I'd Been Pondering That Myself

NRO, Jay Nordlinger, and the incomparable Mark Steyn.

The Editors of NRO: "Yalta Regrets."
"Russia is awash with nostalgia for the bad old days of Soviet Communism...Bush’s speech was an implicit but powerful criticism both of Russia’s flirtation with authoritarianism and of its swooning sentimentality about Soviet brutality."

Jay Nordlinger:
"Speaking of genocide: Are you sick of Sudan, or have you not learned enough about it? I have a piece in the current issue, examining the Darfur genocide, and the one that took place previously in Sudan’s south. (Darfur is in the west — same country, different genocide. Lovely record, Khartoum’s.)" [And in case you were wondering - yes, Sudan sits on the UN's Human rights committee. - Tyler]

A word about the 92nd St. Y (which is, or was, a YMHA, incidentally, not a YMCA — a Young Men’s Hebrew Association, not a Young Men’s Christian Association): You look up in the auditorium, where concerts are held, and you see names. Ready for them? Beethoven, Lincoln, Washington, David, Moses, Isaiah, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Bach . . . Is it not hard to feel what has been lost, when you see what our culture was, what our civilization was, what people appreciated, what they looked up to (literally)? Is such a feeling pure, conservative, shameful nostalgia?
And what if names were placed in some pantheon today? We’d have . . . Alice Walker, Michael Moore, Barry Commoner . . .

And check out his bumper sticker rant at the end.

Finally, the incomparable Mark Steyn. Unfotunately, it's a tease for his next printed column, but it's worth reading. He brings up a question I've been having - where has the popular culture reaction to the war on terror been?

A week and a half after the VE Day anniversary, here's a date that will get a lot less attention: May 19, 2005. On that day, the war on terror will have outlasted America's participation in the Second World War. In other words, the period since 9/11 will be longer than the period of time between Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945.

Does it seem that long? For the most part, no. The War on Terror has involved no major mobilization of the population at large. In contrast to Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, "I'll Be Seeing You," "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)," "The Last Time I Saw Paris," "Victory Polka," "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," and "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin," American popular culture has preferred to sit this one out, aside from Michael Moore's crockumentaries and incoherent soundbites from every Hollywood airhead who gets invited to European film festivals. And the response of U.S. government agencies hasn't been much better: In his testimony to the 9/11 commission, George Tenet said blithely that it would take another half-decade to rebuild the CIA's joke of a clandestine service. In other words, three years after 9/11, he was saying he needed another five years. Imagine if FDR had turned to Tenet to start up the OSS. In 1942, he'd have told the president not to worry, we'll have it up and running by 1950.

So, while this war may have started with the first direct assault on American territory since Pearl Harbor, it's clearly evolved into a different kind of conflict, one in which after three and a half years it's hard for many Americans to maintain the sense that it's a "war" at all. By now, National Review's British, Commonwealth, and European readers will be huffing that the Second World War wasn't three-and-a-half years long, you idiots; it was six years, except for certain latecomers who turned up halfway through. Fair point. But if the Americans were late getting into World War II they were also late getting into the war on terror: Al Qaeda's bombers, Saudi moneymen, and Wahhabi clerics had been trying to catch Washington's eye for years only to be dismissed, as then-defense secretary Bill Cohen said of the attack on the USS Cole, as "not sufficiently provocative." You'll have to do better than that, Osama!

And then he did.

Think about it. The shock waves of that day rippled through our society and affected our daily lives. The attack forced us to radically reconsider our security - but few of us did. Aside from a lame miniseries, some half-hearted spy series, "special episodes" of a couple of TV series, and a few songs ("The Rising," "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning," and "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue" are the only examples that come to mind), where are the reflections of that? And why? Is September 11th destined to become a quiet, dim memory like the flu pandemic of 1918?