We Have No Claim To Pearl Harbor Day

As Victor Davis Hanson writes:

On Dec. 7, 1941 — 65 years ago this week — pilots from a Japanese carrier force bombed Pearl Harbor. They killed 2,403 Americans, most of them service personnel, while destroying much of the American fleet and air forces stationed in Hawaii.

The next morning, an outraged United States declared war, which ended less than four years later with the destruction of most of the Japanese empire and its military.

What struck me most about his column was that there was no grand celebration of the waking of a sleeping giant that was America on December 6, 1941. Instead, he writes mostly of the nearly 3,000 innocent civilians we lost in an attack on New York City almost sixty years later and the trials and tribulations America's global war on terror has become.

I heard a sound clip of Al Gore, a would be Democrat leader and former Vice President on the news yesterday. He, in his particular stupor-ed way, pronounced the Iraq War the greatest strategic mistake in America's history, totally ignoring the tragically flawed policy of a President from his party that turned Iran over to a mullahcracy, thus paving the way for many of our greatest challenges in the world today. He was simply another mediocre politician serving himself and his personal and professional interests yet once more at America's great expense. Regardless of his political persuasion, that such a smallish man could occupy the second highest elected office in this land for eight years is what aggravated me the most.

And then you take this mostly useless useful idiot blogger, Atttyood, and read his screeching prose and quote of how the Right is only pointing out the obvious flaws of today's AP as a means of distracting from events in Iraq.

We noted that this was just part of a broader tactic, to denigrate all reporting about a war gone terribly wrong by nitpicking the photojournalism of the fighting in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.

It is important to get to the truth here. But the point is that the bloggers and the U.S. Army, who reflexively denied the initial account, did so not because they were concerned with accuracy. They picked on it because they saw a chance to use a potentially false story -- though it seems clear now that it might be true after all -- as a way of throwing into question all the reporting from Iraq and, more specifically, undermining the characterization of the situation in the country as abysmal.

And I am left scratching my head while wondering what happened to that great country which once had no trouble identifying and destroying its great enemies when attacked?

America was frightened of nothing when she began, not because she was brave, but because she was afraid of everything, being a mere niche on a coastline in a once distant and still foreboding land.

Yet, through strength, through sheer resolve she ploughed her way across a continent, accomplishing all and everything along the way, stopping only long enough to build this or that great monument to the judgment, character, sense of wonder and over-coming that characterized the strong hearts, minds and backs of her ancestors, the very men and women through whose travails she was so whole-heartedly raised.

Certainly she had her rifts, not the least of which was her own Civil War. But somehow through it all she retained a sense of oneness, a country ultimately indivisible with liberty and justice for all. And while the differences she endures today might not appear to be as profound - they've yet to flow down through her in endless rivers of blood, it is difficult to deny that America's parts have never seemed more distant and distraught.

It's that lack of a feeling of a common Americanism that confounds me most as regards the tough spot we find ourselves in today. Tough, yet many of our self-professed most needy ride in cars not dreamed of by our ancestors and live in dwellings such that even small apartments would seem like castles in a New Jerusalem carved out of so much wilderness back in America's most early and most desperate days.

America was attacked in 1941 and she came together with a resiliency and pride that carried her, not only to victory, but up to the pinnacle of civilization over the next long and often difficult fifty or so years. But the attack in 2001 seems to have torn her asunder and left her bitter, almost desperate and unduly confused.

So, no, I'm sorry. As she stands today she has no right to claim the great legacy initiated by the terrible events of December 7, 1941.

I'm not a complete pessimist. I always hope and often believe America will still prevail. But Americans today appear more hell bent on attacking one another as the enemy, than they do uniting for any necessary common good or goal.

And in her angst the sense grows that what we are all doing is waiting ... until the next December 7th, or September 11th, so that a once proudly united nation can hopefully look inside, take stock of herself and face an ever threatening world as, simply, one, again.

If a House divided cannot stand, then certainly a nation divided can not succeed. And the free world needs, more than anything, a strong united America to succeed. America has been the beacon of hope and freedom for far too many other nations to let them down. And currently, no others appear even close to rising up to take her fabled place - and, yes, I know, perhaps least of all, Iraq.

But it would be an unspeakable tragedy were America to not be able to fulfill that role now for a bare democracy born of little else but America's dream. And perhaps by finding the strength and quiet to fulfill that one do-able mission America won't actually need another disastrous attack to learn that, indeed, she does still have a wonderous and ultimately always united national soul.

Comments

[gil]

Jake.

What Rihel does is nothing. I just bloged at some Montana Militia Pshyco blog by the name of 7.62 MM Justice and a guy that call himself "Sniper One" (The idiotic name tell you all you need to know about the fat fart that writes it).... The coward rather than argue his idiotic points (He can't), just deletes your entire post!!

And then he tell you; "This is my blog" !!!

Hey Snipper one, if you can read this..... You can keep your blog and shove it up where the sun don't shine..... I have never seen a blog that only keeps the postings of people that agree with the idiot writing the blog..... In comparison to Sniper One, Rihel is down right Democratic.

[Rick]

"This is almost as good as having your own little zoo. ; )"

Dan,

I see what you mean. The howler monkeys can even type.

Is your zoo running that experiment, with an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards? Because they have produced the Bonehead Manifesto here.

Cordially...

[gil]

It's been quiet.
Apparently the zoo closes for Sunday.

..... Or the Right Wingers are out in force Christmas Shopping for the latest Best Seller in the New York Times list; "Wars For Dummies" by William Baker.

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