...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Back to sleep: I can think of no better way to commemorate 9/11 than by quoting from Mark Steyn’s piece that appeared in The National Post on 9/12. It's from Steyn’s book of post-9/11 articles, The Face of the Tiger:

You can understand why they’re jumping up and down in the streets of Ramallah, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful Presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska, by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do.

And, for those on the receiving end, that “money shot,” as they call it in Hollywood—the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill—represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the west generally.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The Federal Government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton’s forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his days with inconsequential initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history; programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors, government “lock-boxes” for any big-ticket entitlement focus groups decide they can’t live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. If you drive around Vermont and Massachusetts and California, you spend a lot of time behind cars with smug bumper stickers calling for more funds to be diverted from defence to education, because this would prove what a caring society we are. Tuesday was a rebuke to those fatuities; the first charge of any government is the defence of the borders—and, without that, it makes no difference how much you spend on prescription drug plans for seniors. From the moment Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad and ended the Gulf War, the world has been on a ten-year long weekend off.  It loaded up on the SUV, went to the mall, enjoyed the good times and deluded itself that in the new world politics could be confined to feelgood initiatives—big government disguised as lots and lots of teensy-weensy bits of small government. Yesterday’s atrocities were a rude awakening from the indulgences of the last decade, with some awful stories to remind us of our illusions—disabled employees in wheelchairs, whom the Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80^th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

On Tuesday, the post-Cold War era ended and a new one began…

If only that were so. Seven years after that rudest of awakenings, the Candides of the Western world would prefer to go back to sleep, secure in their delusion that, if only we could solve that tricky Israel-Palestinian situation—or, better yet, get rid of the Jewish state—all would be for the best on this, the best of all possible globes. The desire to take a vacation from history is alive and well as the world lines up behind Bambi Obama, the candidate whose “charisma” acts like a comforting sedative that induces somnolence and ameliorates pain even as it clouds the mind: the Bambi people in the U.S. and abroad have convinced themselves that the greatest evil in the world (aside from Zionism) isn’t the totalitarian will to power; it is global carbon emissions.

Well, if you want to commit suicide, carbon monoxide is a far pleasanter way to go; far pleasanter than, say, being blown to smithereens by jihadis, or submitting to your divinely-decreed dhimmitude, and dying, slowly but surely, every day.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:39 | link | comments

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