It is now barely two weeks since the Terror in New York. Americans are still in the throws of an admixture of shock, passion, grief and denial. On the surface, we are united as never before. This pampered democracy; this brave and generous people; this arrogant, proud people; this indulgent, raucous collection of rich and poor, urban and rural, native and immigrant, black, brown, yellow and white, — all of us are, for the day, Red, White, and Blue as we have not been in three generations. Perhaps more.

President Bush's popularity is at historic highs, exceeding Harry Truman at the end of World War II, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt at its beginning. Yet, it is fair to say, it is unclear as to what our final disposition toward the ugly events of 9-11 will be. We shall see ...

I believe we shall not resolve this crisis of America, this crisis of what we are as a people, until we properly respond with the statement and moral conclusion, "They — Are — Evil!"

Superficially simplistic, this four syllable sentence is profound in its implications and a decisive philosophical dislocation with the last thirty years of American acculturation.

"They" delineates a clear headed sense of self-definition, a definitive break with the , 'we're all alike; all peoples are equal' school of cultural relativism, taught to two generations of Americans and seemingly invincible within the academy and popular culture. This wide eyed and breathless naiveté choked to death in the acrid smoke of cement and steel, amid visions of dancing Palestinians in the streets, on the morning of 9-11;

"Are" is in the present tense; it is the now, not some safe, academic, dim and infinitely malleable past; not in some speculative, poetic abstraction of the future;

"Evil" is a concrete moral judgment, not a relative term. How decisively counter it runs to a relativistic age. It defines a universal 'wrong', and counterposes, by implication, a universal standard of 'Good.'

If America awakens from thirty years of moral somnolence and can speak these words, "They Are Evil," perhaps we shall yet be able to summon the moral fortitude necessary to confront the unambiguous Evil of 9-11. For it is not Bin Laden nor the Taliban who is our ultimate enemy. Rather, it is our own lack of moral compass, focus, humility and fortitude under pressure. We are like wraiths on the wind, neither alive nor dead, who know not ourselves nor the world in which we live. Our world is Disneyland and Ally McBeal; indulgence without consequences, feeling without substance. We sit, warm, well fed and comfortable as against a windowpane, while a blizzard of brutality howls outside one eighth inch of thermal glass. Our glass cocoon shattered in shards of the World Trade Center and showered us in awareness of a 'nature red in tooth and claw.'

Our own inability to perceive — and act upon — the very definition of 'Evil' is our real enemy. Until we were so violently jarred from the lulling seductions of physical and material security, and awakened to the predations of mortal threat, we lived without need of the strength and definition and unity within us.

Now, we shall see if that fortitude and residual American character can sustain us still, or if it is fatally atrophied. We shall see if this generation is to be aroused, unified by mortal moral threat to America and sustained by the Idea for which it stands.

Three times Pearl Harbor died on 9-11. Three generations of indulgence, decadence and self doubt have seductively whispered to three generations of Americans since. Grandfathers fought and defeated empires, east and west. Now, we shall see if youth so separated from their experience can re-forge the sterner stuff essential to survive, as a people and as an Ideal for mankind ...

The unctuous voices of denial, moral disarmament, relativist seduction, and blissful sleep drift over us like air candy even now ... On National Public Radio, three commentators mused on the unspeakable horrors of 9-11... A former Clinton Administration State Department official mused: "We must step back and not react in anger and haste ... We must apply pressure in non-violent ways, such as gradually tightening economic sanctions and working with allies to make the doers of violence a Pariah among nations." (Now that should keep the Taliban quaking in their turbans ...)

A female commentator concurs, "Yes, I fear violence only begets violence. We must work to examine ourselves, to examine the provocations that would incite such violence and confront the hatreds within us. I fear if we react with a military response, we will only provoke further violence against us ..."

And, in a Coup de Grace to civilized thought, in a classic monument to moral anemia by a male NPR commentator, " ... as horrible as the tragedy in New York was, we should remember, there were deaths on both sides!" Could one imagine a more quintessentially exquisite distillation of liberal relativist (non)thought than this insipid, clammy, utterly bankrupt interchange?

Yet ... are there Americans who recognize these words for what they are? Are there Americans who give these words any credence? Are there Americans who are persuaded by its Pied Piper appeal? One's thought runs to the smarmy calculations of Wormwood, C.S. Lewis's character in The Screwtape Letters ...

I should say this NPR 'opinion' is rather the sump distillation of the cultural relativity, moral disarmament, and sonorously savage cultural deconstruction of the last thirty years. Given time and space to grow, the so-predictable NPR vacuity and familiar relativist refrain shall replace the immediate, objective, popular, 'reactionary' horror at 9-11 with the elites' seductive soliloquy of moral surrender.

This Voice of the Dead is sung daily by our anointed elites, that eunuch chorus of a self-hating, deconstructing, dying culture.

But the choice is up to us, the People. By our choice we shall be measured. Yet, free will is hardly free. Choices are free; consequences of choice are often costly.

The devolution is indeed fascinating to watch as it is exhilarating to engage. We are like Ciceros, struggling vainly, yet watching the consensus for Republican virtue fade in the mists of our own, self imposed antiquity. Or are we ... ?

We must assiduously avoid calling 9-11 a 'disaster' ... Disasters are earthquakes and other natural acts of God ... We must not call the World Trade Center a 'tragedy' ... Tragedy is non-volitional, as when a child dies in a struggle with cancer ... We must be able to call 9-11 'Evil'... It is an atrocity. It is volitional, cataclysmic, soulless Evil. It is the act of an eternal Enemy, an enemy not of a people or religion or culture, but an Enemy of original transgression. An enemy which spans religious definition. An enemy that resides and grows within each human heart which loses the clarity to recognize, loses the fortitude to resist.

When we can see Evil, recognize it, and call it by its name — only then shall America be, not just disturbed, not merely impassioned by the emotive moment, but truly Awake. Only then shall we be able to do what we must to identify and confront this horror which threatens, not only the seat of civilization on earth, but our very soul. Only then may we have hope of triumph, in our finest moment, over the unspeakable Evil of 9-11.

Two jet-bombs immolated the World Trade Center; a third exploded within the walls of the Pentagon; yet a fourth was retaken from the hijackers by magnificently heroic Americans who refused to ride on the wings of Evil. They knowingly and willingly died that others might live.

America itself now rides in the Fifth jet. It is not too late to awaken. It is not too late to seize control of the Fifth Jet. Americans themselves must recognize Evil — and those who enable it. Americans must refuse to ride to the death of good and beautiful things. We must do what must be done. Awaken; seize control; that the Idea of America may yet triumph and enlighten the world. We must act, not in arrogance, not in haste, not in passion, but in the bracing splash of spring water clarity, of rock-cold resolution ... And in the warmth of re-found faith in God, in our country, and in ourselves.

If 9-11 has taught us to define Evil again. It has also taught us of our own good, and of value worth defending.

In our re-birth and resolution, in our unity and in our action, May God, indeed, bless America. ... As Todd Beamer, American Hero, might say, "Let's Roll!"

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