I’m taking a day off from work next Monday, and plan to spend the day reading blog editorials and memorial posts as I’ve done in recent years, reflecting, thinking, and hopefully also writing a bit here.
I’ve been finding much insightful discussion and commentary on Pajamas Media’s excellent Blog Week in Review podcast (one of three podcasts I currently listen to regularly, together with the Glenn and Helen Show and Penn Jillette Show), and am looking forward to listening to the September 8th edition, whose topic is the fifth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. I’m also currently midway through watching last year’s Discovery Channel documentary “The Flight That Fought Back,” which I hope to finish later today.
It is vitally important to me that we take the intent and consequences of the September 11th, 2001 attacks seriously, and summon all the will we have to work for the survival and health of this magnificent, precious civilization of ours. I must say I feel deeply worried about our evident lack of cultural confidence, by our seeming desire to believe the seductive idea that there is no danger, and by the attacks’ apparent lack of impact on certain Americans’ scornful, derisive, and to me seemingly suicidal pre-9/11 rhetoric toward contemporary American culture and Western civilization.
What Bill Whittle said on the subject in January goes for me: “When it comes to cultural suicide, I’m aginn’ it.” We seem to be gazing pathetically at our navels when we ought to be clapping like furies. I only hope that we will come to realize what’s gone wrong in time to reverse this worrisome state of affairs.
Best wishes folks. More again soon.
…courtesy of Instapundit. Something new to be concerned about, or just more of the same desperate theatrical posturing and attempts to incite divisions among Americans?
Meryl Yourish comments: “Sounds to me like they just got last season’s 24 on DVD.”
Indeed. Sounds like they’re scraping the bottom of the idea barrel. I hope they haven’t also been watching Battlestar Galactica and building poorly-founded expectations that they’ll drive us to some kind of pathetic navel-gazing self-doubt about our right to exist… Even a single attack of the magnitude they allude to would, I feel confident, put an end to such idle pursuits and galvanize Americans’ will to hunt down Al Qaeda and its brethren and unequivocally destroy their ability to ever do such things again — something the 9/11 attacks only partially succeeded in doing. But I certainly hope that any such attempts will be successfully thwarted, and we’ll therefore never get to find out.
Glenn Reynolds says he won’t be watching the Oscars this year. I’m not planning to go out of my way to watch them either. I’ve had my fill of Hollywood’s cultural cynicism and misguided activism in recent years, thank you very much. So many better things to do with one’s time…
UPDATE Sunday 3/5: The Manolo is liveblogging the Oscars, with guestbloggers Stephen Green, Gay Patriot, Roger Simon, et. al. Hilarious stuff! OK, so I’ve got the show on in the background now so I can at least get the jokes. So sue me…
(This post is no longer quite as timely as it was when I began it as a draft over a month ago — by the timescales on which the blogosphere operates, at least — but it’s still relevant I think, so please bear with me while I dredge up a bit of the semi-recent past on which to ruminate.)
Back in August, I bookmarked this article by Michael Barone that appeared in the wake of July’s London subway bombings. For such a brief piece, it managed to touch on several compelling points, but there was one 20-word quotation in particular that really reached out of the page (or browser window, as it were) and seized my attention. Citing Australian journalist Tony Parkinson quoting French author Jean-François Revel, Barone penned:
“A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
I was floored — in the way that I’m floored on reaching The Moment, the gem of expression that many a Bill Whittle essay seems to contain. Revel’s comment hit the mark succinctly and precisely, and in so doing it gave me a chill.
Revel made his remark in reference to Cold War attitudes in the West. Yet it seems as relevant as ever today, when we face enemies committed to our destruction at a time when we seem more heavily burdened than ever with one massive guilt-trip after another about our culture (both in the U.S. and, more broadly, in the West), the way we live our lives domestically, and the role our country plays in the world.
I fully believe that we can endure and prevail in the fight against violent Islamic extremism if we want to. The key question seems to be: Do we want to? Having seen everything from apparent indifference to some pretty clear “no” answers from the domestic left in the years since 9/11, I have gotten to be far more worried about our own frame of mind than anything that al-Qaeda and its brethren have in store for us.
Revel’s statement expresses so clearly what I’ve come to believe is the primary danger facing us today, and makes a point so central to my motivation for starting this blog, that I feel it belongs at the top of every page — so there I have placed it.
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Barone’s article came to mind again as I followed blogospheric and mainstream news outlet coverage of the recent riots that began in Clichy-sous-Bois and subsequently spread across France for two dismal weeks — this time for reasons more closely related to the article’s central theme. In it, Barone posed a rather un-PC but seemingly very important question: Is multicultualism’s tendency to segregate and isolate people a source of problems? To which I would add a further question that I imagine Barone might have had in mind but didn’t explicitly state: What happens to a “multicultural” society that becomes so tolerant that it allows itself to be a host for people who are anything from indifferent to it or alienated from it (as in the poor, predominantly Muslim suburbs of Paris) to committed to its subversion and destruction (as in the case of the U.K.-raised London bombers, or the transplanted 9/11 hijackers)? The answer seems as relevant to the current situation in France as it does to the broader war on terrorism or violent Islamic extremism.
Multiculturalism holds wide appeal in part because it is embodies a kind and noble sentiment: allow for people’s differences, respect them as unique individuals and let them live their own lives in their own ways.
The seming problem with multiculturalism lies not in the abstract idea but in its reduction to practice. Multiculturalist critics of the characteristically American “melting pot” approach to immigration have long complained about its expectation that people adapt or “assimilate” into their adopted host culture, in spite of the demonstrable benefits that doing so confers — both for the individuals doing the adjusting, and for the society that in turn benefits from their contributions, productivity, and solidly founded feelings of inclusion and investment in the culture’s survival and success. America may offer immigrants a place to succeed, but (there’s always a “but”, isn’t there) it exacts an unfair price, multiculturalists allege, by asking them in return to adopt and incorporate into their lives certain American attitudes, traditions, or ways of doing things. Multiculturalists’ intended purpose seems to be to spare immigrants’ feelings and offer sympathy for the challenges that go with building a new life in a foreign place. By asserting as their axiom that all cultures are unquestionably of equal value, and opposing the expectation that people adapt to succeed, multiculturalists ostensibly seek to suppress inter-cultural conflict and simultaneously improve immigrants’ lot in life. But it’s become apparent to me that this approach can and does backfire in many ways, and I suspect that the unfortunate events we’ve seen unfold in Clichy-sous-Bois and its environs are evidence of that. The social fragmentation that can result from applying such thinking has been aptly termed “Balkanization”, and it doesn’t appear to be good for anyone.
Multiculturalist ideology also provides another rhetorical tool or set of justifications with which contemporary social critics can continue to disparage us. I suspect it holds special appeal among intellecutals because its obsession with cultural equivalence provides a way to denigrate or gloss over the pronounced achievements of contemporary Western society, which competing ideologies cannot allow to stand as objects of admiration or aspiration.
Though multiculturalism claims as its axiom the notion that all cultures are morally equal, “In practice,”, Barone notes, “that soon degenerates to: All cultures all morally equal, except ours, which is worse.” I have all too frequently seen the phenomenon that Barone describes in action, and the clear hypocrisy of it has been one of the many motivators for my move away from contemporary American liberalism over the past several years. People of other cultures are to be pandered to apologetically, it seems, but it’s open season when it comes to criticism of America and her culture and lifestyles. I hate to have to say it, but I’ve really lost patience with the double-standard that others should be encouraged in celebrating their cultures but we in the United States, or in the Western world at large, should be constantly shamed. I feel justifiable pride in my own culture too, and I simply won’t abide that disingenuous double standard anymore, pretenting not to feel the glow that I do feel in the core of my heart.
I declare here and now that I have every confidence in, and every hope for, our country, our culture, and our way of life in the United States. I feel deeply proud and deeply grateful to be in the company of such a courageous group of people, who would carve a life not out of guarantees of safety but out of raw, untamed frontier. I pledge to do my utmost to contribute to America’s continued thriving and success, that she may remain a congenial home to those who cherish freedom and an authentic beacon of hope to all who choose this life of liberty that I hold so dear. To stand here and make this delcaration clearly and unequivocally — well, that in itself has been a significant part of my purpose in starting this blog, so it seems an appropriate segue for the end of this post.
Thanks for tuning in folks! Thanks for being witness to my small, but to me vitally important, declaration concerning who I am and how I will live. Hope to see more of you in the future as I get this project out of the shipyards and off to sea… Best wishes.
This is the beginning of an attempt to give something back to a country to which I feel I owe my life, and to a culture of freedom with which I am deeply in love. It is my long overdue thank-you letter to America. It is the still-unfolding story — told from inside this wonderful, imperfect bubble of relative freedom, stability and prosperity that I feel so deeply grateful to inhabit — of my own American Dream.
That last in particular is a rather loaded phrase to use these days, I have come to learn, but I leave it there with a purpose. It’s the tragically baggage-laden name given to one of many concepts I intend to touch on here. Give me time and I will explain what it means to me, and why I think it is worthy of more than our derision.
Part of my approach to this project, I expect, will be telling fragments of the one story that I know best: the story that I have lived and seen with my own eyes. So it seems appropriate to begin with one such fragment, one thread drawn from the many that have run through my life:
Music has always been precious to me. The music I’ve known in my life has become an inextricable part of the way I remember times and places gone by, and of the way I think about the future. “Fearless Dream” is a phrase taken, in a sense, from a song I grew up with. During a pivotal phase in my life, between my friends’ departures for college and embarking on my own adventures — now, I dare admit, roughly 15 years ago — one of the albums I listened to most was Rush’s “Exit … Stage Left”. It was frequently there in the background as I dreamt my own dreams and hatched my own hopeful and ambitious plans for the future. The second song on the album, “Red Barchetta,” tells the story of a young man’s weekend escapes to his uncle’s farm, where he takes an old roadster for harrowing white-knuckle rides down winding country roads. Geddy Lee’s infamous soprano voice soars exuberantly over Neil Peart’s equally famous rock-steady syncopated drumming, as guitar and bass drive the rhythm line home in tight and agile unison:
“Jump to the ground
As the turbo slows to cross the borderline.
Run like the wind of excitement
chilling up and down my spine.
For down in his barn,
my uncle preserved for me an old machine
(old in your years).
To keep it as new has been his fearless dream.
I strip away the old debris, that hides the shining car
a brilliant, red Barchetta from a better-managed time”
Or at least, that’s how I always heard it. The consensus among the lyrics websites seems to be that the actual phrase is “dearest dream.” Some of the other details differ from what I remember too. But the above has stuck in my mind as what my ears always heard, and seems fitting in its own right — so, for my purposes, “fearless dream” it will always be. When I listen to the song today, those ringing words still lift my spirits as much as ever.
The phrase struck me as an appropriate title for this web log for two reasons. First — and this is a broad theme on which I hope to elaborate here — because I think it takes courage to live in a truly free society. Freedom comes with no roadmap and no warranty. Trying to figure out what to do with it can be scary as hell. It has been, at times, for me. This is something that I think most of us are not taught to expect, at least not directly. Yet acknowledging the inherent risk that goes in hand with having real freedom, and addressing the question of why living in freedom might be worth embracing the accompanying uncertainty and peril, is essential I think, if we’re to have some hope of preserving this precious and hard-won gift. We must keep the answer to this key question in mind as we consider possible courses of action that can curtail freedom, or we may give it up without much of a thought.
Second, I want to make some humbly offered contribution here to illuminating and thereby hopefully helping to revitalize and preserve the ideas that have made this culture of freedom possible — ideas that I think form the essential cornerstone of our culture’s success. Ideas of great prescience and beauty that we seem, from my current perspective, to be in actual danger of either forgetting or intentionally discarding. “…this brilliant, red Barchetta from a better-managed time…”
I don’t think of myself as someone who’s given to worrying overly much. If anything, I more often tend to fall into the middle-of-the-road “Crisis? What crisis?” category. But certain of the seemingly popular attitudes that I have encountered repeatedly since my college years have left me with the sinking feeling that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong in our perception of ourselves and our way of life. We seem to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to the hand-wringing of professional social critics, while forgetting the very good reasons for choosing to live as we do. At times, I fear we might be getting ready to throw this precious gift, born of so much sacrifice, out the window. Certainly I know people, including old and dear friends, who seem to think that the time for the American way of life, with its emphasis on individual freedom and carefully circumscribed governance, has come and gone. That we ought to replace the maxim of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the legal and governmental framework that supports it, with something ostensibly better. If that is to be the case, then I feel the need to say my peace before it is gone. Because if we turn our backs on this idea of freedom that has been so foundational to our way of life, I think we should at least take the time to fully understand what it is that we will be giving up.
Writing this weblog is part of my way of dealing with the heartbreak of this apparent change in attitudes, attempting to understand what has caused it, and trying to figure out whether it might be reversible. Freedom has made my life possible, and it has taken me some years to appreciate just how precious and fragile it is, and to realize just how much I have taken it for granted.
There are so many interrelated ideas that I want to explore here, that it’s difficult to say at the outset what the overarching, unifying theme will be. This has to do with how we think about economics, equality, responsibility, rights, science, reason, technology, art, culture, human achievement, history, and the future … that great unknown and unknowable. I can’t possibly forsee, at the outset of this project, whether I will be able to clearly articulate the many interconnections among ideas that I’m setting out to explore … or whether I will even succeed in making the time, amid a very busy work and home life, to keep up the project. But these are things I find myself thinking about all the time, and touch on issues that I’ve come to think are crucial to our future. This stuff has been lodged painfully in my heart and I just have to get it out. So I will try.
I of course have my own filter, my own lens through which I see the world, which may well differ from yours. I have great confidence in the “free market in ideas” — in your capacity as the reader to survey the wide variety of ideas that are out there and then draw your own conclusions based on the sum of the evidence and arguments presented. Critics have every right to criticize, and we have the right to ask whether what they’re saying really makes sense. My aim here is only to use my one voice to say things that I think need saying. There are well-reasoned arguments to be made in favor of choosing freedom over safety and other competing demands, and I hope to shed some light on those here, for it seems we don’t get much exposure to them nowadays.
In no small part, I am here to make what, much to my surprise, has become a pretty bold and audacious statement in the year 2005: that we in the United States have been needlessly losing confidence in our way of life. That we have a culture that, while it needs a little help here and there, is every bit worthy of our hope, enthusiasm, adoration, sacrifice, courage, loyalty, and devotion.
This is the beginning of an attempt to give something back to a country to which I feel I owe my life, and to a culture of freedom with which I am deeply in love. It is my long overdue thank-you letter to America. It is the still-unfolding story of my own American Dream.
Stay tuned. The best, I hope and believe, is yet to come.
