It's Time to Demand Expensive Oil

(Friends keep forwarding schemes to "punish" the oil companies. Every year, it seems, there's another e-mail round-robin urging us to buy no gas on a certain day, to boycott this or that company, to flood Congress with petitions demanding $2/gallon gas... Here's my reply to the latest.)
Dear Sally and Friends,
Boycotting Exxon/Mobil is certainly not a bad idea. That supercorporation's perfidy is indisputable, and taking it down a peg would harm no one.
But I fear that by demanding cheap gas, we are contributing to the problem, not the solution. We Americans somehow think we are entitled to gasoline at less than the cost of its extraction, refining and delivery--- not to mention the cost of supplying arms to our clients in the Middle East, supporting a massive military, invading countries that don't toe the line, dealing with the social costs of soldiers' deaths and traumas, etc., etc..
All this is very expensive, and even at $4/gallon we would be shielded from the true cost of our desire to drive wherever we, whenever we want, without noticing the expense.
Make gas $4 a gallon. Make it $10. Make us grow up, cope and get creative. Make the added cost a foresightful tax, not further windfall profit for the oil companies. (By the way, a very heavy, permanent tax on oil windfalls would go a long way toward discouraging further oil wars.) Apply the revenue to an immediate crash program to rebuild our deliberately dismantled public transportation systems and industries; to develop REAL alternative energy systems for heating, electricity and driving (and NOT the ludicrous, polluting petroleum-based ethanol scams touted by the right); to make America truly free, safe and strong as only a self-reliant, sustainably powered nation can be.
By demanding cheap gas, we're reinforcing the never-stated but very real argument that underlay the invasion of Iraq: "To hell with 9/11, WMDs and Saddam: What's OUR oil doing under THEIR sand?"
It's time to demand EXPENSIVE gas from a government committed to energy independence, to investment in America's economy and security, to lasting peace and a healthy planet.
I thank you for reading this far, if you have, and urge you to join me in helping America grow up and take responsibility for its legitimate needs and wasteful desires. Before it's too late.
Best wishes,
Bill

--- HistoryBuff

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Pentagon: There Was No Saddam/Al Qaeda Link

The obvious has been confirmed. So, if I may quote the absolutely necessary Juan Cole, "Now who will tell the US troops who marched into Iraq in 2003 with pictures of the World Trade Towers pinned to their backpacks? Ooops, guys, sorry. You were had by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld." But, of course, it wasn't just the troops who were had. Almost the entire American public, vociferously misinformed by a supposedly "liberal" but actually right-of-center media establishment, believed the administration's obvious lies. The rest of the developed world, not anti-American but simply better informed, was not taken. Couple this non-revelation with Alan Greenspan's admission, last fall, that "the Iraq war is largely about oil," and we are at last enabled, by the most impeccable of conservative testimony, to discuss the war and the Bush Administration for what it really is. But, of course, neither of these stories has received or will receive more than a few lines, a few moments' attention on the major networks and cable news shows, or in the campaign speeches of "realist" John McCain or "liberal" Clinton. We refuse to know what we know, so we can avoid the unpleasantness of admitting we've done what we've done...

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Bill Buckley's Monster

When he died late last month, William F. Buckley Jr. had lived long enough to see -- if not to admit -- that the movement he is credited with creating, post-WWII American conservatism, had become a monster.
In 1955, when Buckley used his father's money to create the National Review, he claimed to be addressing “disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order” through a magazine that “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”
Any thinking person might imagine that the concept of calling history to a halt should have been D.O.A.. After all, American conservatism had been utterly discredited by the Great Depression and World War II, the disastrous results of laissez-faire capitalism and a schizoid, neocolonial-isolationist foreign policy. Unmitigated capitalism, colonialism, racism, segregationism, sexism: If the Atlantic Charter, the Four Freedoms and other statements of Allied intent meant anything, then these old "isms" and many more had to be challenged. The centuries-long hegemony of wealthy white males was in retreat from Little Rock to Dien Bien Phu.
Young Buckley wasn't intimidated by the fact that conservatism's essential ideas were buried or brain-dead. In this sense, his reinvention of conservatism was similar to Victor Frankenstein's ambition: to assemble a better entity by raising assorted bits from the grave.
His first book, "God and Man at Yale" (1951), protested against the allegedly "liberal" faculty's attempt to undermine students' self-flattering theological certainties. The book's essential subtext is that Yale is where God prefers to recruit Skull and Bones men and teach them how to rule the lesser peoples of His world.
Encouraged by this book's reception, Buckley embarked on a career as a sort of Tory Oscar Wilde, wittily attacking anything that challenged the “organic moral order” he saw reflected in his mirror.
With the founding of the Review, he recreated conservatism as an alleged system of thought, mostly by stitching together ideas already decomposed to the point of blatant rot. The litany of putrid causes he championed is a roll call of crimes against democracy and humanity: A staunch supporter of McCarthyism, he followed through with decades of polarizing exaggeration of "the communist threat." He stood foursquare for a segregated South, never backing down from his assertion that whites were and are "the advanced race." He defended an ever-escalating nuclear arms race, the Vietnam War, the CIA overthrow of democratically elected regimes around the world, social and legislative restriction of women's rights and roles, FBI and CIA spying on Americans at home, Nixonian dirty tricks, and corporations' right to poison people and the environment.
The difference between Buckley and successors such as Rush Limbaugh was mostly a matter of manners. Charming and funny in ways Rush will never be, Buckley upheld the same vicious values in a loftier tone, and so imagined himself speaking to better purpose. Yet he is as responsible as Karl Rove for the triumph of a conservatism that decries "big government" but, when in power, bloats bureaucracy out of all recognition, eliminating services to citizens while bankrupting their future to feed defense contractors. Through the decades from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan to Dubya, Buckley rolled out the red carpet for a conservatism that reimagines the Constitution to support a "Christian nation," a "unitary executive," detention without trial, "presidential signings," regime change and other travesties.
If there was ever any substantive distinction between Buckley and the monster his movement has become, it was his ability, on rare occasions, to say, "I was wrong." Of course, he only apologized to himself. For example, when George W. Bush's disasters became so odious that even Buckley's Dartmouth cohort, Jeffrey Hart, backed away from the rising stink, Buckley, too, tried to distinguish between what he had wrought and Dubya's fiscal, military and constitutional carnage. The distinction he drew -- "Bush is conservative, but he is not a conservative" -- was faint, to most observers, but apparently auto-exonerating. And last year, after smoking killed his wife and crippled him, Buckley forswore the decades of pro-tobacco claptrap he'd written while millions of other people sickened and died, declaring that he would support a ban on smoking.
"A conservative," Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward." Buckley only stumbled forward when reality shoved him from behind. Otherwise, insulated by his wealth, connections and self-affirming solipsisms, he lived the life of a public intellectual without ever troubling himself to do an intellectual's essential chores. These are the same mental and spiritual labors to which his "liberal" Yale instructors were urging him, more than 50 years ago: to wonder why things are the way they are; to question his own assumptions; to think.
Victor Frankenstein made the same mistake. He, too, knew better than his lower-caste professors and their "liberal" science. He, too, brought forth a being of unexpected strength and absolute amorality. In each case, the monster's destructiveness revealed the brutal essence of its maker's elegant argument. We can only hope that, like Frankenstein's monster, William F. Buckley's reanimated conservatism will toss itself on its maker's pyre.

--- HistoryBuff

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Sexual Politics

I don't like to use public men's rooms anymore.

I'm afraid I'll move my foot the wrong way and someone will mistake me for a Republican.

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Where The Mountain Stands Alone -- And Writers Are In Fine Company

     Walt Whitman used to write his own reviews of Leaves of Grass, anonymously praising his own transcendent, vigorous style as proof that we had an "American bard at last."
     And what can we do but praise such a splendidly American scam? Unabashed in self-praise, stupendous in style, Whitman's auto-reviews also possess two exculpatory virtues: They're arguably necessary (America needed some help accepting its own poetic genius) and they're not claiming anything that the poems can't back up. If Whitman's poetry belongs to the first age of American literary modernism, his unsigned self-advertisements belong to the heroic age of American humbug: Like the fabulous publicity stunts of his contemporary, P.T. Barnum, Whitman offered hype with real heft behind it. However a Barnum poster might exagerrate, there was no arguing with Tom Thumb's tinyness or Jenny Lind's trill. And who can say that Whitman sang untruly of himself?
                         * * *
     All of which is just to say that I am trying not to be embarassed by the urge to self-advertise--- and calling, as ever, on Epimetheus for wisdom, or at least for a plausible precedent.
The object being to inform preemptivehindsight.com readers of the publication of Where The Mountain Stands Alone, a simply beautiful new release from the University Press of New England. The title refers to the First Nations name for Mount Monadnock, “the mountain that stands alone” in New Hampshire's southwest corner. The book's brilliant editor, Howard Mansfield, writes that “the elusive feel of one place exists in that intersection of political and family history, landscape, destiny, expectations, weather and time.”
     Where The Mountain Stands Alone is a handsomely designed and illustrated anthology of essays, historical texts and excerpts from oral histories ranging "from the formation of the region's distinctive landscape to the lives and customs of its first inhabitants, from the industrialization of the antebellum period to the collapse of both farms and mills, from the region's influence on writers and artists to the rewilding and repopulating of the twentieth century." Its contributors include Sy Montgomery, Ernest Hebert, Janisse Ray, Tom Wessels, Richard Ober, Jim Collins, Jane Brox --- and your humble HistoryBuff, who is honored to be in such company.
     I'll play Walt no more boldly than to assure you that Where The Mountain Stands Alone is a terrific read for any New Englander, Yankee-in-exile or faraway white-clapboard fan; for any lover of nature, and epecially those concerned by our interaction with the environment; and for history buffs in general and especially those with interests in First Nations' fates, New England civic traditions and the region's literary legacy. And as a good look at any one place often teaches us something about all places, so I can recommend Where The Mountain Stands Alone to all who take a Whitmanesque interest in the world, who appreciate the universal applications of any well-drawn map of the particular.
    

--- HistoryBuff

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Immigrants to Bush: Learn English, U.S. Values

    By William Craig
    The Aggravated Press
OMAHA, Neb. (June 7, 2006) - New arrivals to this country urged President Bush to learn English and adopt American values, a spokesman for immigrant workers said yesterday.
     The president touted his immigration reform plan at a community center that offers immigrants English classes and business start-up help. However, many in the "illegal" community said he needs those services more than they do.
     "Most of us learn fast, by necessity," said community leader Angel Maria Morales, "as immigrants to the U.S. have always done. We learn English to understand our bosses here, or to negotiate with customers, since many of us start our own service or construction businesses. The president, on the other hand, has never had a job or a business that wasn't bought for him, and he can't say 'nuclear' or 'terrorists.' He definitely needs help."
     President Bush wants to offer citizenship to long-resident "illegals," but is feeling political pressure from constituents worried about costs sometimes associated with immigration, including increased expenditures for schools, police and health care. In response, the president has pandered to fear by sending National Guard troops to the border and talking tough.
     "You got to repay a debt to society," Bush told immigrants yesterday, "and learn the skills necessary to assimilate into our society. Show us you've been working hard."
     "'Show us you've been working hard'? Is he kidding?" asked Teresa Gutierrez, a frequent visitor to the community center, where she is drawing up a plan for an office-cleaning business. "What's he think we're doing here? Illegal immigration has always been about jobs. The only welfare queens left in America sit on the boards of Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil and GM."
     "It's a matter of American values," said Morales, who worked for years at meat-packing plants in the Midwest and Northeast which attract illegal immigrants with no-questions-asked jobs paying less than legal wages. He recently started a lawn-care business in Omaha that employs six people, two of them "Anglo" youths, at two dollars above minimum wage. "The president needs to join us in citizenship class," he said, "and finally study all that stuff he skipped at Yale, like U.S. history and the Constitution.
     "I mean," Morales adds with a smile, "most everybody wants to learn English, but nowhere in the Constitution does it say that America is an English-speaking country. For that matter, nowhere does it say that America is a capitalist country, or a Christian country, or that wealthiness is next to godliness.
     "On the other hand," he noted, "the Constitution does say that only Congress shall have the power to declare war, that nobody should be held indefinitely without trial,and that everyone should be free from warrantless searches--- all the stuff you guys fought King George III for. We've been reading up in class, and we think Mr. Bush is deeply confused."
     The president announced the creation of a task force to further immigrant education in English and "values." He also said he would establish an Office of Citizenship within the Department of Homeland Security, which would promote the responsibilities and rights of U.S. citizens.
     "I already got values," said Linda Pintura, a hospital laundress. "We sneak over the border to work hard for a better life. He stole two elections to rob the country blind for his rich friends. Who's the menace? Who got the American values?"
     "Wow," said recent immigrant Juan Portuondo, a mason's tender. "Kinda choke you up with pride and gratitude, huh? I sure wanna hurry up and get natural so's I can have my rights protected by that Office of Fatherland--- desculpame--- 'Homeland' Security. Whatever. Hey, I'd love to talk more, but I gotta go 'put food on my family.'"
     As if sensing that his usual mix of vague "compassion" and explicit fearmongering wasn't playing well with this audience, Bush swerved to take a non sequitur swipe at Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. When a visitor to the center, Lourdes Secola, told the president that she was from Venezuela, Bush told her that he worries about her country.
     "I think it will be okay," Bush told Secola. "But it's going to take awhile. Sometimes leaders show up who do a great disservice to the traditions and people of a country."
     At that point, however, the president was drowned out by gales of derisive laughter, punctuated by shouts of "Ya think?" and "No, really?" which continued until he was led away.
    
    Ripped from the headlines, with apologies to The Associated Press and Washington Post

--- HistoryBuff

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Let Dubai Do It: Dubya Ports Plan Is Brilliant

     I think it's too bad that Dubya is in such trouble on so many fronts that no one recognizes the potential brilliance of his Administration's hand-the-ports-over-to-the-Arabs gambit.
     I mean, think about it: Actually securing all our ports and stuff would require the expenditure of real money here at home, where it wouldn't be anywhere near as easy for it to be something-for-nothing diverted to the arms-and-oil magnates Dubya proudly calls his "base." That's why it hasn't been done. Feeding-your-friendswise, it's been much more efficient to pour kabillions into the phony war and phony reconstruction in Iraq, a rathole beyond the reach of rational accounting practices.
     (F'rinstance, even after receiving news that virtually none of the money spent on "reconstruction" has benefited anyone but arms manufacturers, mercenaries. outright grafters and well-connected US contractors, Congress is still so terrified of looking unpatriotic that it keeps writing blank checks for $80-120 billion "special" war approprations ever few months. Yet, here at home, we inspect fewer than 5 percent of incoming shipping containers -- alleged prime habitat for nukes, bioweapons and anti-aircaft missiles -- for lack of less than $200 million.)
     Now, perhaps it was just sheer, absentminded greed: "What? Families of Arab oil sheiks wanna buy our port contracts? Hey, they know who their friends are..." Never stopping to think that Wild West, anything-goes boomtown Dubai -- and in particular, Dubai's shipping industry -- is (according to the CIA Factbook and other reputable sources) a major "drug transshipment point," a hotbed for "money laundering," a major racketeering center, etc.. Just the kind of place terrorists find so useful! And so convenient for exceedingly angry, Saudi-connected Wahhabi Muslims who hate sin-rich Dubai almost as much as they hate the Great Satan. The kind of non-Iraqi guys who were on those 9/11 planes.
     All this might seem problematical, if you thought about, it and perhaps the Bush folk just didn't think.
     But then, maybe they
     Maybe, being nominally Americans, as opposed to sole-loyalty citizens of My Capital 'Tis of Thee, they've actually worried a little about how to provide better homeland security -- without, of course, using up money they want to spend way over in Iraq, where we can't actually watch it being wasted.
     And finally, somebody on Rove's staff got an idea: GIVE THE PORT BUSINESS TO THE ARABS! Make 'em think twice about killing a cash cow! Who wants to sacrifice anything as cushy as port shipping revenues (can you say "skim"?) by allowing their bin Laden cousins to blow off a little anti-infidel steam?
     Yessir, next time Osama writes home for more cash and some suicide boyos to deliver a container full of radioactive botox to the Miami Port Authority terminal, our vigilant port contract holders in Dubai will suggest he do something useful, like dynamite a Swiss Yoplait factory or slip Pervez Musharaff a whopee cushion. Talk about pre-emption! This could be the greatest thing to happen to America's sense of security since Al Haig reassured us that he was "in charge." Whew!
     And hey, if the Arab radicals just really, really need to blow us up again, and/or if there's unaccountable resistance to the election of Uncle Dick in 2008, well, at least the right people will be in the right places to ensure an efficient incident...
     Yours in peace through superior fraud,

--- HistoryBuff

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