After America полностью

How many times do the American people have to ace that test? They’ve been doing it for a decade now, and every time the usual suspects try to kill them the ruling class, with barely veiled contempt, insists that its own knuck-ledragging citizenry is the real problem. A couple months later Nanny Bloomberg went to the Statue of Liberty of all places to tell the plebs he has the misfortune to rule over to shut up. The man on whose watch Ground Zero degenerated from a target of war to a victim of bureaucracy was there to lecture dissenters that the site of the 9/11 attacks is a “very appropriate place”⁷³ for a mosque. The people of New York felt differently, but what do they know?

“To cave to popular sentiment,” thundered Nanny, “would be to hand a victory to the terrorists—and we should not stand for that.”⁷⁴ We used to hear this formulation a lot in the months after 9/11: If we do such-and-such, then the terrorists will have won. But this surely is the very acme of the template: If we don’t build a mosque at Ground Zero, then the terrorists will have won! You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists—and the American people are with the terrorists.

As is the way with the Conformity Enforcers, Nanny Bloomberg pulled out all the abstractions. “It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.”⁷⁵ Really? That’s not what Osama bin Laden said. But, if we put away our abstract generalities and listen to what the enemy is actually telling us, then the terrorists will have won! For a fellow so open and accepting, Nanny Bloomberg seems awfully dogmatic and strident. This is the WEIRD syndrome—the determination to hammer the hard square peg of global reality into the hole of multicultural nullity, whatever it takes. Even after Faisal Shahzad’s arrest for the attempted bombing of Times Square, the Associated Press, CNN, the Washington Post, and other grandees of the conformicrat media insisted on attaching huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments in Connecticut.⁷⁶ Subprime terrorism? Don’t laugh. To the media, it’s a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit?

Poor old Faisal Shahzad. Before heading off to Times Square, he made a pre-detonation video outlining the evils of the Great Satan.⁷⁷ Nothing about mortgage rates or foreclosure proceedings in there. He couldn’t have been more straightforward, but still Nanny Bloomberg and the media cover their ears and go “La-la-la. Can’t hear you.”

Paul Berman, a lifelong liberal, says that the doctrine of relativism makes “everything the equal of everything else.”⁷⁸ As a result, our ruling class—political, academic, cultural—have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” This is almost right. In fact, the cult of absolutist relativism is a kind of affirmative action against their own civilization: In any dispute between the boundlessly tolerant West and a highly intolerant Islam, it must be the fault of the former for being insufficiently tolerant of the latter’s intolerance. A society led by men with such a self-destructive urge will get its wish, and very soon, and deservedly so.

Not so long ago I saw a two-panel cartoon: on the left hand panel, “This is your brain”; on the right hand panel, “This is your brain on political correctness”—a small and shriveled thing, but now standard issue.

Here’s a random selection of headlines:⁷⁹

The above were all plucked from the United States Navy newsletter. When the first newsletter showed up in my in-box, I thought it might contain under-reported tales of derring-do off the Horn of Africa battling Somali pirates. But instead it’s one diversity-awareness story after another: “Senior Navy Leader Receives Most Diverse Engineer of the Year Award”; “Appointment of First Somali Pirate to Joint Chiefs Of Staff Shows Diversity Is Rising, Says Top Pentagon Official.”