Here’s an email that cheered me:
As a gay man, it took no effort for me to detest the collectivist ideology of the theocratic thugs of the far Right. But it was quite a while before I began to see something that I had long been feeling: that the victimist egalitopians of the Left are just as much in the thug category. You only need to cross them to find out that Noam Chomsky and Pat Robertson are twins. I live in San Francisco. My mildest dissents from the party line have most often been met with a two-pronged response: “You are far too intelligent to consider such a thing” and “Is something going wrong in your emotional life?”. I am in fact far too intelligent not to notice the combined condescension and abdication of thought therein expressed. And my emotional life is indeed in difficulty: Muslim terrorists want to destroy the civilization that makes my very existence possible and they blew a hole in my home town.
I come from a strong Catholic background, was a lifelong Democrat and I am a 60’s boomer. So appeals to “Justice and Peace” seemed to me only the Natural Form of Righteousness. Now I see that what is lacking there, and in almost all the Left, is “Freedom”. I have watched with increasing dismay as most of the idiots and the savants of the Left have lined up against President Bush’s response to 9/11. Not that his strategy is unassailable and without risk (what, in this world, could be?). But the smug and self-satisfied contempt with which they respond, especially to him as a person, has pulled the mask off. (Apparently cultural sensitivity does not extend to Texans and the maligned standard of IQ suddenly is back in vogue). None of them show anything near such a feeling for the Islamist thugs who slaughtered 3000 of their countrymen and women in a single morning.
I am afraid that my generation learned too well to love their enemies without ever learning how to stop hating their fathers. So that now, hatred of the father takes the form of love of the enemy. And inside all that is a toxic self-hatred that appalls me.
Maybe out of this horror, some new kind of Western self-understanding will emerge.
The Dish 