America Alone (28 page)

1. Self-righteous

Who exactly is being self-righteous here? If you want a public culture that reeks of indestructible faith in its own righteousness, try Europe--especially when they're talking about America: if you disagree with Euro-conventional wisdom, you must be an idiot. Or a Nazi. As Oliver James told the Guardian the day after the 2004 U.S. elections, "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"

Mr. James is a clinical psychologist and appears to have a bad case of projection. With respect to Mein Kampf, it's Europe that has resurgent anti-Semitism (the French intifada), explicitly racist parties (the British National Party), and neo-Fascists who, if not yet their countries' leaders, have gotten near enough to be in the presidential run-off (Jean-Marie Le Pen) or form part of the governing coalition (Austria).

2. Gun-totin'

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Americans tote guns because they're assertive, 'self-reliant citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. At dinner in Paris a couple of years ago, I was asked about

"this American sickness with guns."

"Americans have guns," I said, "because a lot of Americans like having guns." My host scoffed. "A lot of people here would like to have guns too. But they don't."

"Exactly," I said.

3. Military-lovin'

What's not to love? Americans take pride in their military on absolute grounds, but, if they were to go all comparative about it, they'd point out there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel n' dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.

4. Sister-marryin'

Back to demography: you can't be a redneck in Germany, Spain, or Italy. When the birth rates are 1.1 children per couple, there are no sisters to bunk up with. 5. Abortion-hatin'

Is Brian Reade saying he loves it? Abortion is one manifestation of what John Paul II called the reduction of sexuality into an "instrument for self-assertion." Mr. Reade might respond, "Yeah, that's what's so great about it!" But whatever one's tastes in this area, as the pope understood, sex as mere self-assertion is a dead end. If the progressives either abort or decline to conceive their progeny, the progeny of the redneck knuckle-draggers will be the only fellows around.

6. Gay-loathin'

More projection. It's Amsterdam where the poor gay guys now have to watch what street they turn down. It's Paris where the gay mayor was stabbed by a gay-loathin' Muslim. Homophobia-wise, America's fundamentalist Christians have nothing on Europe's fundamentalist Muslims.

7. Foreigner-despisin' non-passport ownin'

The only despisin' of foreigners that's going on here seems to be by Europeans toward Americans. Recall Margaret Drabble's diatribe from the beginning of this book. We only skimmed the surface:

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes.

Etc. When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. If one were to formulate it
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less disapprovingly, "self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport ownin' red-necks" equals "culturally confident, self-reliant, patriotic, procreative, religious, democratic, constitutional rednecks who believe in national sovereignty rather than ineffectual poseur multilateralism." As for Mr. Reade's bit about "the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us"--if it bothers you that much, why not try urinating back? Ah, but in Europe it seems even that simple act is in the process of being feminized. Stehpinkeln--standing while urinating--is disapproved of in Germany, to the point where toilets can now be fitted with voice alarms triggered when the seat is raised. "Hey, stand-peeing is not allowed here and will be punished with fines, so if you don't want any trouble, you'd best sit down," orders the

"toilet ghost" in a voice that imitates former chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The notion of German government leaders commanding you in the privacy of your own home to urinate like a woman seems almost too poignant an image of the peculiarly European blend of state-enforced docility. In contrast to the swaggering Texan cowboy, it's the Last Stand of the EU-Corraled. Yet millions of these devices have been sold and Klaus Schwerma has written a book on the phenomenon called Stehpinkeln: Die Letzte Bastion der Männlichkeit?--or "Standing Urinators: The Last Bastion of Masculinity?" This hardly seems the time to open up yet more unbridgeable cultural divides between the Old World and the New. The British TV historian Simon Schama defined the Bush/Kerry divide as "Godly America" and "Worldly America," hailing the latter as

"pragmatic, practical, rational, and skeptical"--which is, naturally, exactly the wrong way around: it's the Christian fundamentalists, Holy Rollers, born-again Bible Belters, and Jesus freaks of Godly America who are rational and skeptical, especially of Euro-delusions. It's secular Europe that's living on faith. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshriveled in its birth rates, redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet.
THE PASTEURIZATION IS PROLOGUE

Lest you think this is veering close to the jingoistic xenophobia deplored by America's East Coast media, let me do a bit of America-bashing. The softening and feminization of the Western world isn't merely a matter of gun confiscation. I've never been one of those Americans who's just plain old anti-foreigner--mainly because I'm not an American, I'm a foreigner. And so I'm quite partial to foreigners, apart from myself. I blush to say it but I like French food, I like French coffee, I like French women. To be honest, I'd rather see some interminable French movie where Isabelle Adjani or Isabelle Huppert or pretty much any other Isabelle sits naked on the end of the bed smoking a cigarette and discussing with her husband how each of their affairs are going than watch Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator XII. Please don't throw the book away in disgust until after you've paid for it. I've never subscribed to that whole "cheese-eating surrender-monkey" sneer promoted by my National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg. As a neocon warmonger, I yield to no one in my contempt for the French, but that said, cheese-wise I feel they have the edge. When I'm at the lunch counter in America and I order a cheeseburger and the waitress says, "American, Swiss, or cheddar?" I can't tell the difference. They all taste of nothing. The only difference is that the slice of alleged Swiss is full of holes, so you're getting less nothing for your buck. Then again, the holes also taste of nothing, and they're less fattening. But either way, cheese is not the battleground on which to demonstrate the superiority of the American way. In America, unpasteurized un-aged raw cheese that would be standard in any
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Continental fromagerie is banned. Americans, so zealous in defense of their liberties when it comes to guns, are happy to roll over for the nanny state when it comes to the cheese board. Personally, I want it all: assault weapons and Camembert, guns and butter and all the other dairy products that U.S. big-government federal regulation has destroyed the taste of. The French may be surrender monkeys on the battlefield, but they don't throw their hands up and flee in terror just because the Brie's a bit ripe. It's the Americans who are the cheesesurrendering eating-monkeys, who insist that the only way to deal with this sliver of Roquefort is to set up a rigorous ongoing Hans Blix-type inspections regime. France, for all its faults, has genuinely federalized food: a distinctive cheese every twenty miles down the road. In America, meanwhile, the food nannies are lobbying to pass something called the National Uniformity for Food Act. There's way too much of that already. The federalization of food may seem peripheral to national security issues, and the taste of American milk--compared with its French or English or even Quebecois equivalents--may seem a small loss. But take almost any area of American life: what's the more common approach nowadays? The excessive government regulation exemplified by American cheese or the spirit of self-reliance embodied in the Second Amendment? On a whole raft of issues from health care to education the United States is trending in an alarmingly fromage-like direction. As they almost say in New Hampshire, live Brie or die. Americans should understand that the softening of a state happens incrementally. You can reach the same point as the Europeans by routes other than gun confiscation.

Could America wind up as just another enervated present-tense Western nation? Well, it's halfway there. I've no wish to be "partisan." Not because attacking the Democrats is, as the media say, "mean-spirited," but because the Democrats have chosen to make themselves all but irrelevant to the great questions of the age. You can understand why the Dems miss the nineties. There was nary a word about war. Okay, you'd get the odd million-man genocide in Rwanda, but you tended to hear about it afterward, usually as a late-breaking item in the Clinton teary-apology act. Instead, it was an era of micro-politics, a regulation here, an entitlement there, a bike path and a recycling program everywhere you looked. Venusian Americans assumed they'd entered an age of permanent post-Martian politics, and they resented September 11 as an intrusion on their minimalism. When you're at an event for the "antiwar" movement, you realize it's no such thing: it's an I-don't-want-to-have-to-hearabout-this-war movement. So they mock Bush, Cheney, Rummy, and Co. as the real terrorists--the ones determined to maintain America in a state of "terror." Oddly enough, this was how the Left chose to live during the Cold War, when the no-nukes crowd expected Armageddon any minute. If you believe in a two-party system, in the end even the integrity of the dominant party isn't served by the self-marginalization of the only alternative: the Democratic Party needs to get back in the game. But to do that they've got to get over the bike-path micro-politics and back on the unlovely central thruway of geopolitical reality.
MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY

Conservatives, on the other hand, embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney ever said was a couple of weeks after September 11: "One of the things that's changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government--big shift--and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do." Really?

I'd say September 11 vindicated perfectly a decentralized, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government--the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped--big-time, as the
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vice president would say--was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA, and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the U.S. border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he'd been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers. Yet, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, Amazon.com would know that he'd bought The A-Z of Infidel Slaying two years earlier and their "We have some suggestions for you!" box would be proffering a 30 percent discount on Suicide Bombing for Dummies. Amazon is a more efficient data miner than U.S. Immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon's system is very cheap, but it's in the nature of government to, do things worse, and slower.

Here's another example of Dick Cheney's government--the one we "trust and value and have high expectations for"--from the morning of September 11: FAA Command Center: Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters: God, I don't know.

FAA Command Center: That's a decision somebody's going to have to make, probably in the next ten minutes.

FAA Headquarters: You know, everybody just left the room.

Most of what went wrong on September 11 we knew about in the first days after. Generally, it falls into two categories:

1. Government agencies didn't enforce their own rules (as in the terrorists' laughably inadequate visa applications).

or

2. The agencies' rules were out of date-three out of those four planes reached their targets because their crews, passengers, and ground staff all blindly followed the FAA's 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late, as the terrorists knew they would.

The next time a terrorist gets through and pulls off an attack, it will be for the same reasons: there'll be a bunch of new post-September 11 regulations, and some bureaucrat somewhere will have neglected to follow them, or some wily Islamist will have rendered them as obsolete as his predecessors made all those thirty-year-old hijack rules. That's an abiding feature of government: 90 percent of its ever-proliferating agencies just aren't very good, and if you put your life in their hands, more fool you.

But, on the fourth plane, they didn't follow the seventies hijack rituals. On Flight 93, they used their cell phones, discovered that FAA regulations weren't going to save them, and then acted as free men, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private individuals. The first three planes were effectively an airborne European Union, where the rights of the citizens had been appropriated by the FAA's flying nanny state. Up there where the air is rarified, all your liberties have been regulated away: there's no smoking, there's 100 percent gun control, you're obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you; if the stewardess--whoops, sorry--if the flight attendant's rude to you, tough; if you're rude back, you'll be arrested on landing. For thirty years, passengers surrendered more and more rights for the illusion of
America Alone