Metropolis: Scary books for summertime reading

An Air Force officer (my dad) who was in Germany after World War II once told me a humorous story: “Here I was in the country where everyone had supported Hitler just a few years before, but after the war no one could remember anyone who was a Nazi. And, of course, no one I spoke to had ever been a Nazi. I wondered where all of the Nazis had gone.”

Aside from the few Nazis who, um, retired to South America or found golden parachutes into our CIA and rocket programs, most of the goose-stepping legions were still in Germany. Understandably, they were a little anxious at some of the lines on their resumes.

You can picture the conversations:

German fellow: “Nazis? Oh, I vas not a Nazi. I think I heard one lived a few blocks over in dat direction. And vas is that you ask about a Herr Adolf? Adolf who? Oh, that Adolf. Never heard of him.”

And so it might soon become for the Republicans: “Bush? Oh, yes, I have a bush in my front yard. Oh, you mean George Bush? Who’s that? I never heard of him. That ‘W’ decal on my Mercedes? Well, I’ll be darned. Some vandals must have pasted that there.”

Which brings me to a few recommendations for summer reading. My best bet this year is the June 12 opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court, a rebuke handed to George Bush that says, no, Mr. Cowboy, habeas corpus isn’t optional. Actually, what Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote was: “Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law.”

You’d think it would be getting a might uncomfortable to admit that one is a card-carrying Republican. We may yet get to the day when bubbas such as our own Georgia GOP misleaders are asked, “Are you now or have you ever been ... ?” After all, the war is a disaster. The economy is a disaster. The nation’s infrastructure is a disaster. Health care is a disaster: We pay more per capita than any other nation, rank 45th in life expectancy, one in six Americans has no health insurance, and the major job of insurers is to deny coverage when people need it. Corruption disaster after corruption disaster is landing on Bush and friends. In Georgia, roads are clogged, water is running out, the economy is stalling, schools are failing – and 10 years too late, Gov. Sonny Perdue just discovered that commuter rail is worth talking about.

And gas prices! The historic massive theft of middle American wealth by a cartel, its oligarchs and their political vassals of both parties is best explained by Googling those photos of Bush kissing – yes, smooching – a Saudi prince. America owes its soul to those horrid princes, and finances the debt with the Chinese.

Heck, between former presidential mouthpiece Scott McClellan’s new book, What Happened, and the bipartisan Senate committee report that concluded Bush concocted tons of facts, stretched others, and buried the real truth about his motives for war – why haven’t Americans already grabbed torches and pitchforks, and stormed the castle to rid it of monsters? According to McClellan – and he was there by Bush’s side – Dubya’s motive for war was his conclusion that only wartime presidents are remembered as “great.” In this case, what defines greatness is being the absolute worst.

Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor who won 105 of his 106 felony trials, including 21 murder convictions, has a new book out with a catchy title: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. The mainstream press predictably has ignored the book, despite its best-selling status.

On Oct. 1, 2002, six days before Bush launched his propaganda offensive against Saddam Hussein, W had received a consensus report of 16 intelligence agencies that, as Bugliosi reports, “Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country, that he would only be a threat if he feared that America was about to attack him. In other words, he would only be a threat if he was forced to fight in self-defense. So we know — not ‘think,’ but we know — that when George Bush told the nation ... Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. So if we had nothing else at all, this alone shows us that he took this nation to war on a lie, and therefore, all of the killings in Iraq of American soldiers became unlawful killings and therefore murder.”

There are other nifty books out there for fun summer reading. I highly recommend Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon Wolin, an acclaimed history professor at Princeton. Wolin states the obvious: Totalitarianism has donned new clothes. Instead of coups and a military regime, democracy has been destroyed from within. The government creates a state of perpetual war, manipulates the populace with fear, creates an unembarrassed fusion with giant war corporations, rips the social safety net and undermines the ability of government to provide critical nonmilitary services. People feel powerless, disengage from civic life, watch “American Idol” – and Big Brother arrives in a limo instead of a tank.

Adding to that, Wolin argues, is the cowardice of the Democrats, the media and the punditry.

They remain cowards. There will be no impeachment of Bush, despite Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s well-argued resolution (worth reading) for impeachment a couple of weeks ago. It will stay locked in the Judiciary Committee. The press will continue to parrot the Republican smears of Barack Obama – and neglect to dig into John McCain’s lobbyist/Charles Keating/Phil Gramm/etc., etc., baggage. Not to mention the Arizona senator’s mentoring by fellows from the Project for the New American Century – the Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz gang that envisions the United States as a new Rome with our boot heel on the neck of the world.

My last bit of recommended reading: Elliot D. Cohen’s The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America into a Dictatorship. Speaking of McBush’s foreign (i.e., war) policy advisers, Cohen states: “The credo of this group is ‘the end justifies the means,’ and the end of establishing the United States as the world’s sole superpower justifies ... anything from military control over the information on the Internet to the use of genocidal biological weapons. Over its two terms, the George W. Bush administration has planted the seeds for this geopolitical master plan, and now appears to be counting on the McCain administration, if one comes to power, to nurture it.”

Think I’ll go home and watch “American Idol.”

The make-believe conversation with a German was paraphrased from a 1960s ditty by the Chad Mitchell Trio: “I Was Not a Nazi Polka.”