King Features Weekly Service
He Hasn't Kept Us Safe
defeating the terror group and limits the resources devoted to fighting it. So long as ISIS looks as though it is successfully resisting its enemies, though, it has a magnetic appeal to potential loyalists in the West. If it is impossible to snuff out the ideology of Islamic radicalism on the battlefield, it is possible to make it look much less alluring. No one likes a loser. ISIS will no longer have such perverse cachet as soon as it is crushed in the field. President Obama is certainly right that a San Bernardino or an Orlando isn't going to bring the country to its knees, but he underestimates the price to American society. Do we want to live in a country where every county agency or nightclub feels compelled to deploy metal detectors and armed guards? President Bush used every tool in his power, from the Patriot Act, the NSA surveillance program and enhanced interrogations to relentless military operations overseas, in his zeal to protect the homeland. President Obama let up the pressure, and what he once dismissed as the JV team is exacting a terrible price.
June 13, 2016
dents,granted, when, inespecially point of fact, it isthat the Bush's sucgiven students arediminished too blinkeredthe by race cesswho itself urgency people and gender to marvel at great works felt about the terror threat. Butofwith two doart. mestic terror attacks in the past six months The poet Maya Angelou said in a leckilling more people and wounding ture once that as athan child60she thought, more than 70, the long stretch “Shakespeare must be a black girl.” of safety at is harder to dismiss. It washome because, growing up in the Jim Crow South, a victim of unspeakable The rise of terror attacks within the U.S. abuse, 29 spoke so powerfully -- Sonnet in addition to the mayhem in San Berto her. nardino and Orlando, there has been a Yale’s petitioners must consider Toni drumbeat of to smaller attacks -- corresponds Morrison a traitor her race and genwith ISIS conquering and holding der. She had an argument with a the- swaths of A Safe Space territoryyears in Syria Iraq. Itshe isn't a coinciater director agoand in which From Chaucer defended “Othello,” and went on to dence. production based DesdeYale English majors are demanding a write aJohn McCain and on other hawks warned President Barack Obama desperately mona, the play’s doomed female charsafe space from Chaucer. so often during the Iraq War that if we rewanted be a peacetime president, is Or how about Derek Walcott, In a to petition to the English depart-yet acter. treated in the face of the jihadi whom a Yale professor sympathetic threat overending second term with Islamic ment,his Yale undergraduates declare terseaspetitioners it would follow us home, the argument to the suggests adding a required two-semester rorthat attacks looming larger thanseminar at any time began to lose its force. But they were right. to the required course? He told The on Major English Poets is a danger to since 9/11. The tide of war isn't receding, Guardian newspaper a few years ago It is an iron law of nature that if a group like their well-being. Never mind that the as he famously contended in a speech on be absurd to haven, say, “Don’t read offending poets, Shakespeare, Chau- it would ISIS gets a safe it will use it to train, thecer, Afghan drawdown in 2011; it is lapping because he was white.” Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, et Shakespeare recruit and propagandize for terror attacks onto our shores. Anyone reading widely in the English al., are the foundational writers in the against the West. canon will encounter supremely talThe left language. hates the notion George W. English It’s as ifthat chemistry President view isInthat attacks female, blackObama's and gay writers. students learning the periBush "keptobjected us safe,"tobut after Sept. 11 -- ented a like the one on the Pulse nightclub fact, many other Yale courses feature aren't an odic table. plot set in motion before he took office -them.existential But the creative streamhebegan threat. While certainly doesn't root of another the plaintsignificant against the BushThe prevented attack so-called dead white males. It is them horseminar is, of course, the usual PC with want them to happen and finds thebean-counting, rest of his presidency, at a time their rible geniusand thatwrenching, their words they transcend where prodigious tal-when are the implicit a follow-on strikestood here the at home their time and place and have given us ents who have test ofseemed time all price of what he conceives as a prudently butand inevitable. explore the deepest questions phrases, characters and stories that are crafted anti-ISIS strategy -in other words, still vital today. to beachievement human are for Itabout was what easy ittomeans take this one that doesn't show much urgency about An official description of the Major found wanting. The petition whines that “a year spent around a seminar English Poets seminar says the classes table where the literary contributions seek to create a heightened “curiosity of women, people of color, and queer about the way language works,” as folk are absent actively harms all stu- well as “a confidence in engaging with historically and formally diverse literdents, regardless of their identity.” This is a variation on the widespread ary texts.” This is a reasonable enough belief on campus that unwelcome academic goal — unless the students speech is tantamount to a physical involved are willfully incapable of threat. In this case, the speech happens curiosity or confidence. There is an easy solution to the to be some of the most eloquent words written in the English language. One dilemma of the aggrieved petitioners: can only pity the exceedingly fragile They shouldn’t study English, or anysensibility it takes to feel assaulted by, thing else that might challenge their say, “Lines Composed a Few Miles absurdly small-minded ideological hobbyhorses. Above Tintern Abbey.” The petition’s implicit contention is Rich Lowry is editor of the National that the major poets are too circum- Review. scribed by their race and gender to © 2016 by King Features Synd., Inc. speak to today’s socially aware stu-
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
*Answers located on next page.
MORE IRONY • In Sheridan, Wyoming, the annual Snow Festival was cancelled due to snow. • U.S. Rep. Charles Joelson was upset that souvenir statues of the U.S. Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima being sold in Washington D.C. were made in Japan. • A facility for the rehabilitation of alcoholics in Paterson, New Jersey happened to be located at the intersection of Straight Street and Narrow Street. • The first commercial with Mr. Whipple and Charmin toilet paper was produced in Flushing, New York. • Billy Carter, brother of former President Jimmy Carter, was allergic to peanuts.
(c) 2016 by King Features Synd., Inc.
Q. Where's the most ironic place to die? A. The living room! ------------------------------------Today I saw that my ironing board cover was wrinkled. I laughed at the irony. Then I laughed again because irony has the word 'iron' in it. -------------------------------------
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