Scholar Victor Davis Hanson is ticked off and more than a bit gloomy about the inanity and contradictions that abound in what passes for public discourse in a time of crisis and war. Unfortunately, he's entirely correct. As always with Dr. Hanson, read the whole thing and get smarter.
Is there any general explanation for all these contradictions? I think very little other than the general lesson that we can draw about a rather humane, affluent, and leisured society after September 11 finding itself confused and in a baffling war against medieval enemies it thought were not supposed to be around in the 21st century. Who, after all, wishes to relax on the sofa to watch The Apprentice or Extreme Makeover — and then channel surf to images of barbarians promising to roast and eat Japanese aid workers or scenes of charred bodies being dissected by Attila's modern-day spiritual successors?Posted by Alan at April 17, 2004 09:26 AMApparently, even after 9/11, we trust that we really are so strong and so competent that our military can provide us with the (false) assurance that American soldiers alone — without our own engagement, consistency, or sacrifice — can stop such savages from once more crossing the Rhine and Danube to mass murder us. So here at home in Rome, in our world of utopian perfection and material surfeit, we fiddle in hearing rooms and in focus groups while our enemies burn — on the assumption that there is no room for human error, that hindsight is always perfect, that the messy choices of the present are never between bad and worse, and that humans are always expected to be godlike rather than fallible.
Deep down we know that some sort of freedom is what most Iraqis want — and what Islamic extremists in and outside Iraq most fear. But we wish its creation to proceed flawlessly without loss of blood or treasure. And at all times we insist on gratitude from those we aid, who are humbled, perhaps even furious, because we are giving them precisely what they seek — but also what in the past they lacked the resources, skill, or courage to obtain on their own.
What a weird war we are in. The president of the United States gives a press conference to steel our will and endures mostly inane cross examination — at the very time the New York Times best-seller list has five of its top ten books alleging that he is a near criminal. Various disgruntled, passed-over or fired employees (Clarke and O'Neill), buffoonish provocateurs (Franken), and conspiracists (Phillips and Unger) all assure us in their pulp of everything from Bush family ties with Nazis to a First Family perennially plotting to get Americans killed for nothing other than cheap oil.
If that was not enough, a U.S. senator, with a reprehensible record of personal excess and abject immorality, now in his dotage damns the war in Iraq on moral grounds — even as young Marines seek to protect a nascent and tottering consensual government from thugs and killers. An ex-president who calibrated his campaign for a Nobel Prize by criticizing his successor in a time of war to the applause of foreign powers now steps forward to call for a more principled nation. Such are the moralists of our age.
Are we crazy? I think in fact we almost are. But the tragedy is that if we are paradoxical, self-incriminatory, and at each other's throats, our enemies most surely are not. They know precisely what they want from us — an Islamic world of the 8th century, parasitic on the resources and technology of the 21st, by which all the better to destroy a supposedly soft and bickering West. And if the present chaos here at home continues, they are apparently on the right track.