Reflections On The Boston Bombers And Boyhhod In America

Whereas American media has shed mostly darkness on the “apparently” mysterious motivation behind the ruthless, savage, April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon—a Chechen leader offered some valuable insights about these homegrown terrorists:

[The] Tsarnaevs … were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America.

The man makes a profound point. Here, and not in Chechnya, did the Tsarnaevs receive a liberal, lax, progressive education, emphasizing the wicked ways of the West and the righteousness of its “victims.” It is here in America that these invertebrates matured into aggrieved ignoramuses.

“If we Americans cannot even agree on what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one national family?,” prodded Patrick J. Buchanan, in a recent column.

“A common faith and moral code once held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground, after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially, ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us together? The Constitution, the Bill of Rights? How can they, when we bitterly disagree on what they say?”

As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, reluctantly, diversity in fact immiserates. The greater the diversity in a county or country, the more distrustful and depressed are its inhabitants.

America’s practically pornographic rituals of public grief—what are they if not a neurotic symptom of this disconnect? A diverse and distrusting people, lacking in a shared national DNA, are thrust together by the crisis of the day. In the absence of any core value over which to unite, we Americans meet on the only common ground we share: the graveyard. We come together to bury or remember our dead. We unite to grieve over tragedy and misfortune that have befallen us for no other reason than that we exist in the same space in time.

 

As to America’s ingenious and inspired founding documents aforementioned: The vast majority of the people in this variegated land remain ignorant of them. Or, if familiar with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (or better still, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers)—they’ll have been taught contempt for their framers and the philosophy these magnificent men espoused. When he hears parents, pedagogues, politicians and media sycophants pound on about the country’s Founding Fathers as the archetypical pale, patriarchal oppressors—a young man quickly learns to reject his adopted country’s heritage and look elsewhere for roots.Boys, especially, require strong, moral men in their lives—men who affirm their masculinity. American boys, however, are mired in an estrogen-infused, cloistered world where real men in authority are a threatened minority. The nation’s schools have been, for the most, drained of manliness. Almost to a man are they staffed by feminists (mostly bereft of the Y chromosome).

Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was a product of a freewheeling, fatherless household. The tele-experts have been mum about a mother who was weak and ineffectual. Nancy Lanza was filled with fear. She used a menacing gun collection to overcompensate for her parental inadequacies. A strong, caring male might have taught the troubled Lanza to handle firearms responsibly; might have helped diffuse the lad’s rage. A manifestly weak woman playing at make-believe manhood only added fuel to that fire.

Reflecting this warped reality are America’s revised history textbooks, which are short on heroic figures and long on “history from below.” Physicist Myron Pauli, a featured writer on BarelyABlog.com, recently recounted his surprise at learning from his daughter’s “history” book that “World War II was fought primarily by women, Navahos, Mexicans, blacks, and Japanese-Americans.” The next edition, presumably, will illuminate the “neglected” role of the homosexual, hermaphrodite, and transgendered community in winning that war.

Boyhood today means BB guns and “bang-bang you’re dead” are banned. Tykes have a choice: undergo anger management and anti-bullying instruction or be chemically neutered by way of ADHD meds. Concomitantly, although your kids (boys and girls) desperately need discipline, the rare classroom disciplinarian risks litigation (from you!).

And, as his real nature craves heroic tales about yesteryear’s warriors and explorers, a little boy is required to hack his way through a page-turner like “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads.” The smashing success of politically incorrect books such as “The Dangerous Book for Boys” proves just how much little boys want to be boys again. The book reintroduced a new generation of youngsters to the joys of catapult-making, knot-tying, stone skimming, astronomy (concocting rocket fuel from saltpeter and sugar is not in the book, but is a lot of fun—or so my husband tells me). In short, more of the stuff of Boy Scouts, before the organization was hounded and hogtied by politicized girls and gays.

This very sexual activism is practiced by the president of the United States. No other than Barack Obama tinkled basketball player Jason Collins to congratulate him on stepping out as the first openly gay player in NBA history. Imagine Vladimir Putin or the president of Chechnya doing the same. Impossible!”

A huge step forward for our country” is how a hugely hyperbolic (and frightfully masculine) First Lady tweeted out about Collins’ “accomplishment.” Small mercies, Michelle Obama did not call the festive affair a giant leap for mankind.

In the unmanly (because so undignified) mosaic described so far, pride-of-place must be reserved for the American president. To a boy from a Muslim culture, America’s man-in-chief has to represent a mass of contradictions. This president and those before him lead the lavish and licentious lifestyle of an emperor. This as they bomb and obliterate other people from afar. Hardly honorable, much less manly.