Too Easy

     It’s become too easy to write these pieces, day after day.

     You might find that to be an unusual complaint. Not having polled others who write sociopolitical opinion for the Web, I wouldn’t know. However, it’s at the core of my dissatisfactions. It robs what I’ve been doing these past twenty years of its point.

     The conflicts are too many and too stark. The cleavages are too absolute. The behavior of the openly involved parties is too cartoonish. The talents of a Jonathan Swift would be wasted on them. Hell, they don’t challenge my far more modest talents terribly much.

     The country needs a break. Yes, I need one too, though knowing my own proclivities I doubt I’ll take one. The need of the United States of America is far greater.

     But it doesn’t look as if we’re about to get one.

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     Have you seen the latest revelations from Project Veritas?

     I do hope you watched that with attention, all the way to the end. I have no idea how many Leftist vermin are engaged in the plans revealed above. One would be too many, and it appears that considerably more than one want to participate. Perhaps having been exposed by Project Veritas will put a damper on their assaultive, destructive plans. That would be for the best, but the underlying mindset is what matters most.

     More than four years ago, I wrote that America is in a state of civil war. It was an “undeclared” war back then; conditions are different today. The PV videos show us a group plotting to prevent a political transition by shutting down a city and physically assaulting those who differ with it. If that doesn’t constitute an admission of outright warfare, I can’t imagine what would qualify.

     War journalism is the easiest sort to write. (Not to collect, mind you.) The battles occur right before your eyes; all you need to do is recount the events. Unless there is a great moral reawakening among those who wish us harm, that’s the sort we of the Internet Commentariat will be writing for some time.

     It’s not a cheery prospect.

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     I don’t travel much, these days. I got my fill of it long ago. The last time I got on an airplane was seventeen years ago. I don’t expect to board one in the foreseeable future. As a conduit for the events and sentiments of distant places, the Internet suffices for now.

     These past few years that conduit has reported mostly anger and fear. The fears are politically, economically, and socially determined; the anger is general. Such are the wages of the war in progress: a war that until recently was being fought by one side while the other strove to ignore its existence.

     It’s a difficult war to name. At first blush it seems to have the character of George Alec Effingers’s short story “All The Last Wars At Once.” I tend to see it in a different light:

     Mark's waking life was now divided between periods by the Sleeper's bedside and periods in the room with the spotted ceiling. The training in objectivity which took place in the latter cannot be described; the details would be unprintable and had, indeed, a "kind of nursery fatuity about them which is best ignored. There indeed lay the horror-to perform petty obscenities which a silly child might have thought funny under the unchangingly serious inspection of Frost, with a stop watch and a note-book and all the ritual of experiment. And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it became a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant. [C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength]

     I don’t think any exertion of mine could make it clearer.

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     I don’t want to be at war. Most people I know would say the same. Even professional soldiers don’t look forward to war, despite the boredom of the peacetime barracks. Most fight because they must, because it’s been forced upon them; very few fight because they enjoy it.

     But here we are. Covert war is being displaced by open war, war that kills and destroys. The Constitutional procedures and social traditions of two centuries and more are being shoved aside. It was not we of the Straight and Normal side who sought to do so.

     The Left wants war. It wants it because it knows that we don’t want it – and because no other course could possibly restore its ascendancy.

     If you came here looking for jubilance or reassurance, my apologies. In light of the most recent events and reports, my triumphal mood of a few days ago has darkened. We’re going to be forced to fight.

     Have a nice day. Hope to see you on the other side.