Golden Oldie - by Readers' Request

First posted August 12, 2005

AN OPEN LETTER TO PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS,
ONE OF SEVERAL FORMER REAGAN ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WHO IS NOW CALLING FOR THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT BUSH.

To my Republican Relatives:

I was raised in a small town called LeRoy, Kansas during the sixties and couldn’t wait to get away from it into the big bad world of demonstration politics, draft dodging and cultural revolution.

I stole Karl Marx and a multi – volume account of Trotsky’s life from the high school library because it hadn’t been checked out, according to the slip card, since 1963 – nobody was reading these books in LeRoy, Ks.

My parents were Republican, both voting for Nixon each time he ran for the presidency.  I hated what they were doing at the time supporting anything Nixon said or did.  I refused one Thanksgiving Day to say the meal prayer and was slapped out of my chair for it.  Every evening the grainy black and white television screen would broadcast Walter Cronkite with a board tallying war deaths like football scores, it made me sick, angry and convinced nobody understood me in LeRoy, Ks.

Since that horrible time I have “mellowed” and grown to appreciate in a deep way some of the things my father taught me about the Republican outlook of the “I like Ike” era.  He many years later after over a decade of not communicating with him apologized for the holiday slapping – and said he too had grown to resent the perpetual wars of this “empire.”

You wrote in your most recent and excellent post at Counterpunch:

“Conservatives and Republicans used to be people who thought it was America's business to avoid wars and to govern well at home. It was Democrats who involved us in wars--World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam all started under Democratic presidents.
Governing well at home meant being suspicious of government power, not giving government carte blanche with Orwellian legislation called ‘the Patriot Act.’ I can remember when conservatives and Republicans would have gone berserk if Democrats had identified patriotism with the police state legislation called ‘the Patriot Act.’”   - WHY IS CHENEY LOBBYING FOR A BOOST IN CHINA’S NUCLEAR CAPABILITY?

Mr. Roberts, I have read almost every essay you have posted on Counterpunch over the last several months and have come to understand that my own extended family members have become delusional, disjointed and drunk with this “new” form of fascistic “Republican.” 

Now I understand and have softened much of my emotional distrust of Nixon.  He did get us out of Vietnam and he started the E.P.A. and ensured a minimum wage for hundreds of millions of low – wage people.  I still think he was a bit of a rat about dirty political tricks, but nothing compared to this regime.

I was taught that sectarian religion had no place in the government; instead government was to protect all religions from each other.  I was taught that privacy in the home and the bedroom were matters of those that live in the home and sleep in those bedrooms.  I was taught that the First Amendment insured this freedom.  I was taught that so long as the dissent was peaceable – it was not only permissible but necessary to guarantee a check on unbridled totalitarianism.  I have learned those lessons in blood and sweat since growing older, and I have come to the conclusion that my beloved relatives in my extended family are no longer capable of practicing or understanding their own “lessons.”

I love them more now than before, but cannot understand how they have allowed this rabid evangelical Christian, imperialist monster of the Republican Party to betray them.

They no longer believe in the privacy of the free individual in a republican government. 

I married over twenty years ago a woman physician, who decided in the early nineties to start performing abortions, one of less than a half dozen in this state to do so, and both of us were quickly thrown into the sordid and dirty politics of the “new Republicans” in this state.  I was forced, contrary to my own pacifistic leanings, to legally arm myself and to develop an intelligence network (at great personal expense) to determine threat assessments against my family.  The people surrounding the clinics I soon found myself protecting, for the most part were mainly religiously hysterical people who were more mentally ill than homicidal, yet no one in this position could negate the nefarious and lethal activities of many of their cohorts around the country.

And not one of my relatives even fathomed, understood or counseled me in this debacle.  Support was furtive at best.  My step – father was the only one who repeatedly said he supported my wife’s decision to perform abortions – the rest were silent.

The only counsel I received was from an uncle who confidently assured me that Bush Two was not going to outlaw abortion during the Gore – Bush election and that the best thing I could do was vote for the moron.  I registered as an Independent and will never take on registration in any political party for the rest of my life on the surface of this planet.

My only conclusion to this is that they equate criticism of a Republican politician to treasonous activity and have thrown their most important lessons as Ike taught them of the “military industrial complex” to the BBQ pit in their backyards.

They have let this moronic monster of a political machine to fester and grow and my only hope is that they listen and read of more authors like you, criticize the hell out of their local party leaders and get the profiteers and zealots out now!   At least, you remind them of what they used to stand for.

Sincerely,
Michael Caddell

Ps. To all my beloved relatives receiving this transmit.  I apologize if I have offended you but it had to be said by someone in our family.  My immediate family has been battered, dislocated and practically destroyed by your political hypocrisies. You didn’t like communist regimes in the fifties and sixties now you support and profit from Wal – Mart destroying our village small businesses, importing their Chinese junk upon us, selling nukes to them and hold our whole country hostage to Big Energy, Big Oil and Big Agriculture.  Get mad, get mad as hell, but don’t blame me anymore for this mess.

Just like Iraq it’s your mess, now clean it up – and get the morons running your party OUT!

Mr. Roberts articles are at: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08112005.html they are archived also elsewhere at this web site, look for them on your own, I am not going to spoon feed them to you.  You wouldn’t respect my hand holding anyhow.