A Gorbachev Initiative for Europe’s Quaternity: Sarkozy’s Opportunity

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/13/08

An article by Charlemagne of The Economist this last week succinctly explains that the EU is made up essentially of four economic sub groups - Mediterraneans, Continentals, Anglo-Saxons and Nordics. These groups seem a union of traditionally Catholic and Protestant Europe intentionally designed to keep out Orthodox Russia. This reflects the oldest and the first division of rising European consciousness and one that has plagued Europe since the fourth century. In light of the on-going conflicts in Kosovo, South Ossetia and Georgia, perhaps older cultural contours of Christendom would work better. Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic and Protestant were Europe’s ancient four pillars from its beginnings and through its history. These four form a European Quaternity; a quaternity is a psychological pattern of wholeness described by C.G. Jung as a complex and interacting pattern in which any one element was not complete, but broken, without the others.

If Europe ever hopes to solve its problems - and Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia will always be Europe’s problems and will again soon be Europe’s problems as America begins to turn East – it will have to fully include Russia and it will have to include parts of Islam. Someone, perhaps France’s Nicholas Sarkozy, who is in Moscow for peace talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, might initiate a forum to consider a new approach. And while in Moscow he might look south to the Hagia Sophia as Tolstoy did. He would find that culturally, if you walk until to get to Muslim lands, they are different only by degree and not by kind to Orthodoxy.

Whatever else you might say about him, Sarozy was right to initiate the Mediterranean Union and to welcome the southern regions as part of Europe’s remembrance of its shared past and its future. It was something that needed to be done and something that the Germans, the nominal economic leaders of the EU but still beholden to America, would never have done. Say what you like about him, but he and possibly he alone is able to open Europe to new ideas and new vision – ideas unhatched in America by think tanks and heavily-funded lobby groups and special interests which at best see Europe as an American sub state and at worst, a submissive vassal state of a conquered territory.



Sarko is ready for his close up. He could bring Europe’s four corners together at a benign center somewhere; a four-cornered mandala in which all in Europe’s traditions might interact.

He might also tap Mikail Gorbachev to this purpose and as an outside observer and avatar of new awakening, he could bring in his hot new wife’s pal, the Dalai Lama, and a few other outsiders, but this should be essentially an initiative for and about Europe; Cold Warrior-free, Bush-free, McCain-free, Clinton-free and Obama-free.

Some 15 years ago Gorbachev established an innovative forum through The Gorbachev Institute to discuss the state of the world by inviting world leaders from all paths of life – monks, soldiers, artists, historians, poets; invitees ranged from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and Margaret Thatcher to George Schultz and James A. Baker. Even Shirley MacLaine and New Age guru Fritjof Capra. He might do the same now for Europe.

We are entering now the fourth political generation of America’s post-war arc of power. Europe is returning to itself and the buzz words and propaganda models which have become conditioned reflex to second and third generation no longer resonate. Zbigniew Brzezinski – said to be an Obama advisor these days – was first off the mark Sunday in comparing Russia’s Putin to Hitler, then suddenly it was springtime for Hitler as all the secondary press and its lobbyists and entrenched interests followed suit.

Not to be outdone, George Will said that he was even reminded of Hitler when he heard the traditional Chinese drum corps on its ancient instruments and saw the children waving at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. It reminded him of Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films for the Third Reich. This is the old school; a wog’s a wog and a foreign devil by any other name is still a foreign devil.

But Will bemoans the passing of the night and the fog in a generation without history: “A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony,” he writes. “Who remembers 1934? Or anything.”

I remember Will on his Sunday morning TV talk show a year after he had been denouncing all of Europe as fascist accommodators and anti-Semites for not supporting Rumsfeld and those fey French in particular, saying wistfully: “I don’t think anybody really thought it would turn out like this.”

Anybody? Did somebody say Brett Scowcroft, Wesley Clark, Gary Hart, Jim Webb, so many others? And who gave Will and these other apologists soviet-style life contracts anyway? Couldn’t we treat them with the same honor, respect, love and equality that we grant to sports figures and fire them when they fail? Hockey legend Pat Quinn, a Canadian national hero who led the men’s hockey team to gold in the Winter Olympics of 2002 was fired within minutes when he failed to bring the Toronto Maple Leafs to the Stanley Cup.

Had any American commentator or statesman spoken adult-to-adult and in good faith about the Russian invasion of Georgia on Monday he would have been hounded off the stage by the voice of the horde as Wesley Clark was several weeks back when he responded simply to a journalist who had commented that crashing a jet fighter does no necessarily prepare one to be President.

But Gorbachev still has cache. In an essay published beneath Will’s in Tuesday’s Washington Post he writes: “The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia's territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force -- both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar -- it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.”

Nevertheless, it was still possible to find a political solution, he writes. For some time, the peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, found common ground.
Through all these years, Russia has continued to recognize Georgia's territorial integrity, says Gorbachev. Clearly, the only way to solve the South Ossetian problem on that basis is through peaceful means, but the Georgian leadership flouted this key principle.

“What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension,” he writes. “The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas. Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against ‘small, defenseless Georgia’ is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity.”

Gorbachev points out that the Georgians were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a "blitzkrieg" in South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was expecting unconditional support from the West, and the West had given him reason to think he would have it.

“By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its ‘national interest,’ the United States made a serious blunder,” he writes. “Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone's interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region.”

This is plain talk from one of the world’s most highly regarded politicos; a statesman unparalleled in our time who risked his life and that of his family to bring about the end of 70 years of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.

But I question today whether either political party or Presidential candidate in America, boxed in by entrenched and antiquated ideas – some more than a century out of date - of dominant special interests and lobby groups and a fully propagandized public, is willing or able to listen.

Where is the one free man who will break the trance?

Gorbachev might look to Sarko.

Trouble in Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”: Russian Bears

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/11/08

It was characteristic of Donald Rumsfeld to refer to Eastern Europe’s oldest Byzantium regions as “New Europe.” This was the kind of oxymoron and conspicuous make believe that marked the all hat, no cattle Bush administration. What was a little spooky about it all was that when they pretended to tell the truth with fixed jaw and flat eyes, people pretended to believe them.

When these states of Europe’s oldest soul; Kosovo, the Czech Republic, South Ossetia and Georgia among them, were released from the grip of the Soviet Union, they had little in common with Catholic and Protestant Europe, but they wanted to join NATO. They did have the experience of television and radio. And they had cousins in America, some of whom were Senators. What they really wanted was to become secondary American states and have America defend them against their closest and oldest cultural relative, Orthodox Russia.

What they wanted, it was said at the time, was not Trotsky and Lenin. They wanted America. And not just Jefferson and Lincoln. They wanted Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein. They wanted Frank Zappa.

Not long ago they began to realize that the price of being American pseudo-states could be high: Rumsfeld would need them as soldiers in his war on Iraq when no one else in the world but England – our own trusty Gurkhas who would loyally follow us to hell and back – would join him. And he would need Poland and the Czech Republic as military bases for his defensive anti-Russia missiles. The conspicuous, shared delusion reached farce level when he claimed it was to defend against Iran. When they signed on, Russia was sickly and they were told it was dying. But then overnight, it was stronger than ever; rich in oil wealth and the rubble was booming.

At the beginning, way back say 20 years ago, Russia was weak and the neocon apparatchiks hoped to kill it, advancing the very unique theory of the end of time; the United States being the center of a clock, with everything else descending into hinterland and Russia at the farthest edge of nowhere. They came to that because they studied public policy at Yale and Harvard instead of Gogol and Tolstoy which guys like George Kennan studied in what Paris Hilton calls the olden days.

Taunting Russia when it was sick and weak became regular practice for the last two Presidential administrations, Henry Kissinger said recently, hoping to advance more mature foreign policy in the near future. Back in 1997, the Senate, egged on by Vice President Al Gore, voted to expand NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary although a group of elder statesmen, led by Susan Eisenhower, called it “a policy error of historic proportions.”

Under the new NATO agreement U.S. troops would be committed to respond to conflicts involving any of the new member nations of Central Europe. But even Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, the dean of Cold Warriors, asked President Clinton: “What would be the impact of extending coverage of the U.S. nuclear umbrella to them?”

Helms, who had about as much affection for Russia as General Jack D. Ripper, asked in a letter to President Clinton: “Is a border dispute involving one or several of the new NATO members so vital a national security threat to the U.S. that we are willing to risk American lives?” Nevertheless, swelled by a sense of infallibility at a time before DOT.com stocks came crashing down and claims were being made that the Dow Jones index would soon hit 35,000, almost 90 Senators voted for the resolution.

Gogol or Tolstoy would have taught them that Russia actually never dies; it just sleeps for very long periods, like a bear. And every time Hitler or Napolean or Rumsfeld thinks that this time, the bear is really dead, it wakes up.

This week the bear woke up.

George W. Bush will be remembered as a gatekeeper in a number of ways. But most importantly, what Bush did for the first time since Eisenhower threw England and Anthony Eden out of the Suez in 1956 was to legitimize the use of military force as an everyday tool of diplomacy. In 2005 he virtually declared war on any place in the world which had a dissident who would invite him to challenge its enemy.

A clever and seasoned political operative like Vladimir Putin, a mirror to Bush just as Stalin was a doppelganger in the witch mirror to America's rise to power under FDR, would immediately see the advantage.

What the Egg Means

The Bird’s Nest and the Egg, the symbol of the China Olympics are a dream archetype. That is, the egg is a dream of original experience which suggests the very beginning of a new and creative period. Original artists and other creative persons dream of an egg in a nest or two eggs in a nest (See Quigley in Exile). The Surrealists group almost all dreamed of eggs in a nest. The dream is often two eggs in a nest and there is a statue of Lord Krishna in Michigan State’s anthropology museum of Krishna holding two eggs one in each hand. Another rendition of this is a theme of two birds in a tree – the eggs have hatched and represent the two forces of live, intuition and order, which might be considered a kind of yin and yang. Teh Bird's Nest and Water Cube divided by a street likewise represent the yin and yang in an intuition and order manifestation; circle or organic form always represents "psyche" or yin force and square always represents Yang or external order force. A line between them becaue as Neils Bohr said Particle and Wave are seperate.

The most famous of the egg pictures in the Surrealist Movement was Salvador Dali’s painting of Geopoliticus Man, a picture of man hatching out of an egg. Seen in context with other of Dali’s pictures, particularly Poetry in America, the blood dripping from the man can be seen to be coming from the Christ wound – the painting represents the “second Christ” or the Aquarian, who Dali has pictured elsewhere as a Buddhist monk in yellow robes descending from the Christ wound of a horse – Pegasus, who awakens the Age of Aquarius, and landing in a desert which in connection with the other pictures might be Texas. Dali did a series of the “egg” pictures all of which have the egg as the world and hatching in the place on the map which is the United States.

China and the New Man: Blade Runner meets Lao Tzu

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/8/08

The China Olympics is all about eights. The eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year and the eighth something else.

Inscrutable. The FBI might call in Fox Mulder for a consult when he is finished with Father Joe. Eight, you see, is the number of sides on a Ba Gua. Eight is, as any teen-aged viewer of Lost will tell you, the number of stacks on the five-thousand-year-old oracle known as the I Ching (which is a Ba Gua) and it is also the shape of the hatch and the shape of all things of the Dharma Initiative on the mysterious island. Eight is the sum total of the male quaternity and the female quaternity; the yin and the yang. Eight is the totality of human consciousness as it interfaces with cosmic consciousness.

It has been long since we have we seen such excitement. Not since the moon went blind in Boston when Big Papi, offering a prayer to Angela Rosa Arias, his mother in heaven, lifted the curse from us in 2004. The Yellow Emperor himself seems to be winking, as the sun fell into total eclipse on opening week. I wonder if the Politburu Standing Committee consulted court astrologers on this. I think not. As the I Ching points out, things just happen that way. Anyway, Mao had them all executed. But this is sure a long march from Mao.

As the opening ceremonies of the Olympics begin, viewers and visitors will be treated to an astonishing sight; a masterpiece of China’s oldest traditions in ancient costume and dance, peeks of which have been popping up all week on TV. The march of performers brings to mind the Terracotta Army, the 3,000 life-size statues built in the 2nd century to protect the tomb of the first emperor of China. It brings to mind the flying Taoist warrior monks of karate opera which have become mainstream soap and kid culture in the West since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It also brings to mind the strength, brutality and might of the Red Armies which marched across the 20th century in Tiananmen Square and Moscow’s Red Square.

But up in Shanghai a different cord is heard when Gregory Rodriguez of the LA Times interviews Qingyun Ma, dean of the architecture school at USC and one of the world’s most promising architects, who spends his time between L.A. and his firm’s offices in Shanghai.

There's little room for historical sentimentality in Shanghai, Ma tells Rodriguez. It is a place that constantly looks to the future. The explosion of new skyscrapers going up everywhere seem to have the architectural density of cotton candy.

“Most of them are so superbly ugly that they're exciting,” says Ma. "If they're ugly, they'll be torn down sooner,"

Rodriguez says that as Westerners marvel at the enormity of China's urban building boom, they also tend to bemoan the ongoing demolition of the country's architectural patrimony. Even his guidebook complains about China's "perverse delight in destroying its own heritage" and the fact that in Shanghai, an enormous city of 19 million souls, only 600-odd buildings have been designated as protected historical sites, compared with nearly 40,000 in London.

But, he adds, Ma sheds no tears for the quaint buildings that have given way to thousands of new structures -- and they aren't all ugly by any means. In fact, Ma barely conceals his disdain for architectural nostalgia.

"The concept behind historic preservation is foolish," Ma tells Rodriguez. "It assumes that there is infinite space for future generations. We have to allow people in the future to build their environments based on their own needs and intelligence."

L.A.'s lack of historical sentimentality is one of the reasons Ma enjoys his adopted home.

Ma's worldview embraces a certain kind of chaos that he might say actually defines ‘tradition,’ writes Rodriguez, at least in the built environment: Things change, and that's the way it always has been.

It might be no surprise that Ma loves L.A., which he considers a city “ . . . for the future.”

Blade Runner meets Lao Tsu; the ancient and the endless comes to greet the temporary and the throw away.

Ma is China’s New Man. The New Man goes forth without a backward glance. But these same words and ideas have their own tradition and orthodoxy. They were heard a hundred years back when the great architect Albert Kahn brought the New Man to Detroit while his brother, another New Man, took offices in Moscow. We have seen the New Man in New York in early part of the 20th Century, in France and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and the New Man of Russia as early as 1835: Lermontov was perhaps the prototype and Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov the primal archetype. But no where was the New Man so successful as when Comintern agent Gregory Voitinsky brought him to China and Andre Malraux and friends bought him to the Far East.

In the Olympics today China shows that it is beginning to learn what Russia and the West have learned; that the Old Soul does not die, it just sleeps. Beneath the picture of Stalin is the Black Madonna, and when the time is right, the Red Army with its tens of thousands of thermal nukes will be no match for a slim volume by Solzhenitsyn. Even Ford’s and Kahn’s industrial vision, presented by Huxley as a Brave New World, could not survive the sweet overheard chords of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. Then it is suddenly all over for the New Man of Marx or his twin, the New Man of Industry and Capital and his People In Black (PIBs) who execute their ideas in steel and glass.

During the Cultural Revolution Mao set out to destroy every shred of the past that he could find. Monks and mandarins were hounded and destroyed by the hundreds of thousands. Then in 1981, Deng Xioping, desperately trying to find a way to raise cash, sent a state educated and trained athlete named Jet Li to an abandoned monastery called Shaolin Temple to think about making a movie about warrior monks who were said to be masters of kung fu. He found ruins. Only three monks had survived the torture and beatings in the new wave of chaos that was the Cultural Revolution. But that was enough to relearn China’s most ancient traditions and to make the movie, Shaolin Temple, which became a runaway hit and created a new genre.

Jet Li’s kung fu was strong. Reports are that so many Chinese young people left home to find their way to Shaolin Temple and become martial arts monks and experts that the Chinese government had to build new trains to send them back home.

China today is not the best of worlds, but it is a better world than that which existed before for over a billion of the world’s people. And from this day on, 8/8/08, the Chinese are a people that the rest of us will have to come to terms with as friends and competitors, much as the world had to learn to come to terms with America as we built in strength and imagination all through the 19th century.

And it found its way here, to us and to the 2008 Olympics, by finding its way back to itself via three Buddhist monks.

War is Over. We Won.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/06/08

The war is over before it’s begun, said Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, quoting Sun Sun Tzu’s famous phrase from The Art of War. It should be noted that as per the Taoist arc of ascending and descending power that Sun Tzu describes, war is likewise already well over before the end is acknowledged. I felt it mid Spring in 1968, a few hundred miles to the left of Quang Tri where the battle of Khe Sanh was blazing. Others did too. I felt it again on November 8, 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

Bret Stephens, who writes the Global View column for The Wall Street Journal, made that claim yesterday. He says the war in Iraq is over and he bet Francis Fukuyama $100 that it is.

“The war in Iraq is over. We've won,” writes Stephens.

It might not be quite fair to bet with someone who declared “the end of history” in 1992. But Stephens is right; the war is over and we won.

The war in Iraq was from the beginning a revenge kill plain and simple. The sacking of Baghdad was the price of 9/11. To get the true picture you’d have to have gone to Southern States – Southern States is a farm and feed chain that runs through the South – in my old neighborhood of Tobaccoville, NC. Tobaccoville is about the nicest place on earth. It is right next to Mount Airy, NC, which is, in fact, the nicest place on earth. Mount Airy is the real-life Mayberry, as in Mayberry RFD, and it is just like that TV show.

I stopped in at the Southern States in Tobaccoville to buy a new pair of Pointer Brand overalls just after they bagged Saddam. At the cash register they had a photoshoped picture under glass of Barney Fife driving the patrol car with the bearded and forlorn Saddam Hussein blankly staring out the window in the back seat.

That tells you all you really need to know about the war on Iraq.

They never talk about it and it would be impolite to do so, but for every war there is an inner war. That’s Sun Tzu. The external war calls for neutralizing the opposition, holding real estate and extracting fortune and retribution. The inner war calls for revenge. It is the animal life force and it is required to regain equilibrium. That was Sherman’s purpose in sacking Atlanta when victory was elsewhere. Atlanta was the price of Southern secession, just as Hiroshima was the price of Pearl Harbor and Wounded Knee was the price extracted for the death of Long Hair at Little Big Horn. Black Elk, the Lakota mystic, took his first scalp there as a child soldier and beaming with pride, brought it to his mother, who sang a little tremolo for him. He said so many Indian ponies had trampled through that Custer’s body could not be distinguished from the others in the pile of horses and soldiers. But the massacre at Wounded Knee would inevitably follow. Likewise, the sacking of Bagdad would inevitably follow 9/11.

This is what war is really about. Later they come with Telford Taylor or Henry Kissinger and Thich Nhat Hanh and the other tiny Buddhist monks in their big oversized government-issued overcoats, the quiet and serenity which sustained them through warfare since Dien Bien Phu challenged by the rainy cold of January mornings at the Paris Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam. That is something else. That is something other than war.

Here is something you’ve got to watch out for. Anyone who has ever been in a war will tell you that it is hard to slow down later. And the bigger the war, the bigger the afterglow. The phony Cold War was an afterglow of WW II so vast that it threatened world stability for decades to come and it still does. It is also hard to stop being a soldier once you’ve been one. It is hard to change course and go back because everything you did prior to the war now seems too easy.

Gaze is shifting now from Iraq to Afghanistan. And that is what President Obama has to watch out for.

On his recent trip to Afghanistan Obama said, "losing is not an option." He said that he wants to "rebuild the country” and to stabilize the country and to promote a rising standard of living and disable al-Qaida and the Taliban to the point where they cannot cause problems for anyone.

But that is something else entirely. Haviland Smith, a foreign policy expert and a former CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as Chief of the Counterterrorism Staff, says there could be problems with that.

“And now,” he writes in a recent editorial, “we sail off into Afghanistan! It is almost as if, in the aftermath of 9/11, we are morally obliged to do that. We have to find Osama bin Laden. After all, he launched that attack on us from Afghanistan, with the protection of the Taliban – the same organization that has now morphed into an insurgency against our presence in their country.”

Historically, he says, where terrorist organizations hardly every win anything significant, insurgencies almost always do.

“Afghanistan is very different from Iraq. Where Iraq is fairly flat, Afghanistan is anything but. The terrain is mountainous and not favorable for conventional warfare. The people are different. Although they are not Arabs, but a mélange of Central Asians, Persians and other minor groups, they are 80 percent Sunni and 20 percent Shia. Their main languages are Indo-European and their culture is tied more to Persia than to the Arab world. They have the reputation of being unconquerable and ungovernable.”

As a people, says Smith, Afghanis are not terribly interested in being ruled by anyone outside their own tribe or clan, let alone their nation. They have tried that before. If our goal in Afghanistan is to pacify the country, or bring them democracy and prosperity, let's think again.

Obama’s African-American Race Hecklers

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 8/1/08

“Why have you not one time spoken . . . not one time . . . to the oppressed and exploited African-American community?” a young black man asked Obama today in Florida.

Of course, he has, but he sometimes didn’t say what they wanted to hear. It was the soaring rhetoric from the mid Sixties, but derivative, imitative and absurd. Obama in a word, told the heckler that this is a democratic dialog which gives him the option to vote for someone else, but the only way we are going to solve our problems in this country is for all to come together.

And incidentally, the first Black President, Bill Clinton, is this week in Africa, where he has many friends, trying to grasp shards of a racial legacy that is rapidly sinking into the twilight.

This is a good moment, because if offers opportunity to see the two faces of race which have emerged and institutionalized themselves here since integration.

What the Clintons, he and she, have offered throughout their co-career, such as it is, is a vision and model of victimization. But it is a patronizing vision when it is coming from white folk, and especially so when it comes from an Arkansas governor and his missus.

Clinton fully endorses the views of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. All of Bill Clinton’s major black supporters are in the matriarchal tradition of the Deep South. They are either elderly women writers of accusatory and racially outraged prose, or black male preachers. Vernon Jordan aside, Bill Clinton has almost no other black friends.

Bill Clinton obviously hates Obama. Bill hates Obama because he took away his opportunity to play again in the White House as a kind of male Eleanor Roosevelt, acting as Hillary’s legs – going around and giving speeches everywhere while she takes care of business.

Jackson – Bill’s pastor and conspicuous confidant – also hates Obama. But he hates Obama because Obama suggests and demands that black people, like all people, hold some responsibility for their present state and destiny. In essence, Obama treats black people as equal to white people. Jackson and most all of Bill’s other black preacher friends (and his celebrity priest friends in Africa) seek and find with Bill a special relationship and a very different status of responsibility.
Bill, Hillary and myself grew up with the fierce people; the best and most beautiful among us died before 30 and if they didn’t die of their own passion they were gunned down, like Malcolm X and John Lennon. But strangely enough, the fierce ones, more than the rest of us, seemed to die anyway, like Otis Redding, killed in a plane crash and Jerry Rubin, run over by a car. So today it is odd – even tiring – to see a generation remembering itself through this phony Arkansas governor and his wife.
But what I want to know is how did a group of black Baptist preachers in the South unite to show their support for Hillary at the historic moment when a black man was running a juggernaut, in the words of David Brooks, to the Presidency of the United States. They have shifted now to Obama but only because they were relentlessly hounded by the press as “Uncle Toms” and as a “black boy network.”
He’s forgotten now, but in the days of the fierce people, Malcolm X, the fiercest of the lot, used to call people like this “House Negroes.” Bill’s got the silver hair. He plays the saxophone. And he loves the colored girls – Malcolm’s phrasing - don’t cha know. Andrew Young’s ill conceived and ill-spoken comments in support of Bill Clinton and his preacher man pals showed an attitude long familiar to the South and to readers of Southern history. Such a man – quite often called Governor by the slaves - is the pride of Malcolm’s “Mr. Big” – the slave put in charge of the blacks in the plantation culture to keep them in line. It shamefully showed pride in a white politician clearly because of his arrested sexual attitudes and the disconnect between sexual behavior and love and the responsibility which naturally flows from these relationships.
Welcome to the old school. This is precisely how “massa” behaved to the disgust of the civilized and thoughtful black and white in the Old South, like Mary Chestnut, whose astute observations are faithfully reported in C. Vann Woodward’s publication of her wartime letters. “Massa’s” black mistresses are a theme which runs through the whole of Southern literature. All the “mullato” children of the “House Negroes” – the favored of “massa” who are brought into his parlor, clearly bear the same facial features as the white children, and the Governor showed no public disgrace, but a pride in his virility; a pride shared by his fellows.
“The Governor” and “Mr. Big” are symbiotes. “He loved his master more than the master loved himself,” Malcolm said of the “House Negro,” and the house slave identified fully with the master: “If the master was sick, the House Negro would say, ‘What’s the matter, boss, we sick?’”
Malcolm X, banished today, was not afraid to die and not afraid to live. He was the “Field Negro”, he called himself, who came to push the “House Negroes” out of their fawning, complacent and submissive spot in the white man’s parlor.

Obama is no such man. He has his own originality and authentic power. His is a new moment. A moment of maturation of attitudes. Even if he is not elected, it is too late for Jesse Jackson and Bill’s special friends and their “special relationship.” They have lost their special place in the Governor’s parlor.

Turning Catholic

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/30/08

Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, has abandoned devotion to Kali, the Mother of Death and Life, and adopted the way of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. They say it increases his chances of being chosen as Vice President by John McCain. They’ve been saying that about Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia, as well. He’s top of the VP list for Obama. Sources close to Kaine say one of the things that makes him appealing for this job is that he is a Roman Catholic.

My own belief systems vary somewhere between the Bodhisattva and Brett Hull, so I shouldn’t claim that much insight to this.

But I’m not sure how Jefferson would feel about this. Or Jim Webb, the Senator from Virginia, who has written a nice book recently about the common folk of Virginia from which he hails.

One of the things I first found attractive about Obama is that in his book The Audacity of Hope he showed an ability to grasp how the longest stretches of history grow from a small but significant detail. And he explained the situation Jefferson faced in Virginia regarding religion. There was a strong movement afoot to create a theocracy so that Virginia’s high-church Episcopalians could lock out the Baptists and keep the common folk from rising up and taking over the government (Webb’s clan on the frontier out past the New River). So Jefferson in a rare instance followed the cue of the Christ, who pointed out that religion and government were the two faces of a coin and are naturally separate and should remain so. The things of Caesar belonged to Caesar and the things of God belonged to God, so Jefferson demanded likewise that they be separate. Otherwise it would be like in that Batman movie where the guy has a coin with heads, one on each side; Two Face.

But there is a whole movement afoot today toward Catholicism as a political agenda. The thoughtful political columnist for The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, who was also a speechwriter for George W. Bush, writes that Roman Catholicism is today a mainstream of thought in conservative thinking. The most influential political columnist, Bob Novak, born and reared Jewish, has not long ago converted to Catholicism. “Jeb” Bush, almost certain to run for President in 2012, is a serious Catholic. My mother would call him a “good” Catholic although the distinction today between a “good” Catholic and just a regular Catholic (or a “lapsed” Catholic) would probably be lost. George W. Bush is widely expected to convert to Catholicism when his tenure as President ends.

My mother would be thrilled. For decades, she prayed for the conversion of the Jews in congregation. My Aunt Nora used to baby sit for Jewish babies and bring them down to the Catholic Church and surreptitiously baptize them. Maybe Novak was one. But that was in the day when Rose Kennedy, mother of Jack, used to ask. “When are the nice people going to invite us over?” By the “nice” people she meant The Protestants, and the answer was never.

Joe Kennedy, father of Jack, was not so naïve. Roosevelt had said to him, “This is a Protestant country and you Jews and Catholics better get used to it.” So they bought their beautiful family compound at Hyannis Port on the Cape because Yankee Protestants refused to sell to Irish Catholics in nearby Cohasset.

The Catholization of conservatism is a significant turning of events in our time, and in a season when we have seen habeas corpus abandoned like a superstitious tribal talisman and the Constitution shredded for the simplest expedience of politics and religious warfare, this could have long-term consequences.

Nothing could have greater consequences than the traditional leadership represented by conservatives and Republicans today accepting the religion of the Divine Mother as their own because our historic period began when Elizabeth I – the Virgin Queen, for whom Jefferson’s state was named - did two things. First, she granted charter to 200 billionaires in London to form the East Indian trading company. But the second thing was more important: She outlawed the practice of worshiping the Divine Mother. The two together created the Protestant Ethic, the rise of modern-day capitalism, the British Empire and its secondary derivatives, like the United States.

This action by Elizabeth I is the hallmark of modern times. It is the core moment of awakening history since medieval times. From this the Enlightenment came and the scientific method. This is the journey which Mozart, the greatest of western visionaries, extrapolated from as the cosmic passage of the European in his opera The Magic Flute, in which the protagonist, who might well have been Jefferson, drops his allegiance to the Queen of the Night (Kali; the third phase of Europe’s Earth Mother as her moon descends to black) and crosses the universe to the Council of Fathers. This is the core and center of Michelangelo’s life work in which he not only takes the Christ Child - the Divine Child, who represented mankind – out of the Divine Mother’s arms and puts him on the ground in The Madonna of Bruges – “the better to serve his Warrior Pope” he says in his journals - but in the Sistine Chapel, he casts the Divine Mother aside in disgust. These are our historic beginnings.

I still have a friend which whom I attended Latin Mass with as a child and I still talk to her every few days. I can still smell the prayer book from the Latin Mass. Her grandfather and my grandmother were born in the same town in Ireland the second century back so she still has visual and sensory recollection of the women praying the rosary together in a circle and so do I. To us, who recall the image of the Divine Mother standing on the world with a dead snake under her feet; and remember the bloody feet of the Christ on the cross, the plaster worn through in the musty, cavernous, stone churches in Boston by the embrace and kiss of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, this is an interesting turn of events.

Boston was tribal back them; one was Irish Catholic, Jewish, White Glove Unitarian, etc., as in the movie Miller’s Crossing. Politics was virtually a play of single combat warfare between Henry Cabot Lodge and Jack Kennedy; that is, it was political warfare between Protestant Republican and Irish Catholic Democrats, the largest other tribe in the region, to which all others paid union dues. We in our tribe felt that Jack Kennedy won his day through working class solidarity and its collective strategies. We, the Irish Catholic majority, between 1880 thereabouts and WW II, had driven the wealthy Protestants down to Texas.

Now their Mexican wives and girl friends have converted them. My mother would be delighted.

It is interesting that this is occurring at a time when Pope Benedict has reinstated the old forms and even up here in the bush in northern New England you can once again attend a Latin Mass. I think I am probably the only one, but I see this as significant and historic turning of events and possibly a harbinger.

A Boston priest once commented that people of my generation who grew up Catholic and Irish left as a generation without hostility or malice; it was just like hanging up and discarding an old coat. But I and a few of my school friends back then felt that we didn’t really leave the church for The Beatles and Joan Baez, but that the church left us when it dropped Latin and instituted the secular forms. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote that with the Latin Mass all Catholics spoke in the same voice, throughout the world and throughout time and when they abandoned the Latin they broke the circle. He also made the point that with the new mass the priest faced the people, representing God to the people in an authoritarian posture. In the old form, the priest faced the other way, representing the people to God, as he always had.

Now it has all come back. Interesting as well perhaps that back then, all pop culture was concerned with rising, rising, like Michelangelo’s red-haired and muscular Christ, pushing the Divine Mother aside in the Sistine Chapel; rising to space, to the planets, to Pluto, Siruis and beyond as Walt Whitman predicted. (And then, he wrote in Passage to India, “ . . . the true son of God would come, singing his songs.”) Today it is all about returning, and in some cases coming back to earth and knowing it as if for the first time. Perhaps this is where we will land. In the same place from which we left.

Let Bloomberg, Rendell and Schwarzenegger Rebuild America

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill 7/27/08

Three of the country’s major politicians, Ed Rendell, Governor of PA, Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City and Arnold Schwarzenegger have urged both the Republican and Democratic national committees to adopt pro-infrastructure planks in their party platforms. They are co-chairs of Building America's Future which is dedicated to bringing about a new era of U.S. investment in the infrastructure which enhances our nation’s prosperity and quality of life.

Both parties should heed their call. Both parties should call for an expanded mandate for these three to the point of assigning enough authority to them to create an organizational infrastructure within the government to fix falling bridges, collapsing levees, abandoned cities and other internal ills. And more should be added to their committee: People who know things that politicians don’t know; artists and waitresses and hockey players and novelists and people who understand that cities and regions have souls and who understand what those souls are made of in their particular area. People like Alice Waters who links farmer to restaurant to people in California. People like sculptor Maya Lin, who has a good feeling for circles and squares and water and can see things to their center. And even people like Marshall Bruce Mathers III – Eminem - the inner child of my favorite city, Detroit, who understands, like Yeats, that people are not separate from their places nor their places from them.

To the Building America’s Future committee: Note - The fiasco in rebuilding Ground Zero should be used as a model for what not to do; Manhattan Island should have been looked at comprehensively as one cultural and architectural unit before they attempted to rebuild; there was something askew with the placement of the Trade Towers in Battery Park from the first – rebuilding gave an opportunity to correct it. Note - The Modernist Movement is over and so are the post-modern and deconstructivist derivatives. These are internationalist visions suitable to the turn of the last century and to the 1920 and 30s which trailed to end-of-century as a singular power arc rose in the world. That arc is descending – those days are past; that century is over.

This is about America, not about Germany or China. It is about rebuilding regions which fit together to form a whole unit which is not the whole world but the United States of America and its greater continent, perhaps, north and south. In rebuilding regions, we should not look to Hamilton who saw all people in the world eventually as New Yorkers by degree of different shade and tinge. Under the Hamilton trajectory we have evolved as consumers rather than citizens. Under his tutelage our earth and structures have become economic zones rather than places. In this we should hark back to Jefferson, who believed in a country of unique peoples in complementary and sympathetic regions.

America, since Hamilton, has looked outward. This project demands looking inward. For a project of this scale, the continent needs to be reconceptualized. We should begin to look at the natural contours of American culture as they have evolved since 1776. One-size-fits-all federalism was the right way for the vast wilderness which was America west of the New River back in 1776, but since then we have developed unique regional cultures.

Unfortunately, we in the West have no matrix for looking inward; our way is to only look outward, then crash and burn. But in his last work, the great ambassador George Kennan proposed a model of regionalization, citing 12 regions which have evolved into natural states. It would be useful to look at his regional model as a managerial principle because if the U.S. were a corporation, it would be the only large corporation without district managers. As a tool for problem solving, the federal government as it has grown since 1776 may be too large to manage successfully and also too abstract and too remote, was Kennan’s concern, while most of the states are too small and powerless.

The Katrina disaster can be seen today as a failure first of all of Hamilton’s vision of federalism as a management principle. It is a disaster for which neither political party really holds the blame. It is the product of an outdated, outmoded and anachronistic management process.

In rebuilding America, the Building America Triumvirate might look to Kennan’s regional model. Each region can be seen as a managerial department with different needs and wants, and funding could be acquired from within the regions to fit the collective need there. The Katrina region, for example, is made up of three states. There should be a “Katrina tsar”; a regional manager with temporary and project-related authority over the three-state governors which answers directly to the President. Likewise, each region of the Building America group could have a “tsar” or district manager to assess need and insure cultural autonomy; 12 tsars or district managers answering to the Triumvirate, Rendell, Schwarzenegger, Bloomberg, and those three answering to either President Obama or McCain.

Environmental issues and security issues should be worked into this creative matrix of restoring the cities and regions. Canada is adopting new principles of intra-mural commerce between provinces to encourage local trade. It makes no sense to bring energy from Iraq here to us here in northern New England when we can get it cheap from Quebec or tomatoes from Mexico when we can get them from Nova Scotia. And for environmental and security reasons it makes better sense to buy local.

A different psychological model might eventually develop, one more akin to the vision of Alice Waters, who serves only regional food and produce in her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. It adds something to the purpose of visiting up here in the northeast where people come to peep at the leafs in October when you order a lobster; it is part of the region and casts its karma on the people of the region. When you can get them anywhere – Lima, Ohio, or Yadkin County, NC - they seem a disappointment; one-size-fits-all lobsters.

"America's highways, bridges, tunnels, and mass transit have fallen behind. The same is true for our levees, schools, ports, courthouses and water delivery systems. Our economy and environment are suffering because we cannot move goods and people efficiently - we need a strong federal commitment to tackle this problem," said Governor Schwarzenegger at a recent conference. "We have always come together as a nation to solve our biggest problems and I am confident that if both parties make infrastructure a top priority we will rebuild America with the pride and ambition that reflects the unlimited potential of our people."

The great old American cities with their master works by architects like Albert Kahn in the Detroit region have fallen victim to time and clutter – they were built as industrial centers and to house immigrants entering by the millions, and have since found only ad hoc functions. But they have also fallen victim to committees. Detroit, for example, is cluttered with bad architecture, bad commissioned art, and building without a plan or worse, building with plans that changed so many times that that they formed no pattern but chaos. Underneath is a jewel of high architecture, vastly varied neighborhoods and one of the greatest farm markets in America, but it would take the eye of someone like Maya Lin to find it and retrieve it. It would also take a few with political clout and heft to take the sledge hammer to much of the trashy and didactic commissioned art. Like any manager restructuring say a university or museum, there will need to be long-term cohesive plans to keep unity over generations. Which is why the co-chairs in this Triumvirate might be appointed dictators for life, as the Supremes of the high court have life contracts.

"The principles we are advocating will help our nation be more competitive in the global economy, ensure our environmental sustainability, enhance our citizens' quality of life and improve public safety," said Mayor Bloomberg. "They are good public policy and make sound business sense. We need to invest more in our infrastructure and those investment decisions need to be based on merit, not politics."

Philadelphia, which went through a renewal period just prior to 1976 at the Bicentennial, had a very successful restoration and one which still echoes. Back in the early ‘70s a waitress/artist could buy an old stone historic house with boarded-up windows for $800 or less off South St., an area which had fallen into decline. Ed Rendell was a great mayor who came in during this time of growth. He helped awakened in Philly to a new sense of itself and a free feeling in the old city; it was a rich and happy time when poet drank with Kansas tourist, waitress/dancer and artist and local gangster together in the same rooms where Jefferson and Franklin cast our fate. It is auspicious that he co-chairs this committee. Today, these restored areas are among the most valued urban real estate in the country and the old Father-Son-Holy Ghost houses, as these little carved gems are called, are worth millions.

There were no doubt a whole group of committees to get this going at a time when Philly advertised itself with this slogan: “Philadelphia is not as bad as everybody says.” But the cultural awakening which Rendell presided over happened because it didn’t start really with some committee. It started with the artist/waitresses who lived along the South St. region. The idea was back then to send in the artists and let them live cheap and they will restore the old neighborhoods with their own initiative and creativity.

The lawyers would follow, they said, with their cash and cache and they will do the rest. And they did.

Kissinger and Sam Nunn – Kicking it Old School

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/24/08

The LA Times asks this week: Was Phil Gramm right?

At a gardening shop near where I live the proprietor points out that when the season opened this year she sold out of onions and potatoes in the first few days. In a time of scarcity, she said, people begin to stock up on basics. I see it all over – people up here building big gardens and turning to wood stoves. Local stores have sold out of them as well.

We are sensing the end of something. It has been rising for a long while, but now it has hit a nerve.

Phil Gramm’s recent comments were meant to scold and were no help to John McCain, but what he said about a “mental recession” has some relevance. “Mental,” or psychological factors are relevant influences on the culture and on the economy. They are fully predictable as a part of the business cycle because everything in human culture, including economic theory and its applied practice, comes first from the human psyche.

People sense that we are at a turning. But when my neighbors across the river in Vermont, which has more invested capital per capita than any other state, get all survivalist and start grabbing up basic food stocks like onions and potatoes, it is misplaced anxiety. We are at the classic third-generation break point which generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe tell about; the moment in post-war time when the world ends and begins again.

And we are also still at end of the millennium. Or rather, we are no longer at the end of the last millennium but are beginning to feel our feet in the new millennium. But they are not solidly grounded yet. It is a big change and history could well show the Clintons and George W. Bush as the unfortunate Keepers, the mythic Twins which accompany the millennia. Only now we begin to face forward.

The change ahead is holistic; Billary and Bush will be left behind but so will the attendant cultures which accompanied these generations. And so will Phil Gramm be left behind. Gramm was a good head-full-of-ideas and was man-of-the-hour oh, say 20 years ago. McCain’s selection of him as a key adviser is telling. It reveals McCain to be a nostalgico candidate; one seeking to restore a vision of the past and beholden to the past.

He senses it himself; he is a man who like all red-blooded American boys from the fifties felt aspiring to be President was the right thing to do, like going to church and playing sand lot baseball. But McCain is, if nothing else, a decent American and he knows that there is nothing really in his history or his present repertoire which would actually make him a good President. This is where the new uncertainty is coming from in his recent daily stumbling. And he is the warrior who has proven to be willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the party and the good of the country, like the fighter pilot who after being shot up in the air, considering his options and trying to find the steady-mindedness and balance enough to identify an appropriate target to hit on crashing.

That is why he is likely to avoid the fanciful and novelty in picking a VP, like some of the strange bachelor farmers and religious exorcists being suggested to him. That is why he will choose someone who can prepare the Republican party for 2012 and begin to rebuild from there. Obama, “The One,” as McCain has come to call him, has it wrapped up this time around and McCain can see that with some relief. Larry Sabato, the Virginia political analyst, compares the current race with the Eisenhower/Stevenson contest in which Eisenhower won all but a few Southern states, McCain being the Aldai Stevenson of the Republican Party. A pretty good analogy.

But Obama would do well to look beyond McCain and look to 2012 as well or his rising star will have come with the dust and like those of so many pseudo-political saviors which appear at turnings, will be gone with the wind by 2010. McCain’s logical choice is Mitt Romney and he is the choice of the Bushes as well, who McCain sees as wiser and more pragmatic than he is. Go back and look at Romney’s campaign logo; it is easily mistaken for that of the New England Patriots. Both Obama and Romney well – perhaps masterfully - understand organization but in their very different ways.

Romney’s creative management gifts should not be overlooked. If he looks stiff, he can also be versatile. In recent days his sideburns have grayed, and he has begun to look strangely and remarkably like Billy Graham. But when Fox reporters asked him recently: Governor Romney, Obama says Americans should talk French. Shouldn’t the French talk American just like Jesus talked? Romney stepped aside and wouldn’t play. He is actually fairly fluent in French having journeyed to Paris as a young man on his Mormon mission.

Obama is all about establishing new forms and his political survival beyond 2011 depends on it. He is good at it and he has a great team in this primary season. It is beginning to look like Jack Reed, the Senator from Rhode Island, could be his VP choice but Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas, is also said to be a front-runner.

What he doesn’t need, and he probably knows this, is someone who will share the spotlight with him or even a VP who would be thought of as the next President to follow him. But what he does need is a bulky offensive line to protect him up front. Like Romney, he might look to the well-managed Pats. Obama, tall, lanky, self-assured and keen of eye and wit, does on occasion display an unbearable lightness of being not entirely unlike the Patriots’ quarterback who often seems to be just standing by himself in the field, aloof and alone with his thoughts, or waiting for something that the rest of us can’t see, until he throws the ball. But when the ball is thrown it is thrown as it has never been thrown before.

Forget VP, like Tom Brady, Obama needs to stand alone and like Brady, he needs bulls up front for protection. I’d suggest a bulky offensive lineup starting with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chicago’s Bill Daley and New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, with Daley as Chief of Staff. They are three of the most competent people in politics today and if Obama doesn’t poach two of them they are very likely to go to McCain/Romney.

This would be political theater on Obama’s part with the emphasis on theater. But it worked for Ronald Reagan, who brought far more than himself to the Oval Office. He brought a lineup. Forget VP. A great President stands alone and VPs advancing to the Presidency are always a disappointment. TV, a feeling rather than a thinking venue, tends to create states of conditioned reflex and for no good reason have we come to look to VP as the next President. But James A. Baker, Reagan’s Chief of Staff, would have made a far better president than Bush I.

Cultural turnings are looked at either as end-times or beginning-times depending on whether or not your own personal time and influence is ahead or behind. Panic mentality – wealthy people buying survival staples like onions and potatoes in a high-end garden shop - is normal in a time of transition.

Evidence is everywhere today that the fourth post-war generation is at hand. One of the features of the ascending century and its first generation – a generation of patriots and heroes according to Strauss & Howe - will be warrior-quality intensity in politician and poet. Singular individuals like Picasso will arise, who, when asked what he sought in painting replied, “I don’t seek. I find.”

Recently, my kids have been suggesting movies on the lives of artists and writers who were purely dedicated to pursuits of perfection and masters of their tasks and crafts; artist Jackson Pollock and writer Truman Capote in particular. Recent movies on their lives have won academy awards, but these great artists have long been absent from the public eye.

This presents to us a new trend; a trend which is diametrically opposed to Clinton-era soccer-mom culture in which everyone gets a trophy. As Bruce Wayne tells us (that would be The Dark Knight), mastery and perfection seeks no trophy and usually gets none. It is above and beyond the “excellence” theme of the Reagan period and its current moment can be seen in the work of the warrior artist who sought mastery and perfection and found it and died trying: Heath Ledger in the role of The Joker in the current blockbuster, The Dark Knight.

The new generation recalls the Old Masters, say Strauss and Howe, like Pollock and Capote. It seeks the “Gray Champions” of honor and integrity from grandparent’s day. And we are suddenly seeing that today.

In the last nine months we have heard the voices of wise elders which seem to have been silenced for decades, particularly those of Sam Nunn and Henry Kissinger, who have called for a quieting of the political rhetoric and the end of the hubris that has punctuated foreign policy and threatened world stability here at the turning of the millennium.

In a recent essay in The Washington Post, Kissinger calls for a stabilization of relations with Russia, which the young and the restless of recent years have jeopardized with their naïve display of manlies.

“Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, a succession of U.S. administrations has acted as if the creation of Russian democracy were a principal American task,” he writes. “Speeches denouncing Russian shortcomings and gestures drawn from the Cold War have occurred frequently. Proponents of such policies assert that the transformation of Russian society is the precondition of a more harmonious international order. They argue that if pressure is maintained on the current Russia, it, too, will eventually implode. Yet assertive intrusion into what Russians consider their own sense of self runs the risk of thwarting both geopolitical and moral goals.”

Sam Nunn, has joined Kissinger in calling for a return to sense and sensibility in foreign policy.

Not long ago, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Nunn, who retired from the Senate more than ten years ago, “ . . . has watched what's happened to the country, and he's more than a bit ticked — at the "fiasco" in Iraq, a federal budget spinning out of control, the lack of an honest energy policy, and a presidential contest that, he says, seems designed to thwart serious discussion of the looming crises.”

Kissinger and Nunn have been working together recently in calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. Obama expressed agreement with Nunn when Nunn held a bi-partisan conference on these issues last summer, which Bloomberg and David Boren of Oklahoma attended. Susan Eisenhower, who perhaps more than anyone has been steadfast in pushing for a new approach like Kissinger and Nunn are calling for, has also endorsed Obama.

Nunn has recently called attention to the urgency of the situation in Afghanistan and Obama has reflected these comments in his visit to the Middle East. Time magazine has already picked up on the new zeitgeist and on its cover this week calls the deployment in Afghanistan, “the right war.” It was announced recently that Nunn has been selected by Obama as a senior advisor on foreign policy. Nunn is almost certain to hold a foreign policy position in an Obama administration.

This is a good beginning at a contentious turning with high gas prices, amorphous economic woes, wonderful David Attenborough nature videos on PBS and urgent voices assuring us that the end is imminent; voices like Carl Sagan’s and Paul R. Ehrlich’s, whose professorial and earnest tome, The Population Bomb, assured us in the 1970s with all scientific credibility that we would certainly be long dead by now. This world today is much like that world of the later 1970s.

But back then things began again with Ronald Reagan. And things really got moving with the publication of a few books like Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One and Robert Christopher’s The Japanese Mind. America suddenly realized we had two oceans, one on each side, and the countries on the other side of the Pacific were rich and creative and getter better at what we did and in what we thought only we could do.

I hope the young ‘uns continue to bring forth warrior artists like Heath Ledger. And I hope Obama does look post-partisan as he claimed he would when he showed his enthusiasm for the Kissinger/Nunn principles. Here is a couple he might bring in as well: Winston Lord and Betty Bao Lord, American ambassadors and China hands at the time when the West first fully awakened to China as a rising culture and economy. Because whether we accept it or rebel from it, the century begins next month and not at the Democratic or Republican conventions. It begins on August 6, in China, the opening day of the 2008 Olympics.

The basic staples of life in this ascending world will not be onions and potatoes. They will be mastery and perfection because when it gets to the tipping point, and things always do, they will be the tools we need to survive and to flourish.

NH takes Hugo’s Free Oil: Say Good bye to Live Free or Die

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill, 7/21/08

Here in northern New England we experience a kind of liberalism I would call detached. Or maybe a better word is unhinged. It is an organic product of changing demographics.

Not long ago – in my father’s day – it counted for something to be from these parts because most people lived in the northeast; Texas was a desert and California was a hinterland. New England, particularly its northern parts, was considered core to that sensibility which evolved into the American condition. So much flinty character we were imagined to have that when Governor Sherman Adams – Yankees used to have names like that – put his mind to it he would send Eisenhower to the Presidency, even though Eisenhower hadn’t even put his name on the ballot. Even nowadays that rugged individualist sensibility resonates on big and small screen; the fictional President in The West Wing was naturally reared in New Hampshire.

But since post-war demographics have shifted to the south, the southwest and just everywhere. The rise of dominant opinion and new American ideas, particularly in the south since Ronald Reagan, is a natural product of these shifting demographics. When the south became empowered economically it voiced its own opinions unbeholding to the northeast. In places like Tobaccoville, NC, were we happened to rear our kids, the change was dramatic. Over 80% of the people, having voted Democratic since 1865, changed their voter registration to Republican. They changed their religion too. It was a full cultural empowerment and it permanently shifted attitudes in America. As Newt Gingrich said, borrowing the ubiquitous Sixties refrain, the northeast was no longer relevant.

There does seem to be a sense of being left behind here in recent decades, and the further north you go from Boston, the more you feel it. Complaint has become loud and stringent; more a cry in the wilderness without conceivable objective than original thinking and considered plan of action. And right now it is going to get a lot worse because the 40-some million people exactly my age born all at the same time within a few months of war’s end are planning to retire this year and probably at least seven million of them are going to buy Subarus and put a bunch of bumper stickers on them and move up here to try to get the band back together that they left behind in high school.

So it gets stranger and stranger. And the public airwaves didn’t get the Gingrich memo, so anything we do up here – the crazier the better – will be fully reported in the press as somehow important and relevant, and will awaken or be amplified like a fire storm in some other far away place like California or the Pacific Northwest.

Robert Redford, the movie maker who always wanted to be a professor and plays one in his recent movie, Lions for Lambs, makes a salient point about the new unhinged. He plays a professor who, like Johnny Cash’s wanderer, is looking for one good man; a spirit who would not bend of break who would sit at his father’s right hand. He is looking for a warrior in a world of delusional liberal wimps. When discussing handing out clean needles to heroin users, the class, like a school of fish, universally embraces the idea and scorns the loner – Redford’s warrior – who compares this to assigning a separate highway lane for drunk drivers. Redford’s point seems to be that this kind of liberal dilettantism creates a psychological transference which sends the group aloft and detaches it from the key issues of the day, like the invasion of Iraq, torture, Gitmo.

Redford asks, how did we allow these things to happen? How did we deal the opposition a free hand? We did so by embracing the absurd and the irrelevant as ends in themselves; as substitutions for the real issues that needed to be confronted and the real work that needed to be done. We did so because we did not have the courage to face the political realities as they came to us and so we substituted fanciful issues in their place.

Here in the northern reaches of New Hampshire rugged individualism has saved us from this kind of thing, or so we have told ourselves. But this week we have entered the horde. This week New Hampshire has agreed to accept free oil from Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela. It is the kind of thing I would expect from our neighbors, but it was unimaginable in Sherman Adams’ day. I thought it was unimaginable here in New Hampshire until last week.
According to press reports, New Hampshire becomes the last state in the Northeast to embrace the offer.
"A lot of people have said, ’We need help and we value any help we can get,'" said Amy Ignatius, director of New Hampshire's office of energy and planning.
Chavez hates the United States. He hates George Bush. I don’t like Bush either, but I don’t hate him.
New Hampshire has signed on for the free oil just as Chavez visits Moscow so to spend up to a billion dollars on Russian weapons next week. Chavez's shopping list could include three "Varshavianka" class electric-diesel submarines and 20 Tor-M1 ground-to-air missile systems, sources say. According to a Venezuelan government statement Thursday, Chavez says Venezuela is looking to obtain new military hardware including Russian tanks. The president already has bought Russian weapons, including Sukhoi fighter jets and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles.
Incidentally, last week Chavez threatened to cut off oil to the U.S. if it "continues to try to hurt us.” Presumably that would be states other than New Hampshire which, as far as I understand it, has actually entered into a passive federalist accord with Venezuela in opposition to the United States. And this weekend diplomats speaking for Chavez’s Best Bud, President Lula da Silva of Brazil, said the United States deception in trade talks reminded him of tactics used by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
Somebody tell these people: The Fifties called. They want their political parties back.
Chavez sees himself as the “new Castro” sticking it to the Americans by getting the Old Alliance back; the Russians and the Chinese in particular, and throwing in Iran, Syria and a few others; just anyone with a grudge against us. And here in the U.S. what Chavez is looking for is - in the language of the Fifties - fellow travelers like those in homage to The God that Failed, as Stalin-era communism was called in a famous book by that title. Stalin called them, the “useful idiots” – sympathizers and passive supporters of those who would despise us.
Doris Lessing wrote about subtle identification with one’s enemy and the path of political nihilism as a sick post-war soul in Europe and America; a kind of cultural possession which took her and her friends to the dark side well into the 1950s. They were useful tools to Stalin all during the gulag period, a time when tens of millions died, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first-hand account. But their influence came to an end when Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon and denounced them as collaborators and appeasers. Koestler was himself a fellow traveler. That book and his other writings became a major influence in American thinking in the 1950s.
Lessing wrote about her experiences again in a New York Times essay in 1992: “While we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.”
She won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year for writing about this. But apparently they didn’t get that memo at Concord’s office of energy and planning either.
I’m not surprised to see the surrounding states up here go along with Chavez but I’d like to see a county-by-county ballot referendum in New Hampshire on who wants free oil from Chavez and who doesn’t.
New Hampshire was until this week the most Jeffersonian of states. We wear independence on our license plates and when a foreign leader like the newly elected Nicolas Sarcozy, intent on changing France’s trajectory, wants to show a (fanciful) flinty independence, his first symbolic act is to come to our cold lakes to bask. We even had a movie recently with Bruce Willis busting thing up under the anthem of our state motto.
But this independence has yielded to demographics. The tax rate up here is an attraction to outsiders, some of whom are not particularly independent of spirit but simply want to avoid taxes and the everyday responsibilities of republican government. These people are generally from the industrial parts of Massachusetts and have just in recent times moved across the border.
The trouble is, they have brought Massachusetts with them. And they outnumber the rest of us in the mountains.
New Hampshire still has the right stuff which gave it its reputation, but now it is invariably overwhelmed by the mass market corporate culture which has moved across to the bottom of the state creating a kind of Massachusetts “pseudo state” just above the Massachusetts border.
We have clearly seen this new condition in voting patterns in recent elections and it was illustrated most vividly in the Democratic primary in ’04. At the frozen top of the state, Dixville Notch, which might be considered the gnarly essence of New Hampshire, Wes Clark won up to 80 percent of the vote. But at the end of the day it was all John Kerry, same as in Massachusetts. And in the Senate and House races today it is no surprise that some of the Democratic candidates seem to bear no relationship to the northern tradition of flinty independence but rather seem right off the rack at Filene’s basement in Boston.
It may have been a harbinger when the stone face fell off the mountain a few years back. It is still on the license plates and so is the slogan, Live Free or Die. But that time has passed and now the new culture dominates. The free and independent mountain spirit of New Hampshire is a God that Failed. We are now North Massachusetts.

Summer Reading: Carol Felsenthal’s Clinton in Exile

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill, 7/17/08

There is a masterfully crafted scene in Carol Felsenthal’s Clinton in Exile that brings to mind the stillness and awe of Robert E. Lee signing surrender at Appomattox or Nelson’s funeral after Trafalgar. You feel as if you are waiting there for Lee to make his despondent comment on behalf of the heroic vanquished when Grant’s Indian guide responded, “We’re all Americans here.” You feel you are nervously waiting through a dead quiet in a side parlor for Wellington to arrive or perhaps the King’s entourage to enter and offer homage to the fallen warrior and god king of Trafalgar. You sense that the events which brought you to these pivotal passages in the river are larger than you are; larger than your family is and more important and people will look to this great moment as a turning for a 1,000 years to come. But it is not Nelson at Trafalgar or Lee at Appomattox. It is Bill Clinton entering a room of adoring supporters waiting for him to do a crossword puzzle.

And that captures the essence of this downward spiral which is the life and times of Bill Clinton starting on the day he left office. Trafalgar and Appomattox are indeed simply bends in the river of a tribal pre-history which brought us to this, the most important moment in “human history” as Clinton tends to describe the events which led up to this moment; to his moment, the Brahma point from which all past time descends and all future time ascends. He describes the Internet as “the fastest growing means of communication in human history” in 1998 as he so described the cloning of Dolly. Just as he described Hillary as co-winner of the Democratic primary last week while addressing a group of governors.

But he would be uncomfortable with the analogy of Lee and Nelson, even though, as Felsenthal points out, he wanted military medals added to his official White House portrait, although he dodged the draft and like much in this legacy, he lied about it. Likely he envisions himself as a kind of Gandhi or Bodhiharma who saved Africa – although one million Rwandans died on his watch and died by the knife – and cured AIDS, much as Elvis dreamed that he was Jesus later in his life.

This is an odyssey of gold watches and billionaire friends; bimbos, bling and a private airplane bigger than a doublewide; and cash-raising speeches, end on end – three in a day at up to $800,000 a pop, bringing in $46 million in just a few years. But at the center of this political theater nothing holds. There is no Trafalgar. There is no Appomattox. There is no center. In the center is a maze – a crossword puzzle; a maze much like the one Dedalus built to insulate the King and hide him from his obsession.

Felsenthal’s book brings to mind the great writing of Barbara Tuchman; great because Tuchman creates on her canvas a pastiche of such detail that the story which is history is revealed as if of its own initiative. Likewise, Felsenthal, without guile, rancor or interpretation, reveals critical details we need to know to understand what happened to put what we have heard so far into perspective; the conversation between Bill and Hillary when the Monica episode is sprung to the press was quiet and loving; that the Monica episode is characteristic of a life-long journey, and that the key enabler in this fairly squalid story is not Bill’s Hollywood hack producer friends or vain political panderers, but Hillary. Like the plain girl – as Bill’s mother, Virginia, who wore tube tops and played the ponies, described her – who married the fancy man, she seems to expect the controversy and maybe enjoy it, vicariously sharing in its shady celebrity. It is the source and means of her entire public life and persona.

When the subject of Bill’s continued philandering was raised with Hillary, she responded, says one man who knows both Clintons well. “Screw ‘em. If they want to go vote for a pro-life Republican, let ‘em.”

We need to hear these voices and the not so quiet and loving voices as well: Don Hewett recalls a 60 Minutes episode about Vernon Jordan, Bill’s golf pal, when Mike Wallace asked him, “What do you and Bill Clinton talk about on the golf course?” and Jordan answered, “Pussy.”

This is Bill’s story but it is also a generation’s story; or rather, the story of that part of a generation which came to identify with the Clintons. It is the story of that part of the generation born to adulthood on May 4, 1970, perhaps, the day of Kent State, of which hippie leader Jerry Rubin said, “After Kent State you couldn’t get a girl to type your term paper for you anymore.” Rubin declared the hippie movement dead then and said, “Wealth creation is the real American Revolution.” He moved on to Wall St. and that part of the generation which sees Clinton as its avatar followed like a horde.

Felsenthal’s book tells a story of liberalism as it began to take an unusual tack with this group, at a time when Lewis H. Lapham, the venerable Harper’s editor, said liberals began to enter a room in a way that seem to say look at my haircut.

And it is a story of plain people, Bill and Hillary, or people who started out plain and today face the daily terror that history will remember them as plain.

During his lowest moods, Felsenthal writes, Bill worried that the business, policy, and nonprofit worlds would reject him out of fear that their members would be offended by his very presence. “That fed into his biggest insecurity – “ she writes, “that he did not really belong in the elite circles in which he mixed, the he was, after all, just white trash.”

But Felsenthal’s detailed writing reveals an ambivalence; possibly an inherent, subliminal desire by Clinton to flaunt the low life and vindicate the lore and mores of the poor white folk of the agrarian South. In her subtle and skillful telling, the Clintons begin to suggest and original Bill and Hillary counterpart and a historic parallel which some historians have suggested came about in opposition to the hippies and the Sixties generation: The TV preachers Jim and Tammy Faye Baker.

Felsenthal writes: Today Bill Clinton collects high-end watches and wears a Rolex, or a Patek Philippe or a Cartier or an Audemars Piguet or a watch by the young German watchmaker Michael Kobold. These are watches that cost thousands of dollars; some reach to six figures. Clinton has about fifty watches in his collection . . . . In 2004, when Michael Kobold, German born and only twenty-seven, first met Clinton at a small private party, the former president was wearing an Audemars Piguet skeleton watch that was worth well over a hundred thousand dollars.

So many watches, so little time. She goes on and the passage brings to mind Jim Baker holding up his gold watch and joyfully shouting to the TV camera: See this gold watch? Jee-sus wants you to have this gold watch.

Felsenthal tells an important story; a story which took us to the end of the second millennium and to a continuing series of events by a Presidential couple which historians will see perhaps in time as a phenomenon rather than a political process, and possibly even as a millennialist phenomenon like UFO encounters, Wormwood, dreams of the Yellow Monk, Jerry Springer and visions of Armageddon.

Upending Torture: Start a Truth Commission

by Bernie Quigley

for The Hill, 7/13/08

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 who have breached the faith of the American fabric and condition as it has never been breached before have found their way out of what were once considered venerable journals like The National Review to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And just a few months back the discussion of torture in papers like The New York Times and the LA Times was 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. And let’s talk about how these mad millennialist visions of psychobilly preachers too long in the hollow got to be American foreign policy.

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? And 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 Barack Obama 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 don’t really light the fire 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?

In Obama’s Celesteville, Caroline is the True Guide

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/11/08

If the Kennedy era came to be known as Camelot, what seems to be emerging in the awakening Obama period is a kind of Celesteville, the mythic kingdom of Babar and Celeste. Babar, benevolent king of the elephants, always took his final counsel from his chief advisor and mentor, the graceful and wise, “little old lady” who had no actual name. With a touch of a quality of organizational genius that appears to come naturally to him, Obama has latched on to Caroline Kennedy as the same kind of serene advisor.

Caroline is Obama’s “little old lady.” Not gray and elderly like Babar’s, but wise and subtle and with a touch so deft and precise that it virtually turned history a few months back. Obama’s campaign turned and so did the generations when Caroline placed an op-ed in the NYTs endorsing him, trumping the NYTs own endorsement of Senator Clinton just days before. From then until now her presence has been felt. Like in the astonishing Oprah rally with Michelle Obama and Maria Shriver which ran on TV parallel to the Super Bowl (and turned Bill Clinton – watching at Bill Richardson’s house with the clicker in his hand – green). Caroline dots the Obama campaign like the puffs of white dog wood buds which awaken spring in the Appalachians; there she is with Uncle Teddy going into the Senate vote yesterday and there she is on the plane with Obama and Senator Clinton heading to New York. She is here, there and everywhere.

Obama will need her. Politics is Power. A look at the trajectory of politics in America since Yalta shows a rise of the Power Principle manifest primarily in the Republican Party; Eisenhower and Reagan on a trajectory which is likely to continue. True Democrats like Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, interspersed regularly with levity and playfulness; the yin dancing through the yang, but always in yang’s house. Some, including myself see Obama as potentially a new JFK; some say a new Lincoln. I have a friend who says Obama is the Chosen One – the Aquarian - and will lead a movement to last 2,000 years. But in the perspective of recent history, the most likely scenario is a happy one-term affair, like the breathing space between Watergate and Reagan, a time when the Republican Party was seen as dead in the water, as it is seen today. But Watergate was the best thing to happen to the Republicans. It allowed them to dump the trash and rebuilt within a decade and dominate the political scene for the next 25 years.

In Obama’s short list of VP candidates Kathleen Sebelius and Ed Rendel have the management ballast to institutionalize whatever this rising spirit brings forth. But while they are in New York I hope Barack and Caroline stop in to see Mike Bloomberg. He and his buddy Arnold are two of the best managers in America; both virtually offer themselves as “post partisan” to either party and both have vision well beyond the narrow reach of their recalcitrant and time-bound state governments. As counselors, they could rebuild the Democratic Party as a new entity. And Obama should poach them. Because if he doesn’t, they will rebuild the Republican Party by 2012 with Mitt Romney at the helm.