Have a very Willie Christmas!
The Unfallen Getting a grip on the war with Iraq: The 'wrest' of the story... The war with Iraq: Taking a better grip... War with Iraq: Why the Bush Doctrine will prevail--and fail... A Just and Libertarian war... Cain's world: Persephone's second coming... A Costco family Christmas Hang tough... The season's greetings Curing the incuriosity of the East... A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan Colloquy with a goat Back-handing the sinister American left... To Condi, with sweetness Islam and moral equivalence Reds Anastasia in the light and shadow Hail to the chump
Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie's collection of Christmas stories...
A new book by Greg Swann, can be downloaded for no charge here.
What we should want, if we had brains enough to want wisely,
is a world peopled by rationalists, egoists, individualists.
A slow but certain way to achieve that is to give the world
capitalism, which can be effected simply by dismantling the
barriers to it. The world--left unmolested--runs by itself.
The United States is going to use Iraq to demonstrate a
simple fact that other nations have sought to obscure since
the collapse of the Soviet Union: America is not just the
pre-eminent world power, we are, for now at least, an
invincible world power.
Our enemy is not Islam or China or the entrenchedly
enstenched French. Our enemy is Abel's
anti-Hellenism--irrationalism, anegoism, anti-individualism,
anti-capitalism. Whether they know it or not, these are the
things immigrants are escaping when they come to America,
and their contraries--reason, egoism, individualism and
capitalism--are the ideas United States must export.
Whatever one might say about President George W. Bush, about the Republicans, about the
state of the American body politic, it remains that this war
not only will be fought, but that it should be
fought. It must be fought, if the philosophical
principles that undergird human liberty are to endure upon
the Earth.
The War on Terror will be won, if it is, not by the second coming
of the Nazarene, but by the second coming of Persephone. When the
West dares to be what it is, Cain's world, and when it dares to
hold the rest of the world accountable for its expressions of
murderous passion, then there will be hope for the
transmission of the culture of cool deliberation that is the best
and highest achievement of Western Civilization.
Do you know about Costco? It's a warehouse-sized store that
sells huge quantities of stuff at wholesale prices. There
are other companies that exploit the same basic idea.
Another big one is Sam's Club, where the motto is, 'When
mere WalMart just isn't enough.'
It is when people waver that the principles that could buttress them grow stronger. It is when people stray that the principles that should guide them prove themselves straight and true.
"Merry Christmas!" said the Perky Little Clerk to the
Misanthrope as she handed him his purchase. "I'm not a
Christian," the Misanthrope growled.
A post-communist China may be focused outward. Islam (and
many another Eastern sect) is focused eternally inward. Only
Hellenism brings that which is without within, in her
sciences, and that which is within without, in her arts.
"There is no casual death, no easy death, no safely,
comfortably abstract death. There's only the real
death of real people, the death that results in endless,
boundless, horrifying grief even when no one is at
fault. How could anyone be casual about that?"
It's not just that antique Westerners were even worse than their Islamic counterparts, but, amazingly, the modern children of Athens can only aspire to be almost--but not quite--as morally worthy as ancient and contemporary Muslims.
What best fits the evidence? A left that lusts after power? A left that misunderstands the threat to freedom? A left that is perverse or distracted or over-committed? Or a left that labors persistently to undermine and destroy the West?
The West can change--the West thrives by changing--and the East never can. A President Condoleezza Rice, a conservative black woman president of the United States of America, would make that argument more eloquently than any book ever could.
The derision by the politically correct of Robertson and Falwell notwithstanding, it is nevertheless true that Islam is a warrior culture. It was born in war, and it remains committed to holy war down to the present day.
When the Scout leader regurgitates the Marxist horseshit he was force-fed without even knowing it was Marxist horseshit, without even realizing he was being force-fed, without ever once thinking about what his words might mean--that man is the most effective recruiting agent the Communists ever had.
The hard job is to stay free...
Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie's war on Billary Rodham Clintonanist
