Meandering through the headlines this morning, I had the vague feeling every itsy-bitsy item was part of the same story. I started with Kathryn’s link to the Virginia school that’s banned tag because of its “intense aggression“.
Oooo-kay. If tag is too intensely aggressive for children, what kind of grown-ups do you wind up with? Well, maybe the kind Andy McCarthy talks about here:
We, on the contrary, are an odd combination of diffidence, self-loathing, and arrogance: doubtful we are worth the trouble to defend; apt to figure that if people hate us, we must deserve it; and sure that it is within our power to satisfy their grievances — even though we didn’t cause them — by dialogue, political processes, sensitivity-training, and, of course, buying them off — which simply confirms them in their suspicion that we don’t have the stomach for the fight.
For a specific example of that, see a cringe-making TV appearance by my old boss at The Chicago Sun-Times, John Cruickshank, now the big cheese at CBC News in Canada. John posits a sophisticated equivalence between Muslim “extremists” (ie, people who threaten to, and actually do, kill you) and “extremists” who are “intolerant of any restrictions on speech rights” (ie, people who point out there are fellows who want to kill you). As one female pundit comments: “I would not want to have this guy defend me in a bar.”
But then guys aren’t really expected to defend gals in bars any more, are they? And, speaking of defenseless women, if you want the whole magilla – the west’s over-investment in its own illusions – in one bleak little news item, consider this story from the BBC:
An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.