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PARTISAN REVIEW
don't just reach up into the air and say, "I want to impose a busing
order." Judges don't do that. And I tried, with great sound bites and
flair and drama, to explain to them the system of law and how judges–
when they are presented with proof of extensive racial discrimination
and segregation by governmental agencies-are duty-bound under the
Constitution and the ru le of law to provide a remedy to the plaintiffs.
The folks didn't want to hear any of that. And right in the middle,
twenty minutes into it, while I was beating up my opposition, somebody
got the order, "Get him off the air!" So, I was knocked off of CNN's
Talk Back Live
and never got invited back . Never! And I consider myself
a good talking head, by the way. But nobody has called yet to put me
on CNN as a regular commentator, or on FOX News, or MSNBC, or
any of those news stations, and I wonder why.
In the interest of time, let me just tell you this : I'm mad as hell. And
they know it. We have a war on our hands-a cultural war. We have to
stand up and defeat anti-intellectualism in this society. I hope we can do
it. I hope we can do it in a free society without banning books . I hope
we can do it in a free society without banning newspapers . And I hope
newspapers understand eventually that there are people who know how
to read, but who just don't buy what they've been reading in those
newspapers. Thank you very much.
Edward Rothstein:
Thank you.
It
seems clear from the subject of this
panel that I am expected to discuss issues related to my employer and
my colleagues. Instead, I will explore the relationship between Ameri–
can culture and American democracy. This is, after all, the context
within which any discussion of the American media must take place. By
implication it has some relevance to the panel's main theme.
A peculiar meeting took place about two years ago, in the courtyard
of the nation's most secure federal prison in Florence, Colorado. Three
men stood in isolated mesh cages and talked for an hour. One prosecu–
tor called it "the oddest Kaffeeklatsch in the history of Western civiliza–
tion." This gathering consisted of Timothy
J.
McVeigh, the bomber of
the federa l office building in Oklahoma City; Theodore
J.
Kaczynski,
the Una bomber; and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first
World Trade Center bombing.
Only Yousef's act, of course, was part of a long-term systematic
threat-a twenty-year campaign by totalitarian Islamicism that has
grown ever more threatening. But these terrorists' conversational inter–
ests apparently never touched on their killing techniques and plans.
