Kobayashi World

The greatest trick the Republican Party ever pulled was convincing America it didn't exist.

It has been a surly and substantive experience watching the GOP convention this week. The irreducible blend of cynicism and political genius only reminds us of how brilliant the GOP is at winning the presidency, a skill the scale of which is only matched by the self-same party's propensity for sub-par governance.

If John McCain wins this election, it will be the most brilliant political maneuver in the history of American politics. While we should keep in mind that the Democrats' nomination of a sexy, skinny, 3-point swishing African with the middle name of Hussein gives the Republicans an artificial boost, there has rarely been such broad agreement among the American people on any issue other than this: George W. Bush has been a catastrophe.

If 80% of Americans agree that the country is headed in the wrong direction, we must ask ourselves two questions: when was the last time that many Americans agreed on anything, other than the weeks following Pearl Harbor or 9/11? And secondly, how is it that the governing party in such a discontented nation could harbor any hope of re-election?

Watching Sarah Palin and John McCain address the GOP delegates made me think of what it must have been like for the Soviet leadership to listen to Khrushchev after Stalin's death. Khrushchev waited until Stalin was dead to tell his peers what they already knew; Joe Steel was a sociopath and Communism would not survive unless Stalinism died with Stalin.

It turned out that Communism would survive Stalinism, but Communism could not survive Communism. Still, because Khrushchev owned up to and acknowledged the sins of his peers, he stalled history by 30 years. In a very cynical sense, this was political genius.

And in the same sense, the nomination of John McCain and his selection of Sarah Palin is the most brilliant maneuver of American politics in recent history.

The GOP should have no chance of holding onto the presidency. The only way they could do so would be to nominate a candidate whom they openly despised. And they did so. Conservatives HATE John McCain. He is an apostate in their eyes. And that is exactly why he might win.

McCain is running as a Republican on the platform of "throw the bums out!", conveniently omitting the inconvenient fact that he is one of the bums. The GOP is an incumbent party whose candidate is running on a platform of radical realignment.

This is a brilliant strategy by McCain, but it would have been in McVain had he not nominated Sarah Palin for VP. By nominating Palin, McCain has ensured heavy conservative turnout, and Palin's story is one that will appeal to the right wing far more than that even of George W. Bush.

The GOP has no business even continuing to exist as a political entity after the last 8 years. The fact that it may actually cling to the presidency, which is has held for 28 out of the last 40 years, is beyond comprehension.

John McCain hijacked his own party, and I commend him for doing so, but as most wise men recognize, a man can be adequately judged by the company he keeps.  As Republicans go, Mr. McCain is less guilty than most, but he is still guilty of the most salient crime in America today: he is a Republican.

Vice and Virtue

I am mildly distressed by the haughty and contemptuous derision heaped upon Governor Palin by Democrats, who are suddenly appalled at the idea of a young, vivacious outsider winning high office in Washington. Apparently, only presidents should be such neophytes; vice-presidents must be elder states(wo)men.

It is also an edifying lesson to witness the behavior of the media re: the sex life of Mrs. Palin's 17-year old child. The "news" media has decreed that this is all of our business, and here I am sharing in the most private and intimate details of a child who lives 6,000 miles from me.

Can one imagine the fear that a child raised in such a conservative household must feel when she becomes pregnant at such a young age? Imagine that fear, that insecurity, and then imagine that, not only do you have to break the news to your parents, but that the assorted vipers and vultures that fancy themselves to be speaking truth to power would subsequently tell the entire world about the most fundamentally private thing that has ever happened to you.

Not to be unduly morbid, but would we be shocked if a child committed suicide in such a scenario? Just a cry in the wilderness, in the vainest of hope that these people will learn to mind their fucking business before they destroy a life literally as well as figuratively.

That aside, Mr. McCain's selection of Governor Palin raises several serious questions for me, and these questions are not predicated on the unseemly lack of respect and translucent sexism that the left-wing has employed. Put simply, I'll wait to judge Mrs. Palin until I see her in action and, when such judgement is forthcoming, her lack of a y chromosome will not be the focal point of my critique.

Ovaries aside, problems remain. Firstly is that this is the latest in a disquieting string of vice-presidential nominees (mostly Republican) that seem to hinge entirely on the premise that the man heading the ticket is invincible and immortal. In other words, there have been way too many VP nominees that nobody seriously believed was presidential timber.

Now, this may have been understandable in 1880, when the Speaker of the House was far more powerful than the president, or even in 1930, before the age of international terrorism, assassination, or the real possibility of instant thermonuclear holocaust.

But after Franklin Roosevelt died at the crescendo of World War II, after John Kennedy was murdered, after Richard Nixon resigned, after Ronald Reagen went senile, after Bill Clinton was impeached, and after George W. Bush was....George W. Bush, it is inexcusable to select a VP that is not seriously considered fit to be president.

I would argue that the VP nominees this year carry more import than they ever have. Both viable presidential candidates have serious flaws that stress the importance of a competent and prepared VP.

First for Obama. Obama is very young and very inexperienced. He acknowledged these chinks in his formidable political armor by choosing an older and far more experienced man for his VP. And, not to descend into undue morbidity, but if there was ever a candidate for assassination, it's Barack Obama. I respect Mr. Obama's selection of Mr. Biden because it indicated to me that Obama has a mature and sober understanding of these blind spots.

Now, for Mr. McCain. What are his flaws? Like Mr. Obama, his age is an issue. Mr. McCain is 72 and has had cancer several times. Now, if Mr. Obama is a special candidate for assassination, is Mr. McCain not a special candidate for natural incapacitation, whether via illness or death?

Put simply, it seems more likely at this juncture that Joe Biden or Sarah Palin will be running this country sometime in the next 4 years than the equivalent scenario prevailing in any other year.

But how great are those odds, really? Well, 4 presidents have been assassinated, 4 have died of natural causes, and 1 has resigned. That's 9 unplanned and unelected presidencies out of 43 administrations. So, over this history of our country (I can no longer call it a republic), there has been a 20% chance that the vice-president takes over upon death or removal of the elected president.

The other cynical component of all this is that the Republicans are trying to equate Mrs. Palin with Mrs. Clinton in terms of representing a radical departure from the status quo vis a vis the place of women in American politics.

I have exceedingly little love for Madame Clinton and the Democratic Party, but she received 20 million votes to be president. Mrs. Palin received 1 vote (from Mr. McCain) for her position. To say that an endorsement from tens of millions of voters is the equivalent to an endorsement from one desperate senator is insulting to women.

I'll reserve further judgement on Mrs. Palin, but the fact that Mr. McCain selected her to be a heartbeat away from being the most powerful person on Earth after meeting her once tells me quite a bit about both the style and substance of the senator.

I do feel that Mrs. Palin has the potential to shift this election to Mr. McCain. I also feel that, if this were to happen, there is the potential for Mrs. Palin to become president. I further feel that Mr. McCain did not seriously entertain this possibility and that this failure represents a fundamental lack of respect for the office he seeks.

Georgia On My Mind

Vladimir Putin is a bad dude. He is "bad" in a sense that romantacists like the Neo-Cons (stress on the "Con") cannot understand. He is bad in a way which is not necessarily good, but which is necessarily necessary. Putin is the leader of one of the world's great nations and, for better or for worse, he acts accordingly.

It has been fascinating to witness Russia's incursion into Georgia, but it has been far more interesting to study the responses from America's public "intellectuals", which have been disconcertingly colored by reductionist drivel and pedantic doggerel that would make Puff Daddy blush.

As soon as Russian tanks moved into Georgia, the critical mass of American "journalists" colored it as an act of agression, and the right-wing"intelligent"-sia couched it, of course, as pure good versus pure evil.

"Conservatives", whose current foreign policy is far more romantic and interventionist and naive that the "Liberal" foreign policy of the 1960's, have insisted on treating the equivalent of an American intervention into Nicaragua, of which there have been many, as the fodder for apocolypse, as the precursor for Armagedeon.

The recent forum with Senators McCain and Obama also illustrated this dynamic, which has paralyzed our politics for my entire adult life. There are slivers of truths to all canards, and human history itself has been shifted on its axis due to to the sliver of truth in the assertion that "Liberals" refuse to acknowledge the distinction between right and wrong.

While Liberalism can occasionally drift into the amoral morass of moral relatvisim and situational ethics, this flaw is (hopefully) more than countered by Liberalism's utility in stressing "nuance", that insidious, slightly French, slightly faggy word that separates people from primates.

And while nuance is often employed to rationalize inexcusable behavior, it also serves to avoid disproporionate escalations by mediating and tempering the communication between adversaries.

By looking at Russia's actions in Georgia as holding some great moral weight, or representing some great moral test, the "Conservatives" are tying their feeble mare to a wagon that's without wheels.

The Conservatives' cling to Manichean truths is commendable to a certain extent; a society that is incapable of making any universal moral declarations is not worth maintaining. Certain transgressions such as rape, murder, or unprovoked war must be recognized as wholly illegitmate regardless of who commits the act in question.

What Russia has done in Georgia, however, is surprisingly sober and limited by any reasonable standard. Let us consider how America would react if Russia sold sophisticated weaponry to Mexico, sent military advisors to train the Mexican army, and offered a full and formal military alliance with Mexico. What would we do?

Well, in short, we would bomb the shit out of Mexico. Georgia is not some random bystander whom Russia crushed for its own sake. It is the birthplace of Stalin, it borders present-day Russia, and it is an open military ally of Russia's primary antagonist which, sad to say, is still the royal US, the U.S.

While Conservatives rail about the assault on the "peace-loving" people of Georgia, one has occassion to wonder what makes a people "peace-loving" other than a willingness to buy American weapons.

I have written often, but I fear insufficiently eloquently, about the debt that the world owes Russia. Russia peaceably surrendered the largest land empire in history to its constitutent peoples. The United States responded by treaching this great nation, this nuclear bomb-bristling collusus, this smasher of Hitlerism, as a conquered foe.

America rapidly expanded its military alliance, NATO, to the borders of Russia. Again, would we allow ANY foreign power anything remotely comparable to this in our backyard? Much of the "moral" outrage evinced by the Conservatives hinges on the unspoken but clearly implicit assertion that the United States has the right to treat Russia like....como se va?...like its bitch.

I am not particularly enamored of Mr. Putin, but he has not done anything in Georgia that sundry American governments have not done throughout Central America and the Carribean.

The trap into which the Conservatives consistently run headlong is their obsession with their own "morality". Since they justly and rightly cling fast to the idea that there ARE moral abolutes, which I agree with entirely, they fall prey to the fallacy that every situation must therefore have two sides: pure good and pure evil.

This blanket approach is rather childish, of course, and much more insipid than the liberal lionization of "nuance", for while the Conservatives rightly acknowledge the existence of good and evil, they show no indication that they understand the NATURE of their favored rhetorical paramours.

Good and evil exists within every nation and within every heart. There were good Germans once, and there are bad Georgians now. To project universal good or evil onto individual actors is naive in the extreme. Since motives are always mixed, only actions can be purely right or wrong.

Rape is purely wrong, even if the rapist is not purely evil (which he never is). If invading sovereign nations is purely wrong, as the Conservatives now hold, how is it that my peers were sent 6,000 miles to do just that in 2003?

Why We're Worse

I assume few of us were truly shocked by the recent revelations of the millworker son's scumbaggery, but it occurs to me that Mr. Edwards' indiscretions were even more pathological than Mr. Clinton's, and that his sins are analogous to our nation's conduct internationally.

Is it not beyond serious debate that hypocrisy makes sins worse than they would otherwise be? The one and only positive spin that can be put on Mr. Clinton's behavior is that it didn't genuinely shock anyone.

Before Mr. Clinton was elected president, we all knew who he was. More importantly, Bill Clinton never castigated or moralized or condemned or evangelized regarding the personal behavior of others; when presidential candidate Gary Hart was caught cheating on his wife, nobody saw Bill Clinton going out of his way to express shock and rage at such conduct.

But where was Mr. Edwards when Slick Willie was impeached and the Constitution and the office of the presidency were being degraded in a way that Monica never was, both by Mr. Clinton's behavior and the behavior of the Republican-controlled Congress?

Mr. Edwards was one of those smarmy, self-righteous, ruthlessly ambitious, and constitutionally contemptuous blowhards than lined up behind the mic, salivating as they waited to castigate the president for something that many of them were guilty of themselves.

The Congress spent more time debating the proper classifications of fellatio (is it sex? is "is" is?) and whispering about the alleged curvature of the president's penis than they did debating the merits (or utter lack thereof) of invading Iraq. And Mr. Edwards was on the front line of both fiascoes.

So, we have the hypocrisy aspect. We also have the fact that Mr. Edwards' wife has cancer, but that is a private matter that is out-of-bounds in my opinion, just as the Clintons' marriage should have been, and just as all consensual sex would ideally be in a serious country.

The most dismaying aspect, however, is the timing. This affair took place before Mr. Edwards began his run for the presidency. He knew that, were the affair to be exposed, it would be fatal to his ambitions. Nonetheless, he ran for president.

In any other year, John Edwards of 2007 would have been the nominee in 2008. Barack and Hillary overshadowed him, but imagine the reckless contempt of a man who would mount a serious bid for the presidency knowing full well he had a skeleton that wasn't even in his closet yet; it was still in his pants.

What if he had won the nomination? What if Hillary and Barack hadn't run? What if Edwards was the nominee and this story broke as it has? That is a hypothetical that Edwards must surely have realized, but which he narcissisticaly justified ignoring.

How to relate this to our nation's behavior on a macro level? Well, since hypocrisy makes sins worse, the United States has dug a hole for itself similar to that which Mr. Edwards has dug for himself.

When a man or a nation insists on judging others, and then engages in the same behavior that he has condemned, that man or nation has less moral legitimacy than the man or nation who openly admitted its flaws and acknowledged its detached and cold-hearted self-interest.

Georgia is a small, defenseless country in Russia's traditional sphere of infleuence, indeed, on its very border. Russia is bombing Georgia as I write, which would the moral equivalent of the United States bombing....Panama?....wait....Grenada?....shit....never mind.

If Premier Bush had it his way, Georgia would be in NATO, which would mean that the United States would now be at war with Russia, a nightmare whose aversion kept the Cold war cold but which Mr. Bush would have gladly visited upon the world for the "cause" of South Ossetia.

Thankfully, we do not have a tripwire alliance with Georgia, and all Mr. Bush can do is condemn the Russian attacks. But, regardless of the morality or wisdom of what Russia is doing, is there anyone left on Earth who can listen to Mr. Bush condemn a strong country for bombing a weak one and recognize his words as holding an ounce of political or moral legitimacy?

The words of the American president has no moral legitimacy because the office of the presidency has been used to endorse and execute the most cold-blooded, unilateral, often illegal actions any country could take (invasion of sovereign nations, violations of treaties, kidnapping, torture, blah, blah, blah).

All powerful countries behave this way; rules are for the weak and sins are judged not by their actual manifestation but by who commits them. But what makes us worse than other historical and contemporary powers is that we insist on moralizing endlessly and insipidly with our mouth even as we sin with our hands, as if the rest of the world could not focus on both simultaneously.

This being Olympic season, it is worth noting that China is the nation of the future. One of the most interesting strategies which has allowed for the unprecedented explosion of Chinese influence is China's foreign policy, which Mr. Bush is castigating in China during the Olympics

(I'm not particularly enamored of the Chinese government, but Mr. Bush's behavior is distasteful in the extreme; the Olympics is about the dignity of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people. The Olympics are meant to be the anti-politics.)


China's foreign policy is based solely upon open and honest self-interest and respect for the right of other governments to pursue the same. China does business with shady regimes, just as the United States does, but it does not endlessly pontificate on the relative morals and ethics of the rest of humanity.

If the John Edwards and the United States actually behaved as if they were different from Bill Clinton and China, I would take the former over the latter ten times out of nine. But they don't, and personally I prefer the flaws to the fairy tales.

Barack and Britney

I have neither read nor watched any "news" in about 5 weeks, and I was reminded this week of why this abreviated abstinence surely added years to my life.

The one bit of "news" I have been privy to recently is that John McCain made an ad linking Barack Obama and Britney Spears, deriding them both simply as "celebrities" who might make you want to throw your underwear on the stage but who you should not want to be in charge of bombing Iran.

Really? There are so many ways to dissect this phantasmagoric culture-fuck that I hardly know where to begin.

Firstly, I guess it's refreshing that the ad didn't subtly apply that, if Brother Obama were elected, he would deflower our precious and pure nubile womenfolk. This may be due in part to the fact that Britney Spears is about as pure as and nubile as a truck-stop bathroom.

The relative chastity of our favorite daughters aside, I am serious when I say I applaud the lack of overt "Obama's gonna pimp out our women" ads. We have made progress in this regard, at least; nobody's making ads with Barack Obama filling in for Willie Horton. The fallback strategy, however, is bizarre in the extreme.

John McCain isn't saying we need to save our Britneys from Barack; he's saying Britney is Barack! Welcome to post-racial America, which is less racist but every bit as idiotic as the prior iteration.

It has been rather fascinating to witness how Hillary Clinton, and now John McCain, have gone to great pains to paint Obama's infectious popularity as being ipso facto evidence of his lack of real leadership qualities. Surely one cannot be both popular and wise!

What a dismal worldview this is; it leaves no room for likeable people that are actually worth knowing. If one is interesting, inspiring, in touch, he must necessarily be illegitimate, naive, perhaps even devious, nay, treacherous.

The problem with this argument, and the reason Senators Clinton and McCain are having a hard time refining the rubric of this narrative, is that it implies a rather dismal view of the intelligence and judgement of the American people.

Their argument says, essentially, "If the American people are intoxicated by a politician, that obviously means that said politician is a demagogue and a charlatan." The inescapable implication, of course, is that American voters are saps, which is true, but which must not be spoken in polite company (and if Presidential Candidates know anything, it's Political Correctness and Polite Company).

But to equate Barack Obama speaking to hundreds of thousands of Europeans, who would have stoned and spat upon our current president had he ever dared venture into public in a European capital, with a pop star whose claim to fame is the infrequency with which she wears underwear is....well, it's so pathetic that it's not even worth getting into a high-brow dissection of the thought process that went into it.

McCain, it is now manifest, is desperate. He should not feel feel desperate, however, as desperation implies some sort of control over one's destiny which is perceived to be slipping out of reach. John McCain, however, never had control over anything.

McCain's lack of control is one of the most interesting things about this election, and it is a thing that could be rather liberating if the candidate himself accepted it. Put simply, this election has absolutely nothing to do with John McCain.

This election is a referendum on Barack Obama, and nothing more (as if that were not enough). John McCain is a brave man and a relatively decent man, but that is totally immaterial to the parameters of this election.

Americans will vote on whether or not they are comfortable with Obama. If they are not, it would make no difference who Obama's opponent was unless Obama was running against a darker-skinned person, perhaps even a woman, a lesbian, an atheist, a communist, or a Muslim (surely, several million voters are convinced that Obama is one of these things).

I am always one to look for historical precedent, and the one I am drawn to is the 1960 election. As with all historical analogies, the incongruities far outnumber the parallels, but it one sense, I think the comparison is apt.

The 1960 election pitted John Kennedy against Richard Nixon. Nixon was the sitting vice-president, and though still in his 40's, he was not the candidate of "change". He was a known quantity, promising to do nothing much more than not rock the boat.

Kennedy, however, was different. His youth, his religion, and his inner circle all represented dramatic change in the context of his times.

That election, accordingly, was nothing more than a referendum of whether people were okay with a young, roguish (read: scumbag), Catholic, openly intellectual (unlike today, when candidates are pressured to dumb down) candidate. Poor Dick Nixon, who was a far wiser man, indeed a great man, man than mainstream American thought acknowledges, got lost in the shuffle.

It isn't that Nixon in '60 and McCain in '08 are utterly predictable automatons; they are both strong candidates in their own right. But, due to the nature of their respective opponents, Dick and Mac found themselves in elections in which they wasted their time by even bothering to campaign.

This leads to the question: when the establishment candidate realizes that his only chance at winning is to make voters scared of endorsing his "radical" opponent, how does the establishment candidate react?

Well, Dick Nixon reacted by visiting all 50 states (back in the age when a round trip to Alaska was a week long, semi-dangerous proposition and an utter waste of time in terms of vote-gathering). Nixon took his case to the people in a way that no presidential candidate had done before.

Nixon fought hard (and, objectively speaking, won that election), but he never attacked Kennedy by comparing him to Elvis or to James Dean. There was never any commerical implying that, since Kennedy's wife was so hot, he must be a halfwit.

Yet that is what McCain, or at least his campaign (and does this man not put the "pain" in campaign?) has stooped to. No one likes a hater. Barack Obama has many manifest weaknesses that McCain could tastefully and constructively adress and exploit, but he seems not to know how.

And do you know why? It isn't just because Obama's a celebrity; it's because of how Americans, even stodgy old Johnny Mac, apparently, behave around celebrities. Utterly intimidated, relived of your senses, so flustered and disoriented that your own value escapes you, and you are left with nothing but envy. And, not to get all Yoda with it, envy leads to hate.

The Pyhric Pinnacle

The adulating fascination with Winston Churchill among contemporary American "leaders" (it is far more apt to simply call them "power holders") is a disquieting exercise in supremely selective memory and overarching ignorance that should trouble all who value history as well as all who value the future which, barring narcissists and nihilists, includes all of us.

We tend to remember Churchill as the man who saved democracy, but let us consider that one could walk from Baghdad to South Africa 1939 without leaving British-controlled soil and simultaneously without walking upon soil whose tillers enjoyed the right to vote for their decision-makers.

It is utterly impolitic in the United States to imply that Hitler was anything short of the most evil and murderous man to ever live and that, had he not been crushed without regard to the cost, "we'd all be speaking German". The inconvenient truth, however, is that we sided with the wrong butcher. And it was Churchill, who some call "The Man of the Century", who was more responsible for this butcher's bill than anyone else.

Great Britain declared war on Germany when Germany insisted on re-taking historically German territory from Poland, an anti-Semitic dictatorship with which Hitler had vainly attempted to forge an alliance. Poland refused to negotiate with Hitler because, and only because, Great Britain promised the Poles protection.

For simple physical and logistical reasons, this protection was an utterly hollow promise, sort of like Bolivia pledging to go to war for the territorial integrity of Oklahoma, and though the bloodiest war in the history of the world was begun to "save" Poland, Poland spent the next 50 years under a tyranny....wait for it....worse than Hitler's.

Hitler was a hater. He hated many things. Among the things he did NOT hate were the British Empire and the United States. Among the things he DID hate were, of course, the Jews, but his most visceral ire was reserved for the Bolsheviks.

Hitler recognized and vowed to protect the British Empire and the Catholic Church, but he identified the Soviet Union as a cancer on civilization that must be lanced. And, since the Reich was on the geographical front line against the promised global Marxist revolution, he aimed to crush it in its crib. He did not ask for help. He asked simply to be left alone.

Again, is it heretical in our current paradigm to imply that Hitler's aims were in any way limited or rational because, among other reasons, the means which the United States and Great Britain used to defeat Germany were neither limited nor rational. American pilots killed more Germans in one night, on several different nights during the war, than the Luftwaffe killed during all of its "terror bombing" of England.

Faux-scholars, and legitimate ones as well, point to Mein Kampf as the blueprint for Hitler's intentions. They are right, of course, but only selectively so. Hitler promised to reverse the Carthaginian and unjust "peace" imposed on Germany after World War I, he promised to drive the Jews out of Germany, and he promised to crush the Soviet regime.

He accomplished these first two tasks largely without resistance from the West. When he embarked upon the third undertaking, however, the West attacked. Even though any even lukewarm proponent of protected religion and basic human dignity would have rejoiced at seeing Stalin on the wrong end of a sword, the West attacked as Hitler began his assault on the greatest mass murderer in history.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler and Stalin both invaded Poland. Great Britain declared war on Hitler. Why? And at what cost? Poland lost a greater percentage of its population in World War II than any country had lost in any war in prior human history. Then it was pimped out to a full half-century of tyranny and foreign occupation. Good thing the British guaranteed Poland "protection", huh?

Let us have no illusion about Hitler. He was a son of a bitch, he was a racist, and he planned to take over Eastern Europe. But, more importantly, let us have no illusions about Stalin. He was perhaps history's preeminent son of a bitch, and he DID take over Eastern Europe, but he did so with the blessing of the world's only democracies, including our own.

Let it be said: the cost of crushing Hitler was to resign the nations the West claimed to aim to "save" to a fate even worse than what Hitler had in store.

It has perpetually been in vogue to denounce Neville Chamberlain for his "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich, just as it has been in vogue to see Winston Churchill as a man ahead of his time, as the man who alone understood the danger of Nazism and held the line against all odds during those long and lonely years of 1940 and 1941, when a cigar-chomping, brandy-swilling imperilast and first-degree racist, Winton Churchill, single-handedly staved off the extinction of Western Civilization.

But what did Chamberlain give up? At Munich, Chamberlain allowed Hitler to claim the Sudetenland. The Sudetenland was a nearly universally German region of Czechoslovakia, a nation created out of thin air 20 years prior. More than 90% of Sudetens voiced their desire to return to Germany. Was this appeasement, to return confiscated property to its historical owner?

Fast forward six years, when Churchill allowed Stalin to claim an entire half of the European continent, none of which had been historically Russian, and none of which had voiced any desire to be governed from Moscow. How was this not "appeasement"?

Chamberlain gave a million Germans back to Germany. This is the perenially-cited definition of "appeasement". Churchill gave tens of millions of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukranians, Albanians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Serbs, Croatians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and assorted others to the greatest mass murder who has ever lived.

All this, after declaring a war which led to 50 million deaths and the ruin of the British Empire, a war declared to protect the very countries which were so casually signed off to a half century Soviet tyranny before said war was even over.

Much as the Americans in Iraq (a country created in large part by Mr. Churchill....thanks again, Winston), Churchill seemed utterly seduced by the temptation of employing apocalyptic levels of organized violence against an unarguably distasteful man.

He butressed this all-too-human impulse, and herein lies the key, by an incomprehensible disregard for the fact that there would be a day after, and that the day after was as much as responsibility of willing belligerents as the war itself.

As Americans, we have an understandable inability to empathize with the rational interests of landlocked states surrounded by hostile powers with military parity. States like Germany. States like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. States like contemporary Iran.

As a result of this geographic blessing, the most divine accident, we are blind to the realities that such states face. This is not meant as an apology for Hitler, of course. But neither should shoddy scholarship be allowed to serve as an apology for Stalin.

It is as simple as this: the West had two odious choices in 1939. Should we side with Hitler or with Stalin when they inevitably clash? Instead of choosing to let the despots bleed each other and undermine their tyrannies, the West subsidized and bled for the worse of the two.

In the 1980's, the West had a similar choice. Iraq and Iran were facing off along similar fronts. Iraq was the Germany. The state to the West, the bulwark protecting a certain secular region from an insidious and expansionist ideology from the East. Iraq was a brutal, vaguely fascist state. Not an appealing actor, but who was the enemy?

The enemy was Iran. Iran was the Soviet Union. The state to the East, a relatively new revolutionary experiment which promised to export its ideology around the world. Clearly, this was the more threatening enemy to the West. And the West acted accordingly, if amorally, by aiding and arming Saddam Hussein for forming the military barrier against the latest expansionist ideology.

How far have we fallen? There are never perfect choices, but we seem preordained to follow Churchill into the moral morass of claiming to exalt certain immutable values as a matter of principle while simultaneously making such poor and naive decisions that we end up facing both possible enemies rather than siding with one in a way that would lead to a lasting peace.

If we study each of the two two cases above, Hitler vs. Stalin and Hussein vs. Khomeini, and we ask which dictator we have ended up funding only to end up fighting, the answer is, tragically, and in both cases.....both.

The Death of Decency

"Our world is morally upside down. We preserve nature but abort babies. We have developed technology to build strong, solid houses, but we have weak, sick homes. We are smarter, but no wiser, and we know more but understand less. We go faster, but we get nowhere. We have conquered space, but our habits have conquered us. We rescue the whales, but neglect and abuse our own children. At the root of it all is materialism."

"That Americans inhabit a less contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is arguable only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand to profit from the videoization of everything. The greater accessibility of information through computers and the internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between. These effects are especially deleterious in a culture with an endemic predilection for technological answers to non technological questions and an endemic suspicion of anything that smack of intellectual elitism."

The above quotes are written by a fundamentalist evangelical and a secular humanist, respectively. They are rare in their insight, and in the fact that they tell the same truth, however the two authors may despise each others' worldview. Above all though, such coherent and articulate critiques are the exception in our coarse and vulgar culture today.

As a historian, I'm not one to fall prey to willfully ignorant romanticizing of the past, but there are certain things that were better back in the day. Primary among these things are the ways we communicate with each other, and the type of communications we expect from our leaders.

It's not that politicians haven't always sniped at and insulted each other. But they used to do it with class. Winston Churchill was a pro at the cleverly crafted dis. Here are some classics:

"With a few more brains, sir, you could be a halfwit"

"Sir, you never open your mouth without subtracting from the sum of human intelligence."

And, of course: "In the morning, madam, I will no longer be drunk, but you will still be ugly."

Now, we have the immortal words of Dick Cheney: "Go fuck yourself."

The above is just a lighthearted example of the larger point: if we don't even expect our leaders to speak like intelligent human beings who care about language and ideas, why we would expect it from anyone else?

Boy George has, of course, elicited heaps of scorn from eggheads everywhere for his torturous syntax. What I think is much more relevant than his blunders, though, are the things he means to say. Primary among these is the use of the word "folks".

Mr. Bush will speak of everyone, everywhere, as folks. He will refer to the folks at FEMA, or the folks in New Orleans, or the folks in Baghdad, or the folks at NASA. In some ways, this is.....well, its folksy. In other ways, though, its rather disconcerting. The idea that the people raped by the hurricane are indistinguishable from the people tasked to save them? No offense, but I don't want "folks" running our government.

Consider:

Friends, Romans, folks

Of the folks, for the folks, by the folks

We shall bear witness that these folks shall not have fallen in vain

How wrong do those phrases sound? Pretty wrong, no? This idea that the president of the United States is just one of the folks is not populism; it is abdication of responsibility. It is as if an elementary school teacher thought of himself as just another member of the class. Who would that benefit?

It is this leveling-off tendency, this suspicion of intellectuals (only "liberal" intellectuals, of course), this hostility towards science and provable facts, that has permeated everything we are exposed to. Both the Bible-thumpers and the Bible-haters have much to complain about.

If there is any "ism" that will dominate American thought in the future, as expressed by our pop culture, it is nihilism. The rejection of the knowable, of the preferable, of the very idea of morality, is proudly evincing itself all around us.

Let me put it this way: some women may have once dressed in manners that uncouth and ribald men may have called "slutty". Now, some women dress in form-fitting shirts that have "SLUT" or "PORNSTAR" printed proudly across the chest. It was once scandalous to show a husband and wife sharing a single bed on TV. Now, it would be scandalous for any two adults on TV to be a monogamous married couple.

Since I'm still a bit too young to be a cranky old man (although 29 is the new 79) I really do think I'm onto something here. I think our culture is sick, and I think we polish the brass on the Titanic with fairy tales about our manifest goodness and delusions of grandeur.

But what is it that we really export to the world? Is it democracy? Or is it Girls Gone Wild? Is if free trade? Or is it Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Is it erudite and measured debates among free and informed citizens? Or is it an endless parade of blowhards screaming at each other about fags and flags? Is it Christianity? Or is it bottomless materialism? Is it freedom? Or is it nihilistic hedonism? Sometimes I think I'd hate us too.