France, like a cur dog.

I am fond of the image of a dog lying on its side and raising its legs to expose its belly as a metaphor for surrender. That is what the West is mad, crazy to do these days. To surrender to its inferiors, that is.

It once was a strength of the West to tolerate aberrational thinking because we understood that it can sometimes illuminate important problems or open new doors of scientific understanding. We also simply decided to value freedom as an end in itself and permit others to enjoy it short of the destruction of the established order or conduct that would scare the horses. The resulting diversity we understood contributed to variety and nuance and was often a welcome relief from Levittown sameness. So what if someone wanted to build a pyramid of bottles, discarded tires, and railroad ties? Maybe you wouldn’t hire the guy to tutor your kids in social studies, true, but then the project could be seen as a healthy outlet for someone whose energies might be devoted to unhealthier ones if his freedom to use his own property were interfered with.

Think Democrat Party politics.

Correctives existed in the form of zoning laws, association bylaws, ridicule, avoidance, or, in the case of misguided intellectual experimentation and trail blazing, debunking.

Think global warming.

But what can you say about a great nation like France that turns this upside down and embraces aberration as though it were the Blessed Sacrament itself?

Much as I am given to periodic frustration and amazement at France’s policy choices that seem to come straight out of a house of mirrors or an advanced degree program in how to goad Americans, I could never imagine the president of such a country in fact surrendering so abjectly to something so debased as Islamic civilization, loosely speaking.

Nicolas Sarkozy, Président de la République, has called Arabic the “language of the future, of science and of modernity" and believes that “investing” in this language “brings with it one of the oldest and most prestigious civilizations of the world.”

The fact that Islamic culture has been noted only for its military conquest, elimination and subjugation of non-Muslims and women, its theocracy and total incompatibility with self government and free inquiry, and its near total failure to discover, invent or produce anything of value throughout its history seems not to have been noticed by Sarkozy.

More likely, he knows this but calculates that keeping the peace with millions of Muslims foolishly permitted to take up residence in France will avoid an immediate upheaval, the inevitable later one to be dealt with by some schnook successor.

The British once seriously considered between WWI and WWII that France was its principal antagonist. The most crazed tea-drinking, scone-biting, Yorkshire pudding-nibbling officers of the Imperial General Staff who pushed that seemingly odd idea have come close to being vindicated by events. That their own government itself would adopt similarly pusillanimous policies that would put Britain at risk is an irony they would not have found bearable.

"Sarkozy: “Arabic Is the Language of the Future.” By Tiberge, Brussels Journal, 10/14/08.