This Is Us
Alas. I believe we can and must get beyond the country we seem to play-act through the distorting lens of the highly-biased conservative corporate-censored, sensationalist, and pro-establishment non-journalistic media that unfortunately most lazy Americans rely on.
I acknowledge subject matches Knopfler and Harris' title from "All the Roadrunning," but we're on very different turf here, Mark and Emmy.
This coming to grips with ourselves as a country increasingly divided and polarized can be a devastating but essential process involving far more than twelve steps. Diversity of ethnic origin, religion, and political preference have probably always been one of the distinctive features of our country. But if you have the impression it is harder to engage folks who favor another candidate or merely don't agree with you on the increasingly long list of litmus tests, it seems to be thanks in majority measure to a scheme reaching back according to one theory to an alliance between a young Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon in his second attempt to regain a winning role in politics.
George Packer has an excellent and essential recent article in the New Yorker taking Rick Perlstein's new book "Nixonland" as his theme:
The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.
“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group—men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, “burned the paint off the walls.” As they left the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.”
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Polarization is the theme of Rick Perlstein’s new narrative history “Nixonland” (Scribners), which covers the years between two electoral landslides: Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and George McGovern’s in 1972. During that time, Nixon figured out that he could succeed politically “by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s,” which were also his own. In Perlstein’s terms, America in the sixties was divided, like the Sneetches on Dr. Seuss’s beaches, into two social clubs: the Franklins, who were the in-crowd at Nixon’s alma mater, Whittier College; and the Orthogonians, a rival group founded by Nixon after the Franklins rejected him, made up of “the strivers, those not to the manor born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own.” Orthogonians deeply resented Franklins, which, as Perlstein sees it, explains just about everything that happened between 1964 and 1972: Nixon resented the Kennedys and clawed his way back to power; construction workers resented John Lindsay and voted conservative; National Guardsmen resented student protesters and opened fire on them.
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The result was violence like nothing the country had seen since the Civil War, and Perlstein emphasizes that bombings, assaults, and murders committed by segregationists, hardhats, and vigilantes on the right were at least as numerous as those by radical students and black militants on the left. Nixon claimed to speak on behalf of “the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators,” but the cigar smokers in that South Carolina hotel were intoxicated with hate.
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Packer, working in a more real-time medium than Perlstein of course, has the opportunity to inculcate the latest events, but seems to have been infected by the unfortunate tendency of the modern mainstream journalist to equivocate, waffle, and generally dodge. He attempts to employ David Brooks (whose credentials if they ever existed are toast now in my book - he's an absolute Quisling and unrepentant liar) as a source in quotes for the idea that McCain embodies “a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics.” Come again, and maybe again? Packer goes on to refer to McCain as (apparently in Packer’s own words, but the Brooks feed-lot stench is still hanging in the air for purposes of coy deniability), “the least conservative, least divisive Republican,” for purposes of arguing “how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.”
Yeah, right. Of course we want or even need to think that is the case, but somehow this comes across to me as taking the favored team (and believe me, in this case it is true patriots, not some overpaid squad of professional athletes) out for “a little partying” the night before the Big Game.
See what you think. Packer is well worth reading, though disbelief should not be suspended.
But, turning to another implication of “this is us,” I’m caroming into the absolutely despicable policies currently in action in the states of Idaho and Wyoming in particular allowing the killing of wolves. Admittedly these have not been in recent times states that actually come close to incorporating democracy or the basic principles of governance on which the country formerly relied in their operations. But it is hard to imagine that in the 20th Century, never mind the current one, that killing a wild creature like a wolf (using snowmobiles in some cases!) could ever be sanctioned aside from a repeat-predator inside a fenced ranch. The issue of predation on cattle and sheep is an important one, but from what I can tell rarely discussed fairly with regard to the long history of exploitation of the Public Lands for free-range grazing. I'm open to discussion on the topic of a wolf-predator that becomes accustomed to preying within a contained area. When we are basically subsidizing a potentially destructive use of the Commons, I have to grant the Wolf hegemony. Open-season on wolves is beyond the pale.
Katherine Mieszkowski has an excellent article on the subject at Salon (as well as link to an earlier article from her pen, with compelling title "The Wolf in All of Us"):
In Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley, the return of gray wolves has turned the wild canines into celebrities. At dusk, scope-toting wildlife watchers and photographers stake out the valley to observe the crepuscular predators. One of the most popular wolves in the valley, known to wildlife biologists as 253M, won the affectionate nickname Limpy, because of a pronounced limp from an injury.
Born to the Druid Peak pack, Limpy was wounded in a fierce fight with a neighboring pack, the Nez Perce, before he was a year old. After the injury, he could hardly use his back left leg for the rest of his life. "This is a wolf that could easily have just died, but he fought back, and he was able to still hunt," says Brian Connolly, a children's book author, who spends four months a year in Yellowstone wolf watching.
In 2002, Limpy's renown grew when he wandered to Utah and got caught in a coyote trap. It was the first confirmed wolf sighting in that state in 70 years. Shipped back to Wyoming in the back of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife truck, Limpy became the beta male of his pack. His dark coat made it easy for wildlife watchers and awestruck tourists to pick him out as he roamed the valley, hunting elk, tending pups and defending the pack's den from bears, all despite his bum leg.
To wildlife biologists and conservationists, Limpy embodies the success of the $30 million federal project to reintroduce the charismatic predator into the northern Rockies. Today, after an exhausting political battle that has lasted decades, 1,500 wolves thrive in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. But there's a flip side to the victory.
This year, on Feb. 27, given the reintroduction's success, the Bush administration removed the gray wolves of the northern Rockies from the federal Endangered Species List. It's now legal to shoot a wolf in more than 85 percent of the state of Wyoming, even if the wolf being shot has no history of preying on livestock or domestic animals.
On March 28, the day that new state wolf policies went into effect, a hunter stationed near elk feeding grounds in Daniel, Wyo., shot and killed Limpy. In the parlance of wolf management, Limpy was a "clean" wolf who'd never been known to prey on livestock or domestic animals.
-clip-
I acknowledge subject matches Knopfler and Harris' title from "All the Roadrunning," but we're on very different turf here, Mark and Emmy.
This coming to grips with ourselves as a country increasingly divided and polarized can be a devastating but essential process involving far more than twelve steps. Diversity of ethnic origin, religion, and political preference have probably always been one of the distinctive features of our country. But if you have the impression it is harder to engage folks who favor another candidate or merely don't agree with you on the increasingly long list of litmus tests, it seems to be thanks in majority measure to a scheme reaching back according to one theory to an alliance between a young Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon in his second attempt to regain a winning role in politics.
George Packer has an excellent and essential recent article in the New Yorker taking Rick Perlstein's new book "Nixonland" as his theme:
The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.
“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.” Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group—men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, “burned the paint off the walls.” As they left the hotel, Nixon said, “This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.”
-clip-
Polarization is the theme of Rick Perlstein’s new narrative history “Nixonland” (Scribners), which covers the years between two electoral landslides: Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and George McGovern’s in 1972. During that time, Nixon figured out that he could succeed politically “by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s,” which were also his own. In Perlstein’s terms, America in the sixties was divided, like the Sneetches on Dr. Seuss’s beaches, into two social clubs: the Franklins, who were the in-crowd at Nixon’s alma mater, Whittier College; and the Orthogonians, a rival group founded by Nixon after the Franklins rejected him, made up of “the strivers, those not to the manor born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own.” Orthogonians deeply resented Franklins, which, as Perlstein sees it, explains just about everything that happened between 1964 and 1972: Nixon resented the Kennedys and clawed his way back to power; construction workers resented John Lindsay and voted conservative; National Guardsmen resented student protesters and opened fire on them.
-clip-
The result was violence like nothing the country had seen since the Civil War, and Perlstein emphasizes that bombings, assaults, and murders committed by segregationists, hardhats, and vigilantes on the right were at least as numerous as those by radical students and black militants on the left. Nixon claimed to speak on behalf of “the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators,” but the cigar smokers in that South Carolina hotel were intoxicated with hate.
-clip-
Packer, working in a more real-time medium than Perlstein of course, has the opportunity to inculcate the latest events, but seems to have been infected by the unfortunate tendency of the modern mainstream journalist to equivocate, waffle, and generally dodge. He attempts to employ David Brooks (whose credentials if they ever existed are toast now in my book - he's an absolute Quisling and unrepentant liar) as a source in quotes for the idea that McCain embodies “a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics.” Come again, and maybe again? Packer goes on to refer to McCain as (apparently in Packer’s own words, but the Brooks feed-lot stench is still hanging in the air for purposes of coy deniability), “the least conservative, least divisive Republican,” for purposes of arguing “how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.”
Yeah, right. Of course we want or even need to think that is the case, but somehow this comes across to me as taking the favored team (and believe me, in this case it is true patriots, not some overpaid squad of professional athletes) out for “a little partying” the night before the Big Game.
See what you think. Packer is well worth reading, though disbelief should not be suspended.
But, turning to another implication of “this is us,” I’m caroming into the absolutely despicable policies currently in action in the states of Idaho and Wyoming in particular allowing the killing of wolves. Admittedly these have not been in recent times states that actually come close to incorporating democracy or the basic principles of governance on which the country formerly relied in their operations. But it is hard to imagine that in the 20th Century, never mind the current one, that killing a wild creature like a wolf (using snowmobiles in some cases!) could ever be sanctioned aside from a repeat-predator inside a fenced ranch. The issue of predation on cattle and sheep is an important one, but from what I can tell rarely discussed fairly with regard to the long history of exploitation of the Public Lands for free-range grazing. I'm open to discussion on the topic of a wolf-predator that becomes accustomed to preying within a contained area. When we are basically subsidizing a potentially destructive use of the Commons, I have to grant the Wolf hegemony. Open-season on wolves is beyond the pale.
Katherine Mieszkowski has an excellent article on the subject at Salon (as well as link to an earlier article from her pen, with compelling title "The Wolf in All of Us"):
In Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley, the return of gray wolves has turned the wild canines into celebrities. At dusk, scope-toting wildlife watchers and photographers stake out the valley to observe the crepuscular predators. One of the most popular wolves in the valley, known to wildlife biologists as 253M, won the affectionate nickname Limpy, because of a pronounced limp from an injury.
Born to the Druid Peak pack, Limpy was wounded in a fierce fight with a neighboring pack, the Nez Perce, before he was a year old. After the injury, he could hardly use his back left leg for the rest of his life. "This is a wolf that could easily have just died, but he fought back, and he was able to still hunt," says Brian Connolly, a children's book author, who spends four months a year in Yellowstone wolf watching.
In 2002, Limpy's renown grew when he wandered to Utah and got caught in a coyote trap. It was the first confirmed wolf sighting in that state in 70 years. Shipped back to Wyoming in the back of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife truck, Limpy became the beta male of his pack. His dark coat made it easy for wildlife watchers and awestruck tourists to pick him out as he roamed the valley, hunting elk, tending pups and defending the pack's den from bears, all despite his bum leg.
To wildlife biologists and conservationists, Limpy embodies the success of the $30 million federal project to reintroduce the charismatic predator into the northern Rockies. Today, after an exhausting political battle that has lasted decades, 1,500 wolves thrive in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. But there's a flip side to the victory.
This year, on Feb. 27, given the reintroduction's success, the Bush administration removed the gray wolves of the northern Rockies from the federal Endangered Species List. It's now legal to shoot a wolf in more than 85 percent of the state of Wyoming, even if the wolf being shot has no history of preying on livestock or domestic animals.
On March 28, the day that new state wolf policies went into effect, a hunter stationed near elk feeding grounds in Daniel, Wyo., shot and killed Limpy. In the parlance of wolf management, Limpy was a "clean" wolf who'd never been known to prey on livestock or domestic animals.
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 9:34 PM
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