Mickey Rooney in Ah, Wilderness, the excellent 1935 movie version of the Eugene O'Neill play by the same name.
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Once and for about 200 years, the biggest danger on the Fourth of July was that the braver, wilder, dumber, dearest boys (yet untamed and "focused" by Ritalin doping) might get hold of some M-80s -- a quarter stick of dynamite, so the lore went -- and blow a finger off.
Which could be pretty awful; but today ... I don't have to draw a picture. Suffice it to say, it is now a core part of US Indepedence Day celebrations for federal, state and local authorities to be on highest alert for an Islamic bomb; for "First Responders" to be at the ready with stretchers, turnicots, oxygen tanks, in case random Muslims successfully execute Koran-holy jihad, and, then, they believe, find Allah's highest reward for killing infidels in Islamic paradise, an orgiastic "heaven" with 72 underage girls -- or, booby prize, 72 white raisins, depending on the translation.
Welcome to the Fourth of July in Dar al-Harb. Yes, face it, do, please: We, the People, have come to inhabit the Islamic land of war. Why? Because a critical mass of pious Muslims inhabit our land. Duh al-Harb. It really is that simple.
Here is a rubric devised by Dr. Peter Hammond and excerpted recently by Ingrid Carlqvist in an essay on the Islamization of Sweden. Cataclysmic recent experience across the Western world indicates the estimates below on escalation are very much on the conservative side -- perhaps because we now inhabit a hotter or hyper-state of global jihad in which less does more. Still, the progression by which Islamization becomes conquest is clarifying to see written out, and surely bolsters Donald Trump's call for a moratorium on Islamic immigration. History, past and recent tells us: with Islam comes Islamic law, jihad and dhimmitude -- the end of free civilization.
So, when did we become dhimmi-inhabitants of the jihad zone?
It's a very long story, and it didn't start with Islamic immigration. It didn't even start with the 1965 Immigration Act; nor did it start in the fierce fighting by elites of both parties against immigration controls, including ideological exclusions, passed by the Senate in the McCarran-Walters Act six decades ago. In those days, the revolutionary, collectivist and totalitarian ideology twisting and subverting liberty in this republic was Communism, not Islam. Our bulwarks had to be breached and overrun by Marx in order for Islam to follow.
We have to go back even one hundred years before that to see Marxists and Marxist ideas first entering the federal government in the administration of Abraham Lincoln -- here is a study which surely picqued my interest -- although I have yet to discover a mechanism for the infiltration-to-occupation of the US government and other institutions by ideological Communists and Soviet agents more effective, more successful than the administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Harry Truman -- as laid out in American Betrayal.
This may seem far afield from the 240th Fourth of July, but there is a holiday connection.
After performing yeoman work throughout 1943 -- from shilling for Stalin on the Katyn Forest Massacre, to shipping uranium to Moscow despite the Manhattan Project's embargo, to revealing to the Soviets that the FBI was secretly surveilling Soviet (atomic) espionage, and much more (all copiously footnoted in American Betrayal), FDR's top advisor Harry Hopkins -- said by some experts to be the greatest American agent of the Soviets during World War II -- would collapse in his Georgetown home on New Year's Day 1944.
Hopkins would take seven months to recover, returning to Washington on July 4, 1944.
He had plenty of damage in him, too, leaving much more rubble to sort through -- which, alas, reminds me: Have a safe Fourth.
Let's hope it's happier next year.
#MAGA