The Chief has noted that his favorite contemporary essayist, Bill Whittle, is now a regular at NRO, with a weekly piece there. This takes cognizance of this offering as a possible introduction.  Bill’s stuff puts him rather easily in the category of a leading 21st century candidate for assuming the mantle of Thomas Paine.
His stuff is so pithy, and spot on, that it’s almost scary.
I live a few miles from Santa Monica High School, in California. There, young men and women are taught that America is “a terrorist nation,†“one of the worst regimes in history,†that it’s twice-elected leader is “the son of the devil,†and dictator of this “fascist†country. Further, “patriotism†is taught by dragging an American flag across the classroom floor, because the nation’s truest patriots, as we should know by now, are those who are most able to despise it.
This is only high school, remember: in college things get much, much worse.
Two generations, now, are being raised on this poison, and the reason for that is this: the enemies of this city cannot come out and simply say, “Do not defend the city.†Even the smartest among us can see that is simple treason. But they can say, “The City is not worth defending.†So they say that, and they say that all the time and in as many different ways as they are able.
If you step far enough back to look at the whole of human history, you will begin to see a very plain rhythm: a heartbeat of civilization. Steep climbs out of disease and ignorance into the light of medicine and learning — and then a sudden collapse back into darkness. And it is in that darkness that most humans have lived their lives: poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The pattern is always the same: at the height of a civilization’s powers something catastrophic seems to occur — a loss of will, a failure of nerve, and above all an unwillingness to identify with the values and customs that have produced such wonders.
Whittle goes on and describes with some specificity how this process is happening to us:
And how is this done, this “throwing open of the gates?†How are defenders taken off the walls?
Well, most of what I learned about Vietnam I learned from men like Oliver Stone. This self-loathing narcissist has repeatedly tried to inculcate in me a sense of despair and outrage at my own government, my own culture, my own people and ultimately myself…. that the real threat to the nation comes from the generals that defend it, or from the businessmen that provide the prosperity we take for granted.
I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes –visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest.
I’ve been told this story in some form or another, every day of every week of the past 30 years of my life. It wasn’t always so.
So where does this leave us now? The picture we see when we look at ourselves, in the words of a song, “ain’t that pretty at all”, but still gives some basis for hope, along with, what for the Chief is a deep-seated, deeply felt concern for the possible course of events.
And standing against all this hypnotic power — the power of the mythmakers in Hollywood, the power of the information peddlers in the media, the corrosive power of America-hating professors on every campus in America… against all that we find an old warrior — a paladin if ever there was one — an old, beat-up warhorse standing up in defense of his city one last time. And beside him: a wonder. A common person… just a regular mom who goes to work, does a difficult job with intelligence and energy and grace and every-day competence and then puts it away to go home and have dinner with the family.
Against all of that stand these two.
No wonder they must be destroyed. Because — Sarah Palin especially — presents a mortal threat to these people who have determined over cocktails who the next President should be and who now clearly mean to grind into metal shards the transaxle of their credibility in order to get the result they must have. Truly, they are before our eyes destroying the machine they have built in order to get their victory. What the hell is so threatening to be worth that?
Only this: the living proof that they are not needed. Not needed to govern, not needed to influence and guide, not needed to lecture us on our intellectual and moral failings which are visible only from the heights of Manhattan skyscrapers or the palaces up on Mulholland Drive. Not needed. We can do it — and do it better — without all of them.
YES! Bingo!
Whittle concludes:
It is the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity — and not those of the preening cosmopolitans that gape at them in mixed contempt and bafflement — that have made us the inheritors of the most magnificent, noble, decent and free society ever to appear on this earth. This Western Civilization… this American City… has earned the right to greet each sunrise with a blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains.
And what, really, is a Legion of Narcissists and a Confederacy of Despair against that?
The Chief fully concurs.