March, 2006 -- In Paris in 1925 Ernest Hemingway wrote my favorite political poem.  Eighty years later, it is still relevant.  Think of the mass mob reaction to the UAE Port fracas.  Think of the UN’s internal corruption and inability to deal with the most egregious of international dangers – Iran’s nuclear program.  Think of France.  Somebody has to, I suppose. 

But seriously, think of this Persian "civil war" for which the formerly relevant mass American media is strenuously lobbying.   It is news to these people that the Baathists who ruled Iraq with an iron fist for many decades are by way of bombs and sniping trying to destroy the democratically chosen new authorities in that land.  I am shocked, shocked to be informed of this.  I was totally unaware that people in Iraq disagreed with each other.  I thought all those mass executions ordered by Saddam Hussein for all those years were a clear indication that there was a perfect Arab unity, there.  When, in recent years, bombs blew up at police recruiting stations, I thought that the bombers had mistaken Iraqi police stations for U.S. military facilities, or restaurants where the service was slow. 

And, think back to the video footage of all those Kurds in the northern part of Iraq.  Men, women and children plus dogs, goats and sheep, laying dead by their thousands after Hussein’s aircraft gassed them with weapons of mass destruction which as a result of the excellent journalism of Terry Moron and David Gregory we now know he didn’t have.  We should ask why Terry and David didn't think that was civil war. 

Wars are often civil, as inaccurate and ironic as that seems.  The Normans and the Saxons. The French Revolution. China became a cohesive nation as a result of civil war.  Russia became the Soviet Union in a civil war. Italy was manufactured by civil wars, as was Greece.  I can't remember a time when civil wars weren't going on in both Africa and South America. How about the Spanish Civil War?  Hemingway was there.  Hell, the Fourth of July streets of Hemingway’s youth, small town Michigan, reverberated to the boots of entire companies of men who fought in the American Civil War.  As a boy, he personally knew men who had seen combat in that  conflict. 

The thing is, as Hemingway well knew, the thugs both at home and abroad,  must be recognized by their actions, and faced down and defeated.  There are values which must be maintained if a decent nation is to survive, let alone thrive.  He knew that nations which have problems with enemy recognition are nations which are ripe for the picking by the vultures who hover in hot winds watching for signs of weakness below. 

What is the weakness below, at present?  How about the mess in the schools (multiculturalism, leftwing political indoctrination and the various evil ramifications of political correctness), the mess in the big liberal media (sedition as high chic cynicism), the mess in the courts (eminent domain as a tax avenue for towns and the legalized slaughter of the unborn, to name two examples), the mess in congress (gutless moderates and outright leftists), the mess in Hollywood (visceral thematic anti-Americanism), the mess in our culture (the urban, mostly black, anti-education and pro-violence victimization rant), the mess in our homes (families dismembered by casual divorce, drug use or simple lack of parental presence), the mess in our health care system (millions of illegal aliens sapping its vitality) and the mess in our basic national infrastructure (money for bike paths and empty light rail transit cars instead of highways are two which come immediately to mind.)

(I mean, where does Hollywood get the money to finance their eternally leftwing cinematic diatribes?  Those anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-2nd Amendment, anti-conservative, anti-traditional values epics cost millions.  Who is providing the money to make them, and why?)

You who regularly read this magazine know the old sayngs.  Evil exists, and all it needs to win is for good men to simply sit there and do nothing.  Those of you who are young may be of the opinion that Hell is a recent invention.  To comfort and to energize you, we give you the poem, written in Paris in 1925.  It comes from the mind of a man who knew that the instant the last problem was solved, the story was at its end.

The age demanded

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung
The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.

                        -- Ernest Hemingway

Others may by way of serious research have observations to make of the sort of political creature Hemingway was.  Whatever that was, for those of us who are amazed at the taste of his text, there is a barrage of sense impressions contained within, not the least of which is the illumination of mass human nonsense portrayed in the poem above.

He could have been writing about a whole bagfull of people who are bothering American conservatives, today.

(LL)

Original essay text © 2006 Oregon Magazine  The poem's copyright, if there ever was one, probably ran out before Truman became president.   When it was written there were still people alive who were in the theatre audience when Booth shot Lincoln.