AGAIN?:

God bless America: In a poem written for the Guardian, the distinguished playwright Harold Pinter takes the US to task for its seemingly inexorable march towards war on Iraq (Harold Pinter, January 22, 2003, The Guardian)

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

It's that "again" that really makes one want to vomit, because two of the times the Yanks galloped off across the globe were to save Britain from the Germans. In the Second World War it is at least arguable that we even saved them from being defeated and occuppied by the Nazis. This raises the specter that, had there been a Harold Pinter in Nazi Britain and had he similarly spoken out against the injustice of the regime, he might now be a lampshade on some death camp commandant's night table.

In a particularly savage irony though, here's a bit from Wikipedia about Mr. Pinter's politics:

He continually strives to bring human rights violations and oppression to the public's attention. Letters from Pinter often appear in Britain's newspapers, such as The Guardian and The Independent.

In 1985 he travelled to Turkey with the American playwright Arthur Miller and met many victims of political oppression there. At an American embassy function honouring Miller, instead of exchanging pleasantries, Pinter spoke of people having an electric current applied to their genitals - got him thrown out. (Miller, in support, left the embassy with him.) Pinter's experience of oppression in Turkey and the supression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.

So, apparently he's not only ungrateful to America for helping his native land, but is now protesting when we try to help out with one of his pet causes: the Kurds. It would seem Kurdistan is a lovely cause in the abstract, but when it comes time to do something about its people Mr. Pinter has nothing better to do than engage in mental onanism, stroking his banal anti-Americanism for all it's worth, which isn't much.

MORE:
Harold Pinter's "God Bless America": The latest piece of Brit anti-war poetry hits the streets with an incoherence that must be seen to be believed. (J. Bottum, 01/27/2003, Weekly Standard)

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 5, 2003 9:54 PM