Letters to the Editor
aveutter
Published Letters: 198 Editor's Choice: 32
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Two competing War Myths
[Read the article: The waning power of the War Myth]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The waning power of the War Myth, which may have never been as potent as we imagine, has been shadowed by the crumbling state of the political infrastructure. We saw some of it when the response to Katrina fell short. Then a bridge in Minnesota fell down. The global economy will probably be dragged into the swirling water of credit excess, business deals with Communist thugs, and poison toys in the mouths of our children.
Like all lame duck Presidents Bush is trying to reflect on his place in history. Reagan dreamed he was going to win the Nobel. Bush daydreams that he might get to the end in one piece, and preserve some level of confidence in the ability of government to govern.
If he meant to drown this government in a bathtub he couldn't have done a better job. Before he begins building Stab in the Back II, he better be careful. The Left now realizes that it was their failure to purge the Rumsfelds and Cheneys that caused this problem. Bush himself was content to adopt a Conservative shadow version of Reagan, who in turn emulated FDR. Bush has carried out the tradition, from 9/11 as Pearl Harbor, to the ownership society, to the treachery at Malta, now carried on through visits to China by Hank Paulsen. All the glory and pratfalls of Democratic party history are evident.
The Iraq war myth connects the dots in this history, from the war to vanquish the Axis powers, to the leadership in Tehran. Vietnam was a diversion from the longer and wider struggle againt Fascism in all its various manifestations. The message is continuity, not Vietnam, per se. Vietnam was part of the Cold War chess game. And we won that game, right?
Leaving Vietnam was a mistake, entering the war was a mistake. The logical analogy to Iraq should be evident. The Bush presidency was a series of failures to close the deal. He couldn't close the deal on Iraq, he couldn't put the port deal over and place troops on the Dubai side of the Hormuz Straights. They couldn't prop up the economy, or prevent the foreclosure of thousands of homes. They couldn't close the file on Bin Laden.
With all three branches of government under Republican control, and the Democratic Congress cowering in the shadows, and their signature on every war appropriations bill since the war started, its hard to make a case for American omnipotence, on or off the battlefield. The war myth is historical continuity, and Bush the radical, speaking of continuity is a bit odd, but this administration has never been as good at propaganda as everyone believes, or the aftermath of the war in Iraq would have been a slam dunk too.
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get parents involved
[Read the article: Teachers: Be subversive]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The number of administrators relative to the number of teachers has expanded greatly. This reflects a growing obsession with managing the sheer number of students who must be housed, pampered and protected each day, while they sit in these crowded encampments. Education or reeducation?
The obvious solution is to televize learning channels, and let the children homeschool. That would free up the teachers for more personal attention, place responsiblity on the parents, and remove the schoolyard as prison yard atmosphere, that exists in these large boarding faciliites.
In the current system, teachers are viewed as a labor resource, to be outsourced, and dumbed down, (the purpose of this is to prevent situations where labor actually has more knowledge and control of the workings of the business; a trend underway in the American workplace for some years now, where workers are commoditized in order to better fit into a system of universally replacable labor components to keep labor costs down.)
Educating children to work in this kind of environment requires nothing more than enforced compliance. The education system, with help from big pharma, handsout out Ritalin, and seeing that Johnny plays well with others. The children who are meant to be managers are sent to Magnet Schools, where superiority is drummed into them, and they are taught to manage the hoardes of commodity labor. Even invention is a labor commodity, to be exploited, as they have learned from their Chinese overlords. There is no intellectual property any longer.
Televized education gives some respite from this, but not much. The more important factor is that it allows parents to become involved, which contains the possibility of hope.
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Style Over Substance
[Read the article: How Bush betrays Reagan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Reagan critics called his presidency a victory of style over substance, while Bush has almost no style. To be fair his "aw shucks" persona is vaguely reminiscent of Reagan. Bush likes to cut brush, like Reagan. Reagan didn't want Bush Sr. as his VP, didn't like Bush, and cut him out of the loop at every opportunity. There is that famous photo of Reagan, Bush and Gorbachev, in New York. The top two world leaders were striking poses, which Bush Sr. stood beside them, looking clownish, with the toes of his shoes pointing up in the air.
It's probably fair to say the current Bush pays about as much attention to the legacy of Reagan as the situation demands. His real challenge has been to exceed the shadow of his socially maladapated father, whose maudlin outbursts were evident even then.
Policy doesn't matter, the pundits define policy, Presidents act, and to the extent that they act well, they gain some respectability. To conclude that we have become a nation of men, and not laws, is made in counter point by Greenwald's article today. In the end Bush (take your choice) wasnt' very convincing. The war on Terror will end with a whimper, probably, and the Bush family will exit the political stage. That they held power for even a little while, you could make the case that they were Conservatives of substance. That neither of them could command a stage, made them more or less irrelevant.