Bruce Walker
Men have long understood the
special connection between words and the transcendent. Historians like John
Lukacs have noted that virtually all of our reality is words. Novelists like
George Orwell saw only too well how the mutilation of words by monsters could
send reality into a hopeless downward spiral.
Leftists understand how well
words fight evil, but the concept of evil is abhorrent to Leftists. People are
"sick" or "ignorant" or "foolish" or
"unlucky" but never evil (except, of course, anyone who ever notes that
evil exists.) It is small wonder that the Left also wages war on words.
Education is increasing anti-educational. Images, like camouflage, can
delude, and so the Left uses images instead of plain language to send its
messages. The dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 is becoming the life of many people.
The illusion of normalcy in
horribly disfigured lives is preserved through an army of makeup artists,
constantly covering shattered lives with the narcotic of social conformity and
the ephemeral popularity. That Hitler was once wildly popular does not matter:
he is not popular now, so now – only now! – Hitler must have been a fiend.
When words must be used,
Leftists want these words in fiction and in drama and not in fact or in
history. Art has the power to inspire, but art has the greatest power to
deceive. Small wonder that some of the greatest horrors in history have been
done in the name of art. Anyone who believes great film cannot also be
great evil is a fool: the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in magnificent cinema; the
Nazis appeared best in beautiful Nazi art; the Gulag Hell of Soviet Russia was
made breathlessly seductive by artists who lacked souls.
When fiction must be replaced
by fact, or purported fact, then the facts should be spoken and not written.
Political speeches have become infinitely more important than political
platforms. So interruption has become the most accepted way of making a
point. Infantile denial of the obvious has become a placebo for
serious discourse.
It is not accidental that the
manuscripts of nighttime news programs look like Kindergarten arguments. Read
today excerpts from the Lincoln-Douglass debates or Patrick Henry's stirring
"Give me liberty or give me death!" speech. These written records of
spoken words, although sometimes only a summary of remarks made, still read as
great thoughts and great sentiments should read and should have sounded.
The intellectual deconstruction
that is Leftism so infects our world that even a great genius at a great
moment, like Winston Churchill in the Second World War, reads less clearly,
less crisply, less cogently and less compellingly than Lincoln's Second
Inaugural Address or his Gettysburg Address eight decades before.
Lincoln was not greater than Churchill: the Age of Lincoln was greater than the
Age of Churchill. The tone and the cadence of Churchill are what we hear in his
speeches, but in those two great speeches of Lincoln – those two very short and
very pointed addresses – the words themselves pierce all the frauds of cultures
and speak instead of nobility.
How did Lincoln's voice sound?
It was nothing as beautiful as Churchill or Reagan or FDR or Hitler or
Mussolini. How did Lincoln appear? He looked like a graying gargoyle, an object
of ugliness. Perhaps that is why the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural
are so very short: people were listening to the words, and when they stopped
listening then they would notice his superficial hideousness.
Leftists, when forced to use
written words, very much prefer that these words be editable. Old books are no
friends to any Leftist. Try to find Workers Paradise Lost or Capable of Honor
or Witness if you doubt the lust of Leftism for book burning. Each of these
masterpieces were bestsellers by great authors, yet most people could not even
tell you who wrote the book or when they were written.
Even The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's trilogy of the greatest holocaust in
human history, a book which Time Magazine simply called "the greatest book
of the 20th Century" is hard to find in most libraries and impossible to
find in most book stores. Why? Murdering books or kidnapping books keeps all
but a few of us in carefully hedged ignorance.
When Leftists write, they write
in enormous and dull prose. They write not to be clear but to kill clarity.
They dream up long-winded statements which boil down to nothing at all. They
write tax codes and mission statements. They write word painful to read.
This is why the world today –
America today – seems divided into those who hold things dear and those who
hold things worthless. Words give meaning to life. Men die for words. Men
created America with words. These words, whether found in the Declaration
of Independence or the Federalist Papers or the King James Bible speak easily
across centuries while the Leftist next today door cannot write a single
thoughtful paragraph. The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf,
grand tracts of Leftism, are tedious and dry.
Freedom is zest and slavery is
most of all abominable boredom. Writing words intended to speak for centuries
require the courage of faith and conscience. Writing words intended to die soon
in the memory hole simply requires the abdication of all that has value, which
is the soul of soulless Leftism.
© 2008
Bruce Walker — All Rights Reserved
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Bruce Walker is the author of
two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his
recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on
Christianity.
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