Back to Childishness

I would never have imagined that journalists, academics, actors, artists, and the intelligentsia in general would have so opposed the end of dictatorship and promotion of democracy abroad. And who would have thought that Vietnam would become the source for Democratic nostalgia, rather than the usual recrimination? Did anyone think the appointment of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, promises of $15 billion in grants to combat AIDS in Africa, and lectures to the politically powerful Arab world to cease the genocide of black Sudanese would earn George Bush slurs evoking the Taliban, the old Confederacy, and fascism? Have we become children who live in a world of bedtime stories, afraid to face the cruel truth around us?

So Victor Hanson begins today's article about our War on Terror. More than most other commentators of our times, Hanson is able to place our situation in a historical context. As the "Greatest Generation" who had to face and put down true evil depart, and the new generation for whom evil is nothing but a "cultural construct take their place in positions of power and influence, we seem to be less and less able to see the world around us for what it is and to take the necessary actions.

THE WAR MADE IT WORSE FOR US?
This is a favorite canard of New York Times and Washington Post columnists who resent the inconvenience of security measures in their digs, and the attention such vigilance diverts from Mr. Kerry's message. This story I think runs something like this. After 9/11, instead of pursuing the culprits through the proper domain of law enforcement, Mr. Bush embarked on two wars. Thus, we are now plagued with a series of terror alerts in a manner that did not follow the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Then rightly we indicted the culprits, arrested them, put them on trial - and went back to our afternoon nap.

Put aside the idea of magnitude - the singularity of 3,000 dead, a city block leveled, and a trillion dollars in lost revenue - as well as the fact that the 1990s appeasement led to constant harvesting of American diplomats, soldiers, and tourists abroad.

Instead, focus on the sheer historical ignorance of such sentiments. The tardy decision to fight back - whether in Britain in 1939 or the United States in 1941 - always carries with it the acceptance of greater short-term bloodletting and chaos in hopes of long-term security. Churchill was applauded for ending Chamberlain's appeasement - and then nearly was sacked after Dunkirk, Singapore, and Tobruk defeats that all could have been avoided by submissively "dialoguing" with a Hitler or Tojo.

It may seem banal to say that history repeats itself, but in many ways the enemies we face now are similar to what we have faced before. And the leaders needed to face them require similar qualities of strength and courage.

In a word, we have devolved into an infantile society in which our technological successes have wrongly suggested that we can alter the nature of man to our whims and pleasures - just like a child who expects instant gratification from his parents. In a culture where affluence and leisure are seen as birthrights, war, sacrifice, or even the mental fatigue about worrying over such things wear on us. So we construct, in a deductive and anti-empirical way, a play universe that better suits us.
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We too are reverting to our childhood and thus are in the same weird mood preferring fantasies and stories to reality. The Democrats know it. And so the unifying theme of their otherwise contradictory messages is that we can return to the infantile delusions of September 10, and not the crisis-filled adult world of post-September 11 that now confronts George W. Bush.