"Mass Civilizational Suicide"

I'm not used to getting snootfuls of pessimism from Mark Steyn, but leave it to him to be insightfully right about it when he does:

Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:

1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalized brothel.

2) A British court has ruled that a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained in custody because jail causes him to suffer a ''depressive illness.''

3) Seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Eden of Charlestown, R.I., has been awarded an A by his teacher and the ''Silver Key'' in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled ''Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself.''

A trio of itsy-bitsy little stories from the foot of page 27 of your daily paper, if they made it at all. But they're as revealing about the course of the war as anything going on in Iraq.

Follow the link and read the whole thing. After discussing in detail all three examples and their implications for the future, Mr. Steyn arrives at a sobering conclusion:

I'm not worried about Iraq. As they demonstrated on January 30th, they'll be just fine. The western front is the important one in this war, the point of intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides. It's not that young Eden knows nothing, but that neither his teachers, judges nor furniture showroom proprietors do. By contrast, our enemies know us very well, at least when it comes to courtroom strategies and canny manipulation of the fetish of ''tolerance.''

It's an open question whether the West will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won't, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilizational suicide. And then the new barbarians will inherit, and young Master Eden will end his days pining for the rosy-hued nostalgia for the Bushitler tyranny.

The moral of this story is that traditional Western culture and Judeo-Christian moral values are not arbitrary, or designed to "spoil everybody's fun," but serve a very valid and necessary practical function in ensuring the health of a free society. One might describe them as society's social immune system, fighting off "foreign organisms" (i.e. harmful ideas) in order to ensure that our culture and institutions continue to function within normal parameters. Without them the social compact, in its myriad aspects, begins to break down. And that's something that we can ill-afford in the middle of a global struggle against an enemy that is as much, if not more, cultural in nature as it is political and military.

We see this cultural rot almost any time a Democrat opens his/her mouth these days. That may seem like the formula for protracted Republican national dominance (and to a large degree, it is), but some day - perhaps sooner than many of us imagine - a Donk is going to get back into the White House, and if the party from which s/he springs hasn't regained its marbles and returned to its Truman/JFK roots, well, the "tipping point" to which Mr. Steyn refers may not be far behind.

And look whom the Dems have just made their party chairman.

This is the kind of "food for thought" that spoils even my appetite.