Whittle Is Back and Posted On "Rafts"

[Annie]

He may be the best general essayist I've read on the war. There are links, most of which have been posted here before. It's long, the first installment, and I'm only postin the intro:

June 18, 2006
RAFTS

This is the introduction to a new book entitled AN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION. Regular readers -- and thank you for your support and patience these past long months -- may notice that there is in this chapter some recycled material, although none from the SILENT AMERICA essays. In this one case, I could not think of a better way to express an idea I had played with back in 2004.

There is a British tradition at Christmas time, a tradition I would love to see transplanted to these American shores. It’s an old form of interactive theater called the Pantomime.

I almost wrote ‘interactive children’s theater,’ but that would be to sell it short. Children’s theater today is completely Barneyfied – all syrup and rainbows. Pantomimes were derived from the classics, with pirates and other scary villains, and swordfights and the like. It was the kind of thing a young boy could sit through for two hours without thoughts of escape or serial homicide. It was the first live theater we children had ever seen, a magical experience turbocharged by the immediate proximity of the most magical night of them all.

There are two traditions that I remember clearly. First, the young male leads – Peter Pan, say – were invariably played by hot young women in tights, leaving eight year old boys watching swordfights, rooting for Peter or Puss in Boots, while in the deep back of the mind some faint but growing voice was whispering under all that cheering, saying but look at those legs! That was confusing.

What wasn’t confusing was the audience participation. Children and parents were encouraged to hiss loudly when Captain Hook entered the stage, to shout warnings of ambush and hiding places. It was a loud, screaming, cheering, full-on blast.

Now the other thing I remember is that moment in Peter Pan where Tinkerbell lies dying…dying from a lack of belief. It is at this point that Peter Pan would walk to the front of the stage, and implore us in the most desperate terms to clap as loudly as we could to show how much we believed in her, believed in magic, believed in redemption, believed in the power of our own belief. We would clap till our hands were raw, clap and stomp our feet until the foundations shook, parents and children alike, while Peter would shake his head sadly and tell us it wasn’t belief enough. Then we would clap like furies, scream like Viking berserkers, mom and dad beside us, hollering and shouting and stomping their feet, a wall of sound, a rhythmic, pulsating tsunami of emotion…and then, just then, the slightest stirring of a delicate hand…

Humans are animals. I do not mean that in a negative way. But that is what we are: creatures capable of great good and great harm, susceptible to animal fears and passions, lower than angels but not without grace. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – a man who has seen a fair amount of both good and evil – wrote of that fault line, “that line separating good and evil, passing not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but right through every human heart. “

As animals, we are wired to live in a state of nature. In the long marathon of our history, our civilizations are only the last two or three halting steps. It took millions of years to design and build the human animal. It will likely take that long again to design out all of the passions and furies that brought us here.

Until then, we live with a choice: to live in a state of nature, or a state of law. The state of nature is the default condition that the huge majority of human lives has lived under, and continue to live under to this very day – lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short in Hobbes’ memorable phrase. Or, we can chose to impose upon our internal fault line a series of laws and customs, a Civilization, that imperfectly attempts to keep as many of us as possible on the side of the angels.

That Civilization is not a natural state. It is highly artificial and daily runs into our proclivities for murder, greed, pride and mayhem. And because of that artifice, it is a structure that not only must be built, but one which must be maintained, only once, and that is constantly. Victor Davis Hanson -- whom I deeply admire -- described this as rust build-up on an iron structure, rust that must be regularly removed if the structure is to remain standing. That seems exactly right to me. And so here is my poor attempt at providing us with something no more or less important than a small wire brush.

The maintenance of that Civilization requires many prerequisite tools, and in the following pages I hope we can examine some of them. But the elbow grease, the one indispensable element, is that belief: belief that this work is worth doing. It is the belief that we can drain the open sewers of our most base impulses, and in their place build lives of decency and civility. It is, in the long run, the belief that we can make Tinkerbell fly.

Now there are people who do not much admire this iron bridge we have built, this bridge from the terror and anarchy of the jungle to the distant shores of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There was a time when these forces were strong enough to tear down that bridge. That time may again come. But for now, they lack the power to pull down this Civilization. But they do have the power to get us to forgo the wire brush.

In the pages that follow, I will do my flat-out level best to try not to generalize, to confine my anger specifically to those who daily unscrew the bolts and drill out the rivets of this magnificent Civilization. We are past the point of name-calling now. The hour is late. This is too important for arguments between Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals, or Hawks and Doves. There are villains and heroes aplenty on all sides, and we are going to need every hand that we can get...

 

[CockySOB]

Bill Whittle is an excellent essayist, I'll agree.

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000132.html

Here's the link for those interested. Lots of good stuff on his site for those who want to root around.

 

[Annie]

Bill Whittle is an excellent essayist, I'll agree.

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000132.html

Here's the link for those interested. Lots of good stuff on his site for those who want to root around.

Thanks, can't believe I left that off! :shocked:

 

[CockySOB]

Another worthy essayist is Kim du Troit. I loved his essay on "The Pussification of the Western Male."

 

[Annie]

Another worthy essayist is Kim du Troit. I loved his essay on "The Pussification of the Western Male."

Yep, not too mention his gun collection! :shocked:

 

[Annie]

Chapter 1 of his new 'book' is out:

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000135.html

CHAPTER ONE
THE WEB OF TRUST

There was a time – and being born in 1959, I am old enough to remember it – when the idea of Civilization needed no explanation or defense. Everybody knew what it meant. Civilization was tied to another term, now likewise mocked, and that term is Progress.

Progress was the idea that society was moving forward, upward, toward higher goals – better medicine, faster transportation, the brutality of hard labor replaced by stronger, then smarter machines; abundant energy, increased wealth and leisure: all of these things were greatly desired, and society was proud to provide them, proud to show them off in World Fairs and Expos and in the mythology of the movies.

Now “progress” and “civilization” are ironic terms, in sneer quotes, muttered with that pathetic, bored tone of cynical nihilism started by the narcissistic brats that I have been ten years behind for my entire life. Today, I try to exercise and watch my weight only so that I may live long enough to see the last of these radical hippies die in their sleep.

The entire concept of Civilization has been so deconstructed, and vilified, that by having the audacity to defend the ideals of Civilized behavior Your Author has been called a racist (nope – I happen to have African Ancestors!), a repressed homosexual (please – I have two pairs of shoes!) and even a potential cannibal! (What happens in Papua New Guinea, stays in Papua New Guinea.)...