I Think You're Totally Wrong by David Shields Page B

barricades, but you think of yourself as more politically engaged than I am. Okay. Well, I want to investigate that. Even though you’re twelve years younger than I am, you remind me, in a way, of my mother and father. You probably think of me as—I don’t know—neurotic, overly interior, solipsistic, whatever. But I find you extremely didactic, moralistic, polemical, self-righteous, preachy. Is that unfair? You say I’m hesitant to judge, but—hey—I’m happy to judge anything anytime.
    CALEB: You judge subjective taste issues: a book, a movie, a painting, but on moral issues, no.
    DAVID: I think of myself, in fact, as trying to scrutinize each choice. Can you think of an example where I’ll give someone too much benefit of the doubt?
    CALEB: You paint a picture of people taking advantage of their race—the NBA as reparation theater.
    DAVID: I would certainly write that book differently now.
    CALEB: Your interpretation of Fawcett’s
Cambodia
was off. You wrote, essentially, “Brian Fawcett uses juxtaposition as a way to show that mass culture is as insidious as the Khmer Rouge.”
    DAVID: But in his email to us, he actually seemed to agree with me. Otherwise, there’s no point to that book; there’s no other way to make sense of the bifurcation of the page into media parables and war atrocity.
    CALEB: I just reread
Cambodia
. Your interpretation isn’t so far off, but that just means that both you and Fawcett are wrong. Any Cambodian who lived through the Khmer Rouge would not think the invasion of McDonald’s and Walmart and TV into their homes is so terrible. That’s a Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky–level analogue. Absurd.
    DAVID: “When you ask me if I’m political, what you’re really saying is, ‘Do you identify your critique of everyday life as a political one?’ It seems to me a politics of consciousness and a politics of awareness are so lacking in most of what are considered to be political viewpoints that I’m not sure I want to call it politics. Before I can begin to discuss the kind of questions that people normally call ‘politics,’ I would have to solve perceptual and mental and emotional confusions that seem to me to so surround every discourse that I certainly haven’t gotten anywhere close to ‘politics’ yet.”
    CALEB: Who’s that?
    DAVID: Lethem.
    CALEB: Let’s talk about
Human Smoke
.

    DAVID: Nicholson Baker is sympathetic to Quakerism, is essentially a pacifist. And he wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make for pacifism: World War II. Most people would support the Allied effort to stop the Nazis.
    CALEB: Even Chomsky.
    DAVID: Baker doesn’t, in any way, justify what Hitler did, but he wants to show you Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s warmongering, their death-dealing. The book is trying to show you that, finally, if Germans die, if Japanese die, if Americans die, if British soldiers die, it’s all human smoke. We’re all people. We’re all mortal beings. That’s the book, and it’d be hard to argue otherwise.
    CALEB: I’ll argue otherwise.
    DAVID: You see it differently?
    CALEB: Baker showed the warmongering of the Allies, but the book doesn’t say, “We’re all human smoke.” Baker says that despite the degradation war brings, “we must fight. We must stop evil at all costs.” And that’s the message.
    DAVID: It is?
    CALEB: In the final scene, two Nazi soldiers are outside a concentration camp. One takes a whiff of the ash in the air and says, “Ahh, human smoke!” This macabre image contradicts your forced metaphor.
    DAVID: You’re right to focus on that paragraph, but to me you’re reading it way too literally. If that’s all he was saying, why would he even have bothered to write the book? Why did the book receive so many reviews that were beyond negative? The entire strategy