The new Crusade same as the old

June 29, 2002—Ray Berry recently wrote a letter in his BushToons, where he spoke of seeing a documentary on the '50s called "Duck and Cover," about the Cold War and nuclear war scare. He went on to suggest that it had built into those of us who were kids then a sort of hard-wiring acceptance of a black-and- white view of the universe, where We are always the Good Guys, and They are always the Bad Guys.

The problem is, of course, that the real world doesn't work that way, that it's all shades of gray.

Now, I have viewed the last 20-odd years as the GOP pushing this world-view as hard as it can. There was serious trouble for them by the time of the '92 elections, because The Evil Empire had fallen, and they had no real Bad Guys to be against. With what they tried through the '90s, we saw the first shots fired, when in the Bush-Dukakis debate, Bush Sr. "accused" Dukakis of being a "card-carrying liberal," as though he was accusing him of being a communist.

Obviously, it worked to some degree, but not far enough for them, since they lost the '96 presidential elections, as well.

With the advent of 9/11, they finally had everything they wanted back again: an Evil Empire (militant Islamics), consisting of, and run by, people who didn't look like us (assuming that "us" referred to Caucasians), who wanted to destroy us. Better still, unlike the Soviets, who were also a legitimate nation-state which could be destroyed economically, this was more of a Vietnam-style conflict, where the enemy could move, regroup, and attack again ("they won't stand up and fight like a man!" . . . didn't the British say that, in some little colonial conflict a couple hundred years ago?).

This is literally almost the scenario of Orwell's 1984, except that there is, at least for the moment, only one superpower fighting an eternal war.

Consider this phraseology, now: "fighting an eternal war against Evil." Ring a bell? Is this not exactly a return to the Crusades of the Middle Ages?