Thank God For Radical Islam!
I know this is wrong on so many levels I cannot even begin to count them, but yes, as a Post Post-Modern Baby Boomer American philosopher, fed up with the lisping sighing prattle of delicate liberals and equally nauseated by the strident delusions of hell-fire Buchananites and his perpetually pissed off puritanical brethren all waiting to gloat when the rapture comes, I am oddly glad we are being forced to awaken from our cushy American delusions. Screw the rapture and screw the abortionists. This is tectonic. Fantasies about Wal-Mart, the glass ceiling, flat tax and gay pride, are not really much of a problem when you take a slightly broader view. Radical Islam has been pounding at the door for awhile, and we all really should have awakened from our dogmatic slumbers. Ladies and Gentlemen, Disney Land, and Harvard, will now be closing. Please return to the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This is the time for authentic philosophers and theologians to put down their otiose academic games and take gainful employment saving Western rights-based democracies. Liberals and Conservatives need not apply; you can keep on dreaming of social workers and heaven.
Yes, the radical Islamists really do want to kill us, and the moderate Muslims, much like the Catholics, think our consumer culture is perverse which is why neither opposes too forcefully the violent Islamists, so long as they only blow up the icons, residents and proselytizers of the Protestant consumer cultures of America and Europe. And all our fulsome hand wringing and progressive sensibilities will not help us a jot until we actually decide who we are, morally that is. Yes, the big armies of the centuries have finally come out again; it’s the Imams vs. the Popes. The Muslims and the Catholics, who together speak for nearly 4 billion people (more people than ten USA’s), are now getting ready to go head to head again. And this time it is not at all about terrorists killing consumerists. The Muslims, it seems, have also been killing Catholics as Catholics. And these guys each know exactly who they are. They each really have moral clarity, and have had moral clarity for around one-thousand-five-hundred years. We spoiled puritanical Americans are merely their arrogant children; we are the small fry in the big one that is coming. After all, there is not much a few smart bombs or other fancy military toys can do to change the minds of the waves of billions and billions people who are intent on overthrowing Western Culture as their protesting children have recently conceived it. We Americans may have the best guns in the battle but they have the divisions that count. The blunt reality is we really are not the dominant world power we imagine ourselves to be. Their divisions are fully composed of self-guided smart bombs, billions of humans guided by God in heaven above and crystal clear morality within. Our little bombs are only guided by littler satellites. And our nukes have no clear targets. All we really have is Madonna, Fifty Cent and Viacom.
So yes, this certainly is a world war, and do not delude yourself for even a second, this is a world war like no other, this world war is the “World Moral War,” the war for moral clarity on earth. The Pope’s divisions beat the communist military handily, but it is not so clear they will beat the Muslim divisions so easily. And the side with the toughest morality will win this war. And we in the land of complaining Protestants, Busch Gardens and imminent rapture have not got much of a horse in this race, yet. As a consequence, I fear that unless America is willing to define the moral core of liberal democracies we whiners of the Mayflower will be entering a time that will be known as the twilight of liberal democracies. Hume is speaking my fellow philosophers. Muttering in your academic beds, prostrating yourselves for professorship will only leave your children dead. Philosophy is again relevant; the question is whether we philosophers are up to our duty to define a moral order of liberal democracy that can protect us in the moral wars ahead. Be sure, the frame of “warfare” is infinitely more apt than the politically correct frame of “nurturing families” sticky with cotton candy at the amusement park. There is no cotton candy in Mogadishu.
Yes, the radical Islamists really do want to kill us, and the moderate Muslims, much like the Catholics, think our consumer culture is perverse which is why neither opposes too forcefully the violent Islamists, so long as they only blow up the icons, residents and proselytizers of the Protestant consumer cultures of America and Europe. And all our fulsome hand wringing and progressive sensibilities will not help us a jot until we actually decide who we are, morally that is. Yes, the big armies of the centuries have finally come out again; it’s the Imams vs. the Popes. The Muslims and the Catholics, who together speak for nearly 4 billion people (more people than ten USA’s), are now getting ready to go head to head again. And this time it is not at all about terrorists killing consumerists. The Muslims, it seems, have also been killing Catholics as Catholics. And these guys each know exactly who they are. They each really have moral clarity, and have had moral clarity for around one-thousand-five-hundred years. We spoiled puritanical Americans are merely their arrogant children; we are the small fry in the big one that is coming. After all, there is not much a few smart bombs or other fancy military toys can do to change the minds of the waves of billions and billions people who are intent on overthrowing Western Culture as their protesting children have recently conceived it. We Americans may have the best guns in the battle but they have the divisions that count. The blunt reality is we really are not the dominant world power we imagine ourselves to be. Their divisions are fully composed of self-guided smart bombs, billions of humans guided by God in heaven above and crystal clear morality within. Our little bombs are only guided by littler satellites. And our nukes have no clear targets. All we really have is Madonna, Fifty Cent and Viacom.
So yes, this certainly is a world war, and do not delude yourself for even a second, this is a world war like no other, this world war is the “World Moral War,” the war for moral clarity on earth. The Pope’s divisions beat the communist military handily, but it is not so clear they will beat the Muslim divisions so easily. And the side with the toughest morality will win this war. And we in the land of complaining Protestants, Busch Gardens and imminent rapture have not got much of a horse in this race, yet. As a consequence, I fear that unless America is willing to define the moral core of liberal democracies we whiners of the Mayflower will be entering a time that will be known as the twilight of liberal democracies. Hume is speaking my fellow philosophers. Muttering in your academic beds, prostrating yourselves for professorship will only leave your children dead. Philosophy is again relevant; the question is whether we philosophers are up to our duty to define a moral order of liberal democracy that can protect us in the moral wars ahead. Be sure, the frame of “warfare” is infinitely more apt than the politically correct frame of “nurturing families” sticky with cotton candy at the amusement park. There is no cotton candy in Mogadishu.
posted by James D. Carmine PhD at 9/23/2006 12:49:00 PM
6 comments
