THOUGHTS ON ISIS--September 20, 2014

What should we do about IS? How about we do nothing--by which I mean, nothing of a military nature. It's not our fight. It's a civil war in Syria, a civil war in Iraq, maybe a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a war between Shia and Sunni, even a war between less and more extremist Sunni. It does not and should not involve the US military. So why do so many people seem to think it should?

Mostly, I think it's because we regard Iraq as "ours," not of course in any formal colonial sense, but morally. We remember Colin Powell's Pottery Barn dictum: You broke it, you own it. We feel responsible for Iraq, and why not? Three successive presidents fought inconclusive wars there, Bush 41 to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, Clinton to enforce sanctions and no-fly zones, and Bush 43 to topple Saddam and occupy the whole country. Now Obama is doing the same.

Many say that George H. W.'s mistake was not to send the forces all the way to Baghdad in 1991. I disagree. I think his real mistake, the real American Original Mesopotamian Sin, was his initial decision to challenge Saddam's occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Not to apologize for Saddam, but was he so serious a threat as to justify shock-and-awe bombing, and a huge deployment of US combat troops? I'm half inclined to say that we fought the Gulf War in a state of hubris, because the Communist bloc was crumbling, "the world was ours," essentially unipolar now that the Cold War was over, and we needed to show our might in order to consolidate it. We thought we could get away with it, and we had the means to hand, namely military power, which was our hammer, as in "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Saddam was a nail that stuck up at just the right moment. Subsequently, Clinton's air campaign worked, after a fashion, while Saddam dodged the sanctions and the Iraqi people suffered. Meanwhile, in his Afghan cave, Osama fumed over the US presence in Saudi Arabia--also a by-product of the Gulf War.

Then, in the fog of confusion following 9/11, it wasn't hard for Bush 43 (or rather Cheney et al.) to hustle us into war, because "terrorism." I saw Colin Powell on Bill Maher last night, and was surprised at how mad I still am at him. Bush was just a fool, but Powell, Condi Rice and lots of others should have known better! It was bad enough that no one was fired over 9/11. It was worse that no one resigned in protest at the 2003 misadventure. All we did was break a brutal but functioning dictatorship, dispersing its army and ruling elites, with no clear idea what would replace it beyond some Wilsonian vaporings. We thereby exposed and inflamed regional, ethnic and sectarian hatreds that had been there long before the British decided there should be an Iraq in the first place. Like the British after they took Pretoria in 1900 (can't resist a Boer War allusion), we then found ourselves waging a prolonged counter-insurgency, in which 5000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. All of it went on the national credit card. It was the first US war ever for which the Treasury did not raise a penny in taxes. I'm still mad about that, too!

We left behind a country aligned with Iran and not even willing to let residual American forces stay, unless subject to Iraqi justice. It was Bush who first set us up for that with the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement, and Obama who found it oh so convenient to bring the last of our forces out at the end of 2011. I don't really blame either Bush or Obama for the fate of the SOFA, but would three or four thousand of our troops lingering on in Iraq have made much difference? The new Iraqi army had heaps of our weapons, many of them since lost to IS, and six or seven years worth of training. How much more were we supposed to give? Anyhow, the Iraqis plainly didn't want us there any more. Staying on without a valid SOFA, seven years after we declared Iraq "sovereign" in 2004, would have effectively put us in the position of invading the country all over again.

If al-Qaeda was blowback from the Gulf War, and of the anti-Soviet Afghan effort even earlier, IS, everyone seems to agree, is blowback from the Iraq War. Its core is further fanaticized remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who began to operate in eastern Syria when Assad lost his grip there, coincidentally also in 2011. The religious zeal of IS comes mostly from these, while a lot of its practical military prowess comes from Iraqi and possibly some Syrian military veterans opposed to Baghdad and Damascus respectively. Without these hardened military men, IS is just a terrorist group; with them, it has become a conquering army, but so far only in the power vacuum created by the Syrian Civil War and the collapse of Baghdad's authority in northwest Iraq. This is what makes the "if-we-don't-stop-them-there-we'll-have-to-fight-them-here" comparisons I hear with (of course you know what's coming) Hitler and Nazi Germany so idiotic. Hitler ruled the world's second biggest industrial economy. IS has a few hundred oil wells, by no means the equivalent of the Ruhr. They occupy a few cities connected by roads in the North Mesopotamian Plain; if only they could be flushed out of cities like Mosul, air power could make those roads look like the 1991 Death Road in southern Iraq.

But there's the rub: Americans have a touching faith in air power, but as we're forever being cautioned, air power by itself doesn't occupy territory. Don't get me wrong. Obama was justified in using air power to save the Yazidis and, where possible, other endangered minorities from extermination. Bombing to chase IS away from the Mosul Dam to "protect" Americans at our huge fortified Baghdad Embassy (the biggest structure in the whole city) was more doubtful, but OK. But extending bombing into Syria, in opposition to what's left of the government there, in an area with apparently dozens of rebel groups besides IS, makes no sense to me at all. You have to take in the whole strategic situation.

The strategic situation is that IS is surrounded by enemies, many of them heavily armed. Let's go down the list.

Assad who's almost as bad as Saddam, but didn't we support Saddam, when he fought Iran? I think our real quarrel with him is that he is actually aligned with Iran, and enjoys support from Putin.

The non-IS Syrian rebels, very poorly "vetted," as we now say. When we do vet them, I think we'll find that the moderate ones are not the ones likely to fight most effectively and immediately against IS, and it will take a year or more to train the "moderate" ones.

The Kurds, apparently very effective but only in defense of their own homeland. If they really become independent, they'll exercise a pull on their ethnic fellows in Syria, Turkey and Iran. There's trouble for the future, but for the moment they seem to need little helping holding their own against IS.

The Iraqis of the Shia regions, backed by Iran. The Iranians have ridiculed Obama's chemical warfare "red line" in Syria, but have said they draw their own "red line" against IS at Iraqi Shia shrines like Karbala and Najaf. For your real neo-cons, Iran has always been the arch-enemy. I disagree. Our tiff with Iran has lasted longer than our refusal to recognize Communist China, and I think it's time to end it, even if it means letting them have a few nuclear weapons. If this be appeasement, make the best of it. Pakistan has hundreds of nukes, and is far more dangerous.

The Turks, supposedly our NATO allies. If IS were to attack them, I suppose we would have casus belli, but IS seems too clever for that; they just returned 49 Turkish hostages, heads still attached, as a good will gesture, without even payment of a ransom. So IS is hemmed in on the north, though so far Turkey seems inclined to take few active measures against it.

At a further remove, the Egyptians, whose military regime has just declared itself opposed to IS. Actually, even the old Morsi government would have hated IS too; both are "Islamist," but different strains.

Also Jordan and the Gulf States, the former with a capable though small military and a border with both Syria and Iraq, the latter able to provide financial support if nothing else.

If it came to that, the nuclear-armed Israelis. Let's hope it won't come to that. I respect Israel and the Jewish people, but it's been a huge error, over the past few decades, to suggest we'll back anything any Israeli government, any time, may decide to do, which has only encouraged the rise of their rabid right wing, egged on by our evangelical right wing. I think time and demography are working against Israel. If it should be necessary, I'd gladly give every Israeli Jew US citizenship and welcome them here. I can't think of any other set of 5,000,000 or so people who would make a greater contribution to the US economy and US culture. But I digress.

Last, the Saudis. Here's the crux of the matter. I think Saudi Arabia is IS' next likely target, should the group decide on further military expansion. Probably even its ultimate objective. The proclamation of a Caliphate constitutes a claim on Mecca and Medina and hence a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the House of Saud. For decades we've had a devil's bargain with the Saudis, keeping world oil prices low in exchange for protecting them and allowing them to use their oil money to buy off their humbler subjects, while their wealthier ones massively endow mosques and madrassas all over the world--many of them not exactly "moderate." In this way, Saudi Arabia is also the ultimate source of this infection. Osama and most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis who reviled the Kingdom for being in bed with infidels (us), al-Qaeda in Iraq was inspired by the original al-Qaeda, and IS derives from al-Qaeda in Iraq. What goes around, comes around. Now the Saudis will have to deal with the consequences of all that. If they are to be partners in any coalition with the US and the West, we will have to lay down the law to them about the double game they've been playing.

 So most of the states surrounding IS have excellent reasons for getting together against it, and most of them have forces, many of them trained by and even in the US, and weapons, many of them furnished by the US, quite capable of defeating IS insofar as it is a strictly military power. There should be no need even for the US to orchestrate a coalition, let alone let itself be used as its air force, or its ground army, in a region where almost our every move since World War II has come back to bite us. FDR's deal with ibn Saud, Truman's impulsive decision to recognize the State of Israel, Ike's connivance at bringing back the Shah, Nixon's massive airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, Carter's failures in Iran, Reagan's dispatch of Marines to Lebanon, Bush 41's war with Saddam, Clinton's marking time in the no-fly zones, Bush 43's occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq,now Obama's overreaction to Congress' and the public's overreaction to the beheadings of American journalists--horrifying, but unlike, say, Benghazi, not even an attack on people officially representing America. All of it a nightmarish decades-long clusterfuck of our own making.

This doesn't mean IS is not our enemy. It clearly is. When I say we should do "nothing" about it, I mean nothing of a military nature, whether bombs in the air or boots on the ground. Besides the al-Qaeda-derived fanatics and the disaffected Sunni Iraqi and Syrian military, there is another element to IS, foreign fighters who have flocked to their cause, and who may seek to return to their home countries, including the US. These are most definitely a danger. There are also people who have remained in western countries, including the US, whether Muslim immigrants, people born of Muslim immigrant parents, or, probably most dangerous of all, converts who want to prove themselves, who may be inspired by IS to blow up a few buildings or cut off a few random heads. Something like this was evidently nipped in the bud in Australia a few days ago.

The US should do three things. Homeland security and, unfortunately, surveillance should be continued and maybe even intensified--maybe DHS will finally justify the trillion or so spent on it since 2002. In particular, I would tag and target anyone who has traveled to that part of the world and wants back in. I would trawl the Internet looking for plots, since that's how most of them seem to get started these days. They like to blow things up, but I wouldn't overlook cyber attacks. Imagine Americans having to do without Facebook or Twitter, let alone access to their bank statements, stock quotes or Amazon for a few days! The horror! I would do everything possible to secure energy independence, so we can stop sucking up to the Saudis. That includes the Keystone pipeline, fracking, nuclear, whatever. And I would stop turning the Middle East into an even bigger weapons bazaar, which is what we are poised to do.

Yes, I'm nauseated by the sight of Americans (and others) getting their heads sawed off, women being raped and sold into slavery, religious minorities slaughtered for holding fast to their faith. But what exactly has changed over the past month or two that would justify all the war talk? At first I thought IS was trying to intimidate us into keeping out, now I think maybe they were trying to goad us into coming in. If we do, we are playing their game, and compounding all our earlier blunderings in that part of the world, which are a large part of what provoked this madness in the first place.

WAR AND LIBERTY

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." I see this James Madison quote a lot lately. I get it: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now Syria? Still, I'm inclined to question it. What is "continual" warfare? Does it mean total mobilization? We haven't had anything like that since 1945. Even Korea and Vietnam were only as traumatic as they were because we still had the draft, hence their wrenching effects on American society and politics. But what about a nation with relatively small, professional volunteer armed forces? Like ours. Or like the British at their imperial apogee in 1815-1914. It would be hard to find a year in that century when British troops were not fighting somewhere. If not India or China, then Africa or the Crimea. All the while, Britain became steadily more democratic, with less privilege and more careers open to talent, less given to monopoly and protection and more to free market capitalism, less insistent on religious conformity and more open to freedom of belief and expression. Almost all these British wars were controversial. Some ended in victory, some in defeat. Some inflicted real psychic wounds, notably the Indian Mutiny, which aroused feelings of undeserved betrayal, as well as racial fears, and the Boer War, because of its unexpected duration and moral ambiguities. Most had few such effects. The press treated some as virtual sporting events. None, interfered much with the advance of "British liberties." Honor the Founding Fathers, learn from them, but don't necessarily assume that a quote from Madison, Washington or any of them is necessarily definitive.

EIN GEDANKENEXPERIMENT

Here’s a little Gedankenexperiment for your perusal. Suppose firearms had never been invented. The American colonists waged their struggle for independence with motor vehicles, which were used to move troops from place to place, to spy on the enemy, and also as moving platforms from which to pelt the Redcoats with snowballs or stones. The British were similarly equipped, but could not match the Americans in development of ATVs, hence they won most regular engagements but were eventually worn down by irregular warfare in the backcountry. The 2nd Amendment then might read, “The right of the people to keep and operate motor vehicles shall not be infringed.” Would we then be arguing that it is unconstitutional to require that motor vehicles be registered, inspected and insured, that drivers should be licensed and periodically given written or road tests, that drunk driving should be legal, that red lights and stop signs are a violation of citizens’ rights? The details are different, but the logic seems the same.

JARED LOUGHNER: A CONDITIONAL APPRECIATION

Your concerns were the concerns of a lot of us these days: the manipulation of words ("grammar"), the manipulation of standards of value ("currency"), the sources of authority (the Constitution), the justifications for violence (wars), the necessity and at the same time the vacuity of formal education (PCC or elsewhere), individual rights ("freedom of speech"), a very likely dire economic future ("homelessness," "low-income pay"). Your reading list (Orwell, Huxley, Marx, Hitler, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Plato) includes works everyone should probably be familiar with.

But dude, your midnight video! Halfway through it, some sort of guitar music begins in the background, suggesting a perspective in which everyone more or less has to have a playlist and everything that happens has to have a soundtrack. It's mostly in the cadence and tenor of your speech and the spooky near-deserted campus-at-night setting that I get hints of what you might be about.

LET ME KNOW WHEN ANY OF THIS STARTS TO SOUND FAMILIAR

Germany after World War I kept up all sorts of social spending, while at the same time having to pay stiff reparations to the victorious Allies. The reparations were not beyond the ability of the German economy to support, had it not been for politics. Left-wing elements could not bring themselves to abandon entitlements, while right-wing elements proclaimed that it was virtually a patriotic duty to refuse to pay either reparations or taxes, so yawning deficits were covered by simply printing money. In 1923, when the French occupied the Ruhr to force payment, the Germans responded by refusing to work, so inflation (too much money chasing too few goods) became hyperinflation (a virtually infinite quantity of money chasing no goods at all.)

After 1923 the currency was stabilized by wiping out a dozen or so zeroes, and supported by short-term loans from American and other foreign bankers. In 1928 these foreign funds began to dry up as capital sought higher returns on Wall Street, and they dried up totally after the 1929 Crash brought about a mad global rush for liquidity. In Germany, the Depression brought renewed deficits to a country where both left and right, remembering the horrors of 1923, clung desperately to budget-balancing.

What to do? In effect, the left wanted to balance the budget on the back of business, by increasing taxes to pay unemployment benefits, while the right wanted to balance the budget on the backs of workers and the unemployed, by cutting or eliminating the benefits. A political deadlock ensued: sound familiar? It was resolved by suspending parliamentary government and replacing it with presidential rule by decree after 1930, and ultimately of course by something even more extreme.

A little give and take might have spared the Germans and everyone else a lot of trouble. But no, everyone had to stand on principle.

ONLY THE TRULY WELL-EDUCATED SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO VOTE

Someone has floated the suggestion of a basic “civics literacy” test as a prerequisite for voting. I like it! No one should vote who doesn’t at least understand what federalism means, or what the 1st and 2nd amendments say, or (within 20 years) when the Civil War was fought.

I also think there should be a basic “global literacy” test in our famously globalizing world. No one should vote who can’t locate China on a world map, or identify the EU or the UN, or say whether Buddhism, Christianity or Islam is the main religion of the Middle East and North Africa.

While we’re at it, a basic “scientific literacy” test, so that we will have properly informed citizens voting on issues like abortion rights, the teaching of evolution and global warming.

All in English, of course.

Yes, that should do it!

Then I would wait for the fun to begin: endless litigation, political grandstanding, protesting and counter-protesting over who makes up these tests, what form they should take, which aspects of US history to emphasize, what counts as “science,” and so on.

If anything ever comes of it, expect it to be way dumbed down.

WHY ARE WE OVER (AND MAYBE SOON TO BE IN) LIBYA?

Liberals like Jon Stewart think Obama’s Libyan intervention makes no sense at all: if its purpose is humanitarian, then why not Yemen? or Bahrain? or for that matter, Darfur?

Radicals and socialists and environmentalists and pacifists are against it because it’s yet another instance of US “capitalist-imperialist warmongering,” because it will probably leave the Libyan sands rich with depleted uranium, and because it means breaking things and killing people.

Neocons are critical because it wasn’t laid on soon enough. Many folks think Obama got pussy-whipped by three bitches named Hillary, Susan and Samantha, or that America did, because the nation assumed the position successively for the rebels, the Arab League, the UN and the French. Constitutionally-minded conservatives (and many on the left as well) insist that Obama should have asked Congress for a war declaration–or at least laid his case before the full Senate and House. The military follow orders, but surely hate it because it strains the already strained US armed forces, and seems to have no clear objective, least of all anything that could be called "victory." Many civilians, right and left, have apprehensions about the open-endedness and likely expense of a third war on top of two already in progress.

Some–also from both right and left–have pointed out that we have no idea who the rebels in Libya even are: as Qaddafi himself warned, it could turn out that America very stupidly has gotten itself into an alliance with Al-Qaida!!

Yet early polls seemed to show Obama getting a bounce from this misbegotten affair, same as LBJ every time he escalated, and Bush when we first went into Iraq, but you can bet it won't last.

Why in the name of heaven did anybody think this was a good idea?

KING FOR A DAY (OR ANYWAY UNTIL 2012)

Rep. Peter King (R NY)--the same Peter King who once lauded the terrorist IRA as "freedom fighters"--is set to turn his powerful Congressional investigative lens on radical Islam and its threat to God's country. Here is what will likely happen, after the King investigations have run their course.

Congress will pass a “Defense of American Law” against Sharia that will probably have about the same effect the “Defense of Marriage Act” had on the spread of gay marriage and civil unions. Then Muslims will go back to enforcing Sharia law on themselves, as they are doing even now where it doesn’t too blatantly violate ours. Some will push for toleration of more and more extreme Sharia practices, others will shrug and go on with their lives as they are doing now. Here and there, some understanding of Sharia may prevail in the state and Federal courts, e.g., that Muslim women cannot be forced to expose their faces but may submit fingerprints, DNA or iris scans for identification purposes.

There will be no public beheadings or stonings, and the White House will not sprout minarets. The Republicans will continue to raise a Muslim Scare, the Democrats will scurry along after them. Some terrorist plots will be broken up, some innocent Muslims may be victimized, until the government overreaches or people simply lose interest and move on to the next thing.

In all these ways, our current Islamophobia is not much different from the alarms over French-inspired Jacobinism in the 1790s, over “popery” in the mid-19th century, and over communism during the Cold War. In all these instances, there was a combination of an external threat with internal subversion, which though real enough, was exaggerated by some for mostly political reasons and made the occasion for a debauch of investigation, denunciation and ritual expurgation. In each case, the alarms and excursions peaked after the real threat was past.

We can take heart, though! One of the things that makes America great is that sooner or later, we get over it. A century hence, Americans will celebrate Muslim holidays in the same superficial, commercialized way they presently celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo–minus the alcohol, one hopes.

POWER TO THE PAPAL!

In the 19th century, and into the 20th, many Americans believed that the Roman Catholic Church was a vast international conspiracy whose chief object was to subvert the American Republic.

Roman Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign potentate believed to be infallible; hence they could never become loyal Americans.

Unspeakable crimes were committed in convents, where the bones of babies fathered by priests and borne by nuns lay buried in shallow graves.

Whenever a baby was baptized in a Catholic Church, the faithful would take up a collection to buy a rifle and 50 rounds of ammo in preparation for the day when they would all rise up and slaughter their Protestant neighbors.

Catholic schools taught nothing but hatred and superstition.

Catholics were bound by canon law, which took precedence over common law, and intended that ultimately it should be binding upon the whole nation.

Catholic churches were built with foreign funds and deliberately intended to tower over Protestant ones, and Catholic processions on saints’ days were a deliberate provocation to nonbelievers.

A Catholic who lied, even under oath, about any of these things was committing no sin, but rather a glorious deed which would count toward his heavenly reward.

Of course it was the hugest of crocks.

But it reminds me of the irrational Islamophobia so prevalent in the US today, which I’m quite sure our descendants will find a shameful blot on the American past.

GLENN BECK IS NOT LOSING HIS MIND

Glenn Beck is losing ratings.

But he’s not losing his mind: everything he does is calculated to keep you right on the edge of your seat, blood pressure elevated, waiting for the next “episode” (as he revealingly calls his daily airings) when “all will be revealed.”

His MO is to pose as an autodidact, which is at least honest, because that is what he is: “I’m not asking you to take my word for it. I didn’t know any of this stuff myself about [insert target du jour--SEIU, the Caliphate, George Soros, how racist the progressives were] until I read [insert name of fringe-y book by deservedly unknown author] and boy did it ever open my eyes! You there in the recliner with the TV dinner, you need to educate yourself, find out more about the connections [scribbling frantically on chalkboard] and draw your own conclusions!”

But why bother, when he’s already done it for you?

CRUSTACEAN NATION

What follows is to be understood as a dialogue between a protostome and a deuterostome.

P. Yes, yes, I've heard of Walter Reuther and Joe Hill and Jimmy Hoffa. My dad was in a union, and I never heard him complain. You know, I guess it's OK in the private sector, but public-sector unions are an entirely different matter because they negotiate with government monopolies which can pass $100,000 teachers' salaries and $200,000 a year pensions for firemen on to us poor taxpayers! And then they reward the school boards and fire commissioners by bringing out the troops in November. Teachers (except the lazy and liberal ones) and firefighters we love, but to let them have collective bargaining? That's just a step away from communism, where the government owns and runs everything, and "the workers" run the government. In reality, of course, "the workers" are a little gang of bosses, some driven by idealism or utopianism, and some by sheer greed or power-lust.

Susan Sarandon, meet Joseph Stalin.

D. You are ignoring the fact that private-sector unions have been all but wiped out over the last 30 years. Unions need a base from which to claw their way back into serious private-sector organizing. What would you suggest if not the "government unions," with all their faults? But it seems most of you folks who purport to be down with unions don't really want that, you want the public-sector unions not just weakened but gutted and filleted. And speaking of seafood, you may have heard the claim (true or not I can't say) that if one lobster tries to climb out of a pot of boiling water, others in the pot will claw him back down in, so there’s no chance that he might help pull them out. Of course, lobsters are anything but altruistic, and I’d like to think anti-union Americans are smarter than crustaceans, but I’m beginning to have my doubts.

Larry T., meet drawn butter.

WHAT UNIONS HAVE MEANT

For 75 years, from shortly after the end of the Civil War until shortly after the end of World War II, the sharp odor of class conflict hung in the American air. Unions arose repeatedly­, only to be beaten down. At length, by the mid-20th century, a modus vivendi prevailed: organized labor purged itself of its anti-capit­alist elements, and capital accepted unions and collective bargaining­. Not coincident­ally, it was at the same time that the US became the middle-cla­ss country it still fancies itself to be, in which the rich were only moderately rich and the poor had the benefit of the higher wages and benefits the unions had fought for--and better chances to become middle-class or even rich than ever before or since.

In the 1980s, the labor-mana­gement truce broke down. First Reagan-era union-bust­ing, then seemingly inexorable globalizat­ion with its punishing outsourcin­g of jobs to low-wage countries, broke the back of organized labor in the private sector. That left the public sector (teachers, firemen, etc.) as its last bastion--o­ne which is now also under assault, in Wisconsin and soon coming to a state near you.

I would be the last to defend everything unions have done! They often protect incompeten­ce and resist worthwhile innovation­s. They have been prone to racketeeri­ng. They have not been above using violence, but the next time you hear someone carelessly speak of "union thugs" as if it were all one word, I would invite you to do a bit of digging into the history of strikebrea­king and "industria­l services" deployed on the side of corporate capital. Try Googling "Baldwin Felts" or "Battle of the Overpass." Then you will learn what your grandparents and great-grandparents were up against, how they prevailed over it, and how their gains have been squandered by worker complacency and employer hostility.

MY FINAL SOLUTION TO THE JEWISH QUESTION

Allow me to pose a whatif:

Should Israel find itself about to be overwhelmed by a powerful coalition of forces coming from north, south, east and west, what if the US were to grant, on the spot, US citizenship to every citizen of Israel? Don’t laugh: similar suggestions were made about joint Anglo-American citizenship in 1940, when the British had their backs to the wall.

This would not necessarily mean military support for Israel, certainly not if our forces were still stretched and overextended as they seem to be at present. But the US could surely muster up enough naval power for a colossal Dunkirk, evacuating its new Jewish citizens from the Middle East and giving them refuge in America. I can’t think of any set of 5 million people on earth likelier to make positive contributions to American business, society and culture.

Why just pray for the Jews when we could actually do something to help them? But then, What Would Jesus Say if we thwarted His Plan for a massacre of those Jews who remained "stiffnecked" by refusing to accept Him?

BOO, LOU

Doesn't take much to scare Lou Pritchett, does it? He is the retired Procter & Gamble soap-peddler who's circulated a missive confessing his--wait for it--Obamaphobia. I mean that literally: Mr. Pritchett is knickers-soiling scared of the President. He finds Obama alien, elitist, arrogant, impervious to criticism, anti-capitalist, bent on turning America into Europe, and much else drawn from the usual playbook. He expects to be muzzled; it's as if he can hear jackboots marching up to his doorstep and big saps pointedly thumping against meaty palms.

Let's address some of Mr. Pritchett's main points.

Obama lived barely four years abroad, when he was in grade school. He is culturally as American as anyone. Would it be better if he had no exposure to or interest in foreign cultures?

His education was paid for partly by his grandparents, partly with scholarships, and partly with student loans which he spent a good deal of his adult life paying off, like lots of other people. Since Mr. Pritchett asks (actually, he doesn't), he has publicly stated that he probably owes some of his advantages to affirmative action.
Yes, doors have opened for this man. Only in America. . . .

Obama's lifestyle has not been especially lavish; much of his rather modest fortune has come from sales of his books--which I'm willing to bet Mr. Pritchett has not read.

He never ran a company or met a payroll because, after a short stint working for an international investment firm, he decided that low-paid public service, the "community organizing" so sarcastically derided by some, was a more honorable and useful career. Who's to say he was right or wrong there? He is not the only President to have no background as a private business entrepreneur, owner or executive: both Roosevelts, Coolidge, Reagan, and Kennedy are others who come to mind.

No military experience? The same could be said of Clinton, Hoover, Harding, Coolidge, Taft, Jefferson and (gotta say it) for all practical purposes, Lincoln and G. W. Bush.

Radical extremist associates? Most of these, from Frank Marshall (perhaps Lou's heard of him?) to Jeremiah Wright to the infamous Ayers duo, have publicly expressed themselves to the effect that Obama is too much a compromiser, not radical enough!

It's not hard to find info on Obama's path to the White House. I would recommend The Bridge, by David Remnick, and there are other sources as well. Mr. Pritchett would probably find most of these unacceptably liberal, but has he troubled to read any serious biographies of Obama, or just the usual screeds by Malkin, D'Souza and the like?

Turned health care over to the government? Then why did he never seriously argue for single-payer, still less true socialized medicine a la Britain's NHS, settling instead for (again) a compromise that gave health insurance companies millions of new customers?

Wind mills preferable to coal, oil and gas? Sorry, haven't heard Obama say anything of the sort, but fossil fuels are finite resources, which wind is not, so perhaps he should.

Wants to kill the capitalist goose which has delivered the world's highest standard of living? First off, is America's the world's highest standard of living? Ask the Danes, the Dutch or the Swiss and they'll laugh (or maybe yodel) at you for your ignorance. And if Obama wanted to kill capitalism, why did he bail out private banks, insurance companies and auto firms? Last I looked, the market was up since 2008.

Demonizes O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck et al. ? Pardon me, but the man's only human, and, while I would expect the POTUS to exercise some restraint, what have these guys been doing for the last two years if not demonizing him?

Judging by the pic accompanying this dire missive, Lou Pritchett should get his head out of his own book, get himself off his yacht (not that there's anything wrong with having a yacht), take his mind off his bottom line for a minute, take a look at the world around him and stop being such a fraidycat!

WHAT THE NEW DEAL WAS ABOUT

National Review and the Wall Street Journal may be impressed by Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man," but I am not. Most of her arguments can be found in most conservative New Deal critiques from John Flynn to Jim Powell. Insull, Mellon and Willkie certainly deserve more sympathetic attention than they usually get, but Father Divine and Bill W? If Shlaes' point is simply that Americans practiced self-help even in the depths of the Depression, OK, but really, does all this add up to anything we didn't already know from "The Grapes of Wrath" or "The Waltons?"

Shlaes' key point is a valid one, as far as it goes. By poorly conceived and sometimes flatly contradictory policies, by lurching from compulsory cartelization (NRA) to trust-busting (PUHCA), by alternate bouts of budget-tightening and fiscal liberality, by courting business and then bashing it, FDR and his minions shell-shocked much of America's entrepreneurship and capital into a defensive position born--as she rightly says--of uncertainty over what "that man" might think of next.

Offsetting this, millions of ordinary Americans (FDR's "forgotten men," not Shlaes' or William Graham Sumner's) felt a new certainty: that basic relief would be provided, that labor and farm interests would not be neglected, that homesteads would not be foreclosed and that the banks where they saved their money (if any) would still be there in the morning. Without such assurance, would the political system itself have survived?

Let's recall also that people in the 1920s often called the period through which they were living "postwar." Always in the background there were the farm price supports, the concessions to labor, the progressive taxation, and the enlistment of dollar-a-day men in the war boards of 1917-1918. "If we could beat the Kaiser then, why not Old Man Depression now?" First Hoover then FDR intervened as no earlier presidents would have, simply because of the precedent of the World War. Almost by reflex, most of the public, indeed much of the business community, demanded it already in 1929-1930.

WE KUM

Across the Atlantikum
Frum the Anglium
Frum the Kaledonium
And the Hibernium
Kum we to getsum

Pushum back wayback
Getum on the run
Blastum to kingdum kum
Dont spare a one ovum
Nits make lice lice make nits

Bringum frum Kongodrum
Loadum and bringum
Throwum over the side
Putum on notice
They ourn by the grace of God

Greifen wir Lebensraum
(We stood beside our cotton bales)
To da halls of Montezumium
Gold in dat dar alluvium
So on to the Pacifikum

Where we rested threescore and ten sum

In kum
rubber bananas chromium
Yiddishe from the Baltikum
Popeworshippers Bolsheviks alldatskum
Two-leggd flotsum and jetsum no end ovum

Out go
Food flicks and Fords
AEF GI Joe JFK and Coolio
Dollars lots of dollars
Will make it all right

Now Islum
Kum to kill us alluvus
Wont leave us alone
Wont be happy til they get it
So heres the vade mekum

Takeumout alluvum
Mit uranium und plutonium
Sturmum und drangum
Buryum deep and then
Fuggedaboutum

--June 2005

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING DRAFT

We don’t need no stinking draft

We need East Coast shorties
who be draining down forties
and smashing them on the curb
who live to disturb
the peace yall

We need Cali sisters
tight enough to carry heavy ordnance
for their pimps for they won’t
take three strikes
all for love

We need white trash cookers
Dodge City wing-walkers going up and out
in household chemical fireballs
orphaning their attack dogs
their recipes gone forever

We need Fresno cholos
not Lands End Anglos who never stuck anybody
or stood vigil with a pipe and a bag of weed
over a dead soldier named Jésus
til sunup over the Circle K

We need tested mules
no Muffies need apply no followers of fashion
load bearers like in that movie the Passion
of the Christ to make this Crusade
the last one

We’ve got work to do
seduction instruction destruction
excavation adjudication interrogation
it’s going to be hot buggy and dangerous
best not fuck it up with any more Yalies

--May 2004

VOTE DEMOCRAT!

Obama's seems to be a decent man who might even be a great president--but I think it's time to emphasize good old-fashioned partisanship. Vote the party as much as if not more than the person.

Say/shout/write/blog/tweet from the rooftops: enough is enough! Vote Democrat!

Unnecessary war waged incompetently, a military abused and stretched way thin, illegal immigration that we can't live with and can't live without, job losses, no energy policy at all (that we know of, except to drill like a sadistic dentist) in the face of probable peak oil, a shitstorm of bad debt here, there and everywhere.

This is what eight years of Republican rule, in the absence of a veto-proof opposition majority in Congress, have wrought. Time to return to the party of the people--"the Democracy," as 19th-century Americans called it.

The Democracy has flubbed and floundered and triangulated and been its own worst enemy at times, but still it stands. It offers an alternative to the idolatrous worship of the free market. It refuses to become a wholly owned subsidiary of moneyed elites or deranged evangelicals.

With or without Obama, I'm betting the Democrats can make gains this year simply by running against the Republicans as Republicans, and as proud Democrats.

And yes: say, "I support the Democrat Party."

I know it originated as a faintly derogatory usage, but I for one have adopted it with pride.

GAS GRACE

Lord make us truly thankful for what we are about

Five billion years since a star turned on
a star to guide us a sun by which to reckon years
through revolutions of aggregates of planetesimals

Four billion years of photons massless falling on water
black carbon the while daisy chaining up itself most wondrous and most beautiful
all earth blooming with bullies and victims and bystanders

God said let there be lipids

Half a billion years of bags of lipids now swarming now spawning
now buried downpressed now bubbling up in sponges of rock flammable
there for their descendants to find to suck to burn and not to yield

Their exhalations a sweet savor in the Lord's nostrils

Now see mister our hungry Hummers must be fed
(threes mostly truth to tell but who could resist the low payments)
how their little faces upturned rebuke us if we fill not up

Hydrocarbon fires boil water driving trains of leaping leptons Sandy
else how would we know whos ahead on Idol
or if Obama be snoring or his blacklight be failing and with it all hope

And ever make us mindful of the needs

Of them who dwell in Phoenix and in Bullhead City and along the Gas Coast
and of shivering humble cabin folks from Maine to Magadan
let the AC not crap out let the woodfires snap crackle pop

Thy will be done as long as it dont cost too friggin much

--June 2008

A THANKSGIVING WISH

America should proclaim a new national High Holy Day: June 25, the anniversary of the Little Big Horn. On that day, we will all whoop and holler and don paint and feathers and little children will go door to door chanting Lakota war chants and demanding “heap whiskey” in exchange for not torching the house and tomahawking everyone inside and we will all have backyard buffalo barbecues with squash and pumpkin and succotash and retailers will benefit hugely from advance sales of Yellow Hair wigs (for ease of scalping) and decorated lodgepoles for the front yard and cards wishing near and dear ones a joyous First Americans Day.

There, now we're even.

On June 26, everyone will rush out to buy deep discounted Fourth of July fireworks and beach gear. (Only eight days left!)

Y'all dig in now and remember to save room for pumpkin pie.

--November 2006

THE HAMID SHOW

You want cultural sensitivity? Here's cultural sensitivity.

Hamid wakes to find himself in a beautiful garden, with plenty of shade and fruit trees, and fountains flowing with wine served up by almond-eyed, lush-lipped, melon-breasted virgins, each more beautiful than her 15-year-old sister. The wine intoxicates, yet in a holy way. The houris compete to offer themselves for his eternal sexual service, yet their hymens regenerate so there is no sin. His manhood is drained repeatedly, yet arises again and again, hard and insistent.

Now he is joined by white-robed fellow jihadis, some his cave-mates from the old days, the rest eager to hear more of his bold deeds against the infidel. They all relate in wonder how they seem to have been transported to this place from their former abode, a hellhole where constant colonoscopies and tiresome visits from American journalists took time away from prayer, Koran-reading and basketball.

Ha! Those weak, irresolute Crusaders and Zionists! They used to sit us in La-Z-Boys for interrogation, we who once bedded down on the hard desert floor! They gave us juice boxes and Oscar Mayer Halal Lunchables, we who once lapped water from mudholes and ate goat jerky. Their kindnesses only increased our contempt for them! Tongue loosened, Hamid talks freely of his past exploits, his future plans for the American pigs, his compatriots still at large in Dearborn and Dagestan. The while, a booming Voice blesses him in the most poetic Arabic, though he cannot see Whose Voice it is for the blinding white light emanating from a giant golden throne.

But wait! It was all a ghastly ruse! Those houris are really just hookers hired for the occasion, the mujaheddin are really American soldiers who have actually learned a foreign language and gotten reconstructive plastic surgery for their country's sake. They borrowed the whole sound-and-light show from Hollywood. By the Prophet's beard, what are those blue pills?

Gotcha, sucka! The country that put men on the moon and tuna in resealable pouches has brought forth another miracle: all the fun, all the results of torture without the thing itself. We Americans are after all a good people.

--October 2006

TATERS AND BACON

Take down Saddam like a sack of taters
Pay no attention to screamers and traitors
Anti-Americans useful idiots and Bush-haters
Finish the job started by the Crusaders

Now the Big Dog’s wakin
In fear of Uncle Sam Saddam's shakin
He says he’s WMD-free but he’s fakin
Bomb the sucker and make him eat bacon

Who says we shouldn't go to war?
What else do we have the Army for?
Or the Air Force, the Navy and the brave Marine Corps?
Like Normandy in forty-four

On to Baghdad! And when we get there
And dig Saddam out of his lair
And lay his atrocities bare
And feed shelter and heal all his poor victims, where

Will the antiwar poets have to jump
When America will have played its trump?
The world will thank us all but a rump
Oil at twenty a barrel gas a buck at the pump

--February 2003