Mark Steyn on the Snotty Response to NR's Lopez

The other day National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez went to see Oliver Stone's new movie ''World Trade Center'' and remarked:

"It's about our love of family, and the work we'll do for them, and the joy they bring us. It's about the irreplaceable, incomparable bond between a man and wife. It's about the united outrage we feel when Americans are murdered. It's about why we fight."

This prompted the following letter: "For the record, and unless I am somehow uninformed, I think it fair to state that you do not fight -- you never have and, hopefully, never will have to. You are not a member of any of the branches of the armed forces, nor a reservist. You are not, and I am fairly sure, have never been engaged in a combat situation. Your contribution to this war is limited solely to your ability to exercise the skillset provided by your liberal arts education in the pages of the National Review.

"It does a tremendous disservice to your readers and is extraordinarily disrespectful to the millions of men and women around the world who are in uniform and fighting and dying for their countries."

What a bizarrely wrong-headed attitude. Aside from anything else, I wonder if the gentleman (if that's the word) understands how freakish it would strike every previous generation of Americans (and, indeed, almost every other society in human history) to berate a blameless young lady for not grabbing a rifle and heading for the front. And, if the issue is "extraordinary disrespect" to the troops, it's utterly self-defeating to argue that only active-duty servicemen get proprietorial rights in a war.

....

So even the most powerful military in the world is subject to broader cultural constraints. When Kathryn Lopez's e-mailer sneers that "your contribution to this war is limited solely to your ability to exercise the skillset provided by your liberal arts education," he's accidentally put his finger on the great imponderable: whether the skill set provided by the typical American, British and European education these last 30 years is now one of the biggest obstacles to civilizational self-preservation.

Read the whole thing.