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Another Country
 A
stay in the hospital, with the heightened awareness that your days
are numbered, makes you feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle: you come back to the
ordinary world with a different perspective.  Things that used to
seem urgent to me now seem trivial, especially political quarrels.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
In Washington the two parties
have been fighting bitterly over the confirmation of President Bush’s
judicial nominees. The Republicans may resort to “the nuclear
option” to prevent Democratic filibustering and other obstructive
tactics. The Democrats call Bush’s nominees “radical.”
I hardly know which side is more
risible. Both parties blow their noses on the U.S. Constitution, so it hardly
makes any difference which controls the judiciary. The Democrats are
somewhat worse, which doesn’t mean the Republicans are good. To
call the Republicans “radical” is to pay them a compliment they
have done nothing to deserve.
The Democrats, whether they
admit it or not, want judges who will declare homosexuality and same-sex
marriage constitutional rights. But the Republicans favor unconstitutional
Federal entitlements, expanded executive powers (Homeland Security, the
USA PATRIOT Act, et cetera), and of course undeclared war. George W. Bush
makes Bill Clinton look like Thomas Jefferson.
“The real American is all
right,” said G.K. Chesterton. “It is the ideal American who is all
wrong.” Today the “ideal” American wants to impose his
false ideal of democracy on the rest of the world. But to most of the world
American democracy, supported by American weaponry, appears an alarming
thing.
What happened to the country we
used to love and the world used to admire? For many years it was a country
of implicit understandings about freedom and the good life. The government
seemed to accept its limits and respect our desire to be left alone.
![[Breaker quote for Another Country: America, then and now]](2005breakers/050426.gif) But
as new forms of tyranny exploded abroad, our own politicians
got ideas too. The concentration of power, economic dirigisme, high taxes, a
mania for equality, and world empire became accepted as enlightened
principles. Gradually, America became a profoundly different country. We
hardly noticed it happening.
Today we take topless spending
and bottomless debt for granted. American military forces are now
stationed in more than a hundred countries around the world. At home,
meanwhile, smoking and obesity are “problems” for the
government to solve.
The older America venerated its
inventors, creative men like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford who enriched us
all. We were grateful to medical men like Jonas Salk, who found cures for
dreaded diseases. Today we honor politicians, especially those who, like
Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, got us into the bloodiest wars and enlarged
the power and scope of government.
That older America also loved
gentle humor and melodic music. It hardly needs saying that our tastes have
coarsened remarkably in these areas, along with our public morality. Much of
the blame for this, I’m afraid, lies with the American Catholic Church,
which, since the Second Vatican Council in the Sixties, has ceased to exert
the gravitational force it did when I was a child, even as government has
joined the mammoth entertainment industry in marginalizing all religion.
I spent only a few days in the
hospital, but it might almost have been half a century. Maybe it was that
I’d been largely insulated from the media; but when I left, I was, for
whatever reason, acutely conscious of how startlingly the country had
changed during my lifetime. The monstrous growth of the government had
been accompanied by a paganization we couldn’t have imagined fifty
years ago.
Would my father’s
generation have fought for this country in World War II if they could have
foreseen the America of 2005? Despite the current celebration of
“the good war,” I seriously doubt it. They thought they were
fighting for a way of life that has now vanished, destroyed by politics and
cultural decay. Maybe it was already doomed, and the war only hastened its
destruction.
Tens of millions died in “the
good war,” probably including a Gershwin or an Edison, to say nothing
of the misery of countless ordinary people. There is nothing about it to
celebrate, unless you’re a politician who profits by the new order that
arose in its ruins and survives today. Politicians love to commemorate wars,
the men who died in them, and above all the politicians who started them.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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