War And Peaceniks

It's difficult to escape the bleatings of the "artist class," many of whom are implacably opposed to the war on terror. Most of Hollywood think conservatives are war-mongers at best, war-profiteers at worse. They're un-concerned about Arab autocracy and weekly beheadings; they presume democracy's too good for the developing world; they recoil when Americans with even average rhetorical skills correctly call terrorists evil. And they deny our enemies struck the first blow--and did so out of envy.

Yet it was always so. When Revolutionary France declared war on England on February 1, 1793, Britain didn't want war and hadn't provoked one. But the successful constitutional monarchy just across the Channel was a constant and flourishing reminder that mob rule and the guillotine preserved no rights of no men. But, in addition to a thriving economy and powerful Navy, Great Britain was a contrary moral force, as Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves reminds us:

[G]iven the way it had acquired its empire, and was still working to exploit and maintain it, this may seem hypocritical, even ludicrous. It did to many at the time. But it is not coincidence that in five years, Pitt [the younger] would bring forward a bill banning the slave trade and take the first tentative steps toward Catholic emancipation.

Herman also mentions (at 333 n.*) that the dissenters in those days--William Godwin, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Coleridge and others--sought solitude in Dorcetshire England, where they launched the Romantic poetry movement.

That same moral force endures today, across America and the Anglosphere. So there's a worthy, and traditional, way to solve the problem of Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Margaret Cho, 70 year-olds with memories limited to eight months, etc. Let the fragile flowers mourn, but create. I especially favor the part about solitude.

Meanwhile, we'll continue battling the French. More than two centuries later, they're still the enemy. It was always so.