Ron Paul and Mitt Romney: Why is Japan Killing the Whales?

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 11/19/07

The 2008 Presidential race will bring an end to Clinton-era Soccer Mom politics. No longer will everyone get a trophy. No longer can just anyone and their wife, secretary or auntie be President, Senator, Supreme Court Justice or Attorney General. The price of incompetence mounts daily. Virtual disaster is at hand and there is real potential now for America to fall into third world status.

In Soccer Mom America everybody got a chance. Married six times? Outstanding bench warrants in Nashville? Sexual assault charges still lingering in limbo in Arkansas? Fail to pass the bar in D.C.? Don’t know how to file income tax yet? Hard time for trafficking in Florida? Not a problem. Everybody gets a trophy. You can even be President and with the proper stylist and consultants the fact that your only education was as a free-church preacher in the taking-up-serpents churches in the hollows of Appalachia can spin to your advantage: On that free-basing cocaine and dog fighting conviction you can play the Born Again card.

No more. Nature demands – survival demands – a return to the aptitudes and abilities of the very best among us.

Elsewhere, away from of the dreary night of politics, a sea change is being marked by astonishing gifted athletes Tom Brady, Randy Moss, Wes Welker and the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick who brought them together. They have changed football as Bob Dylan and The Beatles changed music. And likewise they will change our world and our generations. Necessity will demand that that same level of surly New England excellence that Belichick brings to football be brought to everything we do in the world including politics and government, lest we fall into a chasm between Asia and Europe.

And say what you like about him but Mitt Romney brings the same level of management to politics and government that Belichick brings to football.

But Romney will not turn the age although he is likely to manage it: Ron Paul will turn it.

Why are the Japanese killing the whales? Because no one cares what America thinks anymore. The U.S., riding the economic curve out of World War II and on to the end of the century, established post-war values in the world and if the world wanted to play with our football they would play as we played – there was no other option but the commies. Our values; that is, the things that we thought - through vanity possibly or delusion - were the good and great things of the world; from Jefferson and Madison to Cal Kline and Michael Jackson - created the climate the others were to bask in if they hoped to play.

No more. Now they will do what they like and it starts with the Japanese.

Japan understands subtle. Bunraku puppet theater is a masterful dramatic tradition in Japan where the puppets are all surrounded by shadows in black cloaks, which adds a spooky dimension to the action – the players are puppets; they are merely pawns to the shadows and forces unseen from the unconscious. All public action is contrived and symbolic puppet work, artfully placed. Japan acted in Samurai tradition when it yielded in submission to MacArthur; the vanquished in the warrior’s honor tradition submitting its will to the master and victor. They would do what the master demanded: They must become slave and subset to the master and be the master’s will. Play baseball. Turn Christian. Whatever. Stop killing and eating beautiful, sensitive and psychic humpback whales as sushi. Today, the warrior tradition yields. Japan leaves America and MacArthur behind.

Overt symbolism was always important and apparent in relations with the Japanese. Back in the early 1980s when Japanese management strategies became a fashion I remember a discussion by a Japanese diplomat on the McNeil/Lehrer news hour about America turning to the hollow aluminum baseball bats. The diplomat was urging the Victor to show his Valor and the resolute character and resilience which conquered him and his world. He was asking us to again seek excellence, and to be all that we could be. And get rid to the aluminum baseball bat, he said, it is hollow, empty and manufactured. Go back to the wooden and shamanistic Louisville Slugger which represented America when we rose to greatness.

In Robert Christopher’s book, The Japanese Mind, which helped explain Japan to America back then, Christopher made the point that the Japanese had only a few options for success in the globalist post-war world. The one was to tag along on America’s path as America demanded. Another was to find fellowship with a rising China. Today you might add Europe and Russia as well. Such conspicuous public symbolism as beginning again to hunt the humpbacks is certainly not accidental. It is Japan’s Samurai spirit saying to America: We are free from our burden of failure and atonement. You have failed in the Master’s Task: we no longer owe you fealty.

Was bound to happen. And of course, China – still fuming about all those Southern Baptist politicians suddenly madly in love with the Dalai Lama – will try to bring the slowest of deaths now by inching toward Russia and the revolutionary peasants below the border suddenly oil rich. Time to read Sun Tzu again: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable: when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” Now they are dropping T Bills and dollars and trading up for euros and sterling and the world follows as if on the path of a trail of crumbs dropped in the forest. Even rap singers and supermodels are demanding pay in euros.

Ouch. The sudden friendship of the French should have been the tip off. Now the French like us. No one else does.

We are at the end of things and at the beginning of things. The tiresome thing about this Presidential campaign is that it is like watching TV reruns on the high stations; there is Frazier, Seinfeld and the Clintons; there is John McCain in his Old Soldiers uniform recalling wars of those old enough to be grandfathers and great grandfathers.

But things begin as well. I think it is fully possible now for Barack Obama to win this Presidency and I hope he does. I want to see a man whose grandfather lived in an African village become President of the United States. Paul and Obama were the only candidates to instinctively oppose the neocon fantasy in Iraq. Everyone knew it was smoke and mirrors. The politicians Clinton, Kerry and Edwards simply yielded to war fever. It was the first test of management in our century and only Obama and Paul passed.

And in the Senate, only Obama instinctively knew and understood that habeas corpus is the basis of the white man’s long journey from the 12^th century to the millennium. He understands in his most primary nature that torture does not call for cutesy comments to the moderator like Hillary’s spine-chilling retort that she’d talk to her husband about his position. (As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, Bill Clinton’s position on torture was the same as his and as Rosa Brooks pointed out in the LA Times last year, Hillary’s was – surprise – the same as her husband’s.) And like Jack Kennedy and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Obama is the only candidate with an unquenchable smile and one which shows a primary life force of joy and belonging.

If Obama does win, he will be a curing, healing President. A President who brings élan and world spirit like a Jack Kennedy or Bobby. Or like the folksy Sunday-school teacher who returned us homeward to ourselves, Jimmy Carter.

But Ron Paul brings a sea change. Never before have ideas like his held sway in America and those ideas have been around for a long time. And never before has New Hampshire seen such a scene with a politician.

The Concord Monitor, in describing the aftermath of a September campaign rally in Manchester, wrote: “Members of the audience chanted his name. Several jumped up and down. Descending from the stage, [Paul] found himself surrounded by supporters snapping cell-phone photographs. Two women turned so Paul could sign the backs of their T-shirts.”

The decline of the dollar and the descent of the American economy into a valley between Asia and Europe brings the end of America’s globalist economic arc in the world. Bush killed it, possibly intentionally. Perhaps he is a closet Libertarian and prefers the city-state or nation-state to world government and globalization based out of Wall St. I’m about 70% thinking he does.

But when things end they don’t die. They turn into something else. And Paul’s popularity is rising because his ideas on economy and culture are suited to the times and suited to the times ahead.

Paul might be what anthropologists call a Monkey King; he is the creator of a new era and inspires new leaders and new paths of leadership. The generation or generations which follow look first to Monkey King. History often forgets their names, like firebrand James Otis who inspired John Adams to revolution or Theodore Parker, the fiery Massachusetts preacher and Yankee crusader who egged Lincoln on to warfare. The leaders who come now in the fourth post-war generation will look to Paul.

And given time, I believe Mitt Romney and the best minds in the Republican Party will look to Ron Paul because the Republican Party has split now between the Paul faction and everybody else. Paul is a natural for the South and Southwest and vocalizes much they have long felt. Paulites and Paulines will rise and advance in red America and in states where small government and states rights are taking new meaning. This is a new historical path and one more suited for the U.S. in the century ahead. It is suited to an America fully formed with rich and indigenous regions which increasingly over the decades will have a less and less need for a federal government, and as California and the Eastern States have directly expressed recently, find the Hamilton tradition of federalism to be an impediment to their progress and prosperity. It is an impediment to excellence.

There is a widely held misunderstanding about Romney – one reflected in a poor article this week in the Washington Post. It is that Romney, because he is a Mormon, will not accept new ideas. I wonder if these people actually watched the 2002 Winter Olympics which Romney took over as President and CEO and rescued it from incompetent leadership. The entertainment was largely run – it seemed to have been commandeered – by Robbie Robertson, a Monkey God of my own generation, who brought the world Woodstock, The Band and Bob Dylan in various guises. Robertson brought in a whole bunch of Canadian First People; women primarily, and had them waving herbs and shouting Indian blessings at the athletes. He brought in great singers and entertainers like Rita Coolidge from the Sixties period. Indeed, it was all a great hippie show leading up to an “Oklahoma” style dramatic presentation on the celestial rise of the White Buffalo, a Native American Indian harbinger of the rising Age of Aquarius.

To the contrary; there may indeed be a positive management aspect of being a Mormon. Here in Massachusetts Romney felt no inherent conflict between Irish Catholic and White Glove Unitarian; a Curse greater than the New York Yankees which had fated the region since Emerson and Parker.

Paul and Romney are fully at odds over Iraq and many other things. But what Romney can do like no other is take a fresh idea and form it, fill it in and contour it to suit the day. We are seeing now in Ron Paul ideas which may not have worked 30 or 50 years ago. But they may be perfectly suited to the times ahead.

Romney’s staff has stated that it is still looking for the single idea as keystone to the Romney campaign and a Romney Presidency. Possibly he will find it in Ron Paul.

The idea of small government in particular, has never been fully formed. Ron Paul speaks to it as did Reagan. As the coffers shrink in big states like California and throughout the U.S., smaller government will become a necessity. But since Reagan, “small government” has meant only thin government. If governments are to lose their wealth and weight, the shape and packaging of government must change.

Government is almost exclusively about packaging. But like the puppets in Bunraku theater, ideas about government are surrounded by spooks and dark shadows - and regionalism conjures ghosts from 1865. However, a regional council for the Katrina region for example, would at least temporarily manage the multifaceted issues of repair, environment and law enforcement that need to be handled together. Only Romney has recognized that “one size fits all” federalism brings widespread incompetence to problems of poverty and prosperity. This begins to travel the path of Paul.

Up here in New Hampshire, the Free State Project people, who I admire and respect, have a simple plan. As one mountain independent put it on her blog, their issues are uncomplicated: “legalize marijuana, end the war, Hillary is a commie . . .” They would have no problem with George Kennan’s desire expressed in his last days, of seeing America divided into 12 working regions. People expect us to behave like that up here; if they tried it in other states the Homies (that would be the Homeland Security) would be on their tails.

But regionalization, seen without spooks and shadows, in no way challenges the entity and essence of the United States, it simply shifts the responsibilities for solving problems to states and regions. It is simply a way of building matrixes for small government; of defunding federalism and repackaging appropriately to the various cultures on the continent without causing chaos and difficulty. It is simply a better package in a continent fully culturized; a matrix for community tier economy and a Jeffersonian vision of family, community and culture.

In truth, community cannot hold in Hamilton’s view in which corporation is primary and its main cell of energy is the individual. In Jefferson’s view it is family, church, region and community tier economy. It is a difference of Particle and Wave, and as we learned from the physicist/shamans of the 1920s and 30s, one can be either a Particle or a Wave, but not both at the same time: In a word, Hamilton and Jefferson are incompatible, but they can alternate, and the one best for some conditions is worse for others. The Jefferson path – the Paulist path – could well be the better package for our rapidly arriving century.

The days of the Soccer Mom are quickly fading. Necessity returns us to excellence as it returns us to our truest nature in the darkest hour. I first spotted the first slouching return to competence and excellence on the TV show House; it is an auspicious harbinger of the age ascending. Dr. House is a genius intuitive with skill derived from his own knowledge, perseverance and experience. He is Master in a sea of self-assured, incompetent, group-think professionals born of management theory and Best Practices conferences. He is universally despised by Organization Man and even crankier than Bill Belichick. He is a cripple, a freak and an outcast in an autonomous and self-sustaining management culture in which everyone is used to getting a trophy.

“Chicks up front”: Why Hillary Will Support the Draft

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 11/09/07

I take Mitt Romney on face value when he says the all-volunteer army is working and he doesn’t intend to change it. It is in keeping with his nature and all his personal history to manage and improve an existing paradigm rather than to arbitrarily break it and do something else. But what will President Hillary do? I am almost certain by now that she will establish a military draft.

I have traveled in the same river as these people and one of the weirdly random talents I have had in my life is to show up unintentionally at places just when they were getting interesting. Like when Jack Kennedy rose out of my father’s old neighborhood in Boston and ran for President when I was a kid. And when Bob Dylan awakened the Sixties kind of in my high school football field in Newport R.I. Another was in August, 1968. I had just completed a year’s tour of duty in Thailand and began a half world journey; down the mountains and through the jungle by slow train to Bangkok and after a stay for a week or so at five-baht peasant hotels, the flight back to San Francisco. I had just enough travel money left to make it to Chicago.

I ended up sleeping in Union Station for three days, waiting for family to wire some of my cash. I hadn’t a clue what was going on in the U.S. When I arrived in Chicago the city was in turmoil. It was during the riots in the 1968 Democratic Convention.

As it turned out, it was a major turning point for people my age and thousands gathered to protest the war in Vietnam at Lincoln Park and Grant Park. Signs in the crowd read, “Chicks up front,” so the coppers wouldn’t hit so hard, said to have been orchestrated by Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, the main organizer of the event.

It was certainly a time for change for Senator Clinton as well. As reported in a recent NYTs article on the turmoil of '68: "As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, The Conscience of a Conservative, on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation."

Chicago brought forth a potential American passage; the trial of the Chicago Seven featuring Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dillinger and others followed as denouement. It might have amounted to a change in the way we live in this country: Recently I’ve been sent into a kind of déjà vu as I have heard some of the exact same anti-war phrases by those who opposed the invasion of Iraq and have used some of them myself.

But it didn’t turn out because the hippies and the war resisters did not pass the test of fire: On May 4, 1970, when four were left dead at Kent State the party ended. Rubin said in one of his autobiographies that after Kent State you couldn’t get girls to type your term papers for you anymore. You couldn’t call them chicks anymore either. Earth Mother had yielded to Wall St. and the corporate culture.

That failure haunts that same generation today because a revolutionary culture cannot change in mid-stream and join the mainstream corporate culture; Kent State could have triggered a mass uprising like the Irish Rebellion or the Boxer Rebellion in the last days of Manchu rule. A new culture – a new auspicious world – could have arisen from Kent State. But it failed. As such, it cannot well be incorporated in the experience of the individual as a psychological or mythic transition to adulthood. It can only be considered a few years of escapism and play: You cannot really be against the war and be for the soldiers as it is the fashion to say today. You have to be on one side or the other.

That was John Kerry’s problem from the first. He wanted to be one of the hippies . . . and was famously photographed at an anti-war rally with John Lennon . . . and one of the soldiers too; he proudly decorated his office with his military colors. It doesn’t work. The hippies didn’t consider him one of them, nor did some of his fellow soldiers who swift-boated him.

Gary Hart made a better transition. He opposed the war in Vietnam and directed George McGovern’s anti-war candidacy. After the war he became a military officer and a military expert. At all times, including today, he knew who he was. As the invasion of Iraq loomed some of us invited him to come speak here in New England on the topic. His opinion and his prediction of vast and extended warfare across the Middle East was perfectly accurate. Senator Clinton, who should be considered the leading voice of the Democrats at that time, did not listen to him. She listened instead to the focus groups and to the hordes when war fever and revenge were sweeping the country.

Senator Clinton today represents the people of her age who opted-out of the hippie days when its brief allure receded in the smoke at Kent State. They followed the path instead to Wall St. with Jerry Rubin and Arkansas po' white Bill was avatar to this transition. Rubin called himself a “pilot fish” to his generation and he is key to the age. Rubin had told them in the Sixties to go home and kill their parents and to avoid investment because, “A hip capitalist is a pig capitalist . . . They are traitors to their long hair." A decade later he would tell them, “Wealth creation is the real American revolution.” And the generational horde followed, like fish.

A problem arises now and has over the years and it is a mythic problem. The Billarys and the Cheneys and Bushs did not participate in the tribal adventure they were sent to as young ‘uns and they all appear to be living out the failed consequences of a myth unfulfilled. Certainly Cheney and the neocons seem to be living out a dangerous fantasy with their war adventures in Iraq and everywhere, but likewise the Dems seem to be unleavened by the tragedies and successes of military experience.

The key question today is how will the Democrats and the Republicans manage the continuing mess in Iraq, Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world? Specifically, will they continue to rely on the professional army which seems heavily indebted to mercenary forces like Blackwater? Or will they establish a draft?

There are two “prisons” here – as Toynbee called them. The one is mythical: She opposed the war in Vietnam which was a primary directive of Kennedy and the country at the time. To do so is in fact a very radical step; in the past, only a very small minority of Quakers or Buddhists here in New England would take it. And they would not change their views on warfare and capital once the inconvenient war was over as Hillary and the Rubin horde has. Hillary has to prove she has manlies to be President. Katty Kay of BBC has offered commentary in that regard; because she is a woman, said Kay. But more so, I would say, because she opposed the war in Vietnam. Having adopted the mainstream direction after the war, the previous position can only be considered a weakness or failure which creates compensation and dangerous instability in later leadership.

The Democrats in this regard are now displaying romanticized notions of the citizen-soldier in World War II and the draftee in Vietnam which I see as a default of intelligent analysis and avoidance of the problem at hand. This romanticizing comes from a lack of personal experience in time of crisis: One can only imagine fair action and judgment in war if there is no personal experience as touchstone, so one makes decisions by feelings and imaginings.

The question of military service popped up here in New Hampshire when Hillary came to talk recently to a group of local editors and reporters. She said to them that she sees no support among the military for a return to the draft.

Unfortunately, that does not answer the question of whether or not she supports the draft, and like oh-so-much she and her husband have said to us over the years; it does not even address the question. We already know that there is no interest in the draft in the military. And if we were unsure we would go and ask them. We want to know what she thinks about the draft and specifically, if she would establish a draft to continue the conflict which, if she, Romney or most of the others are elected, is certain to go on for at least a decade if not much longer.

But she has not answered that question.

Under the circumstance it is probably better to try to get the answer as Greg House, MD, of the clever TV show House does. House never listens to his patients. He assumes they always lie, obfuscate or hide the truth. Instead, he sends his interns out to search their houses and talk to their friends and relatives to find out what is going on.

We might do the same with Bill and Hillary. If we don’t know what they are thinking; if they are congenitally incapable of talking straight, we might look to their friends and those who they would bring with them to the Oval Office if they are elected. It has been suggested in the press that Hillary would bring either Jim Webb, warrior, novelist and the new Senator from Virginia, or General Wesley Clark. I would think that someone like Kathleen Sebelius, Governor of Kansas, or Mark Warner, former Governor of Virginia and current candidate for the Senate, would be much better but again, this is compensation – to prove that the Democrats have manlies; to prove it to themselves.

When he ran for Senate Webb was forced to answer if he would support the Democratic candidate “no matter who it is” (meaning Hillary) and he said he would. Clark was among the first to endorse Hillary this Fall and it was felt by some at the time that he had been running for VP with Hillary all along.

In ’04 when he ran for President there was a clear suggestion that he would like the job of Secretary of State. Some of the best commentators have speculated this year that because of the good work he did in the ’06 race for vets running for office and because of the high profile he showed in opposition to a potential invasion of Iran, he is certain to have an important position in any Democratic cabinet, possibly Secretary of State.

When he endorsed Senator Clinton, General Clark said he had known her for 21 years. He is one of Bill’s best friends; I see him as Bill’s “alter ego” – Arkansas guy and fellow Rhodes Scholar.

On July 6, 2004, Clark addressed a small group in Manchester, NH, and said, “I know you all don’t support the draft, but when I heard in the early 1970s that they were thinking of going to an all-volunteer army, I thought, ‘good for the army, bad for the country.’”

He cited the classic argument of a “professional army” as the tool of an elite regime while the draft was the way of an egalitarian, democratic people.

Myself, I find this faulty. Both Hitler and Stalin relied on a draft.

It is an important issue because increasingly, Clark appears to be forming opinion for the Democrats and for the Clintons.

Senator Clinton needs to be asked directly if she is committed to the all-volunteer army as Romney is or if she is in agreement with Wesley Clark on this issue. Which of these will be the law of the land when she is President?

If she doesn’t answer straight, which she won’t, we should press her on who she will bring forth on military issues and make our own assumptions from that.

She certainly believes in registration and told my local reporters that 18-year-old women, along with men should be required to register.

“I think that should be required of everyone in case of a national emergency,” she said. And in a hair-raising aside, she suggested that 9-11 was such an emergency.

“I really believe that Bush could have gotten the nation involved. He chose not to,” she said. “He had a chance after 9-11 to summon America to service and sacrifice, and he didn’t do it.”

She said she would also “like to do more” with national service and presumably everyone could be pressed into “national service” in case of “a national emergency.”

So in a Hillary Presidency, you won’t only have the chance to be pulled out of a card game, as I was, and drafted into the war in Vietnam, but could also be drafted, man or woman, into alternative service; possibly doing laundry at the White House or scrubbing floors at the William J. Clinton Library and Museum in Arkansas.

Some of my madcap, dynamic friends up here in the Free State Project in New Hampshire claim that Hillary is a commie and her yearnings go back to the early days of Trotsky or Lenin in Russia.

Her political vision goes back further than that. It goes back to Peter the Great.

Sarko the Appeaser: France’s New Vichy Regime

- for The Free Market News Network, 11/06/07

As the Congress of Appeasers, Accommodators and Enablers readies to hear France’s new leader, they might prep with a showing of Casablanca. At no time have the Peeps more resembled the vacillating and ineffectual crowd at Rick’s Cafe Americain. Today Charles Schulmer, the Senator for New York, takes out an op-ed in the NYT’s to claim his credibility on voting for Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general, who doesn’t think that half drowning a woman or man with a bag over her head constitutes torture. That is he isn’t sure. Schulmer follows in the footsteps of his Weak Sister from California, Diane Feinstein, who this week also cast her vote for torture with resolute conviction.

Say what you like about France, where I spent some of the best moments of my ‘tweens; it generally knows the difference between love and rape. But that cannot be said about Nicolas Sarkozy, the recently elected President of France.

Truth is, when Sarkozy visited us first off here in New Hampshire after his election we were only vaguely amused. I mean, I’ve been to Paris and I’ve been to Lake Winnipesaukee. If he felt that our live-free-or-die motto suggested that we would follow the horde to Bush’s war against the dark-skinned non-Christians of the world, he completely missed the point. And how ridiculous could it be to run for President of France pretending to emulate those of us in the northern mountains of New Hampshire? Or wearing a NYPD t-shirt?

That his wife slipped back to France under cover of night was the tip off that beneath the veneer of Austrian-Hungary Empire stuff (Sarko’s paternal line . . . startling that the French would even think of going there at all . . . ) France still had instincts.

As it is widely reported, “Sarko the American” as he is known in France, makes his first official visit to Washington today to try to “ . . . heal the wounds over France's opposition to the Iraq war . . . ” He hopes to affirm that he is a sure ally of President Bush in his most trying hour.

Good to have a friend, even one who fauns. Will Bush laugh at him when he speaks French as he did in New Hampshire? Reports tell us that there is a “collective swoon” in the Oval Office over this Frenchman. That should be a tip off: This President, like most Texans, hates France and everything about France and always did. Why do they like this Frenchman?

It seems so long ago now but as I recall, it was Donald Rumsfeld that called Bush’s New World Order, “old Europe” and “new Europe.” New Europe consisted of our vassal state England, our two pseudo-American states Poland (created by recent American immigrants in New York and Maryland) and the Czech Republic (created by American lost-in-the-ozone poet numbsculls in the English Department), Turkey and someplace else about the size of Ellis Island with a name I can’t pronounce. I got the willies at the time because at the beginning Bush’s plan – the pre-emptive policy – seemed coined originally by Wilhelm II and the only main allies at the time were England and Italy. Then when Rumsfeld got on the Jim Lehrer show to talk about how Hitler nationalized the German economy, his arms started waving and he got really animated, much like General ‘Buck” Turginson (that would be George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove.

Today, Poland, governed by twins - which is a nice touch for a country that can’t remember who it is - is opting out as it realizes that the price of being a pseudo-American Euro-state is high, and that these “new Europe” satellites are merely Gurka forces – Foreign Devils fighting on our behalf – in our global war on Islam and missile sites to territorialize Russia.

Now England is entirely screwed; it is neither Euro nor American and will now be continually cursed by its direct neighbors because it cast its lot with Bush. Turkey is now among our greatest enemies. And General What’s-His-Name in Pakistan, hoping to develop a new nazi-burgher class globally, is about to lose his funny CIA money.

But, alors, now here in the darkest hour, France comes to our aid.

Congress should turn this man out: He comes to us as Marshall Petain came to France. As you recall, when the messenger from the French Underground was shot down at the beginning of Casablanca, he fell beneath a large portrait of Marshall Petain, who accommodated the German invaders in the Vichy regime. Likewise Sarkozy accommodates and appeases today a President without moral bearings and a Congress without a backbone.

We are now at a Vichy moment; a moment like that portrayed in the movie Casablanca, about an incident at Rick’s Café American which turned the world from accommodation to character. Today we are all Monsieur Rick, tormented and torn between man and mouse, waiting for the man of courage and valor and resolute conviction to arrive and order the playing of La Marseillaise.

That man is not Nicolas Sarkozy.

Note to Congress: If you Google YouTube – Casablanca – French National Anthem you can view Paul Heinreid, taking his cue from Humphrey Bogart, and ordering the local band at Rick’s to play La Marseillaise, and drowning out the Vichy Swine in the greatest two minutes in the history of electricity.

Suggested reading for Sarko the American and the new torture buffs in Congress and in the Oval Office: 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, Andre Malraux’s: Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, Anti-Memoirs.

One question: Who raised you?

Romney's Logo & the New England Patriots
- letter to the NYTs, 11/06/07

Here in northern New Hampshire I think we couldn't care less if a candidate is Mormon, Tree Druid or a Zoroastrian Fire Worshiper. The old school worships with the Red Sox and the new school with the New England Patriots. I’m sure I was not the only one dismayed in the last few weeks when the Romney signs started going up to see that Romney's logo is almost identical to that of the New England Patriots. New England has become a different place in the last seven years and frankly, we have become a better people . . . but not because of Romney. That credit goes to Manny and Big Papi and also to Randy Moss, Wes Welker, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. For Romney to attempt to accommodate this energy may be a few degrees away from copyright infringement but it well constitutes a crime against humanity here in New England.

Shiva Turning: New England Nation

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 11/2/07

The Hillary camp's Cajun Cartel surreptitiously proselytizes the draft in WW II "common man" nostalgia (they are 15 years too late) while the Repubs will stay more likely to the current system: For the Dems it is a two-track approach, one travels the land with sentimental stories of heroism by common draftees and parables of great wars, while the central character lies outright. In any case, America has lost its identity to the incipient monarchist incursion of personality cult - Bush, Clinton - and federalism has reached the end of its decent interval.

" . . . 50 more years of war," says General Abizaid. Would be better if they taught the pseudo-monarchs and Generals they send to Oxford as Rhodes scholars something more advanced than sociology and Carroll Quigley: They become, as Toynbee said, imprisoned by their learning rather than awakened by it. Did any of these aparatchiks ever read Kipling? Koestler? Doris Lessing? Malraux?

Indeed, did they read George Kennan, America's greatest ambassador since Franklin, and who, according to a distinguished Vermont professor who spoke to him on his death bed, later in life proposed decentralizing the U.S. into a “dozen constituent republics” including New England, the Middle Atlantic states, the Middle West, the Northwest, the Southwest (including Hawaii), Texas, the Old South, Florida, Alaska, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles: “To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp"?

The West doesn't plan for 50 years. It cannot plan for five years. It is the nature of Hamiltonian federalism; it is from beginning of the rise of northern imperialism in the 1830s (which forced Canada to confederation) to advancing foreign adventures in the 1880s, to the rise to American globalism after WW II entirely a product of rising capital; an angel which has now passed elsewhere. Today capital has reached equilibrium - Wall St. is only one of many brokers and no longer the most important. New York had only three things: Wall St., the Yankees, and The New York Times. Now it has no purpose.

But as New York declines, New England ascends. The Curse was always the shadow of dominance by New York which embittered and incapacitated New England; not since Babe Ruth but since the Civil War. It has been said that the South found its identity in the Civil War. But New England lost hers. Today it awakens, and at the center of Boston there is suddenly a little zen temple named Dice-K.

We have been experiencing an end game since Reagan's passing and the Reagan Presidency itself was a last stand. The monarchist tendency, the Congress of Peeps, the incompetence of fed administrators, the preemptive policy, the failure of the dollar and the view of America abroad as pariah are organic consequences in the natural path of failure.

But things don't ever end; they change. They transform from one thing to the next; they waste their skin. The only defense against waterboarding is New England nationalism. Can we not begin to sell our own New England treasury bonds? Can we send our own representative to the UN?

Hippies for McCain: Is Bill the New Eleanor?

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/28/07

"I'd rather be dead than cool." - Kurt Cobain

Argentina, it appears, will be the first of our neighbors to circle the drain in the spiraling descent to tribal monarchy, as First Lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is elected President by a wide margin. For this they need elections?

‘Tis only in imitation, of course, of the tall, handsome, organized and oh-so-rich white people in the north and of the continuing folly which is Clinton, where hubby Bill threw a birthday party for Hillary this week with characteristic third-world monarchist hubris and the gaudy taste of a fascist South American dictator.

Crisis approaches in this strange turmoil which brings us together spiraling into the dual millennia of Aquarius: What’s black is white; what’s up is down. Yet it comes as no surprise that Wife of Bill wants to be President. It is the classical, symbiotic marriage of the mercurial trickster man and the dominatrix woman – the trickster needs Big Nurse to control his random inner child and arrested sexuality. And Big Nurse sees the world as satyr, the goat boy running naked in the world. She needs to bring it to order. Bill needs to be brought under control: He is the world and the world is goat boy.

As the Democrats continue their descent into nostalgia, they model on a perceived misunderstanding. It is a kind of a ritualized dress-up; an “acting out” of Franklin and Eleanor. It comes as no surprise that Hillary would want (need) to be Bill or Franklin, Leviathan II, coming just after Wilson, but what is kind of odd here is that Bill seems to really want to be the new Eleanor Roosevelt. As he told a British newspaper last week, thrilling to the idea, Hillary really wants him to go around the world as soon as she is President to put the world back together just like it was when he was President. (Way back in the Second Millennium - did somebody say Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo?). I can just see it now with Bill traveling the world and the country as Eleanor did, going deep into the mines to pitch Hillary to the harden and seasoned men: “I am my wife’s legs,” he will tell them.

Not surprising; like so many men with unsure and arrested sexuality, they marry big, bossy women and prefer the life of chamber music, art or saving the world by giving speeches to the blue-haired elderly women of church or party with a whole lot of money. It’s kind of a syndrome.

But it is not going to work. The press has sentimentalized Bill Clinton’s illicit sexuality by comparing it to Betty Ford’s drinking, or the sad case of apparent compulsion of Larry Craig; things we in New Hampshire would deal with and forget in the character of men and women otherwise honorable and competent, as Ford was and Craig is. But Bill Clinton’s acts of sexual dominance and submission in the Oval Office were entirely intentional and fully orchestrated to please and impress his generation. They bring the celestial high point of 200 years of nihilistic political symbolism; a long path that shifted its idea from engaged murder by Anarchists in the 1880s, to sexual dominance, territoriality and exhibitionism like that of the “nihilist saint” Jean Genet in the 1950s.

The nihilist agent seeks to territorialize in conspicuous symbolism that even the proles can understand – in the Sixties it was called Mao Theater. A good expression of it was the famous Life Magazine picture of the student radicals called Weathermen who had taken over the Office of the President at Columbia University. One of the students was sitting behind the President’s desk smoking a cigar. Had he had sexual congress with the President’s secretary on the desk would have been even better; or dominating a police officer in a homosexual act as in Genet. But nothing in this shadow tradition is so rich and primal in counter-culture symbolism as Clinton’s act of sexual dominance in the Oval Office.

Here is the difference between Larry Craig and Clinton. Here in New Hampshire we would see Craig as someone who wanted to do his duty and struggled in the dharma path of life with a mild possession; something to which he was ashamed and in denial of as it hindered him in his duty to family and country; his duty to himself. In New Hampshire we would probably reelect Craig because many things drain the joy from our lives as we struggle on our varied paths. We would respect Craig because in spite of these things he kept to the path. It is a story on which some of the world’s greatest religious texts have been based including John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Mahabharata. But that is not why the Clinton supporters like Clinton, at least the ones of his generation. They like him because he had sex in the Oval Office: They think it is cool. They think it is counter culture. And so does he.

The accusations of sexual misconduct by the President didn’t end with the impeachment trial, they just stopped: The country just needed to move on. But the country will not now or ever move back to a Clinton White House and if it starts to get close, the accusations of sexual misconduct will return. There were rumors rampant of misconduct with other interns among college administrators at the time of the tabloid events; events which with any suggestion of plausibility would have sent any college vice president or district manager at Wal-Mart packing before sundown; there are still unaddressed and unresolved sexual assault accusations against the former President; and there is still the glib defiance, a positive assertion to the faction of his generation whose development stopped at Woodstock. They like it because it is counter-culture.

But Youth Wants to Know and if this former President wants to return to the White House a new generation needs to clearly understand his actions and the purposes and intentions of his actions without guile, sentimentalism or bullshit: Did the President of the United States actually pull his pants down when an attractive female staffer entered the room? Did he do this often? Are you serious?

This week, John McCain was right to invoke Woodstock as a milestone and turning-point event in the generations since WW II. Senator Clinton this month asked that one million dollars be spent in her state to build a museum to the Woodstock event at Yasgur’s farm in 1969. In a charming and touching political ad here in New Hampshire McCain said he couldn’t make the scene because he was “all tied up” at the time. This race is about a generation and who and what of that generation will come forth; Hillary Clinton and hubby Bill, the first representatives of the Woodstock generation? Or John McCain who was shot down over Hanoi 40 years ago this week. It will also decide which will be left behind for good.

It has long been forgotten, but between the acts at Woodstock was a simple and sincere Hindu guru, Swami Satchidananda, who offered the world a simple message: “One truth, many paths.” It was an exotic awakening and brought some culture shock at the time, but such events tend to demystify that which is strange, foreign and alienating to us. It is easy to make fun of the Hari Krishnas, Beatles' guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the others who became popular in the Sixties, but those event have become acclimatized and assimilated and have made possible the welcoming of new immigrant groups to America who add spice and character to the American condition. They also made for the sincere and genuine friendship of my old Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina with the Dalai Lama 25 years later and the compassionate understanding of my current Senator John E. Sununu who this month joined with 26 other Senators in cosponsoring a Sense of the Senate Resolution condemning the violent government crackdown of the Burma junta against the brave and peaceful Buddhist monks who marched unflinching to certain death and imprisonment.

As one prominent conservative scholar and commentator has written, Woodstock and the Sixties were not about politics; they were spiritual awakenings and cultural transitions. And as the Christian Master has said, the things of God and the things of Caesar are two realms and two sides of the coin. The Clintons have not a clue to this. As Sixties types they see instead the communists and the anarchists who commandeered the day. They are “Rubin Democrats” – not the kind who follow the economic cues and insights of Goldman Sachs’ Robert Rubin - but Jerry Rubin, the Marxist revolutionary who told the young ‘uns to go home and kill their parents, but after the draft was passed urged them on to Wall St. He was, he said, a “pilot fish” of his generation and he was, but only to that part of the generation, including the Clintons, which misunderstood the basic premise.

McCain was the flip side of the coin. At its core, war is a test given to a new generation; if you pass the test you are allowed to go on in the universe of your life and generation to other tests; and if you pass the next and the next, you might even get to be President. If you fail or if you avoid the test it costs in later life – your actual successes are always fraught with breakage and defaulted by embarrassments and you are cursed to live out the far side of your life like Elvis; vain, feminine, fat-in-the-face and drugged and unfulfilled, with oiled and blackened hair singing in trashy Vegas bars in the god suit; or charming the elderly and adoring women of church and political party with sentimental and adolescent visions of saving the world.

Ron Paul: A Jeffersonian Awakening for America

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/17/07

“ . . . first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.” - New England’s Celestial Bard, 1838

At the beginning, our continent took two paths and was led by two visions; the one, the expansive, globalist vision of Alexander Hamilton of the Empire State, who saw a strong and singular central (world) government enabling a world of capital and corporations. The second was a vision of unique states and regions and peoples, loosely connecting the one to the other, growing over time, rich in character and each with its own identity and personality. These would be peoples whole in their own communities; people close to the earth and close to their experience of God. This was the vision of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian. The Jeffersonian vision was sent into exile in 1865. Ron Paul has brought it back.

Hamilton’s vision was at war with Jefferson’s from the start. And as power accumulated in the Empire State through the rise of corporations and the industrialization of the northern cities, the Hamilton vision dominated and found its Dark but Identical Twin: Marx was a countervailing movement reacting to Hamilton-based capitalism but likewise, a materialist plan featuring one world and one central power. From 1865 until now, both political parties should be seen as manifestations of one or the other of these two masks, sent to the world stage for and agin’ by surfing the rise of England’s and America’s economic arc in the world.

From as early as 1830, when the industrial revolution came to New England and New York, Jefferson had no role whatsoever. The industrialists had the power and Jefferson and the Virginians were considered tribal and regressive by both the Marxists and the Empire Staters. Today, for the first time in more than 150 years, Jefferson’s vision has awakened again in the world with the rise of Ron Paul.

There could not be a better man for the times than Ron Paul. He rises here in northern New England because we are one of the last vestiges of Jeffersonian independence in the northern parts, although all of our early great poets were Jeffersonian, including the Celestial Bard cited above. We lost our identity when Wall St. became the world vortex of capital, but this week the NYTs Magazine asks in an excellent and comprehensive article by Daniel Gross, is NY no longer the capital of capital?

In today’s burgeoning and increasingly integrated global financial markets, he writes, New York is clearly no longer the epicenter of world capital:

“Since the end of the cold war, vast pools of capital have been forming overseas, in the Swiss bank accounts of Russian oligarchs, in the Shanghai vaults of Chinese manufacturing magnates and in the coffers of funds controlled by governments in Singapore, Russia, Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia that may amount to some $2.5 trillion, according to Stephen Jen, a Morgan Stanley economist.”

Having your own stock market today is akin to having some of those gigundus pointy buildings and sending guys (of every race, creed, sex and sexual orientation) to the moon to play golf. It shows NY it is no longer Big Boss on its own terms: If you don’t have the dough, you gotta go.

Could be that culture follows capital. Or capital follows culture. Can’t tell. I would say though that for whatever reason, New England does indeed seem to be rising again and coming out to NY’s shadow. It was horrible here growing up in a city of 150 empty cotton mills. I volunteered for Vietnam just to get away from it. It was so bad that in the restaurant I worked at as a college student some of the waiters also played for the Patriots. No duh! And the federalies had sent a major highway right through the heart of the city of Boston as they had through so many other major cities in the country, cutting them in half to show who was boss. But today New England is looking pretty good and so is Boston. They buried the highway. Our quarterback is almost beyond imagination. And the Red Sox have broken the Curse, and possibly broken the Yankees: Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

But the masks persist. David Brooks, one of the High Priests who accompanies the Conquistadors, is starting to get stressed out. He writes in his column for the NYTs this week that the Republicans are losing the Hamiltonian grounds to the Democrats.

It is true. The fact is that Marx needs proles in big numbers to accumulate power. (Worth noting, China has 900 million potential workers who have not yet been brought into China’s Hamilton/Marx hybrid). By Bill Clinton’s day we had outsourced ours. Without proletariat, the Democrats had no voice, no pocket of oppression. So Bill Clinton tried the direct Hamiltonian path. That is when the Republicans began thinking of abandoning it.

The Republican Party has abandoned the Hamiltonian ground, writes Brooks, and has lost “intimate contact” with the “working class dreamer” (wow). And instead, this ground is being seized by Hillary Clinton. In fact, the Clintons, like the god Janus (and not unlike China), are trying to wear both masks, Hamilton and Marx.

One of the very great college teachers, Jack Deaver, used to tell us at U. Mass: “We look for a mask that fits until we find one that fits so well we can’t get it off.”

That’s the Democrats’ dilemma today, or rather the Clinton dilemma, because as of now, there is no Democratic Party, there is only the Clintons.

But Brooks is right when he says that the Republicans are beginning to yield the Hamiltonian ground. And it will one day, not far away, leave Brooks behind.

The Federalist Society takes James Madison, Jefferson’s colleague and right hand man, as its avatar. When it was noticed that the new Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts, was associated with The Federalist Society, old school Hamiltonian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., went apoplectic. He began writing letters to editors denouncing Jefferson and appearing on talk shows just before his death warning against the Jefferson position. And recently, Mitt Romney, who has spoken at The Federalist Society, also suggested Jefferson when he began using the phrase “one size fits all federalism” suggesting regional rather than federal solutions to social and political problems.

It was inevitable that the Jeffersonian paradigm would awaken after the South, Texas and the Southwest were brought into the mainstream Republican fold, as all Southern life is based on Jefferson.

As Frank Owsley, one of the great historians of the 20^th century put it:

“In the beginning of Washington’s administration two men defined the fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies (North and South), Alexander Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other State Rights, but in truth the first should be been called Unitarianism and the second Federalism.” (“The Irrepressible Conflict” by Frank Owsley, 1930)

Today, Jefferson’s vision comes out of shadow and onto Main Street with Ron Paul. Paul, with Howard Dean, is one of two voices and new directions for the political parties and it is most interesting that Dean, a New Yorker, speaks to Vermont while Paul, a Texan, speaks to us here in New Hampshire. We are binary states. Indeed, we are very much alike, like twins, but the kind of identical twins who are vastly different. In fact, both states have burgeoning independence movements and they are the only states that do.

But Dr. Dean carries what might be called the “Deaver Curse” – the mask which can’t come off. It is a problem, it could be a crisis.

It is an issue that some of the greatest literary minds of our time have written about and one of them last week won the Noble Prize for Literature. Anti-communist writer Arthur Koestler wrote in the 1930s and 40s about Soviet agents going to their executions by Stalin’s hand still endorsing Stalin and his works. He asked the question how could a European, who considered himself and herself to be a humanitarian, become a Communist and enable and abet the executioner’s hand? And why would he still endorse the executioner even when he was the one being executed? Doris Lessing, who recently won the prize, asks a similar question.

In an essay in 1992 she points out that many writers and politicians, when they leave the Communist cloak behind, simply change the language and remain in the same condition.

“While we have seen the apparent death of Communism,” she writes, “ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.”

Would that some of the “anti-war” types of the last five years had read them. Howard Dean and Ron Paul both opposed the war from the very start. But immediately after the decent interval had passed, Dean went direct to the head of the Democratic Party and folded in with the party, enlisting with the party which had endorsed the invasion of Iraq, the pre-emptive policy, the war on Islam “to take generations” and with Senator Clinton as front-runner, the completely and pathologically irresponsible policies which legitimize use of nuclear weapons in battle circumstances and the full endorsement of a pending invasion of Iran which could well bring us today to a full-scale war with Russia.

Dr. Paul has a different position. When asked by a Washington Post reporter last week if he would endorse another Republican who supported the invasion if he did not get the nomination, he said: “I cannot in good conscience vote for them.”

This is the way the world begins again; with one man willing to go alone, refusing the good models, even those which are sacred to the imagination of men, as Ralph Waldo Emerson advised us to do here in New England back in 1838.

NH Northern Counties Should Seek Statehood Status: Ron Paul is NH

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/14/07

Senator Clinton is way ahead in New Hampshire. The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion has her at 40%. Her closest rival is at 20 percent. If she wins the state, the northern counties of New Hampshire should begin to call for separate statehood status.

New Hampshire is Ron Paul. You see it everywhere – on oversized signs in Warren, Woodsville and Lisbon, in the local papers and at state fairs. He has taken the imagination of the Live Free or Die state and more than anyone in today’s Presidential race he represents the instincts, ethic and the mythic tradition of independence that brought people to like him up here as we once liked John McCain and others too rich for the blood of the mainstream federalist consensus.

New Hampshire is today the most Jeffersonian of states in a nation of mass-minded and manipulated corporate consumers which have forgotten what Jefferson awakened in the world. We wear independence on our license plates and when a foreign leader like the newly elected Nicolas Sarcozy, intent on changing France’s destiny, wants to show a flinty independence, his first symbolic act it to come to our cold lakes to bask. We even have a movie nowadays with Bruce Willis busting thing up under the anthem of our state motto.

But right now Ron Paul is New Hampshire.

It may seem odd that this same environment would want to send Hillary Clinton – who seems on closer inspection more a Mrs. Harry Truman than a Mrs. Clinton – the apogee of middle mind; middle age; middle management mid’lin – to the highest numbers in the polls.

It is simple demographics. The tax rate up here is an attraction to outsiders who are not particularly independent of spirit but simply want to avoid responsibility. That is, they want cradle to grave federal care same as in Massachusetts and pre-Sarcozy France, but want others to pay the bill. (A condition of the Mid’lin Class: neither master nor man and woman, but mid’lin – they want to live like the Eloi and the royals of 17^th century France, but still have the attitudes of the proletariat ancestors). These people are generally from the industrial top of Massachusetts and have just in recent times moved across the border.

The trouble is, they have brought Massachusetts with them.

New Hampshire still has the right stuff which gave it its reputation, but now it is invariably overwhelmed by the mass market corporate culture which has moved across to the bottom of the state.

If we could have a primary of just us in the northern New Hampshire counties – which is most of the state and mostly mountains - and exclude the few counties of the Massachusetts people in the flatland south – the Massachusetts “pseudo states” or economic colonies - we could once again express our native independence and Ron Paul would very well win the state.

We have seen this new condition of voting in recent elections and it was illustrated most vividly in ’04 at the frozen top of the state, Dixville Notch, which might be considered essence of New Hampshire, when Wes Clark won up to 80 percent of the vote. And as with Ron Paul today, large Wes Clark signs dotted the northern landscape (sometimes to the distress of the Massachusetts people who would if they could, zone their property to outlaw pick up trucks . . . they also feel the big political signs benighted their neighborhoods). But at the end of the day it was all John Kerry, same as in Massachusetts.

If Senator Clinton or one of those milquetoast others of both parties wins this state the northern counties above industrialized Manchester on the southern tip should seek independent state status – call that Free State status – to restore our independence of mind and influence. And while we are traveling there we might call for a state Constitution Convention to retool our old state Constitution. Consider the new with Jefferson in mind and Madison, and find a state Constitution to fit the times and temperament.

After we ditched the Massachusetts people in the south we might for example specify in our new state Constitution that before the U.S. President can send New Hampshire men and women to war against China, Russia, all of Islam and the other of its now so many enemies (I added these up using the CIA Factbook and it comes to at least 2.5 billion people against the 301 million in the U.S.; but then we have Blackwater), she would need permission from the New Hampshire Governor. And when President Hillary attempts to reestablish the draft to show her manlies, as she is certain to do under the advice of the Clinton Cajun Cartel which keeps her on her populist and nostalgico course, she would need our permission to press into service from our state.

If this came about the northern counties should be called New Hampshire. We would not be creating a new state, we would only be restoring that which we once were and finding again that which we have lost or had taken away from us. The southern counties could be called North Massachusetts. But Little Massachusetts would be better. We used to call small towns which resembled big towns “little” in old New England, and the littles always do best to follow Mother.

Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize in Literature

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/12/2007

Not since Harry Potter has literary critic Harold Bloom been sent so close to the edge, calling the award of the 2007 Noble Prize to Doris Lessing, “ . . . pure political correctness.” But the literature award to Doris Lessing is an important landmark.

Since war’s end, two books by literary figures have virtually changed the political landscape and the way we live today. The one is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon published in 1940. Koestler was an early communist and supporter of Joseph Stalin. But his later writing revealed to the West the delusional world of Marx and the widespread slaughter of millions it brought on in Russia during the rein of Stalin. He cast much of the blame on himself and on the dilettante and appeasing leftist and liberal Western thinkers and writers of the 1930s and 1940s. Koestler lifted the curtain to reveal that Marx, the nihilist god of Europe’s illuminati, was a ‘god that failed.’ By the 1950s his writing began to turn the tide and a new moral conscience developed in the West largely out of his perspective. Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is the second book. She herself was a communist in the 1950s and her rejection of the nihilist delusion advanced Koestler’s view. It brought a new generation out of shadow and on to a better path.

Contemporary social conscience and cultural studies may be as Bloom might claim; weakling, suburbanized and tenurized nihilism; insidious work akin to that of the coat carriers and fellow travelers who Koestler indicted. But Lessing does not in any way belong to that crowd. She is one of the very last lions of the old school: Writers like Koestler, Jack Reed, Andre Malraux, the committed journalists at McClure’s Magazine like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens and their colleagues of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. They were original thinkers who shook the world and men and women of enormous courage, ability and character who were neither daunted by the odds nor afraid to die for what they believed. And very often they did.

The Canadian Century (a Sputnik Moment)

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network at 10/4/07

The Russians have planted their flag at the North Pole in recent days; in that singular place where the earth seems to align itself with the North Star. I seem to live not far away; in any case, as near to the North Pole as one can possibly live and still be an American. In the Border Lands in Wisconsin thereabouts, agrarian visionaries say there is nothing north of them but "a bunch of fences." I’ve been there: There are no fences. It is starting to get crowded up here in New Hampshire and last I was there, the traffic flow was even greater north from Chicago to the border line.

New Elizas are crossing that fateful psychological river and heading North to freedom; they are coming here daily to the northern edge of New Hampshire even from North Carolina and Texas and beyond. My own neighbors are looking even further north.

And for this reason only: It is getting hot up here and the culture is starting to flip from Denial to Panic. For the first time in my history I have talked this summer to tobacco farmers in North Carolina who complained about the heat. As part of the unspoken lore and tradition – that which makes us who we are – Southern people generally do not complain about the heat. Same here. We never complain about the cold. But it is not that cold anymore and last winter we didn’t have November ice till late January.

The Canadian Century is upon us and all roads lead to the thawing tundra: I’m beginning to wonder if I may yet buy real estate at the North Pole.

But the warming problem interfaces with another: In Ottawa last Christmas with family, attempting unsuccessfully to skate on the Rideau Canal because the ice was melting, an environmentalist asked if we would sign a petition to "stop global warming." Jokingly I said: "Global warming; bad for Texas, good for Canada."

In years past I have sent my daughter to the school bus through a passage in the snow well over her head at 10 degrees below zero for a month on end. Now, it is hard to feel bad when you feel good. Here in northern New Hampshire we had a bumper apple crop don't cha know. And in Greenland they are now growing wheat. And when the hockey season started last night I was still working in my yard in beautiful 80 degree weather.

Most Americans don't really understand how beautiful and vast and open Canada is and how pleasant a trip to Tim Hortons can be in the morning and how genuinely nice Canadians are: Canada is the Undiscovered Country of the North American mind. But the hordes are now looking north from Hoboken, from Tobaccoville, from Paris, Texas. And so are entrepreneurs and government agencies looking for advantage in minerals under the ice and the Northwest Passage.

We have two minds: the Buddha mind and the Doing mind. The later which dominates and finds pleasure in "positive" (meaning doing things) action; it is the enemy of Buddha Mind: It is Norman Vincent Peale; the religion of optimism; the religion of doing things to feel good. Hard to get around.

The Russians planting of the flag at the North Pole is a Sputnik moment but underwater. Its purpose is to territorialize our northern regions and turn our gaze north as surely as if it was a war dog peeing on the frozen tundra property line to warn off Canadian coyotes. (Just as the U.S. intends to territorialize [by which we mean to dominate psychologically - see Sun Tzu] Russia by planting missiles on his borders.)

It begins the drive to new action and passion in the new century. It begins a new era of growing things and creating things and killing things and thinking things up and making them on a vital and brand new, snow white and pristine Canadian canvas: It begins the Canadian Century.