Chamberlain Bush Churchill and Gore

Sounds like a white shoe legal firm.

Due to a lack of any recent fiction works which have captured my interest I've been wending my way through some history books lately. From William Manchester's great Churchill biography, The Last Lion; Alone 1932-1940 comes this passage on p. 470

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so, once it has become the past, succeed only in making it seem implausible. Among the perceptive observations and shrewd conclusions of the Churchills and Sargents were clutters of other reports and forecasts, completely at odds with them. All of it, the prescient and the cockeyed, always arrives in a promiscuous rush, and most men in power, sorting through it, belive what they want to belive, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions while taking out insurance, whenever possible against the possibility that the truth may lie in their wastebaskets.

Neville Chamberlain required a very large wastebasket...

It is merely coincidence that just a couple of weeks ago I referenced a post by Billmon which deconstructed the argument of those few remaining in the Administration's Amen Corner that punting or playing for time on the issue of Iranian nuclear research would be equivalent to Chamberlains's doe-eyed sellout of the Czechs to der Furher. We all know that George Bush requires a very large wastebasket as well. But, the above passage and, well the entire first five hundred pages or so of Alone are a treatise on two themes.

One, that no matter what evidence to the contrary, most people in uncertain times will continue to believe that the good times will go on right up until the moment where the good times literally die in flames before their eyes. Would that our generation had a Churchill; an elder statesman, currently in disgrace for poor judgement, who would nevertheless continue to eloquently condemn the current government's folly and sound the alarm for action.

I look now... no I issue a call to Al Gore to step into the role of Churchill. I will leave it to the reader to decide if this is a sign of my (and no few others') desperation or if this is another case history's ability to rhyme. Nonetheless, mark my words, he once derided as Ozone Man will yet have a part to play in history's great drama whether he will it or not.

Two, that the Bush Administration does not hold the all-time record for folly, stupidity and obstinate obedience to cherished -- and tragically wrong -- world views. Yet.

America has had its share of dismal presidential failures; men whose lack of courage and perverse vision of how the world works resulted in pain, desperation and death for thousands: Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover. But these men live on in infamy almost solely in American minds and in darn few of those. However, mention the name Neville Chamberlain to almost any reasonably educated person in the world and you will instantly receive a look of recognition. Chamberlain's name is synonymous with idiocy and selling upwards of 30 million people down the road to hell in the name of political expediency and faith-based reasoning.

We can only hope that for future generations, the name of Bush remains a slur that is recognizable chiefly to Americans as a member of a sadly lengthy list of electoral mistakes; of disasters narrowly avoided or eventually overcome at great cost mostly to ourselves. But he is making his break for the Big Time -- surely his name will ring through the ages in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, as he gins up a crisis in Iran and closes his eyes to the state of the worlds energy markets and climate he stands on the cusp of overtaking the seemingly invincible Chamberlain for the title of The Worst Idiot In History.

Al Gore may not be the Churchill figure (okay, Last Jedi, if you insist). But we desperately need SOMEONE to fill that role, to speak out with bona fide courage from a position of authority and put themselves in the wings awaiting Bush's evenutal fall. Perhaps, to be a Churchillian figure one must first be in the wilderness, which is why I logically gravitate to Gore as opposed to say, Russ Feingold.

But need him or her we do. Churchill was not able to prevent Chamberlains's folly, but without him the world probably have entered a long and dark age. We have a choice to make in November of this year that may yet keep the name of Bush a (mostly) American slur. Let us hope that we make the right choice so that our apparent lack of (rhymes with) Churchill does not plunge us into a long, dark age.