I intended an unbiased dispassionate review. Though already familiar with and impressed by Ilana Mercer's brilliant fresh approach to some of today's most controversial subjects, I was certain I could provide a disinterested analysis of her book.
Objectively Biased
It is not possible. No one fully alive can read Ilana's book dispassionately. One cannot read a book that evokes continual involuntary utterances of, "Yes!" "Oh, that's right!" and "Exactly!" and remain disinterested. It was not all "yes" and "that's right." There were the occasional, "yes, but ..." and "I'm not sure I'd say it that way." Even those rare points of difference, however, provided new and interesting ways of looking at things.
If I could be dispassionate, I would say Broad Sides is a perfect mix of reason and rhetoric. Combining surgically precise logic and irrefutable facts, Ilana launches a scathing criticism of the immorality and irrationality dominating every aspect of modern society, culture, and politics. It would be true, too, but incomplete.
There are other journalists writing many of the same things Ilana writes. They make similar analyses of the facts, they point out the same foibles in our leaders and their policies, they describe the same absurdities passing as culture—but when Ilana writes about them, they do not seem like the same things.
There is something missing in the writing of those other writers attempting to defend Western culture, civilization, and liberty. While they write about these things, clearly, even convincingly, they are all but ignored, as though what they wrote did not matter. But Ilana is impossible to ignore.
A Fire Shared
Oriana Fallaci is another journalist who has that same impossible-to-ignore element in her writing. While their styles, even their political views, are quite different, the quality that sets their work apart from all others, is the same. Oriana is older, more experienced, but no wiser than Ilana. It is Oriana, however, who identifies the ingredient they share but is missing in most of today's journalism.
In her Jan. 10, 2003 address, "A Sermon for the West", to the American Enterprise Institute, Oriana Fallaci said, "We have lost passion....round me, I see no passion. Even those who hate me and attack me and insult me do this without passion. They are mollusks, not men and women. And a civilization, a culture, cannot survive without passion, cannot be saved without passion. If the West does not wake up, if we do not refind passion, we are lost.
"Well," she said, "I have not. I boil with passion. I, too, am ready to die for passion."
In her introduction to Broad Sides, Ilana wrote, "The great and singular achievements of the West—from ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment, to the industrial and scientific revolutions of modern times—were products of a historically unprecedented union of rationality, morality, objectivity, and passion." [My emphasis.]
Principles, the Fuel of Passion
Ilana wrote to me: "Passion indeed is very important and cannot, simply cannot be faked. Put it this way, and this you can quote me on in connection with my passion: If I didn’t write regularly, I would combust!"
And where does this passion that fires Ilana come from?
Ilana named the first chapter of her book, "First Principles." What a novel idea that one should first have principles. While the entire world of academics, intellectuals and the media operates on sentimental slogans, floating abstractions, pop-psychology, and junk science, Ilana insists on principles.
It is what her entire book is about. "In sum, this is a personal manifesto, on one level aimed at rolling back the modern Leviathan State and reclaiming civil society," Ilana writes in her introduction. "More fundamentally, however, it's a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary life through the filter of timeless principles—principles that led to the West's ascendancy, and whose neglect has led to its disastrous decline."
That is where the passion one is "ready to die for," like Oriana Fallaci's comes from; that is how passion that, "cannot be faked," and sets one on fire, like Ilana Mercer's is ignited.
That passion comes from seeing the implacable assault on the principles responsible for all that is Western civilization and all that makes life worth living. It comes from seeing these timeless principles trampled on, intentionally, in every sphere of modern society and culture. It comes from seeing a government whose every policy and action supports that assault while suppressing every outcry against it.
Making Connections
Ilana not only explains those principles, she makes the connections between the principles and actual events that demonstrate the tragic result of their demise.
The sappy sentimentalism that substitutes for true passion in the media, totally incapable of making connections between facts, much less between principles and actions, is a soporific mesmerizing the gullible public into blithely accepting the anti-principles dominating our culture. Along comes Ilana, who not only can put two and two together, but does so with such clarity and heat, not even the slumbering public can miss the obvious contradictions the media blather attempts to cover up.
She demonstrates, for example, the disastrous result of exchanging a precise concept, like "individual liberty," with an ambiguous one, like "democracy." As Ilana says, "...we were once a republic and are now a social democracy.... The Constitution has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed."
In favor of what has the Constitution been destroyed? Democracy, the subtlest of collectivist terms, the "common good," and the bastardized "rights of the people," to just anything the majority of them want and vote for. The only one left out of this picture is the individual.
Ilana writes: "With individual rights being held hostage to the 'greater good,' the vote in a democracy is not to select people who would protect the inviolability of the rights the founders wanted to instantiate—the right to life, liberty and property. At best, the vote is a toss-up between a candidate who would loot for welfare and the candidate whose preference is to pillage for warfare.
Then, she makes the connection between disastrous "democratic" domestic policies and atrocious contradictory foreign policies, as the United States joins the international program to foist the same social democracy destroying America on every country possible, whether the people in those countries have any desire for it or not.
"The one fellow will ransack the taxpayer in order to secure prescription medication for those who think their health is the collective's responsibility; the other 'virtuous' chap thinks nothing of a shakedown to impose democracy on far-flung nations, never with their democratic consent."
If we're not being fleeced to force democracy on other sovereign nations, we're being fleeced to support them. She makes that connection too. "What an obscenity democracy is! The latest victory our democratic institutions can boast, the latest lien we've apparently authorized against our paychecks, is a commitment to more foreign aid," she says. "Since the beneficiaries of foreign aid reside in Washington, Geneva, Brussels, and assorted mansions dotting Third World landscapes, it takes a great deal of cash to maintain them in style. Which is why, worldwide, the UN is seeking approximately $166 billion annually in foreign aid."
Outraged by the Outrageous
While others, aware of these gross abrogations of principles, half-heartedly point them out, but not too loudly, lest anyone should notice they are not following the PC line, Ilana is openly outraged by the outrageous, as when the real principle of "states rights," which means individual rights and the decentralization of political power, is obscured by phony charges of racism as in the case of Trent Lott.
She is incensed by the destruction of real rights under an avalanche of phony issues, such as safety, security, and "national defence." While the bureaucrats and social commentators argue about the best way to "control" airlines, for example, no one mentions, much less thinks about, the fact airlines are private property—the moment the government starts talking about making the airlines (or anything else) safe, the right to private property has already been scrapped, which is why she asks indignantly, "whose property is it, anyway?"
She decries the corruption of rights the revolutionists fought and died to secure. Real rights are the source of real hope; where they are secured one knows their life and property are safe from grubby grabbing looters, both private and public. Ilana rightly calls them negative rights.
"Negative rights are real or natural rights because they don't conscript me in the fulfillment of your needs and desires and vise versa. They merely impel both of us to keep our mitts to ourselves."
Today, rights means just the opposite. As soon as someone says, "we need to do this to secure rights," it is not hope the words generate, but fear, because rights today means the rights of every grubby grabbing looter to the life, time, and property of others. What they mean by rights is their right to intrude in your life and confiscate your property to insure they have clean water, sanitation, health care, energy, food, education, or whatever else it is, "democratically," decided everyone has a right to have.
She is furious with a government that regularly steals from its citizens by taxing them ("The Number of the Beast") and devaluating their money by inflating it ("Monkeying with the Money") but puts honest businessmen in jail and confiscates their property for violations of immoral, incomprehensible laws—furious because no business men can force anyone to do business with them and whatever wealth they gain must be by offering a value others willingly pay for, while the wealth accumulated (and mostly wasted) by government is entirely by means of extortion (taxes) and fraud (inflation).
On Target
Ilana's fusillade of passionate rhetoric is carefully aimed at the enemy of principles. The anti-principle, multi-cultural, moral relativistic infection destroying Western civilization pervades every aspect of society and government, and Ilana's sharp eye misses none of them.
She exposes the hypocrisy of the government's, "war on terror," while that government's "war on drugs" policies finances terrorism. "The price of pure heroin for medicinal purposes is a fraction of its street price. The difference amounts to a state-subsidy for organized crime, al-Qaida included."
"The drug trade," she explains, "is indeed firmly linked to terrorism—the avails from the trade finance roughly 25 percent of the world's terrorist activity. But it is prohibition of drugs, which is the doing of governments, that is directly responsible for the excessive profits the drug trade yields."
She scorns the even bigger hypocrisy of a government that invades countries halfway around the world to "protect" Americans from terrorist invaders, while the terrorists are invading, by the thousands, across both borders north and south.
She takes direct aim at the "mainstream media," which she says, "seldom fail to shed darkness on whatever topic they tackle."
What better example than the case of Mrs. Toogood, caught by the ever watchful eye of big brother's henchmen when she was punishing her child, Martha, for misbehaving. "The assorted execrable commentators ... nonchalantly spoke about the need to place Martha with a loving family. In most situations and despite human fallibility, children love and need their parents more than anything, and vice versa. ..."
"The same anchors and experts," she continues, "whose vigorous defense of child killer Andrea Yates began while Yates was still rounding up the kids for their deadly dip, and who tirelessly promoted Yates' imaginary disease—the same people who daintily avoided describing the gruesome Medea-like savagery Yates inflicted on her children—were merciless about Toogood: 'What kind of monster would do what Toogood did?' And 'have we stumbled on a career criminal.' they gobbled."
Blasting the Brain Business
Can anything be more dangerous or destructive than that which is used both to vilify every virtue and excuse every evil. There is such a thing. It is called psychology. Ilana calls it "Twenty-First-Century Voodoo."
This pseudo-science-become-big-business is the source of the anti-concepts behind such inverted values as those exhibited by a media that frets about a vicious child murderer being misunderstood while mercilessly demanding punishment for a concerned mother.
On its own, psychology would just be another kind of quackery competing for the easy money of the gullible. But psychology now enjoys the protection and promotion of the government. This mostly baseless nonsense is now forced on everyone at the point of a gun, and it is used by the government to justify everything from taking people's children away from them (or drugging them into oblivion) to forcing jail time or "medical treatment" on those the government deems require it.
Psychology is used by government as another excuse to intrude itself into every aspect of human life, such as, "...the ubiquitous crisis-intervention team descending on a community...," which Ilana explains is more likely to do harm than good, if it does anything at all besides filling the bank accounts of psychologists and social workers.
"Disease labels are now being slapped on an ever-wider range of behavior...," which is just another excuse for government to get in on the act. Quoting Stanton Peele's Diseasing of America, she writes, "The dangers of gathering more and more behaviors under the disease label [is]... we cannot rule out that anything people do but shouldn't is a disease, from crime to excessive sexuality to procrastination." Since sick people are obviously not responsible for what they do, guess who is responsible?
Devastating Disgust
Ilana is disgusted with the inversion of principles by which the psychologists excuse every criminal excess and human fault and condemn every virtue. Those same upsidedown values pervade every aspect of our culture. It is more than just a loss of values, it is anti-value; where knowledge, decency, and virtue are despised, ignorance, squalor, and vice rush in to take their place. The cultural degradation is everywhere, and Ilana holds it up for everyone to see.
It is on television: "... the mother of a slain and raped tiny girl, out and about on "Larry King Live," a week after her child's dreadful demise. There is nothing these people will not say and express in public. They have no private lives."
It is in the schools: "Secondary schools are also suffused with this stuff. Feminism animates the child-centered, progressive public-school system and the 1960s vision its teachers hold dear. My own daughter was force-fed a pedagogic diet of pop psychology and politically correct pap, mostly by female teachers. They promoted every mythical, PC orthodoxy that pervades the Zeitgeist. At the same time, these women did little to foster content-based learning, something that they deem to be soul destroying," and, "content-based, top-down education has long been supplanted by pop-culture-friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam."
It is in the arts: "Leftist writer Maraly Lois Polak penned an adoring ode to Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's poet laureate, ... Ms. Polak describes Baraka's 'Somebody Blew Up America' as a 'brutally powerful 9-11 poem...messy and sprawling and mesmerizing and incantatory and luminous.' Adjective-littered language is bad form for a writer. Polak, however, is not concerned with form in prose or poetry, much less is she concerned with principle." She explains for those who don't know what the principles are, "Art—writing included—is a discipline. Good writing in particular can be about any topic. First and foremost, however, it must be technically accomplished. The kind of art that derives its artistic legitimacy solely from its political message is, however, a decoy for the talentless."
What is promoting this artistic nihilism? "With some exceptions, government-supported art conjurs the Soviet Socialist Realism. While the communists forced terrifically ugly, prosaic, state-affirming works on their subjects, our own supercilious liberals labor to trash what's left of Western culture. Think Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ"! As contemptuous as Baraka is, he is merely guilty of being a talentless and tasteless parasite. The real culprits are the politicians who create and fill these positions, then make the taxpayers pay for them."
It is in our entertainment: Of the adult fascination with The Lord of the Rings, she says, "At some stage it would seem developmentally appropriate for adults to cease craving a steady entertainment diet of fantasy and develop an interest in real people, in relationships and how flesh-and-blood make their way—and interact—in a complicated world. What has happened to such narratives, to the depiction on celluloid of developed—as opposed to flat—characters. What ever happened to the art of acting? What ever has turned America into a stun-gunned audience with the attention span of a nit and an ability to focus only on fast-moving and imploding animated objects, or on relationships that are entirely abstracted from reality? Fact has lately outdone fiction. The need for some escapism can be understood in light of the events since September 11. But the American audience has for some time demonstrated the aesthetic and sensibility of a magpie searching a trash heap for a shiny object."
It is on the Internet: The Blogger phenomenon is not a cultural positive: "The fact that millions of people are moved to mouth daily on the web is no more significant to freedom than the fact that billions of humans have a bowel movement every day." The product, I might add, is about equivalent.
Truth Bombs
Someone recently suggested to me that what was needed in the "war on terrorism" is more bombs. I said that bombs were not going to help anything. It would be like shooting a hornets nest with a beebee gun. You might eliminate a few hornets, but you would enrage the others who would simply spread out and attack more furiously.
Besides, the problem is not the hornets, the problem is a world that is vulnerable to them. The terrorists are not destroying our society, we are doing it ourselves. "What we need are truth bombs," I said.
I did not myself know exactly what I meant, but I had in mind, something more than the usual insipid propaganda and silly programs. What is needed is truth in a form that would literally explode the myths, the PC multiculturalism, anti-intellectualism, and hedonism that permeates our culture and society, like some insidious rot, which is the real cause of our defenseless vulnerability.
I may not have known exactly what they were when I said it, but I know now what they are, those truth bombs. Ilana Mercer's Broad Sides is a whole book full of them.
