Ten days before Christmas, I contracted a sore throat, an obnoxious contagion sweeping through the community as children carried it home from schools for the holiday. It wasn't a cold, I know, for want of a single symtom. Colds do not generate in me a malaise; the flu does, but this sickness was not apparently a flu. Whatever the proper diagnosis, I spent the week prior to Christmas in a slough of discouragement with myself and my life. In my mind, I rationally recognized the discouragement as a symptom of the sore throat and struggled against the mood; alas, to no avail. Only as my health improved did the mood ebb. By Christmas day, I felt better and my normal mood of optimism prevailed.
While I moldered with my sick throat, frequent coughing and hacking prevented me from focussing my mind on any task. Even my morning reading of our daily newspapers--a ritualistic occasion shared with my wife in which we voice back and forth across the breakfast table our favorite rants--was distracted and desultory. I absorbed little. The flecks of the nation's changing political mood, blowing in the media winds, blew past me unobserved. Somehow, I filtered out the premature posturings of new elevated Democratic Party committee chairpersons, as they flexed their party's agenda, much as, I suppose, my brain filters out my vision the shadows on my retina cast by the floating specks of debris from the disintegrating irises and other matter of my eyes.
As I--and we, the nation--slouch toward the new year, the national mood begins to show itself. If you read the NIH guidelines for the emergence of clinical depression, as distinguished from situational depression, you get guidelines for watching for evidence of the new mood. It persists longer than two weeks. You wake earlier than normal in the morning thinking blue thoughts. The mood spreads like a gel into the pores and interstices of the news, institutional events, and bureaucratic processing. Normality is being infected. The national sore throat appears in the voices of Democratic Party influentials, such as Senator Biden, who cough and hack their intentions before the cameras and microphones. The Democratic Party is preparing to reprise its shameful theatrics of the early 1970s. Then, the party forced abandonment of the nation's fight against Communism in southeast Asis, with murderous consequences that followed for a decade; now it will force abandonment of the fight against Islamic totalitarianism. Murderous consequences will follow for another decade, probably another generation.
Churchill's metaphor for the successive failures of democratic Europe to confront Nazism in the 1930s was the gathering storm. What America is experiencing now is not, however, a gathering storm. It is an emerging mood disorder, a mood illness, a spreading infection that will disable us, weaken us, and ultimately threaten the nation. A nation imbued with discouragement and malaise cannot confront, cannot defeat, a nation, such as Jihadist Islam, imbued with optimism and self-confidence.
As with other illnesses, our growing national mood disorder shall have to endure a crisis before course of treatment and correction shall occur. We will have to endure pain and loss, before we will be in a situation where the illness of our mood disorder reveals itself to ourselves. That crisis will be, of course, another major strike against us. When it shall happen of course we don't know, in 2007, or 2008, or 2010, or 2015. Many doctors--the expert analysts, such as Kissinger--say a massive military strike against the homeland is inevitable. But in the insular delusion created by our mood of discouragement, even the words of doctors, such as Daniel Pipes, are ignored by the patient. I pray, selfishly, that my family in New York will survive what is to come, that we will get our haven in out of Southern California created in time to provide a haven for them and us.
(Revised.)
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