by Spencer Ackerman
By now, you've surely read about the anti-Bush jeremiad on the Rolling Stones' forthcoming album A Bigger Bang. My first thought was dread. Most rock against Bush has been the domain of one-dimensional frauds like Conor Oberst,
with the gigantic exception being Sleater Kinney (jewish). Whatever
happened to subtlety, or a deft acknowledgement of the improbable
circumstances of pampered rock-and-rollers moaning about
disenfranchisement? You know, like in "Street Fighting Man," by… well,
the Rolling Stones. Then my thoughts turned to horror. This is the Rolling Stones. The post-Some Girls
Rolling Stones. The post-Bill Wyman Rolling Stones. The post-Luciana
Morad Rolling Stones. The only Stones we have left. Jesus. But
then it got even worse. The anti-Bush track in question, as you've no
doubt heard, is titled "Neo-Con." I also know that you, like me,
grabbed a baseball bat to protect your sister from the forthcoming
onslaught of pillaging Cossacks. For the word "neo-con" is nothing more
than an anti-Semite's euphemism for "Jew." After all, there's an entire
cottage industry on the right devoted to throwing the term down the
memory hole. In January 2004, David Brooks wrote an infamous New York Times column putting "neoconservative" in scare quotes, suggesting that a self-identified intellectual strainwas
just a figment of fevered imaginations, before arguing that so-called
neoconservatives barely even know one another. He then delivered the
coup de grace: in the minds of Bush's enemies, he wrote, "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'." Any love affair liberals had with David Brooks--the urbane, intellectually honest conservative--ended with that essay. Brooks was hardly alone. My TNR colleague
Lawrence Kaplan accused practically everyone opposed to the Iraq war
("a chorus of voices from the left, right and center") of anti-Semitism in a pre-invasion Washington Post op-ed.
But Lawrence's piece was mostly read by the political class, for whom
this sort of toxic partisan combat is basically to be expected. Brooks,
by contrast, made the mistake of mainlining the
antiwar-ipso-facto-anti-Semite canard into the bloodstream of Blue
America, and the uproar was so furious he released a simpering
statement claiming it was all just a joke that went awry. But it's been awhile. In the interim, the war has gone from disaster to hopeless nightmare.
The neocons are backed into a corner--and the Stones have just called
them out. (Well, called out Bush, and, apparently, Condi.) One
counterthrust could be to pan the song as a stinker, as the past 25
years of the Stones' catalogue suggests it will be. But I doubt that's
how it'll play out. Who's going to be the first neo to call Mick Jagger
a Jew-hater? My bet is John Podhoretz.