In vino veritas

Well let's see. It's almost midnight on January 4th and I've had about four glasses of vino (Yellow Tail). Just finishing the last few pages of Mark Steyn's America Alone.

I'm not sure if the wine improves my usually brilliant analytical prose or not. I usually post sober. I hope it doesn't affect my many prejudices. I've spent too many years cultivating them to have them wiped out in a few minutes by a couple of glasses of red wine. Accordingly, if I do post something here redolent of liberal wishy-washy cheese eating surrender monkey ...... whooooa .... all systems seem to be registering go for prejudicial commentary .....

Steyn has written a pretty good book (somewhat repetitive, but good) that accords with my view of the Islamic threat to our civilization. Even more importantly he points out how our defeat, if it comes, will be largely a self-inflicted wound. That is how great civilizations die, you see ... by suicide.

That part of his book is the most depressing part of his analysis, but it is the pertinent part. The demographic reality is not empirically refutable. Our refusal to procreate dooms us.

We are either aborting our future, or are refusing to make and nuture it. My apologies to my two sons. I bequeath you a mess created by my generation that is largely narcissistic and materialistic in the extreme. Steyn says we Westerners spend our productive decades as perrennial adolescents. Guilty as charged. I did not begin to grow up until I married at 39. I did not become an adult until I held my first-born son in my arms at age 43. I became a Conservative after I turned 50. It seems I'm a late bloomer boomer.

Well better late than never I say (an early bird not being an option). I will nurture my sons with all the love I can muster to the best of my callow abilities and I promise, as a New Year's resolution (which I normally abhor) to shake off the dead hand of social consensus and speak that which I know.

God bless those engaged directly in the fight against our ancient and pitiless enemy. On you rests more than your smugly effete compatriots know.

(burp!)

Harrowing risks and insurgent seepings.

On Tuesday Canada's national Mop & Pail newsrag ran a Canadian Press story by a chap named Les Perraux noting that the Canadian Afghanistan mission was the top news story of 2006. Not too surprising if you think about such things. Consider, however, how Mr. Perraux depicts the deployment.

For the first time since the Korean War, Canadian soldiers went into sustained, major combat and suffered hundreds of casualties, including 36 deaths in the past year.

Canadians took tiny patches of terrain at harrowing risk only to have insurgents seep back into strongholds. like ghosts of anti-Soviet forces from the 1980s.

And through the spring-to-fall Afghan fighting season, images of Maple Leaf-draped coffins became crimson staples for front pages and newscasts.

There is nothing I like better than un-slanted, fact-based news story that leaves editorializing to - ah - editorial writers. Yessiree. Globe & Mail editors and Canadian Press writers are exemplars of this fine liberal press tradition, as the above noted prose exemplifies. Don'tcha think?