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| August | 17 |
| 2006 |
A story is doing the rounds today about Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge, who wrote, as the Telegraph put it, of her "hankering for an age when seminars were enlivened by the sexual frisson between dons and students".
In the main, it's been reported as a jolly little story. Hmmm. But let's ignore the fact that what she hankers after is more accurately described as sexual harrassment.
Rather, one needs to bear in mind that Prof Beard is no sweet, other worldly academic. She is, as her piece in the London Review of Books on October 4, 2001, makes clear, a hard core anti-American possessed of a truly vile view of 9/11:
[W]hen the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn't just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.
MessageSpace
Curiously you don't quote "her piece" but someone else's, and another source entirely. A closer reflection of what she said can be found in the LRB letters column.
Bullshit. I read the letter, and it is the classic kind of doubletalk that says - I did not say the victims had it coming, I just said that American foreign policy caused it. Which is not only shit, it is unworthy of a really fine scholar - which Mary Beard is - who should have learned from her own subject the importance of intellectual honesty and the shame attendant on defending herself by making distinctions without a difference.
Prof Beard was the "disinterested" classicist on the recent BBC programme on how the Roman Empire is dealt with in the British media. Funny that half-way through the programme it turned into an anti-American rant. Mind you, not all Beardie's fault, we had Roy "Lord" Hattersley, Terry "Python" Jones (so amusing) etc etc.
Paolo, in your haste to condemn the letter, you missed my point. Stephen's quote came from Columbia Journalism Review written by George Kennedy. In her letter she quite specifically says she did not say 'America had it coming.' Since her full article is not to be found at the LRB, its difficult for me judge whether she's the monster you make out.
I'm sure you won't take anything I say on trust, but the reason I cited the CJR was precisely because the piece isn't on the LRB site. But in those far off days I subscribed, and Beard's piece was one reason (amongst many) why I stopped. I cited it much earlier in this Independent piece:
http://www.stephenpollard.net/000099.html
Whatever she says now, she said exactly what she is quoted is saying.
Beard writes:
"To believe that the United States 'had it coming' is not to believe that the victims deserved to die. It is, rather, to recognise a causal connection between US foreign policy and the events of 11 September; to see those events as a sad but predictable outcome of US actions elsewhere in the world."
A few years after the Holocaust, a handful of survivors plotted to poison the water supply of a number of German cities as an act of revenge. Fortunately, the plot was uncovered in time and the cities were saved. Had the plot come to fruition millions of innocent people would have died. Would that have been "a sad but predictable outcome of German actions?" No, it would have been mass-murder.
'Would that have been "a sad but predictable outcome of German actions?" No, it would have been mass-murder.'
This is a false dilemma It is entirely possible that it was both.
The letter I linked to was contemporaneous. If we are allow you to clarify your post we must afford Prof Beard the same respect.
I have no idea why you suggest that I won't take anything you say on trust. I think you must be talking about your own insecurities, rather than any belief I might hold.
The CJR quoted Prof. Beard verbatim. I'm puzzled that nobody has found her original piece on the LRB website: it's at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/mult01_.html. But the context doesn't add anything to the bare quotation, and I don't think her subsequent letter offers a plausible defence. It is true that, in the original piece, she wrote that "The United States had it coming" was "what many people openly or privately think"; but the wording implied strongly that she shared that belief. Also, her suggestion in the LRB letter that the phrase "had it coming" referred only to a "causal connection" between US actions and 9/11 strikes me as sophistry: in everyday language, to say someone "had it coming" means precisely that they deserved whatever happened to them. Rather than clarifying, I think her letter compounded the original offence.
That said, I think that a couple of sentences written when most of us were still in shock is a flimsy basis for branding her a "hater of America"; and in general Prof. Beard's writing displays a high degree of intelligence, wit and sanity.