QUO VADIS AMERICA ???

Gość: Jurek QUO VADIS AMERICA ??? >>> ORWELLICA?????? IP: 193.188.161.* 07.12.01, 09:41

Mr. Ashcroft’s America, America's Mr. Ashcroft
By P. M. Carpenter
Mr. Carpenter is a writer and doctoral candidate in American history at the
University of Illinois.

As the Man from Mississippi, Mr. Trent Lott, said on the heels of the
narrowest confirmation in 76 years, it "would be a futile waste of time" to
question our collective confidence in the new attorney general-as opposed, one
assumes, to a productive waste of time. Trent was so right. It's downright
silly to question or fault the attorney general for advocating military trials
of immigrants in this land of immigrants, or for detaining hundreds of swarthy
ethnics without constitutional accountability, or for unfettering the F.B.I. to
spy on domestic religious and political groups
In general-just to tidy up all of Ashcroft's doings in one neat package-it's
silly to fault the man for unleashing the gestapo-spores of a police state, for
at his very core is an intolerant, racist, unfulfilled totalitarian yearning of
which he has never made much of a secret. Ashcroft may be a Himmlerian
doppelganger, but he's our doppelganger, straight out of the scenic, right-wing
Missouri Ozarks. He did not simply materialize against our wishes. We put him
everywhere he has been and where he is now, every step of the way. He is our
creation.

Technically speaking, he's now the president's creation, but that is as much a
technicality as this president's tenure. George is no more responsible for his
own decisions than Dolly the sheep: he's merely an admixed clone of Papa
George, anachronistic Cold Warriors, Calvin Coolidge and Friedrich Hayek. In
the face of mandatory preppyism and seductive family money, W. didn't have much
of a chance to become his own man. Lacking the inherent courage and character
of an FDR, who faced the same pitfalls in his youth, W. never even tried. Now
his presidency is the enactment of others' desires. In 1991, when Attorney
General Dick Thornburgh took a powder, Papa's White House floated then-Governor
John Ashcroft as the "favored candidate to head the Justice Department"; Junior
only nodded that the dream should come true. "Did I do good, pop?"

No, despite W.'s prodding, Ashcroft is our creation-and we have in the attorney
general's chair what we deserve. Yes indeedy it's a "futile waste of time" to
attack him now, for his curious brand of integrity for decades has been there
to behold, accept or reject. It has, by and large, been accepted.

The first sign of Ashcroft's extraordinary integrity appeared at the plucky age
of 25. As the war in Vietnam raged, this pro-military son of a God-and-country
Pentecostal preacher opted for college deferments from the draft until he
graduated from law school. Having no educational deferments left, he passed an
Army physical-then, with a little help from his church friends, promptly
secured an "occupational" deferment from the local draft board. John had a
vision: he could best battle Ho Chi Minh's godless horde in the indispensable
wartime role of teaching business law to undergraduates at Southwest Missouri
State University. While on deferment he also realized the military harm to Ho
of opening a private law practice. A kind of precocious integrity, you might
say.

After serving an unremarkable two-year stint in the unremarkable elected office
of Missouri's auditor, Ashcroft went on to serve Show-me men, women and
children as their attorney general. In those hoary days he was, avowedly, a
politically disinterested opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. This he
proved in 1978 by filing what amounted to an oppressive nuisance suit against
the National Organization for Women for wanting to organize a convention
boycott against the state when it failed to ratify the proposed amendment.
Politics had nothing to do with it, said he and his angelic aides. Such
speculation was misguided. His only interest was in seeing that antitrust laws
were obeyed. Integrity, always integrity.

Impressed by his fairness as attorney general, Missourians next awarded
Ashcroft the governor's chair. There, the gospel-singing chief executive
demonstrated how fundamentalist religious beliefs need not interfere with the
high-minded performance of office on behalf of all Missouri citizens and
especially-again-on behalf of women. For instance, in organizing a state Task
Force for Mothers and Unborn Children, Ashcroft showed real courage by not
bowing to pressure to appoint at least one pro-choice member. Official
integrity-not slavishness to religious fundamentalism-demanded the best
possible task force. It wasn't Ashcroft's fault that not a single pro-choicer
was qualified. He was willing to take the heat; to nobly face the gratuitous
charge that bible-thumpism had somehow influenced his appointments.

Also as governor he rejected leftist extremist views held by such radicals as
former president Gerald Ford. It was with Ford and 38 other sandal-wearing
types that Ashcroft served in 1988 on a panel concerning American race
relations. The other 39 members--to a person--discovered a socio-economic gap
between minorities of color and white Americans that wasn't getting any better.
They all signed a report that said so. Bosh, said Governor Ashcroft. His fellow
board members "fail[ed] to recognize and examine important areas of progress
experienced during the last three to four years." You recall those crucial
three or four years that the Reagan administration devoted to improving the
sorry lot of disadvantaged minorities, don't you?

To many folks' way of thinking, the highlight of Ashcroft's subsequent U.S.
Senate career-highlight in the sense of revealing his "inner soul," the sort of
thing his boss is fond of selectively peering into-came in his 1998 interview
with Southern Partisan Magazine. To those who might casually assume the
publication is put together by harmless, adolescent history buffs who like
dressing up as weekend Dixie warriors, think again. Under its website's
heading "What Is Southern Partisan?" the publishers proclaim the magazine is
the "unreconstructed voice of the conservative South." There simply ain't any
two ways of reading that. "Unreconstructed" conveys only one thing: postbellum
efforts at guaranteeing social and political rights for freed blacks were
wrongheaded. The South, and by inference the nation at large, would have been
better off had whites kept "Sambo" in his place-as was done so charmingly in
those happy-go-lucky antebellum or Jim Crow days, as though Reconstruction
never happened.

One would think a University of Chicago law graduate, state attorney general,
state chief executive, and member of the United States Senate would have sensed
Southern Partisan's ideological mission to have been at least a trifle
distasteful; and if an interview was to be granted, it would be only for the
purpose of wringing its racist neck. Not so for John Ashcroft. Instead, he
praised the publication for having "a heritage of defending Southern patriots
like Lee, Jackson and Davis." Further, "traditionalists must do more . . . or
else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives . . . to some
perverted agenda." Next our children may be falsely taught that Nazi patriots,
who just as assuredly gave their lives in the promotion of racist ideology, did
so out of "some perverted agenda."

Ashcroft was at home with the cretins of Southern Partisan. He said he was. It
is in print that he said he was. Yet presumably more progressive-minded
Democratic Senators-duly elected voices of the American electorate-failed to
filibuster this totalitarian throwback. Eight Democrats even voted for him.

With the shameless support and acquiescence of the Democratic Party, Ashcroft,
after sending up warning flares for more than 3 decades, was

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Gość: Jurek QUO VADIS AMERICA ??? >>> ORWELLICA?????? IP: 193.188.161.* 07.12.01, 09:41

Mr. Ashcroft’s America, America's Mr. Ashcroft
By P. M. Carpenter
Mr. Carpenter is a writer and doctoral candidate in American history at the
University of Illinois.

As the Man from Mississippi, Mr. Trent Lott, said on the heels of the
narrowest confirmation in 76 years, it "would be a futile waste of time" to
question our collective confidence in the new attorney general-as opposed, one
assumes, to a productive waste of time. Trent was so right. It's downright
silly to question or fault the attorney general for advocating military trials
of immigrants in this land of immigrants, or for detaining hundreds of swarthy
ethnics without constitutional accountability, or for unfettering the F.B.I. to
spy on domestic religious and political groups
In general-just to tidy up all of Ashcroft's doings in one neat package-it's
silly to fault the man for unleashing the gestapo-spores of a police state, for
at his very core is an intolerant, racist, unfulfilled totalitarian yearning of
which he has never made much of a secret. Ashcroft may be a Himmlerian
doppelganger, but he's our doppelganger, straight out of the scenic, right-wing
Missouri Ozarks. He did not simply materialize against our wishes. We put him
everywhere he has been and where he is now, every step of the way. He is our
creation.

Technically speaking, he's now the president's creation, but that is as much a
technicality as this president's tenure. George is no more responsible for his
own decisions than Dolly the sheep: he's merely an admixed clone of Papa
George, anachronistic Cold Warriors, Calvin Coolidge and Friedrich Hayek. In
the face of mandatory preppyism and seductive family money, W. didn't have much
of a chance to become his own man. Lacking the inherent courage and character
of an FDR, who faced the same pitfalls in his youth, W. never even tried. Now
his presidency is the enactment of others' desires. In 1991, when Attorney
General Dick Thornburgh took a powder, Papa's White House floated then-Governor
John Ashcroft as the "favored candidate to head the Justice Department"; Junior
only nodded that the dream should come true. "Did I do good, pop?"

No, despite W.'s prodding, Ashcroft is our creation-and we have in the attorney
general's chair what we deserve. Yes indeedy it's a "futile waste of time" to
attack him now, for his curious brand of integrity for decades has been there
to behold, accept or reject. It has, by and large, been accepted.

The first sign of Ashcroft's extraordinary integrity appeared at the plucky age
of 25. As the war in Vietnam raged, this pro-military son of a God-and-country
Pentecostal preacher opted for college deferments from the draft until he
graduated from law school. Having no educational deferments left, he passed an
Army physical-then, with a little help from his church friends, promptly
secured an "occupational" deferment from the local draft board. John had a
vision: he could best battle Ho Chi Minh's godless horde in the indispensable
wartime role of teaching business law to undergraduates at Southwest Missouri
State University. While on deferment he also realized the military harm to Ho
of opening a private law practice. A kind of precocious integrity, you might
say.

After serving an unremarkable two-year stint in the unremarkable elected office
of Missouri's auditor, Ashcroft went on to serve Show-me men, women and
children as their attorney general. In those hoary days he was, avowedly, a
politically disinterested opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. This he
proved in 1978 by filing what amounted to an oppressive nuisance suit against
the National Organization for Women for wanting to organize a convention
boycott against the state when it failed to ratify the proposed amendment.
Politics had nothing to do with it, said he and his angelic aides. Such
speculation was misguided. His only interest was in seeing that antitrust laws
were obeyed. Integrity, always integrity.

Impressed by his fairness as attorney general, Missourians next awarded
Ashcroft the governor's chair. There, the gospel-singing chief executive
demonstrated how fundamentalist religious beliefs need not interfere with the
high-minded performance of office on behalf of all Missouri citizens and
especially-again-on behalf of women. For instance, in organizing a state Task
Force for Mothers and Unborn Children, Ashcroft showed real courage by not
bowing to pressure to appoint at least one pro-choice member. Official
integrity-not slavishness to religious fundamentalism-demanded the best
possible task force. It wasn't Ashcroft's fault that not a single pro-choicer
was qualified. He was willing to take the heat; to nobly face the gratuitous
charge that bible-thumpism had somehow influenced his appointments.

Also as governor he rejected leftist extremist views held by such radicals as
former president Gerald Ford. It was with Ford and 38 other sandal-wearing
types that Ashcroft served in 1988 on a panel concerning American race
relations. The other 39 members--to a person--discovered a socio-economic gap
between minorities of color and white Americans that wasn't getting any better.
They all signed a report that said so. Bosh, said Governor Ashcroft. His fellow
board members "fail[ed] to recognize and examine important areas of progress
experienced during the last three to four years." You recall those crucial
three or four years that the Reagan administration devoted to improving the
sorry lot of disadvantaged minorities, don't you?

To many folks' way of thinking, the highlight of Ashcroft's subsequent U.S.
Senate career-highlight in the sense of revealing his "inner soul," the sort of
thing his boss is fond of selectively peering into-came in his 1998 interview
with Southern Partisan Magazine. To those who might casually assume the
publication is put together by harmless, adolescent history buffs who like
dressing up as weekend Dixie warriors, think again. Under its website's
heading "What Is Southern Partisan?" the publishers proclaim the magazine is
the "unreconstructed voice of the conservative South." There simply ain't any
two ways of reading that. "Unreconstructed" conveys only one thing: postbellum
efforts at guaranteeing social and political rights for freed blacks were
wrongheaded. The South, and by inference the nation at large, would have been
better off had whites kept "Sambo" in his place-as was done so charmingly in
those happy-go-lucky antebellum or Jim Crow days, as though Reconstruction
never happened.

One would think a University of Chicago law graduate, state attorney general,
state chief executive, and member of the United States Senate would have sensed
Southern Partisan's ideological mission to have been at least a trifle
distasteful; and if an interview was to be granted, it would be only for the
purpose of wringing its racist neck. Not so for John Ashcroft. Instead, he
praised the publication for having "a heritage of defending Southern patriots
like Lee, Jackson and Davis." Further, "traditionalists must do more . . . or
else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives . . . to some
perverted agenda." Next our children may be falsely taught that Nazi patriots,
who just as assuredly gave their lives in the promotion of racist ideology, did
so out of "some perverted agenda."

Ashcroft was at home with the cretins of Southern Partisan. He said he was. It
is in print that he said he was. Yet presumably more progressive-minded
Democratic Senators-duly elected voices of the American electorate-failed to
filibuster this totalitarian throwback. Eight Democrats even voted for him.

With the shameless support and acquiescence of the Democratic Party, Ashcroft,
after sending up warning flares for more than 3 decades, was

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