Warring Against Ourselves

I note without surprise that we wage war not just on Islamic terrorists, but on little boys who play cops-and-robbers. Yes. Listen: (CNSNews.com, March 20):

"From California to New Jersey, public schools are banning the children's game of 'cops and robbers' and threatening students with expulsion.For example, at Lewis Elementary School in Fort Irwin, California, one father removed his nine-year-old son from class after the school principal threatened to expel the boy if he didn't stop playing cops and robbers on the playground."

Sheer idiocy. But there is more.

"[We have] suspended play when they're using imaginary weapons until the guidelines can be developed to help the staff differentiate between dangerous and imaginary play." This pearl of lucent sanity from Gary Thomas, the District Superintendent, who doesn't know the difference between "imaginary" and "imaginative."

This rigid, hostile, puritanical control of little boys is now national policy. Very, very bad, cops and robbers. It could be worse, though. Little boys might play Cowboys and Injuns. (They certainly couldn't call it that. Perhaps "Genderless Animal Care Technicians and Preternaturally Noble At-One-With-Nature Role Models" would do.)

One laughs, having no recourse, but it isn't funny. There is at work here something somber and ugly. It isn't just the schools. The country is eating itself, as if it had an autoimmune disease, as if undergoing cultural apoptosis. The political classes, using the minorities as bludgeons, and appeals to virtue as pretexts, seek to eliminate boyhood, the pursuit of excellence, the rewards of achievement, sexual identity, the family, religion, standards of honesty and civility, and personal responsibility. Half-educated teachers practicing playground Stalinism are just a part of it, one front in a larger war.

What do we think we are doing?

It isn't politics as usual. Nor is it liberalism. In my lifetime, liberals have wanted to end apartheid, allow women to become chemists if they chose, ensure equal opportunity, permit the Pill, guarantee decent treatment of farm labor, and tone down a sometimes puritanical morality. None of this is evil. European nations have embodied most of these ideas without ill effects. Practice has fallen short of theory, as happens in politics. Measures have perhaps been taken too far or not far enough. Civilized politics consists largely in fine-tuning the reasonable. Yet it hasn't been evil.

This is.

Current policy has become a twisted caricature of reasonable impulse. Affirmative action, an understandable if ill-advised idea, has led to the sclerotic hierarchies of a permanent caste system. Welfare has produced an eternal underclass. To ensure that things be decided without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or national origin, we insist that nothing be decided except according to race, creed, color..

To raise blacks, we lower academic standards for whites. Being against violence, we let Hollywood bathe children endlessly in moist brains-on-the-ceiling violence, treated with loving sadism. Then with an almost prurient squeamishness, we expel kids for playing "violent" boy games -- meanwhile encouraging girls to go into combat.

The nation has become a milkshake of confusion, hostility, and sexual antagonism, always disguised as something else. Note that while the schools punish little boys for playing soldier, adventure movies now routinely show women slugging men, kicking them in the crotch, or becoming naval commandoes. The opposition isn't to violence, but to masculinity.

We become a nation of unmen and half-women. A man who publicly worries because a child says "bang," and then calls the police, must have painful problems of sexual identity. A normal adult who sees a boy doing something he shouldn't, which does not include playing cops and robbers, says, "Bobby, stop it." A male who can't do this, who has to have police support and sends the child for psychiatric treatment, has something wrong with him. So does a society that permits it.

The Soviet Union placed dissidents in mental institutions and drugged them into conformity. We do it to our children. The difference is.?

In the campaign of cultural self-mutilation, stated motives are seldom real motives. The news media lavish attention on child-molesting by Catholic clergy, while simultaneously advocating acceptance of homosexuality in Scoutmasters. A contradiction? No. They aren't against homosexual clergy because they oppose pederasty, but because they dislike Catholicism. They do not want homosexual Scoutmasters because they favor pederasty, but because they don't like the Boy Scouts.

If memory serves, the Scouts when I was one long ago said that a Scout should be: Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Does that not have a sun-lit, Fifties-ish, Normanrockwellian sanity that is a total reproach to our ghetto zeitgeist? A retro wholesomeness that makes the political classes cringe?

The desire to treat homosexuals decently was perhaps a manifestation of liberalism. To force the children of people you don't like into intimate association with homosexuals is a manifestation of hostility. Or are homosexual Scoutmasters thought to have a restraint that we deny in Catholic clergy?

On and on it goes. Are we nuts? (Yes.)

All of this is of course done in the name of this or that moral imperative -- justice, equality, fairness, what have you. The country reels under the onslaught of malignant goodness. But -- do the metaclasses seek to put women in combat because they think women want to be in combat -- or because they detest the military, hate its conservatism and (once) unapologetic masculinity, and want to humiliate it?

The unspoken agenda -- to bring down the former United States as a cultural entity -- sluices through metagovernmental policy. Do they truly like blacks, or merely want to shove them down the throats of the hated white Europeans? To judge by policy rather than protestation, the political class holds blacks in contempt. Note that racial policy invariably assumes that blacks are helpless, shiftless, require hand-feeding, and cannot be expected to achieve. Our managers simply use them as a weapon for destroying the society.

All of this ties into the diffuse anger that eats away at the country. We are not a happy people. Racial animosity runs deep. Blacks don't like whites don't like Latinos. The hostility of women toward men corrodes society. The breakup of the family leaves children angry at they aren't sure what. It adds up. Over years one sees the public mood change. Road rage is rage expressed on the road, not caused by traffic. More and more I see people walking against street lights, deliberately forcing cars to stop. Manners deteriorate.

I think we're on the way out.