[interviewer]:
How much of Tolkien’s Catholic beliefs and perspective resonate with you?

I’m burying my career so substantially in these interviews that it’s painful. But I think that there are some questions that demand honest answers.

I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged. And if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization. That does have a real resonance with me.

I have had the ideal background for being an actor. I have always been an outsider. I grew up in colonial Africa. And I remember in 1955, it would have to be somewhere between July the 25th when the school holiday started and September the 18th when the holidays ended. My father took me down to the quayside in Dar-Es-Salaam harbor. And he pointed out a dhow in the harbor and he said, “You see that dhow there? Twice a year it comes down from Aden. It stops here and goes down [South]. On the way down it's got boxes of machinery and goods. On the way back up it’s got two or three little black boys on it. Now, those boys are slaves. And the United Nations will not let me do anything about it.”

The conversation went on. “Look, boy. There is not going to be a World War between Russia and the United. The next World War will be between Islam and the West.”

This is 1955! I said to him, “Dad, you’re nuts! The Crusades have been over for hundreds of years!”

And he said, “Well, I know, but militant Islam is on the rise again. And you will see it in your lifetime.”

He’s been dead some years now. But there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and think, “God, I wish you were here, just so I could tell you that you were right.”

What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a jewel it is.

How did we get the sort of real democracy, how did we get the level of tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you around this table, and yet you will take it and you will think about it and you’ll say no you’re wrong because of this and this and this. And I’ll listen and I’ll say, “Well, actually, maybe I am wrong because of this and this.”

[He points at a female reporter and adopts an authoritarian voice, to play a militant-Islam character:] ‘You should not be in this room. Because your husband or your father is not hear to guide you. You could only be here in this room with these strange men for immoral purposes.’

I mean… the abolition of slavery comes from Western democracy. True Democracy comes form our Greco-Judeo-Christian-Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world.

And there is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren’t bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially. And rightly we should be. But there is a cultural thing as well.

By 2020, 50% of the children in Holland under the age of 18 will be of Muslim descent. You look and see what your founding fathers thought of the Dutch. They are constantly looking at the rise of democracy and Dutch values as being the very foundation of American Democracy. If by the mid-century the bulk of Holland is Muslim—and don’t forget, coupled with this there is this collapse of numbers ... Western Europeans are not having any babies. The population of Germany at the end of the century is going to be 56% of what it is now. The populations of France, 52% of what it is now. The population of Italy is going to be down 7 million people. There is a change happening in the very complexion of Western civilization in Europe that we should think about at least and argue about. If it just means the replacement of one genetic stock with another genetic stock, that doesn’t matter too much. But if it involves the replacement of Western civilization with a different civilization with different cultural values, then it is something we really ought to discuss—because, g**dammit, I am for dead white male culture.

That's what Howard Dean represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left.

Vermonters marked the end of the Dean era by electing a Republican governor and a Republican House. Even Vermont isn't as liberal as liberals assume. What's liberal is the idea of Vermont as it's understood across America: a bucolic playground of quaint dairy farms punctuated by the occasional boutique business that's managed to wiggle through the Dean approval process. A lot of those dairy barns are empty and belong to weekending flatlanders, the rest are adorned with angry 'Take Back Vermont' signs, and the quintessential Green Mountain boutique business, Ben and Jerry's, wound up selling out to the European multinational Unilever. But these dreary details are irrelevant. To Democratic primary voters across the land, Vermont is a shining, rigorously zoned, mandatory-recycling city on a hill. And the only way up the hill is by the bike path.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force.

They got him! Or so they suggested, back in March. No one said it explicitly, but for a day we hoped. The troops were massed and poised; intel came in, off when the rockets. I remember watching video of flames licking the sky that night - best of all possible worlds, it seemed. The war hadn’t even begun, and maybe the butcher was a pink smear on a shattered hunk of concrete. Not the case, as it turned out. Then came another decapitation attempt before the troops took Baghdad, and I thought the same thing: if only. "Coalition forces have discovered a liver on a rebar, and are making DNA tests as we speak!" But he lived. He fled. He literally went to ground. Looking at the odorous burrow where he was finally found, you realize that the last words Saddam might have heard were “fire in the hole!' - but somehow those atavistic cowboy soldiers swallowed their instincts and took him alive.

Good.

Alive is better.

Right now the TV is playing a hastily assembled documentary of Saddam’s rise to power – it’s mostly clips of the butcher in tailored suits, smiling, at ease, in power. The suits always seem to blind certain people. They see the suits, they assume the best. They want to sign treaties, make contracts, lend money. Yes, yes, he is a hard man, but it is a hard part of the world, no? One must deal with someone. Saddam was said to have studied Stalin, and in one respect he trumped his idol. Stalin’s smile never reached his eyes. He was always looking around to see who on his team was smiling more than he was, or wasn’t smiling enough. But sometimes Saddam actually had a genuine smile. And why not? He had his people under his heel, and a good portion of the West in his pocket. The American presidents, they came and went. Granted, so did their bombs. But no American president knew what it was like to grow up poor in Tikrit. No American president had ever shot a man – soft hands, they had. They had big sticks, but big sticks taxed the arms of weak men, and they always laid them down eventually.

Hence the grin; hence the big wide open toothy grin. Top of the world, ma. Top of the world.

Many have noted that the sight of Saddam looking like Nick Nolte’s mugshot will have a harsh effect on our old seething friend, the Arab Street. They will see him looking like a piss-soaked bum with matted hair and bags under his eyes that look like Kathy Bates’ bosom, and they’ll see the Proud Example brought low, the man who had stood up to America humbled and unmanned. (That always makes me wonder how many fellow Arabs a man can kill before that crime exceeds the virtue of Standing Up to America. Half a million? One? Two?) What struck me was his expression when the doctor poked around in his maw for a suicide pill – he had the standard reflex familiar to anyone who’s been in a dentist’s chair. The intimacy of the act makes you look away. You look up; you endure; you disengage until it’s over. Saddam humiliated himself. A big bald Yank stuck a stick in his mouth and he couldn’t even look him in the eye.

This was their hero? His army evaporated. His statues came down like cheap plastic bowling trophies. He ran away. He hid in a hole. There’s your man, O brave foes of American imperialism. It’s Ozymandias in reverse, really – in Shelley’s poem, the stumps of the great statue punctuate the vast and trackless desert, and when we are asked to look upon Ozymandias’ works and despair, it’s a comment on the smothering hand of time. Nothing remains. But now the entire world can look upon Saddam’s works, and despair for different reasons. We see what he did. We see everything that remains; we see what he didn’t do. It’s possible to build a reasonably prosperous society that invests in its people, doesn’t invade its neighbors, opposes Israel and stands up to America. (Just look at France.) He failed to give his people anything but the geegaws and baubles stolen from successful cultures. Streetlamps and telephones: so what? It was the sort of government that would institute rural electrification only to reward friendly tribes and power the testitcle-clamps in the torture cells.

Saddam’s failure isn’t his alone. The entire political construct he represents is a miserable man too tired to resist when it’s finally pushed against a wall. One hopes the point is made: when the US Army turns your way, your barber and your tailor are no help at all. When you’re a ragged hairy thug dragged from a bolt-hole who’s having his back teeth interrogated by a grim buff Murcan soljur who would really prefer to be home for Christmas, there’s a chance Paris and Berlin won't take your calls.

I’ve read all the nutball far-left sites worrying about the worrisome worries – does this help Dub? Was it all faked? Surely America will see that the man paraded before the cameras was a soy-based simulacrum cooked up in the Halliburton labs? It’s amusing to troll the fevered swamps, but nothing they say matters in the end. The history texts will note that Baghdad fell on this date, Saddam was captured on that date, and the events between the two events will fill up a paragraph at best. Cruel but true. This was a big event, but there are bigger events to come.

We live in an age where we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it does. And drop again it will.

If this war has a mascot, it’s the millipede.