 WHO'S afraid of Naomi Wolf?
| I think most of us vaguely remember her, the gal who told Al Gore to wear earth tones and to be macho. |
If her latest book keeps rising through the US bestseller lists, then the Bush administration should not just be afraid, but very afraid.
| I doubt Bush is losing any sleep. Nobody has to tell him to be macho. |
Wolf is calling for American citizens to rise up in a bloggers' revolution to push back what she calls "a fascist shift" in her homeland.
| "Fascist" to Naomi and her ilk means Republicans. I don't see Republican storm troopers marching around thumping people, though I do see a lot of masked anarchists conductng Kristallnachten every time there's a major summit conference, and I do see a lot of Goebbels-like propaganda produced by the Democrats, to include the book under discussion. |
She compares the present situation in the US with the early days of Mussolini, Stalin and, if you're still not convinced, Hitler.
 | Don't they all? Nobody ever compares the current situation in the U.S. with, for instance, northern Italy when the condotierri were in their heyday, or 1688 England, or Russia during the 17th century. It's always "Help, help! The Nazis are coming!" It's never "Help, help! The Sforzas are coming!" or "Help! Help! The Papists are coming!" or "Help! Help! It's Charles XII!" My imagination's not remotely flexible enough to produce any kind of correspondence between the U.S. of today the Italy that gave rise to Mussolini. Bush as pre-Yezhovschchina Stalin is simply ludicrous. |
The End of America (Scribe, $24.95) is as much a personal story of how Naomi Wolf's life has changed since September 11, 2001, as it is her country's.
| Maybe she should serialize it in Modern Romances. |
From 2002, Wolf became a critic of the Bush administration.
| The way that sentence is constructed, it implies that prior to 2002 she was a Bush supporter or at least neutral. In fact, she was a Dem partisan and an advisor to Al Gore, just not one of his better advisors. Perhaps that was because of her penchant for hysteria. Or maybe it was her habit of finding Nazis under her bed. |
Her view was that even dissent was part of being American, part of the great democracy that thrived on argument and openness.
| Ohfergawdsake. Dissent for the sake of dissent is mere carping. It has no intrinsic virtue. It is not brave, especially in a society where it's not going to land you in jug. Even in a society where it'll land you in jug, though, it's stoopid to dissent with no reason. If you were a Sov, and you dissented from, for instance, the Bol'shoi Opera, or the running of the Trans Siberian Railway, or the launch of Sputnik, then maybe you deserved a few weeks in Lubyanka. |
At first, it was Muslim men boarding planes who encountered problems.
 | There was no problem for the community at large, mind you. Just the mild curiosity over whether the guys with the turbans were gonna fly whatever plane they were boarding into another building full of screaming innocents. |
Now, the force of security measures are being felt by people such as Wolf: white, Jewish and female. She believes she is being targeted because she has become a critic of the administration.
| Sounds like she's suffering from delusions of adequacy. And maybe over-categorization. White, Jewish males aren't feeling it, obviously; only the females. Oriental Jewish females aren't. White Episcopalian females certainly aren't feeling it, though white Seventh Day Adventist females might be. I don't have a reading on the Samoan Lutheran females or Cambodian Lesser Vehicle Buddhist males yet, but they're in the mail. |
She found that most times she travelled through airports (nine out of 10, she calculates) she would be taken aside for questioning. Then she discovered she was on a watch list. After one trip, she discovered her suitcase had been opened and a letter from Homeland Security placed next to her computer.
| Right. If I was gonna search her baggage for incriminating evidence of whatever it is she thinks she might be suspected of, I'd leave a letter next to her computer to cover my tracks. |
| Wonder if she framed the letter ... |
 | My wife got the same letter last time she flew. It said "This bag was opened by Homeland Security". Wonder if I better keep an eye on her. |
She heard that 250,000 Americans had been sent secret letters telling them they were under national security investigation and that they could not discuss the letters with anyone.
| 250,000 Americans have received secret letters that they're not supposed to discuss with anyone. Right. And they all took the warning seriously, except for Naomi Wolf, who's too Brave™ to keep her mouth shut. |
She says security officials are beginning to walk through airports yelling "Freeze!" when they spot someone they consider suspicious.
| "Really. They do. I seen it!" |
People are increasingly being taken to holding cells at airports for interrogation.
"Another one, Schultz! Get me my truncheon!"
"Jawohl, mein Süpervisör!" |
 Wolf began to study the lead-up to dictatorships: the laws, language and tactics of Italy in the '20s; Hitler's National Socialists in the 1930s; East Germany in the '50s; Czechoslovakia in 1968; Chile in 1973; China in the '80s. "What was clear is that there is a blueprint for closing down a democracy and that Hitler studied Mussolini, Stalin studied Hitler. These guys all learned from each other." She found 10 common steps to the suspension of a democracy, then started ticking off those occurring in the US.
| The ten points are mercifully not enumerated in the text... |
The US is obviously not where Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia or Chile were, but an "incremental process" is under way.
| It's perfectly visible to people with the right kind of training, if you look at it from just the right angle... |
She invokes the Founding Fathers, who saw tyranny as eternal but democracy as "vanishingly fragile".
| The Founding Fathers were pretty dismissive of democracy, not having a lotta trust in the demos. They favored a republic, and for pretty good reason. Having dumped the requirement for voters to be land owners, thereby relieving them of the requirement to have an investment in the nation, the republic's becoming more evanescent by the day. Naomi's not bitchng and moaning about that, though. |
The book doesn't hold back.
| Neither does a 3-year-old having a temper tantrum... |
"It is hard to think of another policy goal that this administration has pursued with such single-minded focus as it has legalised torture," she writes.
 | There's a difference between torture and rough treatment. However, if they need anybody to take a welding torch to various parts of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad or Ramzi bin al-Shibh, or Abu Zubaydah, I'm available. |
"This elaborate push to torture brown people to confess to crimes they didn't commit makes political sense — even though it should make the moral sense recoil."
| What the hell "brown" people is she talking about? Are the Ecuadorians involved? Surely she's not talking about Ramzi? He's a Yemeni Arab. Arabs are similar to Italians and Greeks and Spaniards in overall appearance, despite the obvious amount of inbreeding that went into producing him. Keep their mouths shut and you can't tell 'em apart. KSM is an ethnic Baloch, if I recall, which is not a "little brown man" but a primitive white guy with a turban and an AK, kinda like the Bugtis. Abu Zubaydah's a Paleostinian, another of those Mediterranean types. So precisely which bad guyz is she referring to? And who told Naomi they didn't do it? Weasley Clark? Al Gore? |
Wolf discovered many other critics of the administration were on the watch list, including one of America's leading constitutional scholars, and two elderly women who run an anti-war movement.
| There's paragraph after paragraph of this claptrap. It seems to go on forever. Naomi apparently lacks an original bone in her body. Her arguments, especially as interpreted by the writer, are specious. Or maybe the word I'm looking for is "tendentious." Or even "tedious." The whole article, and Naomi's book with it, are useless except as a snapshot of what the political atmosphere's degenerated to since 9-11. Or maybe since the McKinley administration. |
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