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 etter tread carefully
here. I am starting to get a reputation as the wet blanket of NRO
— the guy who believes we are doomed, doomed, and that the
current war effort will fizzle out with nothing much accomplished
but a change of government in Afghanistan. A change, that is to
say, from a gang of cutthroats who thought America was the Great
Satan to a gang of cutthroats who perceive us as being more of a
Great ATM. My assertion last Thursday that "democracy is no
match for terrorism" didn't help. Am I on board with this war,
or not?, readers are asking. Who gave me permission to sickly o'er
the native hue of resolution with the pale cast of thought? What
kind of lily-livered chattering-teeth party pooper am I?
It is, of course,
bad form to express doubt about the nation's determination to see
this through. But see, that's why NRO has me on the payroll. When
the site needs to be garlicked up a bit with a dash of bad form,
bad taste, or bad attitude — send for Derb! So here I go, telling
you something else you most likely don't want to hear.
Let's start
with my colleague Victor
Davis Hanson on last Friday's NRO. Victor makes the case that
September 11 triggered a sea change in American attitudes —
in the attitudes of the large general public — towards that
complex of ideas that goes under headings like "political correctness,"
"multiculturalism," and so on. People (says Victor) just
aren't going to swallow that stuff any more. Ordinary Americans
now know that: "Regimes that are autocratic and theocratic...
are not merely different, but murderous." Prior to September
11 we were in a posture of cultural cringe towards the older, wiser
and more worldy nations of Europe; we now know that "our allies,
though they sometimes mean well, remain continually weak."
We used to genuflect to those love-the-world do-gooders at the U.N.,
the Hague, Geneva, Kyoto... Now we know they are just a bunch of
gassy hypocrites. The whole silly business of educating kids in
multiculturalism was, says Victor, "based on romance, ignorance
and isolation" — on the cosmetic prettying-up of cultures
where human life, and especially female human life, was in fact
nasty, brutish, short, and cheap. But the American public, he claims,
will be no more deceived. September 11 woke us up.
Now, if you've
read much of my stuff, you know how desperately I want this all
to be true. I yield to no one in my loathing of the whole p.c.-multiculti-"diversity"
racket, and have said so many times. I think Western Civilization
is the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas, far superior to any other,
and that the Anglo-Saxon model of that civilization, as developed
across the four or five centuries of the modern age, is its apotheosis.
I favor a strong assimilationist ethic for newcomers to America,
reinforced in the public schools, with periodic moratoriums on immigration
to help assimilation along — the next moratorium being long
overdue.
So I'm with
Victor in what he's wishing for. It is, however, a well-known fact
that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So here's the question:
Is Victor right? When the Twin Towers fell that terrible day, did
the scales fall from America's eyes along with them? Is it really
the case that:
All is changed,
changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
(There should
be a question mark here somewhere, but I'm not going to mess with
William Butler Yeats.) Let's take a look and see if we can plot
a graph.
 I
was reading Victor's piece for the second time — I'm a huge
Hanson fan — in the Saturday New York Post, which printed
it as an op-ed essay, when one of my neighbors phoned. What, she
asked, is the Chinese for "one hundred"? I told her, and
then asked her why she wanted to know. "Oh, next week is Multicultural
Week at the school, and the kids have to find out how different
cultures say things." Later I asked Rosie, who keeps track
of school affairs, if she knew about this. Yes, she said, it's a
regular thing at the school.
This
is also, of course, Black History Month, when the kids, having just
had a full week of Martin Luther King, get a full month of Harriet
Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. The first two are
names only to me; but I read Douglass's book as part of my own personal
Americanization program, and thought it, and him, very admirable.
If Tubman and Truth were of that same caliber, then certainly these
are people I'd want my kids to know about. At least they're all
American. My little angels, however, are in first and third
grade; and at this point in their academic careers, I can, without
trying very hard, think of at least 100 names that, in my opinion,
it's more important for them to get acquainted with, let alone have
an entire month devoted to.
One
of the guests on O'Reilly's show last week was a New York City schoolteacher,
a sane and well-spoken person, as far as one could judge, who has
been suspended from classroom duties and may be fired because she
told her class that the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks
were Arabs.
Norman
Mineta, who is on record as believing that if we practice ethnic
profiling, we are "no different than [sic] the despicable terrorists
who rained such hatred on our people," remains Secretary of
Transportation. Which means, among other things, that if the president,
vice president and twelve other congressional and Cabinet officials
should be wiped out, Underperformin' Norman becomes the acting chief
executive of the United States of America. Think about that
in the dark watches of the night!
You see where
I'm going with this. No, I'm not against the war. I'd cheerfully
go fight the shining-eyed ululating little bastards myself, if there
was any place in the ranks for a middle-aged out-of-condition bookworm
with flat feet and corrective lenses. Yes, I'd cheer along with
Victor if I thought the hate-America bedwetters had been routed
from our schools, colleges, law schools, governments, media, courts,
lobbies, churches... The question is: Have they?
Is it now much
more difficult for a young man from Egypt or Saudi Arabia to enter
the U.S.A.? Is it really? Are this nation's borders far more secure
now than they were five months ago? Are they? Is the federal government
engaged in an all-out no-expense-spared effort to track down and
deport illegal immigrants? (Starting with the 115,000 illegals who,
according to the Census Bureau, come from the Middle East. And,
come to think of it, including legal immigrants who are found
to have criminal records, unsavory connections, or opinions that
Americans are no longer willing to tolerate among guests in this
country.) Is it? Do Hollywood airheads now think twice before making
their vapid anti-American "thoughts" known to their adoring
fans? Do they? Shall I see, the next time I go to Rockefeller Center,
that sign directing citizens to the passport office in English and
Spanish replaced by a sign printed in English only? Shall
I?
Have the pests
who clamor for portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
and other great Americans to be taken down from municipal offices
crawled away to sulk in their rat-holes? Have they? Will the next
college brochure I see not contain that weasely text asserting
that while the school does absolutely not, no not ever! discriminate
in any way, shape, or form against anybody at all on the basis of
race, gender, disability, orientation, etc., etc., they are nonetheless
most especially anxious to hear from minority applicants?
Will it? Are our defense labs going to stop assigning highly sensitive
research projects to people known to have personal connections in
unfriendly countries? Are they? The next time a gang of man-hating
feminist ideologues decides to trash an old, proud, tradition-encrusted
military school, will the Supreme Court not say: "Go
ahead, girls! Hey, break a few windows for us while you're down
there! It's all on Uncle Sam!" Will it? Look, I'm only asking.
Back in the
late 1980s, there was a judge in New York City named Bruce Wright,
known to all as "Turn 'Em Loose Bruce" for his lenience
towards the criminals who came up before him. This was one of those
liberal judges who had an excuse for every felon, even for those
too stupid or obstreperous to have prepared an excuse for themselves.
Well, one day Judge Wright got mugged in the street near his home.
He was off work for a few days. It was a big story in the tabloid
newspapers, and a lot of people were making jokes about it. When
Judge Wright returned to the bench, he made a point of starting
off that day's session with an announcement: "As I'm sure you
all know, I was the victim of a criminal assault the other day.
I want to make it clear that this experience will in no way change
my sentencing policies on this bench!" As he paused to let
this sink in, someone called out from the back of the courtroom:
"Mug him again!"
The atrocious
mugging America got on September 11 should have woken us from our
opium-dreams of multiculturalism, historical guilt, and national
self-abasement. Did it, though? Vic Hanson thinks so, and I hope
with all my heart that he is right. God forbid we need to be mugged
again to bring us fully to our senses. God forbid! ... Yet still,
I can't help but wonder.
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