Scott Simon is the host of Weekend Saturday on NPR stations. Until his coverage of the Balkan wars, he claims he was a pacifist. Like many newly converted, he seems to exercise his new faith in military solutions to moral dilemmas without much wisdom or judgment. It was apparent from his Saturday morning broadcasts before the Iraq war that he supported the Iraq war and was dismissive of, and mischaracterized, opposition to the war.
This morning, he had a commentary in the context of the Moussaoui trial about a friend of his who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks. The friend, who Simon describes as a life-long opponent of the death penalty, not surprisingly has violent fantasies of dealing out violent justice to the 9/11 conspirators. I wrote the following comment this morning to NPR.
"Almost every Saturday morning, I have to consider why I find Scott Simon so annoying. Some of it has to do with the new certainty of Scott as a lapsed pacifist and Scott's seeming dismissive of those of us who opposed the Iraq war (but are hardly pacifists) as being insufficiently attuned to the horror that was Saddam's Iraq. (In Simon, one sees shades of Dos Passos, Chambers, Horowitz and Hitchens; converts who fail to find any more wisdom after their conversion).
This morning, my buttons were pushed by his comments on Iran, but more particularly by the Moussaoui commentary. One can raise many issues as to this prosecution that no one in the establishment media seems to be raising: for example,
Is it appropriate to execute someone for lying to the FBI (regardless of the possible consequences) given our Constitutional protections against self incrimination?
With Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in custody, why is Moussaoui (something of blundering scapegoat of more than questionable sanity regardless of his beliefs) and not the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks being tried?
Why do we remember and focus on the pain and mistakes of 9/11 more in the context of the death penalty phase of a criminal prosecution than in other reporting?
The subject of Scott's commentary was pedantic and no surprise to anyone. The fact that even those opposed to the death penalty in the abstract have violent fantasies of dealing out vengeance to those who have murdered family members seems prosaic to everyone who is not a lapsed pacifist, particularly in the context of a prosecution that raises much more fundamental issues for this country."