Concerning the power of presidential speech...

(From my Facebook page...)
The world is being led to the brink of nuclear war by a commander-in-chief whose idea of diplomacy is tweeting that his ICBM-armed opponent is short and fat. If we survive, and if we try to restore our democratic republic, it may be useful to remember how real presidents communicate. Here, from 'Commander in Chief,' https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780671663827 Eric Larrabee's excellent study of FDR at war, is a reminder of the importance of presidential utterance:
"A major presidential speech is far more than a speech. It is both a statement and an instrument of executive purpose. Its text will be minutely studied, both at home and abroad, for veiled and buried implications, for hints of omission and carefully calculated turns of phrase, which tell the practiced reader what he wants to know about the government's current cast of mind. Within the administration itself the speech may set a tone, discourage one faction or put another to work, lay down a line of action as firmly as though it were an executive order."
Our current president cannot be understood through "a major presidential speech." His official, scripted speech comprises blather, bluster, boilerplate and untruths. His ideas and the likelihood of his doing one thing or another, "discourag[ing] one faction or putting another to work," are more accurately reflected in the flow of his mendacious, boasting, self-pitying, ignorant, self-contradictory, vicious and inane tweets.
Larrabee describes the exceedingly careful construction of speeches meant to guide the nation's and the world's understanding of U.S. actions and intentions. Today, anxious audiences -- our citizens, our allies and our enemies, the billions of human beings whose prosperity and safety are affected by

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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."