September 4, 2008
I’ve been trying to read Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, but it has to go back to the library before I’m even halfway through. I remember many of the events chronicled here, but the book provides some very necessary context and interpretation, as well as reminding me just how ugly things got in the late 60s-early 70s. One gem from page 213:
This was something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence — the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.
If there’s a better description of the basic Republican political strategy, I’ve never read it.
September 7th, 2008 at 10:03 am
I don’t know about this being one party’s strategy and not the others… but I really resonated with the title of this post.
I just wish we could vote already and be done with it.
September 17th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Hey Marcus, it may fit some
fringe parties in our 2-party cartel, but even when
the Democrats win they can’t
lay claim to such strategy.
Wannabe Republicans is what dem Dems are, check out Chris Dodd’s (recall Paul Simon’s early endorsement)
“offerings” on regulating
global capital markets, or
MBNA Joe Biden’s for that
matter. These folks reflect
back the American majority whether we is US or not. The American Dream is to rise up out of the working class into the upgraded consumpion class and to segue asap into the leisure class. All disciplines, whether religion, godless socialism, the army, summer camp, scouts
even team sports has to fight against that human nature to get folks to pull
together. As Greg Brown once remarked introducing a song on a live record, he doesn’t believe in “Willfull Community” as socially engineered. Living at the time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Brown felt it takes hostile climate and
seasonal environs to get folks to pull together and
that is a survival strategy.
In yesterday’s Oregonian Edge copped from The Onion:
“Evolutionists flock to apparition of Darwin in water stain.”