Watching in Eerie Slow Motion as the Bomb Falls

I get the growing sense that we are at one of history's great turning points. It is just hard to see how big it really is. But as whole lot of people seem to be heading right off a cliff.

There are turning points in history that seem to throw everything into relief: the fall of the Berlin Wall, Roe v. Wade, Altamont, the Lisbon earthquake (said to have ended the Romantic Era by suddenly demonstrating that Nature was not as cuddly as many thought). I think we have seen a succession of such moments just recently, a rapidly accelerating drumbeat of them.

Climategate was a big one, not just killing the Global Warming campaign, but throwing a lot of doubt on the trustworthiness of academics, experts, journalists, and governments. On the professional class.

The Tucson shootings-- or rather, the media reaction to them, trying to represent Loughner as a right-winger acting on orders or inspiration from the Tea Party—was a similar turning point, I think, visibly and audibly declaring the moral bankruptcy the legacy media and, to some extent, the entire political left.

Now the revelations about the abortionist Kermit Gosnell are going to be a tough one for a lot of people to forget. This is just the sort of thing that sticks in the mind whether you want it to or not. It may destroy the pro-choice (pro-abortion) movement, and it may even shake the common adulation for the medical profession.

I am well past feeling any joy about it all. No doubt, a lot of rascals are going to get their comeuppance, but most epochal changes also hurt a lot of good people. I think of the French Revolution.

As that sounded the death knell of the landed aristocracy, I suspect we are seeing the death knell now of the educated, professional class. And that is a much bigger deal. Just as there were some, indeed many, good people in the aristocracy, with their old code of gentility and chivalry, so there are some, indeed many, good people in the professions, with their Hippocratic oaths and Harvards and Confucian or Rabbinical ethical traditions. While I welcome the coming increase in human dignity and freedom from their (or rather, our) demise, I fear the good may be interred with their bones.