After America - Mark Steyn [81]
As is the way with the Conformity Enforcers, Nanny Bloomberg pulled out all the abstractions. “It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.”75 Really? That’s not what Osama bin Laden said. But, if we put away our abstract generalities and listen to what the enemy is actually telling us, then the terrorists will have won! For a fellow so open and accepting, Nanny Bloomberg seems awfully dogmatic and strident. This is the WEIRD syndrome—the determination to hammer the hard square peg of global reality into the hole of multicultural nullity, whatever it takes. Even after Faisal Shahzad’s arrest for the attempted bombing of Times Square, the Associated Press, CNN, the Washington Post, and other grandees of the conformicrat media insisted on attaching huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments in Connecticut.76 Subprime terrorism? Don’t laugh. To the media, it’s a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I-and ending in -slam.
Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit?
Poor old Faisal Shahzad. Before heading off to Times Square, he made a pre-detonation video outlining the evils of the Great Satan.77 Nothing about mortgage rates or foreclosure proceedings in there. He couldn’t have been more straightforward, but still Nanny Bloomberg and the media cover their ears and go “La-la-la. Can’t hear you.”
Paul Berman, a lifelong liberal, says that the doctrine of relativism makes “everything the equal of everything else.”78 As a result, our ruling class—political, academic, cultural—have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” This is almost right. In fact, the cult of absolutist relativism is a kind of affirmative action against their own civilization: In any dispute between the boundlessly tolerant West and a highly intolerant Islam, it must be the fault of the former for being insufficiently tolerant of the latter’s intolerance. A society led by men with such a self-destructive urge will get its wish, and very soon, and deservedly so.
Not so long ago I saw a two-panel cartoon: on the left hand panel, “This is your brain”; on the right hand panel, “This is your brain on political correctness”—a small and shriveled thing, but now standard issue.
Here’s a random selection of headlines:79
Naval History Web Site Highlights Women’s History Month
Senior Navy Leader Receives Black Engineer of the Year Award
Davede Alexander Receives Diversity Leadership Award
Navy Women in Aviation Show Diversity Is Rising
Top Pentagon Official Discovers Model of Diversity at Corona
Warfare Center, Says Navy’s Doing Diversity Right
CNRH Seminar Teaches Lessons of Hope and Empowerment
The above were all plucked from the United States Navy newsletter. When the first newsletter showed up in my in-box, I thought it might contain under-reported tales of derring-do off the Horn of Africa battling Somali pirates. But instead it’s one diversity-awareness story after another: “Senior Navy Leader Receives Most Diverse Engineer of the Year Award”; “Appointment of First Somali Pirate to Joint Chiefs Of Staff Shows Diversity Is Rising, Says Top Pentagon Official.”
Fred Astaire in Follow the Fleet, 1935, words and music by Irving Berlin:
We joined the Navy to see the world
And what did we see?
We saw the sea...
Follow The Fleet, twenty-first century remake:
We joined the Navy to see the world
And what did we see?
We saw the Diversity Leadership Awards.
Well, you say, look, they’re just doing what they