After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (24 page)

Tear down that wall . . . so they can get a better look at
me!!!
Is there no one in the White House grown-up enough to say, “Er, Mr. President, that’s really the kind of line you get someone else to say about you”? And maybe somebody could have pointed out that November 9, 1989, isn’t about him but about millions of nobodies whose names are unknown, who led dreary lives doing unglamorous jobs and going home to drab accommodations, but who at a critical moment in history decided they were no longer going to live in a prison state. They’re no big deal; they’re never going to land a photoshoot for
GQ
. But it’s their day, not yours.

Is all of human history just a bit of colorful backstory in the Barack Obama biopic? “Few would have foreseen at the Elamite sack of Ur/Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow/the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand/

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the passage of the Dubrovnik Airport Parking Lot Expansion Bill that one day I would be standing before you talking about how few would have foreseen that one day I would be standing before you.”

If he is not as esteemed in the world’s chancelleries as an American president might have the right to expect, he is at least self-esteemed. He is the
ne plus ultra
of self-esteem, which may explain why, whenever Obama’s not talking about himself, he sounds like he’s wandered vaguely off-message. You could hardly devise a better jest on the Feeler generation, those Americans reared in the Cult of Empathy, who voted for Obama because he was supposed to embody both their empathy for him and his empathy for all the victims of the heartless Bush regime. Within months, liberal columnists complaining about his “detachment” found themselves confronting the obvious—that whatever they felt for him, he didn’t feel for them. In this Obama was yet again the supreme embodiment of our times: in the Age of Empathy, “feeling good” is better than “doing good”, and feeling good about yourself is best of all.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

we are the worLd . . .

In contemporary education’s flight from facts to feelings, “empathy”

has become a useful substitute for reality. In the schoolrooms of America, you’ll be asked to empathize with a West African who’s sold into slavery and shipped off to Virginia, or a loyal Japanese-American in a World War II internment camp, or a hapless Native American who catches dysentery, typhoid, gonorrhea, and an early strain of avian flu by foolishly buying beads from Christopher Columbus. This would be a useful exercise if we were genuinely interested in socio-historical empathizing. But instead the compliant pupil is expected merely to acknowledge the unlucky Indian as an early victim of European racism, and to assign the slave a contemporary African-American identity and thereby “empathize” with his sense of injustice. At this level, empathy is no more than the projection of decline 163

contemporary and local obsessions over the rich canvas of the past and the other.

You didn’t hear the word much a generation back. Now people who would once have sympathized with you insist on claiming to “empathize”

with you. As Obama explained to his pro-abortion chums at Planned Parenthood: “We need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges. Alright?”65

Alright. So let’s take the fourth of those empathetic categories. If you’re paralyzed in a riding accident, I can
sympathize
at the drop of a hat: my God, that’s awful. Helluva thing to happen. But can I
empathize
(to quote a definition from David Berger’s Clinical Empathy) “from within the frame of reference of that other person”?

Example: “Driving down there, I remember distinctly thinking that Chris would rather not live than be in this condition.”66

That’s Barbara Johnson recalling the immediate aftermath of her son Christopher Reeve’s riding accident. Her instinct was to pull the plug; his was to live. Even the boundlessly empathetic Bill Clinton can’t really “feel your pain.” But the immodesty of the assertion is as pithy a distillation as any other of what’s required in an age of pseudo-empathy.

The first definition in Webster’s gets closer to the reality: “The imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.”

That’s geopolitical empathy as practiced by the western world.

In the December 2007 edition of the
Atlantic Monthly
, Andrew Sullivan, not yet mired up Sarah Palin’s birth canal without a paddle peddling bizarre conspiracy theories about the maternity of her youngest child, contemplated the ascendancy of Barack Obama and decided that his visage alone would be “the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.”67 As he explained: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the 164

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new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. . . . If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

I was
The Atlantic
’s in-house obituarist for some years and I retain an affection for the magazine. But honestly, how could any self-respecting publication pass off such fatuous projection as geopolitical analysis? Let us grant that Mr. Sullivan is genuinely smitten by “Obama’s face” and that his effusions are sufficiently widely shared that they help explain the appeal of a man of minimal accomplishments to a certain type of American liberal whose principal election issue is that he wants to feel good about himself.

Nevertheless, the assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Karachi or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the laziest kind of projection even by the standards of progressive navel-gazing.

For a start, the new pan-Islamism notwithstanding, there is an awful lot of racism in the Muslim world. If liberals stopped gazing longingly into

“Obama’s face” just for a moment, they might recall that little business of genocide in Darfur. What was that about again? Oh, yeah, Sudanese Muslim Arabs were slaughtering Sudanese Muslim Africans. Sure enough, a week after Obama’s election, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, issued a video denouncing the new president as “abeed al-beit,” which translates literally as “house slave” but which the al-Qaeda subtitles more provocatively rendered as “house Negro.”68

But, putting aside the racism, there is just a terrible banality underlying assumptions such as Sullivan’s. Those who hate the Great Satan don’t care whether he has a white face, a black face, a female face, or a gay face. In a multicultural age, we suffer from a unicultural parochialism: not simply the inability to imagine the other, but the inability even to imagine there is an other.

Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of the “known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also decline 165

unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”69 The old Cold Warrior’s cool detachment is unfashionable in an age of ersatz empathy, but it has a rare humility. In an age of one-worldist fantasy, it helps to know that you don’t know—and that, even in a therapeutic culture, you don’t know how everybody
feels
.

For four decades America watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while conservatives deluded themselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact, that it could be contained within the precincts of academe, was always foolish. So what happens when the big colored Sharpie words on the vestibule posters—Diversity! Tolerance! Respect!—bust out of the grade school and stalk the land? On September 11, 2007, at the official anniversary observances in Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick said 9/11 “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.”70

“Mean and nasty”? He sounds like a kindergarten teacher. Or an over-sensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulis again. But that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days—the shot heard round the world and so forth. Anyway, Governor Patrick didn’t want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he went on, “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”

We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words

“each other.” They posit not just a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim but also a dangerously delusional “empathy.” The 9/11

killers were treated very well in the United States: they were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lapdancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the big day gave them a good time—or good enough, considering 166

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what lousy tippers they were. September 11 didn’t happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohammed Atta.

But the lessons of 9/11 were quickly buried under a mountain of relativist mush. Consider the now routine phenomenon by which any, um, unusual event is instantly ascribed to anyone other than the obvious suspects. When a huge car bomb came near to killing hundreds in Times Square, the first reaction of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, was to announce that the most likely culprit was “someone with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill”71 (that would be me, if his SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). When, inevitably, a young man called Faisal Shahzad was arrested a couple days later, Mayor Bloomberg’s next reaction was to hector his subjects that under no circumstances would the city tolerate “any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”72

How many times do the American people have to ace that test? They’ve been doing it for a decade now, and every time the usual suspects try to kill them the ruling class, with barely veiled contempt, insists that its own knuck-ledragging citizenry is the real problem. A couple months later Nanny Bloomberg went to the Statue of Liberty of all places to tell the plebs he has the misfortune to rule over to shut up. The man on whose watch Ground Zero degenerated from a target of war to a victim of bureaucracy was there to lecture dissenters that the site of the 9/11 attacks is a “very appropriate place”73

for a mosque. The people of New York felt differently, but what do they know?

“To cave to popular sentiment,” thundered Nanny, “would be to hand a victory to the terrorists—and we should not stand for that.”74 We used to hear this formulation a lot in the months after 9/11: If we do such-and-such, then the terrorists will have won. But this surely is the very
acme of the template: If we don’t build a mosque at Ground Zero, then the terrorists will have won! You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists—and the American people are with the terrorists.

As is the way with the Conformity Enforcers, Nanny Bloomberg pulled out all the abstractions. “It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.”75 Really? That’s not what Osama bin Laden decline 167

said. But, if we put away our abstract generalities and listen to what the enemy is actually telling us, then the terrorists will have won! For a fellow so open and accepting, Nanny Bloomberg seems awfully dogmatic and strident. This is the WEIRD syndrome—the determination to hammer the hard square peg of global reality into the hole of multicultural nullity, whatever it takes. Even after Faisal Shahzad’s arrest for the attempted bombing of Times Square, the Associated Press, CNN, the
Washington Post
, and other grandees of the conformicrat media insisted on attaching huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments in Connecticut.76 Subprime terrorism? Don’t laugh. To the media, it’s a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit?

Poor old Faisal Shahzad. Before heading off to Times Square, he made a pre-detonation video outlining the evils of the Great Satan.77 Nothing about mortgage rates or foreclosure proceedings in there. He couldn’t have been more straightforward, but still Nanny Bloomberg and the media cover their ears and go “La-la-la. Can’t hear you.”

Paul Berman, a lifelong liberal, says that the doctrine of relativism makes

“everything the equal of everything else.”78 As a result, our ruling class—

political, academic, cultural—have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” This is almost right. In fact, the cult of absolutist relativism is a kind of affirmative action against their own civilization: In any dispute between the boundlessly tolerant West and a highly intolerant Islam, it must be the fault of the former for being insufficiently tolerant of the latter’s intolerance. A society led by men with such a self-destructive urge will get its wish, and very soon, and deservedly so.

Not so long ago I saw a two-panel cartoon: on the left hand panel, “This is your brain”; on the right hand panel, “This is your brain on political correctness”—a small and shriveled thing, but now standard issue.

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Here’s a random selection of headlines:79

Naval History Web Site Highlights Women’s History Month
Senior Navy Leader Receives Black Engineer of the Year Award
Davede Alexander Receives Diversity Leadership Award
Navy Women in Aviation Show Diversity Is Rising
Top Pentagon Official Discovers Model of Diversity at Corona
Warfare Center, Says Navy’s Doing Diversity Right
CNRH Seminar Teaches Lessons of Hope and Empowerment
The above were all plucked from the United States Navy newsletter. When the first newsletter showed up in my in-box, I thought it might contain under-reported tales of derring-do off the Horn of Africa battling Somali pirates. But instead it’s one diversity-awareness story after another: “Senior Navy Leader Receives Most Diverse Engineer of the Year Award”; “Appoint-ment of First Somali Pirate to Joint Chiefs Of Staff Shows Diversity Is Rising, Says Top Pentagon Official.”