Why this blog's name is more apropos than ever

I'll cut to the chase: It's because Westerners are generally so affixed on their own damn navels that they don't understand how advanced the threat to their civilization is.

Take the stripes-on-the-social-media-profile-picture phenomenon. It's about a toxic mix of self-congratulation and helplessness. The striper's automatic response to an event like the Paris attacks is along the lines of, "I feel like there's nothing I can do! I just want to respond in some meaningful way!" And what is the first idea that comes to mind? To convince yourself and attempt to convince all your "friends" / "followers" that you care.

Yes, indeed. Above all, we must care. That is the measure of a human being's worth, after all (in the post-American worldview).

Hashtags and candlelight vigils are manifestations of the same phenomenon. Way down inside, some of the better-informed post-American cattle-masses who have made some attempt to cultivate mature thought processes know it's nothing but a distraction, but who doesn't want to be distracted when the reality in your face is all icky and terrible?

After the murderous jihad attacks in Paris comes the predictable Western response: not resolute self-defense, but weepy candlelight vigils, protestations of unity, and hashtags. After the jihad attacks in Garland, Texas, Chattanooga, the University of California Merced, and scores of arrests of American Muslims working for ISIS (the FBI has 900 ISIS-related investigations currently ongoing), our top priority should be to crush the enemy.

Instead, we get pathos and pitiful memes. NBC reported: “Paris residents were using the hashtag #PorteOuverte — French for ‘open door’—on Twitter to offer safe haven to strangers stranded after a string of deadly attacks Friday night.” Everyone is congratulating himself over this hashtag. “Twitter users in other countries,” NBC added, “also began using the hashtag to share their delight that social media was being used for a good cause”—colossal stupidity.

This passivity extends right down to the grammatical level:

As a writer, I hate passive voice and I hate euphemisms. Any sentence that hides the actoreither by removing him entirely from the sentence or by throwing him in at the end as an after thought, and that uses euphemism to turn a heinous act into an anodyne one is a cop-out and a white wash. Examples of these cop outs and white washes include variations of all of these statements:  “French people were killed” or “French people die in attack,”or “Paris hit by terrorist attack,” or simply “Poor France,” or “What a terrible tragedy,” or “Our thoughts are with France.”  Each is a cowardly effort to avoid saying that “Islamic jihadists slaughtered more than 129 people in cold blood and wounded more than double that number.” 

The sum total of the sequence of events over the past two weeks - the campus insanity at Yale, then the U of Missouri, and then elsewhere, the Paris attacks, the Freedom-Hater debate at which none of the candidates would dare use the term "radical Islam," the stripes, hashtags and candlelight vigils - tells the story of a civilization that had been given a birthright of having almighty God's full nature revealed to it through the Holy Bible, of having a succession of great minds that distilled ideas about how humans should organize themselves into society into a grand and unprecedented experiment in putting liberty first among a nation's values, and of articulating the human condition in works of art that have not only survived centuries but attained prominence among the artistic expressions of our species - and then squandering that birthright in a few short decades.

And the squandering process gains momentum by the day.

As does the determination of that civilization's enemies to destroy it and remove all memory of its glory from human consciousness.

It is so very late in the day.