The tax we pay, every day, for liberalism

Over at TownHall Linda Chavez tells about the wide-open holes in U.S. airport security through which GAO investigators managed to sneak bomb-making equipment onto planes. Her advice? Lots more security, and lots more willingness of American travelers to sacrifice and not want to bring so many things onto planes.

Chavez’s uncomplaining stoical prescription for life under constant terror threat epitomizes what I first wrote about in 2004 and have been repeating ever since: that this is our future so long as Muslims are living and moving freely among us. Paul Nachman in the first letter following Chavez’s column quotes a VFR entry from 2006 where I summed up the problem. It is a hopeless grey vision of a society subjected to ever increasing and more onerous security, all because of the presence of a certain group whose presence we never challenge. It is as though a man were expiring from smoking four packs of cigarettes a day but it was forbidden to mention or even to think that he ought to stop smoking. No one ever asks, why do we have to live this way? What would have to change for us not to have to live this way? The question literally never occurs to people, because asking it would bring them up against the ruling idea of our society: thou shalt not discriminate.

Our willingness to accept this unnecessary, deadening burden for the rest of our individual and collective time on this planet brings to mind a passage from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”:

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

* * *

UPDATE: In two comments posted at 2:14 p.m. and 2:19 p.m. following the Chavez article, a commenter named jackbenimbleISaMoron writes: “This was another brilliant column by one of the greatest conservative thinkers of our time. Linda Chavez is a national hero and I pray that one day she runs for president.” Praising her for her work against affirmative action, he adds, “You imbeciles out there who talk hatefully about her need to get a clue. You aren’t true conservatives if you don’t love Linda Chavez. That’s a fact.” [Italics added.]

Thanks, jack, for exemplifying my frequent observation that in the Bush era mainstream “conservatism” has declined to brainless cheerleading and quasi-fascist hero-worship.

Paul Nachman also replies to jack, pointing out how Chavez’s heavy-handed ethnocentricity on the immigration issue belies her supposed commitment to race-blindness.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 16, 2007 02:12 PM | Send