Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again
In the 1797 rhyme, though all the king’s horses and men tried their best, Humpty-Dumpty remained broken.
Since the First World War when an American President called for destruction of balance of power politics, our concept of the national interest was infected with a spiritual disorder. That disease was made visible in a variety of attempts to surpass real problems the American nation encountered with proposals that transcended mere politics.
We call these proposals “the Democratic Project” which can be misdiagnosed as “Idealism” or selfless aspiration and confused with teachings that we read in the King James Bible.
Underlying the “Democratic Project” is not the “Sermon on the Mount,” but a rejection of reality and reality’s replacement with another, much better, reality rooted in all the deep recesses of the human soul where we hide from the Giver of Life and aspire “to go it alone.”
That, basically, is what “Making the world safe for democracy” means.
Ignore the centers of faith, community and tribe and replace them with something new and “Made in America.”
The civil society we imposed on Afghanistan would last until the native forces of that Muslim nation could breath without contamination by noxious American idealism.
Now our intellectuals wonder what went wrong and are searching for a new idealistic spirit to cover our eyes from reality.
“Reality” rightly understood rejects “nation building” and the placing in harm’s way of American boys and girls with high school idealism and memories of military service by fathers and grandfathers. They fight in honor of the service of family members not suspecting that they, veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars, are victims of a modern ideology
When, and if, they come to understand that, “the Democratic Project” will be given an officer’s funeral at Arlington and we might see an unbroken Humpty-Dumpty..
