By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Friedrich Nietzsche, that great sage of despair, asked,
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you
will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be
nothing new in it . . . ?’” Nietzsche called this idea of eternal recurrence
“the heaviest weight.”
In the wake of the slaughter in Orlando, Florida, where
49 people were killed and even more injured during an attack early Sunday on a
gay nightclub, it seems many are all too eager to carry a similar load. As soon
as news broke, pundits and politicians returned to dog-eared scripts to repeat
lines memorized long ago.
President Obama, who has spent his presidency yearning for
the reality he wants rather than the one he has, once again downplayed any
suggestion that this was another battle in the war on Islamic terror he does
not want to fight.
“Over the coming days, we’ll uncover why and how this
happened,” the president promised, referring to a killer who called 911 to
proclaim his allegiance to the Islamic State and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” amidst
the mayhem.
Obama conceded that it was an “act of terror,” but as
John Podhoretz noted in the New York Post,
referring to “terror” without a modifier is like a doctor discussing “cancer”
without identifying its specific form or location; it is a way of talking
around the problem without addressing it.
(For her part, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary
Clinton, in her initial wilted-word-salad response, said she was perfectly
“happy” to call it “radical Islamism.” Beyond that, she offered little beyond
staying the course in her desired third Obama term.)
Obama’s tentativeness gave way to conviction when he
spoke of how “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward
gays and lesbians. And conviction gave way to certainty when he tried to turn
this attack into one more example in his brief for gun control.
In this reflexive retreat to rote thinking, the president
was truly a representative if not of the American people then at least of much
of the media and the political class.
The New York Daily
News blamed the attacks on the National Rifle Association. The only
references to “jihad” on its front page were not to a self-proclaimed jihadist
but to past cheap shots the newspaper has taken at the NRA. Left-wing pundits
flipped on the autopilot and tried to make this slaughter about guns and
homophobia (based on the testimony of the killer’s father, an apparent Taliban
supporter no doubt eager for a different storyline).
Meanwhile, many on the right — not to mention a
Republican presidential candidate — immediately turned an atrocity into an
argument for a ban on Muslim immigration. Such a ban would not have stopped a
killer born and raised in the United States, but it would surely encourage more
potential “lone wolves” to believe that America regards Islam itself as the
enemy. Indeed, banning Muslims as if they were all part of an undifferentiated
blob of terrorists just happens to echo the Islamic State’s propaganda.
“There are only two armies, two camps, two trenches,”
Muslims and everyone else, the Islamists proclaimed in a recent communiqué.
But the GOP’s instant analysts didn’t limit themselves to
relatively new ideas, such as a ban. Donald Trump surrogate and possible
running mate Newt Gingrich seized the moment to call for a return of the House
Un-American Activities Committee, launched during the 1930s. See, it’s not just
Democrats who want to go back to the Roosevelt years.
At least Gingrich was pointing to the real problem. As
Obama demonstrated in his remarks, too many elites in this country reflexively
try to make Islamic terrorism America’s fault. Whether the culprit is American
imperialism, guns, Guantanamo Bay or, this week, homophobia, we instantly race
to comfortable excuses and comfortable arguments. The true nature and scope of
the challenge is too unpleasant to contemplate, and so we return to our scripts
and read our lines until the next slaughter provides an opportunity to read
them all over again.
It’s enough to make you want, as Nietzsche imagined, to
“throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus.”
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