Filmaker Eugene Jarecki, author of The American Way of War: Tavis Smiley interview

Tavis Smiley interview with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who directed, among other things, The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

Jarecki's book, titled The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, is a historical account of the United States military establishment, its accumulation of political and economic influence in the wake of World War II, and its relation to American foreign policy adventures, the drastically increased power of the Executive Branch and the curtailing of the civil liberties of American citizens.

I have no idea whether or not the book is any good, and it's not that Jarecki is necessarily the most articulate person in the world. What I like is that he is straightforward and unpretentious, and he describes clearly and succinctly the problems and and possible solutions. I believe that the possibility of political change emerging from a bottom-up movement hinges on whether or not you can explain to your aunt what's at stake in two short sentences. Jarecki speaks in a way that your aunt can understand (and yes, I'm bored out of my mind at work):

Tavis: And what I mean to get to is this -- we were talking about the Bush doctrine a moment ago; this whole notion of we strike first if we think you are going to do something to us -- we'll ask questions later on. There hasn't been, to my mind, at least, a whole lot of criticism of that. He got pretty much what he wanted from this Democratic Congress, so I've not seen -- there have not been hearings.

For all the complaining about George W. Bush and he's got to go and eight years is enough, there's not been a lot of talk, as you know, about this Bush doctrine and whether it's wrong for America. And the reason why that concerns me is because no president ever -- I can't think of a single president who wants to give back executive power.

If one executive grabs a hold to it, the next one surely is going to hold on to it. You see where I'm going with this?

Jarecki: You're asking an extremely important question, and I'll say for the record that my book looks at what the Bush administration did in a historical context. So to some extent, when you read the book, it's not a Bush-bashing book; it's a book that really says here's the Iraq war, and in fact a lot of it is new that happened but a lot of it is not so new.

Some of it is an extension of things that came before; a slippery slope that sort of started around World War II and has led us on this path to sort of permanent war making, the way we're finding ourselves. But at the same time, I have to say that the reforms that I seek, and the book talks about some of the reforms that I think are crucial, none of them can happen unless the Bush administration is held accountable for the crimes and wrongdoings and errors of the past eight years, and it is a moral failure in America that not more people are talking about that.

It's a moral failure that the church and that the general clerical community is not talking about it, and it's an obvious failure of Washington that Washington has so lost its moral compass that these kind of transgressions can happen, from torture to a misbegotten war, to people dying, people getting maimed, and we're sitting here not having those national conversations.

Tavis: So how do you scale back, then, from the creep that the Bush administration has essentially gotten away with, this notion of the Bush doctrine? If one president can get away with this -- we hit you first, we ask questions later -- why, with all due respect to Obama, why couldn't Obama or anybody after Obama -- again, nobody wants to give that up. So how do you reel that back in, is my question?

Jarecki: Sure. Well, I think it comes from --

Tavis: Can you put the genie back in the bottle?

Jarecki: I think you can, and it comes from you and me. And revolutions throughout history have put genies back in bottles. It would have seemed impossible to tell the colonists of America that they would triumph over the British empire and put that genie back in that bottle. It would have seemed impossible to tell the black South Africans that they would triumph over a system of apartheid; put that genie back in the bottle.

So the fact is this can be done, but it's never done, as you point out very astutely -- it's never done from the executive down. Change is not trickle-down; change is trickle-up. ...

Read the transcript or watch video.

I have like three or four posts of substance that are in progress. So, soon there'll be something more interesting upon which to feast your eyes.

This is where the real fun begins:Pay attention to the Republican Party's excuses & explanations

I think that you can tell a lot about the health of the Republican Party by observing all of the excuses that its remaining apologists devise in order to explain away what appears to be a landslide victory for Barack Obama, as well as for several Democratic congressional candidates across the country. My diagnosis of the Republican Party is that it is in big big trouble.

Here's some of the spin and blame-gaming in which the Republican Party has been engaging and in which it will continue to engage:

• the voters are 'scared' about the economy, and they don't understand the economy all that well, so they're voting Dem as an act of panic;
• the media are 'liberal' and 'biased' and were 'in the tank' for Obama,
• and they never gave Sarah Palin a 'fair chance',
• and they never inquired about Barack Obama's real connections to William Ayers, etc.;
• Democrats encouraged and engaged in voter fraud;
• Democrats failed to insist upon the showing of ID cards at the polls.

This final allegation is especially infuriating and widespread, because it is essentially an index of the extent to which the Republican Party is fast hemorrhaging the cosmopolitan and suburban portions of its base.

What's left of the Republican Party at this point is, quite frankly, the Dixiecrat portions, which it absorbed into its ranks with the advent of Goldwater and then Nixon.

And, just in case anybody here doesn't know what the Dixiecrats were all about: they were the segregationists who never forgave the Democratic Party for having passed the Civil Rights Bill. In other words: racists.

Voting for Obama as the First Act in a Long Struggle

If there's any issue on which there's near-consensus among Obama's and younger generations, it's that the rights and privileges of citizenship are meaningless unless they are claimed by the citizens. American political discourse (both local and national) has, since the so-called "Reagan revolution," consisted in the main of the systematic instrumentalization of political power to the designs of economic power. This instrumentalization has occurred on every front imaginable: infrastructural, ideological, cultural and psychological. To vote for Barack Obama today is to acknowledge the necessity of reclaiming this political process for the people. It is at once an act of enormous consequence and an act whose promise will only be fulfilled if (and to the extent that) we mean what we're saying.

Barack & Michelle voted this morning in their & my neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago.

If Obama wins the presidency today, it represents the declared reclamation of the ownership of the political process on the part of the nation's citizens. We -- the citizens -- declare our intention to reclaim our citizenship. Simple as that. It's a cause for celebration, and I will breathe a sigh of relief if and when Obama gives his victory speech tonight in Chicago's Grant Park.

It's important for us to remember what this declaration signifies. It doesn't mean that we've bequeathed the power to invent and pursue policy to a unilateral Obama Plan. It also doesn't mean that the wreckage that has been made of our infrastructure and political process is going to be swept away all in one fell....erm....swoop. Most importantly: it doesn't mean that we ourselves no longer bear the scars of a broken meritocratic, Cold War, my-country-right-or-wrong ideal. Our subconscious is littered with the remnants and curios of the past 30 and 50 years of narrow ideological bullshit. Embedded in our very conceptions of self are innumerable contradictions that will at times be painful and at times liberating to work at resolving.

The first step is to recognize it for what it is: to overcome the fear of seeing the shambles for what is. The second step is to declare our intention to repair what's broken.

That's what your vote for Obama means. It's no small thing, but neither is it an end in itself.

Go vote. Paddy, I'm talking to you.