The difference between men and women

Roman statue of Cerberus, mythology's three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hell. (Wiki commons)

I have concluded that women are like communists and men are like capitalists. And that’s a good thing.

Let me explain. When I was in the sixth grade, America was immersed deeply in the Cold War. In order to explain to a bunch of 11-year-olds the difference between the United States’ form of government and that of the U.S.S.R., my teacher put two students at the front of the room, standing behind a chalk line. He then instructed them to race each other to the line on the other side of the room. One was to only skip; the other could do anything at all to reach the other side first―run, do backflips. Anything.

It was clear that the one allowed to run would win. And this, said Mr. Smith, was like the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The U.S. only did things according to the rules (whatever those were; he didn’t elaborate), while the U.S.S.R. would do ANYTHING to win.

Male gamesmanship is paramount to men

So am I saying that women will do anything to win, while men will follow the rules―whatever they are?

Yes and no. But to digress first. All this arose after I asked my husband a question this morning and he answered me, mumbling into his moustache as is his habit, while walking into another room, knowing that I had bacon sizzling, the extractor fan running, and BBC on the radio. Hmmm….and I would hear his answer how?

So I asked again. Again, he did not do the sensible (the female) thing. Rather, he walked through the living room, petted the cat while the bell on its collar jingled, opened the french doors to let the birdsong in. Not once did he consider doing what a woman would have done: return  to the kitchen and answer  the question without making the person who asked it sound like a lightbulb: What? What? What?

Yes, of course, this is a generalization of the worst sort. But it has been my experience that women do what is needed to get the job done whereas a man will ‘follow the rules’ set out, regardless of whether the job gets done. Just so they can say they did it. “But I ran the lawnmower, honey.” Too bad he didn’t drop the blade enough to whack grass. “But I took out all the garbage I could see.”  Too bad he didn’t look in the trash bin under the sink, where it has been for DECADES!

Bush as a fine example

For a real-life example, look (if you can stomach it) at George W. Bush. He didn’t get the job done. He didn’t get ANY job done. What he did was follow the rules: If someone punches you, you punch him back harder. The male rules, I might add. The fact that he didn’t have a strong enough punch going in to knock out the opponent never occurred to dear, dumb Georgie. He was simply following the rules. (“But Daddy, I did invade Iraq like any son of yours should to avenge your failure; aren’t you proud?”)  

Dumbya was able to tell the world that he had done what he was supposed to do. The fact that what he did was wildly ineffective, indeed deadly, doesn’t count in the man’s  game. Saying he had done it was all that counted.

What would Jesus' mother do?
What would a woman have done? I’d like to think that a woman wouldn’t have been reading My Pet Goat to a bunch of kids, trying to look ordinary, when the job she held was extraordinary. Anyone can read My Pet Goat; only the POTUS can lead America. So I would have hoped she’d be in D.C., doing the job of the President and reading something more enlightening to adults than My Pet Goat…a security briefing, for example.

Indeed, I’m hoping a woman would have paid heed to the prior warnings that had been floating about, things about Muslim men learning to fly planes and not land them.  But then, I’m hoping a woman would not have had Cerberus―oops, I mean Dick Cheney―insulating her from the essential information she needed for her job.

But even assuming four planes were brought down by terrorists during the tenure of a female president, as they were on 9/11 during a man's tenure, I would hope she was totally communist about the response.

Women put first things first

That is, if one assumes that the first goal would be to prevent any attempt at a recurrence, then she would instruct the minions to find out what was needed to defuse the situation, and then provide that. She might insidiously and with lack of malice aforethought bring learning to the hut-bound masses so they couldn’t be so easily fooled and led by cunning demons in human clothing. She might apologize for previous national insults to others, and make amends. She might, indeed, send a goon squad or two to find the mastermind of the disaster and bring him/her to justice, but it wouldn’t be the first priority. Solving the global inter-relational problems would be the first priority, because that would keep her population safe. Catching the evil-doers, if indeed their own people didn’t marginalize them as they began to hate America less, would be no more than gravy.

But that magical woman president would lack one thing. She would lack the ability to simply claim, at the conclusion of her term, that she had followed the rules, done the expected, filled in the usual blanks. That would be enough for a man, enough for a male president, and more than enough for Dumbya.

I can dream, can’t I?

(Almost) hanging out with Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant: Deer Hunting with Jesus from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

A couple of years ago, while toiling in return for teabagger abuse...that is, while writing an ethics column for examiner.com that enraged those duped peons and led them to heap epithets upon me...I ran across Joe Bageant. I had read some of his stuff online. I had never read Deer Hunting with Jesus, although, with its Hunter Thompson-esque title, I'm surprised I hadn't.

Bageant was a critter born of the hills and hollers of West Virginia. And I...I was just a superannuated superstar wannabe who'd been born in Brooklyn, and raised on New York's Long Island "near the Hamptons" to paraprhase Laverne & Shirley's "Raul's Resort, Near Mexico." What did I know about middle America? The kind that thinks it's stuck up to aspire to a Mercedes, but a gas-guzzling Caddy is OK. The kind that actually eats other critters that had skin on when they were dragged off the back of the pickup, and a bullet somewhere inside. I was a striver, not a begrudger, nor a peon arrogantly satisfied to be a peon. Whatever did I know about them?

Nothing. I was clueless as to why a class of Americans that I could barely define, let alone drink a beer with, would be of interest to me, and why their poet laureate, Joe Bageant, would be the person I most  hoped to emulate in the near future, and truly wanted to meet.

I almost met him. His publisher was sending him on a speaking trip to England...supposed to be last fall. But two things happened. Joe got sick, and the publisher canceled the trip. I don't know which came first, although by then, we had corresponded several times and plans were afoot for me to be Joe's guest at one of the London gigs.

Of course I wanted Joe to get well, but it never sounded good. He had lived hard, smoked, drank. No, cancer did not sound good for Joe Bageant. And it wasn't.

It was about as good for him as voting with the Republicans is for those gun-toting, deer-shooting, holler-living, Bible-thumping hillbillies he cared so deeply about. The same people I care deeply about, as long as you substitute their precise counterparts in my native neck of the woods: the Italian pipe-fitters, the Lutheran fouth-generation German immigrant families from the Sudetenland who drive for a beer distributor, the shanty Irish bartenders who gave English dese, dem and dose because the Irish language (erroneously called Gaelic by most Yanks) doesn't possess the "th" dipthong.

As long as you include all those people in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island--and in working class enclaves nationwide--in your description of Joe Bageant's target subjects (if not target readership, which seems to be those of us who climbed out of those enclaves but haven't forgotten), then he and I were soul mates.

I have been too long away from the Italian/German/Irish/etc. peasant gene-pool in downstate New York to hope to know what they are thinking, precisely, and why--precisely--those who derive so little from the immense abundance of the New World, relatively speaking, would possibly think their lot would improve by voting as the masters of the universe, who live in the Hamptons and not near the Hamptons, tell them to.

It's a mystery.

It's a mystery why Joe had to move on.

It's a mystery why his readers are, mainly, those who don't really need to read him.

It will be a miracle if the trickle down theory, applied to Joe Bageant's ideas, makes its way into the hearts and minds of the hills and hollers and used to batter their oppressors, rather than remaining pristine, if well loved, on the genuine wood shelving in the houses of his readers--we who left places like the one he left, but who haven't had the courage to go home again as he did....and agitate for change.

RIP Joe Bageant, and please accept my heartache in tribute to your work and life.

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Upper Crust ethos

Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house now on the National Register of Historic Places. (Wiki Commons)

One of the things missing in England is Frank Lloyd Wright. There is an installation of a room he designed, an office, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but I’ll need a lot more reasons for a London trip than viewing a single room, even if it was by Frank Lloyd Wright. London, contrary to popular belief, is not close to every other place in England. First, there are the miles and miles of two-lane roads with little motorway involvement. Second, Cornwall is about 200 miles from London. Plus one has to pay 12 pounds a day to the government to take one’s car into the city itself…But I digress.

I have always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs because they are so perfect not only architecturally, but in their underlying ethos. Wright’s Usonian house idea always intrigued me; these were marvelous houses meant for the middle class, and not the filthy rich. There are only about sixty of them standing today, but one was in the Baltimore neighborhood where I lived for six years. You can see it here.

There were also, nearby, the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses, modern cubes with oddly attached roofs and stacks of glass bricks here and there on the façade, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. (I use the term façade with my tongue firmly in my cheek; to Baltimoreans, the word is fakade. I swear.) I didn’t name them Frank Lloyd Wrong houses. My late good friend the Rev. Jeffrey Proctor called them that after he moved to Baltimore; he, too, was fond of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had a lovely sense of humor.

However, this is about neither the Frank Lloyd Wright house in my larger  environment all that time, nor the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses I had to drive to get to Starbucks.

It is about elitism, and how bone-deep it seemingly is in the American moneyed class. The Old Money class, that is.

It was probably more than 30 years ago that I first became friends with a couple who lived in a swell house on Manhattan’s East Side. It was filled with museum-quality furniture and paintings. After I moved away from NYC, when I was their weekend guest, I awoke to a Courbet hung above the dresser in the room I was assigned. It certainly was fun, too, to be served the de rigueur East Side watercress soup followed by a chicken wing and a mushroom cap at the elegant dinner parties the couple hosted, parties where one might easily meet Nepalese princes and princesses, among other people born to the ermine. (At West Side parties, one actually got fed real, life-sustaining food, although those soirees lacked the monkey-suited serving guys one would encounter on the East Side.)

Still, I quite enjoyed going on the New York Garden Club tours each spring as a guest of my friend’s mother. I got to see Zubin Mehta’s house and garden one year. On those days, we always had lunch at the Summerhouse, a very preppy spot on the upper East Side.

Once, my friend and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be, as she ALWAYS put it, “culture vultures.”  I was keen to see the new installation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francis W. Little House II Living Room.  “I can’t stand that stuff,” my friend intoned. “If you want to see it, I’ll just go and wait for you outside.”

I did want to see it, and I did see it. No accounting for taste, I thought, and thought nothing of it.

But now, on reflection, and coupled with a later incident, I have decided her distaste was not aesthetic, at least not totally, but cultural/class-based as well.

The other incident?  While disagreeing with my political views, my friend’s husband told me I was childish and used the term “you people” to denigrate my opinion. I ended the friendship over that, and not before time, I think.  

I suspect I was the house oddity for the couple, the unaccountably well-raised member of the middle-class, decently educated, slightly traveled, and with a knowledge of which fork to use. But I didn’t fit intrinsically into their world, just as Frank Lloyd Wright, with his ideas of a decent bit of ground and some lovely furnishings for all, didn’t fit. (NOTE: Wright wasn’t a universal egalitarian. His ideas descended only down through the middle-class, but that was better than most architects of his day, who thought only about the wealthy and their needs).

Regarding its Wright room, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the house from which it came “is composed of a group of low pavilions interspersed with gardens and terraces, which, in plan, radiate from a central symbolic hearth.” Wright took into account the architectural/cultural lexicon of a few thousand years, making the ancient concept of the cultural heart/hearth move onward through the Roman vernacular of rooms for specific uses, to the thoroughly modern concept that a home should be an organic whole.

That is not so, of course, in the homes of America’s upper classes. They are not now, and never were, organic wholes. There would have to be separations so that servants would not forget their place, so that mere tradesmen should be forced to use a rear entrance, while invited gentry used the front. (Visiting the house of George Bernard Shaw last weekend, I learned that he refused to use the servant bells in his house; he both believed and lived his socialist ideals, in direct contravention of British upper crust mores, which the American upper crust was aping.)

Upper crust houses have not historically featured flowing spaces, meant to put residents and guests at ease as in a Wright house. Rather, the upper crust manse will feature defined and delimited areas, entry to which denotes one’s position in the hierarchy of the family or in society at large. Admission to the kitchen meant one was a servant; houseguests, of course, could also enter to get a glass of milk before bed and so on, being temporary “family.”

Usonian houses did have separate dining rooms, or at the very least, dining areas. And the kitchen itself conformed to the upper class ideal; it was place where the work of cooking and cleaning up was done, and was not appropriate for guests. Not because kitchen work is inferior and should be reserved only for servants, but because dinner guests are to be pampered and honored in return for the conversation and liveliness the contribute to the occasion. Although he was an egalitarian, Wright drew the line at imposing a host’s tasks on guests--a line I do retain in common with my ex-friend--and kept the kitchen where it belongs, as a separate room.

Unlike my friend, I could easily live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, should I ever be fortunate enough for the gods of civilization to bestow one upon me. And everyone, from the man cleaning the gutters to Prince Charles, would be invited in the front door and given some refreshment on the good china.* Indeed, it has never once occurred to me to treat tradesmen/women any differently than I would treat Prince Charles. As my mother used often to say, they all put their knickers on one leg at a time. (Actually, she said, “What, they pee perfume?”  We got the message.)

Her message was that it doesn’t matter who you are, but what you are matters very much. Who you are is denoted by whether you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,  a mansion on Manhattan’s East Side, a Frank Lloyd Wrong house, my house, or a tent. Or your car, these days. One’s estate is not what one is; it merely represents one’s current state of finance, something that changes over time for everyone. Everyone. Even my fine friends had to sell some paintings to afford schools for their kids, darn fine schools, but still….And in the end, when they couldn’t afford the inheritance taxes on that fine East Side pile of bricks, they had to rent it out and move to the hinterlands.

But you know what? They are doubtless still referring to those they perceive to be of lesser estate as “you people.” The great unwashed. Yup. The rest of us.  I’m one of “you people,” and proud of it.

But I still wouldn’t mind if the gods of bricks and mortar dropped a bona fide Frank Lloyd Wright house in my back garden.

* Ludicrous thought, as is “good silver.” If you and your family aren’t good enough for the good china, who is? Reverse snobbery…against yourself. If you don’t regularly use the silver, you’ll have to polish it by the time you get it out of the drawer. Far better to regularly use your “stuff” I think.

Fair Game: Valerie Plame's outing on the big screen. Where's Bush?

Plame's book, Fair Game, has been made into a movie, out soon. Perhaps it will yield enough profit for her to protect herself and her family since the government she served has declined. (Wiki commons photo)

I'm tired of talking about George W. Bush. I used to think he was simply the puppet of Dick Cheney; then someone convinced me that he did have a brain and was not Dick's puppet. I don't know and don't, any longer, care who ran the mechanism of whom. The fact is, the two of them brought such ignominy to the White House and its environs that it would seem that Washington, DC., is no more than salted earth today, unable to support life or nourish those who depend on it.

I often -- for example, day in and day out -- try not to think of the disaster those two miscreants left behind. I am beginning to learn something about British politics, which is only sensible since I live in the UK now. But yesterday morning, BBC4 radio broadcast an interview with Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA clandestine agent outed in a fit of pique by Deadeye Dick's well-exercised right hand, "Scooter" (perfect name for Dick's right hand, no?) Libby.

Amazingly, Libby served time for his unconscionable engagement in payback. Payback? For what?

Bush administration kicks truth in the teeth

For truth. In the Bush administration, any breath of truth allowed to exit the compound would have to be dealt with severely, rendered a body blow until it was no longer recognizable as truth, so that their lies could supplant it.

Just so, Bush and Cheney and Libby and countless others mantracized the lie of the hour. One of those lies, according to Valerie Plame Wilson, was that Iraq had WMDs and that Niger had supplied the essential “yellow cake.” Not. Her husband, a retired ambassador with first-hand knowledge, said it did not. So the Bush-Cheney cabal paid him back for his disloyalty (or to the rest of us, his honesty) by ruining his wife's career. (This, of course, leads to certain assumptions about the regard of the Bush-Cheney administration for the female gender.)

Outed undercover agent in danger

A subsequent lie tossed into the murky air of Foggy Bottom was that the Wilson family was not in any mortal danger after Libby outed Valerie Plame Wilson, or at least, Bush-Cheney used that excuse when their CIA (recall, it had once been Daddy Bush’s CIA, literally) denied her request for protection.

Unbelievable. Is this, then, the same government that believed the entire nation was in mortal danger because some Muslims had wreaked havoc and taken 3000 lives in New  York City just a couple of years before? Is this the administration that was throwing money, ordnance and lives of young military personnel against countries that might be harbouring that sort of terrorist? The entire nation was supposed to be at risk from deadly forces from overseas, but there was no reason to think anyone might want to harm Valerie Plame Wilson or her family after it had been made clear that her job was collecting information about national enemies for years: Is that right? No, it's clearly wrong.

It would be natural to ask, how stupid were Bush and Cheney, and how stupid did they think Americans are?

Dumb like foxes

Bush and Cheney weren't stupid at all; they knew exactly what they were doing in engineering precisely what has come to pass―a nation deeply divided along ideological lines. More succinctly, they created a nation divided between those who drank the Bush Kool-Aid and chose to be frightened and therefore manageable by those who would force them into ignorant servitude, and those who were not afraid because they knew:

• The world was always thus, fraught with dangers

• It is not impossible that 9/11 was either and inside job or done with inside foreknowledge

• It is tantamount to becoming a serf to trade personal and civic freedom for putative protection, especially from shadowy forces.

Bush-Cheney were smart enough to know that they could force most Americans into the Kool-Aid parlor; they thought Americans were pretty stupid, and by and large, they were right. It's unfortunate that their single instance of correct assessment was that one.

Considering the hubris and self-referential activities of the Bush-Cheney cabal, it is easy to believe that there never was a real threat from Middle Eastern terrorists, even if one accepts the Twin Towers as a bona fide case of two towers, built to withstand almost anything, collapsing although the fire did not engulf them and was still localized on the upper floors when the buildings fell like a house of cards with the LOWER decks kicked out by an unseen hand.

Home-grown terrorists on Christian agenda

But let's leave that possibility. In the past ten years or so, most of the horrific acts in the US were carried out by US citizens and not even Muslim ones at that. I cite, most recently, the shooting of Rep. Gabriele Gifford, the killing of a judge and a little girl, and the wounding of many others. Where were the Muslims then? Living on the inhospitable alien landscape of Afghanistan, a nation that has been no more than rocks and camels and donkeys and men who would make other men and all women into chattel for centuries, and whose land--despite having been fought for by superpowers from Alexander the Great to the USSR to America--is virtually a pile of rocks and dust offering little more than vicious subsistence to the inhabitants. This factor, unfortunately, makes the place almost ungovernable and certainly unbconquerable; those with little to lose care little to live and will thus sacrifice yours and theirs with equal abandon.

It was a dingbat looney with Christian zeal who wreaked havoc most recently, an apparent home-grown psycho who had slipped through the cracks as he wound down into fundamentalist uber-angst and reckless behavior.

***

Valerie Plame Wilson got no protection. She left government, although she claims she still encourages students to enter government service. The woman must be an eternal optimist, thinking that there will never be another government as unethical in its conduct and inimical in its intent toward the American people as was the execrable government of George W. Bush. Or else, advising college students to go into government service is one way she can protect her hide from those inside who would do her harm. It is certain that the government that dumped her out of the boat is not going to wet its slimy hands helping her get to shore. And make no mistake; it’s still the same government, with just enough window dressing to keep the credulous confused.

It was an interesting interview. The interviewer asked Plame Wilson if she might have been over-reacting to threats against her and against her family. Her answer was clear, succinct and unemotional, precisely as one would expect from someone who had worked within the stress of clandestine ops for years. Valerie Plame Wilson, I have concluded, is good indeed at what she does, not least of which is surviving a several-pronged attack by the government she was proud to serve, and emerging with her mind intact.

Will brainy college graduates save America?

Bush and Cheney have so much to answer for, I and an army of bloggers could point out their misdeeds daily for the next decade and barely scratch the surface. Plame Wilson said she tells college students to study hard and graduate with the best education they can get because the nation will need brainy people who are well educated to solve the problems created in the past decade.

That’s true. But will they be treated as traitors for voicing concerns, even if they also offer solutions? Will truth ever regain a foothold in American life? Hearing truth requires a willingness to grapple with it, something in short supply in America since Bush could reach no higher than holding a book upside down when pretending to read it to children.* Grappling with truth often requires at least a modicum of education and courage, both of which Bush-Cheney badly damaged nationally.

Bush-Cheney virtually destroyed primary and secondary education in the United States via No Child Left Behind. They systematically dismantled the US economic system via a wealth shift of major proportions away from the middle class and to the top 400, and the concurrent rendering of a great deal of America's population homeless or jobless, or both. They rendered the population helpless to help themselves by a steady diet of panic alerts, color-coded so that an uneducated and biddable population might be driven to excesses of both fear and pseudo-patriotic zeal. Remember "freedom fries"? The puerile hallmark of a deluded and gullible population looking for a scapegoat for their own fear and their leaders' failures.

***

I wonder if that interview with the thoughtful and well-spoken Valerie Plame Wilson would ever have happened on a US radio station. I think not. I think a Limbaugh or Hannity would have been employed to assault her verbally in an attempt to prove to the baggers of the nation that this patriotic woman is in fact a traitor despite her years of service, and because she shouldered her betrayal by her superiors better than almost any soldier might.

I would like to think that the absence of an American demand for accountability by Bush-Cheney is also a mass shouldering of betrayal in the upright manner of Valerie Plame Wilson. But I think it is not. I think it is the craven simpering of a nation of peasants convinced by their masters that, if they speak out, they will be denied even the small scraps of dignity shown to them, as well as all means to live. Lord knows, there is little dignity in an America where educated people scrape by on jobs the less-educated would have once been glad to have as a means to start up the ladder. There is little means to live, when threats are made daily by Congress to scrap the meager program (compared to Europe’s) that is Social Security, to dam up unemployment benefits in a nation where the major industry is, at the moment, unemployment.

America no longer needs to fear becoming like the USSR. It already is. As in the USSR, America’s peasants refuse to revolt, or perhaps are already officially terrorized far beyond the capacity to take meaningful political action, concerted action, not actions cynically orchestrated by platoons of emperor wannabes like the Koch brothers and Rush Limbaugh. The population doesn't realize that, sooner or later, there’s going to be a gulag like Guantanamo, and not only for those identified as enemy combatants (rightly or wrongly doesn’t matter in a police state), but for those patriots labeled as traitors by the actual traitors in a democracy-killing real-life version of Mad magazine's prescient Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy.

* Bush was photographed holding the kindergarten book upside down. What did that signify? Did he think, like a mirror, the camera would reverse things? Or could he have been pre-occupied with other thoughts?

Valerie Plame Wilson and the USSR-ization of America

I'm tired of talking about George W. Bush. I used to think he was simply the puppet of Dick Cheney; then someone convinced me that he did have a brain and was not Dick's puppet. I don't know and don't, any longer, care who ran the mechanism of whom. The fact is, the two of them brought such ignominy to the White House and its environs that it would seem that Washington, DC., is no more than salted earth today, unable to support life or nourish those who depend on it.

I often--for example, day in and day out--try not to think of the disaster those two miscreants left behind. I am beginning to learn something about British politics, which is only sensible since I live in the UK now. But this morning, BBC4 radio broadcast an interview with Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA clandestine agent outed in a fit of pique by Deadeye Dick's well-exercised right hand, "Scooter" (perfect name for Dick's right hand, no?) Libby.

Amazingly, Libby served time for his unconscionable engagement in payback. Payback? For what?

Truth. In the Bush administration, any breath of truth allowed to exit the compound would have to be dealt with severely, rendered a body blow until it was not longer recognizable as truth, and their lies could supplant it.

Just so, Bush and Cheney and Libby and countless others mantracized the lie of the hour. One of those lies, according to Valerie Plame Wilson was that Iraq had WMDs and that Niger had supplied the essential "yellow cake." Not. Her husband, a retired Ambassador with first-hand knowledge, said Not. So they paid him back for his disloyalty, never mind his telling of truth, by ruining his wife's career. (Which of course leads to certain assumptions about the regard of the Bush-Cheney administration for the female gender.)

A subseequent lie was that the Wilson family was not in any mortal danger after Libby outed Valerie Plame Wilson, or at least they used that excuse when the CIA denied her request for protection. Unbelievable. Is this, then, the same government that believed the entire nation was in mortal danger because some Muslims had wreaked havoc and taken 3000 lives in New  York City just a couple of years before? Is this the administration that was throwing money, ordnance and lives of young military personnel against countries that might be harboring that sort of terrorist? The entire nation was supposed to be at risk from deadly forces from overseas, but there was no reason to think anyone might want to harm Valerie Plame Wilson or her family after it had been made clear that her job was collecting information about national enemies for years. Is that right? No, it's clearly wrong.

It would be natural to ask, How stupid were Bush and Cheney, and how stupid did they think Americans are?

Two wildly different answers to those two question.

Bush and Cheney weren't stupid at all; they knew exactly what they were doing in engineering precisely what has come to pass; a nation deeply divided along ideological lines, or, more succintly, divided between those who drank the Bush KoolAid and chose to be frightened and therefore malleable to those who would force them into ignorant servitude, and those who were not afraid because they were educated, intelligent or wise. Those who were not afraid because they knew:
The world was always thus, fraught with dangers
It is not impossible that 9/11 was either and inside job or done with inside foreknowledge
It is tantamount to becoming serfs to trade personal and civic freedom for putative protection, especially from shadowy forces.

Considering the hubris and self-referential activities of the Bush-CHeney cabal, it is easy to believe that there never was a real threat from Middle Eastern terrorists, even if one accepts the Twin Towers as a bona fide case of two towers, built to withstand almost anything, collapsing although the fire did not engulf them and was still localized on the upper floors when the buildings fell like a house of cards with the LOWER decks kicked out by an unseen hand.

But let's leave that possibility. In the past ten years or so, most of the horrific acts in the US were carried out by US citizens and not even Muslim ones at that. I cite, most recently, the shooting of Rep. Gabriele Gifford, the killing of a judge and a little girl, and the wounding of many others. Where were the Muslims then? Living on the inhospitable alient landscape of Afghanistan, a nation that has been no more than rocks and camels and donkeys and men who would make other men and and all women into chattel for centuries, and whose land--despite having been fought for by superpowers from Alexander the Great to the USSR to America--is virtually pile of rocks and dust useful mainly to separate other places where there is a culture that depends on more than vicious subsistence.

So, Valerie Plame Wilson got no protection. She left government, although she claims she still encourages students to enter government service. The woman must be an eternal optimist, thinking that there will never be another government as unethical in its conduct and inimical in its intent toward the American people as was the execrable government of George W. Bush. Or else, it's one way to protect her hide from those inside who would do her harm. It is certain, the government that dumped her out of the boat is not going to wet its slimy hands helping her get to shore.

It was an interesting interview. The interviewer asked her is she might have been over-reacting to threats against her and her family. Her answer was clear, succinct and unemotional, precisely as one woud expect from someone who had worked within the stress of clandestine ops for years. Valerie Plame Wilson, I have concluded, is good indeed at what she does, not least of which is surviving a several-pronged attack by the government she was proud to serve, and emerging with her mind intact.

Bush and Cheney have so much to answer for, I and an army of bloggers could point out their misdeeds daily for the next decade and barely scatch the surface. Plame Wilson said she tells college students to study hard and graduate with the best education they can get because the nation will need brainy people who are well educated to solve the problems created in the past decade.

Plame Wilson is apparently an optimist. The problems created by Bush-Cheney include both the virtual destruction of primary education via No Child Left Behind, and the systematic dismantling of the US economic system via a wealth shift of major proportions away from the middle class and to the top 400, and the concurrent rendering of a great deal of America's population homeless or jobless, or both.

I wonder if that interview with the thoughful and well-spoken Valerie Plame Wilson would ever have happened on a US radio station. I think not. I think a Limbaugh or Hannity would have been employed to tear her limb from limb, to prove to the baggers of the nation that this patriotic woman is in fact a traitor despite her years of service, and because she shouldered her betrayal by her superiors better than almost any soldier might.

I would like to think that the absence of an American demand for accountability by Bush-Cheney is also a mass shouldering of betrayal in the upright manner of Valerie Plame Wilson. But I think it is not. I think it is the craven simpering of a nation of peasants convinced by their masters that, if they speak out, they will be denied even the scraps of dignity shown to them, as well as all means to live.

In short, America does not need to become the USSR. It already is. The peasants refuse to revolt. Sooner or later, there's going to be a gulag, and not for enemy combatants only, but for those patriots labelled as traitors by the traitors in a deadly real-life version of Mad Magazine's prescient Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy.