The op-ed page of yesterday’s New York Times had three articles expressing the same idea, in the same terms, with the same rhetoric:
Maureen Dowd wrote that Bush got re-elected by “dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule.” She thinks “W. ran a jihad in America
A jihad?
Gary Wills wrote that Election Day was “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” He says we now resemble “our putative enemies” — Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s loyalists — more than we resemble the enlightened “secular states of modern Europe." We are a country of "fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity."
Our putative enemies?
Thomas Friedman was “deeply troubled” (he is always deeply troubled). Bush used people’s “religious energy” to “promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad.” Friedman would support Bush if he “mobilizes [the country’s] deep moral energies to unite us” — by adopting Friedman’s views on gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. But he opposes Bush if he uses those energies for “dividing us from one another and the world.”
Apparently our “religious energies” need to pass a global test.
As someone who shares the views of Dowd, Wills and Friedman on gay marriage, abortion rights, and stem cell research, let me gently advise each of them as follows: get a grip.
There is a real jihad going on. It is being fought against us by real enemies. They have already struck at Istanbul, Madrid, Jakarta, Beslan, Moscow, New Delhi, New York, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Saudi Arabia. They are currently engaged in genocide in Sudan. They have made barbaric beheadings and suicide bombings commonplace. They tried to decimate Los Angeles International Airport on January 1, 2000 (during the golden Clinton years, more than a year before George W. Bush took office). September 11 was their second attempt on the World Trade Center.
And you think the enemy is George Bush? Or religious people in red states?
Gay marriage, abortion rights and stem cell research are important, but disagreement and debate on these issues — on which there is more than one possible point of view — is not “divisive.” On the contrary, the ability to discuss these issues in a civil and respectful manner, between groups of widely different backgrounds, is what distinguishes America from the "enlightened" countries of Europe.
On Tuesday, while waiting for the election results, the incomparable James Lileks was reading the diaries of Victor Klemperer (“I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years” — a book Christopher Hitchens, in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, calls “a nonfiction event that quite eclipsed the journals of Anne Frank”). Lileks was reading about what a real domestic jihad looks like:
I’m up to the late 30s, when the long knives come out.
Jews are forbidden to drive, since this arrogantly presumes to profit from the labor of good Aryan workers. (Seriously). Jews must pay reparations. Jews must have their property assessed. Jews cannot use the library public rooms. And so forth.
Every day a different decree; every day a different liberty removed.
It’s remarkable, really — people get up, have breakfast, get the mail, tend the garden; in this sense they are unmolested. But imagine if every day you were informed of something you could no longer do, even if you didn’t do it.
At first you take comfort to things you can still do, but it soon becomes apparent that any liberties you still possess are ones they have not yet gotten around to confiscating. . . .
And the author of this book has seven years left to go. .
Lileks’ bleat includes a message for those who think Bush is leading a “jihad,” that America resembles our "putative enemies," that the real enemy is religious people in red states:
We’re still all over the map on a great many issues, as ever, and the desire for compromise is still a desire to settle the issue OUR way.
At the end of the day the Line will be moved; it’s just a question of where it ends up. The “progressive” impulse questions everything; the conservative impulse wonders why we question what has worked for us before.
What emerges from this dynamic satisfies neither, and fuels the next round of debate.
I’d rather have that than 30 years of a static society that ends up so ossified and brittle it shatters into a thousand pieces. Because there’s always someone there with a dustpan, a broom, and a long loud speech about how the Jews wanted it to turn out this way because they control the Hefty Bag industry.
You want comity? You want progress? Enough with the catastrophe rhetoric, then. Enough with the nonsense. Enough with the gasbag fantasies. Reading the Klemperer diaries make me realize again what real true perfidy looks like, and how those who view a Bush victory as “four more years of evil” are parading their petulant variety of moral idiocy for the approval of the claque. . . .
Lileks ends his bleat with this paragraph, a good reminder for everyone on all sides of the debate on moral issues in America:
It’s a great and rare idea: one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. I think we can hammer out the particulars in a spirit of good will, eh? Or not. Our choice.