Donald J. Devine

Defining national greatness
May 24, 1999

Contradicting its editorial ideology of national greatness through martial triumphalism, the Weekly Standard cover story for the week of the big Kosovo votes in Congress featured a modest teen girl who died a martyr in the Columbine High School massacre. Little Cassie Bernall was bigger than the president, Congress, the Air Force, NATO, Serbia, and the other pretentious institutions that week because true greatness actually comes from the countless simple acts of virtuous heroism that create the good society, day by day, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The Weekly Standard and the other "national greatness" conservatives apparently believe that national greatness comes from grandiose imperial projects such as war. Traditional conservatives believe America is great because its children, families and other little communities pursue good. Take Yugoslavia: whatever its grave errors of policy or its inhumane actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Serbia was not threatening the United States. No theory of a just war allows starting one without prior aggression or at least its threat. It is clear NATO bombing did not even stop the atrocities and it probably even provoked them to such a mass scale. When a vote in the House of Representatives supporting the current bombing failed on a tie, American intervention lacked even the legitimacy of law. This is national greatness — to bomb safely from 15,000 feet and blithely shrug off the civilian carnage as "collateral damage"?

Those neo-conservatives seeking some greater quest in the post-Cold War world need look no further than the decline of the institutions that really define national strength, high-lighted so tragically in Littleton. It is not guns, for they were more widely available before the rash of mass killings by children started just a few years ago.

Besides, no gun control is credible that does not confiscate the 200 million arms already in 40 percent of homes — and that simply cannot happen.

Blaming the decline on Hollywood and TV gets closer. Until recently, there was not the gratuitous violence of "Scream," where a teen-age girl is pictured watching her "jock" boyfriend being tortured to death by two fellow students, who then maim the girl and later butcher a dozen more students and teachers. Until recently, a newspaper like The Washington Post would not find that such a movie "deftly mixes irony, self-reverence and socially wry commentary," but would say it is sick.

While extreme, "Scream" is not much worse than most other TV fare and certainly is not more perverse than the "Natural Born Killers" film so favored by the Columbine killers.

Today, it is difficult to scan the TV channels and movies without being overwhelmed by either violence with no redeeming message or, at the very least, by constant assaults against common decency. Of course, this was the explicit mission of the intellectual left from its beginnings — to undermine traditional values and institutions and replace them with universal, neutral, "scientific" mores and bureaucracies.

Today, we, reap the results of two centuries of leftist efforts to cleanse the culture and the regime. For a long time, America escaped; but the intelligentsia rose in the New Deal and finally won control of the culture in the 1970s.

It took two generations to progressively wear down the tradition but it was finally acceptable to murder wantonly on screens in everyone’s home and to tolerate Nazi uniforms in school only by the 1990’. Do the greatness warriors have the courage to demand the necessary decency list?

All the stories about Columbine mentioned the empty neighborhoods to which the teen-agers returned after school, where the children were left to their own devices. Where were the adults? In the news stories, it was a mystery. If the greatness people are looking for something big to attack from closer than 15,000 feet, let them touch the real third rail of politics and demand that parents raise their children. As it is, liberal experts not only teach the parents (let us face it, mothers) that it is OK to do one’s own thing and pursue self-fulfilling work; but the shrinks actually warn it is unhealthy not to follow the selfish way.

Divorce too. The leftist intellectuals even produce studies proving children do equally well whether a mother is at home or at work, as if all the effort of those who stay at home is worth nothing, making it stupid for anyone to do so. Take on, not the extreme feminists, but the general belief that no one (except paid, part-time "experts") need do the hard work of child-rearing, every day, every waking hour. Danielle Crittenden, Wendy Shalat and a few brave others did but, without the resources of the Standard or the Wall street Journal — or the passion they devote to Kosovo — the culture cannot be regained.

If the passion to draw blood is not abated with this, try another big institution worthy of some fervor: education. Here the government has a monopoly and everyone not on the National Education Association payroll knows it is a disaster. It is not so much that schools will not teach math but that they cannot teach virtue. No one teaches character, except a bit at church for some.

To teach neutrality, that tolerance is the highest value, requires tolerating Nazis, as in Colorado. Cracking down with a purer politically correct line is neither tolerant nor effective. The only real solution is to create schools that are allowed to teach value standards, even religious ones. But this requires private schools competing with the government ones. Let the national greatness media confront the NEA with the voucher head on, not leisurely, but every day.

For ones willing to use the military at the drop of the regal hat, where is the passion about defense reform? Not the strategic defense initiative, which everyone now purports to support, but a tough one like military standards. Women at West Point get an "A" grade for the same performance that earns a man "D." Why? The average female has only half the upper body strength of a man and 70 percent of the aerobic capacity (the average 20-year-old woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old man.) At the Naval Academy, female midshipmen were almost 2.5 times more likely to suffer torn ligaments as men, and were injured 11 times more on the obstacle course. Pregnancy is now officially compatible with a military career. The Center for Naval Analysis reports the "unplanned loss’ of time on duty at sea is 10 percent for men and 25 percent for women. Before confronting Slobodan Milosevic, Bill Kristol, solve that.

If the greatness crowd wants more, the three largest national programs are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; and they are all bankrupt. One thing is for sure: The national greatness spokesmen are very angry with traditional conservatives, who even opposed the Kosovo bombing — much less sending ground troops — calling them cowardly McGovernites. But if name-calling is what it takes to begin the debate, then so be it.

At its 50th anniversary meeting here in Washington, NATO changed its mission from defense to active world policeman, without a by-your-leave form Congress.

Before we trip into something even worse, it is time to decide whether American greatness consists of world crusades of moral cleansing or of building free institutions peacefully, from the bottom up.

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Donald Devine, former director Of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is a columnist and a Washington-based policy consultant and a Vice Chairman for the American Conservative Union.