protagonist or it becomes mere pathos. Bhutto had nothing to offer her nation but cunning and corruption. She knew full well that power in Pakistan transfers by violence and murder. Her Oxford education, pretty face, and democratic affectations were a facade to mask personal ambition. She died because she engaged in blood sport and played the game poorly. Folly will dance a jig on her grave while the Furies kick back for a cigar and a good bourbon. Meanwhile, a tempest rises across the plain of the Indus River. Necessity is a cruel bitch. Even worse than Bhutto.
Dec 30, 2007 - 5:37 pm 4. Sidney Raphael:Perhaps, as you write, the French dude deserves special mention for his saccharine sentimentality. But how could you not mention that at the other end of the sentimentality spectrum Hillary Clinton stepped into deep doodoo in an supremely over-analytic way and threatened to set back Pakistani-American relations to the year 700?
Dec 30, 2007 - 5:47 pm 5. happyfeet:Poor dead Benazir’s 15 minutes are almost up, but you should get an award for the Diana part I think.
Dec 30, 2007 - 5:53 pm 6. michael:To me the saddest reaction I heard was that of NPR whose analysts seemed gleeful that ‘Bush had horribly miscalulated by trying to put Musharraf and Bhutto together.’ These are the moralists who would fall into paens of pathos for civilans killed in Iraq. Liberal fascism peace be upon it.
Dec 30, 2007 - 7:18 pm 7. WH:I think Levy means well, but I vaguely remember a story he wrote about Israel’s war in Lebanon two summers ago that went so horribly awry. In it, he made the astonishing claim that Israel would be victorious, because its defense minister was so visibly distraught and vexed by the human lives involved; I personally thought it looked like Peretz was horribly unsuited to his position as a wartime defense minister, and I think events bore that out. It seemed almost like an unintended parody of the way liberals see violence and war as only justified if it is paired with copious amounts of self-doubt and angst. Levy probably would be fine in his proper element–a Paris salon philosophizing–but in hardheaded questions of state, dudes like him really should be ignored.
Dec 30, 2007 - 8:49 pm 8. Tom von Gremp:Sidenote: That the MSM has felt compelled to use, for the most part, 20 year old pictures of Ms. Bhutto bodes very poorly for Senator Clinton, but I digress…
Dec 31, 2007 - 3:47 am 9. Sissy Willis:As Peters wrote in that NY Post piece, “She was a splendid con”
Dec 31, 2007 - 4:29 am 10. Rubicon:America’s politicians would do themselves more of a favor if they simply said, “what a shame,” and left it at that.
Dec 31, 2007 - 4:56 am 11. Curly Smith:Hillary goofed on her calls for America’s president to demand or call for Musharraf’s resignation.
Unless those nuclear weapons are threatened, I think we should keep our mouths shut & let Pakistani’s do their own thing.
I think it’s more of a Camelot-ization of Bhutto than a Diana-ization. JFK is widely regarded by the media, and the Left, as one of our greatest Presidents. In reality, he accomplished very little.
I recall Rush mentioning RFK’s signature close to his speeches where he quoted George Bernard Shaw “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” and think it applies to the “remembering” of both JFK and Bhutto. In both cases, we see the transference of what the media wanted, what could have been, versus what actually happened. Consequently, defects are not just glossed over, they’re entirely discredited by the deification process. The focus on “coulda, shoulda, woulda” ignores the very real problems of getting from the here of “what is” to the there of “what might be” and that the biggest obstacle in the journey might be the person they’re deifying.
Dec 31, 2007 - 8:09 am 12. Jon Motherwell:Kimball is right to criticize the hagiogrification of Benazir Bhutto in the West. She was a “martyr for democracy,” the story line goes — but she really represented the dynasitic element in Pakistani politics. Her father founded her political party in the 1970s; she inherited on his death, and leadership is now being passed to her son. Ali Bhutto launched Pakistan’s nuclear program in the 1970s, and tilted that country in the direction of the Soviet Union during his tenure, nationalizing Pakistani industries along the way.
Dec 31, 2007 - 8:58 am 13. romat:Her death is a setback for Western hopes in Pakistan and the region in general. We do not need to idealize her in order to see this; indeed, such idealization will make it harder to identify a successor who might pick up her mantle.
It seems to me that Bush, Rice, and whoever else was in on persuading Mussaraf to allow Bhutto to return badly miscalculated as they have so often. “Free” elections don’t solve every problem.
Dec 31, 2007 - 9:21 am 14. David Thomson:Benazir Bhutto, was at the very best, a well meaning fool. She placed her country in greater danger by returning. Bhutto should have instead pressured Musharraf to become a more effective fighter against the religious crazies. This must be Pakistan’s number one priority. Democracy cannot truly take hold until the Islamic nihilists are sufficiently marginalized.
Dec 31, 2007 - 9:44 am 15. Jammer:Oh how rich this all is. Almost every post here is either (1) a gratuitous slap at a murdered woman who, despite it all, showed more personal courage than everyone here tied together, or (2) a gratuitous slap at Hillary Clinton. How brave!
Dec 31, 2007 - 10:10 am 16. David Thomson:“…a gratuitous slap at a murdered woman who, despite it all, showed more personal courage than everyone here tied together…”
Amen. Your point is well taken. Benazir Bhutto was indeed a brave woman. Nonetheless, she still behaved like a naive fool. Her behavior has only made the situation worse in Pakistan.
Dec 31, 2007 - 10:42 am 17. Sarah Rolph:I don’t see how it is a “gratuitous slap” to observe that Bhutto’s personal courage was badly misplaced and served no useful end, but instead handed a victory to the enemy. Nor is it at all gratuitous to observe that Hillary Clinton is callously using Bhutto’s death to advance her own political agenda. Both points seem important and relevant, to me.
Dec 31, 2007 - 10:55 am 18. Rachel:In both cases, we see the transference of what the media wanted, what could have been, versus what actually happened.
And THAT is why I dread a Clinton presidency. And I’m a liberal.
But back to Bhutto. Why is it everytime a person gets killed or something bad happens it’s W’s fault? He may have encouraged Bhutto to come back but *she* stayed.. She also took the risk of coming back to a country that, based on my readings, she took advantage of and would have taken again IF she was elected. She could have said no, and she could have taken Musshie’s advice and stayed down. It’s working for al-Sistani.
What I hate is that everything other people do or happens to them, it’s somehow Bush’s fault, regardless of their own actions. Now watch when Hillary! gets into office it will be everyone’s fault but hers! (I’m mostly ranting here, but I *am* concerned about such a thing happening, esp. in Mideast foreign policy)
Dec 31, 2007 - 12:57 pm 19. Jane:How do we know that she is really dead?
Dec 31, 2007 - 3:52 pm 20. Helian:At the risk of wearying the sage Mr. Kimball with my “cant,” I must insist that Ms. Bhutto is not only a hero, but a glorious hero. This fact is obvious to anyone who can actually grasp the meaning of the terms “hero” and “glory,” difficult as that may be lo now these 80 years and more since it became fashionable to “debunk” all heroes. She is a hero in spite of all those wise experts in modern “ethics” who have concluded they know with 100% certainty that she is guilty of all sorts of crimes and corruption because, after all, they read it in a couple of blogs. She is a hero in spite of the fact that the Internet’s legions of self-appointed geniuses have concluded she acted out of “self-interest.” (You know, just like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Davy Crockett, Dan’l Boone, and Johnny Appleseed.) She is a hero because she knowingly put her life at grave risk to stand up for democracy, women’s rights, the secular state and liberty against the religious fanatics, obscurantists, misogynists, and would-be dictators who, like the poor, ye have always with you. These facts are obvious. To experience such facts as “heroic” and “glorious,” of course, one cannot be purely and coldly logical. They are, after all, subjective terms. One must be capable of a certain susceptibility to human emotions to understand what is meant by such terms. Gratitude for example. I am grateful to Ms. Bhutto, because she has given her life to do something of value to me. There is nothing more complicated than that behind my perception of her as a hero. Of course, I realize how absurd, and, indeed, abject it must seem to many of the other commenters here that I am capable of perceiving heroism in an individual who is not absolutely righteous and morally pure according to the exacting standards of this highly ethical age, but there you have it. Some of us are born with certain intellectual and moral deficits, and we live with them as best we can.
Dec 31, 2007 - 8:16 pm 21. eliXelx:There was not a single Jew next to her either the first or second time, which can lead to only one logical conclusion…
Jan 1, 2008 - 7:07 am 22. greenconsciousness:Are you the same people who derided King, Gandhi, Kennedy, Van Gogh, and Rushdie? How fool hardy they were to demand and support civil rights, human rights for the oppressed in spite of their corrupt private lives.
How dare they and Bhutto not be perfect morally and ineffective politically as are blog writers.
How dare Diana concern herself with the victims of land mines and AIDS instead of feeding your belief that beautiful women are stupid, useless or corrupt morally?
How dare the poor and oppressed mourn the death of their hope for relief.
Are you the same people who told women to lay back and enjoy it? Shut up and listen to our betters? Just as no one can ever be correct enough for the left, no one can be pure enough for the sexist right.
I would rather “study Mr. Levy’s histrionic communique” all day long rather than read this pretentious misogyny.
Jan 1, 2008 - 9:19 am 23. Donna:What accounts for its singular awfulness? How has he managed to crowd so much cloying insincerity and grating exhortation into fewer than 800 words?
Hey, he’s a fashionable French intellectual. What else do you expect?
This is far from being Levy’s worst. I remember a ridiculously pretentious piece he wrote about some soccer player a few years back. For a minute I thought I was reading the Onion instead of the WSJ.
Jan 1, 2008 - 1:01 pm 24. Donna:greenconsciousness:
Do you mean filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Oh, yes, I really remember the enlightened Hollywood crowd reacting in outrage when van Gogh was killed,…,oh, no, wait a minute, in fact, the people who seemed most upset about his murder were those awful sexist right-wingers. Not a peek about van Gogh was uttered at the Academy Awards that year – they were too busy fawning over Michael Moore and patting themselves on the back for their oh-so-brave anti-Bush stance.
I agree with Jon Motherwell:
Her death is a setback for Western hopes in Pakistan and the region in general. We do not need to idealize her in order to see this; indeed, such idealization will make it harder to identify a successor who might pick up her mantle.
Exactly. I was dismayed when I heard of her death, but she was hardly some noble exemplar of democracy. And it’s hardly “misogyny” to point that out.
Sheesh, I guess coolly appraising political figures is “sexist.” If our hearts were in the right place, we’d gush and sob over Diana and Bhutto like teenyboppers at a Justin Timberlake concert.
Remember, folks, it’s all about feeeeelings, damn the facts!
Jan 1, 2008 - 4:38 pm