Essays in Idleness

It sounds like a convenience franchise, now; somewhere you might go to buy cigarettes. The events of “Nine Eleven” have faded into cliché, and are used for cliché in our political environments. This is perhaps a bit better than an annual bathing in dubious sentimentality. But nothing approaching to an historical “lesson” has been learnt or is being assimilated. The history since has consistently painted modernity as a moral vacuum, and the West (once Christendom) as an empty casque.

This is disappointing, for a brief moment at the time I thought we had suddenly awakened. As late as November of 2001, there was a common attitude of defensive loyalty, before our leftish lunge resumed. By Christmas, however, it was obvious that the filth had resurfaced, and that if we carried the battle into Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be lost to Islamic fanatics. The only reason not to fight those wars was because they would be lost. And they were, one again, lost, as badly as we lost Vietnam to Communists.

When we were tested, we wilted. The contemporary “Western man” abandons his frontiers.