There's no place like home

But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

Iran's president speaks at a great American university. That university's president, in the act of introducing his lecture, whines like a baby bereft of his pacifier that his guest is a big meany poopy-head. City Council members, too, and a rabbi, make like ten-year-olds, giving their press conference in front of a sign with his face struck through and the legend "Go To Hell." Up in Albany, Democratic leader Sheldon Silver treat the students of this great university like ten years olds, threatening to defund Columbia University lest censors like himself prove unable to shut the poor children's ears to difficult speech. (What, was he worried they'd be convinced, join the jihad?) Then a Republican presidential candidate chimes in—bye, bye, federalism!—saying Washington should starve the school of funds, too. American diplomats used to have the gumption to spar face to face with dreaded foreign leaders. Now they go on cable TV and whine about what a "travesty" it would have been to visit a site which properly should belong to the world. Hundreds of foreign nationals died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (maybe even some of the Iranian!). Yet we have to systematically repress that—as if our national ego would crack like fine crystal if we were forced to acknowledge the mingling of American blood with that of mere foreigners.

Bill Maher says this often, and I agree, that we Americans have way too much faux moral outrage. I mean, c'mon, you believe that the Creator of all time, space, physics, and energy, who went to the trouble of engineering a Big Bang and shepherded tens of billions of years worth of cosmic thermonuclear reactions in order to create a life sustaining planet upon which He could create bodies to house souls and send His son to death by torture so you could go to Heaven forever even though you're a sinner by virtue of a fraud perpetrated by talking snake who offered a magical apple to a rib-woman, and you want to base our nation upon those principles and overturn 231 years of secular Constitutional rule, and YOU'RE offended by a D-list comedian saying "suck it, Jesus"?

No, most people believe in God in the nebulous "there must be a Higher Power" sense, as in "the world's a scary, infinite, and sometimes unexplainable place; I hope something bigger is running it all." (It's not. Sorry, it's a whole lot of orderly processes affected by random events plus nearly infinite time. Human beings were as likely as silicon rock-eating creatures writing "No Kill I" on the dirt near Captain Kirk's feet. The fact we exist and think only proves we exist and think, not that there is a purpose leading to our creation, or even that there is a creator.)