Dean Barnett stares down the abyss:

In late 1938, Winston Churchill passed a London restaurant and heard great bonhomie coming from within. Churchill said to his companion, “Those poor people. They little know what they will have to face.”

The same can now be said of American society today. Some people choose to believe that the greatest threat to our way of life is George W. Bush. These people deserve the condemnation that history will heap on them.

Others more acutely recognize the threat, but are hamstrung by their fealty to political correctness. If a major daily paper ever wrote an essay like this one, CAIR would pitch a fit. Writing pieces like this invariably brings angry rebukes from those who refuse to look into the abyss and would rather focus their considerable capacity for rage at less formidable targets than hundreds of millions of angry, dangerous people.

But an abyss is what we face. And looking away won’t change a thing.

Wouldn’t be interesting to see a play about actual contemporary anti-Semites whose power extends beyond the confines of an animation studio? But you’re far more likely to see a play about the sex-doll origins of Barbie, for example. Why? Because it would shock town squares to learn that the doll with the tiny waist, long legs and hella-portion hooters might have something to do with sex. It would reexamine – nay, examine for the first time – this culture’s notions of sex, a subject no one ever dares to raise.

Some day someone may pen a biting satirical look at a government so nervous about sex and the irresistible lies of Mad Ave they banned Barbie, Western Pop music and American ads themselves.

If such a play’s performed, it won’t be in by expats in Scotland; it’ll run in Tehran after the Mullahs fall. Among the wise and brave in the west, the Red Scare and the Eisenhower Golfocracy will remain the go-to era for the modern Dark Ages, a time when talented, witty people couldn’t glibly support a collectivist blood-soaked totalitarian system without fear their boss might get the wrong idea.

Update: This profile of Mark Steyn in New Zealand's National Business Review dovetails nicely to the above post:

In the theatrical world, one reads often about the "courage" of many artists making their own statement on international affairs in the new world. These are the types who congratulate themselves on the tremendous moral courage involved, say, in placing a crucifix in urine or some such religious offence ­ provided it is not an affront to the type of Muslim radical who might actually do something about the offence.

As Mr Steyn notes, "we've devalued language to the point where 'courage' means saying something rude about George W Bush rather than having the real courage to identify the real threat to the world we live in."

If one thinks western civilisation is collapsing from "a decadent exhaustion," as Mr Steyn puts it, echoing a strikingly similar critique put years ago by another great commentator, Malcolm Muggeridge, then one is presumably obligated to write about it.

But why would someone want to save civilisation in the first place? Couldn't the fortysomething Mr Steyn, who lives in New Hampshire with his editor wife and three children find something else to occupy himself with?

"You want to do it because you want to enjoy all those small personal pleasures like being able to walk into a piano bar in London and hear a fantastic new singer singing The Way You Look Tonight. That is one of the small pleasures of life, and it's those accumulated pleasures that are something very important and something valuable.

"Radical Islamists, of course, take the view that there are no small pleasures in life- that you can't go out dancing, you can't listen to music, you can't play sport and that earthly life is a drudgery you endure until you get to paradise. I don't look at it that way."