Israel as a Jewish State

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/27/10

Should Israel be a Jewish state as England is a Protestant state*? As Tibet was a Buddhist state before the communist invasion? A lot of Americans probably think it already is. It is not. In the phrase of Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Manhigut Yehudit faction of the Likud, it is simply a “state for Jews.” But this will be the historic question that rises now to new generations here and in Israel as we enter into the new century.

“This year, with G-d's help,” writes Feiglin, an orthodox, native-born Israeli, “there will be more Jews in Israel than anywhere else in the world. This is a sea change in the state of the Jewish nation and the first time since the First Temple era that the majority of Jews has resided in Israel. This summer we start the countdown to the end of the exile.”

Unfortunately, though, it is also the worst of times. Anti-Semitism is exploding all over the world. The State of Israel is rapidly losing the legitimacy for its very existence. “Simply put,” he says, “our successful state has turned into a pirate ship. Ahmadinijad can fly wherever he wants, while Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon dares not land in Europe. It is now fashionable in academia to talk about the day after the destruction of the State of Israel.”

Should there be a Jewish state, commentator Daniel Pipes asks in National Review Online? That is the central question. It does not help anyone to distract from it.

It was long assumed that the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 would end Arab-Israeli conflict but it had the perverse effect of making other states and also the Egyptian populace more anti-Zionist, Pipes writes. Then in the 1980s Palestinian recognition of Israel gave birth to a hope that the conflict would close. The total failure of the 1993 Oslo Accords buried that expectation.

“What now,” he asks? “Starting about 2007, a new focus emerged: winning acceptance of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.”

Palestinian leaders responded with howls of outrage, declaring that they “absolutely refused” to accept Israel as a Jewish state. “On taking over the prime ministry in early 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Olmert’s point in his diplomacy. Regrettably, the Obama administration endorsed the Palestinian position, again sidelining the Israeli demand.”

It would seem to a distant (Buddhist) outsider here in New Hampshire, that a race of people so tenacious that it would survive Romans and Pharaohs, a thousand plagues and curses and after that Hitler and Stalin, that Hillary and Bono would be a cake walk. But Israel is threatened today not by bombs and programs, but by vague, globalist ideology and makeshift rock and roll utopianism which seems cobbled together at Starbucks after a late night.

War changes people but the Clintons and Obama seem much the same as they were before 9/11 and five years of war in the Middle East. But we will want to know how do Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Rick Perry and any others who might seek the Oval Office in 2012 feel about Israel as a Jewish state.

* England’s government is called a Parliamentary Monarchy. The monarch for England is Queen Elizabeth II. The monarch, also known as the Crown, is the head of state in England. It serves as the head of the judiciary, commander in chief of the armed forces, supreme governor of the Church of England, and Church of Scotland, and summons and dismisses Parliament and ministers of the cabinet.

The end of "Lost" - Jack Shephard is the Aquarian

As per the earlier theme of shifting the "time style" from Pisces to Aquarius, the interior story ends with Jack at the light/fountain (Self) in the center of the island repairing the karma by replacing he sacred stone - much as John Locke repaired the "time style" when Ben broke it. The water pours forth. Jack is the Waterpourer; the iconic figure in the symbol of Aquarius in the zodiac pouring water from a vase; freeing the creative consciousness for the new millenia. Nice at the end the eye closes; like Khrishna going back to sleep at the end of Maharabarata. That figure - Waterpourer - is known as the Titan.

Cuba, Mexico, Obama vs. America

Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/24/10

I can’t think of any time in our history when a sitting American president has publicly and conspicuously allied himself with a foreign leader in direct opposition to a sitting American Governor, as President Barack Obama has done this past week with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. And the president of a broken country run by drug lords at that. As anticipated, as if on cue, Cuba immediately chimed in to support the alliance. Possibly this is the new “international order” that the President talked about at the West Point graduation this weekend.

Obama sees himself as a citizen of the world and probably as a world god-king like Elvis, Michael Jackson and that delusional Lord Jim, Bill Clinton. But he consciously senses to himself that his conversation and congress as President is with only parts of America. To the parts below the Mason-Dixon Line he dictates. To the parts east of Tahoe, he dictates. To those rubes and red necks in Alaska he doesn’t speak at all.

Surely, before he goes on vacation to a safe house in Martha’s Vineyard this summer, Rahm Emmanuel will rig something up for him out there in the despised heartland; a quick photo-op in the Grand Canyon, like last year, or maybe doing something like pretending to admire a NASCAR stock car and quipping with the driver about engines. (Does he even know how to drive? Did he ever own a car?) But he is alienated and afraid in these parts. He not only does not like these people, but like his friends in Martha’s Vineyard – a day’s sail from where I grew up - he thinks they are boorish. He thinks they are stupid. He thinks they are dangerous and underdeveloped. They are not impressed that he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review. It is nerve wracking. They do not even like lawyers. And increasingly, they do not like him either.

As Calderon appears arm and arm with Obama at the White House and condemns America to an adoring Congress, AP reports that Cuban lawmakers have passed a resolution denouncing Arizona's new immigration law as "racist and xenophobic," recalling an old dispute in the process: the argument that the United States' purchase of Arizona from Mexico in the 19th century was tantamount to theft. The tightly controlled, communist-run island has long been criticized for its human rights record, which includes the jailing of 200 political prisoners, the banning of a free press and the outlawing of opposition political parties.

Cuban citizens are required to carry identification with them wherever they go, and can be stopped by police and sent home if they are found in a part of the island where they don't belong.

Three astrological levels on the TV show “Lost” – Sawyer and Kate are the Adam and Eve of Aquarius

As we cross into the Age of Aquarius out of the Age of Pisces, three levels of astrological time are present, going back 6,000 years to the time of Jacob. During the run of the series Jacob and his Shadow, Man in Black, the smoke monster are the old protectors of the light. Ben Linus and Richard Albert are their external agents in the world. Ben – identified as the Christ in the second season by the chest wound and the book, Brother’s K – representing the beginning of the Age of Pisces with Richard Alpert, known as Baba Ram Dass in the Sixties, representing the end – he started the hippie movement with Timothy Leary, his co-professor at Harvard.

Entering Aquarius now with Jacob dead and the smoke monster transferred to John Locke, Jack, son of “Christian Shepherd” takes the role of Guardian. The external agents here should be Desmond (who played Jesus in an earlier movie) and Hurley – both these have avatar karma – Hurley speaks to the Unconscious direct; listens to the dead, while Desmond, like Brahma is immune to the peaks (Vishnu) and troughs (Shiva) of the light. Leaving Kate and Sawyer to be the new Adam and Eve of Aquarius.

For the "Big Questions" board at The Hill:

Rand Paul’s victory is particularly significant. He is Clu Gulager handsome and tough; simple and honest and unflappable and could rise as a folk hero in the heartland, where all American folk heroes – Johnny Cash, Chuck Yeager - come from. He brings (returns) into American homes and communities the specific common-sense family values of the Paul family. Without the Pauls, the Tea Party movement was an amorphous cry in the woods, sincere but exploitable by old Republican hacks and with the potential of falling into the hands of extremists. Its feet are on the ground now. Ideas of Austrian economics and small government can now grow and mature into the mainstream.

Miss Oklahoma’s simple declarative sentence

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/19/10

There are three issues in the Arizona situation. In order of importance they are: A state’s right to act without permission from the federal government, chronic federal incompetence and mismanagement and the third: Is the controversial Arizona plan a good and workable plan in controlling the border? I was struck by the clarity of Morgan Elizabeth Woolard’s - Miss Oklahoma’s - “simple declarative sentence”; Hemingway’s model for emphatic prose, and her grace under pressure (more Hemingway) in answering the question on these issues by Oscar Nunez. “I’m a huge believer in states’ rights,” she said.

She is against illegal immigration but she is also against racial profiling. But because her first premise is states’ rights, she thinks it is therefore allowable for Arizona to create that law even though it may not be a great law. She did not say it was a good law. As Texas governor Rick Perry said, it is not. But compared to recent comments by Attorney General Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, Woolard’s was a pretty good answer.

Napolitano and Holder responded in interviews to the first issue: States rights. States should not be allowed to act on their own. But their commentary gave more evidence to the second issue, federal incompetence.

As the Manchester Union reports, Holder has publicly worried that Arizona's new immigration law will lead to racial profiling and is unconstitutional. He even suggested that the Justice Department might sue Arizona to overturn the law. But, as the Washington Times reported, Mr. Holder acknowledged to the [congressional] panel he hadn't read the law he was criticizing, and he gave conflicting accounts on whether he had talked to the team that was reviewing it.

Napolitano’s prose was more elliptical than Miss Oklahoma’s. She said the Arizona law “ . . . was not a law I would have signed.”For what reason, asked Senator McCain? Because “It’s a bad law enforcement law . . .” she said. (Say what?) She said she was familiar with laws “of that ilk.” But also admitted to Senator McCain that she had not read the law.

PJ Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, criticizing the Arizona law on national TV also admitted that he had not read the 17-page law.
Woolard was absolutely ready for the question, she said. “I just spoke from my heart and I believe what I said was well said and I feel strongly about that and I'm proud of my answer.” As well she should be. In a political season of intentional misspeaks, official deception and outright lies her candid and forthright delivery was a simple, declarative delight.

Nikki Haley, Sarah Palin and Jenny Sanford: The Three Sisters awaken

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/17/10

They were there at Arthur’s death and at the beginning of Siegfried’s ride; the Three Sisters are harbingers of mythic beginnings and endings calling from native hills and rivers. So the arrival of Jenny Sanford in the morning and Sarah Palin in the evening to support Nikki Haley in the South Carolina governor’s race is most auspicious.

She already has Mitt Romney’s support and by now she has caught national attention. Nikki Haley represents a rising political tide in conservatism in America and she was an early favorite of the Tea Party movement. As this movement is being vilified in the MSM, it is finding common sense in Rand Paul in Kentucky and solid and formidable structure and determination in Tim Bridgewater in Utah. Haley brings to it disciple and a knack for organization, and with Palin and Sanford in tow it may be suggested, that primal strength of character of that the Three Sisters archetype suggest.

“It is a tremendous honor to receive Governor Palin’s endorsement. Sarah Palin has energized the conservative movement like few others in our generation. She has helped millions of Americans find the power of their voice. I am extremely proud that she has offered her support to my candidacy,” said Haley.

Haley, a state representative from Lexington, has been an advocate for fiscal responsibility, transparency in government, and conservative values since her first day as a state legislator in 2005.

“I’m very proud to add my voice to Jenny Sanford’s and others in endorsing Nikki Haley for governor of South Carolina,” said Palin. “Nikki is a strong pro-life, pro-Second Amendment fiscal conservative who served with distinction as a state lawmaker, a reformer who fought her own party to protect the interests of the taxpayer, a proud daughter of immigrants who worked night and day to achieve the American dream, a wife of an officer in the Army National Guard, a board member at her family’s Methodist church, and – most proudly – the loving mother of two beautiful kids.”

Inevitably, misfortune falls to a state when it is revealed that a sitting governor like Mark Sanford reads lusty romances like The Thorn Birds. Fate is sure to ensue, as it has. But in the way of the Trickster, the world is then given Jenny Sanford who many in South Carolina regard as the organizational backbone and powerhouse behind her husband’s political success.

Mrs. Sanford endorsed Haley’s candidacy for governor in November, saying, “[W]hen I’m asked my wish for South Carolina’s future, my wish is for a leader of state government like Nikki Haley. She’s principled, conservative, tough, and smart.”

After November, these three women need to take this show on the road.

How Clinton-era “diversity” hobbled black progress in the South

By Bernie Quigley

30 years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial integration in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the white liberal imagination of northern people rather than to advance the economic progress of black people in the South. While the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the north and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.

The South, white and black, shared a cultural core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form which might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commence-based materialistic culture of Philadelphia and the north.

Not long after I worked in a college in the South which made sincere effort to integrate along the lines of culture, region and religion. It was a great opportunity. Economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: “diversity and globalization.”

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. Problems related to race in the South no longer need be seen as specific economic issues caused by historic conditions; problems fully amenable and with corrections well underway. They became instead aesthetic issues. Race and ethnicity became an abstraction: Prejudice is so fifties. And not just prejudice against blacks, but against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short term exotic novelties soon lost and forgotten in the hay when the novelty wore off. Actually heard O.J. Simpson make the point on “Saturday Night” back then: Blacks, he said, had become boring to white liberals. They had stopped, then moved on. The poor and working-class Southern blacks huddled by themselves – country bumpkins virtually outcast by well off blacks as well as whites in the new upscale cultural environment – with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.

Travelling recently with one of my sons to Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seemed complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campuses as there are elsewhere. I inquired and was told that rich foreign students pay the way for poor blacks and poor local white kids.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s, was obviously embarrassed by the Southern religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago – shudder - but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized. But there seemed to be only enough American black students - great looking ones, like models for J. Crew or Abercrombie & Fitch - in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead – or those of political offices or news outlets - and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK day.

Alamo uprising advances: Bad news for Romney. Who is Tim Bridgewater?

by Bernie Quigley

for The Hill on 5/11/10

Say what you like about Mexicans in Arizona, legal or not, but they are hard working there and everyplace else they go. And if they didn’t go there the work won’t get done. In 1994 I wrote a long article about the migrant workers in the tobacco fields of Yadkin County, North Carolina, where a few dozen Mexicans were cutting tobacco. I asked their Catholic padre how many of them were illegal. “All of them,” he said. I brought it up to the governor and the wealthiest Democrat in the state – both of whom had cut tobacco when they were kids – and they were shocked. Shocked! But not the farmers. They’d been exclusively using Mexican labor for almost 20 years.

They are to the Southwest and the West what the Irish were to New York and Boston 150 years ago. They do the work. They in the near generations will inherit the culture, just as the Irish did Boston. And so will the Mormons. The ride of this most astonishing American life force from Vermont to Utah is not yet over. In fact, it is just advancing. Both these people awaken together as the West awakens.

The New York-based left may still be stuck in the 1930s with Roosevelt, but as Robert Samuelson said yesterday in the Washington Post, the days of the welfare state are numbered. Europe and America are changing perceptively in the same political pattern across the spectrum; the left and the maudlin conservative middle, which are often indistinguishable, are feeling the pain of unabashed and original conservative populism. It is a change in temperament. The religious conservative force of Moshe Feiglin’s Jewish Leadership faction presses against the Americanized (New York) establishment in Israel. A new conservatism challenges England and they are having to bargain their way out of disaster. And it is coming to Germany. But the template can be seen in the Southwest and particularly in the Utah primary.

The denial of the press is palpable: Ask any politico or pundit in D.C., “Who lost the Republican convention in Utah?” The three-term, 76-year-old incumbent, Bob Bennett. Ask who won. No answer. The hundreds of articles written about this primary are about who lost, not who won. As in Isreal’s recent Likud election, they are about what is passing and what is just holding on, not about what is beginning. The answer is that Tim Bridgewater won by a good margin at 57%. Mike Lee came in second with 42%. These two are considered “Tea Party favorites” but Bridgewater just seems like a smart and capable characteristic Westerner; a self-made man one who didn’t go to Harvard and who hasn’t yet plugged into the establishment. He grew up in a double-wide in West Jordan and went to Snow College on a football scholarship.

No question, the passing of Bennett, from the political scene marks a transition. The traditionalists, like New York Times’ David Brooks, thought they saw the Beatles tumbling down the steps from the airplane and went virtually apoplectic. But unless you were there you wouldn’t have noticed that when Bennett took the podium, he was given a rousing intro by Mitt Romney. There in the land of Mormons, where respect of the elders is elementary, Romney paid homage to the elder. And the crowd turned away from Bennett and from Romney.

We saw this in NY 23 when the rank and file lined up to oppose Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman. We saw it just recently in the Texas primary where Cheney, George H.W. Bush, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes (W.’s proxy)and other party regulars lined up to oppose Rick Perry and Sarah Palin. Perry won in a landslide. And now the same pattern in Utah. Mitt Romney, favorite of the Bush camp, turned away on his own turf for the new conservatism.

In the U.S. this follows demographics. Power, population and economy are moving/have moved to the Southwest. They have the work force. They have the resources. They have the beginning life force that New York and New England began to experience in the 1820s. One way or another they will have the power.

In hindsight, that is what Nixon was about, that is what Reagan was about; that is what the entire post-war period which started with Eisenhower is about. The West will not be held back. Romney, a Mormon who went to Brigham Young, can call on experience back east as a Harvard Business School grad and governor of Massachusetts. But east coast credentials may be just the thing that takes it away from him in 2012

Let Greeks be Greeks, Italians Italians – and an Italian Pope, please

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/10/10

Robert Samuelson, the economist at the Washington Post, has a good column today about the decline of the welfare state, citing Greece, and making the obvious suggestion that we face the same circumstances, simply calling welfare, “entitlements.” Samuelson seems to have been ahead of the pack right along. Earlier on he advised economists to study history. No doubt he is right this time too. But I’m sensing globalization is taking a hit as well. And opposition, which this last century and a half wore the mask of internationalism, may this time find the human face of regionalism. This “new regionalism” might even be called – to coin a phrase - federalism

What I found most interesting in his piece is this: “Euro coins and notes were introduced in 2002. . . It was supposed to lubricate faster economic growth by eliminating the cost and confusion of constantly converting between national currencies. More important, it would promote political unity. With a common currency, people would feel ‘European. ‘Their identities as Germans, Italians and Spaniards would gradually blend into a continental identity.”

Where did the idea come from that because Europeans had a single currency they would suddenly begin to think of themselves as one people? Did the same people who made this judgment which is essentially anthropological, make the same fiscal and economic judgments? Because it is a different realm of thinking and each requires different kinds and types of thinkers. My guess is that it was just post-war zeitgeist; the cult of the CEO. In the “participation mystique” of post-war, everyone in the world was an American by degree (or like the current Supreme Court, everyone a New Yorker by degree). Europe, China, everywhere, following the rising American post-war victory march of outwardly expanding capital. Europe was European because all the world looked to New York as its culture capital and to New York, Greeks, Italians, Bosnians, Slovenians, Ukrainians, Germans, etc. were and are all the same; generic Europeans.

What high contrast to the world of Roosevelt and Eisenhower. When the war was drawing to a close Eisenhower hired on Ruth Benedict to help determine how Japan would respond to American conquest and best recover. The result was Benedict’s classic, “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.” I don’t recall and such classic initiated on the thinking of a unified Europe. But I do remember Yeats comment, “ . . . the center no longer holds” published between the wars. Eisenhower brought in Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung to answer the same question about Germany.

Was any such expertise brought in to actually explain how Europeans would react to a single currency? Why would they suddenly see themselves as one people? Would Greeks start acting like Germans and Swiss, getting up at 4 am to correctly align their wood piles in the mountains? Would Germans start acting like Italians? The assumption was, in fact, they would all start – continue –acting like Americans.
A variety of things outside the flow of capital including temperature, terrain and geography, tradition, religious heritage and traditional antagonism, make up a people. But many economists today, like Paul Krugman, see the world as a mechanical economic process; a clockwork orange – a clockwork Greece and Italy. It is painfully misguided. The price now will be high. People return to their nature to restore their humanity. Anthropologists from an earlier day, like Mircea Eliade, would have told them this.

Lest we forget, the world followed America to globalization in the post-war period even to the point of the Catholic Church abandoning its tradition and its “center culture” of centuries by bringing in a non-Italian pope in a new globalist marketing package, ignoring the ancestors and taking its cues from Fox news. But the globalization of the Church with the election of the Polish John Paul II in 1978 was immediately followed b y the rise of Ayatollah Koemenie in 1979 and the globalization on Islam, the “Shadow of God” which – as “Lost” watchers should understand by now - chronically follows her everywhere, like a “twin”, including here to Times Square, when the prelate leaves the island. ‘Twas ever thus. May I make a suggestion to the Roman Catholics? Put the wine back in the bottle. Next time around, please, an Italian Pope.

How Clinton-era “diversity” hobbled black progress

30 years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial segregation in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the white liberal temperament of northern people, but while the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the north and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.
The South, white and black, shared a cultural core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form which might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commence-based materialistic culture of the north. (“Horse-worshipin’ Yankees,” wrote one detractor.)

Not long after I worked in a very good college in the South which made sincere effort to integrate along those deep and resonant lines of culture, region and religion. It was a great opportunity for the South. Economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: diversity and globalization.

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. The problems related to race in the South no longer need be seen as specific economic issues caused by specific historic conditions; problems fully amenable and with corrections well underway. They became instead aesthetic issues. Race and ethnicity became an abstraction: Prejudice is so fifties. And not just prejudice against blacks, but against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short term exotic novelties lost and forgotten in the hay. They huddled by themselves – country bumpkins virtually outcast in the new upscale cultural environment – with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.
Travelling recently with one of my sons to those same Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seemed complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campuses. Money talks. I inquired a while back and was told that rich foreign students, very many who pay full boat and are generous alumni, pay the way for poor blacks and poor white kids.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s, was obviously embarrassed by the Southern religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized. But there seemed to be only enough American black students - great looking ones, like models for J. Crew or Abercrombie & Fitch - in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK day.

In the beginning, the issue was slavery and the attitudes of a culture abandoned economically for 100 years after the Civil War. In the South these are existential issues; the South is and always will be a biracial culture with white and black sharing a religion, a culture, a home. These were and are problems the South will solve and are solving itself. Here in the north, race is avocation; a worthy project and a chance to do the right thing. But we in the north lose interest and move on to something else – as we did after the Civil War - as it is not really our home.

Black and white in the age of Obama

30 years ago I had an essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer making the point that racial segregation in the South had become a project primarily to satisfy the dominant liberal temperament of northern people and while the South had effectively integrated in the 1960s, the north and Philadelphia, where I lived, had not.

The South, white and black, shared a core in religion, primarily Baptist, of a form which might be considered indigenous to America and to that region, while both religious Southern whites and blacks were inherently alien to the commence-based culture of the north. (“Horse-worshipin’ Yankees,” wrote one detractor.)

Not long after I worked in a very good college in the South which made sincere effort to integrate along those deep and resonant lines of culture, region and religion. It was John Hope Franklin who made the point that black and white in the South shared culture and created one another.

It was a great opportunity for the South. Economy was booming. Poor blacks and blacks from the country where heart was trusted over head could find a natural and organic cohesion with whites in the Baptist chapel. But what destroyed those honest attempts can be understood in two words: diversity and globalization.

Diversity became the buzzword in the Clinton era. It took the college administrator, whose job it was to raise funds, off the hook. The problem no longer need be seen as economic; Southern blacks left out of regional economy. It became aesthetic: Prejudice is so fifties. And not just against blacks, against everybody. You could substitute Chinese instead. Rich ones. Or East Indians. Rich ones. Or gay people, or Iranians, or Valley Girls or Zoroastrians. The possibilities were endless.

The few rural and religious blacks brought in after that were like Kafka’s hunger artist: Short term novelties lost and forgotten in the hay. They huddled by themselves – country bumpkins virtually outcast in the new upscale cultural environment – with the few religious Southern whites in the Pat Robertson corner.

Travelling recently with one of my sons to those same Southern colleges these past weeks, the morph seems complete. There were tons of Indians, Chinese and other Asians on campus. Money talks. I inquired a while back and was told that the rich Asians, who pretty much pay full boat and are generous alumni, pay the way for poor blacks and poor white kids like mine.

The school tour guide in one school in particular that had a long and laudable Baptist tradition going back to the 1840s, was obviously embarrassed by the religious heritage. She was from New Jersey. Yes, there were Baptists here long ago but now this is the center of the school, she said, proudly pointing to her sorority house. She guided the tour away from the historic chapel and avoided the topics of race, religion and culture like the plague.

No question, the school was fully globalized, although the diversity of the student body seemed to reflect every race, ethnicity, creed, code and sexual orientation they have in New Jersey. Maybe that is what they mean by globalization; all different, yet all the same, like Pete Seeger’s little boxes. But there seemed to be only enough black students - great looking ones too, all in J. Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch - in view to supply the school’s front office in years ahead and the college brochures and to give a little talk on MLK day.

Failure

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/7/10

Countries fail because the third post-war generation lacks the courage and determination and sense of continuity in crisis that the first generation (Roosevelt, Eisenhower) had. It is like inheriting money. By the third generation there is nothing left. In fact, those qualities which bring the country out of the despair and back to equilibrium - warrior qualities - are scorned by the third generation. President Obama appealed to the horde in his Mile High speech at the Democratic Convention and this week encourages the mob on Cinco de Mayo. He attacks and seems to abjure the power-building archetype of Wall Street with the low and adolescent theater of televised show trials. So do his first officers, Pelosi, Reid and Barney Frank. Too bad. The result is always the same. When the panic sets in, the country then turns in desperation again for someone unflappable like Roosevelt or Eisenhower. Someone like Mitt Romney. Although it may be said that turning over the country to the founder and captain of Bain Capital is a little like volunteering for receivership. But that could truly be said about Roosevelt as well.

The one thousand point drop in the Dow Jones yesterday shows a country, a world, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Possibly someone hit the wrong button and sent the world spiraling. The Greek riots promise instability in Europe. China faces bubble problems. My excellent senator Judd Gregg says that California is our Greece.

A historic change can be grafted as a power arc in the rise and decline of England which started when Lord Nelson brought the English-speaking world to dominance over Napoleon in 1805. Then this week it was said that an important shift in the British elections yesterday was when Simon Cowell, the bitchy judge on American Idol, made a desperate pitch for the conservatives in The Sun. It was indeed a critical moment for England and in the absence of Nelson, she found Cowell. If they did not bring in a conservative Parliament, they would not bring in the austerity measures needed to save the currency, to save the stock market, to save England from sinking to the status of Greece. They did not. From Nelson to Cowell. Victoria’s bookends.

Now England is like the noble Duke of York: When they were up they were up, when they were down they were down. But now they are only half way up and neither up nor down.
The royal princes may take a look at Canada. It is great and vast and steady and sober and they still have Don Cherry and Sid the Kid Crosby to shore up the manlies. Us too.

Mike Bloomberg joins the Zombie Jamboree

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/5/10

Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York, assured the public that there would be no racial profiling of Muslims or Arabs in New York City after the bombing attempt at Times Square. But unfortunately, the night before, when egged on by that panting puppy, Katie Couric, who suggested "a home-grown," suspicion, the mayor replied: "Home-grown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something.” Tea Partier. Got it.

There was a time in New York City when the heart was Southern, and if your didn’t have Southern blood like Truman Capote, Harper Lee or Willa Carther, you were probably not that good. It was a golden age for magazines with Mississippi’s Willie Morris at Harper’s, North Carolina’s Harold T.P. Hays at Esquire and Howell Raines at the New York Times. In his comment Bloomberg, who grew up in a tribal Boston suburb where everyone was identified by their ethnicity; Jewish, Irish, Italian, WASP, shows all the sophistication of the current batch of provincials at the New York Times who see “Jesus land” as a boiling pot of fascism, and like Ilsa in “Casablanca,” long for Paris. But – jut, alors! – the train has left the station. Even the English today ditch the accent when they move to Hollywood, otherwise it will mean low theater like Dancing with the Stars or Fox news. A successful New York or Chicago politician would in the formal model of “Miller’s Crossing,” hook up with an Irish sidekick to enter the native world of intuition. Bloomberg’s got one. We’re supposed to have that primordial nature thing although we couldn’t organize a cat fight.

New York City is as Bloomberg says, the greatest city in the world. But it is an American city and any New Yorker who doesn’t’ understand that is provincial and like the South of the 1940s, locked in the nostalgia of the Grand Tour. It is sometimes a condition of us Boston ethnics, last to arrive at the table and late for dinner. Sociologists say we look back for three generations to Ireland, Poland, Germany, China or wherever we came from. Then we become Americans. In this regard, Italian New Yorker Rudy Giuliani, who was not that long ago married in Graceland I have heard, the capital of Jesus land, is the more American, the less provincial of New York’s recent mayors. New York is closer to Nashville than it is to Paris. It must be.

Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s Irish sidekick, might present for the mayor and his helpers a kind of cultural sensitivity training, for those stuck in this shadow of history. Bring them against their will to watch a few Toby Keith videos (“I love this bar,” Wayman’s Song), and sit in on a few sermons by Pastor Hagee. Suggested reading: W.J.Cash’s “Mind of the South,” John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward’s “The Burden of Southern History.” Start the session with the Taylor Swift happy dance. (Which incidently, has 40 million hits on You Tube.)

Where Bloomberg and I grew up ethnicity and prejudice formed our consciousness. We Irish were taught that Southern white people were inferior to us as they were inbred and dangerous. We Irish were taught that Jews were naturally smarter than we were and had to be watched because they would take over everything. We have found great personal success in a collective generational ego fueled by post-war dollars, but the new Rubin Museum in Chelsea aside, Mike Bloomberg’s New York City is more provincial and less fierce, less artistically driven and mature than the New York days of Pollock, Capote, Alfred Kazin, D.T. Suzuki and Kenneth Burke; than high-church lawyers who shook the world like Telford Taylor and street fighters like Norman Mailer. But they smoked in those days. The artist today might do better to follow the endless child Tintin to Tibet.

Possibly the WASPS saw us coming and just let us in when they moved to Texas, much as the Southern planters did when they handed the plantations over to the black field hands at the end of the Civil War, and headed west.

Make New York City a terrorist-free zone: A states’ rights defense against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/3/10

We might be at the sea change when CNN reports that it was a Vietnam veteran who noticed smoke from the car bomb intended to blow up Times Square. The degradation of Vietnam vets came from a society which couldn’t face the difficult realities of democratic life and represented soldier/action man – those who could - as a drug addict, “baby killer” and psycho. But here he is now with instinct, awareness, responsiveness and courage. He is Master Chief; he is Zen Man. He, the soldier, the veteran, is the culture’s one essential element; the fundamental building block of a free society. Possibly we are turning a corner. Maybe the black flags can start to come down now.

The incident may even bring even New York City, which prides itself on its inability to deal effectively with terrorism, much as Boston did before Christmas, to a fighting stance. The Christmas bomber brought Scott Brown to the Senate and brought New England – like the Kind in Lord of the Rings - out of its pseudo-pacifist trance. Possibly this could do the same for New York City.

It couldn’t happen at a better time for New York, for America. A week before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to New York City to gloat. New Yorkers should not let it happen.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu's senior ministers have arrest warrants waiting for them in Europe's capital cities - while mass murderer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is invited to lecture at Columbia University,” my Israeli friend Moshe Feiglin wrote last month. Now Ahmadinejad comes to the UN.

Certainly Hillary will grant him a passport. The Clintons, although generational figures; Sixties people and not real New Yorkers – denial again – have been snuggling up to terrorists since the Oslo Agreements.
Real New Yorkers should stop this from happening.

I hope the governor of Arizona is not aiming for annulment with her new immigration law. As Texas Governor Rick Perry said, it is a bad law. It is especially bad as states sovereignty posture following the wave and appealing to complex and low populist passions. But I bet New York City could find a great states rights defense against Ahmadinejad right now and prevent his entering the city; my city, the greatest city in the world.

There are so many different ways to make this not happen. But New York has, since the Sixties, come to see protest as an end in itself. That is, the idea that a bunch of people going outside to pout, as per the Saul Alinsky handbook, is in itself satisfying. It is zero sum. It makes no different to these people if it succeeds or fails. They like to fail. It relieves them of the responsibilities of governance; of adulthood. They substitute easy tasks for responsibility: Yes, we welcome terrorists like Yasser Arafat and Ahmadinejad, even Kali, the Death Mother, but we have a very strong bottle bill. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, which I opposed, we offered a price for the war on Iraq: State secession. A “states rights defense against Dick Cheney.” Seems to have caught on. There has to be a price extracted; there has to be an object, or it is just a play of conspicuous piety, and New Yorkers have been doing this for 40 years now.

The plan should be two parts: One, Ahmadinejad will not speak, will not arrive in New York City. Two: What are the options?

Because the UN is irrelevant to the moral core of the greatest city of the world and so it a federal government that would grant a high terrorist like Ahmadinejad a visa. And if New York City meets the needs and demands of these aerial abstractions that hover above her like the space ships in V, she loses her moral core; she loses her soul; she loses everything.

Understanding Lost

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 4/28/10

My kids watch a comic news report about the unfortunate spouse or family member who lives with someone who watches “Lost” and suggests survival strategies. As this astonishing concoction of soap opera, Saturday matinee, and mythical religion draws to a close, it might be worth explaining to them what is happening. This is what is going on with that: In our time, the 2000 year ages known as Platonic Months have shifted. The Age of Pisces, which began when three Zoroastrian astrologers followed a star to Bethlehem, has ended. It ended technically on January 1, 2001 and the next 2,000 year link in the 24,000 year sun cycle, the Age of Aquarius, began on that date. This is what “Lost” is about.

Each of these ages has a Watcher and that Watcher has in Jungian terms, a Shadow. In “Lost,” the Watcher (which is a kind of celestial Helper) is Jacob and his Shadow is known as the Man in Black (the smoke monster). The Watcher comes from the ancient most place in human consciousness or probably beyond (the Self in Vedic texts), but not a real physical place, a cosmic place. The Egyptian Alligator god Taweret towers over the cosmic island and its center, the Temple. The Temple suggests Temple Mount, which might be considered the portal to “earth soul” or “Unconscious” of the earth and cosmos. It is anima mundi; the eternal mother soul of the earth to which in Mircea Eliade’s expression, the race “endlessly returns.”

“Lost” is a narrative of the shifting astrological ages and although people associate Aquarius with the Sixties, the ages technically shifted in 2001 – a year which will be eternally marked by the destruction of a temple, one as relevant to our day as Temple Mount was to its 2,000 years ago, the World Trade Centers.

Jack Shephard (son of “Christian Shephard”) seems to be developing as the new Watcher of the age and John Locke as his Shadow. They replace Jacob and the Man in Black. “Lost” is about objective truth/logic and faith/intuition and comes down on the side of faith. When Jack rises to faith by trusting his intuition, “logic” personified by John Locke becomes subordinate to faith (becomes Shadow) and the world can awaken again.

Jack is the Aquarian. I think. Or maybe George W. Bush.

As critic Stanley Kauffman said about the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” back in 1978, it was an “an event in the history of faith.” “Heaven,” wrote Kauffman, “with a capital H is being replaced by the heavens and the fiction of the field [UFO flicks] is a chief pulse in the change.” “Close Encounters” could be seen, as C.G. Jung saw throughout the UFO culture, as a “modern myth of things seen in the sky.”

What is interesting about “Lost” is that it is a modern myth of things returning to earth. So is the “Survivor” series. They are myths about the eternal return to anima mundi, the mother spirit of the earth.

“Lost” could well become a kind of Mahabharata for the age ahead. I think it would make a good one. This is kind of important (for hippies, anyway) because there is something in very long swings of time that likes returns to the beginning, as Eliade suggests in his text, “The Myth of the Eternal Return.” Even history – especially history – returns to first moments.

When you return to day one of the Age of Pisces it is the birth of the Christ to which the Zoroastrians were heading, and the whole next 2,000 years seems to have spiraled out of that moment. Interesting here because when historians (or hippies or “Lost” cultists) return to the beginning of Aquarius say 1,500 years from now they will find four things in the first decade: “Lost,” the broken temple on Wall Street, George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. In the mist of time everything else for hundreds of years on each side may be swept away.

Vermont does the right thing

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/27/10

Rugged individualism was the original guiding ethic of northern New England. Possibly it still is. I know master builders up here who have never yet seen the need to hook up the electricity to their own houses and loggers who do well for their families pulling trees out of the forest with Percherons. But this I wasn’t expecting.

Lisa Rathke of the Associated Press writes that Vermont will not seek millions in a federal grant program aimed at improving failing schools, joining a handful of states in dropping our of the “Race to the Top” program despite strapped education budgets.

The Obama administration requires states to link teacher pay to student performance and invest in charter schools, which would require policy and legislative changes in Vermont.

And Vermont said no to $40 million federal dollars.

“When we look at it realistically, with limited resources, we have to make sure we put our energies and our efforts in places that we know we can be successful in and that fit what the direction of Vermont education is moving in,” said Armando Vilaseca, Vermont Commissioner of Education.

Vermont’s Governor Jim Douglas was the first to run to Washington, D.C. for federal bailout cash although we seem to need it least here in New Hampshire and Vermont than anyplace else. It is a conditioned reflex, felt first in those who do public budgets: Fed funds are free. It takes time to develop the temperament – possibly a new generation – to just say no. The new thinking that says states can and should think for themselves came from a New England tradition and started up here in Vermont and New Hampshire. But oddly enough, took root elsewhere.

Maybe Vermont is finding its old self again under the federal veneer. It is a better self. Scott and Helen Nearing, among the most rugged of rugged individualists, left Vermont in the Sixties when city folk started coming in by the bundles. Scott didn’t like them. One neighbor even forgot to feed his horse. Vermont was becoming a detached borough of New York City. So they moved way off into the forest. It is conceivable now that if they were still alive, they might even begin to think of coming back.

Why Pataki is important

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/26/10

There can be seen now two schools of Republicans. Bush Republicans and Perry Republicans. This took form in Texas Governor Rick Perry’s recent primary race when Dick Cheney, George H.W. Bush, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes (W’s proxy) lined up behind Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Sarah Palin lined up behind Rick Perry. Perry won in a landslide. But the sides had already been drawn up for and against in Doug Hoffman’s Conservative Party challenge in NY 23. It was the moment of the significant turning. Palin and Perry were there and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty showed up after the brush was cut, while Newt Gingrich and the party regulars lined up behind the traditional Republican. But George Pataki, former governor of New York, was there first. The Bush clan is now sidling up to Tea Party types; Cheney to Rubio in Florida, Mitt Romney to Nikki Haley in South Carolina. But George Pataki was there first.

He told The Hill that he won’t rule out a Presidential race in 2012. He’d be a great addition to a line which would hopefully include Perry, Palin and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. That would leave Mitt Romney holding the coat for the Bush people. But all of these others add substance and character to what is the sea change known as the Tea Party. It is heartland-based and the American century ahead will find its strengths and prosperity in the American heartland.

The fledgling spirit of the Tea Partiers, like Tamino, may need three words for guidance on its journey to maturity. Those words might be: passion, perspective and packaging. Palin provides passion and Perry the comprehensive abilities of a well-run and healthy state manager. But Pataki provides perspective. His recent six-stop tour, Revere America, geared to repealing Obamacare, adds class and character to this grassroots movement.

“Obama’s government controlled health care significantly jeopardizes jobs, our economy and our children’s futures by spending one trillion dollars and adding $600 billion in new taxes on families and businesses,” says Pataki. “ObamaCare represents an unprecedented overreach of the federal government into the lives of individuals and tramples on the Constitution as evidenced by 19 states filing suit against the federal power grab.”

It is of vital importance that this movement include someone from the northeast, preferably New York, or it runs the possibility of dangerously dividing red states from blue. Giuliani has the passion but not the perspective. Pataki is that man. Honest Jeffersonian strengths are growing in the heartland, reaching already beyond the states challenge to Obamacare. Minnesota and other states are now formulating legislation which would build a high legal threshold to any future federal legislation. These strivings are necessary and must find equitable solutions in our time.

And as long as Bill Mayer, Noam Chomsky, Frank Rich, Tiny Fey and David Letterman scorn the Tea Party and Sarah Palin – German fascists, Ku Klux Klan, slut, “two-headed circus freak dog” I read about Palin in a North Carolina newspaper this week; writes on her hand and has a Garfield calendar on her desk - the movement will grow and clarify. This debased commentary suggests a troupe of vampires in the twilight and triggers an archetypal and instinctive Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, conditioned reflex out there with the plain folk in Sunnydale, and she comes with a sword.

Why Pataki is important. - draft

There can be seen now two schools of Republicans. Bush Republicans and Perry Republicans. This took form in Rick Perry’s recent primary race when Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Karl Rove and Karen Hunghes (W’s proxy) lined up behind Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Sarah Palin lined up behind Rick Perry. Perrry won in a landslide. But the sides had already been drawn up for and against Doug Hoffman’s Conservative Party challenge in NY 23. Palin was there, then Perry and Tim Pawlenty after the brush was cut while Newt Gingrich and the party regulars lined up behind the traditional Republican. But George Pataki was there first. The Bush clan is now siddling up to Tea Party types; Cheney to Rubio in Florida, Mitt Romney to Nikki Haley in South Carolina. But George Pataki was there first.

He told The Hill that he won’t rule out a Presidential race in 2012 and would be a great addition to a line which would hopefully include Perrry, Palin and bobby Jindal. That would leave Mitt Ronmey holding the coat for the Bush party. But all of these others add substance to what is the sea change known as the Tea Party. They, like Tamino, maya need three words for guidance and their journey to maturity. They might be: passion, perspective and packaging. Palin provides passion and Perry the comprehensive abilities of a well-run state. But Pataki provides perspective. ______

It is of vital importance that this movement include someone from the northeast, preferably New York, or it runs the possibility of dangerously dividing red states from blue. Pataki is that man. Honest Jefferrsonian strengths are growing in the heartland, reaching already beyond the states challenge to Obamacare. Minnesota and other states and now formulating legislation which would build a high legal threshold to and federal legislation. These strivings are necessary and must find equitable solutions in our time. And as long as Bill Mayer, Noam Chomsky, Frank Rich, tiny Fey and David Letterman scorn the Tea Party and Sarah Palin – German fascists, Ku Klux Klan, slut, “two-headed circus freak dog” I read about Palin in a Durham, NC, newspaper this week; writes on her hand and has a Garfield calender on her desk - the movement will grow and clarify. They conjure images of vampires in the twilight and trigger an archetypal and instinctive Slayer response out there in Sunnydale, and she comes with a sword.

The Tea Party is an amouphous force, but it may already have done its work. It is inherently a fledgling Federalist party or rising theme in the Republican party.

go to Revere America and talk to the constitutional challenge by the states to Obamacare - this is an ideaa looking for a ringmaster. it is now an idea which will not go away - hippie sttes and Indian tribes are claiming sovereignty as well as Texas and Pacific Northwest and Alaska - and will spread to other cultural regions - as I opposed national prayer day from a federalist perspective; it was a federalist ue. point of view. but with a poor master a great and good idea can become intolerable, fanatic. The good master is the key. Perry is a good master and Palin a good representative spirit of rising America. Guliani represents this as well in a heartfelt way. But not all the way. Petaki is a picture of controlled passion, but ot passion denied but passion organized. new York needs to be involved in this, and it presents a good run: Pataki, Palin, Perry, Romney in 2012 - a stabilizing

Cruising porn at the SEC: Will centralized government destroy America?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/23/10

The dubious effect of the stimulus will soon be up, 100,000 will be added to the unemployment list in August when the census has been completed and President Obama charges after Wall Street in a dangerous populist offensive lead by the Keystone Kops at the SEC which seems to have been drummed up in an undergraduate coffee house. Possibly the most tedious aspect of centralized government; ours, like that in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, is that the need to accommodate the entire vast horde in art and language requires a bulletproof single metaphor. One that even a child could understand. Wall street bad. Big Brother good. A not-so-bright child. Possibly a Child Left Behind in a country left behind.

"As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN." Youth wants to know: Do we in Texas and New England still need a central government?

Current economic policies are unsustainable and the world faces doom because "the governments are taking over", said Marc Faber, editor & publisher of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. Warning that the "ultimate Armageddon" will be much worse the next time around, Faber told CNBC, "What I object to the current government intervention in so-called 'solving the crisis', (is that) they haven't solved anything. They've just postponed it."

Is one-size-fits-all, nationalist, globalist centralization finding its end game? This week's Newsweek, featuring Texas governor Rick Perry in his "Come and take it" boots on the cover, looks at Texas and sees behind the veil a different economic paradigm. "Texas has always been something of a separate country when it comes to politics and culture," they write. "Lately, the state seems to be functioning as its own economic republic." And as its federally dependent neighbor California unravels, it appears to be a quite successful model, but one, which could well be destroyed by Obamcare, the bailouts and centralization. Perry was the first to oppose.

We might ask in New England why this can't be said about us. Because our governors were first to flock to the rhetoric of Obama and the last perhaps to see ourselves with the kind of independence that Perry and Texas today represents. We need to go back to our Emerson and brush off in particular, his essay "Self Reliance" which gave Yankee independence its independence. Today Perry embodies it.

From my friends in Israel, Manhigut Yehudit :

Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said unto them: 'Draw out, and take lambs according to your families, and kill the Passover lamb.

24 And you shall observe this matter for an ordinance for you and your sons for ever.

26 And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you: What do you mean you by this service?

27. And you shall say: It is the sacrifice of G-d's Passover, for He passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when He smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses.' (Exodus 12)

Soon, with G-d's help, we will establish Jewish leadership for Israel. Please be forewarned that when that happens, our familiar, comfortable Pesach holiday will be radically changed. We will have to forget about the Pesach seder with the extended family at the home of the family balabusta. Instead, we will be face to face with the Korban Pesach (Passover offering) at the Temple Mount.

For those who have forgotten, the Korban Pesach is a positive commandment, equal in its importance to the mitzvah of brit milah (circumcision). The mitzvah of circumcision is a personal covenant between a Jew and his Father in heaven. The Pesach offering is the national covenant between the Jewish Nation and its Father in heaven. These two commandments forged the Jewish People as the unique nation of the Creator – both as individuals and as a collective.

Today, a Jewish policeman stands at the entrance to the Temple Mount and explains to the Jews that they are prohibited from praying there. A request to bring a sacrificial lamb is out of the question. When we will finally establish Jewish leadership for Israel, though, the same policeman will stand at the entrance to the Temple Mount and cheerfully explain what you need to know, ensuring that you are well-versed in the Jewish laws that must be observed during your momentous visit.

In truth, it is not the policeman who blocks our entrance to the Temple Mount. It is the observant Jews whose Torah and faith are still in exile. They/we feel more comfortable when our covenant with G-d remains exclusively in the realm of the individual. It's great to be religious in your home and "Israeli" in public. The people subscribed to this mode of living will go to great lengths to avoid being a complete Jew in the complete Land of Israel – both in private and in public. In other words, at some level, all of us have a little policeman in our hearts, blocking the entrance to the Temple Mount. That is why we have a full-sized, flesh and blood policeman at its gates.

When we establish Jewish leadership for Israel, all of this will be distant memory. The prime minister and his cabinet will ascend to the Temple Mount with their sacrificial lambs. The entire national mentality will change, and there will be no more lame excuses for not bringing the Pesach offering.

Instead of sitting in the comfort of our living rooms and chewing on matzah that symbolizes the Pesach offering, we will joyously sit in the streets and alleys surrounding the Temple Mount, eating our roasted sacrificial lamb.

The international uproar will be deafening. How will we be able to conduct "peace" negotiations when the entire Jewish Nation is at the Temple Mount with their Pesach offerings? And who will protect us from Iran? And what will Obama do? And how will Russia react? And what about the European Union? What will we explain?

27. And you shall say: It is the sacrifice of G-d's Passover, for He passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when He smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses.'

Happy Festival of Freedom,

Moshe Feiglin

Crisis in Jerusalem: Israel, Moshe Feiglin and the iPad – final copy

By Bernie Quigley

To be published at The Hill on 4/19/10

Israel has puzzled travelers by blocking them from bringing Apple’s new iPad into the country. They say it threatens to create interference with other products. But Apple says “iPad complies with international industry for Wi-Fi specifications.” Brings to mind a moment decades back when England banned Sesame Street. Said she didn’t want to be dominated by American symbolism and Sesame Street was rife with it (Big Bird). It was the talisman of American dominance same as the Spanish cross was to the Conquistadors.

Like McDonalds, like Sesame Street, the iPad is the new marker of American territoriality. Suddenly Israel resists. Silicon Valley is mystified. But China doesn’t want to be marked either, thus they tussle with Google.

Interesting that the Israelis picked iPad to tussle with. The apple symbol used as the cool capitalist company’s logo seems assumed or borrowed from the Beatles era, as they used the apple for their emblem. Apple computer products would be the dark materialist side of that experience – the outside like the inside for those who cannot tell the difference. Apparently, someone in Israel can.

Interesting as well, in 1964 the Surrealist artist Rene Magritté used the green apple to mark the arrival of messiah. His famous painting of an English man in bowler hat with a green apple in front of his face was titled Son of Man. From the Book of Daniel: “I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven . . . “ Daniel 7:13.

If Israel has a sublime voice, it is that of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel. This week he placed full page ads in the Washington Post, the Wall street Journal and the New York Times about deteriorating relationships between the Obama administration and Israel, a situation which “terrifies” former New York mayor and defender of Israel Ed Koch. Could get worse.

The conservative party in Israel faces a credible challenge. According to Likud law, elections must take place immediately to seat a new Central Committee. Current Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chair Benjamin Netanyahu has tried mightily to permanently postpone these elections. The vote on whether or not to postpone the Central Committee elections is currently scheduled for April 22nd. If Moshe Feiglin, soldier, sabra, who wants Israel to be a “Jewish state” and not a “state for Jews” takes leadership from Likud’s American friends, it will mean a new Israel.

“Soon, with G-d's help, we will establish Jewish leadership for Israel,” writes Feiglin (article here).”Please be forewarned that when that happens, our familiar, comfortable Pesach holiday will be radically changed. . . . When we establish Jewish leadership for Israel.... the prime minister and his cabinet will ascend to the Temple Mount with their sacrificial lambs. The entire national mentality will change.”

Instead of sitting in the comfort of living rooms and chewing on matzah that symbolizes the Pesach offering, Israelis will “ . . . joyously sit in the streets and alleys surrounding the Temple Mount,” eating roasted sacrificial lamb.

“The international uproar will be deafening,” he writes.

Get ready.

Crisis in Jerusalem: Israel, Moshe Feiglin and the iPad

By Bernie Quigley

To be published at The Hill on 4/19/10

Israel has puzzled travelers by blocking them from bringing Apple’s new iPad into the country. They say it threatens to create interference with other products. But Apple says “iPad complies with international industry for Wi-Fi specifications.” Brings to mind a moment decades back when England banned Sesame Street. Said she didn’t want to be dominated by American symbolism and Sesame Street was rife with it (Big Bird). It was the talisman of American dominance same as the Spanish cross was to the Conquistadors.

Like McDonalds, like Sesame Street, the iPad is the new marker of American territoriality; the dog peeing on the edge of the property which to date includes all of earth and the near half of the moon. The dog pees now across the Universe. Suddenly Israel resists. Silicon Valley is mystified. But China doesn’t want to be marked either, thus they tussle with Google.

Interesting that the Israelis picked iPad to tussle with. The apple symbol used as the cool capitalist company’s logo seems assumed or borrowed cultural karma from the Beatles era, as they used the apple for their emblem. Apple computer products would be the dark materialist side of that karma – the outside like the inside for those (like Bono, Al Gore) who cannot tell the difference. (“I’d rather be dead than cool,” said Kurt Cobain.) Apparently, someone in Israel can.

Interesting as well, in 1964 the Surrealist artist Rene Magritté used the green apple to mark the arrival of messiah. His famous painting of an English man in bowler hat with a green apple in front of his face was titled Son of Man. From the Book of Daniel: “I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven . . . “ Daniel 7:13.

If Israel has a sublime voice, it is that of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel. This week he placed full page ads in the Washington Post, the Wall street Journal and the New York Times about deteriorating relationships between the Obama administration and Israel, a situation which “terrifies” former New York mayor and defender of Israel Ed Koch. Could get worse.

The conservative party in Israel faces a credible challenge. According to Likud law, elections must take place immediately to seat a new Central Committee. Current Israeli Prime Minister and Likud chair Benjamin Netanyahu has tried mightily to permanently postpone these elections. The vote on whether or not to postpone the Central Committee elections is currently scheduled for April 22nd. If Moshe Feiglin, soldier, sabra, who wants Israel to be a “Jewish state” and not a “state for Jews” takes leadership from Likud’s American friends, it will mean a new Israel. And of course it will be the end for Hillary’s bitch, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Soon, with G-d's help, we will establish Jewish leadership for Israel,” writes Feiglin.”Please be forewarned that when that happens, our familiar, comfortable Pesach holiday will be radically changed. . . . When we establish Jewish leadership for Israel.... the prime minister and his cabinet will ascend to the Temple Mount with their sacrificial lambs. The entire national mentality will change.”

Instead of sitting in the comfort of living rooms and chewing on matzah that symbolizes the Pesach offering, Israelis will “ . . . joyously sit in the streets and alleys surrounding the Temple Mount,” eating roasted sacrificial lamb.

“The international uproar will be deafening,” he writes.

Get ready.

Maybe Howard Dean needs a Tea Party

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/16/10

I would have no objection if Texas wanted to hold a “state day of prayer” but here in northern New England we pray different or not at all and we consider that to be a sublime spiritual path; what Emerson, Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker called “natural religion.” So it is good for us that U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb didn’t demand that Rick Perry sit through a Tibetan chant up here or that Howard Dean hold hands during that cry that comes pure from the heart of Free Church Appalachian, by ruling this week that The National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional.

One-size-fits-all religion is not religion. It is gruel. Worse even than one-size-fits-all government. The judge’s ruling helps explain what we mean by federalism and one-size-fits-all American nationalism; that we are and were intended to be as per Jefferson’s vision, different but related peoples. Tea Party made that point at first. History may find it like the old Newport Folk Festival. It really caught on for a few years then faded. But when it was over the world had Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. When this is over, and maybe it is now, the world has or will have Sarah Palin and Rick Perry.

But whether he knows it or not, Howard Dean actually qualified for the first shouts of what became the Tea Parties. Sudden demands came from here first that we in Vermont and New Hampshire could oppose the invasion of Iraq as unconstitutional and as per Jefferson and the Kentucky Resolutions of 1797, we were not obliged to participate in unconstitutional action. Dean in fact, was a model of federalist thinking to some of us, including myself. In one of his last speeches as governor of Vermont Dean used the phrase, “We have more in common here with the eastern provinces of Quebec than we do with Texas.”

And Dean as governor pioneered what might be called a “new federalism” in opposition to what might be called “American nationalism.” American nationalists (Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Reid, Clintons, Bushes) are ideologists at war, nationally and now globally, one with one another. They are “citizens of the world” who cannot name their state bird. Regionalists – federalists – are guided by earth, intuition and region to who they are. Dean was adopted nationally as an anti-war figure, but it would only weaken the Democratic party. He won no primaries and outside of his region became a political cult figure, much like George McGovern during the war in Vietnam.

But here at home he shares a common sensibility with his state and with many in neighboring states. With Collins and Snowe in Maine and with Independent governor Angus King there. With Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island and even with Scott Brown in Massachusetts I would venture. All of these people reflect a genuine New England sensibility finding itself again; a new sensibility which will be destroyed again by one-size fits-all nationalism.

His helper Joe Trippi writes this week for Fox: “If you strip away the social issues that separate the Dean movement from today’s Tea Partiers, they share a fundamental principle -- the government is broken, and it is the duty of everyday citizens to fix it.”

Dean cannot fix the country, and fixing the world is a nationalist delusion gone global. But he can fix New England. Vermont’s sovereigntists did not go away. The Second Vermont Republic is sending reasonable candidates up for office in November. Jefferson is new to Vermont, but what is happening here should be asked throughout New England: Suppose we hill Buddhists were required to sing The Old Rugged Cross in school because the Supreme Court says so. What should be done? Do the Supremes, which seem now to be identified with varied tribes instead of stats and regions as intended, dictate New England karma? If so, we not only forfeit self government, but we forfeit our humanity.

The Two Republican Parties: Do we still need the Senate?

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/12/10

Two things were cleared up this week at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. First, there are now clearly two Republican parties: Big Government Republicans (George W. Bush and Karl Rove) and Small Government Republicans (Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Ron Paul). The second thing is that it is now clear what we mean by “small government.” We mean state government.

“[W.] Bush increased federal spending on domestic programs more than any president since Richard Nixon, easily surpassing Bill Clinton, Carter and his own father, so much so that by 2008, America had two big-government parties,” write Reagan biographer Craig Shirley and American Conservative Union vice chair, Donald Devine, Reagan’s first director of the Office of Personnel Management, in a Washington Post op-ed.

The Southern Republican convention this week illustrated this healthy division in conservatism. It brought in new people with dynamic thinking, and Sarah Palin, correctly called now by the mainstream press, a “superstar.” Perry and Palin gave great speeches and so did Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, who sounded like Opie in his response to the President’s address to the joint session of Congress, but at the party conference making prominent reference to the Tenth Amendment and state sovereignty. Ron Paul, an outcast at the debates less than two years ago, was the venerable Old Grandfather. Tea Party is becoming a conservative theme, like a religious revival, instead of a doctrine or manifesto.

Five more states have joined the Constitutional challenge against Obamacare. Before Tea Party ideas are fully absorbed by heart and spirit, a few thoughts which were there at the beginning should be kept on.

In recent years both parties have tried to run up vast deficits when their party was in office, deficits so deep that the next in office would not be able to spend to actualize any programs. Ron Paul brings an antidote with a new approach based on Austrian economics. That his son, Rand, is doing well in his Senate race in Kentucky is auspicious. But it should not be allowed to happen again and the way to prevent it is for states and regions to demand a voice in economy.

“With President Obama’s policies of big government, big bailouts, big banks and big bureaucracy, the Democratic Party has jettisoned the working man and woman of America, who are increasingly coming to reject being ruled by one corrupt city along the Potomac. They want to be governed by themselves in their communities, their localities and their states, in a 21st-century version of the founders’ federalism,” write Shirley and Devine.

Instead of asking do we need the departments of energy or education, which is not about small government but about thinning and pruning big government, we should be asking today, do we still need the Senate? Nothing in our time represents the decline and degradation of the American spirit as the current bunch of coconuts in the Senate. The Louisiana Purchase and Ben Nelson’s Cornhusker kickback highlight a viral condition. The Senate today is the House of Lords. In original intent, the House of Lords might better have been seen as a group of advisors to those who make the laws.

The states and the regions offer a solution and one comes from America’s greatest of minds and greatest of diplomats since Franklin, George Kennan. Later in his life Kennan took to the idea of a Council of Elders, an idea floated by the Gorbachev Institute in San Francisco. It would in fact, play a role like a university’s Board of Visitors or a corporation’s Board of Directors. In this period of reflection he also suggested regional autonomy:

“I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment. I could conceive of something like nine of these republics—let us say, New England; the Middle Atlantic states; the Middle West; the Northwest (from Wisconsin to the Northwest, and down the Pacific coast to central California); the Southwest (including southern California and Hawaii); Texas (by itself); the Old South; Florida (perhaps including Puerto Rico); and Alaska; plus three great self-governing urban regions, those of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—a total of twelve constituent entities. To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”

A Council of Twelve. Under Kennan’s scheme states might consolidate their legislative bodies. There would be 12 instead of 50. It would require a Constitutional Convention like that proposed by James M. LeMunyon of Virginia and signed on to by 20 states. There would always be a role for feds; raising an army, maintaining Arlington Cemetary and the honored heritage, flying the flag.

And do we still need a Supreme Court?

Bob McDonnell’s Confederate Moment

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/8/10

The difference back when my home state, Rhode Island, was a major slave port, was culture. Economy in the North was urban and heading toward industrialization. Economy in the South was agrarian. The two had never met and were temperamentally at odds. Jefferson anticipated Yankee invasion as early as 1797. In the 1820s Henry Adams wrote with stunningly accurate of how and when the Civil War would emerge.

But then as in all wars, economy was key: When industrialization began working in England and in the North equilibrium between North and South was broken. England ended her slave empire in the early 1830s – Evangelical piety arose once the slaves were no longer needed. Industrial wealth and vast flows of immigrants bolstered the Empire State and my great grandfather was drafted right off the boat from Ireland.

As C. Vann Woodward points out in “The Burden of Southern History,” the goals of the northern compact were three: prevent the states from secession, freeing the slaves, equality between white and black. But letters home from Vermont soldiers show that all the soldiers really cared about was Southern secession. When extreme wealth came to the North the first – territoriality – was suddenly possible. The only real problem was Stonewall Jackson, but when he was killed by friendly fire at Chancellorsville, the Southern spirit began to yield.

At the conquest, the South was poor and broken. It remained poor for almost a century. The North was rich and the Empire State was the richest and would go on to being the richest in the world until 1929. But then, after the Second World War, the wealth would spread in a South cheered by Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and beyond to the Southwest and Texas. Then it would recede from New York. And now Rick Perry’s Texas has the best balance sheet in the country and eight out of ten new hires are in Texas. While the real unemployed rate in New York City is said to be up to 20 percent, Albany’s government is corrupt to the core and the debt is endless.

The first purpose of the Civil War was economic consolidation under a single economic system and a single currency in a globalist vision designed by Alexander Hamilton, the New Yorker. Washington signed on with Hamilton at Jay’s Treaty in 1794, sealing the fate of America, sealing the fate of the South and Texas.

Until April 15, 2009, and the tax revolt at the Alamo and everywhere. Because it is all about economics. And the conqueror today looks to the economically healthy Southern and Western free states for material support and a hefty pension after burning Atlanta to the ground and bringing it into submission at the cost of 34,624 lives at Chickamauga, 51,112 at Gettysburg and 26,134 at Antietam in a matter of hours. How’s that supposed to work again?

Temple Mount: Next Year in Jerusalem

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/7/10

Just when you think it is all wrapped up, something happens and it all changes. Like when the glorious arrival of the millenium was officially declared at Barack Obama’s Democratic nomination, biblically staged at Mile High stadium. Then barely 12 hours later Sarah Palin showed up and ruined everrything. We may face another such turning but on a quantum scale if and when israelis begin to rebuild the Temple Mount.

As Wikipedia reports, according to Judaism, the Temple Mount is the place where God chose the Divine Presence to rest, and it was from here that the world expanded into its present form and from where God gathered the dust used to create the first man, Adam. It is also the centermost place from which the western churches emerged. And it was the central office of Knights Templar, from which they take their name. Viewers of the TV show “Lost” have reasonably speculated that the show’s temporal mysteries are ultimately sourced at a mythic Temple Mount.

Haaretz reports that the Our Land of Israel party (Eretz Israel Shelanu) said it intended to mount an extensive bus campaign, with the slogan "May the Temple be built in our lifetime," along with an artist's rendition of the completed temple.
"The mosque on the temple mount is temporary," said Baruch Marzel, one of the party’s leaders, referring to the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques, "and it's only a matter of time before the Temple which the entire people of Israel are waiting for will be built."

The fate of Israel is tied to party elections this month. If Moshe Feiglin’s Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) group, the largest faction in the Likud, comes into power, Israel will be “a Jewish state” instead of “a state for Jews.” In any event, the day is ahead. Tiime is quickly passing when the “authentic” Israeli leadership we have long viewed on Jim Lehrer’s The News Hour appears to hail from a suburb of Philadelphia.

Youth wants to know: How does Sarah Palin feel about Manhigut Yehudit? Mitt Romney? Rick Perry?

Imagine there’s no Easter

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/4/10

On Holy Thursday, a secular political site I go to, feeling the turn in the seasons, but not wanting to draw on any specific religion, offered a version of John Lennon’s Imagine.

It infuriated some viewers, not because it was considered bad Easter religion, but because some viewers saw it as “communist.” More a Taoist or Tolstoyan anthem – themes from which Lennon drew on through the later parts of his creative arc.

But I’ve seen this again and again, including at the Olympics and at one very poignant 9/11 nationally televised memorial featuring Tom Hanks, Clinton Eastwood and Neil Young, where we mourned our deepest hurt and turned to Lennon’s Imagine to speak for the inner spirit.

We are a secular people and if, as President Obama did this weekend, we see Easter as a “celebration of mankind” then John Lennon might as well be its avatar. Because although distinguished psychiatrists like Barbara Hannah correctly in my opinion, see the “one world” thing as a childish and narcissistic delusion, it was only in recent times we came to see ourselves collectively as “mankind” (or “humankind” which is even more insipid).

But Lennon would be better than Marx. Better than Mao, who he very publicly denounced. Better than Bill Clinton or Al Gore or Michael Jackson or Barack Obama or any of a ghoulish host of global conquistadors (and what is enough to gag a horse, the self-proclaimed “world elders”) conceived by the Universe to speak on behalf of “mankind.”

But this Easter, I’m concerned about the Catholic Church. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said, the child predator scandal is vast and threatens even the character of Ireland. And in western Europe and even in Quebec’s oldest of North American churches, the congregations are thin and elderly. The only people who seem to go to church up here in the north are politicians.

My family lines are RC and C of E. The Catholics have mostly turned Buddhist or to science and the stone churches of the Boston Irish are now art studios. C of E has long been secularized and has substituted sociology for the sacred, but the RC side says it always was like that.

And there are 1,600 mosques today in Germany and almost as many in France, but they are politicized as well and some of them violently obsessed.

The only real religious people I talk to today are Southerners – generally Baptist – and Israeli Jews. Both peoples with a sense of place. (A place in nature, a “natural state” as in Tolstoy.) Invariably they are considered “right wing” here in the northeast, where religion is viewed as something like a hat.

But I see a future growing with them, possibly a future together. I see a future here as well among us New England Buddhists and hippies, who follow the gospel of Lao Tzu and Black Elk as we find it and the “no religion” religion proclaimed by Lennon in Imagine. It was after all the Christ who said to go alone to the Father and not listen to the rabbis the “elders” or any of the others in getting there. I see a future in this here, but it looks like a different future.

Virginia’s James M. LeMunyon calls for a Constitutional Convention

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/1/10

As Karl Rove, Dick Armey and others try to steal the fire of the Tea Parties, a singularly good idea, and a thoroughly origin one, that might find a place with this theater seeking a theme is suggested today in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal: A Constitutional Convention. Because the 14-state Tenth Amendment challenge to Obama health care is likely to fail and anyway, this is not about health care. It is about who will manage, nurture and determine the fate of that volatile and enlightened collective soul which is Texas, Rick Perry or Barney Frank? And why again is that?

“The U.S. Congress is in a state of serious disrepair and cannot fix itself,” writes Fairfax, VA, House of Delegates representative, James M. LeMunyon. “It has reached this point over the course of many years – in fact over decades. Regardless of the party in power, Congress has demonstrated a growing inability to effectively address the major issues of our time, including soaring federal debt and the extension of federal authority to states and localities.”

Interest in calling a first-ever Article V convention is growing at the state level, writes LeMunyon, who has introduced a resolution (H.J. 183) in Virginia, calling for a Constitutional Convention to restrain the national government. A petition for such a convention passed the Florida Senate last month. If approved by the House, he says, Florida would be the 20th state with an active call to do so.

The call for a Constitutional Convention might have been inevitable after the bewildering recent decisions of that motley sanga of vying ethnics which is the Supreme Court – a few of whom actually appear troubled - on private property and Presidential powers and their casual dismissal of Habeas Corpus, a talisman of the English-speaking people since 1215 when it was incorporated in the Magna Carta.

WSJ calls for Constitutional Convention


As Karl Rove, dick Armey and others try to steal the fire of the Tea Party, the singularly good idea, and a thorouly origin one, that might find a place in this group, is suggested in the op-ed pages of the WSJ today: A Constitutional Convention.
This weekend, Michael Reagan, osn of Ron, hopes to lead 200,000 in a tax revolt to D,C. That’s good, but Reagan is not a Tea Party leader. This is a new zeitgeist that might officially be considered to have gotten its start on April 15, last year at The Alamo. Present were Glenn Beck, Rick Perry and performer Ted Nuggent. Sarah Palin should also be considered the charmed spirit of the group, but none of these can really be identified exclusively by the wants and needs of the Tea Party, and each individually is larger than the identification of the group. Of these, Perry, who is up for reelection in November, has most succinctly and professionally discussed the issues perttenent to the groups and their basis in the Constitution and the Texan and American traditions. He should add to the contours of his reelection campaign the call for a Constitutional Convention.

Cal Cunningham for North Carolina Senate

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/31/10

In the last 20 years North Carolina has had the churning experience of letting go of the old and finding itself again underneath; returning again to the place where it started, the Democratic Party. Something good happened when the urbane Harvard-educated lawyer and entrepreneur Mark Warner teaming up with the rustic Scotch-Irish warrior Jim Webb from the deep hills of western Virginia. This was a new and auspicious Democratic paradigm; and advanced management and excellence model with Southern characteristics.

It was Mudcat Saunder’s South; the old South, the new South, the same South coming into the republic and bringing with it heart and substance. It awakened in North Carolina when Kay Hagen clicked her ruby slippers and sent Elizabeth Dole back to Kansas in 2008. It advances again with Cal Cunningham’s run against Richard Burr for the Senate in North Carolina. Cunningham, a captain in the army reserves and an Iraq war veteran who won a Bronze Star for his efforts, brings authentic leadership to North Carolina. He has recently been endorsed by General Wesley Clark.

"Cal would be the first veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to serve in the U.S. Senate. He would bring a veteran's unique perspective to policymaking in Washington,” said Clark.

When we were rearing our kids on our little farm in Tobaccoville, NC, the venerable Jesse Helms was our Senator. He came from the ‘50s and refused to let go. Like one of those old Japanese soldiers from World War II who refused to surrender and were still coming out of the jungle decades after the war had ended. But the South had already let go decades before and had joined the world, even led the world, while Jesse was still holding fast to the past. And in a monumental shift in sensibility my Baptist, Democrat precinct which had voted Democrat for 120 years, suddenly made a tectonic shift and 85% followed Jesse to the Republican party in the early 1980s.

But Warner and Webb returned it. They, with General Clark and a few others, brought a new face to the Democrats and a new face to the South, “a Democratic Team with Management Values.” Wesley Clark brought a uniform sense of honor, dignity, intelligence and duty to the country in the oldest tradition of the South and to the Democratic party. Like Hagan, Cunningham fits in this new model which forms an auspiciously rising paradigm and one which returns North Carolina back to its Democratic roots.

During 2008, Cunningham served as a military prosecutor in the Multi-National Corps-Iraq. During his tour, he was government counsel in the first court-martial of a contractor under military law since 1968. In addition to the Bronze Star Medal, he received the General Douglas MacArthur Award for his leadership.

In November 2000, Cal was elected to the North Carolina State Senate, representing Davidson, Rowan and Iredell Counties. In the Senate, Cal worked on privacy legislation, campaign reform, the patient's bill of rights, the clean smokestacks bill, class size reductions, and preservation of farmland. He served as Vice Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate's education committees. He has since served on the Executive Committee of the North Carolina Democratic Party.