While I was participating in protests against the Bush administration's
war, those who opposed us protesters almost invariably yelled "remember
9-1-1" (which event, we know well, had nothing to do with Iraq). Is Rob
Dyer's response more or less "remember St. Bartholomew's Day"? Here it
is:
This is an unbelievable exchange among people many of whom we have loved
and respected all our academic lives. Let us not forget the relentless
mission of Elizabeth's court to defend its new faith against the
encirclement of catholicism. St. Bartholemew's Day was not an ancient
event. We should not ignore the degree of religious fervour that had
animated the two sides during her reign, and the fact that Sidney had
been involved in her attempts to create a holy alliance in Europe.
Dyer's activity is often well described as a secret service agent.
Spenser's creative life cannot be separated from the lives and ideals of
his friends.
Rob Dyer,
Paris, France.
I think this is very like the abuse of our memories of the attacks on
the World Trade Center to justify a badly judged violent response.
Dyer's response assumes that Elizabeth I sought to "create a holy
alliance in Europe"--while in fact, Elizabeth reacted cooly, to say the
least, to Philip Sidney's 1577 embassy to the Imperial court during
which he seems to have broached the topic of a Protestant League with
some of his Continental friends. This isn't to deny the horror of the
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre or of the attacks on the World Trade
Center: it is to urge that we understand the complexity of the
circumstances surrounding them, and that we use our understanding to
work to break the cycle of violence and retribution and the ceaseless
recriminations that rationalize further cycles of violence and
retribution. Moreover, we need to understand and demystify the
mechanism by which recriminations invite people to reduce real
understanding to a reactive counterattack.
Accusations (even though they're true) of atrocities committed by
Hussein are the rhetoric that distracts us while the Bush administration
kills off young American & British men & women, offers violence &
starvation to an already starved and violated Iraqi people, flouts the
U.N., and enriches companies like Halliburton (of which Dick Cheney is a
former CEO) with a genuine pig-trough of contracts to "rebuild" Iraq to
be paid for by the sale of Iraqi oil and by American taxpayers (see
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/business/23REBU.html?ex=1049473422&ei=1&
en=d19c8fb46243f064).
By crying "remember 9-1-1," the Bush administration and its dupes
activate the recriminations that rationalize violence, and worse, they
collapse into one hated (Arab?) identity the one enemy that may pose a
real threat to civilians worldwide, Al-Qaida, and a horrible man who
poses no direct threat to the United States, Saddam Hussein. By crying
"remember St. Bartholomew's Day," Dyer's argument encourages the same
kinds of confusions (Catherine d'Medici & the Guise for the Irish?!)
and, even worse, promulgates the same kind of reflexive accusations that
rationalize violence. Dyer's argument encourages the kind of muddled
thinking that Bush, Hussein, Sharon, and other killers rely on to
misrepresent their bloody power-and-money grabs as "national defense."
I think we should be trying to expose and refute such rhetoric always
and everywhere: that, to steal a phrase from Heaney, would be a
"salubrious role" for criticism "within the body politic." I suspect
Spenser, whose creative life, as Dyer rightly points out, can't be
totally separated from the lives and interests of his friends, would
have wanted his art to serve a more reflective role than merely to
justify English attacks on Catholics everywhere.
Respectfully,
Joel B Davis Assistant Professor
Department of English Stetson University
421 N Woodland Blvd Unit 8300
DeLand, FL 32723 386.822.7724
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