The other day I received a notice that a local theater company aims to stage Sophocles' "Antigone" as a response to the Bush White House and its warmaking policy. This is an excellent notion. "Antigone" affords a timeless prism for considering political and personal morality, the power of the state and the responsi-bility of the individual, and there is every reason to encourage its production.
However, a few words in the release leapt out at me. There was a brief description of an encounter between President George W. Bush and a relative of a 9/11 victim at a 2002 memorial service: "Concerned by the growing talk of war with Iraq, [the relative] handed the President a peace button and said that she and 'her friends in Seattle' were 'praying for peace.'
"The President's response: 'It's good to pray for peace. But we must know the nature of the enemy.'"
Without further explanation, the next sentence of the press release began, "Resolved in part by that troubling encounter with the President..." There followed a brief statement that the relative and a producer friend then went looking for an appropriate play through which to assess the climate of war.
"Troubling encounter"? Dubya has uttered a few thousand moronic things in his time, but the "troubling" remark cited in the press release scarcely counts as one of them. I'd have thought it was an idea no rational person would have a problem endorsing. What's troubling is the relative's failure to deal with the meaning of what Bush had said, and the alacrity and absoluteness with which she read something sinister into it.
I hate simplemindedness, hate kneejerk politics - anybody's kneejerk politics. I hate Islamo-fascists who want to destroy anything they see as thwarting the Will of Allah (and I'm betting Allah hates them, too). And, all right, I don't hate, but I am appalled by, the local activists who, upon hearing the news of 9/11 on 9/11, went up to the attic to haul out the selfsame antiwar signs they had carried in Vietnam days, and traipsed off to protest a new war we weren't even fighting yet. People get used to a mindset and cling to it, like Linus with his security blanket.
Or that 9/11 relative with her excessive readiness to be "troubled," even by unaccustomed lucidity on George W. Bush's part.
But, for the record, I hold Sophocles blameless in this.
