You’d think it was an antiwar liberal who is venting his ideology. But it is not:
Tell me there is a connection to 9/11? There’s not. Are there weapons of mass
destruction? There’s not. Tell me the war will be over soon? It won’t.
It is Lt. Paul Rieckhoff, an Army infantry platoon leader who spent 10 months in the most
dangerous areas of Baghdad, in an interview published this
morning.
You’d think it was Graham Greene who is venting his disillusionment with ideology. But it is
not:
It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the
rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events
like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no
heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves.
It is John le Carré, in “The Secret Pilgrim.”
You’d think it was William Faulkner who is venting about the futility of heroes and the falsity
of history itself. But it is not:
What he saw was that the only manifest artifact of the history of this negligible
republic where he now seemed about to die that had the least authority or meaning or claim to
substance was seated here before him in the sallow light of this cantina and all else from men’s lips
or from men’s pens would require that it be beat out hot all over again upon the anvil of its own
enactment before it could even qualify as a lie.
It is Cormac McCarthy, in “The Crossing.”
