Hey! "Experts," It's Called Democracy In Action

The Geek has taken the position that any legal or narrowly defined political effort to stop the Cordoba House community center, swimming pool, and mosque would only benefit the advocates of political Islam, which group includes the imam behind the "Ground Zero" project.

Simultaneously, the Geek has argued that politics in the largest sense, the coherent expression of a mass view that the proposed bit of triumphalism is unacceptable so near a place of American grief, American humiliation, and recovery would be a most excellent way to derail a horribly ill-advised project.

Not surprisingly, a portion of the monstrous regiment of "terrorism experts" have come out four square in favor of the proposition that opposition to the Great Community Center and Mosque will offer advantages beyond count to the proponents of political Islam, particularly those such as Anwar al-Awlaki, who favor violence in the name of Allah. These academic type analysts demonstrate the common occupational disease of the professorate and others of that ilk--a congenital lack of backbone. They are unwilling or constitutionally unable to see that there are limits to the old don't-offend-them-or-they-will-get-more-extreme.

Only academics and others like them--including members of the current administration--can really, really believe that appeasement works, that tossing t-bone steak to a wolf will make it a vegetarian. Such cringing hand-wringing, such giving in to the worst advice of naked fear may be appropriate in a faculty commons or around the smoothly polished table of a conference room, but it has no applicability in the real world.

Construction workers, the "hard hats" who had such a negative press during the Vietnam War given their habit of beating up on anti-war protesters and "hippies" in general, are contradicting the "experts" in an expression of coherent opinion, a form of democracy in action. The emergence of a grass roots effort based in large measure on the internet has been reported recently. The movement, if it grows, will prove the most effective way of abating the looming nuisance of the Cordoba House community/athletic/inter-faith center and mosque.

The movement is quite simply a boycott. The idea is that no construction workers will engage in building the Cordoba House project. Further, no supplier of necessary materials from steel and concrete to all the specialized widgets needed to make a building a reality will sell to the project.

Given the extraordinary hard times which currently afflict the construction industry with the concomitant high unemployment among construction workers, the very idea that the boycott would be proposed, let alone agreed to by an ever larger number of individuals and firms boggles the imagination. The concept taken together with the positive acceptance to date demonstrates that, despite the best efforts of the American hoi olligoi including the Smiley Guy In The Oval, patriotism is alive and well among the elite despised hoi polloi.

Refusing work in advance during a recession of the magnitude and duration of the current meltdown is not particularly rational. It is not an action taken in self-interest. Patriotism, the belief that the US and We the People are united not only in common values but a sense of common decency, demands that rational self-interest take a back seat compared to acting upon the outraged sense of decency and insulted values.

Patriotism like nationalism may be seen as reactionary hangovers from a past, more primitive time by academics, pundits, and many politicians. However, that view is quite obviously not shared by many within the faceless, nameless bunch collectively referred to as "We the People."

Some hard hats in the Big Apple have pointed in the right direction. It is not enough to oppose the insulting project with words. Effective action must be taken to convince imam Rauf and the others behind the project that they must relocate.

It is critical that the pundits, the academics, the politicians both understand and support the reality of the hard hat movement. It is not anti-Muslim. It is not "Islamophobic." It is not directed against the freedom that all who live in the US have to worship in the manner and place of their individual choice. It is not an artificial movement created for partisan political purpose.

The long and the short of the opposition to Cordoba House is simply one of location. The solution to the problem is very simple, quite easy to understand, and not at all difficult to achieve. If a hick historian in the backwoods of New Mexico can get it so also can the ever-so-sophisticated members of the American elite, so also can the imam, the imam's wife and all the others in the shadows of the Cordoba House Initiative.

Move the bloody thing a few blocks. Move it from the loom of 9/11.