"Get sick, get well, hang around an ink well..." -Bob Dylan
Well, my friends I apologize for the long absence. While some of my westward leaning comrades may be grateful for the hiatus, I have been humbled by a number of you asking me where the heck I was during these momentous times. I confess that every year around New Year’s I take a personal sabbatical and try to finish up books I had started the year before, clean out the “To Be Read” file, throw away the eight year old tax returns and try to clean sweep my brain for the oncoming year. That ritual ablution aside, I have also been exceptionally busy in both professional and personal life. Professional busy is very good…private busy had been an experience on par with Alice’s wanderings: the Redstater household will send our first-born off to college next year. Those of you that have been through it know what I mean: the forms, the trips, and the angst. All this aside, however, I have been keeping tabs on an historic groundswell that we are riding. Throw all that in with preparing for the annual kabuki dance of complying with the IRS and a bad cold and you don’t get much time for scribing.
I had a weird feeling just after our election. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Have you ever entered a room and felt that someone just left but you don’t know whom it was? It’s as if the image, a ghost or a hologram, remains just long enough in the room for you to feel its presence…it makes the hair on your neck stand up. I think W had the same feeling, because his Inaugural Address was majestic in it's tone, filled with hope and calling on the ghosts that have gone before us in this great Republic. Taken alone the events of the past two months are heartbreaking or elating, momentous or disastrous: the tsunami, the Ukrainian election, the Iraqi election, and the real possibility of peace in Israel. The question uttered by a tsunami survivor in Banda Aceh sums up the common thread that runs through all these events and is the ghost in the room: “Where are the Americans?” We are here, and we stride large upon the world stage and we are a force for good. Whether it is delivering the millions of gallons of fresh water that kept a desperate people alive in Indonesia or pressuring the Soviets, er Russians, to quit interfering in Kiev we are there.
What is it in the American character that calls us to action? Clearly our sheer size, economic and military power put us front and center in the world. But this does not translate into a call to duty. There have been large empires in the history of the world that saw to their own good, but not that of others. There is little that we will gain in Indonesia, or among Muslims from our efforts to help in the wake of the tsunami. The “where are the Americans?” question will just as likely be yelled by a group of Muslim radicals storming our Embassy in Djakarta…their intent far different. The same people we were rescuing had the brass to tell us we couldn’t fly our planes off the USS Lincoln for any other use except to assist them. But there we are.
It is entirely possible that the freedom we have helped the Iraqi people achieve will backfire on us and a Shia majority government will align themselves with Iran and evolve into another mullahocracy. But there we are.
Of the events I listed above, perhaps the two that could yield the most fruit for us in the long run will be peace in Israel and a free and independent Ukraine adding to the march of democracies in Eastern Europe. The tanks we will be able to pull back from the Fulda Gap could well be needed elsewhere. But there we are.
It is a fundamental aspect of our character that we simply keep trying. We have a faith that there is always something better if you just keep plugging away. It is the same character that drove us westward. As David Brooks observed in his recent study of the American scene, “On Paradise Drive,” “ …it is the spirit that led young Americans to pass over perfectly good farmland in Kentucky and keep moving west.” Some call it restless, some call it naïve…but in its core, it is good. This is the central aspect of America that European intellectuals, American college professors and the entire Democratic Party don’t get. They see a nefarious scheme to extract oil in our Iraqi venture. They earnestly fear Bible thumping bubbas are going to break through the French doors of their Long Island estates and make them recite the Ten Commandments while being strapped to their loungers and forced to watch Nascar. They honestly believe that if Redstaters had their way that old people would be tossed into the sewers, forests would be clear cut and the entire state of Connecticut would be turned into a giant Wal-Mart staffed with ignorant buck-toothed schleps that don’t know the diff’rence ‘tween a Chardney and a Caberknee. They are committing political suicide and like the Minister in the funeral scene of “The Big Chill,” commenting on the self-inflicted death of the friend that brought them all together for the movie, we find ourselves asking: “Where did their hope go?” Goodness and hope are the Siamese twins of a life lived well. It is this spirit that animates the majority of Americans and it is a spirit that needs nurturing and routine revival.
This is a lesson that must be taught at home. We are generations away from seeing public school teachers allowed or capable to carry this message. Entrenched teacher’s unions that serve as the Zampolit of the American left cannot allow such an uplifting story to permeate the dull block walls of our educational camps.