An old-style conservative would have pinned the blame on the sainted Dr. Spock for creating a culture of coddling, but Hanson, being a neocon wrapped with the finest tobacco, has a loftier explanation on tap.
"One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins.
"Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments — and has absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle."
This, of course, is the same populace that Hanson and his kind invoke whenever they piss scorn on the effete media elite who lack the bedrock wisdom and common sense of real people. When the polls show a majority of Americans support Bush, they're wiser than than the cynical pundits; when a majority of Americans oppose Bush, they're a bunch of dummies who don't know how good they have it.
This is exactly right. Of course, pols of all stripes trot out the hoary cliché of the simple wisdom of the commoners, when it suits them best, but conservatives seem to play this trump card more often, and with greater irony, as it is they who man the majority of the think tanks and media focus groups.
A nation of Homer Simpsons lacks physical and moral sinew, laments Hanson, cracking a walnut with one hand.
"...our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and space — as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of high-definition television in Iraq — and who plotted to keep flat screens out of Baghdad."
He's really full of the ripest fertilizer. It may be true that the jugglers and acrobats in the "media circus" would useless trying to fix the septic tank, but why single them out as distinctive soft products of the information age? It's not as if those who support the Iraq war clank around with tool belts around their waists. How handy does Hanson think his colleagues at NRO are around the house and garage, and how much manual work does he imagine Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and the editors of the Weekly Standard have done in their pampered existence? Find me the correlation between the ability to weld and the steely resolve to prosecute preemptive war--there isn't one. And I would note that conservatives reverence men and women who toil with their hands and technical knowhow, until of course they form a union and try to negotiate better working conditions and health benefits. Then they become blue-collar blackmailers who ought to consider themselves lucky their jobs haven't been outsourced--yet.
Yep, when you need the head gasket in your Buick replaced, who you gonna call -- John Kerry or the Doughy Pantload? The hypocrisy and cynicism of these assholes just never ends. Quasi-classical morons like Hanson scarcely take a Aristotelian breath between composing their latest ode to a Kansan urn, before they're off and invoking the absolute truths of the troops in the field. Very well then -- are the recruiters itching to saddle up Hanson's grandchildren for the noble quest? How about Pierce Bush, who is definitely of draft age? How about Ben Stein's teenaged son? How about Jenna and Not-Jenna?
Or are we just sticking to poor kids who have no other opportunities at their disposal, whose choices are a stultified existence selling gunny sacks of Cheetos to fat people at Walmart, or getting a shot at having Uncle Sam fund a college education by serving in the military? Whatever the case, the incessant invocations of Thucydides Gump and his tweedy associates ring hollow, coming as they do from ivory-tower bells.
And in reading in full Hanson's pronunciamento, there is still more to find unconscionably wrong.
After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East.
Somebody tell this fool the difference between emergency measures, which are temporary by nature and definition, and an open-ended covert policy, based on stovepiped intelligence which was not, contrary to Scott McClellan's shameless animatronic boilerplate, shared in full with even a significant portion of Congress. Hanson and his fellow Serious Thinkers remain oblivious, in their abject demurral of everyone's civil rights, to the fact that nothing except a supposed fear of even retroactive paperwork prevented the NSA from getting their FISA requests, seeing as how they've rejected something like five or six warrants, out of nearly 20,000 requests.
Such a batting average is apparently just not good enough for the fearless armchair warriors.
Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.
Contrary to Hanson's hairy-chested exhortations, no one has forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001. They haven't forgotten that Bush received as detailed a PDB as one could have hoped for, a full month before 9/11. They haven't forgotten that the big excuse at the time was that we had too much intel to process, a veritable fire hydrant of data that simply couldn't be coordinated properly through the byzantine interagency workings. Yet suddenly we need to spy at home and torture abroad, all the while proclaiming that we do not torture.
No, Mr. Hanson, no one has forgotten, and no one has pretended that everything's back to normal. But we Homer Simpsons can at least parse the rhetoric emanating from the Bushie poop-chute, and understand the incongruity of proclaiming the virtues of a garrisoned police state, while asking not even the simplest measures of resource conservation. Hanson and his ilk expect good Germans to just shut the hell up, be content with flipping houses to one another until the bubble finally bursts, and drive, drive, drive to our little hearts' content. As long as we're always, always afraid, living in fear, eternally grateful to the inveterate liars that have conjured this magical sphere of protection by spying on PETA.
*I believe the credit for the phrase "cockpunchers of Thermopylae" goes to TBogg. Absolutely brilliant.
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