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was Friday's prayer service at the Pentagon that clinched it. Mourning
the 6,000 dead in the worst attack on America in history, people
worshipped God on government property, on government time, and with
the government's official blessing, and guess what? We didn't hear
a peep from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Wasn't that
great?
Yes, Black
Tuesday was unspeakably horrible, and no, I'll never be able to
erase from my memory the live coverage I saw of the bodies tumbling
from the burning World Trade Towers like so many plastic babies
tossed into a New Orleans Mardi Gras cake. But some good crawled
out from under the smoking wreckage: Tuesday was the day that knee-jerk,
I-feel-your-pain, pottery-awareness-week American liberalism died
for good. For the first time in decades, Americans got to call on
God unabashedly in public, the way Washington did at Valley Forge
and Lincoln at Gettysburg, without the obligatory ACLU lawyer threatening
to sue because some whining atheist somewhere might "feel excluded."
Here's a short
list of other liberal jeremiads that we won't have to listen to
after Tuesday:
— Carping
about the "anti-gay" Salvation Army. Not after those battalions
of Salvationist volunteers stayed up all night serving sandwiches
and hot breakfasts to the firefighters battling the flames at the
Pentagon — and handing them out without regard to anyone's
sexual tastes. Sorry, gay-rights militants. We love the Salvation
Army.
— Carping
about Rudy Giuliani. You're not hearing much about the "fascist"
of Gracie Mansion, now that he's put his life on the line to walk
among the tottering skyscrapers of lower Manhattan to be with the
rescuers.
— Carping
about "diversity" and our supposed lack thereof. On Tuesday
— and on Wednesday, Thursday, and every other day since, Americans
of every race color, and creed, embraced, mourned together, volunteered
their time, money, sweat, and blood to help the victims, and flew
the flag on lapels, front lawns, car antennas, and buses. "We
ought to kill 'em!" shouted one of the Dominican Americans
who works in my apartment building while watching the carnage on
his television set Tuesday. That's real diversity, the good kind,
not the quota kind.
Best of all,
wonderful things that seemed banished forever by the malaises of
the '70s and '80s and the me-fixated prosperity of the '90s have
made a sudden return to the American scene. Among them:
— Guys.
Big-shouldered, hard-hatted, brave blue-collar guys fighting the
fires, patrolling the streets as cops, dragging near-victims to
safety, burrowing through the dust and the rubble to hunt for the
bodies of the dead and the living, giving their own lives. Wasn't
it just yesterday that pundits were pronouncing the human male obsolete?
— Heroes.
See "Guys."
— Rudy
Giuliani. See "Carping about Rudy Giuliani."
— Prayer.
Not "grief counselors" — that's so '90s — but
the real thing. Got a problem with that, ACLU?
— Assassinations.
Does anyone really want to put Osama Bin Laden on trial? No? I thought
not.
— Soldiers.
See "Guys" — and did you notice how proud we Americans
were when a Marine recovered his corps's colors from the wreckage
of the Pentagon?
— Western
Civ. "Go tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here obedient
to their commands." "Count Roland lay down beneath a pine
tree; he has turned his face towards Spain." Thermopylae. Roncesvalles.
The Alamo. Pearl Harbor. It's our brave tradition, and we want to
hear about it again.
— War.
When last I looked, 78 percent of respondents to a CNN poll favored
bombing Kabul if Afghanistan doesn't hand over Bin Laden fast. And
why stop there?
At another
standing-room-only church service on Friday, a Mass at St. Matthew's
Catholic Cathedral in Washington, D.C., a monsignor preached: "The
age of frivolity is over." He wasn't talking about having no
more fun. God willing, we'll one day be dancing again at weddings
and playing kitchy-coo with the babies who will be born to replace
Tuesday's dead. He was talking about the tendency of our culture,
our liberal culture, to paper over with sentiment and explanation
— and thus, render non-serious — that which is grave.
Instead of evil, we talk about "failure of communication,"
or "abusive childhood," or "legacy of colonialism."
This is all so over now. On Tuesday, we began to see that evil was
evil, and we lost patience at last with the liberals who pretend
that it doesn't exist and can't be fought.
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