Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
> >>Foreign policy is for elites and would-be elites. Same goes
> for the environment, by and large.
>
> Max,
Perhaps I should read Max more often. This is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, taking me back to my very first baby steps in politics. Back in 1965 someone collected signatures from college faculty for a full-page ad in the Chicago Daily News objecting to the Vietnam War. (I don't recall the text, but I think it was fairly gentle.) The Chicago Tribune devoted an editorial to the principle that amateurs shouldn't monkey in foreign policy. I learned about the editorial when a fellow faculty member (from the philosophy department), not knowing I was one of the signers, went on and on about how the signers of it must feel so embarassed by being so foolish in public. Then someone asked the Chair of the university's board of governors (or whatever it was called then), he was also the Chairman of John Deere, what he thought of college professors signing such an ad, and he growled that he thought it pretty awful but he would honor academic freedom (or something like that), and that pissed me off, so I wrote a letter to the the local paper saying (as rudely as it was possible to in a family newspaper) that I didn't need that asshole's permission to sign an ad against the war.
That was more or less the start of the road that in another five years led me to Lenin in my 40th year.
Foreign policy, incidentally, in the United States, is one of the fields that least requires elite handling. It really is for the masses, because the issues are so overwhelmingly simple. If the U.S. government is for it, it's wrong.
Yankees (and Yankee dollars) come home! Yankees out of the world!
Carrol