Obama’s VP: Wes Clark or Jim Webb? DKos diary, 5/18/08

A recent article in the Washington Post says top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been privately getting together to converge the two teams. It claims there are growing reports that the only way to repair the rift between the two parties is for Obama to pick a top Clinton surrogate as his VP nominee:

“There’s a gale-force pressure for Obama to choose a Clinton loyalist as a running mate to heal the party but avoid putting her and her formidable baggage on the ticket,” said one Obama ally in Washington. “You hear the names (Ohio Gov. Ted) Strickland, (Indiana Sen. Even) Bayh, and (retired Gen.) Wes Clark almost constantly, and it’s no secret that Jim Johnson and Tom Daschle are purveyors of that wisdom.”

In making his decision, Obama might consider the importance of the historic moment. As he has been called a transitional candidate, so we are today in a transitional awakening – a springpoint of historical dimensions.

The candidate chosen should be one who intuitively saw the contours of that transition coming, as President Bush and his agents embarked on a misplaced adventure in Iraq: What we want here is the one who was the first to see and the first to act. Obama did, and so did Wesley Clark. And at every point in the delusional spiral of policy, Wes Clark provided a stepping stone to the truth and a new direction for the Democrats to take.

The Democrats have taken that path; incrementally at first and now in the mainstream. Democratic policy today on Iraq as it is expressed by Obama can been seen to have historical process and path from September, 2003 when Wesley Clark joined the 2004 race for President, to June, 2007 when Clark’s position on Iraq became the mainstream of the Democrats.

There is no doubt that the current breach in the Democratic Party could be fatal in November, so the question of Obama’s VP is a vital one.

But it is equally important to pick the candidate who will rise with the times and carry the generations with him. And generations here today are more important than region. As VP, Strickland, Bayh or even Ed Rendell, Gov. of PA would help Obama with regions which have been reading unfavorable to him, but – Rendell aside – some of the figures mentioned to bring regional balance and detente with the Clintons are benign Democratic figures and the thinking here goes perhaps: Let’s get a Hillary supporter but a benign one who would be seldom scene and will make no complaints – in the corporate parlance, it would be throwing a bone to the Clintons.

It is always a mistake to do this for in every situation we should strive to pick the best and the brightest among us; even with our enemies, the best and the brightest in opposition make us stronger and better. But in this grouping, General Clark should be the first and only choice considered.

Clark began to conform to the Clinton camp about a year ago and if he planned to do so earlier, there was no suggestion of it even in conversations with his closest friends, relatives and representatives. It is hard to imagine that he would do anything other than lend support to his former Commander-in-Chief, fellow Rhodes Scholar, fellow Arkansas traveler and friends and colleagues for 25 years. The country and the world got a lucky break when President Clinton specifically took General Clark’s plan and advice on Kosovo when the foreign policy establishment was otherwise adrift.

But that was then and this is now. We are today at the critical Millennial Makover, as authors Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais say in a recent book of that title (Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics). The generation which is rising now will continue to rise and create policy – create our world – into the next 30 years. The overall inclinations of this generation can be found daily here at Daily Kos. It is a harbinger and barometer of that generation’s hopes and yearnings, and that generation’s clear choice is Barack Obama. So what grows here in 2008, will continue to grow and flower into its own political eco system.

It is no secret that Senator Clinton has little support here. As DKos founder, Markos Moulitsas, recently pointed out, she has never registered above 11 percent in a monthly DKos poll of readers.

Thinking generationally seems to come more easily to the artist, monk and poet. It bugs most statisticians, political scientists and objective analysts because it finds its judgments not by specific causality of one event to the next, but by the study of parallel events and alternating events over extremely long periods of time; hundred-years intervals of thousand-year historical movements. But generations are history’s engine. Consider it this way: Imagine inviting Perry Como to have a role in The Beatles, so as to not hurt his feelings or those of his fans. It just doesn’t work, and bringing in the wrong Clinton surrogate to the Obama camp would likewise poison the pudding.

But not Wes Clark. As Senator Clinton’s approval ratings were hovering around zero here two years ago, General Clark’s was sky high. He has always been a favorite of the new generation and it was a web-based campaign which originally urged him to run in 2004. He was, with Mark Warner, the first prominent politician to appear at the first Yearly Kos, and all Presidential contenders would follow at the next.

So whatever else is taken into consideration, Wesley Clark would satisfy the needs of the Party and the new generation.

But Jim Webb, the Senator from Virginia, is also a favorite of the new generation and his election in ’06 was considered one of the first to resonate on the Internet. He was also a favorite here at Daily Kos. The recent publication of his new book, A Time to Fight, suggests he might like to be VP. The Nation says he is running for VP:

“Ronald Reagan's former Secretary of the Navy's got a new campaign book out -- A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America -- and he is undoubtedly aware of the fact that he's currently topping salon.com Obama Veepstakes" survey.”

Jim Webb is certainly qualified to be President and VP on the First Tier as a former Secretary of the Navy and certainly one of the most versatile and creative individuals ever to enter the Senate. As a well-known author, Webb would pull in the Salon crowd but Obama already has them. Speculation is that as a rural Virginian he would help Obama with voters there. But there is nothing Webb brings to the southeast side of the Smokies and the Blue Ridge that a Southern General doesn’t bring as well.

Clark appeals to the South, the East, the West and the Great White North, and as a generational figure, he links time past with the future. There is a new generation of Democrats rising: Webb, Clark, Kathleen Sebelius, Mark Warner, John Lynch here in NH, hooking up with the Old School and the Wise, including Sam Nunn of Georgia and David Boren of Oklahoma. All of these will converge around Obama into a new kind of Democratic Mandala.

Clark, in his great support for veterans in the '06 race, has already altered the climate of the Democratic Party, bringing a strength of character and a patriotism to Democrats that we have not fully experienced in the most recent years. He should be Obama's first choice in this matter.

More on Lost - the new paradigm - Hurley, Ben, John Locke - the Three Celestial Ones; Mozart's The Magic Flute as primary Aquarian myth


As said below, Lost in the last week's episode has made a transition between Platonic Months; the Age of Pisces is left behind and the Age of Aquarius has awakened. Each age has its External Three - Abraham's Three Visitors, the Three Magi, Taoism's Three Celestial Ones which accompany the new age. Hurley, Ben and John Locke - the Three who intuit the voice of Jacob, are the Three Ones in this transition - one more enters perhaps (Sawyer, possibly) and John Locke takes the initiative in a bodhisattva function - that is, one of these "awakened" with the inner truths brings them to the outside world. And incidently, by linking Old Testament figures with Christian and Aquarian, the Lost telling links at least three zodiac months and possibly more - 6,000 years. The Three Celestial Ones appear in one of the most prinary myths of transition from last to next; they are the three men in a boat who accompany Tamino on his journey to Sarastro in the Magic Flute. In keeping with the Lost themes, The Magic Flute is the journey from the Earth Mother and its church to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Here are two essays from Entering Aquarius on this theme; the first on Mozart's The Magic Flute as the primary myth and text of Entering Aquarius.

The Aquarian Paradigm, from Entering Aquarius

There is in Europe a body of work that came about in the 1960s that is a harbinger of the new millennium. It is the full body of the mature work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The classic series starts with the most famous of his films, The Seventh Seal, and the haunting specter of death leading the dancers in shadow to the dark side of a hill. The story is about soldiers coming back from the Crusades, only to find northern Europe torn by plague. Only one survives, the comic peasant with a clear vision of the Celestial Mother. It is the end of the Christian age, and Bergman begins the film with an appropriate quote from Revelations. The Seventh Seal is Wormwood. Here is the essence of the prophecy from Revelations : And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. (Rev. 16:17)

There follows a series of three films called the Silence of God trilogy, filled with a spiritual angst that was characteristic of the age, which could be interpreted as coming from anxieties that arise from sexual awareness in youth, the political uncertainties of the time, the destabilizing side affects of creating great art or other causes. They are masterful films, perhaps the greatest dramatic presentations of that time. But Bergman’s last major public presentation, a film adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, is perhaps his most important. It is the only moment in all of his work where the character experiences triumph in the end, and looking at the full body of work it becomes clear that the angst of the middle films were part of the spiritual and psychological struggle to find the character’s achievement in the last, and that those anxieties were allayed by the character’s spiritual victory in the last film. Other work would come, but much o fit seeking box-office cash and finding a generic audience.

Bergman’s rendition of The Magic Flute is a harbinger of the age here and pending. Taking his films out of their historical periods and viewing them as an expression of the artist’s own development and sensibility, his full body of work is a shaman’s journey which traverses ages, starting with The Seventh Seal at the very end of the Christian age and ending with The Magic Flute at the beginning of a new age.

Perhaps none surpasses Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791) in knowledge of the masculine principle and the feminine, yang and yin, first performed at the high end of the Renaissance as the masculine principle and the Renaissance came to dominate the Earth Mother. In Mozart’s story three warriors guard the Lord of the Temple and his counselors, while three sisters accompany the Earth Mother. But now she is the Queen of the Night, the Earth Mother in her third and final phase. She is Kali, the Death Mother. In Bergman’s movie the Queen of the Night is at one point composed with the moon behind her surrounded by zodiac symbols. And Sarastro, the Ruler of the Temple, is shown with his male counsel in caves that resemble those at Lascaux. Sarastro, here in a beautiful presentation at Ithaca College, has commandeered the Earth, the organic realm of the Goddess.

Tamino, the hero of the story, follows on a sacred love quest and in the process moves his allegiance from the Earth Mother to the Lords of the Temple and joins the Lords of the Temple. Three boy spirits in a flying ship accompany the hero and give him three words to guide him in his quest. The words are: steadfast, silence, and obedience.

Mozart’s opera marks history’s turning point. It was the time of revolution throughout the world. It marks the end of the ancient regimes and the monarchies of Europe. And it marks the end to the old Earth Mother cycle of Europe – white phase, rose phase, black phase – which brought them about over the proceeding thousand years. Germany has a special place here and has a special trajectory. The age upon us and that which awakened with Mozart is the Enlightenment. All of Europe entered the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but it was only the German and Austrian regions of Europe that embraced the Power Principle and at the same time incorporated the yin or feminine sensibility - Abbess Hildegard and Meister Eckhart to Goethe and Leibnitz to Schopenhauer and Jung, embraced the yin world, this tradition follows unbroken from the 12^th century until the present. The other rising Protestant nations rose in denial and opposition to it.

Europe faces a new age today and once again sings in one voice. And it sings a German song; its anthem is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, written within four years of The Magic Flute. The flag of the European Union is a study in zodiac symbolism, a blue background representing sky and air, the masculine field of Aquarius, and 12 gold stars, the full counsel of the zodiac; the council of Sarastro and the Lords of the Temple.




The Aquarian Mandala from Entering Aquarius
It is worthwhile to look at symmetries as they occur in history and not ignorIt e them or consider them random. The patterns of early Christianity bear looking into as they press westward from Christian Constantinople to empower Christian Rome and subsequently the secular and Protestant movement of northern Europe. The patterns they formed may be the patterns we will form.

Historian Edwin O. Reischauer points out that Japan’s rise to secular power in modern times matches that of northern Europe, and the two rose out of feudalism at the same period but were distinctly separate and unrelated to each other. Another symmetry: calculus, the tool by which the Enlightenment rose to materialization and the catalyst for the age of science was discovered in roughly the same period by mathematician Takakazu Seki Kowa in the East, as it was by Newton and Leibnitz in the West.

Today, we see a reversal of Kipling’s maxim: East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Now, East and West, like the recently-photographed galaxy known as IC2163, swinging counterclockwise past its celestial partner NGC2207, appear to be about to form into one unified solar system. Now they cannot be kept apart, and regional cultures like those in Calgary and Vancouver where populations are in the area of 50% Chinese and 50% Canadian Caucasian are in the avant garde of North American life. These cities bring together in harmony Asian and Victorian business and cultural ethics and eastern directions of Taoism and Buddhism. So too, Hindu thought finds its way gracefully into Canadian culture in Toronto and the middle Canadian cities, which have recently received a large number of Indian immigrants. One young filmmaker recently made a film about Lord Khrisna returning to earth as a hockey player. (But doesn’t The Great One already carry that spark which dances amongst the suns?)

It almost appears as if history was waiting for this moment to bring these two forces together in unity. An ancient spiritual force from the East and a new-to-history technical force in the West, as the Dalai Lama generally expressed it recently.

These two forces could not have come together at any other time in history. Nor could they have flowed together into a unique new culture at any place other than the North American continent. The “old souls” of the old world inhibit clear action and when change does occur, so often it merely consists of breakage of the old, as the new tradition of nihilism since the 1830s in Russia, simply breaks the past. Into pieces. But alienation also opens the West to a new future, and that unique but trecherous condition that deprives the American of ancestral lineage and psychological fullness of old world Asian, African and European, welcomes and rapidly adapts to new growth.

North America is the Aquarian continent, made up of all the world’s peoples, castes, races and religions, pouring freely in, as the water pours from the vessel of the Titan. And its epic tale, Huckelberry Finn, identifies the vortex, the Mississippi River. The water pours freely over the falls at Niagara to the sacred lakes of the Manitou, the Great Spirit, into Chicago thereabouts and down the Mississippi to where the Amish flourish, on to the sacred primal place of Elvis’ Graceland and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The westward movement of the last century is matched now by an Eastern movement from Asia to the Pacific Coast in Canada as well as in the United States, creating vortex forces in, around and above the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. This effects all classes and castes that enter and changes their destiny forever. It is worth pointing out the Hindu text which says when you leave your homeland, and start from scratch.

Vancouver, with its Hong Kong cash, is developing as a Paris on the Pacific, but the life force also shows it’s power in the plain people. Jackie Chan, master of the karate opera, is to North America today what Jimmy Cagney was 80 years ago, and if Cagney represented the collective promise and optimism for the millions of immigrants who swarmed to Ellis Island from Europe and Ireland, Chan does the same for the large immigration from the East, who settle primarily as a new American influence to the west and the north of the Mississippi.

This is the Aquarian mandala, which will find creative energy in centuries ahead. This means the development and enrichment of regional cultures on the North American continent, forging one another, helping one another and hating one another; forming new dynamic relationships and creating a new world.

North Americans have more in common with other North Americans than they do with Europeans. This transcends caste and religion, which, in the U.S., have entirely different structures than in Europe and Asia. And it has been like this for a long time and even in the darkest days. W.J. Cash pointed out that the wealthy white woman of the South in the 19^t century had more in common with her black maid than she did with people out of the region. And Thomas Nelson Page, a popular Southern writer writing at the end of the Civil War, pointed out that the Southerner had more in common with his Yankee enemy than with foreigners.

Outside of academia, almost none default to Europeanism in America, particularly in the South and the Midwest. And people who live near the borders of Mexico or Canada share in those cultures in direct relation to the proximity of their borders.

These all three together, Canada, Mexico and the United States, make for the most dynamic singular cultural union in the world today. In terms of global action and passion, they are the center of the world as we enter the new millenium.

We come together in a federalist state. With federalism, everyone is equal, but no one is connected. This is the Hamiltonian model of federalism and it is singularly responsible for how we develop. Hamilton favored a vast, singular state with a central government to aid and abet industry and the business class. Thomas Jefferson envisioned instead a series of autonomous regions, each with their own provincial culture and life force. My prediction is that the Hamilton way is temporary, and once we are all here and found the place we like, we will stay here and grow here to our own Peoples, as Jefferson envisioned a free society. But we are not all here yet and will not be for another 100 years, and in that time, flow in capital, industry and people will come from the East. Then the regions will settle, find themselves, and begin to look inward to find themselves as new people in a new place. Till then, the Hamilton model is appropriate. And in the end, we will be an East/West nation and an East/West continent.

As Revelation closes the gate for one epoch which began its historical march in Constantinople, the Indian visionary opens a gate to the next. Here is Black Elk, in language like that of St. John: “The oldest one spoke again: ‘Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you.’ His voice was very kind, but I shook all over with fear now, for I knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World. And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth, of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth. I knew this, and was afraid, until the first Grandfather spoke again: “Behold them yonder where the sun goes down, the thunder beings! You shall see, and have from them my power; and they shall take you to the high and lonely center of the earth that you may see; even to the place where the sun continually shines, they shall take you there to understand.”

And here is Black Elk as the perennial guide – from Cooper to Kevin Cosner -- for the new arrival on this continent who has lost his orientation and is wandering with a sick soul in the desert of the new world: “And the Voice said: Give them now the flowering stick that they may flourish, and the sacred pipe that they may know the power that is peace, and the wing of the white giant that they may have endurance and face all winds with courage.”

The recent novel Cold Mountain with its Indian guide is representative of the journey to the Self as it unfolds here on what still is a new continent and in what is surely a new age. As Bunyan’s Christian pilgrim seeks a life of the highest integrity and moral perseverance in a world torn asunder in the 1600s, so Frazier speaks to us today. There are two Cold Mountains, one in China where Taoist sages and hermits have lived for ages, and one in North Carolina, considered sacred to Indians in those parts. At the beginning of the novel Frazier quotes the eighth century Taoist sages, Han shan: Men ask the way to Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail. It is a mandala novel; it begins with the character on the edge broken, and in a brief but perfect life he finds in the center, whole. And he finds wholeness and completion in the house of the Indian. It speaks well of the North American journey, a journey for all which is just beginning.

Notes on Lost, 5/8/08 – John Locke is the Aquarian

For Lost watchers, last night’s episode was a turning point. Ben Linus, who was identified as a Christ figure in an earlier season (The Grand Inquisitor – the Christ wound when he was in the prison cell - Dostoyevsky's chapter in The Brothers Karamazov about the Christ returning and put in prison) tells that he is or was the Chosen One, but it is over for him now. Now John Locke – whose name suggests the Enlightenment – is the Chosen One. This conforms with the millennial shift of Platonic Months; the two-thousand year passages of the zodiac. We have left the Age of Pisces – which began with the birth of the Christ and in which the Christ was avatar – and entered the Age of Aquarius – technically, Aquarius rose just as Lost went to the airwaves. The Platonic Months shift or alternate every two thousand years, as novelist Robertson Davies points out in an essay on the subject, from yin to yang. The passing age, Pisces, was a yin age, marked by water (Victoria, men in ships, world conquest via water). He warns, that - hippie lore aside - Aquarius is a yang age - an Age of Titans.

Linus tells John at the end of this tenure of a burden: Being Chosen has its consequences, as he has come to kill his own daughter, Alex.

Lost creator J.J. Abrams went to Sarah Lawrence College where Joseph Campbell taught. Abrams is likely to have been steeped in the Campbell atmosphere as it was strong when he was undergraduate there – Campbell, a mythologist and anthropologist, had just completed a landmark series of discussions on mythology with Bill Moyers - The Power of Myth - held at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and aired on PBS. This series changed the nature of Hollywood.

For anyone knowledgeable in this region, there are clear and distinct themes in Lost that were elucidated by Campbell and C.G. Jung. Campbell was the editor of the portable Viking edition of Jung’s work. As per last night’s episode of Lost, it can be seen that the Lost island is a configuration of psyche and Self – a cosmic castle with its own space/time properties in the middle of an Ocean – Clair is Anima and Christian (her father) is Self – as Jung put it, Self is the interim guide between an individual and the Unconscious. The shack, which only Ben, Locke and occasionally Hurley sense or intuit, characterizes the psyche – Jacob is the pure voice of the Unconscious.

This is a common dream configuration in Jung and expressed throughout Eastern philosophy and religion and in world folk lore – ocean, castle, cosmic guide, Anima, Self. And here last night on the island, John – who takes the reins from Ben as we enter the new millennium, is asked by Christian (all names are meaningful in Lost) to ask the correct question. John Locke asks the correct question: How can the island be saved? The island is Psyche at its center; it is the House of God and the intuition which comes to us through the intermediary of the Self, comes from there: John Locke is the guide. Without John Locke as guide in the new millenium, we are Lost.

More on Lost at Quigley in Exile and Lost as an Aquarian Creation Myth at Entering Aquarius.

Obama, Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger Triumverate: Obama and Bloomberg = Roosevelt and Eisenhower

A voice of the Rising Generation calls forth on Daily Kos and asks the question, "Would Mike Bloomberg be a good Vice President for Barack Obama," bringing forth cries from the heart and distress.

But it is a good idea today especially as it looks as if McCain is turning to Romney. It will destroy all McCain's credibility as a decent American who opposes torture as Romney is second only to Torquenada in this area.

Obama should snag Bloomberg AND his bud Arnold Schwarzenegger as the "post partisan" model for the new century.

In this model Obama is the transcendent leader, like Roosevelt, who has the job of choosing a supreme manager, like Eisenhower - even more important than VP (Jim Webb or Kathleen Sebelius possibly), a task force perhaps on environment with Bloomberg/Arnold sharing chair and given highest national priority (based on the Mark Lynas premise of warming in Six Degrees). Other things - including the current millennialist religious hysteria in the Middle East - come with the dust and are gone with the wind. But the picture presented by Lynas in his books presents a problem that will not go away and may well take us away.

These two men - Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger - are the best managers in the country and like Eisenhower, they have the ability to identify the problem in its largest sphere and apply the suitable fix.

My feeling is that other Republicans will have no ability in this (environment), neither will Gore. Gore is a scholar not a fixer and manager - he has done his part well. The Republicans and half the Democrats have the "earth caretaker" position - they like it because it is in the Bible. But this premise is ill suited and narrow (and the Bible story is about investing money).

Ultimately we do not care for the earth; the earth cares for us - ours is a primal and symbiotic relationship (a Taoist/Buddhist view get more to the nature of the issue).

Obama's writing in The Audacity of Hope shows he has the supple and subtle mind; his understanding in the "religion" chapter in particular of the complex positions of Adams, Henry and Jefferson and how the elite conspired specifically to keep out the Baptists and the common people, shows he has the abilities for transcendent leadership; that is, Obama has the ability to see things to their core and solve them there.

The Al Gore Option

DKos diary, 3/28/08

Time this week presents a perspective from Joe Klein titled Is Al Gore the Answer. Three things: A. It looks today like Obama has it; B. It looks like Elvis will not (cannot) leave the building so maybe Obama doesn’t have it; C. It looks like one of those times in history when the Trickster is at hand and anything can (will) happen. In this environment Klein brings in a more or less classic scenario: A brokered convention in which a third individual appealing to all to some degree is bought in and in this case that could be (should be) Al Gore.

Klein writes:

Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. ... All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their super delegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party-and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? ... A prominent fund raiser told me, 'Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place.

I think it was Emerson (or maybe Kerouac) who said that people don’t make history; historic events make people. The question we might ask ourselves at this moment is: What is the critical issue of our time? The war in Iraq? Oil? The declining dollar and the failing economy? China and India rising? Unification of the country and the crisis of authority in Washington, D.C.? Russian bombers circling Alaska? In that regard Gore might be considered. His name is singularly attached to the issue of global warming and if this becomes the paramount issue, he comes to the fore with it.

What is interesting about Gore in the current political climate is that as a Clinton Administration guy, he, almost alone among the rising fourth generation, has cache. His popularity transcends his own generation. His ratings at Daily Kos last year were sky high – somewhere in the 80% approval if I recall, while Senator Clinton’s hovered around zero. So he could, as Klein says, appeal to the broad spectrum.

But the issues should (and will) bring forth the best candidate to solve that particular problem. And one more fire season across the Southwest may bring us to the issue of supreme importance, global warming.

I feel that we are still in denial on this issue. We bring forth simple or inappropriate solutions like the "caretaker of the earth" one based on a Bible teaching (which is actually about investing money). But we are symbiotes with the earth and the earth cares for us. Or we rush into wrong directions like biofuel which makes things worse.

It is still snowing this morning outside my window here in the north country of New Hampshire and we tend to think about it more when it is hot. Perhaps we will need a Pearl Harbor to finally face up to this issue. Mark Lynas’s new book, Six Degrees, Our Future on Hotter Planet, presents a picture that is now not unlikely. It brings a vision of danger that sends all of history’s villains into shadow. But here there is not Hitler, no Stalin. Here it is Pogo’s maxim: We have found the villain and he is us.

As The Guardian’s review, titled Six Steps to Hell puts it:

By the end of the century, the Earth could be more than 6C hotter than it is today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We know that would be bad news - but just how bad? How big a rise will it take for the Alps to melt, the oceans to die and desert to conquer Europe and the Americas?

I am one of the people who thought that Gore was not always a great Vice President. The Clinton foreign policy initiatives which he fully endorsed and advanced were dangerous and naïve. He tended to listen to novelty perspectives and pop culture mavens. But I also believe that he has grown and improved as a man and as a public figure in the last ten years and that is a remarkable and rare transition for someone his (and my) age. He has earned the title of Elder as many who claim it now have not.

I hope for an Obama Presidency. My best scenario would be a post-partisan commission to face and manage global warming chaired by Mike Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jodi Rell, Governor of Connecticut, who have already made major strides on this issue which have left the federal government in the dark. And a hundred years from now I’d hope the names of those commissioners be remembered as the names Eisenhower and Marshall and Roosevelt are recalled from the Second World War and its aftermath.

But a commission like this would work just as well with Al Gore at the helm as a transcendent leader.

Bill Clinton: Man Without a Country

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 3/22/08

From Sam Stein at The Huffington Post:

MSNBC is reporting that on the campaign trail today in Charlotte, North Carolina, the former president said a general election matchup between his wife, Sen. Clinton, and Sen. John McCain would be between "two people who love this country" without "all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

Former Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton has applied propaganda strategies like we have not seen since the Jim Crow days, implying that Obama would be unfit to be President of the United States through innuendo, mnemonic slander and word and theme association, because he is black.

Understandably, it has been a bad week for the Clintons. The country as a whole has been through a major cultural turning due to a speech given by Barack Obama that will be remembered through the ages. Until now Obama was compared to Jack Kennedy. Now he is being compared to Lincoln. Can’t be good when the comments coming out of the mouths of Clinton apparatchiks call to mind Paulie Walnuts.

The implication now, of course, of the current slander, is that Barack Obama is not a patriot. This is Scorched Earth policy coming from the Few and the Brave: Ferraro, Ellen, Penn, James Carville and The Clinton Cult. There are three parties now: The Democrats, the Republicans and the Clintons; two parties and a personality cult.

Clinton calling on patriotism to soldiers in North Carolina is astonishing. I am a veteran and lived in the hills of North Carolina during the Clinton Presidency. If any veteran in those parts was Fond of Bill it escaped my attention. Many started carrying Glocks publicly, raising Rottweilers and joining local militia groups in direct response to Clinton's amateurish and irresponsible tenure, considering it a failure of federalism and a complete abdication of moral character.

Indeed, veterans and soldiers I knew in North Carolina hated Clinton. Many veterans considered him a coward and an expedient. During the Clinton Presidency two secession groups started; The League of the South and The New England Confederation. Both of these groups - which have now morphed into several - considered the Clinton Administration to be a complete failure of American character and decided it was time to move on. The red state/blue state division - civil war by other means - also directly returns to the character of Bill Clinton and his tenure as President.

To dig back: Here in New England we tend to not be flag wavers, but there are stern standards of the traditions of duty and service which we tend to teach through the most dour of moral parables. Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country pushed upon us round the seventh grade in rural Rhode Island public school comes to mind. It is the moral lesson of a man who was less than patriotic and responsive to duty as the elders determined, and who was, like Bush, Cheney and Clinton, condemned to a life of constant overcompensating or under compensating. That is, when he was asked to cross the first river as his life opened he did not. And was condemned subsequently to wander as if in a fog in his elder years and remain there throughout, exiled and alone as a ship at sea, an aging Child of God lost in his own head.

Is Hillary Running for Vice President?: Orlando Patterson - Black man on the phone

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network

Bill Clinton and his Decepticons are now actually running plaintiff wife Hillary for Vice President on an Obama ticket. They can feel it is up for them and Obama will eventually take it. So the chant this week of Unstoppable is to pitch them – Hillary and Obama - as an undeniable unit; bringing them together and bringing Hillary (and Bill, don’t cha know) on a new last chance strategy; a graded 12 year ride – Hillary as VP in ’08, and President in ’12 and ‘16.

It is, of course, absurd that Hillary, running second, would actually call on Obama for VP as she has been saying she would recently. The Clintons have been claiming all these weeks before that Obama is inadequate and suggesting through nuance, as Harvard’s Orlando Patterson says on the op-ed pages of the NYTs this morning, that he is inadequate because he is black. These mnemonic devises amplify and fix in the press as they are inherently propaganda stratigies and are devised and intended to. Clinton here gives the impression that she would without a doubt now select Obama for VP just as she is failing, so that when the tide changes – and it already has – they will still have survivable options: under these radically new, undesirable and unanticipated circumstances Obama should certainly take her as VP as she certainly would undoubtedly have taken him. As a last resort they – Bill, Penn, the Carville Cartel - will send Hillary aboard as VP. As a propaganda strategy it is less slick, less subtle than what usually comes out of Madison Avenue, say, during Super Bowl. It is more akin to what came out of the Soviet Union during the 1950s.

The Clintons are now holding on with their fingernails. Their shills have descended to a quite course application of propaganda; coercing, intimating and intimidating. There are now three parties: The Republicans, the Democrats and the Clintons. Client 9 will again cast the Clintons in shadow and what Spitzer does will reflect on the Democrats as a whole and our country as a whole. And it will contrast with the Clintons in the White House and where they brought us in that ignominious time when Bill was unapologetically tapping the undergraduates. Client 9 further unravels the Clinton Party as its generational apologists who have again and again supported Clinton as Avatar and made the Democratic Party defenders of the indefensible (did somebody say Marc Rich?) are fast coming out of denial.

But this is the Elvis curse. Elvis refuses to leave the building and is an embarrassment to himself and to all of us late in his life. I expect to see Bill in the god suit next; fat, sweating like a pig and drugged, crooning sadly to dead enders in a Las Vegas casino.

Professor Patterson’s perceptive and thoughtful op-ed in today’s NYTs, Red Phone in Black and White, makes the point that Clinton insinuates in the 3 am TV ad, which shows a little white girl frightened in the night, that the girl is afraid because a black man would be answering the phone. He writes:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s "Birth of a Nation," the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

It is interesting that in the comment section of that article several people referred to a "Bogie Man" which, where I grew up in Rhode Island in the 50s, meant a black man. Another commentator suggested that Bill Clinton suggesting someone coming "in the night" to take the election from Hillary was a draw on racist attitudes in a racially polarized state.

Good points. There was indeed something sick and twisted in the clip – an insidious threat; Red Threat or Yellow Peril or H. Rap Brown threatening to burn down the neighborhood: We built it and we're gonna burn it down. Honkies and all.

But for some reason I started thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a classic propaganda film from the 1930s. It was suggested by the tightness of the close up and the coarseness of the heavy-handed telling and the overt propaganda in these early silent films.

Clinton & Co. have adopted language and strategy reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda: Deceive forcefully and the faithful will reinforce. Her claim last week that her time as First Lady gave her experience in foreign policy was in itself enough to gag a horse, but making such an absurd statement with a bunch of Admirals and army guys at her side was reminiscent of the old Politburo propaganda forums which always had puffy-chested Generals standing by with long faces and long rows of medals to accompany Khrushchev's ridiculous pronouncements.

All I could think about was Mrs. Khrushchev. It sounded ridiculous to anyone not in the cult.

Sam Nunn/Wesley Clark: Question on Raising Kaine - "Will Wesley Clark be Obama's VP?"

Quigley's comment: Sam Nunn represents an old school which might be considered a Democratic Council of Elders. David Boren, Sam Nunn and elders from both parties recently held a conference in Oklahoma to call for Mark Warner style "across the isle" politics. But more important, the Nunn/Boren group bemoaned the narrowness of both parties in foreign policy, particularly in nuclear proliferation. This group precedes Clinton/Albright/Holbrook policy which some in this older group considered ill-informed and naive. In '98 thereabouts when Clinton took a page from the Gingrich Contract with America and pushed Congress to advance NATO to Russia's borders when Russia was considered weak and broken, some in this group including George Kennan considered it " . . . a mistake of historic proportions." General Clark was not policy maker to this but he was chief of NATO at the time so he is associated with this group of policy makers through the Clinton administration.

The only candidate to agree with Nunn/Boren (and Henry Kissinger) and to support Nunn's position on nuclear proliferation at the Oklahoma meeting last month was Barack Obama. So there is a clear generational break between these two Democratic visions of foreign policy and here and in other ways, Obama harks back to Nunn and leaps over the Clinton/Albright generation - and Hillary's point of view on this which should come as no surprise is the same as her husband's. That is probably why Obama was endorsed by Susan Eisenhower, who was at the meeting in Oklahoma and who also called together the foreign policy elders like Kennan to oppose Clinton's NATO initiative (which 90 Senators voted for) on incursion into Russia's near frontier.

Sam Nunn has been mentioned as a possible VP for Obama. An Obama Presidency will almost certainly take a different foreign policy tack than the Reagan/Clinton direction which was primary the same (Kagan/Kristol).

General Clark has been critical of Obama on many occations, starting at the Daily Kos convention last summer, about the time he went to work for the Clintons. I don't see that he had any choice but to support the Clinton camp as Bill was his Commander-in-Chief and the important work Clark did in his life was with Bill's approval and sometimes with the disapproval of the army.

In my opinion the best work General Clark ever did in his life was in opposition to the war on Iraq from '04 to June '07. He opposed the war when few other men and women of his credibility, character and distinguished personal history did. He gave the Democrats a new track and kept them on that track until the war fever had passed. Among politicians, veterans and soldiers, he carried this point of view virtually alone, like a candle cupped in his hands, for quite a long time.

That work is not finished. In one of his books and in the Amy Goodman interview he did last year, Clark called for an investigation of the roots of the war on Iraq as he had heard from friends in the Pentagon that this invasion would take place long before it had been made public. This fully needs to be investigated if America is ever to find credibility with the world again and with our new generations. It is clear that laws have been broken, crimes have been committed and they would be war crimes. This is a very delicate task and requires women and men of the utmost character. These hearings should start with Wes Clark. (And Larry Wilkerson.)

Upending Torture: Finding Equilibrium in the New America Condition

By Bernie Quigley

Shortly after it began, Wesley Clark, as a candidate for President in ‘04, demanded that the beginnings of the war on Iraq be dug up and found and publicly explored and explained before they got buried too deep. It is a good idea. Let’s have televised exploratory hearings. Let them be vast and let them last years and let them begin now.

It is an important idea, and now that senior members of the Government have admitted to torture, let’s also begin as well hearings and investigations into these and possibly other American war crimes. Because in our country, when one commits a crime there are hearings and investigations. And when those crimes involve warfare, they are war crimes.

Not to get all judgmental, but for myself, I’d like to see something a little less touchy-feely than the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Something more widespread. Something more akin to the McCarthy Hearings. Or better still, something like France’s war crime trials of the storied Vichy Swine which took TIME’s Man of the Year in 1931, Pierre Laval, and left him vomiting before a firing squad in 1945.

Here in northern New England, the newspaper editors who for the first time in the 800-year history of the English-speaking people proposed on our op-ed pages that torture be a rational tool of diplomacy, have in most places been delegated to the night desk.

But down the mountain; down there in the vast heartland, the actual torture buffs and advocates who wrote the stories before they went to the syndicates; the agents and fellow travelers of the Popular Front of American Fascism who have breached the faith of the American tradition as it has never been breached before have found their way out of that upper white trash journal, The National Review, to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And discussion of torture in venerable journals like The New York Times and the LA Times is now as common as hep-B and herpes duplex and as American as apple pie. First question to these people: Who raised you?

Perhaps we will need reeducation centers or rehabilitation centers like those set up in Southeast Asia after the war in Vietnam to reeducate communist soldiers, propagandists, prostitutes and others who lost their center to the heady and delirious fever of blood and ideology. Get them at least straight enough to be able to perform the simplest tasks of common humanity like cutting tobacco or gutting fish with humble pride and humility.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Let’s have public discussion of ideas like those openly discussed – bragged about – throughout the media leading up to the war on Iraq when most all the major columnists and journalists in this country and about 90 Senators felt for sure early in 2001 that the war in Iraq would be a cake walk won in a week. It would be the key career move and anyone who didn’t participate would be left behind.

World War II in a week. Let’s go back to the Weekly Standard crew. One of its old school talked openly about frequently sitting around the office and the whole bunch just trying to decide which country to cajole the compliant, submissive and accommodating Congress to invade first.

Are there not War Crime laws against conspiring to invade foreign countries? Shouldn’t there be? Isn’t it, like, unConstitutional? Isn’t it unConstitutional to repeal habeas corpus? Why did the repeal of habeas corpus not ring with the urgency of a suddenly lost talisman to the majority in Congress and the press? And isn’t it therefore a RICO violation or a conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the established Constitutional proceedings? Doesn’t this in fact present a bloodless coup; the substitution of a false government for the true government? Isn’t this against the law?

Let’s begin to ask these questions and let’s have soldiers like Major Tammy Duckworth, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Senator Jim Webb, Admiral Joe Sestak and General Wesley Clark start to ask these questions.

Are the instigators of these illegal issues American war criminals and to what degree are they culpable? To what degree are their fellow travelers in press and politics culpable? Should they at least be purged from our presence? Can’t they be sent some place like the Penal Colony of French New Guinea or the Galapagos Islands?

And let’s have some public and televised hearings and go way back to the beginning. Let’s bring in some of the old folkloric and vastly charming and creative radio preachers I used to listen to in the mountains of Appalachia starting in the early ‘90s and throughout who talked about the invasion of Iraq and gettin’ Saddam for years before in actually happened.

Let’s talk about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ that our Appalachian free preachers told us we were going to help bring about by a war against Saddam.

Was this war simply millennialist religious hysteria of the kind which classically comes about at the turning of millennia? A nation-wide Jonestown to which the Congress, the press and 75% of the American people who supported the invasion drank the kool aid?

Lets get the authors of the Left Behind books to explain to us again as they did to their 100 million readers how a war in the Middle East - something way like this one - was going to bring about the end of the world and bring back Jesus. How was that going to happen again? And let’s talk to the few New York rabbis who brought concerns to The New York Times just prior to the invasion about the apparent connection between these Appalachian religious visions and convictions and the plight of the Jews in this narrative. Was not the final end-game of this fantastic maelstrom of fire and blood the final end for the Jews? How could Jews possibly support this? How could anyone?

More questions arise: Why were so few others in big places like The New York Times and Congress unconcerned about this? How could they possibly claim not to know? One of the authors of the Left Behind books worked for one of our most prominent Representatives. Were they not curious? Was appeasement and accommodation of Bush and company the dominant survival strategy for those Senators who voted for the Iraq war as it was for Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval in France in the early 1930s? Is that why Indian activist Russell Means today calls these American politicians Vichy? Were they simply cowards? Youth wants to know.

And how did our allies not know a word about this?

Weeks before the invasion I’d lobbied members of the House of Commons like Glenda Jackson about the American religious zealots encouraging this war on Iraq and she said they had not a clue about this. She would be the first to bring it to the attention of Tony Blair, she said.

And how did the urban and urbane neocons connect so swiftly with this motley group of Free Church Christian preachers in the Appalachians? What were the external networks? Churches, elected officials, press? They seem unlikely colleagues. What were their shared purposes?

Let’s go back to the tapes of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer weeks before the invasion and look a second time into the eyes and smiles the camaraderie and excitement that the country’s most prominent journalists shared with the most common of agitators, political propagandists and outright thugs, each egging on the other to their Great Moment which they were comparing to the invasion of Normandy.

Let’s go to the deeply involved journalists; the coat carriers at The New York Times who were raising the call to throw France off the UN Security Council and quickly stick India in there, so’s to use a few millions of its minions as American Ghurkhas to hold territory in its new wars abroad in a new America century; and the top Washington Post reporter who advocated invasion of Iraq on the front pages every day for her own agenda - to get the Muslim women to be rid of their burkas and dress like her – the Priestess who accompanied the Conquistador; let’s go to the most famous of TV reporters cheering them on into Baghdad from a Humvee and telling the camera " . . . I think they’re greeting us," while the Iraqi people were throwing him the finger.

Let’s get to the bottom. Who was promoted to the highest perches of newspaper and media posts on the phony Mission Accomplished day and why? How much experience did they have? Compare the backgrounds of these new and present editors to the tradition; to an old editor like, say, Wayne King long of the NYTs, who took 20 years in the trenches and a Pulitzer Prize won in Detroit riots to get to the same position. What kind of newspaper experience did these new people have besides supporting the invasion that led them to such high positions? Why are they still there?

Who early proposed torture in the press and why now have they advanced to major media? Are they not American terrorists? Can they not be imprisoned or exiled? And if we are going to suspend the Constitution, cannot Bob Dylan’s folkloric Mr. Jones, surmised to be the archetypal and anonymous cowardly journalist and editor with neither face nor character, storied in song and generational folk lore for knowing something is happening but not knowing what it is, cannot Mr. Jones be banished outright and purged from the village?

Who were, who are, the central advocates? Who are the American Ayatollahs? Let’s talk to them all. Let’s have everybody watch and hear their explanations.

And while we have them there let’s ask them why they made so little fuss at the dropping of habeas corpus. Let’s ask them why at each and every turn these past few years only so very few like the venerable Robert C. Byrd and that Gray Champion, Ted Kennedy, and a few others like Senator Russ Feingold and Wes Clark spoke up.

Let’s ask the lawmakers why legislation to quit smoking or to ban transfats brings fire to their minds, but torture and habeas corpus are not that burning as issues for them.

But first of all let’s ask them this: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you rise and swell at the magnificent vision of the Declaration of Independence being read by Americans of every shape, contrast and color? Did you awaken to Russell Crowe’s primal American vision of perfection leading the artist’s heart, the troubadour’s intuition and the athlete’s gift - The Beatles and Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix and Satchmo and Randy Moss and Eli and Plaxico - to the moon and beyond?

Do you share in this sacred trust? Do you consider yourself to be part of this participation mystique? Do you consider yourself to be one of us?

Kosovo’s Problem: Frank Zappa is Dead

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/18/08

Issues of time lag were written about best perhaps by Kafka, who came from the darkest place and lived in the shadow of the castle. Kafka’s characters want to bring back the ancient time – the torturer in the short story In the Penal Colony, Wilhelm II and George Bush – when time has passed them by. France, living in its own shadow, has a tendency. It finally gets onto the rising Ronald Reagan era – building big, useless Airbus planes that nobody wants and electing Sarko – just as the Reagan Era has fallen into twilight.

But Kafka would find a true home in Kosovo. The region is vortex to Europe’s Four Grandfathers: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Islam. And ancestral Jews as well. And they all hate each other.

But I blame the trouble today on Frank Zappa. He trumped the Black Madonna and even Joseph Stalin’s dark charm.

Youth wants to know: Who the hell is Frank Zappa? Just another God that Failed; a charming and witty troubadour who once compared his masculine aspect – which Canadians call a tool – with a Harley-Davidson (“ . . . you kick it to start.”).

They were called Velvet Revolutionaries and other things elegant and fey for a place where neighbors stoned each other to death. But they listened to Frank Zappa and Lou Reed who was even hipper and they were the darlings of an age that was unbearably light. They were featured on NPR and championed by the English Department. When the ancient regimes on the edge of Russia were suddenly cut loose from Stalin’s post-war grip, it was widely thought to be because of Frank Zappa.

To recall the first wave, there was a rush of entrepreneurs from Europe and America sent in to get them on track. What they wanted, it was said, was not Trotsky and Lenin. They wanted America. And not just Jefferson and Lincoln. They wanted Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein.

The neocon model – Gingrich and McCain’s current advisers Kaplan and Kristol - - appeared to make sense. There were a lot of Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Latvians and what not in America, no? Let’s hook up with them. Forget the Chinese hordes. This would be the basis of a new American global empire; the Project for a New American Century. The new diplomatic dogma had a simple plan; it was that we, the Americans, would find a dissident in every desert and swamp in the world that had one and send in the troops. Now that the Iron Curtain had fallen, there were a whole group of them over near Austria somewhere.

And these places would become American pseudo-states like Guam and Puerto Rico; Poland, Czech Republic and hey, all of Islam. But some of the less big visionaries; the poets, weaklings, pig dogs, even some at the NYTs – reflected modestly that to actually hold territory one needed more than an Air Force. One needed soldiers, and to hold a bunch of territory one needed proletariat. You couldn’t fight these global wars with undocumented Mexican day workers. And the U.S. had no proletariat.

Not a problem. It was actually suggested; it was actually imagined by these people, that India could supply a few million of its extra hordes and fight for Frank, Michael and Cal, much as the Gurkhas fought for England. All you had to do was throw those sissy French manboys off the Security Council and put India there. This was a plan.

Congress really got into it (it was the end of time, one Pentagon bodhisattva proclaimed). In 1996, everyone in the world wanted to be an American and George Soros, a rich guy, made the point that everyone in the world was a kind of American; everyone was a kind of an American by different degree. So Clinton took the Gingrich playbook and adopted Kosovo’s fledgling liberation movement. Bombing the beast chilled it for awhile and NATO – Don Cherry’s Euro-wimps – was sent in to keep the peace. But today, Peter Finn of the Washington Post reports that their only job is guarding things like Serb monasteries which are now surrounded by massive new walls to shield elderly nuns from being stoned to death by passing ethnic Albanians.

Youth wants to know: Who’s Newt Gingrich?

Kind of made you wonder, in a land where Orthodox Christians have traditionally hated Jews and Muslins have hated Christians and visa versa; indeed, where everyone hates one another, how long Frank Zappa, Cal Klein and Michael Jackson would hold on as god-kings. Soon, all the Frank Zappa guys might be stoning the Michael Jackson guys.

In Kosovo today they are waving American flags. They are yelling, “We love you Bill Clinton.” It was indeed Clinton and Al Gore who, when the Soviets fell, pressed into Holy Roman Empire and promised to line the edge of Russia with nuclear weapons. It was called “a mistake of historic proportions,” by George Kennan and the best foreign policy minds of the day. Even Jesse Helms, my old Senator in North Carolina, had to ask if America was willing to commit troops, alienate Russia and start a new round of nuclear proliferation for such small and relatively insignificant stakes.

Much as they cited Zappa as the true revolution, he was only, in the end, a modest comedian. And these were not really revolutions. In a revolution, the mice kill the cat and take over. Here, the cat simply died.

But like that charming children’s song from Sesame Street, the cat came back. And today the dollar is crashing while the ruble is soaring. And from then to now the same neocon playbook that sent NATO to Russia’s edge has sunk into the sand in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the late ‘90s in Kosovo, America challenged Russia, advancing the geopolitical playbook written at Yalta to the peak of its vision. Kosovo today is either an end-game of Yalta or the beginning of World War III.

I think the first. I doubt the neocons will be able to egg on loyal and decent Southern Baptists to fight another war for them as they did in Iraq. It worked in the Middle East because there was that Armageddon thing; there was the git Saddam thing which played big in my old neighborhood back in Tobaccoville, NC; there was that jump start the Second Coming of Christ in the Holy Land thing and there was 9/11. It might well have been much of it a millennialist fever; an end-of-the-world delusion like those which classically occur at the end of thousand-year periods; a Jonestown in big, and 75% of the American drank the kool-aid.

But, outside the Pole, Czech, and other lobbyists and their agents in Congress, the specifics don’t really hold much of a grip on the broader American imagination on its wandering path. I think it was Chris, the young hood in Tony Soprano’s gang, who showed a kind of diffident interest when Czechs started coming to New Jersey at the fall of communism. Like most new immigrant groups, they formed their own economic under-culture and one of them, Emile (who Chris called “E-mail”), wanted to join Tony’s gang. He graciously explained how Czechs had just risen up in revolution and cast off the Soviet boot. Chris asked: “What’s a Czech? That’s a kind of Polak, right?”

Somebody tell them in Kosovo: Bill Clinton is no longer the President. Frank Zappa is dead.

Notes on orthodoxy . . .

Ganesh is pictured standing on or above a rat and likewise Shiva stomping on a dwarf. The rat and dwarf represent the evolutionary body; the reflex path of human and animal life – the human can find awakening to the cosmic and leave the rat behind. The Christian likewise finds himself “born again” to the cosmic and rising out of the everyday unenlightened body, rising to the cosmic through the Christ. They rise out of nature. But Buddhism starts from alienation in the social order and comes after a long tradition of Hindu orthodoxy. Perhaps it is that as William James says the enlightened moment comes as a flash venture and is sustained by orthodoxy building walls around but killing the spark. Buddha said that when he first became enlightened he felt that he shared something “with the animals.” He left the artificial life of the calcified institutions of borrowed and inauthentic inherited “Enlightenments” behind to find himself first back to nature. From there he advanced again to the cosmic in a second awakening, but the first requirement was to leave the official orthodox culture bereft of spirit behind. So we have it is Japanese zen that all of the public social order is a conspiracy of “language and logic” which must be left behind to find enlightenment. This is in the Christ as well as he rose in opposition to the Pharisees who had banished the shamans and intuitives to written codification and law, creating the same structured orthodoxy, making it impossible to find the “father we cannot see” – the Self in the Vedic texts. For years I complained that the communion was an extension of the animal sacrifice of the pagans and that is what Christ yelled about and was in opposition to at the “money lenders in the Temple.” The King James version presents an anti-Semitic picture of Jews as money lenders in this episode at at time of a rising indegeneous trade class but the point of the story was not in that they were selling (blue laws), but in what they were selling: they were selling animals for the purpose of live sacrifice in the Temple and that is what Christ was railing about (See Tolstoy’s translation in The Gospel in Brief). So the substitution of pseudo-sacrifice or substitute sacrifice by the early Christian churches as a management strategy to engage and absorb the pagan cycle is virtually in opposition to the Christ’s direction. But it is fascinating; it travels the heart through space/time to the ancestors through the ages in a singular act; better if performed in Latin as it actualizes a koan mechanism, shifting consciousness to the Right Side of the brain. Tolstoy’s late writing incidentally, is excellent reading for people in their descent particularly those who were raised Christian, like Tolstoy. It offers a potential path back to the Gate.

For more see Entering Aquarius.

War Crimes Trials for Mr. Jones

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 2/8/2008

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

- Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965

Shortly before he disappeared into the dark night Wesley Clark demanded that the beginnings of the war on Iraq be dug up and found and publicly explained before they got buried too deep. It is a good idea. Let’s have televised exploratory hearings. Let them be vast and let them last years and let them begin now.

It is an important idea, and now that the Government has admitted to torture, let’s also begin as well hearings and investigations into American war crimes. Not to get all judgmental, but for myself, I’d like to see something a little less touchy-feely than the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and something more akin to the McCarthy Hearings. Or better still, something like France’s war crime trials of the legendary and folkloric Vichy Swine which took TIME’s Man of the Year in 1931, Pierre Laval, and left him vomiting before a firing squad in 1945.

Here in northern New England the newspaper editors who for the first time in the 800-year history of the English-speaking people proposed on our op-ed pages that torture be a rational tool of diplomacy, have at least in some places been delegated to the night desk. But down the mountain; down there in the vast heartland, the actual torture buffs and advocates; agents and fellow travelers of the Popular Front of American Fascism have found their way out of that elite white trash journal, the National Review to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And discussion of torture in these venerable journals is now as common as hep-B and herpes duplex and as American as apple pie. First question to these people: Who raised you?

Perhaps we will need reeducation centers like those set up in Southeast Asia to reeducate communist soldiers, propagandists, prostitutes and others who lost their center in the heady and delirious mix of blood and ideology. Get them straight enough to be able to perform simple tasks like cutting tobacco or gutting fish with pride and humility.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Let’s have public discussion of ideas like those openly discussed – bragged about – throughout the media when most all the major columnists and journalist in this country and at least 90 Senators felt for sure early in 2001 that the war in Iraq would be a cake walk won in a week. It would be the key career move and anyone who didn’t participate would be left behind. Let’s go back to the Weekly Standard crew. One of its old school talked openly about sitting around the office and the whole bunch just trying to decide which country to cajole the compliant, submissive and decadent Congress of Peeps to invade first.

Are there not War Crime laws against conspiring to mass murder? Shouldn’t there be? Isn’t it, like, unConstitutional? Isn’t it unConstitutional to repeal habeas corpus? Why did the repeal of habeas corpus not ring with the urgency of a suddenly lost sacred talisman to the majority in Congress and in the press? And isn’t it therefore a RICO violation or a conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the Constitutional government? Are these people American war criminals and to what degree are they culpable? Should they at least be purged from our presence? Can’t they be sent some place like the Penal Colony of French New Guinea or the Galapagos Islands?

Let’s go back to the tapes of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer a week before the invasion and watch in the eyes and smiles the camaraderie and excitement the country’s most prominent journalists shared with the most common of war criminals, each egging on the other to their Great Moment which they were comparing to the invasion of Normandy.

Let’s go to the deeply involved journalist; the coat carriers at the NYTs; the top WaPost reporter who advocated invasion to get the Muslim women to be rid of the burkas and dress like her – the Priestess who accompanied the Conquistador – and to the most famous of TV reporters cheering on the way into Baghdad from a Humvee and telling the camera “ . . . I think their waving,” while the Iraqi people were throwing him the finger.

Let’s get to the bottom. Who was promoted to the highest perches of newspaper and media posts on the phony “Mission Accomplished” day and why? And why are they still there?

Who early proposed torture in the press and why are they now writing for major media? Are they not American terrorists? Can they not be imprisoned or exiled? And if we are going to suspend the Constitution, cannot Mr. Jones, anonymous and cowardly journalist and editor, storied in song and generational folk lore for knowing something is happening but not knowing what it is, with neither face nor character; cannot he be banished outright and purged from the village? Who are the central advocates? Who are the Ayatollahs?

Let’s talk to them. Let’s have everybody watch the explanation.

Let’s talk to all of them and Colin Powell who lied outright and let’s have Alan Dershowitz explain to us again as he did last year how the Clintons’ position on torture was (is?) much the same as his. And while we have them there let’s ask them why they made so little fuss at the dropping of habeas corpus. Let’s ask them why at each and every turn only Barack Obama and Ron Paul spoke up.

And let’s ask them why they are so intent on getting people to quit smoking or transfats, but torture is not that big of an issue for them.

But first of all let’s ask them this: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you rise and swell at the magnificent vision of the Declaration of Independence being read by Americans of every shape, contrast and color? Did you awaken to Russell Crowe’s primal and sacred American vision of perfection leading the artist’s heart, and the troubadour’s and the athlete’s; the avatar’s and the politician’s - The Beatles and Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix and Satchmo and Randy Moss and Eli and Plaxico - to the moon and beyond? Do you consider yourself to be part of this sacred trust? Do you consider yourself part of this participation mystique? Do you consider yourself to be one of us?