2 Comments

This is awesome. VDH has always had his head on straight and writes more lucidly than nine-tenths of the columnists out there.

What a terrific addition, Roger.

Thank you for pointing this out — I’ve now added “Work and Days”, Mr. Hanson’s blog, to my bookmarks.

I notice that you have two recent posts that express frustration with what you perceive to be widespread apathy and/or incomprehension about what we need to do to prevail in the War on Islamist Terror.

I share your concerns. There is no end to the daily stream of evidence that a large plurality if not a majority of Americans don’t seem to take the Islamo-fascist threat seriously enough, or don’t appreciate the pro-active global strategy of President Bush.

However, it seems I am much more optimistic than you. I strongly believe we will prevail in spite of our lack of unity in our efforts, and in some ways because of our lack of unity.

Here’s why I feel this way:

1) The numero uno reason, way above the rest, is because our enemy is basically a motley crew of pathetic losers. In particular, their ideology and belief system is very weak, very brittle, and no match at all for our own ideals of liberal democracy and civil rights.

I understand that it is very dangerous to underestimate or dismiss pathetic losers. We need to stay on top of them and remind ourselves to respect the harm and mayhem they are capable of creating. Pathetic losers, when motivated, can learn to adapt just like we do.

But I think it is also important to remind ourselves that our enemy richly deserves to be thoroughly defeated, and that we should be proud to help bring that about. The hardest part in dealing with any serious problem is defining it properly, but our enemy has helped us out there by spelling out the situation in neon colors.

2) A certain level of dissension in our own ranks is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Dissent can be easily overdone, and I think it may have gone too far in our country (especially with the knee-jerk criticisms that appear regularly in MSM). But it is much, much better to have somewhat too much dissent (or too much apathy/denial/what have you) than to have no dissent at all.

Not only do we need dissent to maintain our country as a free nation, we also need to keep our leaders on their toes. Even if our leaders are doing all the right things. We need a loyal opposition waiting in the wings and making noise so that the prod of competition keeps the folks in charge focused on what they need to do.

3) Things like Khatami speaking at Harvard are not always what they seem. It is too easy to lose perspective and lose heart over these things, and then it turns out there wasn’t even much, if anything, to get bothered about in the first place.

I don’t know about the National Cathedral (at least not any more than you), but I went to Harvard as an undergrad, and I absolutely loved going to the Kennedy Center there to see their featured speakers. Every few weeks or so they would have some guest appearance or special symposium going on, and some of them were very memorable opportunities to confront living exemplars of political and moral evil.

Let me tell you about Ed Koch, for example. I liked him, because he had a good sense of humor and he seemed like a good person. But I was never infatuated with him as a leader or a mayor. He came to the Kennedy Center in 1986-87, gave a talk, and answered questions. I waited patiently for my turn to ask a question, and told him that I was one of his consituents. I told him that I shared his view that New York City has been the greatest city in the world, but I regretuflly disagreed with him that it was still that way at the time. I unloaded on Mr. Koch a short list of problems: crime, education, city services (like the subways!), and burned-out neighbrohoods. I challenged him to compare conditions in New York to other cities I had been to like Paris, London, or even Washington and Los Angeles.

He was genuinely startled by my question, and made a sincere and humble attempt to address my concerns. I think I even got to ask one or two brief follow-ups. But I wasn’t so much interested in his response as in the opportunity to bear witness and focus his attention on the bigger picture (although I was plenty interested in his response as well).

Well, you know what? I got the opportunity to question (and genuinely startle) not just Ed Koch, but the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. when it was his turn to stop by the Kennedy Center. And when Manuel Noriega visited Harvard, other students questioned him pretty pointedly as well (but I don’t think anything succeeded in startling him). And hopefully, Khatami had to field some good questions from students and others as well. (The person who got the most pointed questioning at Harvard when I was there was an official from the old regime of South Africa. He was actually physically barricaded in my dormitory’s common room by a mob or protesting students — I was pretty disgusted by that).

So my third point is, don’t be too quick to despair merely on the basis of isolated data points such as Khatami going to Harvard. Maybe his visit was an unjustified honor for a Hitler in sheep’s clothing. But maybe it was also an opportunity for him to experience what a free campus is like and even get some questions from the audience that called him on his evil B.S. On balance, maybe you are right or Harvard is right (I would tend to agree with you), but I don’t think it’s an overwhelming disgrace in any case.

If nothing else, he learned that the U.S. is not afraid to let evil dictators walk in our midst and even say a few words of propaganda. We take murdering/torturing losers in stride because they are on the way wrong side of history.