War without victory: Laughing all the way
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/31/10
The war in Iraq does not end with a victory march. There will be no sailors kissing nurses at Times Square. It ends with discord and dissent at the exact place where it started, Ground Zero. It did not even end. It just stopped.
In some ways we are worse off than when we started. Today when liberals oppose conservatives they will do so in support of Islamic opinion instead of Marxist opinion as in the debate today over the mosque near Ground Zero. Islam now has faces of dissent in opposition to the West worldwide with varied different degrees of hostility, opposition and territoriality. Much as Marx became the uniform face of global dissent after 1917. Whether it is Taliban in the Punjab, school girls wearing the burka in France or the Iran state media calling the French First Lady a prostitute and threatening Israel with extinction, minarets in Switzerland, car bombs in Baghdad still, or that upscale public service ad now airing on TV of so many Hollywood handsome and striving Islamic faces yearning to be free in America which so closely resembles Obama's “yes we can” video. Marx is dead. Islam has a new face and it is the rising face of global dissent in the new millennium.
Reader Sebastian writes commenting that Colbert and Stewart inappropriately make the news funny. I think it is one of the worse directions in this war. Making the news funny especially as Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart do, appeasing and accommodating both sides, tragically deflects responsibility. This was especially harmful during the war in Iraq. It led a young generation to neither support nor oppose in any sincere, committed and authentic way. It was a purely narcissistic avoidance by what John Kenneth Galbraith called a “culture of contentment” from the stoned elite in the yogurt shop to expedient and weakling Congress (featuring then Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) known by their works as neither hot nor cold to the post-Vietnam professoriate which has never left a college campus.
One of the most important moments in our post-World War II destiny was June 11, 1963, when a Buddhist monk in yellow robes burned himself to death in Saigon. It focused America on to what we were becoming and what we had become. Nothing made more clear and immediate to us the density of our moment. In Iraq, there was no such moment. In Iraq, there was Colbert and Stewart laughed all the way. I am convinced that we will have to face it again because those who oppose us knew we were no longer capable of either serious opposition like that of Thích Quảng Đức, or sustained serious committment like that of George W. Bush.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Sarah and the Apocalypse, Part II.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 9/1/10
“There comes a moment, said Edward Edinger, New York’s pioneering psychoanalyst, when something comes unfettered and free as if from nowhere and brings an end to all the systems and their agents and arts that we take for granted as part of who we are and what we always expect to be. This, said Edinger, is the apocalypse and it could just as easily be bloodless as not.” – from “Sarah and the Apocalypse,” pt. 1, The Hill 10/2/08 – day of the VP debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden
Will Beck’s big day be good for Americans? In my opinion it will be. Will it be good for the economy? Maybe. Maybe not. As Hayek once said, economy responds to subtlety. People notice when prices of groceries are going up and down and it affects their behavior. Some historians and thinkers – Spengler, Jung, Toynbee maybe – say it goes deeper than that. People sense everything although economists do not. They sense a shift in cultural paradigm in places of the heart and gut. Economists are often the last to know. Very few sensed a moment of archetypal change when Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s vice presidential candidate in the first week of September, 2008. But the market crashed unexpectedly within the month. Some felt it was a sign from God as it fell 777 points on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. 777 is the holy number of God blogs in this vein say. And the bell broke on Wall Street when they tried to ring it in the morning. I felt it was a sign of Sarah Palin.
The arrival of Palin was an archetypal shift exactly like the ones described in Edinger’s “Archetype and the Apocalypse”; a tectonic shift in politics and culture. It was the beginning of the “fourth turning” which generational historians William Strauss and Neil Howe had been prolifically writing about in the 1990s. It would be especially devastating to the national collective psyche as we had just triumphantly put all of our eggs in another basket just 12 hours before: Barack Obama’s.
That the opinion makers at the NYTs today field an op-ed writer to find “a Palin of our own” – the Washington Post last week also talked of the “new Sarah Palin” - is an indication that the hysteria which accompanies the archetypal transition – much like the hysteria which accompanied Elvis on the early Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan shows from cultural conservatives – is finally passing and the new cultural situation is being realized and accommodated. That is how Abraham Lincoln got the rural rep and stove top hat. But it was still Alexander Hamilton is country whiskers accommodating the rustic Jacksonians.
The change we face today is vast. It begins the century. The post-war American cycle was based on American conquest in World War II. America expanded externally then but will grow and change internally now. Outward post-war expansion has ended. It is virtually impossible for most economists today to understand that an economy can grow internally as all models in current use are expansionist. But we can, as Rick Perry says, compete internally among regions and it would make us a better place if we did.
The Empire State has a dilemma. The Hamiltonian “empire” instinct is waning and NY is without defenses. Historian Frank Owsley has written that our country has two directions; Hamilton and Jefferson. Jefferson awakens. Trying to find “our own Sarah Palin” could bring the New Yorkers problems. They tried to do that with The Beatles and came up with The Monkeys.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Mike Bloomberg/Arnold Schwarzenegger: Potential for new political paradigm
- for The Hill
Shane D’Aprile of The Hill reports that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is hosting a fundraiser for Democrat Harry Reid. He has also held fundraisers for Democrats Michael Bennett and Joe Sespak and Republicans Mike Castle and Mark Kirk. This suggests that Bloomberg, possibly with his best bud Arnold Schwarzenegger, might be considering advancing a new independent and “post partisan” political direction.
Bloomberg/Arnold could change the political dynamic in this country to one of temperament rather than economic outlook. My local paper here in the mountains tells us today that the “widening consensus” is that the U.S. economy has “slowed to a crawl” and the federal government is out of options. That means that the traditional Democratic Party is out of options as well, as it put all of its chits on the Roosevelt paradigm and the Marx/Keynes hybrid. This at a time when Hayek’s classic “The Road to Serfdom” finds its way to the best seller lists at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And today in the Wall Street Journal statistician Douglas E. Schoen says it is time for Obama to “pull a Clinton.” He should, says Schoen, turn around his administration's reputation: “from one of big-spending liberalism (represented by his attempt to massively overhaul the health-care system) to one of fiscal discipline and economic growth.”
This was the key moment. Bill Clinton correctly abandoned the liberal economic tradition making the claim that the age of big government was over. It was work that needed to be done, because in the Roosevelt day we were a country of factory workers and field hands (who would soon become soldiers) while today the vast majority of us work for smaller independent firms or go our own way. Arnold is surely a paragon of this unique American ethic of independence and individualism. So is Mike Bloomberg.
But it takes a long time to turn around a ship of state as vast as ours. Obama was needed for unfinished business begun by William Lloyd Garrison and Yankee preacher Theodore Parker and advanced by Lincoln, Eisenhower and Kennedy. We absolutely needed a black president to continue and to advance our American progress; progress unique to our time and to our continent. But we no longer need Marx or Roosevelt or Paul Krugman and they have been anchors to the imagination of liberal America and to the mainstream economy.
Time will not wait for the Democrats. Schoen, who served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System," out from Harper on Sept. 14. Polls today show Tea Party to have greater public support than Democrats in congress. There are today three active political temperaments: Traditional Republicans, Tea Party and Traditional Democrats. One will yield. Liberalism needs a new approach and both Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger converge elements of liberalism and conservatism.
We need New York and we need LA but they are crumbling under the paralysis of political tradition and orthodoxy. We need primarily, imagination, and Arnold and Bloomberg bring it. Let’s see what they have to say.
- for The Hill
Shane D’Aprile of The Hill reports that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is hosting a fundraiser for Democrat Harry Reid. He has also held fundraisers for Democrats Michael Bennett and Joe Sespak and Republicans Mike Castle and Mark Kirk. This suggests that Bloomberg, possibly with his best bud Arnold Schwarzenegger, might be considering advancing a new independent and “post partisan” political direction.
Bloomberg/Arnold could change the political dynamic in this country to one of temperament rather than economic outlook. My local paper here in the mountains tells us today that the “widening consensus” is that the U.S. economy has “slowed to a crawl” and the federal government is out of options. That means that the traditional Democratic Party is out of options as well, as it put all of its chits on the Roosevelt paradigm and the Marx/Keynes hybrid. This at a time when Hayek’s classic “The Road to Serfdom” finds its way to the best seller lists at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And today in the Wall Street Journal statistician Douglas E. Schoen says it is time for Obama to “pull a Clinton.” He should, says Schoen, turn around his administration's reputation: “from one of big-spending liberalism (represented by his attempt to massively overhaul the health-care system) to one of fiscal discipline and economic growth.”
This was the key moment. Bill Clinton correctly abandoned the liberal economic tradition making the claim that the age of big government was over. It was work that needed to be done, because in the Roosevelt day we were a country of factory workers and field hands (who would soon become soldiers) while today the vast majority of us work for smaller independent firms or go our own way. Arnold is surely a paragon of this unique American ethic of independence and individualism. So is Mike Bloomberg.
But it takes a long time to turn around a ship of state as vast as ours. Obama was needed for unfinished business begun by William Lloyd Garrison and Yankee preacher Theodore Parker and advanced by Lincoln, Eisenhower and Kennedy. We absolutely needed a black president to continue and to advance our American progress; progress unique to our time and to our continent. But we no longer need Marx or Roosevelt or Paul Krugman and they have been anchors to the imagination of liberal America and to the mainstream economy.
Time will not wait for the Democrats. Schoen, who served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System," out from Harper on Sept. 14. Polls today show Tea Party to have greater public support than Democrats in congress. There are today three active political temperaments: Traditional Republicans, Tea Party and Traditional Democrats. One will yield. Liberalism needs a new approach and both Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger converge elements of liberalism and conservatism.
We need New York and we need LA but they are crumbling under the paralysis of political tradition and orthodoxy. We need primarily, imagination, and Arnold and Bloomberg bring it. Let’s see what they have to say.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Springtime for Hillary: Obama’s Carter moment
by Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/26/10
The Clinton State Department will bring all the solemnity and decorum to the daunting task of peace in the Middle East that the Clintons brought to the White House when their young staffers pulled the “W”s off all the keyboards. The New York Times reports that a State staffer who Hillary enthusiastic supports “ . . . just had the greatest frappuccino ever” north of Damascus but techPresident blog reports he keeps “ . . . having the bad luck of getting the carrot/orange juice instead of the mango juice.” Good to know they still have that undergraduate vigor. Same staffers maybe. But it is profoundly disturbing to think that those who for more than 2,000 years have traversed pharaohs and Romans and pressed through the night and fog of Hitler and Stalin simply to pray again at Temple Mount will be sitting at the same table. The upcoming peace talks will be Hillary’s big moment. Max, she is ready for her close up. But this could be the nexus of President Obama’s problems.
Obama seems a very different person than Bill and Co. He appealed to the rational and to the adult in us at first and we come to trust in the reliability of that to make progress. But he modeled his tenure on Bill’s global overture, feeling he would have a better shot in a world with a Starbuck’s on every block, even in terrorist states. This is Bono’s world and Elvis Costello’s. Harvard, now disinvested in Israel , the Clintons and their youthful State Department and all of those pitiful little countries on the edge of Europe dutifully live in it. The Clintons are products of their own time and generation (or anti-generation). Obama is a more serious person and it seemed at first that he was more instinctive than they were. But maybe that is why liberals are turning against him now. Until this week I’ve always thought that Obama could turn this around. Not now.
Israeli/”Arab” peace agreements, like the presidential library and that Stanley Cup for forgotten ex-Presidents, the Nobel Peace Prize, are second term considerations. Possibly Obama sees the writing on the wall. He should, because this week we are feeling déjà vu all over again.
History turns on a moment and one of those moments occurred in October, 1979, when President Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah of Iran to enter the United States for surgery. Overnight, the country was divided over whether the Shah should be sent back to Iran where the Ayatollah Khomeini had taken control. Soon American hostages were taken. The Carter Presidency was taken hostage as well.
That moment changed everything. It strangely resembles this moment. The controversy over the mosque at Ground Zero has awakened the same primal divisions in Americans, still aching from 9/11. Carter, who tried to do the right thing, was helpless. His presidency was virtually over at that moment. Obama’s bungled comments on the mosque may have brought him his own Carter moment. And if it was the beginning of the end for Carter, it was the beginning of the beginning for Ronald Reagan. Out of this a new champion could rise as well; possibly this fall, beginning maybe as early as this weekend.
And peace in the Middle East will wait for it. It will wait for a new political era and a new generation in America and in Israel. Not long ahead, maybe sooner than later.
by Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/26/10
The Clinton State Department will bring all the solemnity and decorum to the daunting task of peace in the Middle East that the Clintons brought to the White House when their young staffers pulled the “W”s off all the keyboards. The New York Times reports that a State staffer who Hillary enthusiastic supports “ . . . just had the greatest frappuccino ever” north of Damascus but techPresident blog reports he keeps “ . . . having the bad luck of getting the carrot/orange juice instead of the mango juice.” Good to know they still have that undergraduate vigor. Same staffers maybe. But it is profoundly disturbing to think that those who for more than 2,000 years have traversed pharaohs and Romans and pressed through the night and fog of Hitler and Stalin simply to pray again at Temple Mount will be sitting at the same table. The upcoming peace talks will be Hillary’s big moment. Max, she is ready for her close up. But this could be the nexus of President Obama’s problems.
Obama seems a very different person than Bill and Co. He appealed to the rational and to the adult in us at first and we come to trust in the reliability of that to make progress. But he modeled his tenure on Bill’s global overture, feeling he would have a better shot in a world with a Starbuck’s on every block, even in terrorist states. This is Bono’s world and Elvis Costello’s. Harvard, now disinvested in Israel , the Clintons and their youthful State Department and all of those pitiful little countries on the edge of Europe dutifully live in it. The Clintons are products of their own time and generation (or anti-generation). Obama is a more serious person and it seemed at first that he was more instinctive than they were. But maybe that is why liberals are turning against him now. Until this week I’ve always thought that Obama could turn this around. Not now.
Israeli/”Arab” peace agreements, like the presidential library and that Stanley Cup for forgotten ex-Presidents, the Nobel Peace Prize, are second term considerations. Possibly Obama sees the writing on the wall. He should, because this week we are feeling déjà vu all over again.
History turns on a moment and one of those moments occurred in October, 1979, when President Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah of Iran to enter the United States for surgery. Overnight, the country was divided over whether the Shah should be sent back to Iran where the Ayatollah Khomeini had taken control. Soon American hostages were taken. The Carter Presidency was taken hostage as well.
That moment changed everything. It strangely resembles this moment. The controversy over the mosque at Ground Zero has awakened the same primal divisions in Americans, still aching from 9/11. Carter, who tried to do the right thing, was helpless. His presidency was virtually over at that moment. Obama’s bungled comments on the mosque may have brought him his own Carter moment. And if it was the beginning of the end for Carter, it was the beginning of the beginning for Ronald Reagan. Out of this a new champion could rise as well; possibly this fall, beginning maybe as early as this weekend.
And peace in the Middle East will wait for it. It will wait for a new political era and a new generation in America and in Israel. Not long ahead, maybe sooner than later.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Palin/Fiorina 2012 or McCain/Palin 2012
The "Big Question" at The Hill today:
Question was: "What do the results of last night's election mean?"
My answer was: "It means that McCain/Palin 2008 is the rising paradigm. Rising to Palin/Perry 2012 or Palin/Romney 2012 or Palin/McDonnell 2012 or my favorite, Palin/Fiorina 2012."
I'd add to that McCain/Palin 2012 would be a master plan. As the beloved senator is getting up in years, Palin would then follow potentionally as president for up to 12 years or 16 years between them. Not sayin. Just saying.
The "Big Question" at The Hill today:
Question was: "What do the results of last night's election mean?"
My answer was: "It means that McCain/Palin 2008 is the rising paradigm. Rising to Palin/Perry 2012 or Palin/Romney 2012 or Palin/McDonnell 2012 or my favorite, Palin/Fiorina 2012."
I'd add to that McCain/Palin 2012 would be a master plan. As the beloved senator is getting up in years, Palin would then follow potentionally as president for up to 12 years or 16 years between them. Not sayin. Just saying.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sarah Palin’s America and Scott Brown’s Boston
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/23/10
It is tribute to Sarah Palin’s folkloric status that a Washington Post article today refers to a South Dakota politician, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, with “wholesome, conservative values” as “the Democratic Party’s own mama grizzly, straight out of the heartland.” Herseth Sandlin’s Republican opponent, state Rep. Kristi Noem, is being called at home “the next Sarah Palin.” But this is the way they used to talk shortly after Bob Dylan awakened his world. They were always finding the “next Bob Dylan” but there was none. They did however follow his lead. Today, only Sarah Palin and the Oracle Octopus of Oberhausen share the status of original folk hero. Recently, the Post has been catching up with the world of Sarah Palin. They even have an interactive “Palin Endorsement Tracker” featuring a picture of Palin and Nikki Haley, the Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina who skyrocketed in the polls when Palin endorsed her.
The conflict we face today is city vs. country, just as we did in 1829 when Andrew Jackson, the most folkloric of all American folk heroes, shook up the Beltway establishment. They would follow his lead too. The country always wins in a vast agricultural nation like ours and it will win this time. But it is putting New York and Boston in the most awkward situations, because at times like this, the first will be last: It’s in the Bible. Jackson not only ran against the Beltway Establishment, he ran against the whole colonial era. But the era had ended anyway as they always do and Jackson simply came next. That’s where we are now. The Kennedy Era has ended. Something different is coming next and Sarah Palin brings it.
Of all the jabs at Palin from the entrenched establishment’s opinion makers – fascist, red neck, Ku Klux Klan, has a Garfield calendar, “ . . . out of her league,” Islamophobe (or my favorite, “beyond Islamophobe”) “breeder” (which people with shaved heads and tattoos on them yell out the window of cars at you up here in Vermont if they see you with children) – the most garden variety is “not smart.” Michelle Bachmann as well. So Barney Frank would ask “Is Michelle Bachmann as smart as a fifth grader?”
They think that people outside Boston and New York are not as smart as they are; especially people from the country like Sarah Palin. It is especially neurotic here in Boston. Because most of our families were proles even when Ted Williams was at bat; some of them really historically gnarly proles. That is why we the proles and ethnics and minorities felt the need to conquer Harvard, Temple Mount of the Protestant Establishment (and Martha’s Vineyard, of course, where its celebrity scholars bask) and make it our own. But the Back Bay/Beacon Hill crowd was always gracious; they just moved to Texas and built a new temple.
Before Jack Kennedy Boston was a grim, dirty place with an elevated highway running right through the center of it and red-haired pink people screaming out of the windows of cars at you and throwing bottles. After a brief joy which abruptly ended on Nov. 22, 1963, it became the dark, bitter place well depicted in the Martin Scorsese movie “The Departed.” No longer. The Curse is lifted. Manny saved us. The era has passed. Boston today is a sea of baby strollers and Red Sox caps. It is Scott Brown’s Boston and it is fairly well suited to greet Sarah Palin’s America.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/23/10
It is tribute to Sarah Palin’s folkloric status that a Washington Post article today refers to a South Dakota politician, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, with “wholesome, conservative values” as “the Democratic Party’s own mama grizzly, straight out of the heartland.” Herseth Sandlin’s Republican opponent, state Rep. Kristi Noem, is being called at home “the next Sarah Palin.” But this is the way they used to talk shortly after Bob Dylan awakened his world. They were always finding the “next Bob Dylan” but there was none. They did however follow his lead. Today, only Sarah Palin and the Oracle Octopus of Oberhausen share the status of original folk hero. Recently, the Post has been catching up with the world of Sarah Palin. They even have an interactive “Palin Endorsement Tracker” featuring a picture of Palin and Nikki Haley, the Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina who skyrocketed in the polls when Palin endorsed her.
The conflict we face today is city vs. country, just as we did in 1829 when Andrew Jackson, the most folkloric of all American folk heroes, shook up the Beltway establishment. They would follow his lead too. The country always wins in a vast agricultural nation like ours and it will win this time. But it is putting New York and Boston in the most awkward situations, because at times like this, the first will be last: It’s in the Bible. Jackson not only ran against the Beltway Establishment, he ran against the whole colonial era. But the era had ended anyway as they always do and Jackson simply came next. That’s where we are now. The Kennedy Era has ended. Something different is coming next and Sarah Palin brings it.
Of all the jabs at Palin from the entrenched establishment’s opinion makers – fascist, red neck, Ku Klux Klan, has a Garfield calendar, “ . . . out of her league,” Islamophobe (or my favorite, “beyond Islamophobe”) “breeder” (which people with shaved heads and tattoos on them yell out the window of cars at you up here in Vermont if they see you with children) – the most garden variety is “not smart.” Michelle Bachmann as well. So Barney Frank would ask “Is Michelle Bachmann as smart as a fifth grader?”
They think that people outside Boston and New York are not as smart as they are; especially people from the country like Sarah Palin. It is especially neurotic here in Boston. Because most of our families were proles even when Ted Williams was at bat; some of them really historically gnarly proles. That is why we the proles and ethnics and minorities felt the need to conquer Harvard, Temple Mount of the Protestant Establishment (and Martha’s Vineyard, of course, where its celebrity scholars bask) and make it our own. But the Back Bay/Beacon Hill crowd was always gracious; they just moved to Texas and built a new temple.
Before Jack Kennedy Boston was a grim, dirty place with an elevated highway running right through the center of it and red-haired pink people screaming out of the windows of cars at you and throwing bottles. After a brief joy which abruptly ended on Nov. 22, 1963, it became the dark, bitter place well depicted in the Martin Scorsese movie “The Departed.” No longer. The Curse is lifted. Manny saved us. The era has passed. Boston today is a sea of baby strollers and Red Sox caps. It is Scott Brown’s Boston and it is fairly well suited to greet Sarah Palin’s America.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Will Hillary kill us all?
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/19/10
The list of federalist incompetencies is spiraling the country down the drain: Health care, Medicare, a broken dollar, a 13 trillion dollar deficit, Katrina, Arizona, Afghanistan, Blagojevich. The turning began when Bill Clinton turned a prefect failure of a presidency into a cult movement of himself by having kinky sex with an undergraduate in the Oval Office. It was a Dada masterpiece. His generation understood. As an act of political nihilism Jean Genet could not have topped it. Clinton was the first rock and roll president. After all the bribes and lies and continuing undergraduate squalor, that he and his wife are still in the public eye is testimony to our inability to govern ourselves any longer with clarity and character. As First Lady, Hillary Clinton’s health care debacle was historic. She has been a perfect failure as Secretary of State having presided over the fatal alienation between America and the world’s two original sources of human awakening: Israel and China. But now, Hapsburg-style family politics and no-fault governance continues as she is mentioned for Secretary of Defense. She could get us all killed.
Compared to the firepower we have aligned in the South China Sea and the potential for devastation, Afghanistan is simply a patriotic distraction. At the beginning of the war in Iraq I proposed that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate based on Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions. The idea seems to be catching on today in the middle conservative states as 30-some states now have state sovereignty resolutions. I expect little will come of them but the idea is beginning to sink in.
Really I meant that we shouldn’t have to participate if we as a state and region thought it was wrong – then it would be our moral obligation to oppose - or because we saw no benefit in it. This is an idea whose time is not far ahead.
In recent comments, Andrew J. Bacevich, professor in international relations at Boston University and author of “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” made the point that in our system the one political party is imperial and so is the other. A point I have been making here myself. The gods always come in two faces; Ford and Chevy, Mac or IBM, Republican or Democrat, but they do more or less the same work. The only defense against this is regional; that is, a commitment to a New England point of view; a Texas point of view, a California point of view or a Pacific Northwest point of view. I would go so far as to say that we New Englander should not necessarily share governing, moral or even cultural issues with any other group of people and should have the most limited and practical relationships with the rest of the continent, primarily mutual defense. Ambassador George Kennan supported this idea when it was presented to him in his very last days.
We the Anglo/Americans have been at war in Asia since 1835. We have used nuclear weapons there without a moment’s hesitation. Two out of the four post-war generations have served in separate wars there and now Secretary Clinton sends gunboats again up the South China Sea as England did in the Opium Wars. Individual dissent is soon absorbed. The only way to oppose these policies is for a region – New England, Rick Perry’s Texas, Jerry Brown’s California, the Pacific Northwest – to find the courage to refuse to participate. It does not take a village. It takes a governor.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/19/10
The list of federalist incompetencies is spiraling the country down the drain: Health care, Medicare, a broken dollar, a 13 trillion dollar deficit, Katrina, Arizona, Afghanistan, Blagojevich. The turning began when Bill Clinton turned a prefect failure of a presidency into a cult movement of himself by having kinky sex with an undergraduate in the Oval Office. It was a Dada masterpiece. His generation understood. As an act of political nihilism Jean Genet could not have topped it. Clinton was the first rock and roll president. After all the bribes and lies and continuing undergraduate squalor, that he and his wife are still in the public eye is testimony to our inability to govern ourselves any longer with clarity and character. As First Lady, Hillary Clinton’s health care debacle was historic. She has been a perfect failure as Secretary of State having presided over the fatal alienation between America and the world’s two original sources of human awakening: Israel and China. But now, Hapsburg-style family politics and no-fault governance continues as she is mentioned for Secretary of Defense. She could get us all killed.
Compared to the firepower we have aligned in the South China Sea and the potential for devastation, Afghanistan is simply a patriotic distraction. At the beginning of the war in Iraq I proposed that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate based on Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions. The idea seems to be catching on today in the middle conservative states as 30-some states now have state sovereignty resolutions. I expect little will come of them but the idea is beginning to sink in.
Really I meant that we shouldn’t have to participate if we as a state and region thought it was wrong – then it would be our moral obligation to oppose - or because we saw no benefit in it. This is an idea whose time is not far ahead.
In recent comments, Andrew J. Bacevich, professor in international relations at Boston University and author of “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” made the point that in our system the one political party is imperial and so is the other. A point I have been making here myself. The gods always come in two faces; Ford and Chevy, Mac or IBM, Republican or Democrat, but they do more or less the same work. The only defense against this is regional; that is, a commitment to a New England point of view; a Texas point of view, a California point of view or a Pacific Northwest point of view. I would go so far as to say that we New Englander should not necessarily share governing, moral or even cultural issues with any other group of people and should have the most limited and practical relationships with the rest of the continent, primarily mutual defense. Ambassador George Kennan supported this idea when it was presented to him in his very last days.
We the Anglo/Americans have been at war in Asia since 1835. We have used nuclear weapons there without a moment’s hesitation. Two out of the four post-war generations have served in separate wars there and now Secretary Clinton sends gunboats again up the South China Sea as England did in the Opium Wars. Individual dissent is soon absorbed. The only way to oppose these policies is for a region – New England, Rick Perry’s Texas, Jerry Brown’s California, the Pacific Northwest – to find the courage to refuse to participate. It does not take a village. It takes a governor.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Bush, Kennedy and Bill the Blessed: America adopts the Hapsburg model
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/17/10
In the first free elections after the fall of the Soviet Union, the call spontaneously arose from a few who had lived under Hapsburg rule for a thousand years for a Hapsburg to seek elected office. No it wasn’t supposed to be like that they were told. It was supposed to be like America: Michael Jackson. Cal Klein. Coke. Democracy. The Hapsburgs graciously stepped aside. Perhaps the grand historic irony will be that just as Eastern Europe was breaking free, America was beginning to yearn for the Hapsburg model of dynastic governance.
Today, a large swath of people in New England can think of nothing but having someone – just anyone; drunk, sober, mad or sane – vaguely related to a Kennedy run for office. Of course it is not just us Boston Irish. The ethereal Clinton generation as well longs for Wife of Bill, Friend of Bill or Bill the Blessed himself to actually run again in some twisted configuration. The Clinton devotion has become especially acute since The Blessed One has recently begun officiating at weddings. Word is that this transcendent multiculturalist will soon be hearing confessions, officiating at baptisms and performing the Bris for his devoted flock in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Surprisingly, the Bushes, who come from an actual legacy of republican governance, established the new Hapsburg paradigm of family governance. And again today talk is of Jeb Bush in 2012.
The MSM loves to mass market “dynasty.” It sounds just like a TV show. But dynasty is governance for the horde; peasants in body and mind who have not yet found the will to moral liberation. Possibly we on the eastern seaboard of recent European descent are more inclined; possibly ancient memory is pulling us back; possibly we have never really assimilated – it is all they talk about a lot of them; Tuscany, Florence, the Spanish coast, Ireland. Emerson warned us of this.
Dynasties are the worst possible form of government. Worst than dictatorships because in dynasties the peasant goes willingly to moral submission. Worst than kings and queens, which offer unified awareness within groups. Dynasties negate the free mind and the moral initiative of the individual and yield it up to the emperor (Bush, Clinton, Kennedy) who becomes a kind of serial god king through his family line. Without that free mind and moral will the peasant can never be a citizen. The best that can be hoped for is to become a consumer. You are still a peasant but you have more money.
I think I saw the reason why this is happening shopping with my wife this weekend. One of my neighbors was wearing a t-shirt that read, “No cure for stupid.” Maybe they were referring to the Washington Post reporters who are again pushing for dynasty this week with a Kennedy story. This might work while the money still flows. But summer reading of S.C. Gwynne’s astonishing “Empire of the Summer Moon” chronicling the material hardships which included rape, torture and mutilation of Rachel Parker Plummer and the indomitable Parker clan in their willful determination to stake a claim in west Texas little more than a hundred years ago should suggests otherwise.
The Baptist and Methodist and Mormon pioneers who settled the Southwest took their freedom of their own will. We, the tired, poor, huddled masses – most of us Euro peasants at the same moment the Parkers were claiming Texas with Bible and Sharps rifle - were more or less handed it on Ellis Island. I have no doubt they will keep it. The rest of us back East, I’m not so sure.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Bush, Clinton, Kennedy “dynasties”: America adopts the Hapsburg model
In the first free elections after the fall of the Soviet Union, the call spontaneously arose from a few who had lived under Hapsburg rule for a thousand years for a Hapsburg to seek elected office. No it wasn’t supposed to be like that they were told. It was supposed to be like America: Michael Jackson. Cal Klein. Coke. Democracy. The Hapsburgs graciously stepped aside. Perhaps the grand historic irony will be that just as Eastern Europe was breaking free, America was beginning to yearn for the Hapsburg model of dynastic governance.
Today, a large swath of people in New England can think of nothing but having someone – just anyone; drunk, sober, mad or sane – vaguely related to a Kennedy run for office. Of course it is not just us Boston Irish. The Clinton generation as well hoped and hopes for wife of Clinton or Clinton again in some twisted configuration. The Bushes who were not Euro peasants but come from an actual legacy of republican governance established the new Hapsburg paradigm of family governance. And again today talk is of Jeb Bush in 2012.
The MSM loves to mass market “dynasty.” It sounds just like a TV show. But dynasty is governance for the horde; peasants in body and mind who have not yet found the will to moral liberation. Possibly we on the eastern seaboard of recent European descent are more inclined; possibly ancient memory is pulling us back; possibly we have never really assimilated – it is all they talk about a lot of them; Tuscany, Florence, the Spanish coast, Ireland. Emerson warned us of this.
Dynasties are the worst possibly form of government. Worst than dictatorships because in dynasties the peasant goes willingly to moral submission. Worst than kings and queens, which offer unified awareness within groups. Dynasties negate the free mind and the moral initiative of the individual and yield it up to the emperor (Bush, Clinton, Kennedy) who becomes a kind of serial god king through his family line. Without that free mind and moral will a peasant can never be a citizen. The best that can be hoped for is to become a consumer. Then you are still a peasant but you have more money.
I think I saw the reason why this is happening shopping with my wife this weekend. One of my neighbors was wearing a t-shirt that read, “No cure for stupid.” Maybe they were referring to the Washington Post reporters who are again pushing for dynasty this week with a Kennedy story. This might work while the money still flows. But summer reading of S.C. Gwynne’s astonishing “Empire of the Summer Moon” chronicling the material hardships which included rape, torture and mutilation of Rachel Parker Plummer and the indomitable Parker clan in their willful determination to stake a claim in west Texas little more than a hundred years ago should suggest otherwise.
The Baptist and Methodist and Mormon pioneers who settled the Southwest took their freedom of their own will. We, the tired, poor, huddled masses – most of us Euro peasants at the same moment the Parkers were claiming Texas - were more or less handed it on Ellis Island. I have no doubt they will keep it. The rest of us back East, I’m not so sure.
In the first free elections after the fall of the Soviet Union, the call spontaneously arose from a few who had lived under Hapsburg rule for a thousand years for a Hapsburg to seek elected office. No it wasn’t supposed to be like that they were told. It was supposed to be like America: Michael Jackson. Cal Klein. Coke. Democracy. The Hapsburgs graciously stepped aside. Perhaps the grand historic irony will be that just as Eastern Europe was breaking free, America was beginning to yearn for the Hapsburg model of dynastic governance.
Today, a large swath of people in New England can think of nothing but having someone – just anyone; drunk, sober, mad or sane – vaguely related to a Kennedy run for office. Of course it is not just us Boston Irish. The Clinton generation as well hoped and hopes for wife of Clinton or Clinton again in some twisted configuration. The Bushes who were not Euro peasants but come from an actual legacy of republican governance established the new Hapsburg paradigm of family governance. And again today talk is of Jeb Bush in 2012.
The MSM loves to mass market “dynasty.” It sounds just like a TV show. But dynasty is governance for the horde; peasants in body and mind who have not yet found the will to moral liberation. Possibly we on the eastern seaboard of recent European descent are more inclined; possibly ancient memory is pulling us back; possibly we have never really assimilated – it is all they talk about a lot of them; Tuscany, Florence, the Spanish coast, Ireland. Emerson warned us of this.
Dynasties are the worst possibly form of government. Worst than dictatorships because in dynasties the peasant goes willingly to moral submission. Worst than kings and queens, which offer unified awareness within groups. Dynasties negate the free mind and the moral initiative of the individual and yield it up to the emperor (Bush, Clinton, Kennedy) who becomes a kind of serial god king through his family line. Without that free mind and moral will a peasant can never be a citizen. The best that can be hoped for is to become a consumer. Then you are still a peasant but you have more money.
I think I saw the reason why this is happening shopping with my wife this weekend. One of my neighbors was wearing a t-shirt that read, “No cure for stupid.” Maybe they were referring to the Washington Post reporters who are again pushing for dynasty this week with a Kennedy story. This might work while the money still flows. But summer reading of S.C. Gwynne’s astonishing “Empire of the Summer Moon” chronicling the material hardships which included rape, torture and mutilation of Rachel Parker Plummer and the indomitable Parker clan in their willful determination to stake a claim in west Texas little more than a hundred years ago should suggest otherwise.
The Baptist and Methodist and Mormon pioneers who settled the Southwest took their freedom of their own will. We, the tired, poor, huddled masses – most of us Euro peasants at the same moment the Parkers were claiming Texas - were more or less handed it on Ellis Island. I have no doubt they will keep it. The rest of us back East, I’m not so sure.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Mad Men: End of things/new beginnings
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/14/10
It does something to see your life pass in pictures, as I did watching a PBS fund raiser of the early Newport Folk Festival. The young Joan Baez was on stage asking the audience, “Is Bobby here?” And Bob Dylan was there and he jumped up on the stage with her. I was there too, sitting somewhere in the audience. Now his voice pops up on “Mad Men,” ominously foreshadowing “something coming” in 1962. And it was coming. Now it’s leaving.
The mastery of this elegant theatrical dream comes not only with the troupe acting and writing, but in the details of the period. Indeed, nurses, existential and independent, much like the one who lives down the hall from “creative shaman” Don Draper, did drink at The White Horse and that was one of the draws to writers and executives in those days. That and in November, 1953, Dylan Thomas set a personal best there. As I heard it, after drinking 21 shots of something he said to the bartender, “I believe that’s a new record,” and went outside and dropped dead. Probably not exactly true but it was a day and place where the repeated anecdote felt truer than the thing that really happened. Most have since been forgotten or passed on. In contrast to the immortal Don, the shadow which walks alone, sitting calm and relaxed as it falls before him, watching - slouched back in his chair in “Mad Men’s” iconic intro. As in the fable in which Lord Krishna lights a cigarette and an eon passes before he ends his smoke.
We are winter now in 1963. The President has just been murdered. Don asks his secretary to buy a few “Beatles 45s” for his kids for Christmas. The old pass before us in exquisite detail. Most of them today are dead. And more falling is ahead.
As John Feehery wrote here last week Old School is Out Forever, commenting on the passing of the larger than life Danny Rostenkowski and others who made the age. I received a photograph on the same day of my old friend Barr Ashcraft taken in 1972 in Saigon and a letter asking how he died. It came from Neal Ulevich who photographed the war with Barr and it contained an outlay for a book of photographs of those involved in the war. Details of the photos speak of the day; Saigon tailors had their own sense of style. Fu Manchu mustaches didn’t last that long. Conservatives reacted to the Sixties style with white plastic belts and plaid and check polyester. Some of the most featured and representative journalists, like Hunter S. Thompson, died as the memories died, as my friend Barr did. “In with the dust and gone with the wind.” But their work will pop up like angels or specters in Don Draper’s saga.
There has never been a time in my life like that. The world changed overnight. But our times now are like that again and “Mad Men” forms a paradigm of the present. We are waiting again and sensing a change again, but waiting this time for something different.
These times are what Mekong Buddhists call a “between.” They are quiet and undifferentiated times ; time as the Buddhists think of death. Ours is the biggest “between” – between centuries, between millennia. And the life which will spring again from it will be as vastly different and unsuspected as that which dawned on Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in 1963.
Just ahead. I tend to look forward to it.
Friday, August 13, 2010
The Elizabeth Warren Phenomenon
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/13/10
In the scramble to defend against Sarah Palin the Democrats have found that irony is not a strong enough defense. But now they could have found their secret weapon: Elizabeth Warren. The century can now begin.
The professional left is not ready to back an Obama primary challenge quite yet, The Hill reports. But suddenly the Democrats are finding again that amazing grace which arises from the heartland and periodically renews. Forget Keynes, Marx and even Hayek. Forget Greenspan and Bernanke and Summers. The vigorous American life force was built by John Wesley and George Whitefield. Forget Barack and Bill and Hillary with their bribes and lies and squalid celebrity friends and those tired Kennedy look alikes (parking their yachts in Newport, like Jack) and the debilitating leftovers from the Sixties who yearn to bask in the glow of the superrich Martha’s Vineyard. Elizabeth Warren is the antidote. She is the Wesleyan avatar. She comes with a sword and it is the Protestant Ethic. The Democrats should be delighted that it could be offered to them. She could potentially be to Barack Obama what Scott Brown was to Ted Kennedy: The Future.
It is time that they depart in disgrace those who have nothing left. Like New Hampshire Democrat Timothy Horrigan who the Associated Press reports quips on Facebook: “dead Palin wd be even more dangerous than a live one . . . [she] is all about her myth & if she was dead she cdn’t commit any more gaffes.” And New Hampshire Democrat Keith Halloran who likewise commented “Just wish Sarah and Levy were on board,” in reference to the plane crash that killed Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
It is time for the Democrats to leave it behind and join the world. Elizabeth Warren gives them the opportunity.
The renewal spirit on this continent is Dorothy, she arises from the agrarian heartland giving courage to the coward, heart to the timid and brilliance to the dim. She always rises from the heartland. She is Sarah Palin and Jack London. She is Elizabeth Warren and John Wesley.
It is fantasy football right now, but an Elizabeth Warren ticket with someone like businessman-senator from Virginia Mark Warner as VP would give the Democrats a fighting chance to join the century by 2012. Because right now they are on the waterfront with Terry Malloy, facing a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/13/10
In the scramble to defend against Sarah Palin the Democrats have found that irony is not a strong enough defense. But now they could have found their secret weapon: Elizabeth Warren. The century can now begin.
The professional left is not ready to back an Obama primary challenge quite yet, The Hill reports. But suddenly the Democrats are finding again that amazing grace which arises from the heartland and periodically renews. Forget Keynes, Marx and even Hayek. Forget Greenspan and Bernanke and Summers. The vigorous American life force was built by John Wesley and George Whitefield. Forget Barack and Bill and Hillary with their bribes and lies and squalid celebrity friends and those tired Kennedy look alikes (parking their yachts in Newport, like Jack) and the debilitating leftovers from the Sixties who yearn to bask in the glow of the superrich Martha’s Vineyard. Elizabeth Warren is the antidote. She is the Wesleyan avatar. She comes with a sword and it is the Protestant Ethic. The Democrats should be delighted that it could be offered to them. She could potentially be to Barack Obama what Scott Brown was to Ted Kennedy: The Future.
It is time that they depart in disgrace those who have nothing left. Like New Hampshire Democrat Timothy Horrigan who the Associated Press reports quips on Facebook: “dead Palin wd be even more dangerous than a live one . . . [she] is all about her myth & if she was dead she cdn’t commit any more gaffes.” And New Hampshire Democrat Keith Halloran who likewise commented “Just wish Sarah and Levy were on board,” in reference to the plane crash that killed Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
It is time for the Democrats to leave it behind and join the world. Elizabeth Warren gives them the opportunity.
The renewal spirit on this continent is Dorothy, she arises from the agrarian heartland giving courage to the coward, heart to the timid and brilliance to the dim. She always rises from the heartland. She is Sarah Palin and Jack London. She is Elizabeth Warren and John Wesley.
It is fantasy football right now, but an Elizabeth Warren ticket with someone like businessman-senator from Virginia Mark Warner as VP would give the Democrats a fighting chance to join the century by 2012. Because right now they are on the waterfront with Terry Malloy, facing a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Gay marriage: John Yoo and the new federalism
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/12/10
It is a little startling to hear Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox Business publically explaining to millions of viewers ideas which were considered seditious and marginal five years ago. Tea Party ideas demonized by the MSM. Crazy Jeffersonian ideas from the Libertarian ghetto suggesting that states have sovereign rights which are protected by the Constitution. “Are you serious?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied when the idea was first suggested to her. The question today is, how many and what kind. The federal government should run the military, control the borders and deliver the mail, Texas Governor Rick Perry said not long a ago. New voices today in mainstream gubernatorial races say defense is enough.
John Yoo, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gives a perspective on the federal judge’s Gay Marriage ruling that may fit the times. The federal judge “. . . elevated himself above the collective wisdom of millions of California voters and the considered judgment of state and federal officials” he writes in The Wall Street Journal. He says the Constitution creates a far better approach to decide contentious moral issues: federalism.
“Under our decentralized system of government, states offer different combinations of taxes, spending and rights. Citizens can vote with their feet and live in the states that satisfy their preferences. Arizona, Oregon and Hawaii can compete to attract gay couples dissatisfied with Prop 8 (as if California's fiscal mismanagement weren't reason enough to leave).”
Yoo supports gay marriage as a policy matter but says having the courts mandate it promises trauma of the sort that followed Roe v. Wade.
If the Supreme Court upholds the ruling, laws in 30 states restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples would be null and void. But times have changed since 1973 when Roe v. Wade was pressed upon the states, many of which would have rejected it. The Hill reports that the American public has a more positive view of the Tea Party movement than the Democratic leadership in Congress. This time around the states are ready to defend their sovereignty and autonomy and the clear and legal expressions of their political will.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/12/10
It is a little startling to hear Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox Business publically explaining to millions of viewers ideas which were considered seditious and marginal five years ago. Tea Party ideas demonized by the MSM. Crazy Jeffersonian ideas from the Libertarian ghetto suggesting that states have sovereign rights which are protected by the Constitution. “Are you serious?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied when the idea was first suggested to her. The question today is, how many and what kind. The federal government should run the military, control the borders and deliver the mail, Texas Governor Rick Perry said not long a ago. New voices today in mainstream gubernatorial races say defense is enough.
John Yoo, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gives a perspective on the federal judge’s Gay Marriage ruling that may fit the times. The federal judge “. . . elevated himself above the collective wisdom of millions of California voters and the considered judgment of state and federal officials” he writes in The Wall Street Journal. He says the Constitution creates a far better approach to decide contentious moral issues: federalism.
“Under our decentralized system of government, states offer different combinations of taxes, spending and rights. Citizens can vote with their feet and live in the states that satisfy their preferences. Arizona, Oregon and Hawaii can compete to attract gay couples dissatisfied with Prop 8 (as if California's fiscal mismanagement weren't reason enough to leave).”
Yoo supports gay marriage as a policy matter but says having the courts mandate it promises trauma of the sort that followed Roe v. Wade.
If the Supreme Court upholds the ruling, laws in 30 states restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples would be null and void. But times have changed since 1973 when Roe v. Wade was pressed upon the states, many of which would have rejected it. The Hill reports that the American public has a more positive view of the Tea Party movement than the Democratic leadership in Congress. This time around the states are ready to defend their sovereignty and autonomy and the clear and legal expressions of their political will.
Monday, August 09, 2010
Free California
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/10/10
California’s fate today begins to suggest that of Tibet. It is a free and independent place with its own unique culture and vital life force, and its will is clear. But self governance is quashed by autonomous and arbitrary magistrates thousands of miles away. Here is a proposed amendment for the fledgling California constitutional convention: “No one should judge Californians but Californians. The California Supreme Court is the supreme court in the land. Citizens of any sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religious persuasion or lack thereof can be California Supreme Court justices provided that they were born in the state and graduated from a California law school. (Law schools from Massachusetts, Connecticut and London don’t count. Different traditions, different culture, different values.) The California Supreme Court’s ruling is the final appeal and the supreme law of the land. It can only be overturned by a majority vote in a state referendum.” Because freedom is not free and it must be taken because it is never given.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said this weekend he was disappointed that the court overruled the "will of the people” in California. Federal dominance has been taken for granted since contention rose between Adams and Jefferson in the Marshall Court. But when these early cases are reviewed, the familiar political influence and shenanigans are uncovered. The question is who gives the federal courts the right to overturn the common will of the people? Can the courts give themselves that right? Why should the people abide by a ruling if it runs against their collective will and instincts?
In an opinion piece in The Christian Science Monitor, Jeff Amestoy writes, “If [U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn] Walker’s decision is ultimately affirmed by the US Supreme Court, state constitutional provisions in some 30 states restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples would be null and void.”
Judge Walker’s ruling may become historic not because of the substance of the issue - gay marriage - but because it occurs as new perspectives on state and regional sovereignty are awakening across America. And that which was universally taken for granted as egalitarian, right and enlightened just yesterday, can appear overnight as random, arbitrary, dictatorial and territorial when the sea changes.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/10/10
California’s fate today begins to suggest that of Tibet. It is a free and independent place with its own unique culture and vital life force, and its will is clear. But self governance is quashed by autonomous and arbitrary magistrates thousands of miles away. Here is a proposed amendment for the fledgling California constitutional convention: “No one should judge Californians but Californians. The California Supreme Court is the supreme court in the land. Citizens of any sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religious persuasion or lack thereof can be California Supreme Court justices provided that they were born in the state and graduated from a California law school. (Law schools from Massachusetts, Connecticut and London don’t count. Different traditions, different culture, different values.) The California Supreme Court’s ruling is the final appeal and the supreme law of the land. It can only be overturned by a majority vote in a state referendum.” Because freedom is not free and it must be taken because it is never given.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said this weekend he was disappointed that the court overruled the "will of the people” in California. Federal dominance has been taken for granted since contention rose between Adams and Jefferson in the Marshall Court. But when these early cases are reviewed, the familiar political influence and shenanigans are uncovered. The question is who gives the federal courts the right to overturn the common will of the people? Can the courts give themselves that right? Why should the people abide by a ruling if it runs against their collective will and instincts?
In an opinion piece in The Christian Science Monitor, Jeff Amestoy writes, “If [U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn] Walker’s decision is ultimately affirmed by the US Supreme Court, state constitutional provisions in some 30 states restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples would be null and void.”
Judge Walker’s ruling may become historic not because of the substance of the issue - gay marriage - but because it occurs as new perspectives on state and regional sovereignty are awakening across America. And that which was universally taken for granted as egalitarian, right and enlightened just yesterday, can appear overnight as random, arbitrary, dictatorial and territorial when the sea changes.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
The silence of the bumper stickers. Storm coming.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/07/10
Received mail about seeing no bumper stickers in North Carolina and Virginia. Marilyn writes thoughtfully: “A possible explanation for no bumper stickers in NC is my observation that more couples here are a split-ticket. Bare bumpers are the compromise.” But bumper stickers also express advanced political yearnings: “Charlton Heston is my President” or the classic, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” or “Had enough yet?” And devoted followers tend to keep the stickers on long after the race. Apparently not with Obama. Driving home to New Hampshire only two drew attention. One said, “Danger, I drive like a Cullen.” Another was a Mitt Romney sticker seen at rush hour in Hartford on a car driven by a woman simultaneously driving and eating a plate of macaroni and cheese, which takes both hands. Spooky. It brought to mind that quiet moment when the dogs headed for the hills just before the tsunami.
I’ve been experiencing a political turning since Bill Clinton and since they changed the money to the bloated deconstructivist thing. Many of those who predict change professionally using a generational system saw the Great Change in Barack Obama. I did not. I saw the Obama presidency as the successful completion of a political cycle starting in 1831. There were three objectives of the northern invasion of the South: Preventing Southern secession, freeing the slaves and egalitarianism between black and white. C. Vann Woodward pointed out that the third goal was unachievable in the 1800s but America was beginning to get to it in the 1950s. The Obama presidency achieves that third goal. So the Obama presidency brought an end rather than a beginning. And when historic periods end, something entirely new begins. The Roosevelt longing is evidence of a society looking back, not forward. The change is ahead.
Change is either external or internal. Generational predictions usually follow an 80-year model. I use a 160-year-model as the historic periods, like the generations, tend to alternate. So I have been predicting internal change. And that is what we have been seeing in this past year as Missouri, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Vermont and 30 other states call for sovereignty. The runaway popularity of Ron Paul and Austrian economics is evidence that we are experiencing internal change.
Today, several nations including China, Israel, Germany and Canada send subtle messages that they do not necessarily require our benevolence. China and Israel, increasingly less subtle. Globalization no longer works to our benefit although the priests who accompany the conquistadors – Bono, Matt Damon – think they are still very much needed to save the world. Internally we hear the phrase “post American” more frequently. It will neutralize those cultural missionaries who “think globally” but “act locally.” (Or is it the other way around?) Yuppies may be retiring in droves to third world states where living is cheap and reefer grows on trees, but otherwise we are seeing the end of globalization as we have known it.
The Wall St. Journal’s intuitive Peggy Noonan long ago sensed danger and called a warning. Better than those tsunami dogs, she sensed it back in 1994: “Something inside was telling us we were living through ‘not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms.’”
“I can imagine, for instance,” she wrote, “in the year 2020 or so, a movement in some states to break away from the union.”
The storms will start in September and October, 2010.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/07/10
Received mail about seeing no bumper stickers in North Carolina and Virginia. Marilyn writes thoughtfully: “A possible explanation for no bumper stickers in NC is my observation that more couples here are a split-ticket. Bare bumpers are the compromise.” But bumper stickers also express advanced political yearnings: “Charlton Heston is my President” or the classic, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” or “Had enough yet?” And devoted followers tend to keep the stickers on long after the race. Apparently not with Obama. Driving home to New Hampshire only two drew attention. One said, “Danger, I drive like a Cullen.” Another was a Mitt Romney sticker seen at rush hour in Hartford on a car driven by a woman simultaneously driving and eating a plate of macaroni and cheese, which takes both hands. Spooky. It brought to mind that quiet moment when the dogs headed for the hills just before the tsunami.
I’ve been experiencing a political turning since Bill Clinton and since they changed the money to the bloated deconstructivist thing. Many of those who predict change professionally using a generational system saw the Great Change in Barack Obama. I did not. I saw the Obama presidency as the successful completion of a political cycle starting in 1831. There were three objectives of the northern invasion of the South: Preventing Southern secession, freeing the slaves and egalitarianism between black and white. C. Vann Woodward pointed out that the third goal was unachievable in the 1800s but America was beginning to get to it in the 1950s. The Obama presidency achieves that third goal. So the Obama presidency brought an end rather than a beginning. And when historic periods end, something entirely new begins. The Roosevelt longing is evidence of a society looking back, not forward. The change is ahead.
Change is either external or internal. Generational predictions usually follow an 80-year model. I use a 160-year-model as the historic periods, like the generations, tend to alternate. So I have been predicting internal change. And that is what we have been seeing in this past year as Missouri, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Vermont and 30 other states call for sovereignty. The runaway popularity of Ron Paul and Austrian economics is evidence that we are experiencing internal change.
Today, several nations including China, Israel, Germany and Canada send subtle messages that they do not necessarily require our benevolence. China and Israel, increasingly less subtle. Globalization no longer works to our benefit although the priests who accompany the conquistadors – Bono, Matt Damon – think they are still very much needed to save the world. Internally we hear the phrase “post American” more frequently. It will neutralize those cultural missionaries who “think globally” but “act locally.” (Or is it the other way around?) Yuppies may be retiring in droves to third world states where living is cheap and reefer grows on trees, but otherwise we are seeing the end of globalization as we have known it.
The Wall St. Journal’s intuitive Peggy Noonan long ago sensed danger and called a warning. Better than those tsunami dogs, she sensed it back in 1994: “Something inside was telling us we were living through ‘not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms.’”
“I can imagine, for instance,” she wrote, “in the year 2020 or so, a movement in some states to break away from the union.”
The storms will start in September and October, 2010.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Dick Morris:
"As Congress reconvenes next week to pass a $26 billion bailout of state and local governments entombed in their own deficits, we witness a foretaste of the crisis that will be the central event of the first half of next year: the collapse of state governments.
"As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama's requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?"
"As Congress reconvenes next week to pass a $26 billion bailout of state and local governments entombed in their own deficits, we witness a foretaste of the crisis that will be the central event of the first half of next year: the collapse of state governments.
"As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama's requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?"
The Apocalypse has passed. The South consolidates.
I feel about North Carolina much as George W. Bush feels about Texas or Sarah Palin about Alaska. I’m not from there but found attachment through love and marriage. We reared our babies on a little farm in Tobaccoville.
It is a different place. We New Yorkers live in abstraction; in ideas formed to steel and glass provided by so many. Hamilton built the “empire state” to be and to expand itself like that. The South is a place of earth, more like a garden. Jefferson intended it to be like that. The South shares in the abstraction and distraction provided by us New Yorkers, then something happens and they don’t. And now that has happened again.
In my summer trip this month to let my kids visit their Virginia ancestors I find the South to be conspicuously different than it has been in the last 30 years that I’ve been here. First off, from coast to the mountains in North Carolina there are no bumper stickers. Not one. There’s usually hundreds, telling you about Jesus, Elvis, guns and ammo, The Rapture, Obama and Sarah Palin. It is worse than Vermont with the bumper stickers. No more. No more reaching out, demanding to be heard on the outside or acting it out. All quiet on that front. Now the South is looking in. Consolidating.
Another thing is religion. In a local Starbucks, an old-line Virginia couple – doctors in their 70s that I’ve seen here for years – are praying with their hands out; the style of one of the new churches. You used to see that kind of thing in Wafflehouse where you could pray and smoke at the same time, but here, the local Brahmins had happily flowed with the newly imported commercial class from Seattle and left their praying at home. Not the same now. The tradition trumps.
And the TV preaching is different. Catholics have most definitely entered the local competition. The Baptist choirs are reaching a new majesty and perfection. But there is schism: The devil can be seen in some of those other preachers talking about the Apocalypse, some new preachers are saying now.
If you rode through the hills and hollows of southern Appalachia up by Clinch Mountain five years before the millennium all you would hear then from the Free Church mountain preachers was “Jesus coming.” War coming. The Great Satin, Saddam Hussein, has arrived. Armageddon is at hand. I lobbied Congress and even the House of Commons then saying this could mean trouble and not only about war in Iraq. War changes people as the Mexican War changed the South. No one was interested until 9/11.
But you don’t hear that now. For a long time my old Southern States in Tobaccoville had a photo shopped picture of Barney Fyfe driving the patrol car with Saddam Hussein, bearded and bagged, handcuffed in the back seat.
Now the Apocalypse has passed. The war is over. We won. The South is returning and finding an older self. The abstractions that we New Yorkers have provided them are burning off and those who shared in them are beginning to feel a chill.
I feel about North Carolina much as George W. Bush feels about Texas or Sarah Palin about Alaska. I’m not from there but found attachment through love and marriage. We reared our babies on a little farm in Tobaccoville.
It is a different place. We New Yorkers live in abstraction; in ideas formed to steel and glass provided by so many. Hamilton built the “empire state” to be and to expand itself like that. The South is a place of earth, more like a garden. Jefferson intended it to be like that. The South shares in the abstraction and distraction provided by us New Yorkers, then something happens and they don’t. And now that has happened again.
In my summer trip this month to let my kids visit their Virginia ancestors I find the South to be conspicuously different than it has been in the last 30 years that I’ve been here. First off, from coast to the mountains in North Carolina there are no bumper stickers. Not one. There’s usually hundreds, telling you about Jesus, Elvis, guns and ammo, The Rapture, Obama and Sarah Palin. It is worse than Vermont with the bumper stickers. No more. No more reaching out, demanding to be heard on the outside or acting it out. All quiet on that front. Now the South is looking in. Consolidating.
Another thing is religion. In a local Starbucks, an old-line Virginia couple – doctors in their 70s that I’ve seen here for years – are praying with their hands out; the style of one of the new churches. You used to see that kind of thing in Wafflehouse where you could pray and smoke at the same time, but here, the local Brahmins had happily flowed with the newly imported commercial class from Seattle and left their praying at home. Not the same now. The tradition trumps.
And the TV preaching is different. Catholics have most definitely entered the local competition. The Baptist choirs are reaching a new majesty and perfection. But there is schism: The devil can be seen in some of those other preachers talking about the Apocalypse, some new preachers are saying now.
If you rode through the hills and hollows of southern Appalachia up by Clinch Mountain five years before the millennium all you would hear then from the Free Church mountain preachers was “Jesus coming.” War coming. The Great Satin, Saddam Hussein, has arrived. Armageddon is at hand. I lobbied Congress and even the House of Commons then saying this could mean trouble and not only about war in Iraq. War changes people as the Mexican War changed the South. No one was interested until 9/11.
But you don’t hear that now. For a long time my old Southern States in Tobaccoville had a photo shopped picture of Barney Fyfe driving the patrol car with Saddam Hussein, bearded and bagged, handcuffed in the back seat.
Now the Apocalypse has passed. The war is over. We won. The South is returning and finding an older self. The abstractions that we New Yorkers have provided them are burning off and those who shared in them are beginning to feel a chill.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
The New Trophy Wife
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/3/10
Gone are the days when a rich and influential man would desire an opera star for a status wife as Aristotle Onassis did, or a Russian ballerina as Keynes did. What the successful and status-conscious newly rich and influential man would want today in a trophy wife is a Senator or possibly a Supreme Court justice. A lowly Congresswoman wouldn’t even get you into the middle-range country clubs.
Which tells us something today about how we strive and what we want. It also tells us about the quality of our desire and our muse or lack thereof. Good to know that Lady Gaga, the new mestiso’s goddess in Obama’s global coalition against Arizona is remaining celibate. RE the muse, it is worth the effort on this vacation to “Youtube” a few of Gladys Knight’s early Rhythm and Blues pieces or put on James Brown’s “Try Me” or Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” from the early days and ask ourselves with crumpled brow how we got from there to this in our American century; here at the end of it.
But it brings up the issue of why today it seems so many women are prominent in politics. Because for many of them, particularly in the northeast and on the West Coast, they are rich, or their husbands are, and these extremely rich liberals have formed a new leisure class model. It shows why perhaps such scorn is shown to Sarah Palin, who makes her own way working much of it with her hands.
It seems to be a Democratic thing. Republican women – Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Sarah Palin – make their own money, make their own way. But the old adage, behind every successful man is a woman, has shifted. The Democrats today are the party of the new, conspicuous rich with Bill, that hunka, hunka burnin’ love with the 50 gold watches and the three-million-dollar wedding for his daughter – swagged no doubt from those sweet, blue-rinse dowagers still with that little “I miss Bill” stacker on their bumpers – establishing the paradigm. Would be great to have the little missus actually be President. That would get you into all the clubs. (And quash once and for all those debilitating “white trash” chortles and snickers and murmurs.)
In the new Democratic model, the adage today is behind every successful woman is a very rich man.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 8/3/10
Gone are the days when a rich and influential man would desire an opera star for a status wife as Aristotle Onassis did, or a Russian ballerina as Keynes did. What the successful and status-conscious newly rich and influential man would want today in a trophy wife is a Senator or possibly a Supreme Court justice. A lowly Congresswoman wouldn’t even get you into the middle-range country clubs.
Which tells us something today about how we strive and what we want. It also tells us about the quality of our desire and our muse or lack thereof. Good to know that Lady Gaga, the new mestiso’s goddess in Obama’s global coalition against Arizona is remaining celibate. RE the muse, it is worth the effort on this vacation to “Youtube” a few of Gladys Knight’s early Rhythm and Blues pieces or put on James Brown’s “Try Me” or Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” from the early days and ask ourselves with crumpled brow how we got from there to this in our American century; here at the end of it.
But it brings up the issue of why today it seems so many women are prominent in politics. Because for many of them, particularly in the northeast and on the West Coast, they are rich, or their husbands are, and these extremely rich liberals have formed a new leisure class model. It shows why perhaps such scorn is shown to Sarah Palin, who makes her own way working much of it with her hands.
It seems to be a Democratic thing. Republican women – Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Sarah Palin – make their own money, make their own way. But the old adage, behind every successful man is a woman, has shifted. The Democrats today are the party of the new, conspicuous rich with Bill, that hunka, hunka burnin’ love with the 50 gold watches and the three-million-dollar wedding for his daughter – swagged no doubt from those sweet, blue-rinse dowagers still with that little “I miss Bill” stacker on their bumpers – establishing the paradigm. Would be great to have the little missus actually be President. That would get you into all the clubs. (And quash once and for all those debilitating “white trash” chortles and snickers and murmurs.)
In the new Democratic model, the adage today is behind every successful woman is a very rich man.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
California’s birth pains: Ronald, Jerry, Arnold and Jerry
After watching Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed over the weekend on the Tom Sullivan Show I’ve given up the long-held delusion that Arnold would ride the white horse to the White House. He could well do that, even in President Obama’s administration. But he will bring to that only a charismatic novelty. And the White House already has one: Obama.
As Arnold ends his term in November, a strange symmetry is occurring in California. When he first ran for Governor, Arnold even got support from the most deeply conservative of the religious right in the heartland because he was a Hollywood hottie and suggested Ronald Reagan, the California governor who was also a Hollywood star. Reagan was followed by Jerry Brown as Governor. What is odd this time around is that Arnold could well be followed by the same Jerry Brown who is running again.
Arnold is a great pitch man and poster boy for California, but is not now and never was Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s California, like John Wayne’s, was more Texas than California as we know California to be today. That is, Reagan’s was the sagebrush “Hey, Sisco” - “Hey,Pancho” California which spread west and north from the Hollywood desert before Janis Joplin, before the Summer of Love, before the vast and world-wide cultural awakening in the mid-Sixties to which even Woodstock was a lawyer’s impoverished imitation.
Reagan was Governor of California during this awakening, from 1967 to 1975. He was the traditionalist’s hedge against it. He soon brought the hedge to Washington, D.C. But in that time California as we know it today was born, possibly at the Fillmore with the cries and animal chords of “. . . four gentlemen and one great, great, broad,” as Janis and her band was introduced to the big world in the summer of 1967.
This was the California that Reagan rose in opposition to, but this is a door that would not be closed. It is the California that Jerry Brown inherited when he went to the California governorship in 1975. This was always Jerry Brown’s California and it is today.
Janis’s cry from the heart was a birth pain, but it is a birth that has not completely gone full term yet. It is a strange fate indeed that Brown follows Arnold – Arnold, the Reagan knock off – as he followed Reagan himself. California may be down now, but it is not out. Possibly it is about to finally be born.
In the masterful “Mad Men,” set in 1963, California is described as “new and shining” while New York is a “city in decline.” Those who worked on Mad Ave. as I did decades ago know how the story ends: The talent moves to California. This is the new America in the center of the new world rising between east and west, superseding the old paradigm of North vs. South. It is revealed in living arrangements. A former soap opera actress (Jon Hamm’s landlady) has a house in LA but keeps an apartment in New York. While celebrity President Bill Clinton owns a house in West Chester County in New York, but keeps an apartment in LA.
One is light, one is shadow, but the light has shifted: CA is now in the light, NY has fallen into shadow. America’s edge today facing the world rising is California and it is not Schwarzenegger’s California or Reagan’s California, but Jerry Brown’s.
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