The San Francisco Symphony has produced a fabulous on-line exposition of Beethoven’s Symphony #3 in E-Flat Major; the Eroica. You can have it play and watch the score roll by, noting the key changes, showing the themes… wow!
Eroica
Archive for October, 2006
Eroica
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006Climate Change: Stern Warning
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006The 700 page climate change document released yesterday by the British govenment has claimed coverage around the globe. We hope that means the sludge of uninterest among the political class gets stirred up too, though skimming down the links above will turn up quite a few who still doubt.
The lead author is Nicholas Stern, currently a senior British government economist, and former Chief economist of the World Bank. This means he has bonafides among the powerful, those whose financial interests will be threatened, and that he casts the dangers not only in biological and geographic terms but in money lost terms. Perhaps what he has seen will turn the tide of complacancy, something mere science has not yet done. [If only we could get the global warming to show up naked...]
I haven’t seen a link to the report itself. It would be good to get at some of the detail. Part of the story is that the British have also hired Al Gore as a kind of lobbyist to take the case the report makes to the American people. As he knows, he has his work cut out for him, what with salacious messages on Congressional cell phones and all.
The San Francisco Chronicle made it a front page, top of the fold story - though somewhat shouldered aside by a bigger, photo article on SF homelessness. The LA Times’ staff writer, Kim Murphy was the writer.
The NY Times buried it in a short article on page 8 by Heather Timmons. You wouldn’t know it existed from a perusal of the front page of the on-line edition.
Bob Zuber posted a piece from the UK Guardian, below.
Sunday Evening Moving On
Sunday, October 29th, 2006It’s Sunday afternoon. Outside the hummingbirds are making last dashes at the feeders swung off the balcony rail. Once in a while one bounces off the wide windows through which I watch. They seem to recover quickly and zoom off — about their business, of living. I’ve wondered what their brain is signalling on such occassions; how this thump, system-shock, disorientation and recovery gets interpreted. They don’t mistrust the experience it seems, since they return, evening after evening.
Inside, my retarded sister-in-law of 55, Debbie, is doing her Sunday puzzles, like a mantra. The solution to each curved side seems to calm her. She certainly has pride of completion - shouting her achievement with words we still don’t understand. On the TV is her boyfriend, Willy Nelson. Why he of all singers, she feels engaged by, we have no idea. Not a Sunday goes by that she doesn’t go to the CD shelf and pull it out and hand it to me, gesturing to where I should put it in so she can hear and see. Sometimes she sings tunelessly along. Today we carved a pumpkin for her. It is lit and grinning on the mantle now. She is more engaged with her puzzle and waiting to “talk” to her brother. She has maybe 30 words we can understand, and strings of sound between them that we presume have sense for her.
Sundays are strange days: simultaneously a day in which I resolutely want to do nothing but nothing– but to stare out the window, to watch a football game, to skim the newspaper– and a day in which I have resolved to catch up with everything: the condominium papers, the 5 chapters for a reading club, the deep analysis of a new book of Kafka interpretation, balancing the checkbook… I want to take a two hour walk and also to nap lazily on the sofa.
We are long past religious here. Maybe we listen to some Gospel on the radio, or Bach from the tuner; we may reflect on how unbelievably fortunate we are, for all our large and petty gripes. Even the large calamities seem manageable; we get through them. A realization burbles, of what thin happenstances separate each of us from Debbie — normalcy from non normalcy; what separates us from Iraqis — a year or ten of religious imposition, of being convinced of alliances with God.
The future does not seem so certain, of course, as our past fortune would predict. More than at any time in my life the long stretch of our American fortune looks to be stretching out less surely before us. During the raucous years of opposition to the US war in Vietnam the anger was about what was happening, not about what might come to be happening. There was much more than the war, of course. The warnings of population growth and what it might bring were upon us. Famine and war was everywhere but they seemed isolated at best, or connected to some eternal perveristy of the human creature at worst. There was not a general sense of being on a moving belt that we could neither stop, not get off. Global climate change was not an idea we were familiar with.
Neither were the US politics of the time quite so obviously bent on the destruction of their own foundations. As despicable as Richard Nixon was, he could seem to be an abberation; adjustment back to decency seemed possible — even to we angry young. What is happening now seems entirely different: those who have power are consumed by it and cannot see the mid-term, much less long term, consequences of their actions.
The elimination of habeus corpus is truly a frightening event. The war in Iraq has no forseeable good consequences. Nuclear North Korea and the likely reactions of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China are a crap shoot with no lucky combinations.
But I forget. It is Sunday. A day of rest. If the human body is kept from rest it shuts down. I think the same may be true beyond the 24 hours of night and day. Without days of rest, weekly, or seasonally, days spent in idleness, or celebration, we shut down. It is true. Today Iraqis are dying — because of our President. Yet we must rest. It is true that there are 9 days until elections, which may put a door stop, however feeble, in the closing door of democracy. Yet we must rest.
One small contribution we make by this rest, other than our own recusitation, is that by sloth we contribute very little — even nothing– to the CO2 greenhouse that beyond all the rest threatens our lives as we live them. Perhaps we should return to the old Basque model: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday… in Euskara of course.
And in the days and hours when we do not rest, we stand on our feet, we raise our voices, we diminish our enemies and add to our friends. We plan for better times to come.
War
Saturday, October 28th, 2006“No one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune. Whereas those who were better off and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be were beside themselves with joy. Katzinsky said that was the result of their upbringing. It made them stupid.”
…
“There were thousands of men like him, all convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that it cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly… We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake. And under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing we already knew that death throes are stronger….
We distinguished the false from true. We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.”
All Quiet on The Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
In Translation
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006I’ve been away from political keyboarding for a few days, at a translation conference in Bellevue, Washington. Two hundred or so translators of literature, some of us friends for over 20 years, meet yearly to talk about writing, and more particularly, writing between two languages. Almost everyone writes into English. The from ranges from 16th Century Russian to modern Korean, from all the centuries of Spanish, and the remnants of Spain’s empire. Francophones are here, and translators from the four languages of Scandanavia; Portugal and Brazil, Haiti, Poland, China in all its glorious variation, and on and on. Each year it seems we hear a language we have never heard before.
It’s not just the language itself of course; it’s how the language is used — in that culture’s literature: stories, poems, songs, novels, aphorisms, expressions of love, of scatalogical excess, of mourning, purchasing, dreaming. That is the real wonder of the conference: hearing the translations into English of this beyond-marvellous rainbow of human expression.
I went to two sessions on Thursday morning: “Translating the Erotic Mode in Persian Poetry,” and “Avoiding the Missionary Position — Chinese Erotic Poetry.” Of the Persian, (Iran, of course) I heard of Forough Farrokhzad and her ground breaking role for Iranian women writers, of the sweet erotic expression she wrested from the male tradition:
Love Song
translated by Karim Emami
My nights are painted bright with your dream, sweet love
and heavy with your fragrance is my breast.
you fill my eyes with your presence, sweet love.
giving me more happiness than grief.
like rain washing through the soil
you have washed my life clean.
you are the heartbeat of my burning body;
a fire blazing in the shade of my eyelashes.
you are more bountiful than the wheat fields,
more fruit-laden than the golden boughs.
more …
Of course there was more, in just that one session, than I can reproduce; the notes I took could occupy me for hours. The delight of all of us is to recount our struggles with recalcitrant words: how the Persian speaks of a delightful act in a word or two for which English needs a whole description, and how the translator tries to deal with that.
The Chinese session brought 5 translators together. I learned that, contrary to the Persian tradition, the Chinese had for centuries included women; that when clouds and rain appear in poems we should always suspect the release of erotic tension; that mooring a boat is often an image for sexual intercourse. We learned of the curious beliefs of erotic Daoism — that the male brain is composed of the same material as his semen [rippling, knowing, modern laughter was heard,] and to become a wiser man, semen should be restrained from ejaculation so it would return to the brain… The Golden Lotus was mentioned, and other works more ancient and more recent. David Lunde gave us this, from the Zi Ye Poems:
“She opens her window to the autumn moon,
drops her robe, snuffs the candle–
within her bed curtains a waiting smile,
she raises her body in orchid fragrance.”
Geoff Waters explained that, depending on how the ideographs are read, the two simple lines,
“Birds fly away inexhaustibly,
Mountain by mountain, autumn’s color renewed.”
might be something like,
“The cock comes and goes without rest,
Rising and falling upon her, her color deepens.”
Love of course is interrupted by war. In a panel on modern Russian fiction one writer passed out examples of her attempts to bring Russian soldier cursing (from the wars in Cechnya) into US soldier cursing; the Russians being much more inventive, and detailed, the Americans settling for a select and pungent few, endlessly repeated.
In a panel on translating the Religious I heard of the goddess Enheduanna, of Sumer, 2300 BC, just 400 years after Gilgamesh himself, and heard some of her temple hymns, in Sumerian, as best as we know how to pronounce it, and in English. Fabulous.
The great Langston Hughes, it turns out, was also a translator, translating some of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads , a few poems of Gabriela Mistral’s, and others. Unusually, and path-breakingly, the panel members instead of each talking about an author and “me-as-the-translator,” brought us Hughes and those writers he had translated, along with history, biography and translation criticism. Fine stuff.
One of the books I am most looking forward to is titled In The United States of Africa, a broad satirical novel from a Djiboutian, Abdourahman Waberi, which imagines Africa as the all powerful, world straddling, super power frantic to protect its borders from the clamoring, starving, drug addled caucasians, too lazy and no good to create wealth in their own homelands. David Ball, the translator, read a remarkable short bit of the story. Watch for it. It should be out in 2007.
In the little, impromptu bookstore, books by most of the translators were on display, and to be purchased. The not-to-be-praised-enough Copper Canyon press was there, with a good selection of its books and breath taking broadsides. I couldn’t tear my eye away from this:
Twigs
by Taha Muhammad Ali
Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.
My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.
And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.
After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and all that we’ve longed for,
on all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrify
within us.
1989-91
Translated by
Peter Cole,
Yahya Hijazi,
Gabriel Levin
What is created in these four days, beyond simply information exchanged, is a perfect little heaven. ALTA (The American Literary Translators Association) although essentially an academic organization, like many others (MLA, AWP), has never been the competitive, cut throat, job searching queue that characterize some of the others. People are generous, interested in each other, and the work they are doing. Almost to a person they come away invigorated, feel connected again. The work of a translator, part detective, part writer, is done largely alone. Certainly there are “informants” and others to whom we talk, but a lot of it is a lonely struggle, and lonely at the end when the paycheck arrives in its tens of dollars, or books to give out to our friends. The conference puts us together with others like us, and who like us! In all the years I have gone, and for all the reasons I have heard why a person translates from Croatian, or Urdu, or Portuguese, I have never heard: so I can despise them better; so I can shame them.
Learning, knowing, sharing, stitching together the great cloak of language to keep us all warm. That’s what we do and we like being together to be amazed and excited even if only once a year.
A Poem
Monday, October 23rd, 2006Becoming One With Stone
The granite mountain
Glacier white.
Its flour river tumbles
Boulder over boulder.
Just beyond a bomb is falling.
Becoming one with stone.
Will Kirkland
Written in contemplation of the Carbonado glacier of Mt Rainier, October, 2006
Somehow This Happened
Saturday, October 21st, 2006Truthdig publishes a very powerful letter from Kevin Tillman, brother to Pat Tillman the NFL player who turned down a 3.6 million dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the U.S. Army, following the terror attacts on September 11, 2001. Pat was killed in Afghanistan, and after the initial coming home wide-screen attention given to a fallen hero it was revealed that, in fact, he’d been killed by his comrades in arms; “friendly fire” as it’s called. Kevin joined up with his brother, and served out his term. He remembers his brother, and more, here.
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
War Support Flaming Out
Monday, October 16th, 2006WASHINGTON (CNN) — A poll conducted for CNN over the weekend suggests support among Americans for the war in Iraq is dwindling to an all-time low. Just 34 percent of those polled say they support the war, while 64 percent say they oppose it.
For you in the premature 64% this is no solace. The question of course is will it translate into getting the chicken-hawks out of office.
Race and (Psuedo) Science
Saturday, October 14th, 2006The Holocaust Museum in D.C has mounted a major exhibition in Dresden, Germany about the “scientific” eugenecist interest throughout the West that provided the springboard for the Nazi exterminators.
By the beginning of World War II, a number of doctors were eager to further the study of eugenics. Although the story of Josef Mengele’s medical experiments at Auschwitz is well-known and poignantly evoked in the exhibit by interviews with twins who survived, thousands more doctors and geneticists participated in sterilization and euthanasia programs or benefited directly from the Holocaust. “During this period where power was abused, this profession — so respected today — allowed itself to be corrupted,” Bachrach says. The exhibit includes pictures of some of the thousands of congenitally ill infants who were secretly killed by their doctors beginning in 1939. During “Operation T-4,” a sort of test run for the death camps, tens of thousands of psychiatric patients were gassed in the cellars of mental institutions around Germany in the early years of the war.
Ney - Gone
Friday, October 13th, 2006Representative Bob Ney, Ohio, who long and vehemently denied any ill-doing — no bribe taking, no relation to Abramoff, etc — is pleading guilty today, and probably resigning his Congressional seat.
In a calm and clear voice, Mr. Ney admitted before Judge Ellen S. Huvelle in Federal District Court that he had indeed engaged in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy and made false statements about gifts he accepted while representing the people of Ohio’s 18th District.
I don’t suppose we’ll see any analysis of, or read any apologies for, all the denials, the stand-by-our-man statements, finger wagging at Democrats or any other statements or gestures making up the whole sordid stew of malfeasance, corruption or wrong headedness. What we will see are statements like “We have to leave the past behind us,” “I’m focused on the future,” etc etc. Because wandering through the haze of denial is so much more comfortable that really, really, looking at what has been and is still going on in the country and in the congress.
Oh hoh! So he’s not leaving Congress until his term is over! What the Eff?
Update: Muckraker says “a few weeks” before resignation. “A few constituent items to tie up.” Hmmm…or files to destroy?
Retirement Bridge
Friday, October 13th, 2006This isn’t our usual posting fare but it struck me as such bleak humor about the state of our country.
A man who couldn’t find steady work had a plan to make it through the three years until he could collect Social Security payments: He robbed a bank teller, then handed the money to a guard and waited for police.
To add a kicker to the sad story, the man is about my age — and is described as a “charming old man.” Excuse me while I go do some push-ups…
Christian General
Friday, October 13th, 2006Yes it’s a good thing to hear: Great Britain’s top soldier says UK troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. It’s amazing actually. However, there is more to his comments that are not reported in any of the US papers I have seen.
Sir Richard warned that the continuing presence of British troops “exacerbates the security problems” in Iraq and added that a “moral and spiritual vacuum” has opened up in British society, which is allowing Muslim extremists to undermine “our accepted way of life.”
The Chief of the General Staff believes that Christian values are under threat in Britain and that continuing to fight in Iraq will only make the situation worse. …
Sir Richard warned that the consequences will be felt at home, where failure to support Christian values is allowing a predatory Islamist vision to take hold.
He said: “When I see the Islamist threat in this country I hope it doesn’t make undue progress because there is a moral and spiritual vacuum in this country.”
“Our society has always been embedded in Christian values; once you have pulled the anchor up there is a danger that our society moves with the prevailing wind.”
“There is an element of the moral compass spinning. I think it is up to society to realise that is the situation we are in.”
“We can’t wish the Islamist challenge to our society away and I believe that the army both in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably wherever we go next, is fighting the foreign dimension of the challenge to our accepted way of life.”
“We need to face up to the Islamist threat, to those who act in the name of Islam and in a perverted way try to impose Islam by force on societies that do not wish it.”
“It is said that we live in a post Christian society. I think that is a great shame. The broader Judaic-Christian tradition has underpinned British society. It underpins the British army.”
I haven’t seen the whole interview yet but will post it if found. Meanwhile, it’s a matter of celebrating the idea, not the whole man…
Free Speech Hero
Thursday, October 12th, 2006Thought you’d be interested to meet Mike Stark, ex-Marine.
In 2002 Stark, an ex-Marine, was “sitting at home, watching TV like everyone else.” He wasn’t an activist, but as America prepared for war with Iraq, he decided he had to do something. “I started calling local radio talk shows whenever I had the time,” he recalls, “and sharing what I knew about the Iraq situation. I wanted people to be careful–I wanted to remind them that they shouldn’t believe everything they heard.”
Here’s more.
And his blog — callingallwingnuts.com
Two Stupids Don’t Make A Smart
Thursday, October 12th, 2006So, in Turkey it is a crime to say that the Turks of 1915 slaughtered Armenians in genocidal proportions. A crime against Turkishness is the strange way this is described.
France, yesterday, in its lower house, made it a crime while in France to deny that the Turks had so slaughtered.
Turks in France demonstrated for their right to deny (reality) and the French parliamentarians are happy to have struck a blow for thought control by law.
Of course it is on such stupidities that history is built. The Turks’ interest in being part of the EU will recede and interest in being part of caliphate revanchism will grow. The French will be sated in their pride. Why before you know it George W Bush will be exchanging coded text-messages with French pages….
French MPs Pass Genocide Denial Law
In a nice bit of irony, Orhan Pamuk, Turk, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk was the first of 3 (I believe) Turkish writers brought up on trial for defaming Turkishness in his writing.
Books In the News
Thursday, October 12th, 2006Scott Ritter has a new book out: Target Iran: The Truth about the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. You can imagine all too well what Ritter has to say. It isn’t pretty.
Christian Alfonsi has: Circle In the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq Says Bill Moyers: “A riveting can’t-put-it-down account of how history kicks back and keep getting it wrong.”
And for something more practical, and optimistic, we have Bill Scher’s Wait, Don’t Move to Canada. He’s over at FireDogLake being interviewed. Lots of good talk about the book.
I ran into an old friend at Book Passage in Corte Madera following the great Jerry McNerney fund raiser Wednesday evening (more later.) He was there reading, with others, from a new Maxine Hong Kingston edited book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Maxine has been running writing-and-meditation workshops for veterans and their families for many years. These 80 or so short peices, mostly memoir, are a result of that work. From my brief reading so far it’s a book many of you will want on your night table, to read slowly and then to meditate: war does not end when the war ends. [If you hurry over there are still autographed copies available.]
And finally, Barak Obama has a new book out, The Audacity of Hope, prompting speculation by the Chicago Tribune that a Presidential run may come sooner rather than later. [By the way, Bay Area folks, Obama is at Marin Civic Center, Exhibition Hall, Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:00 noon.]
Requiem: Kurt Vonnegut
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006“When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Requiem
This is the last page, but the Author’s Note, of A Man Without A Country, (c) 2005
Progressive Future
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006I’m the kind of person who looks forward to the next thing to worry about. (Ask my wife!) I am not alone in this, of course. So while November 2nd is looking to be a good day — not because we will find ourselves at the gates of the fabled city on the hill, but because the mud-slide will have been slowed (not even stopped) –we will still have President Dick Think.
Most of the Dems elected will still be immersed in the same tougher than thou theology. But at least there will be a chance for us. So, what is happening to build on what seems to be this coming moment? Matt Stoller has a good post, and good links over at MyDD.
There’s a myth that the emergence of the conservative movement came because of a small group of scheming billionaires who funded think tanks and publications that created policy and a culture of political activism on the right. One of my pet peeves is how much the left has internalized this myth, and you can see this in discussions of Pete Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, or Karl Rove. It’s particularly annoying when it comes to Karl Rove, who is a skilled and amoral political operator, but not one who’s supernaturally good. Rove learned his turnout game from labor, after all.
Korea: Ah Hah! WMD
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006John McCain is attacking Bill Clinton for allowing NorKor to have nukes, showing once again what Mad Gop disease does to a man’s brain. Mr. Incompetence, McCain’s daddy, is just lost in the cavities for a while.
“I would remind Sen Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush Administration’s policies that the framework agreement her husband’s administration negotiated was a failure,” McCain said.
If you’d like to know what really happened with Korea during Clinton’s tenure you can start with Fred Kaplan’s piece for Washington Monthly.
And of course these are not simply “You Stoopid!” — “No, You Stoopid!” arguments.
Nobody knows precisely what North Korea has. This is what makes negotiations both difficult and necessary. Bush’s failure to make a deal, while the fuel rods were still locked up, constitutes one of the great diplomatic blunders of our time. It may not be too late to avert the coming disaster. The question is whether the president–whoever he might be–recognizes that a disaster is coming, decides to deal with it, and does so fairly soon. The time is already late; at some point, it will run out.
William Arkin, the WaPo’s security columnist — and no friend of Clinton’s plan — has this to say.
What we are really witnessing is government at its worst, not just promising a capability on which it cannot deliver, but worse, communicating American resolve and toughness on the one hand while exposing weakness and impotence when it matters.
North Korea - Nukes
Monday, October 9th, 2006You’ve seen the news — Korea has apparently set off an underground nuclear explosion. (If not, scan down the page.) Much is in flux at the moment, but here’s a good start-up analysis from Josh Marshall.
North Korea’s nuclear program has been a problem for US presidents going back to Reagan, and the conflict between North and South has been a key issue for US presidents going back to Truman. As recently as 1994, the US came far closer to war with North Korea than most Americans realize.
President Clinton eventually concluded a complicated and multipart agreement in which the North Koreans would suspend their production of plutonium in exchange for fuel oil, help building light water nuclear reactors (the kind that don’t help making bombs) and a vague promise of diplomatic normalization.
President Bush came to office believing that Clinton’s policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.
Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years: Clinton did it=Bad, Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.
All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush’s idea was that the North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton’s mix of carrots and sticks.
Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq, the North called Bush’s bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren’t so grave and vast.
Racialism and Buchanan
Monday, October 9th, 2006I’ve heard from various folks that their views of Pat Buchanan have changed for the better in the years since the invasion of Iraq. Buchanan forthrightly opposed it, and made arguments against US interference in others places around the world. So far, so good. Before this admiration slops outside that theme into glowing reviews of the man himself, his recent book, State of Emergency, should be considered.
White America is changing color, Buchanan argues — “one of the greatest tragedies in human history.” The Mexican government is involved in a plot to take over the Southwestern United States, and parts of this country already look like the “Third World.” The segregated South wasn’t all bad “culturally” — blacks and whites were united, after all. America, despite what its founders wrote, was a nation formed not on the basis of creed but rather a homogenous ethnic culture. To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: “We gotta get into race and ethnic questions.”
State of Emergency unapologetically reflects Buchanan’s insistence on the centrality of race to the United States and its culture. “This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by ‘blood or birth or soil’ but by ‘ideals’ that must be taught and learned … is demonstrably false,” Buchanan writes in the book.
Check out Orcinus for more.