The big identity party

Commentary...

The continued balkanization of the United States into identity groups, travelling companies of grievance theatre, and the culture of self-loathing we are now widely and actively nurturing isn't doing us any favors.

One cannot, it seems, insist on being idealized and set apart as special for various reasons while at the same time decrying a lack of unity in the plurality. That's cognitive dissonance. It seems to be the pervading influence of our time, and it is probably destructive to our larger cohesiveness as Americans. You remember, E Pluribus Unum? Are you feeling that much, these days?

It's hard when everybody is focused on being a unique and special snowflake.

All of this rampant "snowflaking" probably portends bad things. Too many snowflakes makes a blizzard, and blizzards are hard to navigate, let alone survive. Empires such as ours generally run their course after about 250 years. Give or take a few years, or lingering claims of imperial hegemony, a rough average of 250 years is true enough from the Assyrians to the Macedonians to the Romanovs and the British.

Most of them fall apart from the inside out, having lost faith in whatever united them to begin with, or a vision forward. Why should we be any different?

We are among the very few nations on earth initially founded on the basis of an idea. That idea is, of course, enshrined in the Constitution, that vision of what we would like to be. Which isn't to say that we haven't had problems, or that we still don't. We have and we do. But the Constitution has allowed us that rare phenomenon among governments-of any kind-to be self-correcting, and to an astonishing degree has been succesful.

But the snowflake revolution seems to be impeding much of that. Congress itself appears to be trapped in amber. Last week in Louisiana, a lawmaker attacked the notion of school kids reciting the Declaration of Independence because, in her considered opinion, it was racist.

Which brings me to Orlando. There is no shortage of puffery surrounding this latest tragedy, whose motive has transmogrified from guns to terrorism to sexual orientation to mental health and back again. The Attorney General of the United States, Loretta Lynch, offered up a supreme example of otherwordly banality to the American public when she declared that the murderer's motive "May never be known."

Huh? That is either deliberate ignorance operating at an Olympic level, or it's an attempt to obfuscate the fundamental issue, and for reasons we can only guess.

There is a reluctance to call Islamic terrorists what they are, but strangely, Islamic terrorists have the compelling habit of telling us exactly who they are, exactly what they are doing, and why they are doing it. The Orlando shooter was at pains to make his oaths and declarations while actively engaged in murder. So perhaps we can cut to the real heart of the issue, which isn't guns or sexual orientation, or mental health.

It's our Constitution. In military terms, it is our center of gravity, which is why it is being attacked. The United States Constitution is the principle aggravation - without question - of militant Islamists. It isn't Middle-eastern policy or the treatment of Muslims - those are sideshow issues meant to distract us and to validate hatred and murder. We know that to be true because the terrorists can't stop telling us so. Sharia law - "the straight path," rejects virtually every value of free peoples, and provides severe punishments for liberal minds.

It's our Constitution. Because it guarantees us freedoms. Because it places the rule of secular law above the Koran and above the Hadiths. We are a nation - and a culture - of secular law, and so long as the Western world continues to govern itself by secular law, while guaranteeing religious freedoms (an inexcusable affront), we will exist in the dar al harb, the house of war, and that means that extremist strains of Islam will continue to murder people in nightclubs, fly jets into skyscrapers, and drive car bombs into our interests everywhere.

They cannot tolerate the way we live.

Likewise, our Constitution cannot co-exist with the methods and designs of crackpot and extremely dangerous Islamists, who have done us the favor of telling - and showing - us precisely the world they want to create. It isn't a mystery: they want a worldwide caliphate. Images of gays being tossed off of buildings, or little girls shot in the head for attending school, aren't contrived. It's what they believe, and one of many ways they hope to accomplish their goal. If they say the Bamyan Buddhas will be destroyed, they will line up a battery of howitzers and destroy them. If they say women should never be outside alone, they will douse them with acid to make sure they aren't.

And they never take a target off the table. Ever.

It really is that simple, no matter what kabuki acts of hand-wringing and self-loathing the pundits perform on television, or how the abysmal assortment of milquetoast American politicians try to exploit the latest massacre for personal and political gain - or worse, to deprive law-abiding Americans of even more of their own freedoms in the name of "safety."

The only question now, and maybe forever, is how rigorously we intend to honor, uphold, and defend the Constitution against its enemies - and they can be nothing less - both foreign and domestic, who would see it destroyed.

And without destroying it ourselves in the process.