When I first read Joyce Carol Oates’ now notorious tweet “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?”, I could only conclude that Joycie had been sipping too deeply of the elderberry wine, and decided to pass along. Ralph Douthat, however, took up the challenge to find some coherence and meaning in Joycie’s gnomic tweet, and came up with the following:
“If you don’t recognize that for at least some of the Islamic State’s young volunteers there is a feeling of joy and celebration involved in joining up, then you’re a very long way from understanding the caliphate’s remarkable appeal. And Oates, in a daffy-seeming way, has put her finger on one of the West’s weaknesses in this conflict: Our widespread inability (concentrated in particular among our leadership class) to imagine or understand what else, beyond the pull of sadism and thuggery, our fellow human beings (including quite a few young, Western-raised people) seem to find intoxicating about the Daesh experiment.”
As you might guess, if you’ve read any of Ralph’s greatest raps, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to a long lament regarding today’s shallow, secular West, that gives us everything, everything except a reason to live.
Well, I’m as secular as they come, if not as shallow, and I find plenty of reasons to live, even at age 70. Furthermore, suppose Joycie had tweeted “All we hear of Nazism is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?” or ““All we hear of Communism is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?” Would Ralph be quite so ready to moralize? I wonder.
