Strakon Lights Up, No. 67

Don't they know there's a war on?

 

I'm going to have to quit making fun of C-Span addicts who monitor governmental rituals wall to wall and minute by minute. These days you never know when a minor event is going to attain major significance. That very thing happened this past week at the convention of the left wing of the Imperial Fascist Party, when hundreds of homosexual delegates and, no doubt, many of their sympathizers booed a color guard at the opening of a session. That event affords those who witnessed it and those who have been permitted to hear about it a revealing glimpse of how the culture war is being fought in its closing stages. The single most revealing aspect is that only one side is really fighting.

Like all Red Guards, left-wing homosexuals despise the symbol of the empire that succors them because it is traditional and because most of the normal people whom they abhor cherish it and think it symbolizes something decent and heroic. But potty-trained Guards know better than to boo the flag, per se, while the TV cameras are on. The Ministry of Truth might not be able to finesse that very well, and even the most numbskulled of the sheeple might remember it come Election Day. Instead, it was the color guard itself that the sodomists booed at the Democratic Convention, and they booed it because it was composed of Boy Scouts. I'm confident Minitrue will be able to explain that away or kill it with silence; and if, perchance, millions of the ruled do hear about it, heck, for all I know it will actually earn votes, on net, for Albert of the Big Teeth and his sidekick Holy Joe.

After all, the Scouts are homophobic stormtroopers, according to those on the winning side of the culture war. If Scouting ever occupied an implicit place in the fundamental formula of flag, Mom, and apple pie, it's fast losing it in the mind of the soccerites, depending as they do on Minitrue, the state schools, Red judges, and sloganeers of the bureaucracy to tell them what's Good, Right, and True from one week to the next.

Conservatives are upset and indignant, as usual, but they're fighting, if you want to call it fighting, on terrain chosen by their enemies. That's also as usual. Last night's shout-fest on Fox News's "Hannity & Colmes" was a good example. Conservative co-host Sean Hannity virtually quivered with outrage over the booing incident, while his liberal partner, Alan Colmes, and guest Gloria Allred naturally didn't have any problem with it. (There's no need to waste any disparaging adjectives on Allred; I cannot be the first to point out that her last name is exquisitely descriptive all by itself.) Allred said the booing was, in fact, a good thing: the Scouts should be made aware how "unpopular" the anti-sodomy policies of their organization are.

I agree! Truth be told, I can hardly believe the Scouts aren't already aware of their fatal unpopularity among the people who matter.

Once again we see validated Sam Francis's taxonomy, which classes the Republicans and mainstream conservatives as the Stupid Party, and the Democrats and the Left as the Evil Party. (Actually, I think the Republicans are pretty evil, too, but for our purposes here, let's concentrate on the intelligence differential.) It never occurred to Hannity to wonder what in tarnation the Scouts thought they were doing when they accepted the Evil Party's invitation in the first place. It's a question I'd like to ask the Scouting hierarchy myself. Don't they know there's a war on? I guess they're an adjunct of the Stupid Party, too.

***

In SLU #56, I argued that normal folk who want to save something of white Western civilization in its Old American form need to ruthlessly pursue "symbolic secession." ("Let them keep the Stars and Stripes, and we'll take Don't Tread on Me," July 8) If ever there was a case crying out for symbolic secession, this would seem to be it. If the Scouts wanted to save anything of their traditions, you'd think they would have long since tumbled to the fact that their enemies were in control of the country and gone underground.

But on second thought, that wouldn't help the Scouts. The soul of their organization is already hopelessly compromised and corrupt. And not just "already." It always has been. I'm not referring merely to the Scouts' traditional use of government property — school gyms and the like — which eventually gave Red judges the excuse to reach out and scoop them up as a "public accommodation." The Scouts' eager cuddling up to the state is only a symptom of Scouting's pervasive disease — or, better, congenital disease.

The Scouts are just another of the Old American institutions that are inherently defenseless in the face of the fully mature progressive empire. I almost wrote "Old Republican," but that's precisely what Scouting is not. The Scouts, with their uniforms, flag worship, ranked hierarchy, and national-statism masquerading as patriotism were first organized in America when the Old Republic was moribund and the progressive empire was being founded. Indeed, Scouting was an early epiphenomenon of empire, founded when American imperialists were becoming proudly self-conscious — and desirous of imitating (and eventually succeeding) the British Empire that Baden-Powell loyally served. Before that era, few ordinary Americans would have thought it appropriate to round up their children, dress them in uniforms, and encourage them to waste their time with imitation military chicken-squat.

Now the ultra-respectable Scouts of the early empire are being redefined as abominable by the modern empire, in the same way other inherently flawed and compromised institutions and practices of an earlier time have been redefined — states' rights, government execution of predators, old-style unit cohesion and morale in the military, civic virtue as taught by the state schools, state-recognized marriage, and so on, up to and including the Constitution itself. It may well be that advising the Scouts to go underground makes as about as much sense as advising the Republican Party to go underground. "Underground" in this case probably amounts to six feet under. If so, I won't be one of the mourners at that burial.

The Scouts have been slow to realize there's a war on because they were an honored regiment in the unofficial grass-roots "army of America" for so long. The makeup of that army changed when they weren't looking; suddenly they're finding that they're no longer a part of it; they're still useful to the empire, to be sure, but as villains instead of heroes, enemies instead of allies. They're like the Soviet POWs at the end of World War II who kept thinking they'd fought heroically for the socialist Motherland but didn't know what the regime was saying about them back home. How surprised they were when, after being "liberated" by the Red Army, they were sent straight to the Gulag, as trrrraitors!

It would be wonderful if there could be a new, non-authoritarian organization dedicated to teaching boys how to save those in danger of drowning, help old ladies across the street, and survive in the woods, while at the same time teaching some other, more general lessons, lessons quite different from the general lessons Scouts are being taught now. Scouts for Freedom, anyone? I'll bet that, once inspired by the examples of Francis Marion and John Singleton Mosby, they could learn how to survive in the woods quite well without the military chicken-squat. Even if they were equipped with nightscopes, cammies, and AK-47s.

August 19, 2000

© 2000 by WTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.



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