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Thursday, January 5 2006
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I defy anyone to find anything in a modern newspaper as bracing or blunt – or as long, for that matter – as this much-discussed Mark Steyn piece on the decline of the West. I’ve felt the same things for the last few years, and it’s not out of some grim censorious distaste for eyebrow rings and wardrobe malfunctions. I do not worry about libertinism. I worry about libertines who think the greatest threat to the imminent Utopia is a Wal-Mart exec who refuses to stock a CD because the lyrics celebrate shooting cops in the head, or who think that uptight repressed Christers are six inches and five days away from replacing the Constitution with the plot of “A Handmaiden’s Tale.” The people who make a religion of environmentalism (I read “State of Fear” over the vacation break, and I can see why it horrified so many; it simply wasn’t helpful. While I don’t doubt that Crichton votes Dem – I just have a feeling – it was cruel & delightful fun to read a novel where George Soros Sees The Light, and Ted Danson is eaten by cannibals), the people who consider themselves enlightened but believe all sorts of pseudo-scientific nonsense (no pesticides for us! We only eat vegetables nutured by donkey offal), the people who regard the entire modern world as a giant horrid Cancer Machine designed by callous top-hatted industrialists. My father is 80 years old, healthy as an ox, Zorba-strong, and he’s been breathing petroleum fumes since 1952. They see threats and perils everywhere except where there are, you know, threats and perils.
If the Islamists were Christians, they’d be motivated. That threat they understand, because that threat sounds like Mom and Dad, and they would dimly comprehend that the threat to their liberties – their civilization, for that matter – is sorta like grounding and loss of TV privileges. But as Steyn points out, “multiculturalism” is utterly flummoxed by monocultural Islamists; it has no arguments against it, and appeals to some gaseous modern conception of “European” values evaporate upon contact with the hot implacable nature of the up-and-coming culture.
The telling line in Steyn's piece quotes that fine Gaul Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." I’ve read a lot of Revel; a great man and a profound, clear thinker. Lucky for him, he is old, and will not see his fears made manifest. Guilt is a problem, but it’s not the entire enchilada. It’s guilt married to a peculiar belief that Western Civilization is unique only in its sins. The only thing Western Civ really gave the world was slavery, imperialism, war, and capitalism; the fact that we have eliminated or diminished or abbreviated those sins is due not to anything inherent in Western Civ but some overarching, free-floating Enlightenment unmoored from the cultures that produced it. The world began in 1968, and owes nothing to what came before; if we wish to combat the regrettable enthusiasms of some other cultures whose animus appears religious, we should deconsecrate the cathedrals in order to set an example and light the way. Religion is the enemy to the transnational progressives, because religion holds up laws and codes and rules the wise burghers of Belgium cannot amend.
So you have Swedish clothing designers putting a tag on hot jeans with a skull and an inverted cross, with the express intention of pointing out the “evil” of Christianity. "It is an active statement against Christianity," Bjorn Atldax told The Associated Press. "I'm not a Satanist myself, but I have a great dislike for organized religion."Atldax insists he has a purpose beyond selling denim: to make young people question Christianity, which he called a "force of evil" that had sparked wars throughout history.
It goes without saying that selling anti-Christian iconography to European fashionistas is a brave an act as reducing the food pellet allotment to your pet hamster; a true act of bravery would be yanking the dead wildebeest out of a lion’s mouth. Or selling jeans that have the international cross-and-bar NO symbol over the crescent of Islam. They don’t dare do that – partly because they are deeply suffused in the very racism they decry, and regard the inhabitants of their tall dead Corbu-inspired concrete ghettos as brown rabble beneath contempt and therefore irrelevant to relevant discussion, and partly because they have a nagging fear of editorials, hate-speech laws, tut-tuts from the thinking class, and the occasional unhinged fellow with a knife. But Christianity? Didn’t that die in a muddy hole in Ypres?
I know, I know: I am a hopeless reactionary. I believe in judging a culture on the liberties and prosperity it affords to its people. I believe that the West is an anomaly in human history, and that it is a rare thing to have what we have: information without boundaries, freedom unimagined by those who have gone before, women’s equality instead of the black Hefty-trash-bag dress, respect for gays instead of death-by-stone-walls, and all the other remarkable accomplishments like space probes and plumbing and overnight delivery of Omaha Steaks (track the UPS code in your browser, if you wish.) But it didn’t just happen. As Felix Under said to Oscar Madison: you have to make gravy. It doesn’t just come.
So maybe the virtues outweigh the flaws. Maybe the enemies of Today, so fastened on the utopia of Tomorrow, ought to stop insisting that Yesterday is naught but a long black smear we must disown and disparage. But that would require them to understand what Yesterday was really like, and that sort of retrospection eludes many. I heard an interview tonight with a professor of Constitutional Law who thought that Bush’s lies about the Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection was an impeachable offense. Apparently the 90s never happened; Yesterday began on 9/12, when people were upset about something or other, and acted rashly for peculiar reasons. Ever since then we’ve been piddling ourselves over imagined threats, when the real threats to our freedom are quite clear.
Wal-Mart, for example, probably won’t stock the Swedish jeans. I think that says it all.
(perm link.)
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Wednesday, January 4 2006
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Another year gone by. Three hundred and sixty five days - yet it seemed like a scant 52 weeks. Perhaps it was that extra second added on January First; threw everyone’s internal clocks off. But before the year yields to its inevitable successor, let us look back at the notable moments of 2006. Yes, 2006. Tomorrow’s news, today!
The spy stories continued to add up, as it became increasingly obvious that the Administration was boosting employment statistics by hiring hundreds of thousands of people to read every text-message sent by cell phones. “It’s dull, useless, meaningless work,” said one official, “but as long as it detracts from the search for terror suspects and needlessly intrudes on the right of 14 year old to send inscrutable, abbreviated rants about their parents without fear of detection by indifferent authorities looking for terror warnings, we’re all for it.”
The Supreme Court banned no-knock searches in Mosul; Congress passed legislation requiring US Spec-Ops troops to give up night-vision gear, and wear squeaky shoes, and speak in stage whispers.
The New York Times, fresh from reporting the self-destruct codes for the American spy satellites that had inadvertently listened into fifteen pay-per-view porn orders from cable subscribers in Omaha, revealed that US subs have been violating Chinese territorial waters to monitor military communications. The Times named the boat, the captain, his home address, and posted his credit report online. The boat was never heard from again, and was presumed sunk. Outrage was swift – but only when the Justice Department demanded the names of the people who’d leaked the secret information. “Not content with destroying the Fourth Amendment, this administration seems intent on demolishing the First,” said one legal expert who appeared on CNN but declined to give his name, fearing reprisals. (His name was later leaked to the Times, which printed it, but declined to name its sources.)
Chastened, The Administration begged the Times to put all its classified leaks in the “Times Select” online subscription-only service, guaranteeing no one will read them.
Valerie Plame signed a six-year contract with Cover Girl.
Judge Samuel Alito was confirmed, just in time to cast the deciding vote outlawing parental notification for partial flag-burning.
Saddam was convicted and sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. While awaiting execution he published several children’s books – including “Goodnight Moon and Your Entire Accursed Family as Well” – and this resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize nomination and the solemn, creased-brow support of several Hollywood celebrities. George Clooney announced he would appear in a Saddam biopic,
The US resumed talks with North Korea, which were constantly interrupted by phone calls from someone named “Iran” who wanted technical advice. The North Korean diplomat explained it was his mother; she had a new, uh, computer. Yes that’s it, a computer. Ha ha! You know how old folks are. The simplest things, like email or web browsing or inputting flight coordinates to ensure the airburst doesn’t occur prior to target, and they’re completely at sea. Now where were we?
Midterm elections went better than expected for the Republicans. The Democrats ran on the platform of “We’re not saying what we’d do with a majority, but it rhymes with Imbleach. Other than that, whatever. ” Republicans run on the platform of “Warrant? I got your warrant right here.” For the first time they sweep both New York and New Jersey. Despite the victory, Democrats were successful in blocking ANWAR drilling forever, insisting that the answer to shortages isn’t finding a new resource to tap, it’s reducing consumption.
Later that year, House Democrats moved to tax email instead of cutting the Federal budget.
Zarqawi realized that the campaign of blowing up the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis was not exactly winning over the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis, and decides to try politics, running for City Commissioner in Baghdad. His campaign slogan – “Perhaps We Got Off On the Wrong Foot” – does not prove successful; disillusioned by failure, he signs on with Al-Jazeera to produce a reality show, where six hopefuls compete to see who will be a suicide bomber. “You’re wired!” he says to the winner.
In the biggest sign of hope for the region yet, the show is a flop.
(perm link.)
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