If you look around today, you’ll find these defeatists and counterrevolutionaries in full moan. They tell us we’re doomed. We’ve lost our faith, they say, we’re badly led, they whine, our problems overwhelm us. Woe are we, woe are we. The defeatists and counterrevolutionaries have been around since the beginning.
Today’s enemies are not in the same league as those of my first years, or those of the end of the Cold War. The Muslim Brothers, said to be the Bolsheviks of the Muslim Arab world, didn’t (or haven’t yet, at least) put up much of a fight when they were shown the exit by a military they had purged and staffed with men believed to be loyal to the Islamist cause. The Iranian regime is fractured, its opium-addicted supreme leader unable to impose order even when he gets to choose the candidates for the presidential election.
In short, we have glorious opportunities.
Today’s defeat may contain tomorrow’s victory. Obama has shown the world what life would be like without America, and lots of people don’t like that picture. The fear and anger that we see in the banners and posters in Cairo, denouncing Obama for his complicity with their departed tyrant and his betrayal of the American revolutionary values we celebrate this holiday weekend, are shared by millions of Iranians, Tunisians, Syrians, Libyans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Ecuadorians and Nicaraguans.
Our current leaders have no interest in advancing our revolutionary values. On the contrary, they instinctively side with the oppressors, with our enemies. They conduct apology tours. But they, too, will pass.
Without Carter, there would not have been Reagan. We had to be reminded of American exceptionalism, and this was accomplished by a feckless president who, like the current one, saw us as the heart of the problem rather than the last best hope for a solution.
Idon’t know if a new leader is readying him or herself to reassert our national values, but it’s certainly possible. There is a new generation moving through the ranks, some of them tempered on the battlefields of the Middle East. We can already see some of them in Congress, in state capitals, in the Tea Party, and even in the media. They seem to “get it.”
Can they win? And even if they do, will they have the courage and the wit to take advantage of the cards the Great Shuffler has dealt us?
I’m an historian, not a prophet. But we’ve actually got quite a good hand.You see how that works?
Take the highway to the End of the Night
Take a Journey to the Bright Midnight
Realms of bliss - Realms of Light
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to the Endless Night