Book Review: Eric Larsen's "A Nation Gone Blind"

By Sean M. Madden
Online Journal Contributing Writer

"Two years have passed since Eric Larsen's A Nation Gone Blind was published -- two long years during which time I, and doubtless many others, would have been less pained had I, we, known that another soul had penned these words of truth, nowadays so seldom heard. For it is truth which is central to Larsen's book, his solitary search for it, and his well-wrought conclusion that the public at large and even our so-called intellectual classes -- including writers, editors and academics (in the humanities no less) -- are no longer able to think well due to a preponderance of feeling and zeal which has largely crowded out clear reasoning based on empirical evidence and logic...."

Technorati tags: United States, Simplification, Deceit, Eric Larsen, media, Politics, Propaganda

Bordergate: The Story The Government Doesn't Want You To Read

By Darlene Fitzgerald
June 2, 2007

My name is Darlene Fitzgerald and I have over 20 years of combined law enforcement experience in the military, private industry and as a Special Agent, and in 1999 I resigned in protest because I refused to work for an agency that is worse than the people I put in jail.

In 1998 I was in charge of a U.S. Customs task force operating an extensive investigation called Operation Rite Rail. We uncovered tons of narcotics and contraband being facilitated into the U.S. from Mexico via railroad tanker cars - with the apparent approval of U.S. Customs managers. Just a little over a year ago this resulted in the landmark civil case in federal court: Fitzgerald - Nunn Vs. Department of Homeland Security.

At this trial supervised by now-fired US Attorney Carol Lam, Superior Court Judge Yvette Palazuelos took the stand and made history by being the first sitting Judge ever to testify against the U.S. Government.

The essential fact of my testimony, corroborated by other credible Special Agents and managers, is that high-level Customs managers shut down my investigation into narcotics smuggling.

I had already seized 8000 pounds of marijuana and 34 kilos of uncut cocaine in just one pressurized railroad tanker car. I had in my grasp five cars imported from Mexico that were improperly manifested as "empty", yet contained 25 to 40 tons of suspect contraband. They had been sent from the same front company in Mexico where the previously seized tanker car was from, and I had high-level information from a reliable informant as to the contents of these five cars. Yet I was ordered off the case and told to shut down my operation.

At the trial, Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAIC) Gary Pinkava took the stand for Customs and admitted without elaboration that he would not allow me or my supervisor to pressure test, at no charge to the government, these highly suspected tanker cars. This would have been the largest seizure on record for any agency (25 to 40 tons), and it was under the command and control of ASAIC Pinkava.

Subsequently, as testified to by numerous witnesses, these tanker cars were released into the commerce of the U.S., uninspected by anyone.

Evidence of the following was most certainly exposed at the trial: Witness tampering, Facilitation of the importation of 25 to 40 tons of contraband into the U.S., Perjury, Misprision of Felony, and possible Subornation of Perjury.

This evidence was sufficient to warrant the initiation of a grand jury investigation -- yet there was none. All of these crimes remain Un-investigated! Complete transcripts of this trial testimony may be read at www.BorderGate.net.

What my task force and I also exposed is the horrendous national security terrorist threat that these tanker cars pose to our nation. Timothy McVey blew up the Federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City with about one ton of ammonium nitrate in an unsealed-cargo truck. This cowardly attack killed scores of people and resulted in over eleven damaged buildings being torn down. Yet a terrorist can put forty times this amount of ammonium nitrate in a railroad tanker car and pressurize it. This would create what is essentially the world's largest "pipe bomb."

It is important to note that there have been no other rail tanker car seizures since that done by my task force in 1998. Have the drug smugglers and terrorists simply quit trying to enter the U.S., or have they been operating freely with the assistance of corrupt managers within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The real victims here are all of the brave whistleblowers who have come forward with important information that exposes threats to our national security in which I have chronicled in my recently released book entitled "BorderGate." Most recently my fellow Whistleblower John Carman was arrested by the FBI for what appears to many to be a clear case of entrapment in order to shut him up.

This is the same FBI office that John and I have repeatedly exposed in the media for failing to investigate the facts revealed in "BorderGate."

What has happened, and continues to happen to all of the Whistleblowers in the BorderGate story is not only wrong, but it places our country at grave risk as well. All we can do is put the facts before you. Henceforth, nobody can say they were unaware of what is going on.

To quote the famous French free thinker Voltaire, "Being right is dangerous when it is government that is wrong."

How sad is it that so many years later this is still true today.

Editor's Note: Ms. Fitzgerald urges all who choose to do so to contact the House Judiciary Committee and urge them to investigate this lack of action.

Darlene Fitzgerald has more than 20 years of successful experience in criminal justice: Military, federal law enforcement, and private industry. She is an honorably discharged, decorated veteran who served her country not only as a Captain in the U.S. Army Military Police Corps, but as a U.S. Customs Special Agent fighting on the front lines of the War on Drugs.

Technorati tags: US Department of Justice, Homeland Security, BorderGate, Darlene Fitzgerald, Whistleblowers, Corruption, US Government, news, activism

Bill Moyers Interviews Maxine Hong Kingston

(Click Photo for Video)
Bill Moyers writes:

"For all the words Maxine Hong Kingston has poured onto the page from her own life and mind, for the many years Maxine Hong Kingston has been coaxing words from others. In 1993 she put out a call to veterans to join her in workshops devoted to turning their experiences into poems, novels, and essays. Here in the hills of Northern California, over 500 veterans...from every war since World War II have taken part, and some of their finest work has now been published in this book, 'Veterans of War; Veterans of Peace.' For many of them it has been a life-changing, even life-saving, experience."

Photo Credit: (Truthout.org)

Technorati tags: Bill Moyers, Maxine Hong Kingston, Veterans, Books and Literature, news

The Fall of America?

“There is the moral of all human tales; / ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, / First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last.”
-- Byron

Cullen Murphy examines parallels between the United States today and the world of ancient Rome.

Also See:

• Evil Empire by Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch.com

  Is imperial liquidation possible for America?

Technorati tags: New York Times, Rome, America, Walter Isaacson, Empire, Books, news

Chick Lit

Heels Over Hemingway
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

I was cruising through Borders, looking for a copy of “Nostromo.”

Suddenly I was swimming in pink. I turned frantically from display table to display table, but I couldn’t find a novel without a pink cover. I was accosted by a sisterhood of cartoon women, sexy string beans in minis and stilettos, fashionably dashing about book covers with the requisite urban props — lattes, books, purses, shopping bags, guns and, most critically, a diamond ring.

Was it a Valentine’s Day special?

No, I realized with growing alarm, chick lit was no longer a niche. It had staged a coup of the literature shelves. Hot babes had shimmied into the grizzled old boys’ club, the land of Conrad, Faulkner and Maugham. The store was possessed with the devil spawn of “The Devil Wears Prada.” The blood-red high heel ending in a devil’s pitchfork on the cover of the Lauren Weisberger best seller might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics.

I even found Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with chick-lit pretty-in-pink lettering.

“Penis lit versus Venus lit,” said my friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who was with me. “An unacceptable choice.”

“Looking for Mr. Goodbunny” by Kathleen O’Reilly sits atop George Orwell’s “1984.” “Mine Are Spectacular!” by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger hovers over “Ulysses.” Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” series cuddles up to Rudyard Kipling.

Even Will Shakespeare is buffeted by rampaging 30-year-old heroines, each one frantically trying to get their guy or figure out if he’s the right guy, or if he meant what he said, or if he should be with them instead of their BFF or cousin, or if he’ll come back, or if she’ll end up stuck home alone eating Häagen-Dazs and watching “CSI” and “Sex and the City” reruns.

Trying to keep up with soap-opera modernity, “Romeo and Juliet” has been reissued with a perky pink cover.

There are subsections of chick lit: black chick lit (“Diva Diaries”), Bollywood chick lit (“Salaam, Paris”), Jewish chick lit (“The J.A.P. Chronicles” and “The Matzo Ball Heiress”) and assistant lit, which has its own subsection of Hollywood-assistant lit (“The Second Assistant”), mystery lit (“Sex, Murder and a Double Latte”), shopping lit (“Retail Therapy”), the self-loathing genre (“This Is Not Chick Lit”) and Brit chick lit (“Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging”).

The narrator of that last, Georgia, begins with a note to her readers: “Hello, American-type chums! (Perhaps you say ‘Howdy’ in America — I don’t know — but then I’m not really sure where Tibet is either, or my lipstick.) ... I hope you like my diary and don’t hold it against me that my great-great-great-grandparents colonized you. (Not just the two of them. ...).”

Giving the books an even more interchangeable feeling is the bachelorette party of log-rolling blurbs by chick-lit authors. Jennifer “Good in Bed” Weiner blurbs Sarah Mlynowski’s “Me vs. Me” and Karen McCullah Lutz’s “The Bachelorette Party.” Lauren Weisberger blurbs Emily “Something Borrowed” Giffin.

I took home three dozen of the working women romances. They can lull you into a hypnotic state with their simple life lessons — one heroine emulated Doris Day, another Audrey Hepburn, one was the spitting image of Carolyn Bessette, another Charlize Theron — but they’re a long way from Becky Sharp and Elizabeth Bennet. They’re all chick and no lit.

Please do not confuse these books with the love-and-marriage of Jane Austen. These are more like multicultural Harlequin romances. They’re Cinderella bodice rippers — Manolo trippers — girls with long legs, long shiny hair and sparkling eyes stumbling through life, eating potato skins loaded with bacon bits and melted swiss, drinking cocktails, looking for the right man and dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like, “Any guy who can watch you hurl Cheez Doodles is a keeper,” and, “You can’t puke in wicker. It leaks.”

In the 19th century in America, people often linked the reading of novels with women. Women were creatures of sensibility, and men were creatures of action. But now, Leon suggested, American fiction seems to be undergoing a certain re-feminization.

“These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,” Leon said. “And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down ‘Will Francine Get Her Guy?’ and pick up ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ ”

The novel was once said to be a mirror of its times. In my local bookstore, it’s more like a makeup mirror.

Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Books and Literature, Women, news, commentary, op ed