Patriotism in The Cross Fire

By Richard Lacayo

Remember how Sept. 11 was supposed to mark the end of the culture wars? Americans were going to put aside their differences, acknowledge their common humanity and bond with one another in the shared pleasure of hunting down Osama bin Laden and blowing him to bits. For a month or two you could almost believe it. But with the war in Afghanistan winding down, it appears that the time has come for the American left and right to start gunning for each other again, at least in bookstores.

In this corner we have Bill Bennett, former drug czar, author of The Book of Virtues and Somber-Presence-at-Large for the Republican right. His new book, Why We Fight (Doubleday; 170 pages), is a continuation of the culture wars framed as an attack on critics of the war on terrorism. And in this corner we have Michael Moore, the left-wing prankster and filmmaker (Roger & Me) whose new book, Stupid White Men (HarperCollins; 277 pages), is a smart-aleck rampage through the world made by CEOs and the G.O.P. It quickly hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Just behind it on that same list are Bias, Bernard Goldberg's conservative complaint about liberal media, and, further down, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, by David Brock, the repentant right-wing muckraker. Why do we fight? It sells.

The main targets of Bennett's book are "the diversity mongers, the multiculturalists, the relativists, and the plain old anti-Americans" who blame America for the Sept. 11 attacks and reject the use of retaliatory force. Unfortunately for Bennett, the Afghan war did not produce much serious opposition in the U.S. Whatever liberals may feel about American policy, it's hard to find any who actually sympathize with bin Laden, a man whose dream of a world where women are kept at home, where every area of life conforms to the harshest reading of Scripture, sounds too much like Jerry Falwell's idea of Utopia. So Bennett is reduced to shadowboxing tiny opponents. He pulls quotes from the occasional dissenting Op-Ed piece, whips the tattered scarecrow of Noam Chomsky and rescues us from "the militant black activist Lorenzo Komboa Ervin." Lorenzo who?

Bennett might have had a real adversary in Moore, but Moore doesn't address any Sept. 11 questions. Stupid White Men was originally scheduled for publication the week of the attack, then held back by his publisher because of worries that his snippy tone--"Idiot in Chief" is one of the milder things he calls George W.--would not play well in wartime. Now we have his book pretty much as he wrote it, a bit of unadulterated pre-Sept. 11 wrath and a handy compilation of everything Moore's fans hate about the contested 2000 election ("Gore won!"), corporate greed and the buccaneering free-market culture that gave us Enron. Some of it is very funny. A lot of it is old-time left-wing boilerplate. But all of it is in the voice of the rare liberal commentator who breathes some of the same fire you get from the Limbaughs and O'Reillys on the other end of the spectrum. No wonder his book is selling so fast. Michael Moore is what demoralized lefties have instead of a political party.

--By Richard Lacayo