Xena, Buffy, Sarah Palin: Revenge of the Wolf Girl

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/31/09

Anyone who lived in New York City in the mid-70s will recall the odd notice every day on page two of the city edition of The New York Times right above the Brooks Brothers ad. It was put there by a sincere group of Hasidim, bearded old world Jews who had arrived from Russia not long before. Should Jews settle in one place or travel throughout the world it asked. What is God’s will?

The argument is the oldest and most elementary in the tradition. Should we travel and live like the hunters and gatherers of old, or stay put and farm? Hunters were a moon-based culture long since displaced by time. The Hasidim, as I understand it, still use a lunar calendar. Farming is a sun-based culture. The question was should we live by the ways of the moon as the old tribes did when the women synchronized their menstrual cycles so as to have them occur all at once in the full moon when the men were away on the hunt, or live in the sun and build tall all in the same place, as we build tall today in New York, Chicago, Dubai, Singapore.

Building tall in one place might be seen in our day as being environmentally imperfect. Even fatefully flawed from the beginning. Only the Sun King would build such a narrow, vulnerable, fragile and inadaptable society. Those who lived by the moon knew the earth’s heart because the moon is daughter to the earth. It might be said that the earth cannot be free again until the moon’s daughters come back. That is precisely the crux of the rabbinical riddle in The New York Times; to live by the ways of the moon or those of the sun.

Could be that which is breaking Wall Street; the return of the moon’s daughters. When the bell actually broke on Wall Street last fall on the morning the Dow hit that number storied in the occult, 777.7, was only a day or so before that the huntress, first daughter today of the moon and forest, arrived here in the lower 48 and took to the podium with John McCain. Nothing strikes to the heart of a staid agricultural megatropolis as a free, beautiful woman with a hunting rifle. She is feral anima, the enemy unseen by Big Nurse in the Cukoo Nest; the wolf girl actively at war with the Corporation Mother in Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Princess Mononoke.

But it could have been seen coming in the pop culture which is only the dream of the wider corporation culture. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, - they call her The Slayer because she comes with a sword - was a dead serious venue. She came into the night as a destroyer but not one who wanted to destroy the corporate culture or be any part of it. She came at first to protect her sister, a child, from sexual abuse. She came to take the night back from predators. The adults, in this series were much like those in Twilight – a horde of city-bound automatons; not that far from the undead themselves. Indeed, there was often no clear distinction between living and the dead, and those psychically alive lived in secret. But Buffy came with a sword delivered to her by the Earth Mother herself: In the last episode, she appears from behind a veil as Buffy pulls a sword from a stone. “You pulled the sword from the stone,” she said. “I was the one who put it there.”

Likewise Xena, Warrior Princess; hunter, gatherer, head buster, heart breaker, moon mother incarnate.

And this is the difference with Sarah Palin. And this is why corporation women hate her. She does not want to work as an employee of the Sun King or serve in any capacity in his realm. She does not want to be an op-ed columnist for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. She does not want to be a chaired professor at Harvard or Duke or Berkeley or a Judge or a Vice President of Hewlett Packer. She already has everything she has ever wanted. Like Buffy, she wants to protect her daughters and live quiet under the moon and near to the wolf on the edge of the forest with them and with her Indian husband.

To understand Sarah, look to Bella, whose best friend is kin to the wolf. It is essential in understanding the turning of the times (and consequently the century and possibly the millennium) to recognize that the same contempt that was shown to Palin eight months ago was also shown to Twilight, the book and movie as well. They represent a turning of the generations and as William James wrote, all institutions move to create their own orthodoxy and destroy the original, the new, the next generation. It will ruin everything. In the Academy Awards last, Twilight was barely mentioned and the papers like The Washington Post loaded up with erstwhile professoriate proclaiming them un-deconstructivist, etc., etc. etc. – certainly not like we were back in the Seventies.

The press was still waiting for Harry Potter to kiss the girl. Then this happened. Seven months on the world started catching up. Twilight won most all of the MTV awards and today it is impossible to pass a check out stand at the grocery without a look over to Robert Pattisson’s hypnotic green eyes on Kristin. Five million have already watched them kiss on You Tube. And unlike Harry and what’s-her-name in their new movie, they seem to have learned how to do it pretty well.

The age is upon us and it takes its first sensibilities from a new moon. It will be a generation what has learned to love the moon and live under it, not fear it and oppose it, reversing a course of 200, 400, possibly 600 years in the West.

Something is happening here. We are beginning to think about the moon again. And we plan to go there again in 2020. And the question we should ask today is the same that the Russian rabbis asked us to think about in New York back the mid-70s: How will we go forward, building more upon more, floor upon floor, with the sons of the sun or traveling again to the forest with the daughters of the moon?

This is the piece that was picked by Rush yesterday:

Is Obama a Snob?

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/27/09

Did Harvard’s Professor Gates sink Obama?

Last week on July 21, Dick Morris commented in The Hill that superficially, the United States appears to have a presidential system, but in fact it more and more resembles a parliamentary form of government. When a president loses the approval of the majority of the voters and polls reflect that his ratings have fallen substantially below 50 percent, he loses his power. Then on Saturday, Rassmusen Reports Daily Tracking Poll reported that for the first time 49% of voters say they only somewhat approve of the President's performance. This was the second straight day that his overall approval rating has been below 50% among Likely Voters nationwide. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.

Now that Cambridge intends to “open a dialogue” - they love to have this kind of “meta-narrative about race” as one New York Times columnist put it - in the elite college neighborhoods where the president has spent most of his adult life it will continue to grind him down. He’ll be at 45 % by September.

Between July 21, when the Boston papers first reported the arrest of Professor Gates, there was plenty of time for the public to sense that whatever else happened and whatever we would learn in the next three days, this was a classic contretemps between the Two Bostons: Harvard Yard and Fenway Park. And as a classic form of single combat psychological warfare, there could not possibly be a more unequivocally perfect symbolic representation of Harvard in our time than Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. And there could not be a more distinguished representative of Fenway Park than Sgt. James Crowley, an inscrutably honest cop who taught classes on racial profiling and who supported the President “ . . . 110 percent” but refused to back down to him.

Purely from a marketing point of view Obama’s knee-jerk identification with Professor Gates when he didn’t have all the facts was terrible strategy. A samurai would never open a chink that wide for the opposition to exploit. And he took his audience for granted. Just as Letterman did. And it showed Obama’s instinctive identification with a small and cloistered elite and one which William F. Buckley, Jr. considered so self-important and deluded that he said he’d rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston phone book.

Obama instantly alienated himself from the vast world of common folk which he so hopes to save. And next week’s trek to Nantucket/Martha’s Vineyard, storied for late night, drug-addicted, burned out Saturday Night . . . types will bring more fuel for scorn. Back in 1977, long before it caught on in Texas and Alaska, the two detached ocean towns actually tried to secede from the boorish, coarse, brutes and Morlocks of Red Sox Nation to form their own fashionably stoned hippie wonderland and overwhelming majorities voted to secede from Massachusetts and possibly the nation. But that was a different time; a time when the generation’s folkloric muse and mentor declared, “ . . . everybody must get stoned,” and half the country, including Obama, was.

It will not make things better for Obama when he goes to bask with the same disaffected Eloi of Harvard Yard at Martha’s Vineyard.

Is Obama a snob? Does he see himself only as a title in caricature and dress up as snobs do? As Kerry does. As Barbara Boxer does. Does he to himself feel he doesn’t belong where he is as snobs do? Is his only talent giving speeches? Why is he so associated with pretenders? Why would he seem uncomfortable with plain, original, solid folk? People like Al Roker or Tony Dungy. People like James Crowley.

I simply can’t imagine him disappearing alone in a smoke-filled Legion Hall and finding his way to the bar to sit and talk to the old soldiers who are drinking already at 10 a.m. as I have seen Wesley Clark do.

Is that why Jesse Jackson and the regular folk Chicago preachers hate him?

Quigley and The Hill on Rush - July 28, 2009

Rush Limbaugh posted my Hill piece, Is Obama a Snob:

Story #5: State-Run Media Blog Asks: Is Obama a Snob?

RUSH: There's a great piece, by the way, at The Hill. This is another thing I can't believe. The Hill is part of state-controlled media. I can't believe this piece. It is a blog post but I still can't believe it, it's on The Hill. "Is Obama a Snob?" It's written by a blogger here named Bernie Quigley. "Did Harvard's Professor Gates Sink Obama? -- On July 21, Dick Morris commented in The Hill that superficially, the United States appears to have a presidential system, but in fact it more and more resembles a parliamentary form of government. When a president loses the approval of the majority of the voters and polls reflect that his ratings have fallen substantially below 50 percent, he loses his power."

I shared that Morris piece with you when it came out. "Now that Cambridge intends to 'open a dialogue' ... in the elite college neighborhoods where the president has spent most of his adult life, it will continue to grind him down. He'll be at 45 percent by September." This Bernie Quigley says that you've got two Bostons here. You've got Fenway Park and you've got Harvard; you've got the sergeant and you've got Gates. And who does Obama identify with? Obama identifies with the snob professor, who doesn't know half of his own department's expertise. So the theory -- I'm making this brief -- Mr. Quigley suggests, "Obama instantly alienated himself from the vast world of common folk he so hopes to save. And next week's trek to Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard, storied for late-night, drug-addicted, burned-out Saturday Night ... types will bring more fuel for scorn.

"Back in 1977, long before it caught on in Texas and Alaska, the two detached ocean towns actually tried to secede from the boorish, coarse, brutes and Morlocks of Red Sox Nation to form their own fashionably stoned hippie wonderland and overwhelming majorities voted to secede from Massachusetts and possibly the nation." It never happened obviously. But now Mr. Quigley theorizes here: "Is Obama a snob? Does he see himself only as a title in caricature and dress up as snobs do? As Kerry does. As Barbara Boxer does. Does he to himself feel he doesn't belong where he is, as snobs do? Is his only talent giving speeches? Why is he so associated with pretenders? Why would he seem uncomfortable with plain, original, solid [people]? "People like Al Roker or Tony Dungy. People like James Crowley. I simply can't imagine him disappearing alone in a smoke-filled Legion Hall and finding his way to the bar to sit and talk to the old soldiers who are drinking already at 10 a.m., as I have seen Wesley Clark do." And get this last line: "Is that why Jesse Jackson and the regular-folk Chicago preachers hate him?" Bernie Quigley, but maybe not for long.

Obama Needs Powell

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/29/09

CNN squarely named the problem in its morning headline: Officer, Gates Needed Adult Supervision.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that he has been the victim of racial profiling in the past, but that he believes Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. could have been more patient with the police officer who arrested him. Speaking to CNN's Larry King, Powell also faulted the Cambridge Police Department for escalating the situation.

Maybe Obama needs adult supervision as well. This is something I have felt from the very beginning. In fact, from the first 12 hours after he received the nomination I felt there were problems and they went in this sequence: Joe Biden, Hillary, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner. None of these people inspire professional confidence and the sudden bailout announcement seemed dangerously out of nowhere. Since then, I have seen the president’s office change course based on things they read in the morning papers.

There is a novelty aspect to a president who came to office with no experience in virtually anything and no conspicuous talents except a gift for oratory and a giddy press which celebrated him as a global god king is now beginning to create a negative reinforcement. Such nonsense could bring a hard fall. It is starting to hurt the dollar. This administration needs an mature hand; a wise adult. As Tony Dungy was brought on to mentor and coach Michael Vick, Colin Powell should be brought on as Special Advisor to the President.

Mitt Romney, After the Storm

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/24/09

Before the storm, said Louisiana resident James Madison, he had Mormons knock on his door just like everybody else and the object was to try to get rid of them as fast as possible; go away, not interested, don’t want to hear what you have to say. After the storm, “ . . . a little bit different now. They’re part of my family now. Always will be. They got into my heart. They’ll never stand on my doorstep again without being invited into my house.”

They were hearing stories of troops coming in and heard helicopters were flying over, he said, they even heard that the President was flying over. But no one was there on the ground with them except the Mormons in their yellow t-shirts to help them clean up.

Katrina turned the seas and changed the political tide. It has become the symbol of a late great country. As Harold Meyerson asks this week in The Washington Post: Suppose our collective lack of response to Hurricane Katrina wasn't exceptional but, rather, the new normal in America. Suppose we can no longer address the major challenges confronting the nation. Suppose America is now the world's leading can't-do country.

In contrast, the Mormon relief trucks were on the way before the hurricane had even made land fall. Police Chief Larry Hess went over to the Bishop’s warehouse and found a huge building. “ . . . it was all catalogued and categorized and with their warehousing procedures and policies . . . they just knew where everything was, they knew how much of each thing they had, they were able to get not only saws to us but canned goods, outlets to outside communications . . . they had satellite phones . . . it was almost as if a business that specialized in emergency or community disaster response had arrived.”

When pundits and policy makers go on vacation this summer they might find a beach house with a DVD player and plug into the documentary The Mormons which aired last year on PBS. The episodes are also available at the PBS web site. Because now that we have listened to everybody else it might be time to listen to the Mormons.

Their’s is an astonishing journey of grace, faith, heartbreak, perseverance, determination and courage and one fully original, integral and indigenous to America. It may take a couple of quiet walks on the beach in the evening to fully metabolize. But it could well be that our sea has changed with Katrina and our American journey will begin again with the Mormons. Former Bay State Governor Mitt Romney is in a dead heat with President Obama in the first major poll that asked voters who they would support in the 2012 presidential election, the Boston Herald reports.

Obama and Boston’s Finest

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/ 23/09

“I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts what role race played,” President Obama said at a White House press conference. “But I think it's fair to say. . .” that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly.”

Those two sentences make sense neither legally nor logically. If he had not seen all the facts, he could not have come to any sensible conclusions as to how the police officer acted.

I do however think it is fair to say, looking at these two sentences, that Obama responded to the situation archetypal rather than professionally or humanly. That is, he saw the cop as a stereotype – an autonomous form which resides in his mind and responds uninhibited by judgment through innate psychological constitution or conditioned reflex. That is, he is predisposed to see “cops” instinctively as “objects” - generally stupid and uninformed “forms” and is conditioned to those positions before he approaches the facts in the case. This is undergraduate stuff. It would not make for a good lawyer. And I think it is fair to say that this conditioned reflex must carry on to other authority figures and purely archetypal figures like fire fighters, military officers and judges.

The President responded to this incident much as cops responded to events at a time here in New England when if you were too stupid to get a job on the floor of the factory you could be a cop or a prize fighter. What the President said about cops yesterday recalls what comedian Lenny Bruce said about Irish cops 50 years ago (and when I was a kid I had 40 Irish cousins and uncles in the Massachusetts police force with all the same last name in that period). That in looking for a suspicious person, the Irish cop follows his natural instincts and “ . . . a suspicious person to an Irish cop is a Polak.”

Unfortunately, the President sees today with those same eyes of caricature and prejudice. Which is not really surprising because in so many ways he seems to be still living in the Fifties. As he has suggested so often, he is his mother’s child in that regard.

Black Swans and Starbucks

Our house in the western valley of the White Mountains is older than Tennessee and so is most of the stuff in it. So it is always good to get away and see what is new in the world; cable TV, motel doors that open with magnetic cards and Starbucks.

In my latest journey to the outside I felt a complete change of seasons in North Carolina. When I first went there 25 years ago I used to go to the original Krispy Kreme in Winston-Salem. In those days it was a smoky cavern filled in the early morning with older men talking among themselves – World War II vets mostly – including Graham Martin on occasion, the ambassador to Vietnam at the end who infuriated President Ford by holding the American fleet in the South China Sea for three days after the fall of Saigon. It saved 40 thousand lives.

In the times which opened up after that first period Krispy Kreme caught the entrepreneurial spirit and went global. Then they brought in latte and banned smoking and the men began to drift away. In the later period a Starbucks came in and here you could see the newer generations unfolding by the CDs they would play and pitch at the counter. World music. Good stuff, too. Then in more recent years which might be considered a turning – at near the pitch of the war on Iraq – you could find Johnny Cash as he had just passed away and the Dixie Chicks. Later – last year – they recalled Paul McCartney; the age in dénouement.

But it was a little surprising this time around to see Dean Martin being promoted at the Starbuck’s cash register. Great singer; better than Frank I always thought but I am not of that generation and so don’t have that bonding thing that reinforces Frank among those of his time, nor do most any of the others who come to Starbucks. Was as if they were suddenly marketing to the old World War II crowd from Krispy Kreme. Or else, they had come to the end of things, marketing-wise.

I see this on PBS as well.

All of my adult life, PBS fundraisers have presented an anthropological path up the mountain and down again of my own generation. Rising in to the decades of work ahead they always presented the movie Woodstock at fund raising time, year after year, as we rose reluctantly away from it. Then descending from the mountain was Wayne W. Dyer, Ph.D, and a woman who looked like Hillary giving Buddisty psychological advise; down-market Deepak Chopra pop self-help stuff. Then penguins; an ominous sign as penguins are a prey species; benign, aging Tellitubies who evolved by escaping predation to frozen and barren places like where I live; the totem animal of the horde that PBS was pitching on documentary, CDs and little desk calendars. Penguins, like the price of gold, are harbingers.

In recent years they have been running old tapes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at Newport in 1964 where we who are not Southern first encountered Johnny Cash and where the generation was supposed to have begun (and apparently where it ends); much the same images that Dylan is pitching now on TV to sell Pepsi. Long interviews with Peter, Paul and Mary as well with occasional bouts of Pete Seeger.

But this year everything has changed. This year at PBS fundraisers they present Victor Borge, a classical pianist/vaudeville comedian in tails from the old Ed Sullivan Show. I can’t imagine that anyone under the age of 60 would even know who he was.

This Starbuck’s is now is a cop’s hangout. The Krispy Kreme is still there but the global empire has gone bust and it is empty in the mornings.

Sociologists take note. Economists too and political scientists. Generations come in waves then the sea turns flat. Some social systems and effects are technically hard wired but they interact with soft systems as well; things like love and the feelings music brings, which MIT theoretical physicist Kerson Huang says acts with hard systems but cannot be measured or quantified. And as Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, there are always those pesky and unpredictable Black Swans, like the occasional mad man who comes into Starbucks off the street, asks for spare change then tips over your table. He is part of the equation as well; an essential part.

Will Sarah Palin Run in 2012 as an AIP Candidate?

- for The Hill on 7/21/09

by Bernie Quigley

Not long ago Mike Huckabee said that he hopes Sarah Palin is not thinking of “going independent” as she brought electricity to the Republican Party in her run with John McCain. It might be worth wondering if she is thinking of running in 2012 as a candidate for the Alaska Independence Party (AIP).

Palin has been on eight trips outside her Anchorage base since announcing her resignation.

"I am Alaskan. I've grown up here and I'm going to remain in Alaska," she said in an interview. "It's not farewell. It's more like, thanks for letting me be here and I'll see you soon."

She has not offered any specific plans for 2012 but she hints that she has a bigger role in mind, and she plans to launch her new platform by speaking her mind on the social networking site Twitter.

"Once I am 'Sarah Palin, Alaskan,' I can really call it like I see it," she said.

There have been calls here in northern New England for a regional political party to address issues of federal and state share of responsibility but there is today no viable third party movement in the region. The AIP is venerable in this league and Palin was associated with it vaguely as she offered them a greeting from the Governor’s office one year and her husband, Todd Palin, once belonged to the party.

The states sovereignty movements across the country now claim 36 initiatives. They started in February are a direct result of the federal bailouts and are likely to make progress as the deficit advances into the trillions. Palin made several elliptical references to the 10th amendment movement in her parting address several weeks back and she once addressed it directly.

When the winged monkeys took to the air over her resignation, it almost went unnoticed that in one of her last acts as Alaska’s chief Governor Palin signed a joint resolution declaring Alaska's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Palin signed House Joint Resolution 27, sponsored by state Rep. Mike Kelly on July 10, the Tenth Amendment Center reports. The resolution "claims sovereignty for the state under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States."

Alaska's House passed HJR 27 by a vote of 37-0, and the Senate passed it by a vote of 40-0 World Net Daily reports.

A recent Rasmussen Reports survey has Mitt Romney tied to Barack Obama and Palin only six points behind. When asked if she does not get the Republican nomination should Sarah Palin run as an Independent, 21 percent said Yes.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was the first to raise the cry against the Obama administration’s bailouts but since the Trickster has taking him out of play for the time being the leadership mantle on this issue could now pass to Palin as she was one of the first on board to support his efforts. And as estimates today for liability under the bailouts is up to $23.7 trillion - nearly $80,000 for every man, woman and child in the country – vastly more than even Sanford’s dire predictions last November, the Obama movement could very quickly begin to be seen as a sad but comic opera and a massive hoax of historic proportions. The Sanford/Palin position could be the antidote.

To the Moon and Back - draft

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/20/09

By returning and rest we shall be saved . . . - The Book of Common Prayer

One giant step to the moon forty years ago today changed things. Possibly it changed everything for all the future and for everyone. Shortly thereafter in 1977, film critic Stanley Kauffman went to the movies and saw a film that he called an epiphany, “an event in the history of faith.” It was Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This movie that could not have been made before July 20, 1969 when we landed on the moon for prior to that we were afraid of the moon. We were afraid of space.

Close Encounters was distinctly different from Sci-fi movies of the 1950s, movies like War of the Worlds, in particular, in which great “eyes” suddenly appear in the cities and blast the cities away. We had been dreaming of going to space and dreaming of aliens for decades, even a century before. The Fifties response was to blast the aliens away before they blasted you, transferring a hostile enemy from Nazi Germany to the U.S.S.R. to an ambiguous alien invasion in ten short years.

What is interesting today is that we now dream of returning to earth in TV shows like Lost and Survivor. And in these, as in the space flicks back in the Fifties, it is a strange, new and even psychic place which we have got to and know it as if for the first time. In the late 1990s and early 2000’s we were back to blasting away aliens again in movies like the 1996 Independence Day and Spielberg’s 2005 remake of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise. Speilberg brought us up, then just as the end of his career he brought us back. This could be an event in the history of faith as well.

Swiss depth psychologist C.G. Jung was fascinated by U.F.O. sightings in the 1950s and as early as 1946 he began to collect data on people who had “visitations.” He wrote the monograph Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in 1958 : As we know from ancient Egyptian history they (UFOs) are manifestations of psychic changes which always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. Apparently they are changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformation of the collective psyche. . . . We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the springpoint enters Aquarius.

Jung’s comments brought him a high place in a new hierarchy. He was positioned top row center in the Council of Elders on the cover of The Beatles most famous album, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, the definitive archeological object of the day.
The circular space ships are eyes, said Jung. It is the eye of God, the eye of Horus, the sky god, projecting down from the heavens.

We shouldn’t fear these things, he said. We should welcome them. And when we do we – the world - will begin to engage a new awakening.

I don’t know if Stephen Spielberg was listening, but I expect he was, as Close Encounters . . . followed just that prescription. Spielberg’s screenplay is based on the book The UFO Experience (1972) by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who portrays alien encounters as optimistic, benevolent and loving. The dreamers in the movie follow their visions and welcome the intruders from Outer Space rather than blast them away.

This was followed by the Spielberg movie E.T., screenplay by Melissa Mathison - a well-known contributor to Tibetan Buddhist causes. E.T. is the story of the sweet-faced extra-terrestrial and it was accompanied by a famous poster featuring the Hand of God touching the little alien, like Michelangelo’s picture of God touching Adam’s hand in the Creation scene on the Sistine Chapel. By the end of the century aliens are less than divine and we have become completely acclimated to critters from outer space. In the Spielberg blockbuster a few years back, Men in Black, they pass for ordinary citizens in New York City, although the guardians, the Men in Black, cast a wary eye upon them.

That would set the course. From then on out, Outer Space would be an element we would feel familiar in. Indeed, from then until the end of the century all epics would take place in the air or in space. The Star Wars sage presented a Taoist and Zen primer and would carry for 30 years. There are specific references throughout the series to Zen, Buddhism and Taoism. A “Quigon-ginn” for example, is a Taoist avatar. John Wayne, the 1950s man on horseback, would be the last of the earth-bound heroes. But I half expect to see him pop up again in the next season of Lost.

No one understood the sci-fi alien encounter genre better than Chris Carter, creator of The X Files, whose agents, Scully and Mulder, are often between worlds, earth-bound and alien, and aliens are sometimes viewed as ourselves on another astral plane or ourselves evolved from DNA from an extra-terrestrial species. The X Files, which took some of its impetus from Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack’s book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, progressively moves the genre away from us against them, to a situation where we somehow share something with the aliens: I am he.

David Duchovny, educated at Yale and Princeton, brought some learned credentials to the show, and in one episode to which he contributed script, there is a retelling of Dostoyevski’s chapter in The Brother’s Karamatsov, “The Grand Inquisitor.” In the X Files version – as in the sci-fi folk lore of the three Men in Black accompanying a new avatar - Christ comes back as an alien and is imprisoned, effectively making the jump to hyper space from the Piscean Age and one of its last, great Christian thinkers and novelists, Dostoyevsky, to the Age of Aquarius.

For the record, in the final episode of The X Files on May 19, 2002, in which Scully and Mulder are reunited, the Cigarette-Smoking Man reveals that the world will end on December 22, 2012. That is, the “alien invasion” -- which suggests the new consciousness taking precedence over the old -- will be completed on that day. In the final scene, Scully and Mulder realize they are seeking the same thing - he as a UFO investigator and she as a Roman Catholic. Mulder takes Scully’s cross in his hand that she has been wearing on her neck throughout the series. It is interesting that it is exactly that worn by John Lennon in his last pictures with the New York City basketball shirt. It is interesting because in the week in which the Age of Aquarius actually began – Dec. 31/Jan. 1, 2001, the X Files featured an episode written by Mulder with a messiah figure who directly suggests John Lennon.

The ultimate Aquarian episode and one of the best is The Blessing Way, in which Mulder is left for dead by the Cigarette Smoking Man, then taken to the Land of the Dead where he meets his father, and is raised again from the dead or near-dead and “born again.” He is guided through the Land of the Dead and brought back by a Native American shaman during the birth of the White Buffalo on a Wisconsin farm, a Native American sign of new Awakening and a harbinger of Aquarius.

The X Files’ final regular series episode with Scully and Mulder together is a virtual Nativity scene with alien visitors, complete with guiding star and the Lone Gunmen presented as the three Magi bearing gifts. The child Scully bears is ultimately given up for adoption to a family that lives under the flag of the White Buffalo.

The child is the Chosen One, the Aquarian, and the White Buffalo is the symbol of Aquarius. (Both Close Encounters and The X-Files have tag lines that suggest religious faith. The movie poster for Close Encounters reads, “We are not alone.” In The X-Files, there is a poster of a flying saucer in Agent Mulder’s office that reads, “I want to believe.”)

By the turn of the millennium, but even the tenacious Star Trek crew has turned the corner. One of the very last chapters, Andromeda, staring the dreamy, New Age Kevin Sorbo as Dylan – no authoritarian Captain Kirk, just Dylan – the ship’s commander, casts its crew as “keepers of the way,” a page right out of Lao Tsu and the Tao te Ching, although the commander still has a tendency to break heads.

The desire to conquer the universe is a phantom. We cannot conquer the universe. We cannot conquer the earth. We cannot conquer ourselves. The gods hide in low places and the new Twilight books and movies advance the seeker’s genre by asking the most deeply impressed human question of all the human ages: How do we and can we engage our full human nature without encountering the beast which lives within us. How can we engage and contain our own bestial nature. The alien in not in space. It is within ourselves. Like Jung’s “eyes in the sky” the vampires here are “gods” as well, the Shining Ones who seek the solution to this question. In our traditions, the only others who have successfully mastered this dilemma are the Volturi; barely guised old school Italian Roman Catholics; the kind who pop up again in the Ron Howard’s reworking of the Can Brown novels like The Da Vinci Code.

The Star Trek series began coming “back to earth” in the 1986 feature Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, the self-parodying tale of the Enterprise crew coming back to earth in the 1980s to save the whales, one of the most engaging of the series, directed by Leonard Nimoy. After his retirement from the series William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the long-running series, wrote a book called Get a Life about Trekie cult followers. Trekies later became the subject of the hilarious spoof Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver, who played Captain Kirk’s dark cosmic sister, Lieutenant Ripley, in the Alien series. Trekies aside, Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Ripley are both Master Aquarians working their way through the murky ambiguity unknown of an unknown future. “To boldly go where no man has gone before”; that would be to the new millennium.

By the beginning of the new century we have returned to earth (and to its quality of the Unconscious, Middle Earth). Spielberg's A/I (2001) is a high-tech retelling of the Old World Pinochio story (the myth/dream of an old man at a spiritual loss and carving his Savior/Messiah out of a tree, like the Prague Golem story of the 16th century Rabbi Loeb). In Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Matrix, there is no longer the belief that the alien is really out there, in space, and that we should go after him, but that space fiction and its inhabitants are representative of an inner condition, as it has been right along in the Star Wars series. And in the magnificent animated feature film, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, (2002) we re-enter the natural world of earth, air, fire and water that we left behind when we said good bye to Abbess Hildegard in the 12th century. Perhaps like Haku, we will remember our name.

As all things looked to the sky in the 1950s, today all paths return to earth. Tolkien’s Rings series enters a state preceding the medieval period, State of Heaven brings us Christian on Islam war is the 12th century, the best seller The DaVinci Code, contains riddles of a far earlier day and Harry Potter. The Deathless Child of Old England, returns us to where we came.

Our space journey did not begin with Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk. It began with Columbus. These are the sentiments of the most American of poets, Walt Whitman: Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?/ The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,/ The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,/The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,/The lands to be welded together.

The passage would be to the sun and the moon and all of the stars and to Siruis and Jupiter. Then: After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d)/ After the great captiains and engineers have accoomplish’d their work,/ After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,/ Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name;/ The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

We are a land-based species and cannot live in outer space. It should be the most obvious fact of human nature. But that we cannot live there and were not meant to does not mean we shouldn’t visit there. The planned space missions to the moon and Mars that are to begin around 2020 bring six separate worlds, three in the West - Russia, the EU and America - and three in the East - Japan, China and India - to a new plane of human experience. This in itself brings a new Creation. It is a world which before July 20, 1969 did not exist and was not even suggested. It is a new world in which the Dalai Lama has said the technical mastery of the West joins the psychic and spiritual influences of the East. They have found something they lacked in us and we have found something we had lost in them. Nothing could be a greater tribute the great, heroic, human achievement of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, the three avatars who went to the moon in a very small boat forty years ago today.

Every State a Free State

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/17/09

Nothing can separate us for we are all that is left. – Smashing Pumpkins

I’m almost a little glad that Dallas quarterback Tony Romo has broken up with his attractive girl friend. Too bad for Tony but maybe he will be a little more focused this year. And I wonder about New England’s Tom Brady as well as Tom is married now to the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. Which is a good thing for him and the missus but how could you work?

We live in an age which has come to see beauty as ugly, strength as weakness and character as creepy conspiracy. It is the viral deconstructivist curse which has brought the third-generation people to the end of things and here at the end has brought Obama to a farm without roosters. It is a celebration of weakness, a striving to the middling and an affirmation of banality. We reached apogee about 1994 when they started passing out soccer trophies and advanced karate belts to every single kid. Success in previous experience and innate ability is no longer required for the most critical positions; see Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Joe Biden as VP, both back benched only months after their appointments. Innate ability is even considered innately unjust in the Cloud Cuckoo Land where everyone gets a trophy.

30 years ago I recall talking to a Yale undergraduate student about a dream she had of flying into a city with a set of architectural drawings. But the plans were to remove all the buildings in the city rather than build them. That was the agenda; a kind of suburban form of political nihilism that had morphed from Malraux, Koestler, Trotsky; the fierce women and men who shook the world, to the timid and the tepid three generations later. As one commentator said, “They didn’t want to take over the world, they wanted to take over the English Department.”

Yale then was many second and third generation Americans who had first got to Ivy League but were locked in paralysis and neurosis by the task of unbuilding the building they had gone to build. A group like New York Times columnist David Brooks has been concerned about throughout his career and ruminates again with a colleague this week if they are now in the ruling class. I got the highest marks in the class. Am I in the ruling class yet? I got the highest grade in the test, can I be President now, can I be in the Supreme Court? Probably.

Most my age have gone off to play by now and Brooks will soon because his generation (which Michael Jackson marked as Monkey God) has found its work ended about this week. But it should be asked if the republic was better served in the old day of the fierce women and men when everyday journalists like Ida Tarbell, Jack Reed, Lincoln Steffens, S.S. McClure found their world work completed and retired not to the think tank but to the drunk tank.

The second and third generation dilemma today is well seen perhaps in this observation by the second-generation New Jersey Italian Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony Soprano’s Beatrice and psychiatrist. She is having dinner with her son, sent to the upscale Bard as Brooks and company were sent to elite, WASPy New England prep schools and colleges so as to join the ruling class. She asks what he is studying. The deconstructionist poets, he says.

“My son a Deconstructionist,” she said with barely concealed scorn. “And your grandfather a general contractor.”

Will come as no surprise that when she needed survival help, when she was forced to turn to the life force itself, when she truly needed a real man to wreak savage vengeance to establish equilibrium in the world again after she had been raped, she would turn instead to Tony.

The m’am sahibs in New York’s upscale press today are in systemic disarray. Like New York’s own Scarlett O'Hara they see it all beginning to slip away and ask, why Dovey, what is that frightful Sarah Palin doing and what does she want? Why is she here? Where is she going? I know where she is going. She is going to Texas – the only state besides Alaska today left with a sense of place, belonging and bound by the heart to the earth - to be with Governor Rick Perry so as to advance his reelection prospects the 10th amendment movement, which she mentioned once specifically and twice more elliptically in her going-away-from-Alaska speech. Red state/blue state contention – a division of head and heart - began here in 1794 when Washington joined the New Yorkers at Jay’s Treaty, alienating his fellow Virginians Madison and Jefferson and fatefully entitling New York to Alexander Hamilton’s corporate vision of continental and world dominance which carried from Ulysses S. Grant to Michael Jackson. Nothing in 150 years, not Mao, not Uncle Ho, not Osama bin Laden, not George W. Bush, not nothing, has shaken New York’s inherent conquistador sensibility like Sarah Palin in a bright red dress.

Attacks on Governor Palin, in this week when the Democrats have sent a stand up comic to the Senate, have gotten laughable. That conservative Gate Keeper, Peggy Noonan, of The Wall Street Journal – the first to cry Eeek! - has declared Palin to be an actual threat to the republic like a post-1984 Emmanuel Goldstein, the state’s declared Enemy of the People in George Orwell’s classic. Most tragi-comic is perhaps the MSM’s engaging of a teen-age boy who managed to get her daughter pregnant. It is getting like the early days when Senators Jesse Helms, Claiborne Pell and Daniel Moynihan helped bring the Dali Lama and the Tibetan people’s plight to the attention of Congress. The Chinese government responded in a panic, saying that Tibetans used the skulls and bones of babies for kitchen utensils. I expect Alaskans do the same. Nevertheless, her stock rose again this week when her recent op-ed in The Washington Post in opposition to President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plan was challenged by Senator John Kerry in The Huffington Post. I propose a series of public televised debates on energy and economy between Kerry and Palin; Nantucket Democrats vs. Alaska Republicans.

The 10th amendment movement started here in New Hampshire. On first reports that a group of Libertarians was looking for a place to make a fresh start and this was one of the locations they were looking at, nor'easterners responded with a Yankee sense of concerned indifference and phlegmatic detachment. Come on up, the governor responded. It was a good place to come - cheap living shrouded in beautiful mountains with six months of snow and silence, and in the spring, bear and moose wandering into your back yard. There is nothing quite like a clear, cold night sky full of stars with coyotes crying on the edge of the forest to bring you back to first principles. And nothing clarifies the mind and brings it out of slumber like stoking a good New England wood stove on a crisp, cold morning - one in the kitchen, preferably, where family will share the warmth. Especially if you have split your own wood and harvested your own trees.

That these young people would seek secession if they didn't get what they wanted didn't cause much of a stir. Daniel Shays down in northern Massachusetts had done the same after western Massachusetts farmers quickly discerned that Sam Adams was just pulling their leg about taxes and all before the Revolution. Adams' slogan, "No taxation without representation," worked better among the Clipper ship captains, China merchants and newly rich real estate agents in Boston which was in direct economic competition with London, than it did in the north country, where most of the farmers were indifferent to governance by either London or Washington - both seemed far beyond their reach and their imagination. Then after the Revolution, taxes didn't go down as Adams said they would. They went up. Most everyone in the United States has forgotten Daniel Shays and his Rebellion which brought about the Federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia but up here we haven't as it is our native history. Maybe there is still something antiquated in our mind that doesn't quite gel with the big world of the federalists and the globalists that followed this tax rebellion.

I was born and reared about three hours away from where I sit now and like others, I guess there is a sense that something has passed us by. In Rhode Island we even had our own accents and used funny words like "parlor" and "piazza" when referring to the screened wooden porch out back. And if we left town people had a hard time understanding what we were saying. In those days, the country roads among the swamp Yankees who lived in places like Little Compton and Nanaquarket - places that still had beautiful Indian names - were lined with huge elegant elm trees. Every quiet country road in New England was lined with elm trees that rose like cathedrals. Then something happened and they all died. Every one of them. And all at once they died all over New England. And something else happened. They put a bridge in between Newport and Jamestown and our quaint little towns were no longer eight or ten hours away from New York City on secondary roads, but two hours on good roads. And that was the end of that.

So a few Libertarians with new ideas didn't seem like much of a threat and if anything, they appeared to our eyes to resemble our own Daniel Shays more than they did the New Yorkers, one of whom bought an entire street of old colonial houses in Little Compton all in one afternoon.

In New England, we understood about federalism. We understood what it meant and what it would bring. And we understood its symbolism and how it changed us. When the New England town common that I live on here in New Hampshire was built in the mid-1700s, in the center was a stone well, the most ancient symbol of any people, the symbol of soul, tradition, earth and animals as they all meet together in secular and divine community. We meet at a stone circle and carrying water from the well brings nourishment, spiritual as well as physical. When people meet at the well they meet the elements of earth and water of which they are a part and there they find their union with the world and with the Universe. Most stone wells are round in New England and in the English tradition - the circle representing the collective psyche and Mother Earth. Yank farmers of English stock also had a particularly special tree if front of their house that they built their farm around and honored in the same agrarian tradition and one New Hampshire man even penned a song you still hear today at winter solstice combining traditions called, "Jesus, the Apple Tree."

The town common today is nicely restored but they took the well away. You can still see it - they put it down the road, off to the side and out and away from the common. What they put in its place was a flag pole and an American flag - not even a state flag until I called to whine, just an American flag. Federalists have no use for stone circles.

New England understands federalism because we lost our original spirit to federalism in the build-up to the Civil War. Just as the South would yield to the New Yorkers - they of the "Empire State" - so too would New England submit. Our great poets and speakers - Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott who brought us natural religion were our best. But in my opinion, they were also our last. Now, like Andrew Wyeth's great but haunted paintings of Maine's manor houses and farmsteads, New England's spiritual house is empty.

This is a consequence of federalism. New England went willfully under the banner of federalism to great effect, but there are consequences as well. Until now, northern people have never challenged the principles of federalism. Generally speaking they were satisfied with their lot and had won the day. From the early part of our passing century we had conquered the world. From 1865 onward, complaint of the nature of the federal compact had come only from the South. But now, for the first time since the Civil War, the federalist principle was being challenged by northern people and that was a consequence of the war on Iraq.

When the Libertarians moved to Littleton bringing with them the idea of states rights and an independent spirit, the only other coherent voices on the continent making a credible claim for the same rights were The League of the South and the Parti Quebecois in Quebec Province, both of which sought independence through non-violent and democratic means. Now there are perhaps more than a dozen such groups, like the Free California movement and the Republic of Cascadia. And some have fancy web sites and fancy lawyers. Most of these new groups are in the so-called blue states. But 36 red states following New Hampshire’s cue have initiated state sovereignty legislation in the past three months.

The war on Iraq began to explain federalism up here to people who hadn't thought about it or who took it for granted for 140 years. Federalism means that if Washington, D.C. declares war on some other country for whatever purpose, the states have no say in the matter. Nor do the states have a say in any other matter. For practical purposes one can dissent only as an individual. And as that erstwhile KGB agent Earnest Hemingway once wrote, a man by himself doesn’t have a chance.

At the beginning of the war on Iraq I proposed that we in the northernmost states of New England did not have to participate and under Thomas Jefferson's view of the Constitution we had the right not to participate as states. And anyway, if we felt it was wrong to do so AS A STATE we had the moral obligation not to participate. This was loosely based on Jefferson's having written a secession clause to the Virginia constitution and the Kentucky Resolutions which he wrote in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, stating clearly his purpose that the states were the final arbiters of the Constitution.

The Constitution, like marriage, should open you up and awaken you, not shut you down and cripple you. My proposal received surprising support from the most liberal quarters in the North as it did from conservative Southerners. But most northern people I spoke to then had never before considered themselves to be citizens of a particular state and region and having particular rights as a citizen of that state. My explanation was that which the stone circle signifies - you are a citizen of a real place (you are the place) - a state with formidable mountains and great beauty and character and with its own way of earth, water, wind and bears in the woods and clear nights in winter and its own soul and traditions and its own personality - in federalism you are the agent of a concept; a buyer within an economic policy, within an abstraction. You are a figment of a globalist illusion. You are the faceless, uniform and undifferentiated expression of a horde holding a little candle in a Pepsi commercial. In federalism you do not live in a place. You live in an economic zone.

Until the war on Iraq and the reelection of George W. Bush northern people didn't care about this as they felt they held the balance of power in the federation. But now no. Now they look at states rights again and now it is time to look at Jefferson again.

Having lived in two states in my life with strong and unique identities, Rhode Island and North Carolina, I cannot understand why any state would not want to be a free state as Jefferson proposed it. Every state should have the same default clause that Jefferson wrote into Virginia's contract when he tentatively entered Virginia into federation. I cannot conceive of a state today with its own personality and life force not desiring and demanding to have such a clause. Every state should be a free state and every state should have a state constitution declaring itself to be a free state and allowing it to gather with its own neighboring states and regions in any way it so desires.

As Jefferson said, this is natural law. What needs to happen is that every state should look to take back its own inalienable rights as the Free Staters in New Hampshire look to be free. Every state should call on its state government to renew itself and review its contract with the federal government. Each state should insure that their federal compact affirms Jefferson's view of the states as safest guardian of the liberties and the domestic interests of the people and the surest bulwark against imperial and anti-republican tendencies as he clearly stated his position in his inaugural address.

Prior to the Civil War, New England was closer to Jefferson's view than to Hamilton's view. It is our natural birthright and we should reclaim it and call for the reapportioning of states rights and federal rights. Perhaps developing regional circles of care and responsibility in opposition to “one size fits all” government, a phrase that Mitt Romney used first, Rick Perry second and Governor Palin used again in her recent comments. We were a fledgling continent when we were first declared a federation. 230 years later we require a new culture of government including state and county circles, regional circles and more free and independent continental relationships.

Let’s have a Debate between Sarah Palin and John Kerry on Energy and Economy

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/15/09

Governor Sarah Palin has published an opinion piece in The Washington Post about President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy policy, calling it an enormous threat to our economy and saying it would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage. Senator John Kerry, who once had his picture taken with a hunting rifle in his hands, has challenged Palin with comments in The Huffington Post. "The global climate change crisis threatens our economy and our national security in profound ways," writes Kerry.

This is the second time Kerry has challenged Palin in two weeks. It is, as CNN said, Round Two. As Kerry sees himself as point man in the anti-Palin squad, Palin should challenge Kerry to a series of public and televised debates on issues of energy and economy. The Nantucket liberal vs. the Alaskan conservative. Should bring big box office.

Why Sarah Palin? Every State a Free State (Live Free or Die)

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/14/09

I’m almost a little glad that Dallas quarterback Tony Romo has broken up with his attractive girl friend. Too bad for Tony but maybe he will be a little more focused this year. And I wonder about New England’s Tom Brady as well as Tom is married now to the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. Which is a good thing for him and the missus but how could you work?

We live in an age which has come to see beauty as ugly, strength as weakness and character as creepy conspiracy. It is the viral deconstructivist curse which has brought the third-generation people to the end of things and here at the end has brought Obama to a farm without roosters. It is a celebration of weakness, a striving to the middling and an affirmation of banality. We reached apogee about 1994 when they started passing out soccer trophies and advanced karate belts to every single kid regardless of race, color, sex, creed, sexual orientation, ethnic persuasion or ability.

30 years ago I recall talking to a Yale undergraduate student about a dream she had of flying into a city with a set of architectural drawings. But the plans were to remove all the buildings in the city rather than build them. That was the agenda; a kind of suburban form of political nihilism that had morphed from Malraux, Koestler, Trotsky; the fierce women and men who shook the world, to the timid and the tepid three generations later. As one commentator said, “They didn’t want to take over the world, they wanted to take over the English Department.”

Yale then was many second and third generation Americans who had first got to Ivy League but were locked in paralysis by the task of un-building the building they had gone to build. A group like New York Times columnist David Brooks has been concerned about throughout his career and ruminates again with a colleague this week if he is now in the ruling class. I got the highest marks in the class. Am I in the ruling class yet? I got the highest grade in the test, can I be President now, can I be in the Supreme Court? Probably.

Most my age have gone off to play by now and Brooks will soon because his generation (which Michael Jackson marked as Monkey God) has found its work ended about this week. But it should be asked if the republic was better served in the old day of the fierce women and men when everyday journalists like Ida Tarbell, Jack Reed, Lincoln Steffens, S.S. McClure found their world work completed and retired not to the think tank but to the drunk tank.

The second and third generation dilemma today is well seen perhaps in this observation by the second-generation New Jersey Italian Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony Soprano’s Beatrice and psychiatrist. She is having dinner with her son, sent to the upscale Bard as Brooks and company were sent to elite, WASPy New England prep schools and colleges so as to join the ruling class. She asks what he is studying. The deconstructionist poets, he says.

“My son a Deconstructionist,” she said with barely concealed scorn. “And your grandfather a general contractor.”

Will come as no surprise that when she needed survival help, when she was forced to turn to the life force itself, when she truly needed a real man to wreck savage vengeance to establish equilibrium in the world again after she had been raped, she would turn instead to Tony.

The m’am sahibs in New York’s upscale press today are in systemic disarray. Like New York’s own Scarlett O'Hara they see it all beginning to slip away and ask, why Dovey, what is that frightful Sarah Palin doing and what does she want? Why is she here? Where is she going? I know where she is going. She is going to Texas – the only state besides Alaska today left with a sense of place, belonging and bound by the heart to the earth - to be with Rick Perry so as to advance the 10th amendment movement, which she mentioned once specifically and twice more elliptically in her going-away-from-Alaska speech.

The 10th amendment movement started here in New Hampshire. On first reports that a group of Libertarians was looking for a place to make a fresh start and this was one of the locations they were looking at, nor'easterners responded with a Yankee sense of concerned indifference and phlegmatic detachment. Come on up, the governor responded. It was a good place to come - cheap living shrouded in beautiful mountains with six months of snow and silence, and in the spring, bear and moose wandering into your back yard. There is nothing quite like a clear, cold night sky full of stars with coyotes crying on the edge of the forest to bring you back to first principles. And nothing clarifies the mind and brings it out of slumber like stoking a good New England wood stove on a crisp, cold morning - one in the kitchen, preferably, where family will share the warmth. Especially if you have split your own wood and harvested your own trees.

That these young people would seek secession if they didn't get what they wanted didn't cause much of a stir. Daniel Shays down in northern Massachusetts had done the same after western Massachusetts farmers quickly discerned that Sam Adams was just pulling their leg about taxes and all before the Revolution. Adams' slogan, "No taxation without representation," worked better among the Clipper ship captains, China merchants and newly rich real estate agents in Boston which was in direct economic competition with London, than it did in the north country, where most of the farmers were indifferent to governance by either London or Washington - both seemed far beyond their reach and their imagination. Then after the Revolution, taxes didn't go down as Adams said they would. They went up. Most everyone in the United States has forgotten Daniel Shays and his Rebellion which brought about the Federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia but up here we haven't as it is our native history. Maybe there is still something antiquated in our mind that doesn't quite gel with the big world of the federalists and the globalists that followed this tax rebellion.

I was born and reared about three hours away from where I sit now and like others, I guess there is a sense that something has passed us by. In Rhode Island we even had our own accents and used funny words like "parlor" and "piazza" when referring to the screened wooden porch out back. And if we left town people had a hard time understanding what we were saying. In those days, the country roads among the swamp Yankees who lived in places like Little Compton and Nanaquarket - places that still had beautiful Indian names - were lined with huge elegant elm trees. Every quiet country road in New England was lined with elm trees that rose like cathedrals. Then something happened and they all died. Every one of them. And all at once they died all over New England. And something else happened. They put a bridge in between Newport and Jamestown and our quaint little towns were no longer eight or ten hours away from New York City on secondary roads, but two hours on good roads. And that was the end of that.

So a few Libertarians with new ideas didn't seem like much of a threat and if anything, they appeared to our eyes to resemble our own Daniel Shays more than they did the New Yorkers, one of whom bought an entire street of old colonial houses in Little Compton all in one afternoon.

In New England, we understood about federalism. We understood what it meant and what it would bring. And we understood its symbolism and how it changed us. When the New England town common that I live on here in New Hampshire was built in the mid-1700s, in the center was a stone well, the most ancient symbol of any people, the symbol of soul, tradition, earth and animals as they all meet together in secular and divine community. We meet at a stone circle and carrying water from the well brings nourishment, spiritual as well as physical. When people meet at the well they meet the elements of earth and water of which they are a part and there they find their union with the world and with the Universe. Most stone wells are round in New England and in the English tradition - the circle representing the collective psyche and Mother Earth. Yank farmers of English stock also had a particularly special tree if front of their house that they built their farm around and honored in the same agrarian tradition and one New Hampshire man even penned a song you still hear today at winter solstice combining traditions called, "Jesus, the Apple Tree."

The town common today is nicely restored but they took the well away. You can still see it - they put it down the road, off to the side and out and away from the common. What they put in its place was a flag pole and an American flag - not even a state flag until I called to whine, just an American flag. Federalists have no use for stone circles.

New England understands federalism because we lost our original spirit to federalism in the build-up to the Civil War. Just as the South would yield to the New Yorkers - they of the "Empire State" - so too would New England submit. Our great poets and speakers - Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott who brought us natural religion were our best. But in my opinion, they were also our last. Now, like Andrew Wyeth's great but haunted paintings of Maine's manor houses and farmsteads, New England's spiritual house is empty.

This is a consequence of federalism. New England went willfully under the banner of federalism to great effect, but there are consequences as well. Until now, northern people have never challenged the principles of federalism. Generally speaking they were satisfied with their lot and had won the day. From the early part of our passing century we had conquered the world. From 1865 onward, complaint of the nature of the federal compact had come only from the South. But now, for the first time since the Civil War, the federalist principle was being challenged by northern people and that was a consequence of the war on Iraq.

When the Libertarians moved to Littleton bringing with them the idea of states rights and an independent spirit, the only other coherent voices on the continent making a credible claim for the same rights were The League of the South and the Parti Quebecois in Quebec Province, both of which sought independence through non-violent and democratic means. Now there are perhaps more than a dozen such groups, like the Free California movement and the Republic of Cascadia. And some have fancy web sites and fancy lawyers. Most of these new groups are in the so-called blue states. But 36 red states following New Hampshire’s cue have initiated state sovereignty legislation in the past three months.

The war on Iraq began to explain federalism to people who hadn't thought about it or who took it for granted for 140 years. Federalism means that if Washington, D.C. declares war on some other country for whatever purpose, the states have no say in the matter. Nor do the states have a say in any other matter. For practical purposes one can dissent only as an individual. And as that erstwhile KGB agent Earnest Hemingway once wrote, a man by himself doesn’t have a chance.

At the beginning of the war on Iraq I proposed that we in the northernmost states of New England did not have to participate and under Thomas Jefferson's view of the Constitution we had the right not to participate as states. And anyway, if we felt it was wrong to do so AS A STATE we had the moral obligation not to participate. This was loosely based on Jefferson's having written a secession clause to the Virginia constitution and the Kentucky Resolutions which he wrote in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, stating clearly his purpose that the states were the final arbiters of the Constitution.

The Constitution, like marriage, should open you up and awaken you, not shut you down and cripple you. My proposal received surprising support from the most liberal quarters in the North as it did from conservative Southerners. But most northern people I spoke to then had never before considered themselves to be citizens of a particular state and region and having particular rights as a citizen of that state. My explanation was that which the stone circle signifies - you are a citizen of a real place (you are the place) - a state with formidable mountains and great beauty and character and with its own way of earth, water, wind and bears in the woods and clear nights in winter and its own soul and traditions and its own personality - in federalism you are the agent of a concept; a buyer within an economic policy, within an abstraction. In federalism you do not live in a place. You live in an economic zone.

Until the war on Iraq and the reelection of George W. Bush northern people didn't care about this as they felt they held the balance of power in the federation. But now no. Now they look at states rights again and now it is time to look at Jefferson again.

Having lived in two states in my life with strong and unique identities, Rhode Island and North Carolina, I cannot understand why any state would not want to be a free state as Jefferson proposed it. Every state should have the same default clause that Jefferson wrote into Virginia's contract when he tentatively entered Virginia into federation. I cannot conceive of a state today with its own personality and life force not desiring and demanding to have such a clause. Every state should be a free state and every state should have a state constitution declaring itself to be a free state and allowing it to gather with its own neighboring states and regions in any way it so desires.

As Jefferson said, this is natural law. What needs to happen is that every state should look to take back its own inalienable rights as the Free Staters in New Hampshire look to be free. Every state should call on its state government to renew itself and review its contract with the federal government. Each state should insure that their federal compact affirms Jefferson's view of the states as safest guardian of the liberties and the domestic interests of the people and the surest bulwark against imperial and anti-republican tendencies as he clearly states his position in his inaugural address.

Prior to the Civil War, New England was closer to Jefferson's view than to Hamilton's view. It is our natural birthright and we should reclaim it and call for the reapportioning of states rights and federal rights. Perhaps developing regional circles of care and responsibility in opposition to “one size fits all” government, a phrase that Mitt Romney used first, Rick Perry second and Governor Palin used again in her recent comments. We were a fledgling continent when we were first declared a federation. 230 years later we require a new culture of government including state and county circles, regional circles and more free and independent continental relationships.

Electric Cars vs. Latte Sucking Yuppie Wimps

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/12/09

Vancouver city council has unanimously approved new regulations for electric vehicle charging stations, CBC reports. Under the plan approved Thursday, developers must include plug-ins for electric cars in at least 20 per cent of parking stalls in new condominium and apartment buildings, along with some city-owned parking lots.

One commentator responded, “Yet another example of a Canadian special interest group of latte sucking yuppie wimps that has taken over and obtained access to government policy.”

Council doubled the original proposal that would have required only 10 per cent of stalls to have the charging infrastructure. David Ramslie of the City of Vancouver said the initiative is drawing direct support from car manufacturers like Nissan and Mitsubishi.

“As a result of this each stall will cost $2000 eh. Think again. Do the freaking math folks. Those are after tax dollars,” said the commentator.

Ramslie said the city is getting attention from car companies when it comes to new model launches. "We've had discussions to bring electric vehicles to Vancouver first because we feel this city is set up in so many ways to support electric vehicles."

“In addition the cost will be added to your mortgage. Your real cost will be about $5000 a stall which is stupid beyond belief. People will likely pay for the charges via their credit cards pushing the costs even higher,” replied commentator.

The estimated price tag for the plug-ins is between $500 and $2,000 per stall. Developers are being given an 18-month grace period before the plug-ins are required.

“The fix is easy. Keep the special interest groups away from government policy making. Oh and you can bet the instructions will be in at least three or four languages too. Anybody heard of an extension cord? You can buy one at crappy tire for about $20,”said commentator.

“Electric cars are coming. They are in Europe and in Japan,” Mayor Gregor Robertson told Joanne Lee-Young of the Vancouver Sun, echoing observers who see that while Vancouver might lead Canada, it would be playing catch up to many cities elsewhere, such as San Francisco and Paris, which already each have hundreds of charging stations and growing culture for electric car use. “We need to be prepared.”

“Where does electricity come from,” asked commentator Dams n Coal?

Master Chief Obama

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/10/09

That we are treated this morning by a leading banner photo on Yahoo with pithy comments and observations on why Sarah Palin resigned by a teenage boy who got her daughter pregnant shows how close we have come in this past year to a commissar society. It was Master Chief Obama who first took the initiative, making the despicable comment about putting lipstick on a pig after Sarah Palin made a joke about hockey moms and pitt bulls in her vice presidential debate. Master Chief Obama then defended his comment guess where? The Letterman Show. This is mnemonic slander; suggest and deny, suggest and vehemently deny. It is an insidious form of propaganda that is feeling and sensory rather than language and logic based which the fellow travelers in the press instinctively sense, intuit and advance.

The Master Chief cued the press and the press opened the floodgates. The commissars in the press, from Tina Fey to Katie Couric and on to the second rate subcontractors on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post – much of it coming from the women’s guild - followed the Master Chief’s cue and the horde in the blogs were like a breaking river.

Master Chief’s nod to the horde from Letterman’s perch suggested those studies in which a man in a white coat with pens in the pocket that may or may not be a scientist orders test subjects to do things they would normally find abhorrent if anyone else asked. But they dutifully, gleefully do what a man in the white coat says. It shows us to have the potential to be a society of Renfields, willing, even anxious, to follow Master Chief’s cue and execute his will because we are the Master Chief too. It reveals a totalitarian inner life rising from dormancy here in the Land of the Free.

The Master Chief’s recent trip to Russia brought to my mind anti-war events in the ‘60s and ‘70s when Russian commissars from the Soviet Union were actually in the room helping things along. “Friends”, you see, come to help. And that this bothered the participants little. Indeed, the presence of a foreign authority encouraged and authenticated their naivety. They seemed glad to the help. In the Soviet Union, the commissars ordered the press to say what they did, but they didn’t need to. That you were a member of the Party was commitment enough to indicate that you would do what the Party expected of you. Somewhere in the process a mystic transubstantiation took place as it has here now with Obama. You and the Party were the same and you were the Master Chief too. And that, in those days, was what was identified as totalitarian.

In an opinion piece in the New York Daily News, yesterday, Mike Murphy, and advisor to Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jeb Bush, writes that to go forward, the GOP must snap out of its Sarah Palin spell. To the contrary. Today the GOP has to stand up on her behalf and these three have not. They have remained passive holding the coats while the commissars have tried to destroy her. Rudy Giuliani has spoken up, Rick Perry has spoken up, John McCain has spoken up. Let something begin again with these three in opposition to the passive expedients in the GOP and the coat holders.

Why is there still so much Republican love for Sarah Palin, Murphy asks?

Red state Republicans see the snarky, elite attacks on Palin as an attack on them, he writes. And in some ways, they are.

This is absolutely the answer. The agrarian states naturally responded to a woman who worked with her hands with her husband to make her way in the world and who raised the family as they do. That is why they liked her and identified with her at first. When the commissars went after her they began to love her, because they understood, as Murphy implies, that the viral and instinctive hatred of her by the corporation t shirts was a hatred of them as well. The commissars have created and institutionalized Sarah Palin now in the heartland. She will not go away from the country people now but is bound to them by love and purpose. And like Rick Perry in Texas, she doesn’t care what they think of her in New York.

A Month of Sarah Palin

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/7/09

It is remarkable in itself that when Sarah Palin comes down to the Lower 48 to go to a baseball game with Rudy Giuliani, she remains in the press for a month.

It is interesting as well that this has taken place as a parallel event to a funeral of a generational pop star that is dragging out longer than Washington’s, Lincoln’s or Kennedy’s. Maybe things begin where they end. Here is a thought to her and her delightful Alaskan family from a neighbor in the northwest who was thrown to fame and fall victim of it as well:

Journalists are the most ruthless life form on earth . . . the evilest, most uncaring . .. bitterest . . . no matter what we do, no matter how clean we live our lives, we’re not going to survive this because there are already too many enemies . .. we threaten too many people . . . everyone wants to see us die. They’ve already tried to pass the most offensive part which is attacking my family and that could go on to years. But there’s going to be a time when I’m not going to be able to deal with it anymore when my daughter is old enough to know what is going on. – Kurt Cobain, 1967 - 1994

Note to Stanley Fish's column today in the NYTs RE Sarah Palin:

The Power culture runs on Logos Unchained; all the buildings are square, all the people in pants; it is all that is allowed - Eros is in exile. Michael Jackson is Power's vision of Eros Incarnate; a cryptic caricature; Power's imagining of Eros and a substitute for the real thing. A culture has never been so out of equilibrium and in danger of breakage. The sudden appearance of Woman in Red Dress/True Eros – as in "The Matrix" – almost cracks it in two.

Sarah Palin’s Next Step

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/6/09

"I am real surprised. It is real unconventional," William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, told FOX News. "It would make sense to finish the governorship and then run for president in 2012.”

But it is not unprecedented. William Weld, one of the best and most popular Governors in Massachusetts history not long ago did much the same. A year into his second term he launched an unsuccessful bid for John Kerry’s U.S. Senate seat, then, after losing, resigned to pursue a failed bid to be the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Then he moved to New York to consider running for Governor there.

Kristol didn't count Sarah Palin out for 2012, calling her "crazy like a fox."
"It's a huge gamble -- but some of her gambles have paid off in the past," he said.

"If I had to bet right now, I would bet that we just heard the first opening statement in the 2012 presidential race."

I don’t see that she had any choice. Defend when you are attacked. Any Hockey Mom could tell you that. If you want to understand Sarah Palin don’t look back to McCain, Reagan or any other politician. Look to Gretzky, Brett Hull and Sid the Kid Crosby. Study hockey strategy.

A wide but aging and ailing swath of political and cultural America, mostly urban and educated, has begun experiencing subtle and insidious uncertainty, like rumors of the plague coming to Venice (“Why are they disinfecting the streets of Venice?”) since Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was asked to be VP for John McCain last August. A state of things they perhaps naively and innocently took for granted seems to be dying before their eyes and as in the Kübler-Ross model, when they look back there will have been five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

In this chronology Katie Couric of CBS and Charles Gibson of ABC entered Denial on our behalf in their famous initial interviews in Fall, 2008. David Letterman, Repressed but Fuming Anger (and irony is anger for the timid) in June, 2009. By next Spring, when her book comes out there will be Bargaining and by Fourth of July, 2010, Depression.

Rising into the mid-term elections of 2010 when the dollar has floated downstream like a dead Alaska salmon and the rising BRIC nations have ganged up against us with a new reserve currency, we will start getting to Acceptance.

It was said here two weeks back that Mark Sanford, the governor who cries for Argentina, was a kind of Monkey God for a new movement in America that could now pass on to Rick Perry. Characteristically, Monkey Gods like Sanford disappear – they return to the forest of mischief and ambiguity from which they came after their creative original work is done.

He [Sanford] was the first to speak out in opposition to the bailouts and he stood alone. Shortly after Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, joined him. What he started has converged now with an entirely new approach to government, an approach more akin to Jefferson than Hamilton which is taking hold in 35 states, including Texas, with Perry at the front of the ship. Yesterday, there might have been three people articulating these themes in the 2012 race; Sanford, Perry and Sarah Palin. Now there will likely be two; Perry and Palin.

Scratch the Rick Perry-at-the-front-of-the-ship part. Make that Sarah Palin.

Expect that the conventional religionists who control the orthodoxy of the political process and the airwaves, even those who supported her during the campaign against the slings and arrows of the liberals, will start to kick. Her crowd is electric and like Kennedy, like Reagan, she brings a complete change of paradigm. My hunch is that she will ignore the forms and traditions entirely and seek a new base culture, a new audience and a different path, much as musicians and singers did in the Sixties, to create an entirely new consciousness and a new political culture.

There is a deep, systemic and fundamental split in the general sentiment of this country today. Over there is Obama chatting amiably about coordination of currencies over a light lunch with his new BFFs Sarko and Carla Bruni and maybe some of his Nobel Laureate friends or working in the White House organic vegetable garden with Alice Waters. Over here is Kyle Busch in the last 14 seconds of the Daytona Fourth of July NASCAR race over the weekend, his green car crushed, crumbed, spun and tossed in the air in a heap of wrecks all crashing together and scattered everywhere at well over 100 miles an hour. And he walks away from it.

Obama speaks to the complex and neurasthenic detachment of Henry James’ Bostonians who so loved the slaves but hated the working man. Sarah speaks to Joe the Plumber. Obama, like Hillary Clinton, speaks to the righteous indignation of the sociologist and the guilt of the do-gooder. Sarah, like Victoria, calls to the warrior.

How the Palin Phenomenon will Change American Politics

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 7/2/09

When Vanity Fair this month attempted to institutionalize the anti-Palin mnemonic slander into a regular New York City zeitgeist, it bounced off the wall again as it did with Letterman. William Kristol, the most influential commentator and editor of The Weekly Standard, responded and the Palin Phenomenon is now at the heart of Republican politics.

The generic Palin haters, Letterman, Tiny Fey, Katie Couric and the others, do not initiate trends. Their job is to reinforce and advance old trends that are dying out of lack of oxygen and energy and diseases of the aging and the infirm. These are New York’s’ Chryslers and Chevys; dying breeds forcing influence in a last hurrah as the city itself seems on the verge of drowning.

Sarah Palin represents a new force in American politics and it is one that eventually and as soon as possible the Democrats are going to have to catch up with.

Palin, with husband and children in tow, represents a new cultural dimension in America. She represents small town America. She represents agricultural America and the rising future of plain folk who live among a wealth of commodities. She represents to America exactly what Andrew Jackson represented to America when he came out of the frontier and brought with him a spirit of nature that would trump Adams and Jefferson and stay with us for decades.

When she first took the podium it presented to America a Rorschach test. She was deeply and instinctively hated by some for the way she looked and spoke. She was hated because she had babies, a good husband who didn’t read The Thorn Birds, went to church local and because she represented an Earth Mother archetype which the urban professional class in particular had left behind last when Jerry Rubin instructed the hippies to leave the country and the rural ways and head to Wall Street with him and the Clintons.

Kristol, and conservative commentators including The Hill columnist Dick Morris and David Brooks of The New York Times spontaneously greeted her with un-designed enthusiasm. The Wall Street Journal’s conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, most influential in forming the recent tradition of East Coast Republicans – which might be called George H.W. Bush Republicans or “Catholic” conservatives – cried, “Eek! A mouse!”

Noonan’s are perhaps the best instincts in thoughtful commentary today and back to the 1980s. She saw instinctively that this would change everything for them. And she was right. Today Republicans have to decide. Do they go forward with the new agrarian paradigm and Sarah Palin, or try to match up with the Obama Democrat sensibilities and issues (Schwarzenegger Republicans) – gay marriage, choice, deficit spending – on social issues. That is, should they follow the new path to the heartland or try to be more like urban Democrats? Three things will influence their choice: Obama’s rank in the polls which is sinking; the continued influence on culture of New York and California, which is also sinking and demographics: Americans continue to move south and southwest and to the middle and western states and so does the economy. This is Palin’s turf, not Noonan’s. Not Obama’s either.

We are at a historic turning today and in cultural terms it closely resembles the rise of Andrew Jackson, whose influence came about primarily because the colonial period had simply come to a dead end with the death of Adams and Jefferson. Everything ends. Then it begins again. The Founding Fathers brought us through a birthing period and once we were ready to walk, we correctly left them behind. The terror in the eyes of the New Yorkers at first sight of Palin – one regular New York Times columnist compared her to Hitler, another mocked the pregnancy of her 17-year-old child, starting a short philosophical tradition of disgrace - was exactly that of Jefferson and the high church East Coasters when they saw the rustic brawlers coming in from the country with Jackson. He feared for his country, he said, at the thought that Jackson, still with a bullet lodged in his chest from a duel in Tennessee, could one day rise to the Presidency.

But Jackson was the purely American – non-European – President, while the colonials still looked across the Atlantic for advice, validation of their ideas and culture and consent. In Obama’s autobiography he talked about the vision of Jefferson and Madison in insisting and fighting for religious freedom and what it meant at the time, when the political struggle was to keep the Baptists – the common folk of the South – out of politics and keep it in the hands of the Virginia Episcopalians – the ruling gentry. Jackson represented those common folk and more.

In that regard, Sarah Palin is pure country today and purely Jacksonian. That is what is scaring the britches off the New Yorkers and the smart set at Café Des Artistes and Elaine’s and the Berkeley annex at Chez Panisse, you betcha. But the country would not be held back then and it will not be held back today. The campaign strategies of both Obama and Hillary Clinton designed to “whistle past Dixie . . .” and write off the South and the Midwest as much as possible, so to take control through urban enclaves was short-sighted, dangerous and immoral. The regions will not be left behind.

He may not be fully aware of it, but John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for VP will prove in time to have been a master stroke. But in fact, he stole the idea from the Democrats. It was not Sarah Palin who initiated rural, Jacksonian sensibilities into politics; it was the brilliant, gun-tottin’, tobacco-chewing new senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, who had done so just two years before in his run for Senate. Webb outright campaigned in his Democratic primary as a rural Virginia warrior, Scotch-Irish, Old South red neck. And he won two to one in Alexandria, the “urban profession” enclave, over his polite, urban professional opponent.

History looks in one direction, forward. When Jackson took the Presidency it would mark the end of the Colonial period. America would no longer look to the Ivy League-educated, the editors of Harvard Law Review, the Boston Quincy neighborhood or Monticello for governance. To the contrary. One’s status would rise by being thrown out of Harvard as Emerson was. Instead, all parties would look West and rekindle the heartland spirit thereafter with Jacksonian knockoffs, up to and including the man in the stove-pipe hat and the Amish whiskers said to grow up in a log cabin with only three sides.

We are today at such a turning. Palin is a harbinger. The old ways are over. The new day is here and it must be engaged on its own terms. To countervail against Palin, the odds on favorite of agrarian, conservative, heartland America, the Democrats will eventually have to look back to Jim Webb. The will need to appeal to the heartland or they will lose it entirely and the consequences for them and for the country could be devastating. (Watch Rick Perry and Ted Nugent at the upcoming Fourth of July tea parties.)

Webb’s pal Mark Warner, now Senator from Virginia, has in his career been the leader in converging the needs and desires of rural hills and hollows when he was the most successful Governor of Virginia. Jon Tester, the Senator from Montana and a farmer with fingers missing to prove it, would make a good match for VP in 2012 or thereafter. Or Brian Schweitzer, Governor or Montana, with one of the highest approval ratings in the nation, a steadfast Second Amendment supporter with an “A” rating from the NRA.

The Republicans should take the heartland initiative that Palin represents and the Democrats have to leave the lace curtain Palin-haters behind if they want to compete in the long term. Otherwise, Obama will be their last hurrah.