Come Home, America

Come Home, America. Instead of trying to run the world, let us tend our own wounded society. Let go of inflated claims to global dominance. Instead redeem the fundamental values and sacred principles of the national inheritance. Do not resign from the world. Rejoin on it on more practical and promising terms. -- William Greider

Bill Greider's Come Home, America has been released in paperback. I couldn't recommend it more highly. The book was released last year with little notice and silence from the corporate media. Greider, who worked at the Washington Post for many years and was headed to the front office, abruptly left in 1981 and has since, starting with Secrets of the Temple, wrote a series of book, including Who Will Tell the People, that pulled the curtain from power in America, revealing how things actually operate. Of course such work is essential for any system that proclaims itself "self-government", but the powers that be don't take too kindly to that kind of thing and any perpetrator is internally ostracized -- officially disappeared from the corporate media and sanctioned political dialog.

Greider is one of the vanishing breed of old small "r" republicans. Those who look at this great experiment, the American Republic, with all its great faults and sins, but understands its rare value in Western history. Underlying the entirety of Come Home, America, which is Greider's most appropriately personal book, is the essential understanding that any republic, any system of self-government, can only work with the active participation of the citizenry. Yet, each year we have seen both the growing abdication and forceful removal of the vast majority of the American people from their necessary roles as citizens. People at this point are so disenfranchised, and Greider doesn't ask this, but I think its appropriate, the real political question facing us is "Do you still want this republic?"

If so, Come Home, America is a good place to start. It doesn't provide a list of solutions and talking points, rather, it is a narrative that entwines the complexities facing us including militarism, financial oligarchy, and the environment. The book gives some suggestions for how to start talking about these issues. And make no mistake, that's the first thing that needs to happen if we're going to reclaim this republic, we need to start talking with each other. Not campaigning or sending letters and making phone calls into the great corrupt void that is DC, but talking to each other, so we can come up with what we're going to do to face these challenges. Only when we understand what to do, will we be able to move our government.

This is an especially important point as we watch our electoral process now locked into a death spiral of replacing failed Republican with failed Democrats, then reversing the cycle. The small group of people who are Democratic activists have watched a supposedly imperative, but weak, health care reform dominate politics for six months, suddenly to disappear and now be replaced with a supposedly imperative, but weak, financial reform effort. They will soon be asked to support the reelection of incompetent and corrupt officials espousing failed reform as a campaign platform. This is simply the politics of nihilism.

The only way we're going to change things is to reject this Sisyphean cycle. A great way to start would be to read and get a group of friends to read Come Home, America, and then sit down and ask, "What are we going to do about it?"