Tim Robbins has a commanding voice, the kind of voice that suggests clear thought. In this he is a very good actor, because his recent speech at the National Press Club was what a logician calls "internally inconsistent." This is a polite way of saying that Robbins asserted, within seconds, both A and not A, to the applause of his marginally more intelligent press corps audience. That is a polite way of saying that the whole lot of them are self-absorbed twits whose collective firing might give pause to someone who considers rising unemployment an inherently undesirable condition.
A thesis of Robbins is that A) it is implausible that Hollywood's glorification of violence gives young people a greater propensity for violence; while B) Republican presidents' glorification of violence through military action has inspired in young people a greater propensity for violence (not A). This is the fantasy of entertainment industry executives, who claim that what people see on a screen does not affect behavior even as they receive millions in advertising revenue.
Robbins isn't simply inconsistent, which is amusing but inconsequential. He is dreadfully wrong in his second premise, as are his narcissistic "Not in Our Name" compatriots. (Why you presumptious little primpers, who told you that it is in your name?) This colossal pigheaded wrongness, which twists its holder around until he finds himself spitting vituperation at a country that has only days ago liberated, among other people, a prison full of children, has two shining points of stupidity at its core.
The first is the notion that war is a glorification of violence. This is only true of some wars, and anyone who thinks that one war is just like another is hopelessly mired in delusion. The suffering and the quantity and means of violence may be similar, but to think that these are all of which a war is comprised is to assert some profane equivalence between the Allied liberation of concentration camp Jews and Arab nations' efforts to eliminate Israel in 1948. The rebuttal from the committed, self-indulgent dove is to assert that the ends don't justify the means, that might does not make right.
Bullfeathers. If ends never justified means then man would never do anything. And while might may not make right, sometimes it sure as heck is right. To the pampered star whose peace pose is a religious adornment, this is not an allowable thought, even if he financially supports politicians who make it their personal mission to assert might in any number of spheres of human endeavor. You think might doesn't make right?
Just war doesn't glorify violence, it glorifies sacrifice for a decent cause, like protecting the innocent, liberating the oppressed. These people do not exist, to Robbins and Sarandon and Penn and the host of willfully ignorant poseurs who comprise the West Coast Conscience of our nation; there are only misunderstood tyrants and camera-ready victims of errant (and aren't they all errant?) bombs.
The second point of stupidity in the beliefs of Robbins et al. is to assume that all violence has bad consequences (for what else can one mean when one says, as a point of assertion rather than restatement of religious teaching, that violence is "never the answer"?). This is not only provably false through logic, but through experience. The person who believes it is therefore wrong in both fields of inquiry: theory and practice. He is, if zeroes could be multiplicative, doubly ignorant, twice as wrongheaded.
Violence is a painful answer, a regrettable answer, in many cases a tragic answer, but make no mistake, sometimes it is the only feasible answer if innocent lives are to be saved or liberated. To label unjust the killing of, say, 10 willful wielders of violence in order to spare 20 who would but live peacefully, is to render justice a useless word, a toy of intellectual thugs and feckless U.N. talkers. Look at the people rejoicing with their children in the streets of Iraq. Look at them.
There is justice.
So go away you little, little man with your wrongheaded ideas and your marginally sane "life partner," back to your wretched coven of insular, preening, self-stroking pretenders, and leave the work of war and peace to clearheaded men and women.
