Calling the Pigs

I'm up here in the Frozen North (a.k.a. Toronto) on business, as Dymphna has mentioned. But I have a brief break and access to a computer, so...

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I've been catching up on my reading, and this morning I read an article by Rich Lowry in the print edition of National Review about the Virginia Tech massacre and Seung-Hui Cho. It's from the May 14th issue, and is available online behind the subscription wall, but I can't give you the URL from here.

Mr. Lowry says this:

When the [English] department head began to tutor [Cho], she established a secret code word with her assistant to signal when she should call security.

I'll assume that the English Department at Tech is pretty much the same as English departments at other universities across this great land of ours -- i.e., a hotbed of deconstruction, political correctness, multiculturalism, subversion, and general sedition. Yet, in the moment of her crying need, the department's head apparatchik called on the hated forces of militaristic oppression to rescue her from possibile danger.

I noticed the same thing at William and Mary last weekend. Dymphna and I had to endure various graduation events, several of which involved seniors (some of them English majors) giving speeches that combined lame jokes with overworked rhetoric. These students had the tactlessness to mock old people and tourists -- many of their parents were memebers of both these groups -- and one ridiculed the various police forces on campus and in the city of Williamsburg.

The young man who spoke so crassly was directing his remarks to the audience at a candlelit gathering of students and their families in the courtyard of the Wren building. All around the periphery were representatives of the despised Williamsburg police, standing with their arms folded, watching carefully and patiently for anyone who might do the assembly harm, whether mujahideen or Cho-wannabes. I'm sure these policemen are used to abuse and reidicule at the hands of W&M students. My cohort directed plenty of the same kind of invective at them back in our student hippie days.

However, as soon as disaster strikes, when the bomb goes off or the deranged loner with automatic weapons arrives on the scene, the first thing these recently-sneering students will do is to dial 911 on their cellphones and summon the pigs to come to their rescue. They know that the traditional forces of law and order will, despite being held in avowed contempt by their young charges, do their duty to the best of their ability to protect them from harm -- and then, no doubt, be reviled for not arriving on the scene sooner.

This is a quintessentially adolescent attitude. But the problem is that it has become endemic to the entire elite/academic/political establishment, so that a permanent adolescence has settled into most of our important institutions.

It has caused the members of our protective forces -- the military and the police -- to despise those they are charged with protecting, to look down on those soft-bodied ingrates whom they have to defend. This situation does not bode well for the future of our constitutional republic -- an intelligent, well-educated, and well-armed group of young men regards its civilian overseers with a well-deserved disdain.

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Bob Dylan famously sang, "How many times will the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned?"

The unspoken assumption behind this plea for universal non-violence is that the state or the "international community" possesses some kind of power to enforce such a ban. And if someone -- some group, country, or international gang of thugs -- refuses to observe such a ban, then what?

Why, then we pick up the phone and call the pigs.

Oh, wait a minute -- we've "banned" the pigs.

So what do we do now?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.


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