Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Belmont Club: Restarting The Clock
The Belmont Club discusses the new epoch, the attack of September 11, 2001, and how it has forced us to declare our values, to consider "will I fight this enemy?", and the left's refusal to answer that bell in favor of supporting that enemy:
I too welcome the conflict between left and right over the War on Terror because it separates the wheat from the chaff, those who want to preserve our way of life versus those who have devalued it so far that to them it doesn't seem worth defending. The towers falling in New York were no more real to them than those falling at the end of Fight Club, that is until Dubya declared war on a very real enemy and put reality on the table for all to face. Today's Bush-hating left feigns superiority and blames him for everything they can think of, but that's all they have. They don't even appreciate the threat, let alone present a solution, mistaking the momentary satisfaction of hurling an epithet for the real courage required to confront the enemy where he lives. That they leave for the truly brave.
Read it all; it's the Belmont Club.
One unintended effect of the September 11 attacks is that it put a defining question to different modes of American political consciousness. Until then it was possible to treat many ideologies respectable since the 1960s as harmless forms of conoclasm, posing "provocative" but fundamentally hypothetical views. But when attacks on the US homeland made it categorically necessary to answer the question: 'are you willing to fight our assailants', many sincere ideologues paused, shook their heads and said: 'No. In fact I am morally obligated to help our assailants'. When Noam Chomsky went out of his way to support Hezbollah it wasn't inexplicable, it was logical. His long articulated hypotheticals have simply become actuals.
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Until September 11 it was possible for the more "enlightened" segments of society to regard patriotism, religion and similar sentiments with the kind of amused tolerance that one might reserve for simpletons. Nothing that a little institutionalization and spare change couldn't straighten out. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Great Polite Silence is over. People like Chomsky and President Bush have stopped being hypothetical and become all too real. Bring it on.
I too welcome the conflict between left and right over the War on Terror because it separates the wheat from the chaff, those who want to preserve our way of life versus those who have devalued it so far that to them it doesn't seem worth defending. The towers falling in New York were no more real to them than those falling at the end of Fight Club, that is until Dubya declared war on a very real enemy and put reality on the table for all to face. Today's Bush-hating left feigns superiority and blames him for everything they can think of, but that's all they have. They don't even appreciate the threat, let alone present a solution, mistaking the momentary satisfaction of hurling an epithet for the real courage required to confront the enemy where he lives. That they leave for the truly brave.
Read it all; it's the Belmont Club.
