December 24, 2001

Our Loyal Allies

I really need to stop reading lefty British publications. It's a bad, bad habit of mine.

Not that this naive American hasn't learned all sorts of fascinating things about the United States, the September 11 atrocity, and world politics. Without the London Review of Books, I would have had no idea that we had it coming. Without The Guardian, I wouldn't have known that we are merely bullies with a bloody nose, that what goes around comes around, that we need to dare to damn Israel, that the body bags have already started coming home from this new Vietnam, and that unless we cease the bombing immediately, we will be responsible for genocide in Afghanistan. Without The Independent, I would never have understood that we are war criminals, that we are barbarians and cowboys, and that we eschewed face-to-face combat because we thought our troops would be decimated, traumatized, and humiliated.

Oh, occasionally you run into something worth reading. But mostly it's just knee-jerk defeatism, anti-Americanism, leavened with the occasional spasm of virulent anti-Semitism. Huzzah for our closest allies!

I ran across the following G.K. Chesterson snippet a little while ago. I don't usually quote works that I haven't read entirely, but this one just seems sums up the aforementioned writers so well. I'll bend the rules this time:

A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, 'I am sorry to say we are ruined,' and is not sorry at all.

Anyway. I mostly fish through the lefty rags for the same reason I'm compelled to listen to right-wing talk radio. I'm looking for the really whacked out stuff. The caller who screams, "Ya know what I think? I think we need internment camps for liberals!" You know... something that helps me feel superior and clever.

It's a counterproductive impulse, obviously. My goal is to package the Right and the Left into safe little boxes. See -- those people are idiots! But of course that's not true. For every Robert Fisk there's a Christopher Hitchens, or a Salman Rushdie. For every Michael Savage, there's a William Safire. For every Barbara Lee, there's... well, every other Democratic congressional representative.

The long and short of it is, I've found my New Year's resolution. No more British po-mo silliness. Or American silliness, for that matter. No more tossing all liberals into the Idiot Lefty Box, or all conservatives into the Frothing Right-winger Box. I should know better by now.