You Can Be Serious

Most of the people I know are of the multi-culti ilk, the types that sit around and give a little Bush-bashing over supper, talk about how wonderful it is to live in multi-ethnic Canada, and mutter uncomfortably when someone mentions Jesus (unless they're swearing; people that have decided Christianity is for the birds still use it when they spill their coffee. "Christ, that's hot!")

I know so many multi-culti left wing weirdos (and those are the majority of my friends) that I sometimes wonder how Bush, Howard, and Harper managed to get into power. The answer is that the people who voted for them are serious, while the people who bash them all the live long day are not. Serious people don't harp on about things, they get on with their lives and do what needs doing, and then they vote. Unserious people eventually turn into blowhards, railing against their enemies without doing anything about it.

Back in 2004, a girlfriend of mine asked me who was going to win the US Presidential election. I said Bush. She thought I was nuts. She worked in a health spa and saw 14 clients a day. Every one of them told her that they hated Bush and that he was going to get ousted from power. They gave her the usual Alec Baldwin insight into why Bush would blow it: he's dumb. I repeated that he would win.

After he won, she asked me how I could have been so certain. I told her that I hadn't been too sure, but once she'd told me that every gym rat and fat lady in need of a deep cleansing facial massage hated Bush, I knew he was a shoo-in. Serious people go to work, feed their kids, don't want to be blown up by terrorists, and only freak out about their skin if they're caught in a grease fire. Serious people think about serious things. Fat ladies with bad skin read People magazine under the hair dryer and regurgitate whatever the New York limousine liberal writes in the op-ed.

It is ironic that the left wingers who pretend to champion multi-culturalism and a kinder, gentler hand are more unaccepting than the people they despise.

Take the evening news. If Bush comes on the screen, it is normal for the left winger to say, "Look at this moron." Just like that. They don't care who in the room might disagree with them. They take it as self-evident that Bush is a moron, and that you'll agree with them.

The same people that say, "Never talk about religion and politics," are the people that talk about religion and politics all the time. If the Pope gets a write-up in the paper saying that abortion is bad, the person reading the paper will tell the room that the Pope's an ass without any second thoughts whatsoever.

I knew a guy who once showed me a cartoon map of the United States. Instead of being called 'the United States,' the cartoonist had written, 'Jesusland.' When the guy showed it to me, he was chuckling. When I didn't laugh, he smirked and said, "Oh, you're one of those."

One of what? If he meant that I was one of those people that don't laugh at lame gags, he was spot on the money. If he meant I was one of those people that take pity on losers like him, he was right again.

Because none of the above examples are serious. They're not arguments, they're opinions put together using the Frankenstein technique: a little David Letterman, a little CNN, a little CBC, and voila: Bush is a dummy, the Pope hates women, and the United States is a collection of Bible thumping imbeciles.

I am always nervous whenever too many people believe the same thing, and I am extremely nervous when their views on a subject can be wrapped up in one statement. "Bush is a dummy." Okay, but he beat your hero Al Gore in all of his college grades, so does that mean I don't have to believe in global warming anymore? Because Al Gore, by your definition, is a dummy?

Serious people look for answers. They seek them out. If they see a word in the paper that they don't understand, they don't complain that the egghead who wrote the piece uses too many 'big words.' They look it up.

Unserious people believe anything that is repeated often enough, and feel it is their duty to repeat it, too. And when they run up against someone who doesn't know the mantra, they feel confused and frightened. And, as these bleating sheep are so fond of telling us, we fear what we don't understand. Unserious people cannot face their own pathetic irony.

Unserious people are afraid of issues that can only be discussed, never acted upon. Global cooling in the '70s becomes global warming in the '80s, which becomes climate change in the '90s. That's three major shifts in the argument in as many decades. How are we supposed to act on it if we can't even make up our minds what it is we're acting upon? The unserious people aren't concerned with that. They're concerned with the idea that they're concerned. They merely want to talk. It makes them feel good. Action takes guts. Unserious people don't have them.

But what about the congressional elections, you ask? Yes, what about them. They're being trumpeted as a victory for the left, and a backlash against Bush. Or, more specifically, as a backlash against Bush's ideals. (Never make the mistake in thinking that someone dislikes another person because they know the person. I don't know Bush personally, and probably neither do you. It's his ideals you like or dislike, not the man himself; put Clinton's words in Bush's mouth and, with the exception of Monica Lewinsky, people would change political parties overnight).

I'm not so sure about a leftist victory in the election, per se. The Democrats gained the House and the Senate, but not by very much. The country is still coming up 50/50. If Bush had fired Rumsfeld before the election instead of after (the biggest gaffe of his presidency), the Republicans would have taken it in a walk.

But they lost, and it would be easy to assume that the Party of the Unserious (that would be the Democrats) are proven correct: that the country should pull out of Iraq. Really? Is that what the election said? I don't think so. I think the election results showed that people are just a hair more ambivalent about the war, not about being there in the first place, but with how it is being fought.

I was at an interview a few weeks ago, where someone was asked what they thought of the Hiroshima bomb site. The answer was, "If we did stuff like that more often to people that screwed with us, we wouldn't be having this problem in Iraq right now." The whole room got uncomfortable, and people cleared their throats, and somebody changed the subject.

But what about that? You don't hear too much of that stuff in the man-on-street interviews produced by CNN. But the opinion must be out there. Dig deeper. Do your homework. Look around.

The Iraq question has a magnifying effect on people, showing them to be serious on the one hand, or unserious on the other. Anyone who thinks Iraq is not intrinsically tied into the war on Islamic fascism is either incredibly ignorant, or pro-fascist. This is the supreme war of our generation. This is bigger than the Cold War, and bigger than Nazi Germany.

In the Cold War, some relatively sane guys had their hands on the button, and they were prepared to use it only if the other guy did first. With Nazi Germany, at least we knew where these guys were, and we were pretty sure that if we knocked over Berlin, they'd surrender.

It's interesting to note that back during the Cold War, there were marches against nuclear weapons, movies made about the world going up in smoke, and pop stars making anti-nuclear statements between bong hits.

Today, with Iran saying they're going to wipe Israel off the map, and the North Koreans test firing rockets into the Sea of Japan, nobody gives a damn about nukes. Why? Because the people who yawn at the idea of Israel being obliterated aren't serious Western citizens. They are, in fact, pro-fascist, and anti-West. There can be no other explanation. All of Israel's enemies are racist, totalitarian regimes, bent on her destruction. To not care what these regimes plan on doing, to not march against them for the first time in history, shows that you implicitly support what they stand for.

Can there be any question of this? Imagine sitting in your office in Iran. You watch as hundreds of thousands protest against Bush sending troops to Iraq. You watch every news agency from CNN to Al-Jazeera rake the Americans over the coals for tying a leash to a prisoner's neck. The outrage and condemnation are far louder than when an insurgent's prisoner has his head sawed off. In Italy, the rainbow flags drip from the windows, with Pace ('Peace') written across them. From New York to Sydney to London to Tokyo, the unserious march shoulder to shoulder, decrying their own governments.

You tip back your chair, shoot your aide for some insult or other, and flip the channel. It only gets better. Your enemy's newspapers expose classified information. The UN, based in the city where two buildings were knocked down by people you call martyrs and heroes, invites Hugo Chavez to attendance. There, he calls the President of the country he is visiting 'Satan,' then hops the next plane home without fuss.

You yourself step in front of the cameras and declare that Israel must be destroyed, that Jews should move back to Europe, and that the Holocaust never happened. And you mention in passing that you want to develop nuclear technology to bring the electric bill down.

In France an average of 80 cars a day are burned by Muslim 'youths,' who just never seem to get old. In Madrid, boom, in London, pow.

Death and mayhem, and blood running through the streets. Then, perhaps to test the waters one last time, to see just how hypocritical and ignorant the Unserious of the West are, you pull out the big guns. While the lesbian Rosie O'Donnell on the View tells the American housewife that Christianity is as bad as Islamic fundamentalism, hundreds gather outside in Kermanshah, Iran to watch a homosexual man hang for the crime of sodomy.

And after all of this, the world and Rosie say...nothing. At least, not to each other. But to you, the racist, fascist, immoral dictator, the silence is deafening approval for the words you say and the acts you commit. How could it be taken otherwise?

His name was Shahab Darvishi, by the way, the homosexual man who came up against Islamic justice. Sodomy, like rape, murder, adultery, blasphemy and espionage, are capital offences in Iran. And before the ladies get too happy with the death-for-rape deal, you might want to know that you need four eyewitnesses to prove rape. And even then, as happened recently to a gang rape victim, the woman might receive 96 lashes for reporting said rape, because it means admitting she was alone with a man not her husband.

It should be plain that this is a battle of ideologies. This is Freedom vs. Fascism, and Good vs. Evil. Serious people know this. The Unserious should too, because it is summed up in one little line that even their feeble minds could grasp, were it not for their blind hatred of the man in the White House.

No matter how many clitorises are clipped from the crotches of young girls, no matter how many heads are cut off, no matter how many cars burn in France, no matter how many Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims themselves are gunned down in the street. The Unserious have tuned out this information. They receive their orders from the fascists, and they march accordingly.

Until, perhaps, it's their cousin or sister that gets blown to smithereens on a downtown bus. Which is exactly why the Americans and others (we Canadians chickened out) are in Iraq right now. It's the oldest lesson in the book. Fight in someone else's backyard. I don't care if the Americans are there for two hundred years, I just hope they have the willpower to stay there. Better that volunteer soldiers slug it out in Iraq, than scores of women and children are decimated at a shopping mall in Philadelphia.

If the Americans were to pull out of Iraq, it would be the singular greatest defeat in the history of the world. Do the Unserious really believe that 3000 dead soldiers requires a Super Power running away from bands of murderers and thugs bent on knocking down our buildings, hacking off our heads, and mutilating our children? Nevermind what they would do to the Iraqi civilians immediately after an American withdrawal. Can they be serious?

This is a battle of wills. A car bomb here, a car bomb there, and sooner or later the Yankees and the Brits will run away. But how far do you run? If you aren't there to keep an eye on your enemy, exactly how long is it until they have their eye on that shopping mall in Philly? Tell me where you run to then.

Seriously.