- note to WesPAC about General Clark's Rising in New Hampshire - 10/31/06


Thanks for this. With the New Hampshire speeches last week, General Clark and the Democrats began entering a new phase. I write about phases of history and specifically how in or around the 60th post-war year, the post-war period falls apart. One sympton of this is the inability of management to think strategically and to act tactically - its the "git 'r done" impulse that today guides the administration; but it is without guidance, or plan. There is no course to stay. But when the crisis comes, the master strategists return again; the cultural breakage occurred between 1925 and 1932 in the last post-war period and the crisis then as now has similar characteristics - in many ways it was a "crisis of incompetence" which led to it but after the breakage occurred it brought forth great strategists; Roosevelt, Eisenhower, George Marshall, George Kennan. We are in a similar phase of in-between now and as far as I can see, only General Clark adresses it substantively. Like Eisenhower, he is a master strategist. The great movie Casablanca is about the period of indecision which preceded action between the wars; appeasors arise - Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval - as the French citizens are intimidated by the German bullies (Capt. Renault - Claude Reins - is surely the spiritual father of the House and Senate today, bullied by Karl Rove into voting for the invasion of Iraq although it was transparently designed by neocons for their specific agenda; lets remember their names). It is very much like a psychological sickness. But when the Marquis leader Victor Laszlo - Paul Heinreid - stands up in Rick's Cafe Americain and orders the playing of the La Marseillaise to drown out the German folk songs, the indecision breaks; the fever passes and the citizens awaken. General Clark is that rising figure - you could feel it rising in New Hamshire. (Thanks to my son Peter for photo crop skill - and to Paul Hienreid.)

Carol Shea-Porter for Congress

- notes for The Fighting Dems on a Daily Kos blog - 10/29/06

Wes Clark and Carol Shea-Porter: A New Direction for the Democrats

We seem to be at the end of things when habeas corpus, a pillar of democratic government, can be swept away overnight almost without discussion in Congress. And we have been hearing these same radicals in Congress and in the Oval Office these last weeks endorsing strategies of torture which have never been even vaguely considered in sound and moral government, and tragically, some of these barbaric and unconstitutional tribal practices have been echoed by leading Democrats.

The Democratic Party is going through a period of change. But it is also a day of awakening. There is new energy and a new climate of discussion, a new willfulness and a new sense of urgency; a new sense of duty. It is a new wind which I didn't feel in 2003. But I got a glimpse of it when General Wesley Clark and Carol Shea-Porter faced reporters after political speeches at the American Legion Hall in Manchester , New Hampshire , two weeks back.

"We know what the Geneva Convention means," said Shea-Porter. "We know what is right. We don't need this discussion."

Carol is a military wife and teacher running for Congress. She and General Clark spoke with one voice about the crisis our country faces.

General Clark's determination, willfulness and drive might have been too rich for the mainstream in 2003 because the mainstream was not yet ready to face the crisis and its challenges. But now it is ready to accept the crisis and ready to address the challenges. General Clark is now becoming the representative figure of the Democrats. His authority is felt to be authentic and is intuitively trusted. He has risen through a waning force; Joe Lieberman's chicanery and Bush appeasement, and a positive charge ?Tammy Duckworth's sincerity and passion and Jim Webb's intelligence, integrity and assertive sense of duty.

I see this same force awakening here in New Hampshire with Carol Shea-Porter as well. Most all present at the Legion Hall were former soldiers and military spouses, and Carol talked to us straight and as one of us, as Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neil, Mary McGrory and Jack Kennedy once did, and with a clarity and determination that the Legion Hall hadn't heard in many years.

This is becoming the new condition of the Democrats and it will become the new forum. Appeasement and denial are falling off like scales and Democrats are rising through the maelstrom. Wes Clark, Eric Massa, Jim Webb, Tammy Duckworth and Carol Shea-Porter are leading the charge for the Fighting Dems to a new century. They are bringing a new direction to our country and a new sense of duty to the Democratic.

Lost, 10/25/06 Henry Gale is Linus

It is learned that the Others live on a different island. There are two islands, as there are two stones, black and white. We know that there is a submarine as well - classically, in dreams a submarine represents a journey into the Unconscious ("We all live in a Yellow Submarine."). The islands form an actual tai chi. Jack is sent to operate on his Other counterpart, Henry Gale - who is sick and suffering from a tumor. As one stone is strong, the other is in remission - it is the way of Tao and the explaination of tai chi. Henry Gale - the name taken from the uncle in The Wizard of Oz - is really named Ben (in Hebrew, "Son of") Linus. Named, no doubt, after he who seeks the Pumpkin of Higher Power & the sincere Pumpkin Patch. Desmond develops intuitive powers and joins Mr. Eko and John Locke as one of the Three. See The Three Celestial Ones on Quigley in Exile.

Suggested reading for the new Torture Buffs:

Kranz Kafka: In the Penal Colony
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and much more
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

One question: Who raised you?

“Scum of the Earth”: The Clintons & Torture

by Bernie Quigley - for The Free Market News, 10/23/06

What have I become? - Nine Inch Nails

Alan Dershowitz provoked a storm of controversy several years ago by advocating “torture warrants” as a way of creating accountability for the use of torture in terrorism cases, he said this week in a Los Angeles Times essay. For this approach he said he was condemned as a moral monster, labeled an advocate of torture and called a Torquemada. Now, he says, President Clinton is in agreement with his position.

Clinton summarized his views in the following terms, said Dershowitz: “If they really believe the time comes when the only way they can get a reliable piece of information is to beat it out of someone or put a drug in their body to talk it out of ‘em, then they can present it to the Foreign Intelligence Court, or some other court, just under the same circumstances we do with wiretaps. Post facto . . . . “

Foreign Intelligence Court? “Some other court”?

They are talking about the “ticking bomb” situation here, which is all the rage in torture circles these days. It is an esoteric, almost aesthetic judicial question, like how many angels can do the Bugalu on the head of a pin?

Dershowitz is correct in including Bill Clinton as a fellow traveler in his egregious position on torture. In an article titled “Hillary Hits Bottom,” Rosa Brooks reports in the Los Angeles Times this week that Senator Hillary Clinton echoes these barbaric positions as well and shares in the public disgrace.

“Has Hillary Clinton been watching too many episodes of 24,” asks Brooks, “or is she just determined to prove that she really is entirely without principles?”

Whichever it is, Senator Clinton hit a new low last week, she writes, telling the New York Daily News that the President should have ‘some lawful authority’ to use torture or other ‘severe’ interrogation methods in a so-called ticking-bomb scenario. These comments appear to directly contradict her previous statements on the Military Commissions Act, Brooks points out, which President Bush signed into law Tuesday.

Dershowitz may be the thug that his detractors have labeled him to be, but he is not a coward. He understands that today in America, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, most public intellectuals and politicians are weaklings and can be easily cowed, territorialized and dominated with aggressive and bullying tactics as the Clintons have been, and can easily be brought around to the position of the dominant Alpha males - Dershowitz, Paul Wolfowitz and the neocons, the Israeli lobby, Tom DeLay and the Christian Zionist Movement. It was the classic strategy of the Popular Front in Europe in the 1930s and among New York intellectuals early last century in magazines like The Dial and The New Masses.

It is interesting that the neocon fathers and mothers who have nurtured such twisted and dark policy initiatives as we have recently seen took as their original guiding moral light a man from that same period; Arthur Koestler, a key figure in the European Popular Front, who later rejected Communism. Koestler wrote two books on interrogation and torture. In Darkness at Noon he asked how a man like himself could be seduced into the Personality Cult of Stalin and a movement that advocated and practiced torture, as the Stalinists did with such proficiency. Koestler, whose astonishing resemblance to Wolfowitz cannot be coincidental, at one time suggested names in France and Germany which were sent up to Stalin for torture and execution. Later, he offered a different point of view from the torture advocates of today.

Dershowitz insinuates in his essay that his advocacy of “torture warrants” is enlightened because it is shared by the liberal Bill Clinton. Koestler wrote to the contrary. He offered that although he thought he was an enlightened intellectual himself, a distinguished and celebrated man of letters throughout Europe east and west, and an early pioneer to Israel, he and his friends were no better than Stalin and his torturers when he advocated for Stalin. The issue to Koestler and his followers in Brooklyn in the 1950s was not so much the Commissar and the Brute, but the fellow travelers, the enablers and the cowards – editors, intellectuals and politicians – who engendered the Brute.

The level of moral distinction Koestler felt these people achieved is suggested in the title of another book he wrote about torturers, The Scum of the Earth.

But this week I have heard a new voice from a different drummer in Manchester, New Hampshire; that of Carol Shea-Porter, a military wife and teacher running for Congress.

“We know what the Geneva Convention means,” she said. “We know what is right. We don’t need this discussion.”

Most present were former soldiers, and she talked to us straight and as one of us, as Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil, Mark McGrory and Jack Kennedy once did, and with a clarity and determination that the Legion Hall hadn’t heard in many years.

A sign, maybe, that the accommodators and appeasers will begin to retire now to Nantucket, the Magic Mountain or the Presidential Library, and the Personality Cult of the Clintons will begin to dissipate. And the Democrats will finally return to earth again from their long and arduous space journey.

This Week on Lost - 10/18/06 - Hurley, Mr. Eko and John Locke Encounter Spirit Bear

They always call them Polar Bears, but like many things in this thoughtful TV show, it works on two levels. In Dharma culture, these two levels are Nirvana (the Unconscious or inner life) and Samsara (the Conscious or outer life). The white bear can best be understood as a Spirit Bear. Hurley fears the bear. Mr. Eko has a full encounter with the Spirit Bear. Spirit Bear is actually a white black bear which is sacred to the Haida Indians of British Columbia. Spirit Bear finds those in the forest who are psychologically Lost, as all the characters on the island are. When Spirit Bear finds you it will take you on a devastating adventure of transformation & awakening. You come out a transformed person with heightened sensitivities and spiritual awareness. Walt has had a Spirit Bear encounter. Now Mr. Eko has had an encounter with Spirit Bear in a cave (and encounter with the Earth). He finds a preternatural sense and is able to see John Locke’s true nature (“You will find them John because you are a hunter.”) Notice the cross has been torn from Eko’s neck. Eko’s faith is pure as it must be with a shaman, but he will find now a fuller context for his newly awakened state. Perhaps Locke is unable to undergo a Spirit Bear transformation as his faith is thin and based on intellectual properties. He needs “signs” and proofs. Mr. Eko’s faith is innate. Locke will anchor in Eko’s faith. Notice that Locke turns Mr. Eko's church into a sweat lodge, a house of spiritual transcendence of North American First Peoples. And Mr. Eko loses his Jesus Stick in the blast to Desmond. See Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen. For more on Lost see Quigley in Exile.

A Democratic Party with Southern Characteristics

by Bernie Quigley – for WesPAC 10/13/06

Mark Warner’s decision not to run for President left a large hole in Democratic politics. Warner, born in Indiana and reared in Connecticut, brought a winning smile and a winning strategy to the campaign trail. He campaigned for his Virginia Governor’s seat at Big Top churches and at the NASCAR track, where Nantucket liberals fear to tread.

He may also have transformed contemporary Democratic politics. In Warner's tenure as Governor, Virginia can be seen as a Petri dish. Warner proved beyond any doubt that the South and all of the red states can be brought back home to the Democratic Party by a genuine, enthusiastic and sincere politician with excellent management abilities, who respected his fellow Southern citizens as he found them.

As Governor of Virginia and as a Presidential candidate, he abandoned the politics of confrontation and established a new model, reaching across the isle to create working relationships with Republicans and ignoring ideology and issues-oriented strategies which often alienated mainstream voters and filled Republican ranks.

In Iowa, Warner would refuse to enter into the politics of confrontation and polarization when reporters pressed him into positioning on the most contentious issues. He once answered, “97% of what I do is management.” Jim Webb, candidate for Senator in Virginia, said all his anger and contention fell from him after 9/11. It should everyone.

It’s a management thing. The Democrats need to understand. There is the essence of the new paradigm in Democratic politics, and although Warner has dropped out for the time being, the same management-based political model has been adopted here in New Hampshire with great success by our Democratic Governor, John Lynch. He faces reelection next month with 80% voter support. Three Republicans in New Hampshire state races have cited their support for him in their campaign literature.

It is often said up here that New Hampshire is a Southern state. Lynch’s election to office did parallel Warner’s in Virginia. Like Warner, who followed the ideological Republican George Allen in office, Lynch followed a similar Republican with cranky, eccentric ideas which were Republican political novelty a few years back. Here in New Hampshire, it washed out quickly after two years. Lynch followed with the new model. He does not represent a return to Northeast Democratic politics as usual. Like Warner, he brings an entirely new approach and brings perhaps a historical turning; a return to sobriety, good management, bipartisan cooperation and common sense.

Warner and Lynch bring good news for the Democrats. But the list of remaining Democratic Presidential candidates cited in an AP story about Warner’s decision not to run could bring the country to a crisis in 2008. Most are senators. None have serious management experience. Some are eccentric and inexperienced. Others have been mentioned recently simply because of their ethnic status or because they look good on a horse.

Of the three frontrunners suggested, only John Edwards does not entirely alienate the South, Texas and the Midwest. Wes Clark was not on the list, nor were any inspired or prominent Democratic Governors like Lynch, Mike Easley of North Carolina or Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.

Warner had hired political strategist Dave "Mudcat" Saunders to help manage his Virginia Governor campaign and Saunders is partly responsible for beginning to return Southern people to their Democratic Party roots in Virginia. Shortly before Warner announced that he would not run for President, Saunders went to work for John Edwards.

Perhaps a new group should form today to rebuild the Democratic Party on the new paradigm which Warner, Saunders and Edwards are bringing to the Democratic Party: A new politics which would bring Southern, Texan and Midwestern politicians into the mainstream, and which would encourage and draft candidates like Easley and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius; moderates and conservatives who have abandoned contention and culture wars in favor of cooperation, and who bring with them management abilities and expertise.

It would be a party with Southern features, and it would set as its goal the recovery of red states lost to Republicans.

I’d be the first to nominate my Governor for such a task force or committee to investigate. New Hampshire, in most approximations, is blood red in a sea of light blue. Wes Clark should surely share leadership on such a committee. As Marcos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos pointed out, with Warner out, General Clark is now the only outsider in range of the 2008 Presidential race. (That Clark and Warner, the only two candidates with high distinction as managers, are considered "outsiders" is what the Democrats need to start thinking about.)

And Clark is a paragon of Southern experience and character. He is a manager first and foremost, and he has been traversing the heartland tirelessly since the election, lending support to Democrats in the Ozarks, Alabama and Des Moines just these last few days.

Southern people go to church. Southern people respect veterans. Southern people are unpretentious and unassuming. Southern people care about family and friends. And so do my neighbors up here in New Hampshire and Vermont and so do people all over the country.

But such simplicity doesn’t seem to be pulling the press. The mainstream press is pretty well fixed, Hedgehog like, on the Hillary and the anti-Hillary thing; Warner being the anti-Hillary. They can think of little else.

The Democrats and the press which follows in their wake appear to suffer from visions and ideas whose historical time and purpose have passed, but whose aura still lingers on in the valleys. Virginia and New Hampshire have led the way to a critical turning in Democratic politics and Warner and Lynch represent that turning. The will and intelligence is available to awaken and bring the new paradigm to life. It’s just that the old coat is hard to shake off, especially because the press sees no other path on the horizon and continuously defaults to old ideas.

Part of the problem lies in history and geography. We are at a major historical turning come about by the shift in major economy from North to South. It hasn’t fully matured and manifested yet in the South, and the North, against all odds, refuses to let go.

The problem also resides in the very idea of liberalism. It has lost its true path and purpose over recent decades as a moral initiative and duty and become instead a posturing of public piety and a social style of identification and status (as one would identify with Starbucks or suburban soccer moms); one does not oppose global warming so much to protect the environment as to feel swell about protecting the environment and to identify with that position as "our kind" in polarization of those the swarty Others who are not "our kind" (NASCAR moms and Big Top Southern church goers).

I was raised and educated in New England and worked the most part of my grown up life in New York City. My father worked in cotton mills in Fall River, Massachusetts, and so did my mother’s family.

This is something the new people who come to the Northeast (like the Clintons) need to know about us: What you come here to seek no longer exists. The angel has passed. The spirit of enterprise which came here from Manchester, England, filling Fall River, Lowell, Massachusetts and Manchester, New Hampshire, with hundreds of quite beautiful stone and glass factories and millions of immigrants, left almost a hundred years ago. The cotton mills have gone South. My father was an electrician. He turned the lights out.

There is no New England as it is imagined to be by outsiders. Eric Sloane, chronicler of our old covered bridges, wood tools and great Yankee barns, said it passed in 1865. The old school Yankees, like the Bush family, all moved to Texas in around the 1930s. It is the same in New York. It passed away at the same time. James Thurber, the great cartoonist for The New Yorker in the 1920s is said to have written on the ceiling above the stalls in the building’s men’s room the words, “Too late,” for those who came after him.

Red state is destiny. The life force that was the Northeast dissipated before the end of World War II. As population moved South people moved South. Economy is moving Southwest now and population is still dropping in the northern New England states as it has been since World War II.

And as economy went to the South, so did political empowerment. A new cultural relevance emerged. The rise of the Christian Right, the roar of the NASCAR track, the sweet Tennessee and North Carolina Baptist choirs which have long been the mainstay of the Newport Folk Festival and even the popularity of Connecticut-born George W. Bush are evidence of a fundamental shift in American culture. And Otis Redding and Little Richard and Dolly Parton and Billy Bob Thornton.

The South has risen. It is strong. This cultural arc is exactly equivalent to the economic boom of the 1800s, which brought with it the rise of Irish popular culture which enriched New York, Boston and America in the late 1800s – John L. Sullivan, the popular operatic John Mccormick, and the great run of blarney in music, literature, the dance and Vaudeville hall and later, the big Hollywood movie screen.

The Northeast Democrats and liberal culture seem to be in denial of this.

What continually curses them is the illusion that although economy may have moved away, New York is still the center of information, opinion and influence. Certainly it dominates, but it continually fails them. Perhaps because the Northeast no longer centers economy, it yields so easily to narcissism and nihilism, the dark muse of the empty vessel. Power follows economy, and if the Democrats expect to go forward, they must follow power.

The Democratic Leadership Council came into being after Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory in 1984. The idea was to try to make the Democrats more like Republicans – Republicans with more fanciful hair, said one wag. It was a false and imitative effort and ended up alienating the large swath of America known today as red states.

What the Democrats should have done back then was ask themselves why the South, Texas and the Midwest had abandoned them in droves. Howard Dean said he wanted to go after those guys with Confederate flags on their trucks. We know what he meant and it was a good idea. It is exactly what Mark Warner had already done with grace, vision and aplomb, and it is exactly what the Democrats should do today. But a former Governor from Vermont, the Magic Mountain of avant-garde liberalism, cannot start that discussion and even the suggestion brought widespread alienation to the red states.

Nevertheless, the discussion should start and it should start in Richmond, Raleigh, Macon, Nashville, Austin and Dallas, Texas. Texas especially as it is the big place, and as New York was to the old industrial America of vast influence in the world between 1865 and 1929, so Texas is to the new economy and the new culture just very recently awakened and yet to reach full expression beneath the Mason-Dixon Line and west of it.

Only the South can fix this party to make it work again as the South made it work for the Republicans in the 1980s.

But Concord, New Hampshire, Haverhill, and Conway, our singular jewel in the White Mountains, should be talking and listening as well. It is a good fit for New Hampshire.

If you all fix it we will follow you. We have no place else to go.

Notes on Lost, Season 3, Episode 2 – 10/11/2006

Sawyer was bound to get Kate – they both have the strong life force which comes from elementary biology (compared with Jack who’s like force is in his head) – they only needed “island” orientation to get regular. Notice the airlines which crashed in Oceanic Airlines. As much is symbolic and referenced to literature in this, this name is from George Orwell’s 1984, in which the global, oppressive empire is Oceania, a malevolent vision of America. Lost symbolically crashes the empire with the airplane, allowing the people to be “born again” as a new people – we are all new people in America, and distinctions – Irish, Islamic, etc., yield after three generations. Lost is a vision of awakening America.

Ben giving proof of the real world to Jack by showing him the tape of the 2004 World Series which the Red Sox won, was a nice touch. It was so unlikely a possibility that Jack refused to believe until he saw the tape. That World Series was like a Lost episode. In fact, the joke up here in New Hampshire where it was a big event, was that the Red Sox was getting help from the “Land of the Dead” – the team revived as if “from the dead”; the major player was named Damon (daemon – a helper from the dead) and made himself look like Jesus, and a full eclipse of the moon occurred as the Red Sox won the Pennant (moments after the victory, the moon passed back to its normal condition).

When Kate changes from long pants and backpack to dress, her journey has come to its center & she is ready for Awakening. Moreover, it is Alex's dress, daughter of Danielle, the Dakini or Earth Spirit - the lineage of the Earth Mother. Kate has found new awareness is the hnading off of the dress from the one to the other. When has tv or film prepared such compositional subtlety? Not since John Ford and Von Stroheim.

Notes on Lost – 3^rd Season, Episode One: Lost is an Aquarian Creation Myth

I’m going to put a few notes ongoing about the TV show Lost over the next few weeks – it is a remarkable show and a milestone in TV culture. These are notes and impressions.

How Lost works on several levels: In the last season Henry Gale (Ben) was identified as a Christ figure by the Christ wound given him by Danielle and by the book, The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky, in which the prisoner is identified as the Christ in the chapter The Grand Inquisitor. Mr. Eko confesses his sins to him, but Henry Gale (the name of the uncle in The Wizard of Oz) doesn’t understand that he is the “Second Christ’ (perhaps the first did not know he was the First Christ). As the story goes, this third season, all is explained. Ben is a cult leader seeking information. The “real” Henry Gale, the black man buried under the parachute, will be explained – perhaps he was at one time one of the Others. But within the scene itself before the explanation unravels, there appears to be two Henry Gales and we know that the live one (Ben) is supposed to somehow represent the Christ. It appears that Henry Gale leaves behind his “old self” for a new incarnation. This is the classic telling of Krishna’s kicking aside and stomping on a dwarf – in many Hindu pictures and also in Tibetan Buddhist (See "Lost: a Taoist Classic" on Quigley in Exile). When Krishna rises in the new body, be is ready for his new dance of creation “dance of life and death.” The Christ’s second creation is Aquarius. Lost is an Aquarian Creation Myth. Suggested reading: The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus, the Christ (1920, reprinted, Garland Publishing) by Levi H. Dowling

Entering the third season, the Others are revealed to be a kind of Dharma cult, something like Naropa, but with computers and Bucky Balls. J.J. Abrams attended Sarah Lawrence – perhaps he studies with Joseph Campbell – the show is quite knowledgeable about depth psychology and myth, and Campbell taught at Sarah Lawrence. Notice the lights and darks; Jack has a wife and a dark (Spanish) mistress. Then on the island, he has affections for Kate and (dark) Anna Lucia. At the Others camp he may draw affection from Ben’s (Henry Gale’s) girl friend who looks like his original wife.

Until now Jack was almost always with a back pack on and so have other characters. This is a common dream image of someone on a spiritual or psychological journey.

Ahead, Mr. Eko has been shown to be the man of unequivocal faith, while John Locke’s faith is all in the head. Locke fails, but Eko will bring the Dharma Inistative forward – Locke to be his second, following in Eko’s faith. Ben as a Christ figure is way interesting because although he is identified by the Christ wound and the Bros. K book, we see him and we know him to be a bad character – manipulative and self centered – he leaves his girl to die in the prison and Jack saves her. Easy to see that the entire Others cult is tired of Ben and the whole Dharma deal. But Mr. Eko does not see the bad parts & could take him – Ben – as the second Christ; the second face of Christ in the new Platonic month. FYI Lost is about a shift in Platonic Months, a 24,000 year journey around the sun under 12 signs of 2,000 years apiece. The procession started with the Birth of the Christ, 2,000 years ago. We have just left the Age of Pisces, the age of Christ and Mohammed (the dual fish in the zodiac sign) and entered the Age of Aquarius on January 1 of this year. From Madame Blavatsky to Salvador Dali, there has been the suggestion of the Second Christ as a Buddhist monk. Eko, most sincere of the faithful, is making the transition from traditional Roman Catholic to New Age Buddhist/Taoist (the 108 clicker suggests the Tibetan rosary which has 108 beads – the Dharma insignia is the Ba Gua, sing of the tai chi).

Thirteen Moons: Charles Frazier’s Exile

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 10/9/06

In the late 1990s, a host of editors and scholars gathered to reflect on what was good and what should be remembered of the waning century. In one of the most erudite lists, the best non-fiction book of the century was declared to be The Education of Henry Adams, published in 1907 and written by the grandson of John Adams.

At the same time, Charles Frazier was writing Cold Mountain, which seemed strangely out of place when it first appeared in 1997. It was a story of loss and breakage - a Civil War tale in a time of peace and burgeoning prosperity. It was a land journey epic in an age of space travel. It was a Taoist vision of awakening when political and literary nihilism was at its fullest flower. It was a great novel. North Carolina poet Fred Chappell called it “a masterpiece.” The venerable Alfred Kazin called it “astonishing.”

Here in 2006, Frazier has written another great novel, Thirteen Moons, and 100 years hence, when they gather again to determine which were the awakening influences of the new century, they will first turn to Frazier.

Thirteen Moons is written with a flow and subtly of expression which we haven’t seen since Willa Cather and Tolstoy. Indeed, in a century which seemed to take its influence from an American interpretation of Trotsky’s famous maxim – “every man an Oprah, every man a Bart Simpson, every man a Bush,” writing of this depth, ability, subtlety and intuition has been exiled from the Academy.

Frazier comes not from the Academy but from the western hills of North Carolina, the Cherokee region, where the mountain tops flow in the light blue mist like a sea, sweeping the imagination and forming the character of the people. Indians consider it to be a sacred place with magical properties – a place where dreams are full and rich and draw serpent-handling holiness preachers, hippies and Tibetan monks alike to its essence.

Cold Mountain, where Frazier’s ancestors settled, is one of these peaks, and it is the scene of his first novel. It is serendipitous that there are actually two Cold Mountains in the world, one in North Carolina and one in China. Frazier, in a masterful display of literary craftsmanship, combines the two and brings the reader to the essence of an awakening American journey and the new century, via Cold Mountain in China, the home of Taoist shamans and mystics for millennia. China’s Cold Mountain is a mountain of the mind as well as nature, and in the introduction to the book, Frazier quotes Han-shan, the most famous of its inhabitants from the 8^th century: “Men ask the way to Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.”

Cold Mountain is a journey home. And if the country was not ready to go there when the novel first appeared, it is surely ready now. For it is a novel which is part of an endless cycle of human experience – a novel which finds the protagonist and his world exhausted from war, going from the edge of an outward push with feverish enthusiasm and esprit d’corp, then turning about and yielding to the heart, and trying to find the trail back. Trying to remember what home was, or might have been, had he still his arms and legs and eyes and head working in full and in harmony one to the other; trying to recall a life without the daily onslaught of wholesale slaughter.

A blind man who sells food to the troops outside a soldier’s hospital says to Frazier’s character: “It might have been worse had I ever been given a glimpse of the world and then lost it.” Therein is the tragedy of all who try and fail in war, and sometimes those who succeed. The journey home is slow and arduous, often impossible.

Yet this is a tale of faith and good hope. For when the illusion of politics and war fall from the eyes or make them blind, the essence of life can be grasped and perhaps it is only then that it can be grasped.

Cold Mountain is a timeless tale. Reviewers compare it to The Odyssey, but it was told long before and since. The Crusades engendered the telling of this kind of story time and again, for it was a war which was perennially lost, which makes it appropriate for today as we are in perhaps the final chapter of that 900-year-long conflict. In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the Templar finds no home to return to from the Crusades, only the Plague. The Robin Hood story comes from the Crusades as well, and in this telling, the warriors turn from the endless outward adventure to find again their essence; the Green Man, the Earth Mother and the tribal Albion, the White Goddess, and the woods. Frazier’s telling is related to this as it is an American telling, and the returning warrior seeks the oldest of truths and truest of guides for the white man come uninvited to a new home on a new continent – the Native American as spirit guide and guide through the psychological wilderness.

At journey’s end – the end of a short and perfect life for the protagonist - Cold Mountain’s soldier finds his heart in a Cherokee village in an Indian hut. Frazier’s journey owes to Homer, but owes more to Black Elk, who most succinctly described the journey home. This is Black Elk: “I was standing on the highest mountain of them all . . . And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy ... but anywhere is the center of the world.” And this is Frazier’s journey, a journey to the center of human experience.

Frazier’s two novels form a unified vision which - like the life of the white buffalo in Wisconsin; a harbinger of enlightenment and spiritual awakening to Native Americans - traverses two millennia and awakens in the second.

Thirteen Moons is again auspicious. The protagonist is named Cooper, perhaps in homage to James Fenimore Cooper, who first and foremost saw the white man and the Indian inextricably linked on this continent, and saw in the essence of the American experience the white man from Europe put aside his matrix of big ideas and city shoes and marry instead to the spirit of nature. That is Natty Bumpo, half white and half Indian, but given the Indian name, Hawkeye or Deerslayer, as the Indian nature would ascend. It is that which would allow us to turn inward. Our natures were to be one, guided by the Indian, and if we didn’t find that, we would eventually default to Europe – if only in heart and head - or die in the wilderness.

It was Chief Joseph who said, “Our spirit will walk among you,” and in Frazier’s cosmology it does.

In Thirteen Moons, Will Cooper, at the age of 12, is given a horse, a key and a map and sent alone on a journey through the wilderness to the edge of the Cherokee Nation. The map he carries brings him to the edge of Indian Territory. He stops, afraid, at entering the world which in uncharted. Like Inman, Frazier’s character in Cold Mountain, he has totem animals and spirit guides, animal and Native American.

Frazier’s mastery goes almost unnoticed, as it should with great writers, and his subtlety sometimes matches that of the Taoist monk, Han shan. At the edge of the forest, here is Cooper looking west: “ . . . the map turned abruptly white and all the geographic opinion it ventured further was the words INDIAN TERRITORY, lettered rather big. No fading or tapering off. Everything halted all at once. So the lesson the map was taught was that knowledge has strict limits, and beyond that verge the world itself might become equally unspecified and provisional. In my mind, the place thus rendered could be contained within no state and could contain within it no counties or towns . . . “

Han shan would have understood that the white space on the map was wu-chi. It is the imagination and the American journey of the mind which has not yet hatched and does not yet exist, the benign state from which tai-chi, the countervailing forces of life and the ten thousand things erupt and create the flow of history.

And this is the most auspicious vision for our country and for our new century. For here we are a people not yet born, but soon to be, and soon to find the life of the heart and the mind as we’ve not known or experienced it before - in richness, subtlety, pain and slaughter, love and yearning, peace and prosperity and all that is to come.

Simon Winchester's White Rabbit & the new Lost

Simon Winchester has written a way interesting op-ed today in the NYTs about an obsession to say "White Rabbit" every morning of his life when he woke up for 60 years. Thought it would be worth reprinting my essay on The Matrix and the Magical Animal, a white rabbit, which leads the shaman to his destiny. From Quigley in Exile. Y'all seen the new Lost? From Dostoyevski (The Bros K) to Otis Redding (These Arms of Mine), the Dakini Danielle & Mr. Eko - does anything speak to the millennial condition with such succinct clarity, vision and discrimination? Is like a Saturday movie matinee serial of The Mahabarata. This year is critical - Mr Eko changes from Roman Catholic to New Age Buddhist. A milestone transition between the millenia. Note: Winchester's change of condition might have something to do with his moving from England to Massachusetts. Life changes - John Lennon went from Light to Shadow. (See "Mother," which starts off with Big Ben, as a sad, existential goodby to England.) Jan Morris changed her sex and shifted from great historian to great journalist. It takes three generations and then you enter the realm of Black Elk's vision (anthropologist say one's head actually changes shape after two generations, to one closer to configuration of Native Americans'). I still yearn for Lost Mother; North Carolina, Ireland, Mother. Cheers, Quigley

The Age of Thomas - from Quigley in Exile

Tiny slips of paper falling from my desk which belongs somewhere but I can’t remember where: . . . Neo presents the vivid picture of the shaman’s journey between millenia. It is a great contemporary shaman’s journey as it returns the shaman back to earth from his space journey. As science fiction went to the heavens in the 1970s, it returns to earth with Neo . . . We are an Earth Species and must find ourselves and our way on this planet . . . To desire to find ourselves in the most distant space is to avoid our fate. In some ways it is a childish illusion of avoidance of adulthood and moral responsibility . . . One of life’s little 3 x 5 cards is the understanding of Hegel as a thesis vs. antithesis coming to a synthesis. But this is a Power Principle view of life – a yang view. The two forces in the world in this view are not yin and yang, but yang plus and yang minus. I always see yin and yang presentations as an erroneous understanding of Hegel. Two men sword fighting is not yin and yang. There is no yin present. Thesis/antithesis is a vision of the world without yin, our world in the West since the 1400s. Most marriages today are yang/yang relationships, each partner with a separate corporate identity outside the body of the other. It makes no difference if they are biologically man and woman. They are friendship relationships - pal relationships. Family as Corporation. Relationships. But that is not marriage, and not yin and yang. The popular book and upcoming movie, The Da Vinci Code on the surface suggests the dynamic Seal of Solomon code – the two interlocking triangles of the Seal of Solomon, but on investigation, there are no yin figures in this entertaining piece of pop mysticism . . . Like most marriages today in Matrix world, all man and woman – everyone in the world perhaps - are yang figures and yang individuals (their nests will always be square). Yin is Andromeda, lost in the ozone, dangling her two Japanese fighting fish at the end of a string. But she’s returning to earth now and here her name is Trinity.

The Matrix presents a mythic picture of the yin world and the yang world and the shaman’s journey from the one to the other. The difficulty in seeing comes from the fact that there are actually four things, not two. There is yin and yang, and each has a Dark Face, yin minus and yang minus. The yang plus and yang minus is brilliantly represented in Thomas Anderson’s journey. Before he Awakens, Keanu Reeves’ character, Thomas Anderson, has dual nature (Thomas means the Twin, specifically the Twin of Jesus and cosmoglomically, we enter perhaps The Age of Thomas, with the second incarnation of the Christ in Aquarius, - each of the Twelve will present as the Christ in a 24,000 Sun Cycle – this is suggested in the third Matrix, but put that aside). Neo’s dual nature is in the 3 x 5 Hegelian vision of anti-thesis and thesis (when someone speaks of the dual nature, ask if she means, man/woman, man/Dark Face, Woman/Dark Face, Man/God-Universe-and Male God [Sky and Fire] or Female God [Earth and Water] – I never know what they mean and think they don’t know). The one, the positive yang, is Thomas Anderson working days as a computer programmer. This is Mr. Anderson in the world. The other is the anti-Anderson, yang minus, working nights as a hacker to negate the work he does in the day. They could well be political parties which see in their sole initiatives contervailing the other. This is thesis and anti-thesis, but they do not form synthesis – they simply endlessly swordfight throughout the ages, the one making the other stronger and visa versa. Mr. Anderson leaves this world and finds another, the yin world. Like all male shamans, he is sent inward by the Triple Goddess (Trinity). Mr. Anderson’s is a classic shaman’s journey and it begins in sleep, where the Universe enters the Unconscious of the living individual. Neo is sleeping. In his dream he hears a voice which says; Wake up Neo, the Matrix has you. The Matrix presents Keanu in the Hegelian dual nature of the current everyday world. It is a woman’s voice from the Unconscious which brings him out. A man’s journey into the yin world always starts with a woman’s voice – it is the female inner nature of a man (and visa versa for women). She lives in the part of consciousness that a man living in Ego/Ego Dark face like Mr. Anderson has never experienced and has no abilities to travel in. The Hegelian 3 x 5 says it does not exist (the common misunderstanding is all important in creating culture. It makes no difference and is of no importance as to what Hegelian actually meant and what is true in Hegel) . . . In life, the most critical moment is the very first – the birth moment. It is then the organism is most likely to fail. Mr. Anderson has to respond to this message without any of the tools he has from his everyday or everynight natures. He has to abandon his skills and tools. He has to find intuition. He has to obey it. This is key to Awakening. Trinity tells him one thing to do: Follow the White Rabbit. Like Alice and Arguna, like most journeys to the Self, a Magical Animal will lead the way. Suddenly friends appear at the door. He is not ready (one is never redy) – he is busy – he cannot go with them – then he sees the tattoo of the White Rabbit on one of the partyers – a Trinity manifestation – he immediately says he will go. Without question, he puts aside his former everyday selves, and follows the guiding light of his Anima. The next he finds turmoil. This is the dangerous confrontation with the Unconscious in the modern world bereft of psychic experience and knowledge. Mr. Anderson has never been there, and most who try to go there (as in the Pokemon movie) will not survive the journey. But Mr. Anderson’s instinctiveness in abandoning his reason-based matrix and hearing his intuition assures his Salvation. The Matrix is a classic journey to the Self and one like all others. Every journey a man has to the Self is exactly like this: A female voice invites you to the Psyche and her world, the yin world – (but her Dark Face – vagina dentada - might eat you). Within that journey a man will find the Self if he is strong and if he can survive the Confrontation with the Self – the part of the person which is part of the Universe – the Lord of the Unconscious/Morpheus – and find a new self with a new name. In this Awakening, the new psychic life casts off the old as an abandoned skin. Neo represents us in the world today (or the one half of the world which identifies with the Neo journey/will be opposed by those who do not in equal and opposite counterforce). It is an active journey of the Collective Unconscious. The movie is a catalyst – an avatar – to a greater Awakening of the general public. It could go on to greater phases just as the Mahabarata went on volume after volume. The arcane elements in this series – the Twins, for example, (like the Twin John Paul Popes in occult folk lore, Church arcania, dreams and the zodiac, appear as Gates) present a public dream of a new world hatching. I have only talked to women who have had this journey. They dream of Twins at the beginning. Sometimes they are twins or have twin siblings. They dream of all these elements. But it is interesting and perhaps significant that this picture occurs at the turning of the millennium. Neo emerges a different man. There is a whole cosmology today from Stan Lee to Star Wars to The Matrix, The X Files, Stan Lee again with new movies, The X Men. These have profound inner intricacies which are confluent with mythical and anthropological thinking and have perhaps implications.

Letter to Jim Jeffords RE Habeas Corpus:

- by Bernie Quigley, for The Free Market News Network, 9/29/2006

Congratulations on your retirement from a life of good work & work that needed to be done. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that you gave your parting speech in the same week that the Senate allowed the President to repeal Habeas Corpus. Over the years I have admired your character and courage and solicited your support. One such time was at the beginning of the war on Iraq when I started an ad hoc group called The Acadian Alliance, and claimed that we three northern New England states, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, had the Constitutional right not participate in the war (and the moral obligation not to). I also proposed at the time that we send our own representative to the UN. This idea brought praise and chuckles from John Kenneth Galbraith, still at his desk at Harvard deep into his 90s.

I am strongly supportive of the war against the Al Qaeda network operating out of Afghanistan and even more deeply sympathetic to the needs of Homeland Security. If the FBI wasn’t reading my email I’d feel like a failed writer. Some of the others I’ve encountered in opposition to this war were in my opinion, deluded Sixties Reenactors and irresponsible political nihilists seeking opportunity in tragedy. But now that Habeas Corpus has been repealed, it appears that I (or anyone who holds a dissenting opinion) could be taken from my house with complete legality, held indefinably, never to be heard from again. As one legal commentator pointed out last night on the evening news, I could even be legally executed without explaination to my family.

The question is this: Is the repeal of Habeas Corpus a real need in a time of uncertainty for securing the nation, or is this what we have become? If so, perhaps we in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine should begin to consider our relationship with the federation. As Howard Dean said when he was governor of Vermont, we have more in common with our Canadian neighbors in the Eastern Provinces than we do with Texas. We are an Enlightenment people; people of the Age of Reason. Habeas Corpus is our legacy.

Not long ago The Nation magazine called states secession one of the "bold new ideas" of the new century. I find it irresponsible and dangerous; the realm of mischief makers and the disenchanted. Only the most dire circumstances should begin such a conversation. But the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, under the guise of fighting terrorism, is one such circumstance. Preemption is another. A President who seeks extra-Constitutional powers is another. The repeal of Habeas Corpus is a landmark.

Our laws and our kind of government evolved from the Enlightenment and the ideas of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. But it may be that those ideas are too lofty and difficult for a country as vast and inclusive as ours and the arc of grace and light which brought us here to the millennium was only a temporary condition. And we are returning today to an earlier sensibility. Bush's war on Iraq increasingly gives all the impressions of the continuation of a war on Islam which has been going on by Christian nations since 1096. Worth noting, as the proposal to repeal Habeas Corpus gives no date for return to Constitutional governance - it is not a temporary aberration as Lincoln's suspension was during the Civil War. It is open-ended and quite possibly a permanent change to our American life.

Rage and Sock Puppets

by Bernie Quigley – for The Free Market News Network, 9/27/2006

This morning The New York Times reports: “Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive.”

The battle is highlighted by the Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, conspicuously defending her husband (who holds no political office) against Condi Rice (who does).

We enter today the third phase of acrimony between North and South since post-war. Historian Dan Carter well describes the first phase in his provocative and brilliant book, Politics of Rage, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, a political biography of George Wallace.

Carter wrote that the entire Wallace rise and fall was a reaction to the new initiatives of the culture of the 1960s, of the Freedom Riders in the South, the integration decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the hippies and so on.

“Journalists might greet this growing counterculture with curiosity, even approval. But Wallace knew – instinctively, intuitively – that tens of millions Americans despised the civil rights agitators, the antiwar demonstrators, the sexual exhibitionists as symbols of a fundamental decline in the traditional cultural compass of God, family, and country.”

Wallace invoked images of a nation in crisis, Carter wrote, a country in which thugs roamed the streets with impunity, antiwar demonstrators embraced the hated Communist Vietcong, and brazen youth flaunted their taste for “dirty” books and movies. “And while America disintegrated, cowardly politicians, bureaucrats, and distant federal judges capitulated to these loathsome forces."

After 49 states voted for Ronald Reagan, the country entered into a kind of stability. Phase two came with the election of Bill Clinton to the Presidency. The South had an immediate and visceral response against Clinton, which I gauged as starting the moment quite shortly after his inauguration when he stopped Air Force One at the end of the runway to wait two hours for him while he paid $175 for a haircut by a famous Hollywood hairdresser.

The climate change was palpable in Tobaccoville, North Carolina, where we lived, worked and reared our kids on our farm. Red state/blue state alienation would begin to rise. Within the first years of his Presidency both the House and the Senate would be lost to the Republicans, allowing right wing extremists to grow within the party unhindered.

The Christian Right would rise with the Southern economy, and the common people of the South throughout would clearly define who they were and who they were not. And where they would go and with whom, and where they would not go. As the Clintons vacationed yearly in Nantucket, the conspicuous playground of the Liberal Very, Very Rich, the Sixties theme of which as Carter writes, which originally alienated the South, came to acculturated the whole of the Democratic Party – fab Sixties pop culture figures like Carly Simon would greet the President at the Airport. Today editors of The New Republic and the liberal publishing houses in New York and even England’s Gordon Brown who hopes to follow Tony Blair, vacation in Cape Cod. It is the vortex of Clinton Democrats.

Today we go to Phase Three as it begins to become clear that Senator Clinton and her husband will continue to dominate the political atmosphere. A reader asks “what does a dollar for Hillary is a vote for Bush” suggest? Money is power, and each dollar sent to empower the Clinton Party will have an equal and opposite counterforce in the red states, further alienating the regions.

But a fight between Clinton and Rice, as representative of contention between Democrats and Republicans, brings to mind the old Sherlock Homes presented on public television years back, in which the series ends with Holmes and Moriarty horns locked in battle, going over a waterfall. The image kept coming to mind at the end of the millennium.

Both parties today seem spent forces; the Bush Republicans amateurish and incompetent, the Democrats vituperative.

Such talent is kept hidden with the Dems, from Wes Clark, to Tammy Duckworth, to Kathleen Sebelius. But orthodoxy and tradition, writes William James, prevents the spirit from rising and spends its fortune institutionalizing the Old Ways, and keeping it imprisoned.

And the Prudence Pillars of the Republicans – General John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, Colin Powell and others, who today criticize the President, resonate with inherent American integrity. It is unfortunate that the Democrats have no similar Council of Elders. But a party of the aging young, nostalgic for its college days, does not get to have elders.

So in this season of acrimony, who’s doing the work? Arnold Schwarzenegger gets headlines with activist actors George Clooney and Don Cheadle, signing legislation to end California investment in Sudan. Arnold Schwarzenegger discusses climate change. Arnold Schwarzenegger signs bills on carbon emissions. Arnold Schwarzenegger leads Democratic opponent Phil Angelides by 17 points.

Beyond Elvis: Bill Clinton is Leviathan

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 9/24/2006

I’m sure you’ve seen him these past weeks. He is everywhere. On The Daily Show, in a 23-page interview in The New Yorker – his core constituency, they love him at The New Yorker, and give him the kind of treatment usually reserved for Churchill – on the cover of The Huntington Post, on Fox News Sunday; Elvis here, Elvis there, Elvis everywhere. Elvis has not left the building. He is staging a comeback.

It is one of the core mysteries of life that certain people seem to resemble famous others. When he first appeared in the world outside Arkansas, The New York Times Magazine ran an odd story about how much he resembled Elvis. I found it to be way spooky. He does look like Elvis. He wears the same size 13 shoes. He has a penchant for trashy women which appeals to some of his constituency and which he orchestrates as part of his charm and charisma. And he married an out-of-town woman, which he saw as moving upscale into the world beyond Hope and Memphis and Little Rock. It caused some resentment among his own; as the Southern Gentlemen would sing it, he drifted too far from the shore.

When I worked in the South they used to say about Elvis, “He never should have married that Yankee woman.” Caused him to want to rise above himself and cursed him to chase it back throughout his life in Graceland’s Jungle Room with any woman on hand. But Elvis would go home too and sing Gospel - beautiful, simple and utterly sincere, as none other could, to the very end of his life. When I left the South they started saying the same thing about Bill Clinton: “He never should have married that Yankee woman.”

For some things there is no explanation. Perhaps Elvis was America’s Vishnu; emanating in part or in whole elsewhere in space and in time – with Michael Jackson, with Eminem, with the Deathless Child of Enlightenment wherever that entity would awakened in the world. After his first popularity had passed (my mother and father wouldn’t allow my sister and I to watch on The Ed Sullivan Show - it was considered too scandalous – lucky for You Tube we can see it today) he began to think of himself as transcendent. Like when he started wearing the white god outfit in his Vegas act. Then letting the crowd at his feet touch his garments. And like many other minor deities and artists before him, he descending into sadness, drug addiction and confusion when the spirit abandoned.

The curse of celebrity took him. But it was not an addiction to the drugs and the women which brought him down. It was an addiction to himself. He’d come to see himself as a god-king, and when people called him the King, he’d scold them and remind them onstage that Jesus Christ was the King. But then he dreamed too that he was Jesus.

Celebrity is a killer. When The Beatles first played large stadiums it made John Lennon nervous. The tens of thousands of teens screaming and crying hysterically, some taken out in a trance in ambulances. And it gave him the creeps that they rolled in the sick and the crippled to the front rows as if The Beatles were healers.

It is not only pop stars who fall victim to it. Politicians, religious figures, even scientists do. It is a kind of persona madness; a conviction that one’s public role in the world becomes the true self. The adoration of the hordes becomes a personal conviction: I must be a god king if all these millions think I am. It is a core theme of some of Rudyard Kipling’s and Joseph Conrad’s best work, perhaps because the Victorians were most susceptible to it.

Even Einstein suffered from it, possibly more than most. He adopted some of the most tragically misguided ideas of the century; the passing fancies and affectations of Europe’s avant garde, such as world socialism, after he’d become famous and sought after. He even invited Freud to join him as kind of avatar on the world stage, but Freud had the better sense. But no matter what Einstein proposed, including the building and use of nuclear weapons for warfare (“my biggest mistake,” he later demurred) the Eloi of the governing classes, which held him in awe, were certain to adopt it.

I was at the first Clinton inauguration on assignment. At Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, a man was reciting the Baghavad Gita and every time he got to the name Lord Krishna, he substituted Bill Clinton in its place. And Elvis was there of course, as Clinton promoted an image of himself as Elvis and his FBI code name encryption was Elvis. An Elvis Impersonator marched in his inaugural parade.

Clinton had forgotten his own Southern Baptist roots or maybe he felt he had outgrown them. Any sincere and earthy Pentacostalist preacher from Memphis or beyond would have told him that it’s not good to mess with the dead. It’ll come back on you.

Clinton’s new Popular Front this week had some good commentary. I read in The Huffington Post that he’s sick of “ . . . Karl Rove’s bullshit.” So am I. A good number of us have been sick of it for six years. So where has this guy been? And now he’s speaking out against torture. Now that the crisis has passed. Why did he wait to resist until the crisis had all but passed? The only Dems we’ve been hearing in opposition these long six years have been Robert C. Byrd, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Jim Webb of Virginia.

Now that the country has been shamed and disgraced by practices abhorrent to every wave of America from Jefferson to Eisenhower, he speaks out. Why should we listen now? Till now only John McCain has been able to carry influence in opposition to this President. The Democrats have either acquiesced to him or appeased him, including at the very top of the list, the Senator from New York, that Bible thumpin’, flag lovin’ born-again Warrior Princess, Hillary Clinton.

The few who have spoken out clearly have been marginalized by the big bucks Nantucket Democrats who get their news from The New Yorker. Why does he speak out now? Because the many Bill Clinton appearances this Fall, coordinated with a full blog roll on the internet by Hillary apparatchiks, along with the rumor last week that Clinton Democrat Terry McAuliffe (“Terry McAuliffe?,” commented Marcos of the Daily Kos) had been hired by Senator Clinton for her Presidential shot next year, are a coordinated effort to begin Senator Clinton’s rise to the Presidential race in 2008. McAuliffe said he would raise 100 million dollars to that effort and he let it leak to the press on Capitol Hill.

No doubt he can. It should be considered scandalous to exploit an issue like torture or Karl Rove’s bullshit for political advantage, but we have passed that marker long ago. Nothing is scandalous to these people. Everything is marketing.

It seems to be backfiring. On the Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace this morning Clinton appeared to unravel. He went on the show to talk about his Global Initiative and was irked when Wallace asked him why he hadn’t “put bin Laden and al-Qaeda out of business.” Then he attacked Wallace, insinuating that he was one of Fox’s conservative hack commentators, but Wallace has generally been free of that and has been respected in the profession for 30 years. It seems a fair question. I’d like to know.

Clinton wanted to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative, which is kind of his own UN, but more hip. He wanted to talk about how his cool friend, Richard Branson, who made Virgin Express airlines and those trendy TV shows where they jump out of airplanes into snake pits or something is going to help stop global warming by giving Clinton a billion dollars.

Giving away a billion dollars is getting to be a pretty cool thing. Everybody Bill Clinton knows now since he became President practically has that much money. But, somebody tell these guys: Cool is passé. It has been now for a full generation. It was Kurt Cobain, the innocent waif and god-king of a whole generation since which began with his anthem: “I’d rather be dead than cool.”

Is there any way that someone like Bill Clinton can be led to understand that there is something preposterous about him thinking that he is the man at the Center of the World, and that his trendy, but aging and post-seasonal friends can start their own UN? Can someone tell him that he can’t stop global warming or cure AIDS because he gets Mick Jagger to hang out with him?(Mick Jagger?)

Bush’s ratings have gone up considerable in the past two weeks. My own theory is that a misconceived quote by a careless Pope with a Medievalist bent had an unintended, pneumonic, feeling effect and as it appeared to offend Muslims, likewise it appeared to millions of others who instinctively trust in his traditional authority to have been a Bush endorsement. I think the new Clinton presence has helped Bush as well. Mainstream Democrats seem unable to understand this simple logic of politics; a dollar for Clinton is a vote for Bush.

Bill Clinton was President in a time of soaring hopes and rising economy. Half of the country was invested in the stock market. In this America everyone was going to be rich. It was a grand illusion, but not an unfair one. When the sun shines bright on people they feel that Jesus loves them.

But the country changed on 9/11. And the century changed and the millennium changed. The attitudes of the Clinton period were perhaps right for that time. But they are not right for this time. The True Believers in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party are the last to know.

History will pass them by. Charles Baxter today in The New York Times gives a more relevant picture. In reporting on Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, he gives a sense of the new century.

The campaign is in crisis mode, he writes. The race is between Michele Bachmann, the Republican, and Patty Wetterling, the Democrat, and it reveals a Bush-era national trend now visible locally. In Minnesota’s Sixth District, he writes, liberalism is the new conservatism. Baxter describes the Republicans as in a state of constant crisis, and “crisis rhetoric, which is inherently radical rather than conservative, dissolves social stability.”

The Democrat, on the other hand, is “tame and pleasant and sensible” — conservative, that is. In the Democrat’s view “ . . . we are not in the end times but in a stable world shaped by well-financed public education, Social Security, benefits for veterans, a decent respect for the opinions of others, a reluctance to engage in foreign adventures, and balanced budgets.”

Lake Wobegon in this day is the avant garde. These attitudes can be seen growing in many places in America. But as the Democrats have moved beyond Apocalypse and are bringing stability to the heartland in many places, they keep getting dragged back by the Second Millennium Clintons.

Baxter’s piece is prescient and shows the Democrats in a position to make progress in the country by accentuating the solid values of Lake Wobegon. But not if they can’t get past the Clintons.

This is what Tibetans do. When someone dies, they put a little boat a stream and light a candle in it. As the boat goes down the stream, the candle burns, and when the candle is out, the loved ones left behind go on with their life. But all things die and nothing dies – the day passes on to a death and so does the millennium. Tibetans make no distinction. They likewise let go of these and avoid attachment, which locks them into a figment of their imagination, and let go of the past as they let go of mother’s hand.

The Democrats should put a candle in the boat – two candles – and send it down the river. And go forth into the world in peace and good hope with new eyes and new ideas.

Suddenly a Southern General: Wes Clark Is The Last Best Hope for the Democratic Party

by Bernie Quigley - for WesPAC, 9/17/2006

When Wesley Clark arrived in Concord, New Hampshire, to sign the book and officially enter the New Hampshire primary, there were few on hand to greet him. But it was a wonder that anyone was there at all.

Silver-haired Southern Generals had less than made their mark here in New England’s north country where New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine blend into their own distinct and independent-minded province.

We get Willy Nelson today in Bernie’s TV ads. Everyone calls Vermont’s Senate candidate Bernie Sanders by his first name as he is one of us. (I think Bernie’s got it. At the Tunbridge farm fair in Vermont yesterday, I saw hundreds of people wearing Bernie stickers and only one wearing a Tarrant sticker and that was Tarrant.) And in truth, Willy seems more likely to belong here. But a Southern General? As time passed us by like a river which brought us here then headed South, then Southwest and West and across the Pacific on its auspicious American journey, we’d all but forgotten our soldiers.

Joshua Chamberlain, who with a small band of Down Easters, out of ammo and alone at the peak of Cemetery Ridge, turned a page of world history, but is forgotten today in Maine and even despised. And Robert Gould Shaw, buried on the battlefield with his African-American men at the request of his Boston Blue-Blood father, is passed unnoticed by tourists and New England visitors alike on their way to the Duck Pond and the Make Way for Ducklings statuary in Boston Common.

I’ll say this bluntly: If you were raised in New England at the end of World War II you would be taught that soldiers are bad (and Southern Generals the worst of all). Necessary sometimes, but not something you would aspire to be yourself. That would be mostly for guys from Texas. Or Arkansas.

All of our uncles and family people had served – in Mark Clark’s army in southern Europe, in General Patton’s tank corp – but in New England, the season had changed.

Some generational theorists suggest it changed at a very specific moment at the Newport Folk Festival about two minutes away from my high school, when the howling lament of the young Triskster and generational waif, Bob Dylan, traveled his lonesome road from Minnesota’s border land wilderness to our little town. His first voice, raw and apocalyptic, would ring of Changing Times and echo the sentiments of John F. Kennedy’s speech writer, Ted Sorensen, particularly the great speech about the “new man of the Sixties,” Kennedy gave in Los Angeles when he accepted the Democratic nomination. It would electrify a new generation.

Kennedy was dead before that age could awaken and the mood darkened with his assassination. A different age would open when our eloquent and volatile Magical Animal changed from a wooden guitar to one electric at Newport. A year or two later when my only high school friend to willingly enter military service was killed in Vietnam, his death was marked only by the aging; veterans of the Legion Hall and the generous town people of the Lion’s Club.

It was not a good season for war. We’d seen too much of it. Raymond Aaron had called it a century of Total War. And with the advent of nuclear weapons, the world had changed intrinsically. The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli made the claim that the human psyche itself had changed; that is had been shattered and maybe destroyed.

But there was innocence to our American endeavors. French liberated by American soldiers at Normandy commented on how free and almost childlike our soldiers were. Andre Malraux, who admired our newness in the world, once said we were the first people to become first in the world without wanting to be. We’d been cast there by fate and circumstances, and the elegance, élan and style – Norman Mailer called it “animal grace” – of Jack Kennedy and his astonishing wife Jackie (who’d read Malraux and brought him to the White House) brought an awakening to the world and a turning of the page in history.

Later, when I served in northern Thailand, I noticed that the shops and stalls in the marketplace all featured pictures of the King of Thailand, the Queen, and JFK. I thought they might be trying to appeal to G.I.s sent to war in Vietnam. But a friend in the Foreign Service said it was the same in huts and villages throughout Africa. Which was a little mystifying to us in New England. Our families knew his families back to Ireland. He was born in our neighborhood and he married Jackie in my high school parish church.

Something left us when he was assassinated. Something from which we have not yet fully recovered.

You can always tell the character of a good man by the wife he gets. Nancy Reagan was smarter than Ronald Reagan and insiders say she was responsible for his brilliant second-term initiatives in Reykjavik (at which Gorbachev said Reagan was incoherent). Likewise, Jackie’s world was deeper and broader than Jack’s and she brought to the White House a fullness we had not seen before nor since. It was that caliber of character and intelligence which first began to ascend again in Concord when Wes Clark first came to New Hampshire.

When General Clark signed the book in Concord, it was crystal clear who was in charge of this country. War fever had gripped the country and the populist press marshaled it relentlessly, dominating and territorializing the political scene. At a brief news conference General Clark asked the reporters present if they wanted to hear his ideas on the war on terrorism. It was a brilliant and practical plan about inviting the Saudis to engage in the war as much was (and is) at stake for them. But the press didn’t seem particularly interested.

General Clark brought thoughtful consideration and in depth analysis to the political condition. To us biased New Englanders, it was a little surprising for an army General, even for one who had served as NATO chief and brought peace to Kosovo. One of the most striking moments came a month or so later at a house party in Concord. At the end of the informal gathering, one of the reporters present asked General Clark a question and it just came naturally to him to create an analogy to a similar historical situation which occurred several hundred years before in Europe. Clark explained the situation in terms of historical dynamics, in the same way that Kennedy advisors and supporters Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith or Henry Steele Commager might have. One of the reporters broke out laughing, from joy and surprise. He’d not, in our time, seen this in a politician.

President Bush, who rises to a populist drumbeat and acts “from the gut”as he likes to say, has stated in personal interviews how he found thoughtful discussion in his classical Yankee education at Andover, Yale and Harvard to be contemptible. He finds it pretentious. This confuses us New Englanders, because he seems to hate us, even the 99% of us who went to ordinary schools. Yet to us up here it is clear that this Connecticut-born President is Yankee though and through and the only thing Southern or Texan about him is his desire to be one. He brings to mind Eudora Welty’s cat that had kittens in an oven and called them biscuits.

It works for him in the populist press, but this is not a way to solve problems.

As bad as this President is, for Democrats, the war on Iraq and the desire to do the right thing after 9/11 make him hard to counter. Perhaps because the shadow of JFK’s death still afflicts Democrats, particularly those of us from the Northeast, and when we come forth we come forth to some degree out of shadow, and we bring with us vengeance and a sword. It alienates mainstream America which does not want to be disloyal at a critical time.

It seems almost impossible today for anyone but Senator John McCain to question the administration as it presses on with the most disgraceful policies, advancing torture and interrogation methods more suited to the Viet Cong than Jack Kennedy’s America (or Telford Taylor’s, for that matter, or Dwight Eisenhower’s). Among the Democrats, only Wesley Clark seems to be able to manage to get through without shrillness and dark rhetoric. Perhaps because he is a soldier through and through. Perhaps because he is a warrior/scholar, like the Man in the Center of Lao Tsu’s and Sun Tsu’s ancient vision of wisdom guiding action. I think it is that it just comes naturally to him to find decency in himself and a positive outlook no matter what the circumstances; that he can find that life force whole and within himself, which was unique to JFK as well.

It is possible today to go back on You Tube and other internet venues and hear Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sing at Newport in 1964 and hear Jack Kennedy speak in Boston and Washington. It provides a nice documentary picture – a snapshot of the moment’s intangibles that you can’t quite describe in words. It is a worthwhile exercise to go back and listen to the Kennedy press conferences, not so much for the President’s message, but to observe the complexity of the reporter’s questions and the President’s answers. The complexity of a post-war world of common people. And compare to the simplicity of “gut reaction” press and politics of today.

One of the wisest and most thoughtful observations General Clark made was on his last visit here to New Hamshire at the end of the primary. Those of us who had volunteered for him at the beginning were called to come again to Concord on the morning John Kerry announced his Vice President. We thought it would be Wes Clark, but on the radio on the way down, we learned it was to be John Edwards. The primary had passed, and as it was at the beginning, again there were few in attendance. General Clark encouraged us to go out and work for Kerry and Edwards in this most critical election.

And this is what he said to us: “The Bush administration does not really represent the will of the American people. But if he is reelected, in five years it will.”

It was a chilling though and a lucid observation of cultural passages as they trail through political opinion and processes.

It came to mind yesterday morning reading about President Bush’s attempt to “redefine” treatment of prisoners and pass legislation that would create special military tribunals to try terrorist suspects and continue secret interrogations in clandestine prisons abroad.

Colin Powell said, in support of Senator McCain, “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

The world at large and here at home, for these comments reflect us as well, as we have come to doubt our own moral basis. And if this is what we have become, we have failed ourselves and failed our Republic.

Powell’s comments were amplified as the night before we had watched the terrific and instructional movie Black Hawk Down, about American soldiers on a UN mission to Mogadishu; humiliated, broken and shot to bloody pieces. It was the same Mogadishu where my state department friend had seen pictures of Jack and Jackie Kennedy in huts and shops 30 years before.

From then to now a process can be seen; one of retreat, one of arrogance, one of incompetence and one of hubris. The Somalian tragedy in hindsight began to look like Khartoum as it was to the Brits; the end of a power arc in world history which left Victoria’s Imperial England running in naked terror from the end of a spear. Jack Kennedy carried a flame cupped in his hands to these same places where we were welcomed, trusted and cheered.

Today the path seems open to McCain, who wants the Presidency badly. And that is good for the country as it will repudiate the Republicans who have brought us shame and disgrace at home and suffering abroad. But if generational theory is correct, and in hindsight it always has been, the thing that is supposed to happen at the critical turning point never does and we get something else entirely different and unexpected instead.

We are at such a critical historical juncture now. In times like this, just when we go looking for the new Eisenhower, we get Jack Kennedy instead; just when we go looking for the new John Wayne instead we get Luke Skywalker; just when we hope to see the new Pope John Paul appear among us, we get instead the Dalai Lama. It is then that the least expected happens. It is then that a lone, undernourished troubadour with a Biblical bent and the fire of free youth will change the world overnight simply by putting aside a wooden guitar for an electric one, and a whole new generation of men will put down their swords and grow their beards. It appears as an anomaly and it comes in the night like something out of Revelation; suddenly a Strong Man; suddenly Woodstock; suddenly a Hollywood actor turned politician; suddenly a Georgia Sunday School teacher and peanut farmer turned President; suddenly a Southern General. And everything moves forward from that moment, and everything which came before is suddenly forgotten.