Third Party Coming

by Bernie Quigley, for The Free Market News Network, 6/19/06

I ran into something quite remarkable the other day. A column from Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan suggesting a third party is about to hatch in our country. “Something's happening,” she wrote. “I have a feeling we're at some new beginning, that a big breakup's coming, and that though it isn't and will not be immediately apparent, we'll someday look back on this era as the time when a shift began.”

All her adult life, she said, people have been saying that the two-party system is ending, that the Democrats' and Republicans' control of political power in America is winding down. According to the traditional critique, the two parties no longer offer the people the choice they want and deserve. Sometimes it's said they are too much alike--Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Sometimes it's said they're too polarizing--too red and too blue for a nation in which many see things through purple glasses.

What is interesting is that I found this article reprinted at a discussion forum of a political web site established by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of the book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. Just after the millennium, the authors say, America will enter a new era that will culminate with a crisis comparable to the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. The survival of the nation will almost certainly be at stake.

Then at the same time I found another story about Mike Bloomberg, the highly regarded Republican major of New York, who might be thinking about running for President.

Bloomberg said he was too liberal for Republicans and too conservative for Democrats. Then he added, "Running as an independent candidate would be a daunting thing.”

When Alan Greenspan left office recently he made a prediction that a third party candidate would raise a challenge in either the 2008 race or the 2012 race. Now two other very prominent Republicans are making the same suggestion.

It is high time, and it may be destiny. The American political condition is rotten to the core and so are the mainstream public air waves. We have been six years in crisis and things seem about to get worse. The Democrats blame the Republicans for our recent catastrophes but for the main, they offer little more than finger pointing and biting criticism. Maybe it is not the Republicans fault. Maybe what we are seeing is an organic failure of the political process and a complete meltdown of Alexander Hamilton’s vision of federalism. Intelligence preceding 9/11 was a failure of federalism. The response to 9/11 was a failure of federalism. The Katrina recovery was a failure of federalism. The conception and execution of the invasion of Iraq was a complete failure of federalism.

In this environment, if the economy turns, the ship of state could entirely break up on the rocks.

These failures have occurred because of people hired to serve and give advice in government and in secondary establishments like the press. We have reached a level of incompetence not seen in government in our time.

Pundits, some of whom were the original neocon enablers, have recently compared the Bush Presidency with the Jacksonian period, when the newly empowered Southern states to the west flaunted a new populism in the face of the Whigs in the Northeast, driving them to extremes. It is an appropriate analogy. And it should be remembered that the Whigs, who bore a close similarity to the passive and effete mainstream Democrats today, were driven out of business. But in the 19^th century a new party rose like a Phoenix. We see that potential today as well.

That challenge could come from the division of an existing party as it did back in the mid 1800s with the rise of Lincoln and the Republicans, and there is evidence that new directions and strengths are building now in the Democratic Party. The Democrats are showing new potential with candidates like Virginia governor Mark Warner, General Wesley Clark, and Jim Webb, who recently won a primary race for Senate in Virginia. But none of these figures are conventional Democrats. Webb was a Republican and served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and only recently turned back to the Democrats in opposition to the incompetence and corruption of the Republican Party. General Clark likewise only entered politics in opposition to the crisis in government brought about by the Bush Administration’s incursion into Iraq. And Mark Warner is described in a prominent magazine article as the antithesis of his party; the anti-Hillary.

But will this new path gel with the Democrats? Daily we hear the most random ideas from them and a constant falling back on the old ways. And did somebody say Joe Biden? Didn’t I already not vote for him when he wanted to run for President 20 years ago? The Democrats fate could well be that of the Whigs.

A few weeks ago Dick Meyer of CBS News’ online journal outlined a nuts and bolts strategy that Bloomberg, running with General Anthony Zinni, could use to capture the White House and deliver a score of Senate seats in a new Independent Party. Support for these ideas, he said, as judged by e-mails, clicks and blog links, was overwhelming. He recently proposed a bi-partisan cabinet for a new Independent Party featuring Warren Rudman as Attorney General, Sam Nunn as Director of National Intelligence, Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, as Secretary of State.

“The Perot experience seemed to put an end to third-party fever,” wrote Noonan. “But I think it's coming back, I think it's going to grow, and I think the force behind it is unique in our history. This week there was a small boomlet of talk about a new internet entity called Unity '08--a small collection of party veterans including moderate Democrats (former Carter aide Hamilton Jordan) and liberal-leaning Republicans (former Ford hand Doug Bailey) trying to join together with college students and broaden the options in the 2008 election. In terms of composition, Unity seems like the Concord Coalition, the bipartisan group (Warren Rudman, Bob Kerrey) that warns against high spending and deficits.”

Unity, says Noonan, seem to address America's growing desire for more political options.

A third party today will only be successful if it galvanizes a new generation in American politics. That is what the Strauss and Howe book is about; ideas bonding generationally, forming an engine of history. We are at the turn of the millennium, and the Millennial Generation will bring us forward.

There is new evidence of that generation rising in the blog culture. As in the 1830s, they form their own news outlets and go their own way, abandoning in total a mainstream press mired in mediocrity, cronyism and corruption. Just this past week at the Yearly Kos event in Los Vegas, this generation reached a milestone. The Yearly Kos was a Who’s Who of new Democrats, featuring Warner and Clark, and entirely leaving behind the “machine politicians,” most notably, John Kerry and Senator Clinton (who, in spite of her $20 million bank roll from mainstream Democrats, gets a 0% approval rating in a recent Daily Kos survey).

The Strauss and Howe’s theory is wise and based on common sense. The old form their own orthodoxies and standard practices which become fixed in outmoded systems and invariably collapse. A new generation rises from the ruins and brings in a new civilization.

After Yearly Kos, Markos Moulitsas, first among equals at the Daily Kos, is suddenly sought out. He is quoted now in political perspective articles and appearing on talk shows. Recently, he has been traveling the country pitching his book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. He says he will write another book now about Libertarian Democrats.

What is a Libertarian Democrat? It sounds like a new political party.

Paradigm Change

Jim Webb's great victory in Virginia brings a paradigm change to the Democrats. The race between Webb, the independent Democrat and Miller, the machine politician, is a microcosm of the awakening century. The Democrats are indeed divided, as a snake divides when it sheds its skin. Webb will bring a new populist Democratic conviction in November, bringing in a new generation and a new outlook. This is also the first important race where influence of bloggers was pitted against cash from Establishment Democrats and the bloggers took the day. Jim Webb is Aragorn, bringing the fight forward and restoring integrity and authenticity to the Democrats and to the country.

Born in Texas

by Bernie Quigley

- for WesPAC, 6/12/06

“I am delighted to be here with you this evening because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.” Ann Richards

Could be that we are all destined to be born again as Americans in Texas. Could be that something will happen in Texas to make us different kinds of individuals in the world and a different kind of country. Something from which there will be no going back. Could be that destiny awaits us in Texas. The great visionary Salvador Dali saw a cosmic man-child, Geopoliticus Child, born there in the desert; hatched there, hatched out of a world egg. A new man for a new millennium beholding to none who came before.

Our primary myths arise from Texas. New England was much the same as England after the Revolution. And even when my grandparents arrived here, the mills in Manchester, New Hampshire, were identical to those in Manchester, England, and so were the people and so was the countryside. But Texas is different. Right away you notice it: The sky is big, the desert flat and arid. It does something to you.

The Alamo brings us a more American myth. We began to rise then in conflict with one another in the Mexican War and in the great civil conflict which followed on its heels. And in Texas, lost, gunned down and left for dead, we met our spirit friend. He nurtured us back to life and health. And when we were born again by the Indian healer’s hand we were finally Americans with no thoughts remaining of our European prehistory. Chief Joseph said this spirit would always walk among us, and when we least expected it, it would be there. Like at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee was signing the surrender. He noticed an Indian present, Col. Ely Parker, a Seneca who worked for Ulysses S. Grant. Lee said, “I’m glad to see there is at least one real American here.” The Indian said, “We’re all Americans here.” Europeans have not such friends. No one does.

Six years into the new millennium we sense an awakening. It is appropriate that we sense it in Texas where seven Iraq war veterans are seeking office as Democratic candidates and are rising up in a new beginning, like the six mythical Texas Rangers left for dead in the desert, rising from the dead and born again. It is appropriate as well that General Wesley Clark is speaking on their behalf and on behalf of all veterans and all Democrats in Texas. We are at a cultural turning. The seven Texas Fighting Dems spearhead a new Democratic movement forming across the country. It is bringing a change to the political culture like I have not seen since I watched the Friday Night Fights on TV with my father. Since they asked us weekly on the TV, “Who is that Masked Man?”

I felt a sea change in politics a few months back when reports of the Fighting Dems first began appearing on Wes Clark’s web site. I’d been in the room with General Clark when he signed the book to enter the primary in New Hampshire and I volunteered for him all through his campaign. General Clark brought integrity and character to the Democrats. Frankly, he brought a sense of adulthood, duty and responsibility that somehow had drifted over the generations. Now others, the seven Texans and Iraq war veterans like Eric Massa of New York and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois were bringing the same bright and positive charge to the table. This will awaken in Texas.

It is a trifecta week: three major and formative events are at hand - Jim Webb, the Texas Democratic Convention and the Yearly Kos. Jim Webb, running for Senate in Virginia faces a primary on June 13. He is possibly the most effective public speaker since Malcolm X. He will eat them alive. He will hunt them down and leave them in a pile of spit and bones on the floor. But what I like about him is that his American journey is in one important way the characteristic American journey of our times. It is a path which begins with the Democrats and ends with the Democrats. When institutions he was born into or became part of would take a wrong turn as all public institutions invariably do, he would leave without hesitation and beat his own path. Eventually the vast majority would abandon the institution as well and follow his path. Like 80% of the voters in my old precinct in the hills of North Carolina, he was a Southerner who was born Democrat and switched parties as the country was ramping up to the Reagan period. George Will said in a column about him in The Washington Post, Webb “ says he was ‘pretty much’ a Democrat until President Jimmy Carter ‘pardoned the draft evaders.’” As we approached the day when 49 states would vote for a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, Webb and the vast majority of Americans were again on the same path. He told Will, "I wouldn't shake John Kerry's hand for 20 years," because of Kerry's anti-Vietnam activities, but “I voted for him in 2004.”

This is the pattern of many who are returning to the Democratic Party. Born Democrat in Northern cities and Southern towns, they left the party during the Reagan administration. Now they are coming back. My thought is that they were right to leave then and now they are right to come back. Now is the time for a new turning of the political culture.

The Democratic Party was once the party of the real people of this country. The people who grew soybean and cotton, the people who gathered for barbecue at the Legion Hall, who went to church, listened to Johnny Cash, and served without rumination or discussion when they were called to duty.

Here in Boston, New York and New England, Democrats changed our world, turning Irish, Polish, Jewish, German and other immigrants into full-blown Americans, proud, hard-working and unpretentious. They were people like my father who bought the Boston tabloid every evening on the way home from the factory for the single purpose of checking the Treasury balance – not that they were heavily invested in T bills, but because every day each factory worker would bet on the last three numbers in a factory pool. They sent their champion to Washington in 1961. The very last of these public figures from my old neighborhood, Massachusetts representative Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Mary McGrory, have slipped into history’s shadow lands.

Now they are coming back. Jim Webb is one of them and so is Wesley Clark. Webb is an astonishing individual, well known to all of us who were awake during the war in Vietnam. He is a warrior to the bone who wrote one of the most important novels about Vietnam, Fields of Fire. In his amazing life’s journey he was also Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, but quit his post when they cut the Navy’s funds. He is a man who could sit at the table with Tip O’Neil or John F. Kennedy. And every Fighting Dem is a profile in courage and can do the same. Webb and General Clark speak on their behalf.

From Webb’s political writings, it seems clear that the Dungeon & Dragons Warriors of the White House Cabal which engineered the misbegotten vision of hubris and fantasy play in Iraq, is what led him back to the Democratic Party. Which was a kind of homecoming. On Sept. 4, 2002, he wrote in an article called “Heading for Trouble” in the Washington Post: “American military leaders have been trying to bring a wider focus to the band of neoconservatives that began beating the war drums on Iraq before the dust had even settled on the World Trade Center. Despite the efforts of the neocons to shut them up or to dismiss them as unqualified, these leaders, both active-duty and retired, have been nearly unanimous in their concerns. Is there an absolutely vital national interest that should lead us from containment to unilateral war and a long-term occupation of Iraq? And would such a war and its aftermath actually increase our ability to win the war against international terrorism?”

We heard similar words from General Clark during the New Hampshire primary, while most other Democrats seeking high office supported the neocon agenda. Now they have flipped and are following General Clark’s initiative. But we have lived in crisis for six years now. Corruption in policy making pervades the Administration and decay has reached the base of the spine as even the public air waves are dominated by the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Charles Krauthammer and that tall, blond number who dresses like a transvestite. Americans are beginning to seek authenticity. And that is bringing a fork in the road.

Last week Russ Feingold, Senator from Wisconsin, who was one of the very few Senators to oppose the invasion of Iraq, spoke to us here in New Hampshire and put much of the blame on the Democrats. We have challenged corrupt government only with weakness and timidity. We have sustained mediocrity and corruption by governing passively; hoping it would pass soon and then our turn would come. But with this approach it does not pass; it sustains and builds itself to higher crescendo. As Thomas Mann chronicled the moral decline of the German middle class in his great writings, an attitude of passivity, smugness, affectation and cultural retreat was the hallmark of the rise of fascism in Europe. We in the Land of the Free are following sheepishly in the same dynamic pattern.

Feingold speaks with clarity and authenticity. His integrity has brought him to the top of the youthful and dynamic movement which vents its spirit daily at the Daily Kos and the other blogs.

My thought is that this is the most important of generational movements in America today. It is the fourth post-war generation, the group historians William Strauss and Neil Howe say will begin America’s millennial epic. This generation shares none of the timidity of those on the one hand/on the other hand Democrats. They will run the country for the next 30 years.

Recently, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, who coined the phrase Fighting Dems and has heavily promoted them on his blog, suggested a fork in the road for Democrats. He wrote in an op-ed article in The Washington Post saying that there are now emerging two Democratic Parties; old Democrats, and he mentioned Senator Clinton and John Kerry, and new Democrats (he mentioned Russ Feingold and Mark Warner, who have recently scored one and two in his monthly survey of readers). General Clark also consistency scores high in Daily Kos polls and has since he entered Presidential politics in the last election. Kos has actively promoted the new wing of the Democratic Party, featuring a new Fighting Dem every week.

“Hillary Clinton has a few problems if she wants to secure the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination,” wrote Kos. “She is a leader who fails to lead. She does not appear ‘electable.’ But most of all, Hillary has a Bill Clinton problem. (And no, it's not about that.)”

Hillary Clinton leads her Democratic rivals in the polls and in fundraising, said Kos. Unfortunately, however, the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment -- led by her husband -- that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad.

The Yearly Kos, uniting the netroots this week in Las Vegas, is a Who’s Who of new Democrats, and although Markos does not endorse candidates at the conference, star power participants who are candidates or possibly will be candidates for public office include Mark Warner, Wes Clark and Eric Massa.

This could be a watershed event and such a turn in the culture comes none too soon. Pundits, some of whom were the original neocon enablers, have recently compared the Bush Presidency with the Jacksonian period, when the newly empowered Southern states to the west flaunted a new populism in the face of the Whigs in the Northeast, driving them to extremes. I think it is an appropriate analogy. And it should be remembered that the Whigs, who bore a close similarity to the passive and effete wing of the Democrats today, were driven out of business. But from there a new party rose like a Phoenix. We see that potential today as well. Recently, Alan Greenspan has said that he expects a third party challenge in either the 2008 or the 2012 race as both mainstream parties are at their extreme, leaving the wide middle open to new cultivation. But that challenge could come instead from the division of an existing party as it did back in the mid 1800s with the rise of Lincoln and the Republicans, and there is increasing evidence that it is building now in the Democratic Party.

It should be recalled that when the country desired to be born again in the 1830s it could not rely on the mainstream press, which had succumbed to the same passivity, corruption and ambivalence as the political culture as a whole. So William Lloyd Garrison began a new press, The Liberator, in 1831, and the Gray Champion and Yankee Crusader, Theodore Parker, mounted the podium at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, where his fiery addresses would find their way into Lincoln speeches.

Nature will always find its way in a country with a temperament as free and independent as ours, and this time it is the independent journals and the blogs rising organically into the political culture. Markos is their William Lloyd Garrison.

These events come in a good week. Al-Zarqawi is dead and with Henry W. Paulson heading to the Treasury Department, there are clear suggestions that Rove and his folkloric crew of unenlightened amateurs have been sidelined and the Bush Administration is making attempts to rejoin the world.

But after six years when every utopian, millenialist, religious zealot and political cultist was drawn to his aura, we have to wonder. With what strengths do we approach the new century having let go the reins of the world for six years? When President Jimmy Carter went back to the farm after four years, which had been left in the hands of brother Billy, he found there was little left. Paulson will need strong kung fu to reach over the transom and grab hold the dollar before it sinks into oblivion.

The sudden appearance of competent managers from a mainstream sensibility like Goldman Sachs and the dispersal of ideologues are good for the country. But it may not be good for the President. As he, like myself and 40 million others who rose together in a wave out of WW II, turns 60 in the next few weeks. He has always seemed to dislike his own generation and sometimes to despise it. Indeed, he strangely seems to have no real friends his own age. And he was clearly chosen by an older generation to oppose his own and to do the impossible – to form an alternative path to the inevitable destiny of one generation following the next; to hold back time. The recent suggestion of competence in the White House reveals the able hand of James A. Baker, administrator of extraordinary competence in the Reagan Administration and the Bush family fixer. As the President turns 60, once again, the reins have been taken from him by his family. He cannot feel good about his work in the world to date at a birthday which signals completion and returning. And that cannot be good for the country.

I am not one of the people who hate the President. I have always shared the values and the family culture of the Bushes. And as one born in New England, which often seems hindered in its progress by a wistful yearning for the Old World of England and the Continent, what I like about the Bushes is that they continued their American journey and moved to Texas. Because sometime maybe 30 years after watching the Lone Ranger with my father, I somehow came to understand why he wore a mask. The Texas lawman was left for dead in the desert and was brought back to life by an Indian healer. But he had no memory of his own history; no memory of Boston, England, France, Poland, Russia, Italy or Ireland. He was born again; born American and he had only the Indian to guide him. He had nothing else and was alone in the desert. He was new in the world and free. Free for the first time. We are the Masked Man, our identity incomplete. But free for the first time, born in Texas.

Quigley has an eRadio interview at The Free Market News Network

For you all interested, on Monday, 6/5/06, I should have an eRadio interview posted on The Free Market News Network which kindly publishes my essays. I talk about England's downward spiral as a nation state ("America's Gurkhas"), Fightin' Al Gore's misbegotten, misconceived and imperial vision (invasion of the Holy Roman Empire - Are we ready to take on the Russkie?), the June 13 Yearly Kos as a watershed event for the New Democrats, and thoughts on Fighting Dems, Mark Warner and Wesley Clark. - Quigley

"A policy era of historic proportions."

For fun, here is an old essay I published on August 9, 1997 when Al Gore was Vice President. It came out in The Herald-Sun in Durham, NC, and is about NATO's expansion into Holy Roman Empire, which Gore championed. Essay was titled, "Helms May Carry Peace Mantle on Issue of NATO Expansion." How in the world can China be asked to restore freedom in Tibet when the moment the Soviets drop the curtain in Romania and Bulgania the Americans step in, nukes and all, armed to the teeth?

8/9/97

A few months back, the newspapers published a picture of Jesse Helms at a dinner of some kind, leaning over and conferring with the Dalai Lama. They looked like a couple of old pols from the good old days of the political machine, like-minded and agreeable, conferring on patronage or intra-party politics. (Reader: Tibetan Buddhists remember their friends from when they were alone in the world: The Three Celestial Ones back then were Helms, Claiborne Pell and Pat Moynihan.)

Readers nationwide must have wondered what the two men had in common besides a hatred of the Reds who conquered and occupied Tibet. I know I did. I didn't know Helms was so fond of Foreigners.

Although I have long admired the Dalai Lama for the peaceful approach to political problems that won him the Nobel Peace Prize, I have never quite thought of Helms as a peace monger. If anything, Bill Clinton has been tagged as the peacenik, at least by association, and in his youth he actively supported the peace movement during the war in Vietnam.

Now we have Helms sitting side by side with a Tibetan lama who more than anyone living in the world today deserves to be called a Man of Peace.

Perhaps it is not just political expediency. And perhaps something of the man of peace is beginning to rub off on the North Carolina senator. Recently Helms, along with 19 of his Senate colleagues, sent a letter to President Clinton asking him to clarify his posiiton on his proposal to expand the NATO alliance to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

The senators wrote that they did not want to prejudge the merits of any potential new member of NATO or to express support or opposition to Clinton's proposal. They wanted to preview those matters that will be most contentious as the Senate debates NATO expansion.

The considerate tone of the letter and the thoughtful nature of the questions approach what the Dalai Lama and his fellow Tibetan Buddhists would call "mindful." This time, when the question is asked, "Who is on the side of peace?" we may be looking at Helms and company.

Consider the contents of the senators' letter. The first question it asks is, What is the military threat that NATO expansion is desinged to counter? It refers to the Communist threat to Europe at the end of World War II, when Europe was weak and beaten.

Now the Communist threat is gone, the Russians have established rudimentary democratic measures and embraced Western economic policies. (Reader: This in 1997. Alors, how times change.) Traditionally, when a war is over, the winning side demobilizes and sends its soldiers home to enjoy the peace and the war tax is repealed. Why is NATO expanding?

The letter states that under the new NATO agreement U.S. troops will be committed to respond to conflicts involving any of the new member nations of Central Europe. It asks, "Is a border 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?"

The letter points out that the nations of Central Europe have a long history of border, ethnic, nationalist and religious disputes: "What would be the impact of extending coverage of the U.S. nuclear umbrella to them?" the letter states.

Another good question as it brings into the picture the terrible slaughter that has recently ended in Bosnia with a tenuous peace agreement.

(skip) . . .

And remember Quemoy and Matsu, the tiny islands in the Far East that China began shelling in a territorial dispute in 1954? The State Department and the military chiefs recommended to President Eisenhower the aggressive use of atom bombs against China to settle the "horrible business." Is Bill Clinton (and Vice President Al Gore, who vigourously endorsed this policy) recommending the same kind of strategy in Eastern Europe? Does a new NATO agreement damand such a strategy?

Finally, the senators ask if we are not creating an incentive for Moscow to withhold its support for further strategic arms reduction and perhaps even develop an early first use nuclear policy. At the moment, the letter points out, the current leadership inRussia is becoming reconcield to the likelihood of NATO expansion. But what of tomorrow's Russian leaders? (Reader: Again . . . how times change. Russian military spending will reach 800 million next year, growing in direct proportion to the decline of democratic sensibilities.)

These are all good questions. NATO is, after all, a war machine. In fact, it is a World War Machine which guarantees that any squabble among any of the traditionally contentious European and Central European peoples immediately escalates into a global conflict. By expanding NATO and arming its new members "to the teeth" as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl put it . . . advances the possibility of conflict.

Has the karma wheel turned, making Clinton (and Gore) - the peace advocate of the 1960s - and his foreign policy establishment the insidious aggressor and the instigator of war? It wouldn't be the first time such a turnaround has come about.

Perhaps the greatest was the change from Gen. Eisenhower to President Eisenhower. When the greatest general since Grant and Lee, the man who won the war against German fascism, left the presidency, he called the country to vigilance.

In the councils of government we should guard, said Eisenhower, against acquisition of unwarranted influence, "whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist, he said.

Take nother for granted, Eisenhower warned in his farewell address to the nation. It is perhaps fitting that Susan Eisenhower, his granddaughter, calling the policy "a policy error of historic proportions" is leading the fight against NATO expansion.

America’s Gurkhas

by Bernie Quigley - to The Free Market News Network, 5/27/06

As American military bases begin to grow in Bulgaria and Romania lets recall the words of America’s greatest ambassador, George Kennan, that this policy initiative was “a mistake of historic proportions,” pronounced while Secretary of State Madeline Albright danced and laughed the night away with a flower in her mouth. Worth recalling that no one pushed this policy more vigorously than Al Gore as Vice President.

One can begin to see just why China and Russia go after their near frontiers as vigorously as John F. Kennedy went after the Soviet missiles in Cuba. The Berlin Wall had barely fallen when 90 U.S. Senators rushed to send American bases to Russia’s border with a new line of nukes.

This week the hysterical chorus of the mainstream press loves Al Gore again because of his environmental views; this the same Al Gore who after writing Earth in the Balance signed papers to build a million or so Buicks in China. I would like to echo Kennan’s sentiments as he is not here to do so. John Kenneth Galbraith agreed and so did every other great foreign policy mind at a time of petty governance. And then we had allies and friends in the world and influence. Now we do not. Now we do not even have an army to face down the Russkie, “toe-to-toe,” as Slim Pickens put it in Dr. Strangelove, as he rode a thermo-nuke out of the bomb bay of a B-52 like Pecos Bill riding the cyclone

In this policy design there are nuclear policies and defense priorities. At the time the 90 Senators voted, only Jesse Helms raised the voice of concern. As the Soviet curtain fell, America was on the rise with Rottweilers in the back yard, Glock 9s under the driver’s seat and a millennialist vision of the Dow at 35,000, Starbucks in Red Square & Jesus too. Do they love Al Gore because they are all 55 to 60 years old and can think of nothing new; can tolerate nothing new and so recall all things past which will come again if only in their dreams? This is the Viagra generation, spiraling downward in panic and impotence. In youth, a generation in contempt of the old; in old age afraid of the young.

Post Cold War, the new idea of those at State and at the Pentagon (while they were still in early planning to jump start the new millennium with the invasion of Iraq) was to drop American soldiers down from Germany to permanent bases in more relevant positions of the New American Empire. This week the new Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert visited the White House, as one commentator said, for the confirmation of his coronation. That is exactly it. Ehud Olmert: He the King of Greater Israel (and we, His Majesty's colonial and provincial servants). Meanwhile, Australia’s John Howard, who had the misfortune to be in Washington at about the same time, was given gruff back door treatment.

We are now an Israeli-based society as Tom DeLay and the Christian Zionists have seen it in cosmic prophecy and as his NEOCON visionaries have explained it to him. (Those of us who get our religion from Lost and Neil Young and The Church of Johnny Cash and Mother Earth are only and obscure, confused and esoteric interior cult.) In this new Empire, Australia, like England, is hardly a secondary American tribe. Australia and England are now America’s Brigade of Gurkhas, noble warriors committed to defense of the foreign Fatherland whenever and wherever they are called to duty (but tribal and regressive . . . don't use the good silver.).

But has anyone noticed a surprising and sudden strain of competence in the current White House . . . a centrist immigration policy which alienates Richard Viguerie and the Christian Right; Laura Bush dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to denounce the Constitutional Amendment for gay marriage; Blair and Bush admitting errors in Iraq? It has to be coming from family fixer, James A. Baker, most competent of administrators from the Reagan era, who is now once again lending a hand to miscreant son. Rove and the current White House incumbents are incapable of this kind of competence. Baker will be needed. Coming up the Democrats have Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Wes Clark and seven pit bulls, the Fighting Dems of Texas. A formidable team is assembling. For the sake of our country I am glad Baker is there.

Key to any rising Democrat today is pragmatic intelligence and authenticity. In a time of crisis people seek authenticity. They need to get to the core of problems and find individuals with the character and solutions to solve them. This is a change from “issues” oriented politics. We are even seeing up here in the mountains of New England a move to authenticity. In Vermont, the fiery Independent Bernie Sanders and the Republican General Martha Rainville are both authentic individuals but are as different as day and night in their political orientation. Yet both are likely to win their upcoming races.

General Clark as bought a higher level of leadership to the Democrats and to the country and he has raised the standard of political dialog, bringing courtesy and respect into the arena. He also binds a new generation of under-25s to war veterans, helping to develop a new attitude in this country toward the armed forces; an attitude toward duty, dignity and responsibility which we have not seen in decades. It speaks to a new age, a new generation and a new turning of the political culture. It is a new beginning.

Not that it is any of my business, but I guess I might have wanted to ask Vice President Gore, “Does every Chinese need a Buick?” In an age of environmental concerns in which Al Gore claims relevance as a swami, that would be 1,313,973,713 more Buicks in the world. And a Harley and a Ski-Doo and a second house on Lake Michigan? Do they still even have Buicks?

Sounds stupid and regressive, but a thought which might have come from the remarkable crowd I used to have breakfast with at DuBrow’s Cafeteria on 7th Avenue in New York City before it was called Avenue of the Americas. Old Jews who spoke Russian, Yiddish, English, Hebrew and German all in a sentence. Men of sense and sensibility and passion and vast experience. Ed Koch, who as mayor of New York at the time, came back from a visit to China with visions of thousands of bike riders pouring like a river over the Brooklyn Bridge in place of cars. But that was in days when New York City people including myself felt themselves unique in the world and a tribe apart and would never have dreamed of electing someone as their Senator who was not one of their own.

Where is Bernie?

As American military bases begin to grow in Bulgaria and Romania lets recall the words of America’s greatest ambassador, George Kennan, that this policy initiative was “a mistake of historic proportion” (while Madeline Albright danced with a flower in her mouth). Worth recalling that no one pushed this policy more vigorously than Al Gore as Vice President. One can begin to see just why China and Russia go after their near frontiers. The wall had barely fallen when 90 U.S. senators rushed to send American bases to the Holy Roman Empire. This week the hysterical chorus of the daily press loves Al Gore again because of his environment views; this the same Al Gore who after writing Earth in the Balance signed papers to build a million or so Buicks in China. (Where is what we gentile used to call in New York the Good Jew? He of the remarkable crowd at DuBrow’s cafeteria on 40 St. speaking Russian, Yiddish, English, Hebrew, German, all in a sentence at breakfast? Men of sense and sensibility and passion and vast experience. He would always come to save us. Where is a great man of sense and character like Ed Koch who as mayor of New York came back from China with visions of bike riders in New York City, in the days when New York City people including myself felt themselves a tribe apart and formidable and would never dream of electing for their Senator an outsider - a Midwestern generational cult figure to vote in Senate as one of their own.) I would like to echo Kennan’s sentiments as he is not here to do so; John Kenneth Galbraith agreed and so did every great mind at a time of petty governance. And then we had allies and friends in the world & influence. Now we do not. Now we do not even have an army to face down the Holy Roman Empire. In this design there are nuclear policies. At the time the 90 Senators voted, only Jesse Helms raised the voice of concern. America was on the rise with Rottweilers in the back yard, Glock 9s under the driver’s seat and a millennialist vision of the Dow at 35k, Starbucks in Red Square & Jesus too . . . do they love Al Gore because they are all 55 to 60 years old and can think of nothing new; can tolerate nothing new and so recall all things past which will come again if only in their dreams? This is the Viagra syndrome; spiraling downward in panic - in youth afraid of the old; in old age afraid of the young. Where is the Good Jew? He always comes and saves us. Where is Bernie Sanders? Where is Bernie?

The Da Vinci Code

5/22/06 from Quigley in Exile

We enjoyed The DaVinci Code movie yesterday. What is fascinating is the "return to earth" aspect. We return from space and land in the 12th century. This movie is very like "first encournters" with space aliens in '50s movies - they are terrifying and frightening - like the mad monk of Opus Dei. But as space contained riddles to enlightenment, so now does the Earth and its Church, the Roman Church of the 12th Century. Since 9/11 people have greater dreams of the Pope - in one such dream the Pope gave a woman gold coins, while a contemporary "suitor" gave her chocolate coins covered with gold paper - false coins. Contemporary dreams parrallel this; as Dreamers dreamed of UFOs n the '50s and '60s, today they dream of "travelling" in the 12th century & into the earth. The Earth is giving birth again to the Human condition. Jedi Knights are astral versions of Knights Templar & today almost half the books on the NYTs best seller lists are about Templars. Parrallel event is the ascention of Pope Benedict. I find him a man of character & of the old ways. As early UFO dreams portended visions or an ascending space age, this movie portends a renewal of the Old Ways of the Catholic and Orthodox churches of Europe. The dual triangles represent a yin and yang vision as the movie presents it, but in reference to the I.M. Pei triangles in the courtyand of the Louvre, the question should be not that they exist, but why is one big and one little? What is their nature? Why is one underground and one above ground? What are their qualities? If they are not identical as in the tai chi symbol, the one dominates or "territorializs" they other, and gives a clue as to the nature of the age we are in and the age ahead. In the previous age, from the time of Christ to the 14oos, the yin and yang was represented by the image of Madonna and Child motif. It was a yin age and the Mother figure ascended and dominated the yang figure, the Baby Jesus. The ultimate yin symbol of this is down the road a few blocks from the Louvre, on the Ile de la Cite, Notre Dame (Our Mother). In the old portraits and paintings, the Mother represented the Earth, the Christ Child the Human Race. These features tell the story; they were seperated, one from the other, in the time of Leonardo - he opposed the seperation as the movie implies and it is clear in his pictures by suggestion. See Mother and Child & Triple Goddess here. This is an awakening moment for our century. In Alchemist terms (Templar) the Horse has arrived in the Courtyard.

Old Dems, New Dems and Fighting Dems

- May 18, 2006, for The Fighting Dems web site

When Tammy Duckworth won her Illinois primary last month it made headlines at the Daily Kos and at WesPAC, General Wesley Clark’s web site, but there was otherwise sparse recognition of the brave army officer who lost both her legs in a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq.

The next day comprehensive articles began to appear and in one article in The New York Times, Major Duckworth was named. The article said the success of women in the recent primaries was an important indicator of how Senator Clinton of New York would fare in 2008 in her Presidential race.

It was a startling piece of reportage. All roads lead to Hillary, even those through combat, camaraderie and rehabilitation. Until recently, the press could think of little else. Twice in one month CNN ran a story about Senator Clinton not running for President. “Will Hillary not run for President?” A non-story about nothing. A runaway horse which the press couldn’t get off. I was reminded of the old Saturday Night Live routine: “General Franco is still dead!” And when the Times recently ran a story about Mark Warner, the recently retired governor of Virginia, on the cover of their Sunday magazine, the editors declared him to be “the anti-Hillary.” There are only two topics today in Democratic politics; the things that are Hillary and the things that are not Hillary.

Up here in the New England hills there was some controversy week before last when the popular Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman (who once proposed a contract when a boy kisses a girl, with an amendment clause for each and every additional foray into the jolly mayhem) wrote a column telling John Kerry not to run again. It kind of mystified us for awhile. But she is only clearing the decks of her local commitment, ramping up for Hillary.

This is not an issue of press hordes blindly following the one after the other off the cliff. It does have prompting from Republicans – all leading contenders like to say (some gleefully) that they expect to be running against Hillary in 2008. Indeed, Rupert Murdock’s Fox New Network, which has raised its stock in maligning her over more than a decade, is holding a fundraiser for her this summer. But the press, in the notable phrase of the great Watergate investigation, follows the money. And the money is going to Hillary.

Recently, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, who coined the phrase Fighting Dems and has heavily promoted them on his blog, suggested in an op-ed article in The Washington Post that there are now two Democratic Parties; old Democrats, and he mentioned Senator Clinton and John Kerry, and new Democrats (he mentioned Russ Feingold and Mark Warner, who have recently scored one and two in his monthly survey of readers). Kos has actively promoted the new wing of the Democratic Party, featuring a new Fighting Dem every week.

“Hillary Clinton has a few problems if she wants to secure the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination,” wrote Kos. “She is a leader who fails to lead. She does not appear "electable." But most of all, Hillary has a Bill Clinton problem. (And no, it's not about that.)”

Hillary Clinton leads her Democratic rivals in the polls and in fundraising, said Kos. Unfortunately, however, the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment -- led by her husband -- that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad.

It comes down to this: Elvis will not leave the building. He is bored. He is vain. In my opinion, he has become a political cult figure as used to be called in politics a “cult of personality.” He likes being famous, but he lacks that quality of character of a Reagan, Ford or Carter, to know when the work is done and turn homeward. It is the problem of an aparatchik; one who has no home but his cause, his work, his popularity and fame. No place to go when his life works is finished. When Bill Clinton finished his second turn as President he saw it as only the beginning. It was his grand delusion shared by many of his followers. But now he is taking all the air out of the room and sending his proxies to the talk shows to debase mainstream Democrats. And he is taking all the money out of the room as well.

I felt a sea change in politics a few months back when reports of the Fighting Dems first began appearing on Wes Clark’s web site. I’d been in the room with General Clark when he signed the book to enter the primary in New Hampshire and volunteered for him all through his campaign. General Clark brought integrity and character to the Democrats. Frankly, he brought a sense of adulthood, duty and responsibility that somehow had drifted over the generations. Now others like Paul Hackett, Tammy Duckworth and Andrew Horne – seven of them in Texas, and others all over the country - were bringing the same bright and positive charge to the table.

But other good men like Tim Dunn, who attained the rank of Lt. Colonel serving with the Marines in Kosovo, Desert Storm, Desert Shield and the Iraq War were beginning to turn back. He pulled out of his race in North Carolina’s 8^th district, and one of the reasons was lack of funds. In the same period, major fundraisers in the state were holding fundraisers for Hillary.

At a recent fundraiser in New York held by George Soros for Wesley Clark, someone asked the General how much money he hoped to raise.

“As little as possible,” he said.

Clark said to hoped to keep WesPAC going and wanted to make enough money to cover his costs. But he said, candidates should not be raising money for 2008 until the 2006 races are over in November, as it draws funds away from local races.

The Democrats have lost sight of this, blinded in part, by the prize at the top. The Republicans have not.

The day after Markos had his op-ed in The Washington Post, something very interesing happened. After ignoring bloggers like Kos and denying their influence for years, his comments the day before in the Post were reported as front-page news in The New York Times. Suddenly, people were listening. And now they will continue to listen.

Next month, Jim Webb faces a primary race in Virginia. Webb is a fascinating man who once wrote the most well-known novel about Vietnam, Fields of Fire, after serving in Vietnam as a Marine. He was also Secretary of the Navy and has done all kinds of things. And he comes with a big noise. If you go to his website a speech opens upon you. He is possibly the most effective public speaker since Malcolm X. He will eat George Allen, his opponent in the general election, alive.

Many of us here in New England and the Northeast tend to forget our war dead and overlook our soldiers. A tour of an undergraduate college today in the northeast would show far greater interest in Bart Simpson than Stonewall Jackson, Joshua Chamberlain or Robert Gould Shaw, who’s monument is passed unnoticed on the Boston Common. It has given us issues of authenticity and when someone like Kerry postures as a warrior, it strikes a cord of disbelief. Jim Webb, like fellow Fighting Dems Andrew Horne in Kentucky and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois and Eric Massa in New York are soldiers who bring a sobering sensibility to the Democratic Party. They bring a character-based sensibility to politics, honed in duty, sacrifice and civic responsibility.

These people have always been here. It is the Democrats who have turned away. The Fighting Dems, with Jim Webb as Pathfinder and Gatekeeper, awaken a new political front. Once again, others will follow their lead.

Creeping Monarchism, but not today

by Bernie Quigley

I left home because of the Kennedys. It was nothing they themselves did personally. In fact, I admired the first of the brothers enormously. And here in New England, they belonged to us – us being the people of South Boston who came from Ireland in ships that still traveled under sail as my grandmother’s did. Indeed, when the original ancestor of Joe and Honey Fitz established a bar on Water St. in East Boston, he found a Quigley to open it with, and it was that which became the center of political power for working class Irish for a good long time.

When I was a child I’d be taken to political rallies to meet John F. Kennedy when he was still a local pol, dragged off by my parents against my will to smoky auditoriums in Providence or Boston. I thought it was ridiculous then that they saw this young Senator, who smoked less than the other men and was fair and fine like those of the Old Sod who had only recently arrived in the Land of the Free, would ever be President. Our people did not be President. We were small and provincial and said the rosary in a circle after supper in the evenings.

So it wasn’t something that they did. The Kennedys more than anyone brought us Boston Irish from Old World to New World and gave us true democratic sensibilities. It was a problem with the rest of us. Years later when Robert F. Kennedy was murdered the age changed dramatically. But the Kennedys kept coming. Some it seemed, were unfit for office, but just the same, we elected them. It was our Old World sensibility, from a European world of authority and monarchy which trusted in family and ethnicity rather than reason, conscience and citizenship, still active, still alive and dominating our New World sensibility. In Massachusetts and Rhode Island, we would vote for anyone it seemed, so long as his name was Kennedy. We would even vote for someone who looked like Kennedy or had a name which sounded like Kennedy (who wasn’t even Irish).

I thought it was only us Irish, of the paternalistic church and the habits of the 19^th century European. But recently journalist Joe Klein mentioned it in one of his essays. Now it’s a Clinton thing as well, and like it was with the Kennedys, Friends of Bill will vote for anyone named Clinton whether she has leadership qualities or not, whether she has political instincts or not, or whether she can be elected or not. One who merely represents them as a generation or a tribe (or a generational tribe). Klein called this a creeping monarchist tendency in American politics.

This tendency to vote ethnically (or generationally) is a monarchist tendency. It is why I left Boston. I left to experience America and the world. I was tired of every person I encountered being exactly like my family. And I left because I felt these people with their Kennedy obsession were not fully acclimated to the New World. I left and didn’t return for 30 years.

When I was a child, we, the ethnic Irish in a secular American world, seemed overly religious to our secular neighbors, and it had a political dimension. It was the way we defined ourselves as a group, in opposition to our local political adversaries. Irish Catholics were well aware that they had two sensibilities; one ethnic/religious, and one secular/political. In those days you would never see a Catholic with a bumper sticker announcing his religion. It was un-American and disrespectful to the Protestants, who were our political adversaries, but adversaries we respected as fellow citizens. But in the end, citizenship won out over ethnicity and religion identity and we became Americans. For which I say, Thank you Jesus.

Then in 1991, Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly for William Weld, a New York WASP, a Blue Blood Harvard man, the kind of man we Boston Irish had pitted ourselves against politically for 100 years. The times had changed. New World sensibility had finally succeeded. We the Boston Irish had lost our monarchist tendency which drove us to vote for only our own kind, and instead, voted overwhelmingly for Bill Weld, the best and the brightest candidate. We even abandoned Democratic Party identity as well as ethnic and religious identification, as Weld ran as a Republican, but called himself a Libertarian (and still does). Boston was ready for democracy. I started looking East again and eventually moved back.

That was before George W. Bush. Suddenly, Protestants were religious, and frankly, in a heartfelt and sincere way. And the Irish were no longer. Last year in Southie, the Catholic Church shut down dozens of its cavernous stone cathedrals to which millions came to worship a hundred years back.

Now the Republicans are getting monarchist. Klein mentioned that they now look longingly to Jeb Bush to follow in his father’s and brother’s footsteps. I must admit I was kind of shocked when I was on the road last year and stopping for coffee, happened to notice on CNN TV news Jeb Bush throwing himself at the feet of the new German Pope. Just like my old Irish aunties would do when the priest came to the house. Just as we Irish threw ourselves to the feet of the Kennedys.

I think it will happen one day that our democratic sensibility and our sense of ourselves as citizens and as Americans will yield to religious identity, to ethnicity, to tribalism and to monarchy. Regionalism will flourish and we will come to distrust our neighbors not of our own blood, as we did in Europe for millennia and back then in Boston. Perhaps it is nature’s way that we sleep and awaken and then go back to sleep, centuries at a time. But as Aragorn said in the recent The Lord of the Rings movie, now is not that time.

We are at the cusp of an awakening in America. The big, generic and monolithic press corp is becoming as irrelevant as the steam engine and is rapidly yielding to vital and imaginative blogs and independent presses like this one. Blogs, with their new voice and new vision will ascend the life force of a new generation. There is freedom, originality and vitality in these new venues, and in the perennial cycle of life, Those of the Old Ways are protecting their outmoded habits, obsolete ideas and their irrelevant orthodoxies. They are terrified of the young ‘uns. You can hear their complaint almost daily now in big press reports like I’ve seen recently in The Washington Post, The New York Times and on National Public Radio.

Today we are beginning to hear discussion of the Old Democrats (Clintons, Gore, Kerry) and the New Democrats (Mark Warner, Wesley Clark, Russ Feingold). The one is yielding and the other is ascending. Once again the snake is shedding its skin. And there is a new generation of vital new Democrats, many of them recent veterans of Iraq and some from previous wars. They are people like Jim Webb of Virginia, running for Senate and riding point for the Fighting Dems, who will soon bring a big noise to the world. And there will need to be some new blood because there is new batch of gifted Republicans as well who will be hard to beat – George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger – these and others calling themselves Libertarians and Independents.

Recently we have been through a bad spate of leadership, but that happens every time the old yields to the new. What is new here is the new century, and those times are upon us.

Quigley’s Tibetan Buddhist Theory of Relativity (Nothing is Relative)

“The Inside is Out and the Outside is in . . .” The Beatles White Album, taken from The Gospel of Thomas ("When the Inside is like the Outside . . . the Kingdom is at hand.")

I was shocked this morning when reading an LA Times story on brain neurons in which the author brought up the name Alfred Wallace. The author, Robert Lee Hotz, was discussing creationist doctrines & evolutionary biologists, saying the latter are hard presses to explain how nature could make something as intricate as the human brain. “Even Alfred Wallace, the 19^th century biologist who discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin, could not accept that such a flexible organ of learning and thought could emerge by trial and error.” Before WW I the two names, Darwin and Wallace, were spoken together. Then Wallace was abandoned.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who like to do Suduku puzzles and people who prefer to watch Lost. Current research by a British scientist has it that on the first day a baby is born a boy will generally look at a mobile hanging over his head while a girl will look at a face; the one direction is a technical puzzle (Suduku doers), the other is empathy (Lost watchers).

Likewise all things in the world have either one or two directions. The Creationists have had a difficult time explaining themselves because their agenda is political rather than spiritual. Likewise with the Darwinists. Darwin’s argument at the Oxford seminar was always in opposition to the narrow Christian view, but by putting itself in opposition to another view, the “science” became political, and it is impossible to do science as a creative art with a political agenda.

Now these are the core Creation myths of red and blue America. One sees it on car bumpers – the Creationists have the sign of the fish pointing to the left, (the sign of the Inner Life; the “negative’ arrow sign in math), the Darwinists have their little fish with feet and pointing to the right, (the sign of the Outer Life; the “positive” sign for the arrow in math). The Christ was marked by the Fish in early Christianity, as the Star over Bethlehem to which the Three Zoroastrian astrologers followed began the Age of Pisces, marked by two fish n opposition, beginning the first of 12 Platonic Months and a new 24,000-year Sun Cycle. These are the two Fighting Fish of Astrology, no?, like Holmes and Morriarty, going over the waterfall.

Lately we have been getting déjà vu all over again (Paul McCartney making sure the Indians don’t whup up on the baby seals in Canada, boursie students in Paris demonstrating in the streets against the government before they go to work for the government), so I thought I would bring it up. Yesterday, the NYTs had an essay on Freud (To paraphrase Bette Midler with apologies, “When its 3 am in LA, its still 1970 in New York.” They hold their breath long, no?). Largely Freud has been left behind by the world (but the English Dept., alors, she holds on to things in the attic). Freud, like Darwin, starts with a negative template, which the culture already shares, and builds on that. But recognize that the shared base is a cultural one; an agreed-upon paradigm of vague cultural understandings and misunderstandings, some of them intentional; a religion. Freud and Newton bring a mechanistic view. It can be seen as coming from John Calvin, who brought to the north of Europe a vision of a deterministic God, and the West took it from there – Newton was the logical and natural next step. The journal of science in Newton’s name 20-some years ago made a public apology for all the pseudo-science which evolved (evolved is the right word) in his name; blurred visions which inculcated ideas of Freud and Marx and perhaps Keynes. Scholarship at the time published several volumes about Newton’s writings on the Green Man, a million words on the vegetation spirit of the earth (like the big swirlly deal in Princess Mononoke and on the first season of Lost.) But apparently they didn’t get that memo in the English Dept. In New York they are at wits end. They are terrified of blogs. They hate LA. They know not J.J. Abrams nor Markos Moulitsas. They are terrified that a new generation will replace them and they are right. There is no place to go but back.

The mechanistic view was sent forth in Newton’s name; Freud sent it forward in his own name. Both had a Double. Newton’s was Gottfried Leibniz, who discovered calculus in the same month as Newton in Germany. Leibnitz was, however, at the time reading the I Ching, which had been sent to him by a Jesuit from China. Leibnitz said the I Ching was the same as calculus. Yet the culture went forward on Newton’s view, recreated and somewhat misunderstood as a mechanistic path. Freud had a double as well, C.J. Jung, who’s principles drew a vision of the psyche similar to a Tibetan Mandala. Related to this, he brought in the phrases, Introvert and Extrovert. He was dispised and excluded from the discussion as it didn’t fit the negative template. Likewise Darwin had a Double, forgotten today, Alfred Wallace. Wallace, like Jung and Leibnitz, provided an Inner Vision rather than the Outer movement of Darwin and the ascending mechanistic view. So the Three Steppingstones of the expanding contemporary world, Newton, Darwin, Freud, each had a Double; Leibnitz, Wallace, Jung. The first group were technical Extroverts (Suduku doers). The second group were empathetic Introverts (Lost watchers).

Good to know, as Leibnitz, Wallace and Jung have all but been forgotten on the Journey Outward.

We have been driving outward since 1492 and we are still trying to drive. I have on my other blog, Quigley in Exile, varied essays about dreams of clairvoyant dreamers I talk to (one in particular) who dreams of being in the sky and returning to earth. This is just the opposite of prominent dreams of 50 years back when people dreamed of going into space (UFO dreams). I call this a “Returning to Earth” myth and it is the prominent myth of our times. The 50s were marked by Outgoing Myths; movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds and popular periodicals like Analog science fiction magazine. Today, the Survivor tv series and Lost mark the age. They are Incoming Myths; Returning to Earth Myths.

Ask a scientist about Alfred Russel Wallace. No one remembers him. It is good that he is beginning to be remembered. His Creation myth is similar to the Hindu, which started with a vision of natural selection similar to the Darwin/Wallace picture, then moves Inward. Newton/Darwin/Freud are Outgoing Philosophers. Wallace/Leibnitz/Jung are Incoming philosophers.

We as a people are losing interest in going into space. It is becoming post-seasonal and old fashioned, like the railroads. We can no longer “keep going West,” either. We have been West and then found the East. Now the East is coming back to the West. Our Outward Journey is ending because we have no where to do. We can only go Inward.

American visionary Walt Whitman, greatest of men, poets and Children of God, predicted this. Our journeys to China and the Spice Island were the same as our journey to space, just ahead, he wrote in 1871 in the poem Passage to India. But soon the Outward Journey would end.

Our space journey did not begin with Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk. It began with Columbus. These are Whitman’s sentiments: “Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?/ The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,/ The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,/The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,/ The lands to be welded together.” The passage would be to the sun and the moon and all of the stars and to Siruis and Jupiter. Then: “After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d)/ After the great captiains and engineers have accoomplish’d their work,/ After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,/ Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name;/ The true son of God shall come singing his songs.”

Jim Webb: A Time for Soldiers

by Bernie Quigley - 5/3/06 to The Free Market News Network.

It is best to visit Guinea Station when the petals are falling. The dogwoods and red buds float like clouds on the edge of the woods and carry on light and dark in a dance of new joy that betrays the burden of millennia passing underfoot. The small white clapboard house is a graceful and haunted place with a Sunday morning quiet. The room where Stonewall Jackson died is kept intact and exactly as it was at the moment of his death. Not a book has been misplaced or a bed spread moved in the eternal twilight and quiet since the mythical Southern General’s passing.

The buildup to the Civil War has parallels with the current Iraq quagmire. Yankee populist writers, like Frederick Law Olmstead, had traveled through the Southern states and returned north to report that invasion would be a cakewalk. Nothing but “white trash” in those Appalachian hollows; hillbillies, starving subsistence farmers and hunters, drunk and insolent, who had lost the will to work under the decadent slave system of the plantation holders. It would be over in months with few Northern casualties.

But with Stonewall on horseback, the unimaginable seemed possible. Olmstead’s pre-war reconnaissance, like Donald Rumsfeld’s and Condi Rice’s in our day, had proved to be pernicious. Two years after the onset of hostilities, the Confederates were camped in Pennsylvania and facing Washington, D.C. But then events turned. When Stonewall died, knocked off his horse by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville, the lamp flickered and Confederate hopes would soon dim. Shortly after, at Cemetery Ridge, the Union would hold fast and begin to fight in earnest. Then early in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant would move his camp to Virginia and take charge of the Union army. From that point on, there would be no stopping the carnage until Appomattox.

Some historians say the modern world began at Appomattox and Cemetery Ridge. It set the pattern for modern warfare; tens of thousands, 40,000, killed in an afternoon. Then millions would fall in just a few seconds as the petals fell: Bull Run, Antietam, Verdun, Normandy, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Khe Sanh. But the age really began in the modest white clapboard farm house in the still and quiet place in the gentle Virginia hills on the day in May when Stonewall Jackson died.

Virginia, more than most states, remembers its war dead. Perhaps Virginians, like Jim Webb, are born fighting.

Webb, who is running against George Allen for Senate, if he wins his primary election, has had a fascinating, productive and multifaceted life. He served with the Fifth Marine Regiment in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts. He has written six best-selling novels including Fields of Fire, considered by many to be the classic novel of the Vietnam War. He taught literature at the Naval Academy as their first visiting writer, has traveled worldwide as a journalist, and his PBS coverage of the U.S. Marines in Beirut earned him an Emmy Award. His original story, Rules of Engagement, was released in April 2000 and starred Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. In 1987 he became the first Naval Academy graduate in history to serve in the military and later be appointed Secretary of the Navy. He resigned as Naval Secretary in 1988 after refusing to agree to a reduction of the Navy's force structure during congressionally-mandated budget cutting.

What I like about him is that his American journey is in one important way the characteristic American journey. When institutions he was born into or became part of would take a wrong turn as all public institutions invariably do, he would leave without hesitation and beat his own path. Eventually the vast majority would abandon the institution as well and follow his path. Like 80% of the voters in my old precinct in the hills of North Carolina, he was a Southerner who was born Democrat and switched parties as the country was ramping up to the Reagan period. George Will says in a column about Webb in Sunday’s Washington Post, Webb “ says he was ‘pretty much’ a Democrat until President Jimmy Carter ‘pardoned the draft evaders.’” As we approached the day when 49 states would vote for a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, Webb and the vast majority of Americans were again on the same path. He told Will, "I wouldn't shake John Kerry's hand for 20 years" because of Kerry's anti-Vietnam activities, but “I voted for him in 2004.”

From his political writings, it seems clear that the Dungeon & Dragons Warriors of the White House Cabal which engineered this misbegotten vision of hubris and fantasy play in Iraq, is what led him back to the Democratic Party. Which was a kind of homecoming. On Sept. 4, 2002, he wrote in an article called “Heading for Trouble” in the Washington Post: “American military leaders have been trying to bring a wider focus to the band of neoconservatives that began beating the war drums on Iraq before the dust had even settled on the World Trade Center. Despite the efforts of the neocons to shut them up or to dismiss them as unqualified, these leaders, both active-duty and retired, have been nearly unanimous in their concerns. Is there an absolutely vital national interest that should lead us from containment to unilateral war and a long-term occupation of Iraq? And would such a war and its aftermath actually increase our ability to win the war against international terrorism?”

Common sense then and now. But now it is too late.

Recently, John Kerry, another with hindsight from Vietnam, announced that voting for the war on Iraq was his great mistake. Had he and his Senate colleagues who voted overwhelmingly for the invasion paused in their fever to listen to Webb, there might have been a different outcome: “Other than the flippant criticisms of our ‘failure’ to take Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, one sees little discussion of an occupation of Iraq,” he wrote in 2002. “But it is the key element of the current debate. The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay.”

Webb’s comments parallel those of Wesley Clark, alone among the Democrats to make these same points in the recent Presidential election. Few listened then when 75% of Americans took a wrong turn and backed the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, but people are listening now. And Webb and his fellow Fighting Dems are bringing these issues to mainstream America in 2006 in important elections in Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, New York and throughout the country. They bring a sea change to American politics and it should be a wake up call to the Democrats.

Most of us here in New England and the Northeast tend to forget our war dead and overlook our soldiers. A tour of an undergraduate college today in the northeast would show far greater interest in Bart Simpson than Stonewall Jackson, Joshua Chamberlain or Robert Gould Shaw, who’s monument is passed unnoticed on the Boston Common. It has given us issues of authenticity and when someone like Kerry postures as a warrior, it strikes a cord of disbelief. Jim Webb, like fellow Fighting Dems Andrew Horne in Kentucky and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois and Eric Massa in New York are soldiers who bring a sobering sensibility to the Democratic Party. As Webb’s 2002 Washington Post essay and his many other writings bring out, his is a character-based sensibility, honed in duty, sacrifice and civic responsibility.

These people have always been here. It is the Democrats who have turned away, lost in post-9/11 denial and a reverie of generational delirium, waiting for the Sixties to come back. (News flash: ABC has just cancelled its primetime show Commander in Chief, in which Geena Davis plays President Hillary. Democratic Party rank and file and its vast and pervasive auxiliary press take notice.) The Fighting Dems, with Jim Webb as Pathfinder and Gatekeeper, awaken a new political front. Once again, others will follow their lead.

Today we are beginning to listen to soldiers. Six Generals have spoken out in opposition to the conduct of warfare under the leadership of Secretary Rumsfeld. Last week we heard from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, speaking out to oppose the Radical Republic of the neocons who have commandeered the sane sensibilities of honest Americans. This week we have heard from General Powell, probably the world’s most respected American. We will hear more.

There is a time for Bart Simpson and a time for Joshua Chamberlain, the New England soldier who held fast at Cemetery Ridge. We enter again the time of the soldier. Jim Webb leads the way. Like his son, a Marine who will likely ship to Iraq this summer, he is a man who enters first into responsibility, without hesitation, and is first across the line to accept his share of whatever pain it will take to return to the peace, and willing to accept as well his share in its grace.