After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (25 page)

Fred Astaire in
Follow the Fleet
, 1935, words and music by Irving Berlin:

We joined the Navy to see the world

And what did we see?

We saw the sea . . .

Follow The Fleet
, twenty-first century remake: We joined the Navy to see the world

And what did we see?

We saw the Diversity Leadership Awards.

Well, you say, look, they’re just doing what they need to do to keep the congressional oversight crowd off their back; it’s just a bit of window dressing.

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Hmm. In 2009, thirteen men and women plus an unborn baby were gunned down at Fort Hood by a major in the U.S. Army. Nidal Hasan was the perpetrator, but political correctness was his enabler, every step of the way.

Major Hasan couldn’t have been more straightforward about who and what he was. An Army psychiatrist, he put “SoA”—“Soldier of Allah”—on his business card.80 At the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for trying to persuade patients to convert to Islam, and fellow pupils objected to his constant “anti-American propaganda.”81 But, as the Associated Press reported, “a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.”82

This is your brain on political correctness.

As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in U.S. history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit.83 And he gave it to a roomful of fellow Army psychiatrists and doctors—some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And when the question arose of whether then Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic,”

the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried, “How would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.”84

This is your brain on political correctness.

So instead he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood. And barely had he got to Texas when he started making idle chit-chat praising the jihadist murderer of two soldiers outside a recruitment center in Little Rock. “This is what Muslims should do, stand up to the aggressors,” Major Hasan told his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee. “People should strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”85

In less enlightened times, Colonel Lee would have concluded that, being in favor of the murder of his comrades, Major Hasan was objectively on the side of the enemy. But instead he merely cautioned the major against saying things that might give people the wrong impression. Which is to say, the right impression.

This is your brain on political correctness.

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“You need to lock it up, major,” advised the colonel.86

But, of course, he didn’t. He could say what he wanted—infidels should have their throats cut, for example. Meanwhile, the only ones who felt any need to “lock it up” were his fellow psychiatrists, his patients, his teachers at the Uniformed Services University, officials at Walter Reed, and the brass at Fort Hood. So they locked it up for years, and fourteen people died.

And even when the slaughter had happened, much of the media found it easier to slander both the United States military and the general populace than to confront the evidence. Like Nanny Bloomberg, the Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano professed to be most worried about an “anti-Muslim backlash” from the bozo citizenry she had the forlorn task of attempting to hold in check.87

As for the Army, well, obviously, they’re a bunch of Bush-scarred psychos who could snap at any moment.
Newsweek
called the mass murder “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”88 “A psychiatrist who was set to deploy to Iraq at the end of the month, Hasan reportedly opened fire around the Fort Hood Readiness Center,” wrote Andrew Bast. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers individually that it makes it increasingly difficult for the military as a whole to deploy for wars abroad.”

No mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim,” but Mr. Bast was concerned to “get at the root causes of soldier stresses.” As in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Operative word “post”: you get it after you’ve been in combat. Major Hasan had never been in combat.

But, just as they effortlessly extended the subprime mortgage crisis to explain the Times Square bomber, the same conformicrat “experts” redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone. Until November 5, 2009, PTSD was something you got when you returned from battle overseas and manifested itself in sleeplessness, nightmares, or, in extreme circumstances, suicide. After November 5, PTSD was apparently spread by shaking hands and manifested itself in gunning down large numbers of people while yelling “Allahu decline 171

akbar!” This is the first known case of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but there could be thousands out there just waiting to blow.

This is your brain on political correctness.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year before that Major Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as spiritual advisor to three of the 9/11 hijackers and an imam so radical he’s banned from Britain, a land with an otherwise all but boundless tolerance for radical imams. Al-Awlaki advocates all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that there was no need to worry because this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s

“research interests.”89 Which is one way of putting it.

Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (with its Potemkin membership but lots of Saudi funding) and the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (the biggest voting bloc at the UN) want a world where Islam is beyond discussion—where “red flags” are ignored because to do anything about them would risk career-ruining accusations of “Islamophobia,”

or six months of “sensitivity training” to spay you into a docile eunuch of the PC state.90 How’s that project coming along? After Major Hasan’s pre-Post-Traumatic Stress breakdown, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, assured us that, despite the slaughter, it could have been a whole lot worse:

“What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”91

Celebrate diversity, yea unto death. The fact that a grown man not employed by a U.S educational institution or media outlet used the word

“diversity” in a non-parodic sense should be deeply disturbing. “Diversity”

is not a virtue; it’s morally neutral. A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan’s leading clitoridectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the better for it.

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Nevertheless, asked “Who ya gonna believe—the Celebrate Diversity Handbook or your lyin’ eyes?” more and more of us plump for the former, if only for a quiet life. Nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to and preventing potential workplace violence.”92

“Workplace violence”? Yes, it’s the new official euphemism: “The changes include plans to educate military commanders on signs of potential workplace violence. . . . ”

Say what you like, but at least the Army’s workplace violence is “diverse.”

The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. Old watchword: Better dead than red. Updated version: Better screwed than rude. In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: if you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put that down as mere confirmation of your long-established “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in a micro-regulated, credential-obsessed society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

And “Allahu akbar?” That’s Arabic for “Nothing to see here.”

Pace General Casey, what happened was not a “tragedy” but a national scandal.

Anwar al-Awlaki and his comrades have bet that such a society is too sick to survive. Watch the nothing-to-see-here media driveling on about

“combat stress” and the Pentagon diversicrats issuing memos on “workplace violence” like gibbering lunatics in a padded cell, and then think whether you’d really want to take that bet. The craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Café hat-decline 173

check girl, the wish for a quiet life leads to death, and not that quietly. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you’re in big (and probably terminal) trouble. And when the guy’s on the table firing wildly and screaming “Allahu akbar!” the PC kindergarten teachers won’t be there for you.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

. . . we are the chiLdren

Political correctness is the authoritarian end of a broader infantilization.

Hardly a week goes by where you don’t read a lifestyle feature such as this, from
New York
magazine:

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.93

Death Cab for Cutie, the band, took its name from “Death Cab for Cutie,”

the song. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band sang it back in the Sixties, a parody of Top 40 death anthems (“Teen Angel,” “Leader of the Pack”) with Vivian Stanshall Elvising up the refrain as the taxi runs a red light and meets its rendezvous with destiny: “Someone’s going to make you pay your fare.”

One wouldn’t want to place too great a metaphorical burden on an obscure novelty number, but to the jaundiced eye America’s Eloi can easily seem like infantilized cuties unaware they’re riding in a death cab. In the old days, there were, broadly, two phases of human existence: You were a child until thirteen. Then you were a working adult. Then you died. Now there are four phases: You’re a child until twelve, eleven, nine—or whenever enlightened jurisdictions think you’re entitled to go on the pill without 174

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parental notification. Then you’re an “adolescent,” an ever more elastic term of art now stretching lazily across the decades. Then you work, after a fashion. Then you quit at sixty-five, sixty, fifty-five in France, fifty in Greece, whatever you can get away with, and enjoy a three-decade retirement at public expense. The tedious business of being a grown-up is that ever-shrinking space between adolescence and retirement.

Let Barack Obama explain things: “I see some young people in the audience,” began the president at one of his “town hall meetings” in Ohio.94

Not that young. For he assured them that, under ObamaCare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were twenty-six.

The audience applauded.

Why?

Because, as the politicians say, “it’s about the future of all our children.”

And in the future we’ll all be children. For most of human history, across all societies, a 26-year-old has been considered an adult—and not starting out on adulthood but well into it. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parents, but someone who would be expected to have parental responsibilities himself. But not anymore. Sure, come your twenty-seventh birthday, it’ll be time to move out of your parents’ insurance agency—at least until Obama’s next piece of child-friendly legislation. But till then, here’s looking at you, kid.

This ought to be deeply insulting to any self-respecting 26-and-a-half-year-old. As for the rest of us, the kind of society in which 26-year-olds are considered children is a society in decline—in economic decline, cultural decline, spiritual decline, in demographic decline (as Europe already is), in terminal decline. The western world lives increasingly in a state of deferred adulthood. We enter adolescence earlier and earlier and we leave it later and later, if at all.

As everyone knows, our bodies “mature” earlier so it would be unreasonable to expect our grade-schoolers not to be rogering anything that moves, and the most we can hope to do is ensure there’s a government-funded decline 175

condom dispenser nearby. But even as our bodies reach “maturity” earlier and earlier, it would likewise be unreasonable to expect people who’ve been fully expert in “sexually transmitted infections” for a decade and a half to assume responsibility for their broader health-care arrangements.

And, come to think of it, isn’t it unreasonable to expect 30-year-olds who’ve been sexually active since sixth grade to assume responsibility for their sexual activity? As the
Washington Post
reported: High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is “just like asking grandma or auntie.”

So DC officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company’s super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, pref-erably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called

“WrapMC”—for Master of Condoms.

“If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to trash them,” said T. Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia. “So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people want?”95