As we all gather around the tube each morning to get our daily fix on the world according to Rosie O’Donnell on The View, many of us tend to laugh off her brand of celebrity talk show hyperventilation as grandstanding for ratings or, at worst, the innocent rantings of the lunatic leftist fringe. But when over half of our high school seniors can’t place the Civil War or World War II in the correct half-century, a significant percentage of our twenty-somethings say that their primary source of news is the late-night talk shows, and scores of otherwise credible members of the engineering community actually seem to believe that the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11 was a government-directed inside job, we cannot so casually dismiss the pop cultural rantings of a left-wing kook. What we must realize is that this means of communication, along with the “blogosphere”, is a very real, and very successful, element of the strategy of the left. We also must recognize that they don’t deal in the truth, because the very concept of objective reality itself is considered by most of these people and their fellow travelers in the post-modern academic community as a construct of the Eurocentric, white, male imperialist oppressor class. I won’t go nearly as far as Dinesh D’Souza in his book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, which essentially blames the American secular left for enraging al Queda and its leadership to the point of attacking us. However, I do think that an indication of how far apart the opposing sides in the American culture war may be are the answers to the following questions: (1) Who is the greater threat to America, George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden?, and (2) Which represents our greatest ideological threat, evangelical Christianity or Islamic fundamentalism? To the extent that the answers to these questions indicate the assignment of anything approaching a moral equivalence in the choices of a significant number of our intellectual class, our mainstream media, and our cultural icons, folks, we have a lot more work to do in defining and identifying our real enemy.
