Americas Own Worst Enemy

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• Reader Comments (1)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  This is going to be full-crank mode here, but if Chalmers Johnson read this review that fell off the cliff, I would like him to know that a younger person feels that, if anything, he is not “pessimistic” enough. Engler starts out well enough, lauding Johnson and then describing his knowledge, but before I could hold onto the paper, he went off into Weekly Standard territory, or New Republic at its most lickspittle.
  Charge #1. Nemesis “lacks analytical force.” Yet the next sentence describes it as a “jeremiad.” A jeremiad, by definition, has force. Force it’s got, even if, in your Kerry-for-President flag-waving you disagree with what the force states. You lack “analytical force” if you say you like Twinkies. The quotes Enlger summons up have, even on the truncated own, have the “force” of hurricanes.
  Charge #2: Every one of Johnson’s quotes is incontrovertible, yet in junior intern style, Engler ripsotes that he “has essentially thrown up his hands.” Well, take a look a around, and if you don’t “throw up your hands,” you’re naive, at best, bought off and willingly obtuse more like it.
  Charge #3: These quotes are incendiary and correct, yet Enlger states:  “Such pessimism is overblown.” Right. Things are fine, the supersystem is fine, go shopping, take a course, yay for us. “The republic has survived Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, and democracy, however battered, will outlast Bush as well.” You with the terminal cancer: look, you’ve survived so far, no reason to think you won’t continue, you’re fine, what’s a few near-death moments, gee whiz, it’s a wonderful world. We “survived” those two tyrants? Did the Cambodians? Did those whose lives we wrecked? Can you look at the destruction we Americans have caused, and most especially the right-wing Christian Republican elites have caused, and not appreciate a little cynicism? “Democaracy” is a concept that worked for a few Greek city-states, but it is not a term that describes our corporate-dominated, focus-group, multi-trillion dollar political mess.
  Charge #4. “Bush is less an omnipotent tyrant than a lame duck.” Engler should have the right to take those terrible words back right now. The neo-cons are in control, my friend, with daily devastation being wrought, here at home, next in Iran, though the bases Johnson so tellingly cites - He is a “lame duck” in the sense that the bombs about to fall and the pollution continuing to be engendered are illusions. Yet this is what a “progressive” paper issues?

  Posted by notabilia on Mar 17, 2007 at 8:22 AM

  Page 1 of 1 pages

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