YELLOW RIBBONS - Good riddance!

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Patriotism, Pilgrims and Shaping the Future

America regains its confidence. Good riddance to yellow ribbons!

BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY Monday, November 19, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

Surveying the reaction to September 11, Father Richard John Neuhaus asks, where have the yellow ribbons gone? Where did the flags suddenly come from?

"Nobody decreed that it should be so," he writes in the December issue of First Things; "it just happened, and its happening is likely to be of great significance." First appearing in the Iranian hostage crisis two decades ago, the ribbons were "too often a symbol of self-pity and maudlin sentimentality." But they've been replaced by "a buoyant patriotism unprecedented in living memory."

This week, redolent with American tradition and folklore, is an apt time to reflect on the new patriotism. The flags are an affirmation of a community that reaches back through the generations to the first settlers carrying Western civilization to these shores. The United States is a unique nation, based not on ethnic kinship but on a set of ideas. At this moment we're testing whether those ideas resonate even in places like Kabul or Kandahar on the opposite side of the globe.

It's telling that we do not celebrate the earliest excursions by the Spanish, who reached Florida in 1527 and founded Santa Fe in 1609. We do not even celebrate the first English colony, Jamestown in 1607; it was a project of a joint stock company, which is to say a corporate enterprise.

Instead we honor the Pilgrim fathers who arrived on the Mayflower in November 1620. They'd spent 64 days at sea and disembarked as winter broke over a desolate wilderness. By spring only 50 of the 102 immigrants had survived, but the next October they shared their successful harvest in a feast with the Wampanoag Indians. On shipboard they signed the Mayflower Compact, a charter for self-government. A decade later, on the ship bringing the Puritans to nearby Massachusetts Bay Colony, Gov. John Winthrop proclaimed "a city upon a hill," warning that "the eyes of all people are upon us."

These ideas of personal freedom, religious liberty and self-government were heady then and remain so today. Over time they were leavened by other streams of the American experience--the Enlightenment ideas of the Founding Fathers, the immigrant influx, the frontier, the Civil War. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving an annual holiday, weeks before uttering the words "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

These ideals also met the sharp challenges of the century just closed--two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War. Politically, with the collapse of communism, democracy swept through much of the world. Militarily, the U.S. armed forces routed the Iraqi army, one of the largest in the world, in 100 hours. Economically, multinational corporations from Stamford and Detroit created a globalized economy.

As all this took place, swaths of American opinion became consumed by self-doubt, of all things. Serious people, or at least credentialed ones, imagined that the Japanese economic juggernaut was the wave of the future. Yale professors wrote best-selling books about American decline; Princeton ones fretted about the rights of other species. Spoiled children of the upper middle class protested against the globalization that gives the only hope to the world's poor. The academy was obsessed with "postmodernism," meaning the abandonment of standards, and "multiculturalism," meaning any old culture was as good as the next one.

While much of this was simply frivolous, Prof. Samuel Huntington propounded a hardheaded version in writing of "The Clash of Civilizations." The 21st century would not be one of globalization through democracy and capitalism, he argued, but a struggle of values as Muslims, Confucians and the like gained power to implement ideals shaped by their own history and religion. Other civilizations have little use, he wrote, for "Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state."

Just at this moment, clearly, we're having a dustup with Islam. It's both unfair and shortsighted to anathematize all Muslims, but it's also true that whereas Christ was a martyr, Mohammad both taught disciples and led armies. Islam did inspire great civilizations and empires that ruled non-Muslim peoples with some tolerance. But it has failed to reach an accommodation with modernity so largely shaped by the Christian, Enlightenment and capitalist West.

We are in the early stages of testing whether this impasse is permanent. To reject modernity is to consign your people to economic backwardness. The Saudi Arabian monarchy has done much to set the stage for this outcome, staking its legitimacy on the extreme Wahhabi version of Islam, using its oil money to give Muslim children in other countries a stultifying education and shaping Islam world-wide through the prestige it holds as protector of Mecca and Medina. The result, ironically, is that the Saudi royal family is threatened not by democracy but by Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

The United States obviously cannot dictate to Islam, but it is not powerless to shape events. The military campaign is already paying huge diplomatic and psychological dividends, and the apprehension or death of bin Laden will pay more. U.S. diplomats could surely be less bashful in urging the Saudis to abandon a course dangerous for us and suicidal for them. And even Riyadh would take notice if terrorist sponsor Saddam Hussein were overthrown and a modernizing regime established in Baghdad, the city of the Caliphs.

If this sounds ambitious or even visionary, American flags have replaced yellow ribbons. The civilization reaching back to the Mayflower is recovering its self-confidence, lost somewhere in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Its can-do spirit was not restored, given the lingering intellectual faddishness, even by the fall of the Berlin Wall. But now, after the unspeakable evil we witnessed on September 11, only a few aging and pitiful radicals will stand to argue that there are no standards, that one culture is as good as another, that America is a malign force in the world. The U.S. has the power to shape the future, and is on the verge of acquiring the will.

And in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, men play music, women open their burqas and children fly kites. A taste for freedom starts to look like a universal value after all. The Pilgrim view is prevailing not because it is Western or Christian, but because it is attuned to human nature.

Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

-- Anonymous, November 19, 2001


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