Sunday, May 16, 2004

Posted here Sunday, May 16, 2004 at 10:35:16 AM     The parallel between the prison problem and culture of the Geneva accords has its parallel in the hard won culture of nuclear constraint. Both have been undermined by the Bush administration. Bush is fundamentally (pub) a primitive, and chose his associates to not upstage him, men of limited vision, animistic intelligence, and not part of the emerging world civilization. They have taken the US down a road that fundamentally soured the long built up semi-positive admiration for American openness and "progress." The question for historians will be, was it in the cards anyway, or was Bush a key choice point?  If so we then have to look back at Reagan's administration being the training place for many of the current neo-con group. We might need to look back further: Nixon, Goldwater, the rot under the cold war. I think of the difference between Teddy Roosevelt and guns, and Olmstead and the parks, and the American craftsman movement of "domestic architecture for a democratic America." Could we have opted for a more domestic vision? Or did business logic (tech plus capital) drive the whole process with a deep inevitableness? ********