By Paul Eidelberg

If you are puzzled by “homegrown” Islamic terrorism in America, if you are wondering why many youth join “radical” or “extremist” Islamic organizations, you may want to consider, among the various causes of such phenomena, certain hitherto unexamined facts about American “culture.”

One such fact is the lack of any clearly defined culture in this country. Most clearly lacking is what was once deemed admirable and worthy of praise and imitation: the heroic.

The concept of the heroic was once propagated by Hollywood Westerns, personified, for instance, by Gary Cooper in “High Noon.” Such heroic personalities have been replaced by urban misfits, portrayed, for example, by physically unimpressive types like Dustin Hoffman.  But this touches only the surface of the anti-heroic.

Probing more deeply, the heroic, which portrays man as larger that than life, has been buried by the ordinary. Shakespeare is dead, replaced by the meaninglessness Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.

The ordinary has become the preoccupation of the cinema. It has been endowed with philosophical trappings, such as the college-bred doctrine of moral relativism, a doctrine that denies black-and-white distinctions, such as “good” and “evil.” The old Hollywood ending in which good triumphs over evil is now ancient history. For Americans, history began with the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima, hardly an act requiring personal courage.

To make things even clearer, ponder Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” whose central character is rightly named “Willy Loman.” The salesman has nothing of his own, and this exactly defines the anti-heroic.

Indeed, the anti-heroic has conquered the American mind and is vividly exemplified in Barack Obama’s servile apology for American greatness. Moreover, Obama’s retreat from America’s pivotal role in the Middle East may be compared to Miller’s Death of a Salesman translated from the stage in Broadway to the stage and death of American foreign policy!

We see this demise in America’s anti-war movement and corresponding anti-war movies. We are witnessing the senility of contemporary America. This senility goes against the grain of youth. It clashes with youth’s full-blooded imagination and dreams of greatness. Small wonder that some young Americans have joined a Muslim terrorist group that exalts self-sacrifice in the seemingly heroic cause of Islam.

Contrast the moral relativism and milquetoast nihilism of American colleges and universities. Barack Obama ingested the moral anemia of academia. Hence his phlegmatic description of ISIS terrorism as “bankruptcy” and his less than heroic forays on the golf course while the world is going to hell. But now you may begin to understand why some American youth want more than Willy Lomans