Lewis Lapham's piece in the current Harper's Magazine

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Harper's is not on line for free so I ran down Lapham's
piece in the library (Lapham is the editor of Harper's).

I have enjoyed Lapham's witty insights in the past. In
this case however I didnt see any insights. He mocks
the fatuity of prosperous capitalists and the smug
self-satisfaction of the directors of World War II movies 
such as Spielberg. One can hardly cavil at this judgement
but I dont see anything in this that sheds any light on
our current predicament or whether or not the Afghan
intervention is the right thing to do. Still less is there
any light shown on whether rounding up Osama and gang
is doable or impossible.

Spielberg's Private Ryan or other self-serving and
self-congratulatory TV claptrap about WW II does not
change the moral and historical implications of WW II.
Or, regarding the present predicament, to note the moral 
flabiness of American self-love as Lapham does here is 
not to explain what the events of 9-11 signify or 
more importantly what the correct response on the part
of the government should be.

Is the attempt to arrest or kill Osama and gang justifiable?
Whether it is doable is a different question. Osama's acts
are so beyond the pale of acceptableness that Bust and
company have been rather successful in gathering an
alliance of governments throughout the world to support
the action in Afghanistan. As for the anti-Americanism of 
the street in the Third World, it may be just noise with
no implications.

Of course it is hard to believe that Bush and his contemptible 
gang of right-wingers could be doing the right thing. The
likelihood that they of all people could be in the right
seems vanishingly small when we think of who these people
are and their track record. And yet...it seems the right
thing to do, I mean to go to Afghan and catch the bad guys
if it is doable.

I do not pretend to know whether it is doable.