The Palin Hypothesis: Sarah as Cinderella

I just couldn’t get it. What was all this ranting and raving over Sarah Palin? Sure she beat looking at an Alaskan king crab but she wasn’t that hot. I just couldn’t see it, especially after seven-years exposure to the dark, sultry, come-hither femininity of Thai cuties and another two years surrounded by the sirens of Samoa, women who were so knockdown gorgeous they didn’t waste time with make up or enhancements of any kind.

No, this Sarah Palin phenomenon was deep, subtle, even a mite vexing. So I started to look and to listen to her more closely. I didn’t much care what she said but how she said it. I didn’t much care what she looked like but how she used her hands, body, voice, and facial expressions to charm, to flirt, to win folks over. Way back in the dark recesses of my mind a Sarah-like being began to take shape, began to emerge– someone who did not turn me on, someone who rather scared the living bejesus out of me.

Then it hit me. Sans the Japanese specs Sarah was the spitting image of the homecoming queen at my pre-integrated, all-white, long-gone high school in Jacksonville, Florida. Indeed she was the spitting image of every home coming queen at every Aryan dominated high school in the United States circa 1960. And therein lay her baby-boom appeal, to wit she was the Cinderella of our adolescence, the young lovely of our wildest sexual fantasies, the babe we collectively most wanted to bang.

Did I say “Cinderella?” Hey, what triggered that? Surely it was not an original thought. From whence did it come? It was then that the intellectual Mac truck struck me: Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942, 1955) Chapter XI– the one dubbed “Common Women,” to be precise.

Any hypothesis however is only that: a hypothesis. To be scientific one must gather data, test the hypothesis, and evaluate the results it to see whether the notion is valid or not. So I set about to do just that.

To gather data I reread Wylie’s “Common Women” and reviewed Palin’s most memorable quotations– the ones that best defined her as Alaskan governor, as a political diva, as the darling of dolts everywhere.

To test the hypothesis I aligned Wylie’s ideas as they appeared chronologically in the text with Palin utterances at various times and at various locales. At all times I strove to be objective, to stay above the fray, to be completely apolitical. Indeed there was no space for subjectivity with Sarah Palin and her dysfunctional family– not when I didn’t know them. Like most people they seemed decent enough, especially in the context of our rapidly expanding rectal world.

No, like any good scientist my only goal, my sole objective, was to ferret out the Truth, to see if Wylie’s “momism” was still alive and well in America. I therefore invite you, dear reader, to peruse the following in a similar spirit– with detachment, with indulgence, with reason, and with fair play. And please note: all the Wylie quotes come from the 1955 revised edition of Generation of Vipers, whereas the Palin quotes are cited after each entry:

Wylie:

MOM IS THE END PRODUCT OF SHE.

She is Cinderella … the shining-haired, the starry-eyed, the ruby lipped virgo aeternis, of which there is presumably one, and only one, or a one-and-only for each mate, whose dream is fixed upon her deflowerment and subsequent perpetual possession.

Palin:

“I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.          
–Acceptance Speech
Republican National Convention
September 3, 2008

Wylie:

The pretty girl then blindfolded her man so he would not see that she was turning from a butterfly into a caterpillar. She told him, too, that although caterpillars ate every damn leaf in sight, they were moms, hence sacred.

Palin:

“Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I’m not blind!”

– The Other McCain
August 1, 2009

Wylie:

Mom is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just mere men… Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires.

Palin:

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”

–Acceptance Speech
Republican National Convention
September 3, 2008

                                   

Wylie:

I have been foolhardy enough to try, on occasion, to steer moms into useful work … I got a gaggle of these creatures behind a move toward a pasteurization law, only to find, within a few weeks, that there was a large, alarmed, and earnest committee at work in my wake to prevent the passage of any such law.

Palin:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

–Statement
Current Health Debate
August 7, 2009

Wylie:

Mom also has patriotism … the going of her son (to war) is only an occasion for more show … I have a firsthand account by a woman of unimpeachable integrity, of the doings of a shipload of these super-moms-of-the-gold star, en route at government expense to France to visit the graves of their sons….

Palin:

“My son Track … he’s gonna be deployed in September in Iraq. Pray … for this country, that our leaders … are sending (U.S. soldiers) out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

– Speech
Wasilla Assembly of God Church
June 2008

Wylie:

… (Mom) has become the American pope.

Palin:

“When (John McCain and I) hear along the rope lines that people are interceding for us and praying for us, it’s our reminder to do the same, to put this all in God’s hands, to seek his perfect will for this nation, and to of course seek his wisdom and guidance in putting this nation back on the right track.”
– James Dobson Interview
October 22,2008

Needless to say I was rather stunned by these near-perfect parallels. Without question Sarah Palin is Philip Wylie’s quintessential “Mom,” even though he gave birth to his essay a good twenty-two years before she was born. In fairness I sought out something – anything - that had skewed the results. Surely Wylie was one of those loony liberals for only a liberal could write with such flair, with such reckless abandon.

But here too I was stymied for Wylie - like Palin - was a staunch political conservative. Indeed he and his brother Ted had traveled to the USSR to see the soviet system firsthand. The brothers came away appalled, determined to document the horrendous living conditions they had witnessed upon their return to the United States. They never made it. On the train out of Russia Philip contracted cholera, whereas Ted mysteriously jumped to his death from a sixth-floor hotel room, just minutes after cheerily bidding “good night” to his brother. You figure.

The Palin Hypothesis was therefore valid, rock-solid– both from a scientific and historic point of view. For each and every thesis however one can find an equally strong antithesis. Who then is the antithesis to the fair Sarah? Ah, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure the cosmetic wizards had nobly cinderellafy her in preparation for the marathon race against Barack Obama. But looking like Cinderella is a far cry from being Cinderella. Did you ever see that picture of poor Hillary with soon-to-be hubby Bill at Yale Law School? Talk about Coca-Cola specs. Talk about geekdom. Talk about pathetic.

So don’t count Sarah out in 2012. Indeed she stands a great chance of becoming our first woman president with Todd our first gentleman. Sure Todd is no Prince Charming but the GOP is working like hell to make the glass slipper fit.

Right now I’d say the shoe is at least halfway on.  

That Traitor in the White House

Now don't get all excited. I'm not about to skein your grey matter with another tirade on the doings of Barack Hussein Obama. Obama is still fresh milk which the hourglass of time has yet to homogenize.


No, I am talking about another critter– long gone from the stage, not even in the wings. I speak of that silver-throated toad Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our longest sitting (in more ways than one!) president, the man whom "the Greatest Generation" lionized, the first true traitor to inhabit 100 Pennsylvania Avenue.


Yes, yes, I know. Most political science professors would disagree. Indeed they rank FDR in the top five US presidents, some even saying he was our greatest. But these puffin-headed savants are readily dismissed when one juxtaposes FDR's legacy with that of say Warren Harding and Teapot Dome.


To my mind the mort accurate assessment of FDR is the one being bantered around by the conservative right, the one that states that Roosevelt had nothing to do with lifting the United States from the depths of the Great Depression, that our collective thanks instead should go to a mass murder, to that mustachioed mesmerizer in Germany: Adolf Hitler. For Hitler did start World War II.  And it was World War II that finally pulled humanity out of the Great Depression– though we did lose some thirty-five million people in the process.


Sadly this is far from a profound or even a new line of enquiry. Indeed I first heard it expressed in high school by my civics teacher Mr. Bishop circa 1960. Bishop said flatly: "It took World War II to revitalize and invigorate the American people and, in turn, the US economy." In other words my civics teacher did not utilize an economic factoid to deprecate and disparage the most popular president in US history. Small wonder public school teachers bore our children to death.


Hmm... the most popular president in US history.  Did I really write that? Have I too been brainwashed and am now incapable of expunging that blatant falsehood from my consciousness? It would appear so. When all is said and done, when all the myths have been stripped away, Roosevelt stands before us naked with this singular, solitary fig leaf: he was elected to the highest office in the land not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. A a result, when he died of cancer in 1945, many Americans could not recall having lived under another president and wept openly.


But does longevity alone make a president great? Of course not. We don't even have to bring in other presidents to see the folly of this fallacy. FDR was hated and hated bitterly long before he and his egalitarian wife Eleanor stepped foot into the White House in 1932. Why else would Guiseppe Zangara try to shoot him in Miami when he was president-elect? Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, took the bullet instead with these alleged and highly melodramtic last words: "I'm glad it was me instead of you." In the immortal words of a fellow professional football player upon learning that Pat Tilman had given up a three-million-dollar-plus contract to serve his country as a Ranger: "What a chump!"


Once in office FDR did move quickly– in the wrong direction. Embracing the economic babblements of John Maynard Keynes, he immediately set up government program after government program in a vain attempt to lower unemployment and stave off mass starvation and homelessness. For a man who claimed "the only thing we have to fear is Fear itself," FDR was bedeviled by two Keynesian ogres: 1) that an unmanaged, unregulated capitalist state would inevitably succumb to chaos and 2) that a modern industrial state could theoretically spiral into such an economic slump that recovery would be problematic at best.


How could FDR fall for such poppycock? How could he embrace ideas that flew in the face of time-honored truths such as Adam Smith's "the invisible hand?" The answer may come as a surprise: polio.


Yes, I said "polio." Polio is the key to the Roosevelt conundrum. On the plus side it made him a deeper and more thoughtful man. On the minus side it prevented him from mixing, from mingling with the masses. His public appearances were therefore not so much talks as staged events. Never in his extended presidency did he give a speech from a sitting position. Instead he was propped up behind a podium, sometimes holding on for dear life.


Polio then was the mother of Roosevelt's hallowed (or should I say hollow?) "fireside chats." Radio gave him a means too hide his malady and still talk to the American people, to go right into their homes and win over their hearts and their minds. And this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Of course the American people were not stupid. They knew it was all smoke and mirrors. No one hid the fact that Roosevelt was a cripple. Still it is best not to see the ugly side of reality– to present fantasy instead of truth. Don't believe me? Talk to an epileptic some time.


FDR knew all this. He was perfectly aware of all the pluses and minuses of his polio. He even knew that it gave him a degree of protection, that it made it harder for an assassin to kill him. "How so?" say you. "Here's how," says I. Hearing that the financial sharks of Wall Street were calling him "That Man in the White House," Roosevelt knew he had tipped his hand, that he had committed the sin of sins: he had betrayed his class.


Aye, that is the unforgivable sin. Once a family has made it, once a family has crawled out of the muck and the mire to the rarefied air of generational social elitism, there is no room to sympathize with the average man, much less the poor. Seldom is this simple idea every broached. But a mistake, a lapse, occurs every now and then. One such lapse can be found in Rafael Sabatini's novel Scaramouche. At the tail end of the book Scaramouche's father defends his brutal killing of his son's best friend with these words:


... you accuse me, sir, of murdering your dearest friend. I will admit that the means employed were perhaps unworthy. But what other means were at my command to meet an urgency that every day since then proves to have existed? M. d Vilmorin was a revolutionary, a man of new ideas that should overthrow society and rebuild it more akin to the desires of such as himself. I belong to the order that quite as justifiably desired society to remain as it was. Not only was it better so far as me and mine, but I also contend, and you have yet to prove me wrong, that it is better so for all the world; that, indeed, no other conceivable society is possible. Every human society must of necessity be composed of several strata. You may disturb it temporarily into an amorphous whole by a revolution such as this; but only temporarily. Soon out of the chaos which is all that you and your kind can ever produce, order must be restored or life will perish; and with the restoration of order comes the restoration of the various strata necessary to organize society. Those that were yesterday at the top may in the new order of things find themselves dispossessed without any benefit to the whole. That change I resisted.... 


This passage was penned in 1920– a good twelve years before FDR assumed the office of the presidency. How could he and his handlers miss it? But miss it they did. And in came Keynes with his twisted and traitorous thoughts on modernizing capitalism for he 20th Century. No wonder the Wall Street sharks dubbed Roosevelt "That Man in the White House." I'm sure they had even juicer epithets for him when cloistered together in the sanctity and purpled ease of their private chambers.

Cool Schools: An Open Letter to the Parents of American Schoolchildren

Dear Parents of America:


         Tired of broken promises by school board members that your child’s school is “not yet there but improving?” 
         Tired of the incessant twaddle about “diversity” from your superintendent?
         Tired of teachers bragging that, gee whiz, most of the kids can now write simple declarative sentences and do basic math (arithmetic in your day) by the 12th grade?
         Tired of mind-numbing parent-teacher conferences in which you are told what you already know, namely that your kid is gifted or not gifted, has self-esteem or doesn't have self-esteem, needs differentiated instruction or doesn’t need differentiated instruction, is smart or downright dumb?

Tired of all this?

Well, here is my professional answer, gleaned from over two decades of teaching in the trenches: Cool Schools.

         What, pray tell, are Cool Schools? Simply put, they are institutions of learning strictly designed to satisfy the specific needs of various personality types.

According to the Brookings Institution on the Left/Right Hemispheres of the Brain and the Rockefeller Foundation for Cognitive Self-Realization within the Global Village, there are fifteen adolescent behavioral groups– no more, no less. Never, in the thousands upon thousands of years of human development (note: I did not use the word “evolution”), have institutions of learning been set up to address the needs of ALL fifteen types.

That however is beginning to change. Indeed visionary educators in such diverse states as Michigan, Connecticut, Utah, and North Carolina, are now busily at work on detailed prototypes.

         What will these new schools be called?

What kind of students and teachers will they have?

What will be the curriculum?

The teaching methodology?

The role models?

The code of conduct?

In an effort to answer some of these questions, I have named (in no particular order) the fifteen school prototypes below (SP); along with a brief description of the student body type (SBT), the ideal teacher type (ITT), role models (RMs), and books to enhance knowledge (BEKs).

SP: The Tool School

SBT: hands-on, nuts & bolts grease-monkeys                  
ITT: Tom & Ray Magliozzi                                    

RMs: Click & Clack

BEK: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

SP: The Pool School

SBT: vapid conformists, aka “the Popular Group”                 

ITT: Dick Clark

RM: Paris Hilton 

BEK: Babbitt

SP: The Mule School

SBT: stubborn, bullheaded, obnoxious boors

ITT: Bill O’Reilly                 

RM:  Rush Limbaugh

BEK: The Superior Person’s Three Books of Words
                                                              

SP: The Rule School 

SBT: regimented, militaristic goose-steppers

ITT: G. Gordon Liddy                 

RM: Oliver North

BEK: The Art of War

SP: The Fuel School

SBT: environmental, pantheistic tree-huggers

ITT: Wangari Maathai                 

RM: Robert Redford

BEK: Silent Spring

SP: The Dual School

SBT: schizophrenic, bipolar whackos

ITT: Billy Joe Thornton

RM: Brian Wilson

BEK: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

SP: The Duel School 

SBT: egocentric, self-promoting spoiled brats

ITT: Mary-Kate Olsen                 

RM: “The Donald”

BEK: Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room

SP: The Yule School

SBT: angelic, myth-mined zealots

ITT: Benny Hinn                 

RM: Joel Olsteen

BEK: A Purpose Driven Life
                                                              

SP: The Cruel School

SBT: psychopaths, sex perverts, and serial killers

ITT: Charles Manson                  

RM: Jeffery Dahmer

BEK: Helter Skelter

SP: The Gruel School

SBT: obese, consumer-crazed gluttons

ITT: Paul Prudhomme                 

RM: Anna Nicole Smith

BEK: Les Francais a table
        

SP: The Drool School

SBT: jocks, cheerleaders, and “the beautiful people”

ITT: Brad Pitt                 

RM: Angelina Jolie

BEK: The Girls’ Book of Glamour

SP: The Jewel School

SBT: geeks, nerds, and other tyro-technos

ITT: Steve Jobbs                 

RM: Bill Gates

BEK: The Bell Curve

SP: The Ghoul School

SBT: goths, wiccans, and pagans in general

ITT: Howard Stern                 

RM: Dita von Teese

BEK: Dracula
                                                              

SP: The Fool School

SBT: skinheads & gangbangers

ITT: Snoop Dogg                  

RM: Eminem

BEK: Fight Club

SP: The Stool School

SBT: major sh--s

ITT: Osama bin Laden                 

RM: Timothy McVey

BEK: The Turners Diaries
                                                                       
         Sound outlandish, foolish, and downright nuts?

         Hardly.
         I’m sure you know exactly which school best fits your child and why.  If not then you’d better set up a conference with one of your child’s teachers–pronto.
         All you have to do is call up your school, make an appointment, and demand the type of Cool School that best suits your child. It’s that easy. Take no heed of the besieged, beleaguered look you see in the teachers’ eyes. Remember: their job isn’t simply to educate but to raise your child for you.

Never forget that.

And never forget that change – ah, that wonderful word change - is imminent, and that, like any American parent, you must be on the crest of the next pedagogical tsunami.
         Indeed, you and your kids are the tidal wave itself. 
         Just don’t ask the teachers what the shore is going to look like.

As ever,

The Yuletide Kid

Requiem for a Fetus

There it was. The custodian at my middle school did not believe his eyes, but, raising the top of the toilet tank, sure enough, there it was: a fetus floating facedown– stone cold, dead.

We never found out the color, but it had to be either black or white. Not brown. As an ESL teacher, I knew most of the brown kids and they would have leaked whose it was. That and the timing: I was one of the last in the school to find out.

My classroom was at the far end of the school right next to the gym so when word trickled down to me I knew it wasn’t one of my darlings. Call it the Yuletide Kid’s’ 7th Law of Educational Development: the magnitude of a middle school student’s crime is inversely proportional to the time elapsed.

An emergency faculty meeting was called for 3:25 p.m. sharp. No teacher or teacher’s aide was exempt for any reason whatsoever­– not for a doctor’s appointment, not for an illness in a family, and certainly not for marital or financial problems.

Of course, my colleagues and I went to the media center blind. Sure there were a few who knew something was amiss but most did not have a clue.

Nonetheless there was a certain eerie, funereal atmosphere that permeated the chamber, a cold stiffness and rigidity that brought a tingling, primordial sensation to the skin.

Our principal had a way with words, a true eloquence that she now leaned on to keep us in line.

“You are called here today,” she intoned, “to hear from my lips a true tragedy. A child, no a fetus, has been discovered in one of our restrooms.”

She paused, scanned the room, and awaited an utterance to follow the collective gasp. When no such utterance was forthcoming, she continued: “We need to protect not only ourselves but the name of our school from the prying eyes and ears of the media and the community. I am therefore begging - no, beseeching - you not to utter a single syllable of what transpires between these four walls. Above all, discretion and secrecy are paramount. I cannot stress that enough. So I repeat: discretion and secrecy are paramount. Now, are there any questions?”

“What are we supposed to do if a member of the media calls us at home?” a teacher in the front of the room asked.

“Splendid,” the principal said. “You have anticipated my second and final point. With the assistance of the Crisis Management Team, I have prepared a simple statement that you will receive as you exit this meeting. In essence it says to notify me and only me here at school. Once you have read the statement, you are to hang up the phone immediately. Do not, under any circumstance, allow the journalist to carry on a dialogue with you in any shape, matter, or form. Do I make myself clear?”

The silence was deafening. Something was terribly wrong here. A tribal crime had occurred and all we seemed to care about was our jobs. Were we that gutless a group?

Hardly. Indeed we had a reputation for being a damn tough staff, so why all the cringing and cowering now?

I honestly don’t know. Maybe teachers are a problem-solving lot and here was something we just couldn’t solve. Not up close, anyhow.

I’d like to think that. I’d like to think that it had little to do with fear, with the fact that some of us had kids in college, that others had sick family members that needed both financial and emotional support.

But the truth is: I don’t know. I don’t know now and I certainly did not know then.

None of us did.

None of us do.

There might have been some other questions– a query here or a query there. I really do not recall. A fetus in a toilet has a strange way of shutting people up. Trust me on that.

Oddly I did not feel any bitterness, any animosity, towards my boss who was orchestrating and directing this charade. In fact I admired her leadership, her presence of mind, the way she was trying to protect our school.

But what about the fetus? What about that intricate mass of organs and glands and tissue that had been growing for seven or eight months inside the body of a vital thirteen-year-old girl? There was no talk of a miscarriage or stillbirth. So what was left? I knew the answer to that. Every teacher in the room knew the answer to that.

As expected, the story - though sketchy - broke on the evening news and the next day was covered in the town newspaper. Then it just percolated away. Not a single teacher, to my knowledge, received a telephone call at home, no one was approached either going to or coming from school. The incident just seemed to melt away into some sort of massive mental mist.

That was many, many years ago. Since then the school has continued to evolve. Some teachers have stayed; others have transferred (myself included); even our principal has been promoted to a supervisory position in the central office.

But what about the fetus? Ah, that is the reoccurring question, isn’t it? With each passing year it has grown and matured in my mind. I do not feel any sense of quilt, though I suppose I should. No, what I see is a larger and larger question mark, a question mark strangely in the shape of a gigantic fetus.

Sometimes I find myself speaking to it. The analytical side of me says: “Fetus, you are gone– eaten by the earth or made into ash by the incinerator.”

Or the emotional side of me says: “Fetus, you are still amongst us, ever growing with the absence of your presence. You seem to call out for a collective good-bye, a requiem for the lost.

“Well, Fetus, who can give you that requiem now? We were cowards at your death and, guess what, we are cowards now. You gave us an opportunity to teach, to talk to our students about the mystery of life and death. But that opportunity has gone, long gone.

“And with it went any chance you had.

“Forgive us, Fetus-– we knew but did naught.”

Going Our Separate Ways: A Geographic Solution to the Culture Wars

Now comes word that conservatives do not want President Barack Hussein Obama to speak to our public school children. These patriotic Americans, these true-blue freedom fighters, fear that the President will not encourage the students to work hard, stay in school, and strive to be better citizens. Instead they say that BO will seize this opportunity to warp young and supple minds, that he will indoctrinate them with socialist or, worse yet, communist concepts. We all know there is a difference– a big, big difference.

Hey, let’s admit it. Let’s not mince words. With such inflammatory talk the time has come for a nice, amicable parting of the ways. It just isn’t working. The great experiment of the Founding Fathers is kaput, down the toilet, into the cesspool.

Sure it was fun while it lasted. Well, maybe not all the time. The Revolutionary War was a long, protracted affair, right up with Iraq and Afghanistan. And the Civil War was not exactly a time of great joy and jubilation. Nor was the Spanish Flu of 1919. Nor the two World Wars with the Great Depression sandwiched in between.

But thankfully those days are to the rear. That was when Americans were one people, when we truly loved and cared for one another. Who today wants to relive all that strife, all that bloodletting, all that gore? Clearly what’s needed is cultural surgery, a societal divorce. And as in all divorces there is but one question: how best to divide the spoils– who goes where and who gets what?

I’m not one for playing God. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I do however have a vision, a vague outline of how this divorce can be accomplished, how conservatives can go in one direction and liberals the other in relative peace and tranquility. Remember: this is far from a definitive vision or a perfect plan. Still we must begin somewhere.

Geography is the key. We must first look at the map and make some fundamental decisions on where the two sides should reside. All eastern and most western cities I have dubbed “the Untouchables.” They are not only crammed with liberals but infested with America’s biggest losers: the poor and the downtrodden. There is no way we are going to uproot these folks without societal catechism, without carnage on a massive scale. So this then is the jumping off spot: conservatives, by and large, will take the initiative and abandon the major metropolitan areas for the wide-open spaces.

What then? Well, at first glance it would appear that conservatives should populate the Mid-West or what Joel Garreau calls “The Breadbasket” in his seminal work The Nine Nations of North America. But there’s a problem– a big, big problem. The Breadbasket is just what Garreau says it is: the Breadbasket. As such, it not only feeds the United States but a huge hunk of the world. What liberal would give that up? What liberal would freely fork over the source of his food to a conservative, to a culture-war combatant bound and determined to destroy him?

So it looks like we’re stuck, doesn’t it? It looks like we will have to continue to coexist in what Lincoln called “a house divided”– that we will have to hunker down and get used to spewing bile in one another’s faces. Maybe. But maybe not. Let’s take another look at the map. Let’s ask ourselves some fundamental questions. Where, besides Israel, would conservatives be happiest? In what states could they insulate themselves from their dreaded foes? Where could they be free from the insufferable poor? Where could they practice their odd blend of capitalism and Elmer-Gantry Christianity without the intrusion of satanic liberal thought–without evolution, string theory, and the Big Bang?

Once these questions are broached the heavens part, the haze lifts, the fog dissipates, and two gargantuan states come into view: Texas and Alaska.

Yes, yes, I know. Texas and Alaska do no share a common border. How then can they be made into one country? But wait. Isn’t that old school? With our ubiquitous cell phones, laptops, and lightning-fast Internet access, a common border becomes a bit quaint, nothing but a trifle. Still are Texas and Alaska compatible? More to the point, are the two states large enough and ideologically compatible to absorb a mass influx of millions upon millions of crazed conservatives? Happily the answer to that is a resounding “Yes!”

Let’s first examine the great state of Texas. I say “great state” for that is what Texans have called the Lone Star State for decades. Indeed they have not stopped there. Even after JFK was gunned down in the streets of Dallas, Texans crowed ad infinitum, “Don’t mess with Texas.” More recently Governor Rick Perry has taken it a step farther and advocated outright secession. I don’t know about you but I’m not one to coerce. I’m willing to give the Guv the benefit of the doubt. I’m willing to say, “Adios, Texas.”

Besides bringing joy to the hearts and minds of myriad conservatives, a sovereign and separate Texas would quickly put to rest the thorny issue of illegal aliens crossing the Rio Grande. Exactly how Texan conservatives will accomplish this feat, I do not know. But this I do know: they will. After all, they don’t wear ten-gallon-hats down there for nothing.

Alaska too has recently evinced Texan-size discontent. Blessed with stupendous natural resources and with Queen Sarah and her quirky family a constant source of inspiration and entertainment, Alaska is the perfect place for young, boom-boom conservatives and their families. Sadly, these conservatives age and when they do Alaska, with its permafrost winters, ceases to be the land of the midnight sun and the aurora borealis. Instead it is transformed into the land of the slip and the slide, a place from which any octogenarian would flee were a sanctuary available.

That’s where Texas comes in. Ancient Alaskans would retire there, just as liberals retire to Florida. They could visit the Alamo, stroll the broad streets of Dealey Plaza, and hone their telescopic rifle skills unimpeded on the banks of the Rio Grande. Theirs would truly be “the Golden Years.”

But what if the twin states of Texas and Alaska were not up to the task, what if the resources of these majestic states, though vast, could not accommodate the hordes of conservatives that migrate there? What then? Do we have a safety valve, a third state, to call upon? I believe so. Some call it the home of the NRA. Others refer to it as “the Big Sky Country.” Still others call it the womb of the Unabomber.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Montana!

Sure Montana pales beside the glitz of Texas and the grandeur of Alaska. And, yes, the state-count is still ridiculously lopsided: liberals forty-seven, conservatives a mere three. But that’s sans bombast. And we can’t forget bombast. Once the bombast of Talk Radio is figured in, the equation balances.

Even-steven, I would say.

Wouldn’t you?

China After Twenty Years

The Chinese is the perfect type of industry. For sheer work no worker in the world can compare with him. Work is the breath of his nostrils.

–Jack London

Feng-Wang-Cheng, Manchuria

June 1904

Though not having lived in there for two decades, I would venture that the People’s Republic of China's game plan has remained pretty much the same, especially when one takes into account the rapidity with which the country has been industrialized. A number of my Chinese colleagues at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages - some being hardcore Communist Party members - were candid about their nation’s goals and objectives. On many, many occasions they expressed fear that Mao's Cultural Revolution had gravely hindered China’s economic development– so hindered it in fact that their country might never again be great, might never compete with the industrial behemoths: Japan, the United States, and the European Union.

I cannot underscore this enough– this great fear amongst educated Chinese that, after thousands and thousands of years of sustained, high-end civilization, their country would at last come up short. These same Chinese friends also shocked me with the assertion that they were more than willing to subject a generation of Chinese workers to ungodly, slave labor practices in order to stop this from happening.

To be frank, I never thought the Chinese could pull off this transformation, especially being hampered at that time by two currencies: Renminbi (RMB) and Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC). And I told them so. I was then told that FEC was just a temporary economic gimmick– a currency whose sole purpose was to make life in China more comfortable for foreigners, that once China became potent strong RMB ("the people's moolah") would become the national standard.

I was further instructed not to dwell on currency (after all wasn’t it nothing but “silly paper?”) and give more thought to production and territory. I cannot reveal, in this short space, all that I learned or all that was said to me. Nonetheless here, in a nutshell, is what the Chinese Economic Resurrection Plan (my phrase) appeared to be in the early 1990s.

1) Transform the cities into modern entities without any regard to environmental protection, labor practices, and work conditions. This has been accomplished, thanks to the mixed use of massive manual labor, modern machinery, and totalitarian directives.

2) Make Mandarin Chinese the official language of instruction throughout the country. This was met with great resistance from the South where Cantonese was then dominant and ubiquitous. Still the Communist Party stuck to its guns and prevailed. Most young Chinese can now orally communicate with their compatriots, whereas before they could only do so through written expression. Take note of this when you examine the present Xinziang situation where a perceptive observer will note both a clash of cultures and a clash of languages. Also, it does not hurt to apply it to Quebec with its wasteful English/French policy and parts of the United States where Spanish has supplanted English.

3) Take back Hong Kong when the lease expired with Great Britain. The Hong Kong Chinese did not want to be ruled by the mainland. Why on earth should they? They had many more freedoms and a much higher standard of living, with the exception of those in the slums. I often quipped, "The People's Republic of China should not take over Hong Kong but Hong Kong should take over the People's Republic of China." Some of my Chinese coworkers were not amused.

4) Get Taiwan back by hook or by crook. Now this is where it gets dicey for about the only scenario that would allow this to happen will be a weakened and vulnerable United States. Japan, though desirous of a sovereign Taiwan, is no match for China militarily and knows it. Again, I cannot underscore how much China wants to reclaim Taiwan. A Westerner can only understand this after talking in depth with the Mainland Chinese since Taiwan is more than a cerebral wish: it is an emotional desire. Put simply, the Chinese mind cannot grasp the idea of freely giving up territory as the United States did after World War II. In this regard the Chinese are much like the Russians, the greatest land-grabbers of all-time. The ongoing Kuril Islands dispute with the Japanese government illustrates this perfectly. Russia seized the Kuril Islands from the Japanese during the last weeks of World War II. To this day, despite international law favoring their return to Japan, Russia continues to control the Kurils. The Chinese, like the Russians, have a visceral attachment to the land– one that is difficult for the Western mind to comprehend. This visceral attachment is not only part and parcel with Chinese history but part and parcel of the Chinese soul as well.

5) Become the dominant economic power in the world. Such a statement really sounded insane back in the 1990s. The modernization of the cities, the taking back of Hong Kong, even an eventually power grab for Taiwan– all made sense. This did not. For this to occur too many ducks would have to line up:

Duck #1 would have to be a positive result from the massive slave labor used in modernization. We all know what happened here– the Chinese stunned the world and pulled it off.

Duck #2 would have to be not just a short-term weakening of Japan but a long-term erosion of its economic structure. How could this possibly happen? Heck, twenty years ago there were bestselling books being published with such titles as Japan as Number One. Then in the 1990s the Japanese real estate market collapsed. (Sound familiar?) Unbeknownst to most Westerners, China pounced and pounced repeatedly demanding and receiving special trade agreements and extended reparations due to Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Duck #3 would have to be a resurgent Russia, a country that would again distract Western Europe and the United States. This didn't seem in the cards either. After all, weren't the new Russian capitalists having a good old time with their criminal enterprises, their villas, and their lavish lifestyles? Moreover, the Communists had been silenced and were nothing more than a political flicker. Then slowly but surely the rank-and-file Russian became sick and tired of all the corruption and embraced the communist sweetheart to end all communist sweethearts: Vladimir Putin.

But even if those three ducks lined up perfectly (which they subsequently did!), there was no way Duck #4 - the United States - would oblige. Still, the Communist Chinese went to work to undermine and exploit American big business. The plan was multifaceted but had two key components: (1) make labor costs so attractive in China that American greed would dismantle its domestic industrial plant and move to China for the short-term kill and (2) lower the true value of the Chinese Yuan, thus accelerating a favorable balance of trade.

The first was sheer sacrifice; the second was raw mercantilism. This was not easy to pull off. Still, the Chinese had a few things going for them. First, American big business knew little to nothing about the Chinese people and the Chinese culture. Nor did it want to. All it could see was a billion plus people hungry for Western goods. The Chinese, on the other hand, saw themselves as producers and in the long run winners of this economic war.

On the surface Chinese and American business practices appear to be contradictory. One needs to remember however that a chief tenet in Chinese philosophy is the belief in contradictions. Sure, winning over venal American entrepreneurs was a no-brainer. All the Chinese had to do was buy them off and – surprise, surprise - they sold out at bargain basement prices.

Honest American businessmen however were another matter. They had to won over by diplomacy, smarts, and stealth. I cannot count the times, for instance, that I witnessed one unsuspecting American businessman pitted against four Chinese businessmen. I never saw a one-to-one negotiation, always one against four– with the headman forever feigning ignorance of the English language when indeed he usually spoke English quite well. Why such a ruse? Well, this gave the headman time to think while the translation was in progress– an old trick commonly utilized by the late prime minister Chou En Lai.

China nonetheless needed external help. But where could that possibly come from? Well, 9/11 wasn't all that shabby. It started the United States down the War-on-Terror Road: first Iraq, then Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Then our economy tanked due to (1) people living beyond their means and (2) the wedded corruption of our federal government to many of our key financial institutions.

In the end I could not have been more mistaken. Indeed I had been wrong every step of the way. The ducks have lined up pretty much as China hoped and prayed they would– perhaps even better. I really don't know if world domination is possible. Conceptually it could come to pass via a bizarre marriage between of the capitalistic power centers of the West and the socialistic power centers of the East, with China in the starring role. That would mark the end of nationhood and the emergence of what today is dubbed a “New World Order” whose genesis dates back to H. G. Wells’ little book World Brain. Yes, the idea is that old.

Of greater likelihood is the usurpation of English as the dominant language of the world.

That, I suppose, would be Duck #5.