The Cold Civil War: Now In Multimedia Form!

Back in the summer of 2010, I did one of my rather more involved Silicon Graffiti videos on the topic of the “Cold Civil War.” In retrospect, I wish I had done this video as a two-parter, given the number of elements I was juggling, including the Tea Party, Palestinian “Pallywood” video productions, and flip-cam gotcha clips. But the overall theme is that modern wars are fought in two places, on the physical battlefield, and inside the TV screen and computer monitor:

I certainly don’t claim any credit to the title. As I mentioned in the video, author William Gibson wrote the phrase the “Cold Civil War” for one of his science fiction novels in 2007. That led blogger April Gavaza, also known as the “Hyacinth Girl,” to pick up on the concept a year later. Mark Steyn would then put the phrase into wide dissemination via the Corner and his own Website. In the comments to my video, a reader pointed out that Ayn Rand used the phrase in the headline of a 1962 L.A. Times column.

Today, Michael Walsh runs with the topic at NRO, via his left-wing “David Kahane” alter-ego:

Dedicated as we are to striking, destroying, poisoning, and destabilizing, we naturally flocked to a party with a long criminal history such as the “progressive” Democrats had, and their admirably “flexible” and “nuanced” approach to such arcane notions as law and truth and morality and standards of right and wrong. It was like a permanent “get out of jail free” card, a form of atheist indulgence buying, but instead of sinning no more, we went out and sinned our tushes off.

Up was suddenly Down. Black was suddenly White. In was suddenly Out. How wonderful it all was. We never thought of the consequences, because consequences are for later and we are for the here and now. It’s no accident that one of our standard rejoinders when you lot objects to one or another of our social experiments that we’ve just implemented, usually by judicial fiat, is: “Well, the sky didn’t fall, did it?’

Only one thing stood, and continues to stand, in our way: you.

And by you I mean principally the other half of the Baby Boomer cohort, the ones who didn’t, like Satan, rebel. Some of them, a few, were like the angel Abdiel, who flirted with joining the insurgents but quickly repented and returned to the Enemy camp. But most of them just got up in the morning and went to work, dealing with reality as if it were, you know, reality, instead of the elaborate artificial academic construct we had fashioned. Unlike us, the constant kvetches, they never complained. They worked for ten cents on our dollar, their backs worth less than the penny for our thoughts, and still the fools were under the impression they were living the American Dream. Try as we might, and we did, to convince them otherwise, they believed in this country, believed in American exceptionalism, believed that their children would have a better life, believed — even when, like Abdiel, they slipped and fell — in the power of redemption. And even though we laughed at them, they persisted, which is one virtue we certainly know how to respect.

So the Cold Civil War continues, unto the generations, which would be mine. Because unless you finish us, we are most certainly going to finish you.

Read the whole thing, particularly since Occupy Wall Street is very much a rehash of the blue-on-blue late ’60s, with the radical far left “Occupiers” battling earnest liberal businessmen — and they’ll all go into the polling booth with the hopes of reelecting President Obama next year.