It’s Tuesday, February 25, (the day before what would have been my 54th wedding anniversary if my Barb hadn’t just up and gone off to spend eternity with Our Lord 11 years ago), and it looks very much as if the United States of America, with all its power and majesty, is about to wage war, fast and furiously.
This apparent fact has ginned up a lot of anti-war protests, most of which, when examined carefully, turn out to be anti-George W. Bush protests more than expressions of genuine pacifist sentiment.
Take for example the Hollywood crowd, a motley assemblage of serial adulterers, abortion promoters, gays, practitioners of multiple marriages and divorces, and all around unwholesomeness. They don’t like George W. Bush. They don’t like what he stands for. They don’t like his proclaimed and scrupulously-lived Christianity and his marital fidelity. No matter what he did, they’d find reasons to rail against it.
So too, for the elitist mainstream media, a sleazy collection of pro-abortion, pro-gay Marxists who will not be satisfied until the nation comes to its senses and elects a socialist president and a socialist congress. This craven crew is afraid to be as openly anti-war as their Hollywood brethren, but scratch one and you’ll find a dedicated but trembling anti-warrior underneath.
Then of course there are the geniuses of academia who have taken time out from their vocation of turning out semi-illiterate graduates and protesting every single thing Mr. Bush’s does, to attack his Middle East policy and the prospect of a war on Iraq no matter how justified it may be.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of good people who are uneasy with the aspects of empire building inherent in our determination to rid the world of one of the more undesirable heads of state. People such as Pat Buchanan, who upsets the liberals by displaying an ability to think clearly and with an historical perspective few in public life can match. Their protests are rooted in a genuine – and justified – fear that the United States is being led down a modern Appian Way to a Roman-style imperium.
I have to count myself among them. I am very uneasy with the notion of an American empire which will brutalize us and ultimately make us dependent upon the labor and treasure of subject foreign peoples. The bread and circuses (we call ’em “entitlements” nowadays) we increasingly demand of our government must be paid for and it certainly makes them a lot more enjoyable when someone else picks us the tab. But I am also very much afraid that the die is cast – that Pax Americana has already been launched.
As I mentioned in my column last week, a quick glance at the area of the Middle East around Iraq shows it is already swarming with our legions, and even if, in the unlikely event that we don’t go plunging into Iraq, we are obviously there to stay and, coincidentally, to help pacify a region our empire builders insist is badly in need of pacification (so too, for that matter, is downtown Los Angeles and a lot of other urban areas, but that’s another matter).
But all that begs the question. It looks like we are going to whack Iraq, and because I include myself among the “we” I will fall in behind my commander-in-chief. If we go to war, it will be, like it or not, America’s war, and I am an American. It may not be a case of “my country, right or wrong,” but it comes close.
As for the prospects of empire, let’s just say it’s inevitable. I won’t relax and enjoy it, but at my age, I won’t have to hang around long enough to see the chickens come home to roost, which they will someday, and with a vengeance.
As for those exquisites who are so vehement in their opposition to Mr. Bush’s Middle Eastern adventures, and everything else he does, it is important to keep in mind that in the final analysis it is not really George W. Bush they despise, it is America itself.
So screw ’em.
Semper Fi.