Melanie Morgan
September 7,  2004

Strange as it may seem, some of the best things about this country have been our enemies.  Consider them: the fascist hoodlums, the Communist crushers, the make-believe mullahs who immolate their own children in the name of the Koran.  Through the years these have been the adversaries to have.

Same goes for their stateside sympathizers.  The hard-nosed isolationists resigned to the Reich.  The campus utopians and their sophomores.  And today’s dreamy one-worlders, enchanted by the view through John Kerry’s several minds and Michael Moore’s dissipated one.

How the dreamers must have looked forward to last month’s opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.  It was to be expected that the doings would proclaim the superiority of internationalism over George Bush’s Western chauvinism.  With the Games commencing amidst unprecedented attacks upon the West—upon the very notion of Western Civilization—surely cosmopolitan Athens would play it safe and rock to the planetary World Beat…

So imagine the consternation of the Left when they found that their one-world jubilee had been hijacked—right there in Olympic Stadium—by a 3 ½-hour salute to Western culture.  How they must have squirmed while watching the Greeks lay claim to the pillars of the same civilization that so embarrasses the liberals and enrages the terrorists!  Holy Hellenists, Batman!  Plato, Pythagoras and the Patriarchs?  The actual Pantheon of the Dead White Men, buried in the belly of a post-mod Trojan Horse?  Next time, in Beijing!

The media made much of the sheer generosity of the Greek nation in staging such a lavish welcome.  But that’s not news.  Everyone knows that the Greeks are among the most extravagantly hospitable of peoples.

No, the real story is that, in the Age of Terrorism, the geopolitically ambivalent host nation stepped up and hoisted its colors.  In spite of their historic differences with the U.S. and its allies, the Greeks boldly declared themselves the proud progenitors of the embattled West.  The ideas that the Greeks reclaimed last month in Olympic Stadium, last year might have gotten Greeks killed in Baghdad.  Or, two years ago, in Kabul.  And perhaps today or tomorrow in Mindanao or Peshawar or Jakarta, because the war that the Greeks have joined is truly a culture war.

We all recall the “Culture War” of 10 or 15 years ago.  It was a war of words that pitted the conservative defenders of Western tradition against liberals who, no longer finding in Western Civ anything worth defending, gaily danced on its grave.  But now the stakes are far higher.  Today’s culture war is a brutal confrontation with those who would sooner destroy Western Civilization than debate its virtues.

So where are the liberals dancing now?  In a theatre district of the mind, a realm undisturbed by the Twin Towers or the USS Cole, unperturbed by the beheadings or the mass graves, unruffled by Saddam’s daily missile attacks on our lawful aircraft, uncomplicated by the sad history of appeasement.  The war that has been made on us is so unimaginably terrible that liberals dare not imagine the terrors to come.  The risks are so incalculably great that they prefer not to calculate them.  The cost of retreat so unthinkable that they would rather not think at all.

Not long ago it was fashionable to say that Ronald Reagan was nostalgic for a past that never was.  Today it’s become apparent that American liberals are stuck in a pre-9/11 world that never really existed.  Little wonder that for the second time in four years the dream-dancers would have us elect a confabulatory candidate.  President No-Kidding-There-I-Was.

If John Kerry stuck a feather in his magic hat, would we too call it macaroni?

Who then would defend us?

Melanie Morgan is a talk-show host with radio station KSFO in San Francisco, California

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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