The Politics of Personality:
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Ahmedinijad and Love Iran
“This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.”
— William Shakespeare Love’s Labour’s Lost V.I. 637
There is something in the character of Halofernes — the ridiculous and bumbling pedant of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost — that resembles both Lee Bollinger and Mahmoud Ahmadiniejad’s recent professorial posturing at Columbia University. As The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins aptly pointed out, both men attempted to use their respective professorial roles to invoke a sense of objective and passionless academic decorum that evening. However, instead of a serous and collegial debate about policy, what inevitably transpired was pure politics of the worst kind.
Bollinger’s introductory remarks, which set the tone for the evening were decidedly not generous or kind: “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” said Bollinger, adding later in his speech that “today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for.” This kind of hyperbole and ideological rhetoric — whose “civilized world,” after all, was Bollinger referring to — was, as Stanley Fish noted in the New York Times on Sept. 30, flagrantly at odds with his role as president of the university and, as most pundits have since recognized, did nothing but add credibility and support to Amedinijad’s sometimes wacky ideas about homosexuality and the Holocaust, while making the overall political climate at Columbia University appear at once simultaneously intolerant and naive. In other words, Bollinger blew it.
But this is not a column about Bollinger’s lack of manners or Ahmedinijad’s incredibly faulty gaydar. What was most disturbing about Bollinger’s remarks was the way that he, like the popular media at large, focused the debate on the character of the Iranian President rather than on the policies of the state. Say what you will about Ahmedinijad, but he is not, and could not possibly be, a “petty and cruel dictator,” since the president has very little real power in his own country. On the contrary, Ahmedinijad is largely a figurehead for the Iranian government and not its leader. The human rights violations, the suppression of dissent and the squelching of free speech are not the work of Ahmedinijad, but reflect larger forces at work within the social, religious, economic, and political cultures of Iran — forces, mind you, that have received increasing public support thanks to the United States’ occupation of huge portions of the Middle East and its continued backing of nuclear-armed Israel.
Bollinger’s rhetoric of personal accountability — “I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes what you say and do” — is, sadly not exclusive to university presidents, but reflects a larger trend within the political climate of our times, away from any real engagement with substantive ideas or discussions of constructive change, towards an easily manipulated politics of personality. Demonizing Ahmedinijad at a time when the United States seems more dedicated than ever to some kind of military intervention in Iran, is not only ungenerous, but downright irresponsible. Who cares, after all, what the man thinks about the Holocaust or what his definition of homosexual is? Our own President Bush, remember, is no friend to homosexuals at home or abroad, nor is his administration — as recent documents from the Attorney General’s Office indicate — particularly concerned about torture, human rights violations, or the suppression of free speech, whether its in Afghanistan, Iraq, or the United States.
Both men, obviously, are incompetent bunglers, but this is not the problem. The problems lie in the forces at work behind these hollow men, in the public and secret policies driven by the interests of those with the power to influence events for their own gain, and in the absolute failure of the media, which is, after all, a part of the very structures of power it’s supposed to monitor, to understand the politics of international relations from a global perspective. Of course Iran wants a bomb; of course Iran is interested in expanding its interests in the Middle East now that the United States has completely destabilized Iraq — that’s what nations do: they look out for their own interests. When Ahmedinijad is gone, Iran will still have regional ambitions, and when Bush is gone, the US will still continue to assert its economic and strategic interests through violent or coercive force.
We are all of us, Iranians and Americans, ruled and controlled by interests far greater than any individual leader, and it is time that all of us, including our esteemed Ivy League university presidents and professors, started to pay attention to the bigger picture, stopped berating the puppets on the podium — in fact it might be time that we started ignoring them completely — and accepted the much more difficult and far less glamorous responsibility of actually working for real peace and consistent change. n
Leave a Reply
