Roberts' ruling brings a sea change: Mitt Romney joins the Tea Party

(copyright by Bernie Quigley, 2012)

The Obamacare ruling by the Supremes this week dramatically changes the political landscape. Such change can be seen as a compromise when compromise would not work to hold back time. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has been called the "great compromise" which forced slavery on the north and offended states rights and the Tenth Amendment, brings a good comparison in that a similar cultural shift occurred then, to what is happening now in America. The effect was to further infuriate the North and drive them closer to warfare and the great tragedies which lay ahead. As one major commentator claimed today, “John Robert’s Compromise of 2012” is “historic because it is a Compromise — a crisis-averting pact across lines of ideology, party and region, the likes of which we have not seen since pre-Civil War days.” It is indeed and Roberts is now infuriated the right and the 30 states which brought opposition to this federal mandate.

Said to friend at the Tenth Amendment Center that we on the ground since 2003 on behalf of states’ rights have now managed to radicalize three important and committed adults; Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Bob McDonnell. This is the way of all historic transition in its classic anthropological passage: It took John Brown to empower Lincoln, and the half mad lawyer James Otis to empower John Adams. So that, remarkably, which began with a few New Hampshire renegades called the "free staters" ten years ago can now actually count Mitt Romney in their ranks. And Rick Perry, who always had the tendency, and Bob McDonnell.

This, represented today by John Roberts, the archetypal Eastern Establishment Conservative and a George H.W. Bush appointee, brings a full change of paradigm to conservatism. Until today there were three sensibilities in government; the Roosevelt Democrats and the Bush conservatives, and the rising Tea Party coalition which brought a challenge to Obamacare. John Roberts’s decision classically links Bush conservatives to Roosevelt/Kennedy/Obama liberals and this is the essence of his “compromise.” In this event Bush conservatives lose to history and rural conservatives rise to the center of political culture.

Mitt Romney has in the last few years gone through a natural radicalization. In effect, he has joined the party of Sarah Palin, Ron Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano and is now the leader of that movement. And the coalition and Tea Party influence now takes dominance over the easterners in the Republican Party. Those conservatives who hope for an Obama victory in 2012 so they can run back the clock with Christie/Jeb Bush in 2016 have been accommodated by Roberts’ “compromise.” But Robert is rapidly becoming a pariah to conservatives and their hopes are now diminished.

Wayne Powell’s challenge to Eric Cantor: Mudcat v. the Establishment

 

Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/16/12

It is difficult to envision Eric Cantor's name emblazoned across the front of a NASCAR stock car. Impossible to imagine Ralph Stanley playing at his events. Cantor is from the age when the South finally joined up with the Eastern conservative establishment, leaving church, party and tradition behind. The great historian, W.J. Cash, early warned of this: The ominous New Man would come to the South, he said, a reincarnation of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, avatar of commerce as a measure of all humanity. Texas conservative Ron Paul brought up Lewis as well when asked a question of the advancing establishment by Fox: When America becomes a fascist state, said Paul, quoting Lewis, it will be calling itself a Christian nation and wrapped in the American flag.

You won’t find that in Cantor, (who honored “the vigilance of [George W.] Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice”) but you will find it in those in D.C. and  on Wall Street for whom he holds the coat. What is historic in Cantor’s tenure is that virtually half of America’s conservatives have begun to look elsewhere – to Paul’s vision of states’ rights and sound money, for example – for new guidance.

But as the conservative establishment gobbled up the heartland, Virginia, with a little help from Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, co-author with Steve Jardin of “Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the  Heartland and What the Democrats Must do to Run ‘em Out” came to remember what it once was and what it had become. Democrat Mark Warner came to the governor's office and the state rose to unprecedented prosperity. Not long after Jim Webb followed to the Senate and Virginia appeared to remember its name; to remember again who it was. Today, Virginia has the opportunity to send Cantor packing with Wayne Powell who has the support of Mudcat.

Powell is a retired Army colonel who was mobilized to command troops after 9/11. A product of the Richmond public schools, he chaired the advisory committee to the Henrico County school board, where his two children were educated. Wayne is fluent in Spanish, and provides pro bono legal help for the Hispanic community all over Virginia.

“We’re going national,” Saunders told The Daily Caller. "What he [Cantor] has done is sold out the 7th District and his country so that he could become majority leader and continue his march to the speakership," Saunders said.  "It's all about Eric Cantor. It has nothing to with anything else."

Call it the "Mudcat" paradigm. It is antithetical to the Eastern establishment. Saunders advised the Indiana-born, Harvard lawyer Warner fundamentally to embrace the place he lived and to celebrate it in all it had been. Warner did sponsor a NASCAR stock car and the Stanley Brothers did play at his events on Mudcat’s advice. It was true Jacksonian populism well before the moose-eating variety became attractive to the right. The NASCAR theme is a masterful Zen strategy. It shows a politician’s comfort level with the common people of rural America. And most of them just look scared and out of place.

What voters get to vote for in Richmond is American heartland as it is experienced in Mudcat, Jim Webb, Mark Warner and Wayne Powell.  Or the South imagined by New York money and reinvented and as a Gene Autry movie. With Cantor they get a failing, bankrupt and unconstitutional foreign policy, a failing, imperial financial system, a philosophy challenged today by 40% of its own, and a losing apparatus of a political family whose time has passed. They get a subtle and secretive establishment leaving in its wake bitter inventive which poisons the airwaves and the blogosphere and a legacy of global embarrassment and pain for America and our most ancient ancestor, Israel.

Dwight Eisenhower, Anti-hero

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/14/12

Most interesting in the case of the controversial Frank Gehry memorial to Dwight Eisenhower is that it has brought Ike, our great heartland warrior, back to the popular front in the face of strong opposition from establishment figures and government councils. Ike is again a folk hero, the new man for our times; but this time an anti-hero rising against the establishment.

And that would make sense given his famous last words: “We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

A breathtaking speech, often over scored by his fair warning of a rising political establishment like that which today hopes to caricature his fateful life and work: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. . . . We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

TAKE NOTHING FOR GRANTED. Special Agent Fox Mulder (“Trust no one.”) could not have said it better. Followers of The X Files, which speaks to federal dominance and control, will recall that Agent Mulder amended Ike’s famous warning to read “ . . .  the military, industrial, ENTERTAINMNET complex,” so relevant today as the American entertainment industry has become – as Aldous Huxley predicted it would early on – a soft propaganda machine, tweaking and amending the meaning of totalitarianism and bringing it to a global scale.

But the keenest eye here comes today from Suzanne Collins who brings the full assembly of government agents and Hollywood-like entertainers in full, propaganda conspiracy to the big screen in “The Hunger Games.” It seems almost a specific fulfillment of Ike’s warning.

The remarkable thing here is that defense of Ike does not come from the current Eastern conservative establishment – they are still pitching Jeb Bush to vindicate over time miscreant brother W’s dark forays and save the family rep – it comes from outsider blogs like mine and counter cultural press like The Huffington Post.

In the midst of this controversy, the only current full analysis of the “flawed selection process” by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission which rejected public tradition and favored "’closed competition,’ which considered only registered architects and heavily favored experienced designers with established reputations,” comes from Sam Roche of the Huffington Post.

Eisenhower, like Katniss Everdeen, is anti-hero to a rising generation.

President Obama steps up: The importance of the Eisenhower memorial

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/ 8/12

The model for the proposed Eisenhower memorial looks now like toy soldiers preparing to mount for D Day. And there is no telling what the final result will be with trickster architect Frank Gehry making the decisions. There is a riddle here: Why is a general who ranks with Lord Nelson, with Grant, being treated with such light-handedness? Two things today: As the Washington Post reports, The Eisenhower Memorial Commission, a bipartisan body tasked with creating a memorial to the 34th president of the United States, has agreed to delay a critical design hearing tentatively scheduled for July. And most important, President Obama has entered. As  AP reports, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has expressed interest in viewing models of architect Frank Gehry's design with the key parties involved. No meeting has been set, but Salazar could hold discussions about how the memorial project could move forward.

Are Congress, the press and the people fully aware of what is going on here? Is someone trying to edit General Eisenhower out of history? In 1956, Eisenhower ordered the British out of the Suez, making no friends with Israel’s David Ben-Gurion but establishing American dominance in the Middle East. “Over to you,” Macmillan telegraphed back, acknowledging American’s dominance. But that all changed when the George W. Bush administration brought England along on its invasion of Iraq to establish international credibility on a mission universally believed to be based on a hoax. When we hear of World War II nowadays from Bush conservatives it always seems to be about Winston Churchill. The British sent a bust of Churchill to President Bush to affirm the new relationship. Obama sent it back. What he should do is put a bust of Eisenhower in its place.

Would Dwight Eisenhower have approved an invasion of Iraq patently and obviously based on a fiction of the presence of weapons of mass destruction? At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq a very few prominent women and men of the highest character came forth to oppose George W. Bush and his supporting congress. They included Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, General  Wesley Clark, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, and Eisenhower’s son John Eisenhower. Ike’s granddaughter Susan Eisenhower also left the Republican Party to endorse Barack Obama in  2008.

Concern registered about the proposed Ike memorial seems to be coming mostly from Democrats like Jim Moran, Congressman from Virginia. Concerned calls and emails I received after several articles have also been from prominent Democrats. Are the neocon movement and Bush conservatives hoping to mock Ike or trivialize and minimize his influence with a novelty monument by an aging hipster who made a hat for Lady Gaga? Are conservatives attempting to edit Eisenhower out of history to supplant him in a false hierarchy since WW II? So it goes with them now, Churchill, Reagan and George W. Bush and you never hear a mention of their most honorable warrior. But it won't hold up to time.

"Snow White": The new generation awakens

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/2/12

It is hard to grasp the nature of subliminal things when Twitter has made that traditional agent of in depth understanding, the compound sentence, obsolete. And the conservative blogosphere, sautéed in sociology and political science, does not believe mythical substructure and psyche are "real." But then they don't believe Bob Dylan is real. So Snow White is a reach. But I hope Mitt Romney takes his grand kids to see “Snow White and the Huntsman” because as a fan of “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” he alone seems to get the rising generation: Those still in high school today that will rise to make the century. “Snow White and the Huntsman,” released this weekend, figures in this.

So here then is a thought just for Romney: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Snow White. These will form the collectivity or in the phrase Toynbee used, "the collective unconscious" of the rising generation. And please don't call them Millennials. They think you are talking about their older brothers. These kids are still in high school.

They came late to Harry Potter and it was their older brothers' fun, but what Harry did was complete the work of Winston Churchill and provide a British fairy tale for American children. Kids are like Conrad Lorenz's geese and imprint on the first thing they see when they are young. So as my friends and I busted through the Smokies to Texas with Davy Crockett, Harry's generation sees its origins in England again much as the colonials did. Psychologically we are still English, so to answer the question the Washington Post asks this weekend, should America have a queen? We still have one. She still lives in England.

All history or at least a lot of it should be looked at as a war between the Red Queen and the White Queen as it is in the symbolic war of chess. This is “Twilight” and the Red Queen is actually named Victoria, suggesting of course, Victoria, the great queen between the Elizabeths I and II. In “Twilight” she gets her head chopped off. “Twilight” is an American creation myth, in which the White Queen (Bella) in alliance with Native America, takes back the ground yielded back to England and Europe in Harry Potter. The old queen must be killed so the new generation can awaken. So it is with “Snow White.”

Key to the telling of “Twilight” is the symbolism on the book covers: On the first is an apple, the symbol of new creation, on the latter one, “Breaking Dawn” is the White Queen chess piece, indicating victory for Bella and her rising generation. For each generation must fight for its existence. If necessary, with real arms, like Katniss.

And here she is in “Snow White and the Huntsman.” This time there are eight dwarfs, as there should be, because the dharma is eight-fold. And she chooses neither light nor dark husband. Like Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, who founded Protestantism, the modern age and conquered the world, she takes no husband. Robert Graves suggests in “The White Goddess” about the ancient history of Britannia which in our time very much includes America, the Red Queen brings the cycle to twilight and to death. An odd thing to consider at Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Then the White Queen - a warrior queen dressed in armor like Joan of Arc - begins the creation again. She brings the new generation and potentially, like Elizabeth I, she brings the ages.

Ike memorial

One more comment on the Ike memorial. I never get to D.C. much but from the on-line photos I wanted to add that an artist like Gehry - like Lady Gaga - whose life work has been irony should not be chosen as the knowing insider joke of the hipster is always part of the ongoing work of the "anti-establishment" artist (it is not really art, it is hidden political sociology and commentary and Gehry is incapable  of anything deeper).  Unless I am missing something from the on line photos of the mock up, the inside joke here seems to be that the collection of marines around Eisenhower in the "fly fishing" photo seems to intentionally suggest toy soldiers of the kind children used to play with. And the people following in the background seem to suggest the horde which follows blindly like those in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind” lured to the alien spacecraft.

Three broke things that need fixing: Democrats. Republicans, America

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/3/12

When Democrat Shirley Franklin was elected mayor of Atlanta it turned out to be in worse shape than she expected. Then these nice young men from Bain offered help fix it. As I understand it, it is what Bain does: Fix things which are broke. Bain’s Mitt Romney did a great job with the winter Olympics in Utah in 2002 although I am sure the very controversial dragon dance honoring the White Buffalo as the harbinger of Aquarius sent most conservatives to the fainting couch. Maybe they didn’t notice. Here are three things Bain might also fix: The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and America.

The Democratic Party: "Will these Clinton era people ever go away?" Marcos Moultisas of the Daily Kos asked years back. Not likely. Bill's conspicuous support for Romney’s work at Bain when Obama camp is on the attack is characteristic of the narcissistic Clinton cult. They hope Romney wins so they can run Hillary in 2016. Obama is in my opinion the best candidate of the Dems in the post war period – meaning better even than Jack Kennedy - but is hampered by the Roosevelt tradition and freaky types like Bill and Hillary and their poisonous generational tails like Bill Maher. It needs modification. A thought: Replace the decadence of the Clintons with the character of Susan Eisenhower. A lifetime Republican, she endorsed Obama in 2008, announcing that she was becoming an independent. She said to the Democratic National Convention in 2008: “I stand before you tonight not as a Republican or a Democrat, but as an American.” It is a historic paradigm shift and change of temperament but the Dems haven't recognized it. Surely David Axelrod sees it. And like the angels in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” she comes with a gift of three words: “Simple, sustainable and affordable.” Start again from there.

The Republican Party: Like the Democrats, they are also plagued by tradition. The albatross hanging from their necks is George W. Bush. As the bloated and aging middle mass of the Dems can think of nothing but Clinton, so the bloated middle of the Republicans can think of nothing but the Bushes. Romney gets it and will bring a new agenda for a new century if he arrives. But like the pitiful and disloyal Clinton cult which hopes for a Romney victory, many here hope for an Obama victory so they can run brother Jeb from the broken state of Florida in 2016. Possibly as VP mate to Governor Chris Christie from the broken state of New Jersey.

America: America was designed in 1776 to package three cities and a forest. It was a great design but - and I am sure any competent, young Bain manager would notice this - we have since become a place full of people. The western states are no longer lines drawn on a map, exactly like those T.E. Lawrence drew with a stick in the desert to create the morass which is the Middle East today. They are real places now and will mark their own destinies. They will need more responsive representation.

Since 2009 the west and the middle of the country has vehemently stepped forth to claim its self identification. 29 states have opposed the eastern establishment on Obamacare and 30 against gay marriage. These changes must be accommodated or there will be breakage. A western VP for Romney – possibly Texas Governor Rick Perry - would begin to address this.

"Snow White": The new generation awakens

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/2/12

It is hard to grasp the nature of subliminal things when Twitter has made that traditional agent of in depth understanding, the compound sentence, obsolete. And the conservative blogosphere, seeped in sociology and political science, does not believe mythical substructure and psyche are "real." But then they don't believe Bob Dylan is real. So Snow White is a reach. But I hope Mitt Romney takes his grand kids to see “Snow White and the Huntsman” because as a fan of “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” he alone seems to get the rising generation: Those still in high school today that will rise to make the century. “Snow White and the Huntsman,” released this weekend, figures in this.

So here then is a thought just for Romney: Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Snow White. These will form the collectivity or in the phrase Toynbee used, "the collective unconscious" of the rising generation. And please don't call them Millennials. They think you are talking about their older brothers. These kids are still in high school.

They came late to Harry Potter and it was their older brothers' fun, but what Harry did was complete the work of Winston Churchill and provide a British fairy tale for American children. Kids are like Conrad Lorenz's geese and imprint on the first thing they see when they are born. So as my friends and I busted through the Smokies to Texas with Davy Crockett, Harry's generation sees its origins in England again much as the colonials did. Psychologically we are still English, so to answer the question the Washington Post asks this weekend, should America have a queen? We still have one. She still lives in England.

All history or at least a lot of it should be looked at as a war between the Red Queen and the White Queen as it is in the symbolic war of chess. This is “Twilight” and the Red Queen is actually named Victoria, suggesting of course, Victoria, the great queen between the Elizabeths I and II. In “Twilight” she gets her head chopped off. “Twilight” is an American creation myth, in which the White Queen (Bella) in alliance with Native America, takes back the ground yielded back to England and Europe in Harry Potter. The old queen must be killed so the new generation can awaken. So it is with “Snow White.”

Key to the telling of “Twilight” is the symbolism on the book covers: On the first is an apple, the symbol of new creation, on the latter one, “Breaking Dawn” is the White Queen chess piece, indicating victory for Bella and her rising generation. For each generation must fight for its existence. If necessary, with real arms, like Katniss.

And here she is in “Snow White and the Huntsman.” This time there are eight dwarfs, as there should be, because the dharma is eight-fold. And she chooses neither light nor dark husband. Like Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, who founded Protestantism, the modern age and conquered the world, she takes no husband. Robert Graves suggests in “The White Goddess” about the ancient history of Britannia which in our time very much includes America, the Red Queen brings the cycle to twilight and to death. Then the White Queen - a warrior queen dressed in armor like Joan of Arc - begins the creation again.

And the White Queen is Snow White. She brings in the new generation and potentially it, like Elizabeth I, will bring in the ages.

A hat for Lady Gaga but not for Eisenhower

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 56/1/12

Two moments come to my mind with Eisenhower. How he described the conduct of war was one: "The enemy has to know it is licked." Had it registered in 1914 the 60 million who died 20 years later - 2.5% of the world's population - would have been saved. The second is that great picture on D Day, probably the most important day in American history since Cemetery Ridge. It is an iconic photograph of Ike straight up and unsentimental as he addressed the marines, many of whom would be seeing their last day on earth. It talks to everyone and everyone reads it differently. What are these men thinking as they embark and what words does Eisenhower brings to them to fortify their will and courage? But as kids who take the tour of the Capital learn from the tour guide, Ike was talking to the men about fly fishing.

How vastly opposite from the mad, gnostic, primordial visions of Woden the Nazis were conjuring on the other side of the water. How right a reminder of the difference the “fly fishing photo” brings between them and us.

But generations flip and as one looked to Ike - and my neighbor named her son Ike - the next would look to Doc Watson and Bob Dylan. And I've friends who named their kids Dylan. They go to different places of head and heart because as Pete Seeger sang it there is a season to all things and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to kill. A time to heal. And then it changes again.

And that is architect Frank Gehry's problem. It changed again. He pitched his project in one era and presented his prototype in a different era. Gehry has found enormous popularity in his seasons. He would be a great choice to erect a memorial to Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Duchamp or Picasso and as I understand it he actually designed a hat for Lady Gaga. But there is no reason for him to design one for Dwight Eisenhower. His was an age of irony and irony is only a shadow; it is what there is when there is nothing left.

It is shocking that Gehry was selected for the Eisenhower project. Would the committee have picked an aging hipster who designs hats for Lady Gaga to form a monument for Lord Nelson? Washington? Possibly because Ike was so unpretentious and his soldiers such regular folk they failed to make a distinction. Possibly the decadent notion slipped into the collectivity that behind him was another general just the same, and another behind that and another, but there wasn't. Eisenhower was the one indispensible man on whom history turned and without him there would have been no turning.

Susan Eisenhower sensed the sea change. It started last summer she said, when the deficit began to hit home. I saw it in the appearance of Katniss and Peeta. Lady Gaga saw it in Adele when she took all her awards.

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Congress and the memorial commission should reevaluate. Susan Eisenhower is correct when she says:

Today, we must learn again to celebrate things that are simple, sustainable, and affordable. These values were dominant after World War II, as the country, under Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership, built a modern industrial infrastructure and emerged as a global superpower and the leader of the free world.

Simple, sustainable and affordable: Irony yields to originality, ambivalence to honor, material girl and manufactured girl to “girl on fire.”