Powerful with Global Implications, Needs a Third Transformative Work,
November 8, 2003
Michael J. Weiss
Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.
When Howard Dean used the shorthand expression “guys with confederate flags on their pick-ups” he was actually talking about what some call “NASCAR dads” and Michael Weiss calls the “Shotguns & Pickups” cluster (number 29 in his first book, number 43 in this advanced and improved edition).
Although others have written about the nine nations of North America (Joel Garreau), various “tribes” across the nation, and demographics in general, Michael Weiss stands head and shoulders above all of them in providing the definitive reference work that is also a form of novel about America.
With this book he also begins the process of extending his ideas to he world, showing how neighborhoods in 19 countries can be classified into 14 common lifestyles, the bottom three being Lower Income Elderly, Hardened Dependency, and Shack & Shanty….billions of people disenfranchised by amoral capitalism, whose desperate circumstances have not quite made themselves felt, yet, in America.
I have only one major criticism of this book, apart from its obsession with understanding people in order to sell to them–it fails to go the extra mile in understanding the future consequences of each group's economic status and consumer preferences. Although the book very specifically addresses the politics of each group (predominant ideology, 1996 presidential vote, key issues), it lacks the transformation analysis that might be helpful in understanding the political economy dynamics of each group, and what might be required to craft a new national progressive consensus that reduces materialism, corruption, waste, and restores democracy, community, and sustainable national security and prosperity.
Regardless of this modest shortfall, this is an extraordinary book, as was the first that I also own (The Clustering of America). Those interested in how these clusters are coalescing into a new progressive movement that is in-front, deep green, against big business, big money in politics, and amoral globalization, might wish to read Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, Search for “Cultural Creatives” or visit culturalcreatives.org. America is changing. This book by Michael Weiss is a brilliant snapshot of where we are today.
I want to save America from its craven politically corupt and economically bankrupt systems. This book is a first step in understanding who we are so we can transform ourselves, and our world, to create a prosperous world at peace.
Although there is some repetition from “Stupid White Men” and there is a clearly a hot publishing trend in pushing out “liberal left outrage” books, the level of detail in this book on specific things that have gone wrong and specific lies and misleading communications from the Bush Administration make this an extraordinary reference work. Michael Moore has done the Democratic's political research for them.Unfortunately, the book suffers from no index. Had the publisher taken one man-week to do a decent index of specific topics and statements that the author has superbly researched and foot-notes, this book could have moved a Nation–as it stands, it will merely incite the already upset.
Do buy the book–the details are wonderful and every American needs to understand the degree to which most public statments and most public reports about the Administration's policies are outright deceptions.
Although Jim Hightower appears to have been first on the block with satirical and details critiques of the extreme rightists and corporate cronies of the neo-conservatives, it was not until Al Franken and Michael Moore made the genre popular that this book seems to have taken off. It is the equal of Franken's and Moore's books, but lacks any sort of footnotes or bibliography while helpfully including an index for looking up specifics. In combination with the first two books mentioned, and William Greider's earlier and most serious “Who Will Tell the People” as well as his most recent block-buster, “The Soul of Capitalism” (about immoral capitalism and why this leads the rest of the world to fear and hate us), as well as “Weapons of Mass Deception,” this book rounds out a very satisfactory public case for sending the current Administration back to the holes they crawled out of.
New Comment: the author was ahead of his time. See new links below.
The book is worth buying for the Preface and Introduction alone. The rest of the book is a somewhat irritating replay of every column the author has ever written, and not nearly as well done or as riveting as, say, Tom Friedman's replays in “Longitudes & Attitudes”. However, if you have not read the author's columns, his bite-size descriptions of irrational exuberance, crony capitalism, the failure of the Federal Reserve, fuzzy math, how markets go bad, and global spoilage, then they are all certainly worth browsing.
The Preface has three core ideas: 1) the elites are ruling badly and not beneficially for the majority of the population including all the voters and most of the stockholders; 2) politicians and corporation chiefs are getting away with blatant lies to the public because of a media that avoids critical inquiry; and 3) open sources of information–all that lies in the public domain–are more than adequate for anyone to get a grip on reality.
The Introduction is a bit scarier and more pointed. The author joins Mark Hertsgaard, author of The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World in suggesting that the radical right is creating nothing less than a Reichstag in America. In the author's view, and he quotes Kissinger in chilling terms, the radical right is a revolutionary power that is very deliberately and with malice at all times, rejecting and undermining the democratic rules of the game. In the author's words, the radical right is “a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.” The author goes so far as to suggest that the radical right considers elections as “only a formality” and that they will do anything–including subversion of the Constitution–to “win” those elections and reap the domestic and foreign “looting rights.”
Disclosure: I used to be a conservative Republican and used to think such ideas were simply over the top. I have been radicalized by the last 200 books I have read (and reviewed on Amazon) and I have to say, while the third of the nation that is close-minded and ideologically-blindered on the right may give the author short shrift, the other two thirds–the drop-outs and splinter parties, and the failing Democrats–they should take Krugman very seriously. He is an economist, teaching at Princeton, not a journalist nor a sensationalist, and in my view, when one combines his book with that of Clyde Prestowitz, a Presbyterian elder and solid Reagan Republican and fiscal conservative (Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions), with that of William Greider, writing on the immorality and social costs of capitalism as we practice it today (The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy), one can only conclude that the Republic, and that for which it stands, have been hijacked, are being looted, and the American Democratic experiment is on very thin ice.
The index to this book is helpful in running down specific individuals, corporation, and organizations that have committed crimes against the Nation that the author has addressed in his many columns for the New York Times, as repeated in this book.
Unique Blend of Lessons Learned and Tutorial on Intelligence,
September 24, 2003
Cees Wiebes
This is a superb publication. An American, who would never have received the kind of direct official support provided to the author by the government of The Netherlands, could not have written it.This is the only book that I know of that fully integrates deliberate studies of UN intelligence; Western and NATO intelligence (which the author correctly notes does not exist); Dutch intelligence; and belligerent party intelligence.
Several recurring themes of lasting value emerged from my reading of this book:
1) The UN is dangerously devoid of intelligence qua decision-support. The culture of the UN leadership, the UN bureaucracy, and the UN delegates is one that places a higher priority on the semblance–the mockery–of lip service to open sources and legal methods, while sacrificing the lives of UN forces in the field. One cannot read this book, and its superb documentation of how UN Force Commander after UN Force Commander pleaded for intelligence support, only to be told no by the staff in New York, without becoming very angry. This book makes it perfectly clear that the UN leadership failed the Croats, the Serbs, and the international peacekeepers, in every possible way. Toward the end of the book the author also focuses on the UN as a source for the belligerents, i.e. UN incapacity for operational security and secure communications in fact makes it a primary source for belligerents seeking to kill one another.
2) The West failed in Bosnia in part because it became over-reliant on technical intelligence (which it could not process or analyze with sufficient speed and reliability), and did not have adequate numbers of competent clandestine Human Intelligence (HUMINT) or even ground-truth observers in the region. A contributing source of failure was the evidently deliberate decision on the part of the Clinton White House to downplay the conflict and to withhold such intelligence warning as they did have from the UN, in the misplaced belief that sharing such information would interfere with the peace process. Tens of thousands died because of Clinton White House irresponsibility.
3) Intelligence “liaison” or structured sharing across national boundaries, was an ungodly mess made worse by the inherent biases and rose-colored glasses worn by the Americans and the British on one side, and the French and the Germans on the other. “Wishful thinking” by policy makers interfered with proper assessments of the relative condition and intentions of the various belligerents.
4) The CIA clandestine endeavor was split, with one Station operating out of Sarajevo and another out of Zagreb, and no overall coordination or integration of sources and reports.
5) Civil Affairs (CA) as a military occupational specialty is blown forever by CIA Directorate of Operations (DO) abuses, most without the permission of the U.S. European theater commander. CIA/DO managers should be disciplined for this breach of internal US government protocols.
6) The Dutch were not ready to field a major operational or tactical intelligence support architecture, and in-fighting among various elements prevented the various analysts from making the most of what little they could glean from varied sources. The same was actually true of all Western intelligence communities–all had other priorities and too few resources [although language deficiencies are not emphasized by the author, one presumed a grotesque lack of required competencies across the Croat and Serb dialects as well as Yugoslavian, Turkish, and Arabic]. In the view of a senior officer whose quotations close Chapter 3, heads should be rolling for dereliction of duty–although the subject refers only to the Dutch, the reviewer would add US and British heads as well.
7) The book excels–is remarkable and perhaps unique–for its discussion of the secret arms supplies–not only the routes, the providers, the landing zone delivery means–but the active violation by the US of the embargo, and the active role of US Special Forces in violating the embargo without a covert action “finding”, and hence also in violation of US law. Other nations were equally at fault. It is clear from the book that the UN needs not only operational and tactical intelligence for the specific area of operations, but an extended intelligence and operational capability sufficient to *interdict* incoming arms to the belligerents. This book may well be the single best reference on this topic.
8) The sections of the book on signals and imagery intelligence are a work of art, combining historical scholarship with original research and a very fine tutorial aspect. The listing of the 11 disadvantages of SIGINT (pages 224-228) is the finest I have ever seen. The bottom line in both instances is: too much collection, too little processing and analysis. The author uses a remarkable quote from a former Director of the National Security Agency to make this point: good news is that we can exploit a million messages a day; bad news is that we don't know which million out of the billions we capture to do… Also interesting is the detailed accounting of belligerent party competencies in SIGINT and IMINT, to include the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and advanced methods.
9) The book ends with two notes that I choose to emphasize, although the author makes many valuable observations in his conclusions that I will not repeat here: first, support to UN operations was the *fifth* priority for Western intelligence, coming after force protection, after ground truth observation, after support for air targeting, and after support for NATO ground troop planning; and second, Doctors Without Borders, a non-governmental organization, was the *only* entity to get true validated warning of the Srebrenica genocide.
The index is terrible-names only. Properly indexing the book for references to all intelligence sources and methods as well as events and practices, would make it 2X to 3X more valuable as a basic reference.
This book is highly recommended and a “must have” for every national security and international affairs library, and for every professional interested in peacekeeping intelligence.
This is a fine book. It has one really great sentence that most of those reading the book have undoubtedly passed over quickly, on page 37: …although fighting continued for some time at a terrible cost in human lives and suffering, Rome emerged the military victor–and the political loser.”
As I contemplate all of the other non-fiction books, and especially those with national security wisdom relevant to our times, it is, I must say with all candor, a little irritating to see this book in the top ten. This is what loosely-educated wonks read to appear educated and “steeped in history.” This is a fine book, but if policy wonks don't understand that they need to be putting Schell (The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People) and Greider (The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy), among others that I have reviewed, above this book, then they are demonstrating their myopia.
This is a good book. If, however, it is the best the policy world can do in terms of selection, then we have a classic illustration of how random and ignorant policy wonks can be–meanwhile, 1400 Middle East scholars and professors throughout the land go unhead, while a handful of talking heads quote Cicero and pretend to be learned.
One star is taken off because this book has way too much white space–125 pages of text stretched to 372.It is a good thing to see this book ranking at this time as #1 in Amazon sales. America *needs* to read this book because the Republic has lost its soul–only by reading about reality and then voting accordingly, can this Republic be saved.
I recommend the book be read together with “Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq”, and the much older but seminal work by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent: The Polical Economy of the Mass Media.” The bottom line is clear: there is a constellation of power in America that integrates the incumbents of the White House right now, the mass media, and the major corporate interests–oil, electrical and water utilities, finance, fast food and military systems–that is both corrupt and using blatant lies to get their way with the public.
As I have personal experience with a certain class of people whose worldview is shaped by the Pat Robertson 700 Club, intense readings of the Bible in isolation from global realities, and a deep, deep feeling that America is perfect and anyone who does not agree is a traitorous moron, I really have to commend Franken for the humorous but well documented manner in which he skewers both the “front fluff” (Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg, Bill O'Reilly, Paul Gigot, and the entire Fox “News” Team) and the “backroom mean” (George Bush Junior, Mama Bush–aka in the book from several sources, “Queen Bitch”–and the really really dangerous and unethical Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz) as well as the lesser evils–Rumsfeld chief among them).
The author's use of transcripts for “hard fact” documentation is superb, as are the endnotes. Indeed, the truths that he uses as his raw working material are so powerful that I found some of his satirical untruths or exaggerations to be off-putting–either they should be clearly marked (even put in little boxes so the publishers can add another 25 pages and charge even more for the paperback version) or even eliminated. Put bluntly, this book has so much important stuff to communicate, that the satiracal untruths detract from the value of the endeavor.
The book should have an index. I wanted to look up all references to Dick Cheney and could not.
Special for Fox “News” devotees: If you read just one book *other* than the Bible, this is the one for you. It just might shake you out of your death grip on a cocaine-based, crime-based presidency, and allow you to consider the possibility that all Americans–including those in la-la-land–need to wake up to the difference between manufactured lies and real-world truths that will determine the future of our children and our grand-children. God is *not* amused by the present state of affairs. He just told me so, himself, right after telling Dubya his time is up.
