The threats against France prove it: it doesn’t matter if you ally with the United States or not. Al Qaeda is the enemy of all liberal societies.

Not that, in this case, France’s position is so pure. The banning of religious symbols in their public schools is a serious affront to the freedom of religion and of speech. This is the kind of thing that made the 13 colonies of Vespuciland revolt and break away from Europe back in the late 1700′s…

Besides being a regressive and discriminatory tactic, it’s also a stupid one. Making Muslim girls take off their physical headscarves isn’t going to lessen their religious belief; on the contrary, the banning will make Muslims feel (rightly) like an oppressed minority, and consequently they will cinch more tightly the headscarves in their minds. But maybe those atheists in the French government have never heard of Circumcision of the Heart.

And re-enacted by bunnies.

You can number me among those disappointed by the results of the recent Spanish election. My heart goes out to the Spanish people, but in their grief, I think, they have made a gross mistake.

Mark Steyn, writing in the Telegraph, gives a cogent if harshly titled analysis. Edward Luttwak wrote a piece for the New York Times also worth checking out.

The gist is that the Spanish have sent a clear signal to Al Qaeda and other terrorists that they can be cowed into submission; that Al Qaeda’s bombs work, and work well, having changed the direction of a Western democracy in their favor.

Now Julian Sanchez, writing in Reason, gives perhaps the best possible case for why the results of the Spanish election was not about, or not just about, the ‘A’ word. But as Steyn points out, “no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the background – just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government.”

Sanchez admits as much, but claims that the Western pundits are creating this perception of appeasement in the terrorists’ minds, making for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, no, not quite. The Al Qaeda videotape found after the bombing blamed Spain’s involvement with the “Bush criminals and their allies” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Spanish people voted for the party that would extricate them from these alliances. 2 + 2 still equals 4, doesn’t it?

There is a lot of willful ignorance here. The first bit is on the part of those Spanish that think they’ll be safer after their troops leave Iraq. It was not but one month after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden began talking about the “tragedy of Andalusia.” The what? Andalusia—you know, the kingdom Christian Spain took back from the Muslim Moors during the 13th century.

Spain will never be safe from Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda’s goal is at the least the reconquest of all lands ever held by Muslims; and there’s a good bet Osama wasn’t lying when he called for the destruction of all our licentious Western democracies.

The latest news is that Spain’s new Prime Minister Zapatero vows to “relentlessly hunt down terrorists”—but won’t go to war against them. This is the second bit of wishful thinking. Because you cannot defeat an enemy bent on your destruction by simply making proclamations. Naming a single director for the Civil Guard and the National Police won’t deter the extremists trying to destroy you. The Spanish people may hope—and I do hope with them—that this cup will pass, but if it doesn’t—and I doubt that it will—the Spanish are going to have to recapture some of the spirit of their 13th century ancestors. That, or lose everything Isabelle and Ferdinand worked so hard to give them.

One of the reasons—besides mere procrastination—that I failed to blog in February was my newfound employment at—well, I won’t give you the name—a major chain bookstore. One of the benefits the store offers its employees is a 14-day book loan of any title on the shelves. Through this program I’ve finally been able to get my hands on a copy of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning.

I’m not going to do a full review here. That’s been better done elsewhere. I recommend reading the book, or at least John J. Reilly’s review for background. But for my short-attentioned friends, the basic premise of the book is that English and American history running back to the 13th century operates in cycles (or saecula, as the authors put it) of 80 to 100 years—each of which is divided into four turnings with corresponding generations. The “Fourth Turning” of the book’s title is the Crisis era; the last one we experienced was the Depression and World War II. The authors (the book was published in 1997) predicted the next Crisis era to begin somewhere around 2005, give or take a few years.

Now then, a lot of people who’ve read this book, and apparently the authors themselves, have concluded that the 9/11 attacks were the beginning of a Crisis era. And indeed for a while it seemed so—the country was filled with a new resolve, and we swooped down on Afghanistan and Iraq.

But… But… Maybe I am indeed just a cynical Nomad, the tail end of Gen X, but it seems to me much of this resolve has disappeared, and the sense of unity which was so strong after 9/11 has dissolved. We have returned to obsessing over the trite and the trivial. The war coverage is still there on the news, but it is sandwiched in between segments on Paris Hilton and John Kerry’s forehead.

Reading Strauss & Howe’s book, and their descriptions of the different turnings, I can only come to one conclusion: we are still in the era preceeding the Crisis; we are still in the Unraveling.

Seeing it like this, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not the first of a new era, but the last of the old one. It seems especially accurate to speak of Iraq this way—as an Unraveling era campaign begun in the early 1990′s and not finished until the early 2000′s.

There’s a sense, I think, that during an Unraveling nothing serious can be done; the public won’t tolerate casualties, for instance, and no one is capable of great political initiatives. But this is historically untrue; in the last Unraveling we had World War I, Prohibition, and women’s suffrage.

In an Unraveling, the authors said, the spirit which appears in a Crisis can indeed show up, but it disappears quickly; the flame flickers brightly, but then dies.

Quite simply, 2001 was too early for a Crisis. The Boomers are too young to act as Gray Champions; Rumsfeld, of the silent generation, has been the architect of our recent wars—and it is the tail end of Gen X who has for the most part been on the ground fighting them, not the up and coming Millenials. Much has been made of the great role our Special Forces have had. Well, Special Forces troops tend to be older than your average soldier—placing them firmly in the Gen X demographic. Even more revealingly, the tactics of Special Forces—unconventional, loner missions out on the edge—stand in stark contrast to the Crisis archetype of fresh faced team player youth contributing their small part to the march of a division.

What does this mean, then? What implications does it have, if we accept we are still in the Unraveling?

Not happy ones, unfortunately. For having the real Crisis ahead of us means we have some great Reckoning yet to come; something of which 9/11 was only a small, if bitter, foretaste. The Reckoning will only be the beginning of our labor; work that will last a generation’s length. If there is a silver lining, it is that with the Crisis will return the Spirit of America we all felt so keenly in the aftermath of the Trade Center’s fall; this time for an extended engagement. If God is with us the nation will come through into an era of unprecedented prosperity. But first a long, dark night.

“One great idea on which all tragedy builds is the idea of the continuity of human life. The one thing a man cannot do is exactly what all modern artists and free lovers are always trying to do. He cannot cut his life up into separate sections. The case of the modern claim for freedom in love is the first and most obvious that occurs to the mind; therefore I use it for this purpose of illustration. You cannot have an idyll with Maria and an episode with Jane; there is no such thing as an episode. There is no such thing as an idyll. It is idle to talk about abolishing the tragedy of marriage when you cannot abolish the tragedy of sex. Every flirtation is a marriage; it is a marriage in this frightful sense; that it is irrevocable. I have taken this case of sexual relations as one out of a hundred; but of any case in human life the thing is true.

The basis of all tragedy is that man lives a coherent and continuous life.

It is only a worm that you can cut in two and leave the severed parts still alive. You can cut a worm up into episodes and they are still living episodes. You can cut a worm up into idylls and they are quite brisk and lively idylls. You can do all this to him precisely because he is a worm. You cannot cut a man up and leave him kicking, precisely because he is a man. We know this because man even in his lowest and darkest manifestation has always this characteristic of physical and psychological unity. His identity continues long enough to see the end of many of his own acts; he cannot be cut off from his past with a hatchet; as he sows so shall he reap.”

-G.K. Chesterton

And yet, that we live a continuous and coherent existence is the source of all our great and lasting joy as well. At least, it would be if I could have you back in my life.

My memory isn’t too good, I guess. Echoes of just two things.

“I love you.”

“This is the end.”

And I’ve never seen how those two statements are compatible.