Hit Parade

On its face, Anne Applebaum's column is op-ed boilerplate, the standardized, otiose lamenting of all who fail to share the columnist's obsessions. It's a familiar genre: Nicholas Kristof tells you that you're a bad person for not swimming across the ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then trekking overland to Darfur, the whole while carring a thousand pounds of rice and wheat on your back, as Kristof himself does every summer; Tom Friedman tells you that computer engineers are the fountain of youth where there used to be an oil well that laid golden eggs that hatched into crocodiles which are successful start-ups and elephants which are declining old-economy legacies; Maureen Dowd told you that she can't believe that's what you're wearing; Charles Krauthmammer muttered about a mineshaft gap; Peter Beinart furiously stroked his little weiner and screamed, "Close the door! Don't look at me! Don't you ever knock?"; Jonah Goldberg wallowed neck-deep in his watering hole, for though awkward on land, in the water he is beautiful.

Despite its familiar form, something about Applebaum's routine stuck in my ear, and I think I've diagnosed the discord. If you ignore the embarrassingly plaintive editorializing, you'll find Applebaum narrating a history along these lines: In the moments immediately following 9/11, shocked, saddened, and afraid, the world, by which is meant something like "those inclined to agree with us anyway," was united by what seemed like a unique and overriding concern, a "brief moment of consensus [...] when the world's most powerful governments all believed that the world's worst problem was international terrorism." In the intervening years, the world's worst problem has re-diminished somewhat in our allies' estimations and is now one among a constellation of global problems, which include climate, poverty, disease, agriculture, and the high-larious hijinks of Russia's very own king of the one-liner, Vladimir Putin.

As she scolds us all for taking our eyes off the prize, she says, "Most of all, though, the world's divided attention proves once again that global Internet access and global television have not created anything resembling a global conversation." And by "global conversation," yes, she does mean "unanimity." This I find odd--the absolute conviction that if only people talked it out and, you know, really thought about it, they would inevitable and inexorably come to precisely the same conclusions as our humble columnist. I think we can reasonably assume that international terrorism remains high on the list of concerns for all the attendees of the G-8 summit. Non-state actors, as goes the not-so-neologism, don't bode well for the state's force monoply, and without that, the state is just a particularly well-funded and well-armed gang in a world of armed gangs. So it's not a question of whether or not all these fine folks agree broadly that terrorism is in the Top 40, but that they don't explicitly affirm Applebaum's judgment that it ought to be topping the charts, and if you're not buying, you're not listening.