September 16--more ice skating
Ice skating at Squaw Valley yesterday topped off a busy weekend. First on Saturday was a wedding at Walley's Hot Springs and a pretty good lunch. Saturday night the Creative Cooks got together for a Greek theme. I just put together a fruit salad as I didn't keep track of the theme and wasn't even expecting a dinner this month. Some good stuff there--stuffed grape leaves, soup, salads, baklava, custard. The most interesting item--the host broke out some mavrathiro wine from Santorini Island. That is a very good dessert wine.
Anyway, Richard's sister-in-law won a couple of passes to Squaw Valley for ice skating and swimming. She couldn't use them and gave them to Richard. He probably would have gone up with his girlfriend but some issues have come up so he invited me. Circumstances prevented us from getting there until late. Sunday was the last day High Camp is open for two months--it's time to get ready for ski season. Basically everything closed at 4 and we got up there around 3. But it was free so that's okay. I would have liked to have been able to do some swimming, too, but sometimes you don't get what you want.
Sara Robinson begins her series on Albion's Seed (1 2). Though I think she is gravely mistaken about current politics, I find her take on this book quite interesting. I have to, as I don't anticipate reading it myself.
The televised hearings on the Iraq war before House and Senate committees have demonstrated two political facts: the Bush administration and the Pentagon plan to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely, and the Democratic Party leaders, in both Congress and the presidential campaign, intend to do nothing to stop them.
--Patrick Martin
President Bush’s nationally televised speech, delivered Thursday evening from the Oval Office, was the low point of a week of lies and absurdities designed to justify the United States’ bloody colonial war in Iraq. The ugly farce began with the congressional testimony Monday and Tuesday of Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
--Barry Grey
Eva Liddell, "McKinley, Bush and the Distractions of War," CounterPunch 14:14 (August 2007) 5:
By the time that William McKinley became president in 1896, followed around by his front man Mark Hanna, the guy who Karl Rove claimed to have modeled himself, the Republican party had insisted it was the "one true party" based on one prime to glory. The Great Emancipator, the hero of the plain folk, had been a Republican too.
There had been a lot of money made during the Civil War favoring the cities of the North. War had built factories, enlarged mills, increased the railroads and telegraph services. Trades, crafts, labor unions--all bloomed into existence aided by the war tariff. It wasn't so kind to the farmer or the plain rural folk no matter where they lived, be it the North or the Midwest. Twenty years after the war, they were beginning to see the real picture of what the Civil War meant to them economically. They threw away their photograph of Lincoln rising among the clouds into the embrace of Jesus Christ. The Lincoln cult was replaced by cynicism and the realizition that while the Western farmer may have fought the South to save the Union, the real gain was made by businessmen in the North.
Before 1896, during the anomalous situation of having a Democrat for president, the people had made known to the politicians they were angry and agitated at their economic circumstances which they blamed on the monopolists. The Panics during Cleveland's administration only deepened their plight. Their cry for reform made America's overprivileged business magnates a pack of frightened men. In 1896, the Democratic party--always terrified of reform--insisted it had changed its ways and was now the "Party of Reform." It had no choice but to put up its candidate for the presidency the orator and populist reformer William Jennings Bryan and to make sure that he lost. They picked some sleazy Bourbon Democrat out of Arkansas to manage his campaign and instructed the loyal Bryan not to make inflammatory speeches against the rich and the privileged, the only way he could have won.
When the sweet-tempered McKinley came into power, people couldn't figure him out. He never told anybody what he wanted to do. He spoke in windy, vague and slef-contradictory terms. The press assailed him as weak and he did nothing to correct the impression. No other president until George Bush Jr. has been seen as such an instrument of other people's visions and the tool of their ambitions. He projected himself as the victim of circumstances and allowed his front man Hanna to be seen as the powerful force driving his campaign and running his presidency. He seemed to be even too weak to care about the insults that he was Hanna's puppet. But it was Hanna who did all the dirty work while McKinley seemed to want very little.
This appearance was a political necessity for McKinley who knew that in order to get what he wanted--which was nothing less than the radical reconstruction of the republic--he had to appear as not wanting it. He spoke in a confused fashion to the people about his vision for a new republic, one of "national unity and cohesion." He, of course, knew what this new "unity and cohesion" meant. It would quell discontent, eliminate dissent and weaken those who still had a vision of the old republic. He knew it meant the imposing of order and discipline on the country's unruly politics and on its sprawling economy. While he set about these aims, he spoke to a baffled public about the importance of "love for the flag" and his own "feelings of mystique" about red, white and blue bunting. The press assailed his idiotic speches as the ramblings of a confused man.
What he wanted is not a mystery now. He wanted what all presidents have wanted subsequently. To steal the wealth of the nation and concentrate it in the hands of the few. To protect the monopolists as they ally themselves to party power, all the while remaining themselves a separate party of no label except that of money.
McKinley, the political genius, knew how he would accomplish his goals. It would be through the act of foreign war with the result that imperial America would be united into "national unity and cohesion." By "accident," of course. Only an accidental empire could be acceptable to Americans.
War would kill reform. War would quell dissent. War would take the people's minds off of their domestic troubles and direct attention to foreign affairs, to war itself. Ever since McKinley, all subsequent war presidents have gone to war for essentially the same reason. The rhetoric remains unchanged. No need to fix what always works. Before going to war with Spain, Mckinley announced that "all diplomatic efforts to secure the peace had been exhausted." Reponsibility for the new American Empire were due to the "march of events," to the "almighty hand of God," to the accidents of war, to popular demand, to "destiny," and to "duty."
As for the Democratic party after McKinley's "splendid little war," it could happily put talks of reform to rest. By pretending to be anti-imperialist once imperialism was safely in place, all previoius internal issues were manageable. Nor was the new imperialism lost on the Southern Democrats. The once great party of Negro rights and equality that now governed the "lesser breeds" in the Philippines gave the Democrats the license to treat southern blacks just as the McKinley administration intended to treat the newly colonized dark-skinned people. Segregation laws carried out by southern Democrats in 1898 and the years thereafter were no coincidence.
George Bush and the man who is supposed to be his operator, his wirepuller, his brain--Karl Rove--merely work from the template that McKinley put into place. The reasons may vary for the U.S. to want war with this country or with that one. But there is one reason that never changes. Keeping the public focused on a current war or the imminent dangers of a new one guarantees the death of domestic reform. Every need for change is thrust into the background when our immediate task is to concentrate on solving the problems of war.
Our two vaunted political parties work in collusion united by that common goal. The third party, the one with no name, the Money Power, insures that they carry it out.
Anyway, Richard's sister-in-law won a couple of passes to Squaw Valley for ice skating and swimming. She couldn't use them and gave them to Richard. He probably would have gone up with his girlfriend but some issues have come up so he invited me. Circumstances prevented us from getting there until late. Sunday was the last day High Camp is open for two months--it's time to get ready for ski season. Basically everything closed at 4 and we got up there around 3. But it was free so that's okay. I would have liked to have been able to do some swimming, too, but sometimes you don't get what you want.
Sara Robinson begins her series on Albion's Seed (1 2). Though I think she is gravely mistaken about current politics, I find her take on this book quite interesting. I have to, as I don't anticipate reading it myself.
The televised hearings on the Iraq war before House and Senate committees have demonstrated two political facts: the Bush administration and the Pentagon plan to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely, and the Democratic Party leaders, in both Congress and the presidential campaign, intend to do nothing to stop them.
--Patrick Martin
President Bush’s nationally televised speech, delivered Thursday evening from the Oval Office, was the low point of a week of lies and absurdities designed to justify the United States’ bloody colonial war in Iraq. The ugly farce began with the congressional testimony Monday and Tuesday of Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
--Barry Grey
Eva Liddell, "McKinley, Bush and the Distractions of War," CounterPunch 14:14 (August 2007) 5:
By the time that William McKinley became president in 1896, followed around by his front man Mark Hanna, the guy who Karl Rove claimed to have modeled himself, the Republican party had insisted it was the "one true party" based on one prime to glory. The Great Emancipator, the hero of the plain folk, had been a Republican too.
There had been a lot of money made during the Civil War favoring the cities of the North. War had built factories, enlarged mills, increased the railroads and telegraph services. Trades, crafts, labor unions--all bloomed into existence aided by the war tariff. It wasn't so kind to the farmer or the plain rural folk no matter where they lived, be it the North or the Midwest. Twenty years after the war, they were beginning to see the real picture of what the Civil War meant to them economically. They threw away their photograph of Lincoln rising among the clouds into the embrace of Jesus Christ. The Lincoln cult was replaced by cynicism and the realizition that while the Western farmer may have fought the South to save the Union, the real gain was made by businessmen in the North.
Before 1896, during the anomalous situation of having a Democrat for president, the people had made known to the politicians they were angry and agitated at their economic circumstances which they blamed on the monopolists. The Panics during Cleveland's administration only deepened their plight. Their cry for reform made America's overprivileged business magnates a pack of frightened men. In 1896, the Democratic party--always terrified of reform--insisted it had changed its ways and was now the "Party of Reform." It had no choice but to put up its candidate for the presidency the orator and populist reformer William Jennings Bryan and to make sure that he lost. They picked some sleazy Bourbon Democrat out of Arkansas to manage his campaign and instructed the loyal Bryan not to make inflammatory speeches against the rich and the privileged, the only way he could have won.
When the sweet-tempered McKinley came into power, people couldn't figure him out. He never told anybody what he wanted to do. He spoke in windy, vague and slef-contradictory terms. The press assailed him as weak and he did nothing to correct the impression. No other president until George Bush Jr. has been seen as such an instrument of other people's visions and the tool of their ambitions. He projected himself as the victim of circumstances and allowed his front man Hanna to be seen as the powerful force driving his campaign and running his presidency. He seemed to be even too weak to care about the insults that he was Hanna's puppet. But it was Hanna who did all the dirty work while McKinley seemed to want very little.
This appearance was a political necessity for McKinley who knew that in order to get what he wanted--which was nothing less than the radical reconstruction of the republic--he had to appear as not wanting it. He spoke in a confused fashion to the people about his vision for a new republic, one of "national unity and cohesion." He, of course, knew what this new "unity and cohesion" meant. It would quell discontent, eliminate dissent and weaken those who still had a vision of the old republic. He knew it meant the imposing of order and discipline on the country's unruly politics and on its sprawling economy. While he set about these aims, he spoke to a baffled public about the importance of "love for the flag" and his own "feelings of mystique" about red, white and blue bunting. The press assailed his idiotic speches as the ramblings of a confused man.
What he wanted is not a mystery now. He wanted what all presidents have wanted subsequently. To steal the wealth of the nation and concentrate it in the hands of the few. To protect the monopolists as they ally themselves to party power, all the while remaining themselves a separate party of no label except that of money.
McKinley, the political genius, knew how he would accomplish his goals. It would be through the act of foreign war with the result that imperial America would be united into "national unity and cohesion." By "accident," of course. Only an accidental empire could be acceptable to Americans.
War would kill reform. War would quell dissent. War would take the people's minds off of their domestic troubles and direct attention to foreign affairs, to war itself. Ever since McKinley, all subsequent war presidents have gone to war for essentially the same reason. The rhetoric remains unchanged. No need to fix what always works. Before going to war with Spain, Mckinley announced that "all diplomatic efforts to secure the peace had been exhausted." Reponsibility for the new American Empire were due to the "march of events," to the "almighty hand of God," to the accidents of war, to popular demand, to "destiny," and to "duty."
As for the Democratic party after McKinley's "splendid little war," it could happily put talks of reform to rest. By pretending to be anti-imperialist once imperialism was safely in place, all previoius internal issues were manageable. Nor was the new imperialism lost on the Southern Democrats. The once great party of Negro rights and equality that now governed the "lesser breeds" in the Philippines gave the Democrats the license to treat southern blacks just as the McKinley administration intended to treat the newly colonized dark-skinned people. Segregation laws carried out by southern Democrats in 1898 and the years thereafter were no coincidence.
George Bush and the man who is supposed to be his operator, his wirepuller, his brain--Karl Rove--merely work from the template that McKinley put into place. The reasons may vary for the U.S. to want war with this country or with that one. But there is one reason that never changes. Keeping the public focused on a current war or the imminent dangers of a new one guarantees the death of domestic reform. Every need for change is thrust into the background when our immediate task is to concentrate on solving the problems of war.
Our two vaunted political parties work in collusion united by that common goal. The third party, the one with no name, the Money Power, insures that they carry it out.