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foreign leader who said it best last week was the Queen, though
she didn't really say a word. I have met Her Majesty from time to
time (I am one of her Canadian subjects), and to put it at its mildest,
for those with a taste for American vernacular politics, she can
be a little stiff: The Queen stands on ceremony and she has a lot
of ceremony to stand on. But on Thursday, for the Changing of the
Guard at Buckingham Palace, she ordered the Coldstream Guards to
play "The Star-Spangled Banner" — the first time
a foreign anthem had been played at the ceremony. The following
day something even more unprecedented happened: At Britain's memorial
service for the war dead of last Tuesday, the first chords of "The
Star-Spangled Banner" rumbled up from the great organ at St
Paul's Cathedral, and the Queen did something she's never done before
— she sang a foreign national anthem, all the words. She doesn't
sing her own obviously ("God Save Me"), but she's never
sung "La Marseillaise" or anything else, either; her lips
never move.
And at that
same service she also sang "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic,"
for the second time in her life — the first was at the funeral
of her first prime minister, Winston Churchill. On Friday, she fought
back tears. When she ascended the throne, Harry Truman was in the
White House. The first president she got to know was Eisenhower,
back in the war, when he'd come to the palace to brief her father.
She is the head of state of most of the rest of the English-speaking
world — Queen of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the
Bahamas, Belize, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, etc. But she understands
something that few other leaders of the West seem to — that
today the ultimate guarantor of the peace and liberty of her realms
is the United States. If America falls, or is diminished, or retreats
in on itself, there is no "free world." That's the meaning
of the Queen's "Ich bin ein Amerikaaner" moment.
Don't ask me
who else you can count on. The NATO declaration was impressive,
but, even as the press release was coming off the photocopier, a
big chunk of America's 18 allies were backsliding. Norway, Germany,
and Italy said they had no intention of contributing planes, ships,
or men. Even as purely political support, the invocation of Article
Five was written in disappearing ink. The Italian foreign minister
— speaking for Europe's most conservative government —
said "the term 'war' is inappropriate." "We are not
at war," said Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, his nation's
signature on that NATO document notwithstanding. Belgium holds the
current presidency of the EU and was last seen apologizing for slavery,
colonialism, etc at Durban's recent U.N. Conference Against Whitey,
Hymie, and Capitalism.
The Royal Air
Force will be alongside the USAF. The Aussies will send something.
The Canadians will manage a token rustbucket like HMCS Toronto,
the ship we dispatched the last time things started heating up in
the gulf. And New Zealand's recalcitrant prime minister may yet
be forced by popular opinion into showing a bit more muscle. The
British, whatever their other faults, have no fear of body bags
and a tabloid press that loves a good war. Polls show 75% support
for British participation in military action. If these are the only
active participants, so be it: In a war about values, responsible
government, the rule of law and individual liberty are essentially
concepts of the English-speaking world that the rest of the West
has only belatedly caught up to. Just a quarter-century ago, for
example, most of southern Europe — Portugal, Spain, Greece
— was run by dictators. These people are used to making their
accommodations with history. That's why the danger in Colin Powell's
"broad coalition" approach is that it will have the same
effect as it had a decade ago — acting as a brake on American
purpose.
But more dangerous
than open anti-Americanism abroad is the more slippery variety at
home. In New Hampshire on Friday, the Union-Leader had a
splendid picture special of patriotic Granite Staters — Dawn
Dupont of Pembroke holding her "Beep To Bomb Bin Laden"
sign on Route 3, the "Live Free Or Die Against Terrorism"
banner in Concord. But at the biggest daily paper in western New
Hampshire attention was already wandering: While British, French,
Canadian, German and Irish front pages were all devoted wholly to
the aftermath of the massacres, the Valley News thought it
was time to, in the Clintonian sense, "move on" and managed
to find room on page one for an inconsequential story about one
school district's high-school building options. The letters page
had three long missives — one arguing that the Second Amendment
gives no individual right to bear arms, one about gays and the Boy
Scouts, and one on Tuesday's events by Robert Daubenspeck of White
River Junction, Vermont, who advised against retaliation. "Someone,
someday, must have the courage not to hit back but to look them
in the eye and say, 'I love you.'" It would be mean-spirited
to regret that Mr. Daubenspeck was not given the opportunity to
test his thesis with one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight
11. But the dreadful inert Valley News is enough to make
me pine for Le Monde.
A couple of
other examples: My friend's 16-year-old daughter came home with
Tuesday's events put into context by her high-school history teacher,
who wanted every pupil to remember that the Allies killed far more
civilians when they bombed Dresden. On Sunday, I went to my local
Baptist Church, where the interim pastor gave the most inadequate
sermon I have ever heard. Her main point was that "even here
in New Hampshire" those who look different from us "are
facing threats to their lives." In a population of a quarter-billion,
maybe two or three dozen have done something dumb — driven
their pick-up to the parking lot of a mosque and shouted something
rude, smashed a window of an Arab-American business, shouted "Screw
you, towelhead." The other 99.99999% have done nothing. Yet
my pastor's principal concern was the ugliness of Americans.
Against that
should be set the example of the local volunteer fire department,
who hosted a town get-together on Sunday afternoon and offered up
prayers that, compared to those of our trained professional preacher,
were straightforward, inspiring, and spoke of God's will and our
obligation to resist evil. But, to be honest, I'm a little rattled:
For every high-flying flag, there's someone who wants to make this
"tragedy" and "crisis" into the usual masturbatory
grief wallow of empty Clintobabble — "healing," "closure,"
and all the other guff. This stuff is far craftier than old-style
pacifism or open anti-Americanism, and after a decade of self-indulgence
it reaches deep into the American psyche. Its grip on churches and
schools is particularly grim: Every part of the country has an example
— the vice-provost at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn.,
who banned American flags "so non-Americans students would
not feel uncomfortable"; the Boca Raton company and Texas grade-school
that did the same thing for the same reason. This is what brought
us to Tuesday morning: the western world's 30-year campaign of self-denigration,
culminating in its ludicrous determination to apologize for Western
Civilization to the massed ranks of gangsters and dictators (supported
as always by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the Republic
of Himself) at Durban, a week before the massacres. This is the
start of a long war, with civilians in the front line. We will never
win it if we are ashamed of ourselves, our culture, our history.
That's why
I thank the queen, a non-American but, pace the vice-provost of
Lehigh University, not one who's uncomfortable with the emblems
of the great republic that overthrew her forebear. And so at St.
Paul's — symbol of British resistance during the Blitz —
she sang the words written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 on the last
occasion the Eastern Seaboard came under sustained bombardment —
by the ships of the Royal Navy. Her Majesty gets it. I wish, back
in America, my pastor, the high-school teachers, school boards,
and vice-provosts did.
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