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Wednesday, June 29, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The big
identity party
The continued balkaniza-
tion of the United States into
identity groups, travelling
companies of grievance the-
atre, and the culture of self-
loathing we are now widely
and actively nurturing isn’t
doing us any favors.
One cannot, it seems,
insist on being idealized and
set apart as special for vari-
ous reasons while at the same
time decrying a lack of unity
in the plurality. That’s cogni-
tive dissonance. It seems to
be the pervading influence
of our time, and it is prob-
ably destructive to our larger
cohesiveness as Americans.
You remember, E Pluribus
Unum? Are you feeling that
much, these days?
It’s hard when everybody
is focused on being a unique
and special snowflake.
All of this rampant “snow-
flaking” probably portends
bad things. Too many snow-
flakes makes a blizzard, and
blizzards are hard to navigate,
let alone survive. Empires
such as ours generally run
their course after about 250
years. Give or take a few
years, or lingering claims of
imperial hegemony, a rough
average of 250 years is true
enough from the Assyrians
to the Macedonians to the
Romanovs and the British.
Most of them fall apart
from the inside out, having
lost faith in whatever united
them to begin with, or a
vision forward. Why should
we be any different?
We are among the very
few nations on earth initially
founded on the basis of an
idea. That idea is, of course,
enshrined in the Constitution,
that vision of what we would
like to be. Which isn’t to say
that we haven’t had problems,
or that we still don’t. We have
and we do. But the Constitu-
tion has allowed us that rare
phenomenon among gov-
ernments—of any kind—to
be self-correcting, and to an
astonishing degree has been
succesful.
But the snowflake revo-
lution seems to be imped-
ing much of that. Congress
itself appears to be trapped in
amber. Last week in Louisi-
ana, a lawmaker attacked the
notion of school kids reciting
the Declaration of Indepen-
dence because, in her consid-
ered opinion, it was racist.
Which brings me to
Orlando. There is no shortage
of puffery surrounding this
latest tragedy, whose motive
has transmogrified from guns
to terrorism to sexual orienta-
tion to mental health and back
again. The Attorney General
of the United States, Loretta
Lynch, offered up a supreme
example of otherwordly
banality to the American pub-
lic when she declared that
the murderer’s motive “May
never be known.”
Huh? That is either delib-
erate ignorance operating at
an Olympic level, or it’s an
attempt to obfuscate the fun-
damental issue, and for rea-
sons we can only guess.
There is a reluctance to
call Islamic terrorists what
they are, but strangely,
Islamic terrorists have the
compelling habit of telling us
exactly who they are, exactly
what they are doing, and why
they are doing it. The Orlando
shooter was at pains to make
his oaths and declarations
while actively engaged in
murder. So perhaps we can cut
to the real heart of the issue,
which isn’t guns or sexual
orientation, or mental health.
It’s our Constitution. In
military terms, it is our cen-
ter of gravity, which is why
it is being attacked. The
United States Constitution is
the principle aggravation —
without question — of mili-
tant Islamists. It isn’t Middle-
eastern policy or the treat-
ment of Muslims — those are
sideshow issues meant to dis-
tract us and to validate hatred
and murder. We know that to
be true because the terrorists
can’t stop telling us so. Sharia
law — “the straight path,”
rejects virtually every value
of free peoples, and provides
severe punishments for lib-
eral minds.
It’s our Constitution.
Because it guarantees us free-
doms. Because it places the
rule of secular law above the
Koran and above the Hadiths.
We are a nation — and a cul-
ture — of secular law, and
so long as the Western world
continues to govern itself by
secular law, while guarantee-
ing religious freedoms (an
inexcusable affront), we will
exist in the dar al harb, the
house of war, and that means
that extremist strains of Islam
will continue to murder
people in nightclubs, fly jets
into skyscrapers, and drive
car bombs into our interests
everywhere.
They cannot tolerate the
way we live.
Likewise, our Constitu-
tion cannot co-exist with
the methods and designs of
crackpot and extremely dan-
gerous Islamists, who have
done us the favor of telling —
and showing — us precisely
the world they want to cre-
ate. It isn’t a mystery: they
want a worldwide caliphate.
Images of gays being tossed
off of buildings, or little girls
shot in the head for attending
school, aren’t contrived. It’s
what they believe, and one
of many ways they hope to
accomplish their goal. If they
say the Bamyan Buddhas
will be destroyed, they will
line up a battery of howitzers
and destroy them. If they say
women should never be out-
side alone, they will douse
them with acid to make sure
they aren’t.
And they never take a tar-
get off the table. Ever.
It really is that simple, no
matter what kabuki acts of
hand-wringing and self-loath-
ing the pundits perform on
television, or how the abys-
mal assortment of milque-
toast American politicians try
to exploit the latest massacre
for personal and political gain
— or worse, to deprive law-
abiding Americans of even
more of their own freedoms
in the name of “safety.”
The only question now,
and maybe forever, is how
rigorously we intend to honor,
uphold, and defend the Con-
stitution against its enemies
— and they can be noth-
ing less — both foreign and
domestic, who would see it
destroyed.
And without destroying it
ourselves in the process.
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