Given the way Bill Whittle’s extraordinary “Silent America” essays saved me from isolation and despair years ago, it should have come as no surprise that a series of new videos from Bill was the first thing that gave me any reason for hope after the re-election of Barack Obama in November. More than that even, Bill’s words and ideas in these videos made me feel unexpectedly energized about the prospect of a way forward. Watching them is no small time commitment, but neither is saving our beloved USA, and I can vouch for the fact that Bill doesn’t disappoint. His sober but undaunted thinking seems like exactly what we need now.
I started with “A New Beginning…”, the November 7, 2012 episode of Bill’s semi-regular video podcast, “The Stratosphere Lounge”. In it, Bill advances a big-picture idea that looks beyond the process of politics-as-usual that has repeatedly failed us, to postulate a tectonic cultural shift that may now be possible: American citizens voluntarily contributing to the building of parellel private-sector institutions that will put their sclerotic, unsustainable government counterparts to shame by the comparison of results they produce. There’s more to it than that, and Bill explains and motivates his idea in much greater depth than I can hope to effectively summarize, so by all means give this a watch if you can.
Bill’s thinking seems to me to contain echoes of Virginia Postrel’s “Dynamism”, with a key idea being emphasis of decentralized, voluntary initiative in diverse and numerous laboratories of innovation over attempting to shape the future through rigid central planning.
The book Bill mentions in this video, “The Starfish and the Spider”, is available on Amazon, by the way.
If you might only find time to watch one of these videos, I’d probably suggest starting with “Where do we go now?”, Bill’s talk at the November 12, 2012 Hancock Park Patriots meeting, which is followed by an unmissable Q&A session (OK, OK, that makes two videos) in which Bill demonstrates how an effective President of the United States would handle key issues and address a press corps that actually did its job and asked tough questions:
As I remarked and quasi-summarized in my Twitter timeline after watching “A New Beginning”:
Bill’s is a big dream, but dammit, everything worth having in this country was built by people who dreamed big. It can be done!
Focusing only on the next election is the trap we keep falling into; it’s how we keep losing ground. It’s the best our opponents can hope for. Progressives/Alinskyites have a long-term plan that has changed the culture over decades. That’s the game we need to play, but there’s more…
Our existing cultural institutions — education, entertainment, space exploration — are lost. They are tied to a sinking Leviathan of a state. Our only hope is to build voluntary parallel institutions that outshine them, that will show by comparison what miserable failures they are.
The good news: Culture leads; government only very slowly reacts and follows and struggles clumsily to adapt.
Our present centralized government is born of the Industrial Revolution, a by-gone age. It’s unlikely to survive the next big paradigm shift. It’s ossified, rigid, slow-moving, and economically unsustainable. The future requires dynamism, adaptability, decentralization.
Progressivism’s idea of “Forward” is the dinosaur in the room. It’s rigid, coercive, glued to theory that doesn’t flex when reality defies it. Think of all the technological revolutions that have blindsided us in our lifetimes, that few saw coming, and the impact they’ve had. Things we’re incapable of planning for end up mattering the most. Progress is what happens while Progressives are busy making other plans.
Anticipating what might be the next wave is hard enough. Trying to engineer a rigidly defined future is a losing battle. Dynamism wins.
So many genuinely smart people know just enough to think they can engineer the world. If engineering has taught me anything, it’s humility. Solvable problems have to be very tightly constrained, conditions for solving them clearly defined. Reality can ruin your whole day.
We know what doesn’t work, or works clumsily at best and seems doomed to collapse under its own weight and inertia, but what’s the alternative? What are the practical mechanics of a way out? Building parallel private-sector institutions whose success puts their government rivals to shame.
The crux of Bill’s idea: Pay your taxes. Write that off as gone, lost. Forget it. Budget some of what’s left to help build something better.
It’s a grand and vague idea in some respects, but I do believe with the right approach this can work. Government can’t compete with private sector dynamism.
I stand by that assessment, and I have hope we’ll find that some variant of Bill’s ideas on this will provide a real and achievable way out. If you yearn to reclaim our future as I do, by all means please give Bill’s latest work a hearing.
In reflecting on the untimely loss of Andrew Breitbart, it occurred to me that I should finally get around to reading Righteous Indignation, Andrew’s last book-form message (though I’m sure he didn’t expect or intend it to be his last) to those of us who’ve found that the same things that ate at him day and night, through the nonstop news cycle, keep us awake at night and worrying for our culture too.
Breitbart’s message, and the story of his pioneering work from the early days of Internet news reporting to the present, are inspirational. But at the moment, something else has really seized my attention. Barely two chapters in, I’ve found myself rather floored by an unexpected number of similarities between Andrew’s adolescence and my own: Andrew grew up in Brentwood; I grew up in West L.A., a stone’s throw away. He’s only a couple of years my senior, so we were there at about the same time, and experienced the same culture. We both started out as “default liberals”, vaguely motivated by a similar, culturally cultivated (and reinforced by the friends we had) mis-perception that the political Right was all about being stodgy old mean meanies who aspire to tell other people what to do. (Andrew cited his “natural disdain for the religious right, which had been the ultimate 1980s-era bogeyman”. Funny, we must have been informed by the same media narrative.) Later in life, we each came into contact with new ideas, began educating and informing ourselves without really having the benefit of guidance from (nor the company of) similarly inclined peers, and as a result moved first to libertarian, then to libertarian/“conservative” positions, only to find ourselves relatively alone in our cultural surroundings. We were both fortunate to have incredibly generous and patient parents who let us find our own paths, hanging in there even when we must have seemed all but hopelessly lost in our wanderings in search of self. My family was down-to-earth in a not-so-down-to-earth town. We largely took simple road-trip vacations. I knew Dad had voted for Reagan, but we almost never discussed politics at the dinner table. Same for Andrew on all counts. Andrew waited tables for a time; I earned my spending money working for caterers. We listened to some of the same music. We both spent time in Westwood. Both were frequent and enthusiastic movie-goers who, later in life, would become disillusioned and estranged by Hollywood’s growing cynicism, anti-Americanism, and political left turn. After college, Andrew worked for a movie production company up until the disillusionment hit him. Before college, I’d had thoughts about going into movie production (special effects for futuristic sci-fi movies were of particular interest to me), but now, years later, I’m glad that I didn’t attempt to make my career in a culture that’s become so deeply hostile to my kind. Some of the other places I’ve been have been unfriendly enough as it is.
Hell, Andrew’s family rented their motor home to John Ritter. Why, a close friend of mine used to babysit for John Ritter!
Can’t avoid saying it: Small world.
There are, of course, also plenty of differences between our early paths in life. Andrew’s college experience, which he describes as drinking his way aimlessly through Tulane and surrounding New Orleans for four years, wasn’t much at all like my own. After nearly dropping out of L.A. public high school because I hated it so damn much, then spending four years alternately working, taking UCLA Extension night classes, and doing some self-teaching in the UCLA physics library, I went to college late, but with a focus, drive, and sense of purpose that many of my classmates lacked. Where Andrew chose, under duress at the 11th hour and for lack of a more compelling option, to major in American Studies, I set out to major in physics from day one, and did everything I could to avoid distractions from my physics and supporting math work, taking courses in other departments only when required, or because I needed some less demanding classes to balance the science-work-heavy course load to which I wanted to devote my best efforts. With few exceptions, I did everything but party while I was in school. (I confess to spending some of my parents’ hard-earned tuition dollars taking a West African drumming class. I couldn’t help it. It was the lure of the Feynman mystique.)
Andrew’s awakening and the beginnings of his transformation began much earlier. Compared to him, I’ve been an embarrassingly slow learner. I lived my adolescence pretty oblivious to anything beyond the mainstream narrative that surrounded me (Democrats good, Republicans bad, though I did like that optimistic Reagan fellow, and assumed that everyone else really, at the end of the day, surely must like him and believe in America the way he did, too). A visit to a gloomy Czechoslovakia in 1985, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, made strong impressions on me, but I never imagined that the inherent evil of Communism was in any doubt at all to my fellow Americans. We all knew too much about the totalitarian abuses, mediocrity, shortages, and twisted, humanity-crushing culture of fear and suspicion and nonsense it produced, right?
College was where the cognitive dissonance, and perception of a world gone wrong, really began to set in for me. Focused as my coursework was on hard science, I didn’t experience the nihilism of the contemporary humanities mindset at full strength as Andrew did (thankfully), but I saw enough going on around me to begin taking notice — from pedantic PC multicultural pandering and genuflection that, while at times eyeroll-inducing, seemed more or less harmless at first, to the totem pole of designated victim groups, to a classmate in the thrall of an absurd “post-modern” anti-rationalist philosophy that denied the existence of any objective knowledge and wrote off the entirety of scientific achievement through the ages as a “social construct” of “white European males” that we had designed, you know, to help us oppress women and minorities, to the banner celebrating Cuban communist thug Che Guevara on my girlfriend’s roommate’s wall. I began to ask myself: What the … ? How did this happen? I had been sleeping.
The funny thing is, I remember very distinctly having this feeling walking home from elementary school one day (that’s “grade school” to most of the world outside of L.A., I’ve gathered): I remember thinking about how I didn’t much like subjects such as history, that demanded lots of burdensome memorization. I preferred to stick to topics like math, where one could reason out the answers from a few logical and easily memorized foundational principles instead of having to labor to commit a great deal of loosely relatable knowledge to rote memory. And I remember being perfectly aware, even as I had the thought, that deciding to avoid the study of history to satisfy such mental laziness was not a winning proposition, for that was how we would surely end up repeating the same mistakes. I knew that worse stuff had come before, and was still happening in the world outside the bubble of freedom and prosperity that I lived in, and that by having that kind of thought I was taking the America I was so lucky to inhabit for granted and might well regret it someday. But I also assumed a sort of “end of history” future, where Freedom would of course prevail and, inexorably, expand and spread its light in dark corners to liberate more and more people across the globe. I didn’t expect life to actually call me on my lack of studious appreciation. If anyone then had tried to forewarn me of the battle I’d end up fighting as an adult — for, as Andrew described it, the “soul” of my culture — I’d have laughed them off as plainly insane. Fears of nuclear armaggeddon aside, none of the culture I took for granted seemed to be fundamentally in jeopardy.
It was only after college that I really started to move, gradually, to the right of center. I knew something was wrong with the cultural self-recrimination and cynical attitudes I had encountered, but I had no awareness of similar thinking outside my own until after 9/11, when I eventually (not until a couple of years after 9/11, if I recall correctly) stumbled upon Instapundit and, through Glenn’s blog, The Drudge Report, Steven Den Beste’s “USS Clueless”, Bill Whittle’s incomparable “Eject! Eject! Eject!”, and other center-right sites and blogs. Excepting the Paul Harvey morning broadcast that my Dad and I had always found amusing while waiting in our parked car for my school bus to pick me up when I was 13 or 14, I had no awareness of talk radio until I started listening to the Instapundit and Pajamas Media podcasts sometime around 2006, I think — eventually learning about Breitbart and what he was doing as part of that. As I said: slow learner.
None of this should be construed in any way as delusions of Breitbartian grandeur. Like the thousands of kindred spirits he so inspired that they enthusiastically declared “#IAmAndrewBreitbart” in Andrew’s defense, when the news of his passing brought forth torrents of Breitbart-hating Twiter vitriol of the very sort that Andrew was known for gleefully retweeting, I feel humbled by his achievements and moral courage — a courage to enter the fray for the sake of what matters, vilification by his bitter detractors be damned, that I can only hope and aspire to find and cultivate in myself. Yet I also feel struck by the notion that, but for the tweaking of a few details here and there, it’s not all that far fetched to imagine that each of us could easily have ended up going down the other’s path, living the other’s life. Maybe that’s overstating it. But I’m feeling a more personal connection to the man’s life and experiences than I was expecting to, and it’s caught me a little off guard, and made me deeply sorry that I didn’t have the chance to meet Andrew and get to know him that others did. What I knew of Andrew through his work had me intrigued and inspired me as it was. Now I fully expect to be glued to this book for a stop-for-nothing straight-through read.
I think what hurt these magazines [(Time and Newsweek)] is Reagan. Because when Reagan was elected and did well, all of these journalists went nuts. Now Hugh Sidey used to write a very pro-Reagan column for Time. … And the idea that you would have a thoughtful, kind of middle-of-the-road wise man journalist writing a column for any one of these magazines that was not knee-jerk partisanship is … literally inconceivable. They all decided with Reagan that they needed, now … their job was to try to reform the electorate. And you could see it. You could see it in the collapse of the big media titles when they tried to reform the electorate, to try to teach you a lesson: You voted wrong. That … the electorate just kind of turned them off and people stopped reading. They stopped reading those magazines. They stopped reading the newspaper when the newspaper became homework … for your soul … instead of: telling me what happened in my neighborhood today.
On journalism then vs. now:
These were Ivy League weeklies … Newsweek and Time are staffed entirely by Harvard and Yale students. But they didn’t have the sense of trying to tell you … why you were wrong, and why you were stupid … the advocacy journalism which came up … really, began in the 70s, but I think really hit its stride in the 80s under Reagan. This idea that you need to be corrected. And the people reading this thought, “Well, I don’t really need to be corrected.” And then you saw the magazines as they desperately tried to come up with something else — was it more show business, more lifestyle stuff, more trend pieces. They tried to do everything they could, because they couldn’t report the news, because it was too obvious what they were trying to do. You look at a paper like the L.A. Times — the L.A. Times is … the dead twin of the New York Times. The New York Times succeeds because it has fantastic feature sections, right? The New York Times succeeds because on Thursdays about style, Wednesdays about food … and Fridays about escapes. It has these great sections that people want to read, despite the front section. And they’ve done that very successfully. But everyone else … they forget the Hugh Sidey model, which is just … everything doesn’t have to be corrective of Conservatives.
…
The mainstream just wants to know what’s going on in the world, and doesn’t need to be told, over and over again, that Conservatives are bad, and that Liberals are good. They just … they don’t believe it, so it seems like a comic book to them.
As Glenn would rightly advise: Listen to the whole thing!
I’m reminded of an older man I once met, whose eyes beamed with pride on relating to me that his son had gone into journalism “to change the world”. I smiled and said nothing, not wanting to rob this nice fellow I barely knew of a notion that was clearly a source of great happiness to him, but in my head I had to wonder: Did his son choose the right career for that? And: what are the implications of conflating the business of reporting facts with the pursuit of advocacy journalism?
Not to be missed: Bill Whittle’s latest and greatest Firewall. Everything you wanted to know about those mean, nasty, evil, really not very nice Republikkkans, but were afraid to ask:
Following are links to some of the most stirring writing I’ve seen today. I’ll continue adding to this list as I go.
Never forget. Never submit.
This YouTube video should make every decent person sick: Counter-demonstrators forced to disperse, while Islamic Supremacists holding signs that call for “Jihad” and declaring “Islam Will Dominate the World” freely spew their rage and burn our flag outside the U.S. embassy in London on 9/11/2011:
All I could remember was how happy Joe always was and how that cheer was infectious to all of his friends and colleagues. I would miss that cheerful influence on me. Joe had made the choice to live life to the fullest extent possible. He was the model of the optimistic American who knows no frontiers and no bounds. He was doing more than his fair share of contributing to a better society.
And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day.
In past years, I’ve written about where I was on 9/11, posted quotes, written about songs, tweeted the names of victims, and recommended blog posts, articles, and videos. But on nearly every anniversary of the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks since I started blogging, the unifying issue on my mind has been nearly the same: To assess where we are and how we are faring some years after.
Reviewing what I’ve written in years past, I find that my answer to that question has changed very little, and the farther we get from that awful day the more that fact worries me, for despite having successfully thwarted at least 19 subsequent would-be attacks, I don’t think we’re faring very well as a culture, in crucial ways that for me raise serious questions about what our long-term future will hold.
I try not to let the gloom envelop me. In so many ways, I am an optimist in my heart of hearts. I have tremendous confidence in our culture and way of life, in our resilience and adaptability, and in all that we can achieve with our ingenuity and dedication and mutual goodwill. Yet it kills me to see that same culture mired in and hobbled by an unwarranted mentality of self-recrimination and self-doubt, and simultaneously unwilling to candidly examine and confront an ideological movement that is actively, deeply, vocally, immutably, and demonstratedly hostile to its foundational principles and continued existence.
What does it mean to live in a culture that is only just barely willing to stand up and fight for itself in the wake of a horrific act of war such as the 9/11 attacks? I would not have thought our present-day frame of mind possible to sustain after such an event, but the cultural and political divisions that predated 9/11 have proven far more resilient than I would ever have expected. We didn’t wake from our slumber of infighting to pursue, united and with doggedly committed determination, the defense and preservation our nation and way of life; rather, we retrenched and resumed fighting each other, our cultural fault lines painfully underscored in the process. As Michele Catalano wrote three years ago,
In so many ways, 9/11 ended up furthering any divisions we had instead of closing them. We chose up sides and backed away from each other as if we were our own enemies —- as if the enemies we had, those who steered planes into buildings, weren’t enough.
This realization, and the seeming impossibility of bridging the chasm, has been a knife in my heart ever since. It kills me. But I don’t see any way around it.
So many aspects of our cultural condition have caused me grief over the past ten years. I feel crestfallen that it is taking us as long as it has to rebuild at the World Trade Center site. I’ve felt deeply betrayed by a Hollywood that now routinely denigrates and vilifies the country whose values and achievements it once celebrated and defended, a Hollywood that I loved in my youth but have now all but written off and given up on. I have been deeply disappointed in a supposedly mainstream American press that seems to have seen it as its sworn duty to demoralize us and convince us of inevitable defeat and dishonor in the wars we’ve prosecuted, in a way that’s been shown to be transparently contingent on the political party of the President in the White House. I’m troubled that over the past three years, we’ve largely acted in ways that can only serve to embolden our enemies, while giving our friends and allies and those we should at least be lending moral support in their fight for freedom and against totalitarianism (c.f. Iran’s democracy activists, and other participants in the recent “Arab Spring” uprisings) scant reason to hope for the backing of a country that has for so long been thought of as a beacon of hope and the moral “leader of the free world”. It makes my heart sink that too many of our own citizens seem to believe that America is the problem in some form or other.
All of these cultural factors pain me and deeply trouble me, but on this 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I’m willing to largely put them aside in the interest of getting just one, crucial point across regarding the single most dangerous problem we face: the inability or unwillingness to name, frankly discuss, and squarely face our ideological enemy. More than anything else, it is a commitment to reckoning with this circumstance that needs to cross the perhaps otherwise impassable ideological chasm that separates the American Right and Left.
We can and will continue to differ with our countrymen regarding specific policy prescriptions, including matters of war. I could perhaps accept that, in a world where I felt we had all made a candid and fully informed assessment of the adversary we are up against. But there are still many among us who don’t seem to want to look Islamic Supremacism in the face, or even acknowledge its existence, either because the prospect is too frightening, or because the acknowledgment would violate long-practiced “PC” rules of cultural conduct that are so deeply ingrained in us, we fear we wouldn’t know how to function without blindly deferring to them. If I could make one plea to my fellow countrymen, Left, Right, and Center, it would be this: Please, please look with open eyes at what we are up against. Even if you must conclude that Islamic Supremacism is a fringe ideology with no real possibility of gaining dominance or causing substantial long-term harm to the free world (I truly wish I could believe it was so), do so with a full understanding and awareness of what the Jihadists intend for us, far-fetched or not, as detailed in their own words and actions: the return of a 7th century Caliphate that is fundamentally incompatible with and hostile to secular and pluralistic free societies, with all the attendant implications for women, homosexuals, infidels and religious and ethnic minorities. These Jihadists have told us their intentions time and time again, but we somehow refuse to believe them.
We are so conditioned to reflexively genuflect to any and every other culture as a show of goodwill, that both our critical thinking faculties, and our courage to overcome fear of social reprisals and voice our honest concerns, seem to have become disengaged or defunct. If every culture and religion in this world was as benign in its intentions toward us as most are, this willful blindness wouldn’t be a big problem. We could all live together in happy harmony and the “coexistence” that so many understandably wish for. But the fact that most others have relatively benign intentions has disarmed us to the crucial few that do not. Our cultural defenses are down — way down — and even being caught off our guard ten years ago with horrific consequences doesn’t seem to have changed that sufficiently. Informing and educating ourselves about what we’re up against is crucial, for we cannot expect to remain both ignorant and free.
Is this state of denial (or leaning strongly toward diplomatic use of language, if you prefer) causing any real problems? It certainly seems to be. How else could a man like Nidal Malik Hasan remain in active service in the United States Army, after repeatedly making statements against the United States and in sympathy with our Jihadist enemies? There are compelling and deeply troubling indications that not only our armed forces, but our broader defense and law enforcement agencies are compromised in their ability and sworn duty to protect this country and its citizens by pressure to whitewash reality, sanitize the use of language that could be perceived as hurtful or offensive, and shrink from confronting reality. We are letting organizations such as CAIR — a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose charter calls for a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions” — advise our FBI on how to combat violent Islamic radicalism.
Bill Whittle’s April 7, 2010 PJTV piece “The Censorship Agenda” revealed in worrisome detail the sanitizing of our foundational national security documents that has taken place since the original, bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report. (As Bill himself suggests, contrary to the provocative subtitle “Obama Bans ‘Islam’”, the culture of self-censorship and willful blindness that produced these results may very well be indicative of a long-extant problem that predates the Obama administration.)
Think about the implications of Bill’s findings: in stark contrast with the comparatively frank and sober assessment of the 9/11 Commission Report (whose use of key terms is tabulated in the leftmost column, below), the FBI’s 2008 Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon (next column), our 2009 National Intelligence Strategy report (next column), and the Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood report on the shooting rampage by Nidal Malik Hasan (rightmost column), use the terms “Islam”, “Muslim”, and “Jihad” a total of zero times.
Zero.
The National Intelligence Strategy report doesn’t even reference “al Qaeda” or use the word “enemy” (employing, instead, the term “violent extremist”, a total of 29 times). The DoD’s Fort Hood report, amazingly, makes no reference whatsoever to “violent extremism”, “Islam”, “Muslim”, “Jihad”, or even to Hasan’s name.
Think about this. Disregard, for the moment, our popular culture and variously informed conversation among Joes like you and me. How is it possible that the very institutions we charge with our defense — whose analyses one would expect, of necessity, to be unflinchingly sober and frank — have become this willfully blind?
I can only shake my head in near-despair at the self-sabotaging ridiculousness of it. It might be funny if the consequences weren’t so dire for all of us. (Bill, however, has a more upbeat outlook than I do this year.)
Forget about applying the non-lethal (but awfully emotionally insensitive) tool of humor by mocking our enemies, which appears to be completely out of the question save for a few valiant out-of-the-mainstream efforts such as Shire Network News and Sands of Passion. In most cases, we can’t even bring ourselves to precisely and candidly refer to them. If our thinking and definitions are clear, there should be no reason not to do so, given all that is at stake.
There is nothing insulting to decent, good members of the Muslim religion when I say “Islamic extremist terrorist”, any more than it is insulting to the Italian-American community (when I was a prosecutor) to say the word “Mafia”. Or that it would be insulting to decent Germans to say the word “Nazi”.
One mistake to avoid is political correctness. You can’t fight crime, and you can’t deter terrorism, if you are hobbled by political correctness. I believe that Major [Nidal] Hasan is an example of that. There is no way that Major Hasan should have been a major in the United States Army, after several years of spewing forth hatred for the United States of America… I would consider Major Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood an Islamic extremist terrorist attack. I have a hard time understanding why the government doesn’t see it that way, since he was yelling “Allahu Akbar” when he started killing people. …
… We cannot use this as an opportunity to say, “let’s put this behind us”, because if we we do that, we will repeat the mistake that we made before September 11th, which is not evaluating correctly the scope and the danger of Islamic extremist terrorism. Notice I use those words and I use them often. I do because I have a simple belief: If you can’t face your enemy, you can’t defeat your enemy. If you can’t honestly describe your enemy, there are distortions in your policy decisions as a result of that.
Re-read that last part, and internalize the essential lesson: If we refuse the accurate use of words, we are sabotaging ourselves.
Since accusations of “Islamophobia”, etc. are now flung automatically against any who express concern about Islam’s militant political arm as exemplified by the likes of al Qaeda and Hamas, let me be as clear as it’s possible to be, knowing full well that “it is impossible to speak in such a way that one cannot be misunderstood” (or willfully misinterpreted): I really don’t want to spend my time writing and thinking about this stuff. I have no intrinsic need to gratify myself or feel superior by grinding ideological axes against either an external enemy culture or my own countrymen. I’d much rather invest my time and energy inventing, innovating, creating, raising my son, spending time with my wife, living and working and striving to do better among peers whose origins span the globe, but who share a necessary basic dedication to the essential principles of a free society. I would love nothing more than to be decisively proven wrong about all of this, and get back to my life. I think and write about this kind of stuff because, as far as I can tell, there is no avoiding it. The very culture that furnishes and protects my ability and yours to live our lives as we do and freely engage in such humanity-advancing work, is under attack by another that demands our submission to a suffocating, stifling, totalitarian ideology. If we cannot name, discuss, and confront that ideology, we might as well surrender to it.
My “endgame” — the long-term future I hope for — is not a perpetual state of war (who would wish for that?), but a true coexistence of stable peace and security that can only exist after the Islamic Supremacist threat has been acknowledged and somehow neutralized. That is to say, I seek a peace worth having. To whatever extent we can accomplish that without resorting to the use of force and violence, wonderful — you have me on your side. I want and hope for a future where I can freely live, work, and prosper alongside all others who share my commitment to upholding the essential principles of our free society, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, regardless of where on the globe they hail from, without any of us having to fear violence from totalitarian nutjobs. There is too much to do and achieve for us to waste our time, capabilities, and resources on war where we have a reasonable alternative. But to shrink from the last-resort necessity of war when it is upon us seems to me no less a betrayal of the society we rightly cherish, for if left undefended that society will crumble.
Even when we are not in our worst moments of genuflecting self-censorship, our choice of terminology has been clumsy, muddled, and unhelpful from the start — and, make no mistake, these poor choices of terminology sink us. Case in point: A “War on Terror” is no more meaningful than a “War on Blitzkrieg”, or a “War on Kamikaze strikes. Terror is a tactic, not an identification of the ideology that motivates its perpetrators. The ideology we’re up against is is most accurately described as “Islamic Supremacism” — a militant, political branch of Islam that sees as its imperative the subjugation under strict Islamic law (Sharia) of all non-Muslims and any who wish to live in free and pluralistic societies. To attempt to broaden our response to al Qaeda’s brand of violent Islamic Supremacism into a “War on Terror” is to dilute our sense of purpose, and pretend against evidence that there are just as many terrorists motivated by various other ideologies who pose an imminent threat. This awkwardly vague and clumsy choice of words was, I think, both an attempt to avoid any reference to or indictment of any sect of “Islam”, and a well-intentioned overture of comradeship to other nations who had suffered terrorist scourges of other origins, but in the end I believe it’s been an ill-advised one. Since we’re not supposed to draw any connection between acts of terrorism and even a small, extreme, ostensibly non-representative minority fringe of Islam, we try to make do with the unhelpfully vague “War on Terror”, and it’s a wonder if we don’t forget what, in fact, we are fighting against.
I’m out of words, but I hope I’ve made my point clearly.
Please, my friends. Before you decide this is not your fight, read, research, learn. Our shared future is at stake.
Recommended Watching
I’ve watched this memorial slideshow every year. It unfailingly moves me to tears. Never forget that day, nor misremember. Never forget those we lost, the heroes who ran unbidden toward danger and lost their lives saving others, the heroes aboard Flight 93 who lost theirs preventing another attack that would likely have killed scores more of their fellow citizens…
Inside 9/11: an in-depth accounting of the 9/11 attacks and the events that led up to them
102 Minutes that Changed America: a uniquely composed account of the attack on New York, seen through raw footage from a variety of sources, combined with emergency calls and radio communications
Recommended Reading
Of all the deeply moving posts, pages, and articles I’ve seen about 9/11, this one from 2009, comprised of stirring photos and an unflinching examination of the enemy and cultural crisis we face, is unforgettable and not to be missed: 9/11: Never Forget, Never Give In
I’ll also be posting links, separately over the next few days, to the best writing about 9/11 I encounter this year. Look for posts tagged “9/11”.
2004:Remembering and Rebuilding(Yes, that’s me, in a post at my old blog. I’ll be transitioning to blogging openly under my own name here shortly. It’s about time.) Republished here, September 12th, 2014.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
