Watching a Documentary on Hippies and the Summer of Love
Pity the poor anti-war Leftist today.
He desperately craves the social relevance his mother and father may have known 40 years ago as members of a counter-cultural movement —and even has a war by which to define himself and his moment as morally superior— but there’s one thing he doesn’t have that makes his opposition safe, sanctimonious, and almost certainly ersatz.
A draft.
The hippies these days excoriate me because I have no skin in the game. Never mind they have none in it, either. Their opposition to the war is rooted in ignorance of what America does and always has done. We intervene. We export the most dangerous idea the world has ever conceived: democratic republicanism. I acknowledge this as our manifest destiny, but the anti-war Left? These people —whose very liberty to speak out against what they ridiculously believe to be a dictatorship run by international Jew finance is the proof against their own premise— are the same ones who are least prepared or interested to advocate the spread of that liberty elsewhere in the world.
Really. It’s liberty. We could not take it more for granted. But Iraqis read newspapers and make cell phone calls and buy music, fashion, and exotic foods. They are running businesses and making deals. They weren’t doing these things before. Not on this scale and with this latitude, anyway.
And the longer this new Iraq has to flower and to grow into something good and secularizing and moderating in the heart of a theocratic and ultra-violent Muslim world, the better off the whole world will be.
I don’t give a goddamn if you understand or approve of that or not. I’ll explain it to you, if you want, but I don’t give a goddamn what you think you know about our national purpose.
When have we not intervened and overthrown and battled against the enemies of human freedom? The United States is such an old hand at burning the very life out of the enemies of human freedom that I —the descendant of Confederate soldiers, sympathizers, and slaveholders— am here to tell you that it is what we do.
So love it. Because you know you can’t leave it.
