Breitbart’s new “Big Hollywood” site appears to be off to a strong start. — I’m still trying to catch up with the initial flood of interesting articles there!
I was positively delighted to see today that Bill Whittle has joined in the action and done what he does best: written another knock-it-out-of-the-park essay that focuses the mind, stirs the soul, and pins the tail on the proverbial donkey. Remixing some elements from his brilliant Silent America essays, Bill lays bare the great peril that I believe we now face as a civilization comprised of free men and women — in this, our darkest hour of cultural self-loathing. The piece is titled “The Workshops of Identity”. By all means go read it now.
Placing our own situation in the context of the many civilizations that have risen and fallen before, Bill gets quickly to distilling the essential lesson:
One thing in common these patterns bear: the rise slow, the fall seemingly precipitous, and in every case we find the loss of nerve and strength and will comes not from the bottom, not from the common people at all, but from the rulers, the philosophers, the most affluent and educated who, in their comfort and Narcissism, abandon duty for self-absorption and self-gratification and who in boredom or self-loathing decide to fling open the gates of the city to the barbarians beyond, while the common man still stands at the walls prepared to die for the people in his charge.
And that gem of expression, my friends, is as usual just the beginning for Bill.
If you like what you see, and haven’t had the pleasure of reading Bill’s prior essays, I can’t possibly recommend them highly enough. They’re available free on his site, Eject! Eject! Eject!, as well as in print. You might start with one of my personal favorites, “Trinity”. I guarantee Bill will not disappoint. (His web server, on the other hand, has a very bad habit with reporting text encodings. If you see junk characters where punctuation should be, switch your browser’s text encoding (“View” > “Text Encoding” in Safari) over to “Western (ISO Latin 1)”, and all should be legible.)
A sampling of the many occasions on which I’ve cited Bill’s excellent work in the past (far more than I had realized until I paused to compile this list):
- Whittle’s Return
- My Tribe is Grey. What Color Is Yours?
- Great stuff recently enjoyed and not to be missed
- Soon, Time Again to Reflect
- 9/11 Observances, Part 2 (2006)
- The Return of Bill Whittle
- Bill Whittle’s back … again!
- Freedom, Wealth, and Poverty
- Freedom vs. Justice
- A Brief Lesson on Elementary Self-Defense
- He’s done it yet again
- Bill Whittle on the RNC, Sarah Palin, and John McCain
- Bill Whittle on The Undefended City
- Bill Whittle, on Kidney Stones and the Financial Crisis
- Cowboys and Secret Agents
- Bill Whittle: A Flag, on a Hill
- Thanksgiving Thoughts
Update 1/15: Thanks to Scoop LaRue for the link back from Conservative Exile!
