George Will and TV ‘War’ Series

Will’s column makes one big mistake: He was, as usual, unnecessarily insulting. Who cares about Gwynne Dyer’s beard? What do his clothes have to do with his ideas?

If we were to look similarly at George Will, his Nazi-like wire-rimmed spectacles, the mousy, half-sadistic, cold look of his eyes, his tight-lipped manner of speech, his hair, his clothes, what would that say about his ideas? Nothing; it would merely be derogatory to Will’s person and sense of fashion.

What Will pointed out amid stylistic gesticulations has merit. The distinctions among nations in different situations should be noted and understood; Israel and England are--in spite of certain theological researches--very different locales in the human condition today. But Will need not insult Dyer’s clothes, appearance and ideas to point these distinctions out, and evince the shortcomings of this PBS miniseries.

In this last respect of due respect, George Will is, apparently often in spite of his better judgment, a mental midget.

We ought to remember that there are many valid and useful ways of looking at the world in order to understand it. In physics, light beams exhibit properties of waves and of discrete particles, and which way at any time you choose to study light is a matter of which view yields the clearer picture. Of course, scientists keep in mind that light is light, neither wave nor particles, but may be viewed as either and has properties of both.

With that analogy in mind, I submit that perhaps Gwynne Dyer’s view, however distorted, intentionally or accidentally, may show us something useful. The view itself may not be close to the God-given truth. But, like our physics, it may serve to move our human understandings one small step closer to truth.

If columnists took a cue from science, and tried first to understand the world in bits and pieces and then constructed a whole picture, instead of starting with a composite battery of prejudices and opinions, from which bastion they sally forth to disparage every understanding different from their own, maybe then we could all live in peace.

KESHAV KAMATH

Malibu