A Friendly Letter, The Blog.

Chuck Fager

As “Zero Dark Thirty” winds down, after Osama Bin Laden is dead, a big military transport is shown, parked on some windswept desert runway. As CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) climbs into its open maw, the pilot emerges to tell her she’s the only passenger listed for the flight.

“You must be pretty important,” he says. “Where do you wanna go?”

Maya slowly straps herself into a fold-down seat, alone as the plane’s huge cargo door closes out the world beyond its drab, cavernous fuselage. After a moment, a tear slowly trickles from each of her eyes, though she does not sob or lose her composure. “ZD30″ ends a moment later, with Maya staring shakily ahead, still not answering the pilot’s query.

Where does she want to go, indeed? For me, this ending silence was one of the “loudest,” most revealing moments in an often explosively noisy film.

Jessica Chastain

For despite Jessica Chastain’s fine acting, this mute moment framed and underscored her character’s essential emptiness. Maya has no history, no family, no friends or personal life, not even a last name, no emotional range, and evidently no professional ambition beyond the decade-long, monomaniac drive to wreak lethal revenge on the architect of September 11. In the end, while OBL may be dead, her life too, it appears, has been all-but consumed in the process. There is evidently a real CIA agent behind her character; and both embody a shameful, emptying time in our history.

Many Americans can no doubt still identify with Maya’s payback obsession. And under director Kathryn Bigelow’s sure hand, the film’s driving pace and vivid visuals make this process easier while the story unreels. Yet for me the film’s emotional frame came to feel increasingly dated, even obsolete. And I believe I’m not alone in that sense.

After all, it’s 2013, and while Osama Bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive), by now more and more of us are beginning to realize that even so, America has lost the two reflexive wars our panicked leaders unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks. And besides these major strategic defeats; beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands killed, and millions made refugees — in the process we also threw away many of our rights at home, and values essential to our moral standing in the world. Was this really the only way to deal with the horror of the September attacks?

The loss of credibility may still be easy for many of us to ignore, but consider: today, what tyrants will do other than smirk and snicker at U.S. State Department reports tut-tutting about their lousy human rights records? Not that our hands were ever entirely clean; but the years of Maya’s obsession were also when the U.S. sank to unprecedented lows. At home, those years similarly yielded steadily increasing domestic repression, from wiretapping to the coordinated crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street, and now the growing shadows of domestic drones circling above our homes and streets.

Yet credibility is not a strong enough term for this loss. Honor helps. But “soul” is better. Dr. Martin Luther King’s motto for his civil rights career was, “Saving the Soul of America.” The crusade by Maya, the CIA and their White House masters to find and kill OBL succeeded, but along the way America lost much, perhaps most, of its “soul.” And slowly, fitfully, Americans are beginning to realize that. Hence for instance, the now overwhelming public urge, across the political spectrum, to get our troops the hell out of Afghanistan, ASAP.

None of this change is addressed in ZD30. But on reflection, it’s not hard to see it coming, given the film’s matter-of-fact acceptance of U.S. torture as of no moral weight whatever, just part of the way it was. (After all, we now know that there were many internal dissenters against torture. But the film steadfastly reflects the CIA’s postwar ass-covering official version.)

Yet after watching the film, the raging debate over whether ZD30 justifies torture seems to me less important than whether it will serve as a new excuse for much of the public to simply keep ignoring the torture record and its ongoing implications.

And my gut tells me that it won’t work very well in that regard — that the hysterical panic that ZD30 and agent Maya so brilliantly exemplify and exploit are now beginning to loosen their hold on us. One very good sign of this shift is the fierceness and tenacity with which knowledgeable critics have debunked the script’s implicit claims of torture’s value.

In the end, the film reminded me of another much-trumpeted incident of the same bloody decade: the capture of Saddam Hussein in his Iraq rabbit hole. We put him on trial and had him executed. Given his many crimes, a conviction was easy, and Saddam’s trial had at least some color of law.

Yet Saddam’s execution did not save our Iraq occupation from inglorious defeat. Nor has killing OBL prevented the Afghan war from facing a similar fate. No matter how many Oscars “Zero Dark Thirty” might win, all the cinematic skill of Bigelow, Chastain and their CIA consultants will not change that tragically empty outcome.

Where then do we go to regain our liberties, our international credibility, our “soul”? Like Maya after the pilot spoke, our spymasters, our politicians, and some of our best filmmakers all face such questions mutely, as yet without any meaningful answers.
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A CIA front company, Aero Contractors, ran “torture taxi” flights out of the Johnston County airport in North Carolina for years. (This is not a rumor; the New York Times among others “outed” the operation years ago.)

Supposedly torture was banned by presidential order in 2009. Yet Aero Contractors has since expanded and tightened its security; so something secretive is till going on there.

A dogged band of local folks have been protesting these flights since about 2005. They call themselves NC Stop Torture Now. Over the years they’ve carried on many different kinds of actions, and have own awards for their inventiveness and persistence. Here’s one of their protests in front of Aero’s hangars:

Over the years, the Stop Torture Now protests have taken many forms, but most included appeals to authorities to investigate what was going on there, as being in violation of national and international law.
These pleas have so far been ignored. But the activists have not given up. When one tactic was brushed aside, they thought up another one.

Now, as 2013 arrives, these activists are taking yet another new tack: led by Allyson Caison, one of the group’s stalwarts, they have adopted the highway in front of Aero, and will be “cleaning up torture” right on its doorstep. Take a bow, Allyson:

The adaptability as well as persistence of NC Stop Torture Now has put it in the forefront of the long-term effort to get an accounting for the US torture program. And as one of the group’s mottos says: Accountability Today Will Stop Torture Tomorrow.

Three months ago, on a bright but cold afternoon, I took a serious blow to the ego, and what’s left of my cultural pride. It probably did me good, but I’m still rubbing the sore spot: it’s like a bruise that just won’t heal.
It started out fine, when I got off a bus not far from Waterford, Ireland, just in time for an interview.
Some weeks earlier, an enterprising student of TV production named Cormac had tracked me down on the net. He had discovered that in 1967 I was part of a large antiwar protest in Buffalo New York, where we walked across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls.
Sure, I remembered. We were carrying medical supplies for Canadian Quakers to distribute among wounded civilians on all sides of the Vietnam War; my stash was a packet of band-aids.
It was illegal for Americans to do this, under something called the Trading With The Enemy Act. So our border walk was open civil disobedience, and we were prepared to be arrested.
But we weren’t. I didn’t recall publishing anything about this protest, one of many from those years; so how did Cormac, who emailed me from Ireland, know about it, and why was he interested?
Turns out there was an Irishman named George Lennon living near Buffalo at the time. He joined the border protest and noted it in his diary.

Now, 43 years later, Cormac and two classmates were making a postmortem documentary about George Lennon, based on this diary. Surfing for material, they found one mention of the Buffalo border protest: turns out it was by yours truly, buried in a talk to a Canadian group of Quakers, back in 1997, which I had since uploaded to an obscure web page (and completely forgotten about).
Which once more goes to show the marvels of the internet, the glory of google, yada yada.
Well, I told Cormac I didn’t know George Lennon, but could describe the border walk. And perhaps even better, I was headed for Ireland in December, so we could talk about it live, on camera.
Which is what we did, in the coastal town of Dungarvan: Cormac, his crew of Katie & Nicola, and me. (That’s them in the photo.) It was sunny but we all shivered in an icy wind off the Celtic Sea. The camera rolled and I did my best to talk telegenically about somebody I’d once almost, but not quite, crossed paths with.
As soon as we were done we headed for the nearest pub, and warmth. There we talked about life and work and all that until the next bus came and I had to head off to Waterford to catch a train.
I don’t think I was with these three for more than two hours. But the conversation has stayed with me ever since. And that brief encounter is what I really want to talk about here.
First off, the three: Cormac and Nicola and Katie embody the spirit of what was formerly called the Celtic Tiger: bright, appealing, energetic and devoted to their craft. They had an unforced friendliness that is almost archetypically Irish.
They were also caught in the collapse of the Tiger and its bubble economy. The financial news from Ireland then was bad (and hasn’t gotten better since, even with a new government). The unemployment figures were (and are) especially gloomy.

The Peace Bridge: Buffalo New York to Ontario Canada

Which naturally had me asking, what they were going to do when they finished school? Surely TV production jobs in Ireland were few and far between?
True, they said, but they weren’t daunted. “We’ll just go somewhere else.” After all, emigration, temporary or permanent, is almost as ancient an Irish tradition as the cloverleaf, including, for that matter, many of my own ancestors. All three had relatives abroad, mainly in the States, as they called it, or Canada.
Well then, I said, surely their prime destination had to be New York or LA, the world centers for TV production, right?
That’s when the blow came. Nope, I was told, with those cheery grins, they were thinking of Canada. Especially Vancouver.
What? Canada over the US for aspiring video and movie types? And Western Canada? I mean, I hear the scenery there is great, and the winters are milder. But we’re talking video and cinema. You’re kidding, right?
They weren’t. We only had time to get started on this before my bus arrived, and I climbed aboard and sat back to ruminate on this startling bit of news.
I’ve been ruminating ever since. Okay, so I’ve learned that B.C. is the third largest movie center in North America, after New York and LA. But even so; who wants to aim at being Number Three?
But the more I ruminated, the more I tried to put myself in the place of Cormac and his colleagues, the more an eerie hollow feeling grew that they had figured out something that I as an American, and maybe many others like me, hadn’t noticed, even though it was right there in front of our faces.

What’s the something? Let’s call it the Emigrant’s Homeland Comparison Shopping List. That is, if I was Cormac, gazing from Dungarvan across the Atlantic, how would these adjoining alternate homelands stack up? I had plenty of time to ponder this query on the flight back to the States.
By the time we were passing Greenland, pondering had turned to brooding: the blows to my cultural pride kept on coming.
Keep in mind I’m a typical American boy, raised to presume that the USA is Number One, the place to which the “huddled Masses” of the world naturally yearn to go, to “breathe free,” right?
But as I mulled and pulled together some data this presumption got shakier and shakier.
[But wait, I hear some of you cry: haven't you been disillusioned about American glory since as far back as Vietnam, as far back as that border walk in 1967? Well yeah -- at least I thought so . . . . I guess it creeps back, like mildew.]
Anyway, let’s tick off some items on this “Homeland Shopping List”:

>> In November of last year, just before I got to Ireland, the Canadian unemployment rate was two points lower than that in the US.
>> And as for opportunity, income inequality in Canada is much narrower than in the US.
>> What about the soundness of the economy? The US borrowed trillions to bail out crooked but “too-big-to-fail” banks, which are still crooked and rickety. How much did Canada, with lots of their own big banks, spend? — Nothing. Not a dime; not a single freakin loonie. Seems they have some regulations the US doesn’t, which kept their banks from crashing. Oh, and their banks still make money. Hmmm.

This Canadian dollar was NOT spent on a bank bailout.

>> Then there’s support for the arts; Canada is far ahead of the US, even in these hard times.
>> Soon enough I was turning to non-cultural matters: I doubt Cormac and Katie and Nicola think much about getting sick; they had that invulnerable glow of the young that I remember well enough.
But if they do get sick, or hurt, there’s no contest: Canada wins by a mile. Compared to their system (which has its flaws) the vaunted US “health reform” is a joke. A deadly joke.
>> Then there’s crime. In Canada, violent crime has been rising — but the rates, even in their big multi-cultural cities, are so much lower than comparable US cities that the difference is mind-boggling. When filmmaker Michael Moore, in “Bowling for Columbine,” walked down a Canadian street opening the unlocked doors on houses, there was some exaggeration in the scene — but not that much.
Sociologists have been puzzling over that huge discrepancy for years, without a clear explanation. But I have one to put in the mix:
>> the fact that Canada isn’t running an Empire, and hasn’t invaded any countries lately. (Yeah, I know, their governments, especially the current one, have often been loyal junior partners in US imperial ventures, and British ones before that. But it’s still not the same.)
>> Here’s the formula: Empire & war abroad equals violence and crime at home; or, in more technical terms, we reap what we sow.
>> For that matter, one other item I just learned about is that there’s no Fox News up there, a fact that galls their right-wingers. Seems there’s a Canadian regulation forbidding broadcast “news” programs from telling blatant untruths. That wouldn’t fly down here in First Amendment land, where public prevarication by the “press” is a precious part of our national heritage. But maybe there’s an upside in less mind pollution.
>> And did I mention that while the Canadian immigration process can be bureaucratic and complex, US procedures have become both maddening and counter-productive? Besides, Canada is still smart enough to see skilled young newcomers as assets to their economy. The US used to do this, but the brain drain of bright foreign techies from Silicon Valley and other innovation centers shows how we’re determined to cripple ourselves, and doing a right good job.

By the time my plane landed in Philadelphia, reflecting on this depressing laundry list had put me into a definite funk. But buck up, I told myself, Canada’s not perfect; it’s no Shangri-La. Consider the downside:

>> Higher taxes; no question about it.
>> More winter.
>> Pressure to learn French. (Actually, I think this would be fun; but not all agree.)
>> Hockey. (Some say the sport is their substitute for war, but the jury’s still out on that. So are many teeth.)
>> An excess of political correctness; Canadians can drive you crazy that way. (But honest, Officer, I really WAS going to recycle this plastic bottle, and put my crumbs from lunch in the compost — but no, not the bones — and really, I have sanitized my hands half a dozen times since I left home an hour ago. Yeah, Merci beaucoup to vous, too.)
>> Ditto for the no-Fox-News thing; there’s more censorship up there.

Buy pyridium online alt=”Peace-loving Canadians at play . . .” />
Peace-loving Canadians demonstrate their devotion to wholesome recreation.

Yet, even after considering these mitigating factors, I can see how Cormac and his friends would head north when they get to this side of the pond rather than going to LA. Again–I thought I knew better; but it was still really a bummer to confront that truth in their comely Irish faces. I’m an American, after all.
But there’s always hope: maybe if they strike it big in Vancouver, then they’ll heed the siren’s call and go south: just one or two megahits, and they can probably afford California health insurance rates, get a house with adequate security systems, such as their own squad of Blackwater goons. Then they can do lunch nonstop, become Scientologists and secretly vote Republican, just like the natives.
Yeah, that sounds like a plan. So here’s to them: Cormac, Nicola and Katie, you’re great, you three. It was an honor and a pleasure to meet you, even if it did leave my American ego battered and reeling.
But one bit of advice, guys: even after you make it to Malibu, keep your main stash in a Canadian bank, and hang on to that passport. I mean, you never know, eh?

Ah, January. It’s the season of snow and ice and other annoyances.

But there’s an UP-side: in the supermarkets I can find tubs of fat, dark, juicy blueberries.

I love ‘em. Call me an old anti-oxidant junkie. (In fact, some of you might have noticed that my Gmail address is supposed to be “wild blueberries” in French. I say “supposed to be” because I misspelled it; oh well, Comment puis-je être maladroit?)

Anyway, there these beauties were today, in one of our local emporia, reasonably priced, considering, and making one’s mouth to water.

But as I put them in the cart, I heard these voices in my head, sounding like some of my greener friends:

Tas, tsk, went the voices. How could you be so selfish, so eager to join in the ruination of the atmosphere and the environment generally? Don’t you know those berries are shipped here from 5,000 miles away by atmosphere-destroying airliner??

Besides which, chimes in another, they’re not even organic; full of toxics and pesticides. 

For that matter, echoes a third, we’re supposed to be buying local, and seasonal; plenty of blueberries grow in Carolina, Buy retrovir within an hour’s drive, and they’ll be ready for you in June. 

Now the chorus: so get with the new age program; practice some discipline and delayed gratification. Have a rutabaga, or maybe some winter–grown Carolina collards instead.

Well. What’s a politically correct fella supposed to do? On the one side –the planet. On the other — damn, those berries look good. Fat-, caffeine- and cholesterol-free too. (And face it: rutabagas on pancakes or in muffins?)

So help me out here, people. What’s it going to be? Collards, rutabagas, and dreams of July blueberry madness? 

Or instant gratification, imperial entitlement, atmospheric destruction, and global warming, all for some Vitamins A, K and potassium. . . .??

My musical hero Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio. Instead of rhapsodizing about Teutonic gods, or killing off ill-fated sopranos, his story dealt with a group of political prisoners who win their freedom from an oppressive system, mainly through the heroism of a woman.

This week in Washington DC, a series of protests will begin which is aimed at US-sponsored torture and imprisonment, particularly the continuing crime of Guantanamo, and the unaddressed impunity of those who made the U.S. and its citizens an international disgrace.

In Beethoven’s opera, there’s a scene where a group of prisoners is let out of their dank cells for a surprise visit to a nearby garden. Overcome by the sight of the sky and the greenery, they sing a chorus, “O welche Lust,” one of the most affecting pieces I’ve heard in the operatic literature.

Here’s the English version of their text, and a fine clip of the scene from the Metropolitan Opera. I urge you to watch the clip (8 minutes), listen to the music, and choose to help bring its operatic denouement to pass in our time.

This post is dedicated to all of those wrongly imprisoned and mistreated, especially those under the auspices of “my” government. And to those who resolve to change that.

Go, Ludwig–Beat Gitmo.

Chorus—Of Prisoners.

Oh, what a pleasure once again
Freely to breathe the fresh air!
In Heaven’s light we live again;
From death we have escaped.

ONE OF THEM.
Let us in Heaven trust;
On Heaven depend our hopes:
He will on our griefs look with pity.
On His goodness all things depend.

ALL.
Oh, liberty! oh, salvation!
Oh, God, upon our miseries have pity!

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It’s easy to think of reasons to trash Dwight Eisenhower.

For one thing, he was a segregationist; he enforced it in the Army, and disliked the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision.

For another, he approved several nasty covert CIA wars and coups (Iran, Guatemala, the beginnings of Vietnam, etc.) We’re still dealing with the fallout from some of them (I’m looking at YOU, mullahs.)

For a third he was – well, he was just so . . . so 1950s. (I grew up in that decade, and couldn’t get out of it fast enough.)

But on the other hand . . . .

There are a couple BIG reasons why I cut him some slack.

A LOT of slack, actually.

First, there’s this thing about World War Three. How it DIDN’T happen on his watch.

But it almost did. Not from a Russian attack, either – but because of bomb-happy US generals, like Curtis E. LeMay. (Now THERE’S a piece of work; look him up if you want a cheap hair-raising thrill that doesn’t involve sex.)

Hey, Ike — Where’s My War??!!

LeMay was in command of the B-52 nuclear bombers, and was itching to turn them loose on the USSR (Yes, if you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” that’s who they’re talking about. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s time.)

But Ike stuck LeMay and his ilk in a shiny brass cage, and kept the whole thing under wraps.

When I found this out (years later, in the Ike biographies), I realized with something of a shock that I (and by extension my kids and grandkids) are all survivors of this nuclear war that wasn’t. That goes for most of the rest of you too. But here I’m just talking about my reactions; and any way I slice it, avoiding incineration comes out a biggie.

Hey, Ike — thanks for “Nothing”!

The other BIG thing didn’t look like much at the time. It only took about two minutes.

It was part of Ike’s Farewell Address, and you can see it on YouTube here

It was his warning, totally out of the blue, that something called the Military Industrial Complex was growing in our society like a cancer, and that if we didn’t watch out, it would take over, and that would be bad.

A few days from now, Jan. 17th 2011, will be the 50th anniversary of that warning. And it turns out Ike was absolutely right. The MIC was growing. IS growing. And it HAS taken over. And that’s bad.

Prophetic is the word we use for such utterances. The word is thrown around a lot; but you don’t come across the real deal all that often, and it can turn up in pretty unlikely places. In this case, in a few words from a bald, superannuated soldier who was heading out the door, to practically universal relief.

Besides paying a belated but heartfelt tribute to Ike for this prophecy, I’m going to spend the weekend of Jan. 14-16 considering the implications of this grim prophecy that has come true, in spades. I’ll do that with a group of friends at our free conference on the MIC at Fifty, at Guilford College.

More information about the conference is here

You could join us too. Did I mention the conference is free?

Here’s one other thing Ike said, though I’m not so sure of the date:

“The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.”

That’s the problem, all right. Join us and let’s see if we can take it on.

I really didn’t want to spend much time on this blog talking about current affairs.
But it’s becoming inescapable. And one topic that requires mention is an ongoing story that only fitfully pops up on the radar screen, but which is a BIG ongoing deal. And the Big Deal is the answer to this question:

Will we go to war with Iran??

Today the answer to the question is: NO.

Tomorrow, however, is another day. And the effort to push the US into a war with Iran goes on day after day.

On one side: US Neo-cons, the Republican leadership, and of course, the Israeli government. These folks are pushing hard and continuously for war.

On the other (”antiwar”) side: Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and most serious military strategists.

Secretary Gates is not necessarily tops of my nice guy list, seeing as how he’s running two nasty wars and planning many more.

Robert Gates: part-time peacenik

BUT credit where it is due: He’s being a good point man for the administration’s apparently determined effort to PREVENT a war with Iran.

This report just out from Reuters quotes him saying the right things:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ratcheted up [pro- Iran war] rhetoric last week by calling on the West to convince Iran that it would be willing to take military action to prevent Tehran from producing nuclear weapons. He said economic sanctions had so far failed to do the job.

Gates has publicly disagreed with Netanyahu about the need to put forward a military threat.
Although he acknowledged on Tuesday that Iranian leaders “are still intent on acquiring nuclear weapons,” he said military action was not a long-term answer.

“A military solution, as far as I’m concerned … it will bring together a divided nation. It will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. And they will just go deeper and more covert,” Gates said.

“The only long-term solution in avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest. Everything else is a short-term solution.”

Iran: twice as big as Iraq, square the trouble.

I don’t know how this tug-of-war will turn out. But it will continue as long as Obama is in office, that seems clear. After all, the best strategic experts outside the Pro-Iran war circle (including the Joint Chiefs of Staff) seem to agree that a war would be disastrous for all concerned, including the US. But the war lobby is not going away.

Another Iran Peacenik: Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen

Most of this struggle will go on behind the scenes. But if you wake up one morning to find gasoline is about $15 a gallon, you’ll know what happened.

And that may be the up-side. When the army drafts the kid next door, we’ll really start to feel the costs. Then it’s all downhill from there.

An example of intelligent conservatism. I wonder if anyone in charge was listening??

From an article by David Frum in the New York Times Magazine, published online Nov. 12:

Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad. G. K. Chesterton observed that you should never take a fence down until you understand why it had been put up. We should remember why the immediate post-Depression generations created so many social-welfare programs. They were not motivated only — or even primarily — by “compassion.” They were motivated as well by the desire for stability.

My comment: “Stability” here means social more than economic stability — as in, prevent economic setbacks from turning into revolutions. After all, the first such programs were set up in Germany by Otto von Bismarck, as means of shoring up a monarchist state and staving off any move toward “socialism”; he was about as anti-radical as one could get, for pete’s sake. (That’s him in the photo below. Does he look like a radical??)

Back to Frum:

Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them. When people lost their jobs, their incomes did not drop by 100 percent, but by 30 percent or 40 percent: they could continue to pay rent, buy food and sustain society’s overall level of demand for goods and services. State pensions created a segment of society whose primary incomes remained stable regardless of economic conditions. The growth of the higher-education sector and of health care had a similar effect.

This shift to a more welfare-oriented economy helps explain why business cycles in the second half of the 20th century were so much less volatile than they were in the 19th century. And fortunately enough, this shift put a floor under the economic collapse of 2008-09. Retirees who lost their savings had to cut back painfully. But at least their Social Security checks continued to arrive. People who lost their jobs might lose their homes. But they continued to buy food and clothing. And the industries that sold those basic necessities continued to function– unlike in 1929-33, when the whole economy collapsed upon itself.

Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did. Conservatives should want a smaller welfare state than liberals in order to uphold maximum feasible individual liberty and responsibility. But the conservative ideal is not the abolition of the modern welfare state, and we should be careful of speaking in ways that communicate a more radical social ideal than that which we actually uphold and intend. . . .

And one other insight from Frum:

Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest. But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education: Jon Stewart’s America versus Bill O’Reilly’s, Barack Obama versus Sarah Palin.

For that reason, conservatives in recent years have ridden populist waves more successfully than liberals have done. Yet conservatives will not find it much easier than liberals to govern a society where so many people feel themselves cheated — and where so many refuse to believe that the so-called experts care for the interests of anyone beyond their narrow coterie and class. . . .

Yeah. Bismarck who?? Some eastern elitist, no doubt.

I make it a rule not to write reviews of books I haven’t read. I also do my best to avoid pontificating about them.

But I’m also a Quaker, who follows this rule about rules by the Elders of Balby, which they appended to a long list of rules for Quakers in 1656:

Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all, with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided: and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.

So in that spirit, here are some comments, not so much about the book, as about a review of the book “Decision Points,” which is just out from our most recent Ex-President, and getting a lot of attention.

The review is in the Huffington Post of 11/14/2010, by one Anis Shivani,a writer in Texas. The full review is here, and well worth reading.

Reviewer Anis Shivani

Whether or not he fair to the book I can’t say, because I haven’t read “Decision Points.” (Have I been forthcoming enough about that?) Nevertheless, Shivani makes many points about the era of the author’s reign that are undeniably true and important, if mostly unwelcome.

Perhaps the most critical point Shivani makes is here:

“Bush truly was a transformative president, among the rare few, and we deceive ourselves — as many in the commentariat continue to do. . . if we consider him an anomaly, a rare eruption of a virus that won’t repeat itself. This book’s ideas will have resonance with a large segment of the population, and a notable number among the elites; we need to study Decision Points (Crown, Nov. 9) seriously, as onerous a task as it may be, if we are to make sense of the perpetual aura of crisis that has enveloped America, and why we seem to be stuck on a self-destructive path. . . . .” (Emphasis added.)

Transformative indeed, and I don’t mean that as a compliment; neither does Shivani. Another key point is in this quote from the book:

A favorite myth in the liberal press for the past decade. . . has been that Bush was a puppet, and that Cheney, or other dark forces, were the puppet-masters; or that Bush’s Oedipal conflict with his father propelled him to take risks. This myth should be put to rest once and for all with Decision Points. Bush compares himself to Harry Truman, who laid the institutional foundations for the national security state that lasted all through the Cold War. He always saw his mission in comparable terms:
“‘I made it a high priority of my second term to turn those tools into institutions and laws that would be available to my successors.’” (emphasis added.)

My comment: and as we have seen with Obama, regrettably, his successor has fully availed himself of these repressive institutions, and shows no inclination to roll back any but the barest few (e.g., Obama banned “torture,” but there’s growing evidence it continues under a more effective cloak of secrecy).

The review continues:

“Just as Truman is still with us, more than sixty years after the inauguration of the national security state, Bush will be with us for the duration of this indefinite war. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he was the primary creator of the perpetual-war state. . . .”

I don’t know if I can muster the fortitude to read “Decision Points.” But Shivani’s review has repeated some necessary truths about Bush’s impact that can’t be ignored, whether or not we read his book that revels in this reality.