What an irony! At the very moment that former President
Mubarak is let out of jail and sent to hospital, Victor Davis Hanson publishes
“America the trivial” in National Review Online this day, August 22, 2013. The
article also comes under the subtitle: “The Kardashians and Anthony Weiner are
deemed more worth of attention than what affects the security and prosperity of
our nation.” The irony is that if triviality is a problem in the eyes of
Hanson, he ought to look at his contribution to it. One such contribution being
that he made it a habit to call Mubarak a kleptomaniac when the man was freed
precisely because he proved to be innocent of that charge.
And I bet that Hanson does not even know how it is that he
picked up that bad habit, and why it is that it represents the core of the
problem he complains about. Well, let me say this: It all started when the
rabbis set out to “educate” the Americans as to what the Jews want them to grow
up and become. To help initiate himself, he may look at the writings of Tom
Friedman who never drops the habit of perpetuating the false notion that half
the Egyptian women are illiterate. Hanson may even go further than that and
notice that anyone writing about Egypt these days will dutifully mention that a
certain percentage of the population lives in poverty as if this were a
phenomenon unique to that country.
In a similar fashion, the rabbis and the individuals who
followed them at the educational lectern used to cry out shorthand type
locutions such as words, terms and expressions in the order of: “Soviet built
Migs” and “guns from Red China,” considered to be verbal icons that supposedly
represented a whole load of meanings. These were meanings that the orator no
longer had to spell out in detail because those in the audience were expected
to know about them and substitute them in their own heads for the locution.
Such approach for addressing the public was not something
that the rabbis invented on the spot. It was something for which they staged
countless dry runs; something they continually rehearsed everywhere they went
on the planet – and did so for hundreds if not thousands of years. It has
always been their way to acquire the power in those places where they had none or
had little of it. The approach is a trick called acquiring leverage, which
means you change the culture in which you find yourself. And there lies the
problem for America ;
that which Hanson is complaining about not knowing what it is he is complaining
about. What follows may help him see that.
Give leverage or the illusion of it to a culture that has
become responsive to communication that does not rise above the triviality of
bumper sticker slogans, and you will have created a lump of flesh that is infested
with flesh eating disease. This is what the American culture has become; it is
how it responds to internal and external events, and why the nations of the
world increasingly choose to distance themselves from it … not something that
the current president or any of his predecessors have done or failed to do as
suggested by Hanson.
What differentiates human beings from the rest of the animal
kingdom is that we can communicate in complex ideas which are also called
abstract concepts. Whereas you can have a long conversation with a human being
as to the validity of the saying: “If speech is made of silver, silence is made
of gold,” you can only shout “quiet” at a barking dog, having trained it or
conditioned it to stop barking when it hears you utter that word.
And a culture in which the children grow up with attention
spans that become shorter with every generation, the human ability they are
born with to think in concepts, is gradually replaced with poorer substitutes.
Thus, each successive offspring will tend to replace the tradition of mulling
over and responding to reasoned ideas, with the habit of responding to commands
that do not exceed in length the slogan of a bumper sticker. From the human
beings that were given to the tradition of intellectual exchange, they are now
only capable of signaling to each other their most basic instincts.
And when Hanson utters Mubarak the kleptomaniac, he tells
the audience to open the floodgate of hatred not only for Mubarak but for all
of Egypt ,
all Egyptians, all Arabs and all Muslims. He thus acquires leverage, and uses
that to acquire still more leverage believing that the losers in this zero-sum
game are the Arabs and the Muslims but in fact, are none other than the
American people, especially the young among them who will grow up with a short
attention span of the bumper sticker variety.
When, in addition to their handicap, you instruct people of
such low caliber that they must have tools to use as leverage, you set them for
a letdown if not a series of defeats and the ultimate self-annihilation. This
will happen because to have leverage is to have a tool that can be used to
pressure someone, forcing them to do what you want them to do. But leverage in
the hand of someone that can only operate at the superficial level of the
slogan, becomes a double-edged instrument because that someone will lack the
means to assess the abilities of his opponents, and will confront them at a
time when they have the upper hand. The accumulation of bad moves in this vein
will weigh heavily on him. Taken to an extreme, the habit will crush him under
its weight.
This is what is happening to America now; it has nothing to do
with the performance of successive American presidents, and everything to do
with the teachings of the early rabbis and the people who followed in their
footsteps, including people like Victor Hanson who don't even know why they are
the way they are.
While it may be argued that the short attention span
exhibited by children at an early age tends to disappear as they grow older, it
cannot be shown that the tendency is universal. More importantly, it can be
shown that it does leave a residue even among the people who seem to develop a
normal attention span at an older age. To wit, Victor Hanson, Tom Friedman and
all those who throw verbal icons that supposedly represent great ideas but are
nothing more than loads of rubbish.
Hanson can do himself and the American people a big favor by
dropping what is trivial, and sticking with what is real in American affairs
and world affairs.