INDECISIVE INTESTINES:

Grapes Of Wrath (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, March 12, 2003, NY Times)

I have a confession to make. Right after 9/11, I was given a CD by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which included their rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I put it in my car's CD player and played that song over and over, often singing along as I drove. It wasn't only the patriotism it evoked that stirred me, but the sense of national unity. That song was what the choir sang at the close of the memorial service at the National Cathedral right after 9/11. And although that was such a wrenching moment for our nation, I look back on it now with a certain longing and nostalgia. For it was such a moment of American solidarity, with people rallying to people and everyone rallying to the president.

And that is what makes me so sad about this moment. It appears we are on the verge of going to war in a way that will burst all the national solidarity and good will that followed 9/11, within our own country and the world.

This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call--and my gut has told me four things.

Mr. Friedman here moves beyond self-parody--whose gut tells them four things? that's one hell of a complex gut feeling--to genuine obliviousness about what he's saying.

The point is that in the immediate wake of 9-11 even people of the Left, like him, were filled with a martial and patriotic fervor, prepared, though only momentarily, to wage a war on terrorism. Here, after all, are the words he was singing along to, penned during another, rather more divisive, American religious war:

Battle Hymn of the Republic (Julia Ward Howe, February 1862,
Atlantic Monthly)

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

The unity that Mr. Friedman was partaking of was largely a result of the Left's acquiesence in the President's call to crush the serpent, to never call retreat, and to be willing to die (and to kill) to make men free. The disunity he's worried about now, the fracturing of that unity, comes from the Left's decision to retreat and an unwillingness to kill even if it will set people free. George W. Bush and those of us who are following him have stayed in exactly the same place we were after 9-11. Where have all the Friedmans gone?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 11, 2003 11:34 PM