Written for Faultline USA by Roger W. Gardner
It was Christmas, 1944. We, my mother and father and I, lived in a great big house in a quiet little town outside of Philadelphia. My father was what you might call a “successful man” with a very important job. I always knew this by the way he walked, and by the way he’d clear his throat before speaking, as though he were preparing to address the Chamber of Commerce. His job, he would attempt to explain, was selling stocks and bonds. My earliest conception of stocks and bonds was that they were some sort of disciplinary equipment used in penal institutions. Later, I discovered, with some disappointment, that they were only paper. My father sold paper. Why this should have made him any more important than Fat Herbie’s father who was a postman, with a really impressive uniform, who delivered paper, I could not understand. But every Christmas, when we visited them, the almost reverential awe with which he was greeted soon convinced me that -- whether I understood it or not -- my father’s job must be very important.
These Christmas trips to New Jersey to visit my mother’s relatives were one of the two highlights of the year -- the other being our annual two-week summer vacation trip to Atlantic City. For my mother, these holiday visits were an emotional and sometimes tearful reunion, for me they were an adventure, and for my father they served as validation of his lofty status as a “successful man”, the opportunity to bask for a time in the respectful admiration of his in-laws.
So, every Christmas morning, after all the presents had been opened and we’d had our breakfast in the Breakfast Room, my father would load up the trunk of his big Buick with all the “New Jersey presents”; my mother would get all dressed up, wrapping herself self-consciously in her elegant new fur; and I would attempt to get every one of my new toys into the back seat of that big black sedan. This would of course precipitate a confrontation with my father, until, finally, after much pouting and stamping of feet, a compromise of sorts would be arranged: I would have to settle for a half dozen of my most valuable acquisitions.
That year, I recall, my most valuable acquisition was a gas mask. An authentic, regulation, U.S. Army gas mask. The mask was made of heavy-duty rubber and attached to the head by means of adjustable rubber straps. The front piece consisted of two large goggles, a strange projecting cylinder for the mouth, and two metal canisters, one protruding from each cheek. I wore the mask from the time we left home until the time we reached New Jersey. I fancied that it gave me a certain imposing presence, sinister and mysterious. In reality, I imagine that I must have looked rather like some overgrown, olive-drab insect. The taut elastic pull of the rubber straps hurt my skin, and the stale musty air that filtered through the canisters eventually gave me a headache. But this was a small price to pay for being so completely self-contained in such a formidable disguise.
This was probably the quietest trip to New Jersey that we ever made. I sat in the back seat in proud, impenetrable silence, thoroughly immersed in my new role as The Mysterious Stranger, content to watch the world sailing by my portholes and listening to the enormous sound of my own breathing as it echoed through the metal chambers. Whenever we’d stop at some busy intersection, I’d press my goggles up against the window in the hope of startling some innocent passerby. My mother, with that typical neurotic adult anxiety, would make me take the mask off every now and then, fearing, I suppose, that I might somehow suffocate. Adults, it seemed, had this uncanny ability to always spoil a good thing.
Like any true adventure, these trips served to broaden my perspective on the world. As we drove out from the suburbs of Philadelphia, out through Germantown, and Willow Grove, through Ambler and Hatboro and Fort Washington, the towns got smaller and smaller, until we reached the low, desolate farmlands of Bucks County -- long, monotonous stretches of somber black woods and snow-covered pastures, interspersed here and there by some lonely and dilapidated farmhouse with a refrigerator on the front porch and some old abandoned truck, rusting away in the front yard, half-buried in the snow.
And I might dimly recall my father’s words, when he’d admonish me to “count your blessings” and remind me that I was a “fortunate little man”. And, sometimes I believed him. For I could see through my goggles that not everyone lived in a seventeen-room house with a butler’s pantry and a maid, or cruised through the countryside in a sleek black Buick.
Our arrival in East Orange would precipitate yet another confrontation with my father -- I, quite naturally, expected to greet them all in my gas mask. My father, however, was adamant, clearing his throat, he launched into one of those long meaningless discourses on the subject of propriety: I could not wear my gas mask. To me, this was both cruel and unfair. I think that I suspected, even then, that my feelings about my gas mask were precisely the same as his feelings about his Buick.
When we’d finally pull up to Aunt Lilly’s -- that little white insubstantial clapboard house at the foot of Mount Pleasant Avenue -- the whole family would come tumbling out to greet us -- except for Uncle Duke, who’d stroll out leisurely in his tall tranquil way, still wearing his crumpled old gray uniform and casually puffing his ever-present pipe.
Aunt Lily was short, fat and jolly, low to the ground like a barrel. She had bright, mischievous little eyes, an infectious smile, and strong chubby little arms that hugged you like a bear. Uncle Duke was tall and lanky, with a slow, deliberate Gary Cooper drawl. They had three boys: Fat Herbie, who was built just like his mother (but without that infectious smile); he was about my age. Neat Albert was a couple of years older and considerable slimmer and -- unlike Fat Herbie, whose worn-out flannel shirt always hung out over the seat of his pants and whose socks seldom matched -- he was always neatly put together. Tall Jack, their oldest boy, was away at the War -- that wonderfully explicit contest between Good and Evil which we called the Second World War. He was, of course, our hero (late at night, in Herbie’s room, where we slept beneath squadrons of P-38s and Flying Fortresses suspended, almost invisibly, from the ceiling, we’d lie awake and estimate the probable number of Japs he’d wiped out that day).
Herbie’s house was tiny and warm and -- unlike our house, whose rooms seemed so remote from one another, where a sound would echo as in a marble mausoleum -- it was filled with the sounds of laughter and the heady smell of homemade oatmeal.
Later that day, the rest of mother’s relatives would arrive -- vivacious Aunt Charlotte with her latest conquest, Ells; my favorite, always dapper Uncle Bill and his humorless “girlfriend”, Marge; and Uncle Bob and Aunt Mabel and their precocious, self-absorbed and excruciatingly beautiful eleven year old daughter Amy.
But we, the visiting dignitaries, invariably held the center of the stage, and, rising to the level of their admiration, we performed our respective roles with remarkable conviction. We exuded confidence and charm -- my mother, so tall and lovely, with those wistful sea-blue eyes and her flowing auburn hair; my father, so stolid and sure in his impeccable pin-striped suit; and me, all scrubbed and clean in my Sunday Best, with my well-polished shoes and my well-polished manners. We were the personifications of Good Fortune, the living embodiment of the American Dream, descending once a year from the mythic realms of our respectable prosperity.
Like the illusive fragments of a half-forgotten dream, the grim truths of our lives -- those violent late-night arguments over my father’s alleged “affairs”; my mother’s mysterious “spells”; the fact that I was becoming sullen and remote and not doing very well at school -- all these sordid memories seemed obscure and faraway, like sorrowful ghosts we had left behind to brood through the empty rooms of that great dark house. And I began to sense between the three of us a certain warmth, a rare cohesiveness, an unprecedented unity of purpose, as though we had formed a secret pact and, bound by some unarticulated code of loyalty and discretion, we protected each other with innumerable sins of omission.
While Herbie and I went up to his room to examine each other’s new toys (mine were always more expensive, while his always seemed more interesting), the men would all sit around the living room discussing the merits of father’s Buick or soliciting his opinion on the progress of the War and its effect on the market; while the women would all congregate in the kitchen gathering around my mother, ooohing and aahing over her latest Christmas fur, discussing -- whatever it was that women discussed.
These precious days flew by in a dizzying blur of frenetic activity -- visiting, exchanging presents, exploring the backyards of East Orange with Herbie, until, all too soon, it would be time to leave. After one last supper in Aunt Lily’s warm little kitchen, my father would pack up the Buick, we’d make our goodbyes, and we’d be on our way.
The journey home was always quieter and less optimistic than the trip out had been. If, in some unspoken way, these Christmas visits were intended to be a reaffirmation of our familial success, then, in some unspoken way, they failed -- the only thing they seemed to reaffirm was the hopeless isolation of our loneliness. Oh, my mother had her furs, and I had my toys, and my father had his stocks and bonds and Buicks; but we never had each other, not the way that they did; and we envied them.
I envied them their little cardboard house, so filled with love and people it seemed about to burst; and I yearned for a brother, a glorious hero like Tall Jack. Or even a little unobtrusive one like Neat Albert. Why, to alleviate my loneliness I would have even settled for Fat Herbie -- in spite of his occasional bullying.
And that serious little man behind the wheel, the intrepid pilot of that lonesome craft, he yearned, oh yes, he yearned. My father yearned for an orderly life with a more orderly wife; a more grateful wife who’d respect his position and appreciate her good fortune; a simpler wife whom he could please and understand; a happier wife who -- in spite of all the doctors -- wouldn’t keep slipping away, sinking deeper every year into that dark, unfathomable melancholy. And my mother, my poor fragile mother. For her the furs were never enough and the seventeen rooms were too much. Life was a burden of sorrows, and she yearned, she yearned for something my father could never give her, she yearned for it all to end.
And so we passed once again through that dark oppressive silence of our private discontents until, for no apparent reason, my mother would burst into tears. My father would clear his throat but offer nothing -- he had learned by now not to ask her what was wrong, for even if she knew, she wouldn’t answer.
Sporadically illuminated by the passing lights, my abandoned gas mask huddled in the shadows on the seat across from me, like some poor deflated octopus, its two great lifeless eyes fixed on me with a forlorn and vacant stare.
In 1945, I turned ten years old; and in that year the population of my little world decreased by one. The Great War ended, but Tall Jack never came home; his awesome presence transformed forever into a small photograph that sat silently on their mantle, surrounded by all the carefully polished medals that he’d won for running, and jumping, and dying.
Oh, we still made the annual Christmas trips to New Jersey, but they were never quite the same. Good, sweet Aunt Lilly still laughed and smiled, but sometimes I noticed, when she’d be in the kitchen washing dishes, she’d suddenly stop, her hands forgotten, lost in the suds, and just stand there looking strangely empty and confused. And long, laconic Uncle Duke seemed older now and even quieter than ever, sitting for hours in his big easy chair beneath the mantle, smoking his pipe in a deep, ruminative silence.
These are some of my Christmas memories, which are, like some of yours, I would surmise, joyous, troubled, poignant and dear.
Merry Christmas, all. And peace on earth.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rosemary's Thoughts, Adam's Blog, Big Dog's Weblog, Cao's Blog, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, third world county, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate's Cove, Wolf Pangloss, and OTB Sports, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Showing posts with label Roger Gardner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roger Gardner. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Sunday, December 16, 2007
This Careful Generation
Originally published December 15, 2007 by Wake Up America
by Roger W. Gardner
This, my friends, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very careful generation. In fact, I‘ve lived in this wonderful country of ours for a little over seven decades now, and this is without a doubt the most “careful” generation that I have ever had the misfortune to live amongst. Somehow we have managed to become the most careful people in the world, maybe the most careful people in history. We live in constant fear that we might inadvertently say something truthful that might offend someone, somewhere. We’ve learned to call this pervasive state of denial Political Correctness. But is it really Political Correctness, or is it something else?
I ask myself, is this present pacifistic crop of Chamberlainesque appeasers really being “careful” of other people‘s feelings, or merely being cowardly? Are all of our so-called PCisms truly demonstrations of our consideration for others, or are they rather an expression of our fear of others? Are we avoiding confrontation with those who threaten our lives and our culture out of kindness and tolerance, or are we just desperately trying to avoid that confrontation? Are we perhaps concerned that we might just antagonize our antagonists even more by naming them? Are we hoping to avoid the inevitable nastiness of these confrontations by hiding behind this intricately-wrought screen of euphemisms called Political Correctness?
When you think about it, isn’t this really that same old weasely logic that in the 1950s induced us to call a Jew “someone of the Jewish persuasion”? As though they had somehow been persuaded to become a Jew. Isn’t this just the latest manifestation of that same old hypocritical crap? Did we also talk about “someone of the Christian persuasion” in the 1950s? I don’t think so.
In short, this is nothing all that new, it’s that old familiar circuitous obfuscation that wouldn’t allow us to call a Jew a Jew. Why? Would a Jew be offended to be called a Jew? Hardly. Every Jew I’ve ever known was proud to be a Jew. Could it be perhaps that we found that word so offensive that we could hardly bring ourselves to say it? Were these semantic acrobatics really evidence of our consideration for others or evidence of that intransigent American brand of anti-Semitism? Was this an example of some early form of Political Correctness in action? Or are we really talking about something else here. Something a little bit easier to understand, but something too awful to actually put it into words. Something called the truth.
Well, I’m going to get a lot of people pissed off right now -- or at least I‘m going to give it a good try. You see, I’m getting sick and tired of being careful. I don’t know how the hell I ever let them talk me into all this bullshit in the first place.
This all started when I read that incredible little article, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about by now, about that Santa school Down Under that instructed their student Santas to no longer say “ho-ho-ho”, because it had a double meaning in the American Black Community, and that some people might find it offensive.
What???
My God, what have we become? We stand by meekly and watch as our wonderful English language becomes increasingly denigrated and devalued, we allow the primitive animalistic gruntings of our Black Inner City Gangsta Rap, pants-falling-off-the-butt “culture” to infiltrate and diminish almost every aspect of our lives: our music, our movies, our television, our sports, the way our kids act and dress -- and now we’re going to tell our Santa Clauses not to say “ho-ho-ho” because it too closely resembles that Gangsta Rap word for “whore”?
Wait a minute. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?
Who are the folks here who should be offended?
After that, I read another article that purported to be an investigation into the causes of the enormous increase in the murder rate in one of our largest East Coast cities -- actually, two articles written explicitly to address this single major problem. However, throughout the entire two articles, not one mention was made of what had actually happened to this city. Not one single reference to the fact that this wildly escalating crime rate just happened to correspond to the most catastrophic societal upheaval in that city’s four-hundred year history. Not only did the articles not even mention these irrefutable truths, but somehow the author ingeniously avoided mentioning that any racial changes had taken place there at all. If someone didn’t know the actual facts of the city in question they would be left to surmise that the city had just suddenly started becoming more criminal for no apparent reason. This, my friends, is what currently passes for Political Correctness. But is it?
Here’s what happened: the Inner City turned Black and the crime rate soared.
Sorry, but that’s what happened.
And I really am sorry; because it was my city of origin that was the subject of these counterfeit articles. I was born and brought up there.
And this Black murder rate in this Black Inner City is a Black problem, not a White problem. These Inner City Black Gangstas are not selling crack because their great-great-grandmothers were slaves. And that disingenuous author who so adroitly skirted the most obvious by never once mentioning race, by referring to “these people and their drug problems” would have had that same delicate problem back in the 1950s calling a Jew a Jew.
The murder of young Black males by other young Black males in the Black Inner Cities is a Black problem and can only be solved by Blacks. Blacks who are willing to be honest with themselves. Blacks who are getting sick and tired of that criminal-worshipping, female-degrading, drive-by shooting, Gangsta Rap drug world of self-destruction. Blacks who are willing to listen to those honest and tough love messages of respected Black people like Bill Cosby, and even from those unapologetic liberals, like Juan Williams. Blacks who are willing to accept responsibility for their own lives and want to quit blaming everything on the Whites, who finally have the courage to disassociate themselves from those so-called Black Leaders, like Al Sharpton and that extortionist Jesse Jackson, who are nothing more than enablers, living off the suffering of others. Offering their followers that same old false comfort of self-pity and victimization by perpetuating the myth of White subjugation.
By pretending that this is still a White problem, that only White people are smart enough to fix it, those delusional liberals are only making matters worse. It’s trying to cure the alcoholic’s problem by telling him he has good reason to drink. And it just ain’t gonna work.
So, what are we really talking about here? Blacks? Jews? Racism? Anti-Semitism? No, we’re still talking about Political Correctness -- or perhaps, more precisely, that same old cowardly disingenuousness in it’s latest disguise? A problem we’ve been wrestling with throughout that whole tumultuous course of human history. It’s called moral integrity. Some people simply call it honesty.
Now, before all you liberals out there rush to get your ammunition and start bombarding me with those familiar epithets of Racist and Bigot, just answer this one simple question. If we are afraid to even identify a problem, how the hell can we expect to fix it? If no one can even address these issues for fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, then tell me how we are going to discuss the issues? With obsequious code words like “these people and their drug problems“? For God’s sake, what people are we talking about? The Swedes? The Chinese?
If the Chinese people were the major contributing factor to the rise of the crime rates in most of our major cities, then we should most certainly be able to acknowledge this fact and try to do something about it. But it isn’t the Chinese people who are causing these terrible Inner City problems, is it? And it isn’t always the Blacks. Sometimes it’s the Mexicans, and sometimes it’s somebody else. But, if we ever hope to do anything about these enormous and growing problems, we had better learn how to talk about them honestly. And have the courage to say who it is we are really talking about.
We have, it seems, traded our language of truth for some weak-kneed second-rate vocabulary of denial; and, most unfortunate of all, some of us are actually pleased with this ignoble transaction. They call it progressive; I call it regressive. They call it Political Correctness; I call it cowardice.
Right now, during this very special season, when a television commercial entices us into thinking about buying a brand new Lincoln for our lover, while adroitly managing to circumvent that contentious word “Christmas”, substituting it with that inept and meaningless word “Holiday”, are these car manufacturers sincerely interested in promoting cultural inclusiveness, or just afraid of the ACLU? Is this just one more example of this new-fangled ideology called Political Correctness? Or is it just that same old-fashioned cowardice hiding its ugly head?
We are losing our national nerve. We live in constant fear. We are afraid of being sued, afraid of being attacked, afraid of being disliked, and we are afraid of being called names. Fear has infiltrated every area of our lives and corrupted our ability to be effective as a people, as a nation. We are even afraid to admit that we are afraid. We are even becoming afraid to be patriotic Americans.
The school board who lifts the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance from that unfortunate school’s curriculum isn’t doing this out of some high-minded noble concept of inclusiveness -- they’re afraid of being sued by some loathsome Dr. Newdow (described by one enthusiastic atheist as “…one of the greatest heroes in the war against religious demagogues”).
To attempt to hide this blatant cowardice behind some shining shield of Political Correctness is a lie which we can no longer ignore, and which we can no longer afford to tolerate.
When we choose to refer to our brave Israeli ally’s ongoing attempts to protect their tiny nation from that continuous generational onslaught from their vicious and hate-filled neighbors and their brutal suicide-bombers as an “Arab/Israeli conflict”, rather than calling it what it is -- "The Arab War Against Israel” -- are we not demonstrating to the world our unconscionable lack of moral fiber? Did we refer to that WWII horror show in the Pacific as some morally-neuter “Japanese/American Conflict”? Hell no.
If I get stopped by a cop for driving without a license, will he let me go if I explain that what I’m doing isn’t really illegal, that I’m really just an undocumented driver? We have become so accustomed to navigating through the perils of this world using these subtle subterfuges and lies we no longer even notice them.
On September 11, 2001 we were attacked by nineteen Muslim terrorists. They left final testaments clearly explaining their motivations for committing this horrendous crime against humanity. They wanted to kill the Infidels. And they killed 2,987 innocent people that day -- and we have still not managed to conjure up the political will to profile Muslim men at our airports.
Does anyone still believe that this is truly an expression of Political Correctness, our good-hearted and sincere efforts to avoid offending anyone of a different faith or race? Or is this just one more instance of a government and an industry caving in to fear. The fear of being sued by CAIR or their faithful ally, the ACLU.
While Islamic leaders worldwide exhort their eager followers to kill the Infidel, and describe this monumental struggle with unabashed clarity as a War of Islam against the West, of Muslims against Infidels, our own president very carefully describes this same militant religion as a "religion of Peace". We console ourselves with the comforting illusion that what we are really up against in this so-called War on Terror is just a small fanatical minority who have hijacked a "peaceful religion". We ignore all information to the contrary, no matter what its source, no matter how valid. Islam has declared War on the West but, none the less, we must be very careful not to offend any Muslims. They might think we're racists. CAIR might sue us. Jimmy Carter might get upset.
Somehow, my friends, before it really is too late, we have to come out from behind our warm and fuzzy euphemisms and have the courage to confront this world that‘s really there, not the one we wished was there. We can no longer blame our dishonorable inaction on Political Correctness. For, when all is said and done, our so-called PC culture is nothing but another form of cowardice. And this cowardice is not only never going to allow us to solve any of our problems, it’s going to get us killed.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rosemary's Thoughts, Right Truth, DragonLady's World, Adam's Blog, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate's Cove, Big Dog's Weblog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
by Roger W. Gardner
This, my friends, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very careful generation. In fact, I‘ve lived in this wonderful country of ours for a little over seven decades now, and this is without a doubt the most “careful” generation that I have ever had the misfortune to live amongst. Somehow we have managed to become the most careful people in the world, maybe the most careful people in history. We live in constant fear that we might inadvertently say something truthful that might offend someone, somewhere. We’ve learned to call this pervasive state of denial Political Correctness. But is it really Political Correctness, or is it something else?
I ask myself, is this present pacifistic crop of Chamberlainesque appeasers really being “careful” of other people‘s feelings, or merely being cowardly? Are all of our so-called PCisms truly demonstrations of our consideration for others, or are they rather an expression of our fear of others? Are we avoiding confrontation with those who threaten our lives and our culture out of kindness and tolerance, or are we just desperately trying to avoid that confrontation? Are we perhaps concerned that we might just antagonize our antagonists even more by naming them? Are we hoping to avoid the inevitable nastiness of these confrontations by hiding behind this intricately-wrought screen of euphemisms called Political Correctness?
When you think about it, isn’t this really that same old weasely logic that in the 1950s induced us to call a Jew “someone of the Jewish persuasion”? As though they had somehow been persuaded to become a Jew. Isn’t this just the latest manifestation of that same old hypocritical crap? Did we also talk about “someone of the Christian persuasion” in the 1950s? I don’t think so.
In short, this is nothing all that new, it’s that old familiar circuitous obfuscation that wouldn’t allow us to call a Jew a Jew. Why? Would a Jew be offended to be called a Jew? Hardly. Every Jew I’ve ever known was proud to be a Jew. Could it be perhaps that we found that word so offensive that we could hardly bring ourselves to say it? Were these semantic acrobatics really evidence of our consideration for others or evidence of that intransigent American brand of anti-Semitism? Was this an example of some early form of Political Correctness in action? Or are we really talking about something else here. Something a little bit easier to understand, but something too awful to actually put it into words. Something called the truth.
Well, I’m going to get a lot of people pissed off right now -- or at least I‘m going to give it a good try. You see, I’m getting sick and tired of being careful. I don’t know how the hell I ever let them talk me into all this bullshit in the first place.
This all started when I read that incredible little article, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about by now, about that Santa school Down Under that instructed their student Santas to no longer say “ho-ho-ho”, because it had a double meaning in the American Black Community, and that some people might find it offensive.
What???
My God, what have we become? We stand by meekly and watch as our wonderful English language becomes increasingly denigrated and devalued, we allow the primitive animalistic gruntings of our Black Inner City Gangsta Rap, pants-falling-off-the-butt “culture” to infiltrate and diminish almost every aspect of our lives: our music, our movies, our television, our sports, the way our kids act and dress -- and now we’re going to tell our Santa Clauses not to say “ho-ho-ho” because it too closely resembles that Gangsta Rap word for “whore”?
Wait a minute. Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?
Who are the folks here who should be offended?
After that, I read another article that purported to be an investigation into the causes of the enormous increase in the murder rate in one of our largest East Coast cities -- actually, two articles written explicitly to address this single major problem. However, throughout the entire two articles, not one mention was made of what had actually happened to this city. Not one single reference to the fact that this wildly escalating crime rate just happened to correspond to the most catastrophic societal upheaval in that city’s four-hundred year history. Not only did the articles not even mention these irrefutable truths, but somehow the author ingeniously avoided mentioning that any racial changes had taken place there at all. If someone didn’t know the actual facts of the city in question they would be left to surmise that the city had just suddenly started becoming more criminal for no apparent reason. This, my friends, is what currently passes for Political Correctness. But is it?
Here’s what happened: the Inner City turned Black and the crime rate soared.
Sorry, but that’s what happened.
And I really am sorry; because it was my city of origin that was the subject of these counterfeit articles. I was born and brought up there.
And this Black murder rate in this Black Inner City is a Black problem, not a White problem. These Inner City Black Gangstas are not selling crack because their great-great-grandmothers were slaves. And that disingenuous author who so adroitly skirted the most obvious by never once mentioning race, by referring to “these people and their drug problems” would have had that same delicate problem back in the 1950s calling a Jew a Jew.
The murder of young Black males by other young Black males in the Black Inner Cities is a Black problem and can only be solved by Blacks. Blacks who are willing to be honest with themselves. Blacks who are getting sick and tired of that criminal-worshipping, female-degrading, drive-by shooting, Gangsta Rap drug world of self-destruction. Blacks who are willing to listen to those honest and tough love messages of respected Black people like Bill Cosby, and even from those unapologetic liberals, like Juan Williams. Blacks who are willing to accept responsibility for their own lives and want to quit blaming everything on the Whites, who finally have the courage to disassociate themselves from those so-called Black Leaders, like Al Sharpton and that extortionist Jesse Jackson, who are nothing more than enablers, living off the suffering of others. Offering their followers that same old false comfort of self-pity and victimization by perpetuating the myth of White subjugation.
By pretending that this is still a White problem, that only White people are smart enough to fix it, those delusional liberals are only making matters worse. It’s trying to cure the alcoholic’s problem by telling him he has good reason to drink. And it just ain’t gonna work.
So, what are we really talking about here? Blacks? Jews? Racism? Anti-Semitism? No, we’re still talking about Political Correctness -- or perhaps, more precisely, that same old cowardly disingenuousness in it’s latest disguise? A problem we’ve been wrestling with throughout that whole tumultuous course of human history. It’s called moral integrity. Some people simply call it honesty.
Now, before all you liberals out there rush to get your ammunition and start bombarding me with those familiar epithets of Racist and Bigot, just answer this one simple question. If we are afraid to even identify a problem, how the hell can we expect to fix it? If no one can even address these issues for fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, then tell me how we are going to discuss the issues? With obsequious code words like “these people and their drug problems“? For God’s sake, what people are we talking about? The Swedes? The Chinese?
If the Chinese people were the major contributing factor to the rise of the crime rates in most of our major cities, then we should most certainly be able to acknowledge this fact and try to do something about it. But it isn’t the Chinese people who are causing these terrible Inner City problems, is it? And it isn’t always the Blacks. Sometimes it’s the Mexicans, and sometimes it’s somebody else. But, if we ever hope to do anything about these enormous and growing problems, we had better learn how to talk about them honestly. And have the courage to say who it is we are really talking about.
We have, it seems, traded our language of truth for some weak-kneed second-rate vocabulary of denial; and, most unfortunate of all, some of us are actually pleased with this ignoble transaction. They call it progressive; I call it regressive. They call it Political Correctness; I call it cowardice.
Right now, during this very special season, when a television commercial entices us into thinking about buying a brand new Lincoln for our lover, while adroitly managing to circumvent that contentious word “Christmas”, substituting it with that inept and meaningless word “Holiday”, are these car manufacturers sincerely interested in promoting cultural inclusiveness, or just afraid of the ACLU? Is this just one more example of this new-fangled ideology called Political Correctness? Or is it just that same old-fashioned cowardice hiding its ugly head?
We are losing our national nerve. We live in constant fear. We are afraid of being sued, afraid of being attacked, afraid of being disliked, and we are afraid of being called names. Fear has infiltrated every area of our lives and corrupted our ability to be effective as a people, as a nation. We are even afraid to admit that we are afraid. We are even becoming afraid to be patriotic Americans.
The school board who lifts the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance from that unfortunate school’s curriculum isn’t doing this out of some high-minded noble concept of inclusiveness -- they’re afraid of being sued by some loathsome Dr. Newdow (described by one enthusiastic atheist as “…one of the greatest heroes in the war against religious demagogues”).
To attempt to hide this blatant cowardice behind some shining shield of Political Correctness is a lie which we can no longer ignore, and which we can no longer afford to tolerate.
When we choose to refer to our brave Israeli ally’s ongoing attempts to protect their tiny nation from that continuous generational onslaught from their vicious and hate-filled neighbors and their brutal suicide-bombers as an “Arab/Israeli conflict”, rather than calling it what it is -- "The Arab War Against Israel” -- are we not demonstrating to the world our unconscionable lack of moral fiber? Did we refer to that WWII horror show in the Pacific as some morally-neuter “Japanese/American Conflict”? Hell no.
If I get stopped by a cop for driving without a license, will he let me go if I explain that what I’m doing isn’t really illegal, that I’m really just an undocumented driver? We have become so accustomed to navigating through the perils of this world using these subtle subterfuges and lies we no longer even notice them.
On September 11, 2001 we were attacked by nineteen Muslim terrorists. They left final testaments clearly explaining their motivations for committing this horrendous crime against humanity. They wanted to kill the Infidels. And they killed 2,987 innocent people that day -- and we have still not managed to conjure up the political will to profile Muslim men at our airports.
Does anyone still believe that this is truly an expression of Political Correctness, our good-hearted and sincere efforts to avoid offending anyone of a different faith or race? Or is this just one more instance of a government and an industry caving in to fear. The fear of being sued by CAIR or their faithful ally, the ACLU.
While Islamic leaders worldwide exhort their eager followers to kill the Infidel, and describe this monumental struggle with unabashed clarity as a War of Islam against the West, of Muslims against Infidels, our own president very carefully describes this same militant religion as a "religion of Peace". We console ourselves with the comforting illusion that what we are really up against in this so-called War on Terror is just a small fanatical minority who have hijacked a "peaceful religion". We ignore all information to the contrary, no matter what its source, no matter how valid. Islam has declared War on the West but, none the less, we must be very careful not to offend any Muslims. They might think we're racists. CAIR might sue us. Jimmy Carter might get upset.
Somehow, my friends, before it really is too late, we have to come out from behind our warm and fuzzy euphemisms and have the courage to confront this world that‘s really there, not the one we wished was there. We can no longer blame our dishonorable inaction on Political Correctness. For, when all is said and done, our so-called PC culture is nothing but another form of cowardice. And this cowardice is not only never going to allow us to solve any of our problems, it’s going to get us killed.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rosemary's Thoughts, Right Truth, DragonLady's World, Adam's Blog, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate's Cove, Big Dog's Weblog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Reclaiming the Power of Hate
Originally published on Wake Up America, Sunday, December 02, 2007
Reclaiming the Power of Hate by Roger Gardner
Asked if they'd really like to kill a German, the GI in WWII Europe answered Yes 7% of the time. When asked the same question about the Japs in the Pacific the answer was Yes 44% of the time.
What accounted for this tremendous difference in our attitudes towards the Germans and the Japanese? We were in the midst of the bloodiest war the world had ever known, and both the Germans and the Japanese were our bitter enemies. Yet while the American people had no difficulty conjuring up a healthy hatred for the Nazis, and the average GI in the European Theater soon learned to despise his Nazi adversaries, and, holding them in special contempt, eventually had no qualms about shooting the notorious SS troops on sight, none the less, throughout that monumental conflict, as the above statistics suggest, the American people, and the average GI, both held conflicted views about the German people themselves.
Throughout our relatively short national history, we had enjoyed long generational ties with Germany and with Germans. We had learned to admire that advanced Germanic culture and those admirable Teutonic traits of hard work and efficiency, diligence and discipline. We listened appreciatively to their magnificent classical music (which they had all but invented) and avidly studied their writers and philosophers. We shared a common bond, unique to those members of the Western World. And perhaps most importantly, we shared a common religion -- and although it had perhaps become somewhat theologically awkward -- at times we both prayed for victory to the same
Christian God.
For these reasons and many more we were, at least partially, able to buy into the argument that the German people were a basically decent people who had either been seduced or terrorized into accepting the lunatic racist visions of the Third Reich. (The degree to which this comforting paradigm still has validity is, of course, highly debatable). But those were our views at the time. And these unspoken cultural ambiguities were often reflected in the actions and attitudes of both adversaries on and off the battlefield.
As an example of this subliminal cultural affinity, consider the following statistic: During the entire course of WWII only 2% of Allied POWs died while in European captivity.
Now, what about the Japanese?
In the first place, after December 7, 1941, they were no longer referred to as the Japanese. They were simply, and disdainfully labeled Japs, and later, Nips. Although there was a small but thriving Japanese-American population on the West Coast and on the American island of Hawaii, few if any cultural bonds existed between the Japanese and American peoples. And, of course, after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese-American community was looked upon, somewhat understandably, with growing suspicion. (Our moral justification for the subsequent internment of our Japanese-Americans is a complicated and contentious subject which deserves to be treated in a separate article). Suffice it to say, that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were a completely different race from a strange and utterly alien culture. Their religion appeared to us to be a weird conflation of Shintoism and Emperor worship, their political ideology was grounded in the unyielding brutal code of the Samurai warrior.
Since the end of the First World War, the Japanese national character had become more and more militaristic, aggressive, imperialistic and -- in a reactionary nationalistic backlash against those cultural inroads made by the Caucasian West into their traditional inbred, closed society -- they had become defensively and virulently racist -- anti-white, anti-Western, anti-colonialist.
Beginning with their brutal and unwarranted invasion of Manchuria in 1931, through the subsequent horrors of their infamous Rape of Nanking, and the innumerable and unimaginable acts of inhumanity committed against captured enemy soldiers and innocent civilians alike, throughout their conquered territories in the Southeast Pacific, the fearsome Japanese soldier accumulated a long, despicable record of sadistic barbarism unmatched in modern times. (An appalling record of rape and government-sanctioned sadism for which they -- unlike the Germans -- have to this day never adequately apologized).
After the Battle of Midway, as the war in the Pacific gradually turned against those at first seemingly-invincible Japanese forces, and as the inevitable and dire fate of the Empire of the Rising Sun became increasingly apparent, the scale of Japanese atrocities grew exponentially.
In stark contrast to that 2% of POWs who perished in European POW camps, an incredible 37% of Allied POWs would die under horrendous conditions in the Japanese prison camps. To be captured by the Japanese during WWII was for many, quite literally, a fate worse than death.
Considering that the American public had first become aware of the Japanese war machine through that treacherous and unprovoked sneak attack on an American Naval Base, during a time of peace, while the Japanese ambassadors were at that very moment meeting their American counterparts at the State Department, the Japanese people quickly became something else; they became Japs. A brutal and inferior race of savages to be distrusted and despised. A race, in short, to be hated.
And hate them we did. We hated them openly, willingly and without reservation. And we didn't just hate their leaders or their armies and their navies, we hated THEM, the Japs themselves, the bloodthirsty, sadistic little squinty-eyed monkeys. We matched their racial hatred of us with our racial hatred of them. No caricature, no obscenity, no epithet could be too vile to describe a Jap. If you were a patriotic American, be you man, woman or child, you automatically hated the Japs. It quickly became a necessary adjunct to our national persona, second nature, like loving your mother and apple pie. It was not only that it was O.K. to hate the Japs, it was considered your sacred duty. And the more fervently you expressed this hate, the more patriotic you became, and the more patriotic you became, the stronger America became.
It was as clear as crystal.
And our hate was essential to the cause, we could not have won the war without it. This natural unquestioned hatred of the enemy -- especially of the Japs -- became our strength and our power, a weapon as necessary to possess in abundance in our arsenals as guns and bombs. It gave purpose to our lives, and was resanctioned daily by our unified patriotic media and our beloved patriotic movies. This sacred and unmitigated hate fueled our patriotic fervor, and enabled us to put up with those ever-increasing burdens of rationing and deprivations, and to endure those awful but inevitable losses of our loved ones.
In short, hate was good.
In itself, hate was neither moral nor immoral. It was, rather, a natural rational reaction. Hate became the very substance that sustained us, the societal glue that bound us all together. Our imaginations thrived on lurid visions of Jap bestialities -- most of which were unfortunately all too true.
It seemed, somehow we knew, that in a time of war hate was a quality as essential as bravery and courage and sacrifice. This was a truth so obvious to us all that no one ever thought to even question it. No one had ever won a war by learning to dislike their enemy. If they won the war, they won the war by learning how to hate their enemy at least as fervently as their enemy hated them. The whole purpose of all nationalistic propaganda, no matter whose side it was on, was to inspire that all-powerful passion of hate, that genuine, pervasive and relentless hatred of the enemy which is absolutely essential to success in warfare.
Then, finally, the war was over and we had won.
But,we had changed.
In 1946, William Wyler released his critically-acclaimed motion picture The Best Years of Our Lives, and immediately it touched the hearts of a war-weary American public. It also showed an unwelcome light on the first cracks in our otherwise confident new peacetime facade.
Basically, the film relates the stories of three GIs returning from the war, and the various problems they encounter as they attempt to readjust themselves to civilian life in a world they hardly recognize. The story opens with the return of a tough, battle-hardened, newly-discharged Army Sergeant, just back from fighting in the Pacific (masterfully played by Frederick March). After one of the most heart-warming homecoming scenes in all of moviedom, he begins that awkward but inevitable process of reacquainting himself with his barely-recognizable grownup children.
Following his college student son's rather underwhelmed reaction to his gifts of hard won Jap war trophies, he listens patiently as the young man proudly announces that he is currently attending lectures at school on World Peace, and learning that in this new Atomic Age we must all learn to get along together and that 'war is never the answer' (thus, inferentially condemning his warrior father who by fighting for his country may have inadvertently transgressed some higher moral code).
And thus it began.
All of those hard lessons we had learned during the war years must now be unlearned and forgotten. As peace settled in those traditional masculine virtues -- strength, courage, duty, loyalty, bravery, honor -- which served society so well in time of war, and had probably saved the very life of that society, were to be gradually shunted aside and devalued, eventually to be replaced by those gentler, more civil feminine virtues of patience, understanding, nurturing, tolerance and love. We were encouraged to become an increasingly passive, self-absorbed, self-indulgent feminine society, a nation obsessed with its health, wealth, weight and security. Soon, our most important national issues would become our civil rights and personal liberties, free speech and gay marriage.
For two successive generations since the end of that great war, we had been undergoing this continuing process of deprogramming and moral readjustment. A whole new vocabulary had emerged to define this new world. Certain words had taken on a subjective moral weight all their own. We still had enemies, but now our most important enemies had become our own words -- words like Prejudice and Racism and Intolerance were now the new enemy. This was the new war we were fighting, a war of words against words. And of all of the words that we were fighting against, none more perfectly embodied the evil nature of our mortal enemy than that most deadly and unconscionable of words -- Hate.
Hate is the very heart and soul of our new enemy; the word Hate itself must be eradicated and expunged forever from our new vocabulary and from our new lives. We must banish Hate from our cities and our towns as the Nazis banished the Jews. We must put up posters at all the entrances to our communities which proclaim: NO PLACE HERE FOR HATE. We must diligently search out Hate wherever it attempts to hide itself and expose it to the bright light of reason.
Our new weapons in this new war would be Openness, Tolerance, and above all, Acceptance of The Other. We had learned our lessons well. Never again would we mistrust The Other merely because they were different from us. Rather, we would enthusiastically embrace these differences. We would especially honor those unique cultural and religious differences, and the more they differed from ours, the more we would respect and honor them.
And if by chance these particular cultures happened to embrace slavery, child abuse, honor killings and the violent suppression and persecution of all other religions and of all of their hapless women, then we shall smile at them and say, This is your culture and your religion and we honor it and respect it and we welcome you into the fold. We open our borders and we open our hearts to you. Because, at all costs, we can no longer tolerate those deadly enemies of Peace -- Prejudice, Intolerance and Racism. Because, as our eager young college student so presciently observed back in 1946, 'in this new Atomic Age we must all learn to get along together, and War Is Never The Answer'.
War is, in fact, the physical manifestation of Hate; therefore, War itself must be our primary enemy. Anyone who proposes War must be the enemy. War will be successfully defeated by the utter eradication of the word Hate. Thus we will maintain our moral equilibrium, the status quo of Peace.
Now, however, we have been attacked once again. This time, a sneak attack even more deadly than the one on Pearl Harbor, with even more loss of life, 2,987 compared to 2,403. This time, it would not even be a military attack against a military target but, rather, a treacherous unprovoked attack against innocent civilians, people going to work in the morning.
We had been attacked by people who hate us so badly that they would gladly die to kill us. They hate us and our Western culture with such passion that they spill out onto their streets in droves daily to stomp on our flag and to burn our president in effigy. We are, they scream and shout at us, the Great Satan, and they have promised to wipe us off the face of the earth. Driven by an unyielding religious fervor, they will not be dissuaded nor deterred in their righteous jihad until they have fulfilled their sacred promise to destroy us.
What, then, is our national response to this violent onslaught?
We are unsure, we remain confused and conflicted, we can barely conjure up a reasonable facsimile of anger without it generating some immediate liberal moral backlash. We have gutted our military and outlawed our masculinity and rendered ourselves all but defenseless. Half of our nation believes we are at war and half of our nation doesn't. We live nervously in our Cowardly New World of clever obfuscations and elaborate denials, we cower behind a wall of euphemisms and confront our enemy's virulent hatred with the only weapons we have left, those pitiful weapons of Tolerance and Understanding. We attempt to defend ourselves against the Murderous Beast by pretending that he's really not there. We would rather be dead than be impolite. We refuse to identify our enemies for fear of offending them.
We have forgotten how to fight back, we only know how to talk. We have forgotten that omnipotent power of hate; foolishly, we have systematically eliminated the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. We have thoroughly expunged that dreaded word from our vocabulary, and we have declared that the word War is now our real enemy.
In summation, we're in serious trouble.
If we are to survive as a nation, as a free and honorable people, if we are to survive as a viable Democracy, we must once and for all abandon all the lies and obfuscations. We must make all euphemisms illegal. We must go all the way back to 1945 and relearn that cold hard masculine vocabulary of War.
To live, we must learn how to hate again. For without the strength of that unmitigated and unquestioned passion, weakened by our own civility, we will most assuredly perish, subsumed in the onrushing tsunami of our enemy's unanswered rage.
Posted by Roger W. Gardner at 6:14 PM
Reclaiming the Power of Hate by Roger Gardner
Asked if they'd really like to kill a German, the GI in WWII Europe answered Yes 7% of the time. When asked the same question about the Japs in the Pacific the answer was Yes 44% of the time.
What accounted for this tremendous difference in our attitudes towards the Germans and the Japanese? We were in the midst of the bloodiest war the world had ever known, and both the Germans and the Japanese were our bitter enemies. Yet while the American people had no difficulty conjuring up a healthy hatred for the Nazis, and the average GI in the European Theater soon learned to despise his Nazi adversaries, and, holding them in special contempt, eventually had no qualms about shooting the notorious SS troops on sight, none the less, throughout that monumental conflict, as the above statistics suggest, the American people, and the average GI, both held conflicted views about the German people themselves.
Throughout our relatively short national history, we had enjoyed long generational ties with Germany and with Germans. We had learned to admire that advanced Germanic culture and those admirable Teutonic traits of hard work and efficiency, diligence and discipline. We listened appreciatively to their magnificent classical music (which they had all but invented) and avidly studied their writers and philosophers. We shared a common bond, unique to those members of the Western World. And perhaps most importantly, we shared a common religion -- and although it had perhaps become somewhat theologically awkward -- at times we both prayed for victory to the same
Christian God.
For these reasons and many more we were, at least partially, able to buy into the argument that the German people were a basically decent people who had either been seduced or terrorized into accepting the lunatic racist visions of the Third Reich. (The degree to which this comforting paradigm still has validity is, of course, highly debatable). But those were our views at the time. And these unspoken cultural ambiguities were often reflected in the actions and attitudes of both adversaries on and off the battlefield.
As an example of this subliminal cultural affinity, consider the following statistic: During the entire course of WWII only 2% of Allied POWs died while in European captivity.
Now, what about the Japanese?
In the first place, after December 7, 1941, they were no longer referred to as the Japanese. They were simply, and disdainfully labeled Japs, and later, Nips. Although there was a small but thriving Japanese-American population on the West Coast and on the American island of Hawaii, few if any cultural bonds existed between the Japanese and American peoples. And, of course, after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese-American community was looked upon, somewhat understandably, with growing suspicion. (Our moral justification for the subsequent internment of our Japanese-Americans is a complicated and contentious subject which deserves to be treated in a separate article). Suffice it to say, that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were a completely different race from a strange and utterly alien culture. Their religion appeared to us to be a weird conflation of Shintoism and Emperor worship, their political ideology was grounded in the unyielding brutal code of the Samurai warrior.
Since the end of the First World War, the Japanese national character had become more and more militaristic, aggressive, imperialistic and -- in a reactionary nationalistic backlash against those cultural inroads made by the Caucasian West into their traditional inbred, closed society -- they had become defensively and virulently racist -- anti-white, anti-Western, anti-colonialist.
Beginning with their brutal and unwarranted invasion of Manchuria in 1931, through the subsequent horrors of their infamous Rape of Nanking, and the innumerable and unimaginable acts of inhumanity committed against captured enemy soldiers and innocent civilians alike, throughout their conquered territories in the Southeast Pacific, the fearsome Japanese soldier accumulated a long, despicable record of sadistic barbarism unmatched in modern times. (An appalling record of rape and government-sanctioned sadism for which they -- unlike the Germans -- have to this day never adequately apologized).
After the Battle of Midway, as the war in the Pacific gradually turned against those at first seemingly-invincible Japanese forces, and as the inevitable and dire fate of the Empire of the Rising Sun became increasingly apparent, the scale of Japanese atrocities grew exponentially.
In stark contrast to that 2% of POWs who perished in European POW camps, an incredible 37% of Allied POWs would die under horrendous conditions in the Japanese prison camps. To be captured by the Japanese during WWII was for many, quite literally, a fate worse than death.
Considering that the American public had first become aware of the Japanese war machine through that treacherous and unprovoked sneak attack on an American Naval Base, during a time of peace, while the Japanese ambassadors were at that very moment meeting their American counterparts at the State Department, the Japanese people quickly became something else; they became Japs. A brutal and inferior race of savages to be distrusted and despised. A race, in short, to be hated.
And hate them we did. We hated them openly, willingly and without reservation. And we didn't just hate their leaders or their armies and their navies, we hated THEM, the Japs themselves, the bloodthirsty, sadistic little squinty-eyed monkeys. We matched their racial hatred of us with our racial hatred of them. No caricature, no obscenity, no epithet could be too vile to describe a Jap. If you were a patriotic American, be you man, woman or child, you automatically hated the Japs. It quickly became a necessary adjunct to our national persona, second nature, like loving your mother and apple pie. It was not only that it was O.K. to hate the Japs, it was considered your sacred duty. And the more fervently you expressed this hate, the more patriotic you became, and the more patriotic you became, the stronger America became.
It was as clear as crystal.
And our hate was essential to the cause, we could not have won the war without it. This natural unquestioned hatred of the enemy -- especially of the Japs -- became our strength and our power, a weapon as necessary to possess in abundance in our arsenals as guns and bombs. It gave purpose to our lives, and was resanctioned daily by our unified patriotic media and our beloved patriotic movies. This sacred and unmitigated hate fueled our patriotic fervor, and enabled us to put up with those ever-increasing burdens of rationing and deprivations, and to endure those awful but inevitable losses of our loved ones.
In short, hate was good.
In itself, hate was neither moral nor immoral. It was, rather, a natural rational reaction. Hate became the very substance that sustained us, the societal glue that bound us all together. Our imaginations thrived on lurid visions of Jap bestialities -- most of which were unfortunately all too true.
It seemed, somehow we knew, that in a time of war hate was a quality as essential as bravery and courage and sacrifice. This was a truth so obvious to us all that no one ever thought to even question it. No one had ever won a war by learning to dislike their enemy. If they won the war, they won the war by learning how to hate their enemy at least as fervently as their enemy hated them. The whole purpose of all nationalistic propaganda, no matter whose side it was on, was to inspire that all-powerful passion of hate, that genuine, pervasive and relentless hatred of the enemy which is absolutely essential to success in warfare.
Then, finally, the war was over and we had won.
But,we had changed.
In 1946, William Wyler released his critically-acclaimed motion picture The Best Years of Our Lives, and immediately it touched the hearts of a war-weary American public. It also showed an unwelcome light on the first cracks in our otherwise confident new peacetime facade.
Basically, the film relates the stories of three GIs returning from the war, and the various problems they encounter as they attempt to readjust themselves to civilian life in a world they hardly recognize. The story opens with the return of a tough, battle-hardened, newly-discharged Army Sergeant, just back from fighting in the Pacific (masterfully played by Frederick March). After one of the most heart-warming homecoming scenes in all of moviedom, he begins that awkward but inevitable process of reacquainting himself with his barely-recognizable grownup children.
Following his college student son's rather underwhelmed reaction to his gifts of hard won Jap war trophies, he listens patiently as the young man proudly announces that he is currently attending lectures at school on World Peace, and learning that in this new Atomic Age we must all learn to get along together and that 'war is never the answer' (thus, inferentially condemning his warrior father who by fighting for his country may have inadvertently transgressed some higher moral code).
And thus it began.
All of those hard lessons we had learned during the war years must now be unlearned and forgotten. As peace settled in those traditional masculine virtues -- strength, courage, duty, loyalty, bravery, honor -- which served society so well in time of war, and had probably saved the very life of that society, were to be gradually shunted aside and devalued, eventually to be replaced by those gentler, more civil feminine virtues of patience, understanding, nurturing, tolerance and love. We were encouraged to become an increasingly passive, self-absorbed, self-indulgent feminine society, a nation obsessed with its health, wealth, weight and security. Soon, our most important national issues would become our civil rights and personal liberties, free speech and gay marriage.
For two successive generations since the end of that great war, we had been undergoing this continuing process of deprogramming and moral readjustment. A whole new vocabulary had emerged to define this new world. Certain words had taken on a subjective moral weight all their own. We still had enemies, but now our most important enemies had become our own words -- words like Prejudice and Racism and Intolerance were now the new enemy. This was the new war we were fighting, a war of words against words. And of all of the words that we were fighting against, none more perfectly embodied the evil nature of our mortal enemy than that most deadly and unconscionable of words -- Hate.
Hate is the very heart and soul of our new enemy; the word Hate itself must be eradicated and expunged forever from our new vocabulary and from our new lives. We must banish Hate from our cities and our towns as the Nazis banished the Jews. We must put up posters at all the entrances to our communities which proclaim: NO PLACE HERE FOR HATE. We must diligently search out Hate wherever it attempts to hide itself and expose it to the bright light of reason.
Our new weapons in this new war would be Openness, Tolerance, and above all, Acceptance of The Other. We had learned our lessons well. Never again would we mistrust The Other merely because they were different from us. Rather, we would enthusiastically embrace these differences. We would especially honor those unique cultural and religious differences, and the more they differed from ours, the more we would respect and honor them.
And if by chance these particular cultures happened to embrace slavery, child abuse, honor killings and the violent suppression and persecution of all other religions and of all of their hapless women, then we shall smile at them and say, This is your culture and your religion and we honor it and respect it and we welcome you into the fold. We open our borders and we open our hearts to you. Because, at all costs, we can no longer tolerate those deadly enemies of Peace -- Prejudice, Intolerance and Racism. Because, as our eager young college student so presciently observed back in 1946, 'in this new Atomic Age we must all learn to get along together, and War Is Never The Answer'.
War is, in fact, the physical manifestation of Hate; therefore, War itself must be our primary enemy. Anyone who proposes War must be the enemy. War will be successfully defeated by the utter eradication of the word Hate. Thus we will maintain our moral equilibrium, the status quo of Peace.
Now, however, we have been attacked once again. This time, a sneak attack even more deadly than the one on Pearl Harbor, with even more loss of life, 2,987 compared to 2,403. This time, it would not even be a military attack against a military target but, rather, a treacherous unprovoked attack against innocent civilians, people going to work in the morning.
We had been attacked by people who hate us so badly that they would gladly die to kill us. They hate us and our Western culture with such passion that they spill out onto their streets in droves daily to stomp on our flag and to burn our president in effigy. We are, they scream and shout at us, the Great Satan, and they have promised to wipe us off the face of the earth. Driven by an unyielding religious fervor, they will not be dissuaded nor deterred in their righteous jihad until they have fulfilled their sacred promise to destroy us.
What, then, is our national response to this violent onslaught?
We are unsure, we remain confused and conflicted, we can barely conjure up a reasonable facsimile of anger without it generating some immediate liberal moral backlash. We have gutted our military and outlawed our masculinity and rendered ourselves all but defenseless. Half of our nation believes we are at war and half of our nation doesn't. We live nervously in our Cowardly New World of clever obfuscations and elaborate denials, we cower behind a wall of euphemisms and confront our enemy's virulent hatred with the only weapons we have left, those pitiful weapons of Tolerance and Understanding. We attempt to defend ourselves against the Murderous Beast by pretending that he's really not there. We would rather be dead than be impolite. We refuse to identify our enemies for fear of offending them.
We have forgotten how to fight back, we only know how to talk. We have forgotten that omnipotent power of hate; foolishly, we have systematically eliminated the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. We have thoroughly expunged that dreaded word from our vocabulary, and we have declared that the word War is now our real enemy.
In summation, we're in serious trouble.
If we are to survive as a nation, as a free and honorable people, if we are to survive as a viable Democracy, we must once and for all abandon all the lies and obfuscations. We must make all euphemisms illegal. We must go all the way back to 1945 and relearn that cold hard masculine vocabulary of War.
To live, we must learn how to hate again. For without the strength of that unmitigated and unquestioned passion, weakened by our own civility, we will most assuredly perish, subsumed in the onrushing tsunami of our enemy's unanswered rage.
Posted by Roger W. Gardner at 6:14 PM
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