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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 18, 2004
Bifocals
I'm now old enough to be wearing bifocals and by trying to walk around in them I have discovered that they are the answer to all our health-care problems. This is because people who wear bifocals are likely to fall down stairs. The judgement of distance from step to step is confused at the boundary between the two lenses. You put a foot wrong and then plunge to your death. Now if younger persons had to wear bifocals it might be a disaster for health funding. The more robust young would often survive their falls becoming merely crippled. This would tend to remove them from the income-generating class and shift them instead into "burden on society". Since bifocals are most commonly prescribed for people towards the end of their productive careers they are killed off at the ideal time -- after they have paid the maximum of taxes but before they can collect their pensions. Since health costs are also heavily weighted towards the old and feeble considerable further expenditures can be obviated. But perhaps that is to take too cynical a view of the problem of health-care funding. Really I wasn't planning to discuss the funding issue at all I leave that to the actuarial specialists and merely note their increasing enthusiasm for euthanasia. I didn't even want to discuss bifocals truth to tell. I was instead looking for an acceptable approach to a more controversial topic. For I've been trying to look at the problems presented to the Americans and their allies in Iraq in a bifocular way -- looking one moment through the lower lens at the news immediately to hand and the next through the upper lens into the middle distance. On the one hand I write these columns day to day; on the other over the last couple of years I've been trying with increasing exasperation to write a book touching on our whole civilizational encounter with Islam. It seems time to revisit some columns I wrote the summer before last while the expedition to Iraq was still being assembled militarily politically and diplomatically. Some readers may recall my attempt to describe what I thought President Bush was trying to achieve; what his "vision" was in response to events which had been clarified by the terror strikes on New York and Washington. I wrote then that he was trying to achieve something like the cleaning of the Augean stables in the Greek myth of Hercules. His mind was working in a Lincolnesque way towards a grand strategy. He would attack the root cause of terrorism in effect by diverting the powerful stream of democracy which had recently swept through central and eastern Europe so that it would now wash through the Islamic world. I did not say whether I thought this strategy would work only that I believed it to be what he was trying. I cannot of course read anyone's mind yet still think Mr. Bush is dug into such a grand strategy. He sincerely believes that democracy in the Middle East is possible; and that American efforts there can tap deep universal human desires for liberty and justice that will like great waters finally succeed in cleaning out centuries of backwardness and tyranny. After a couple of years of additional thought I now have an opinion on this strategy. The problem with it is that it requires the water to flow uphill. "Democracy" and Islam are utterly incompatible. I have become convinced in wrestling and wrestling with Islamic history and teachings that while extremely inconvenient this is a bald fact. Mr. Bush thinks he is pushing universal human values when in fact such ideas as separation of church and state constitutional government freedom of association nay human liberty itself are Western and more specifically Christian ideas. From beginning to end Islam has offered a radically different view of the relationship between man and God and between man and man. Human liberty as we understand it and the civic virtues we have come to associate with "democracy" are truly anathema to it. The mullahs know this. The imams know it. They ought to know they're on the front line of Islam's clash with a very Western modernity. Osama bin Laden understands it perfectly. The ayatollahs all know it too. And Mr. Bush who gets too much of his information about Islam from writers like Karen Armstrong doesn't know it. And so under the politically-correct impression that he is not fighting a "crusade" against Islam he finds himself indeed fighting one. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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