Why Do Our Rulers Hate America?

If you're in a fight with a really nasty guy who's attacked you without provocation, and your antagonist lands a solid punch, what is your reaction (assuming that you're hurt without being incapacitated)?

Do you:
a) Let out a loud groan as the blow connects, falling to your knees while complaining piteously about the unfairness of it all;
or
b) Shake it off and try to put the scumbag down?

If the answer is “a,” you're either a professional wrestler trying to “sell” a phony punch or (what's much the same thing) William Shatner at his Virginia-cured, uninhibited best in a vintage Star Trek fight scene.




Or, to extend the principle just a bit, you're one of the people responsible for orchestrating yesterday's repulsive festival of collective self-pity.

If you're in a genuine fight for your life, the last thing you want to do is display vulnerability and weakness – which is exactly what our nation was told to do in memory of 9-11.

The official narrative of yesterday's 9/11+5 events runs like this:
We are a good and compassionate nation attacked without warning, provocation, or cause five years ago by people who irrationally hate us for our decency. That Enemy still seeks to destroy us and is stealthily acquiring the means to do so – and only by taking shelter in the heroic shadow of our Dear Leader, and making his will our law, can we be safe.

The whole two-day event was an American transliteration of similar rituals enacted in totalitarian states from Nazi Germany to Stalin's USSR to contemporary North Korea. It was vulgar and nauseating. And this exercise in choreographed collective lachrymosity illustrated – to me, at least – that we really don't confront an existential threat from a formidable foreign Enemy.

Assuming that we've been told any part of the truth about what happened five years ago today, and what is still going on today, there are legions of Evil-Doers lurking out at the tenebrous fringes of the Empire whose every waking moment is consumed with the desire to kill all of us they can in order to terrorize the rest.

Inflicting pain and terror on Americans, we are told, is the enemy's very meat and drink – the main course at every repast, and the desert after every meal.
Why, then, are our masters so determined to provide that enemy the satisfaction of seeing America indulge in protracted, ritualized grief, as opposed telling the public to put its game face on?

Some might see this as an illustration of the terminal Oprah-ification of America, which isn't a bad point, as far as it goes.

Others of more militaristic cast of mind would see in this saccharine spectacle proof positive of the liberal media's determination to weaken our resolve. That charge that would make sense were it not for the very visible efforts of the White House to orchestrate and exploit the observances.

This is not to say that the emotions so prominently displayed during the past two days are inauthentic, or unworthy. Thousands of families were deprived of loved ones, whole communities were torn apart, and our nation suffered a huge and lasting trauma on that terrible Tuesday morning.

But if our nation really were engaged in a death struggle with a devious and ruthless foreign adversary capable of destroying our way of life, today's grief-wallow would make no sense at all.

I do not mean denigrate those who lost loved ones on 9-11. I must confess, however, to be puzzled as to why the losses suffered on Black Tuesday are considered so much more painful than those – in terms of dead and wounded, as well as the mounting economic toll – inflicted on our nation by the Bush regime's demented war in Iraq.

More Americans have been killed and maimed as a result of the Iraq war than died on 9-11.

We're told that al-Qaeda is prepared to strike us again at the next opportunity, which may or may not be true. (Since this warning comes from the regime, I'm inclined toward skepticism.)

But we are told unambiguously that our Enemy in Washington fully intends to continue sending Americans abroad to kill and die in pointless wars, while continuing its campaign to build an American Reich.

Toward that end, the regime needs to propagate as much fear and pathos as possible, and is collaborating with our foreign “Enemy” to generate it. This is why rather than telling the public, “Butch it up!” our Rulers yesterday made it a pseudo-patriotic duty to revel in grief and helplessness.

Our Rulers need us to be scared. And they're the real Enemy. Nothing al-Qaeda or like-minded Jihadists could inflict on us – not “another 9-11,” not even a mass terrorist attack an order of magnitude greater than that event -- could possibly rival the damage to our institutions of ordered liberty being done by the power-crazed people infesting our executive branch.

“We already absorb a great deal of tragedy and unpleasantness and still manage to survive,” observes John Mueller of the Cato Institute in a detailed and thought-provoking assessment of the purported terrorist threat. “We live with a considerable quantity of crime, and the United States regularly loses 40,000 lives each year in automobile accidents. Moreover, countries have endured massive, sudden catastrophes without collapsing. In 1990 and then again in 2003, Iran suffered earthquakes that nearly instantly killed some 35,000 in each case. The tsunami that hit Indonesia and elsewhere in 2004 killed several times that many. But the countries have clearly survived these disasters: they constitute major tragedies, of course, but they hardly proved to be `existential' ones.”

“Thus the country can readily absorb considerable damage if necessary, and it has outlasted far more potent threats in the past,” Mueller concludes. “To suggest otherwise is to express contempt for America's capacity to deal with adversity.”

The contempt of which Mueller writes was prominently on display over the past two days.