Joe,
It is on your website that I find the most interesting viewpoints and unique observances. Your self-description as a "Redneck Socialist" is to most people a contradiction in terms, (I among them, at least until reading your work), attracts the most interesting combination of views.
The email from Howard in Pennsylvania, entitled "I'm certain of coming economic collapse", is just such a great example that there is still clear-headed thinking on both Left and Right. I am reminded by his email of the book Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, which is written also from the view of a "liberal conservative" in the 30s and 40s. Reck-Malleczewen was a Prussian Royalist Junker with all the intelligence, fire and independence of analysis that Howard put into his email.
As a meat-eating, gun-toting (nowhere near a redneck, though) "conservative liberal" myself, I can definitely respect that there are any number of points of the political compass from which one can loathe Bush Corporate Totalitarianism, or whatever you want to call it -- it doesn't have a name yet, since it is still so thoroughly camoflauging itself in the corpse-skin of post-World War II America.
I must reiterate the comparisons that you frequently make and made in your response, of the frightening similarity of the current American mindset and 1930s Germany. Reck-Mallczewen saw what you, Howard and I see. He even bemoaned the loss of all the German Lefties, who were his political "enemies", in the defeaning silence of intimidated, fabricated Nazi "unity". Just like Howard will miss us, if and when we go eerily silent.
We Americans from all of the political spectrum have to put aside our differences, so petty next to the threat that the Royal and Loyal Bushies present to liberty and the world.
After the Bushies are defeated (IF they are defeated) and the Old American Republic restored -- with all its faults and flaws, it was never perfect but damn was it a great place to live! -- THEN we can settle whatever is between us and split the difference over the bargaining table, as the founders intended.
You might think me fatuously uberpatriotic here. But in the face of the deeply unAmerican aims of the Bushies, clinging to the root ideas of what made this nation great is about all we have left to rebuild with in the aftermath, if we can stop them from ending the American Experiment. So maybe, in this case, some patriotic rah-rah might be appropriate.
I'd like to think Howard would understand.
Fred
Pennsylvania
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Fred,
Ten Four good buddy. Here here! And Amen!
And I can promise you that if my side wins, we will be as kind as possible to ole Howard when we put him in one of our Commie reeducation camps. ;-)
In friendship,
Joe
