Moving To Montana Soon

Took a great walk today, saw a moose crossing the river, a bunch of wild turkeys, pheasant, another coyote, deer, even some quail! The sign in front of the Baptist church said "For all you do ,His bloods for you!" I guess it's all about marketing.

Montana is back in the Nation magazine ( piece on Max Baucus, K Streets favorite Senator last month), this time about local, grassroots "progressive " politics, our new Senator John Tester, and possibilities for the New West. I wasn't mentioned and neither was the fact
that all these progressives live in two counties, while most of the state is populated with reactionary neanderthals ( sorry anonomous, I meant perception challenged) whose elected representatives argue endlessly about UN flags (hate them), gays (hate them) and wolves (hate them). What Im saying is, don't start packing your bags just yet if your dreaming of a worker-run state unless you want to help build one. Of course ,if you want to be a dental floss tycoon...

Andrew Bacevich does a great review in this same issue of some books about presidential power and Empire. Forget everything I said about you ,Andrew.

My wife returned yesterday from six weeks in Vietnam on a delegation with Thich Nhat Hahn. She said coming back to the states was like returning to the land of the gigantic people. She claims no one in Vietnam is fat. No one. She can't imagine how we could have ravaged such gentle , sweet people and such a beautiful country. I guess much of it was from way up high, where you didn't have to see faces.

Thinking of my recent lack of patience, in 1972 Salvadore Allende warned his companeros to work hard, but patiently. "The creation of a socio-economic regime entails the development of social and economic forces which are essentially opposed to that regime.Those factors , engines of revolutionary change , are not the laws or the institutional apparatus of the state; they are inherant in the economic structure, in the new relations of production which we are promoting, in the conscience of the workers, in the new labor organizations which are changing the infra-structure. It is a rudiment of materialist scientific analysis that the accumulation of quantitative changes produces qualitative changes. No one can have illusions of changing day to night a socio-economic regime. The institutional form of a state can be transformed rapidly but not it's economic structure."

Me and Andrew

Andrew Bacevich, historian, scholar, was on the Charlie Rose show last night bravely questioning that most dominant of narratives, that US withdrawal in Iraq results in a failed state, regional chaos, ethnic cleansing etc etc.. This is the Bush/ McCain/ Lieberman line which intentionally blurs War onTerror fearmongering rhetoric with actual analysis of geo-politics. Israels Greatest Friend actually qouted Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute in an interview yesterday on NPR. I had a problem with Bacevich's sanitized version of post WWII social forces when he was here in Missoula recently, (he failed to mention the working class Left) but he knows his war history. He learned not just from Vietnam but also from the French experience in Algiers.

In President Bush's interview with Jim Leher he mentioned the sacifices most Americans have made for this war. " I mean, they sacrifice PEACE OF MIND when they see terrible images of violence on TV every night."