Guns, Harleys, the Constitution, Oh My!

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/28/09

President Obama is lately being accused of “Nixifying”the White House. He’s also been compared to Jimmy Carter quite a lot lately – especially in my columns – and of course, to JFK, Roosevelt and Lincoln. So far, as far as I can see, no one has compared him to President Gerald Ford. Ford was bland. He was awkward. He was always bumping his head. But he was a great and noble man and a great President because as President he did the work that needed to be done. He ended the war in Vietnam. And that is what Obama needs to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. That may be his only legitimate duty.

One of the bravest moments in post WW II history was when Graham Martin, the ambassador to Vietnam, suffering from cancer and pneumonia in both lungs, infuriated President Ford by parking the U.S. Navy in the Sea of China after the fall of Saigon. For three sleepless days and nights he stood on deck and refused Ford’s order to leave the region. The Vietnamese who helped the Americans knew they would be slaughtered when the NVA headed south and they were moving fast. But Martin had promised them he would keep his ships nearby for three days and anyone who could reach him by whatever means would come back with him. He arrived back in America with a full ship and the lives of tens of thousands of Vietnamese with American families now into the third generation were saved by this heroic action.

The war in Vietnam was then over. Martin and Ford closed the book. We Americans were able then to go on to the next thing; happy days when the Americans beat the Russians in hockey and Jimmy Carter, followed by Ronald Reagan and a new generation of prosperity. But the prosperity and power which rose American wealth to its highest post-WW II peak in the Reagan, Bush and Clinton period would not have been possible without Jerry Ford. Things need to end before they can begin again. And if Obama passes these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on to Romney, Palin, Huckabee, Rick Perry or anyone else, he will have misunderstood his duty. Prosperity will not return. The states will be in turmoil.

The Obama group and the Congress conspicuously doing his bidding seem to value nothing more than going to meetings. Both traditional parties – but not the new group rising in the NY 23 election – seem stuck in the past. Which is to say they seem detached. For a cluelessness test they might be stopped randomly by the press and asked, who are Bella and Edward and what’s up with Taylor and Taylor? If you don’t know, ask a kid.

And instead of heading out nightly to those big hair, dress-up lobbying dinners – Newt Gingrich once compared these gatherings to those of the Mandarins of the Empress Dowager Ci’an’s court before he joined them – they might turn on cable.

Linda Gray and Larry Hagman have been asked to reprise their Sue Ellen and J.R. Ewing characters for a remake of the Reagan-era soap, Dallas. Good for Rick Perry and suggests a George W. Bush revival. But to see what’s really going on in the amorphous, uncharted waters of the collective unconscious, plug into Sons of Anarchy, the FX production which recently beat Leno and the mainstream networks.

I don’t get those high stations but it looks pretty hot, like Kurt Cobain meets Hell Boy. It suggests the first days of the rising Sixties when Hell’s Angels and the Bay Area hippies were brother and sister. Days of love and thunder awakened by war across the Pacific. Which suggests a California revival.

Some quotes from the trailer: “Seems like the original idea of the MC was something simpler. You know, social rebellion . . . call it a Harley commune . . .” And a mother’s advise to younger woman: “You love the man . . . you learn to love the club.” (Harley is family.)

When the local cop stops Jax, the Kurt Cobain guy, and tells him, “I will not look the other way, Jax . . . a friendly warning.” Jax replies, “We’re all free men, protected by the Constitution. You look any way you want, Chief.”

Guns, Harleys, the Constitution. Oh my! That’s the rising theme here. This is the new generation and it is soon upon us. And David Letterman is afraid of Sarah Palin?

Optional Federalist Legislation? A Victory for Town Hallers

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/27/09

After discussing health care longer than it took the Founding Fathers to form the republic, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this week sanctioned an idea which could likewise have historic consequences: Optional federal legislation; a provision with details yet undisclosed that allows the states to opt out of the public plan. This brings first to mind the fateful days of 1832 when South Carolina likewise interpreted federal mandates to be optional. It was forbidden then by President Andrew Jackson who threatened to hang the offenders. But state sovereignty is apparently being welcomed back today by Reid. This is a first material victory for the so-called Tenth Amendment movement; those who have gathered at Tea Parties and Town Hall happenings since President Obama first proposed the vast and unprecedented deficit spending which threatens today the dollar and America’s health, wealth, welfare and prestige and position in the world.

And it occurs at a critical moment; a moment when Republicans are ready to stop playing in the sand and cross the river to the new century. The race in the New York special election brings a critical beginning. As The Hill reports: “Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty became the latest Republican to buck his own party Monday, wading into a New York special election to offer support for Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman instead of the GOP nominee.” Pawlenty, who expects to run for President in 2012, followed the initiative of former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, the first major figure to cross over.

This is popping up now here, there and everywhere among the learned and well washed. The venerable Lamar Alexander, Senator from Tennessee, is rethinking his stance on fuel standards after listening to the feisty and innovative young firebrand Susan Lynn of the Tennessee General Assembly. And today, the influential conservative commentator William Kristol writes in the Washington Post, it is a good time to be a conservative but the party is changing fast.

“The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties,” he writes. “Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.”

Wall Street Journal’s venerable Peggy Noonan saw it coming when she wrote in her column in June, 2006: “Something's happening. 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.” She may not like it now as she was first to raise her voice against Sarah Palin and the new Jacksonian voices rising in the heartland, but she was right then.

There doesn’t necessarily need to be a change of party, but there does need to be a change in sensibility. That time of change could be now. The mid 1800s was a wild and rustic time in America; a time of creative change. Our time resembles that time in many ways and has since the 1960s. Nothing is so volatile as a new idea. We could be seeing a youthful, conservative party rise now to challenge what Jeb Bush the other day called a party of “old white guys.” Two parties of old white guys. And not to leave out Hillary, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, “old white guys” of every sex, creed, color and sexual orientation.

Glenn Beck, Enemy of the People

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/25/09

I was once formally forbidden to talk to any student or professor at the college I worked at for helping a few students organize a conference about the killings taking place in Bosnia. When I was seen talking briefly to a student in passing on the campus later I was fired. This at a time when I had three children under the age of eight and my wife, on the farm with the kids, was eight months pregnant with our fourth. I worked then as a temp doing odd jobs including cleaning toilets at a local Sara Lee factory. When we finally sold our beautiful little farm in the hills of North Carolina we had lost $40,000 and were down to our last $25. But it remains the proudest moment of my working life. Writers like to be censored. It puts even the inconsequential in league with the greatest. So I know how Glenn Beck is feeling today; proud and honorable. Everyone at Fox should feel the same.

Glenn Beck has been officially declared the Enemy of the People by Big Brother. His firm, Fox News, has been virtually banned from Presidential press conferences. In an administration now well known for its lack of perspective, this is a sizeable public relations blunder. Last week Beck was just a folksy, funky and entertaining trickster on a second tier TV station. This week he is the government’s officially-sanctioned Enemy of the People. Last week he was just a chump. Now he’s a national hero.

Not since the Keystone Kops arrested screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for peeing in his neighbor’s yard in the big Hollywood Commie Crackdown of the McCarthy era have the federalies staged such a public farce.

Going Rouge: Hating the beautiful people

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/23/09

Being born beautiful is a condition of biological fate like being born black like Michelle Obama or Puerto Rican like Sonia Sotomayer. To hate someone for her skin it to hate her for her biological fate. It is the same as hating them for being born Irish with red hair – some consider them witches – or having an epicanthic fold on the eyes as many Chinese do.

This might be the purest form of nihilism. When nihilism awakened in Russia in the1830s, it was with Russian aristocrats who had taken on the plight of the poor. The poor were slaves; Tolstoy had 12 living in the living room under the stairs. It is perfectly understandable how hatred of the rich by other rich in these circumstances came about. It became nihilism when the cause of misfortune was resolved and the hatred continued as a generic condition and became institutionalized.

Hatred of the family extended from that and it is possible to see the roots of that as well if families conspired together to intentionally keep the poor poor as might be said about early tsarist Russia. When I was in college Jean Genet, a homosexual thief, had become the political fashion. His life and writing brought a thematic challenge to family and authority in general. During the student riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 he advised the students to have intercourse with goats. Stupid, but this was an age when getting stoned was considered enlightened engagement and stand-up comics – not ready for prime time – were considered philosopher kings. As they are again.

As the 20th century advanced, the specific initiatives which addressed family issues in particular became chronic conditions after the issues had been resolved and even healthy families were despised. Because nihilism is a virus; a religion of the Lost Boys and the broken circle. Every family was a criminal institution. Still you could see the systemic origins. But by then nihilism had become a theme of the suburbs; the well off and the cared for. Practicing nihilism was like a historic reenactment; like those Confederate battle reenactments they have today in Southern towns. And when I was in college people even wore Mao costumes pretending to themselves that they were wearing uniforms.

But it is difficult to see any human character or dignity in hating someone who by twist of fate doesn’t look like you, has red hair or blue eyes or black eyes or is better looking. It is just an inherent hatred. And I’m certain that that is the motivation of The Nation editors who are publishing a book titled Going Rouge, a mockery of Sarah Palin, scheduled to come out on the same day as Palin’s book, titled, Going Rogue: An American Life.

Today England slumps unexpectedly, the dollar is crashing, 20% are unemployed in New York and China suddenly appears on the verge of war with India. Issues are pressing. When you consider the kind of genius that came out of the left in New York in days gone by when you could have afternoon drinks with surviving soldiers from the Lincoln Brigade at the Lion’s Head and get drunk with Norman Mailer – Kenneth Burke, Alfred Kazin, Wilfred Burchett, friend of Henry Kissinger and Ho Chi Minh, might stop in from Mao’s China or Arthur Koestler after his death sentence in Spain had been lifted – it might be fair to ask, what is left of the left? What is left of New York?

Republican Head and Heart: Romney and Palin

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/21/09

Cited on a variety of internet shops like The AtlanticWire, Newser and Lara Ebke’s Red State Eclectic yesterday is a quote from Matt Lewis, writer, blogger and commentator from Alexandria, Virginia. He writes in Politics Daily: “If recent elections are any guide, the Republicans' heads will tell them to choose Mitt Romney. Their hearts whisper something else. Is ‘Sarah’ the name of this siren song?”

W. McCahill at Newser says: “No matter what kind of gains Republicans make in the midterm elections next year, it’s going to be tough to unseat President Obama—and that’s why the GOP is going to choose Sarah Palin, its heart’s preferred candidate, over Mitt Romney, its head’s favorite.”

Mike Huckabee, who leads the others in a recent poll by a wide margin, registers in these commentaries as neither head nor heart.

As has been widely reported, Sarah Palin will appear on the Oprah show on November 16, a day before the publication of her book, Going Rogue: An American Life. This is significant because Oprah is a threshold. Appearing on her show is a “rite of entry” for anyone and everything opening to the mainstream of American culture. And standing in line at the grocery store yesterday I couldn’t help but notice that David Letterman, looking plaintiff and adrift, had made the tabloids. This, a “rite of exit.” Mainstream is coming out of Palin Denial.

With little other information available, the titles of Romney’s book and Palin’s are telling. Romney’s book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness will be available on March 2, 2010. It is not the best title. There is hubris and a kind of conspicuous arrogance to it which he asks us to wear with our chests out. Romney’s title suggests a full endorsement of the Bush II paradigm without a moment’s introspection. It looks to the past to continue the past. It would be what he is good at, but I think it is off the mark and most Americans are getting beyond it and ready for a new turning. Going Rogue, however, suggests a new direction, a new adventure, something just ahead there in the great unknown. It is a very good title and speaks in essence to the frontier spirit of those who venture beyond the Hudson River or the Beltway. Rugged individualism; going alone – Emerson and Goldwater – is suggested. It opens to the future. As was said here at the very first, Palin and family suggest a new era ahead; a new century which awakens the free spirit of the American heartland much as Andrew Jackson did in the mid-1800s.

In the most recent Rassmusen poll when asked who they would vote for in 2012, 29% of Republican voters nationwide say Huckabee, while 24% prefer Romney and 18% Palin.

The Huckabee figure may be good news for Palin. Who will Huckabee’s 29% vote for if Huckabee drops out? Huckabee’s following tends to be culturally conservative and regional. Two things they may not like about Romney: He was governor of Massachusetts and advanced a model of health insurance there similar to Obama’s. And he is a Mormon. Down the road this constituency could head toward Palin.

Obama needs a Junior Seau

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/20/09

Obama is lacking something. There is no one particularly likeable in his organization besides Obama himself. Any vital organization needs what historian W.J. Cash called “the man at the center.” The “man at the center” is not the man at the top. He is someone in the midst of things who brings a spirit to the group that transcends partisanship. Someone with whom most everyone in the organization and out of it can relate to. Colin Powell was a good example in the Reagan organization. Most people liked him. Most still do. But Obama has no such figure. Instead of a Powell he has given us Joe Biden, the white guy from central casting, Hillary, that Other Mother from the Sixties, and Rahm Emmanuel who frightens children and other living things.

The Man at the Center is kind of an annex for the Man at the Top. We are only half way there with the man at the top; Man at the Center is the heart, which should be listened to first. The Man at the Center defines the man at the top to a greater realm as Powell did with Reagan. If she or he is not there, the group will become partisan and oppositional as Bush II and Clinton were oppositional; possibly they were intentionally oppositional, possibly they just didn’t know what they were doing. It brews dissent and opposition. The country will eventually be poisoned in opposition and civil war could eventually erupt as oppositional politics defines via negatives. Or will become totalitarian, where one conquers all, like the current Chinese model which is drawing admirers now from the political fashionistas in New York and Moscow.

The Man at the Center can bring the dead to life as Tedy Bruschi did when he joined the New England Patriots in 1996. The age swirls around him as it swirled around John Lennon in 1967. He lives beyond his death as Lord Nelson did through the Victoria Age and continues to do today in novels and movies.

A great manager, like Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick, understands this in principle and in his heart. Throughout New England these past few weeks they have been wearing the number 54 to honor Bruschi. When he retired the team seemed to lose it heart. Belichick called in Junior Seau who would rather be surfing, rather be cutting oranges to bring to his daughter’s soccer game, rather be sunning in San Diego than tackling in the snow and chill of blustery New England. But he came back for Belichick and for us. And for a few games more we get our heart back. This week we won like in the old days when Junior played with Tedy and Mike Gravel. 59 to zero.

That’s what Obama needs; a Tedy Bruschi, a Junior Seau, a Colin Powell or a Lord Nelson. Without that, he doesn’t have a chance.

Working Class Hero: Palin Rising

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/19/09

A recent Gallup Poll indicates that Sarah Palin’s approval rating has dropped by two percent since the defeat of the Republican Party ticket last November. But despite the decline, Gallup said her ability to stay in the news may allow her to move from being a vice presidential candidate in one election to being a presidential candidate in the next.

Despite a torrent of criticism from the media, Democrats and even some in her own party, Sarah Palin remains the hottest brand name in politics Politico reports.

As part of an effort to gauge Palin's popularity with the rank and file beyond the Beltway, where the GOP establishment is lukewarm toward the charismatic former governor, POLITICO surveyed nearly 50 prominent Republican Party officials and politicians, representing every region of the country and ranging from statewide-elected officeholders to state legislators to state and county party chairs.

Some refused to talk about her at all. Others, mostly her critics, would do so only off the record. But taken as a whole, the body of interviews revealed that despite Palin's high negative ratings in recent national polls, Republicans at the grass-roots level and their leaders still hold a very favorable impression of the former Alaska governor. Westerners had a particular affinity for Palin, with many noting that she embodied the values of freedom and self-reliance.

"People saw her as one of them -- someone who could relate to an everyday person. She's not one of the political class," Heidi Gansert, the Nevada House minority leader told Politico. "I also believe that women appreciated her message and what she'd accomplished in her political career and family life. A woman who has a young family, who is able to become the governor of Alaska -- a lot of people, women who worked the everyday jobs with their families -- they know that she's experiencing the same things they are."

Charles M. Webster, the state GOP chairman in Maine, said Republicans there are very enthusiastic about Palin largely because they can see themselves in her.

"I see her as being somebody who the average, what I call 'working class guy,' relates to," Webster said. "Somebody who's plain-spoken, somebody who hunts and fishes. And this is Maine -- we're in the country up here."

Mitt Romney, Sumitomo Mitsui’s Zen Man and the Preacher-in-Chief

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/16/09

Ted Sorensen, the great speech writer and advisor to Jack Kennedy, had some advice for President Obama at a recent forum at Harvard: “Stop campaigning.” But they’ve been saying that for months now. It was great at first; the nice and easy Sam and Dave tunes at the campaign rallies instead of the usual fascistic AC/DC that Democratic consultants favor. And those fantastic speeches about granny, mom and race. Then it got to be like listening to a preacher. Like those TV preachers. Like Dr. Phil.

The Hill reports that Lindsey Graham is in a cage fight with Ron Paul. It is a representative fight for the times; the one a receding force, the other an advancing force. But both are ideologists. Which in my mind brings up Mitt Romney in importance as he is not. Watching him up here when he was governor of Massachusetts, he seemed fair minded, honest to a fault, project oriented, partisan yes, but at the same time remarkably non-ideological. He fired Billy Bulger, President of the University of Massachusetts, who had been awarded the job as a political plum by the Republican governor just before him.

In solving problems, Romney, who founded the investment firm Bain Capital, has shown the ability to do what Zen requests: See what is there and see nothing else. He could well be at the helm in 2012 and if not, he could still be in the same room as chief of staff to Sarah Palin. And the deeper the economy sinks and the more the deficits rise, the more eyes turn to Romney.

Alan Greenspan said this week that he has no worries about the falling dollar. Warren Buffett, one of Obama’s chief advisers, says it’s all good. But he lost half his fortune last year. And it was reported just this morning that Bank of America lost $2.24 B as loan losses continue to rise. So what does Zen Man say?

Daisuke Uno, chief strategist for Sumitomo Mitsui, a unit of Japan’s third biggest bank, says the dollar may drop to 50 yen next year and eventually lose its role as the global reserve currency.

“The U.S. economy will deteriorate into 2011 as the effects of excess consumption and the financial bubble linger,” he told Bloomberg’s Shigeki Nozawa. “The dollar’s fall won’t stop until there’s a change to the global currency system.”

The greenback is heading for the trough of a super-cycle that started in August 1971, Uno said, referring to the Elliot Wave theory, which holds that market swings follow a predictable five-stage pattern of three steps forward, two steps back.

Uno said after the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the U.S., Europe and Asia will form separate economic blocs.

The Elliot Wave converges with generational theories of post-war cycles. Power awakens at the beginning of the second post-war generation and begins its decline at the end of the third, which is now. In all cyclical theories, it has been pointed out, there is the claim toward the end of the cycle that it will be different this time. That is where Greenspan’s happy face prediction about the dollar comes in. It is part of the culture of the cycle.

Survival demands that we look forward, but by the end of the third generation, looking to the past has been fully institutionalized by three generations and every layer of government and business contributes. Even entertainment attempts to fortify the waning cycle (Tiny Fey, Vanity Fair, Letterman).

Japanese Zen, derived from Chinese Taoism, explains power as a convergence of equal and opposite counter forces. Things rise because they must, things fall because they must. There is a philosophy for rising: Confucianism. There is one for receding: Taoism.

In the West we have only a philosophy for rising. Our philosophy for receding is crash and burn. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Anglosphere Alternative to Chimerica and ‘One World Under Bill’

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/15/09

As the large and rising larger forces in the world gather in Shanghai alleys and other shadowy places conspiring to bounce the dollar out as a reserve currency, here is a thought. We might consider down the road an alternative currency of our own: An Anglosphere currency; a currency converging the U.S. dollar, the Australian dollar and the Canadian dollar. The Canadian dollar is at equity now with the American dollar ($1.03) and the Aussie ($1.09) is getting there. The Anglosphere is made up of English-speaking countries organically related through the tradition of the English-speaking people. Primarily the U.S., Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand.

It is an abstraction worth a suggestion as it leads to the question of who we are and what will become of us in this rapidly changing world. The best heads in public opinion today – historians Niall Ferguson and Zachary Karabell for example – follow the path of economic destiny to China and see the likely world ahead as one called Chimerica, a vast economic union of a sort made up of America and China. Of best practices, this would be perhaps the most fortuitous prospect. But I don’t see it happening.

I am a Buddhist and am one of those called to the East as if to a siren. But frankly, we are a breed apart. I do not see many Americans yielding sovereignty in any psychic or psychological sense to the East. We have converged before, then we defaulted back to our roots and traditions and I believe we will again.

There has been great interest in the things of the East here since the Sixties but the Sixties was in its first initiative an age of peace with utopian features. Its subsequent political manifestations including a kind of messianic capitalism which might be called One World Under Bill – today with Hillary as Secretary of State and James Carville hoping to run Afghanistan behind the puppet Ashraf Ghani – are flighty and partially delusional. At any time, utopian politics reflect an age in transition. And the illusions inherent in these movements, as any reader of Sun Tzu will vigorously nod, provide advantage to our economic competitors.

Obama is smarter and more competent and pragmatic but his world likewise has cult features; Mill High Stadium – the “new Roosevelt,” the “new Kennedy,” the “new Lincoln,” the “new Jesus.” And messianic features; a Nobel Prize for Hope. These come primarily from utopian instincts. The Sixties and Seventies was an age much like the 1820s and 1830s in America when Transcendentalism, which can be considered a kind of New England Taoism or Buddhism, Shakerism and much of evangelical thinking in America today took their awakening. But as Walt Whitman pointed out at the end of that era, those who travel across the Universe come back. The age passed when heartland America found its rustic Andrew Jackson and the northeast yielded back to Victorianism. Likewise, we will shortly leave the utopian dreams and schemes of the Sixties behind because they are primarily generational.

There is an organic cultural cohesion to the Anglosphere and its greatest intensity is on the edges; Australia, a wild child, born free in the desert under the Southern Cross and England, our old mother across the Atlantic. Their first friends in the world are here in North America and possibly we in time will be their only lasting friends.

The current economic crisis is a test. Different countries are getting different marks. China is doing great. The U.S. not so good. But Canada is doing great as well. In banking, the highest scores are going to Canada, vastest realm of the Anglosphere. Of all the people in the world Canadians are most like us. We might learn their methods and get to know them better. Because pretty soon the world is going to have to redraw its circles and it will be time again for some original thinking.

Going Bust: The End of an Age

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/14/09

Marc Faber, the legendary economist of the Gloom, Doom and Boom Report told Bloomberg’s Bernard Lo this morning that over the next few years the United States will have to borrow two trillion dollars per year to stay afloat. In the last few years we have seen the financial crisis of private sector enterprises like AIG and government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie May and Freddie going bust, he said. But at the next station the U.S. Government goes bust.

Part of the problem here may be one of perception. Possibly it is not so much a financial crisis, like the ones in the 1830s and the 1930s, as it is a historic and cultural shift of massive proportions. An article in The Wall Street Journal this week by Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends on It may offer some stepping stones across the river.

Most people are now aware that China is the largest creditor to a heavily indebted U.S. government. It holds close to a trillion dollars of U.S. Treasurys and has invested hundreds of billions more in private enterprises in America. Even though these facts are plainly acknowledged, policy makers and experts continue to underestimate the full ramifications of this relationship.

Our situation facing China is not unlike cash-strapped England’s at the end of WW II, he writes.

As one British official, Evelyn Shuckburgh, remarked in the late 1940s, "it was impossible not to be conscious that we were playing second fiddle." And that was precisely what the U.S. desired. Having supported the British for decades and become its banker and manufacturer during two wars, at the end of World War II the U.S. fully intended to supplant the British Empire.

China is likely this time around to surpass the U.S. in the size of its economy in the next 20 years and the recent implosion of the American financial system has only accelerated China’s rise.

Given the lesson of the British Empire's demise, it would be foolish to base current policy on the assumption that China will hit a fatal speed-bump before it is able to supplant the U.S. And while the level of current indebtedness is manageable for the U.S.—and in fact tethers the Chinese closely to the U.S. economy in ways that are arguably beneficial for both countries—the fact that these economies are currently bound together does not mean that their interests will always be in sync.

The fact is that we have reached the end of an age and that is why the past age’s cheerleaders and letter men – like Letterman – are failing. And the aging generation’s idols like Bill Clinton seem strangely odd and out of time as the big hair get coiffed and silvered. While Hillary, in discussion with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavron, looks ready for her nap.

But we might begin to ask ourselves as Americans where do we want to go? Does the flow of economic history demand that we walk in China’s footsteps? Are there models of economy which might be better suited to our future prospects?

We might consider thinking about the benefits of regionalization because if the U.S. economy is to contract and consolidate, it might contract within a matrix which makes for better packaging than the internal world-without-walls we have now. Does northern New England really need four farm colleges? One might work better. We might begin to think about tax spending and tax breaks to encourage naturally occurring regional cultures and regional community tier economies. We might feature farming where there are farms and factories where there are or have been factories. Because life in the city is different than the hills and prairies and one size does not fit all in temperament, personality, culture and economics.

And we might begin to ask ourselves how did we get to where we are? What do we want to be? What have we become?

Who is General McChrystal?

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/12/09

Is General McChrystal a believer in the Christian Apocalypse in Jerusalem like Preacher John Hargee and the 700 Clubs’ Pat Robertson? At the beginning of the war on Iraq a few New York rabbis tried to warn us about this but few listened. Today the web site Jews on First is a useful watchdog on this issue. But we know almost nothing about McChrystal and our fate, fortunes and American lives are suddenly in his hands.

Is he from New York? Arkansas? Because that tells you something. Was he raised on army bases? Because that tells you something too as people reared without a sense of place can be more prone to abstraction and ideology. His official bios call him a “warrior scholar,” a phase I think I made up myself a few years ago about Wesley Clark who is one. The Pentagon got hold of it and uses it now for anyone who jogs to work.

Before Obama heads off into Pakistan, Indonesia and Thailand, where by some credible estimates 10 civilians will die for every one enemy fighter, he might ask about his road partner. Because it is oddly hard to find out about McChrystal’s early life, his religious beliefs or anything else pertinent to the formation of the man and adult prior to West Point.

As Obama wanders the halls now waiting for someone to order up the playing of the La Marseillais and all in Monsieur Rick’s global Café Americain to leap up and cheer, the beginnings of this continuing conflict should be recalled. When I first lobbied British House of Commons members including the former actress Glenda Jackson, our European allies had no idea how long millennial fever had been brewing in the hills and hollows of Appalachia where I lived in the 1990s, where every folk and free mountain radio preacher was talking about the Second Coming. Armageddon was coming to the Middle East, there would be war to the end times in Jerusalem and Saddam was the great Satan, the Anti-Christ; the anti-American.

When the Hale-Bopp comet appeared just before the millennium, you could almost hear the Blue Ridge murmur prophecy, vindicating the intuitive, unlettered preachers and prophets in the hills and hollows; some touched by the Lord and some by that witch spirit unique to the Appalachians. In was all just as it was written by John, in Revelations 8:10-11 The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water – the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.

Has General McChrystal read Revelations? What are his feelings?

The Left Behind books, which called up this millennial fever in the 1990s sold in the 100s of millions and contributed a vast, subliminal regional culture to where we have got today. They were penned by Tim LaHaye, who worked for Jack Kemp, who played a significant role in getting the religious right to support George W. Bush in 2000. Mike Huckabee finds these books, which in the heat of Armageddon suggest the destruction of Jews who don’t convert, to be a compelling story. This is important and necessary to know because of the influence of the Christian millennialist’s influence on the army and on actual government and foreign policy at the beginning of this war. Does McChrystal share this persuasion? We need to know.

In the Left Behind books the true Christians – that would be Hargee and Robertson - are beamed up after Armageddon and everything else is destroyed. But in real life you can’t plan a future after a war. You have to just try to make something out of what’s left and who can still stand up. Sometimes it is only burned earth and a few women and children. After the Union soldiers burned, killed and ate everything from Atlanta to Savannah there was not one Tunis sheep left in all of the South. There was nothing left. Worth recalling because at the beginning, northern people were advised by Frederick Law Olmstead, who had sojourned briefly in the Cotton Kingdom, that war on the South would be like a walk in Central Park. Language much like we heard on the way into Iraq and heard again on the way into Afghanistan.

The Nobel Committee Through a Glass Darkly

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/9/09

The choices of President Barack Obama to win the 2009 Nobel Prize for peace and Herta Mueller to win the 2009 Nobel Prize for literature make perfect sense, but only to a Swede or a German. Too other Euros too, but it must be said, now that Sarko has become Angela’s bitch, that every European east to the English Channel and west of the Urals is a kind of German or German to a degree. And Swedes most of all as they are to Germany much as Canadians are to us Americans. Harder working, better educated, smarter maybe, better looking, more sophisticated, better hockey players and certainly more polite, but still beholden to us vulgarians down below.

It has nothing to do with literature. It has nothing to do with peace. It never has. It never does. But the Nobel Committee’s selections this year form a perfect picture through a glass darkly of who the Swedes and Germans are and who they are not. But it is their world, not ours, and we should first only be bemused. Because we, as Americans, can never be Swedes or Germans and should not want to be.

Giving the peace prize to Obama – I think he does not want it yet but Bill wants it badly and he will never get it now – should not raise irony although the Nobel Committee cherishes irony. True, Obama has vindicated Cheney and Bush in Afghanistan and trumped Reagan with his new upgraded stars wars system. But this is not about America’s Obama. This is about Sweden’s Obama and they are different. Obama is to the Swedes and the Germans the kind of American they want outsiders (feringhee, foreigner, foreign devils, Americans) to be. They want them (us) to be nice light blue types like Desmond Tutu, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.

Obama got this early, way too early, because they want to force him to be like that as well. But Obama is not a preacher. He may not be a president. It is too early to tell. But to be a real president requires more structure, character and substance than Tutu and Carter and most of the others and Obama has more. It would be a heroic moment for Obama to gracefully turn it down with the claim that he has not yet earned it. Obama still has potential for true grit and natural nobility – Eisenhower, Kennedy - but he will be held back by being bunched in with these guys.

The Nobels don’t like to be lobbied or anticipated. Bill – he of the 50 gold watches - probably overreached in his heavy lobbying for the peace prize. Hey, this is not suburban soccer when everyone gets a trophy. Not to the Swedes. But wait till they give one to Hillary in a few years. That will really piss him off.

And what they always say about literature, “If you are European it is easier to relate to European literature,” is true, even if it annoys the English department. Much as it is easier to relate to classical ballet if you happen to be a white Russian. The day has passed. It passed when John Ford, Buster Keaton, Hedy Lamarr and Sam Fuller superseded the masterful Willa Cather. And it was not an issue of taste or sophistication but one of simple demographics.

But this one thing should be cleared up. The Swedes, in choosing another European for the literature prize were not thinking about Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Maya Angelou, Lee Smith (my choice), Charles Frazier or Bob Dylan when they passed them by. They were thinking of one person: Stephanie Meyers, author of the Twilight series, whose novels have sold tens, probably 100s of millions of copies this past year, most to kids under 16. Because if the first image of the Goth Herta Mueller from Transylvania who’s “ . . . frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed . . .” doesn’t bring vampires to mind you are in denial. It is the core archetype of Europe’s post-Christendom age which the remarkable Angela Merkel has inherited – the myth of the “empty crypt” – the Christ unconjured and unconjurable. They will not turn this over to American vampires from Kurt Cobain’s Seattle, shining in the sun and with a work and family ethic as stringent as Mormons. Forget about that. Europe owns vampires. They will not give this to us. We are vulgar.

The most fundamental illusion of globalization is that America is not first in the world because of military conquest, but we are. Europeans, Germans especially, know that in their hearts and so do we. Asking Europeans who first conquered the world then had it taken from them by us is in one aspect like asking Richmond, Austin or Chapel Hill to provide their vision of us and them after the Southern conquest. You would get Faulkner and C. Vann Woodward. You would get John Hope Franklin, W.J Cash and Maya Angelou. You would get literature, obsession and guilt from the conquered but not from the conqueror. Because the conqueror is free and passes on in curiosity to Jimmy Cagney, 2 Pac, the Baghwan and Kurt Cobain or as Henry James wrote of New England, yields to decay. But the conquered, Germany and the South, are changed forever.

Mad Men and the Second Age of Carter

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/06/09

The definitive detail might be the scene in Charade where Audrey Hepburn snaps the filter off her cigarette with disgust. Only the weak or inauthentic smoked filters. That day has made a comeback with Mad Men. Everyone smokes, but real men smoke Luckies. Some have reported that it is the best TV show ever, at a time when TV writing – The Sopranos, House, Lost – transcends movies in skill and imagination.

I made the point in the first essay I had published, an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer back in 1977 when the anti-smoking crusade had taken on all of the umbrage of a Gandhi hunger strike – that smoking was bad for you but quitting was worse as it formed self-righteousness and pretension and the sense that you were doing something when you weren’t doing anything. That may be why there is such freshness to a story about the hard working and hard playing in the days when drinking started at four in the afternoon. Earlier for top executives. Soon after it passed they – Jimmy Carter – would tax the lunch-time martinis.

People drank then. They drank like Russians. But they drank better and some – some of the very best – drank all of the time. Possibly thinking was more subtle and complex. Certainly the writing was better.

Mad Men’s main character Don Draper looks a little like Mitt Romney, although Romney would have been doing his mission in Paris at the time and has likely never smoked a cigarette. I take it that it is not entirely by accident. I noticed because during the 2008 race when I wrote about Romney I’d receive letters in the chronic commenter/stalker range that complained about his looks; the devo way he dressed, the way he combed his hair. Now it is all the rage.

“I love to go to work and put on that suit,” said Don Draper’s man, Jon Hamm, in a TV interview. “I makes you feel like a million bucks.”

It was a day of warrior individualism – Truman Capote, Jackson Pollock, Audrey Hepburn, Miles Davis, Jackie Kennedy. Of intensely focused zen with D.T. Suzuki and depth psychology with C.G. Jung. A day in Brooklyn as Pete Hamill once phrased it (before he quit drinking) when Jewish girls read Dostoyevsky in their lit rooms at night and Irish boys coming home from the celibacy of the Irish bars, longed for them without luck.

Mad Men brings a change from the Seventies redux of the last year or so – the Second Age of Jimmy Carter – Saturday Night Live yet again but not funny this time, the easy irony and titters in the night scornful of genius as being subtle, insidious and unfair. The post-Woodstock venue yet again, where the big questions asked are not about the banality of evil as Hannah Arendt, cigarette in hand, posed it but, “will Letterman apologize?”

The first Age of Carter was a time of reprieve and rest. A human need perhaps, to fall fallow for a season. But the public spell broke back then with the rise of the TV show Dallas which not by coincidence accompanied a new cycle of power, prestige, good will and prosperity in our country and brought the post-war period to its peak. Maybe we are at the edge of that again. Maybe Mad Men is the new Dallas.

We Need a New Political Party with True Federalist Features

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/5/09


Anyone who has had the experience of wandering in the vicinity as I had during the Tet Offensive would have by now fully gotten that Yogi Berra feeling of déjà vu all over again. The generals, the men in suits, so fully self assured and autonomous and the top political leadership oh so coy and reassuring. But they have no clue as to where they are going and how they will get there. There is one difference between this and Vietnam. Jim Webb, the Virginia senator who served heroically in Vietnam, said recently that he saw positive exit possibilities in Vietnam. He sees none in Afghanistan.

It has gone on this long without firming up any principled opposition here in the hills of New Hampshire and throughout the heartland possibly because we have become, as John Kenneth Galbraith called us back in 1992, a culture of contentment. When the threat of difficulty occurs we wind up like a dervish and surround the Pentagon, then it passes in the night. Those who wish for war have always depended on the expediency of opposition. It is their most valuable tool.

At the beginning of the war in Iraq it was proposed up here in northern New England that the war was illegal and the use of the National Guard to fight it was illegal. Today, as New Hampshire prepares for its biggest deployment ever, 1,100 troops, it still is. They have adopted this approach in Wisconsin. The Bring the Guard Home movement is a national movement of state campaigns to end the unlawful overseas deployment of the National Guard. Our New England governors should sign on with them. But clearly they won’t.

More than half of the country opposes this war. According to a recent poll more than 40% no longer consider themselves Democrats or Republicans. Perhaps it is time for a new political party. An Independent party or a Federalist party or a New England party to emphasis our rights as states and regions under the Constitution, under natural law and common sense. A party to institutionalize our own collective determination on vital moral issues and our responsibility to do what is right on issues of life and death whether it is constitutionally defined or not. Because one woman or man as governor with the courage to refuse deployment would change more than the war. It would change everything.

China at Sixty

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/1/09

In the early 1920s, the French writer Andre Malraux wrote that the question of the century will be how will the Chinese adapt to individualism? That question may still be unanswered as China reaches the 60th birthday of Mao’s revolutionary turning.

That was long ago; before Jet Li and Ziyi Zhang, before Nixon and Kissinger. But the symbols and images chosen for the celebration, including 5,000 goose-stepping soldiers who rehearsed for five months, recall the Soviet style in the age of Stalin.

“I wonder what Chinese leaders are thinking?” Said Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California said to Charles Hutzler of the Associated Press. “For more than 15 years they have been denouncing those who call China’s rise a threat. Now they put on this display of military hardware, with goose-stepping soldiers to match. Aren’t they confirming the China Threat?”

Sixty is an auspicious number that plays well with Chinese. It traditionally represents the full life of a person. To the sage Tao tradition of 5,000 plus years, 60 also brings the end of a civilization’s full life cycle; three generations – 20 years apiece, after which comes decline, death and hopefully rebirth. The three generations can clearly be delineated on this occasion: The Mao Revolution and the Long March, followed by the Cultural Revolution and then the Deng Xiaoping transition to command capitalism and “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

My own hunch is that after it settles some historic business, China will begin to look inward if it can inculcate growth internally through infrastructure spending. But the Generalissimo Franco-ish posture of militant nostalgia will also advance.

Because China can see ahead in strength. She can see that she has conquered the Barbarian. But she still has one problem: She has not conquered herself. That is why a singular, quiet and joyful monk living peacefully in exile in Dharamsala, India, can drive the Chinese leadership to seizures.

Going Rogue with Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/30/09

Years ago Dennis Hopper directed a movie about a Hollywood crew who went to the Amazon jungle to shoot an action film. After they left, a tribal chief had a movie camera fashioned out of vines and pretended to be directing movies. It came to mind during the recent G-20 meeting of global leaders in Pittsburg. Last year historian Niall Ferguson made the credible claim that there is no G-20. There is only a G-2, America and China or Chimerica, or possibly only a G-1, China.

This new phase of post-global, self-serving pseudo events and organizations, like Bill Clinton’s puerile Global Initiative or The (obsequious) Elders, carries all of the convincing authenticity of a Cindy Crawford infomercial. But in the reelection of Angela Merkel as Prime Minister, Germany has stepped away from the pack and opened a portal with fresh and new potential.

What gives significance to Merkel’s victory is that her centralist party in the previous election governed in coalition with the left. She won this time in a coalition with a party to the right with libertarian features. It marks a significant change in Germany and potentially in the west and in the world. It indicates that Germany and others in Europe will no longer necessarily look to Washington for initiative as they find their own way out of the economic recession. America’s post-war leadership arc – a product of military victory in Germany and Japan - may be over. And it suggests that the most central nation of Europe may have finally cast off the shadow of cultural and political nihilism which has plagued Europe and Russia since the Decembrists movement of 1825.

That Other Mother has not yet left New York however, as evidenced by the lead in the New York Times’ news item which sees the German vote not as the victory first for Merkel, but as a failure for socialism: “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.” As the philosopher Kenneth Burke used to point out, the perspective is ingrained in the nuance, tone and texture of the press’s language.

The Times: Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

Those who look back to Europe including Obama’s economists, Obama’s publicists, academics and press, Obama’s friends and key advisors and Obama, are being left behind.

This different is here in the United States as well as the libertarian initiative first took root here. The numbers may be less important than the quality of the crowd; a difference between fashionable and righteous pique and ferocity. The one at the end of things, the other at the beginning. The sanitized, suburbanized, rich-girl Marxism and innocent indignation of the vast antiauthoritarian horde, like that institutionalized by Life Magazine when it reported on Hillary Clinton’s valedictorian speech at Wellesley years ago, which set the paradigm for the next 40 years. Compared to the University of Michigan students who rose to their feet chanting “End the Fed! End the Fed!” at a recent Ron Paul speech. Or that in the American heartland going rogue with Sarah Palin. Who’s afraid of Hillary Clinton?

Obama in Afghanistan: An Unprecedented Show of Uncertainty

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/27/09

There was a problem in Italy at the end of Ramadan last week when thousands of Muslims wanted to pray outside at Rome's Piazza Vittoria. Like they do in Tehran. The Italian government said no, they had to pray in mosques but they did it anyway. What, are the Italians going to arrest them for praying? Despite the ban thousands of Muslims left their shoes by the side of the road, lay down their prayer rugs and participated in the Eid al-Fitr ceremonies.

The French and Spanish imperialists were said to be clever when they sent the priests in right away with the invaders. Once a Catholic always a Catholic, it was said years back about something else, but looking back it did indeed make an imprint in the Philippines, Vietnam, everywhere. To the point where the war in Vietnam identified “ours” as Catholic and “theirs” as communists. Gandhi hated missionaries. They just disrupt the indigenous cohesions, he said. But of course, that was the point. Even in the territorial disputes between Texas and Mexico, when Anglos moved into the northern territories one of Mexico’s few demands was that these Southern Protestants “turn Catholic.” And he may strike people as rigid in his thinking today and stuck in the past, but Pope Benedict is aware of these things as the broody 1000 year rise of Europe in the Eastern Church in the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople became a mosque for almost another thousand years in the second part, leading up to us today. And there they are now praying in the Pope’s own streets.

Probably everybody inherently knows about this. No one told the Irish Catholics in Toronto, Ottawa or Boston to team up together to oppose the French Catholics. Part of being an Irish Catholic was not being a French Catholic. Or Catholic and Protestant among the working people in Manchester and Liverpool.

When my grandparents left from those ports most of the eyes were blue, RC or C of E. Today, judging from the images that come through on Daljit Dhaliwal’s world news, a good percentage appear to be Muslim, like it is a today second religion in England. As Catholicism was a second religion then; the religion of the working class and the common people. And as in much of Europe, these are the people who are doing the real work. The same work that my grandparents did there in Manchester.

In a vast march across the world and into the universe, my neighbors who are in their 100s up here in the White Mountains, and there are a few of them, can trace their ancestors in their time and not long before passing from Anglican, to Puritan, to Unitarian to hippie Buddhism. My people changed too. But only one of my generation has “turned Muslim”: Cat Stevens.

We happened to be in Michigan around Ann Arbor during the 9/11 tragedy. My boys were young teenagers then. There are large Muslim groups in that region and in the elegant and well-maintained state parks that serve as beaches there groups of families gather. You could clearly see the generational differences. The old women dress all in black, in chador. The next generation of women with babies in American style dress but with a head scarf. The third generation in jeans listening to Kurt Cobain like my kids. When we would go into stores in the little local cities where the community is more coherent and strict, the girls at the counters would commonly then be wearing veils. After 9/11 many of the veils came off but the scarves stayed on and the girls would talk to my boys. It was their secret generation way of saying we belong here. We belong with you.

But I think in the world where they play soccer, the veils started going back up. Not after 9/11, but after the invasion of Iraq and on and on with it. It is in the nature of people to separate by difference, often between head and heart. That is why the French and the Irish fought on ice and why when they built the big cathedral in Ottawa, they named one tower after a great French saint and the other after St. Patrick. To keep, as one commentator said, the Irish and the French working people, “ . . . from killing one another.” But the base is wider in this contention. Between the 78 million who watch the Super Bowl and the 2 billion who watch the World Soccer Cup, likely more than half of whom are Muslim. Lining up now in the unemployment lines in Manchester and praying together in the Piazza Vittoria.

The G-20 of Oprahworld

The Dalai Lama, bumping fists in Louisiana this week, found good and heartfelt friends there. But not likely in Pittsburg. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, cheerful, positive and encouraging when traveling in China as First Lady when the Central Committee was pulling middle-aged and elderly ladies from a Taoist sect off the streets by the thousands, never to be heard from again by their families, has assured them resolutely again that there would be no pesky human rights issues to impede our first and most essential friendship with the one-party state that is China. That one party being the Chinese Communist Party.

We are all friends now. Obama, who sees the world as a college dean does, wants to be friend to all. We are all one people in Oprahworld. Especially now that China is taking the lead in environmentalism. It sort of evens out the kidnapping of the child monk, the Panchen Lama, and the thousands of Buddhist monks tortured and murdered in Tibet by the Chinese government. Only Sarah Palin brought it up this week in her speech in Hong Kong.

China’s welcome initiative on environmentalism is modeled after marketing strategies of the old New York groups, venerable now, forerunners of firms today like Crips and Bloods, Inc., entrepreneurs out west. If you throw a basketball game as a charity event for poor children and single moms you can get away will all kinds of other stuff like dealing heroin to the same children and moms. Your marketing will amplify itself. There will be ten, 20 stories by the happy-face liberal press (what Stalin called “ . . . useful idiots”) about the good you are doing for the poor. It will make people happy and deny the more difficult issues. We want to be happy and we want to look nice. Because we’re all one people in Oprahworld; Obama, Hu jintau, Levi Johnson, Octomon, Mackenzie Phillips, Mao Tse-Tung – high fives all around. Makes no difference in the Land of the Free if you’re rich as the Rockefellers or born with a tail. Such a long ride from Germany and Bach’s cello suites in the time when people were all different. Better now.

The temptation of totalitarianism is never far away here in the greater cities of the northeast. Ancient memory possibly, because so many of us up here come not that long ago from Euro-realms dominated by one Rough Beast or another. But this quote from the New York Times’ celebrity columnist Thomas Friedman on Sept. 8 sent a chill through the live-free-or-die types with a few generations in the woods up here in New Hampshire:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

I expect Friedman will be in Pittsburgh this week egging them on. I am certain he will not be in Tibet for the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China because no foreigners will be allowed in the country. As Diana N. Rowan, a writer and activist who has written for The Atlantic and The Christian Science Monitor, ha written of that moment which the Chinese called “peaceful liberation” or as “reuniting Tibet with the Motherland,” “. . . more than 1.2 million Tibetans have died in wartime violence, by execution, the effects of long imprisonment, torture, starvation or suicide. Forced abortions and sterilization were once a policy. There are vast areas now, particularly in Kham and Amdo, where most Tibetan families lack any male members over the age of thirty-five.”

It may in time be seen as the great abomination of our period that we enter into full relationships with a government that is clearly totalitarian. Not to fight fascism as we did when we entered into alliance with Stalin, but just to make a buck. Both parties now have the one approach in fact, that Friedman so seeks. But as the few and the brave are stepping up in states like New Hampshire, Vermont, Texas and Wisconsin, possibly there is a states rights defense against entering into full commerce with states without freedom.

The Bring the Guard Home Movement

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/23/09

In the days of the Vietnam War, journalist opposition approached the edge of fearless. The New York Times, leading the way, was not brave at first about Vietnam, nor was anybody else besides the soldiers. But as in Vietnam, a great wave of protest eventually rose up against the war in Iraq. Then it quickly dissipated with the election of the popular new President although he pushed a similar agenda in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the Times never got brave nor did most of the others, although after “Mission Accomplished” day, they did publish an op-ed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. War is bad. We can all nod vigorously to that.

The problem with quisling journalists, blogging hordes and vast demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people (in the Vietnam era, exposing their breasts and urinating against the walls of the Pentagon) is that the energy leaves like vapor. They simply vent anxiety and are expedient and unsustainable.

But they have a new approach in Wisconsin. The Bring the Guard Home movement brings state-based opposition to the Cheney/Bush/Obama/Biden war now meandering through Afghanistan.

Bring the Guard Home is a national movement of state campaigns to end the unlawful overseas deployment of the National Guard, their web sites states. “It’s the law,” reads their heading.

The idea was first broached up here in northern New England at the beginning of the war on Iraq. Loosely based on Jefferson’s vision of the Constitution, the claim was then that the feds had no right to engage National Guards in foreign wars. At least, not without permission of our Governors or State Legislatures.

As Duane Techsler writes in an opinion piece in the La Crosse Tribune, the current deployment of the Wisconsin National Guard is illegal, “ . . . and perpetrated by lies and deceit of the Bush regime and is being followed by the current administration.”

“We need the Wisconsin National Guard in Wisconsin to serve us in times of disaster at home, such as when we had such massive floodings around the Dells and Vernon County,” he writes.

He requests public support for Bill 203, a bill which will require the Governor to ensure that no Wisconsin Guard unit is unlawfully released into national service. It directs the governor to review every federal call-up of the National Guard for its legality, and where there is no lawful basis for Guard federalization, to take action to keep the Wisconsin Guard at home.

State campaigns are active in Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Vermont, Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Washington D.C., Washington, Wisconsin, and new states are joining all the time, they say.

Mitt Romney’s Speech at the Voters Value Conference Unites Conservatives

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/20/09

At the Voters Value conference this weekend Mitt Romney directly addressed Obama’s incomprehensible and fatally flawed decision, unprecedented in the American political tradition, to tax future generations. It poisoned this most auspicious and most inclusive administration from the very beginning. History – the future - will rise from that moment. It already has. Directly following, back in February, New Hampshire state representative Dan Itse first proposed that the federal government had no right to do so, it was immoral to do so and the states have Constitutional defenses against this. Almost overnight, 30 states followed his cue. Tax revolts and the current Town Hall disturbances followed.

Blame it on Glenn Beck, blame it on Sarah Palin, blame it on Rick Perry, but that Romney has endorsed these efforts as he did this weekend changes the political scenarios. Because if Glenn Beck is a demagogue, then now Mitt Romney is a demagogue. Questions will rise now it the hearts and minds of networks chiefs: Who do we stake our future on now, Mitt Romney or Tina Fey? Who will market our charade for this just one day today? Mitt Romney or David Letterman? And how will we be remembered when the moment is recalled?

As The Hill reports, Romney called the tea party protesters “patriots” who have often been derided by Democrats, and said they could block the president’s agenda.

“Thanks to millions of Americans who have stepped up in town halls and tea parties across the country, he’s not going to get his way,” Romney said.

The Romney speech at the Voters Value is an auspicious beginning. The Christian Science Monitor called it “ . . . a more genteel anti-Obama tea party.” Prior to this there was a division between what might be called Western Republicans like Rick Perry, who supported, endorsed and participated in the April 15 tea parties, and what might be called the traditional, culturally conservative Eastern Republicans who opposed.

The question since February, 2009, was how the mainstream of conservatives would respond to this movement. The question since August, 2008, was how would mainstream conservatives respond to the rising spirit in the heartland personified by then Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin? This week Romney, the smartest and most capable conservative politician since Eisenhower, sealed that gap and united the party on these issues. The West is the Best.

Things end where they begin, the Buddhists tell us. The great leader and conservative thinker, Irving Kristol, who passed away just this past week, asked this question in abstraction back in the late 1950s when liberal lions like Norman Mailer and conservative writers like Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter were still friends: Which should we trust in our hearts to lead us into the future, New York and Washington or the American heartland?

The Republican Value Voters Straw Poll and the Ted Nugent Republicans

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/18/09

I received lots of comments and mail about an entry here yesterday relating Ron Paul to Sarah Palin in a political atmosphere where 43% consider themselves independents. Many were from Paul supporters who didn’t like the connection. Others did. Glen, who says he has supported Paul for 20 years and Palin for one possibly got closest to the current reality: “I think Palin and Paul have a lot in common,” he wrote. “They are both libertarians, but they come to it from different approaches. Paul is an erudite scholar on both economics and foreign policy. Palin comes at it from the heart and from the gut. She is a natural libertarian who believes in limited government, free markets and individual liberty just because it’s right.”

I found it interesting that one commentator claimed that Paul and Palin did not belong together because Palin was just another RINO, a Republican in Name Only. It’s a good phrase and one I have always associated with Ted Nugent, the mad cap Michigan rocker with a conservative political bent. But Uncle Ted is totally in love with Palin. I heard him call to comment on a radio show a month or so ago when Palin was being interviewed about gun laws in Alaska. “God Bless You Sarah Palin,” was his comment.

The Republican Value Voters conference in Washington this week will hold a straw poll on the still long away 2012 Presidential election. It should be useful in cutting through the ambiguity and denial about the various grass roots movements around the country. In a poll six months ago Palin and Paul came in tied for second, behind Mitt Romney. Romney will come back as we get closer to 2012 but he should sink some this week end because of his association with health care insurance as Governor of Massachusetts.

The brooding ambiguity in the heartland has both Jeffersonian aspects (Ron Paul) and Jacksonian aspects (Sarah Palin). Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry registers in on both of these. All three might be categorized as Ted Nugent Republicans to varying degree and manifestation.

The straw poll at the Value Voters conference should give some indication about the Nuge Factor that is rattling some traditional Republicans. Nugent was the star of the show in some of the Texas “tea party” rallies on April 15. Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina, was sent almost to seizures when a purely conservative crowd started chanting “Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Ron Paul . . .” to the tune of “USA, USA, USA . . .” during one of his speeches. Paul is not a Republican, Graham shouted back at the group.

This could actually be a creative cauldron for Republicans if they can get past the fear factor and it could be a winning new direction. They are playing with a bunch of brand new ideas; tax reform, Austrian economics, state sovereignty under the 10th Amendment, opposition to “one size fits all federalism.” If this got out of hand it could be bad, but if these ideas were properly modified, unified and organized it could indeed make – as Rick Perry phrased it not long ago – for a more perfect Union.

In the end, that might be a job for Mitt Romney. That is what he does. As President and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, he turned the legendary Robbie (The Band) Robertson’s free-form but delightful hippie fest into a masterwork of sports and entertainment.

Ron Paul and Sarah Palin: The Ross Perot Moment

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/17/09

The most startling statistic to come out this month is latest Washington Post/ABC poll that shows 43% of Americans now consider themselves to be independents. Much of the celebrity thrill seems to be gone, as Wall Street Journal commentator Fouad Ajami said it would, with the hip new President who gives such charming speeches. Could be that hip is not what you want in a President when the only difference between Cheney’s war in Iraq and Obama’s war in Afghanistan and Bush’s missile defense program and Obama’s is the better cut of the new Commander-in-Chief’s suit. On the two main fronts, the economy and the war, majorities oppose and he has even lost 10% of the young ‘uns since July. 22-year olds consider themselves to be immortal. They don’t want health insurance.

Change is about, without question, but Obama himself may only be the harbinger, not the change. We could be approaching not a Kennedy or a Roosevelt or a Lincoln moment, but a Ross Perot moment.

Ross Perot came out of nowhere back in the early 1990s and with a kookie Texas freshness, a crate full of his own cash and a bunch of charts, he took almost 20% of the vote in 1992. At one point in the summer he commanded a lead with 39%. What the Perot moment indicated was that World War II or Elvis or the Beach Boys or something had freed Americans from their old constraints. But Ronald Reagan really turned the sea. Prior to Reagan you could with accuracy count on good Boston Irish going to the Catholic Church and voting Democrat every time. You could count on New York Jews and Southern Baptists to do the same. But when Reagan took 49 states in 1984 it was all over with that. Americans were free. With 43% claiming to be independent today, they apparently are still free.

This week Ariana Huffington, the liberal doyenne, and Ron Paul both appeared on Morning Joe. They seemed to like each other and to be in increasing agreement on economic issues. But what was striking was the new legitimacy that Ron Paul has gained since Obama’s bailouts have taken hold. Given the high disapproval ratings on both the economy and the war, it could be said today that the country is moving to Paul’s positions by osmosis. Paul opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He opposed the bailouts. He opposed the entire Keynesian perspective that the Obama administration has adopted lock-stock-and-barrel. Morning Joe – no radical libertarian – pulled out an old script to read in amazement how the housing crisis had played out exactly as Paul said it would back in 2003. Paul advocates Austrian economics and as he gathers continuing respect Austrian economics gains a new authenticity as well.

Sarah Palin and Ron Paul bear kinship. Those who like Paul very often also like Palin. She has said she admired Paul’s independent streak and Paul, like Palin, was considered a pariah when America’s support for Obama was in the 70s and all three networks were head over heels for Obamanomics. But as the sweet and authentic Mary Travis of Peter, Paul and Mary unfortunately passed away this week, I was remembering how the charmed old labor songs that The Weavers used to sing took flight when I was a teenager. Bob Dylan was the pariah then, now he’s everywhere – selling Pepsi and women’s underwear on TV during football games, playing Bar Mitzvah’s. You can’t get rid of the guy.

Such an awakening is ahead again perhaps as the old ideas inevitably yield to time. But different times yield to different ideas.

There are maybe subtle hints that the networks seem to be catching on. Charles Gibson, the ABC News anchor, who led the major networks in their idolatrous backing of Obama, is retiring this year. He will be replaced by Diane Sawyer. Comment was that they wanted a woman for the job. But there are certainly lots of other women who could do it. Sawyer goes way back, to Nixon, to Kissinger, to the Time of Tall Men. My instinct was they were making a correction; ditching the lightweights and getting their best people up front for what lies just ahead.

Afghanistan: War without Honor

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/16/09

When South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham asked Admiral Michael Mullen yesterday to assure the 55% of Americans who no longer think we know what we are doing in Afghanistan that the new troops he wants will do the job; will win the war, he nodded yes. As expected.

What I would like to have heard next was this: Do you assure us then that as a man of honor you will resign your commission and leave the republic in disgrace if you fail?

But this is fantasy football. The problem with broad-based governance and its vast, globalist appeals is that it is not based in real people and places but is a democracy of feelings and abstractions. It is like economy detached from gold – it has no talisman to indicate and sustain truth. In this realm of the televised everyday with its primal pounding of the radio everywhere, getting stoned is the modest substitute for enlightenment and disgrace and failure – whether it is an American President’s dithering while one million fall to the knife in Rwanda or a trophy grabbed on award night from Taylor Swift - can be easily accommodated by a simply apology on Leno. With Eisenhower, Sherman and Lee it was different and we may never find this character again in ourselves. And one day we may need it.

Commentator Haviland Smith, a former CIA chief who writes a column for the Barre Times and the Rutland Herald in Vermont, has a more likely appraisal than the Graham/Mullen sweet talk. The President’s strategy may be based on rhetoric, he says:

Why does President Obama believe it is necessary to "win" in Afghanistan? Of course, this question begs the issue of what "winning" means and whether it is even remotely possible. Certainly, historically, it rarely, if ever, has been . . .

Barack Obama of 2008 had literally no military experience or background and thus little credibility with either the military or its American supporters. If he wanted to have any credibility with the right and with pro-military congressmen, he may have felt that he had to balance his negativity on Iraq with a pro-military stance on Afghanistan . . .

As president-elect Obama, he has found himself in a completely different situation. None of his old political associates had much experience with military matters. President Obama has . . . completely revamped his military team with Generals Petraeus and McCrystal as his go-to leaders on Afghanistan . . .

It's a fair guess that two highly ambitious, educated, articulate, relatively young generals would be disinclined to admit that they could not meet the military needs of the administration – "winning" in Afghanistan. Clearly, they have said that the job can be done, albeit with much involvement on the civil side, yet they have no example of its ever having been accomplished!

New Yorker Responds to Joe Wilson’s Shout with Pique

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/14/09

As Pundit Blog’s Charlie Law was first to point out, The Shout – Joe Wilson’s spontaneous live Tweet, “You Lie!” during President Obama’s speech last week, bore some déjà vu resemblance to another episode: “In 1856,” he wrote, “one of Wilson's predecessors in the House, Rep. Preston Brooks of Edgefield, S.C., thrashed Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane in the halls of the U.S. Senate, leaving Sen. Sumner permanently disabled.”

Then as now, New York responded. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd thought she heard the South Carolina Congressman calling Obama boy. It is all about race, she said, clenching the issue with her Pacman grasp of nuance. Plain and simple. Joe Wilson is a racist. You can tell because he is white, he was born in the South and one of his ancestors fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Although probably more of my Yankee-reared and educated children’s ancestors fought for the North, unfortunately they all four would likewise fit the Dowd criteria for “racist” as they are all white, were born in the South and at least one of their ancestral kin fought on behalf of the South.

But Dowd sees here the spirit of Nathan Bedford Forest rising again . . . like those red necks always said, “The South will rise again.” And for informed, boots on the ground insight into the stealthy and insidious ways of the South, she calls on loyal Son of the South Don Fowler, a lifelong Democratic apparatchik most prominently associated with Vermonter Howard Dean and Connecticut’s Chris Dodd. “He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree,” reports Dowd.

Good to know. The Nation, most liberal of liberal political journals has been writing about this for years now and recently Trends Research Institute’s Gerald Celente (born in the Bronx) called this the most important trend of the new century. Apparently this is the first Dowd has heard about it.

There is without question some resemblance to the alienation that primarily opposed New York with “The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War . . .” (Dowd’s characterization) in the 1830s. But I don’t think it can any longer be seen as North against South. And in this round the rising voice approaching is not likely to be John C. Calhoun’s but the former governor of Alaska’s, who has already given Dowd & Co. advanced apoplexia.

But the difference between now and the1830s is this: Then, the New Yorkers were rising to industrial wealth and power unheard of and unimagined in the Western traditions while the South was languishing in the pre-industrial poverty of slavery and subsistence farming. Today, New York and its associated regions including California and New England are running deep deficits. They might even be considered welfare states. While most of the agricultural regions, South, West and Midwest, are flush with cash, running budget surpluses and advancing industry, particularly in the Southwest.

The other problem is this: The nullification legislation recently proposed in South Carolina that Fowler refers to does indeed parallel the nullification legislation advanced in South Carolina in the 1830s. But this time it didn’t start in South Carolina. This time it started in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Wilson: Not that sorry . . .

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/11/09

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports that John Boehner, the House Republican Leader, was a half hour late for a meeting today because he was trying to get Joe Wilson to say he was sorry. Wilson said he already said he was sorry.

How sorry is he? Hold a press conference sorry? Cry in public sorry? Go on Oprah sorry? Mark Sanford sorry? Go on Oprah and cry sorry? Milbank says the problem is that although he said he’s sorry, he wasn’t that sorry.

It’s not easy to be sorry or know how much sorry is always enough. Love is never having to say you’re sorry they said in a novel about Al Gore once. But John Lennon came back then and said love is always having to say your sorry. Hard to say.

The real problem is that this astonishing outburst during the President’s speech was, as Wilson said, “spontaneous.” Like lightning or a flood. By which he meant he didn’t really mean it. But it is maybe unhealthy to be sorry about something spontaneous. It just comes out. And that is what the President, generously forgiving and forgetting, figured. Nancy Pelosi too at first, then she wanted more sorry. And Nancy Pelosi knows sorry like John Chisum, cattle king of the Pecos, knew cows.

But spontaneous doesn’t mean he “didn’t really mean it.” Spontaneous means “he really meant it” and it slipped out. The truth slipped out. Like a sneeze. The truth beneath the suit slipped out.

Better to know it than not know it. Or pretend it will go away if he says he’s sorry.

2009 is not 1929

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/3/09

The headlines on the Washington Post shows how entrenched the mainstream press is in the romance of Rooseveltism and the Great Depression. “The President Pulls a Jimmy Stewart Moment” it read, referring to the Frank Capra movies of the ‘30s. But 2009 has no bearing on the 1930s, which was an era of total complicity and cooperation between government and the entertainment and information industries, and to pretend they do is dangerous and absurd.

Robert Samuelson, the economist at the Washington Post, says economists should learn a little history. All the talk today relating to the fiscal crisis is of the crash of 1929. But the situation today couldn’t be more different.

A little knowledge of literature wouldn’t hurt. The literature of 1920 tells us that America was at the end of an age of ideals and suppositions long before 1929. The crash of 1929 was an external manifestation of a collective psychological collapse or depression that had already occurred. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1925 and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway was published in 1926. These widely popular books were in their way end-or-the-world books; books of abandoned faith in ways gone just before.

World War I brought the death of Europe. It was a war which no one really won. But then in 1923 there was an attempted coup in Germany, evidence that the vast destruction and the moral degradation of the Great War – the mustard gas, the shell shock, the mud and the trench war – was not yet over and the worst was yet to come. In 1925, Hitler published Mein Kamph. History loomed and so did Hitler.

But no way will our historic turning resemble 1929. If anything, our day more closely resembles the rural America of the 1830s. A harbinger in our day might be seen in the TV show Lost, part soap opera, part Saturday matinee, part New Age cult film. It starts with a plane crash and follows in a long, epic struggle; a struggle for the life and death of the American soul, crashing, burning and striving to be born again.

It implies a breakage – a breach of faith - in the spiritual cohesion and continuum. We experienced this in the early 1800s when there were wild mystic variations and awakenings to the usual Western traditions. Cults and new religions arrived with wild preachers in beards. Pilgrims in bear skin shouting would roam these hills to find the dharma path and often found madness instead.

The great spiritual transformation of the early 1800s which brought the world Joseph Smith and the Mormons and Emerson and the Transcendentalists was for the English Protestants who settled in New England the end of an epoch; the completion of a long spiritual striving which started when the Puritans landed.

This season with the death of Ted Kennedy another epoch ends. That of the Irish, Jewish and others ethnics who arrived here between the 1830s and 1910 in the great migration from Europe. The Irish from that period are now Americans. And anyone who attended U. Mass. in the early ‘70s as I did would have seen the same pattern. Thousands of South Boston-born Irish from families Catholic for well over a thousand years, the first in their families to attend college many of them, filling the football stadium to bask in the aura of a 12-year old Hindu guru and god incarnate. Woodstock memories reawakened this season by Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock give evidence to this. The middle post-war generations were a time of shamanism – Mick Jagger, Madonna and Michael Jackson might even qualify - and utopianism and it lingers up here in northern New England’s hills today. Today the top 10 faiths identified by 150 million Facebook users are Christian first, Hindu fifth, Buddhism sixth and Jedi, a contemporary expression of Taoism, tenth. Jewish ranks seventh.

Both these periods experienced cultural and religious breakage or radical change. Decline of the cultural traditions preceded a major economic crisis. In both periods the dominant cultural group yielded power and position. Both periods were prelude to a full restructuring and reorientation of the American condition. But both signaled early before the coming chaos the nature of the crises ahead and the world and its economies that would arise – born again - after the storm had passed.

In 1941 when North Carolina’s W.J. Cash wrote his classic, The Mind of the South, critical of Confederate nostalgicos he expected to be universally condemned. Instead, the book was widely acclaimed by 50 Southern newspapers. The South had let go and was ready to move forward. Time for us to leave Great Depression and World War II behind as well before we get ourselves in real trouble.

Is the World Tired Capitalism? Hatoyama’s World and Miyazaki’s

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 9/9/09

Is the world growing tired of capitalism? An important op ed in the New York Times last week by Yukio Hatoyama, the new leader of Japan, suggests that Japan is. The reassuring voices of the mainstream press have built a wall defending the old temple, but it is unmistakable that something is going on in Japan when the new Prime Minister-designate’s first words to the outside world are these: In the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism people are treated not as an end but as a means. Consequently, human dignity is lost.

Or maybe they are just growing tired of America: The recent economic crisis resulted from a way of thinking based on the idea that American-style free-market economics represents a universal and ideal economic order, and that all countries should modify the traditions and regulations governing their economies in line with global (or rather American) standards.

What is interesting is that we recently have heard more or less the same words from Pope Benedict XVI and Germany’s Angela Merkel seemed to echo them. There is a new view of the world awakening and it contains a criticism of the combination of globalization and capitalism. “American-style capitalism” as Hatoyama calls it, the ultimate one-size fits-all economic culture first designed by Alexander Hamilton to cover the whole world.

For a while, between say 1946 and 2000, it worked. This view was first countervailed by Thomas Jefferson until the around 1948 when Karl Marx brought the opposing globalist perspective. From then till now, every opposition to capitalism, in the field, the factory or the English department, was based on Marx and Co. But if the world is tiring now of Hamilton, it tired first of his twin, Marx. Suddenly Jefferson, who favored the small and the rural; faith, family and community, is gaining relevance, not just in Texas with Governor Rick Perry, who most succinctly outlines and advocates the Jeffersonian perspective in America today, but in the Vatican as well and now in Japan.

It must be fun to be Japanese today. No erstwhile samurai like the great but severe Akira Kurosawa, no monks – or not many - with a shiv in the belt to kill themselves on route if they lose the path to enlightenment. Much more chill. And Hatoyama’s wife, Miyuki, who dreamed of being taken to Venus by aliens, is said to be a hoot. Robert C. Christopher, whose book, The Japanese Mind, was a best seller two decades ago said then that the Japanese had only three choices: To join with the Americans, the Soviet Union or the Chinese and eventually they would have to choose. One of Hatoyama’s national goals is greater fraternity with the East Asian community. But to understand Japan today Asia hands might go to Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki is considered by many to be a visionary and a genius. His movies are primarily for children but they work just as well for adults. In Japan he is a national folk hero. Here in my little town in New Hampshire I once asked my kids and a few others what was their all-time favorite children’s movie. They’ve seen Disney, Spielberg, everything, but the answer was universally, Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.

Miyuki Hatoyama says her husband likes the Miyazaki movies and she mentioned Princess Mononoke in particular. It should be shown to Congress and the State Department, because Princess Mononoke is about a war between two women, one the Industrial Mother who brought factories to the countryside destroying forests and communities in the process, the other is a girl, Princess Mononoke, who shares spirit with the wolf. She is daughter to the forest itself, and she comes to avenge nature and destroy the world of the Industrial Mother. It is beautiful and dark, like a folk tale. The floating bodies may offend those squeamish members of Congress but my kids didn’t mine, and the quiet background – no music pounding constantly – takes a little getting used to, but the artfulness of that style draws you in.

I’d read interviews with Mayazaki when his masterpiece Spirited Away first came out. He has no love for the modern industrial globalists – Hamiltonian or Marxist - and sees the spirit of nature as the core of human experience and community. This is a story that could be told by Jefferson today if he had Mayazaki’s gifts. Or Pope Benedict. Or Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama.