‘dichtung und wahrheit’ We did it.
NowI want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.^18To attempt a critique of this poem’s shortcomings, its feeble sarcasm and psycho-
sexualfrisson, in isolation from its politics is probably futile. While ‘American
Football’ spells out its topicality with the subtitle ‘A reflection upon the Gulf War’,
other poems wear date-lines as badges of their journalistic immediacy, as in the
grotesque ‘Democracy’ (‘The big pricks are out’).^19 How much better or worse this
poem is made by its explanatory ‘March 2003’, it may be beyond the power of
criticism to say. To attack these poems for being partisan or lacking in balance is
beside the point: even if the politics of these poems were beyond argument, they
aretooright for their own good.
In his short bookWelcome to the Desert of the Real, SlavojZiˇzek ponders a basicˇ
trope of much contemporary reflection on conflict, known during the Northern
Irish Troubles as ‘whataboutery’. In a debate that attempts to analyse a single
atrocity such as the September 11 attacks, one side can always shift the focus by
pointing out America’s many misdeeds and asking, But what about...?AsZiˇzekˇ
writes, however: ‘The moment we think in the terms of ‘‘Yes, the WTC collapse
was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarise [sic] with the victims, since this
would mean supporting US imperialism’’, the ethical catastrophe is already here:
the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity withallvictims.’^20 In one of
his Lacanian formulations,Ziˇzek insists that ‘the truth is always monstrous’, andˇ
for an act of literary solidarity to carry any force, it too must contain something
monstrous, in the Curnow rather than the Pinter vein of monstrosity, turning
our satisfaction with its moral stance vengefully back on the reader. It is a test
that Pinter’s ‘God Bless America’ fails miserably. Americans are hawkish religious
bigots, and the ‘others’ are their perennial nameless victims. Yet precisely in the act
of asking ‘what about’—what about the victims of American aggression?—Pinter
succeeds only in dehumanizing them even further (‘The gutters are clogged with
the dead|The ones who couldn’t join in|The others refusing to sing’^21 ). A Pinter
poem that turned on itself and its certainties, and allowed the ‘other’ even the
possibility of being a hawkish religious bigot, if he so wished, would mark a huge
advance over the cartoon victimhood that this poem chooses to peddle instead.
While Harrison and Pinter are merely two of its best-known names, the anti-war
movement has inspired a significant number of anthologies, from Faber’s101 Poems
Against Warand Todd Swift’s100 Poets Against the Warto thePoets Against the War
andnthpositionwebsites. Their number may be all that is significant about them, to
(^18) Harold Pinter, ‘American Football’, inVarious Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2005(London:
Faber, 2005), 260. 19
Pinter, ‘Democracy’, ibid., 258.
(^20) SlavojZiˇˇzek,Welcome to the Desert of the Real(London: Verso, 2002), 51.
(^21) Pinter, ‘God Bless America’, inVarious Voices, 256.