September 10, 2013
America: Not Shining but Burning
By Daren Jonescu

The human mind naturally protects itself from considerations that would interrupt the appealing flow of everyday life. This fact alone explains the continued unwillingness of many thinking people to wonder aloud whether there is still hope for the survival of the United States of America as founded. Too early to voice such a dire concern, you say? On the contrary, it is far too late.

Through most of her history, America has stood as a unique object of admiration and envy to allies and enemies alike, and the most powerful attractive force of the modern era for men seeking prosperity and practical freedom. She has stood, in that expression adapted from the Sermon on the Mount by John Winthrop, and updated by Ronald Reagan, as a "shining city on a hill."

These two images together -- the attractive force and the light in the distance -- explain America's role in the modern psyche. She has been a kind of sun, holding a complex system of political aspiration in orbit around herself. She has played this role not only, or even particularly, through direct involvement in the lives of other nations, but also and primarily through her place in the minds of men around the world whose moral and political thoughts bent in arcs defining variations on the theme of respect for the dignity of the individual man -- arcs that, for over two centuries, had America as their spiritual center.

Human things change, however, all too often for the worse. Modernity's entropy is turning admiration to dread, envy to smug satisfaction, as the world begins to recognize the radically altered aspect of the light now emanating from the former land of the free. To adapt poet Stevie Smith's famous trope, "Not waving but drowning," it is now clear that our modern hope for the perpetuation of freedom and prosperity is not shining but burning.

The prospect of America in ashes, almost unthinkable only yesterday, must cause, and I believe is causing, a radical shift in the modern psyche. The old confidence inspired around the world by that seemingly inextinguishable light -- our presumption, against the rising tide of statism, that America, at least, would resist -- is being "fundamentally transformed" into a blood-brotherhood of the fighting minority within her borders and a few kindred spirits from abroad, united in a last-ditch effort to save America from herself. The city on the hill is itself the battlefront now, its ramparts crumbled, and its defenders vastly outnumbered. Surrender is not an option, but all delusional optimism and defeatist pessimism aside, it is simply too early to tell whether this fight can be won.

Perhaps saving America "from herself" is an inapt description of the crisis. For one might say that America does not need saving from Americans, but rather from an enemy that, while certainly within, cannot properly be called American at all.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/a...l#ixzz2eWK36VGp

@Rev

Thanks for posting.

This is a long read, but well worth it, a worthy way to observe 9-11.

From my perspective if we do not do the hard work of recognizing how wrong things in the US have gone, and how they went wrong, we lack to tools to slow down, stop, or turn them around.

Some choice insights from Daren Jonescu:

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The human mind naturally protects itself from considerations that would interrupt the appealing flow of everyday life. This fact alone explains the continued unwillingness of many thinking people to wonder aloud whether there is still hope for the survival of the United States of America as founded. Too early to voice such a dire concern, you say? On the contrary, it is far too late.

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Perhaps saving America "from herself" is an inapt description of the crisis. For one might say that America does not need saving from Americans, but rather from an enemy that, while certainly within, cannot properly be called American at all.

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Who more genuinely lives and defends the principles I identified as the Idea of America -- Tocqueville, who warned of the threat of "soft despotism," or the generations of leading American thinkers and politicians who have converted his grave warning into a how-to manual?

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" I feel much the same way. I don't feel dour although I do feel that the US as we knew it is no more.
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Today, 111 years after Theodore Roosevelt began this journey the progressives have finally taken over. We no longer have a government that defends and supports the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Control of both the Republican and Democrat parties belongs to the progressives."

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Over those "111 years," the Idea of America has been undone, or abandoned, mainly through the corruptions of nominal Americans themselves. A compulsory education establishment borrowed from Prussia and completed by Dewey indoctrinates generations in the virtues of submission to the collective, keeping to one's place, and faith in the great god, Government.

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