A People Without Pride, Part II: A Response To Comments

I appreciate the comments to my post below about America's lack of reaction to obvious insults to her honor and integrity.

I want to make myself perfectly clear here: I realize that there remains among my people many millions of men and women of good sense who are proud Americans and who swim daily against the currents of today's culture and its institutions.

That is beyond question. It is not, however, the issue.

The issue is that this culture and its institutions have grown so powerful that despite the presence of those many millions, they are unable to respond to events as people of honor understand is necessary. Individuals may have their hearts in the right place, but collectively all of us together--as expressed through our institutions and, even more critically, through our government--do not. Something is getting lost in translation.

And the issue is not just one of being in a minority. That would be bearable. If our current government was composed as it now is and there was in the Congress a minority that was standing up on a daily basis and saying we must answer these Mexican provocations, we must make sure our war memorials are proper, that would be one thing. But we don't see this. There are Members of Congress here and there who are solid on particular issues, but no mass articulating an alternative vision.

I've been called a pessimist for pointing this out, but while I plead guilty to not having the sunniest of outlooks, it's not pessimism if it's an accurate depiction of reality. While there are individual and small groups protesting the "Crescent of Embrace," there is no political institution that has picked it up as a cause.

The real question, given the undeniable existence of patriotic Americans who want their nation to act like a nation--to answer insults to its honor, to defend its interests, to teach its children its history, to guard and protect its borders, to decide who may come among us and live--is why such people are, for all intents and purposes, invisible as an organized force in our institutions.

How can 80% of Americans be for border and immigration law enforcement, yet all of our cities turn a blind eye, our states provide illegal aliens with all the benefits of citizens, our Federal Government is practically an accessory?

You may say that there are plenty of Americans out there fighting the good fight, but where are they? The last mass protest I saw involved tens of thousands of Latinos--in all major American cities, on the same day, on the same time, wearing a uniform, mobilized by their media--marching to support their brothers.

Where were the Americans?

Again, I say: no reaction.

Also, as a (quasi-) Spanish speaker, I watch Univision's newscast regularly. While our news is an endless parade of "your kids are in danger" (Toxic Mold!), consumer exposes (They prey on Seniors!) and celebrity doings (You'll never guess what Paris is up to now!), the Spanish speaking news is intensely political, with in-depth coverage of issues that are of interest to Latinos. Complete with Spanish-speaking USG spokesmen assuring them that the government is on their side.

People say a new movement is needed, and I agree. But there cannot be movement until there is passion and anger and understanding.

And right now, our people are showing none of the above.

I don't know what the answer is yet. But pretending we're not in deep trouble isn't it.

UPDATE: Everyday this phenomena presents itself, in multiple forms. Take this exchange from today's White House press briefing. Such a response is literally unthinkable from any other nation's executive office:

Q Thank you, Dana. Two questions. The head of the Institute for Holocaust Studies, Dr. Medoff, has compared Columbia University's speaking invitation to Iran's Ahmadinejad to Columbia's hosting of Nazi speakers and Columbia faculty members attending Nazi ceremonies in Germany in the 1930s. And my question, does the White House agree or disagree?

MS. PERINO: Look, it's a free country. We wish the same were true in Iran. And if people want to attend and listen to a person who has advocated the destruction of Israel and treats his people terribly, then that's their business.

Andy McCarthy responded to this in the following manner at The Corner:

I kind of wish she had added something about what he advocates about OUR country and how he treats OUR people.

McCarthy puts his finger right on it. A spokeswoman for our president--the American president--and it doesn't even occur to her to speak to Ahmadinejad's actions against AMERICANS. Instead, it's "he's mean to Israelis and awful to Iranians."

Again, America: No reaction.

A People Without Pride, Unknowing

It's nearly always a mistake for me to stop and look at the breakroom copy of The Oregonian as I head for the inevitable Wednesday morning coffee refill. Today was no exception:

Oregon is counting on a new tool to educate Spanish-speaking students across state schools: Mexico's curriculum.

Already in place at three Oregon high schools, the programs aims to use textbooks, a detailed online Web site, DVDs and CDs provided for free by the Mexican government to teach math, science and even U.S. history to Spanish speakers in Oregon.

Conversations are under way between the Oregon Department of Education and Mexico's secretary of public education to align the curriculums of Oregon and Mexico so many courses in Mexico will be valid here and vice versa. The innovative move puts Oregon on par with other educators nationwide who have launched similar ventures in Yakima; San Diego, Calif.; and Austin, Texas.

"Students come to us with such complex issues," said Tim King, director of Clackamas Middle College and Clackamas Web Academy, where a virtual course using Mexico's learning materials got off the ground this week. "We've had to change in order to fit into each school scene, become more complex and open ourselves up to new situations."

Oregon officials say the new approach is intended as a supplement to keep students on track by learning subjects in their native language while also gaining English skills. Until now, school districts statewide have generally relied on bilingual aides to teach and translate English material or used Spanish material that was not necessarily equal to the English material mainstream students were studying.

"That's not enough," said Patrick Burk, chief policy officer with the superintendent's office of the Oregon Department of Education, adding that the goal is to "minimize disruption" for immigrant Latinos.

"The availability of resources is astounding," said Burk, who flew to Mexico with a team of Oregon curriculum officials in August to discuss making equivalency standards official. "We're able to serve the students so much better if we're working together."

Lawrence Auster of View From the Right wrote a short while ago that when he was younger and a more "mainstream" conservative supporter of the Republican Party he used to get angry when he saw Democrats and members of the press insult Republicans in the most hateful manner. However, after a while, he began to notice that despite the fact that the insults were of a variety demanding a response, the Republicans never really seemed to care much.

We've all seen this: think Senator Hatch grinning like an idiot on a Sunday morning talk show while being called a child-killing warmonger and then referring to the person who just called him a willing murderer of children for profit "my friend from across the aisle."

Auster noted that after a while it occurred to him to wonder why he should care so much about these Republicans' honor when they seemed perfectly fine with being insulted to their face. After all, if they don't care, who should?

It's a good point, and a sentiment I've long since shared, but applying it to the losers of the Stupid Party is one thing. Seeing that same sentiment writ large to one's own country and countrymen is something else entirely.

The insults to our national honor pile up so quickly that they are almost impossible to keep up with.

The Mexican president proudly declares that so far as Mexico is concerned, it has no borders and wherever there is a Mexican, there is Mexico.
Americans: No reaction.

The Shi'ite leader in Iraq refuses to speak to or even be in the same room with Americans, who he considers filthy infidels.
Americans: No reaction.

A popular German police drama portrays the US Government as behind the attacks of 9.11 and its message is applauded by prominent members of the German government.
Americans: No reaction.

Turkish government officials praise a film depicting US soldiers in Iraq as crazed child-killers. Americans: No reaction.

The Dept of the Interior awards a contract to memorialize the heroes of Flight 93 and the central motif of the winning design is a Muslim crescent.
Americans: No reaction.

The government of China does nothing to prevent mobs of students from ransacking the exterior of the US Embassy in Beijing, leaving our diplomatic personnel prisoners and under siege for days. Americans: No reaction.

High school students in Montebello, California tear down the U.S. Flag and run the flag of Mexico up the pole to rowdy applause and supportive speeches from school administrators.
Americans: No reaction.

An American state begins using a foreign government's educational materials to teach U.S. history.
Americans: No reaction.

The President of Mexico refers to legislation in the U.S. Congress touching upon immigration as hostile, "unilateral" acts to be resisted by the government of Mexico.
Americans: No reaction.

I'd love to fight this, but after a while one gets the unsettling feeling that one would be bounding into battle without a cause, that one would turn around only to find no one at one's back. It's one thing to make speeches rallying one's countrymen to action to restore the nation and its place of honor, but what if there is no one left to hear?

It's times like this that I get a strong feeling that that ghost has already left the machine. What we see around us is nothing more than slowly decelerating motion of a society that no longer has an engine. Like that chicken selected by the farmhouse wife, it's still moving, even running, but it's not going anywhere.

That's bad enough.

What's worse is the same process that has allowed this to happen--no, that's not quite right--let's say compelled this to happen, also, by some monstrous joke, has also left the vast majority of people unable to even comprehend that anything is happening.

We have become a people without pride and a government without honor.

And we don't even realize it.

Cherry On Top - HNIC Forever

Vancouver's The Province reports:

The wrath of Grapes is returning to Hockey Night in Canada for another season -- with a shocking twist.

For the first time in his broadcasting career Don Cherry will go into a season with management clearly in his corner.

* * *

There's no real mystery about Cherry. He is what he is, a gifted entertainer who consistently says what he believes, knows his audience and every Saturday night delivers a brilliant performance.

Never was that more clear than in 1987 when he defended the Canadian junior players for protecting their teammates in a bench-clearing brawl with the Soviets at the world championship.

Cherry went on national TV and passionately explained that Canadians value loyalty and honour more than a gold medal.

He was right.

* * *

Yet, in 2004, when he pointed out that most of the NHL players wearing visors were "European and French guys," that somehow crossed the line.

Harold Redekopp, the CBC's executive VP, denounced Cherry, calling his comments "inappropriate and reprehensible," and imposed a seven-second delay.

It didn't seem to matter that Cherry's assessment of the visor ratio was completely accurate.

In all, "visorgate" resulted in four different government investigations -- including Cherry receiving a Quebec court order.

Cherry now admits he simply wrote "don't understand" on the order, in red pen, and sent it back.

Later that same year Cherry was voted in a national poll as one of the 10 greatest Canadians of all time....

I have never in my life beheld such an effortlessly brilliant and apparently intuitive response to the bureaucratic administrative "human rights" state.

Red Ensign all the way, that guy.

Always Look On The Bright Side...

I've just returned from a nice lunch filled with some heavy reading, papers submitted to the ISI's recent symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. I'm in the middle of two loan closings at the moment-one of which involves HUD-so you'd think the last thing I'd want to deal with right now are more documents, but if you're spending all day shuffling paper you might as well shuffle something interesting every once in a while.

That's what I tell myself, anyway.

As fate would have it, I had just re-read Bloom's unlikely best-seller a few months ago, on a whim. I had no idea that the book's 20th anniversary was just a few weeks away when I lifted it from its accustomed place on my meager bookshelves.

It made for a riveting revisit. I've changed a lot in the past twenty years, so perhaps it was a different perspective. But I felt at the time that there was more to it than that. I remember walking into my living room one late Saturday night and informing my wife that I had just finished reading a particular chapter of The Closing of the American Mind and how it all just seems to make so much more sense to me now. It seemed to me then that there was more to it than just the passage of personal time. Somehow, events had transpired to illustrate Bloom's main points in a way even the great professor could not have anticipated.

I'd try to explain, but this is the age of the Internet. After pounding through the pages of the ISI symposium submissions, I found that I wasn't the only one who felt as I did. University of Tennessee Professor Wilfred M. McClay put it better in his essay "Recovering the Western Soul" much better than your poor correspondent ever could:

But such a vision does not answer the larger crisis that Bloom himself posited, the crisis of our Western civilization, because he had only a partial and misleading understanding of what the West is. That fact was visible already in 1987, but it has become even more apparent since the emergence into public awareness on 9/11 of the great civilizational struggle that now preoccupies us-and is likely to continue to preoccupy us for the rest of our lives. Here I speak not merely of the "war on terrorism" but of the catastrophic loss of civilizational self-confidence exhibited by the West, particularly in Europe. The demographic collapse experienced by all Western European countries, and the concurrent changes in the makeup of those societies as they follow a rapid and seemingly inexorable course toward Islamization, speaks louder than any words, and has raised the question of whether a strictly liberal and secular Europe has the will to perpetuate itself, let alone defend itself. This question in turn leads back to the point that Bloom himself makes, about a failure "at the peaks of learning." For even an educational vision as deep and humane as Bloom's does not, finally, tell us why we should have children, what we owe our fathers and mothers and neighbors, why we should make good on our commitments, why we should struggle to preserve our way of life, what is finally worth fighting for, and possibly dying for.

Bloom assumed, over against the multiculturalism coming into fashion in his day, that the civilization of the West is universal in character, based as it is on ideas-such as natural rights-that are grounded in unchanging nature rather than changeable convention. But this triumphalism seems far less plausible today. Indeed, it was already being challenged forcefully well before 9/11, notably by writers such as Samuel Huntington, who emphasized the particularity of our civilization, and the need for the West to see itself as a competitor in a world of civilizational alternatives rather than as the wellspring of that self-evident, universal "progress" to which "the rest" all aspire. Like the historian David Gress, Huntington has made a strong case that we have defined the West without sufficient reference to its religious and historical roots-precisely the features of the West that Bloom neglects.

That is to say, without those first principles, the great tradition Bloom so eloquently defends is ultimately lost because it is not a universal tradition, but a Western one. It is this now obvious fact that is glaringly absent from Bloom's book, but not due to any fault on the professor's part. The fact of the matter is that in 1987 the current spiritual crisis of the West had not sharpened to the point of identification. Now, with wide swathes of Western people refusing to even procreate and with the West's very bastion, the United States, unable to memorialize its war dead from 9.11 in any way telling of civlizational confidence (the "Crescent of Embrace"), the crisis is obvious.

You would think that is bad news. But the fact of the matter is that the crisis hasn't worsened. It is systemic and it is on-going. What has happened is that as it has become increasingly obvious more and more people are waking up to the facts and facing the challenge.

There is a lot of despair out there right now. I know because I feel it at times, too. And when one reads papers published by professors who use terms like "the crisis of the West" or "the collapse of Western civlizational confidence" as asides, as givens, as widely-recognized features that undergird the current political debate, it's easy to lose one's head. One begins to understand why Irish monks built those crazy little stone towers.

But that's also the good news. I have grown increasingly convinced that each passing day finds more and more men and women of the West recognizing what is going on and beginning to search for the like-minded and for solutions.

To be sure, it's just a trickle now. But think to how invisible the phenomena was even 20 years ago. Twenty years from now will see mass movements and mainstream political parties grappling with the issue.

In short, the crisis caused by the closing of the Western (not just American) mind is now having such visible effects that people are starting to question the reigning liberal orthodoxies that lead us to this spiritual dead end.

And therein lies hope.