Fifth Column

I've been slowly reading through The Futurist for all its insight, and have come to an interesting article about fifth columnists. I read through his first example (at Daily Kos, who Forbes listed as third of the top 25 most influential internet personalities) and it was frightening, maddening, and disgusting. Its only value is in its honesty, and the unshakable evidence it provides from a leading leftist who admits to hating America. His reasoning, as I said, is maddening, and when I tried to think of how you could reach a person like this in argument I came up with nothing. I then read The Futurist's advice on how to debate a person like this, and I'm not satisfied at all with his advice either. It's because I do not think there is any way to reason with someone like that. Someone so disconnected from reality, who clearly has so little desire to understand truth, who is completely devoid of honor, cannot be reasoned with. There is no Truth to a person like this, except his belief in nothing, which is to say his loyalty to the destruction of everything. These people are part of Dad's 90% (or higher), the percentage of the population who I will never understand, never agree with, whose values I will never share and who I will never befriend and will never want to. Hopefully, they make up an extremely small amount of that 90%.

Anyways, enjoy your New Year's Eve and have a happy New Year!

Reagan speeches

I've been watching some of Ronald Reagan's speeches and reading others today. It started with a link to a YouTube video of his call to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Watching that speech at first, I was caught by the way he had with words, his eloquence and slow, simple, profound speech. Then he says, "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate." And the silent crowd erupts in cheers and applause, causing him to pause. Then, the command of righteousness in his voice, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The cheers explode in a roar again, only moreso, like he is a rock star just coming on stage, his message music to the ears of a people tired from years of divisiveness, agitation and crisis. And I thought, "My god, this truly was a great man."

A lesser point from his farewell address was what brings me to this post though. I'll quote it liberally here:

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-'60s.

But now, we're about to enter the '90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.

So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important: Why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did." Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

This seems to me like a very important message, more true now than ever before. "Those who create the popular culture" obviously have not heeded President Reagan's call, and our television, our movies, and our national sense of pride did not return to a place where it's "in style" to have that well-grounded sense of patriotism. There's a very small group of about four or five leaders in Hollywood who occasionally make movies that instill a sense of pride in our national heritage, and hope for where we're headed. As he said, too many parents don't seem to bother instilling that "unambivalent appreciation for America," and we suffer as a result. See the complacency I mentioned in my last post. And, while as Dad said there are plenty of us still out there who treasure it and are willing to fight for it, I've noticed a downward trend. "Trend" really is the right word because it's like Reagan said, it's not "in style," and realizing that being trendy is important to so much of our nation is a disheartening thing. Is there nothing worth valuing your whole life, are there no absolutes that are important enough to keep in your heart and free from the opinions of others?

Something that Reagan seemed to have, and correct me if I'm wrong (I was barely five years old by the time he was out of office), was a near invulnerability to the stresses of politics. His agenda didn't seem to be party-based, it seemed to be Reagan-based. He appeared to me, from what I've read and seen of him, to hold himself above politics, basing his decisions on a higher set of ideals. Ultimately, it seems he had a better memory of right and wrong, a more cohesive, consistent understanding of why he believed what he did, and a steadfast determination to stick to his gut. He aspired to a higher purpose, that of liberty and freedom from the evils of the world. Just doesn't seem like he muddied himself with petty partisan politics (and I hate alliteration) like is so much the business these days. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Invasion

[edit: I changed the font size of the posts so they weren't so hard on the eyes, but I had to fool with the html quite a bit to get it to look right to me. If it's absurdly large or small on your browser, please let me know in the comments so I can go back to how it used to look. Thanks!]

I just read Bill Whittle's "Freedom" (possiby the oldest essay on the site? Second oldest?). It was a marvelous essay as usual. While not terribly revolutionary in its arguments, he once again put things so damn perfectly and clearly that it renewed in me my vigor on the subject of the Second Amendment. Something he said in it, though, triggered a thought that I'd never before allowed myself.

"And by the way, gun rights supporters are frequently mocked when they say it deters foreign invasion -- after all, come on, grow up, be realistic: Who's nuts enough to invade America? Exactly. It's unthinkable. Good. 2nd Amendment Mission 1 accomplished."

The thing that bugged me was the word "unthinkable." I guess it's something I've always believed myself, that an invasion of the United States is something reserved for wildly imaginative fiction, something that I literally had never given serious thought to before. My whole life, even being the paranoid fantasist that I am, I have never allowed the reality into my head that any force or country could try to invade the U.S. I've imagined countless fascist takeover-scenarios where our government's invasiveness reached a boiling point and federalist troops have come to take away our rights and our weapons to ensure the continuation of their oppressive regime, always resulting in my dad and I staging a heroic last stand or forming a kind of underground resistance (hell, I even started writing a short story about it long ago, and my NaNo story is an extrapolation along the same lines). But it wasn't until Bill Whittle said a foreign invasion of our homeland was impossible, unthinkable, that I realized it's not unthinkable at all.

Most any country in the world could not even begin to hope for victory in invading American soil. There is not a country in all the world, nor has there ever been a country, who could even consider an invasion of our mainland without risking complete depletion of all their resources in attempting such a task, especially not while we have even a single ally. The fighting spirit not only of our military but that which is imbued in every American citizen is simply too great and too common. But it's possible. Communist China has the manpower for such an invasion force, if they were to enlist a quarter of their populace into their armed services. Pretty much every able man and woman of military age would be needed, but they've got enough to throw at us that they would stand a chance at crippling our government, if they could reach our shores. They've got the industrial power to arm so many if needed, I think. And they've probably got a political climate unstable enough where a person of sufficient insanity and boldness could come into power. The chances of these things ever happening are infinitesimally small, but there is still a chance that it could happen.

The reason I decided this thought was worth posting about is that I don't think it's something we should consider unthinkable. If it sounds unpatriotic to imagine a foreign army able of taking down our military and then a significant chunk of our civilian populace, I'd say it's just the opposite. In a strange paradox, it seems to me that so much of the American populace is convinced of our invulnerability, they've lost the appreciation for what we have. It's complacency at its worst. Our national identity is crippled by our strength. We've been so lulled into feeling safe that we have forgotten how fragile our national existence is. That's why September 11th was such a shock, and also why flags flew from every home for months afterwards. When we forget that there are millions, perhaps billions, of people in the world who would like to see us destroyed, or when we let that knowledge become so unreal to us that we can't even imagine a full frontal attack on our home soil, we tend to forget why our nation is something worth defending, and indeed something that needs defending.

This, I think, is a thought that is fairly peculiar to the most recent generations of Americans. Up to 1865, the United States was in a frequent state of war fought to truly establish and preserve its existence as a nation, and fought largely on our own turf. We continued to fight conventional wars against powerful, organized enemies through 1945, and indeed our last full-scale war against uniformed enemies was fought in Vietnam, though it was far from a conventional war, with a great deal of guerilla war in the mix, and a vast swath of opposition to the war here at home. According to my limited understanding, that was the beginning of modern anti-war sentiment, or anyways the first time there had been a sizable chunk of Americans back home who were vociferously against the war we were fighting. Everything since then has been smaller conflicts, or in the cases of Desert Shield/Desert Storm and now the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, wildly one-sided in the case of the former and almost entirely a fight against guerilla combatants in the case of the latter.

Anyways, I'd argue that the last serious, cohesive threat to the United States was gone in 1991, when I was eight years old. So my generation was mostly too young to ever understand and appreciate what it's like to feel my nation threatened by a powerful, capable enemy that existed as more than an ideology. My whole politically-conscious life has been while the United States was the sole superpower, so I never had to fear for the life of my nation. And at that, I think the last great, uniting, open battle against a common foe ended in 1945. Even the baby boomers have never seen a traditional full-scale war. And I posit that these last sixty years of "peace" and prosperity for the American people, these years since our last conventional war, have lulled us into a sense of national security so impenetrable that many of us can't understand the imminent, everlasting need for "a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms". We've only fought elective wars for sixty years, and we've learned to dismiss any possibilities that our great nation could ever be challenged, so we've begun to challenge it ourselves. This complacency towards our national existence for lack of examples of its fragility is what then rots into anti-nationalism. All the apathy towards the safeguards on our freedom, and the attitudes of protectionism that spawned those safeguards, is what results from that complacency. To the Founding Fathers, it was easy to understand how essential an armed populace is to ensuring the security of a free state. But there hasn't been a military-industrial power capable of seriously threatening our borders in at least sixteen years, and we haven't fought a full-scale war on our own soil in 143 years. Still, how quickly people forget.

Somebody named Mark William Paules responded to Bill Whittle's most recent post, "FREEDOM versus JUSTICE", saying that "an engaged and educated citizenry is necessary for a healthy democracy, but there comes a point in the history of every civilization where decadence sets in", citing as an example that when "the Vandal horde [sic] approached Rome in AD 455, the able youth of the city refused to man the walls," essentially having forgotten what it was to be Roman out of complacency. I can only hope that this period without the U.S. fighting wars for its right to exist has not made us forget what it is to be American, fighting tooth and nail not for a tribal leader or a king but for ourselves and the nation in which we can choose our own paths and live with more true liberty than any other civilization in the history of the world.